And We're Living Here In Harrisburg

The capital of the Keystone State may be the key stone that collapses the municipal bond market.

Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson asked Pennsylvania to determine the city to be in municipal financial distress so it would qualify for help and oversight under the state’s Act 47 program.

The city “stands on the precipice of full-blown financial crisis as a looming cash shortfall threatens its ability to pay vendors and meet payroll,” a statement from the mayor’s office said.

Things get interesting from here.  In a very, very bad way.

Folks, as bad as 2010 has been through the first nine months of the year, 2011 is shaping up to be absolutely horrific.  Imagine January has the Republicans in charge, wanting to cut the country off at the knees right when it needs help the most.

Fun, huh?

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Dick Morris, former Democratic campaign maestro who is wrong about everything, is predicting that the Democrats will lose the House and Senate in the worst midterm bloodbath in history.

Bob Shrum, former Democratic campaign maestro who is wrong about everything, is predicting that the Democrats will heroically hold the House and the Senate.

Both of these men are complete idiots.  I fear they may have just destroyed the space-time continuum as a result.

Militia Mission Creep

When people ask me "Are you worried about terrorists attacking America?" I reply "Not foreign ones, no."

Camouflaged and silent, the assault team inched toward a walled stone compound for more than five hours, belly-crawling the last 200 yards. The target was an old state prison in eastern Ohio, and every handpicked member of Red Team 2 knew what was at stake: The year is 2014, and a new breed of neo-Islamic terrorism is rampant in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio ... The current White House Administration is pro-Muslim and has ordered a stand-down against Islamic groups. The mission: Destroy the terrorist command post — or die trying. The fighters must go in "sterile" — without name tags or other identifying insignia — as a deniable covert force. "Anyone who is caught or captured cannot expect extraction," the briefing officer said.

At nightfall the raiders launched their attack. Short, sharp bursts from their M-16s cut down the perimeter guards. Once past the rear gate, the raiders fanned out and emptied clip after clip in a barrage of diversionary fire. As defenders rushed to repel the small team, the main assault force struck from the opposite flank. Red Team 1 burst through a chain-link fence, enveloping the defense in lethal cross fire. The shooting was over in minutes. Thick grenade smoke bloomed over the command post. The defenders were routed, headquarters ablaze.


This August weekend of grueling mock combat, which left some of the men prostrate and bloody-booted, capped a yearlong training regimen of the Ohio Defense Force, a private militia that claims 300 active members statewide. The fighters shot blanks, the better to learn to maneuver in squads, but they buy live ammunition in bulk. Their training — no game, they stress — expends thousands of rounds a year from a bring-your-own armory of deer rifles, assault weapons and, when the owner turns up, a belt-fed M-60 machine gun. The militia trains for ambushes, sniper missions, close-quarters battle and other infantry staples.

These guys are real.  They're out there now in places like Ohio and Utah and Vermont and Montana, training for the use of violence.  To some, it's a game.  To many, it's deadly serious.  Nearly all of them distrust the government, looking to band together in case of "the collapse." 

And they don't like Obama.  No sir.

Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus. Even Patriots who had no truck with white supremacy found that they could amplify their antigovernment message by "constructing Obama as an alien, not of this country, insufficiently American," according to Michael Waltman, an authority on hate speech at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Perennial features of extreme-right scare lore — including imagined schemes to declare martial law, abolish private ownership of guns and force dissidents into FEMA concentration camps — became more potent with Obama as the Commander in Chief.

Threats against Obama's life brought him Secret Service protection in May 2007, by far the earliest on record for a presidential candidate. At least four alleged assassination plots between June and December — by militiamen in Pennsylvania, white supremacists in Denver, skinheads in Tennessee and an active-duty Marine lance corporal at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune — led to arrests and criminal charges before Obama was even sworn in.

"We call it somewhat of a perfect storm," says a high-ranking FBI official who declined to speak on the record because of the political sensitivities of the subject. With an economy in free fall and rising anger about illegal immigration, Obama became "a rallying point" for dormant extremists after the 2008 election who "weren't willing to act before but now are susceptible to being recruited and radicalized." 

And this movement is getting worse as the economy does.   These few are the people I'm really, really worried about causing violence in our country.

They've done it before.  We choose not to remember much about it unless you live in Oklahoma City.

It's Probably Full Of Ur-Quan With Dalek Slaves Riding Borg

Astronomers are excited about a planet discovered in the Gliese 581 system, some 20 light-years from here, that may be the most Earth-like planet discovered yet.  Scientists believe there's a pretty good chance there's the ability to support life there, from the readings.

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it," Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes that measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface.

"This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface," astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday.

I've seen this movie.  120 years from now the first colony ship that heads there gets eaten/assimilated/copied/lost in time/zombified/mindwiped/sacrificed to very old, very dark gods, and we have to nuke the place from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.  Look at the kinds of monsters growing on this planet we're all on now.

Berserker Moderates

CNN's Joe Foreman has an interesting article on the moderate backlash to the tea Party backlash to the liberal backlash to the Bush years:  the rise of the "Militant Middle".

Which brings us to the Tea Party. Despite all the headlines about their impact on the upcoming midterms, I have a theory that out in the political heartland, the trashing by the Tea Partiers may be preparing the battlefield for a much more profound second wave of disaffected, independent voters, who could make the Tea Party look like, well, a tea party.

I've always called them the Militant Middle, and Gary Butts is a founding member. "It's about time the moderates stood up and said, 'Hey, we're in the majority here!'"

He is with ModerateVoters.org, based in Irvine, California, and he says the Militant Middle started growing and coalescing around a broad slogan of "Throw the bums out" long before the Tea Party even started brewing -- and now it's reached a boiling point.

He's not alone. Comedy Central's Jon Stewart stirred the waters with his call for a Million Moderate March on Washington the day before Halloween to "restore sanity."

Stewart tells his devoted audience, "We live in troubled times with real people facing very real problems; problems that have real if imperfect solutions that I believe 70 to 80 percent of our population could agree to try and could ultimately live with. Unfortunately the conversation and process is controlled by the other 15 to 20 percent."

The problem with this is that any "centrist" movement like this always becomes co-opted by the conservative tendencies of the Village.  It would be nice if Americans stood up for fiscally conservative, socially liberal policies, but what happens is it becomes fiscally conservative, socially conservative instead because that's what the Village wants.

The real problem was never the Tea Party.  The real problem is the corporate media that empowers it and ignores the moderates as much as they do progressives.  If you want to take control of the process from the 15 or 20 percent, as Jon Stewart says, you have to take the real control away from the 0.1% that is the Village first.

Gold Rush, Part 16

Gold still up to a record high at $1,317, dollar still down to a six-month low against the euro.  The Japanese yen currency intervention by the Bank of Japan has lasted for two weeks and change, and the yen is now back to the same level it was at and continues to fall.

Stocks meanwhile just came off the best September in decades in the ultimate Dead Cat Bounce.  Just the threat of Helicopter Ben's Magic Printing Press is now driving the markets.  QE2 is now all but assured.

When will Ben pull the trigger?  When he does, the world changes forever.

Unholier Than Thou

Digby has an excellent reader on Bryan Fischer, the latest subterranean scuzzbag talk-radio lout Christian Dominionist to be dug up by the Tea Party in an attempt to sound the dog whistle on Obama.  This guy is turning into the new go to religious loudmouth for the winger right.  Here's a sample of his teachings:

The Scriptures clearly instruct wives, "Submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord" (Ephesians 5:22). The word "submit" is comprised of two Greek words, one of which means "under" and the other of which means "to set" or "to arrange." So a wife is instructed to arrange herself, put herself, set herself, under the leadership of her husband in the home.

What's critical to understand here is that there is no verse in the Bible that instructs a husband to see to it that his wife submits to him. This is a matter between a wife and her Lord, not between a wife and her husband. It is not her husband who is asking her to submit, it is God. It is a matter of reverence for Christ rather than for her husband that prompts her to voluntarily arrange herself under her husband's leadership.

It is a gift that she gives to her husband, not a right that he demands. She demonstrates her reverence for Christ by not challenging her husband's leadership in their home but by supporting him and working with him to help him succeed in shaping and directing the life of their marriage and family.

How does a husband submit himself to his wife? As Webster reminds us, husbands are told to "love your wives, as Christ love the church and gave himself up for her" (Ephesians 5:25). That is, he submits himself to his wife by refusing to use his headship simply as an excuse to get his own way, or as a cloak for his own selfishness. He submits himself to his wife by making a determination to use the authority God has given him in his home to give his wife and children what they need rather than to get what he wants.

Marriage is not and can never be a democracy. Somebody has to have the tie-breaking vote when the poll reveals a one-to-one tie. In a Christian marriage, the husband is the tie breaker. The way it is designed to work is that a wife willingly defers to her husband on those rare occasions when they cannot agree on a course of action, and the husband makes the decision that his conscience tells him is best, not for himself, but for her, their marriage, and their home.

If a husband believes before God that the best decision in a given situation is different than the one his wife prefers, he does not order her to follow him, he asks her. The decision is then up to her. He's not forcing her to do anything. He leaves the issue squarely where it belongs, between her and her God.

If you have a problem with a Christian view of marriage, fine. Don't become a Christian then. Nobody is going to make you, again unlike Islam where the choice is convert or die. But if you do decide to follow Christ, his instructions regarding marriage are clear.

And that's fine for a personal belief between a husband and wife, as all faith should be that:  personal.  I'd never buy into any of this myself, but that's my choice as well.  It's when these tenets are espoused by politicians as the preferred religion of the land that this starts to become a problem.  It's when you believe that the politicians running the country should and need to be guided by beliefs like this that I have a problem with.  You get this kind of thing into national politics and the laws I have to follow as an American, and then we have issues.

Do read Digby's article, there's a lot more on Fischer's odious beliefs on Islam, gays, and the occasional but necessary practice of stoning women.

Replacing Rahmbo

Ezra Klein has an excellent round-up of everything you'd might want to know about the man replacing Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief Of Throwing Things Staff:  Pete Rouse.

Emanuel was a gift from the Gods of Journalistic Color. He was witty and profane. He liked talking to the press, and his friends and foes liked talking about him to the press. He had an outsized personality and a Washington legend that could be used to explain both his achievements and his shortcomings. The man who is replacing him, Pete Rouse, doesn't.

Rouse, who used to be known as the '101st senator,' was Tom Daschle's former chief of staff. When Daschle unexpectedly lost his 2004 reelection race, Obama snapped him up. Rouse went from being chief of staff for the most powerful Democrat in the Senate to being chief of staff for the body's most junior member. It turned out to be a good decision.

Quiet and retiring, Rouse doesn't make a point of going on the Sunday shows or talking to reporters. Remember that no-drama thing you used to hear about the Obama team? That's Rouse. He's like a black hole for drama. But that means few in Washington know much about him.

The reality is if Rahm was the Don of the White House, then Rouse was the Consigliere, the guy who actually fixed all the problems that Rahm and Larry Summers would cause with the rest of the White House Staff.  Rahmbo was the lightning rod for the administration, but Rouse was the fixer behind the scenes.  In his own words:

"The deputy chiefs of staff report to me, one for policy and one for operations, who run the place from day to day...I fix problems. There’s a number of us who fix problems - execution, anticipate things. I know a lot of the senators, Rahm knows the House very well. The thing about both the campaign and the office here, it’s very collaborative. You have a loosely enforced hierarchy where people are responsible for certain things, but people get along very well and there’s no turf. People help each other and not compete with each other. That’s the Obama style, and that was the Daschle style too when he was leader."

Rahm got both the glory and and brickbats as Chief of Swearing Staff.   Rouse got all the work done.  Now Rouse has to handle it all.  We'll see what he can do for Obama as the face of the White House now.

StupidiNews!

• Flooding rain through the Carolinas and mid-Atlantic states from the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole heads into New England today.
• The feds are going after FOX News for an age and sex discrimination complaint brought by a former reporter, Catherine Herridge.
• New offshore drilling rules from the Interior Department are raising hopes by oil drilling companies that the moratorium will be lifted soon.
• The greenback has dropped to its lowest level in six months against the euro.
• Ubuntu gets its own streaming music service from Canonical that can stream music uploaded to cloud storage.

Last Call

Alan Grayson may have taken a hit for his Taliban Dan ad (and after reading Steve M.'s analysis I do have to agree he went to a Republican level of dirty tricks there and he's paying for it) but he's not backing own from this fight, and has his eyes on a larger target:






I still like the guy. I'm sorry. He just needs to not stoop to Wingnut levels of lying to beat an ass like Daniel Webster. He can beat him fair and square.

Let Them Eat Wrestling Cake

Won't it be fun for working-class Americans to have more GOP Senators in Congress?

Republican Linda McMahon accepted the endorsement of a prominent business interest lobby on Thursday, but her campaign staff abruptly shut down a press conference in which McMahon was asked to explain whether she agreed with all of the organization's positions.

Most notably, McMahon said she believed Congress should consider lowering the federal minimum wage in times of economic distress for small businesses, such as the current recession.

"The minimum wage now in our country, I think we've set that and a lot of people have benefited from it in our country, but I think we ought to review how much it ought to be, and whether or not we ought to have increases in the minimum wage," McMahon said.

McMahon did not directly answer a question about whether she would support having a federal minimum wage at all. The National Federation of Independent Businesses, the lobbying group that endorsed her Thursday morning, opposes increases in the federal minimum wage, and has denounced it as harmful to small business interests. 

Because the real problem in our economy is that the folks who make a couple million a year think that $7.25 an hour is just too much to pay people, and really we should change the law to make it less.  $15,080 a year before taxes is really outrageous.

To recap, the nice lady running for Senate in Connecticut who made lots of money off of fake wrestling believes real working Americans should earn less than the current minimum wage if the economy's bad.

Republicans are awesome.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 4

Things are moving fast on the Ally/JPMorgan mortgage fraud story now.  Sen. Al Franken has joined the fray, sending out a letter to among other people Helicopter Ben insisting that this issue needs to be investigated for possible criminal charges.  ZH:

The biggest financial story which continues to get absolutely no mention on CNBC just got its latest multi-step escalation: Senator Al Franken has just blasted a letter to Tim Geithner, Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Eric Holder, John Walsh, Controller of the Currency, Sheila Bair, and, drumroll, Ben Bernanke, telling the recipients that "each of your agencies has an important role to play in addressing this egregious situation and holding all appropriate actors fully accountable. As such, I respectfully request that you collaborate to conduct a thorough investigation into the alleged misconduct. As part of this investigation, it is crucial that Ally and its employees are held fully accountable for any criminal misconduct."

Since if this pervasive mortgage fraud is more than just alleged, the stink will reach to the very top of places like JP Morgan, Ally, and possibly every single bank that has been in the mortgage origination business, something tells us that Ben Bernanke, whose job is precisely to protect the banks' interests will not rush into any investigation for the duration of FASB's existence. It gets better: "Additionally, all homeowners who may have experienced illegitimate foreclosure sales, those who have been forced to defend against illegitimate foreclosure actions, and those who have been harmed must be identified. These individuals must received proper restitution and compensation, as provided for under the law." And the punchline: "It is critical to confirm that no loans provided through the FHA or in conjunction with the HAMP program were associated with Ally's misconduct." Yes, oddly enough the government is about to lose even more credibility once it is discovered that it worked in collaboration with the biggest mortgage fraud scheme in history.

Somebody in the Village may actually notice that underneath all this smoke there's actual flames, especially with Alan Grayson and Al Franken's names attached to the story.  This one is beginning to accelerate at a rapid pace, folks.

I'll keep an eye on it.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe...



Are in fact Bulk and Skull from the Power Rangers.



Discuss.

Special Sauce, Lettuce, And A Hell Of A Lot Of Cheese

The Wingers are in full Cackle of Rads mode this morning over this WSJ story that McDonald's may drop its crappy "health insurance" program because of "Obamacare regulations".

Only one problem, as Jon Cohn points out.  It's not going to happen, and that's actually a bad thing.

First, the basics: One of the new regulations about to take effect under the Affordable Care Act requires that insurers spend no less than 80 to 85 percent (depending on the kind of insurer) of money on actual patient care, rather than overhead, marketing, or profit. McDonald's isn't happy about that. In a memo it submitted to the Obama Administration last week, the company says that the insurance it provides some 30,000 employees won't meet that standard and that, without some kind of special waiver, they would likely have to drop the policies. It's just the latest in a string of complaints and warnings that the fast food industry has made about what it believes is excessive regulation of employer provided health insurance.

By this morning, both McDonalds and the administration were saying the story is overblown. McDonalds says it has no plans to drop the coverage and that it's been in discussions with the administration over how to make sure it can keep offering the policies. The administration is saying much the same thing--that it's aware of the issue, has been talking to industry representatives, and has already made clear these plans will be exempt from some of the early regulations on insurance.

More important, the administration has yet to finalize the rule about how insurance companies spend their money (or what is known as the "Medical Loss Ratio".) It's entirely possible the administration will phase in the requirement slowly. Most likely, then, McDonald's employees who like these plans will get to keep buying them, at least for the immediate future.

So no, McDonald's is not going to drop its mini-med plans.  The bad news is mini-med plans are horrible and dropping them would force McDonald's to provide real health insurance options.

But is that a good thing? As the Journal story makes clear, the policies in question are so-called mini-med plans with very limited benefits. In the case of McDonald's, according to the Journal, there are two options: Employees who go with the minimum plan pay $14 a week for a policy that won't cover more than $2,000 in medical bills a year. Employees who opt for the "generous" option pay about $32 a week for a policy that maxes out at $10,000.

Stop and run the math on that.  $14 a week for $2000 coverage in a year.  $728 dollars on a minimum wage burger flipper salary to cover $2,000 in medical bills per year, max.  That's not insurance, that's a scam.  paying $1668 a year for $10,000 in coverage isn't much better.  You can eat that up in just one ER visit.  So yes, the Obamacare regs would make these plans invalid.  Odds are good McDonald's will get their waiver.

In the long run, McDonald's employees need policies that protect them in case of serious medical problems. And they need policies they can afford. They'll get those policies thanks to the Affordable Care Act--but not until 2014, because the administration and Congress couldn't come up with enough money to implement the full scheme sooner.

And you can thank the GOP for that.  E.D. Kain has more on those 2014 plans, too.  When they get here.

Rahm Boned: New Blood, Part Do

Rahmbo's out, Pete Rouse is the new White House Chief of Yelling Stalking People In The Shower Hippie Punching Staff.

Two people close to Rahm Emanuel said Thursday he will resign as White House chief of staff on Friday, and will begin his campaign for Chicago mayor by meeting with voters in the city on Monday.

The two people familiar with his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to pre-empt Emanuel's announcement, said he will return to Chicago over the weekend and begin touring neighborhoods on Monday.

"He intends to run for mayor," one of the people told The Associated Press.

Both people said they did not know when Emanuel would make an official announcement about his mayoral bid but that he would launch a website with a message to Chicago voters in the near future.

Not going to retire the tag, but a Chief of Staff leaving a month before election day is about as "screw you" as it comes.  I said I wanted him gone and now he is.  Obama said he would go after the midterms, Rahmbo apparently had other ideas.

Funny.  Doesn't feel much like any sort of victory for Obama here.