Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black workers at 16.2% is almost double the 9.1% rate for the rest of the population. And it's twice the 8% white jobless rate.
The size of those numbers can, in part, be chalked up to the current jobs crisis in which black workers are being decimated. According to Duke University public policy expert William Darity, that means blacks are "the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there's a downturn, they're the first to be released."
That may account for the soaring numbers of unemployed African Americans, but not the yawning chasm between the black and white employment rates, which is no artifact of the present moment. It's a problem that spans generations, goes remarkably unnoticed, and condemns millions of black Americans to a life of scraping by. That unerring, unchanging gap between white and black employment figures goes back at least 60 years. It should be a scandal, but whether on Capitol Hill or in the media it gets remarkably little attention. Ever.
The unemployment lines run through history like a pair of train tracks. Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites. The question of why has vexed and divided economists, historians, and sociologists for nearly as long.
For years the sharpest minds in academia pointed to upheaval in the American economy as the culprit. In his 1996 book When Work Disappears, the sociologist William Julius Wilson depicted the forces of globalization, a slumping manufacturing sector, and suburban flight at work in Chicago as the drivers of growing joblessness and poverty in America's inner cities and among its black residents.
He pictured the process this way: as corporations outsourced jobs to China and India, American manufacturing began its slow fade, shedding jobs often held by black workers. What jobs remained were moved to sprawling offices and factories in outlying suburbs reachable only by freeway. Those jobs proved inaccessible to the mass of black workers who remained in the inner cities and relied on public transportation to get to work.
Time and research have, however, eaten away at the significance of Wilson's work. The hollowing-out of America's cities and the decline of domestic manufacturing no doubt played a part in black unemployment, but then chronic black joblessness existed long before the upheaval Wilson described. Even when employment in the manufacturing sector was at its height, black workers were still twice as likely to be out of work as their white counterparts. ...
Suppose a logging firm was tearing the cherry trees from around the Jefferson Memorial. Do you think anyone would notice? Suppose local trash haulers decided the National Mall would make an excellent land fill, construction firms decided to tear down the Washington Monument for building material, or a parking lot was planned for the site of the Vietnam Memorial.
Do you think President Obama might step outside before that tower of white marble was dragged down? Would he intervene before over 58,000 names were covered by asphalt? Would he object before the level of empty beer cans and disposable diapers spilled up the steps to Lincoln's feet?
Then why will he not stop the destruction of the Appalachian Mountains before they are gone forever?
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. points out, his father made the trip to West Virginia to see what was happening there. But these days, the plight of those in the mountains is all but ignored.
Top Comments can be found here. High Impact Diaries can be found here.
Texas Governor Rick Perry is said to be considering entering the 2012 presidential race, and for those who wonder how he would distinguish himself from his patron and predecessor, the Lesser Bush, the answer is becoming clear:
On government spending, immigration and education, Mr. Perry's criticisms of Mr. Bush have given him cachet with conservatives, especially with Tea Party voters who blame the former president for allowing spending and the reach of government to grow rapidly.
Those criticisms have burnished the Perry image as less prone to ideological compromise or a fuzzy "compassionate" brand of conservatism, an appealing trait to those Republican primary voters seeking purity in their nominee. And they have helped Mr. Perry escape the shadow of Mr. Bush, whose sponsorship, along with that of his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, was critical to Mr. Perry's rise.
Sounds like a platform: Bush was too liberal, too bipartisan, and too nice. Have fun with that, Governor. Have fun with that, Republicans.
The Obama administration has already established a standard 35.5 mile-per-gallon fuel-efficiency average for cars, light trucks and SUVs manufactured in 2016 and beyond. The discussion now is over how much the standard should be increased to by 2025. The administration has slated an announcement on its decision about this for September.
Eco-advocates are seeking a 62-mpg standard. The big car companies, including GM, the one that taxpayers still own one-fourth of, are aghast. It's the usual whine, which comes down to the usual claim: no-can-do, too-expensive, unsafe.
Rank-and-file Americans should be deluging the White House to make that 62-mpg standard a reality. Not only would it save them gobs of money, but a soon-to-be-released study by Ceres Coalition concludes that it also would generate 700,000 jobs in 2030:
Boston-based Ceres said the employment boom would come if the Obama administration adopted this fall a 6 percent increase per year in Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, which would roughly equal 62 miles per gallon by 2025.
"Less money spent at the pump means more money for the U.S. economy and more jobs," said Ceres spokesman Peyton Fleming. "The weaker the standard the fewer the jobs that will be created."
The analysis on improved fuel-efficiency standards was conducted by Management Information Services, Inc. Findings:
Job Creation: A net gain of nearly 700,000 full-time jobs nationwide in 2030. 60,000 of these would be in the automobile industry.
Savings and redirected money: $152 billion in fuel savings at the pump in 2030 over business as usual. Of that total, $59 billion would accrue to the automobile industry as part of the purchase price of cleaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles.
In addition, a 62-mpg standard would consume roughly 2.0-2.5 billion fewer gallons of gasoline in 2030, in the range of 35-40 percent less than what is now consumed annually.
Fleming told Daily Kos that the findings are based on an estimated $3200 increase in the 2030 cost of making vehicles burn fuel more cleanly and efficiently. Assumptions are that about 18 million new light-duty vehicles will be sold that year. For purposes of the analysis, gasoline prices were assumed to be an inflation-adjusted $3.54 a gallon in 2030. That seems low, perhaps, but if it is, then the savings and shifted spending would be even greater. The analysts based their gasoline prices on the U.S. Energy Information Administration's 2011 Annual Energy Outlook projections.
The incremental costs, Fleming said, are based on findings in the Technical Assessment Report produced by the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board in September 2010 for their path "B" 6 percent per year case.
The full report will be released in late July along with state-by-state job impact estimates.
Of course, in an even better scenario, most newly manufactured cars and light trucks will no longer fuel themselves with gasoline at all in 20 years. But reaching that goal will require considerably more political will to confront the car companies (including the one the taxpayers bailed out and still own a hunk of) than seems to exist in Washington at the moment.
Gov. Mark Dayton, House Speaker Kurt Zellers and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch met for about an hour Tuesday afternoon. It was their first time in a room together after budget talks fell apart late Thursday.
Gov. Mark Dayton (D) has compromised repeatedly, dropping his initial $37 billion budget proposal to $35.8 billion, then dropping his call for a tax increase on the top 2% of earners to just the top 0.3%, those making more than $1 million per year. Republican leaders of the legislature countered by demanding that he make concessions on abortion and stem cells.
In a radio interview Tuesday morning, Dayton appeared ready to compromise further but not yet to collapse completely—and that appears to be the only thing Republicans will accept. Illustrating the Republican take on the matter, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty is bragging about how he shut down the state's government back in 2005. In this atmosphere, it's extremely hard to imagine that a independent bipartisan commission being put together by Walter Mondale and Arne Carlson will have much impact.
The Los Angeles Timeshighlights some of Justice Clarence Thomas's more extreme solo opinions, most of which seem to be rooted in this: every year Thomas has his new clerks come to his home to watch a movie—"the 1949 film version of the classic of libertarian conservatism, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead."
Explains a lot, and not just his willingness to be the only (often crazy) dissenter on key cases.
Among them, he has declared that the Constitution gives states a right to establish an official religion. Prisoners, he wrote, have no constitutional right to be protected from beatings by guards. Teenagers and students have no free-speech rights at all, he said in an opinion Monday, because in the 18th century, when the Constitution was written, parents had "absolute authority" over their children.
Two years ago, the court ruled that a school official could not strip-search a 13-year-old girl to look for two extra-strength ibuprofen pills. Thomas — alone — dissented, calling the search of her underwear "reasonable and justified."
Alone, he voted to strike down a key part of the Voting Rights Act that is credited with giving blacks political power in the South. And he was the lone justice to uphold the George W. Bush administration's view that an American citizen could be held as an "enemy combatant" with no charges and no hearing....
"He is the most radical justice to serve on the court in decades," said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School and a liberal constitutional scholar. He "would change the law dramatically and give little weight to precedent. It's easy to overlook how radical [he is] because his are usually sole opinions that do not get attention."
He's the Federalist Society's dream Justice, a true "constitutional conservative." Ed Kilgore writes about the radicalism of the movement in reference to Michele Bachmann, but it's applicable here.
...[C]onstitutional conservatives think of America as a sort of ruined paradise, bestowed a perfect form of government by its wise Founders but gradually imperiled by the looting impulses of voters and politicians. In their backwards-looking vision, constitutional conservatives like to talk about the inalienable rights conferred by the Founders—not specifically in the Constitution, as a matter of fact, but in the Declaration of Independence, which is frequently and intentionally conflated with the Constitution as the part of the Founders' design. It's from the Declaration, for instance, that today's conservatives derive their belief that "natural rights" (often interpreted to include quasi-absolute property rights or the prerogatives of the traditional family), as well as the "rights of the unborn," were fundamental to the American political experiment and made immutable by their divine origin....
The obvious utility of the label is that it hints at a far more radical agenda than meets the untrained eye, all the while elevating the proud bearer above the factional disputes of the conservative movement's economic and cultural factions.
On the economic side of the coin, most mainstream politicians are not going to publicly say that the monstrosities they associate with ObamaCare, "redistribution of wealth," or Keynesian stimulus techniques are rooted in their desire to reverse the New Deal, as well as a long chain of Supreme Court decisions that also happened to make possible the abolition of segregation. But many conservative activists actually think that way, and have in mind as their goal nothing so modest as a mere rollback of federal social programs to the levels of the Bush or even the Reagan administration. Bachmann and other candidates can talk to most voters as though they are simply trying to defend America from a vast overreach by the 44th president. But to the radicalized conservative base that dominates contests like the Iowa Caucuses, the constitutional conservative label hints broadly at a more audacious agenda ultimately aimed at bringing back the lost American Eden of the 1920s, if not an earlier era.
It's an interesting concept for Thomas to align with, given that he would have been considered only 3/5ths of a man "in the 18th century, when the Constitution was written." Or perhaps he's interpreting it as three out of five African-Americans being counted, and assuming he'd of course be among the three. Of course, if we returned to his preferred era of governance, he could be in prison on the basis of his marriage alone. And it's a pretty safe bet, had so many of the laws he has dissented from so strenuously not been passed and upheld, the last place he'd find himself now is on a seat in the highest court of the land.
All of which would only be an interesting quirk of Thomas's personality if he weren't part of an increasingly extreme majority on the court, manifesting this hard-right, highly corporatist, and dangerous philosophy. That he's guided by Ayn Rand should be enough to put his place on the court in question, if his ethical lapses alone weren't enough to do so.
If Kansas officials have their way, the temporary regulations against which a U.S. District Court Judge issued a temporary restraining order late Friday will become permanent. The stringent regulations, which were specifically designed by anti-choice forces to shut down abortion clinics in Kansas, were rushed into existence and imposed only six weeks after they passed the legislature and were signed by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback. The only way that could be done was by avoiding a public comment period. Under state law, such regulations only last four months and must be replaced by permanent rules that require public comment before they can be implemented.
Officials with the state health department say the permanent regulations it has in mind are identical to the temporary ones imposed in the middle of last month.
Under the law, abortion providers must obtain a special annual license from the health department. The 36 pages of regulations set minimum sizes for procedure and recovery rooms in the clinics, as well as janitors' closets, requires that there be lockers for patients, something the state's hospitals don't have to have, establishes what drugs and equipment must be on hand, mandates staff qualifications and requires that all medical records be open to inspection.
Two of the three Kansas clinics that provide abortions and other reproductive health care for women were denied licenses under the new regulations, which took effect July 1. While advocates claim the regulations are only meant to protect women's health, clinic operators, their lawyers and pro-choice advocates across the nation point out that other clinics which conduct outpatient surgery and surgical procedures must comply with regulations that are far less strict.
U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia issued the temporary restraining order after the two clinics initiated lawsuits against imposition of the regulations and it will remain in effect while that litigation makes its way through the federal courts.
Dr. Herbert Hodes, who, with his physician daughter, runs one of the two clinics denied licenses, toldTime magazine last week:
"It's a joke and a sham … The only purpose is to shut down access to abortions." He noted he complies with rules from the Kansas Board of Healing Arts and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, since "they're realistic regulations drawn up by doctors for doctors. We all know how much legislators know about health care for women—nothing," Hodes said.
In a statement last week, Peter Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, said:
"…[W]e will not stand by and allow politicians to intimidate women and create more barriers to their ability to get health care. If the Governor and his allies were serious about reducing abortion, they would focus on supporting Planned Parenthood and other family agencies in their efforts to reduce unintended pregnancy, the root cause of abortion. Instead, Governor Brownback chose the path of expensive and unnecessary litigation for Kansas for the next year or two, wasting taxpayer money—something that could have been avoided if he and the Legislature had done what they were elected to do: focus on jobs, the economy and state spending."
Since the Supreme Court ruled for freedom of choice in Roe v. Wade 38 years ago, the anti-sex, anti-woman forces of repression have been chipping away at reproductive rights, with a great deal of success.
But, as Brownlie says, the Kansas law "wasn't chipping away at the edges—this was a full frontal assault."
If the federal court rules in the state's favor, it will reduce the number of abortion clinics in Kansas to one, at least until legislators figure out how to shut down Planned Parenthood.
That will have immense impacts on women. In the words of Jeff Pederson, the operator of Aid for Women, the other clinic denied a license, "I can remember what it was like before." Before were the pre-Roe days when women relied on home remedies and other often dangerous means of aborting pregnancies they couldn't afford, didn't want or were hazardous to their health. That's the reality the Kansas state legislators and the anti-choice forces refuse to acknowledge in their pretended concern for women's health.
This afternoon, President Obama, hoping to jumpstart debt negotiations with Republicans, invited congressional leadership to the White House for a Thursday meeting:
President Obama on Tuesday invited the Congressional leadership from both parties to the White House on Thursday, saying that "greater progress is in sight" on a deal to raise the nation's debt limit and reduce the deficit.
Mr. Obama continued to insist that a final deal include a "balanced approach" that would include tax increases on wealthy individuals as well as trillions of dollars in spending cuts.
But he urged all sides in Thursday's discussions to "leave their ultimatums at the door" and he sounded an optimistic tone about the likelihood that an acceptable deal could be reached in the next two weeks.
Within minutes John Boehner said he was "happy to discuss these issues at the White House," but ruled out supporting tax hikes. However, his statement seemed to draw a distinction between loopholes and tax increases. If that was Boehner's intent, he appears to be cracking open the door to raising revenue through closing tax loopholes:
"We're not dealing just with talking points about corporate jets or other 'loopholes.' The legislation the President has asked for – which would increase taxes on small businesses and destroy more American jobs – cannot pass the House, as I have stated repeatedly. The American people simply won't stand for it. And their elected representatives in Congress won't vote for it. I'm happy to discuss these issues at the White House, but such discussions will be fruitless until the President recognizes economic and legislative reality.
"Our focus should be on getting our economy back on track by making the spending reductions and structural reforms necessary to address our nation's out-of-control debt. We can do so without raising taxes on America's small business job-creators. I'm pleased the President stated today that we need to address the big, long-term challenges facing our country. Our nation's long-term future requires presidential leadership to address those challenges."
There's more than one way to read that, but Boehner seems to be drawing a distinction between "corporate jets or other 'loopholes'" and "raising taxes," saying "we're not dealing just with" the former. It's a small thing, and it might prove to be just a question of parsing and semantics, but if Boehner is indeed opening the door, it might just pave the way for a more balanced approach towards dealing with fiscal policy—and ending Grover Norquist's grip over the GOP. However, for that to happen, Boehner is going to need to do more than just move on the corporate jet tax loophole. He's going to need to find hundreds of billions in savings on the revenue side. Token gestures won't cut it, and both congressional Democrats and the White House shouldn't allow themselves to be satisfied with mere breadcrumbs.
Days ago, one Republican-run House committee approved bills diluting parts of the law requiring reports on corporate salaries and exempting some investment advisers from registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another House panel voted to slice $200 million from Obama's $1.4 billion budget request for the SEC, which has a major enforcement role.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are continuing a procedural blockade that has helped prevent Obama from putting Elizabeth Warren or anyone else in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which opens its doors in two weeks....
"It's mostly setting a marker for the election. And it helps with their campaign contributions," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who chaired the Financial Services Committee last year and was a chief author of the law. "But it also tells people in the financial community that if they win the next election, they'll be able to undo it all."
....
Besides denying the SEC extra money next year, the House Appropriations Committee would limit the consumer protection bureau to $200 million, well below the $329 million Obama wants. The full House has voted to hold the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees derivatives, to $171 million, short of this year's total and less than two-thirds of what Obama wanted.
The GOP is hoping that the people won't notice their actions on behalf of Wall Street. Not a bad bet, since most of us are so worried about keeping our jobs and trying to hang onto our underwater homes (the mess the banksters got us into in the first place) we won't have the luxury of being able to pay attention to how we're all going to get screwed next.
"Unions have played a very important role historically in balancing in some cases the egregious actions of some employers and have been important to the development of our economy," Romney told a town hall meeting in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire on Tuesday morning.
(snip)
"There are some unions that continue to train their workers effectively, their members effectively," Romney said. "But in some cases, if you will the union bosses — the union CEOs that are running the unions — perhaps put the interests of themselves ahead of the interests of their workers. And that may have been what happened in South Carolina."
Despite the moderately positive surface of these comments, there are a minimum of three anti-union tactics on display here.
1) Unions are important historically. You know, in the past. This lets Romney seem to be saying something positive while implying that unions have outlived their usefulness. When in fact, we know that union mines are safer, as measured by traumatic injury and fatality rates, than non-union mines like Upper Big Branch, where they kept two sets of safety records; that collective bargaining raises wages, especially for women and people of color, that companies routinely fire workers for union activity. It is all too clear that without the watchdog role unions play on occupational safety and health laws and other laws to protect all workers, corporations would immediately act to gut the effectiveness of those protections.
2) Talking about "union bosses" or "union CEOs" attempts to put the democratically-elected leaders of unions at the same level as corporate CEOs making tens of millions of dollars per year as their corporations rake in enormous profits, pay little in taxes, and don't create jobs.
3) The payoff. Romney intends to add weight to his criticism of the NLRB's complaint against Boeing by having said ostensibly positive things about unions leading up to it. "I'm not anti-union; I just think they're wrong this time" is on par with "some of my best friends are black." And it's a non sequitur. The NLRB, an independent federal agency, made this complaint, not a union leader seeking some unspecified personal advancement.
Whatever the political calculation Multiple Choice Mitt was making with these remarks, his real record is that he called the Employee Free Choice Act "catastrophic," sent money to help Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker eliminate collective bargaining for public employees, and has jumped on other anti-union opportunities like criticizing the UAW in the auto bailout.
Can't talk: too busy thinking about tax cuts (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
One of the hallmarks of our current political environment is that it is so populated with Crazy that there's often nobody to root for. There is a minor amount of entertainment to be found in trying to sort out who is crazier than who, however: sort of a Batshit Crazy fantasy league, but with terrifying real-world effects. But that's about all. Michele Bachmann, Rand Paul, Herman Cain...crazy has a deep bench, these days.
Today's fight finds old hand David Brooks (not terribly crazy, but never in danger of anyone thinking he's very bright) pointing out in rather vigorous terms, for a Real Media Pundit, that the modern Republican Party is, glory be, populated by kooks:
The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.
This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.
But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That's because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.
The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation's honor.
The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.
But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation.
Youch! Well first off, this David Brooks fellow sounds like a crazy blogger: he could learn a thing or two from Real Pundits, who know that the answer to any insanity by the Republican Party is to pen an earnest plea for "bipartisanship," where "bipartisanship" means that the Democrats should just go along with whatever nutty scenery-chewing thing the GOP wants or the Democrats will be mean and unserious and nobody will like them.
But ask yourself: what could prove David Brooks right in his assessment of the current Republican Party treating tax cuts as a "sacred fixation," nullifying every other principle of governance in favor of their obsession? Oh, I know—how about a prominent Crazy Republican stating it outright!
Congressman Paul Ryan, who for some crazy-ass reason is actually in a position to be in charge of this economic stuff (proof right there that the GOP has lost the reins some time ago), was asked about Brooks' assessment. His response:
What happens if you do what he's saying, is then you can't lower tax rates. So it does affect marginal tax rates. In order to lower marginal tax rates, you have to take away those loopholes so you can lower those tax rates. If you want to do what we call being revenue neutral … If you take a deal like that, you're necessarily requiring tax rates to be higher for everybody. You need lower tax rates by going after tax loopholes. If you take away the tax loopholes without lowering tax rates, then you deny Congress the ability to lower everybody's tax rates and you keep people's tax rates high.
So let's review. David Brooks: the current GOP is populated with "fanatics" that dismiss logic, knowledge, morality and intellectual integrity in favor of this "sacred fixation" with lowering tax rates.Congressman Paul Ryan: David Brooks is wrong because if we do what he's saying, we can't lower tax rates. Did I mention lowering tax rates? Let me say that again a few more times: lowering tax rates, lowering tax rates, lowering tax rates. There, that should prove I'm not obsessive about this or anything.
As a corollary revenue problem as opposed to "deficit problem" issue identified earlier, Ezra Klein adds the "Congress" problem. This is a follow-up to the "do nothing" idea for closing the deficit—by doing nothing other than allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, the deficit could be closed in a decade.
I asked Marc Goldwein, the policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, whether he could build out a graph showing exactly what deficit-creating policy decisions the Congressional Budget Office is expecting Congress to make, and how much of the fiscal gap they each account for. Turns out he could:
What you're seeing here is the differences between doing nothing and doing what we expect Congress to do. The blue slope at the base of the graph is what our deficit picture looks like if Congress goes on permanent recess tomorrow. Every colored chunk above that is a deficit-increasing policy that the CBO thinks Congress is might pass.
You can see from the chart that the biggest chunks for our future deficits are probably going to be the Bush tax cuts and the patch to the alternative-minimum tax. We might see an infusion of spine within the White House and Congress next year to see the Bush tax cuts finally ended, but based on past experience the CBO's prediction that they will be renewed is a safer bet.
The "do nothing" approach is not a silver bullet, because it would raise taxes on the middle class at a time when the middle class can't absorb the cost, and it would also do things like cut physician payments under Medicare by 30%, thereby resulting in many fewer physicians accepting Medicare patients. But here's the real point: "we don't necessarily need grand bargains or debt-ceiling brinksmanship. We just need Congress to abide by PAYGO."
The best way to abide by PAYGO, the pay-as-you-go rules that lately have meant robbing safety net programs to pay for tax cuts, is to start increasing revenue. Serious revenue, not just nibbling around the edges with things like taxing corporate jets.
Two Michigan state Senators have proposed legislation which would allow counseling students to decline to counsel some clients because doing so would violate their "sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction."
The legislation is a response to the ongoing case of former Eastern Michigan University student Julea Ward. Ward was removed from a counseling program after refusing to counsel a gay student about his relationships. She said she could not do that as it would be encouraging or validating a "lifestyle" she did not condone of believe in because of her Christian faith. Ward transferred the student to another counselor, but soon found herself being booted from the university. She sued in federal court, but thus far the courts have ruled that EMU's counseling education program was within its rights to boot her.
But Detroit Democratic Sen. Tupac Hunter says Ward was "discriminated against" by the university. That is why he agreed to co-sponsor the legislation with Grand Rapids area Republican Sen. Mark Jansen.
In Republican logic, shutting down the government is a "win."
Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal's decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.
In another key number, Gallup notes that among Jewish Democrats, the group Republicans have specifically said were beginning to part ways with Obama, support has remained rock solid, with "86% approving of Obama prior to the speech and 85% after." While Gallup notes that it's difficult to gauge the immediate impact of the speech because their tracking poll doesn't have a large enough sample size of Jewish voters, it nevertheless concludes that "aggregated Gallup Daily tracking interviews for the month and half periods prior to and following the speech show no significant nor sustained shift in Jewish Americans' views toward Obama."
Because apparently, there is not yet enough crazy in the presidential race yet:
Former Louisiana lawmaker and Ku Klux Klan head David Duke has begun a 25-city tour to gauge support for a possible presidential bid, The Daily Beast reported.
Duke, a former Pelican State legislator and KKK grand wizard, made two runs for president -- as a Democrat in 1988 and as a Republican in 1992.
Duke said he hasn't considered a run for any public office since his gubernatorial bid in the 1990s, but told The Daily Beast Monday 2012 is becoming a pivotal year for "white civil rights advocates."
An aide to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords who was injured in the same mass shooting that left her with a gunshot wound to the head is set to return to work Tuesday in the Arizona Democrat's district office for the first time since the incident nearly six months ago.
So Rand Paul says he's going to filibuster any and every piece of legislation that heads to the Senate floor unless and until he gets the chance to give a speech about his plan for the debt ceiling:
We're not going to let them go to any issue if we have a say in it. We will filibuster until we talk about the debt ceiling, until we talk about proposals, and many of us in the conservative wing are going to present our own proposal next week. And that is to raise the debt ceiling.
And just what is he planning to propose? The balanced budget amendment.
We will actually vote in favor of raising the debt ceiling next week if we can but it will be contingent upon passing a balanced budget amendment.
Notice how he goes the extra mile and says that if he gets his way on the balanced budget amendment, he'll not only drop his filibuster but he'll also actually vote to raise the debt limit.
Of course, if the balanced budget amendment were adopted, we wouldn't actually need to raise the debt limit, so in making his pledge, Rand Paul is tacitly acknowledging that the amendment won't actually get adopted. So even if he gets his way, Paul knows he still won't get what he says he wants—a balanced budget.
But Rand Paul isn't going to get his way—the balanced budget amendment isn't going to pass the Senate. And that means Rand Paul isn't going to vote to raise the debt limit. So what he's really threatening to do is to shut everything down...until he gets the opportunity to vote against raising the debt limit. And if the debt limit isn't raised...much of the government would be shut down, because we'd run out of cash.
Arguably the lamest thing about Rand Paul's threat is that it's empty. There aren't 40 Republican Senators willing to filibuster raising the debt limit—even they know it must be raised. But that isn't stopping Rand Paul from waxing poetic about filibusters. To paraphrase Barney Frank, Rand Paul is having too much fun bathing in the purity of his irrelevance to think about actually getting anything done.
SSP Labs, a division of Daily Kos Elections, has been busy cranking away, and today, we bring you an installment of Nebraska and Missouri.
We're also rolling out a new feature that we've been busy working on (and which I may have mentioned to a few of you that we met at Netroots Nation): a Google Maps overlay of new congressional districts. The format in which states provide their new districts is rarely accessible—after all, does anyone really know where Census Block 170310611001014 is? (5 points if you do and can say what's special about it!) So we've decided to parse that data into a much more user-friendly form—zoomable down to street level. (You try doing that with those clunky PDF maps that state legislatures produce!)
So first, Nebraska:
Faced with some slight egg on their collective faces with President Obama's nabbing of the NE-02 electoral vote in 2008, the Republicans in the Nebraska unicam tried to strengthen the second district by diving into western Sarpy County instead of the eastern (and less Republican) areas. However, thanks to population growth, the needle only moves a few hundredths of a percent away from us. The second had been overpopulated, so while the part of Sarpy that it does get is more Republican, there's much less of Sarpy overall in it now; the swing is only 0.02% away from Team Blue.
Otherwise, there's remarkable constancy here, with each district having moved between 0.13% and 0.18% towards the Republicans NE-01 moving a few hundredths of a percent away from us and NE-03 moving about 1.5% in our direction (not that it really matters), and each district having 80% or more retained from its old incarnation. (The GOP did rearrange some outlying counties, removing, for example, ancestrally Dem-leaning counties from the 1st into the 3rd.)
Then, there's Missouri:
Having lost a seat (and thanks to some truly spineless Dems), the Missouri GOP set out on screwing Russ Carnahan ... and they, indeed, succeeded. The old MO-03 is chopped into four bits, with it making up no more than 30% of any new district. Notably, slightly more is put into the new 1st than the new 2nd. The 2nd—which will be open given that current GOP Rep. Todd Akin is busy committing voter fraud running for Senate—wouldn't be a particularly soft landing spot for Carnahan, at 46% Obama.
With Sam Graves' 6th district spanning the northern tier of the state, sophomore GOPer Blaine Luetkemeyer's district also experiences a significant change (leaving him with 61% new constituents). However, with the removal of Columbia and Boone County, the new 3rd is actually a slight improvement for him from the old 9th. Boone County is plunked into freshman GOPer Vicki Hartzler's new 4th, boosting her district from 38% Obama to 42% Obama. I would say this could be ripe for an Ike Skelton comeback ... but let's be realistic.
Not much else has changed, with some help for Sam Graves. Freshman Billy Long's district stays largely constant, and Emanuel Cleaver's district adds three rural counties, which drops his district 2% in Obama performance. À la Dan Lipinski though, this drop may be desired (by Cleaver), since those three rural counties surely adds white Republicans ... who are likely less of a threat to Cleaver than, well, white Democrats in the rest of Jackson/Cass County. This, of course, does NOT absolve the four state House Dems who caved to help override Nixon's veto ...
The refrain that's won the day, apparently, for budget negotiators racing to see who can get the most praise from the Very Serious People for making the most Americans suffer under austerity, is "we having a spending problem." Not to put too fine a point on it: Bullshit.
That's a chart from the Senate Appropriations Committee, making a key point.
Our deficit and debts can be traced to the fact that spending on entitlement programs and defense has shot up, and tax revenues have plummeted to their lowest level in decades. But spending on domestic discretionary programs has grown much more slowly. And, if you correct for inflation, and for growing population, it turns out we're spending exactly the same amount on these programs as we were a full decade ago....
"Although non-defense discretionary spending in nominal dollars has increased, when taking inflation and population growth into account the amount contained in the [2011 budget] represents no increase over what we spent in 2001, a year in which we generated a surplus of $128 billion," said chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) in a prepared statement. "So the right question to ask is: Are we really spending too much on non-defense programs? The answer is clearly no."
...In the wake of the Bush tax cuts, and the Great Recession, tax revenue has fallen through the floor to near-historic lows. As a percentage of GDP, it's fallen 24 percent since 2001, and if you correct for inflation, the government is collecting nearly 20 percent less per person than it was a decade ago. At the same time, the population-adjusted costs of mandatory spending programs—driven by Medicare, including its new prescription drug benefit, and Medicaid—have increased by over 30 percent. And, of course, defense spending has skyrocketed. But if you isolate domestic discretionary programs, a decade later we're spending no more on a per-person basis than we were back then.
What has increased? Health care spending, but at a rate that would have nearly been covered by massive loss of revenue in the past decade. TPM took the numbers from the Committee and "put them in a slightly different context, so you can see by what percentage spending and revenues have risen and fallen on a population adjusted basis over the last decade."
As they say, it clearly shows "what is and is not the culprit of deficits and our supposedly out-of-control spending."
Once upon a time, this kind of move might have been called penny wise and pound foolish. The New York Times is reporting that the Obama administration and Democrats on the debt ceiling negotiating team are offering up "tens of billions" in cuts to Medicaid and Medicare in return for any revenue increases.
Administration officials and Republican negotiators say the money can be taken from health care providers like hospitals and nursing homes without directly imposing new costs on needy beneficiaries or radically restructuring either program.
Before the talks led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. broke off 12 days ago, negotiators said, they had reached substantial agreement on many cuts in the growth of Medicare, which provides care to people 65 and older, and Medicaid, which covers lower-income people. Those proposals are still on the table when Congress reconvenes this week, aides said, and are serious options that Democrats could accept in exchange for Republican concessions that raise revenues.
"Congress smells blood," said William L. Minnix Jr., the chief lobbyist for nonprofit nursing homes....
The new health care law trimmed Medicare payments to most providers. Many states, in fiscal distress, are cutting Medicaid, which is financed jointly by the federal government and the states. If Congress and the president now make additional cuts, hospitals say, they will close some services and increase charges to patients with private insurance.
Hospital executives from around the country plan to visit Capitol Hill next week to deliver this message: "Cutting Medicare and Medicaid payments to hospitals will hurt the ones we love, especially the most vulnerable — children, seniors, the poor and disabled."
Mr. Minnix, the lobbyist for nonprofit nursing homes, said: "The issue is not money. The issue is the effects on people, vulnerable people."
The American Medical Association and AARP, the lobby for older Americans, have joined hospitals and nursing homes in fighting other proposals that would limit federal spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product. Members of Congress of both parties have introduced bills that would automatically cut spending across the board if such limits were about to be breached.
The cuts might be not direct cuts to benefits, but like the Social Security COLA cuts being considered, would still hurt the populations served by the programs because providers will reduce services or stop seeing Medicaid or Medicare patients. If they keep these services in place, but receive reduced payments for them, they will pass that cost on to the private insurance population, and health care costs will increase even more.
All of which contributes to compromising the Affordable Care Act further, and lessening its potential for success makes it potentially more unpopular and more vulnerable. Also out the door are the goals of making health care both more affordable and easier to access. Then there's the reality of increasing the hurt on already vulnerable populations. Finally, it's going against the expressed preferences of the majority of voters in poll after poll for taxing the wealthy in order to hold these programs safe. Bad policy, bad politics.
Here's James Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House, earlier today on MSNBC, making the case that the biggest obstacle to getting a debt deal done is the Republican refusal to budge from their Grover Norquist-approved tax pledge:
Clyburn said he was hopeful a deal could still get done, but said Republicans would need to abandon the their anti-tax pledge to Grover Norquist for that to happen. Clyburn didn't argue for raising tax rates themselves. Instead, he argued for closing tax loopholes, which he said could raise $400 billion in revenue. If Republicans insist on saying that closing loopholes is the same thing as raising taxes, Clyburn said it wouldn't be possible to have an effective negotiation:
If you consider closing loopholes raising taxes, that keeps us from having a good conversation about where to go from here. And that's the problem.
Clyburn said that if Republicans rule out revenue, the only way to prevent a default would be to pass a short-term debt limit extension.
Clyburn also pointed out that in any scenario, John Boehner won't be able to deliver enough Republican votes to pass a debt limit increase, meaning that Boehner will need about one hundred Democratic votes to get a debt limit increase through the House.
First Mitt Romney said President Obama made the economy worse.
He did not cause this recession, but he made it worse.
Then Mitt Romney denied saying President Obama had made the economy worse.
I didn't say that things are worse.
And now Mitt Romney is going back to his first position:
After disputing whether he had previously said President Obama made the recession worse last week former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts said on Monday that President Obama made the recession worse. ...after initially seeming to limit his commentary to the president's handling of the recovery, which he said, "has been slower and more painful,'' But then he went ahead and said it, that the president "made the recession worse."
That's a pretty special flip-flop-flop on it's own, but it gets better, because Mitt Romney also said this:
The recession is deeper because of our president; it's seen an anemic recovery because of our president.
Uh, so now Mitt Romney says Obama made things worse, keeping us in a recession. And, at the same time, we're also in a recovery. Never mind the fact that you can't be in a recession and a recovery at the same time. As the L.A. Timesputs it:
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has struggled to craft a consistent economic message in recent weeks — first blaming President Obama for driving the country deeper into recession and then backing off that charge during a visit to Pennsylvania. On Monday in southern New Hampshire, he appeared to offer those conflicting messages within one sentence.
In other words, Mitt Romney was for it before he was against it before he was for and against it.
Former vice president and Minnesota senator Walter Mondale and former Minnesota governor Arne Carlson are planning to introduce a compromise plan to move toward ending the Minnesota government shutdown. It's not clear, though, what effect they'll have, especially since legislature Republicans have been the immovable object in negotiations, and Carlson is pretty much anathema to his party:
And while Carlson, 76, was elected as a Republican, he emerged as a tormentor of Tim Pawlenty during his governorship, endorsed the Independent candidate for governor last year and in December 2010 was banned by the state GOP from participating in party activities.
In other shutdown news, it may be that Republicans' desire to save 7,700 millionaires from increased taxes may not have been the only factor in the shutdown. Republicans also appear to have thrown a bunch of demands on social issues, such as abortion and stem cells, onto the table in the final week of negotiations. That's how much they were there in the spirit of compromise and wanting to avert a shutdown.
Congress took the day off yesterday, to warn the British. Ring, ring! Blam!
Looking ahead to today:
The House won't be back until tomorrow.
The Senate is back in town, and wouldn't you know it? There's a cloture vote scheduled. Amazing! Today, it's cloture on the motion to proceed to the consideration of S.J. Res. 20, an attempted compromise resolution authorizing the Libya intervention.
That's all that's scheduled for today. They can't really schedule much more without knowing whether they'll get 60 votes to end debate on the question of whether or not to begin debate on that Libya resolution. But assuming they do, they might have to spend up to 30 more hours debating the vote they just took about whether or not to end debate on beginning debate, depending on how many Senators want to make that much trouble. Recall that Rand Paul (R-KY) is running around saying he wants to filibuster... something... possibly everything... until some sort of thing happens having to do with the budget and/or the debt ceiling. So does that mean he'll filibuster the motion to proceed to consideration of a Libya resolution because it's not debate on whatever the hell it is he says he wants to see debated? I don't know. And it's quite possible that nobody knows. Maybe not even Rand Paul himself.
So what's in that Libya resolution, exactly? Well, I'll put the CRS summary below the fold. It's pretty detailed. For the above-the-fold summary, suffice to say that this is meant to be a something-for-almost-everyone compromise. It authorizes but time limits U.S. military involvement, prohibits the use of federal funds for committing ground troops, establishes the authorization given is that required under the War Powers Resolution, and declares that yes, the Libyan intervention does constitute "hostilities." There's much more, of course, and as they say, the devil is in the details. Search that devil out in the CRS summary below, or better yet, in the text of the resolution itself.
Today's full floor schedule, and the week's complete committee schedule, appear below the fold.
Well, 2011 is hurtling down the tracks at a brisk pace, or so it seems to me. The second quarter---aka first half---is now behind us, and that means it's C&J number-crunching time. Every few months we post the results of some past C&J polls (no relation to PPP polls commissioned by Kos) to give you a snapshot of how the wheel in the Kossack headbone turns. The total number of votes each poll received is in parentheses:
70 percent of you won't miss going through the craziness of a presidential primary. But 15 percent will. (3,374)
90 percent rated the Republican (aka "Ryan") budget unveiled April 5th as "jaw-droppingly horrific." Four percent rated it "awesome." (4,179)
41 percent of Kossacks are over 55, and 58 percent are under 55. I figure the remaining unaccounted-for one percent is made up of time travelers from the future who technically haven't been born yet. (4,526)
In states where billboards are allowed, 77 percent would vote to ban them. 15 percent would not. (5,339)
48 percent of you have a favorable opinion of your local government. 33 percent have a negative opinion of it. (3,549)
97 percent give Republicans a grade of 'F' for the way they've fulfilled (read: not fulfilled) their #1 pinky-swear promise to create "Jobs Jobs Jobs" for Americans when they were campaigning in 2010. (6,026)
When push comes to shove, 78 percent think the Corporate/Wall Street wing of the GOP will have more influence on Congress's action on the debt ceiling than the teabaggers, who got 17 percent. (4,383)
Among governors you'd most like to see out of office, Wisconsin's Scott Walker comes in first place with 34 percent, followed by Florida's Rick Scott (24%) and Texas' Rick Perry and Michigan's Rick Snyder tied at 9 percent. (5,996)
96 percent of you agree that poor and middle-class Republicans tend to benefit more from liberal policies than conservative policies. (4,643)
As always, we bow to your superior wisdom and ability to click a tiny circular button so early in the morning.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
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Senate:
• AZ-Sen, AZ-08: Mark Kelly, astronaut and husband of Rep. Gabby Giffords, told reporters last week that he will not seek office — at least for now. He said his main focus is his wife's recovery, though he didn't rule out a possible run some day in the future.
• TX-Sen: A source tells Dave Catanese that Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is planning to join the GOP field on July 18, or perhaps sooner.
• WI-Sen: A pretty groan-worthy comment from Dem Rep. Ron Kind, who previously said he'd wait to decide on a Senate run until after the recall elections are concluded: "It may not be sexy being a moderate centrist, but I don't think that we need more people on the far right or the far left." On one level, this sort of thing barely registers, since the only people paying attention right now are (a) activists like us (whose momentary annoyance doesn't matter to Kind) and (b) political journalists (whom Kind obviously hopes will reinforce his desired self-narrative about his "centrist" credentials). But the problem I have with remarks like this is that they potentially undermine our party's nominee if it winds up being someone with a decidedly more liberal profile, such as Kind's fellow Rep. Tammy Baldwin. However, I'm flattered that he thinks we're sexy!
Gubernatorial:
• MT-Gov: Two interesting tea leaves suggest that AG Steve Bullock may indeed be gearing up for a gubernatorial run (as many Democrats hope). Jesse Laslovich, a former state Rep. and assistant AG who now works for the state Auditor's office, says he plans to run for Attorney General himself… but has no interest in a contested primary fight against Bullock. Meanwhile, Bullock just upped the donation limit on his website from $600 to $1200 — an important distinction, since only gov candidates can raise the larger amount (AG candidates are limited to the smaller sum). His spokesperson would only say that Bullock is "exploring his options." A recent PPP poll showed the race surprisingly competitive if Bullock got in.
House:
• CA-36: Dave Catanese has a tally of the number of early ballots from the L.A. County registrar's office for the special election:
That's unwelcome news for Democrat Janice Hahn, though a spokesman claims that 70% of the unaffiliateds are Democratic primary voters.
• CA-Riverside-Moreno Valley: Riverside Community College Board trustee Mark Takano became the first Democrat to announce plans to run in this new district, which, as currently configured, is majority Hispanic. There's no incumbent in this seat, but two Republicans are already running: Assemblyman Jeff Miller and Riverside County Supervisor John Tavaglione. Takano ran against GOP Rep. Ken Calvert in what was then the new CA-43 in 1992, losing by just 500 votes. He got crushed in a rematch the following cycle, during the massive GOP wave of 1994.
• IL-08: While Raja Krishnamoorthi has been trying to ward her off with his impressive fundraising (his campaign is claiming a $400K haul in just a few weeks), Tammy Duckworth still seems interested in making a go at the Democratic nomination in this new seat. A consultant of hers says she's reaching out to folks in the district to gauge a possible run.
• IL-17: The Democratic field is starting to take shape, with East Moline Alderman Cheri Bustos saying she's joining the race and activist Porter McNeil saying he'd stay out. State Sen. Dave Koehler and Freeport Mayor George Gaulrapp are already running, and state Rep. Mike Boland is considering.
• MT-AL: What happens to a poll demurred? Every matchup in PPP's latest in the Montana open-seat House race has 40% undecideds, so click through if you're dying to know. While on balance you have to think this favors the GOP, I wonder if we could somehow squeak out this seat with strong upticket campaigns for governor and Senate.
• NC-11: Some odd comments from Rep. Heath Shuler's spokesperson, responding to rumors that his boss might take a job as the University of Tennessee's athletic director. Andrew Whelan said Shuler "is not seeking the A.D. spot and hasn't been offered the A.D. spot," but as Elizabeth Bewley of Gannett notes, he "didn't expressly deny" that Shuler is thinking about the position. Whelan went on to say that "the congressman is looking forward to his re-election in 2012. He is running for Congress," and added that Shuler's been doing a bunch of fundraisers lately. So who knows?
NY-16 in the 1970s (click for full Brooklyn map)
• NY-09: As expected, Gov. Andrew Cuomo set the special election for ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner's seat for Sept. 13, the same day as primaries for lesser offices throughout the state. Maggie Haberman also says that Rep. Joe Crowley will decide on the Democratic nominee by mid-week.
And it's sounding like that person could very well wind up being ex-Rep. Liz Holtzman, a name which David Jarman suggested here before it ever appeared in the tradmed. Holtzman apparently reached out to Crowley after Weiner's resignation, and Chris Bragg of City Hall News says his sources call her a "top contender." She's almost perfect for the job: She represented a good swath of the current 9th when she served in Congress back in the `70s in the old 16th (you can see a map of her district to the right); she's Jewish; and she's just shy of 70 years old, so she fits the mold of "elder statesman who can win the race but won't seek a second term."
Other Races:
• AL Sup. Ct.: This is a major surprise: Sue Bell Cobb, the only Democrat on the Alabama Supreme Court (and one of only two Dems to hold statewide office) announced that she would resign later this summer, citing nothing more compelling than the usual "spend time with my family" business. Cobb was only elected to her first term in 2006 and wasn't up again until 2013; her untimely move gives Gov. Robert Bentley a free shot at appointing a Republican replacement. Cobb had been discussed as a possible gubernatorial candidate, but this decision will likely seriously piss off her main backers, the trial lawyers, who spent a ton of money on her behalf five years ago.
Grab Bag:
• Dark Money: The FEC ruled that candidates cannot solicit soft money (i.e., unlimited contributions) for super PACs, though super PACs can still raise such sums. Candidates are limited to asking for $5,000 donations. I'm sure this rule will be observed very sternly.
• WATN?: Steve Novick, a contender for the 2008 Democratic OR-Sen nomination ultimately won by Jeff Merkley (who then beat Sen. Gordon Smith in the general), is running for city council in Portland.
Redistricting Roundup:
• Georgia: Legislators are saying they'll make draft maps available to the public before the special session on redistricting commences on August 15. Committees will begin work this month.
• North Carolina: It's Redoomsday for Democrats: Last Friday, Republicans unveiled their new map for the Tarheel state, putting three if not four Democrats in brutal districts. Click the link for our full analysis at Daily Kos Elections.
• South Carolina: I'm going to call it a schadenmander: As you probably know, despite holding the majority in both the state House and Senate, South Carolina Republicans have completely lost control of the redistricting process. Rebel GOPers have sided with Democrats in an attempt to run the clock out and force federal judges to draw brand new maps. (If you want to enjoy seeing Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell spazz about this reversal of fortune, click here.) Republicans aren't completely giving up, though, and say they plan to try again when the legislature reconvenes on July 26.
Poll after poll shows that the American people want higher taxes. That's not the same as liking higher taxes. The people have simply concluded that higher taxes are preferable to the alternative -- so vividly portrayed in the Republican plan to do away with government guarantees in Medicare.
And Republicans don't even have that ugly option to offer anymore. After voters in western New York rioted over it by handing a formerly safe GOP congressional seat to a Democrat, many Republicans have been jumping ship. Odd that House Speaker John Boehner continues to sail on with nothing in the hold but a vague threat to let America default on its debt if ... if what? If Democrats refuse to make the drastic spending cuts Republicans are afraid to push.
What do the American people think? A Quinnipiac poll found that 69 percent, including nearly half of Republicans, want taxes raised on households making more than $250,000. A later Ipsos/Reuters polls shows three-fifths wanting to raise taxes to cut the deficit.
Republicans deserve major credit for forcing action on deficit reduction when President Obama and many Democrats in Congress were showing little interest. But if the GOP walkout is anything more than a negotiating tactic, it is breathtakingly irresponsible, considering the risks of default: higher interest rates, loss of America's Triple-A credit rating, and an immediate 45% reduction in government spending that could leave Social Security recipients, doctors and soldiers with IOUs instead of cash. The standoff over taxes is the sad culmination of years of increasing GOP fealty to a politically handy economic fantasy: Tax cuts are always good, and tax increases are always bad. As this view has hardened over the last decade, the nation has used trillions of dollars in borrowed money to finance two wars, Medicare's prescription drug program and President George W. Bush's broad tax cuts — all initiated with the GOP controlling both the White House and Congress. Now Republicans have belatedly decided that borrowing is bad, too, but they dogmatically resist even the most sensible and painless tax hikes.
Someone ought to study the Republican Party. I am not referring to yet another political scientist but to a mental health professional, preferably a specialist in the power of fixations, obsessions and the like. The GOP needs an intervention. It has become a cult.
To become a Republican, one has to take a pledge. It is not enough to support the party or mouth banalities about Ronald Reagan; one has to promise not to give the government another nickel. This is called the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," issued by Americans for Tax Reform, an organization headed by the chirpy Grover Norquist. He once labeled the argument that an estate tax would affect only the very rich "the morality of the Holocaust." Anyone can see how singling out the filthy rich and the immensely powerful and asking them to ante up is pretty much the same as Auschwitz and that sort of thing.
Here's how to negotiate, GOP-style: Begin by making outrageous demands. Bully your opponents into giving you almost all of what you want. Rather than accept the deal, add a host of radical new demands. Observe casually that you wouldn't want anything bad to happen to the hostage you've taken — the nation's well-being. To the extent possible, look and sound like Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."
This strategy has worked so well for Republicans that it's no surprise they're using it again, this time in the unnecessary fight over what should be a routine increase in the debt ceiling. This time, however, something different is happening: President Obama seems to be channeling Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver." At a news conference last Wednesday, Obama's response to the GOP was, essentially, "You talkin' to me?"
Congressional Republicans have opened a new front in the deficit wars. In addition to demanding trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for raising the nation's debt limit, they are now vowing not to act without first holding votes in each chamber on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
The ploy is more posturing on an issue that has already seen too much grandstanding. But it is posturing with a dangerous purpose: to further distort the terms of the budget fight, and in the process, to entrench the Republicans' no-new-taxes-ever stance.
LAST month President Obama announced plans for withdrawing by next summer the approximately 30,000 American troops sent to Afghanistan as part of the 2009 surge. We commend the president for sticking to the July date he had outlined for beginning the withdrawal. However, his plan would not remove all regular combat troops until 2014. We believe the United States is capable of achieving this goal by the end of 2012. America would be more secure and stronger economically if we recognized that we have largely achieved our objectives in Afghanistan and moved aggressively to bring our troops and tax dollars home.
Only seven years ago, in the aftermath of the legalization of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts, President George W. Bush's strategist, Karl Rove, used the issue to scare voters in Ohio and elsewhere. It worked.
About that time, the most respected Republican pollster, Bob Teeter, noted that while the U.S. was becoming much more tolerant generally, it would probably remain divided on gay marriage for a long time. The late Mr. Teeter, like many of us, would be surprised at how rapidly attitudes are changing. Today, many surveys show majority support for gay marriage; less than a decade ago it was almost 2-to-l against. Then, the public was divided on civil unions for gays and lesbians; there are strong majorities in favor now.
Patricia Cochran is an Inupiak Eskimo and former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.
"I certainly have seen the benefits that can come from [oil] royalties. Schools are better. There are swimming pools, gymnasium, cars—and jobs—all the result of billions of dollars."
Patricia Cochran, a former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council from Alaska, expresses the view of many indigenous people on industrial development in the Arctic. Vast oil and mineral wealth have brought huge benefits to some communities.
But her own conflicted feelings about development neatly sum up the dilemma that indigenous leaders in the region face. In Barrow – Alaska's oil capital – there are also high rates of suicide and depression, while offshore drilling is a threat to subsistence whaling and the hunting of seals and walrus, she points out. So despite the benefits, Cochran is personally quite negative about industrial development and questions the wider benefit to society.
"I personally have a problem with it. I was raised in a traditional way and regard it as my job to be a steward of the land. I see this [industrialised] world of hedonism and consumption as a sign we have lost our moral compass."
And there are fears that the vast sums on offer can sometimes be too tempting. Aqqaluk Lynge, former president of the council, says the wave of money that big multinationals bring to their lobbying "overwhelms" local community organisations.
"We have questions about how the democratic process is gone about and how decisions are reached," he said.
"How can we survive as a people under the pressure that comes from oil companies whose daily income can be higher than our annual budget? ...
I don't know what it's like for a high school graduate to be able to get a union job at a factory and earn enough money to support a wife and kids. I don't know what it's like to be born at a hospital and have my parents rejoice at my birth rather than cower in fear of the bill. I don't know what it's like to have food, clothing and housing expenses constitute reasonable percentage of household income.
I don't know what it's like to grow up as child without fear of gangs, crooked police, and a proliferation of guns and ammo. I don't know what it's like to get a job as a paperboy or delivery boy because those jobs are done by adults. I don't know what it's like to come home to momma or poppa every day because one wage earner can support a family. I don't know what it's like to attend well-financed public schools with well-paid teachers that are the envy of the world. I certainly don't know what it's like to attend an inexpensive private school like John Boehner did because today only the wealthy can afford private school.
I don't know what it's like to have shop class in high school or apprentice programs to learn a trade. I don't know what it's like to be able to simply pick a college, write them a letter, and then attend. One has to hire a consultant these days and I couldn't afford that. I don't know what it's like to have no worries about my parents mortgaging their home to finance my education. I don't know what it's like to get through college without amassing a mountain of debt and ruined credit. I don't know what it's like to have multiple job prospects upon graduation. ...
John Boehner grew up in an America ruled by FDR's Democratic majority. I grew up in an America ruled by Ronald Reagan's Republican majority. The America he grew up is already "snuffed out." I doubt he will ever realize that it was people like him who did the snuffing.
Top Comments can be found here. High Impact Diaries can be found here.
After investigations found that abusive practices were widespread in the mortgage industry, regulators clamped down on some of the worst practices. But Paul Kiel at ProPublica finds that serious problems continue:
Last month, the [California Reinvestment Coalition] surveyed 55 foreclosure-avoidance counselors throughout the state. Collectively they serve thousands of borrowers every month. Almost all of the counselors, 94 percent, reported having worked with clients who'd lost their homes while under review for a modification. About half of the counselors reported this happened "often." This year's totals, which are due to be publicly released next week, are higher than those in the group's survey last year.
Federal banking regulators have put some important protections into place: banks will no longer be able to sell homes out from under owners who are being considered for mortgage modifications, and foreclosure will have to stop once a modification is approved. (Can you even believe that wasn't already a requirement?) But:
While those are necessary requirements, regulators took a "huge step backward" by not explicitly forbidding banks from pursuing foreclosure at all until a final decision has been made on a mortgage modification application, said Alys Cohen of the National Consumer Law Center.
The administration's mortgage modification program, which offers incentives to encourage modifications, has that requirement. But that program is voluntary for the banks and has been hobbled by lax oversight. What's more, over two-thirds of modifications occur outside of the program.
Federal regulators have the power to require all banks to make a decision on a modification application before moving to foreclose, but they've simply chosen not to.
Meanwhile, Kiel finds, homeowners are still having their homes sold as they go through the mortgage modification process, believing that they are doing what they need to do to save their homes. Neither is that the only way people continue to be victimized by mortgage companies. A Florida man lost all of his belongings when a mortgage company went to the wrong address; apparently that mistake isn't isolated, either.
Here's some deficit reduction talk to make your eyes glaze over.
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- Lawmakers are considering changing how the Consumer Price Index is calculated, a move that could save perhaps $220 billion and represent significant progress in the ongoing federal debt ceiling and deficit reduction talks.
According to congressional aides familiar with the discussions, the proposal would shift how the Consumer Price Index is calculated to reflect how people tend to change spending patterns when prices increase. For example, consumers tend to drive less when gas prices increase dramatically.
While that might "save" the government perhaps $220 billion, it could cost the nation's seniors dearly. This is a shift to what's called a chained CPI. The National Women's Law Center explains what that means [pdf] for the people most reliant on cost of living increases.
Social Security benefits are adjusted annually to account for inflation—when the cost of living increases, benefits automatically increase so that their purchasing power does not erode over time. Shifting to the chained CPI would mean a cut in Social Security benefits for current and future beneficiaries, compared to the benefits they would receive under the current COLA. The cut would grow deeper the longer an individual received benefits, making this cut especially painful for women who have longer life expectancies, rely more on income from Social Security, and are already more economically vulnerable than men.
Shifting to the chained CPI has been justified on the grounds that this is a technical change to a more accurate way of measuring changes in the cost of living. However, the chained CPI is not a more accurate way of measuring changes in the cost of living for Social Security beneficiaries whose current cost-of-living adjustments, if anything, are too low.
Of course, while it will hit women particularly hard, it gets all retirees.
According to Social Security's chief actuary [pdf] a person retiring at age 65 and receiving the average benefit would get somewhere around $500 less in their annual benefit when they reached 75, and about $1,000 less at 85. This would start next year, in 2012, and affect all current retirees, in addition to future retirees.
This is a cut in Social Security benefits, anyway you slice it. Social Security was supposed to be left out of the debt ceiling talks. It obviously isn't. Even AARP is raising the alarm about this: "As the chained CPI would result in a lower cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) each year, reducing the COLA even by a small amount is a harmful cut for many retirees.... Now is not the time to accept any changes to Social Security as part of a deal to reduce the deficit. AARP will continue to protect this bedrock of lifetime financial security for all generations of Americans."
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) is on a veto binge. And her state's Republican-controlled legislature is responding with a veto override binge, knocking down 25 out of 34 of her vetoes. The overrides restore funding to education, public television, and the state's early presidential primary, among other things.
Haley's veto of funding for South Carolina Educational Television has produced anger from Republican legislators. House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham, in particular, publicly said that he had worked with Haley's office on the SCETV issue only to have her break their deal:
"They did not have the common courtesy and the dignity to call me and tell me what they're doing," Bingham said. "The governor was involved at every single step of the way like she asked to be. And I felt like it was important and it was critical that she was."
Bingham told House members he got them to agree to a plan "that this governor's office told me that they wanted."
But—as wide-margin veto overrides in the double digits would lead you to expect—it's not just Bingham who's willing to go on the record with his frustration:
"We used to have this problem with Sanford. He'd veto items in the budget that he put in there and asked us to pass," said GOP state Sen. Larry Grooms. "We've had enough of this Sanford-esque discussion that's going on between the governor and the legislature."
The result, said Pickens County GOP chairman Phillip Bowers, is that "most members of the general assembly felt they'd been misled by Haley and her staff."
"I've talked to a lot of general assembly members in the last few days," Bowers added. "I can't find any that trust the administration."
Mark Sanford comparisons are maybe not what a new governor should be aiming for.
Samuel Johnson famously wrote in 1775 that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." In The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce made the appropriate correction: "With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first."
To be fair, Bierce had a 135-year advantage over Johnson. He could look back at the history of a particular brand of patriotism—the American kind—which, like everything else American, our modern flag-wavers will explain to us benighted folks, is exceptional, unlike European patriotism, which to them is a lesser and ignoble kind.
This they claim as if, besides giving us impressive and justifiably revered notions of liberty and justice, our Founders and their successors did not expand the nation from sea to shining sea (and beyond) with a century of mass murder and grand larceny against indigenous peoples, a ginned-up war to grab more than half of Mexico, another to snag Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and a few lesser skirmishes by which places such as Maui became territory where the Stars and Stripes now flies.
The pretend patriots are mortal enemies of us citizens who deeply love our country, but recognize that, historically and now, it is a composite of the good, the bad, and the ugly. We who refuse to reiterate the latest version of my-country-right-or-wrong should be cast out. They deplore us who acknowledge with condemnation that a jingoistic, exclusionary, authoritarian patriotism was in large part what helped make the United States "great" in the worst sense of the word. We who object to the idolatrous intermingling of militaristic nationalism with patriotism might as well be terrorists in their view.
In the words of George Washington, those who practice the "impostures of pretend patriotism" try at every opportunity to stifle dissent and fill the silence with propaganda. It's the Fourth of July! How dare I disrespect patriotism on the very anniversary of the day 56 men signed what could have been their death warrant, the Declaration of Independence. Can't there be just one day when we critics shut up, stand up and salute? Thus do pretend patriots do as they have done throughout American history—confuse dissent with disrespect, critics with renegades, patriotism with obedience.
All too many know-nothings scarf up the red-white-and blue propaganda turds of Glenn Beck as if they slide directly off the parchment signed by the Founders. But he is hardly alone. Our nation is awash in purveyors of what makes a true patriot and what does not in terms Il Duce would have loved. They equate aggressive nationalism with patriotism, dissidence with treason, love of country with love of leaders. Such upsidedownism is a hallmark of right-think. For two and a half years, Beck and a boatload of like-minded others have been fabulously well-paid to spread their poison about liberals, in general, and Barack Obama, in particular. Unlike the purveyors of Manifest Destiny who had no need to hide their desires for a white man's America, today's pretend patriots, all too many of them grifters, wink, nod and dog-whistle their way through the script.
Three years ago, Larisa Alexandrovna pointed out how one of these right-wing "intellectuals," Jonah Goldberg, demanded adherence from us all to Big Brother's brand of patriotism, complete with a polished version of the Two Minutes Hate:
Make no mistake, this is a coordinated effort to deliberately replace substance with its symbol, meaning with an emblem, and essentially strip language down to nothing but trinkets. ...
For a people to be controlled, they must first be robbed of honest discourse and open debate. Distorting language and stripping it of real and honest meaning is the first tool and the best mechanism for transforming a democracy into an authoritarian state. An informed populace is a dangerous populace.
Symbols, however, and false-definitions can provide the appearance of information without the truth of it. Ideas, substance and meaning—all things for which a symbol is simply a representation and a word simply a type of symbol—are far more difficult to control. There is nuance in individual ideas. There are shades of agreement and disagreement and a whole spectrum of understanding and believing. Such a complex system cannot be controlled, and therefore, must be reduced to only its symbol and then distorted.
Symbols and words-as-slogans can be mass produced, mass delivered, and altered from their original meaning, until the symbol becomes its own thing and the substance on which it is based is entirely lost. ...
Patriotism is the word that authoritarians most like to distort ...
Nothing has changed in that regard. Oh, sure, we've seen the Tea Partiers prance around with their Don't Tread on Me banners. And with the Civil War sesquicentennial, we've got the spectacle of a Southern governor hinting at a new secession and neo-Confederates celebrating the slave states' sedition as if it deserves the same respect as "all men are created equal."
I'll admit that calling oneself a patriot is damned hard for someone whose Seminole ancestors were killed in three wars by soldiers flying the Stars and Stripes, with amends and apologies yet to be made. But I call myself a patriot because patriots are rebels. That is not a cry for overthrow and the guillotine. It is an optimism that patriots can and must remake the United States, just as in the past it was repeatedly remade by dissidents who rejected slavery, women's second-class status, workers' impotence, racism's reign.
There is, it goes without saying, much left to achieve. And these days, much to re-achieve, as the oligarchy tightens its noose around the necks of the working classes and its puppets in Congress continue their assigned task of dismantling the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society,
Nothing, of course, offends right-wingers more, seems more disrespectful and disloyal, than when we dissenters, our criticisms barely escaped from our lips, claim ourselves to be patriots. They go apoplectic when we say it's not patriotism that we disrespect but rather the pretenders who have made a fetish of it, twisted it and commodified it. These idolaters love the idea of dissent, the iconography of it, but jeer its reality. To them, patriots must be bootlickers. In extreme cases, jackboots. Proof, if more were needed, that even the word itself, "patriot," must be recaptured from those who have hijacked it.
Sixty-six years ago, George Orwell taught us how words are transformed to con the citizenry into accepting definitions which often are the opposite of their real meanings. In Notes on Nationalism, written in May 1945, he said that patriotism is "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people."
Nationalism, however, is something else, he said, presciently zeroing on the pretend patriots of then and our own time:
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts.
... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage—torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians—which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by "our" side. ...
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. ...
In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.
A patriot will defend what s/he loves without hatred or any notion of superiority. But nationalism demands a belief that others are inferior, which makes it aggressive by nature, the enemy of peace, and thus the enemy of patriotism. Nationalism frames everything in "us" vs. "them" terms.
U.S. nationalism pretending to be patriotism has led to imperialist wars, the slaughter of indigenous peoples, the repeated suppression of dissent. In times of global tension, nationalism masquerading as patriotism demolishes the capacity of people to assess the reality of threats as well as to object if they find those threats wanting.
Fighting for a better country is what patriotic dissidents have done from the beginning of the United States. Arrayed against them and their high principles in every case were the pretend patriots, those for whom dissent was anathema, who saw attempts to expand the nation's democracy as a violation of their rights, who labeled opposition to expansionism and imperialist war outright treason.
Despite the pretenders who engaged in naked aggression against abolitionists, suffragists, trade unionists, civil rights workers and others, these dissidents made America better. They remade America. In our time, they are lauded, but in their own, they were vilified, assaulted and even, sometimes, murdered for their audacity, for their patriotism, for their belief that the ideals in the Declaration were not pretend. We owe them. Not least to imitate their example and remake America once again.
brooklynbadboy told the story of his year-long battle advising a poor single mother from his neighborhood in her epic legal battle against the City of New York and her rapacious landlord in an effort to keep a safe roof over her head, food on her table, and her children in school. This was the first in a series of stories about his work as an advocate for poor people of color.
How does Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts' new movie Larry Crowne stack up as a portrayal of the recession and as a movie? Laura Clawson went to her local multiplex to find out and reported back.
From the Blagojevich saga to the crisis in Greece to stalled progress here at home, Georgia Logothetisexamined citizen complacency and corruption.
Laurence Lewisexplained that some recent court rulings define the necessity of continuing to support the Democrats.
Dante Atkinsreaffirmed his support for the president.
Denise Oliver-Velezintroduced her series on the history and cultural diversity of the Latino/Hispanic communities in the United States, their current and future roles in the Democratic Party, and social change movements.
Ohio passed a budget with massive spending cuts (and massive tax cuts). Minnesota Republicans were willing to shut down the state government in their push for a budget that contained only service cuts rather than service cuts paired with a tax on the wealthy. New Hampshire's budget makes deep cuts. Nor are those states alone.
An analysis from the Center for American Progress connects the cuts, the layoffs, and the effect on entire state economies:
From the start of the Great Recession in December 2007 through the end of 2010, 24 states have cut government spending by an average of 7.5 percent after adjusting for inflation. Another 25 states have expanded government outlays by an average of 11 percent.
As Republicans have told us, government spending is bad, so the states that spent more must have really bad economies now, right? And the states that cut spending must have great economies and rock-bottom unemployment? Not so much. The states that spent more ended up with:
0.2 percentage point decrease in the unemployment rate
1.4 percent increase in private employment
0.5 percent real economic growth since the start of the recession
In contrast, states that cut spending saw on average
1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate
2.1 percent loss of private employment
2.9 percent real economic contraction relative to the national economic trend
If I were fool enough to think that Republican governors and legislators were really looking for good economic outcomes here—or anyway, for economic outcomes that benefited their constituents—I would suggest they might want to consider changing tactics. Since that's not actually anything they care about, however, it's up to voters to pay attention to what's working and who's taking their interests even moderately to heart.
I am now officially announcing the distinct possibility that I will at some future point announce the formation of the nation's newest and best MegaUltraPAC, Corporations United. (An UltraPAC is like a SuperPAC, but ten times more super, and a MegaUltraPAC is in turn ten times more ultra than an UltraPAC.)
Our Corporations United is a group of corporations fighting for the patriotic American rights of corporations. Among our most pressing issues:
We demand corporations like us pay more taxes. It is shameful that our tax rates are so low. The American people helped us in our time of most urgent need: fairness demands we do the same for them. Corporate taxes help pay for the national infrastructure that we use, the national security we rely on, and the national efforts to protect and encourage trade of our products. Not paying our fair share would amount to stealing.
We demand that corporations like us be subject to more rigorous environmental regulations. There is no point in providing a product that will harm people, especially if a small regulatory change can prevent it. Sometimes in an effort to cut costs or undercut the prices of competitors, corporations take shortcuts that may jeopardize worker or environmental health. A strong framework of safety regulations allows all companies to compete on the same level playing field; it prevents unethical companies from profiting from their misdeeds at the expense of ethical ones.
We demand that our workers be treated fairly. Our workers are what makes the economy strong. Not only do they make our products, they provide the demand for our products. Without our workers, our company could not exist. But as with all other corporate inputs, there is a constant race to the bottom. A company that cheats or overworks its workers has an economic advantage over one that does not; there is an unyielding pressure among companies to treat workers worse, not better. In purely financial terms, a corporation seeking maximum profit would even prefer slave or sweatshop labor over other, more expensive workers. By establishing robust minimum standards for worker treatment, we can level this playing field.
We demand action against companies that seek to skirt the rules. If companies move their operations offshore in order to avoid the same minimum standards that other companies are subject to, we ask the American government to penalize those companies, and we ask the American government to aggressively work with the international community to ensure that worker rights and environmental protections are enacted worldwide. Fair trade is more important than free trade: no nation should be able to mistreat their workers or endanger worker safety or the safety of the wider public in order to gain competitive advantage over nations that offer more robust protections. International trade must represent a means by which to better the lives of people worldwide, not a bludgeon with which to punish them.
This message was brought to you by Corporations United, a collection of totally legitimate companies that agree with me and that are definitely not a front group for an assortment of private citizens seeking to mislead anyone.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been burnishing his asshole credentials, and the state's Senate President, Stephen Sweeney, is none too happy about it:
"This is all about him being a bully and a punk," he said in an interview Friday.
"I wanted to punch him in his head."
Sweeney had just risked his political neck to support the governor's pension and health reform, and his reward was a slap across the face. The governor's budget was a brusque rejection of every Democratic move, and Sweeney couldn't even get an audience with the governor to discuss it.
As the Star-Ledger points out, given Sweeney's ambition for higher office and the hit he's taken among Democrats for working with Christie to screw public employees on pension and benefits, it's in his political interest to play up his problems with Christie. That said, Christie has really gone out of his way to create problems:
When Democrats tried to restore money to a few favorite programs — including college scholarships for poor students, and legal aid for the needy — the governor not only rejected the additions, he added new cuts on top of that.
He mowed down a series of Democratic add-ons, including $45 million in tax credits for the working poor, $9 million in health care for the working poor, $8 million for women's health care, another $8 million in AIDS funding and $9 million in mental-health services.
But the governor added $150 million in school aid for the suburbs, including the wealthiest towns in the state. That is enough to restore all the cuts just listed.
Christie then added insult to injury by having his staff tell Sweeney the governor would call him to discuss the budget, but never calling.
Hackers hit the hacks with an extremely sick "joke."
Sickos hacked the hacks at Fox News
Hackers apparently broke into the FoxNews.com's Twitter feed for political news early Monday and used it to announce -- falsely -- that President Barack Obama had been assassinated.
Obama was "shot twice at a Ross' restaurant in Iowa while campaigning. RIP Obama, best regards to the Obama family," read one of several Twitter messages posted on @FoxNewsPolitics early Monday.
"We wish @joebiden the best of luck as our new President of the United States. In such a time of madness, there's light at the end of tunnel," the last in the series of tweets said later.
An article on FoxNews.com confirmed the hack.
Steve Benen smacks around another hack, John McCain:
It's safe to say Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) doesn't have his finger on the pulse of public opinion.
The American people do not want Republicans to compromise on their opposition to any form of tax increase as part of a deficit reduction deal being negotiated with Democrats, veteran Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said Sunday.
"The principle of not raising taxes is something that we campaigned on last November and the results of the election was the American people don't want their taxes raised and they wanted us to cut spending," McCain said on CNN's "State of the Union." "They don't want compromise."
In every meaningful way, McCain's assumptions are exactly backwards.
Four Republicans in New York face "the voters' verdict" for their support of same-sex marriage:
Now, Mr. Grisanti and the three other Senate Republicans who provided votes necessary to legalize same-sex marriage in New York are confronting the uncertainty of how voters in their districts will react. Voter response will influence the balance of power in the New York Senate, where there are just two more Republicans than Democrats. And the events in New York also have national repercussions: because several Democratic-dominated states have already legalized same-sex marriage, gay-rights advocates increasingly need Republican support if they are to change local laws elsewhere in the country.
Some Republican donors, as well as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and leaders of the gay-rights movement, have promised to support the re-election campaigns of the four New York lawmakers. But the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposed to same-sex marriage, said it would spend $2 million in an effort to defeat the legislators, and key elements of the senators' traditional political base have vowed to withdraw support.
This could get interesting: Vice President Joe Biden is taking to twitter—perhaps to talk about things that are a "big fucking deal."
In New York, it's a state law that all motorcyclist wear helmets. Opposed to this motorcycle-helmet law, a group of riders put on a protest near Syracuse Sunday.
As the men rode their motorcycles without helmets in protest, one bare-headed rider suffered a crash, striking his head on the roadway. New York State Police reported the man involved in the crash, Philip Contos, 55, died from the injuries.
Heart disease can sneak up on women in ways that standard cardiac tests can miss.
It's part of a puzzling gender gap: Women tend to have different heart attack symptoms than men. They're more likely to die in the year after a first heart attack.
In fact, more than 40 percent of women still don't realize that heart disease is the No. 1 female killer.
Chantix, the best-selling prescription drug for smoking cessation, was linked to an increased risk of a heart attack, stroke or other serious cardiovascular event for smokers without a history of heart disease compared with smokers who did not use the drug, according to a Canadian medical journal report released on Monday.
And finally, on this Fourth of July, buy your fireworks from an authorized dealer, or better yet, attend a public display. Don't do this:
A 58-year-old man suffered severe injuries Saturday when a homemade firework he was building suddenly exploded, the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office reports. [...]
An investigation found that the victim had been constructing a homemade "super firework" in a shed outside his home with black powder, model rocket motors and other chemicals, said Lt. Kevin Hester of the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office.
The Minnesota Zoo is open, at least. (Photo: Minnesota Zoo)
These are some of the early effects of the Minnesota government shutdown, but, hey, anything to avoid raising taxes on 7,700 millionaires:
The shutdown was rippling into the lives of people like single mom Brenda Grundeen, who says come Tuesday, she may have to quit her job to watch her three kids because their day care center is closed.
"I'm trying to make ends meet. I've got to pay my mortgage," she says. "I'm really close to being in foreclosure. If I miss a mortgage payment, it's really going to hurt."
And:
With most government functions closed indefinitely, 22,000 state workers are not getting paychecks. Diana Rae Evensen, who works at the budget office, says if the shutdown lasts more than a week, her already precarious financial situation will become unmanageable.
The Minnesota Zoo was allowed to reopen, because only about 30% of its income comes from the state.
Jim DeMint didn't have a problem with health care reform or the individual mandate until Barack Obama signed them into law
Jim DeMint tellsThe Christian Post that the tea party isn't aligned with the GOP:
"What is the most misunderstood fact about the Tea Party, in your opinion?" the Christian Post asked DeMint.
"That it is a right wing, manufactured by the Republican Party," he responded. "The Tea Party doesn't like politicians. They don't like Republicans or Democrats. These are people who are independent."
Tea Party members "are people of all walks of life and they are the best behaved group I've ever been in," added DeMint.
Well, the only thing keeping what DeMint said from being true is that in 2010, 92% of hard core tea partiers voted for Republicans. And Gallup reports that eight in ten of them are self-described Republicans. So, yeah, they're independent. Just like how Fox News is independent of the RNC.
The New York Times has taken a look at corporate executive pay for 2010:
The final figures show that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009.
We know corporate profits aren't translating into jobs or pay raises for the average worker, but shareholder profit is king, right? Maybe not:
The median pay raise for chief executives last year — 23 percent — was roughly in line with the increase in net corporate profits. But it far exceeded the median gain in shareholders' total return, which was 16 percent, as well as the median gain in revenue, which was 7 percent.
This is inequality in action. Companies give huge raises to executives while not hiring workers, and not giving raises to regular people because they're lucky to have jobs at all, amIright?
Bill Clinton at The White House last December (Photo: White House)
The Big Dog, endorsing corporate tax reform, tells a crowd of 800 at the Aspen Ideas Festival that Grover Norquist's grip over the GOP is the biggest obstacle in achieving a long-term deficit deal:
"When I was president, we raised the corporate income-tax rates on corporations that made over $10 million [a year]," the former president told the Aspen Ideas Festival on Saturday evening.
"It made sense when I did it. It doesn't make sense anymore – we've got an uncompetitive rate. We tax at 35 percent of income, although we only take about 23 percent. So, we SHOULD cut the rate to 25 percent, or whatever's competitive, and eliminate a lot of the deductions so that we still get a FAIR amount, and there's not so much variance in what the corporations pay. But how can they do that by Aug. 2?"
Clinton also said Grover Norquist, who as president of Americans for Tax Reform is the GOP's unofficial enforcer of no-new-taxes pledges, has a "chilling" hold on the nation's lawmaking.
The former president said it has seemed like Republicans need any revenue concessions need to be "approved in advance by Grover Norquist."
"You're laughing," he told the crowd of 800. "But he was quoted in the paper the other day saying he gave Republican senators PERMISSION … on getting rid of the ethanol subsidies. I thought, 'My GOD, what has this country come to when one person has to give you permission to do what's best for the country.' It was chilling."
Clinton also expressed pessimism that a comprehensive long-term deficit deal could be reached by August 2, though he said that if one were possible, it would have to be "something like what the Bowles-Simpson committee recommended." In way, that statement proves the point he was trying to make, because what the Bowles-Simpson committee recommended was nothing. They failed to approve a proposal. He obviously meant what Bowles and Simpson released as their own proposal, but the fact that they couldn't get it through their own commission underscores the near impossibility of actually getting a comprehensive deal through Congress in the next four weeks.
Cowpens National Battlefield, a Revolutionary War site where Daniel Morgan and his army turned the flanks of Banastre Tarleton's British army. This classic military tactic, known as a double envelopment, was one of only a few in history. (Source: National Park Service)
What's more patriotic on this long holiday weekend than visiting one of the 394 parks in the National Park System? From the absolutely stupefying and indescribable expanse of Grand Canyon National Park to the tiny urban jewel that is the Theodore Roosevelt Island National Memorial, they are the nation's classrooms, playgrounds, zen gardens, escape.
And many of them are in jeopardy, according to a new report from the National Parks Conservation Association, "in the face of pollution, invasive species, climate change, energy development, adjacent land development and chronic funding shortfalls."
A decade in the making, the report—The State of America's National Parks—represents the most comprehensive overview yet performed on resource conditions in America's national parks.
NPCA's Center for Park Research wrote the report based on its studies on resource conditions at 80 national parks across the country, a 20 percent sample of the 394 parks in the National Park System. The report finds that long-standing and new threats are impacting wildlife and water and air quality within our national parks. The historic sites that tell the story of the Civil War, the civil rights movement and the evolution of America's diverse culture are also suffering, mostly because of a lack of funding.
"Our national parks are places we go for reflection, inspiration, and connection to our national heritage—they are places we as Americans decided to protect to showcase where America's story has unfolded. But new data shows that our national parks are in serious jeopardy," said Tom Kiernan, president of the National Parks Conservation Association. "As we approach the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service, we have a responsibility to ensure our American treasures are preserved and protected for the future."
The Association details threat after threat: loss of native species; invasive plants and animals crowding out native species; compromised air and water quality; the systemic threat of climate change; and inadequate resources to protect important historic and cultural sites. It's a daunting prospect to think that this amazing, living national legacy, is being lost.
But the report isn't all bad news. It's a call to action for the Obama administration to "develop a comprehensive long term plan for the parks that reduces threats from energy development and other adjacent uses, enforces air quality laws, and monitors water quality." Here's how they recommend the administration start [pdf]:
Reintroduce native wildlife: Following the successful reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park and elk in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the National Park Service should reintroduce key species of native wildlife into additional park ecosystems to reestablish their essential role in natural processes.
Control non-native invasive species: The administration should use its existing authority to control the entry of non- native plants, animals, and diseases into the United States and provide the Park Service with the resources needed to eliminate or limit the impact of existing non- native invasive species on the national parks.
Enforce air quality laws: State regulators, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Park Service should work together to ensure that all national parks meet the standards mandated by the Clean Air Act, the National Park Service Organic Act, and Park Service management policies.
Collect critical water data in national parks: The National Park Service should collect comprehensive baseline data on national park water quality, water flows, and aquatic communities to monitor and defend against the impacts of development and extraction activities taking place on adjacent lands.
Monitor and respond to the impacts of climate change: The National Park Service should increase data collection and analysis on the impacts of climate change, use the parks as observatories to advance understanding of the consequences of climate change for natural and cultural resources, and take action to mitigate the damages that climate change can produce.
Improve the condition of cultural resources: The National Park Service should develop a multiyear strategic initiative to improve the condition of cultural resources throughout the park system. This initiative should include strategies for addressing the currently inadequate level of protection for historic buildings and historic artifacts.
Reduce threats from adjacent lands: The administration should enforce existing laws to reduce threats from adjacent lands, including resource extraction, air and water pollution, and development that impair ecological functions, fragment wildlife habitat, and degrade natural or cultural landscapes.
Manage adjoining lands cooperatively: The president should issue an executive order requiring federal agencies to manage their lands and waters cooperatively with surrounding landscapes to conserve and restore natural ecosystems and watershed health. The order should direct federal agencies to partner with state, local, and tribal governments, private landholders, nonprofit organizations, and each other to conserve and restore large landscapes identified as ecologically significant by the National Park Service.
Expand the National Park System: By 2012, the National Park Service should prepare a new park system plan that identifies key park wildlife habitat, lands required to implement climate change adaptation and mitigation, and under-represented themes of American history and cultural diversity. The president and Congress should establish new parks and expand existing parks to make the National Park System truly representative of the nation's remarkable natural and cultural heritage.
Provide sufficient funding and staffing: Congress and the administration should provide sufficient funding and staffing for National Park Service operations, maintenance, construction, and land acquisition necessary to achieve the high level of natural and cultural resource protection mandated by the 1916 National Park Service Organic Act.
It's a tall order, one that seems unlikely to be filled in the near future. There are plenty of pressing needs in the country, which are likely to become even more urgent as the recession continues and we're pushed onto the new austerity path our leaders seem hellbent on following.
But the parks embody the very core of our nation. Its history, culture, and the very ground from which we grew. We're neglecting that heritage, and risk losing huge chunks of it forever (or having it get to such a state that the easy solution is privatization and a crass commercialization that would turn them into just so many Disneylands or Malls of America). We can, and should, do better.
Only the Senate was in session last week, which usually makes the recap easy. Or rather, the bottom line list of legislative accomplishments are short, even if the explanation of how they got there (or didn't, as the case may be) is a long, long walk.
Legislatively, the week's accomplishment was the passage of the Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act, delivering on part of the promise of the compromise reached at the end of the Senate rules reform fight this past January. Appropriately enough, the rest of the week's accomplishments were on the nominations front, with Gingrich-buster James Cole and new CIA Director General David Petraeus as the big names on the board. But check below the fold on the round-up from last Friday, and you'll see the huge list of names that made it through by unanimous consent. That kind of plate-clearing happens a lot prior to a recess. Only in the week to come, there'll be no recess. Just a shortened work week.
This Week in Congress
Today, of course, is a federal holiday and no one's in session.
The House doesn't return until Wednesday, with the first votes postponed until 6:30 p.m., and last votes for the week slated for no later than 3 p.m. on Friday. In that short time, the schedule claims they'll be attempting to finish up Defense appropriations, begin Energy & Water appropriations, and a flood insurance reform act as well. I guess that tells us something about how much realistic opportunity one can expect for meaningful debate and amendments.
The Senate is back on Tuesday, and slated to attempt to take up a compromise resolution on Libya, S.J. Res. 20. Harry Reid had to file cloture on the motion to proceed to S.J. Res. 20, by the way. So that's how they came to be able to nail down the vote time. It certainly didn't come as the result of any kind of agreement.
That's all we can say for sure at the moment, now that Rand Paul is threatening to filibuster anything and everything until his latest set of demands are met. His demands, at least this time, are said to be the same as those made, but quickly abandoned, by Ron Johnson last week. That is, well... some sort of debate (no one knows quite what's required) about the debt ceiling. Or possibly the budget. Or some combination of both. And maybe a constitutional amendment, too.
Serious! Not Aqua Buddha-ish at all!
Owing to the long weekend and the delayed Congressional workweek, the committee schedules are are still being compiled. What we've got so far is below the fold, and the rest will be in place in time for each day's Today in Congress report.
From the MASSACHUSETTS-ANNEXED FRONTIER TERRITORY OF MAINE...
Happy Birthday to Us!
Lest we forget from whence we cometh'd, a history lesson ffrometh Michele Bachmann:
In 1775, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams set sail across the Delaware River to tell the King of England they had enough of his liberal agenda. King James called Napoleon and together they decided to kill America. They sent the Nina, the Piñata and the Santa Maria to fight. But then, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln gathered an army to turn back the big government dictators. They told Paul Revere to ride his horse to Frodo to tell him to cast the ring of power into the fires of Mount Doom. But then, John Wilkes Booth showed up and killed Lincoln. But there was still hope, because Jesus appeared on the face of the Liberty Bell and he froze John Wilkes Booth in carbonite. And the liberal homosexuals sailed back to their gay countries, while Americans claimed their land and drank beer. And that's how freedom was born.
Happy 235th Birthday, America. We The People are still kinda sweet on ya.
Our annual posting of the original Cheers and Jeers from July 4, 1776---discovered gathering dust and mold behind some rotten drywall at the farm of Phinneas Pawpatch Piggleton on July 5, 1776---starts in the Commonwealth of There's Moreville... [Washington's sword: Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Liberty Bell: Gong!!]
Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country's future that we're usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy's give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.
This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe — or have convinced themselves — that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible...
"The federal government was created by the states to be an agent for the states, not the other way around," Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said recently.
No, our Constitution begins with the words "We the People" not "We the States." The Constitution's Preamble speaks of promoting "a more perfect Union," "Justice," "the common defense," "the general Welfare" and "the Blessings of Liberty." These were national goals.
They are fighting over power, not principles. "Principles" is their cover story.
The release of oil from the system last week was aimed to remove the fear factor out of the oil market and thereby both protect the stability of the global economy and additionally ensure that oil producers are discouraged from taking undue advantage of market instability and uncertainty.
We believe this aim is in line with the original spirit of the creation of the reserve and is sound policy. The release, while small, signals the market that this administration and our European allies are ready and willing to deal with any future disruptions, a signal that should keep rampant speculation at bay.
Authorities struggled Sunday to gauge the environmental and crop damage from tens of thousands of gallons of oil that spilled into the legendary Yellowstone River, as Montana's governor criticized Exxon Mobil for downplaying the possible scope of the disaster.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen told Roll Call that his firm will probably start polling Senate races this fall when the political climate starts to settle and the presidential race becomes more defined.
"Until we get past the Iowa State Fair, political analysis is worthless," Rasmussen said about the mid-August event. Rasmussen, who admitted he was exaggerating a bit, also downplayed the concept of shaping narratives.
But with a hungry media eager to eat up any and all polls, surveys conducted by PPP, Rasmussen and others inevitably make their way into political story lines.
That can create headaches for party strategists, who doubt those public polls will ultimately persuade or dissuade serious potential candidates from entering or exiting a race. Party strategists on both sides of the aisle will always rely on surveys they pay for by firms they trust.
"You'd have to be high to make decisions based on either of those firms," Jesmer said, referring to PPP and Rasmussen.
While the conservative union elements railed about Sustinet and "Obamacare," the liberal elements tried to play middle-class voters off against Wall Street (they caused it!) and the super-rich (they weren't taxed enough!). These may be interesting angles but not right now. Most of Connecticut's voters do not work on Wall Street not are they super-rich. Most of them have lived through three years of economic hardship. They have lost jobs. They have been handed drastic pay cuts. Not furlough days, like state workers. Pay cuts. You work just as many days for less money...
The majority of state employees understood the preceding. They voted for the concessions. The minority who killed them have opened up a world of pain for everybody. There will be layoffs right away. In the long term, there will be an increased public appetite for politicians who play hardball. Malloy's survival may depend on his ability to be more of a Walker or a Christie. The next governor may be a clone of one of those guys. I'm a registered Democrat, and I'm pretty disgusted with what appears to be a never ending hog trough for many non-union and union employees. I wouldn't vote for a governor who didn't promise to get rid of longevity pay and the use of overtime to pad pension eligibility.
A commonly shared sentiment in Connecticut. There's no sympathy for some of these provisions, but remember, most union members voted to get rid of them.
Nonetheless, trickle-down is clearly on the ascendant — and even some Democrats are buying into it. What am I talking about? Consider first the arguments Republicans are using to defend outrageous tax loopholes. How can people simultaneously demand savage cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and defend special tax breaks favoring hedge fund managers and owners of corporate jets?
Well, here's what a spokesman for Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, told Greg Sargent of The Washington Post: "You can't help the wage earner by taxing the wage payer offering a job." He went on to imply, disingenuously, that the tax breaks at issue mainly help small businesses (they're actually mainly for big corporations). But the basic argument was that anything that leaves more money in the hands of corporations will mean more jobs. That is, it's pure trickle-down.
It really is incredible to see such a concerted effort to rewrite history in front of our faces. There is not much ambiguity in the story of the housing bubble. The private financial sector went nuts. They made a fortune issuing bad and often fraudulent loans which they could quickly resell in the secondary market. The big actors in the junk market were the private issuers like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers. However, George Will and Co. are determined to blame this disaster on government "compassion" for low-income families.
The facts that Will musters to make this case are so obviously off-base that this sort of column would not appear in a serious newspaper. But, Will writes for the Washington Post.
The first culprit is the Community Re-investment Act (CRA). Supposedly the government forced banks to make loans against their will to low-income families who did not qualify for their mortgages. This one is wrong at every step. First, the biggest actors in the subprime market were mortgage banks like Ameriquest and Countrywide. For the most part these companies raised their money on Wall Street, they did not take checking and savings deposits. This means that they were not covered by the CRA.
Let's try that again so that even George Will might understand it. Most of the worst actors in the subprime market were not covered by the CRA. The CRA had as much to do with them as it does with Google or Boeing. ...
There were also numerous cases of some really seriously misguided "compassion." There were many community groups and foundations touting the rise in homeownership even when it should have been apparent that this increase was being driven by people were using junk mortgages to buy homes at bubble-inflated prices. If there was truth in labeling, the "asset building" programs pushed by many of these outfits would be called "asset shrinking."
But it is a tremendous re-write of history to blame misguided do-gooders for the core problem. Good old-fashioned capitalists were making money hand over fist and they were doing it largely without government support, except for the implicit too-big-too fail (TBTF) guarantees that ensured that outfits like Citigroup and Bank of America would survive no matter how reckless they had been. If Will wants to blame the government because of the implicit subsidy of TBTF then he has somewhat of a case. But the argument in this article belongs in the fiction section.
The look on Donald Rumsfeld's face lately has not been a happy one. As the Bush Administration and its defenders try to pretend that the war in Iraq is not going badly, the reality is that things are getting worse with little hope for a solution in the near future.
Viceroy Jerry has asked for 50,000 troops to maintain his rule. There's one small problem with that. There aren't 50K to give. The US military is nearly at the end of it's deployable strength and needs to withdraw the 3ID as soon as possible.
Let's look at the numbers:
So far deployed to Iraq are the elements of seven of the US's 10 active duty combat divisions, making up half the combat power of the US Army. Only the First Cavalry Division is fully deployable from the US. Bosnia is now being covered by National Guard combat battalions and Kosovo was supposed to be covered by units now in Iraq.
Then there are our committments in Korea, Afghanistan and other sundry places.
Michael O'Hanlon argues that we desperately need help from our allies to relieve the burden in Iraq.
OK, now didn't we disregard our allies sane, rational, and logical suggestions about how to deal with Iraq? Now, we expect Japanese and Korean troops, forget French and German to help us out?
Top Comments can be found here. High Impact Diaries can be found here.
It really is incredible to see such a concerted effort to rewrite history in front of our faces. There is not much ambiguity in the story of the housing bubble. The private financial sector went nuts. They made a fortune issuing bad and often fraudulent loans which they could quickly resell in the secondary market. The big actors in the junk market were the private issuers like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers. However, George Will and Co. are determined to blame this disaster on government "compassion" for low-income families.
The facts that Will musters to make this case are so obviously off-base that this sort of column would not appear in a serious newspaper. But, Will writes for the Washington Post.
The first culprit is the Community Re-investment Act (CRA). Supposedly the government forced banks to make loans against their will to low-income families who did not qualify for their mortgages. This one is wrong at every step. First, the biggest actors in the subprime market were mortgage banks like Ameriquest and Countrywide. For the most part these companies raised their money on Wall Street, they did not take checking and savings deposits. This means that they were not covered by the CRA.
Let's try that again so that even George Will might understand it. Most of the worst actors in the subprime market were not covered by the CRA. The CRA had as much to do with them as it does with Google or Boeing. ...
There were also numerous cases of some really seriously misguided "compassion." There were many community groups and foundations touting the rise in homeownership even when it should have been apparent that this increase was being driven by people were using junk mortgages to buy homes at bubble-inflated prices. If there was truth in labeling, the "asset building" programs pushed by many of these outfits would be called "asset shrinking."
But it is a tremendous re-write of history to blame misguided do-gooders for the core problem. Good old-fashioned capitalists were making money hand over fist and they were doing it largely without government support, except for the implicit too-big-too fail (TBTF) guarantees that ensured that outfits like Citigroup and Bank of America would survive no matter how reckless they had been. If Will wants to blame the government because of the implicit subsidy of TBTF then he has somewhat of a case. But the argument in this article belongs in the fiction section.
The look on Donald Rumsfeld's face lately has not been a happy one. As the Bush Administration and its defenders try to pretend that the war in Iraq is not going badly, the reality is that things are getting worse with little hope for a solution in the near future.
Viceroy Jerry has asked for 50,000 troops to maintain his rule. There's one small problem with that. There aren't 50K to give. The US military is nearly at the end of it's deployable strength and needs to withdraw the 3ID as soon as possible.
Let's look at the numbers:
So far deployed to Iraq are the elements of seven of the US's 10 active duty combat divisions, making up half the combat power of the US Army. Only the First Cavalry Division is fully deployable from the US. Bosnia is now being covered by National Guard combat battalions and Kosovo was supposed to be covered by units now in Iraq.
Then there are our committments in Korea, Afghanistan and other sundry places.
Michael O'Hanlon argues that we desperately need help from our allies to relieve the burden in Iraq.
OK, now didn't we disregard our allies sane, rational, and logical suggestions about how to deal with Iraq? Now, we expect Japanese and Korean troops, forget French and German to help us out?
Top Comments can be found here. High Impact Diaries can be found here.
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