I often ask Congressional Democrats these days: “If you agree that your Republican counterparts in Congress are the most craven, corporatist, fact-denying, falsifying, anti-99 percent, militaristic Republicans in the party’s history, then why are you not landsliding them?” Their responses are largely in the form of knowing smiles and furrowed brows.

There are answers that are more specific to account for the large election losses in 2010, the loss of the House of Representatives to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and the prospect of losing the House and the Senate this November. Chief among them is that the two parties are vigorously dialing for the same commercial dollars to finance their campaigns. The resultant inhibitions and self-censorships bring the parties’ real agendas closer together, erasing the bright lines that make elections clearer choices for voters.

Here are eight initiatives that could landslide the Republicans in November’s Congressional contests. It starts with a ringing declaration that recalls the legendary labor rally challenge: “Whose side are you on?” With the two parties often seen as Republicrats or DemReps, due to the lack of credible, distinct differences on military, foreign policy, trade, agribusiness, energy and corporate crime/welfare subjects, among others, such a proclamation of “we the people” helps frame the details of this fresh approach, as follows.

Full Story Here: Can Democrats Landslide Republicans? | Common Dreams.

Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly “different” others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

Full Story Here: The right’s stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Mitt Romney answered his last question from a voter three weeks ago, and just about every day since then, he has swept through towns across America like a whistling train conductor proclaiming, “All aboard.”

Out are 55-minute town hall meetings. In are 15-minute stump speeches at buffed-up rallies. There are rope lines and hot lights, giant flags and Secret Service agents with wires in their ears. The objective: appear presidential, avoid gaffes and convince Republicans that they have no reasonable option left but to rally around Romney’s winning candidacy.

That was the image he presented here Saturday night with his Nevada caucus victory speech. Hundreds of adoring supporters waved “Nevada Believes” signs as the candidate assailed President Obama. Yet the music playing as soon as Romney finished speaking — “A Little Less Conversation” by Elvis Presley — underscored his new don’t-ask-questions-just- get-on-board mantra.

Full Story Here: On campaign trail, Romney skips questions in taking up mantle of likely GOP nominee – The Washington Post.

The GOP front-runners endorse a plan that could disenfranchise millions of voters—including their own.

As Republican primary voters head to the polls in Florida on Tuesday, both GOP front-runners have endorsed a policy that would contradict existing law and could disenfranchise millions of voters across the country.

During a recent debate, both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney supported getting rid of bilingual ballots when the topic was brought up by the moderator. “I would have ballots in English,” Gingrich said. “And I think you could have programs where virtually everybody would be able to read the ballots.” Romney agreed. “I think Speaker Gingrich is right with regards to what he’s described,” he said.

That wasn’t much of a stretch for Gingrich, who once called Spanish “the language of living in a ghetto.” Yet their glib demand for English-only ballots would require amending the Voting Rights Act and doing away with hard-won legal requirements that have existed for decades. It’s a sharp turn away from the Bush administration, which despite a spotty civil rights record filed more ballot access cases on behalf of non-English speakers than any administration had before.

Full Story Here: Gingrich and Romney Want to Say Adios to Bilingual Ballots | Mother Jones.

Unbeknownst to the press, President Obama met Friday evening with former president George H.W. Bush and his son, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, in the Oval Office.

White House officials did not list the meeting on the president’s schedule but released a photo on Flickr. According to the photo’s time stamp, the meeting occurred shortly after 5 p.m., about the time the president returned to the White House from a fundraiser.

When asked what the men discussed and why it wasn’t on the schedule, the White House released a statement saying, “The three men enjoyed a personal visit in the Oval Office – as they have done on previous occasions when President Bush is Washington.”

The Bushes are in town to attend the exclusive Alfalfa Club dinner Saturday, an annual get-together for Washington power brokers that Obama also is scheduled to attend, according to the Associated Press.

Full Story Here: Obama hosts George H.W. and Jeb Bush at White House – POLITICO.com.

OPS: Making secret ‘back room’ deals with the oligarchy again Barry? How bad did you sell us out THIS time?

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Why hasn’t he pushed for a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which Clinton’s deregulation reversed? Does the president really believe that the Dodd-Frank slap-on-the-wrist sellout represents “new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again”? Can he name one single too-big-to-fail banking monstrosity that has been reduced in size on his watch instead of encouraged to grow ever larger by Treasury and Fed bailouts and interest-free money?

Full Story Here: Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton | Common Dreams.

Excuse me for not yelling myself hoarse for Obama’s warmed over State of the Union address.

While I agree with his call for economic fairness, there was not much in his speech that was new or all that promising. And there were several troublesome passages for progressives.

First, mentioning John Boehner, Obama said he was still open to a grand compromise on Social Security and Medicare, which would make Americans have to work longer and get less benefits from Medicare and Medicaid. We don’t need a Democrat to hack away at these crucial social programs.

Full Story Here: In Obama’s State of the Union, Troublesome Passages for Progressives | The Progressive.

Responding to President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader says Obama’s criticism of income inequality and Wall Street excess fail to live up to his record in office. “[Obama] says one thing and does another,” Nader says. “Where has he been for over three years? He’s had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t sent more than one or two to jail.” On foreign policy, Nader says, “I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. [Obama] was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms.” [includes rush transcript]

Full Story Here: “He Says One Thing and Does Another”: Ralph Nader Responds to Obama’s State of the Union Address.

In today’s On the News segment: Mitt Romney is definitely Wall Street’s favorite guy, 83 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s economic plan laid out in his State of the Union speech, the situation at Fukushima may once again be getting worse, and more.

Full Story Here: On the News With Thom Hartmann: Mitt Romney Is Definitely Wall Street’s Favorite Guy, and More | Truthout.

One has to feel for Romney, thrashing about amidst the Newt horror. Here comes the portly Georgian, brushing aside the Mormon priests guarding Mitt’s hotel suite, kicking open the bedroom door, seizing Romney by the throat…Aaaargh! And then Romney is awake, realizing that this is a cold-sweat nightmare that will last … maybe until they close in Florida on January 31, maybe until Super Tuesday on March 6, when nine states hold their primaries, maybe….

We left Romney amidst the supposed flush of victory in Iowa (now awarded to Santorum), and triumph in New Hampshire, with polls in South Carolina showing him a solid ten points ahead of Gingrich, who made a poor showing in New Hampshire on top of a fourth place in Iowa below Santorum and Ron Paul.

Full Story Here: Here He Comes Again! » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

“An activist Supreme Court, misusing its authority by legislating policy from the bench, ignored decades of legal precedent when it ruled in 2010 that corporations have the same constitutional right of free speech as people,” he said in a statement.

The Supreme Court held that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as people, overturning campaign finance laws that restricted the amount of money a corporation could spend in an election.

Full Story Here: Rep. Johnson: Citizens United allowed corporate money to dictate public policy | The Raw Story.

Memo to Republican Establishment:

I would send this memo to each of you individually, but I’m not sure exactly who you are. I’ve been told that you exist and that people like my colleagues Bill Bennett, Karl Rove, and Bill Kristol are charter members of it.

I am assuming you are out there and I assume there are more than three of you. At any rate, I thought I’d take a moment to catch up with you and make some observations on how things are going for your party.

Let me break it to you gently — you’ve got a first-class disaster on your hands. I know you boys thought this thing would work out and you would be able to whip the Republicans in line to fall in behind Mitt (I assume you are all males but if there is a female in the establishment, I apologize.) Not going too good, is it fellows?

Full Story Here: Carville to GOP: You have a disaster on your hands – CNN.com.

Less than a month into its 2012 term, the Indiana General Assembly has become deeply divided, after resurrecting a fight over controversial right-to-work legislation that disrupted the body’s work last year.

On Wednesday, Indiana House Democrats stayed out of session and denied the chamber the quorum necessary to move forward in order to protest their GOP colleagues’ attempts to push through the measure. As a consequence, Democratic members potentially face fines of $1,000 per day until they return.

The current controversy is over Democrats’ attempts to add amendments to the legislation. Democrats wanted the right-to-work issue made into a referendum, so that the people of Indiana would vote on it directly.

Full Story Here: Indiana Right To Work: House Democrats Revolt, Face Fines Of $1,000 Per Day From GOP.

Uprising has ‘potential to rock the politics not just of the state but of the nation in 2012′

Agencies are reporting that organizers of the effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have submitted more than one million signatures, far beyond the number needed to force a recall election.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports: It would mark the first such gubernatorial recall in state history and would be only the third gubernatorial recall election in U.S. history. Organizers Tuesday also handed in 845,000 signatures against Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch as well as petitions against four GOP state senators including Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau.

The sheer number of signatures being filed against Walker – nearly as many as the total votes cast for the governor in November 2010 and almost twice as many as those needed to trigger a recall election – ensure the election will be held, said officials with the state Democratic Party and United Wisconsin, the group that launched the Walker recall.

Full Story Here: One Million Wisconsinites: Recall Gov. Walker | Common Dreams.

House Speaker John Boehner, hoping to spare fellow Republicans a second embarrassing defeat over payroll tax cuts, is prepared to navigate around rebellious Tea Party-aligned lawmakers to get a deal, according to congressional aides.

Republicans in the House of Representatives got a public drubbing from critics within and outside the party in December for initially refusing to approve a Senate plan to extend the tax break for 160 million Americans through February.

The party of lower taxes was left on the defensive, countering a barrage of criticism that its unwillingness to compromise threatened an effective tax hike on workers, potentially damaging the fragile economic recovery.

Full Story Here: Tea Party may get rebuffed in tax cut showdown – Yahoo! News.

In a press release announcing the ad, Jon Stewart spoke about his new role as head of the Super PAC:

Full Story Here: Colbert Super PAC Releases Romney Attack Ad In South Carolina (VIDEO).

An effort by the Republican National Committee may further corporatize the electoral process.

The RNC filed a legal brief Tuesday arguing that a ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates is unconstitutional.

The Huffington Post reports:

The ban, part of a 1907 anti-corruption law that helped curb the influence of corporate robber barons, is one of the last bulwarks of campaign finance law left after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision two years ago.

As ThinkProgress notes, an overturning of the ban would have massive consequences:

Full Story Here: GOP Pushes to Further Corporatize Elections | Common Dreams.

Warren Buffett is ready to call Republicans’ tax bluff. Last fall, Senator Mitch McConnell said that if Buffett were feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check.” The jab was in response to Buffett’s August 2011 New York Times op-ed, which made hay of the fact that our tax system is so unbalanced, Buffett (worth about $45 billion) pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Senator John Thune promptly introduced the “Buffett Rule Act,” an option on tax forms that would allow the rich to donate more in taxes to help pay down the national debt. It was, as Buffett told me for this week’s TIME cover story, “a tax policy only a Republican could come up with.”

Still, he’s willing to take them up on it. “It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that [the deficit] can’t be solved by voluntary contributions,” he says with a chuckle. So Buffett has pledged to match 1 for 1 all such voluntary contributions made by Republican members of Congress. “And I’ll even go 3 for 1 for McConnell,” he says. That could be quite a bill if McConnell takes the challenge; after all, the Senator is worth at least $10 million. As Buffett put it to me, “I’m not worried.” (See below for a statement from McConnell’s office.)

Full Story Here: Buffett Challenges McConnell, Republicans on Tax Policy | Swampland | TIME.com.

Democrats and many progressives are watching all of this with glee. The Republicans are, it seems, eating their just desserts.

For four years, Republican leaders have fanned the tea party’s destructive flames. They’ve been stoking the rage of the conservative fringe ever since Sarah Palin stood up and told armed, angry crowds of white people that they were the “real America.” When that divisive strategy failed to win the presidency, the party’s establishment happily mounted its tea party tiger and rode roughshod over Capitol Hill. The unvarnished cynicism of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner has been at times obscene; they’ve openly preferred a failed Obama presidency to a successful economic recovery. And the tea party caucus has provided cover for this ugliness, allowing Republican leaders to throw up their hands in helplessness—sorry dude, we’d like to make an effort at governing, but the caucus just won’t allow it.

Full Story Here: Why the GOP’s Spectacular Collapse Isn’t Good for Social Justice – COLORLINES.

Dear Tea Party Movement,

For the last few months, the world has been fascinated by your frenzied search for a presidential candidate who is not Mitt Romney. We know that you find the man inauthentic and that you have buoyed up a string of anti-Mitts in the Iowa polling — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich — buffoons all, preposterous figures whom you have rightfully changed your minds about as soon as you got to know them.

It was quite a spectacle, your quest for the non-Romney — and I think we all know why you undertook it. In ways that matter, Romney is clearly a problem for you. His views on abortion, for example, change with the winds. Ditto, gay rights. He designed the Massachusetts health insurance system that was the model for Obamacare. And he’s even said that he approved of the TARP bank bailout, the abomination that ignited the Tea Party uprising in the first place.

Grievous offenses all, I have no doubt. Still, my advice to you idealists of the right is this: get over it. Not for sell-out reasons like: Romney has the best chance of beating Obama. No. You should get behind the charging Massachusetts RINO (your favorite term for a Republican-In-Name-Only sellout type) because, in a certain paradoxical way, he may turn out to be the truest of all the candidates to the spirit of your movement.

After all, given everything you represent, why wouldn’t you line up behind this quarter-billionaire who’s calling for just a little human love and sympathy for billionaires?  I’m sure you already understand me perfectly well, but just to be certain, let me make the case.

Full Story Here: Pity the Quarter-Billionaire: An Open Letter to the Tea Party | Common Dreams.

The past year has seen an unprecedented wave of Republican bills to drug test the poor and jobless. It also saw a smaller wave of Democratic bills that said in response, “No, you pee in the cup.”

One of the most recent retorts comes from Georgia, where last month Democratic state Rep. Scott Holcomb introduced a bill requiring members of the local legislature to prove they’re not Legislating Under the Influence. Holcomb told HuffPost he came up with the idea because he was struck by a bill from his Republican colleagues to drug test welfare applicants.

“I was really struck by how awful it was,” he said. “I wanted to bring some attention to it.”

Democrats in Florida, Ohio and Tennessee have done the same thing. Tennessee state representative G.A. Hardaway said his bill to test lawmakers was inspired by constituents annoyed with a Republican welfare-drug-testing bill. “They said to me, ‘how do we know y’all aren’t on drugs?’” Hardaway told local TV station WMC-TV. “I thought, well, you don’t.”

Full Story Here: Dems Fire Back At GOP Proposals To Drug Test Jobless: ‘You Pee In The Cup’.

“He has decided not to ‘wade into the swamp,’” according to a source familiar with the Republican president’s thinking, who described Bush’s decision on condition of anonymity.

“He’ll of course support the GOP nominee, but doesn’t really care to weigh in. He likes following politics but doesn’t feel the need to be out there ‘opining, bloviating.’ It’s just not him,” the source told AFP.

Bush handed President Barack Obama the keys to the White House three years ago this month after serving two terms but has kept a strikingly low profile as Republicans battle over who will take on the embattled Democrat in November.

Full Story Here: AFP: Bush to stay out of Republican ‘swamp’.

Republican Mitt Romney’s tax plan would increase taxes on low-income families while cutting taxes for the middle-class and the rich, according to an independent study released Thursday.

On average, households making less than $20,000 would see their taxes increase by more than 60 percent, said the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group that studied the Romney plan.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 would get small tax cuts, averaging 2.2 percent, or about $250, the study said. People making more than $1 million would get tax cuts averaging 15 percent, or about $146,000.

“Virtually everybody with a big income is getting a tax cut,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

Full Story Here: Mitt Romney Plan Raises Taxes On Poor Families, Helps Millionaires: Study.

Each and every Republican candidate has called for trillions of dollars in new tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and corporations — all while calling for ending Medicare as we know it and dramatic cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and countless other programs and services that Americans depend on each day.

All of the candidates would take us back to the Bush-era policies that increased income inequality, resulted in the worst job growth in decades, exploded the deficit and national debt, and ultimately crashed the economy. Indeed, the policies proposed by the candidates would not only embrace this failed economic agenda, they would take it even further.

Full Story Here: REPORT: The Republican Candidates’ Economic Agenda For The 1 Percent | ThinkProgress.

In his new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” Tom Frank turns his mordant eye on the unlikeliest political development of the Obama presidency: how the crash of 2008 served to strengthen the political right. The deregulation of Wall Street, championed for 30 years by right-wing leaders, had led to an economic catastrophe so frightening that the country elected a liberal Democrat [OPS: Obama has proven to be a Centrist Republican - if Obama represents the new 'Liberal Democrat' democracy has already ended in this country.] to the presidency. Yet two years later, the most conservative faction of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, had taken effective control of the House of Representatives, the regulation of Wall Street had stalled, and the champions of economic deregulation in Washington had emerged stronger than ever.

Frank, author of the bestselling book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” provides a pithy and nuanced explanation of what he calls the “hard-times swindle.” He spoke with Salon from his father’s home in Kansas City, Mo.

Early in the book, you describe the moment in the spring of 2009 when free-market economics had been so thoroughly discredited that Newsweek could run a cover story proclaiming, “We’re all socialists now.” What happened? Why did that moment dissipate?

Full Story Here: The Tea Party’s “utopian market populism” – Salon.com.

The banker’s town, Pottersville, is filled with bars, gambling dens and despair. The people’s town of Bedford Falls is made of hope, hard working middle class families, and their homes financed by the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan.

The film’s happy ending is the people of Bedford Falls banding together to rescue George Bailey and the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan that had given so many of them a leg up over the years. Republicans seek a different conclusion. They find middle class cooperation and community intolerable. They want the banker, Henry Potter, with his “every man for himself” philosophy to triumph. In the spirit of their self-centered mentor Ayn Rand, Republicans are trying to disfigure America so she resembles Pottersville.

Full Story Here: Republicans Try to Impose Selfishness on American People | Truthout.

My political prediction for 2012 (based on absolutely no inside information): Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden swap places. Biden becomes Secretary of State — a position he’s apparently coveted for years. And Hillary Clinton, Vice President.

So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton.

Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that’s been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (My Political Prediction for 2012: It’s Obama-Clinton).

A recall of controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker now appear inevitable. In just 28 days, activists collected 507,533 signatures. Organizers have until January 17 to collect 540,208 signatures, which is equal to 25% of the state’s 2010 general election turnout. To be safe, recall advocates have set a new goal of 720,277 signatures by the deadline.

The recall efforts success has propted the Scott Walker’s campaign to take aggressive action to invalidate signatures. Walker sued his own Government Accountability Board, arguing the proceedures adopted by the board to review signatures aren’t agressive enough. Without citing any concrete evidence, Walker alleged to Fox News that there was massive fraud in the signature gathering effort. The case is still pending.

Full Story Here: With Over 500K Signatures Already Collected, Recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Appears Inevitable | ThinkProgress.

Just one year ago, Obama sparked a tremendous outcry from progressives for offering up a one-year payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits extension in exchange for two years of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. As 2010 drew to a close, the payroll tax cut — which provides an average of $1,000 a year to 160 million Americans — was viewed as woefully insufficient compared to the potential job-creating revenue from new taxes on the wealthy.

Those meager provisions likely prevented the economy from falling back into recession, but in the year since Obama cut that deal with congressional Republicans, economic growth has averaged a pathetic 1.2 percent. The unemployment rate has fallen from a horrific 9.8 percent to a merely terrible 8.6 percent. But much of that progress is illusory — millions of out-of-work Americans have simply given up all hope of finding a job, a situation that isn’t captured by the unemployment statistics.

Full Story Here: 2011, The Year Washington Lost.

Paul Krugman :-:

One crucial thing you need to understand about political journalists in the United States is that, with some honorable exceptions, they don’t know or care about actual policy.

In a way, that makes sense — the skills needed to cultivate contacts, to get the inside scoop on what’s going on in Congressional scheming or campaign war rooms, are very different from the skills needed to interpret spreadsheets from the Congressional Budget Office.

The problem, however, is that all too often political journalists mistake the theater of policy for reality (or don’t care about the difference).

Full Story Here: Carelessly Mistaking Theater For Policy | Truthout.

 Glenn Greenwald :-:

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles

American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation’s airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America’s tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

Full Story Here: Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Today, Mr. Pastor, a miner’s son and a former high school teacher, is a member of a not-so-exclusive club: Capitol Hill millionaires. That group has grown in recent years to include nearly half of all members of Congress — 250 in all — and the wealth gap between lawmakers and their constituents appears to be growing quickly, even as Congress debates unemployment benefits, possible cuts in food stamps and a “millionaire’s tax.”

Mr. Pastor buys a Powerball lottery ticket every weekend and says he does not consider himself rich. Indeed, within the halls of Congress, where the median net worth is $913,000 and climbing, he is not. He is a rank-and-file millionaire. But compared with the country at large, where the median net worth is $100,000 and has dropped significantly since 2004, he and most of his fellow lawmakers are true aristocrats.

Full Story Here: Economic Downturn Took a Detour at Capitol Hill – NYTimes.com.

During the Bush presidency, in addition to his support for the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, Nelson voted to restrict marriage rights for gay couples and to make reproductive healthcare more difficult for women. He voted against legislation to raise the minimum wage, against attempts to increase Pell Grants and for the 2005 bill to make bankrupcy proceedings more difficult for ordinary Americans.. He voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and voted in support of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and its draconian attacks on civil liberties for detainees (and everyone else). He voted against President Bush’s bill for comprehensive immigration reform, and voted in support of a bill to establish English as the official language of the United States.

Full Story Here: Ben Nelson’s Christmas Gift to America | The Nation.

Many progressives feel a keen sense of disappointment with the Obama administration, which showed a remarkable willingness to capitulate to conservatives when the Democrats controlled Congress and even more craven behavior once the Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives. Organized labor is aghast at the continuation of the Bush tax cuts and the collapse of legislative efforts to facilitate union recognition, peace groups are appalled by the escalation of the Afghan War and the rise of the Pentagon budget, civil rights groups despair over the absence of anti-poverty measures and the growing restrictions on voting rights, women’s groups deplore the administration’s capitulation on contraception, and environmental groups shake their heads at the administration’s veto of auto emission standards, its green light to offshore oil drilling, and its retreat on reducing carbon emissions. Contrasting the administration’s all-out effort to save Wall Street with its indifference to Main Street, many progressives wonder if they have gained anything worthwhile with Obama’s election.

Full Story Here: What Will the Democratic Left Do in 2012? | Truthout.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has faced scrutiny from his fellow Republican candidates over his career at Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that, despite his retirement, still pays him millions of dollars a year. Bain, and Romney, often raked in profits while companies were shedding jobs, as was the case in New Hampshire and South Carolina, among others.

Anticipating that Democrats and President Obama would pick up on those attacks, Romney told Politico last week how he plans to respond. Apparently, his plan is to toss around blatant falsehoods, as he told reporters that Obama “has not created any new jobs” as president:

“I know that the Democrats will try and make this a campaign about Bain Capital; … 25 million people are out of work because of Barack Obama. And so I’ll compare my experience in the private sector where, net-net, we created over 100,000 jobs.”

Full Story Here: Romney Falsely Claims Obama ‘Has Not Created Any New Jobs’ | ThinkProgress.

I spent a week with both “Stop the Machine” and Occupy D.C. in McPherson Park in Washington. I had a chance to get to know these people and I have listened to their stories, stories of unemployment. A 26 year old man named Kevin who lost his job and his home after his IT job was outsourced to India. I listened to a mother who lost her son in Afghanistan and another mother who lost her son through a lack of health insurance. Their list is endless, their grievances are multiple.

President Barack Obama said of the Occupy Wall Street protests, “In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party,” at the recent dedication of the Martin Luther King Memorial. President Obama said that the Occupy movement was blaming the wrong people. It is truly amazing, that a man once considered so astute could be so dumb. The complete misunderstanding of this movement, what it is and what it is all about is almost frightening. Barack Obama is supposed to be the good guy here and yet, he’s clueless. Republican Eric Cantor called Occupy Wall Street protestors, “a mob”; Herman Cain told an audience that the occupiers should all blame themselves for not being rich to thunderous partisan applause.

Full Story Here: OpEdNews – Article: The Obama Deception.

Since the days of Richard Nixon, Republicans have pursued an anything-goes brand of politics that often has the look of hostage-taking, with Democrats usually caving in. But, Robert Parry asks, has President Obama finally learned that the only way to stop bullying is to stand up to it?

By Robert Parry

There is a reason why governments refuse to give in to demands from hostage-takers: because otherwise it encourages more hostage-taking. That is an obvious lesson, but it seems it has taken Democrats many years to learn it, as they have faced Republican strategies of grabbing hostages for decades and have quietly given in, paying ransom again and again.

Yet on those rare occasions when Democrats do stand up – such as against House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s government shutdowns in 1995-1996 and against House Speaker John Boehner’s blockage of a payroll tax cut extension this week – the Democrats usually prevail politically.

Full Story Here: The GOP History of Hostage-Taking | Consortiumnews.

Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen 200 GB of e-mails and credit card data from United States security think tank Stratfor, promising a weeklong Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.

Members of the loose hacking movement known as “Anonymous” posted a link on Twitter to what it said was Stratfor’s secret client list – including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Goldman Sachs and MF Global.

“Not so private and secret anymore?,” the group taunted in a message on the microblogging site.

Anonymous said it was able to get credit details, in part, because Stratfor didn’t bother encrypting them – an easy-to-avoid blunder which – if true – would be a major embarrassment for any security company.

Full Story Here: ‘Anonymous’ Stratfor Hack Reportedly Start Of Weeklong Assault.

The failure is a particularly tough blow to Gingrich, who is a Virginia resident, having lived in the Washington suburb of McLean, Va. for more than a decade. Gingrich said earlier this week that he had reached the 10,000 signatures needed to appear on the ballot, but after a review of his 11,050 signatures, the Republican Party of Virginia announced in a tweet early Saturday that Gingrich “did not submit required 10k signatures and has not qualified for the VA primary.”

Full Story Here: Newt Gingrich Fails To Qualify For Virginia GOP Primary Despite Residency [UPDATED].

Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”

How would this statement be received? I believe, and hope, that it would be almost universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives. Mr. Romney did once say that corporations are people, but he didn’t mean it literally; he supports policies that would be good for corporations and the wealthy and bad for the middle class, but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to introduce feudalism.

But now consider what Mr. Romney actually said on Tuesday: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others.”

Full Story Here: The Post-Truth Campaign – NYTimes.com.

On a recent day in Petaluma, two very different events spotlighted grim results of upside-down priorities from the federal government.

Upwards of 600 people gathered for an early breakfast at the Veterans Memorial Hall to raise money for the Committee on the Shelterless (COTS), a nonprofit organization that last year sheltered nearly 2,000 individuals, served more than 127,000 hearty meals and distributed 800,000 pounds of food to the needy.

We heard moving stories about — and from — people whose lives have been transformed by active compassion, generosity and their own hard work. But, as speakers lamented, COTS must turn away many who need help.

Charities and other nonprofits are struggling to cope with deep economic wounds that have been festering for years. The dire consequences are far more widespread than private agencies can possibly heal.

Only government has the capacity to provide economic remedies for social distress of this magnitude. But government is failing.

Full Story Here: GUEST OPINION: Uncle Sam is making the wrong choices | PressDemocrat.com.

A top ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives on Tuesday defended his party’s support for cutting 20 weeks of unemployment benefits, a position that has escaped much notice in the payroll tax cut debate consuming Washington.

Democrats want the House to pass a Senate bill that would postpone the January expiration of federal unemployment programs for two months. But even if it is reauthorized, one of those programs will automatically phase out next year, unless Congress changes federal law to allow states to keep it, a provision not included in the Senate bill.

“There are things in this bill as we pointed out that we had to make concessions on,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Thursday in response to a question from HuffPost.

Full Story Here: Democrats Defend Cutting Unemployment Benefits.

Adair responds to the critics in the worst possible way.

At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news.

“I listen to Rush and read NewsMax,” he said. “And to make sure I’m getting a balanced view, I watch Fox.”

We’re starting with an anoymous quote from a straw man that Adair met once? Here we go.

My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends.

Full Story Here: PolitiFact Weirdly Unable to Discuss Facts.

It’s at this time of the year that generous, big-hearted Americans reach out to aid the less fortunate among us — like those who’ve recently been knocked down by the recession and seen their incomes plummet. I speak, of course, about our nation’s severely squeezed millionaires.

Yes, many in the infamous 1 percent class are no longer feeling like a million bucks. According to a new federal report, the income of these high-living swells averaged a robust $1.4 million in 2007, but after Wall Street crashed in a heap of greed late that year, their average income took a tumble. In 2009, it fell below the millionaire threshold, leaving these poor rich folks struggling to make it on an average income of only $957,000.

Also, talk about getting a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking, the share of our nation’s total income taken by the 1-percenters fell from a whopping 23 percent in 2007 (the highest since the Roaring Twenties) to a mere 17 percent in 2009. How sad for them, huh?

Full Story Here: The Poor Rich and the Scrooginess of Congress | Common Dreams.

At a press conference on Dec. 7, President Obama warned congressional Republicans not to attach a controversial crude oil pipeline from Canada through the U.S. to a bill extending a year-old break on people’s payroll tax.

“Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut, I will reject,” the president said, standing next to his Canadian counterpart, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Ten days later, Republicans, with the help of sympathetic Democrats and lawmakers who just wanted to get a deal done, did just that. By a vote of 89 to 10, the Senate voted on Saturday morning to extend the payroll tax cut for two months. Included in the bill was language requiring the State Department to issue a permit within 60 days to proceed with the 1,700-mile oil pipeline.

Full Story Here: Obama Aides: Keystone Pipeline Inclusion ‘Is Absolutely Not A Blink’.

OPS: “not a Blink”? OK, then he intended to capitulate again, all along.

Seeking to show Americans that he can understand their troubles, multimillionaire GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been harping on the supposedly hardscrabble 30 months he spent in France as a Mormon missionary. Romney said he lived in apartments that were so rundown that he was forced to defecate in a bucket and shower with a hose. “Most of the apartments I lived in had no refrigerators,” Romney said last week at a town hall New Hampshire. “I don’t actually recall any of them having a refrigerator.” Watch it, via Patch:

Full Story Here: Contradicting Romney’s Account, Fellow Missionaries Say Candidate Lived In A ‘Palace’ On Mission | ThinkProgress.

Congress may have come to an agreement on a $1 trillion bill to keep the government funded beyond midnight (when the current round of funding runs out), but there is significantly less common ground on extending the soon-to-expire payroll tax cut. Democrats, in an attempt to prevent a tax increase on working Americans come year end, have dropped their demand that the extension be paid for via a tiny surtax on income in excess of $1 million.

So does that mean Republicans have dropped their demand that an extension be tied to the approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline? Of course not:

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Friday that his chamber will not sign off on an extension of the payroll tax cut sought by President Obama without including a provision to speed construction of an oil pipeline, which Obama has opposed…“If that bill comes over to us, we will make changes to it, and I will guarantee you that the Keystone pipeline will be in there when it goes back to the United States Senate,” Boehner said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) joined in, saying, “Frankly, I will not be able to support a package that doesn’t include the pipeline.” Republicans claim that the oil pipeline will be a job creator, but the only independent analysis into the pipeline found that just 500 to 1400 temporary construction jobs will be created, “with a negative long-term economic impact.”

Full Story Here: GOP Leaders Still Holding Middle-Class Tax Cut Hostage For Oil Pipeline, After Democrats Make Major Concession | ThinkProgress.

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, something is rotten in the state of Capitol Hill. A majority of Congress is just about to put the finishing touches on an amendment to the military budget authorization legislation that will finish off some critical American rights under our Constitution.

Here is how two retired 4 star marine generals, Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, described in the New York Times the stripmining of your freedom to resist tyranny in urging a veto by President Obama:

“One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past….

Full Story Here: Congressional Tyranny, White House Surrender | Common Dreams.

Gingrich’s plan would provide small tax cuts to those at the bottom of the income ladder, giving those making less than $10,000 an average cut of $222 under one scenario, the analysis found. The Tax Policy Center is a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two respected think tanks in Washington.

Gingrich’s plan would be most generous to those making more than $1 million a year, delivering an average tax cut of almost $614,000 a year. At the same time, it would give them with a lower overall federal tax rate — 11.9 percent — than most people making less money, that is, everyone making between $40,000 and $1 million.

Full Story Here: Study: Gingrich tax plan would give lion’s share to the rich | McClatchy.

I don’t have time today to thoroughly debunk all the reprehensible, anti-democratic, anti-American horseshit hurled by this FL State Rep. Dennis Baxley — the original sponsor of Florida’s new voter suppression laws, limiting early voting hours and imposing new big government regulations and huge fines against voter registration workers — as seen in the following interview on Al Sharpton’s Politics Nation show on MSNBC this week.

Fortunately, most readers of The BRAD BLOG will be able to smell the bullshit of the smirking, democracy-hating Baxley a mile away even without my point-by-point rebuttal. So I’ll just run the video here for now without much comment, as it needs to be seen to be believed.

Near the front of the interview, Baxley admits that there’s been no voter fraud problem in FL, and by the end he’s charging (without a stitch of evidence, naturally) that the non-partisan League of Women Voters, who have been registering voters in the Sunshine State for some 72 years — but who have now canceled their registration program for 2012 thanks to the onerous new GOP restrictions and fines on registration workers — is actually a partisan Democratic organization! Who knew?

Full Story Here: The BRAD BLOG : State Rep. Dennis Baxley Admits No ‘Voter Fraud’ Probs in FL, Lies About GOP’s New Suppression Laws.

Congrats to all voters of Ohio for successfully pushing back against the GOP’s efforts to keep you from voting in next year’s Presidential election! It’s another win for democracy, and another loss for the Buckeye State’s Republican Gov. John Kasich (following on the recent landslide loss of his anti-union bill at the polls last month.)

Today, Secretary of State John Husted (R), officially certified that opponents of HB194 — the anti-voting bill that would have shortened early voting hours and imposed other big government restrictions on the exercise of the franchise in Ohio — were successful in their effort to place the law on the ballot for a voter referendum in 2012. Thus, the act, passed by the GOP legislature and signed by Kasich earlier this year, is officially suspended for now.

As we noted in September, after opponents of the bill had turned in more than 300,000 for certification to the Sec. of State, ThinkProgress’ Tonya Somander summarized the bill’s restrictions on voting this way:

Full Story Here: The BRAD BLOG : It’s Official! OH’s GOP Voter Suppression Law Now On Hold, Will Face Referendum on 2012 Ballot.

Wall Street is its own worst enemy. It should have welcomed new financial regulation as a means of restoring public trust. Instead, it’s busily shredding new regulations and making the public more distrustful than ever.

The Street’s biggest lobbying groups have just filed a lawsuit against the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, seeking to overturn its new rule limiting speculative trading.

For years Wall Street has speculated like mad in futures markets – food, oil, other commodities – causing prices to fluctuate wildly. The Street makes bundles from these gyrations, but they have raised costs for consumers.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (The Remarkable Political Stupidity of the Street).

Thousands of people who have been voting for years and college students eager to vote will find themselves shut out next year.

Even as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich resemble jousting mastodons, clumsily trying to knock each other down, more than a dozen state legislatures in such key battleground states as Florida have been kicking aside eased voting procedures.

Although the laws vary, the obvious aim is to make it tougher for minorities and young people to vote.

Full Story Here: ANN MCFEATTERS: Too many states making it harder to vote » Standard-Times.

The top Republican candidates share a single, radical vision: to trash the environment, shred the safety net and aid the rich.

By all rights, 2012 ought to be a cakewalk for the GOP. Unemployment is pandemic. Riot police are confronting protesters in public squares and on college campuses. In an epic fail of foresight, the Democratic convention will be held in one of the world’s banking centers, Charlotte, North Carolina – setting the stage for violent clashes not seen since the streets of Chicago, 1968. “I hope they keep this up,” gloated Grover Norquist, one of the Republican Party’s most influential strategists. “Hippies elected Nixon. Occupy Wall Street will beat Obama.”

But don’t go writing the president’s political obituary just yet: He may wind up being resurrected by the GOP itself. The Republican Party – dominated by hardliners still cocky after the electoral sweep of 2010 – has backed its entire slate of candidates into far-right corners on everything from the environment and immigration to taxation and economic austerity. Whether the GOP opts for Mitt Romney or an “anti-Mitt” is almost entirely beside the point. On the major policy issues of the day, there’s barely a ray of sunshine between any of the viable Republicans, not counting those who have committed the sin of libertarianism (Ron Paul) or moderation (Jon Huntsman). No matter who winds up with the nomination, it appears, Obama will face a candidate to the right of Barry Goldwater.

Take it from one of the most divisive figures in the history of GOP presidential politics: “Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off,” the televangelist Pat Robertson warned recently. “They’re forcing their leaders, the front-runners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election.” Robertson knows fringe politics: In 1988, he ran for president on a platform that included abolishing the Department of Education and adopting a constitutional amendment to prohibit deficit spending. At the time, Robertson was dismissed as an unelectable candidate of the far right. Today, he would be somewhere to the left of Texas governor Rick Perry. And that way lies ruin: “You’ll appeal to the narrow base, and they’ll applaud the daylights out of what you’re saying,” Robertson cautioned. “And then you hit the general election and they say, ‘No way!’ They’ve got to stop this!”

Full Story Here: The GOP’s Crackpot Agenda | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

It’s a trap.

When Luntz says he is “scared to death,” he means that the Republicans who hire him are scared to death and he can profit from that fear by offering them new language. Luntz is clever. Yes, Republicans are scared. But there needs to be a serious discussion of both Luntz’s remarks and the progressive non-response.

What has been learned from the brain and cognitive sciences is that words are defined by fixed frames we use in thinking, frames come in hierarchical systems, and political frames are defined in moral terms, where “morality” is very different for conservatives and progressives. What lies behind the Occupy movement is a moral view of democracy: Democracy is about citizens caring about each other and acting responsibly both socially and personally. This requires a robust public empowering and protecting everyone equally. Both private success and personal freedom depend on such a public. Every critique and proposal of the Occupy movement fits this moral view, which happens to be the progressive moral view.

Full Story Here: George Lakoff: Words That Don’t Work.

Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat and now House minority leader, promised to release records that are public but haven’t seen much sunshine lately about the congressional ethics investigation of Gingrich back in the day.

Gingrich said that would be foul play and promised to retaliate, claiming Pelosi was threatening to disclose non-public information. But Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said Pelosi was “clearly referring to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record, including the comprehensive committee report with which the public may not be fully aware.”

Hammill helpfully provided public links and we provide them here.

Full Story Here: Nancy Pelosi provides Newt Gingrich ethics report | Politics Blog | an SFGate.com blog.

If you ever happen to come across a Republican on television these days, chances are that you will hear the name Ronald Reagan. Recent Republican debates are the perfect example of the love fest that the current Republican party has for Reagan as each candidate name drops the former president at every turn. If you only listened to conservatives you would think that Jesus Christ was the only person above Reagan on the totem pole of conservative love. They talk about his love of low taxes, less government and conservative family values. The problem is that when you step out of the conservative dream and come back to reality, you find that not only was Ronald Reagan a bad president, but he was one of the worst presidents we’ve seen in modern times. Reagan’s policies have destroyed the United States for three decades, and for the eight years he was in office, here are eight reasons why Ronald Reagan was the worst president of our lifetime.

1. Reagan cut taxes for the Rich, increased taxes on the Middle Class -

Full Story Here: 8 reasons why Ronald Reagan was the worst President of our lifetime – Orlando liberal | Examiner.com.

The Republican presidential contender says he learned about expanding employment during his time heading a private equity firm. But under his leadership, Bain Capital often maximized profits in part by firing workers.

Shortly after Mitt Romney resigned from Bain Capital in 1999 to run the Olympics in Salt Lake City, potential investors received a prospectus touting the extraordinary profits earned by the private equity firm that Romney controlled for 15 years.

During that time, Boston-based Bain acquired more than 115 companies, according to the prospectus. Bain’s estimated annual returns were more than five times that of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the same period.

Now a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Romney says his Bain experience shows he knows how to create jobs. He often cites Bain’s investment in a little-known office supply store called Staples, which now employs more than 90,000 worldwide.

Full Story Here: A look at Mitt Romney’s job-creation record at Bain Capital – latimes.com.

Running for president, for Fun and PROFIT

On Saturday afternoon embattled presidential candidate Herman Cain announced the suspension of his campaign amid allegations of sexual harassment, assault and adultery. The suspension raises immediate questions about what the candidate can do with the millions of dollars in campaign funds that the Cain campaign claimed to have raised in the past two months.

The Cain campaign only raised $4.6 million through the first six months of his candidacy, but as he rose in the polls in October, the campaign announced major fundraising success. The campaign claimed that it raised upwards of $9 million in October and millions more when the first allegations of sexual harassment surfaced.

Now that he is withdrawing from the race, there are few limits on what Cain can do with this money.

“There’s a couple of things [former candidates] can do with [leftover funds],” Paul S. Ryan, the FEC director for the Campaign Legal Center, told The Huffington Post. “They could refund them to contributors if they want to. They could convert their principle campaign committee into a non-standard candidate-type PAC.”

Full Story Here: Herman Cain Quit Race, But Can Still Spend Funds With Little Restriction.

Just when the Mormon millionaire thought he’d got the nomination sewn up, the polls showed him still stuck at about 23 per cent with huge numbers of Republicans saying they didn’t trust the former governor of Massachusetts, that Mormons are in league with Satan, that he took his dog on holiday, tied to the roof of his car, that he’s a flip flopper, that he made his money firing people, that…. On and on.

So there was the Rick Perry challenge. The governor of Texas soared in the polls. He was a cert. Romney raged. Then Perry turned out to be a moron. Romney was on his feet again. A cert. But did his polling numbers surge? Nope. Stuck at 23 per cent and then came another pile of elephant crap, in the form of Herman Cain. Yes, Republicans told pollsters they liked his style, his feistiness, his 9-9-9 tax plan, and above all his consummate skill in not being Mitt Romney.

Full Story Here: Suddenly It’s Newt » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

One reason that the congressional deficit-reduction committee failed is that many Republicans believe time is on their side. That optimism is rooted in the widespread conviction among the party that it has a strong chance of holding the House in 2012 while recapturing both the Senate and the White House. On paper, such unified control would give Republicans the leverage in 2013 to shrink the federal deficit solely by cutting spending without accepting the tax increases that Democrats are demanding as the price for big reductions, especially in Social Security and Medicare

As electoral analysis, that’s hardly unreasonable. But as a legislative forecast, it could prove much more problematic. Even with unified control, passing a deficit plan that relies solely on spending reductions (particularly in entitlements) while preserving tax cuts for the affluent could strain the Republican electoral coalition much more violently than most GOP leaders now assume. In fact, the GOP faces a conundrum: It may gain enough power next year to impose a just-cuts solution only by placating the voters most skeptical of that approach.

The reason is the changing nature of the Republican coalition. Over the past several decades, Republicans have run increasingly well in the overlapping circles of older and blue-collar whites. Those trends have dramatically accelerated under President Obama: In 2010, exit polls showed that GOP House candidates carried a crushing 63 percent both among white seniors and whites without a four-year college degree. Those groups are now at least as integral to Republican success as the corporate managers, small-business owners, and college-educated suburbanites who once anchored their vote.

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Full Story Here: The Budget Wedge – Ronald Brownstein – NationalJournal.com.

The National Defense Authorization Act passed Thursday by the Senate contains a section that spells out the military’s power to detain Americans indefinitely without trial and mandates military detention for some terrorism suspects.

The White House warned last month that senior advisers would recommend a veto, saying the detainee provisions could restrict the ability of law enforcement to combat terrorism and “make the job of preventing terrorist attacks more difficult.”

Full Story Here: White House Threatens Veto Of Indefinite Detention Bill.

But the higher he soars with his populist rhetoric, the more he calls attention to the enormous gap between the promise of hope and change that he campaigned on in 2008 and the actions he has taken as president — especially regarding the economy, which is still stagnating, and Wall Street, which remains unpunished and unbowed even after causing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

As a result, voters will inevitably be asking themselves: Who is this guy, really? Does he mean what he says? Will he do what he says? And would a second-term Obama be different?

One answer to why Obama underperformed is laid out in searing detail in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ron Suskind’s latest book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.

Full Story Here: Dan Froomkin: Suskind’s Confidence Men Raises Questions About Obama’s Credibility.

Democrats’ bet that former consumer finance watchdog Elizabeth Warren could take down Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) appears to be paying off, as a new poll suggests she is pulling ahead.

The survey by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst finds Warren leading Brown 43 percent to 39 percent — just within the poll’s 4.4 percent margin of error.

“These numbers could mean trouble for Scott Brown,” said UMass political scientist Brian Schaffner. “The race is a dead heat and his support is well under 50 percent, which usually means difficulty for an incumbent, especially this far out from Election Day.”

Full Story Here: Elizabeth Warren Is Pulling Ahead Of Scott Brown: Poll.

The country is still celebrating the inability of the supercommittee to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it is important to move on from this victory to retake control of the political debate from the One Percent. As it stands, the One Percent are insisting that the country genuflect over the non-problem of the budget deficit, at a time when tens of millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, millions of people are facing the loss of their homes and tens of millions of baby boomers are approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security to support them.

The deficit is the agenda of the One Percent. There is no reason that the rest of us should be concerned about budget deficits when the rest of the country is struggling with the economic disaster created by the greed and incompetence of the One Percent.

This is not a statement of morality; it is a statement based on economic reality. Budget deficits can be a problem when an economy is near full employment and the deficit can be pulling resources away from private investment, thereby slowing growth. However, it is not a problem with large numbers of unemployed workers and vast amounts of excess capacity.

Full Story Here: Time to Retake Politics From the One Percent in Both Political Parties | Common Dreams.

The truly remarkably thing about the total so far is not, however, that it is so large.

What is truly remarkable is where the signatures are coming from: rural and small-town Wisconsin communities are contributing disproportionally high numbers of signatures to the total.

No one, not even the most concerned critic of Governor Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights, expected the recall campaign would move as quickly as it has.

No one expected United Wisconsin’s recall drive to gather more than half the required signatures in less than two weeks of petitioning. No one expected whole counties to reach their signature goals in the first week. No one expected conservative communities in Republican regions of the state to take the lead in collecting recall signatures against a Republican governor.

But it is happening.

Full Story Here: Wisconsin Recall Drive Surpasses 300,000 Signatures | The Nation.

Full Story Here: DNC TV AD: “Trapped” – YouTube.

And I suspect you’ll find it passing strange for quite such an Ancient as I am still to have heroes…to have lived so long, to have seen so many saints and sinners, to have measured the fancies and foibles of so many persons in the public eye … and still to have held steady in my admiration for one or another of them.

But I very much do, do delight in having heroes, and I’ve inveigled perhaps the liveliest one of all to join me here again for this Open Mind … and to stay with me for at least another one, as well.

Bill Moyers is still a youngster at the top of his form, to be sure — which for me preeminently means as an American “Public Intellectual” and as very much an old-time, long-time preacher and teacher, if you will.

Full Story Here: Bill Moyers Journal… The Conversation Continues | Richard Heffner’s Open Mind | THIRTEEN.

You’ve been seeing this across the country … Americans assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed … Why? For exercising their right to free speech and assembly — protesting the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.

And what’s Washington’s response? Nothing. In fact, Congress’s so-called “supercommittee” just disbanded because Republicans refuse to raise a penny of taxes on the rich.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are people. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year ended all limits on political spending. Millions of dollars are being funneled to politicians without a trace.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich.

 Ezra Klein :-:

Imagine if the Democrats offered Republicans a deficit deal that had more than $3 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts, assigned most of those spending cuts to the Pentagon, and didn’t take a dime from Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare beneficiaries. Republicans would laugh at them. But without quite realizing it, that’s the deal Republicans have now offered to the Democrats.

In August, Republicans scored what they thought was a big win by persuading Democrats to accept a trigger that consisted only of spending cuts. The price they paid was 1) concentrating the cuts on the Pentagon while exempting Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare beneficiaries, and 2) delaying the cuts until January 1, 2013. That was, they figured, a win, as it eschewed taxes. Grover Norquist’s pledge remained unbroken.

But 12 years earlier, George W. Bush had set a trigger of his own. In order to pass his tax cuts using the 51-vote budget reconciliation process, he had agreed to let them sunset in 2010. A last-minute deal extended them until the end of 2012.

Full Story Here: Wonkbook: The GOP’s dual-trigger nightmare – The Washington Post.

‘We’re doing recounts of recounts of recounts,’ says candidate announced as ‘loser’ on Election Night…

After the Municipal Council elections in Provo, Utah on November 8, residents had been told that Gary Winterton had narrowly defeated Bonnie Morrow for the District 1 seat — by just 9 votes.

The margin was close enough that Morrow was allowed to ask for a recount of the paper ballots which were tallied on Election Night by the city’s optical scan systems made by Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (Following years of failure of Diebold’s voting systems, the company changed their name to Premier, only to see the assets of the failing company finally purchased last year by Dominion Voting, a Canadian firm which now services the machines.) The same optical scan systems are used all over the country, and are set once again for use in the New Hampshire’s “first in the nation” GOP Presidential primary to be held in January.

The first “recount” of Provo’s Municipal Council District 1 ballots — carried out on the same op-scan systems that tallied them in the first place — was held yesterday, only to be abruptly called off

Full Story Here: The BRAD BLOG : Paper Ballot Op-Scan Election Results in Utah Flipped After ‘Recount’ Finds New Tally ‘Extremely in Favor of Opposite Candidate’.

The notion that both sides share in the blame is an easy line for commentators to repeat, but it isn’t true. Time and time again, the only thing preventing an agreement on long-term deficit reduction has been the Republicans’ absolute refusal to consider any tax increases on high-income households as part of the solution. Michael Linden and I created a timeline of major events in the past six months of deficit talks:

Full Story Here: Super Committee Fails: How Republican Tax Intransigence Killed It: A Timeline | Truthout.

Young addressed Brinkley as “Dr. Rice” and called his testimony “garbage.” Brinkley replied, “Dr. Brinkley. Rice is a university. I know you went to Yuba College and you couldn’t graduate.”

“I’ll call you anything I want to call you when you sit in that chair. You just be quiet,” Young quipped.

“You don’t own me,” Brinkley shot back. “I pay your salary.”

The exchange took place at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing to discuss the possible effects of drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Full Story Here: Don Young, Doug Brinkley Argue In House Natural Resources Committee Hearing.

As tens of thousands of people descended upon the state Capitol Saturday, organizers of the effort to remove Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker from office announced they have collected more than 105,000 signatures on recall petitions.

“As of (Friday) night — the fourth day of signature collection, more than 105,000 Wisconsin residents have already signed their name to a petition to recall Scott Walker,” said Heather DuBois Bourenane, a volunteer with United Wisconsin, the group spearheading the recall effort. “Across the state, people are talking with their friends, family and neighbors about Walker’s destruction and are doing all they can to end his days as governor.”

Organizers need to collect 540,000 signatures by Jan. 17 to force a recall election. United Wisconsin, which is working with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin on the recall effort, says it hopes to gather between 600,000 and 700,000 signatures by that deadline.

Full Story Here: Recall Walker Rally at Capitol Draws 25,000 to 30,000 – Brookfield, WI Patch.

As the struggle in the streets intensifies, and Occupy Wall Street refuses to remain silent, it’s good to know there are champions in Congress who have stepped up to the challenge of amending the US Constitution. It’s called OCCUPIED: Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy, here.

The Supreme Court, in the 5-4 Citizens United decision of January 2010, declared that corporations have free speech rights like human beings and invalidated the ban on corporate election spending that Congress had enacted. Since then, a grassroots movement has emerged to generate popular support for a constitutional amendment to reverse that decision, including months of work by Move to Amend, Free Speech For People, Public Citizen, People For The American Way, Common Cause, and the Center for Media and Democracy.

Full Story Here: Finally, a Constitutional Amendment for the 99% | OurFuture.org.

In one of the greatest signs yet that the 99 Percenters are having an impact, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, today introduced an amendment that would ban corporate money in politics and end corporate personhood once and for all.

Deutch’s amendment, called the Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy (OCCUPIED) Amendment, would overturn the Citizens United decision, re-establishing the right of Congress and the states to regulate campaign finance laws, and to effectively outlaw the ability of for-profit corporations to contribute to campaign spending.

Full Story Here: Rep. Deutch Introduces OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment To Ban Corporate Money In Politics | ThinkProgress.

This dance should by now be familiar. This past summer, during the debt ceiling negotiations which produced the super committee, the Republicans nearly drove the country into financial default by refusing to allow tax rate increases even as they insisted that Democrats make up the difference in deficit reduction through trillions in destructive spending cuts. Indeed, Standard & Poors specifically cited the GOP’s intransigence on revenue raising when it downgraded the United States’ credit rating.

And before that, in a budget deal hammered out last December, Republicans established their ongoing theme by refusing to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for even the top brackets — at a cost of $133 billion, and benefiting a mere 4.8 million people.

Full Story Here: VIDEO: Deja Vu All Over Again — GOP Intransigence On Taxes Edition | ThinkProgress.

The liberal Vermont Independent, in an interview with CNN, criticized Obama’s stated desire to reform the Medicare and Social Security entitlement programs. Sanders warned that the president’s position could cost him the enthusiasm and votes of progressives.

“Absolutely,” Sanders answered, when asked if Obama has been too “wishy-washy” and willing to compromise with the Republicans.

Sanders indicated that he could see a scenario in which he does not back Obama’s re-election, saying he wants a firm commitment that entitlement programs will be protected from cuts.

Full Story Here: Sanders Issues Campaign Warning for Obama on Entitlement Cuts : Roll Call Politics.

On Thursday, November 17, 2011, the worst job in America belonged to the employees who handle Freedom of Information Act requests for the governor’s office in Massachusetts.

Hours after former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign filed a formal request to that office seeking communications between the Obama presidential campaign and current Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration, the Democratic National Committee responded in kind.

In a FOIA request sent Thursday evening to Mark Reilly, Chief Legal Counsel of the Executive Office of the Governor, the DNC asked for records pertaining to communications between Romney and his staff about their decision to wipe their electronic records clean before leaving Massachusetts statehouse. For good measure, the DNC also asked for “any and all electronic correspondence” that Romney and anyone in his administration (not just the members who erased their emails) made while in office that contain the following terms:

Full Story Here: DNC Sends Massive FOIA Request For Romney’s Email Records.

Next up in that line, unfortunately, is a rehashed form of a radical Balanced Budget Amendment, a plan that according to recent analyses would actually cost America 15 million jobs. But thanks to the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, the Republicans won’t be alone in their chase for a radical budget amendment that could help push the country back into the throes of recession.

Despite the fact that House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said yesterday he would encourage his party to vote against the radical plan, Blue Dog Democrats endorsed the amendment on a press call today, Politico’s Marin Cogan reported on Twitter. ThinkProgress confirmed that endorsement with a spokesperson for Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR), the Blue Dog Coalition’s co-chair for communications. According to the Hill, Ross said on the call that Blue Dogs favored such an amendment “before balanced budget amendments were cool”:

Full Story Here: Blue Dog Democrats Endorse Balanced Budget Amendment That Would Double Unemployment, Gut Social Safety Net | ThinkProgress.

Jubilant opponents of Republican Gov. Scott Walker launched their effort Tuesday to try to recall him from office, starting a 60-day blitz to gather more than half a million signatures to force an election next year.

The drive to collect an average of 9,000 signatures a day, fueled by anger over Walker’s successful push to take away nearly all public worker collective bargaining rights, began with pajama parties and other events after midnight. Daytime activities included rallies, neighborhood canvasses and booths set up around the state Capitol.

A signing event was even held outside of Walker’s personal home in a Milwaukee suburb, where he stays with his family when he’s not in Madison. Walker bristled at how personal the recall had become.

“You see a total disregard for people’s families and others here,” Walker said Tuesday on WTMJ-AM in Milwaukee. “I do think that’s crossing the line and I think most people in Wisconsin would agree with that, no matter where they’re at in the spectrum.”

Full Story Here: Scott Walker Recall Effort Begins.

Leaders of the movement to recall Walker started circulating petitions today to recall Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (R) from office as well, seizing upon a quirk in the state law. Kleefisch was elected to the state’s second-highest office as Walker’s running mate in 2010.

State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen ruled this month that any movement to recall Kleefisch from office had to come separately from one to recall Walker, setting the stage for distinct elections for the two offices next year. While candidates for Wisconsin governor and lieutenant governor run in independent primaries, voters cast a vote for a single ticket in the general election.

Full Story Here: Scott Walker Recall Means Rebecca Kleefisch Could Be First Lieutenant Governor Ever Removed.

It’s simple: Voters are paying attention to what the GOP field is saying — not just the applause-line attacks on Obama but what the candidates propose to do about the economy. The more they talk, the more discouraged the electorate seems to become.

This should be the Republicans’ election to lose. They seem well on their way.

An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll last week showed Obama beating Mitt Romney — his most formidable opponent — 49 percent to 43 percent. That is not a huge advantage, but the trend is in Obama’s favor. Last month, the same poll had the president leading Romney by just two points; in August, Obama was only one point ahead.

Full Story Here: Republicans aren’t closing the deal with voters – The Washington Post.

Under their latest proposal to the deficit reduction super committee, Democrats would agree to undertake comprehensive tax reform that included a pledge to avoid letting Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire.

According to a private document, the authenticity of which was confirmed by a leadership aide, super committee Democrats are eyeing between $950 billion and $1 trillion in revenue raisers and tax hikes as part of a $2.3 trillion deficit reduction package. Between $300 billion and $350 billion of that would come from what one congressional aide described as “low-hanging fruit” — ending tax incentives for corporate jet owners, closing loopholes for oil and gas companies, changing ethanol subsidies, and so on.

The remaining $650 billion in revenue that committee Democrats are targeting would be raised through a set of “Fast Track Procedures For Tax Reform.” As part of those procedures, Democrats would agree to three guiding principles: “(a) corporate tax reform to enhance competitiveness, (b) an individual rate no higher than 35% and (c) a distribution of changes that ensures a tax code as progressive as current law.”

Full Story Here: Super Committee Democrats Propose Scrapping Bush Tax Cut Debate In Exchange For Billions In Revenue.

OPS: Cowards!  Well, you didn’t really expect multimillionaires to scrap THEIR OWN TAX BREAKS – did you?

But according to banking data compiled by economic research firm Moebs Services, the uncertainty plaguing the American economy has nothing to do with government regulations or taxes on millionaires. It’s an uncertainty driven squarely by consumers and small-businesses who are worried about their short-term financial prospects. And it’s been going on since well before Obama took up residence in the White House.

Since the end of 2007, bank customers have pulled over $900 billion out of certificates of deposits at major U.S. banks, parking their money in checking accounts and money market deposit accounts. Banks pay customers interest to park their money in CDs, but pay out next-to-nothing for money market accounts, and still less — usually nothing — for checking accounts.

Full Story Here: The GOP’s ‘Uncertainty’ Talking Point, Debunked.

“Someone needs to explain to the Republicans that Ebenezer Scrooge is supposed to be the bad guy, and before conservatives start whining about another war on Christmas, they must admit they hate everything about Christmas, because brotherhood, goodwill toward men, and especially charity make their skin crawl. Now this week Michele Bachmann proposed cutting huge holes in the federal safety net, demonstrating a total misunderstanding of the concept of a net. Here’s what she said, ‘Self-reliance means if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.’ Merry Christmas to you too, crazy lady. Yeah, that’s the first thing I think when self-reliance comes up, punishment by starvation.

Honestly, who can hear that statement and not think of Scrooge? Who in A Christmas Carol suggested if the poor don’t want to go to workhouses, they should get on with dying as a service to population control. Now if Herman Cain said that at Republican debate, he would get a standing ovation. And say what you want about Ebenezer Scrooge, he never shoved Bob Cratchit’s head into his groin and said, ‘You want Christmas off or not?’ Newt Gingrich refers to Obama as the food stamp president, because he doesn’t want children to starve to death, f**king commie. Mitt Romney says we should let all the people about to lose their homes, lose them, and they can just become renters. Ownership society, meet no pets, no waterbeds. Mitt said the same thing a few years ago when the automobile industry was tottering. Let it die.

I find it ironic that Republicans have such disdain for the lazy, and yet their solution to every problem is do nothing. Their answer to wealth inequality, do nothing. Health care? Do nothing. Climate change? Nothing. Racism? Doesn’t exist. For a group of people so head over heels in love with self-reliance, they sure do recommend a lot of sitting on their ass.

If A Christmas Carol was performed by the Tea Party Dramatic Society, it would be a cautionary tale about how the hero, Scrooge, a blameless job creator is turned into a socialist through the corrupting influence of Tiny Tim. And the play would end with a simple plaintive question from Mr. Scrooge. Just how much of my wealth does Mr. Tim think he’s entitled to?

And that is the great Republican fallacy of this election, that our economic problems are due not to Wall Street’s gambling, but because too many Americans are lazy. But there are 16 million unemployed, and we only created 80,000 jobs last month. The problem isn’t laziness. It’s math. But this is where the Republican Party is now, in favor of people dying because they don’t have health insurance. In favor letting people go unfed if they won’t work, and if they want to work, but are Mexicans, in favor of putting up a fence that electrocutes them.

Even Scrooge is thinking, ‘Look, I hate the poor, but I’m not a f**king psychopath.’ But’s that’s where this party is, it simply has no bottom. Except Marcus Bachmann, he’s a bottom.”

Full Story Here: Bill Maher Uses A Christmas Carol To Slam The Republican’s Holiday Hypocrisy – YouTube.

If you have a high school junior or senior in the house, you know the drill.

SAT, ACT, testing, testing, testing.

Test for math, test for English, test for science.

Go to visit colleges.

Apply. Wait for the call. Dish out the cash.

But here’s something that’s missing from the routine – civics education.

Education about our shared civics culture, about the activists who are seeking to make our country a better place to live, about the laws and institutions that keep this country from spinning into the abyss.

Are there any universities that specialize in civics education?

Haven’t found one yet.

Are there any universities that emphasize it?

Haven’t found one yet.

Full Story Here: Time to Take Your Civics Aptitude Test | Common Dreams.

I’m getting a number of letters, mainly from conservatives and libertarians, who seem to think that my response to Mike Bloomberg’s “It’s not the banks’ fault” rant means I “don’t believe in personal responsibility.”

Apparently, people feel that by explaining how the banks profited from tfhe explosion of subprime home loans, I’m somehow letting the ordinary homeowner who over-borrowed off the hook.

But the question was never, Do ordinary homeowners share any blame for the crisis? The question, as implicitly posed by Bloomberg, was, Is it true that the banks had NO blame for the crisis?

Full Story Here: One Last Note on Mike Bloomberg | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.

House Concurrent Resolution 13 reaffirming “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States;

The Wireless Tax Fairness Act of 2011;

The Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act of 2011;

The Civilian Service Recognition Act of 2011;

Veterans’ Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2011;

H.R. 1965, which raises the monetary threshold for banks issuing securities;

The Small Company Capital Formation Act of 2011, which exempts other securities from regulation;

Access to Capital for Job Creators Act, which exempts some security issuers from regulation;

and The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, which reduces regulations on yet other kinds of securities.

The Senate passed:

Appeal Time Clarification Act;

Removal Clarification Act;

Federal Courts Jurisdiction and Venue Clarification Act;

Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and Related Programs Appropriations Act;

Wallowa Forest Service Compound Conveyance Act;

Sugar Loaf Fire Protection District Land Exchange Act;

Fort Pulaski National Monument Lease Authorization Act;

Box Elder Utah Land Conveyance Act;

Utah Land Conveyance Act

Uintah Water Conservancy District;

Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act;

East Bench Irrigation District Water Contract Extension Act;

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Travel Cards Act;

and the America’s Cup Act

Full Story Here: Things Congress passed this week that had nothing to do with jobs | The Raw Story.

OPS: There are links to detailed articles for each of the above  at the Full Story Here link

A massive 196 House Democrats — nearly their entire caucus — signed a letter to state election officials asking them to “put partisan considerations aside and serve as advocates for enfranchisement” during this unfortunate era of voter disenfranchising state laws:

Beginning with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Congress and election officials across the country have worked on a bipartisan basis to open our democracy to all our citizens. Removing unnecessary barriers to voting was a cause shared across party lines. Sometimes, these efforts were directed at laws and practices that were intentionally created to deny citizens their right to vote. Other times, the laws or practices were relics of a prior era and served no continuing purpose. [...]

Full Story Here: 196 House Democrats Sign Letter To State Election Officals Opposing War On Voting | ThinkProgress.

Video belongs to MSNBC.

Full Story Here: Maddow – Republican War on Voting – YouTube.

Ferguson outlines bold measures to stop the tsunami of money that threatens our democracy, starting with a Constitutional Amendment.

he following has been adapted from a version of a speech delivered to Occupy Boston by Thomas Ferguson, the father of the “Investment Theory of Politics.”

I’m honored to speak to you today about money and politics, but it’s not the first time I’ve been here. This is actually the third time I’ve visited your encampment. The first couple of times I walked around and looked at the signs. Many were priceless; the best tutorials I’ve ever seen on the subject of money and politics. My favorite was the one that advised that Congressmen and women should emulate NASCAR drivers and show us their sponsors. Another styled contemporary capitalism “socialism for the 1%.” And many sharply attacked the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which helped throw open the floodgates to the tidal wave of secret money that is now engulfing American elections.

I’m a social scientist, so I actually counted: about a third of all the signs that day had money and politics as their themes. It was obvious that you here at Occupy Boston and your colleagues in New York, Oakland, Chicago, and other cities have already grasped the heart of the problem of money and politics in America: that we live in a money-driven political system that works pretty well for the 1%, but no one else.

Full Story Here: Thomas Ferguson: How to Take Back Our Political System From the 1% | | AlterNet.

Supporters of the failed measure said it would have created tens of thousands of construction jobs and lifted the still-struggling economy. But Republicans unanimously opposed it for its tax surcharge on the wealthy and spending totals they said were too high.

The 51-49 vote fell well short of the 60 votes required under Senate procedures to start work on the bill. Every Republican opposed the president, as did Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska and former Democrat Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who still aligns with the party.

Obama’s loss was anything but a surprise, but the White House and its Democratic allies continue to press popular ideas from Obama’s poll-tested jobs package in what Republicans say is nothing more than a bare-knuckle attempt to gain a political edge by invoking the mantra of jobs but doing little to seek compromise.

Full Story Here: Obama Infrastructure Plan: Senate GOP Blocks $60 Billion Measure.

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Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life is an unflinchingly honest, take-no-prisoners ride through the life of Oscar-winning filmmaker and bestselling author Michael Moore. Moore shares far-ranging, irreverent, and stranger-than-fiction vignettes from his early life. One moment he’s an 11-year-old boy lost in the Senate and found by Bobby Kennedy; and in the next, he’s inside the Bitburg cemetery with Ronald Reagan. At 17, he goes to get a snack and ends up on the news, creating a firestorm that helps eliminate racial discrimination at private establishments across America. Funny, eye-opening, and moving, it’s the book he has been writing and living his entire life. – Sixth & I Historic Synagogue

Michael Moore is an Academy Award-winning American filmmaker, author and liberal political commentator. He is the director and producer of Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko, three of the top five highest-grossing documentaries of all time. In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, documenting his personal crusade to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections. He has also written and starred in the TV shows “TV Nation” and “The Awful Truth.” Moore is a self-described liberal who has criticized globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush and the American health care system in his written and cinematic works. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Full Story Here: Michael Moore to Democrats: Forget the Crazy White Guy – YouTube.

As Roll Call points out today, the estimated median net worth for a member of Congress in 2010 was $513,000 (this is strictly an estimate as assets are reported in ranges). Meanwhile, the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s David Rosnick points out that the net worth of the median household in the United States that same year was closer to $100,000:

For Congress, the median net worth in 2010 was about $513,000. For regular households, the Federal Reserve Board pegged that number at about $120,000 in 2008, and that number this year is probably around $100,000, [said economist David Rosnick]. While it is hard to make an exact comparison between Congress and the rest of the nation, what is clear is lawmakers “are all a lot richer than anything you would call a typical American,” Rosnick said.

Full Story Here: The Median Net Worth Of A Member Of Congress Is Five Times Higher Than The Median American Household | ThinkProgress.

The Supreme Court may treat corporations like people who can spend whatever they want on elections, but the American people don’t have to accept it, said Democratic senators who proposed a constitutional amendment Tuesday to retake control of campaign spending.

The amendment, introduced by Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), doesn’t directly address the justices’ legal finding that corporations have a right to free speech that was curtailed by election law. Instead, it would add to the Constitution language that says Congress and the states can regulate campaign contributions and expenditures.

The amendment would effectively reverse two landmark Supreme Court decisions — the 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, which said spending money in elections is a form of speech, and the 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled it unconstitutional to regulate the money spent to influence elections by corporations and unions.

Full Story Here: Citizens United Going Down? Democrats Introduce Constitutional Amendment To Overturn Ruling.

As we’ve been reporting, Democrats on the supercommittee—led by Senator Max Baucus—are pursuing a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction, which would include tax increases, spending cuts, a new round of economic stimulus and steep cuts to both Medicare and Social Security. Republicans have rejected the deal in favor of their own, which basically includes all of the cuts and does not include tax increases nor stimulus spending.

But several Democratic members of the House are increasingly upset with how supercommittee Democrats are carrying out the negotiations, and are threatening to vote against a package that includes deep cuts to the safety net. Some are even planning an attempt to get rid of the supercommittee altogether.

Representative Maxine Waters of California has introduced a bill to repeal the supercommittee, and the $1.2 trillion in cuts it’s mandated to make. She believes the committee is “illegitimate” and “borders on unconstitutional.”

Full Story Here: House Democrats Upset With Supercommittee Negotiations | The Nation.

How in the the world can biking and walking be controversial?

They’re good exercise, fun to do and—as an alternative to driving everywhere—help us save money and the environment. Both biking and walking are increasingly popular for transportation and recreation today, thanks in large part to a recent flowering of federally-funded trails, bikeways and pathways that make getting around on two wheels and two feet safer and more convenient.

But in these antagonistic political times, bikers and walkers are now targets of controversy for some members of Congress. In September, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn proposed stripping all designated federal funding for bike and pedestrian projects from the pending Transportation Bill. After an outpouring of opposition from citizens coast-to-coast, Coburn withdrew his amendment.

Now bicyclists and pedestrians are under attack again, this time in an amendment from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. He wants to redirect every last penny of money dedicated to bicycling and walking to bridge repair instead.

Full Story Here: Shareable: Why are Bikes Being Targeted by Congress?.

Alan Khazei, the only major primary candidate still competing with Warren for the Democratic nomination to take on Sen. Scott Brown (R), announced that he was withdrawing from the race, according to the Boston Globe.

Khazei, a well-known social entrepreneur, had an uphill battle ahead of him. He trailed Warren in terms of campaign donations. And with the base of the party fascinated by Warren’s candidacy and national Democrats privately cheering on the longtime consumer advocate, Khazei had little to no hope of breaking through.

Full Story Here: Elizabeth Warren Clears The Field, As Last Major Primary Competitor Drops Bid.