If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
So remember Monday when Andrew Breitbart crashed Anthony Weiner's presser and threatened to release a "far worse" picture in order to "protect" the Congressman's family and force Weiner to come clean?
Prominent conservative voice Andrew Breitbart showed two radio hosts what is likely the X-rated photograph of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) he signaled he had in his possession earlier this week.
After revealing the explicit image said to be of the congressman to Sirus XM's Opie and Anthony on Wednesday, the picture was subsequently leaked into the public eye on Twitter.
Opie wrote in a tweet, which included a link to the photo, "Opie'd eye - this is a pic from @anthonycumia phone of the infamous weiner." He subsequently said on the social media platform, "Lots of you confused how the pic got out there. Myself and Anthony will explain in a bit right here on Twitter."
Nice guy, that Breitbart. And his message is clear: he will do anything in his power to try to destroy the Democratic Party, its politicians, and anyone remotely connected to them.
The media could do something about Breitbart and his blackmail games, but they won't. After all, they would be next.
Iran is only a matter of months from being able to create a nuclear weapon, according to experts.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 54, has long been pushing his country's nuclear capabilities, and at the current rate of uranium enrichment the first bomb could be eight weeks away.
Gregory S Jones, from RAND, published a report this week explaining the severity of the situation and to confirm the fears expressed by a United Nations watchdog.
Surprise, it's our old friends at the ultra right wing think tank The RAND Corporation, with a report sourced in a story in Rupert Murdoch's UK Daily Mail. First bomb by August! We must invade now or else millions will die AIYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...
Oh wait, our liberal media is reporting that Iran already has nukes.
"California is a theocracy run by insane clerics to the failed religion of global climate change and is just like Islamist Iran, and probably just as dangerous to America. Radical Islam and climate change are the exact same thing! Why haven't we invaded California yet to free these oppressed people from their state of tyranny? Certainly we have a couple of Predator drones we can use on Sacramento, right? Why aren't these religious nutjobs who believe in "climate science" all gone yet?"
"Being essentially a religion, the green regime answers its critics with a well-developed mythology about how these policies can be implemented without economic distress."
So here’s one way to tell if you’re a genuine skeptic or a climate denier.
When trying to understand what’s happening to our climate, do you consider the full body of evidence? Or do you find the denial instinct kicking in when confronted with inconvenient evidence?
For example, let’s look at the question of whether global warming is happening. Do you acknowledge sea level rise, a key indicator of a warming planet, tripling over the last century? Do you factor in the warming oceans, which since 1970 have been building up heat at a rate of two-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs every second? Glaciers are retreating all over the world, threatening the water supply of hundreds of millions of people. Ice sheets from Greenland in the north to Antarctica in the south are losing hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice every year. Seasons are shifting, flowers are opening earlier each year and animals are migrating towards the poles. The very structure of our atmosphere is changing.
We have tens of thousands of lines of evidence that global warming is happening. A genuine skeptic surveys the full body of evidence coming in from all over our planet and concludes that global warming is unequivocal. A climate denier, on the other hand, reacts to this array of evidence in several possible ways.
The most extreme form of climate denier won’t even go near the evidence. They avoid the issue altogether by indulging in conspiracy theories. They’ll pull a quote out of context from a stolen ‘Climategate‘ email as proof that climate change is just a huge hoax. I have yet to hear how the ice sheets, glaciers and thousands of migrating animal species are in on the conspiracy, but I’m sure there’s a creative explanation floating around on the Internet.
That creative explanation is apparently "global climate change is a religion based on pure faith, and there's zero scientific evidence to support it."
"She wants us to think about government the way the early Colonists thought about England. She wants us to arm ourselves that we can fight the Redcoats. She wants us to live in a relentless, simmering state of rebellion: ever angry, ever mistrustful, ever detesting the people we've elected to run the government, the people who cover the people in government. She wants us to feel towards government the way angry, middle-aged bikers look at government: as the enemy.
This is why the 2012 election is not about who will lead us, but whether we are ready to vote against the belief that we are governing ourselves. What a negative, self-defeating proposition she makes. What a strange reason for remaining in public life. She gets the history wrong because she gets the United States wrong. We are a self-governing country, and the people that matter are the ones who help us do it, not the people who attack, but do not lead."
And I don't often say this, but Chris Matthews is 100% right about Palin. This is why she will never run for a government office again, because she's running a long con involving at heart, a childish, petulant, entitled viewpoint that says if you don't agree with the actions of our representative democracy, instead of settling that at the voting booth the next election, that instead they are illegitimate and must be rebelled against.
When people she disagrees with win an election, that election is void. That's not what a democracy is all about at all, and certainly not what the United States of America is all about. And yet, Matthews's analysis both seemingly proves that Palin has no intention of running for public office, and that she shouldn't be taken seriously as a candidate for such.
(CNN)– Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Sunday defended recent legislation that requires adults applying for welfare assistance to undergo drug screenings, saying the law provides "personal accountability."
"It's not right for taxpayer money to be paying for somebody's drug addiction," Scott told CNN's T.J. Holmes on Sunday. "On top of that, this is going to increase personal responsibility, personal accountability. We shouldn't be subsidizing people's addiction."
I get it. I agree completely. It's not a perfect solution, but if a person is performing an act that makes them unemployable, then it should be discouraged. Paying for someone else's needs, I'm all for that. Helping someone while they are down, and supporting those who cannot take care of themselves, you betcha. Funding a loser's pot or meth habit while hard workers have to make sacrifices and go without makes no sense. If you are going to accept the assistance, you have to accept the terms. I think it is completely reasonable to enforce this. If someone doesn't want to comply, they have a choice.
However, this is a little simplistic. If someone is going through treatment, we could give a little leeway as long as they show results. That's how you know that drugs is really just a cash crop for the system. There is little to no giving back to the public. Drug money funds our schools and local governments, tax money is spent on commercials and billboards, but no money seems to go for direct treatment. What little there is seems wasted and poorly planned. Meanwhile, addicts are flourishing and we're picking up the bill.
Something's gotta give. Make it so that if people want to quit, they absolutely can. Then they have a choice to make, accountability and consequences for their decision.
The FCC responds to some criticism of their data used for articles pointing out that the US is lagging in broadband coverage and quality. The funny thing is, while they claim that the media has taken their data and run wild with it, they also go point by point and acknowledge all those problems exist. I don't get it. It's almost like the author is personally offended by the discussion, not because the media was wrong, but because they were correct and their numbers supplied that knowledge. Is it not enough to just produce data and let people read and interpret it for themselves?
Click here for the full article, and the broadband coverage map that started it all. By any standards, we're lagging. I'm not sure why the FCC decided to publish a retort, but in my book it didn't do anything but diminish their credibility.
"We have created this huge debt. […] We’ve got to stop the outrageous spending that’s going on. We hear the CBO says well if we don’t raise the debt limit, it’s going to put so many people out of work, I don’t remember then number, I think it’s 250,000 or something, are gonna be put out of work. Well those are gonna be government employees that are put out of work. There are a lot of government employees that need to go find a real job!"
To recap, a government employee currently collecting a salary from taxpayers is saying he'd rather see 250,000 Americans get laid off indefinitely or lose their jobs than raise the debt ceiling, because government employees are not real Americans, they are instead uniformly evil parasites who must be shunned, reviled, or eliminated when possible.
The fact that Paul Broun hasn't been run out of office for saying "Get a real job!" to teachers, firefighters, police officers, mail carriers, park rangers, etc. is lamentable.
So when Republicans stigmatize all government workers, who will they scapegoat next?
"It's a bad idea," Holtz-Eakin said at a panel discussion of former CBO heads in Washington. "Little defaults, big defaults; default's a bad idea period and there should be no one who believes otherwise."
He's not the only one:
Rudy Penner, CBO director under President Reagan, also slammed the suggestion that default was anything but dangerous.
"The dumbest thing to do would be to default even for one day right at this point," he said. "I don't see much good coming out of these notions that somehow if we got a big budget deal it would be OK not to pay interest for a few weeks or few days."
Penner added: "It's playing with matches around gasoline as far as I'm concerned and would be an incredibly stupid thing to do."
Robert Reischauer, CBO director under Presidents Bush Sr. and Clinton, said while he could envision a scenario in which a sudden plunge in the stock market shocked both parties into compromising on a deal, it was too unstable and dangerous an approach to trifle with.
"Do I advocate that? No," he said. "Do I think that's risky? Yes. But we're looking for adult behavior here and seeing none. "
I've long said that the economic giants in the country aren't going to let the Republicans blow up the bond market. But August is only two months away, and there's no sign that the GOP is going to do anything other than continue their hostage taking. It's time for the economic powers that be to step in, and I truly believe they will do so, and very soon.
A woman graduating with a bachelor’s degree last year earned a median starting salary of $36,451. For a man, it was $44,159. When you calculate a lifetime of percentage raises and compound interest, that nearly $8,000 difference is staggering.
As demoralizing as the findings of “Gender and College Recruiting” might be for this year’s female grads, its implications for future generations of women in the workplace are downright alarming. NACE’s analysis, which painstakingly isolates a systematic gender effect by taking into account the differential salary levels among majors and then comparing salaries within the same major, gives lie to the conventional wisdom that paycheck parity will somehow materialize for women with the mere passage of time.
And let's keep in mind this is for college graduates, not for dangerous blue collar jobs like construction or meat packing or industrial fishing jobs where men dominate. A woman immediately finds herself earning 82.5 cents for every dollar a man earns even with a college degree in the same field. But even with jobs where women outearn men, the gap is still massive.
For minority women, the gap is always far, far larger to boot. The gap has existed for decades, but Republicans always say there's no reason to legislate trying to close it. I'm sure it'll happen any day now.
Romney is a threat because he can focus on a dead simple message: 'I'm a successful businessman, I'll create jobs and fix the economy' #2012
That argument would have merit if in fact Mitt Romney didn't have a horrendous and easily exploitable record as a CEO, as Rev. Al Sharpton (filling in for Ed Schutlz) discusses with E.J. Dionne.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz also went after Romney's record on jobs as Governor of Massachusetts.Br
Brett Arends at CBS Marketwatch sums it up as he noted early last year that Romney was going to make this play:
The Republican contender was the governor of Massachusetts from January 2003 to January 2007. And during that time, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the state ranked 47th in the entire country in jobs growth. Fourth from last.
The only ones that did worse? Ohio, Michigan and Louisiana. In other words, two rustbelt states and another that lost its biggest city to a hurricane.
The Massachusetts jobs growth over that period, a pitiful 0.9%, badly lagged other high-skill, high-wage, knowledge economy states like New York (2.7%), California (4.7%) and North Carolina (7.6%).
The national average: More than 5%.
This was after four years. So far Obama has been in office for just one year. How was Romney's performance by his first anniversary?
Fiftieth out of fifty.
That's right. In Romney's first year in charge, Massachusetts ranked dead last in America in jobs growth.
And keep in mind 2003 was the start of the "Bush Boom". Romney was the worst jobs governor in 2003 and he never got much better.
If Romney wants to run on his jobs record, he's going to get slaughtered. But what about his record as a businessman? Well you know, Romney made a lot of money -- by screwing over American workers.
While much of Romney's presidential campaign will focus on his executive experience in the Massachusetts statehouse, the former Bay State governor and GOP presidential hopeful's calls as co-founder of Bain Capital have had a much bigger impact on the American consumer so far.
The venture-capital-turned-leveraged-buyout firm helped fund Romney's personal fortune, believed to be between $190 million and $300 million, and provided $45 million of the $110 million he spent on his unsuccessful 2008 presidential run.
Sometimes the calls didn't quite work out, as was the case when Bain Capital and then-aspiring Senate candidate Romney bought American Pad & Paper Co. for $5 million in 1992. Bain charged Ampad advisory fees, used it to buy a few other office-supply makers and ran the company's debt from $11 million in 1993 to nearly $400 million in 1999.
Meanwhile, it acquired an Ampad plant in Marion, Ill., in 1994 and shuttered the 200-worker facility the next year after workers held a strike over layoffs and pay cuts.
The labor strife was used against Romney by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in the 1994 race for Kennedy's Senate seat and, though Romney gave Kennedy the toughest contest of his career, Romney lost by 18 points.
The subsequent closing of a 185-worker Ampad plant in Buffalo, N.Y., despite a $50 million public stock offering only three years earlier (and Ampad's ensuing bankruptcy in 2000 and liquidation in 2001) made that transaction one of Romney's few regrets during the Bain years and the kind of thing he told The New York Times he would "be more sensitive" about if he could do it over again — despite helping himself and Bain investors pocket $100 million from the deal.
Yes, Romney made some great investments, but at every turn he was a union-busting, worker-bashing greed head who made millions off of the little guy by "streamlining" companies and taking advantage of record-breaking American productivity...while real wages have stagnated for decades and her personally pocketed tons of money as CEO.
Let Romney run on that record. Certainly worked well in 2008, didn't it?
Introduced by Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who also chairs the House's campaign efforts at the NRCC, the "Savings Account For Every American Act" would allow people to immediately opt out of Social Security in favor of a private "S.A.F.E." account. Eventually the program would expand to let employers send their matching contribution to workers' Social Security to a "S.A.F.E." account as well.
"Our nation's Social Security Trust Fund is depleting at an alarming rate, and failure to implement immediate reforms endangers the ability of Americans to plan for their retirement with the options and certainty they deserve," Sessions said of the plan, according to The Hill. "To simply maintain the status quo would weaken American competitiveness by adding more unsustainable debt and insolvent entitlements to our economy when we can least afford it."
Yes, let's solve the problem of the "rapidly depleting" Social Security trust fund (which is perfectly fine, by the way) by having Americans stop paying into the trust fund and then put their money in the stock market. That worked out great for everyone's 401(k) over the last five years or so, didn't it? Now imagine if everyone with a SAFE account lost half their value in another stock market crash, and had precisely nothing to fall back on because Social Security would have been shut down due to everyone pulling their money out now for SAFE accounts?
And even if you scream "the trust fund is a fraud!" look at the proposed solution by the GOP: let's put America's Social Security money into the hands of the same Wall Street tycoons that caused the dot-com bubble, the housing depression, and two recessions in the last 12 years. The same folks we had to, as taxpayers, spend trillions to bail out...and let's reward them by giving them more of your money to use at the Big Casino tables, eh?
Anyone who thinks Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid is welfare is insane. You've been paying thousands of tax dollars into those programs all your working life. Now Republicans want to say "Sorry, you're not going to get anything back from that. We think that's welfare, so we're screwing you out of your money and breaking our promise to you. But hey, why don't you give your money in Goldman Sachs? What could possibly go wrong?"
Does anyone buy that hogwash? Republicans certainly think you're stupid enough to do exactly that. But don't pay any attention to issues like this...quick, Anthony Weiner tweeted his junk!
Meanwhile, the latest WaPo/ABC poll shows the shine has worn off for the President zapping Bin Laden,the economy is still an anvil around Obama's neck, and that the GOP still is having serious problems competing.
Fifty-nine percent, a new high, gave Obama negative marks for his handling of the economy, up from 55 percent a month earlier.
Obama's approval rating on the deficit issue hit a new low of 33 percent, down 6 points since April.
The state of the economy poses a huge challenge for the president, whose re-election in 2012 may depend on his ability to convince voters that his economic policies have been successful.
The survey reflects a broadly pessimistic public mood as high gasoline prices, sliding home values and high unemployment numbers raised concerns about the pace of the U.S. economic recovery, The Washington Post said.
Eighty-nine percent of Americans say the economy is in bad shape; 57 percent say the recovery has not started and 66 percent said the United States was seriously on the wrong track.
Forty-five percent said they trust congressional Republicans over Obama to handle the economy, up 11 points since March.
The poll shows Obama leading five out of six potential Republican presidential rivals but in a dead heat with former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are tied at 47 percent each. Among registered voters, Romney is ahead 49 percent to 46 percent.
Well, if only Romney is ahead of Obama at this point, and there's no way Romney survives the primaries, then things are going to be better for the President. But with the 2012 elections some 17 months off, a lot can happen. Republicans won't pass anything through the House that will improve the economy, and that's exactly what the GOP plan continues to be. Do nothing to help the nation's unemployed and then blame Obama.
A Republican demand that an increase in the U.S. debt limit be matched by spending reductions may do more than force painful cuts. It could mean another vote on the borrowing cap at the height of the 2012 election campaign.
With hopes fading for a grand bargain to rein in the debt, Vice President Joe Biden said he thinks a bipartisan group of lawmakers he’s leading in talks can agree on a $1 trillion deficit-reduction package to win enough votes to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling by August. Yet unless he can get Republicans to agree to raise the debt ceiling beyond that, it won’t be enough to get past the election, budget experts say.
“Nobody has put enough savings on the table to justify lifting the debt limit by $2-or-$3 trillion, which is what we have to do,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan Washington group that examines fiscal policy.
“I don’t know whether they have thought through the consequences of making this dollar-for-dollar deal,” Joe Minarik, senior vice president at the nonpartisan Committee for Economic Development and a former chief economist in the White House budget office, said of the Republicans. “They’ll have to make multiple, politically difficult votes, and the financial markets could be in a continued unsettled state.”
That's exactly what Republicans want, to keep the debt ceiling circus in the news as often as possible for as long as possible, each time demanding more and more concessions from President Obama and the Democrats. This is why you don't negotiate with terrorists, because they will use the same tactics again and again, upping the stakes each time and knowing they will get what they want.
If the Dems are dense enough to fall for this, 2012 is going to be a nightmare. As long as they let the Republicans control the narrative, we'll never deal with issues of import, just an endless series of manufactured crises that the Dems always lose. The only way to win is to no play their game, fellas. You think Dems would have learned this by now.
As we watch Nancy Pelosi and Steve Israel beat the Wenis into a bloody pulp, consider this: Weiner’s district is a D+5 District in Brooklyn and Queens. It was previously represented by Schumer and Ferraro (in her prime, before she was reduced to ugly PUMA racism). Though it’s mainly white and older, it has an above-average percentage of college-educated residents, a much higher-than-average percentage (40%) of foreign-born residents, and whole bunch of traditionally Democratic Jewish voters.
In other words, NY-9 has been an incubator for quality Democratic politicians, and if Weiner quits at the end of his term, it’s pretty likely that another quality Democrat, hopefully with a little better Twitter-fu, will take his place. This isn’t NY-29, where Eric Massa’s extraordinary two-cycle race garnered an against-all-odds win in a tough R+5 district, and Massa’s resignation almost guaranteed a turnover. A Republican hasn’t represented NY-9 since 1923, so it’s pretty easy for leadership to push Weiner under the bus without thinking twice.
Right. Because it's been so effing easy to find outspoken, passionate advocates with a spine on the Democratic side. We'll just get another one, New York is apparently pregnant with them.
Look, I've had my problems with Weiner before, mainly on his eagerness to go after the President on Israel whenever possible. But on the balance of the whole I'd rather have Anthony Weiner in the House than say, Heath Shuler or any number of his Blue Dog pals. The situation in Washington for progressives won't improve if we drop actual working, advocating, effective legislators because they don't meet the puritanical standards of the DC political press corps.
Weiner did lie. I'm angry at the guy, I spent more than a few columns defending the guy and I feel like something of a fool for doing so. I learned a major lesson. I hope he has too. That's a big, huge mark on his record and he will have to face the voters on that.
But if we let Weiner go under and say "We'll find somebody else in the future" then why should anyone in the House on the donks side stick their necks out and make noise about anything when they not only know the GOP will target them, but that they also know that we won't support them, either?
That's exactly what the right wants: pliable, scared Democrats that believe they can't count on their base to back them up. Why should they be "fierce advocates" of anything in that case?
So let's get all emo about Weiner while the GOP plans to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, our environment, science, and our economy in order to obtain and maintain political power. Time to find some goddamn perspective, people.
When hyperbole and stupidity meet, you will find Sarah Palin. She has mumbled her way through enough interviews lately and exposed her lack of knowledge about the country she seemingly intends to lead. The whole peek-a-boo with the press is the latest in her disgusting attempt to get attention. She's like a teenager, jumping up and down and waving her arms to people will look.
The funny thing is, at least one person won't play along. Shep Smith said it best:
"We didn't even cover Palin's publicity tour on our newscast, because I looked for the word news in there somewhere and I couldn't find it."
I cannot say it often or loudly enough. Sarah Palin is a menace. She is not smart, she has no idea when to shut her mouth, she is nothing more than a cheerleader hired to knock out some publicity stunts. She is, in fact, a bleating sheep with nothing to contribute but recycled ideas and rhetoric she can't defend because she doesn't really understand what she is saying. She is an empty vessel seeking fame, when she lacks basic knowledge of how this country operates, what is required in a leader (you know, not resigning when something more fun comes along) and acts like a spoiled child when called on her crap.
I look forward to the day she is given her due smackdown and released back into the wild. That is one grizzly I would gladly see disappear.
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
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