Last Call

Arizona really is the craziest, meanest state in the nation, mainly because it's full of crazy mean Republicans.

It's not quite a scarlet letter.


But a Chandler Republican lawmaker wants the debit cards now given to food-stamp recipients to be bright safety orange. And if there's any doubt what the card pulled out of someone's wallet at the checkout is, that would be erased by the words "Government Food Stamp Card" stamped across it in large black print.

First-term Rep. Jeff Dial said his goal is not to stigmatize those who qualify for the aid, formally known as the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Instead, Dial said he wants to prevent fraud.

"If that does concern people that they have a bright orange card, I hope they go get a better education or better jobs and stop using that card," he said.

Yeah, he doesn't want to stigmatize people who have to resort to SNAP, he's just hoping the bright orange card will embarrass people enough to make them start their own business.  SNAP cards are run by the credit card and bank companies anyway, they have quite a bit of fraud protection on them (that taxpayers are paying the credit card companies and banks to handle.)  The bright orange thing is just to remove any dignity they might have left, because there are really tens of millions of jobs out there, people are just out of work and on SNAP because they're all lazy welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

There but for the grace of God goes this nitwit.  Can they pass a law that forces this guy to wear a bright orange jacket that says "Arizona Government Employee" on it?

South Dakota's Dead Or Alive Abortion Provider Bill Gets The Hook

Somebody needs to give MoJo's Kate Sheppard an award, because if she hadn't noticed this law, it probably would have passed before anyone did.

A state bill to expand the definition of justifiable homicide in South Dakota to include killing someone in the defense of an unborn child was postponed indefinitely Wednesday after an uproar over whether the legislation would put abortion providers at greater risk.

The House speaker, Val Rausch, said that the legislation had been shelved, pending a decision on whether to allow a vote, amend the language or drop it entirely. A spokesman for Gov. Dennis Daugaard said, “Clearly the bill as it’s currently written is a very bad idea.”

The bill, approved by the House Judiciary Committee last week on a 9-to-3 party-line vote, establishes in part that “homicide is justifiable if committed by any person in the lawful defense of such person, or of his or her husband, wife, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant, or the unborn child of any such enumerated person.”

The phrasing caused concern and disbelief on both sides of the abortion debate, with activists in the abortion rights and anti-abortion movements calling the language poorly conceived at best, and perhaps an incitement to violence. The bill was cheered, though, by those anti-abortion activists who argue that the use of violence is justified to stop doctors from carrying out abortions.

Dr. Marvin Buehner, of Rapid City, S.D., who is the only doctor in the region to provide abortions for women whose health and safety are at risk, said he was shaken by the measure.

“Once you get the sense that the Legislature will tolerate violence against abortion providers, even if the legislation is not enacted, it crosses the line into intimidation,” he said. 

Brave guy, when a state legislature decides to look the other way while your death is sanctioned.  It seems however that the media storm has done its job and the bill's not going anywhere without a major rewrite.

Well Boss Hogg Didn't Think It Was Trouble, But The Duke Boys Knew Better

Ol' Boss Hogg's lips have to be getting tired blowing on that racial dog whistle.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, declined to denounce a group's proposal that the state issue a license plate honoring an early Ku Klux Klan leader.


The idea, put forth by the white heritage group Sons of Confederate Veterans, would create a state-issued license plate by 2014 in honor of Confederate General and KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. It would include a car tag and a series of other Civil War license plates.

Mississippi lawmakers are considering the proposal, and Barbour said it's unlikely to be approved but refused to stake out a position against it.

"I don't go around denouncing people," Barbour told reporters Tuesday in his home state when asked about the idea, according to The Associated Press.

Look, your personal opinions about Gen. Forrest being honored with a license plate aside, if this chucklehead really did have anything close to a shot left in 2012, it just died this week.  From a political standpoint Boss Hogg here just shot himself through the foot with a large enough round for both feet at once.  Then again, given the state of the competition in 2012, maybe Barbour figures this is his ace card.

Won't he make a good President after Obama.

Being Civil In The Aloha State

Less than a year after Republican governor Linda Lingle vetoed a civil unions bill in Hawaii, Democrat Neal Abercrombie is now ready to sign the bill into law.

By a vote of 18-5, the chamber approved Senate Bill 232, legalizing civil unions in Hawaii.

The measure now goes to Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who supports civil unions and has promised to sign the bill into law.

By law, the governor has 10 days from the time the bill reaches his desk to decide on the bill, putting his deadline on or about March 3.

The governor's office said details on the bill's signing were forthcoming. Abercrombie is scheduled to travel to Washington, D.C., next week for the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association from Feb. 26-28.

In a written statement, Abercrombie said civil unions "respect our diversity, protect people's privacy, and reinforce our core values of equality and aloha."

"This has been an emotional process for everyone involved, but that process is now ended," he added. "Everyone has been heard; all points of view respected.

"For me, this bill represents equal rights for all the people of Hawaii."

And while "anything can happen" is the mantra often heard among veteran Capitol watchers, most supporters seemed unworried.

"No concerns whatsoever," said Alan Spector, co-chairman of Equality Hawaii. "The bill is passed and Gov. Abercrombie has promised to sign it.

"It was one of his campaign promises. He supports this. We have absolutely nothing to worry about."

Once signed into law, couples would be able to enter civil unions starting Jan. 1.

Hawaii would become the seventh state to grant civil unions to same-sex couples without authorizing marriage itself. Five states and Washington, D.C., permit same-sex marriage.

It's a step in the right direction, and more and more states are taking them.

Military Fails To Protect Female Soldiers

WASHINGTON – A group of U.S. veterans who say they were raped and abused by their comrades want to force the Pentagon to change how it handles such cases.

More than a dozen female and two male current or former service members say servicemen get away with rape and other sexual abuse and victims are too often ordered to continue to serve alongside those they say attacked them.

In one instance, a woman who was bruised from her attack itself and from being restrained was told she didn't fight hard enough and wasn't acting like a rape victim.  Another woman was threatened with physical harm for speaking to her commander. This example says it all, I think:

Kori Cioca, 25, of Wilmington, Ohio, described being hit in the face by a superior in one incident in 2005 and being raped by the same man in a second incident soon after while serving in the Coast Guard in Bay City, Mich.

Even though the man confessed to having sex with her, Cioca said in the lawsuit she was told if she pressed forward with reporting the sex as a rape, she would be court-martialed for lying. She said the man pleaded guilty only to hitting her and his punishment was a minor loss of pay and being forced to stay on the base for 30 days. She said she was discharged from the military for a "history of inappropriate relationships."

Women have valuable roles in the military.  They are also risking their lives (and apparently a whole lot more) to serve their country.  They deserve better from their fellow soldiers, their chain of seniority, and their country.  The rationale that directors don't want something like that on their record doesn't lessen the fact that an innocent person was purposely harmed.

TSA = They Steal Anything

A TSA supervisor stole money from passengers who went through his security checkpoint and accepted bribes and kickbacks from a colleague.

Michael Arato, a supervisor at Newark Liberty Airport, admitted on Monday that he regularly took money from passengers during security screenings and deliberately targeted foreigners who could not speak much English.

The 41-year-old, from Ewing, admitted in federal court that he permitted a worker he supervised to steal $10,000 to $30,000 in cash from traveller's bags over a 13-month period.

So does anyone else think they should go through those scanners when they leave their shift?  The TSA is going to have to earn the public trust if they are going to insist that we run through hoops and make it easy for them.  Any business can hire a thief, it happens to the best of them.  However, creating an abusable system is on them, and the failure to make the screening process more transparent (pun intended) will benefit everyone.

Orange You Supposed To Create Jobs?

Dana Milbank's number came up this week in the "Random Acts Of Actual Journalism" lottery and he turns in a column that actually asks a decent question:  Just how many jobs will be lost by the Republican budget cuts?

"So be it."

That was House Speaker John Boehner's cold answer when asked Tuesday about job losses that would come from his new Republican majority's plans to cut tens of billions of dollars in government spending this year.

"Do you have any sort of estimate on how many jobs will be lost through this?" Pacifica Radio's Leigh Ann Caldwell inquired at a news conference just before the House began its debate on the cuts.

Boehner stood firm in his polished tassel loafers. "Since President Obama has taken office the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs, and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it," he said.

"Do you have any estimate of how many will?" Caldwell pressed. "And won't that negatively impact the economy?"

"I do not," Boehner replied, moving to the next questioner.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I do. I checked with budget expert Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress, and, using the usual multipliers, he calculated that the cuts - a net of $59 billion in the last half of fiscal 2011 - would lead to the loss of 650,000 government jobs, and the indirect loss of 325,000 more jobs as fewer government workers travel and buy things. That's nearly 1 million jobs - possibly enough to tip the economy back into recession.

So be it? 

Of course, that didn't stop Orange Julius's own party from stabbing him in the back today as they shot down the F-35 jet's second engine project (which would of course been built partially by GE in Boehner's backyard of Dayton and nearby Evendale.)

He's against government jobs, willing to put one million Americans out of work this year and then blame Obama for it, but he sure as hell tried to save his own orange ass with government money, eh?  Even his own party wasn't going to buy that and they left him hanging out to dry as the vote failed.

So if the jobs are in Boehner's district, he cares.  The other 434 congressional districts can rot.  These crazy Republicans are going to literally wreck the economy and cost the country a million jobs just to try to win in 2012, and they think you're stupid enough to fall for it.

Nice guys, huh?

If It's Thursday...

Jobless claims this week up 25k to 410k, so that's not good.  We really need to stay below 400k.

Core inflation up slightly, but still not enough to indicate anything more than stagnant princes on big ticket items.  Commodities are another story. 120k people fell off the 99er cliff last week of January, too.  Not good.

Want A Job? Better Have A Job Then

More and more employers are requiring prospective employees to already have a job before they'll even consider looking at them.  If you're unemployed, don't bother to apply.  Turns out the EEOC is taking a look.

As if finding work weren't hard enough already, a federal agency warns that some employers are excluding jobless workers from consideration for openings.


The practice has surfaced in electronic and print postings with language such as "unemployed applicants will not be considered" or "must be currently employed." Some ads use time thresholds to exclude applicants who've been unemployed longer than six months or a year.

Evidence of the practice has been mostly anecdotal, and information about how widespread it may be is sketchy.

But with unemployment at 9 percent and millions of people struggling to find jobs, the practice has caught the attention of regulators, lawmakers and advocates for the unemployed.

"At a moment when we all should be doing whatever we can to open up job opportunities to the unemployed, it is profoundly disturbing that the trend of deliberately excluding the jobless from work opportunities is on the rise," said Christine Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

Expect more and more companies to do this until somebody takes it to court.  It's a lot easier to strip minorities, women, people with kids and older Americans from the applicant pool by saying "unemployed need not apply" and leave the folks who will work 70 hours a week on a flat salary without complaining.  But hey, after years of stripping unions and collective bargaining from the workplace, this is what you get.

StupidiNews!

• Thousands of Bahrain police swarmed protesters in capital Manama's Pearl Roundabout to forcibly end demonstrations in the tiny Arab state.
• GOP Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts revealed to 60 minutes that he was sexually abused as a ten-year old.
• Public broadcasting fights to keep funding that the GOP wants to eliminate completely, and even Washington veterans say this time there will be some major cuts.
• Fed officials continue to have differences over continuing to stimulate the economy by buying bonds.
• French officials are considering taxing Google, Facebook, and other internet giants to help pay for broadband infrastructure.

Last Call

Looks like Wisconsin's new Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker is making friends.

Thousands of teachers, prison guards and students descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on Wednesday to try to preserve the union rights of public employees in the state that was the first to grant collective bargaining to government workers more than a half-century ago.


The new Republican governor, Scott Walker, is seeking passage of the nation's most aggressive anti-union proposal — a plan that would all but eliminate the bargaining process for most public employees.

The sweeping measure was moving swiftly through the GOP-led Legislature and would mark a dramatic shift for Wisconsin, which passed a comprehensive collective bargaining law in 1959 and was the birthplace of the national union representing all non-federal public employees.

The Statehouse filled with as many as 10,000 demonstrators, and many Madison teachers joined the protest by calling in sick in such numbers that the district had to cancel classes.

As protesters chanted outside his office door on the second consecutive day of demonstrations, Walker insisted he has the votes to pass the measure, which he says is needed to help balance a projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall and avoid widespread layoffs.

Walker said he appreciated the concerns of protesters, but taxpayers "need to be heard as well." Although he said he was open to making changes, he promised not to do anything that would "fundamentally undermine the principles" of the bill.

"We're at a point of crisis," the governor said. 

It appears Wisconsin's government workers, teachers, firefighters, police, prison guards and more, are calling Walker's bluff on calling out the National Guard to go after demonstrators.  It seems the lessons of Egypt and Tunisia have not been lost on Americans after all. 

I can see why Walker is petulantly holding the line.  He can't change his mind now or the Tea Party will disown him and his term is over before it begins.  Having said that, it's pretty clear if this knucklehead's intransigence can get 10,000 plus Wisconsinites out to protest in February, it's serious.

It seems the lessons of the Tea Party haven't been lost on these folks, either...just lost on the Village who refuses to cover this.  I guess they need more badly spelled signage, Revolutionary War era costumes, Gadsden flags and concealed guns.  Instead, other than MSNBC, nobody seems to have noticed thousands of working class Americans fighting to keep their right to collectively bargain.

University Of Hard Knocks

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

UNLV President Neal Smatresk told a somber Faculty Senate on Tuesday that the administration was planning a kind of bankruptcy to deal with its budget crunch.

Under the "financial exigency" plan, tenured professors could be fired and whole departments and programs more easily closed down.

Earlier this month, the Board of Regents said it would be premature to consider such a move until the Legislature approved a final budget by June.

Smatresk told the faculty group that the cuts for UNLV would total $47.5 million and would need to be implemented by July 2012, so a plan for financial exigency would have to be prepared.

UNLV has had about $50 million in cuts over the last four years, mostly in non-academic areas and mostly avoiding large cuts for professor positions. If the cuts proposed by Gov. Brian Sandoval were approved, Smatresk said, academic cuts could not be avoided.

"We would have to declare financial exigency," Smatresk said. He added, "I believe the proposed cuts could materialize."

He and other officials would spend the next few weeks developing cutback plans with deans and faculty groups.

"It's very clear our state is approaching a state of fiscal collapse" when it comes to education, Smatresk said.

The cuts, Smatresk said, will lead to a "smaller, more expensive, more selective institution."

Universities, education and knowledge are for suckers, anyway.  Real Americans drop out of college and found multi-billion dollar companies in their garage and stuff.  Besides, clearly the answer here is to cut taxes for the wealthy more and eliminate the estate tax so that when one of them dies, they'll have extra money to endow to the school.

Tax cuts magically create more revenue than the cuts themselves cost, you know.  And you don't need one of them there fancy-pants college degrees to know that, by gum.

Rick Scott Rails Against Jobs

You have to wonder what Rick Scott is up to when he's throwing away jobs in this economy.

TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott announced this morning that he's taking a pass on $2.4 billion in federal stimulus money President Obama's administration had earmarked for a high-speed train connecting Orlando and Tampa.

Scott made the announcement in a hastily called news conference where he denounced Obama's budget.

"You don't have to be an economic expert to know when you spend more money than you take in you will fail," Scott said.

The move likely means those dollars would be headed to California and other states investing in high-speed rail.

Scott had previously said he didn't want the state spending any money on the rail line, which requires $280 million in matching funds. But backers of the project have said that the consortiums of companies set to bid on the line had indicated willingness to put up their own money in return for a contract.

So these companies were willing to invest in Florida and put up their own funding and not stick taxpayers with the bill. Rick Scott killed the project anyway at a time when Florida's unemployment rate is 11.6% and the underemployment rate is approaching 20% plus. Again, this was all about Florida businesses that wanted to invest in infrastructure.

But infrastructure is evil. Can't have President Obama taking credit, you see. So Florida loses out on thousands of jobs. Same thing happened in Ohio and Wisconsin.

The only job these Republican governors care about is their own. The rest of you can go to hell if it means Obama might not look like the Antichrist.

Don't Try To Con The Con Man

Via Barry Ritholtz, convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff says in a NY Times interview that the banks knew he was ripping the planet off.  They were doing the same thing, you see.

Mr. Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence, seemed frail and a bit agitated compared with the stoic calm he maintained before his incarceration in 2009, perhaps burdened by sadness over the suicide of his son Mark in December.

Besides that loss, his family also has faced stacks of lawsuits, the potential forfeiture of most of their assets, and relentless public suspicion and enmity that cut Mr. Madoff and his wife Ruth off from their children.

In many ways, however, Mr. Madoff seemed unchanged. He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.

“They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”

While he acknowledged his guilt in the interview and said nothing could excuse his crimes, he focused his comments laserlike on the big investors and giant institutions he dealt with, not on the financial pain he caused thousands of his more modest investors. In an e-mail written on Jan. 13, he observed that many long-term clients made more in legitimate profits from him in the years before the fraud than they could have elsewhere. “I would have loved for them to not lose anything, but that was a risk they were well aware of by investing in the market,” he wrote.

Mr. Madoff said he was startled to learn about some of the e-mails and messages raising doubts about his results — now emerging in lawsuits — that bankers were passing around before his scheme collapsed.

“I’m reading more now about how suspicious they were than I ever realized at the time,” he said with a faint smile. 

Never con a con man.   Hopefully he'll have company in prison for the next century.

The Worst Thing I've Heard All Year - I Quit Counting

Out of respect for the victim, the article was kept mercifully short.  In a rare exception, I am going to reprint it in its entirety.

On Friday, Feb. 11, the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a "60 Minutes" story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy.

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

There will be no further comment from CBS News and correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time.

This is a grim reminder, one of many in the news recently, that journalists face real danger when they travel abroad.  It's nice to see CBS huddle protectively around  Logan and take the high road.  My prayers are with her, and I hope she recovers as much as one can from something so terrible.