Shimon Peres said England was "deeply pro-Arab ... and anti-Israeli", adding: "They always worked against us."
He added: "There is in England a saying that an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary."I really cannot think of another country on Earth that would say to a democratically elected ally "Your people hate us, your leaders hate us, and you have always hated us."
His remarks, made in an interview on a Jewish website, provoked anger from senior MPs and Jewish leaders who said the 87-year-old president had "got it wrong".
But other groups backed the former Israeli prime minister and said the number of anti-semitic incidents had risen dramatically in the UK in recent years.
The controversy follows the furore last week over David Cameron's remark that Gaza was a "prison camp", as he urged Israel to allow aid and people to move freely in and out of the Palestinian territory.
Mr Peres, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is three years into his seven-year term as president and was awarded an honorary knighthood by the Queen in 2008, said that England's attitude towards Jews was Israel's "next big problem".
"There are several million Muslim voters, and for many members of parliament, that's the difference between getting elected and not getting elected," he said.
Forgetting about the implications for the administration, I've been struck for some time about the apparent need among a fairly large number of Americans to pretend that racism is ancient history with which we no longer need to be concerned (at least as it pertains to racial minorities.) The fact is that Shirley Sherrod lived during the great cataclysm of the civil rights movement and paid a huge personal price for standing up against the forces that killed her father. But that wasn't the end of it. She has spent the rest of her life trying to fight other insidious forms of racism like these discriminatory loan practices that continue to this day. I suspect that somebody forgot to send her the memo that the whole thing is over and that she just needs to move on. Indeed, it's been made crystal clear that the fight isn't over. (The fact that she was targeted for statements about racial reconciliation is even more galling.)
Sixty-seven percent of American adults say they have an alcoholic beverage on occasion, the highest level in 15 years, with beer the preferred drink, followed by wine and liquor, a Gallup poll said Friday.
Drinking was most prevalent in 1976-1978, when 71 percent of Americans said they drank alcohol, and least popular in 1958, when only 55 percent admitted doing so, said Gallup, which began its drinking surveys in 1939.
By age, alcoholic beverages were most favored by 18-54-year-olds (72 percent), followed by the 55 and older crowd (59 percent), Gallup found in its July 8-18 survey of 1,020 adults.Beer costs money, you know. No dinero, no drinky. And if you look at the history of alcoholic beverages over the years, it's always been a moneyed thing traditionally. It's college grads making six-figures who are having a tipple of ripple, and the rest of us are cutting back on the six packs.
There was also a marked difference in drinking habits by education, with college graduates topping people with a high school degree or less by 79 to 58 percent respectively.
Income also mirrored drinking levels, with 81 percent of people making 75,000+ dollars per year saying they drank, followed in descending order by lower incomes until only 46 percent of those making less than 20,000 dollars said they drank.
But a year and a half later, many of the critics have retreated from their sharpest attacks as they watch the auto industry once again turn a profit and begin adding jobs in communities such as Detroit, which desperately need them.
Obama's visit to a Chrysler plant in Detroit on Friday was designed as a victory rally -- complete with campaign-style trappings -- an "I told you so" event aimed squarely at his Republican critics who had attacked the auto bailouts as government takeovers.
A feisty Obama was welcomed with loud applause by about 1,500 auto workers inside the plant that makes the Jeep Grand Cherokee, a vehicle the president said was the first new car he ever owned. If his critics had won, he said, the plant would have been shuttered and dark.
There's no satisfying some, like radio host Rush Limbaugh, who this week referred to GM as Obama Motors. And the auto turnaround is not enough to fix places like Detroit, where 30 percent unemployment has ravaged the city like few others in the United States.
But as Obama arrived here Friday to trumpet the industry's progress, Corker refrained from saying that the bailouts were bad for the country. He says the administration's methods were "heavy-handed" but also takes credit for helping to shape the bailout. He prodded the Obama administration to force the companies to lessen their debt and achieve a more favorable union agreement.
"The ideas we laid out there were followed through," Corker said in an interview. "I take some pleasure out of helping make that contribution. . . . I think what we did is we forced a debate and we forced a hard look at these companies."And now of course Republicans like Corker are trying to take credit for something that Republicans bitterly opposed, while the rest of the GOP is still bitterly complaining that Obama is a socialist. At least the press is finally paying attention to the fact that if the Republicans were in charge right now, America wouldn't have an auto industry outside of Ford.
"I think Charlie Rangel served a very long time and served-- his constituents very well. But these-- allegations are very troubling," Obama told Harry Smith in an interview to be aired on the "Early Show." and first broadcast on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.That's not just Obama throwing him under the bus, that's throwing him under the bus at near relativistic velocities, having top people then retrieve Rangel from under the bus, cleaned up nicely and then having Charlie given a tasteful little gilded sign to put on neck that reads "Enjoy your retirement there Chuck, Your pal, Barack." CSI people should be walking around leaving little folded number cards and a chalk outline.
"And he'll-- he's somebody who's at the end of his career. Eighty years old. I'm sure that-- what he wants is to be able to-- end his career with dignity. And my hope is that-- it happens. "
Spheres of action could include any or all of the following.
• Missile attacks on Israel using conventionally-armed systems might be carried out primarily to demonstrate the survival of a capability after an initial Israeli attack. These would be intended principally to undermine Israeli morale rather than have any serious military effect.
• Closure of the Straits of Hormuz, however brief, would cause a sharp rise in oil prices and be a reminder of Iran’s leverage over Gulf shipping routes. Any sustained price rise would have a potentially catastrophic impact on the global economy.
• Paramilitary and/or missile attacks on western Gulf oil production, processing and transportation facilities would be of very deep concern to the producer states, especially Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. While such facilities have much more intense security than a decade ago, they remain essentially soft targets.
• Action in Iraq and Afghanistan in support of those groups opposing western involvement could be tailored to discourage further attacks on Iran. [...]
I really do believe that locking in budget reforms and spending control will help us in the short run by taking pressure off interest rates and monetary policy. Spending control is pro-growth in this age of sovereign debt crises.Oy. Yes, in an economy where demand is drying up, the key is taking more money out of the economy! Less spending is pro-growth, the way that not ever watering your plants teaches them to be tougher.
I think a mistake Keynesians are making is they think this is demand-side and consumption-led. I think we need to focus on investment and jobs. There’s lots of money sitting on the sidelines.There's money sitting on the sidelines because there's no demand, Sparky. Unless somebody plans on buying the goods and services produced by the jobs you create, they're not going to last too long. We got in way over our heads on equity bubbles and cheap credit, and that's gone. People are cutting back on everything. If the government will not step in to stimulate demand, and the money's on the sidelines, who will buy it?
These short-term stimuli, which Bush and Obama did, don’t change aggregate demand. And that’s why I think we need more of an investment-led recovery. At this point, given the borrowing costs, stimulus is counterproductive.To recap, borrowing costs right now are the lowest in several decades. Why we're choosing not to take advantage of it is insanity bordering on economic negligence. But here's my favorite part:
We need to do things to free up credit. We need regulatory forbearance there. Right now, the policymakers and regulators are doing opposite things. So you’re right that there’s a lot of capital parked out there, and we need to coax it out into the markets. I think literally that if we raised the federal funds rate by a point, it would help push money into the economy, as right now, the safest play is to stay with the federal money and federal paper.Raise. Interest. Rates. That will get people out of bonds and into stocks, where people will still be suffering from demand problems and...then what? Oh, and raising interest rates would also retard investment because...borrowing costs would increase! Ta-da! How does that help with aggregate demand? If raising interest rates would really motivate people to invest MORE, why did we bother lowering them in the first place?
It's been pretty unpleasant watching the Senate lately. The DISCLOSE Act came up, and every single Senate Republican joined together to block the bill from even getting a vote. A package of incentives and tax breaks for small businesses looked to be in good shape, but every single Senate Republican joined together to knock that down, too. Twenty obviously qualified judicial nominees were brought forward, and the GOP blocked votes on all of them. Medical care for 9/11 victims came up, and Republicans prevented it from passing, too.The Senate has one more week before the Labor Day recess and campaign season, so anything that doesn't pass now is dead and buried for...well, who knows how long, most likely the rest of the year minimum. Things don't look good for Harry Reid to try to get money to the states before August 6 or for anything to be done about oil spill legislation either.
And these are just developments since Tuesday.
The generally accepted view of the Deepwater Horizon disaster has focused on the blowout preventer and the non-standard procedures BP conducted just before the explosion and fire. However, most of the damage and the main source of the spill came from the collapse and sinking of the DH platform rather than the initial explosion. A new report by the Center for Public Integrity, based on testimony from people on scene and Coast Guard logs, contains evidence that the platform sunk because of a botched response from the Coast Guard, which failed to coordinate firefighting efforts and to get the proper resources to fight the fire.
Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.
Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them "in almost all" of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. -- more than 300 miles of coastline -- said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon
"It does appear that there is a Corexit sort of fingerprint in the blob samples that we ran," Erin Gray, a Tulane biologist, told the Huffington Post Thursday. Two independent tests are being run to confirm those findings, "so don't say that we're 100 percent sure yet," Gray said.
"The chemistry test is still not completely conclusive," said Tulane biology professor Caz Taylor, the team's leader. "But that seems the most likely thing."Yay. The Corexit worked great! The oil is now in super tiny toxic bits that will wreck the Gulf's ecosystem from the bottom up and kill all kinds of species out there, plus it's toxic. Did I mention it's toxic?
Authorities say a federal judge in Phoenix has been getting some threats since her ruling on Arizona's controversial immigration law.But remember, the Tea Party folks aren't angry, and this is all about people peacefully simply wanting a law enforced, and the folks behind SB1070 are not an unruly anti-immigrant mob whipped up into a blood frenzy that might be in any way dangerous or anything like that.
David Gonzales, the U.S. Marshal for Arizona, says U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton has received thousands of phone calls and e-mails since her preliminary injunction Wednesday that put key provisions of the state's immigration law on hold.
Gonzales says some of the messages sent to Bolton are positive, but others are "from people venting and who have expressed their displeasure in a perverted way."
Gonzales says his agents are taking some of the threats to Bolton seriously. He refused to discuss any extra security measures, which U.S. marshals routinely provide federal judges.
So, as Republicans see it, we can afford tax breaks for billionaires. But care for 9/11 victims, not so much.And so the GOP scuttled it. $687 billion for tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans are behind that 100%. $7.4 billion for 9/11 victims' health care concerns? "Why should my tax dollars help those damn New York liberals?"
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), perhaps best known for his apology to BP after the company's oil spill, "said the rest of the country should not bear the brunt of helping New Yorkers cope with the aftermath of the terror attacks." [Update: To clarify, this is a paraphrase from the New York Daily News, not a direct quote of Barton.]
How could House Republicans kill the bill in a majority-rule chamber? As it turns out, Dems brought the measure to the floor as a "suspension bill," because they didn't want the GOP to try to gut the legislation with poison-pill amendments. But this strategy meant the bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The final vote was 255 to 159 -- far short of the two-thirds threshold -- with 155 Republicans in opposition, many of them saying they would consider supporting the bill, but only if the GOP were allowed to push unrelated amendments intended to embarrass the majority.
Weiner repeatedly yelled about the GOP's "shame," but this misses the point. Republicans are not going to be shamed into doing what Dems want them to do. Republicans are pursuing a concerted game plan here that Dems need to reckon with more directly.Right, and Dems saying "The Dems are wrecking the economy!" won't be called whiny, weak, and impotent either. The point is Greg that anything passionate Dems say about what the GOP is doing will be dismissed as whining, so dismissing what Weiner is saying as whining only feeds that narrative.
Indeed, Dems would be far better served if they kept calmly repeating that Republicans want government to fail, in order to breed cynicism and to get voters to give up on the idea that government works for them.
By the way, there's precedent for this. Remember when former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle erupted on the Senate floor in 2002 in response to Bush's rank politicization of national security in the runup to the midterm elections? That didn't work, either.
To be clear, I'm all for the kind of passion Weiner is showing here, but let's direct it properly. Don't get into a shouting match about procedure. As emotionally satisfying as it may be to watch, raging against the GOP opposition machine's successful efforts to tie Dems in knots just makes Dems look whiny, weak and impotent.
“People say, ‘Oh those Tea Party people, they’re angry.’ I say: ‘No, they’re concerned and they’re worried.’ They’re worried that we could destroy the currency by adding such a massive debt. In Germany it led to Hitler.”You know who invented paper money? The Chinese. They had a Great Wall. That Great Wall? That led to Communism. We should add a plank to the Tea Party to stop the border fence or else the pinkos win. See? This is easy.
The Commerce Department, in revisions issued Friday, estimates the economy shrank 2.6 percent last year — the steepest drop since 1946. That's worse than the 2.4 percent decline originally estimated.I'm betting we'll see even more downward future revisions. Meanwhile, here in the present, the recovery is dying, and I just don't see the numbers getting any better anytime soon.
The economy's plunge underscores why the unemployment rate surged to 10.1 percent in October, a 26-year high.
The revisions in gross domestic product, or GDP, now show zero growth in 2008. That compares with a 0.4 percent gain previously estimated.The economy also grew less in 2007 (1.9 percent) than earlier thought (2.1 percent).
For all three years, consumers spent less and home builders cut more deeply than had been thought. Those factors help explain the downward revisions on the economy.
I’ve been surprised by a lot of things since the financial crisis broke, few of them good. One of the truly amazing things, however, is the return of full, 1930s-type liquidationism — the idea that a slump serves a useful purpose, and that stimulating the economy, even through monetary policy, is a mistake. And so we have Raghuram Rajan in today’s FT arguing that with 9.5 percent unemployment, long-term unemployment at record levels, and falling inflation, we need to … raise interest rates:Well, I have to agree with the Kroog here. Rajan's theory is once again supply creates demand...only that we have over-supply so by moving people to other industries and investing in them demand for those other industries will be created by...Magical Demand...Gnomes...or something, I guess. I don't get it, Rajan admits right there that the problem is lack of demand, and his solution is to shuffle supply around.
This crisis followed a period, from 2002-2004, when monetary policy had done too much heavy lifting. The US had far too much productive capacity devoted to houses and cars, because consumers could obtain financing for them easily. With households now struggling with this remaining debt, should we expect them to spend beyond their means again, or ask them to do so?Moreover, if consumers are now going to want fewer houses and cars, a significant number of jobs will disappear permanently. Workers who know how to build houses, or to sell or finance them, will have to learn new skills. This means resources have to be reallocated into other sectors to ensure a robust recovery, not simply a resumption of the old binge. But this will not necessarily be facilitated by ultra-low interest rates.
If high unemployment were largely about shifting workers out of an overblown construction sector, wouldn’t you expect job losses to be concentrated in that sector? Wouldn’t you expect employment elsewhere to be, if anything, rising? In fact, however, the vast majority of job losses have occurred in parts of the economy with little direct connection to the housing bubble. Yes, as a percentage job losses have been much larger in construction; but nothing in Rajan’s argument explains why we shouldn’t be using policy in an attempt to prevent vast job losses in parts of the economy that aren’t overblown.Ding ding ding! Kroog in one, ladies and gents. And yet all the plans I'm seeing are "Hey, let's transfer more wealth away from the middle class and destabilize our consumer based economy." The point here isn't to save the economy, the point here is to raid the treasury to build fat, load-bearing piles of cash that the guys at the top can use to ride out the floods high and dry while the rest of us drown.
I’d add that even if you think structural unemployment has gone up, it clearly hasn’t risen enough to stop a slide toward deflation — and if it has risen, the slump is arguably a cause, not an effect, of that rise.
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said the central bank should resume purchases of Treasury securities if the economy slows and prices fall rather than maintain a pledge to keep rates near zero.For some time now, readers will note I've been talking about the three stage roller coaster scenario in the economy: bubble-based commodity inflation, recessionary real estate deflation, and then depressionary economic hyper-inflation. The first happened in 2008 ($4 gas anyone?) as the flight to commodities out of the stock market created yet another bubble (which of course was a response to the housing bubble detonating in 2007.) That bubble burst in early 2009 as oil crashed and the deflationary spiral kicked in. Some 18 months later, we're nearing the end of stage two and Bullard's statement here is clearly setting the table for the beginning of stage three.
“The U.S. is closer to a Japanese-style outcome today than at any time in recent history,” Bullard said, warning in a research paper released yesterday about the possibility of deflation. “A better policy response to a negative shock is to expand the quantitative easing program through the purchase of Treasury securities.”
Bullard’s stance increases the odds the Fed will make such a move and reject other options should the economy weaken further, former Fed Governor Lyle Gramley said. Other alternatives to aid growth include using communication to plot the path of interest rates or cutting payments to banks on reserve deposits, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said last week.
“It’s going to be very important in shifting the mix of thinking at the Fed,” said Gramley, now senior economic adviser with Potomac Research Group in Washington. “Having Jim Bullard on the side of doing that could, I think, be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. sent a letter to the Senate Finance Committee Thursday, requesting a series of hearings on the matter and calling BP's plans to take a tax write-off "unacceptable."But gosh, corporate taxes are so terrible and horrible. You know, unless you can can dump a couple hundred tons of Corexit in the Gulf, call it a day, and then write it all off as an expense courtesy of the US taxpayer. Glad to see the Democrats might be willing to do something about it.
On Tuesday, BP said it took a $32 billion charge in the second quarter for clean-up costs, resulting in tax savings of about $10 billion.
That's half the value of the $20 billion fund that BP set up to aid Gulf coast victims, Nelson pointed out.
BP announced the charge along with its second quarter earnings, saying the cleanup costs were the main reason for its $17 billion loss during the quarter.
BP spokesman Daren Beaudo, in an email to CNN, said the company is following U.S. tax code in taking the charge.
Paul believes mountaintop removal just needs a little rebranding. "I think they should name it something better," he says. "The top ends up flatter, but we're not talking about Mount Everest. We're talking about these little knobby hills that are everywhere out here. And I've seen the reclaimed lands. One of them is 800 acres, with a sports complex on it, elk roaming, covered in grass." Most people, he continues, "would say the land is of enhanced value, because now you can build on it."Yep. Rand Paul. Enhancing the Bluegrass State, one big, toxic environmental disaster at a time. I'm sure people are lining up to build on that "enhanced" land. The Details magazine article concludes with this:
"Is there a certain amount of accidents and unfortunate things that do happen, no matter what the regulations are?" Paul says at the Harlan Center, in response to a question about the Big Branch disaster. "The bottom line is I'm not an expert, so don't give me the power in Washington to be making rules. You live here, and you have to work in the mines. You'd try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don't, I'm thinking that no one will apply for those jobs. I know that doesn't sound..." Here he stumbles, trying to parse his words properly but only presaging his campaign misstep. "I want to be compassionate," he concludes, "and I'm sorry for what happened, but I wonder: Was it just an accident?"Clearly ol' Rand here has never been in a situation where the entire town is beholden to one industry or one company. When the only people in the county hiring at a living wage is a coal mining outfit, when the only way to feed your family is to put on a helmet and brave the blackness, and put your life at risk, well...you don't have much of a choice. You play by their rules or you don't play at all.
A Fox News poll released Thursday finds that if Americans were heading to the voting booth today, they would back the Republican candidate in their district over the Democrat by 47-36 percent. Two weeks ago the Republicans had a slimmer 4-point advantage (41-37 percent)....then yes, Orange Julius's claim that the Republicans will pick up 100 seats in the House is not only reasonable but factual, and when it doesn't happen (because the reality is that the generic ballot is much, much closer) then "Democrats rigged the election to keep Congress" will be the latest way to de-legitimize Obama and the Dems.
Wow. Do Dems really think Harry Reid is this radioactive all the way over in Kentucky?
Jack Conway, the Dems' Senate candidate in that state, pointedly refused to say he'd vote for Reid as majority leader, and also cast doubt on whether Reid will win reelection, according to a local news report:OK Greg, first of all this race is basically between two people here, a moderate Republican...and the other guy is Rand Paul, who is mostly insane. Jack Conway is playing the middle of the road right of center position because Rand Paul has ceded that entire ground to him on account he's basically Andrew Ryan from Bioshock and Conway's very comfortable hedging his bets here.
Conway stopped far short of endorsing Reid as leader, and suggested that Reid may well lose his reelection bid for Senate."I don't know. We don't know the outcome of that race in Nevada. I don't know the outcome of a lot of these races and that kind of falls in the category of 'measuring the drapes.'""What I will do is I will go up there and cast my ballot for someone that I respect, someone that I think will be a good leader, and someone who will always listen to me when it comes to representing the interests of Kentucky."Conway's opponent, Rand Paul, has been baiting Conway on this issue, trying to get him to say whether he would vote for Reid, apparently on the theory that this is a liability, because Reid has done more than any other Dem to advance the Obama agenda.
According to Republicans and their conservadem enablers, we have to cut the deficit and pay for every program Congress passes or else we're all doomed. We're stealing from our children, they say. This has manifested itself in Republican filibusters of both unemployment benefits ($34 billion) and a new jobs bill ($33 billion over ten years). A Republican filibuster killed the jobs bill, and, after many failed cloture votes, the filibuster of the unemployment benefits was finally defeated and the Senate Democrats passed the extensions.But what about the Republican party's favorite group to champion, the small business owner? Certainly the GOP loves those guys. Well if you thought Republicans cared about small businesses, they don't give a damn either.
Throughout the past year and a half, it's been the same story. Any effort made by the Democrats to stimulate the economy has been filibustered by the Republicans. They say it's because of the deficit and debt.
And yet they want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which would add $678 billion dollars to the deficit -- and that's just the cost of the tax cuts going to the top two percent of earners. In other words, the Republicans want to spend $678 billion in further giveaways for the wealthiest two percent, and they don't care whether it increases the deficit.
By the way, the Republicans also recently voted against and defeated an amendment to strip Big Oil of its $35 billion in subsidies. Just thought I'd pass that along. Put another way, $678 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy? No problem. Deficit-shmeficit! But $34 billion in unemployment benefits for an out-of-work middle class at a time when companies aren't hiring (say nothing of the aforementioned bullet-points)? Evil! Instead, the Republicans want to give $35 billion to Big Oil in the form of corporate welfare during the worst oil spill in American history while telling unemployed middle class families to piss off.
Do we have a clear picture in terms of who and what the Republicans care about?
Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a $30-billion plan to help community banks boost lending to small businesses, dealing a blow to President Barack Obama's election-year battle to reduce unemployment.Yep. Republicans are so intent now on destroying the economy and blocking any attempts to help regular Americans that they are now totally committed to ripping the economy apart in order to give tax cuts to the wealthy and to see the rest of us burn and blame Obama for it. Mustering $12 billion in tax breaks for small businesses, TOO MUCH DEFICIT. $637 billion in tax cuts for the rich? Those don't count!
Tempers ran high as Democratic leaders failed to muster the 60 votes needed to advance the measure to passage. Republicans were upset that Democrats shut them out from offering a number of amendments to the package, that also includes about $12 billion in tax breaks for small businesses.
There are more uninsured residents of Texas — 6.1 million and counting — than there are people in 33 states. The state’s elected officials might be expected, therefore, to cheer a federal health care law that is likely to deliver billions of dollars from Washington to Austin and cover millions of low-income Texans.So Texas is busy reaping the benefits of being a large red state under the horrors of socialism. Funny how that works out. As Kay points out:
Instead, the Republican political leadership has greeted the law and its anticipated costs with open hostility, leaving policy makers to move forward with a complex set of changes even as the governor, attorney general and ranking legislators rage against it. The same awkward dichotomy exists in many of the 21 states that are challenging the health reform act’s constitutionality, but are nonetheless required to follow it while their lawsuits meander through the courts.
In Austin, legislative hearings and agency planning sessions proceed despite Gov. Rick Perry’s vow to fight “on every front available” against a law that he characterizes as “socialism on American soil.” Bureaucrats apply for federal grants and collaborate with the Obama administration at the same time that Attorney General Greg Abbott strategizes to eviscerate the law in court.
Health care reform going to the states is a good opportunity for Democrats to start countering Republican’s abstract theories on state’s rights by telling the truth: that this relationship is long-standing and mutually beneficial, every politician at the state level knows it, and that’s the real reason it isn’t going away.Especially benefiting from all this are southern and western red states. "Obama's Socialism" here means that ten states are currently getting $1.50 or more in tax dollars from the feds for each dollar residents pay in taxes, and 2, Mississippi and New Mexico, get more than $2 from the feds for ever buck they put in the pot. Texas was getting 94 cents on the dollar, and under health care reform they're getting even more now, enough to put them into positive territory.
Ousted Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod said Thursday that she will sue a conservative blogger who posted a partial video clip of a speech she gave, saying the clip distorted the context of her remarks.Actions? Meet consequences. When I find out where to donate a couple of bucks to Shirley's legal cause, I'll let you know. Smile, Andy.
A furor erupted over the blogger's posting of portions of a speech Sherrod gave in which she told of giving short shrift attention 24 years ago to the pleas for financial aid by a poor white farmer.
Sherrod is black, and the operator of the website BigGovernment.com posted a portion of her speech. The blogger, Andrew Breitbart, said he did so to illustrate racism within the NAACP, which earlier accused the tea party of having racist elements.
Sherrod made the announcement in San Diego at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention.
"She said she doesn't want an apology from Breitbart for posting the video that took her comments out of context, but told a crowd at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention that she would "definitely sue."She's going to need help and support, because she just became Public Enemy #1 to Wingnuttia, and this is going to get absolutely brutal very, very soon.
The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.Right, so the FBI may not be able to read your email or your web pages, but they can at any time declare you a "person of interest" and find our who you are sending emails to and which web pages you've been to, and force your ISP to give them that info, if the Obama administration has their way, all with the added benefit of bypassing any judicial oversight.
But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.
Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau's authority. "It'll be faster and easier to get the data," said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. "And for some Internet providers, it'll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL."
According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national survey, the vast majority believe that most immigrants are basically good, honest people who are hard-working. However, nearly seven in ten say that immigrants are a burden on the taxpayer, 62 percent think they add to the crime problem, and 59 percent believe they take jobs away from Americans.
The poll, released Wednesday, asks about all people who have immigrated from other countries in the past ten years, and not just about illegal immigrants in the U.S.
"The results may explain why most Americans think that the policies that made the U.S. a 'melting pot' strengthened the country a century ago but do not make the country stronger today," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.Apparently immigrants are like members of Congress: the ones you know personally are great, hardworking people who are very friendly. It's the ones you don't know personally who are all criminal, job-swiping parasites. Digby explains the dissonance:
I don't know exactly why CNN thought this was worth doing, but if their polling is correct, it's apparent that "most Americans" are a bunch of nativist jerks. Perhaps that's true. It's certainly always been the case that Americans have always tried to pull the ladder up behind them, whether it was the English settlers to the Germans, then the Germans to the Italians and the Slavs or everybody to the Chinese and other Asians. As for Latinos, well, they have always been here and we just use them as scapegoats whenever we feel like kicking somebody. Apparently, that would be now.When all the Republicans have in 2010 is a deck of scary race cards, every hand looks like El Tri over a pair of welfare queens.
President Obama has called the BP oil spill "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the "Catastrophe Along the Gulf Coast," while CBS, Fox and MSNBC slap "Disaster in the Gulf" chryons on all their spill-related news. Even BP fall guy Tony Hayward, after some early happy talk, admitted the spill was an "environmental catastrophe." The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.We don't know the extent of the long-term damage...so there's no long term-damage. Same sentence, even. Also Rush has a point!
Well, Rush has a point. The Deepwater explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it's no leak; it's the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It's also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it's important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.
Adopted in December 1865, the current 13th Amendment of the Constitution prohibits “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” in the United States or any place under its jurisdiction. The Iowa GOP is not trying to overturn this amendment to reinstate slavery. Instead, it wants to reintroduce the “original 13th Amendment” first offered by senator Phillip Reed of Maryland in 1810. The amendment states that “if any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honor” from a “foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen” and “shall be incapable of holding any office of trust.” In receiving only 12 out of the 13 votes needed for ratification, the amendment was never adopted.
Traditional supporters of the idea are known as “Thirteenthers,” who seek to prevent those with the title of “esquire,” such as lawyers and bankers, from participating in government. But according to its spokeswoman, Danielle Plogmann, the Iowa GOP supports it as an attack on President Obama’s Nobel Prize win:
There are, of course, other implications of Thirteenthism, such as ensuring that the United States never again suffers the humiliation of having a president win the Nobel Peace Prize. That was just what the Iowa Republicans had in mind, according to Plogmann, who wrote in an e-mail that the plank “was meant to make a statement about the delegates’ opinion about Mr. Obama receiving the prize.” (Presumably they didn’t mind if, in the process, they were also making a statement about any American scientist or writer unlucky enough to win a Nobel.) Unfortunately for them, the Department of Justice looked into whether Obama needed Congressional approval to accept the Nobel under the existing emoluments clause, and based on the meaning of “foreign state” (which would not cover the Nobel Prize Committee) concluded that he did not.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency over the state's finances on Wednesday, raising pressure on lawmakers to negotiate a state budget that is more than a month overdue and will need to close a $19 billion shortfall.Yeah, because it's all the employees' fault, not Arnold's or the Assembly's. Let's make them take three days off without pay. That'll improve the situation, right? And hey, the next stop on this road should be familiar to long-time readers: the IOUs are back.
The deficit is 22 percent of the $85 billion general fund budget the governor signed last July for the fiscal year that ended in June, highlighting how the steep drop in California's revenue due to recession, the housing slump, financial market turmoil and high unemployment have slashed its all-important personal income tax collection.
In the declaration, Schwarzenegger ordered three days off without pay per month beginning in August for tens of thousands of state employees to preserve the state's cash to pay its debt, and for essential services.
Schwarzenegger's declaration noted State Controller John Chiang has said he could be forced to issue IOUs as early as next month because of the budget impasse.The only thing I'm surprised by at this point is that more states aren't turning to California's slash and burn style to punish those evil, evil government employees who all get paid in your taxpayer money, the bastards. Oh, but remember, Arnold is a GOP moderate.
If It Causes Stress, Is It Really a Vacation Home?
The dynamics of second homeownership often conspire against this, said Milton F. Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, an organization that does research on wealthy consumers. “People become slaves to their homes. They buy into the headlines and that makes them pretty miserable with their vacation homes.”With the residential housing market collapsing and jumbo mortgages (you know, the kind you find on over-priced vacation homes) defaulting at a far greater rate than standard middle-class mortgages, it's nice to know that the Times is sensitive enough to cover the unbearable lightness of being that must accompany the dilemma faced by what must be trillions of Americans over the agonizing decision to purchase that second vacation home (or in John McCain's case, number 8.)
Let me see if I’ve got this straight:Not only do you have that right, but the Republicans believe they are going to pick up a 100 seats in the House and take over the Senate because the American voter will reward them for the last thirty years of this.
Here we are in the smoldering ruins of an economy recently wrecked by Wall Street greed, in a country where for 30 years almost all income growth has been concentrated among the richest 1 percent of Americans (See graph to right). Rising populist anger, massive long-term unemployment and record home foreclosures serve as counterpoints to soaring corporate profits, while the Supreme Court rules that corporations are people and can spend limitless amounts of money trying to elect candidates willing to serve their interests.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party defends massive tax breaks for the wealthy while blocking aid to the unemployed, fights bitterly against regulations designed to prevent a repeat of the Wall Street meltdown, blocks legislation that would at least require corporate and special interests to identify themselves when they invest in elections and does all that while proclaiming itself to be the party of the little people.
Do I have that right?
"Then you're more stupid for voting for Republicans than you are for using your houses as credit cards, and I'm gonna keep believing it. You've been so played for so long by god, guns, abortion and gays that you don't even realize you're being reamed without lube. There was a class war, and we lost, because you and people like you were coopted by the enemy."Amen, sister. And now comes the shock and awe, sans lube.
Senate Democrats do not have the votes to lower the 60-vote threshold to cut off filibusters.
The lack of support among a handful of Senate Democratic incumbents is a major blow to the effort to change the upper chamber’s rules.
Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate are pushing for filibuster reform at the start of the new Congress next year.
Five Senate Democrats have said they will not support a lowering of the 60-vote bar necessary to pass legislation.
Another four lawmakers say they are wary about such a change and would be hesitant to support it.
Well of course not. People forget that in all this "The problem is the filibuster" talk that the real problem is the Senators who have come to rely on it as the ultimate escape hatch for Senate Dems. "Hey, we all tried voting for your progressive legislation X but, well, the filibuster stopped us."
A 10th Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), said he would support changing the rule on filibusters of motions to begin debate on legislation, but not necessarily the 60-vote threshold needed to bring up a final vote on bills.
Senior Democrats say Reid will not have the votes to change the rule at the beginning of next year.You see? As far as our Senators are concerned the filibuster is working as intended. But then again, as far as a lot of "progressive" Dems in the Senate are concerned, it always has been.
“It won’t happen,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said she would “probably not” support an effort to lower the number of votes needed to cut off filibusters from 60 to 55 or lower.
Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) echoed Feinstein: “I think we should retain the same policies that we have instead of lowering it.
“I think it has been working,” he said.
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) said he recognizes his colleagues are frustrated over the failure to pass measures such as the Disclose Act, campaign legislation that fell three votes short of overcoming a Republican filibuster Tuesday.
“I think as torturous as this place can be, the cloture rule and the filibuster is important to protect the rights of the minority,” he said. “My inclination is no.”
Meanwhile, the section of the law that allows citizens to sue law enforcement wasn't blocked. This is one of the weirdest and most ridiculous provisions of the legislation. Not just the Arizona legislation -- all legislation. Ever.Expect those lawsuits to be filed very very soon. How the hell does that crazy-ass provision work? "I saw me one of them illegals today, therefore you're not enforcing the law, therefore I'm going to sue the pants off you!"
“Preserving the status quo through a preliminary injunction is less harmful than allowing state laws that are likely pre-empted by federal law to be enforced,” she said.My favorite right-wing reaction? Col. Mustard.
“There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens,” she wrote. “By enforcing this statute, Arizona would impose a ‘distinct, unusual and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.”
The decision was a surprise to me in that it struck the provision -- which was most controversial -- as to checking immigration status of persons already arrested or stopped for some other offense if there were a reasonable suspicion that the person was in the country illegally.The most controversial and unconstitutional part of the law gets struck down because of the patently ridiculous and unenforceable burden on Arizona's cops as to what constitutes a "reasonable suspicion" of a person being in the country illegally, without that suspicion being able to be applied in any sane or reasonably consistent way short of A) racial profiling, B) asking everybody for documentation, also stuck down, or C) the person wearing a t-shirt that reads "Undocumented and proud of it" while dragging an unconscious Border Patrol agent around behind them, and the law professor finds it a "surprise".
Several major coal companies hope to use newly loosened campaign-finance laws to pool their money and defeat Democratic congressional candidates they consider "anti-coal," including U.S. Senate nominee Jack Conway and U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler in Kentucky.
The companies hope to create a politically active nonprofit under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, so they won't have to publicly disclose their activities — such as advertising — until they file a tax return next year, long after the Nov. 2 election.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last winter that corporations and labor unions may pour unlimited funds into such efforts to influence elections.
"With the recent Supreme Court ruling, we are in a position to be able to take corporate positions that were not previously available in allowing our voices to be heard," wrote Roger Nicholson, senior vice president and general counsel at International Coal Group of Scott Depot, W.Va., in an undated letter he sent to other coal companies.Yeah, who will speak for our poor, downtrodden, energy companies in states like kentucky? Who will represent their interests as they continue to be downtrodden until the Supreme Court wisely allowed them to spend unlimited money on elections and our Senate concurred...
Nicholson declined to comment on his letter Tuesday, after the Herald-Leader obtained it.
"A number of coal industry representatives recently have been considering developing a 527 entity with the purpose of attempting to defeat anti-coal incumbents in select races, as well as elect pro-coal candidates running for certain open seats," Nicholson wrote. "We're requesting your consideration as to whether your company would be willing to meet to discuss a significant commitment to such an effort."
Local government revenue has dwindled so severely that U.S. cities and counties will have to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs in the coming months, leaving communities without basic services and pressuring jobless rates, according to a new survey.Some of those cuts have been made. Thousands more are coming. That means more cops, teachers, firefighters, city workers, hell entire departments are on the block. The cuts will not make our country safer or more efficient, after all these employees spent money in their communities too and in a real sense it was stimulus spending by local governments and always has been.
The survey, released on Tuesday by three government associations, aims to press Congress on pending legislation that would give them $75 billion over two years to preserve jobs.
Local and state government employment accounts for more jobs in the United States than construction and manufacturing combined. The survey by the National League of Cities, National Association of Counties and U.S. Conference of Mayors found that they are the primary employer in many communities.
Those surveyed—214 cities with populations of more than 25,000 and 56 counties of more than 100,000 people—reported they will cut 8.6 percent of their full-time positions from 2009 through 2011.
"If applied to total local government employment nationwide, an 8.6 percent cut in the workforce would mean that 481,000 local government workers were, or will be, laid off over the two-year period," the report said.
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