Michael Linden has made me feel guilty for highlighting the only one of CAP’s tax charts that I disliked, rather than the nine I thought were fine. So here’s one of the good ones. Keep this in mind the next time you hear some hack from the Heritage Foundation whining that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. It’s a glib debating point, but in reality the effective tax rate on American corporations is one of the lowest in the world. The full set of charts is here.
It’s time for another Gooberhead Award – presented periodically to those in the news who have their tongues running 100-miles-an-hour, but forgot to put their brains in gear.
Today, I’ve got two goobers from last year’s tea bag uprising, both of whom got elected by promising to bring common sense to Congress and take government back from the special interests. Goober Number One is Arizona’s Ben Quayle, the son of Dan – and truly a flake off the old block. Ben has proven to be a stand up guy – not for the folks, but for Big Oil. While voting to slash government programs to help the elderly and the poor, he has voted not once but twice to keep giving $2 billion in annual tax subsidies to the five richest oil corporations.
In a town hall meeting back home, a feisty lady asked him, “Why?” Ben essentially called her ignorant, insisting that Big Oil was merely getting the same tax deductions that all corporations get – “It’s not specific to the oil industry,” he said. To which the audience burst out laughing. They were right to guffaw, for tax giveaways called “Intangible Drilling Costs” and “Enhanced Oil Recovery Costs” are obviously specific to that industry. Is Ben lying… or just a goober?
The push for vouchers is not about “education reform,” but part of a national drive to radically privatize education.
America’s public school system and the constitutional separation of church and state are under relentless assault.
In late April, the Indiana legislature approved House Bill 1003, a measure that broadly funds religious and other private schools. The multi-million-dollar program sets up a new school voucher scheme, expands a tax credit program and offers tax deductions for the costs of private education and homeschooling.
Gov. Mitch Daniels was a chief promoter of the package, and he clearly means to force taxpayers to fund religious education. He is the founder and driving force behind The Oaks Academy, a “Christ-centered” private school in Indianapolis. Daniels sometimes poses as a moderate, but his education plan is anything but.
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the first of President George W. Bush’s two tax cuts, which have played a disproportionate role in blowing up the deficit and debt. As the Center for American Progress’ Michael Ettlinger and Michael Linden found, the federal debt would be at a sustainable level today — even with the wars and the financial crisis — were it not for the Bush tax cuts. ThinkProgress has assembled this short animation showing how the Bush tax cuts drove the deficit and debt up and are still ruining the budget picture today.
Adding insult to injury, in 2001, Bush promised that he would pay off the federal debt within 10 years.
According to a new report by Suzanne Mettler, there’s a shockingly high percentage of people who benefit from government programs, yet claim that they don’t. Check out the actual percentages breakdown in this handy chart:
What’s in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would “end Medicare.” This, the letter insisted, was a false claim: the plan would simply install a “new, sustainable version of Medicare.”
But Comcast, the station’s owner, rejected the demand — and rightly so. For Republicans are indeed seeking to dismantle Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a much worse program.
I’m seeing many attempts to shout down anyone making this obvious point, and not just from Republican politicians. For some reason, many commentators seem to believe that accurately describing what the G.O.P. is actually proposing amounts to demagoguery. But there’s nothing demagogic about telling the truth.
The Republican Party claims to be many things, but redistributionist is not one of them. If you listen to their spokespeople, redistributing wealth is anathema; it’s un-American! Worst still, it reeks of class warfare!
Regularly they decry even the most modest measures proposed by Democrats and their allies that would shift the wealth even a tad from the rich to working and poor people.
But in fact, the Republicans’ policies are redistributionist to the extreme.
Successive Republican administrations over the past three decades have turned the government into a mechanism to ruthlessly redistribute wealth to the upper crust at the expense of nearly every other section of the population.
Prosecutors at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who are examining Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) may have an easier time than federal authorities in bringing criminal charges because of a 90-year-old New York state law.
District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. subpoenaed Goldman Sachs, the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets, for records on its activities leading into the credit crisis, two people familiar with the matter said. Vance may bring charges under the state’s Martin Act, which lawyers call a potent tool for New York prosecutors probing investment frauds, Ponzi schemes and other white-collar crime.
To prove securities fraud in federal court, prosecutors must show that a defendant intended to defraud victims and that the investors relied on misstatements or omissions. Under the Martin Act, prosecutors aren’t required to prove intent, said Michael Perino, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York.
Tens of thousands Greeks rallied in central Athens on Sunday to denounce politicians, bankers and tax dodgers, as the government prepared to inflict another bout of austerity demanded by its international lenders.
“Thieves – hustlers – bankers,” read one banner as more than 50,000 people packed the main Syntagma square outside parliament to vent their frustration over rising joblessness as austerity bites, blaming the crisis on political corruption.
Turnout was the biggest so far in a series of 12 nightly rallies on the square inspired by Spain’s protest movement.
The agriculture industry fears a disaster is on the horizon if the one bit of new immigration policy that Congress seems to agree on becomes law.
A plan to require all American businesses to run their employees through E-Verify, a program that confirms each is legally entitled to work in the U.S., could wreak havoc on an industry where 80 percent of the field workers are illegal immigrants. So could the increased paperwork audits already under way by the Obama administration.
“We are headed toward a train wreck,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat whose district includes agriculture-rich areas. “The stepped up (workplace) enforcement has brought this to a head.”
OPS: Yeah, it would be a tragedy if they had to pay Americans a decent wage to do their dirty work – or, they had to pay to modernize their processes… Damn shame
Scientists said Sunday they had trapped and stored antihydrogen atoms for a record 16 minutes, a stunning technical feat that promises deeper insights into the mysteries of antimatter.
Particles and anti-particles annihilate each other in a small flash of energy when they collide.
At the moment of the big bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, matter and antimatter are thought to have existed in equal quantities. If that balance had persisted, the observable Universe we inhabit would never have come into being.
Both the House Republican budget and the GOP “jobs plan” released last week include a cut in the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. Even though the Congressional Budget Office has found that cutting the corporate tax rate is not a particularly effective way to create jobs, the GOP has continually pushed this cut as a prescription for what ails the economy.
On Fox News Sunday today, conservative commentator Bill Kristol threw cold water on the GOP’s fixation with the corporate tax rate, saying that Republicans “are making a mistake” because “the corporate tax rate is not killing big business in America”:
Republicans are making a mistake if they focus on big businesses and corporate tax rates. Corporations have a ton of cash. The corporate tax rate is not killing big business in America.
Last week, the Obama administration announced that Fiat has agreed to buy the final government share in Chrysler, officially completing that company’s trip through federally managed bankruptcy. The U.S. losses from the auto industry rescue, according to the latest projections, will be much lower than estimates showed over the last few years.
In the first quarter of this year, all three of the Big Three auto companies were profitable. As President Obama said, were it not for the government rescue, “by the time the dominos stopped falling, more than a million jobs, in countless communities, in a proud industry that helped build America’s middle class for generations, wouldn’t have been around any more.”
But Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) would rather have seen those jobs disappear, as his spokesman said yesterday that the auto industry’s revival is “nothing to celebrate”:
Specter of global climate change looms large as 180 countries prepare for conference in Germany in two weeks
Despite 20 years of effort, greenhouse gas emissions are going up instead of down, hitting record highs as climate negotiators gather to debate a new global warming accord.
The new report by the International Energy Agency showing high emissions from fossil fuels is one of several pieces of bad news facing delegates from about 180 countries heading to Bonn, Germany, for two weeks of talks beginning Monday.
Another: The tsunami-triggered nuclear disaster in March apparently has sidelined Japan’s aggressive policies to combat climate change and prompted countries like Germany to hasten the decommissioning of nuclear power stations which, regardless of other drawbacks, have nearly zero carbon emissions.
Contrary to what Republican candidates always sell, Business experience Does Not Make Someone A Good President
With a big hat tip to Crooks and Liars, here it is. Maher is in his usual incorrect form, but manages to resonate true. as usual. His best line, in my opinion, was “Government isn’t about turning a profit. It’s about taking care of the things that shouldn’t need to turn a profit.” Enjoy!
The governments of the United States and Mexico promptly rejected this week the conclusions of a high-profile international report calling for the “legal regulation” of some drugs.
In separate statements, the governments signaled that they would not back away from current strategies in the war on drugs, which in Mexico has resulted in more than 38,000 deaths in 4 1/2 years and is backed by more than $1 billion in U.S. aid under the Merida Initiative.
As The Times reported Thursday from Mexico City and Washington, the Global Commission on Drug Policy is urging governments to decriminalize drug consumption and experiment with legalization and regulation of some narcotics, especially marijuana. The report calls the 4-decade-old war on drugs a failure.
The Washington Post Editors work in a city and live in a nation in which huge numbers of poor and minority residents are consigned to cages for petty and trivial transgressions of the criminal law — typically involving drugs — and pursuant to processes that are extremely tilted toward the State. Post Editors virtually never speak out against that, if they ever have. But that all changes — that indifference disappears — when political elites are targeted for prosecution, even for serious crimes:
The Post Editors, July 3, 2007:
IN COMMUTING I. Lewis Libby’s prison sentence yesterday, President Bush took the advice of, among others, William Otis, a former federal prosecutor who wrote on the opposite page last month that Mr. Libby should neither be pardoned nor sent to prison. We agree that a pardon would have been inappropriate and that the prison sentence of 30 months was excessive. . . . Add to that Mr. Libby’s long and distinguished record of public service, and we sympathize with Mr. Bush’s conclusion “that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.”
The Post Editors, October 27, 2007:
The biggest sticking point [in agreeing to a new FISA bill] concerns the question of retroactive immunity from lawsuits for communications providers that cooperated with the administration’s warrantless surveillance program. As we have said, we do not believe that these companies should be held hostage to costly litigation in what is essentially a complaint about administration activities.
My name is E.coli 0104:H4. I am being detained in a German Laboratory in Baveria, charged with being “a highly virulent strain of bacteria.” Together with many others like me, the police have accused us of causing about 20 deaths and nearly five hundred cases of kidney failure–so far. Massive publicity and panic all around.
You can’t see me, but your scientists can. They are examining me and I know my days are numbered. I hear them calling me a “biological terrorist,” an unusual combination of two different E.coli bacteria cells. One even referred to me as a “conspiracy of mutants”.
It is not my fault, I want you to know. I cannot help but harm innocent humans, and I am very sad about this. I want to redeem myself, so I am sending this life-saving message straight from my Petri dish to you.
This outbreak in Germany has been traced to food–location unknown. What is known to you is that invisible terrorism from bacterium and viruses take massively greater lives than the terrorism you are spending billions of dollars and armaments to stop in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The war on drugs is a waste of time, money and lives. It cannot be won. The world’s drug warriors are out of ideas.
Fresh thinking is of the essence. Governments should consider legalizing drugs to take profits out of the criminal trade.
Filling prisons with drug users does nothing to curb the billion-dollar illicit business, one of the world’s richest. Drug use is a public health problem, not a crime. Arresting small-time dealers does little but create a market opportunity for other small fry. Destroy drug crops in one region and cultivation moves to another. Cut a supply route in one place and another one opens up.
U.S. regulators have allowed a Canadian company to restart its Keystone oil pipeline after completing repairs and safety tests.
Oil from the 1,300-mile pipeline that extends from Canada to Oklahoma and Illinois could begin flowing as soon as Sunday under a revised order from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. The agency approved the revision on Saturday.
Significant progress is being made in the prevention and treatment of ovarian and breast cancer, according to findings discussed at a global oncology conference.
“The studies presented at this meeting show impressive progress in disease control and prevention of breast cancer,” said Dr. Andrew Seidman, professor of medicine at Cornell University.
“Also, two consistent studies demonstrated the benefit of adding bevacizumab (Avastin) to standard chemotherapy for ovarian cancer,” he added.
Southern Chile’s Puyehue volcano erupted for the first time in half a century, prompting evacuations for 3,500 people as it sent a cloud of ash that reached Argentina, authorities said.
The National Service of Geology and Mining said the explosion that sparked the eruption also produced a column of gas 10 kilometers (six miles) high, hours after warning of strong seismic activity in the area.
“You can see the fire (in the volcano) and a plume of smoke, and there’s a strong smell of sulfur,” top Los Rios region official Juan Andres Varas told reporters.
Across the country, the biggest banks have been responsible for abuses against homeowners, often foreclosing on them in abusive ways and disregarding the human casualties of their policies.
Yet in one case in Collier County, Florida, a pair of sheriff’s deputies turned the tables on the mega-bank and struck a blow for beleaguered homeowners everywhere.
A Bank of America branch there had improperly been involved in a foreclosure lawsuit against a local couple, yet the bank was refusing to pay the couple’s legal fees when it was found to be in the wrong.
Wisconsin GOP gets caught in a plot to plant a “spoiler” Democrat in a political contest – and now wants to sue the one who caught them.
The La Crosse County Republican Party plans to sue the person who made a secret recording of the group’s monthly meeting last week, when party officials discussed running a spoiler candidate against Democrat Jennifer Shilling.
Party chairman Bill Feehan said he met with an attorney Friday and would file a suit soon.
“I had to seek legal counsel regarding the illegal taping of our meeting,” Feehan said. “We’ve now been told it’s a violation of a state statute regarding wire tapping.”
In a segment of the tape first obtained by the Tribune, party vice chairman Julian Bradley says he had spoken with Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state GOP, about finding a candidate who could force a primary in the upcoming recall election of Sen. Dan Kapanke of La Crosse. Shilling is the only Democrat who has declared her intention to challenge Kapanke.
Several dealerships, including at least one in California, have marked up new Volts more than $20,000. Others are selling the cars as used, claiming a $7,500 tax credit for themselves.
Car sales may be in a slump, but the hybrid-electric Chevrolet Volts are hot, and that’s leading to shortages — and in some cases extreme dealer markups.
Several dealerships, including at least one in California, have priced new Volts more than $20,000 above General Motors Co.‘s suggested $41,000 retail tag. Others are selling the vehicles as used, claiming a $7,500 tax credit for themselves and leaving the eventual buyers ineligible.
One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans—around half—are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves—see “Bachmann, Michele”—or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives.
Well, so be it. A quarter of Republicans questioned profess to believe that ACORN is definitely planning to steal the 2012 election while another 32 percent think it might be. These numbers are admittedly lower than the 52 percent who, in 2009, went on record accusing ACORN of having stolen the election for Obama, but this should strike a person with normal mental faculties as a mite surprising, given that the organization no longer exists. Similarly, a recent poll of Republicans found that 48 percent of those questioned believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Again, this is almost double the 28 percent who believed it in February, but it is still rather low, given that Hawaii released the president’s long-form birth certificate to satisfy exactly this group of noisy idiots.
These are rather obvious examples, but it is hardly an exaggeration to insist that this astonishing combination of willful ignorance and stubborn stupidity can be found virtually everywhere Republican politics are discussed. Consider the kerfuffle over Newt Gringrich’s derisive comments about Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, made not long ago on NBC’s Meet the Press. In the first place, there is the problem of Gingrich being on the program at all. He was, I never tire of pointing out, its single most frequently booked guest in 2009, with five appearances, even though he held no official position in government and is the only ex–Speaker of the House ever to be invited on the show. (Nancy Pelosi, the actual Speaker at the time, did not appear at all that year.) In addition, we have the complication that although Gingrich is portrayed in the MSM as a genuine intellectual and potential president of the United States, both notions are just as crazy as Gingrich is. How else to explain a grown man who professes to believe that Obama’s political views can be understood “only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior”? And what about his insistence that the Obama administration leads a “secular-socialist machine” that represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union? Is this not enough to earn the boy a rubber jumpsuit?
International bankers have reportedly wasted billions of dollars invested by Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi. The Financial Times says giants like Goldman Sachs were dealing with the dictator’s investments when it needed to plug a hole during the economic crisis. Most of the money has been lost, but with what’s going on in Libya any repayment seems unlikely.
The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?
Republicans don’t want to do anything about jobs and wages. They’re so intent on unseating Obama they’d like the economy to remain in the dumps through Election Day. They also see the lousy economy as an opportunity to sell Americans their big lie that government spending is the culprit — and jobs will return if spending is cut and government shrinks.
Democrats, meanwhile, don’t want to admit the recovery has stalled. They worry such talk will further undermine consumer confidence or spook the bond market. They don’t want to head into the election year sounding downbeat. And they don’t think they have the votes for anything that will have much effect before Election Day anyway.
Tepco said Saturday it has detected radiation of up to 4,000 millisieverts per hour at the building housing the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.
The radiation reading, which was taken when Tokyo Electric Power Co. sent a robot into the No. 1 reactor building on Friday, is believed to be the largest detected in the air at the plant so far.
On Friday, Tepco found that steam was spewing from the reactor floor. Nationally televised news Saturday showed blurry video of steady smoke curling up from an opening in the floor.
Tepco said it took the reading near the floor at the southeast corner of the building, under which runs a pipe emitting steam. No damage to the pipe was found, the utility said.
The Twitter user who first floated the rumor that a lewd photo scandal was brewing for Representative Anthony Weiner is not your typical conservative avenger, an investigation by The Smoking Gun has determined.
Mike Stack, a 39-year-old New Jersey resident, is known as “goatsred” in the Twitterverse, where he has helped lead a months-long assault on the New York City politician. Stack was joined at the hip in this pursuit by “patriotusa76,” who gave his name as “Dan Wolfe” and was the online avenger who happened last Friday night to discover the notorious tweet emanating from Weiner’s account.
As TSG reported yesterday, “Dan Wolfe” has conveniently evaporated in the wake of “Weinergate.” In fact, today Wolfe’s entire Twitter page was deleted.
But Stack, the other Twitter Twin, remains online. An examination of his background has discovered:
There’s a long way to go, and the goal seems like a very tough one to reach, but Wisconsin Democrats are set to go for it: They will announce at their annual convention later today that they intend to launch an effort to recall the ultimate target — Scott Walker himself.
Mike Tate, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, will reveal the plan in a speech today at the convention in Milwaukee, according to advance excerpts of the speech that were sent my way.
“We will not stand down — and next year, we will recall Scott Walker from office,” Tate will tell the crowd, according to the excerpts. “We will begin to repair the damage done to this state and we will begin anew with a Democratic Governor who will fight for our children, who will fight for our families, our teachers and our firefighters. We will fight for the people — not the powerful.”
OPS: This is a great thing to do but lets face facts. By the time this clown is recalled, he will have done HUGE amounts of damage to Wisconsin that will take a decade to repair – if it can be at all. And After he is recalled, he will simply get a 7 figure job with the Koch brothers.
An anti-estrogen drug has shown a “promising” 65-percent reduction of breast cancer risk among post-menopausal women, according to the findings of a study released Saturday.
The research could lead to a breakthrough for women who are at increased risk of developing breast cancer, which strikes some 1.3 million women worldwide each year and leads to the death of 500,000 women annually, said lead study author Paul Goss of Harvard Medical School.
“The potential public health impact of these findings is important,” Goss said in a statement coinciding with the release of the study at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world’s largest oncology conference, gathering in Chicago.
Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into President Barack Obama on Thursday, accusing him of cowering to Republican “extremists” and failing to stand up for progressive priorities.
“The Republican House budget is the most radical right-wing extremist budget ever passed in the modern history of our country, and the more the American people learn about it the more they are rejecting it,” the independent from Vermont wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed. “The question is, however: Where are the Democrats? Where is President Obama?”
“Will the president remain strong in his demand that any deficit reduction agreement include an end to Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy? Will he really fight to eliminate corporate tax loopholes?… Or, as he has done within the last year, will he give Republicans almost everything they want at the expense of ordinary Americans.”
Officials at a middle school in Arkansas are investigating how a list of the worst people of all time came to be published in their recently-released yearbook.
They’re investigating namely because former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney were included on the list.
They placed fourth and fifth, respectively, right after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, terrorist figurehead Osama bin Laden and Charles Manson.
Officials called the addition to the yearbook an “oversight.”
This video was broadcast by Fox News on Thursday, June 2, 2011.
Hackers claiming to be part of protest group “Anonymous” published on Friday over 10,000 internal emails from the Iranian government’s ministry of foreign affairs, as part of an ongoing campaign against the authoritarian regime.
The emails were published to torrent file sharing website The Pirate Bay, along with usernames and passwords. Members also claimed they had taken control of the government’s servers.
In a chat with Raw Story, members of Anonymous on the #OpIran server said they were leading the charge because they want Iranians to know they’re not alone in their struggle against the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In Boston, yesterday, former Alaska Governor and possible 2012 contender Sarah Palin kept mum about her plans to run or not run for President, but she did share some fairly jumbled thoughts on the story of Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride, “…he who warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and, um, makin’ sure as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free. And we were gonna be armed.”
CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin deadpans to the camera, “History lesson from Sarah Palin on the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”. For the record, no shots were fired nor bells rung on the famous ride along the Freedom Trail.
Watch this clip from CNN, embedded via Mediaite, below:
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed “a landmark Medicaid overhaul” yesterday that will put “hundreds of thousands of low-income and elderly Floridians into managed-care plans.” The proposal “gives managed care companies more control over the program that’s paid for with federal and state money,” a shift the state GOP claims will “hold down spiraling costs in the $20 billion program.” However, as TP Health editor Igor Volsky pointed out, a five-county pilot program in Florida already revealed that such a plan produces “widespread complaints and little evidence of savings.” Under managed care, states “have to ensure that private payers aren’t looking out for short term profits by denying treatments or reducing reimbursement rates” and — given what occurred during the pilot program — the results “are already less than promising.”
But Scott may have another reason to push a dubious bill into law. As Mother Jones reported, one of the private managed-care companies that stand to gain from the new law is Solantic, “a chain of urgent-care clinics aimed at providing emergency services to walk-in customers. Solantic was founded in 2001 — by none other than Rick Scott:
Earlier this week, The Nation magazine and the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté announced a partnership whereby they would work together to publish findings from 1,918 U.S. embassy cables — dated between 2003 and 2010 — from Haiti.
Now, the two papers have released their first article about the cables. In “The PetroCaribe Files,” Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives review an ordeal discovered within the cables involving an oil and development deal Haiti was negotiating with Venezuela and Cuba between 2006-2007.
As a part of the deal struck that year, Haiti would join the Venezuelan-led oil alliance known as PetroCaribe and it would purchase oil “only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest” — a remarkably good deal for the Western hemisphere’s poorest country.
A fringe anti-abortion group, Personhood USA, has been startlingly successful at pushing forward legislation across the country that would redefine life as beginning at the moment of fertilization, effectively outlawing contraceptives like birth control pills. Although the medical community has long been in agreement that fertilization does not mark the beginning of a pregnancy — fertilized eggs must first be implanted, and only about half of fertilized eggs actually result in a pregnancy — a growing number of lawmakers are supporting Personhood USA’s efforts to buck medical expertise and legally define life as the moment a sperm meets an egg.
If they succeed in passing such a law — and if such a law survives judicial scrutiny — it could turn common forms of birth control into the legal equivalent of a homicide. While “personhood” laws have always been a transparent attempt to outlaw abortion, the legislation supported by groups like Personhood USA goes much further in trying to assert government control over women’s bodies. These laws would recognize every fertilized egg as an individual and complete human being with full rights, and place millions of women in legal jeopardy. According to 2008 numbers, around 11 million American women use birth control pills and another 2 million use intrauterine devices (IUDs).
Contraceptives like the pill and IUDs not only act to prevent fertilization, but, if fertilization does occur, may prevent that fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus. Personhood USA considers this tantamount to abortion, and wants to make it a punishable offense for women to control their own fertility. Worse, because the proposed legislation could make any effort to terminate a pregnancy a criminal act, it could also bar doctors from saving the lives of women with ectopic pregnancies, which are never viable and need to be terminated as soon as possible.
While religious conservatives and Republican political leaders gathered at the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington this weekend, another group of religious leaders held a small gathering across the street to warn against the perils of the Republican Party’s fiscal priorities.
Four members affiliated with the religious group Faith In Public Life held a brief press conference during FFC’s afternoon intermission to denounce the GOP’s adherence to the philosophies of anti-government, anti-religion author Ayn Rand. The leaders — Rev. Jennifer Butler, Jim Wallis, Rev. Derrick Harkins, and Father Clete Kiley — asserted that the GOP efforts to cut funding from many anti-poverty programs while balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest Americans were not in line with Christian values:
The sky is falling on poor people in this country. The sky is falling. This time it really is. In the past, when we’ve done deficit reduction — and we’ve done it before — we’ve done poverty reduction at the same time. You can do both together. And every previous attempt there has been a bipartisan agreement to a given, a principle, that poor and low income people are not the ones to make hurt more when you’re making tough decisions. … They don’t bear the brunt of our fiscal irresponsibility because they didn’t cause it. We did not get into fiscal trouble because of poor people. … The poor didn’t cause this. Let’s not make them pay for it.
The U.S. government’s half-century campaign to discredit and destroy Cuba’s experiment with socialism has had many ruthless aspects, but perhaps none more so than efforts to disparage and damage the Caribbean island’s widely admired health-care system, as William Blum describes in this guest essay.
By William Blum
June 4, 2011
In January, the government of the United States of America saw fit to seize $4.207 million in funds allocated to Cuba by the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for the first quarter of 2011, Cuba has charged.
The UN Fund is a $22 billion a year program that works to combat the three deadly pandemics in 150 countries. [Prensa Latina (Cuba), March 12, 2011]
“This mean-spirited policy,” the Cuban government said, “aims to undermine the quality of service provided to the Cuban population and to obstruct the provision of medical assistance in over 100 countries by 40,000 Cuban health workers.”
Two things seem particularly noteworthy about the approval Wal-Mart won yesterday to acquire Massmart, a Johannesburg-based chain that operates across 13 African countries.
One is that, despite the ample publicity Wal-Mart has engineered for its “buy local” efforts, the company in fact has zero interest in cultivating local suppliers beyond stocking a few token local veggies suitable for a nice photo-op.
And two: even in countries where the law clearly states that the public interest must be protected in large mergers, global trade agreements give corporations the upper hand, or at least give government authorities an excuse to ignore their own laws.
Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a blog post about the “mistake of 1937,” the premature fiscal and monetary pullback that aborted an ongoing economic recovery and prolonged the Great Depression. As Gauti Eggertsson, the post’s author (with whom I have done research) points out, economic conditions today — with output growing, some prices rising, but unemployment still very high — bear a strong resemblance to those in 1936-37. So are modern policy makers going to make the same mistake?
Mr. Eggertsson says no, that economists now know better. But I disagree. In fact, in important ways we have already repeated the mistake of 1937. Call it the mistake of 2010: a “pivot” away from jobs to other concerns, whose wrongheadedness has been highlighted by recent economic data.
To be sure, things could be worse — and there’s a strong chance that they will, indeed, get worse.
The May jobs report is a disaster — the weakest reading since September. Non-farm payrolls grew only 54,000 last month, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private employment rose only 83,000 — the smallest growth since last June. Government payrolls dropped 29,000.
The overall jobless rate rose to 9.1 percent.
Together with plummeting housing prices, falling wages for non-supervisory workers, a paltry 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter, and a precipitous drop in consumer confidence, the picture should be clear to anyone able to see clearly.
The recovery has stalled.
We’re not in a double dip yet, but the odds are increasing.
On May 24 Elizabeth Warren was back on Capitol Hill testifying before Congress, defending her brainchild, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a key element of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. Warren is a major celebrity in Washington, an Oklahoma-born Harvard law professor who’s done more than anyone since Ralph Nader to put consumer protection on the national agenda. The room was packed with reporters, consumer advocates and lobbyists. GOP Representative Patrick McHenry, who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, could barely hide his disgust for the CFPB and Warren, accusing her of lying to Congress and frequently interrupting her answers. “In a few short weeks,” McHenry warned ominously, “the bureau will become a powerful instrument in the hands of progressive regulators.”
In part because it’s one of the strongest aspects of Dodd-Frank, the CFPB has become a favorite target of Republican attacks, right up there with George Soros, ACORN and Planned Parenthood. It’s been called “one of the greatest assaults on economic liberty in my lifetime” (Representative Jeb Hensarling) and “the most powerful agency ever created” (Representative Spencer Bachus). The Wall Street Journal opinion page denounced Warren and the bureau three times in one week in March. And the bureau hasn’t even officially launched!
On May 13 the House Financial Services Committee passed three bills designed to weaken the CFPB, which goes live on July 21. One was sponsored by freshman Representative Sean Duffy, the telegenic former star of The Real World: Boston. When he entered Congress, Duffy admitted he “wasn’t very familiar” with “banking issues, housing issues, insurance issues. These are specific issues that I didn’t deal with in my entire life.” Yet within a few months he found himself denouncing the CFPB as a “rogue agency” with an “authoritarian structure” and introducing legislation to give existing banking regulators greater authority to override the bureau’s new rules. Other bills passed by the committee sought to change the structure of the bureau from a single director to a bipartisan commission, making it harder to act quickly and decisively, and prevent the bureau from assuming power until the Senate confirms a director. In a rather stunning bit of hostage taking, forty-four Senate Republicans recently announced they would not approve any nominee for the CFPB unless the GOP proposals were implemented. (Warren and CFPB officials declined interview requests.)
Well, Tim Tebow’s new memoir is out, and it’s being joyously welcomed by those who think that sanctimonious 23 year-old jocks have something important to say about life. I got to hear some deep thoughts on the book and on the admirable life of young Tebow from the crew of The Stupid Show as I drove around yesterday afternoon, and while I’m fine with people believing what they feel led to believe, I have finally had about enough of what’s being done to the word faith.
Everywhere we turn here in this most evangelical of cultures, we hear that word. Faith. We revere those who “have great faith,” even when they’re not entirely rational about it. This a comparatively recent phenomenon, too. When I was a devoted Southern Baptist boy (as recently as the early ’80s) we talked about faith, sure, but it wasn’t the ubiquitous code word that it has become.
Let’s be clear about something. I’m not carping about what people believe. To be sure, I have done so and will again, especially when those beliefs shape policy that threatens the culture’s well-being, but that’s not what this complaint is about. No, this is more about the appropriation of a word, the sinister re-engineering of its DNA, its encoding as a dog-whistle that ultimately connotes something that’s a bit hypocritical.
We get that Republicans don’t care about folks like us. We know they are willing to stop Social Security payments, and payroll for the members of America’s armed services rather than raise the debt ceiling. We get it, we really do.
But to tank the American, and likely the global, economy just to give their lame candidate (whoever it might be) a chance at taking down Obama in 2012? Exactly that is starting to look to like their best strategy.
It’s not just Americans drawing a line between a House vote not to extend the debt ceiling and economic setbacks. Our friends across the pond are making the same observation
In the latest troubling sign for the struggling U.S. economy, Americans are cutting back on their spending on products and services due to the high prices they’re paying to fill up at the gasoline pump. This is particularly true for lower-income Americans, according to a new poll.
Not only are these struggling consumers cutting out extras like movies or manicures, but are buying fewer groceries, as well.
Half of Americans who own a vehicle (51 percent) say they have cut back on products and/or services in order to pay the increased price of gasoline. As might be expected, those with lower household income are more impacted. Almost two-thirds (65 percent) of those with a household income of less than $35,000 a year have cut back on products or services because of higher gas prices compared to 38 percent of those who have household income of $100,000 or more.
A constitutional amendment may be our only prayer for stopping the total usurpation of government by Big Business
Sometimes I feel like Gus, the father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” — you know, the guy who thinks you can cure all maladies with a spritz of Windex and declares, “Give me a word, any word, and I show you that the root of that word is Greek.”
Only in my case, it’s give me a scandal, any scandal, and I’ll show you how the corrosive influence of money on politics is at its root and makes what’s bad even worse (okay, maybe not in the case of Anthony Weiner — yet). It’s not an especially effective party trick, I know, unless you’re at a really dreary policy wonk picnic, but you work with what you’ve got.
John Edwards’ illegitimate child? The legal case being built against the former presidential candidate isn’t about paternity or custody or any of that kind of stuff, but revolves around felony campaign finance charges; whether or not two wealthy backers — his now deceased fundraising chair Frederick Baron and 100-year-old heiress Rachel “Bunny” Mellon — provided hundreds of thousands in contributions that in reality paid for the hiding of Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter, and their baby.
Campaign fundraisers are already at work on the upcoming presidential election—Obama 2012 is soliciting donations, and Republican candidates like Tim Pawlenty are spending more time meeting donors than voters.
Outside groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, which spent $50 million on the recent midterm elections, are also no doubt revving up the money machine. Crossroads and similar groups with benign names like Americans for Job Security, FreedomWorks and, yes, the US Chamber of Commerce will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the presidential race.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizen’s United, which allowed unlimited corporate expenditures on political advocacy efforts, has vastly improved the fundraising abilities of groups like American Crossroads. (Karl Rove has admitted this.) Corporations can funnel unlimited money into an outfit like American Crossroads, and then let it do the dirty work of conceiving, producing and airing advertisements that bash or support a chosen candidate.
What Citizen’s United does not allow the corporation to do, however, is contribute money directly to candidates. That remained illegal—until, perhaps, now. Last week, in a decision that received scant media attention, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Virginia ruled that campaign finance laws banning corporations from direct contributions to candidates are unconstitutional.
A group of prominent former world leaders said Wednesday the so-called war on drugs has “failed” and that decriminalizing marijuana may help curb drug-related violence and social ills.
“The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world,” the members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy say in a report.
“Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President (Richard) Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.”
And saying that restrictions on marijuana should be loosened, the report urged governments to “end the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others.”
A new strain of MRSA has been discovered in British milk, scientists report today.
The superbug, resistant to antibiotics, has been isolated from samples of milk taken from farms around the country and has also infected humans. It is the first time MRSA has been found in farm animals in the UK.
Experts said that as virtually all milk sold in Britain is pasteurised, drinking it or eating dairy products was “not a health concern”. Meat was also unlikely to be affected, but any MRSA present would be destroyed in cooking anyway.
The “main worry” was that the bacteria might colonise people who work on farms, who might then transmit it to the wider community.
One of the most prevalent conservative mantras is that higher taxes kill job growth. Leading right-wing lawmakers have repeatedly used this belief to justify tax cuts for upper-income earners and oppose tax increases. In defending the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans last fall, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said he opposed “job-killing tax hikes.”
Yet the idea that higher taxes impede or retard economic growth isn’t generally backed up by the facts. Bloomberg News interviewed Joel Slemrod, who was is an economist at the University of Michigian and is a former senior economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, about the issue. Slemrod pointed out that high tax countries tend to perform well economically and said that returning to Clinton-era tax rates in 2013 would not harm the economy:
“High GDP countries are high tax countries,” said Joel Slemrod, an economist at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “That doesn’t mean high taxes cause the high GDP.” [...] Slemrod, who served as senior staff economist for President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, said raising taxes today would be risky because the economy remains fragile. But given the economy’s performance in the 1990s, returning marginal rates to their Clinton-era levels in 2013, as Obama proposes, wouldn’t be, he said. “It’s just hard to say that’s the kiss of death for economic growth,” Slemrod said.
The right wing has long sought the abolishment of the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) and advocated for replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. A proposal that encapsulates these policies is known as the “Fair Tax.”
While the Fair Tax has recieved little support in the past, Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) — who is facing a highly competitive primary challenger from the right — announced his support for the policy yesterday in a video to his constituents posted on YouTube. Watch it:
House Republicans, as part of their 2012 budget, have proposed dramatic cuts to food assistance programs, including cuts to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) that would prevent hundreds of thousands of eligible women and their children from accessing the program. Late last month, the House Appropriations Committee approved more than $830 million in cuts to WIC and millions more in cuts to the Emergency Food Assistance Program and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program.
To cut these programs with so many families still feeling the effects of the Great Recession is a travesty. But to do so after spending tens of billions of dollars to extend tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans, as Republicans forced Congress to do back in December, is even worse. CAP’s Melissa Boteach and Seth Hanlon found that the cost of the GOP cut to WIC is equivalent to the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires alone for just one week:
The deal struck last December to extend the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush gave the average millionaire a tax break of $139,199 for 2011, according to the Tax Policy Center, or nearly $2,700 per week. Given that about 321,000 households reported incomes of more than $1 million in the most recent year for which there are data from the Internal Revenue Service, that means the Bush tax cuts provide millionaires with about $860 million in tax breaks every week—more than enough to stave off the $833 million in proposed cuts to WIC.
Throughout President Obama’s first two years in office, Senate Republicans waged war on his judiciary nominees — allowing only a handful of them to be confirmed. The GOP’s obstructionism grew so bad that conservative Chief Justice John Roberts scolded the Senate for its dismal confirmation record. A new report by the Alliance for Justice shows that the GOP’s obstructionism was truly historic — the worst obstructionism any new president faced at any point in American history:
[T]he Senate confirmed fewer of [Obama's] district and circuit nominees than every president back to Jimmy Carter, and the lowest percentage of nominees – 58% – than any president in American history at this point in a President’s first term. By comparison, Presidents George W. Bush, Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Reagan and Carter had 77%, 90%, 96%, 98%, and 97% of their nominees confirmed after two years, respectively.
Senate Republicans’ mass obstruction of Obama’s judges stands in stark contrast to the treatment afforded to past presidents. Indeed, the Senate confirmed fewer judges during Obama’s first two years in office than it did during the same period in the Carter Administration, even though the judiciary was 40 percent smaller while Carter was in office.
Finally, it seems, the economic burdens of America’s vast middle class may be catching up with the Street. The Dow lost 2.22 percent today; the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 2.28 percent. Both marked their worst declines since August 11, 2010. The Nasdaq composite index fell 2.33 percent.
We’re coming full circle: The stock market is dropping because corporate earnings are slowing. Corporate earnings are slowing because consumers are pulling back. Consumers are pulling back because they don’t have enough jobs or adequate wages.
The immediate cause of the sell-off was an announcement by ADP Employer Services, a payroll processing firm that estimates employment, that private employers added only 38,000 jobs in May. The economy needs 125,000 new jobs a month just to tread water, given that at least 125,000 people join the potential labor force every month. Simply put, if new hires are in the range of five digits, American consumers will not have enough purchasing power to buy what the private sector can produce.
I try to avoid religious commentary, but – Good God! – what is it about confession that the Catholic hierarchy can’t seem to grasp?
The grotesque epidemic of priestly pedophilia that has roiled the church has been under assessment in a five year, $2 million study commissioned by our country’s Catholic bishops. At long last, the report is out – but not the truth. Instead, the panel concludes that this horror is not the fault of the church, nor even of the abusive priests. Rather – cue the heavenly music – the sixties made them do it.
Yes, it’s the Woodstock defense! The diabolical theory of this study is that “social chaos” created by the tie-dyed sexual revolution of the 1960s so discombobulated otherwise chaste and honorable men that they used their religious authority to rape 10-year-olds and teenagers.
Agency says failure to reach an agreement on the nation’s borrowing limit could lead to a lower credit rating
A credit rating agency is warning the U.S. government that it could lose its sterling debt rating if Congress and the Obama administration don’t reach an agreement to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.
Moody’s Investors Service said Thursday that if the parties fail to make progress soon, it would put the U.S. rating under review for a possible downgrade. That’s because there’s a “very small but rising risk” that the government will default on its debts.
Standard & Poor’s, another major credit rating agency, issued a similar warning in April.
From private prisons to warrantless searches, the government is working with corporations to trample your rights
“Corporate Police State,” it’s a fraught — some might even say, overwrought — term. But in its purest, apolitical form, it simply describes the periodic commingling of state and corporate power to protect private interests.
In the American psyche, any discussion of that phenomenon typically brings one of three images to mind. There’s the Old Corporate Police State — the sepia-toned America of decades long past, a place where state militias murder striking mine workers on behalf of Gilded Age barons and Congress empowers the government to forcibly ban work stoppages that defy corporate executives’ wishes. There’s the Fictional Future Corporate Police State — that smoldering bombed-out world depicted in “Robocop,”“Fortress” and every other dystopian flick in Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic catalog. And there’s the Foreign Corporate Police State — think Dubai, Singapore, Monaco and every other lavish enclave defined by lots of rich people, lots of corporate headquarters, lots of heavily armed cops — and almost no civil liberties.
By imagining the Corporate Police State primarily as a historical, fictional or foreign monster, these snapshots encourage us to believe that this monster poses no threat to us in the here and now. They encourage us, in other words, to ignore the monster’s creeping advances in present-day America.
Time is running out for the White House. A lesson from the failed reelection bid of George H.W. Bush
On Oct. 27, 1992, less than a week before Election Day, the Commerce Department reported that the U.S. economy had grown by a surprising 2.7 percent in the third quarter. Seizing his last chance to refute Bill Clinton’s “it’s the economy stupid” campaign strategy, President George H.W. Bush jumped all over the new numbers.
“We have now had six straight quarters of growth in the United States,” Mr. Bush said as he campaigned through Iowa, Kentucky and Ohio. “And yet the Democrats keep telling us that everything is going to hell. And they’re wrong.”
The Clinton camp scoffed.
Ronald H. Brown, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Mr. Bush’s reaction was “another example of a failed President grasping at straws.”
The powerful House Appropriations Committee approved dramatic cuts Tuesday to several federal nutrition programs that would eliminate nutrition assistance for hundreds of thousands of low-income seniors, women, infants, and children and cut support for charitable food assistance by over 20 percent, according to the nation’s largest hunger relief organization.
“The proposed cuts are staggering,” says Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America. “It is not an overstatement to say that the House bill would make it harder for millions of low-income Americans to get enough to eat –- Americans who are already struggling just to get by from day to day. These proposed cuts are indefensible. There is no other word for it.”
House Republicans have, since they took their majority in January, been seeking to make deep cuts to a swath of federal social programs.
Imagine the firestorm that would raging on Republican propaganda outlets right now if the stock market had dropped 2.2 percent within 24 hours after Democrats had voted unanimously not to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.
The entire right-wing noise machine — from Fox & Friends to Limbaugh, from Hannity to O’Reilly — would be singing the same refrain: The stock market has sent a clear message of disapproval over the Democrats’ irresponsible vote. Whether that assertion was true would not matter. They would make it true simply by unanimously agreeing that it was.
But because it was Republicans who voted irresponsibly, right-wing media sees no relationship between the vote and market drop.
And, of course, neither does the “liberal” lamestream corporate inside-the-Beltway media.
No one sees any connection between this on May 31:
The most recent scuttle-butt, the smart-money, the self-appointed pundits, those in-the-know as well as those who don’t have two clues are making the safest bet on the planet: Sarah Palin wants to run for President.
What if she succeeds?
Her ‘election’ (or ‘selection’) to that high office would be cited as proof that Darwinian ‘natural selection’, often mistakenly called ‘survivial of the fittest’, is absolutely wrong. She will have proven that merit is not rewarded or, at least she will have raised the question: why frickin’ bother?
She will become an inspiration to drop-outs and fuck ups all over the world. She will have legitimized incompetence. She will have inspired several generations of goof-offs, lay-abouts, dumb-asses and run-o-the-mill jerks and YouTubers! I have not yet mentioned thousands, perhaps millions of inmates of various kinds of ‘institutions’ who must be turned loose upon an unsuspecting world should S. Palin continue to roam free! Think about it –is it fair or even legal to keep petty screw-ups locked up when Sarah Palin has her finger on a button that could destroy the world? The wrong folk are behind bars or asylum walls!
The global war on drugs has failed and governments should explore legalizing marijuana and other controlled substances, according to a commission that includes former heads of state, a former U.N. secretary-general and a business mogul.
A new report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy argues that the decades-old “global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” The 24-page paper will be released Thursday.
“Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won,” the report said.
Today’s graduates face miserable job prospects, and experts say the student loan crisis could be worse than the credit card or housing bubbles.
It’s the beginning of summer: warmer weather, longer days, the end of the school year. And that means graduation for thousands of young people across the U.S.; graduation with more student debt than ever before, and into a job market that is anything but promising.
Young people between the ages of 16 and 24 face an unemployment rate nearly twice that of the rest of the population, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. 2010′s 18.4 percent rate for youth was the worst in the 60 years that economists have collected such data. ColorLines notes that in 2010, 8.4 percent of white college graduates were unemployed, 13.8 percent of Latino graduates, and a dismal 19 percent of black graduates.
Those bright, shiny new degrees simply aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on all too often. The cost of a college degree is up some 3,400 percent since 1972, but as we all know too well, household incomes haven’t increased by anything close to that number — not for the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway
Senator Bernie Sanders proposes a major reform of the way we pay for prescription drugs and fund research. He’s patently right
Drugs are cheap. There are few drugs that would sell for more than $5-$10 a prescription in a free market. However, many drugs in the United States sell for hundreds of dollars per prescription and, sometimes, several thousand dollars per prescription. There is a simple reason for this fact: government-granted patent monopolies.
The government gives patent monopolies to provide an incentive for drug companies to carry through research. This is an incredibly backward and inefficient way to pay for research. It leaves us paying huge amounts of money for cheap drugs. It also often leads to bad medicine.
We can do better – and Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a way. He has introduced a bill to create a prize fund that would buy up patents, so that drugs could then be sold at a free market price. Sanders’s bill would appropriate 0.55% of GDP (about $80bn a year, with the economy’s current size) for buying up patents, which would then be placed in the public domain so that any manufacturer could use them at no cost.
Imperialism abroad is destroying what is left of our democracy at home. From warrantless wiretapping to warrantless door-busting, this is what a police state looks like.
The late Chalmers Johnson often reminded us that “A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.” His warning rings more true by the day, as Americans watch the erosion of their civil liberties accelerate in conjunction with the expansion of the US Empire.
When viewed through the lens of Johnson’s profound insights, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Kentucky v. King makes perfect sense. On May 13, in a lopsided 8-1 ruling, the Court upheld the warrantless search of a Kentucky man’s apartment after police smelled marijuana and feared those inside were destroying evidence, essentially granting police officers increased power to enter the homes of citizens without a warrant.
Following complaints from citizens, the European Ombudsman has opened an investigation into the EU’s permitted levels of food contamination following the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan and their communication to the wider public. Similar complaints are also being heard in France.
“Based on complaints submitted to me, it appears that a number of Union citizens perceive a lack of precise and reliable information as regards the changes made to the maximum permitted levels in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident,” wrote EU Ombudsman P. Nikiforos Diamandouros in a letter addressed to European Commission President José Manuel Barroso on 19 May.
Diamandouros noted that while the EU executive’s websites provide links to relevant adopted legislation (297/2011 and 351/2011), “no comparative information on the maximum permitted levels before and after the Fukushima accident has apparently been made available”.
Seeking to avoid a showdown over Libya, House GOP leaders pulled back from a floor vote on a resolution by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) that would bar U.S. involvement in the NATO-led campaign to topple Muammar Qadhafi.
GOP leaders were scrambling Wednesday morning to come up with an alternative plan for considering the measure. This could include having the Armed Services or Foreign Affairs committees draft backup proposals.
Citing “lots of unrest on both sides of the aisle,” a senior House GOP aide said Republican leaders are still working through their options.
Terje Sørgjerd has done it again — you’ll never see light quite like this.
Just weeks after producing two incredible viral hits, “The Aurora” and “The Mountain” (the latter of which attracted over 26 million views), the 32-year-old Oslo, Norway native has created this clip, a fantastic time-lapse shot shortly before “midnight sun” near the Arctic Circle. It’s the result of a grueling 12 day journey (it was shot between April 29 and May 10) that could have easily claimed the life of the filmmaker. He managed to fall in freezing Arctic water twice, and was even hospitalized after falling from a rock during the trip.
The U.S. isn’t doing enough to curtail excessive banker bonuses, Europe’s top financial regulator told the Obama administration in a recently-disclosed letter.
“I think you agree with me that ‘bankers’ bonuses’ is a matter that continues to cause public outrage,” Michel Barnier, the European commissioner overseeing finance, wrote to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. “Getting this matter right is key to restoring our citizens’ confidence in the financial system -– and ultimately -– their confidence in the public authorities regulating the financial institutions.”
Lavish compensation paid to traders and bankers during the housing-driven bubble fueled risk-taking at the nation’s largest financial firms, experts have said. Those risks eventually led to the collapse of storied firms, the near-collapse of the financial system and the most punishing economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Whatever Kevin McCracken actually videotapes in the night skies above Oakland, Calif., by the true definition of the term, he’s certainly capturing UFOs streaking overhead in formations.
Whether these unidentified objects in the sky are space aliens — or, perhaps, a flock of birds — remains to be proven.
(SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO)
Nevertheless, what this man has captured with his lens is extraordinary.
Using a Sony Handy Cam connected to an infrared scope, McCracken has successfully videotaped objects in triangular formations several times in the past year.
Private-sector payroll growth slowed sharply in May, coming in far below expectations and falling to the lowest level in eight months, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.
The ADP Employer Services report showed private employers added a scant 38,000 jobs last month, while April private payrolls were revised down to an increase of 177,000 from the previously reported 179,000. Economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast a gain of 175,000 jobs for May.
The report is jointly developed with Macroeconomic Advisers LLC.
“Obviously a much weaker-than-expected report, hinting that Friday’s nonfarm data will also be weaker than expected,” said Camilla Sutton, senior currency strategist at Scotia Capital in Toronto, referring to the U.S. Labor Department’s monthly non-farm payrolls report due for Friday.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida is challenging in federal court Governor Rick Scott’s (R) executive order forcing all state employees in Executive Branch agencies to undergo drug testing without regard to suspicion of illegal drug use.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit (PDF) on Tuesday on behalf of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Council 79, which represents 50,000 public workers.
Scott issued an executive order in March requiring that all state employees be subjected to urine analysis once every quarter. The order is expected to cost Florida taxpayers over $3.5 million.
Police and firemen in Alameda, California watched a man drown on Monday after realizing they did not have proper certifications for water rescue, leaving them open to possible lawsuits if they attempted to save him.
The drowning victim, 53-year-old Raymond Zack, was apparently suicidal, according to a report from the scene. He waded out about 150 yards into cold waters off Crown Beach in Alameda and took about an hour to drown himself.
A crowd of about 75 gathered to watch the bizarre scene, which saw police and firemen just standing at shoreline watching helplessly. After the man had drowned, authorities couldn’t even go into the surf to retrieve the body. They instead recruited a passer-by for the job.
Ever since New York’s 26th District delivered a stunning upset by electing Democrat Kathy Hochul, the GOP has been struggling to deny that the election was a referendum on House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to end Medicare. Despite ranking as one of the biggest political fails among Americans, the GOP is committed to walking Ryan’s plank.
But one (current) Republican is not buying it. This morning on Fox and Friends, perennial presidential candidate Donald Trump lambasted the GOP over the Ryan plan. Calling it a “death wish,” Trump noted that the plan’s “horrendous” timing delivered the GOP “an impossible loss” and will cause serious losses in future elections:
All around the country, conservative lawmakers continue to cut services and investments in Main Street America, claiming that these steps are necessary to close budget deficits. At the same time, major corporations and wealthy individuals continue to benefit from special tax breaks and loopholes that allow them to get away with paying little to nothing in taxes.
Today, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) released a new report chronicling the tax rates of some of the nation’s major corporations. CTJ looked at a sample of a dozen major corporations and analyzed both their profits and their effective federal corporate income tax rates between 2008 and 2010.
CTJ found that from 2008 to 2010, these major corporations earned $173 billion in profits put together. Yet these major corporations paid an average federal corporate income tax rate during this period of -1.5 percent, meaning they actually got money back from the Treasury in the form of tax benefits. ThinkProgress has assembled the average tax rates of these corporations over this period in the following graph:
Ohio is one of 17 states that require workers to be paid above the minimum wage mandated by federal law. But Ohio Senate Republicans are working to limit the number of people eligible to earn that wage, attaching an amendment to an omnibus budget bill that would circumvent the law and prevent an untold number of workers from collecting the state-mandated minimum wage.
In 2006, Ohio voters approved an amendment to the state constitution setting the state’s minimum wage at $6.85 an hour with a built-in increase attached to inflation each year. The current minimum wage in Ohio increased to $7.40 an hour this year, $0.15 higher than the $7.25 an hour required by federal law.
The amendment by state Senate Republicans would reduce the number of workers eligible for the state minimum wage, making only those covered by the looser federal law eligible to earn Ohio’s minimum wage:
Rick Scott, the nation’s least popular governor, can’t seem to escape bad press this week. First, he was roundly criticized for vetoing $615 million in budget funds — a move that will hurt Florida’s most vulnerable population. Then he was lampooned for signing a bill that mandates drug testing of all welfare recipients — and forces the state’s poorest residents to pay for their own drug tests if they want to receive aid. Now, it turns out the budget Scott signed included $370 million of federal stimulus money the governor has spent years railing against. Scott had pledged to “fight all stimulus money,” and when confronted with his hypocrisy, he fumbled to find a plausible answer:
Florida Gov. Rick Scott campaigned against President Obama’s “failed stimulus” program — yet the freshman politician kept nearly $370 million of the federal cash in the Florida budget he signed last week.
Scott’s decision to keep the stimulus money stands out in a year when the governor touted record budget vetoes of up to $615 million. He emphasized the vetoes of “wasteful” spending at a Thursday event that featured a campaign-style “Promises Made, Promises Kept” banner.
President Obama met with House Republicans today at the White House to discuss ways to move forward on negotiations regarding the nation’s debt ceiling and the budget. During the discussion, talk evidently turned to taxes, and when Obama noted that taxes today are lower than they were under President Reagan, the GOP, according to The Hill, “engaged in a lot of ‘eye-rolling’“:
Republicans attending a White House meeting on Wednesday didn’t take kindly to President Obama telling them tax rates were higher during the Reagan administration. GOP members engaged in a lot of “eye-rolling,” according to a member who was on hand to hear Obama, who invited House Republicans to the White House for discussions on the debt ceiling. [...]
“[The President] made a comment like the tax rate is the lightest, even more than (under former President) Reagan,” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told The Hill following the meeting. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joked that during the meeting, “We learned we had the lowest tax rates in history … lower than Reagan!”
Several media outlets have reported on a letter sent by House Speaker John Boehner to President Obama signed by “150 economists” who support Boehner’s spending cut proposal. But these media outlets have ignored that many of the economists who signed the letter have made baseless predictions in the past, some have endorsed dubious theories, and others have used extreme rhetoric to attack Obama and other Democrats.
What was Timothy Geithner thinking back in 2008 when, as president of the New York Fed, he decided to give Goldman Sachs a $30 billion interest-free loan as part of an $80 billion secret float to favored banks? The sordid details of that program were finally made public this week in response to a court-ordered Freedom of Information Act release, thanks to a Bloomberg News lawsuit. Sorry, my bad: It wasn’t an interest-free loan; make that .01 percent that Goldman paid to borrow taxpayer money when ordinary folks who missed a few credit card payments in order to finance their mortgages were being slapped with interest rates of more than 25 percent.
One wonders if Barack Obama was fully aware of Geithner’s deceitful performance at the New York Fed when he appointed him treasury secretary in the incoming administration. The president was probably ignorant of this particular giveaway, as were key members of Congress. “I wasn’t aware of this program until now,” Barney Frank, D-Mass., who at the time chaired the House Financial Services Committee, admitted in referring to Geithner’s “single-tranche open-market operations” program. And there was no language in the Dodd-Frank law supposedly reining in the banks that compelled the Fed to reveal the existence of this program.
Amid all the nonsense and gobbledegook that has been written about banking industry and about the economic slump during the last four years of the global financial crisis, New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson has stood out both for the clarity of her analysis, and for her willingness to go after the guilty parties in the political and especially the banking system, naming names and calling it as she sees it.
So it was kind of disappointing–even shocking–to read her latest article reporting on a new “study” by Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Joseph Gagnon, warning about the nation’s growing debt crisis.
The Peterson Institute, founded by Wall Street tycoon Peter Peterson, has long been gunning for the Social Security and Medicare systems, which he, and the rest of the Wall Street gang, see as unfairly competing with Wall Street for the assets of the public, and as destructive of the “free market.”
Today, the Government Accountability Board approved three more recall petitions against Republican state Senators in Wisconsin. All six petitions which have been filed have now been approved. Sens. Alberta Darling, Rob Cowles and Sheila Harsdorf join Dan Kapanke, Randy Hopper and Luther Olsen in facing recall.
There are two outstanding questions – the three petitions against Democratic state Senators Dave Hansen, Jim Holperin and Bob Wirch, and the timing of the elections. As I said yesterday, the GAB delayed the certification of the recall petitions against the Democratic Senators by one week, as they pursued fraud allegations. This sets up a quandary for the GAB. They initially wanted all recall elections to occur on the same day. But now they may move the Democratic recalls back a week, or move all the elections back a week. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel explains:
Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget plan is wildly unpopular—especially its provision to end Medicare as we know it. That proposal was resoundingly rejected in the recent special election to fill the NY-26 House seat. But the Ryan budget’s commitment to dismantle Medicare is by no means the only unpopular part. Consider a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll that asked about ending Medicaid as we know it, which is also part of the Ryan budget.
First, the poll asked whether respondents supported major reductions in Medicaid spending (as the Ryan budget does), minor reductions, or no reductions. Only 13 percent supported major reductions. Thirty percent supported minor reductions, and a majority (53 percent) supported no reductions.
In what Democrats called a “political stunt,” House Republicans voted in lockstep to oppose raising the U.S. debt ceiling last night.
This is demagoguery at such a fevered pitch that it bespeaks desperation.
For one thing, raising the debt limit has nothing to do with future spending. It covers the indebtedness in the budget that Congress — including the Republicans in the House — voted for.
Yes, Republicans voted to raise the national debt, now they’re telling world markets that they are demanding that the U.S. Treasury welch on the charges to the national credit card that these same Republicans approved.
The answer? America needs to end its trade imbalance by repudiating free trade, then we need to implement some serious domestic industrial policy to fix our innovation deficit.
Ian Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank, and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.
At the height of the housing boom, the 26th floor of Goldman Sachs’s former headquarters on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan was the nerve center of Goldman’s fast-growing mortgage trading business.
Hundreds of employees worked closely in teams, devising mortgage-based securities — billions of dollars’ worth — that were examined by lawyers, approved by management, then sold to investors like hedge funds, commercial banks and insurance companies.
At one trading desk sat Fabrice Tourre, a midlevel 28-year-old Frenchman who was little known not just outside Goldman but even inside the firm. That changed three years later, in 2010, when he achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the only individual at Goldman and across Wall Street sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for helping to sell a mortgage-securities investment, in one of the hundreds of mortgage deals created during the bubble years.
An important update to “The Weiner affair: Close to solution (but I need your help!”
Readers — please pass along the information here, including the all-important update. In that update, you’ll find that we have made an important breakthrough. Weiner was framed, and we know the name of the framer.
First, the original post, as it appeared this morning (and I apologize to newcomers for the “in medias res” opening; if you just now showed up here, you may want to skim the first few paragraphs:
I owe an incredible debt to my readers, particularly one who comments under the sobriquet “milowent.” We may be very close to a resolution of this case.
First, we have what appears to be damning evidence — the date stamp:
There is another problem with the mysterious 800×600 file came from from Dan Wolfe’s (@PatriotUSA76) internet cache. The larger file has a create data of 5/30/2011 at 01:26:24AM.
Yet the medium size file shows a create data of 5/27/2011 at 1:32:58PM
It appears that the image allegedly found in the browser cache was created on the date it was discovered, not at the time of the alleged tweet. For whatever reason, Dan did a copy-and-paste of that photo (thereby creating a new file) on the 30th, instead of passing along a copy of the original.
owa Republicans are trying to dismiss claims that the vote count in Tuesday's Iowa Caucus was wrong. An Iowa voter told a local TV station yesterday that he noticed a 20-vote discrepancy in the count - and that Rick Santorum was the real winner of the Caucuses. Republican Party officials, though, are sticking to their first count - showing Mitt Romney as the winner by 8-votes - and there will be no recount.
The Republican Party has launched a war on voters around the nation this year with strict new laws that will disenfranchise over 5 million Americans. They claim these laws are necessary to combat so-called voter fraud. Yet in Iowa - where there are no such laws - and where a very, very close and questionable election was just held - Republicans don't seem to care at all about getting it right.
Clearly - the war on voters isn't about making sure the people's voices are represented accurately - it's about making sure poor people, young people, and minorities who tend to vote for Democrats - can't vote at all.
" We the corporations" On
January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations
are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. __________
MOVE
to AMEND
a project of the CAMPAIGN TO LEGALIZE Democracy
Help end Corporate personhood
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
What’s in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would “end Medicare.” This, the letter insisted, was a false claim: the plan would simply install a “new, sustainable version of Medicare.”
Glenn Greenwald :-:
One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans—around half—are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves—see “Bachmann, Michele”—or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives.
International bankers have reportedly wasted billions of dollars invested by Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi. The Financial Times says giants like Goldman Sachs were dealing with the dictator’s investments when it needed to plug a hole during the economic crisis. Most of the money has been lost, but with what’s going on in Libya any repayment seems unlikely.
Robert Reich :-:
Paul Krugman :-:
Robert Reich :-:
A constitutional amendment may be our only prayer for stopping the total usurpation of government by Big Business
Ohio is one of 17 states that require workers to be paid above the minimum wage mandated by federal law. But Ohio Senate Republicans are working to limit the number of people eligible to earn that wage, attaching an amendment to an omnibus budget bill that would circumvent the law and prevent an untold number of workers from collecting the state-mandated minimum wage.
What was Timothy Geithner thinking back in 2008 when, as president of the New York Fed, he decided to give Goldman Sachs a $30 billion interest-free loan as part of an $80 billion secret float to favored banks? The sordid details of that program were finally made public this week in response to a court-ordered Freedom of Information Act release, thanks to a Bloomberg News lawsuit. Sorry, my bad: It wasn’t an interest-free loan; make that .01 percent that Goldman paid to borrow taxpayer money when ordinary folks who missed a few credit card payments in order to finance their mortgages were being slapped with interest rates of more than 25 percent.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
