Truly a man of few convictions, and wishes it to stay exactly that way "no" compromises .
Also the same day Joe Scarborough figured out why the GOP conservative factions in the House and not Obama are to blame for everything "that what's wrong" in America
Find the video .... The local Kansas link printed the eye popping jaw dropping word for conservative word.
http://m.cjonline.com/news/2012-12-21/excerpts-huelskamps-morning-joe-interview
NEiLc
Friday, December 21, 2012
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Building a bigger boat
irin Carmon points out why President Obama can help us build a bigger boat..
.........
Still want to fight a war on women? -
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/07/a_womans_place/?mobile.html
A couple of weeks ago, three words were projected on the U.S. Capitol by a feminist group: “Rape is rape.” It was momentous, but only to a point.
After all, by then President Obama had already repeated that feminist mantra rejecting a hierarchy of rape: In August, he’d announced that “Rape is rape” in response to Todd Akin’s blithe invocation of “legitimate rape.” Three days after the words appeared on the Capitol, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s talk of rape and God’s gifts gave the president occasion to say it again. Rape is rape. You could complain that this was still being debated in 2012, and many did, but why would profound disruption come fast or easy? No, it was an urgent dividing point, and the president himself had chosen a side.
Today, Obama is still the president, thanks to being the choice of an overwhelming margin of women, after (for the most part) not backing down, or away from, reproductive rights and women’s autonomy. A dazzling change achieved last night after years of hard work is the unprecedented wave of women elected to office, many of whom, like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, are strikingly progressive. Instead of projecting words asserting women’s rights outside the Capitol, these women will be asserting them inside. It appears there could even be 20 women senators.
Today, Akin is gone. Mourdock is gone. Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., who said an abortion could never save a woman’s life, is gone. Tom Smith, who said that his daughter having a child out of wedlock was as bad as if she’d been raped, is gone. Republican women who were variously wielded as proof against the party’s misogyny, including Michele Bachmann (who narrowly held on to her seat) and Mia Love, mostly did not do well. Their recent foremothers, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, are mostly forgotten.
This is still a country divided on abortion, but it is also an electorate that has fiercely rejected an antichoice agenda of banning it outright, limiting access to contraception, pushing certain contemptuous and paternalistic abortion restrictions, and evincing a lack of compassion for women’s lived realities, including sexual assault survivors and women who depend on Planned Parenthood and Medicaid. It’s an electorate that, broadly speaking, took a look at where the antichoice “incremental strategy” was heading and turned the other way.
Surprisingly enough, the blueprint for all this was laid exactly a year ago, in Mississippi. Not usually a bellwether state, Mississippi was where people who saw more “personhood” in a minutes-old fertilized egg than in a sentient woman thought they could become slowly inevitable. They were wrong, not because abortion had become less stigmatized in that reddest of states, but because it was suddenly clearer that it wasn’t just those other women who would be restricted — that being a “good girl” didn’t mean your autonomy was any less fragile. A grassroots uprising helped beat Personhood, and this year it was nowhere to be found. A few months after the Mississippi win, the treatment of the decorously on-message Sandra Fluke would doubly prove that point: You could play by all the rules you were supposed to, but a woman in public disagreeing was still a slut.
Recognizing those hard lessons, women earned today’s celebration. But it is, of course, just the beginning of a path that includes undoing a whole lot of damage and calling in a whole lot of return favors; just because the Democratic party is no longer running scared from reproductive rights and the Republicans face some grim truths on them doesn’t mean anyone should get complacent about the way forward.
I once heard Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote her husband — a feminist ally before there were very many — saying that “the symbol of the United States really isn’t the bald eagle. It’s the pendulum.” That day last February, Ginsburg was answering my question about her remark that someone like her, who’d made her name unapologetically fighting for women’s equality at the ACLU, could never be confirmed for the court today. She was saying she thought it could swing back to bipartisan comity, but she might as well have been talking about the cycles of progress and backlash for women in this country.
This year, in an election mostly silent on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg exercised a sort of talismanic and terrifying power: Over sympathetic people who feared her death in the event of a Romney presidency, but who also found inspiration in her steely resilience. (This superhero-like scolding was still going viral even after the polls closed.) More importantly, she’s also probably the most significant believer that reproductive rights are guaranteed in the constitution, not by dint of privacy but as part of guaranteeing women’s equal citizenship — something that would have far-reaching consequences if more powerful people believed it.
Maybe that’s not such a fantasy. Speaking at Barnard’s commencement this year, Obama struck a similar note. The constitution, he said, “had its flaws — flaws that this nation has strived to perfect over time. Questions of race and gender were unresolved. No woman’s signature graced the original document.” But, he added, “What made this document special was that it provided the space — the possibility — for those who had been left out of our charter to fight their way in. It provided people the language to appeal to principles and ideals that broadened democracy’s reach. It allowed for protest, and movements, and the dissemination of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade, change the world — a constant forward movement that continues to this day.” That struggle to make room for all of us is not always so linear, or so regular as a “constant forward movement,” but last night, we got a little closer, by fighting.
.........
Still want to fight a war on women? -
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/07/a_womans_place/?mobile.html
A couple of weeks ago, three words were projected on the U.S. Capitol by a feminist group: “Rape is rape.” It was momentous, but only to a point.
After all, by then President Obama had already repeated that feminist mantra rejecting a hierarchy of rape: In August, he’d announced that “Rape is rape” in response to Todd Akin’s blithe invocation of “legitimate rape.” Three days after the words appeared on the Capitol, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s talk of rape and God’s gifts gave the president occasion to say it again. Rape is rape. You could complain that this was still being debated in 2012, and many did, but why would profound disruption come fast or easy? No, it was an urgent dividing point, and the president himself had chosen a side.
Today, Obama is still the president, thanks to being the choice of an overwhelming margin of women, after (for the most part) not backing down, or away from, reproductive rights and women’s autonomy. A dazzling change achieved last night after years of hard work is the unprecedented wave of women elected to office, many of whom, like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, are strikingly progressive. Instead of projecting words asserting women’s rights outside the Capitol, these women will be asserting them inside. It appears there could even be 20 women senators.
Today, Akin is gone. Mourdock is gone. Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., who said an abortion could never save a woman’s life, is gone. Tom Smith, who said that his daughter having a child out of wedlock was as bad as if she’d been raped, is gone. Republican women who were variously wielded as proof against the party’s misogyny, including Michele Bachmann (who narrowly held on to her seat) and Mia Love, mostly did not do well. Their recent foremothers, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, are mostly forgotten.
This is still a country divided on abortion, but it is also an electorate that has fiercely rejected an antichoice agenda of banning it outright, limiting access to contraception, pushing certain contemptuous and paternalistic abortion restrictions, and evincing a lack of compassion for women’s lived realities, including sexual assault survivors and women who depend on Planned Parenthood and Medicaid. It’s an electorate that, broadly speaking, took a look at where the antichoice “incremental strategy” was heading and turned the other way.
Surprisingly enough, the blueprint for all this was laid exactly a year ago, in Mississippi. Not usually a bellwether state, Mississippi was where people who saw more “personhood” in a minutes-old fertilized egg than in a sentient woman thought they could become slowly inevitable. They were wrong, not because abortion had become less stigmatized in that reddest of states, but because it was suddenly clearer that it wasn’t just those other women who would be restricted — that being a “good girl” didn’t mean your autonomy was any less fragile. A grassroots uprising helped beat Personhood, and this year it was nowhere to be found. A few months after the Mississippi win, the treatment of the decorously on-message Sandra Fluke would doubly prove that point: You could play by all the rules you were supposed to, but a woman in public disagreeing was still a slut.
Recognizing those hard lessons, women earned today’s celebration. But it is, of course, just the beginning of a path that includes undoing a whole lot of damage and calling in a whole lot of return favors; just because the Democratic party is no longer running scared from reproductive rights and the Republicans face some grim truths on them doesn’t mean anyone should get complacent about the way forward.
I once heard Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote her husband — a feminist ally before there were very many — saying that “the symbol of the United States really isn’t the bald eagle. It’s the pendulum.” That day last February, Ginsburg was answering my question about her remark that someone like her, who’d made her name unapologetically fighting for women’s equality at the ACLU, could never be confirmed for the court today. She was saying she thought it could swing back to bipartisan comity, but she might as well have been talking about the cycles of progress and backlash for women in this country.
This year, in an election mostly silent on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg exercised a sort of talismanic and terrifying power: Over sympathetic people who feared her death in the event of a Romney presidency, but who also found inspiration in her steely resilience. (This superhero-like scolding was still going viral even after the polls closed.) More importantly, she’s also probably the most significant believer that reproductive rights are guaranteed in the constitution, not by dint of privacy but as part of guaranteeing women’s equal citizenship — something that would have far-reaching consequences if more powerful people believed it.
Maybe that’s not such a fantasy. Speaking at Barnard’s commencement this year, Obama struck a similar note. The constitution, he said, “had its flaws — flaws that this nation has strived to perfect over time. Questions of race and gender were unresolved. No woman’s signature graced the original document.” But, he added, “What made this document special was that it provided the space — the possibility — for those who had been left out of our charter to fight their way in. It provided people the language to appeal to principles and ideals that broadened democracy’s reach. It allowed for protest, and movements, and the dissemination of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade, change the world — a constant forward movement that continues to this day.” That struggle to make room for all of us is not always so linear, or so regular as a “constant forward movement,” but last night, we got a little closer, by fighting.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
When Porn and Information merge
It's not often easy
It's not often kind.....
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Usher-syndrome#Usher_syndrome_III
It's not often kind.....
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Usher-syndrome#Usher_syndrome_III
Friday, November 16, 2012
War good Gd
It's hard to go toward war and hide your mobilization unless you disguise it as defending yourself....
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
It really is about Alinsky and the community
Barack Obama wrote this article for Illinois Issues in 1988, while he was a community organizer in Chicago. It later became part of a book, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, published by Illinois Issues in 1990. We are republishing it this month to show, in his own words, some of the Democratic presidential candidate’s earliest influences in Illinois.
Problems and promise in the inner city
by Barack Obama
Over the past five years, I’ve often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks. Typical is a remark a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I waited to deliver some flyers to a group of confused and angry parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school.
“Listen, Obama,” she began. “You’re a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.” She shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered back to attend to her duties.
I’ve thought back on that conversation more than once during the time I’ve organized with the Developing Communities Project, based in Chicago’s far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind haven’t been as simple as her question. Probably the shortest one is this: It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.
The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches. During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, many of these issues became submerged in the face of the clear oppression of segregation. The debate was no longer whether to protest, but how militant must that protest be to win full citizenship for blacks.
Twenty years later, the tensions between strategies have reemerged, in part due to the recognition that for all the accomplishments of the 1960s, the majority of blacks continue to suffer from second-class citizenship. Related to this are the failures — real, perceived and fabricated — of the Great Society programs initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.
First, and most publicized, has been the surge of political empowerment around the country. Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson are but two striking examples of how the energy and passion of the Civil Rights movement have been channeled into bids for more traditional political power. Second, there has been a resurgence in attempts to foster economic development in the black community, whether through local entrepreneurial efforts, increased hiring of black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns. Third, and perhaps least publicized, has been grass-roots community organizing, which builds on indigenous leadership and direct action.
Proponents of electoral politics and economic development strategies can point to substantial accomplishments in the past 10 years. An increase in the number of black public officials offers at least the hope that government will be more responsive to inner-city constituents. Economic development programs can provide structural improvements and jobs to blighted communities.
In my view, however, neither approach offers lasting hope of real change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organization. This is because the issues of the inner city are more complex and deeply rooted than ever before. Blatant discrimination has been replaced by institutional racism; problems like teen pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse cannot be solved by money alone. At the same time, as Professor William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago has pointed out, the inner city’s economy and its government support have declined, and middle-class blacks are leaving the neighborhoods they once helped to sustain.
Neither electoral politics nor a strategy of economic self-help and internal development can by themselves respond to these new challenges. The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools, although they did achieve an important symbolic effect. In fact, much-needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in the awkward position of administering underfunded systems neither equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from other sectors.
Self-help strategies show similar limitations. Although both laudable and necessary, they too often ignore the fact that without a stable community, a well-educated population, an adequate infrastructure and an informed and employed market, neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace. Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.
In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.
This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc.
Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.
By using this approach, the Developing Communities Project and other organizations in Chicago’s inner city have achieved some impressive results. Schools have been made more accountable — job training programs have been established; housing has been renovated and built; city services have been provided; parks have been refurbished; and crime and drug problems have been curtailed. Additionally, plain folk have been able to access the levers of power, and a sophisticated pool of local civic leadership has been developed.
But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well. One problem is the not entirely undeserved skepticism organizers face in many communities. To a large degree, Chicago was the birthplace of community organizing, and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts. Many of the best-intentioned members of the community have bitter memories of such failures and are reluctant to muster up renewed faith in the process.
A related problem involves the aforementioned exodus from the inner city of financial resources, institutions, role models and jobs. Even in areas that have not been completely devastated, most households now stay afloat with two incomes. Traditionally, community organizing has drawn support from women, who due to tradition and social discrimination had the time and the inclination to participate in what remains an essentially voluntary activity.
Today the majority of women in the black community work full time, many are the sole parent, and all have to split themselves between work, raising children, running a household and maintaining some semblance of a personal life — all of which makes voluntary activities lower on the priority list.
Additionally, the slow exodus of the black middle class into the suburbs means that people shop in one neighborhood, work in another, send their child to a school across town and go to church someplace other than the place where they live. Such geographical dispersion creates real problems in building a sense of investment and common purpose in any particular neighborhood.
Finally, community organizations and organizers are hampered by their own dogmas about the style and substance of organizing. Most still practice what Professor John McKnight of Northwestern University calls a “consumer advocacy” approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the outside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.
Our thinking about media and public relations is equally stunted when compared to the high-powered direct mail and video approaches successfully used by conservative organizations like the Moral Majority. Most importantly, low salaries, the lack of quality training and ill-defined possibilities for advancement discourage the most talented young blacks from viewing organizing as a legitimate career option. As long as our best and brightest youth see more opportunity in climbing the corporate ladder than in building the communities from which they came, organizing will remain decidedly handicapped.
None of these problems is insurmountable. In Chicago, the Developing Communities Project and other community organizations have pooled resources to form cooperative think tanks like the Gamaliel Foundation. These provide both a formal setting where experienced organizers can rework old models to fit new realities and a healthy environment for the recruitment and training of new organizers. At the same time the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the death of Harold Washington have made both the media and people in the neighborhoods more responsive to the new approaches community organizing can provide.
Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and — most importantly — values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.
Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-thinking pastors have begun to look at community organizations such as the Developing Communities Project in the far south side and GREAT in the Grand Boulevard area as a powerful tool for living the social gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities, changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.
In the meantime, organizers will continue to build on local successes, learn from their numerous failures and recruit and train their small but growing core of leadership — mothers on welfare, postal workers, CTA drivers and school teachers, all of whom have a vision and memories of what communities can be. In fact, the answer to the original question — why organize? — resides in these people. In helping a group of housewives sit across the negotiating table with the mayor of America’s third largest city and hold their own, or a retired steelworker stand before a TV camera and give voice to the dreams he has for his grandchild’s future, one discovers the most significant and satisfying contribution organizing can make.
In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to — it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.
Illinois Issues, September 2008
Problems and promise in the inner city
by Barack Obama
Over the past five years, I’ve often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks. Typical is a remark a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I waited to deliver some flyers to a group of confused and angry parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school.
“Listen, Obama,” she began. “You’re a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.” She shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered back to attend to her duties.
I’ve thought back on that conversation more than once during the time I’ve organized with the Developing Communities Project, based in Chicago’s far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind haven’t been as simple as her question. Probably the shortest one is this: It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.
The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches. During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, many of these issues became submerged in the face of the clear oppression of segregation. The debate was no longer whether to protest, but how militant must that protest be to win full citizenship for blacks.
Twenty years later, the tensions between strategies have reemerged, in part due to the recognition that for all the accomplishments of the 1960s, the majority of blacks continue to suffer from second-class citizenship. Related to this are the failures — real, perceived and fabricated — of the Great Society programs initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.
First, and most publicized, has been the surge of political empowerment around the country. Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson are but two striking examples of how the energy and passion of the Civil Rights movement have been channeled into bids for more traditional political power. Second, there has been a resurgence in attempts to foster economic development in the black community, whether through local entrepreneurial efforts, increased hiring of black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns. Third, and perhaps least publicized, has been grass-roots community organizing, which builds on indigenous leadership and direct action.
Proponents of electoral politics and economic development strategies can point to substantial accomplishments in the past 10 years. An increase in the number of black public officials offers at least the hope that government will be more responsive to inner-city constituents. Economic development programs can provide structural improvements and jobs to blighted communities.
In my view, however, neither approach offers lasting hope of real change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organization. This is because the issues of the inner city are more complex and deeply rooted than ever before. Blatant discrimination has been replaced by institutional racism; problems like teen pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse cannot be solved by money alone. At the same time, as Professor William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago has pointed out, the inner city’s economy and its government support have declined, and middle-class blacks are leaving the neighborhoods they once helped to sustain.
Neither electoral politics nor a strategy of economic self-help and internal development can by themselves respond to these new challenges. The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools, although they did achieve an important symbolic effect. In fact, much-needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in the awkward position of administering underfunded systems neither equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from other sectors.
Self-help strategies show similar limitations. Although both laudable and necessary, they too often ignore the fact that without a stable community, a well-educated population, an adequate infrastructure and an informed and employed market, neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace. Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.
In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.
This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc.
Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.
By using this approach, the Developing Communities Project and other organizations in Chicago’s inner city have achieved some impressive results. Schools have been made more accountable — job training programs have been established; housing has been renovated and built; city services have been provided; parks have been refurbished; and crime and drug problems have been curtailed. Additionally, plain folk have been able to access the levers of power, and a sophisticated pool of local civic leadership has been developed.
But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well. One problem is the not entirely undeserved skepticism organizers face in many communities. To a large degree, Chicago was the birthplace of community organizing, and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts. Many of the best-intentioned members of the community have bitter memories of such failures and are reluctant to muster up renewed faith in the process.
A related problem involves the aforementioned exodus from the inner city of financial resources, institutions, role models and jobs. Even in areas that have not been completely devastated, most households now stay afloat with two incomes. Traditionally, community organizing has drawn support from women, who due to tradition and social discrimination had the time and the inclination to participate in what remains an essentially voluntary activity.
Today the majority of women in the black community work full time, many are the sole parent, and all have to split themselves between work, raising children, running a household and maintaining some semblance of a personal life — all of which makes voluntary activities lower on the priority list.
Additionally, the slow exodus of the black middle class into the suburbs means that people shop in one neighborhood, work in another, send their child to a school across town and go to church someplace other than the place where they live. Such geographical dispersion creates real problems in building a sense of investment and common purpose in any particular neighborhood.
Finally, community organizations and organizers are hampered by their own dogmas about the style and substance of organizing. Most still practice what Professor John McKnight of Northwestern University calls a “consumer advocacy” approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the outside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.
Our thinking about media and public relations is equally stunted when compared to the high-powered direct mail and video approaches successfully used by conservative organizations like the Moral Majority. Most importantly, low salaries, the lack of quality training and ill-defined possibilities for advancement discourage the most talented young blacks from viewing organizing as a legitimate career option. As long as our best and brightest youth see more opportunity in climbing the corporate ladder than in building the communities from which they came, organizing will remain decidedly handicapped.
None of these problems is insurmountable. In Chicago, the Developing Communities Project and other community organizations have pooled resources to form cooperative think tanks like the Gamaliel Foundation. These provide both a formal setting where experienced organizers can rework old models to fit new realities and a healthy environment for the recruitment and training of new organizers. At the same time the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the death of Harold Washington have made both the media and people in the neighborhoods more responsive to the new approaches community organizing can provide.
Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and — most importantly — values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.
Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-thinking pastors have begun to look at community organizations such as the Developing Communities Project in the far south side and GREAT in the Grand Boulevard area as a powerful tool for living the social gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities, changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.
In the meantime, organizers will continue to build on local successes, learn from their numerous failures and recruit and train their small but growing core of leadership — mothers on welfare, postal workers, CTA drivers and school teachers, all of whom have a vision and memories of what communities can be. In fact, the answer to the original question — why organize? — resides in these people. In helping a group of housewives sit across the negotiating table with the mayor of America’s third largest city and hold their own, or a retired steelworker stand before a TV camera and give voice to the dreams he has for his grandchild’s future, one discovers the most significant and satisfying contribution organizing can make.
In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to — it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.
Illinois Issues, September 2008
Second rule for Election Day
You must remember Mt Rushmore!
Washington defined leadership
Jefferson defined the reason
Lincoln defined the republic
Roosevelt defined the responsibility
_______________
"Every male citizen of the commonwealth, liable to taxes or to militia duty in any county, shall have a right to vote for representatives for that county to the legislature. "
"Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights. "
"The elective franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people. "
"The rational and peacable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people. "
Thomas Jefferson, The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, John P. Foley, ed. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1900), p. 842.
NEiLc note: don't deflect on Jeffersons use of the term "male" in the first quote... the topic of women's and minority rights is not the discussion here.... Equal rights for all voters is..
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
No purple Dino here
Barney Frank said "The GOP's interest in the fetus begins at conception and ends completely at birth."
Friday, October 26, 2012
McCainunu way off the tracks
…John McCain, Iraq War supporter, Iraq War voter-for, let it be known that it was all Colin Powell's fault that we were in Iraq in the first place:
“Colin Powell, interestingly enough, said that Obama got us out of Iraq,” McCain told the National Review. “But it was Colin Powell, with his testimony before the U.N. Security Council, that got us into Iraq.”
rss@dailykos.com (Hunter)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/26/1150743/-John-McCain-says-the-Iraq-War-was-Colin-Powell-s-fault
“Colin Powell, interestingly enough, said that Obama got us out of Iraq,” McCain told the National Review. “But it was Colin Powell, with his testimony before the U.N. Security Council, that got us into Iraq.”
rss@dailykos.com (Hunter)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/26/1150743/-John-McCain-says-the-Iraq-War-was-Colin-Powell-s-fault
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Small government GOP style
If Romney is so anti choice and concerned about keeping government small, and if he gets to be president and his Congress votes for repeal of Roe versus Wade who makes the decision to allow an abortion on the issue of allowing an Abortion? When she says, he says, the judge, the cop?
Leave women's issues their issues.
Let women keep their freedom and privacy. Government should stay out of the bedroom and out of the medicine cabinet... Nancy Keenan NARAL President
Leave women's issues their issues.
Let women keep their freedom and privacy. Government should stay out of the bedroom and out of the medicine cabinet... Nancy Keenan NARAL President
Monday, October 8, 2012
Elizabeth Warren
“No, Mitt, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they love, they cry, they dance, they live and they die. Learn the difference.”
Friday, September 21, 2012
Research shmesearch
So the joke goes if I didn't have a pacifier and I didn't have a tit I'm really emotionally screwed up?
Research Suggests That Pacifiers Help Turn Baby Boys Into Emotionless Robocops Later in Life
By Doug Barry, Sep 18, 2012 11:55 PM
SHARE
A new study so hot and fresh out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Bucky Badger singed his adorable little paws on when he took it out of the lab suggests that pacifiers stunt the emotional development of baby boys by robbing them of the opportunity to mimic adults by refining their Jim Carrey rubber faces. Since a big part of learning emotional cues for infants involves observing and mimicking adults' facial expressions, boys who log a lot of pacifier time could experience a deficit of emotional intelligence as a direct result of having a rubber nipple stuffed into their mouths too often.
Research Suggests That Pacifiers Help Turn Baby Boys Into Emotionless Robocops Later in Life
By Doug Barry, Sep 18, 2012 11:55 PM
SHARE
A new study so hot and fresh out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Bucky Badger singed his adorable little paws on when he took it out of the lab suggests that pacifiers stunt the emotional development of baby boys by robbing them of the opportunity to mimic adults by refining their Jim Carrey rubber faces. Since a big part of learning emotional cues for infants involves observing and mimicking adults' facial expressions, boys who log a lot of pacifier time could experience a deficit of emotional intelligence as a direct result of having a rubber nipple stuffed into their mouths too often.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
More interdependence more education
So a more focused curriculum in the schools means future employment ..
Fiat / Chrysler also received the same concessions for its new plant
Now when we retool the schools enough... Apple will have to move their manufacturing assembly plants to the US.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/siemens-plant-in-charlotte-offers-lessons-as-obama-romney-talk-job-creation/2012/09/04/f52304fa-f30c-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_print.html
.And they talk about the quality of the workforce in Charlotte, where local leaders are retooling the public education system to churn out the engineers and skilled technicians needed to operate one of the most efficient gas-turbine plants in the world
Neilc
Fiat / Chrysler also received the same concessions for its new plant
Now when we retool the schools enough... Apple will have to move their manufacturing assembly plants to the US.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/siemens-plant-in-charlotte-offers-lessons-as-obama-romney-talk-job-creation/2012/09/04/f52304fa-f30c-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_print.html
.And they talk about the quality of the workforce in Charlotte, where local leaders are retooling the public education system to churn out the engineers and skilled technicians needed to operate one of the most efficient gas-turbine plants in the world
Neilc
Monday, September 17, 2012
Jobs retooling and redistribution
go to the web cause the links inside the article Are enlightening.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/16/1131863/-The-Republicans-want-to-talk-about-unemployment-Let-s-accommodate-them
The Republicans want to talk about unemployment. Let's accommodate them.
The Republicans would prefer to change the subject from the latest appalling proof that Mitt Romney is fundamentally unfit to be even within the same zip code as the Oval Office. They would much prefer that everyone focus on unemployment. Because we are nice people, let's accommodate them. Because this election very quickly is moving past the question of who will be president next year, and now is more about control of next year's Congress. This election also has become about reframing false political narratives, for the benefit of Democrats, the nation, the world, and the very concept of truth, going forward.
The Republicans have no credibility on deficits. The Republicans have no credibility on national security. For decades, both have been all but ceded as Republican strengths, despite plenty of evidence that they shouldn't be. On those issues, Democrats have often played on the Republican home field, to the detriment of everyone. The Republicans would like for the same dynamic to pertain on the economy and unemployment. At the end of last week, while President Obama was enjoying the early indications of what we now know is a substantial post-Convention bounce, Republicans rejoiced at the release of a lousy jobs report. They were sure that would deflate what they deluded themselves into believing was but a temporary Obama polling bubble. It's the economy, stupid—Republicans rejoiced. And it is the economy. And unemployment still will be one of the key issues in this election, up and down the ballot. But not in the way Republicans think.
President Obama and the Democrats have tried to pass jobs bills. The Republicans killed the American Jobs Act. The Republicans killed the jobs bill that would have repaired our badly crumbling national infrastructure. The Republicans killed the jobs bill that would have given tax cuts to small businesses that create jobs. They're even holding up a bill specifically designed to create jobs for military veterans. The Republicans don't care about creating jobs. Republicans do care about playing politics over jobs, obstructing bills that would actually create jobs so they can exploit the lack of jobs for political gain.
Last Sunday, in the wake of that Convention bounce and that lousy jobs report, the New York Times did us all the great service of providing a case study in how false narratives are framed and propagated, even by supposed journalists working for one of the best traditional media outlets. The culprit was Jackie Calmes, but the lesson is much larger than one person's incompetence or dishonesty. This exemplifies what is so wrong with our national political conversation:
With both parties’ conventions now concluded, what is clear is that each played to type — Republicans as the party of business, Democrats of the worker. For President Obama, however, the week here captured his tricky balancing act: a four-year struggle to show that pro-worker does not mean antibusiness.
Of course, the basic facts prove otherwise, and the only reason anyone could be said to be playing to type is because people like Calmes are typecasting rather than reporting. President Obama's record on business is clear:
The U.S. economy may not be recovering as fast as President Obama likes, but at least he can make one claim: The stock market has done better under his watch than with any other recent president.
Since Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20 2009, all three major U.S. stock indexes are up more than 60 percent. The Nasdaq Composite alone has soared a whopping 105 percent.
And of course those numbers reflect the recovery from the economic meltdown President Obama inherited, and the Fed also gets some credit, but that meltdown occurred under those supposedly pro-business Republicans.
Even so, the market has performed better during Obama's 43 1/2 months in office than in any of the five prior administrations. In fact, the S&P 500 has outperformed most of the major world indexes during his presidency.
(Continue reading below the fold.)
Calmes would seem to be mistaken:
U.S. farmers are heading for their most profitable year on record despite the worst drought in half a century as high grain prices and payouts from a federal crop insurance program compensate for a smaller harvest.
The standard political narrative that Democrats are bad for business would seem to be flat wrong:
The Fortune 500 generated a total of $824.5 billion in earnings last year, up 16.4% over 2010. That beats the previous record of $785 billion, set in 2006 during a roaring economy. The 2011 profits are outsized based on two key historical metrics. They represent 7% of total sales, vs. an average of 5.14% over the 58-year history of the Fortune 500. Companies are also garnering exceptional returns on their capital. The 500 achieved a return-on-equity of 14.3%, far above the historical norm of 12%.
Calmes does include some of the positive economic news, but she buries it amidst more right-wing propaganda, where it can barely be found. But even worse is how she promotes the standard political narrative that what's best for business is best for workers, that job growth is tied to political success, and that the reason we don't have job growth is because businesses are over-regulated and over-taxed.
Calmes:
The challenge for the campaign was to counter Republican attacks at their Tampa, Fla., convention depicting Mr. Obama as the enemy of job creators when unemployment persists, while energizing his liberal base in the convention hall and beyond. The delicate juggling was most evident on Wednesday, during the brief daily window of network television coverage.
Why that is a challenge, Calmes never explains. Because she seems to be tacitly accepting and promoting the Republican narrative, both that Obama is the enemy and that businesses are job creators rather than profit-making enterprises that don't care whether or not they create jobs, just so they create profits— and in many cases make profits by destroying jobs. You know, the way Bain Capital has done. Under Mitt Romney. The same Mitt Romney who would most benefit if anyone took seriously this dishonest and perhaps deliberately calculated Calmes' narrative.
Defining businesses as job creators may be the most essential aspect of the Republican disinformation campaign. Sure, some businesses create jobs, but businesses aren't in business to create jobs, and the facts on that are also readily available, if people like Calmes actually cared to report facts honestly. Because if creating jobs was as simple as keeping businesses highly profitable, those record profits businesses have been making would have resulted in the creation of lots of jobs. Instead, those record profits have created this:
At present, cash accounts for more than 6 per cent of the assets on the balance sheets of US non-financial companies. That is the highest in at least six decades, and represents the fruit of record high profit margins. Companies cut costs through redundancies during the post-Lehman economic swoon, while negligible interest rates reduced their borrowing costs. As a result, US corporate profits are higher, as a share of gross domestic product, than at any time since 1950.
But as uncertainty persists, groups are reluctant to repay that cash to shareholders by buying back stock or – particularly – paying dividends. The pay-out ratio (the proportion of earnings that go in dividends) for the S&P 500 index is at its lowest since 1900.
Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Lagging job creation. Maybe businesses aren't, by definition, job creators. Maybe further greasing the skids for businesses isn't the way to create jobs. Maybe if corporate success meant the creation of jobs we would be seeing lots of jobs created. Which we aren't. But we are seeing this:
Profits at big U.S. companies broke records last year, and so did pay for CEOs.
The head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm.
That was up more than 6 percent from the previous year, and is the second year in a row of increases. The figure is also the highest since the AP began tracking executive compensation in 2006.
Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Record CEO pay. Lagging job creation. Maybe businesses aren't, by definition, job creators. Maybe further greasing the skids for businesses isn't the way to create jobs. Maybe if corporate success meant the creation of jobs we would be seeing lots of jobs created. Which we aren't. But I repeat myself. Because the facts bear repeating.
Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the narrative about job creation that is promoted by the Republicans and their propagandists, such as Calmes. Or maybe we're missing one final element of the Republican narrative that will make it all work. Like taxes. Like that the real problem is that these record profits and this record CEO pay and these alpine mounds of cash are getting so gobbled up by high taxes that there just isn't enough left for job creation. Or maybe not:
The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.
James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.
I'm guessing $32,000,000,000,000 could create a lot of jobs, if the accumulation of staggering amounts of wealth by a very small number of people actually had anything to do with job creation. Which it clearly doesn't. Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Record CEO pay. A staggering $32,000,000,000,000 squirreled away somewhere so it can't be taxed. So where are the jobs? And wouldn't it be nice just once to hear reporters ask that question of Republican leaders? Like maybe asking the Republican presidential nominee, like maybe at one of the televised debates?
The Republican answer to pretty much any economic situation is to cut taxes. High inflation? Cut taxes. High unemployment? Cut taxes. Economy in danger of over-heating? Cut taxes. Economy imploding? Cut taxes. So maybe someone ought to ask Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republicans how exactly cutting taxes is supposed to create jobs. What is the mechanism? What is the rationale? If corporations are making record profits, if they're sitting on mountains of cash, if CEOs are making record pay, and if a staggering $32,000,000,000,000 is sitting somewhere already untaxed, then how is lowering taxes going to create jobs? The ostensible job creators are doing awfully damn well, but they're not creating anywhere close to enough jobs. Maybe that's because the ostensible job creators aren't actually interested in creating jobs.
Remember how President Bill Clinton raised taxes, without getting a single supporting vote from Congressional Republicans? Remember the economic boom that followed, with near full employment and low inflation? Remember how the Lesser Bush cut taxes and cut regulations and produced the worst economic crash since the Great Depression? That's the honest economic narrative. Cutting taxes doesn't create jobs. Allowing the wealthy to accumulate more wealth doesn't create jobs. And in case the Republicans trot out their other tired and dishonest rationale, the problem isn't over-regulation, either:
Labor Department data show that only a tiny percentage of companies that experience large layoffs cite government regulation as the reason. Since Barack Obama took office, just two-tenths of 1 percent of layoffs have been due to government regulation, the data show.
Businesses frequently complain about regulation, but there is little evidence that it is any worse now than in the past or that it is costing significant numbers of jobs. Most economists believe there is a simpler explanation: Companies aren't hiring because there isn't enough consumer demand.
Like every Republican excuse for cutting taxes, cutting regulation is just more factually dishonest false narrative:
We asked experts, and most told us that while there is relatively little scholarship on the issue, the evidence so far is that the overall effect on jobs is minimal. Regulations do destroy some jobs, but they also create others. Mostly, they just shift jobs within the economy.
“The effects on jobs are negligible. They’re not job-creating or job-destroying on average,” said Richard Morgenstern, who served in the EPA from the Reagan to Clinton years and is now at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank.
Cutting taxes doesn't create jobs. Cutting regulations doesn't create jobs. The Republican proposals to cut taxes and regulations won't create jobs. But you know what would create jobs and create a full economic recovery? Keynesian stimulus would create jobs and create a full economic recovery. Government spending specifically focused on direct job creation. That was how the Great Depression was resolved. That was how President Obama stopped the economic freefall he inherited from the anti-tax, anti-regulation Republican Bush administration, which was such a friend of business that it created the worst economic collapse, both for businesses and jobs, since the Great Depression.
Republicans want to blame President Obama for high unemployment, but their solution clearly doesn't work. And they do know that it doesn't work. Because they don't really care whether or not it works. Republicans don't care about creating jobs, they only care about allowing fewer and fewer people to accumulate more and more wealth and power. And the media won't call it class warfare, but they will call it class warfare when anyone calls attention to it.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/16/1131863/-The-Republicans-want-to-talk-about-unemployment-Let-s-accommodate-them
The Republicans want to talk about unemployment. Let's accommodate them.
The Republicans would prefer to change the subject from the latest appalling proof that Mitt Romney is fundamentally unfit to be even within the same zip code as the Oval Office. They would much prefer that everyone focus on unemployment. Because we are nice people, let's accommodate them. Because this election very quickly is moving past the question of who will be president next year, and now is more about control of next year's Congress. This election also has become about reframing false political narratives, for the benefit of Democrats, the nation, the world, and the very concept of truth, going forward.
The Republicans have no credibility on deficits. The Republicans have no credibility on national security. For decades, both have been all but ceded as Republican strengths, despite plenty of evidence that they shouldn't be. On those issues, Democrats have often played on the Republican home field, to the detriment of everyone. The Republicans would like for the same dynamic to pertain on the economy and unemployment. At the end of last week, while President Obama was enjoying the early indications of what we now know is a substantial post-Convention bounce, Republicans rejoiced at the release of a lousy jobs report. They were sure that would deflate what they deluded themselves into believing was but a temporary Obama polling bubble. It's the economy, stupid—Republicans rejoiced. And it is the economy. And unemployment still will be one of the key issues in this election, up and down the ballot. But not in the way Republicans think.
President Obama and the Democrats have tried to pass jobs bills. The Republicans killed the American Jobs Act. The Republicans killed the jobs bill that would have repaired our badly crumbling national infrastructure. The Republicans killed the jobs bill that would have given tax cuts to small businesses that create jobs. They're even holding up a bill specifically designed to create jobs for military veterans. The Republicans don't care about creating jobs. Republicans do care about playing politics over jobs, obstructing bills that would actually create jobs so they can exploit the lack of jobs for political gain.
Last Sunday, in the wake of that Convention bounce and that lousy jobs report, the New York Times did us all the great service of providing a case study in how false narratives are framed and propagated, even by supposed journalists working for one of the best traditional media outlets. The culprit was Jackie Calmes, but the lesson is much larger than one person's incompetence or dishonesty. This exemplifies what is so wrong with our national political conversation:
With both parties’ conventions now concluded, what is clear is that each played to type — Republicans as the party of business, Democrats of the worker. For President Obama, however, the week here captured his tricky balancing act: a four-year struggle to show that pro-worker does not mean antibusiness.
Of course, the basic facts prove otherwise, and the only reason anyone could be said to be playing to type is because people like Calmes are typecasting rather than reporting. President Obama's record on business is clear:
The U.S. economy may not be recovering as fast as President Obama likes, but at least he can make one claim: The stock market has done better under his watch than with any other recent president.
Since Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20 2009, all three major U.S. stock indexes are up more than 60 percent. The Nasdaq Composite alone has soared a whopping 105 percent.
And of course those numbers reflect the recovery from the economic meltdown President Obama inherited, and the Fed also gets some credit, but that meltdown occurred under those supposedly pro-business Republicans.
Even so, the market has performed better during Obama's 43 1/2 months in office than in any of the five prior administrations. In fact, the S&P 500 has outperformed most of the major world indexes during his presidency.
(Continue reading below the fold.)
Calmes would seem to be mistaken:
U.S. farmers are heading for their most profitable year on record despite the worst drought in half a century as high grain prices and payouts from a federal crop insurance program compensate for a smaller harvest.
The standard political narrative that Democrats are bad for business would seem to be flat wrong:
The Fortune 500 generated a total of $824.5 billion in earnings last year, up 16.4% over 2010. That beats the previous record of $785 billion, set in 2006 during a roaring economy. The 2011 profits are outsized based on two key historical metrics. They represent 7% of total sales, vs. an average of 5.14% over the 58-year history of the Fortune 500. Companies are also garnering exceptional returns on their capital. The 500 achieved a return-on-equity of 14.3%, far above the historical norm of 12%.
Calmes does include some of the positive economic news, but she buries it amidst more right-wing propaganda, where it can barely be found. But even worse is how she promotes the standard political narrative that what's best for business is best for workers, that job growth is tied to political success, and that the reason we don't have job growth is because businesses are over-regulated and over-taxed.
Calmes:
The challenge for the campaign was to counter Republican attacks at their Tampa, Fla., convention depicting Mr. Obama as the enemy of job creators when unemployment persists, while energizing his liberal base in the convention hall and beyond. The delicate juggling was most evident on Wednesday, during the brief daily window of network television coverage.
Why that is a challenge, Calmes never explains. Because she seems to be tacitly accepting and promoting the Republican narrative, both that Obama is the enemy and that businesses are job creators rather than profit-making enterprises that don't care whether or not they create jobs, just so they create profits— and in many cases make profits by destroying jobs. You know, the way Bain Capital has done. Under Mitt Romney. The same Mitt Romney who would most benefit if anyone took seriously this dishonest and perhaps deliberately calculated Calmes' narrative.
Defining businesses as job creators may be the most essential aspect of the Republican disinformation campaign. Sure, some businesses create jobs, but businesses aren't in business to create jobs, and the facts on that are also readily available, if people like Calmes actually cared to report facts honestly. Because if creating jobs was as simple as keeping businesses highly profitable, those record profits businesses have been making would have resulted in the creation of lots of jobs. Instead, those record profits have created this:
At present, cash accounts for more than 6 per cent of the assets on the balance sheets of US non-financial companies. That is the highest in at least six decades, and represents the fruit of record high profit margins. Companies cut costs through redundancies during the post-Lehman economic swoon, while negligible interest rates reduced their borrowing costs. As a result, US corporate profits are higher, as a share of gross domestic product, than at any time since 1950.
But as uncertainty persists, groups are reluctant to repay that cash to shareholders by buying back stock or – particularly – paying dividends. The pay-out ratio (the proportion of earnings that go in dividends) for the S&P 500 index is at its lowest since 1900.
Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Lagging job creation. Maybe businesses aren't, by definition, job creators. Maybe further greasing the skids for businesses isn't the way to create jobs. Maybe if corporate success meant the creation of jobs we would be seeing lots of jobs created. Which we aren't. But we are seeing this:
Profits at big U.S. companies broke records last year, and so did pay for CEOs.
The head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm.
That was up more than 6 percent from the previous year, and is the second year in a row of increases. The figure is also the highest since the AP began tracking executive compensation in 2006.
Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Record CEO pay. Lagging job creation. Maybe businesses aren't, by definition, job creators. Maybe further greasing the skids for businesses isn't the way to create jobs. Maybe if corporate success meant the creation of jobs we would be seeing lots of jobs created. Which we aren't. But I repeat myself. Because the facts bear repeating.
Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the narrative about job creation that is promoted by the Republicans and their propagandists, such as Calmes. Or maybe we're missing one final element of the Republican narrative that will make it all work. Like taxes. Like that the real problem is that these record profits and this record CEO pay and these alpine mounds of cash are getting so gobbled up by high taxes that there just isn't enough left for job creation. Or maybe not:
The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.
James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.
I'm guessing $32,000,000,000,000 could create a lot of jobs, if the accumulation of staggering amounts of wealth by a very small number of people actually had anything to do with job creation. Which it clearly doesn't. Record corporate profits. The largest piles of cash in six decades. The lowest dividend pay-out ratio in more than a century. Record CEO pay. A staggering $32,000,000,000,000 squirreled away somewhere so it can't be taxed. So where are the jobs? And wouldn't it be nice just once to hear reporters ask that question of Republican leaders? Like maybe asking the Republican presidential nominee, like maybe at one of the televised debates?
The Republican answer to pretty much any economic situation is to cut taxes. High inflation? Cut taxes. High unemployment? Cut taxes. Economy in danger of over-heating? Cut taxes. Economy imploding? Cut taxes. So maybe someone ought to ask Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republicans how exactly cutting taxes is supposed to create jobs. What is the mechanism? What is the rationale? If corporations are making record profits, if they're sitting on mountains of cash, if CEOs are making record pay, and if a staggering $32,000,000,000,000 is sitting somewhere already untaxed, then how is lowering taxes going to create jobs? The ostensible job creators are doing awfully damn well, but they're not creating anywhere close to enough jobs. Maybe that's because the ostensible job creators aren't actually interested in creating jobs.
Remember how President Bill Clinton raised taxes, without getting a single supporting vote from Congressional Republicans? Remember the economic boom that followed, with near full employment and low inflation? Remember how the Lesser Bush cut taxes and cut regulations and produced the worst economic crash since the Great Depression? That's the honest economic narrative. Cutting taxes doesn't create jobs. Allowing the wealthy to accumulate more wealth doesn't create jobs. And in case the Republicans trot out their other tired and dishonest rationale, the problem isn't over-regulation, either:
Labor Department data show that only a tiny percentage of companies that experience large layoffs cite government regulation as the reason. Since Barack Obama took office, just two-tenths of 1 percent of layoffs have been due to government regulation, the data show.
Businesses frequently complain about regulation, but there is little evidence that it is any worse now than in the past or that it is costing significant numbers of jobs. Most economists believe there is a simpler explanation: Companies aren't hiring because there isn't enough consumer demand.
Like every Republican excuse for cutting taxes, cutting regulation is just more factually dishonest false narrative:
We asked experts, and most told us that while there is relatively little scholarship on the issue, the evidence so far is that the overall effect on jobs is minimal. Regulations do destroy some jobs, but they also create others. Mostly, they just shift jobs within the economy.
“The effects on jobs are negligible. They’re not job-creating or job-destroying on average,” said Richard Morgenstern, who served in the EPA from the Reagan to Clinton years and is now at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank.
Cutting taxes doesn't create jobs. Cutting regulations doesn't create jobs. The Republican proposals to cut taxes and regulations won't create jobs. But you know what would create jobs and create a full economic recovery? Keynesian stimulus would create jobs and create a full economic recovery. Government spending specifically focused on direct job creation. That was how the Great Depression was resolved. That was how President Obama stopped the economic freefall he inherited from the anti-tax, anti-regulation Republican Bush administration, which was such a friend of business that it created the worst economic collapse, both for businesses and jobs, since the Great Depression.
Republicans want to blame President Obama for high unemployment, but their solution clearly doesn't work. And they do know that it doesn't work. Because they don't really care whether or not it works. Republicans don't care about creating jobs, they only care about allowing fewer and fewer people to accumulate more and more wealth and power. And the media won't call it class warfare, but they will call it class warfare when anyone calls attention to it.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
1 2 3 4 can I have a little more...
Comedy is reality. As of course reality is fun. In this as in most cases there is a punch line. And the joke is on us.
Main Street finally caught up to Wall Street. To keep wages low profits as high as possible ah capitalism. NEiLc
Los Angeles Review of Books - How To Read Žižek
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=897&fulltext=1&media=
... Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, Žižek believes that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is “class struggle.” The “struggle” is not between two pre-existing classes — the working class and the capitalist or owner class — that happen to enter into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the “fallout” of capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people “worked” before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to extract profits from this “free” labor power. The conflict is the system, the system the conflict.
“Class struggle” is important for Žižek because it produces two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world — the difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion, it is a completely different framework. Reasonable people from “both sides” cannot come together and hash out a compromise that takes everyone’s interests into account. The “middle ground” is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents our attempts to paper over and ignore that chasm.
So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake can’t be a conflict between cultures, because for Žižek that would imply pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be about the Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our local culture, because that balance didn’t exist in the first place. No, the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren’t taking “our” jobs — the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in who they pay.
--------------
Main Street finally caught up to Wall Street. To keep wages low profits as high as possible ah capitalism. NEiLc
Los Angeles Review of Books - How To Read Žižek
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=897&fulltext=1&media=
... Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, Žižek believes that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is “class struggle.” The “struggle” is not between two pre-existing classes — the working class and the capitalist or owner class — that happen to enter into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the “fallout” of capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people “worked” before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to extract profits from this “free” labor power. The conflict is the system, the system the conflict.
“Class struggle” is important for Žižek because it produces two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world — the difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion, it is a completely different framework. Reasonable people from “both sides” cannot come together and hash out a compromise that takes everyone’s interests into account. The “middle ground” is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents our attempts to paper over and ignore that chasm.
So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake can’t be a conflict between cultures, because for Žižek that would imply pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be about the Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our local culture, because that balance didn’t exist in the first place. No, the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren’t taking “our” jobs — the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in who they pay.
--------------
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Best laugh so far today.
NYTimes: Bill, Barack and Us -
Gail Collins
The Democratic convention was treated to many, many, many words of wisdom from the Talker in Chief.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/opinion/collins-the-roots-are-back.html
Friday, August 31, 2012
It pays to marry the right woman
Worst Ryan puffery yet?
August 30, 2012 10:42 AM | DAVID SIROTA - SALON
The unwritten rule in Washington journalism circles is to never — ever — mention cash. Though the lifeblood of Washington runs as green as a $100 bill, loyal Beltway reporters know that to ascend the career ladder, they must turn the journalism 101 aphorism on its head — rather than doggedly follow the money, they must pretend it either doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist as a decisive factor in American politics.
Why? Because covering the influence of money would offend powerful media moguls, advertisers and politicians who rely on the monied system for influence — and in “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” fashion, that’s anathema to today’s D.C. reporters. Additionally, acknowledging the almighty dollar would also force those reporters to admit the hideous and humiliating realities of their own jobs — it would effectively admit that political reporters are not doing God’s work in some venerable system of honest ideas and principles, but that instead they are bottom-feeding in a swamp of blatant corruption and crime.
To know that money is most often written out of America’s political story even as it sculpts that story, is to simply behold most stories about government and elected officials. But if you happen to be on the hunt for one particularly blatant example of the “No Money” rule in journalism, behold the series on the Ryan family being published by the New York Times in the lead up to Paul Ryan’s Republican convention speech.
In the first story, on Ryan’s, Janna, we are treated to a soft-lit fable about an innocent young woman who in aw-shucks fashion miraculously finds herself married to the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee. As the Times tells it, Janna is connected to Democratic Party aristocracy in Oklahoma, and eventually opted to leave the Sooner State to allegedly “dabble in liberal causes” and follow a supposed “interest in social justice mand the broader world around her” at Wellesley College. In this magnificent mythology, Janna — through none of the corrupting forces of monied Washington — miraculously obtained a job “working on Capitol Hill for a family friend, Representative Bill Brewster” and there “gained a reputation for being smart and social.” Ultimately, we are told that Janna selflessly decided to “give up her career” to “become a wife and mother in Janesville, Wis., as her husband built his career as the ideological leader of his party in Congress.”
If this sounds a little too much like a fairy tale, that’s because it is — it glosses over the ugly horror story that is Janna Ryan’s career.
That’s right, in a 1,235 word piece, the Times gives readers just one fleeting and gauzy sentence about Janna Ryan’s work as a lobbyist, and then moves on to other more important things – like, say, quoting her friends calling her “down to earth.” Thanks to the unwritten “No Money” rule, there isn’t a single dollar sign in the entire piece, despite her making millions for her lobbying firms. Thanks to the rule, readers aren’t told the sordid details about how Janna became not just any old lobbyist — but a high-powered shill for some of the most powerful corporate interests in Washington. In other words, readers don’t get the true story — the real macabre tale of a politically connected daughter of privilege using her connections to get a D.C. job, then getting moneyed up by lobbying firms, and finally coming out on the other side of the machine as the life companion of one of the most loyal corporate-directed Republican lawmakers in Congress.
A few days after the Janna Ryan hagiography, the Times’ crack political team moved on to her husband — and once again pretended money had nothing to do with his ascent. In this spectacular dollop of revisionism, Ryan is reimagined as an earnest policy wonk who “took an early interest in economics”; who “came to realize that the best place to morph theory into policy was Washington”; and whose alleged principles “placed him outside his party’s mainstream.” Respecting the “No Money” rule, the Times leave unmentioned the fact that Ryan’s record is that of a standard-issue Huge Government Republican and a professional politician who famously traded legislative favors for campaign contributions. Also unmentioned is Ryan’s record as one of the most prolific corporate fundraisers in modern Republican history. All readers are given is newspeak — such as cheery references to Ryan never “miss(ing) an opportunity to network” and Ryan always “highlight(ing) the work of his conservative contacts.” Euphemisms never looked so absurd — and deceptive.
Put it all together, and the truth is clear: the power couple that is the Ryans is one that rose to prominence atop a mountain of cash. Without that mountain, there would likely be no political “power” in the duo. That this obvious truism is apparently too taboo for many news outlets to even mention shows just how much the “No Money” rule now dominates campaign coverage — and how much that dominance deprives voters of critical information.l
August 30, 2012 10:42 AM | DAVID SIROTA - SALON
The unwritten rule in Washington journalism circles is to never — ever — mention cash. Though the lifeblood of Washington runs as green as a $100 bill, loyal Beltway reporters know that to ascend the career ladder, they must turn the journalism 101 aphorism on its head — rather than doggedly follow the money, they must pretend it either doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist as a decisive factor in American politics.
Why? Because covering the influence of money would offend powerful media moguls, advertisers and politicians who rely on the monied system for influence — and in “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” fashion, that’s anathema to today’s D.C. reporters. Additionally, acknowledging the almighty dollar would also force those reporters to admit the hideous and humiliating realities of their own jobs — it would effectively admit that political reporters are not doing God’s work in some venerable system of honest ideas and principles, but that instead they are bottom-feeding in a swamp of blatant corruption and crime.
To know that money is most often written out of America’s political story even as it sculpts that story, is to simply behold most stories about government and elected officials. But if you happen to be on the hunt for one particularly blatant example of the “No Money” rule in journalism, behold the series on the Ryan family being published by the New York Times in the lead up to Paul Ryan’s Republican convention speech.
In the first story, on Ryan’s, Janna, we are treated to a soft-lit fable about an innocent young woman who in aw-shucks fashion miraculously finds herself married to the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee. As the Times tells it, Janna is connected to Democratic Party aristocracy in Oklahoma, and eventually opted to leave the Sooner State to allegedly “dabble in liberal causes” and follow a supposed “interest in social justice mand the broader world around her” at Wellesley College. In this magnificent mythology, Janna — through none of the corrupting forces of monied Washington — miraculously obtained a job “working on Capitol Hill for a family friend, Representative Bill Brewster” and there “gained a reputation for being smart and social.” Ultimately, we are told that Janna selflessly decided to “give up her career” to “become a wife and mother in Janesville, Wis., as her husband built his career as the ideological leader of his party in Congress.”
If this sounds a little too much like a fairy tale, that’s because it is — it glosses over the ugly horror story that is Janna Ryan’s career.
That’s right, in a 1,235 word piece, the Times gives readers just one fleeting and gauzy sentence about Janna Ryan’s work as a lobbyist, and then moves on to other more important things – like, say, quoting her friends calling her “down to earth.” Thanks to the unwritten “No Money” rule, there isn’t a single dollar sign in the entire piece, despite her making millions for her lobbying firms. Thanks to the rule, readers aren’t told the sordid details about how Janna became not just any old lobbyist — but a high-powered shill for some of the most powerful corporate interests in Washington. In other words, readers don’t get the true story — the real macabre tale of a politically connected daughter of privilege using her connections to get a D.C. job, then getting moneyed up by lobbying firms, and finally coming out on the other side of the machine as the life companion of one of the most loyal corporate-directed Republican lawmakers in Congress.
A few days after the Janna Ryan hagiography, the Times’ crack political team moved on to her husband — and once again pretended money had nothing to do with his ascent. In this spectacular dollop of revisionism, Ryan is reimagined as an earnest policy wonk who “took an early interest in economics”; who “came to realize that the best place to morph theory into policy was Washington”; and whose alleged principles “placed him outside his party’s mainstream.” Respecting the “No Money” rule, the Times leave unmentioned the fact that Ryan’s record is that of a standard-issue Huge Government Republican and a professional politician who famously traded legislative favors for campaign contributions. Also unmentioned is Ryan’s record as one of the most prolific corporate fundraisers in modern Republican history. All readers are given is newspeak — such as cheery references to Ryan never “miss(ing) an opportunity to network” and Ryan always “highlight(ing) the work of his conservative contacts.” Euphemisms never looked so absurd — and deceptive.
Put it all together, and the truth is clear: the power couple that is the Ryans is one that rose to prominence atop a mountain of cash. Without that mountain, there would likely be no political “power” in the duo. That this obvious truism is apparently too taboo for many news outlets to even mention shows just how much the “No Money” rule now dominates campaign coverage — and how much that dominance deprives voters of critical information.l
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Romney's Choice
If Romney is allowed by his party to choose what planks of the platform he wants to agree with and support. Why shouldn't woman have a choice about what they want to agree to and support.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Reproduction
To Republicans, women are simply the sum of their parts
The GOP's adoption of an anti-abortion platform is further indication of a party that has no clue about reproductive life -
Ana Marie Cox - The Guardian, Thu 23 Aug 2012 19.30 BST
The GOP's adoption of an anti-abortion platform is further indication of a party that has no clue about reproductive life -
Ana Marie Cox - The Guardian, Thu 23 Aug 2012 19.30 BST
He he ha ha uh oh 2
"Hey Representative Akin, I've got a question for you. If women can't get pregnant from legitimate rape? Then how come theres so many light skinned Black people walking around Alabama? - W. Kamau Bell
Who is Romney beholden to.
Don't forget to show your tax returns Mr. Romney.
Big business is doing fine in many places. They get the loans they need, they can deal with all the regulation. They know how to find ways to get through the tax code, save money by putting various things in the places where there are low tax havens around the world for their businesses.” - Mitt Romney
http://m.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-says-big-businesses-are-doing-fine-attributes-success-in-part-to-offshore-tax-havens/2012/08/23/298004e6-ed8b-11e1-866f-60a00f604425_story.html
Big business is doing fine in many places. They get the loans they need, they can deal with all the regulation. They know how to find ways to get through the tax code, save money by putting various things in the places where there are low tax havens around the world for their businesses.” - Mitt Romney
http://m.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-says-big-businesses-are-doing-fine-attributes-success-in-part-to-offshore-tax-havens/2012/08/23/298004e6-ed8b-11e1-866f-60a00f604425_story.html
Sunday, August 26, 2012
You cannot be "pro-life" if you don't give a damn about the lives of the living.
Thanks to Denise Oliver Velez from DailyKoz for this
George Carlin's words on this:
Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked.
George Carlin's words on this:
Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked.
He he ha ha uh oh
Great sense of humor once again...
As a fat old wargamer used to say : always shoot the guy with the gun first.
-----------
Arms and the Duck
By GAIL COLLINS
Last Updated: Aug. 24, 8:10 PM CDT
The gun lobby fairy tale resurfaces. News flash: It’s only in the movies that people are good shots during a violent encounter.
(Here's her point.)
...Under federal law, you only can use guns with a maximum three-bullet capacity if you’re hunting migratory birds. Even the most completely mindless faction in the National Rifle Association appears willing to give that a pass.
“Hunting’s a different thing,” said Jeff Nass, the president of Wisconsin Force, an N.R.A. affiliate. “The ducks and geese can’t shoot back.” Mass shootings, Nass contended, do not occur because crazy people have access to weapons that allow them to hit a large number of people in seconds. “Mass shootings come into play because nobody’s there defending themselves,” he said. “The solution is self-defense.”
So the guy driving toward the Sikh temple with the high-capacity magazine on his gun was legal until he started shooting. The guy sitting in the duck blind, no. Mull that one over the weekend.
The rest here...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/collins-arms-and-the-duck.html
As a fat old wargamer used to say : always shoot the guy with the gun first.
-----------
Arms and the Duck
By GAIL COLLINS
Last Updated: Aug. 24, 8:10 PM CDT
The gun lobby fairy tale resurfaces. News flash: It’s only in the movies that people are good shots during a violent encounter.
(Here's her point.)
...Under federal law, you only can use guns with a maximum three-bullet capacity if you’re hunting migratory birds. Even the most completely mindless faction in the National Rifle Association appears willing to give that a pass.
“Hunting’s a different thing,” said Jeff Nass, the president of Wisconsin Force, an N.R.A. affiliate. “The ducks and geese can’t shoot back.” Mass shootings, Nass contended, do not occur because crazy people have access to weapons that allow them to hit a large number of people in seconds. “Mass shootings come into play because nobody’s there defending themselves,” he said. “The solution is self-defense.”
So the guy driving toward the Sikh temple with the high-capacity magazine on his gun was legal until he started shooting. The guy sitting in the duck blind, no. Mull that one over the weekend.
The rest here...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/collins-arms-and-the-duck.html
Friday, August 24, 2012
No. Stuff like this doesn't happen!
STUFF HAPPENS': When police pursued, the gunman drew his weapon, prompting the officers to respond with deadly force. Nine innocent bystanders were caught in the crossfire - struck by bullets fired by the first responders—but all are expected to live.
Robert Asika, one of those believed to have been shot by police, had this to say when interviewed by the New York Times: “I guess, you know, this stuff happens.
Robert Asika, one of those believed to have been shot by police, had this to say when interviewed by the New York Times: “I guess, you know, this stuff happens.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Holy Hurricane Bachmann!
So on August 29th 2011 the article below appeared. If all things being equal. Then the hurricane slowly approaching Tampa today can only mean one thing: God's hand is on the way to showing Tampa what it's all about.
Michele Bachmann ties God to quake, hurricane. Was she kidding? - Los Angeles Times
August 29, 2011|By Michael Muskal | Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/29/news/la-pn-bachmann-hurricane-god-20110829
It seems that every time there is a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane, someone stands up to say it is a sign that God is unhappy with some human foible.
With the East Coast still reeling from last week’s earthquake and Irene’s deadly path, the latest to invoke God’s wrath is GOP presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann.
At a campaign rally on Sunday in Sarasota, Fla., Bachmann took note of last week’s magnitude 5.8 quake that rocked the Washington area and whose effects were felt beyond New York City. She also cited Irene, which hit the United States as a Category 1 hurricane before traveling up the East Coast to Canada, leaving an estimated billions of dollars in damages and almost two dozen reported deaths.
“I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians,” Bachmann said to supporters. “We've had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here? Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.' ”
In the video broadcast on the morning television shows on Monday, Bachmann, who has been castigated in the past for what some have perceived as gaffes, can be seen smiling.
“Of course she was saying it in jest,” Alice Stewart, spokeswoman for Bachmann's campaign, said in a statement sent to some media outlets.
Giving natural phenomena a political spin has a long and established history. In recent years, it hasn’t been unusual for conservative evangelists, part of Bachmann’s core constituency, to cite such events as God’s punishment for human political failings.
For example Pat Robertson invoked last week’s earthquake that cracked the Washington Monument as a symbol of God’s displeasure with the United States, which the minister argues has moved away from God’s path.
Pastor John Hagee embarrassed then-Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona by saying that Hurricane Katrina was God’s vengeance on New Orleans for hosting a gay pride parade. McCain promptly rejected the comparison. michael.muskal@latimes.com
NEiLc
224.619.6701
http://chicagogheezer.blogspot.com
Michele Bachmann ties God to quake, hurricane. Was she kidding? - Los Angeles Times
August 29, 2011|By Michael Muskal | Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/29/news/la-pn-bachmann-hurricane-god-20110829
It seems that every time there is a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane, someone stands up to say it is a sign that God is unhappy with some human foible.
With the East Coast still reeling from last week’s earthquake and Irene’s deadly path, the latest to invoke God’s wrath is GOP presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann.
At a campaign rally on Sunday in Sarasota, Fla., Bachmann took note of last week’s magnitude 5.8 quake that rocked the Washington area and whose effects were felt beyond New York City. She also cited Irene, which hit the United States as a Category 1 hurricane before traveling up the East Coast to Canada, leaving an estimated billions of dollars in damages and almost two dozen reported deaths.
“I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians,” Bachmann said to supporters. “We've had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here? Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.' ”
In the video broadcast on the morning television shows on Monday, Bachmann, who has been castigated in the past for what some have perceived as gaffes, can be seen smiling.
“Of course she was saying it in jest,” Alice Stewart, spokeswoman for Bachmann's campaign, said in a statement sent to some media outlets.
Giving natural phenomena a political spin has a long and established history. In recent years, it hasn’t been unusual for conservative evangelists, part of Bachmann’s core constituency, to cite such events as God’s punishment for human political failings.
For example Pat Robertson invoked last week’s earthquake that cracked the Washington Monument as a symbol of God’s displeasure with the United States, which the minister argues has moved away from God’s path.
Pastor John Hagee embarrassed then-Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona by saying that Hurricane Katrina was God’s vengeance on New Orleans for hosting a gay pride parade. McCain promptly rejected the comparison. michael.muskal@latimes.com
NEiLc
224.619.6701
http://chicagogheezer.blogspot.com
Hurricane Rush
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Limbaugh-takes-aim-at-Obama-over-hurricane-3809525.php
Limbaugh takes aim at Obama over hurricane forecast - Houston Chronicle
Rush Limbaugh claimed in his radio show Wednesday that the National Hurricane Center's warning that Tropical Storm Isaac could hit the Republican convention in Florida next week was wishful thinking, according to rawstory.com.
"The National Hurricane Center is Obama," he said. "The National Weather Service is part of the Commerce Department. It is Obama."
Isaac is currently taking aim at the Dominican Republic and Haiti and could threaten Florida next week as a hurricane.
Read more: Tropical Storm Isaac takes aim at Hispaniola
Limbaugh questioned the need for the National Hurricane Center, which tracks such storms.
"They are talking about this Hurricane Isaac thing," he reportedly said. " We, who live in south Florida, become experts on it and we don't need the National Hurricane Center -- we don't need all these weather dolts analyzing this for us."
Limbaugh, according to rawstory.com, said there was no reason to believe the storm would hit Tampa, where the convention is slated to be held from Aug. 27 to Aug. 30.
"I can see Obama sending FEMA in in advance of the hurricane hitting Tampa so that the Republican convention is nothing but a bunch of tents in Tampa," he said. "A bunch of RVs and stuff. Make it look like a disaster area before the hurricane even hits there."
Limbaugh takes aim at Obama over hurricane forecast - Houston Chronicle
Rush Limbaugh claimed in his radio show Wednesday that the National Hurricane Center's warning that Tropical Storm Isaac could hit the Republican convention in Florida next week was wishful thinking, according to rawstory.com.
"The National Hurricane Center is Obama," he said. "The National Weather Service is part of the Commerce Department. It is Obama."
Isaac is currently taking aim at the Dominican Republic and Haiti and could threaten Florida next week as a hurricane.
Read more: Tropical Storm Isaac takes aim at Hispaniola
Limbaugh questioned the need for the National Hurricane Center, which tracks such storms.
"They are talking about this Hurricane Isaac thing," he reportedly said. " We, who live in south Florida, become experts on it and we don't need the National Hurricane Center -- we don't need all these weather dolts analyzing this for us."
Limbaugh, according to rawstory.com, said there was no reason to believe the storm would hit Tampa, where the convention is slated to be held from Aug. 27 to Aug. 30.
"I can see Obama sending FEMA in in advance of the hurricane hitting Tampa so that the Republican convention is nothing but a bunch of tents in Tampa," he said. "A bunch of RVs and stuff. Make it look like a disaster area before the hurricane even hits there."
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Self-determination
Irin Carmon once again...
But when progressives cede the moral center to the rape exception, they are implicitly buying into the idea that some reasons to have abortions are more justified than others — and that we should be interrogating these reasons at all. As Tracy Weitz, who conducts empirical research on women who have abortions (remember science?), wrote recently, ”In many ways people opposed to abortion in all cases have a more consistent, and I would say, honest position. For them, either a blastocyst, embryo or fetus has a right to life, no matter how it was conceived, or a woman doesn’t have the right to terminate a pregnancy, no matter the circumstances.” She calls out commentators, including the very pro-choice Rachel Maddow, for saying that politicians are extreme when they even oppose exceptions for rape and incest. ”Unfortunately,” Weitz writes, “it is extreme to oppose the right of any woman to make decisions about the direction of her life, no matter the circumstances under which she finds herself pregnant.” In other words, either you believe a woman has the right to decide not to be pregnant anymore, or you think you should get a say in her decision.
It’s not that I don’t understand why people, including pro-choice organizations, like to talk about rape or life endangerment exceptions. They illustrate how incredibly cruel opponents to abortion are, how divorced they are from the difficult and knotty circumstances of real life. And they help people who can’t understand what kind of woman has an abortion — despite that real 1-in-3 statistic — realize that all kinds of women have abortions, including ones they find sympathetic. Women who have abortions have been so demonized that storytelling helps make that essential empathic leap that so many people are missing. But as Akin shows, once you start haggling over reasons, you’re giving up half the fight — which is that this is about bodily autonomy and respect for women’s ability to determine their own lives.
But when progressives cede the moral center to the rape exception, they are implicitly buying into the idea that some reasons to have abortions are more justified than others — and that we should be interrogating these reasons at all. As Tracy Weitz, who conducts empirical research on women who have abortions (remember science?), wrote recently, ”In many ways people opposed to abortion in all cases have a more consistent, and I would say, honest position. For them, either a blastocyst, embryo or fetus has a right to life, no matter how it was conceived, or a woman doesn’t have the right to terminate a pregnancy, no matter the circumstances.” She calls out commentators, including the very pro-choice Rachel Maddow, for saying that politicians are extreme when they even oppose exceptions for rape and incest. ”Unfortunately,” Weitz writes, “it is extreme to oppose the right of any woman to make decisions about the direction of her life, no matter the circumstances under which she finds herself pregnant.” In other words, either you believe a woman has the right to decide not to be pregnant anymore, or you think you should get a say in her decision.
It’s not that I don’t understand why people, including pro-choice organizations, like to talk about rape or life endangerment exceptions. They illustrate how incredibly cruel opponents to abortion are, how divorced they are from the difficult and knotty circumstances of real life. And they help people who can’t understand what kind of woman has an abortion — despite that real 1-in-3 statistic — realize that all kinds of women have abortions, including ones they find sympathetic. Women who have abortions have been so demonized that storytelling helps make that essential empathic leap that so many people are missing. But as Akin shows, once you start haggling over reasons, you’re giving up half the fight — which is that this is about bodily autonomy and respect for women’s ability to determine their own lives.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Reality vs Newsweek
A point by point rejection of Newsweeks Obama piece ...... by Jared Bernstein
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/a-mess-of-a-screed/
A Mess of a Screed
Aug 20, 2012
What do you do if you’re loaded for bear and they call off the hunt?
I was just in the chair at MSNBC about to argue with Naill Ferguson about his anti-Obama screed in Newsweek but they had to cancel the hit.
NF’s piece is such a mess of factual errors, contradictions, and misguided impressions that one shouldn’t spend a lot of time on it, but since I prepped, allow me a bit of a data dump.
First off, note to Newsweek: create a job and hire a fact-checker. On my first read through this piece I listed 13 errors, including factual mistakes and misleading impressions. Here are a few examples:
–The President failed to deliver on his promises on new investments in infrastructure and clean energy.
Put aside for a second that NF later in the piece supports an agenda that precludes such investments. The claim is wrong. I was about to start collecting the evidence when I recalled just reading it all packed together very nicely in Mike Grunwald’s new book, as he lists the investments in the Recovery Act, passed less than four weeks into the President’s term. He even provides the sections of the bill.
“roads and bridges (Title XII), transmission lines (Secs. 301, 401, 1705) and broadband lines (Titles I, II), scientific research (Titles II, III, IV, VII), electronic medical records (Title XIII), solar and wind power (over a dozen provision), biofuel refineries (Title IV), electric cars (Sec. 1141), green manufacturing (Sec. 1302), and education reform (Sec. 14005).”
[See my recent discussion with Grunwald here.]
–One half of Americans don’t pay taxes (NF: “We are becoming a fifty-fifty nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits).
That’s only true of federal income taxes. Virtually everyone who works pays payroll taxes, and they and everyone else often face state and sales taxes as well. Furthermore, the latter are regressive, as lower income households pay larger shares of their income in these forms of taxes than wealthy households (see figures here).
–The Affordable Care Act adds to the deficit.
No. According to various scores by the CBO, it reduces the deficit (slightly in the first decade, more in the second). NF cites the costs of the bill but ignores the spending cuts and tax increases that more than pay for it.
This is the stuff of House Republican talking-point sheets. How it ended up in Newsweek is more than a little scary.
One could go on for much longer, including the foreign policy parts, where NF scratches his head as to why the President polls “relatively strong on national security.” (Um…bin Laden…out of Iraq…draw down in Afghanistan). There’s even a graph of China’s level of GDP passing that of America’s around 2017, as predicted by the IMF. That’s surely an interesting observation but what is the point in an article about the President’s alleged policy failures? Does NF really believe that a different president would change that prediction? If so, let us ask the IMF who will tell us of course not. It’s a function of a billion+ Chinese in an emerging economy generating high growth rates and thus higher levels of aggregate GDP (as opposed to per capita).
But let’s just touch on fiscal policy, and NF’s position that the President has failed where Paul Ryan would succeed. Here we are passing through a deeper portal into a fact-free zone.
He touts the House budget leader and presumptive VP nominee as a guy who “understands the challenges of fiscal reform” better than anyone. That’s certainly not what we’ve found here at CBPP after extensive analysis of his various budget proposals.
Now, I’d like NF to deal with the facts that Rep Ryan supported the Bush tax cuts, the wars, and prescription drug bill, all of which were not paid for, and, particularly as regards the tax cuts, are major drivers of today and tomorrow’s deficits.
But perhaps NF only wants to look forward, ignoring those past votes (this despite that fact that he’s an historian of sorts, is he not?). Perhaps he wants to ignore that fact that he both touts Ryan’s alleged fiscal hawkery and the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan, never mentioning that Ryan, a member of the fiscal commission, voted against that plan because he is pledged enemy of any tax increases (and B-S raises new revenue).
But he also ignores the deficit-inducing fiscal irresponsibility of the current House budget, authored by Ryan, that goes well beyond GW Bush in terms of tax cuts, paid for by loophole closures to be named later.
He further ignores that on the spending side, the Ryan budget eventually takes government spending outside of Social Security, health insurance programs, and interest on the debt down to less than 4% of GDP. NF ignores CBO’s point re this trajectory that “spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3% of GDP in any year [since World War II]” which is particularly tricky because Rep Ryan seeks higher levels of defense spending in the future.
As Krugman points out today, these are not serious proposals. And yet, despite the fact that the President’s most recent budget has been scored by the CBO as stabilizing the debt/GDP ratio over the next decade (see figure 2 here), it is this budget that gets labeled a “fantasy” by NF.
Enough. The problems here are twofold. One, that NF gets away with this stuff, and two, that he does so in a prominent place like Newsweek.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/a-mess-of-a-screed/
A Mess of a Screed
Aug 20, 2012
What do you do if you’re loaded for bear and they call off the hunt?
I was just in the chair at MSNBC about to argue with Naill Ferguson about his anti-Obama screed in Newsweek but they had to cancel the hit.
NF’s piece is such a mess of factual errors, contradictions, and misguided impressions that one shouldn’t spend a lot of time on it, but since I prepped, allow me a bit of a data dump.
First off, note to Newsweek: create a job and hire a fact-checker. On my first read through this piece I listed 13 errors, including factual mistakes and misleading impressions. Here are a few examples:
–The President failed to deliver on his promises on new investments in infrastructure and clean energy.
Put aside for a second that NF later in the piece supports an agenda that precludes such investments. The claim is wrong. I was about to start collecting the evidence when I recalled just reading it all packed together very nicely in Mike Grunwald’s new book, as he lists the investments in the Recovery Act, passed less than four weeks into the President’s term. He even provides the sections of the bill.
“roads and bridges (Title XII), transmission lines (Secs. 301, 401, 1705) and broadband lines (Titles I, II), scientific research (Titles II, III, IV, VII), electronic medical records (Title XIII), solar and wind power (over a dozen provision), biofuel refineries (Title IV), electric cars (Sec. 1141), green manufacturing (Sec. 1302), and education reform (Sec. 14005).”
[See my recent discussion with Grunwald here.]
–One half of Americans don’t pay taxes (NF: “We are becoming a fifty-fifty nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits).
That’s only true of federal income taxes. Virtually everyone who works pays payroll taxes, and they and everyone else often face state and sales taxes as well. Furthermore, the latter are regressive, as lower income households pay larger shares of their income in these forms of taxes than wealthy households (see figures here).
–The Affordable Care Act adds to the deficit.
No. According to various scores by the CBO, it reduces the deficit (slightly in the first decade, more in the second). NF cites the costs of the bill but ignores the spending cuts and tax increases that more than pay for it.
This is the stuff of House Republican talking-point sheets. How it ended up in Newsweek is more than a little scary.
One could go on for much longer, including the foreign policy parts, where NF scratches his head as to why the President polls “relatively strong on national security.” (Um…bin Laden…out of Iraq…draw down in Afghanistan). There’s even a graph of China’s level of GDP passing that of America’s around 2017, as predicted by the IMF. That’s surely an interesting observation but what is the point in an article about the President’s alleged policy failures? Does NF really believe that a different president would change that prediction? If so, let us ask the IMF who will tell us of course not. It’s a function of a billion+ Chinese in an emerging economy generating high growth rates and thus higher levels of aggregate GDP (as opposed to per capita).
But let’s just touch on fiscal policy, and NF’s position that the President has failed where Paul Ryan would succeed. Here we are passing through a deeper portal into a fact-free zone.
He touts the House budget leader and presumptive VP nominee as a guy who “understands the challenges of fiscal reform” better than anyone. That’s certainly not what we’ve found here at CBPP after extensive analysis of his various budget proposals.
Now, I’d like NF to deal with the facts that Rep Ryan supported the Bush tax cuts, the wars, and prescription drug bill, all of which were not paid for, and, particularly as regards the tax cuts, are major drivers of today and tomorrow’s deficits.
But perhaps NF only wants to look forward, ignoring those past votes (this despite that fact that he’s an historian of sorts, is he not?). Perhaps he wants to ignore that fact that he both touts Ryan’s alleged fiscal hawkery and the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan, never mentioning that Ryan, a member of the fiscal commission, voted against that plan because he is pledged enemy of any tax increases (and B-S raises new revenue).
But he also ignores the deficit-inducing fiscal irresponsibility of the current House budget, authored by Ryan, that goes well beyond GW Bush in terms of tax cuts, paid for by loophole closures to be named later.
He further ignores that on the spending side, the Ryan budget eventually takes government spending outside of Social Security, health insurance programs, and interest on the debt down to less than 4% of GDP. NF ignores CBO’s point re this trajectory that “spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3% of GDP in any year [since World War II]” which is particularly tricky because Rep Ryan seeks higher levels of defense spending in the future.
As Krugman points out today, these are not serious proposals. And yet, despite the fact that the President’s most recent budget has been scored by the CBO as stabilizing the debt/GDP ratio over the next decade (see figure 2 here), it is this budget that gets labeled a “fantasy” by NF.
Enough. The problems here are twofold. One, that NF gets away with this stuff, and two, that he does so in a prominent place like Newsweek.
'You Can't Just Make Stuff Up' - Obama
Irin Carmon comes to the rescue again. Great summery for why it's not just Rep. Akins view but the entire GOP.
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/newsnation/48727974/
Other "Akinites" to be very aware of...
1. Erick Erickson. The RedState honcho and CNN contributor excused Akin’s scientifically illiterate remarks as simply “inarticulate” and then accused President Obama of being pro-infanticide, saying: “the people horrid by Todd Akin’s remarks are, I’m sure, thrilled to have a President who defended infanticide. I’ll take Todd Akin’s inarticulate remarks over an infanticide supporter any day of the week.” Somewhat ironically, Erickson is now claimingthat Akin will withdraw from the race.
2. Tony Perkins. The head of the Family Research Council said “we support [Akin] fully and completely” and that “I think that Todd Akin is getting a really bad break here.”
3. Chris and Dana Loesch. The conservative commentary power couple both lept to Akin’s defense. Chris claimed that “what [Akin] said was medically correct” while Dana wrote that Akin’s comments were less bad than his opponent Claire McCaskill’s record by “any real standard of measurement.”
4. Bryan Fischer. The American Family Association’s “director of issue analysis” straight-up defended Akin’s position, tweeting “Todd Akin is right: physical trauma of forcible rape can interfere w/ hormonal production, conception.”
5. Marjorie Dannenfelser. The head of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony listsaid that “We are proud to support Congressman Akin,” but later backtracked, amending her statement to “Congressman Akin has been an excellent partner in the fight for the unborn.”
6. Glenn Reynolds. The popular pundit and law professor simply wrote “BY THE TIME I NOTICED THIS STORY, IT WAS OVER, but Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks pale in comparison with Whoopi Goldberg’s.”
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/newsnation/48727974/
Other "Akinites" to be very aware of...
1. Erick Erickson. The RedState honcho and CNN contributor excused Akin’s scientifically illiterate remarks as simply “inarticulate” and then accused President Obama of being pro-infanticide, saying: “the people horrid by Todd Akin’s remarks are, I’m sure, thrilled to have a President who defended infanticide. I’ll take Todd Akin’s inarticulate remarks over an infanticide supporter any day of the week.” Somewhat ironically, Erickson is now claimingthat Akin will withdraw from the race.
2. Tony Perkins. The head of the Family Research Council said “we support [Akin] fully and completely” and that “I think that Todd Akin is getting a really bad break here.”
3. Chris and Dana Loesch. The conservative commentary power couple both lept to Akin’s defense. Chris claimed that “what [Akin] said was medically correct” while Dana wrote that Akin’s comments were less bad than his opponent Claire McCaskill’s record by “any real standard of measurement.”
4. Bryan Fischer. The American Family Association’s “director of issue analysis” straight-up defended Akin’s position, tweeting “Todd Akin is right: physical trauma of forcible rape can interfere w/ hormonal production, conception.”
5. Marjorie Dannenfelser. The head of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony listsaid that “We are proud to support Congressman Akin,” but later backtracked, amending her statement to “Congressman Akin has been an excellent partner in the fight for the unborn.”
6. Glenn Reynolds. The popular pundit and law professor simply wrote “BY THE TIME I NOTICED THIS STORY, IT WAS OVER, but Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks pale in comparison with Whoopi Goldberg’s.”
Sunday, August 19, 2012
a "balanced" solution
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/the-meep-meep-moment-on-entitlements.html
The Meep-Meep Moment On Entitlements?
16 Aug 2012 07:24 PM by Chris Bodenner
A reader uses the Ryan pick to evaluate the big picture:
The foundation of a masterful Obama long game to address the budget conflict has probably been laid over the past several months. It would be the resolution to the conflict that was fought to a stalemate in 2010/11 between the White House and congressional Republicans, but it really has roots going back 30 years.
In broad strokes, the issue is that Americans want more government than they are willing to pay for, but they have been shielded from this truth over the years for the sake of political expediency. A well-maintained playing field with equitable rules that offers the promise of success for those who can achieve it and the reassurance that those that stumble won't be left to die in the street. Our basic, tacit, social contract. Even at our current heights of anti-government furor, calls to cut these government functions - which account for the overwhelming majority of the federal budget - are deeply unpopular.
The only thing as unpopular as reducing those benefits is paying taxes to fund them. So over the past several decades the Republicans have skillfully played this dynamic to their favor with a simple formula: Advocate tax cuts at all times, make noise about wasteful spending and cut small items with limited appeal (or appeal only to the unpowerful), and never touch (and in fact add to) spending on popular big-ticket items like defense and entitlements. Oh and, of course, obscure all this with constant, distracting, engagement in the culture wars. The fruits of this strategy, unsurprisingly, are record low taxes, increasing spending, and exploding debt.
The solution is as simple as it is unpopular: raise more tax revenue and reduce spending. That is what Simpson-Bowles propose, that is what the Obama-Boehner "Grand Bargain" would have done, and remarkably it is what the public at large prefers when directly polled - a "balanced" solution.
Simpson-Bowles is reverently regarded by high-information voters as a serious piece of work and it surely is, but denouncing Obama for not embracing it willfully ignores the political realities of the time. It was not approved by its own committee because of liberal squeamishness about entitlement reform and en bloc opposition by Ryan and Republicans to one cent in increased revenue. On the floor of the House it mustered 38 votes. What about our experiences in Congress since 2010 suggest that President Obama embracing this plan would encourage Republicans to do the same?
The GOP establishment is, for the most part, still trying to play from its standard playbook which is to sell tax cuts, keep talk of spending cuts vague, and count on voters to assume none of the cuts would really affect them, just the "undeserving." Even when confronted with specific GOP policy proposals many voters simply dismiss out of hand that a politician would actually do any of that.
That's the formula Romney has used to this point and compared to the specific, painful, realities of a Simpson-Bowles style plan it would win hands-down. You rail on taxes and regulations and demagogue the benefit cuts in your opponent's plan. Then you keep the tax cuts, soft pedal the spending reductions, throw the difference on the deficit, and start picking drapes for the Lincoln bedroom. In fact, the only way you win running on increasing taxes and reforming entitlements is to run it head to head as a choice between your plan and a much more noxious option.
Enter Paul Ryan.
I don't think Chicago ever thought they would be so lucky as to run against the man himself, but they've been trying to hang his toxic budget around the GOP nominee's neck all cycle. That's because Ryan and his acolytes are true believers of a radical small government philosophy. While the GOP establishment knows that tax cuts and deficit spending are what win elections, Ryan thinks he can sell people on huge reductions in services in exchange for tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy. The polling suggests he is very wrong.
The Obama campaign's principle strategy to this point has been to prevent a referendum election on the state of the economy and turn it into a choice between a balanced, conservative, approach that maintains the basic structure of federal spending and a more radical GOP plan to restructure our social contract to accommodate their tax preferences.
Rather than try to avoid or obfuscate this choice, Romney chose to turn into the fire. It is a gutsy call that deserves respect in the nanosecond before he categorically denies neither he nor Paul meant or even said any of the things they have ever said.
But now is the time for Obama to show courage as well. He has avoided the referendum election, he has made it a choice election, and it's a debate over starkly different policies that polling suggests he could win handily. If he is the President so many of us believe we elected, now is the time he proves it by laying out a competing vision - dare I dream of short-term stimulus, rehiring state workers, and recovery followed by long-term deficit reduction in the mold of Simpson-Bowles? He then heads into his second term with a clear electoral mandate to break our current stalemate and cement his first term achievements before they are smothered in the crib.
Now that would be worthy of a meep meep, no?
The Meep-Meep Moment On Entitlements?
16 Aug 2012 07:24 PM by Chris Bodenner
A reader uses the Ryan pick to evaluate the big picture:
The foundation of a masterful Obama long game to address the budget conflict has probably been laid over the past several months. It would be the resolution to the conflict that was fought to a stalemate in 2010/11 between the White House and congressional Republicans, but it really has roots going back 30 years.
In broad strokes, the issue is that Americans want more government than they are willing to pay for, but they have been shielded from this truth over the years for the sake of political expediency. A well-maintained playing field with equitable rules that offers the promise of success for those who can achieve it and the reassurance that those that stumble won't be left to die in the street. Our basic, tacit, social contract. Even at our current heights of anti-government furor, calls to cut these government functions - which account for the overwhelming majority of the federal budget - are deeply unpopular.
The only thing as unpopular as reducing those benefits is paying taxes to fund them. So over the past several decades the Republicans have skillfully played this dynamic to their favor with a simple formula: Advocate tax cuts at all times, make noise about wasteful spending and cut small items with limited appeal (or appeal only to the unpowerful), and never touch (and in fact add to) spending on popular big-ticket items like defense and entitlements. Oh and, of course, obscure all this with constant, distracting, engagement in the culture wars. The fruits of this strategy, unsurprisingly, are record low taxes, increasing spending, and exploding debt.
The solution is as simple as it is unpopular: raise more tax revenue and reduce spending. That is what Simpson-Bowles propose, that is what the Obama-Boehner "Grand Bargain" would have done, and remarkably it is what the public at large prefers when directly polled - a "balanced" solution.
Simpson-Bowles is reverently regarded by high-information voters as a serious piece of work and it surely is, but denouncing Obama for not embracing it willfully ignores the political realities of the time. It was not approved by its own committee because of liberal squeamishness about entitlement reform and en bloc opposition by Ryan and Republicans to one cent in increased revenue. On the floor of the House it mustered 38 votes. What about our experiences in Congress since 2010 suggest that President Obama embracing this plan would encourage Republicans to do the same?
The GOP establishment is, for the most part, still trying to play from its standard playbook which is to sell tax cuts, keep talk of spending cuts vague, and count on voters to assume none of the cuts would really affect them, just the "undeserving." Even when confronted with specific GOP policy proposals many voters simply dismiss out of hand that a politician would actually do any of that.
That's the formula Romney has used to this point and compared to the specific, painful, realities of a Simpson-Bowles style plan it would win hands-down. You rail on taxes and regulations and demagogue the benefit cuts in your opponent's plan. Then you keep the tax cuts, soft pedal the spending reductions, throw the difference on the deficit, and start picking drapes for the Lincoln bedroom. In fact, the only way you win running on increasing taxes and reforming entitlements is to run it head to head as a choice between your plan and a much more noxious option.
Enter Paul Ryan.
I don't think Chicago ever thought they would be so lucky as to run against the man himself, but they've been trying to hang his toxic budget around the GOP nominee's neck all cycle. That's because Ryan and his acolytes are true believers of a radical small government philosophy. While the GOP establishment knows that tax cuts and deficit spending are what win elections, Ryan thinks he can sell people on huge reductions in services in exchange for tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy. The polling suggests he is very wrong.
The Obama campaign's principle strategy to this point has been to prevent a referendum election on the state of the economy and turn it into a choice between a balanced, conservative, approach that maintains the basic structure of federal spending and a more radical GOP plan to restructure our social contract to accommodate their tax preferences.
Rather than try to avoid or obfuscate this choice, Romney chose to turn into the fire. It is a gutsy call that deserves respect in the nanosecond before he categorically denies neither he nor Paul meant or even said any of the things they have ever said.
But now is the time for Obama to show courage as well. He has avoided the referendum election, he has made it a choice election, and it's a debate over starkly different policies that polling suggests he could win handily. If he is the President so many of us believe we elected, now is the time he proves it by laying out a competing vision - dare I dream of short-term stimulus, rehiring state workers, and recovery followed by long-term deficit reduction in the mold of Simpson-Bowles? He then heads into his second term with a clear electoral mandate to break our current stalemate and cement his first term achievements before they are smothered in the crib.
Now that would be worthy of a meep meep, no?
Miserable or not... We're all going,,,
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-13-2012/moment-of-zen---david-rakoff-tribute
Anne Romney "praise the Lord and no more ammunition."
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/campaigning-on-vagueness.html
Campaigning On Vagueness
18 Aug 2012 08:35 AM
by Gwynn Guilford
Greg Sargent rants about the Romney-Ryan's deliberate dodging of policy specifics:
[I]n what appear to be strategic leaks designed to mollify Republicans worried about the campaign’s lack of specificity, Romney advisers are explicitly confirming that all of this is part of a grand strategy to only signal general direction to the American people. It’s a guiding idea that specifics are a political peril to be avoided. The campaign thinks sharing details about what he’d actually do as president would be politically suicidal. As Steve Benen asks: “what does it say about the merit of Romney’s policy agenda if voters are likely to recoil if they heard the whole truth?”
Peggy Noonan thinks that, because of Ryan's involvement, keeping it vague won't work:
Ryan is associated with the word cutting. Republicans will have to make people believe the word to associate with him is "saving," that the Romney-Ryan ticket wants to save entitlement programs that aren't sustainable, that will in time collapse unless we impose ruinous taxes or continue with ruinous deficits. Republicans have just a few weeks to get across—on the stump, at the conventions—that they're trying to save Medicare, not kill it, that they're the lifeguard, not the shark.
NEiLc
224.619.6701
http://chicagogheezer.blogspot.com
Campaigning On Vagueness
18 Aug 2012 08:35 AM
by Gwynn Guilford
Greg Sargent rants about the Romney-Ryan's deliberate dodging of policy specifics:
[I]n what appear to be strategic leaks designed to mollify Republicans worried about the campaign’s lack of specificity, Romney advisers are explicitly confirming that all of this is part of a grand strategy to only signal general direction to the American people. It’s a guiding idea that specifics are a political peril to be avoided. The campaign thinks sharing details about what he’d actually do as president would be politically suicidal. As Steve Benen asks: “what does it say about the merit of Romney’s policy agenda if voters are likely to recoil if they heard the whole truth?”
Peggy Noonan thinks that, because of Ryan's involvement, keeping it vague won't work:
Ryan is associated with the word cutting. Republicans will have to make people believe the word to associate with him is "saving," that the Romney-Ryan ticket wants to save entitlement programs that aren't sustainable, that will in time collapse unless we impose ruinous taxes or continue with ruinous deficits. Republicans have just a few weeks to get across—on the stump, at the conventions—that they're trying to save Medicare, not kill it, that they're the lifeguard, not the shark.
NEiLc
224.619.6701
http://chicagogheezer.blogspot.com
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Royko Picasso and Obama
Romney to Obama ...take (your) campaign of “division and anger and hate back to Chicago.”
Graham Nash to the World 1968 -
Won't you please come to chicago for the help that we can bring.
We can change the world rearrange the world
It's dying - to get better
Picasso and the Cultural Rebirth of Chicago.- Mike Royko
Mayor Daley walked to the white piece of ribbon and put his hand on it. He was about to give it a pull when the photographers yelled for him to wait. He stood there for a minute and gave them that familiar blend of scowl and smile.
It was good that he waited. This was a moment to think about, to savor what was about to happen. In just a moment, with a snap of the mayor's wrist, Chicago history would be changed. That's no small occurrence·the cultural rebirth of a big city.
Out there in the neighborhoods and the suburbs, things probably seemed just the same. People worried about the old things·would they move in and would we move out? Or would we move in and would they move out?
But downtown, the leaders of culture and influence were gathered for a historical event and it was reaching a climax with Mayor Daley standing there ready to pull a ribbon.
Thousands waited in and around the Civic Center plaza. They had listened to the speeches about the Picasso thing. They had heard how it was going to change Chicago's image.
They had heard three clergymen·a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant minister·offer eloquent prayers. That's probably a record for a work by Picasso, a dedicated atheist.
And now the mayor was standing there, ready to pull the ribbon.
You could tell it was a big event by the seating. In the first row on the speakers platform was a lady poet. In the second row was Alderman Tom Keane. And in the third row was P. J. Cullerton, the assessor. When Keane and Cullerton sit behind a lady poet, things are changing.
The only alderman in the front row was Tom Rosenberg. And he was there only because it was a cultural event and he is chairman of the City Council's Culture Committee, which is in charge of preventing aldermen from spitting, swearing, and snoring during meetings.
The whole thing had been somber and serious. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra had played classical music. It hadn't played even one chorus of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."
Chief Judge John Boyle had said the Picasso would become more famous than the Art Institute's lions. Boyle has vision.
Someone from the National Council of Arts said it was paying tribute to Mayor Daley. This brought an interested gleam in the eyes of a few ward committeemen.
William Hartmann, the man who thought of the whole thing, told of Picasso's respect for Mayor Daley. Whenever Hartmann went to see Picasso, the artist asked:
"Is Mayor Daley still mayor of Chicago?"
When Hartmann said this, Mayor Daley bounced up and down in his chair, he laughed so hard. So did a few Republicans in the cheap seats, but they didn't laugh the same way.
After the ceremony, it came to that final moment the mayor standing there holding the white ribbon.
Then he pulled.
There was a gasp as the light blue covering fell away in several pieces. But it was caused by the basic American fascination for any mechanical feat that goes off as planned.
In an instant the Picasso stood there unveiled for all to see.
A few people applauded. But at best, it was a smattering of applause. Most of the throng was silent.
They had hoped, you see, that it would be what they had heard it would be.
A woman, maybe. A beautiful soaring woman. That is what many art experts and enthusiasts had promised. They had said that we should wait that we should not believe what we saw in the pictures.
If it was a woman, then art experts should put away their books and spend more time in girlie joints.
The silence grew. Then people turned and looked at each other. Some shrugged. Some smiled. Some just stood there, frowning or blank-faced.
Most just turned and walked away. The weakest pinch-hitter on the Cubs receives more cheers.
They had wanted to be moved by it. They wouldn't have stood there if they didn't want to believe what they had been told that it would be a fine thing.
But anyone who didn't have a closed mind·which means thinking that anything with the name Picasso connected must be wonderful could see that it was nothing but a big, homely metal thing.
That is all there is to it. Some soaring lines, yes. Interesting design, I'm sure. But the fact is, it has a long stupid face and looks like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect. It has eyes that are pitiless, cold, mean.
But why not? Everybody said it had the spirit of Chicago. And from thousands of miles away, accidentally or on purpose, Picasso captured it.
Up there in that ugly face is the spirit of Al Capone, the Summerdale scandal cops, the settlers who took the Indians but good.
Its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and weak. And of every building inspector who took a wad from a slum owner to make it all possible.
It has the look of the dope pusher and of the syndicate technician as he looks for just the right wire to splice the bomb to.
Any bigtime real estate operator will be able to look into the face of the Picasso and see the spirit that makes the city's rebuilding possible and profitable.
It has the look of the big corporate executive who comes face to face with the reality of how much water pollution his company is responsible for and then thinks of the profit and loss and of his salary.
It is all there in that Picasso thing the I Will spirit. The I will get you before you will get me spirit.
Picasso has never been here, they say. You'd think he's been riding the L all his life.
Graham Nash to the World 1968 -
Won't you please come to chicago for the help that we can bring.
We can change the world rearrange the world
It's dying - to get better
Picasso and the Cultural Rebirth of Chicago.- Mike Royko
Mayor Daley walked to the white piece of ribbon and put his hand on it. He was about to give it a pull when the photographers yelled for him to wait. He stood there for a minute and gave them that familiar blend of scowl and smile.
It was good that he waited. This was a moment to think about, to savor what was about to happen. In just a moment, with a snap of the mayor's wrist, Chicago history would be changed. That's no small occurrence·the cultural rebirth of a big city.
Out there in the neighborhoods and the suburbs, things probably seemed just the same. People worried about the old things·would they move in and would we move out? Or would we move in and would they move out?
But downtown, the leaders of culture and influence were gathered for a historical event and it was reaching a climax with Mayor Daley standing there ready to pull a ribbon.
Thousands waited in and around the Civic Center plaza. They had listened to the speeches about the Picasso thing. They had heard how it was going to change Chicago's image.
They had heard three clergymen·a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant minister·offer eloquent prayers. That's probably a record for a work by Picasso, a dedicated atheist.
And now the mayor was standing there, ready to pull the ribbon.
You could tell it was a big event by the seating. In the first row on the speakers platform was a lady poet. In the second row was Alderman Tom Keane. And in the third row was P. J. Cullerton, the assessor. When Keane and Cullerton sit behind a lady poet, things are changing.
The only alderman in the front row was Tom Rosenberg. And he was there only because it was a cultural event and he is chairman of the City Council's Culture Committee, which is in charge of preventing aldermen from spitting, swearing, and snoring during meetings.
The whole thing had been somber and serious. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra had played classical music. It hadn't played even one chorus of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."
Chief Judge John Boyle had said the Picasso would become more famous than the Art Institute's lions. Boyle has vision.
Someone from the National Council of Arts said it was paying tribute to Mayor Daley. This brought an interested gleam in the eyes of a few ward committeemen.
William Hartmann, the man who thought of the whole thing, told of Picasso's respect for Mayor Daley. Whenever Hartmann went to see Picasso, the artist asked:
"Is Mayor Daley still mayor of Chicago?"
When Hartmann said this, Mayor Daley bounced up and down in his chair, he laughed so hard. So did a few Republicans in the cheap seats, but they didn't laugh the same way.
After the ceremony, it came to that final moment the mayor standing there holding the white ribbon.
Then he pulled.
There was a gasp as the light blue covering fell away in several pieces. But it was caused by the basic American fascination for any mechanical feat that goes off as planned.
In an instant the Picasso stood there unveiled for all to see.
A few people applauded. But at best, it was a smattering of applause. Most of the throng was silent.
They had hoped, you see, that it would be what they had heard it would be.
A woman, maybe. A beautiful soaring woman. That is what many art experts and enthusiasts had promised. They had said that we should wait that we should not believe what we saw in the pictures.
If it was a woman, then art experts should put away their books and spend more time in girlie joints.
The silence grew. Then people turned and looked at each other. Some shrugged. Some smiled. Some just stood there, frowning or blank-faced.
Most just turned and walked away. The weakest pinch-hitter on the Cubs receives more cheers.
They had wanted to be moved by it. They wouldn't have stood there if they didn't want to believe what they had been told that it would be a fine thing.
But anyone who didn't have a closed mind·which means thinking that anything with the name Picasso connected must be wonderful could see that it was nothing but a big, homely metal thing.
That is all there is to it. Some soaring lines, yes. Interesting design, I'm sure. But the fact is, it has a long stupid face and looks like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect. It has eyes that are pitiless, cold, mean.
But why not? Everybody said it had the spirit of Chicago. And from thousands of miles away, accidentally or on purpose, Picasso captured it.
Up there in that ugly face is the spirit of Al Capone, the Summerdale scandal cops, the settlers who took the Indians but good.
Its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and weak. And of every building inspector who took a wad from a slum owner to make it all possible.
It has the look of the dope pusher and of the syndicate technician as he looks for just the right wire to splice the bomb to.
Any bigtime real estate operator will be able to look into the face of the Picasso and see the spirit that makes the city's rebuilding possible and profitable.
It has the look of the big corporate executive who comes face to face with the reality of how much water pollution his company is responsible for and then thinks of the profit and loss and of his salary.
It is all there in that Picasso thing the I Will spirit. The I will get you before you will get me spirit.
Picasso has never been here, they say. You'd think he's been riding the L all his life.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
How to leave a country in ruins. Part two
Britain’s Maplecroft, which specializes in consulting on strategic risk, has said that we are witnessing the balkanization of the Syrian state: “Kurds in the north, Druze in the southern hills, Alawites in the coastal northwestern mountainous region and the Sunni majority elsewhere.”
Israeli-US Script: Divide Syria, Divide the Rest
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32351
Israeli-US Script: Divide Syria, Divide the Rest
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32351
Congressman Paul Ryan
Joshua Hersh, HP 8/20/12 2:15 PM
Former Dem Congressman: Paul Ryan Never Committed To Simpson-Bowles Commission
A former Democratic congressman who sat across from Paul Ryan on a major bipartisan budget deficit commission said Mitt Romney's running mate took a hard line on fundamental economics issues and never fully committed to negotiating a deal. "Paul drifted -- he came to all the meetings, and kept asking pertinent questions, but his heart wasn't in it," said John M. Spratt, a recently retired member of Congress from South Carolina who served with Ryan on the Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010. "Eventually, he just went back to what he was doing before, back to developing the roadmap, working for his party and not for bipartisanship." The Simpson-Bowles commission was a high-profile effort by President Obama to reach bipartisan agreement on reducing the budget deficit. It eventually failed to reach a consensus, largely owing to the opposition of fiscal conservatives, even though many officials in both parties continue to tout the wisdom of its recommendations. In fact, in an interview in early August, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said his own deficit reduction plan "is very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan." For many months, Erskine Bowles, the commission's Democratic co-chair, "bent over backwards trying to accomodate" Ryan, Spratt said. Had he succeeded in persuading Ryan, who had already emerged as a leading voice for fiscal conservatives, Spratt believes that the other two House Republicans would have come along. "Paul really spent most of his effort [in Congress] building bridges within the Republican Party for a particular ideology that views all taxes as anathema," Spratt said. "Any package that has any taint of taxes involved in it, he's simply not interested in supporting." The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spratt also told HuffPost in a phone interview that Ryan -- and the depth of his conservatism -- is "not to be underestimated." "He is intelligent, likeable, affable, and he is well to the right of center," Spratt said. "I remember when Dick Cheney ran for V.P., and people started looking into his background, what they found was that Cheney was a lot more conservative than he had appeared to be in public. I would say the same is true of Paul Ryan. Once the media and opposition dig into his voting record, I think they're going to be rather surprised how far to the right he is." Spratt's assessment of Ryan's negotiating style mirrors that of another Democrat who served across from Ryan on the House Budget Committee, Maryland's Chris Van Hollen. In an interview a week ago on MSNBC, Van Hollen, who is now the committee's ranking member and poised to play Ryan in Vice President Joe Biden's debate prep, said that Ryan was civil but impossible to negotiate with on matters of principle. "There's a distinction between civility and congeniality and willingness to compromise," Van Hollen said. "If you look at the Ryan Republican budget, it is a totally uncompromising document."
--------------------------
Michelle Goldberg puts Human and Women's rights in perspective
Paul Ryan’s Extreme Abortion Views - The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl2012/08/11/paul-ryan-s-extreme-abortion-views.html
Less attention has been paid, though, to Ryan’s hard-right positions on social issues. Indeed, on abortion and women’s health care, there isn’t much daylight between Ryan and, say, Michele Bachmann. Any Republican vice-presidential candidate is going to be broadly anti-abortion, but Ryan goes much further. He believes ending a pregnancy should be illegal even when it results from rape or incest, or endangers a woman’s health. He was a cosponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a federal bill defining fertilized eggs as human beings, which, if passed, would criminalize some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization. The National Right to Life Committee has scored his voting record 100 percent every year since he entered the House in 1999. “I’m as pro-life as a person gets,” he told The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack in 2010. “You’re not going to have a truce
_____________
The $700 Billion Medicare Smokescreen - The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/jared-bernstein/paul-ryan-medicare-cut_b_1776031.html
PLAY BY MY RULES - AP 8/15/12 4:33 PM
WASHINGTON -- Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has been one of the harshest critics of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan. But months after Congress approved the nearly $800 billion package, the Wisconsin lawmaker was trying to steer money under the program to companies in his home state.
Rep. Ryan wrote letters in 2009 to Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis seeking stimulus grant money for two Wisconsin energy conservation companies. One of them, the nonprofit Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corp., later received $20.3 million from the Energy Department to help homes and businesses improve energy efficiency, according to federal records.
In a letter to Chu in December 2009, Ryan said the stimulus money would help his state create thousands of new jobs, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That contrasted with his public statements denigrating the stimulus program as a "wasteful spending spree." It also conflicts with his larger federal budget proposal, which would slash Energy Department programs aimed at creating green jobs.
________________
Reagan's Stockman puts the money in perspective:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=3
_______________
Branden posits that Objectivist beliefs are very similar to behavior exhibited by the GOP obstructionists in the House:
The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand: A Personal Statement by Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D. (NathanielBranden@compuserve.com)
Copyright (C) 1984, Nathaniel Branden, All Rights Reserved
Copyright (C) 1984, Association for Humanistic Psychology
http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/NathanielBranden/BenefitsAndHazards.html
Here is the problem: There is a difference between reason as a process and what any person or any group of people, at any time in history, may regard as "the reasonable." This is a distinction that very few people are able to keep clear. We all exist in history, not just in some timeless vacuum, and probably none of us can entirely escape contemporary notions of "the reasonable." It's always important to remember that reason or rationality, on the one hand, and what people may regard as "the reasonable," on the other hand, don't mean the same thing.
The consequence of failing to make this distinction, and this is markedly apparent in the case of Ayn Rand, is that if someone disagrees with your notion of "the reasonable," it can feel very appropriate to accuse him or her of being "irrational" or "against reason."
If you read her books, or her essays in The Objectivist, or if you listen to her lectures, you will notice with what frequency and ease she branded any viewpoint she did not share as not merely mistaken but "irrational" or "mystical." In other words, anything that challenged her particular model of reality was not merely wrong but "irrational" and "mystical" -- to say nothing, of course, of its being "evil," another word she loved to use with extraordinary frequency.
_____________________
"Those eyes, just so blue, it's like looking into a smurfs anus. " - John Stewart 81312 ... while gazing at Ryan's "glowing" eyes.
"I have heard very few bad things about him as a human being, other than his views." - Gov. Howard Dean
Former Dem Congressman: Paul Ryan Never Committed To Simpson-Bowles Commission
A former Democratic congressman who sat across from Paul Ryan on a major bipartisan budget deficit commission said Mitt Romney's running mate took a hard line on fundamental economics issues and never fully committed to negotiating a deal. "Paul drifted -- he came to all the meetings, and kept asking pertinent questions, but his heart wasn't in it," said John M. Spratt, a recently retired member of Congress from South Carolina who served with Ryan on the Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010. "Eventually, he just went back to what he was doing before, back to developing the roadmap, working for his party and not for bipartisanship." The Simpson-Bowles commission was a high-profile effort by President Obama to reach bipartisan agreement on reducing the budget deficit. It eventually failed to reach a consensus, largely owing to the opposition of fiscal conservatives, even though many officials in both parties continue to tout the wisdom of its recommendations. In fact, in an interview in early August, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said his own deficit reduction plan "is very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan." For many months, Erskine Bowles, the commission's Democratic co-chair, "bent over backwards trying to accomodate" Ryan, Spratt said. Had he succeeded in persuading Ryan, who had already emerged as a leading voice for fiscal conservatives, Spratt believes that the other two House Republicans would have come along. "Paul really spent most of his effort [in Congress] building bridges within the Republican Party for a particular ideology that views all taxes as anathema," Spratt said. "Any package that has any taint of taxes involved in it, he's simply not interested in supporting." The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spratt also told HuffPost in a phone interview that Ryan -- and the depth of his conservatism -- is "not to be underestimated." "He is intelligent, likeable, affable, and he is well to the right of center," Spratt said. "I remember when Dick Cheney ran for V.P., and people started looking into his background, what they found was that Cheney was a lot more conservative than he had appeared to be in public. I would say the same is true of Paul Ryan. Once the media and opposition dig into his voting record, I think they're going to be rather surprised how far to the right he is." Spratt's assessment of Ryan's negotiating style mirrors that of another Democrat who served across from Ryan on the House Budget Committee, Maryland's Chris Van Hollen. In an interview a week ago on MSNBC, Van Hollen, who is now the committee's ranking member and poised to play Ryan in Vice President Joe Biden's debate prep, said that Ryan was civil but impossible to negotiate with on matters of principle. "There's a distinction between civility and congeniality and willingness to compromise," Van Hollen said. "If you look at the Ryan Republican budget, it is a totally uncompromising document."
--------------------------
Michelle Goldberg puts Human and Women's rights in perspective
Paul Ryan’s Extreme Abortion Views - The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl2012/08/11/paul-ryan-s-extreme-abortion-views.html
Less attention has been paid, though, to Ryan’s hard-right positions on social issues. Indeed, on abortion and women’s health care, there isn’t much daylight between Ryan and, say, Michele Bachmann. Any Republican vice-presidential candidate is going to be broadly anti-abortion, but Ryan goes much further. He believes ending a pregnancy should be illegal even when it results from rape or incest, or endangers a woman’s health. He was a cosponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a federal bill defining fertilized eggs as human beings, which, if passed, would criminalize some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization. The National Right to Life Committee has scored his voting record 100 percent every year since he entered the House in 1999. “I’m as pro-life as a person gets,” he told The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack in 2010. “You’re not going to have a truce
_____________
The $700 Billion Medicare Smokescreen - The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/jared-bernstein/paul-ryan-medicare-cut_b_1776031.html
PLAY BY MY RULES - AP 8/15/12 4:33 PM
WASHINGTON -- Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has been one of the harshest critics of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan. But months after Congress approved the nearly $800 billion package, the Wisconsin lawmaker was trying to steer money under the program to companies in his home state.
Rep. Ryan wrote letters in 2009 to Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis seeking stimulus grant money for two Wisconsin energy conservation companies. One of them, the nonprofit Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corp., later received $20.3 million from the Energy Department to help homes and businesses improve energy efficiency, according to federal records.
In a letter to Chu in December 2009, Ryan said the stimulus money would help his state create thousands of new jobs, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That contrasted with his public statements denigrating the stimulus program as a "wasteful spending spree." It also conflicts with his larger federal budget proposal, which would slash Energy Department programs aimed at creating green jobs.
________________
Reagan's Stockman puts the money in perspective:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=3
_______________
Branden posits that Objectivist beliefs are very similar to behavior exhibited by the GOP obstructionists in the House:
The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand: A Personal Statement by Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D. (NathanielBranden@compuserve.com)
Copyright (C) 1984, Nathaniel Branden, All Rights Reserved
Copyright (C) 1984, Association for Humanistic Psychology
http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/NathanielBranden/BenefitsAndHazards.html
Here is the problem: There is a difference between reason as a process and what any person or any group of people, at any time in history, may regard as "the reasonable." This is a distinction that very few people are able to keep clear. We all exist in history, not just in some timeless vacuum, and probably none of us can entirely escape contemporary notions of "the reasonable." It's always important to remember that reason or rationality, on the one hand, and what people may regard as "the reasonable," on the other hand, don't mean the same thing.
The consequence of failing to make this distinction, and this is markedly apparent in the case of Ayn Rand, is that if someone disagrees with your notion of "the reasonable," it can feel very appropriate to accuse him or her of being "irrational" or "against reason."
If you read her books, or her essays in The Objectivist, or if you listen to her lectures, you will notice with what frequency and ease she branded any viewpoint she did not share as not merely mistaken but "irrational" or "mystical." In other words, anything that challenged her particular model of reality was not merely wrong but "irrational" and "mystical" -- to say nothing, of course, of its being "evil," another word she loved to use with extraordinary frequency.
_____________________
"Those eyes, just so blue, it's like looking into a smurfs anus. " - John Stewart 81312 ... while gazing at Ryan's "glowing" eyes.
"I have heard very few bad things about him as a human being, other than his views." - Gov. Howard Dean
Friday, August 10, 2012
Pumice
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19207810
Vast volcanic 'raft' found in Pacific, near New Zealand
A vast "raft" of volcanic rocks covering 10,000 sq miles (26,000 sq km) of ocean has been spotted by a New Zealand military aircraft.
A naval ship was forced to change course in order to avoid the cluster of buoyant rocks, located 1,000 miles off the New Zealand coast.
The unusual phenomenon was probably the result of pumice being released from an underwater volcano, experts said.
One navy officer described it as the "weirdest thing" he had seen at sea.
Lieutenant Tim Oscar told the AFP news agency: "As far ahead as I could observe was a raft of pumice moving up and down with the swell.
"The [top of the] rock looked to be sitting two feet above the surface of the waves and lit up a brilliant white colour. It looked exactly like the edge of an ice shelf," the officer said.
Researchers aboard the ship, HMNZS Canterbury, suggest that the source of the pumice was an underwater volcano (seamount) known as Monowai, located to the north of New Zealand.
The pumice is likely to have been formed when lava from the seamount came into contact with seawater, and as it is less dense that water it quickly rises to the surface of the ocean.
Vast volcanic 'raft' found in Pacific, near New Zealand
A vast "raft" of volcanic rocks covering 10,000 sq miles (26,000 sq km) of ocean has been spotted by a New Zealand military aircraft.
A naval ship was forced to change course in order to avoid the cluster of buoyant rocks, located 1,000 miles off the New Zealand coast.
The unusual phenomenon was probably the result of pumice being released from an underwater volcano, experts said.
One navy officer described it as the "weirdest thing" he had seen at sea.
Lieutenant Tim Oscar told the AFP news agency: "As far ahead as I could observe was a raft of pumice moving up and down with the swell.
"The [top of the] rock looked to be sitting two feet above the surface of the waves and lit up a brilliant white colour. It looked exactly like the edge of an ice shelf," the officer said.
Researchers aboard the ship, HMNZS Canterbury, suggest that the source of the pumice was an underwater volcano (seamount) known as Monowai, located to the north of New Zealand.
The pumice is likely to have been formed when lava from the seamount came into contact with seawater, and as it is less dense that water it quickly rises to the surface of the ocean.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Repeal equals death
Jonathan Alter On ObamaCare: "If We Elect Romney, A Lot Of People Will Die"
"Repeal equals death," columnist Jonathan Alter said on MSNBC's "Ed Show" tonight. "People will die in the United States if ObamaCare is repealed. That is not an exaggeration. That is not crying fire. It's a simple fact. If you have preexisting conditions and you are thrown off of health insurance, or if you get sick after you or your husband, spouse, loses the job, you're not going to go to the doctor as soon, your cancer or disease is not going to be caught as quickly, and your odds of dying are much, much increased."
"ObamaCare will save, literally, thousands of lives," Alter declared.
"They don't need to embrace this ad and get into a big fight about whether they were calling Mitt Romney a murderer or whatever. They need to move on to a debate about the main issue, which is ObamaCare. And they can bring death into the conversation and say, 'No, we're not calling Mitt Romney a murderer, what we are saying is that if he's elected president, a lot of people will die.' Those are two slightly different, but related issues," Alter said.
"Repeal equals death," columnist Jonathan Alter said on MSNBC's "Ed Show" tonight. "People will die in the United States if ObamaCare is repealed. That is not an exaggeration. That is not crying fire. It's a simple fact. If you have preexisting conditions and you are thrown off of health insurance, or if you get sick after you or your husband, spouse, loses the job, you're not going to go to the doctor as soon, your cancer or disease is not going to be caught as quickly, and your odds of dying are much, much increased."
"ObamaCare will save, literally, thousands of lives," Alter declared.
"They don't need to embrace this ad and get into a big fight about whether they were calling Mitt Romney a murderer or whatever. They need to move on to a debate about the main issue, which is ObamaCare. And they can bring death into the conversation and say, 'No, we're not calling Mitt Romney a murderer, what we are saying is that if he's elected president, a lot of people will die.' Those are two slightly different, but related issues," Alter said.
Ambassador Rice
The Obama administration is moving, to increase its backing for anti-Assad -rebels.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL6E8J256S20120802?irpc=932
U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice issued a statement that made no mention of the United Nations playing a role in resolving the Syria conflict.
"We will continue to work urgently with our partners in the international community - including the over 100 countries in the Friends of the Syrian People - to accelerate the transition, provide support to the opposition, and meet the increasingly grave humanitarian needs of the Syrian people," Rice said.
Council diplomats have said privately the United States and Gulf Arab states have become increasingly frustrated in recent weeks with what they saw as Annan's dogged commitment to diplomacy at a time when they believe all avenues for dialogue with Assad have been exhausted.
France's U.N. envoy, Araud, said the council appeared to be "irreconcilably" deadlocked but that it would be dangerous for countries to go outside the United Nations to resolve the Syria conflict.
But that is already happening. The United States, other Western powers, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are increasing support for the rebels,
U.N. diplomats say, and are reconciling themselves to the view that Syria's civil war will be long and bloody.
Separately, Araud said the U.N. observer mission would likely "disappear" on Aug. 19, the day its recently renewed mandate expires.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL6E8J256S20120802?irpc=932
U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice issued a statement that made no mention of the United Nations playing a role in resolving the Syria conflict.
"We will continue to work urgently with our partners in the international community - including the over 100 countries in the Friends of the Syrian People - to accelerate the transition, provide support to the opposition, and meet the increasingly grave humanitarian needs of the Syrian people," Rice said.
Council diplomats have said privately the United States and Gulf Arab states have become increasingly frustrated in recent weeks with what they saw as Annan's dogged commitment to diplomacy at a time when they believe all avenues for dialogue with Assad have been exhausted.
France's U.N. envoy, Araud, said the council appeared to be "irreconcilably" deadlocked but that it would be dangerous for countries to go outside the United Nations to resolve the Syria conflict.
But that is already happening. The United States, other Western powers, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are increasing support for the rebels,
U.N. diplomats say, and are reconciling themselves to the view that Syria's civil war will be long and bloody.
Separately, Araud said the U.N. observer mission would likely "disappear" on Aug. 19, the day its recently renewed mandate expires.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
a drunken backyard pool party gone horribly wrong
U.S. women's water polo team overcomes coach's gaffe in win
Dave D’Alessandro: ddalessandro@starledger.com
They love to play the game. We suspect that you don’t have to be insane to play it, but it can’t hurt. It’s one of the most exhausting, heart-bursting activities we’ve seen this week — it’s there with beach volleyball, Greco Roman wrestling, and judo — but they love it and play it well.
If you’re not attuned to nuance, it looks like a drunken backyard pool party gone horribly wrong. But it has elements of lacrosse and soccer and basketball — picture team handball in a 6-foot pool — and these are the most stout women you’ll ever see. It is physical, it is occasionally mayhem, especially when the girl with the ball invariably disappears under the water line with an audible glug-glug.
Synchronized drowning, that. Sometimes the aggrieved party gets a whistle from the two refs strolling the sidelines. But for all the pounding and grabbing and scratching and finger bending, the most common cause of these gurgles are some defender surreptitiously yanking on an opponent’s full-body suit, and tugging her under.
“It’s different every game you watch,” said U.S. goalie Betsey Armstrong. “I’m the goalie so I don’t get the brunt of it, but my teammates might come out of the water with some rips.”
http://mobile.nj.com/advnj/pm_29222/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=RGgR3kXf
Dave D’Alessandro: ddalessandro@starledger.com
They love to play the game. We suspect that you don’t have to be insane to play it, but it can’t hurt. It’s one of the most exhausting, heart-bursting activities we’ve seen this week — it’s there with beach volleyball, Greco Roman wrestling, and judo — but they love it and play it well.
If you’re not attuned to nuance, it looks like a drunken backyard pool party gone horribly wrong. But it has elements of lacrosse and soccer and basketball — picture team handball in a 6-foot pool — and these are the most stout women you’ll ever see. It is physical, it is occasionally mayhem, especially when the girl with the ball invariably disappears under the water line with an audible glug-glug.
Synchronized drowning, that. Sometimes the aggrieved party gets a whistle from the two refs strolling the sidelines. But for all the pounding and grabbing and scratching and finger bending, the most common cause of these gurgles are some defender surreptitiously yanking on an opponent’s full-body suit, and tugging her under.
“It’s different every game you watch,” said U.S. goalie Betsey Armstrong. “I’m the goalie so I don’t get the brunt of it, but my teammates might come out of the water with some rips.”
http://mobile.nj.com/advnj/pm_29222/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=RGgR3kXf
Genetics and Hormones
Sam Alipour - ESPN The Magazine - July 14, 2012
Will you still medal in the morning?
http://m.espn.go.com/extra/olympics/story?storyId=8133052
Durex paid to be the official supplier at the London Games, and they sent 150,000 free condoms to the Olympic Village as part of the deal.
As the Daily Beast wrote, "Averaged among 10,490 athletes, that's enough condoms for every athlete to have sex 15 times over the Olympics' three weeks.
Will you still medal in the morning?
http://m.espn.go.com/extra/olympics/story?storyId=8133052
Durex paid to be the official supplier at the London Games, and they sent 150,000 free condoms to the Olympic Village as part of the deal.
As the Daily Beast wrote, "Averaged among 10,490 athletes, that's enough condoms for every athlete to have sex 15 times over the Olympics' three weeks.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Vagina vagina vagina
Affordable health care finally in the right hands .. The women in our loves.
http://www.redeyechicago.com/news/ct-red-0803-affordable-care-act-20120802,0,3599830.story
Healthy women, healthy country
By Dana Moran, RedEye
12:59 p.m. CDT, August 2, 2012
Male condoms are 82 percent effective in preventing pregnancy based on typical use, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The birth control pill is 91 percent effective. And intrauterine devices, or IUDs, are more than 99 percent effective. So it made sense during a recent visit to my gynecologist to ask her whether that birth control method was right for me. I got the green light, and was all set to make an appointment to get one.
Then I checked my insurance.
While the device's website explained that many women are covered, I apparently wasn't one of them. And the actual retail price-not including the $350 my doctor would charge for insertion-is $843.60. For the arithmetic-shy, that's a grand total of $1,193.60. In related math, Planned Parenthood reports the average abortion costs $300-$950, in some cases nearly a quarter the price.
Something about this doesn't add up.
Fortunately, things have just changed for the women of America. Starting Wednesday, almost every new insurance plan was required to cover doctor-prescribed contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act. In other words, when my insurance is renewed in January, that $843.60 will shrink to $0.
The new provisions also provide for women in seven other areas of our health care needs, including things men never even have to think about, such as gestational diabetes screening and breast-feeding support. OK, that's not entirely accurate-they think about the breast part.
But if you're a guy, this issue affects you in ways greater than boobs and having to listen to chicks talk about their lady parts. Your girlfriend pays for those birth control pills. Your female friend may become the victim of domestic violence and need counseling. Your mom might not be able to afford visits to her gynecologist someday. Everywhere you look, your life is full of women, some even more important to you than other dudes.
That's what these provisions, and the rest of the Affordable Care Act, are all about. Heath care has to be a political issue, but it's really about taking care of the people you love.
There's been plenty of talk in the political realm about women and their health care rights lately, but there's also been some talk about not talking about vaginas. A female Michigan lawmaker was barred from speaking in the House after saying "vagina" during a June anti-abortion bill debate. Apparently some men are afraid to talk about vaginas, even though they themselves presumably came from one.
But talking about vaginas-as well as the health care needs of all Americans-is exactly what needs to be happening. For example, before you started reading this column, I'll bet you didn't know how expensive IUDs are, or how exceptionally effective they are when compared with other popular birth control methods.
Sometimes it's embarrassing to talk about your body and the strange stuff it does, but if you do, you'll find plenty of other people deal with the same things. The more we talk, the more we can relate-and the more we care about what happens to each other.
(I'm also still trying to figure out a way these new health care provisions translate to all condoms being free. Hey, we can dream, right?)
damoran@tribune.com | @redeyedana
http://www.redeyechicago.com/news/ct-red-0803-affordable-care-act-20120802,0,3599830.story
Healthy women, healthy country
By Dana Moran, RedEye
12:59 p.m. CDT, August 2, 2012
Male condoms are 82 percent effective in preventing pregnancy based on typical use, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The birth control pill is 91 percent effective. And intrauterine devices, or IUDs, are more than 99 percent effective. So it made sense during a recent visit to my gynecologist to ask her whether that birth control method was right for me. I got the green light, and was all set to make an appointment to get one.
Then I checked my insurance.
While the device's website explained that many women are covered, I apparently wasn't one of them. And the actual retail price-not including the $350 my doctor would charge for insertion-is $843.60. For the arithmetic-shy, that's a grand total of $1,193.60. In related math, Planned Parenthood reports the average abortion costs $300-$950, in some cases nearly a quarter the price.
Something about this doesn't add up.
Fortunately, things have just changed for the women of America. Starting Wednesday, almost every new insurance plan was required to cover doctor-prescribed contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act. In other words, when my insurance is renewed in January, that $843.60 will shrink to $0.
The new provisions also provide for women in seven other areas of our health care needs, including things men never even have to think about, such as gestational diabetes screening and breast-feeding support. OK, that's not entirely accurate-they think about the breast part.
But if you're a guy, this issue affects you in ways greater than boobs and having to listen to chicks talk about their lady parts. Your girlfriend pays for those birth control pills. Your female friend may become the victim of domestic violence and need counseling. Your mom might not be able to afford visits to her gynecologist someday. Everywhere you look, your life is full of women, some even more important to you than other dudes.
That's what these provisions, and the rest of the Affordable Care Act, are all about. Heath care has to be a political issue, but it's really about taking care of the people you love.
There's been plenty of talk in the political realm about women and their health care rights lately, but there's also been some talk about not talking about vaginas. A female Michigan lawmaker was barred from speaking in the House after saying "vagina" during a June anti-abortion bill debate. Apparently some men are afraid to talk about vaginas, even though they themselves presumably came from one.
But talking about vaginas-as well as the health care needs of all Americans-is exactly what needs to be happening. For example, before you started reading this column, I'll bet you didn't know how expensive IUDs are, or how exceptionally effective they are when compared with other popular birth control methods.
Sometimes it's embarrassing to talk about your body and the strange stuff it does, but if you do, you'll find plenty of other people deal with the same things. The more we talk, the more we can relate-and the more we care about what happens to each other.
(I'm also still trying to figure out a way these new health care provisions translate to all condoms being free. Hey, we can dream, right?)
damoran@tribune.com | @redeyedana
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