Digging Deeper

Posted: April 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Banksters, Barack Obama, Corporate Crime, corporate greed, corporatism, corruption, Crime, Democratic Politics, Eric Schneiderman, home foreclosure fraud, Homeless, Mitt Romney, U.S. Economy | 16 Comments

Though I’ve been on a hiatus of late, I’ve tried to keep up with basic headline reading, dipping my toes into stories of interest [and/or those producing sheer outrage].  The latter pushed my crazy button when I read this headline last week at New Deal 2.0:

Eric Schneiderman Urges Progressives to “Dig Deeper” to Transform the System

Eric Schneiderman, NY State Attorney General, who vowed to take on Wall St., bring the wrong doers to justice and rectify the massive fraud perpetrated on American homeowners forced into foreclosure.  That Eric Schneiderman, the man I willingly and enthusiastically cheered.  I went so far as to send a note of appreciation.

That was then, this is now.

Because Eric Schneiderman threw his lot with President Obama’s weak-kneed, planned-to-fail foreclosure/securitization fraud task force that has effectively done zip, nada, even after the President’s stirring words during his State of the Union Address.  And then, there was Schneiderman’s claim that he would have a posse of investigators [that would be a total of 55 dedicated, blood hound investigators for a fraud estimated to be 80 times larger than the S&L debacle—which had 1000 investigators] to track down and document laws broken, crimes committed and bring the guilty parties to heel.

Camelot  Revisited! Now back to grim reality.

The wildly touted foreclosure fraud settlement was simply another Get-Out-of-Jail Pass (aka amnesty] for criminal enterprises that took American homeowners for a ride—a slippery slide right out of their homes.  For the inconvenience, the shocking upheaval and worry, 750,000 homeowners (of the 4 million homes seized since 2007] will reportedly receive $2000. What a deal! For the scammers, they received a blanket no-accountability kiss from the Obama Administration, by collectively paying $5 billion to states and the Federal government and allocating $20 billion more to ease the distress [loan modification] for a fraction of the 11 million homeowners now ‘underwater.’  Oh, and the pledge [step on a crack and you’ll break your mother’s back] to sin no more.

Problem solved!

Hummm.  Not really.  Because although the settlement was puny in terms of homeowner relief, it was at least . . . something.  Until we read in late February and early March that a number of states were diverting the settlement funds to plug shaky budgets.

I think it’s reasonable to say that damaged American homeowners have been left holding the bag–the dirty, empty bag.  Again.

But getting back to Eric Schneiderman, the man I had a temporary crush on, the Hero on a Quest Gone Terribly Wrong, had the gall to stand before a group, an initiative ironically entitled Rediscovering Government and give the keynote address, where he reportedly said [in the New Deal 2.0 piece cited above]:

Progressives’ efforts at making significant changes to the system after the financial crisis have mostly borne little fruit, he noted. We therefore “need to dig deeper” see how deeply the unfettered propaganda that less regulation leads to growth and higher taxes always create jobs has affected the American mindset and economy. We also have to aim for long-term, “transformational” change instead of the everyday “transactional” change we usually get bogged down in. We have to move past the election cycles and everyday battles to politics that involve working today to improve circumstances in the future and challenging the way that people think about issues in the first place.

What horse-hockey!

Long-term ‘transformational change,’ instead of that irritating ‘transactional’ change.  Are we to wish upon a star that the crime syndicate dies off, bankster-by-bankster [and all their ass-kissing dwarves]?  Let’s not get into those niggling details of fraud, disgusting greed and all manner of malfeasance, we’ll aim for future transformation?  What the hell does that mean?  Maybe a little corrective surgery down the road, where we implant a human conscience, a sense of honor and integrity into the Wall St. CEOs and their tracker jacker drones?  Otherwise, we might as well change the national motto to:

In Fraud We Trust.

And excuse me, Mr. Schneiderman!  You are the state AG of the Great State of New York.  You were standing square on the power plate and from everything I’ve read you had a fine hand of cards.  But then . . . you folded like a beach chair.

It does no good blaming the Republicans [though they certainly deserve much blame and condemnation] when you’re unwilling to take on the monster, to make good on your own words and vows, only to then turn around and use the editorial ‘we’ in describing what needs to be done in the future.  The future will be forever tainted by the past until we purge the rot and corruption out.  Plastering over an infection never works.  Corruption always bleeds through.  Sadly, I’m sure Mr. Schneiderman [to his ever-lasting shame] knows this.  And how exactly are the damaged parties, progressive or otherwise, suppose to dig for anything?  No job, no home, no healthcare, no future.  Not even a shovel.

Yesterday I stumbled across this:

Corporate America is shifting its focus in product development and marketing to serve the “hourglass economy.” The hourglass has two chambers connected by a slim channel. Translated into economic terms, or better yet, the emerging picture of America, the two chambers represent rich and poor, with virtually nothing in the middle.

Worse, while the traditional hourglass has two equal chambers, the economic hourglass does not. One chamber contains a small percent of the population and most of the wealth and the other is filled with the bulk of Americans, who have little access to resources and diminished hope for prosperity The hourglass economy has become so entrenched that Bloomberg News credits it with dividing Americans and defining U.S. politics.

Perfect!  Better yet:

Citigroup was quick to notice the hourglass trend that was taking root in 2009. To help investors cash in on the demise of the middle class Citigroup recently issued an hourglass investment advisory that highlights twenty stocks of companies targeting low end consumers and fifteen companies targeting the high end ones. Showing that the hourglass economy is real and gaining momentum, Citigroup’s hourglass index posted a whopping 56.5% return between Dec. 10, 2009 and Sept. 1, 2011, according to financial reporter,Patrick Martin.

Ahhhh, yes.  The American way—investing in feudalism’s bright, bright future.  You cannot make this stuff up.

We wonder [well, some wonder] why the electorate is dispirited, angry and disgusted.  This is a prime example.  Public officials from the President down are suppose to be working for the American public, not an abusive oligarchy.

Yes, the GOP propaganda regarding the ‘magical market’ needs to be exposed for the ludicrous and damaging fraud it is.  Taxes are a necessary tool in running any stable government, not a Marxist plot.  Regulation is a counterweight to capitalism’s reckless greed and worst instincts.  But public officials need to be on board, manning the bully pulpits, educating and inspiring the public to press for and demand honest, effective reform, not a slap-hazard wallpapering job called good when the result is an utter wreck. Elected, public officials [sometimes quaintly referred to as public servants] are suppose to be working for us–the public at large–for our welfare.  Not simply feeding the industrial/military complex, bowing and scraping to corporate financiers.

Literary critics question why The Hunger Games trilogy [a Young Adult series] has become so popular, why it’s had crossover appeal.  Bread and Circuses, the never-ending distractions, the deliciously effective tools of fear and need, so effective that not even our children escape [think students up to their eyeballs in impossible debt].

The allegory is us.

In any case, elections are upon us.  We’re going to hear all manner of pontificating, accusations screeched and name-calling taken to brain-freeze levels.  The really disturbing part?  Both 2012 candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, have sold their souls to the highest bidders.  We, the electorate?  We’re merely spectators sitting in the cheap seats.

Let the corporate dogfight begin!

Btw, for a chilling, even startling essay, I’d highly recommend an essay at Naked Capitalism: Code is Law.  Literally.

It’s another angle to look at and contemplate, one that I haven’t seen discussed before.   The comment section is equally good.

As for the election season?  We’re going to need a good shovel.

Thursday Reads

Posted: April 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Crime, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Good Morning!

Last night, George Zimmerman, the man who shot unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin and triggered nationwide outrage was booked on second degree murder charges and is now in Seminole County jail. He will appear before a judge this morning.

George Zimmerman arrived at the Seminole County Jail this evening, about two hours after officials announced that he will face a second-degree murder charge in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Special Prosecutor Angela Corey announced the second-degree murder charge at the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville tonight, more than six weeks after Trayvon and Zimmerman’s fatal encounter.

If convicted, Zimmerman would face up to life in prison on the first-degree felony charge. He arrived at the Seminole County jail about 8:30 p.m. tonight, greeted by a throng of reporters shouting questions.

George Zimmerman's booking photo

I’m not a doctor, but I’ve seen broken noses before. Zimmerman’s doesn’t look like the ones I’ve seen, but as I said, I’m not a doctor.

I just have a few more links related to this story. Trayvon Martin’s parents have behaved with dignity and grace during a time that for them can only have been nightmarish. Via Raw Story, yesterday, they reacted to the arrest and charging of the man who killed their son in an interview with the AP. When asked what they would do if they had an opportunity to talk with George Zimmerman.

“I would probably give him the opportunity to apologize,” said Sybrina Fulton, Travyon Martin’s mother. I would probably ask him if there was another way he could have helped settle the confrontation that he had with Trayvon, other than the way it ended, with Trayvon being shot.”

Tracy Martin, the boy’s father, said he would ask Zimmerman what his motive was.

“Why was he patrolling the neighborhood with a 9mm gun?” he said. “What was it about my son that made him suspicious? What made him decide to disobey the dispatcher, who is trained to handle 911 calls? Why does he feel his life is so altered and does he understand that he altered his own life by refusing to stay in his vehicle? Was it really worth it? Was it really worth taking an innocent child’s life?”

The right wing site the Daily Caller, which has had access to Zimmerman family members reported that George Zimmerman used the My Space handle “datniggytb.”

George Zimmerman, the Hispanic Floridian who killed black teenager Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, had a MySpace account whose username was “datniggytb,” The Daily Caller has learned.

According to a family member whose identity The Daily Caller has agreed not to reveal for safety reasons, the “datniggytb” name is not a racial slur, but a friendly nickname that referred to George himself.

“That was an old nickname his black friends gave him,” the Zimmerman family member said. “He didn’t have an issue with the profile name.”

The family member at first denied that George had a My Space account, and later came up with the “black friends” explanation. I hope someone in the Justice Department reads The Daily Caller.

In other news, the US Justice Department has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple and three publishers for conspiring to fix the price of e-books in order to force Amazon to charge higher prices.

The announcement, made in Washington by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Sharis A. Pozen, the acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, capped a long investigation. The inquiry hinged on the question of whether publishers, at the urging of Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, agreed to adopt a new policy in 2010 that in essence coordinated the price of newly released e-books at the price offered in Apple’s iBookstore — typically between $12.99 and $14.99.

At the time, Apple with its blockbuster iPad was trying to challenge Amazon’s hold on the e-book market. Amazon, the online retail giant, had become a kind of Walmart for the e-book business by lowering the price of most new and best-selling e-books to $9.99 — a price meant to stimulate sales of its own e-reading device, the Kindle.

Publishers, looking for leverage against Amazon, saw Apple as their white knight. The Justice Department complaint, using language that could have been inspired by a best-selling white-collar crime novel, describes how executives from the publishing companies met to discuss business matters “in private rooms for dinner in upscale Manhattan restaurants,” tried to hide their communications by issuing instructions to “double-delete” e-mails, all the time complaining of Amazon’s increasing influence over the e-book market.

Ultimately, the Justice Department charges, the publishers and Apple conspired to limit e-book price competition, increasing Amazon’s e-book retail prices and causing “consumers to pay tens of millions of dollars more for e-books than they otherwise would have paid.”

Three publishers have already settled with the Justice Department. As a Kindle owner, I’ve long hoped this would happen. Steve Jobs made me pay more for books, and I strongly resent it.

Yesterday, while promoting “the Buffet rule,” President Obama used the sainted Ronald Reagan as a stick to beat Republicans with. From Raw Story:

He described for the audience the actions of one of his predecessors in the Oval Office, a president who “gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower tax rates than his secretary, and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong. So this president gave another speech where he said it was ‘crazy’—that’s a quote—that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary.”

“That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior,” he said, “was Ronald Reagan.”

Mitt Romney is still struggling to convince women that He and other Republicans aren’t waging war on them. He’s trying to do this by accusing the Obama administration of a war on women, but he can’t articulate how that war works, according to Talking Points Memo.

The campaign faced a number of questions in [a] press call as to just how Obama’s supposed “War on Women” worked, none of which produced a direct answer. Asked by TPM on the call to explain how another president taking office in January 2009 might have affected the gender gap in job growth, Romney adviser Lanhee Chen only said that the pattern was unusual compared with other recessions and that he believed a president like Romney would have gotten different results….

Chen was pressed again by another reporter to explain why women were disproportionately affected and what “difference in policy” would have changed the equation.

“The president’s policies in general, whether it’s Obamacare or Dodd-Frank or any of the policies they have pursued have really hurt both men and women,” he said. “This president has demonstrated that he’s doing everything in his power to scare away job creators and that’s had a disproportionate impact on women. That’s just a statistical fact.”

Asked a third time to explain the origins of this gender divide and how Romney would tackle the ratio of job losses specifically, Chen again said “it is a fact” that women have suffered disproportionately but offered no specific answer.

“[Romney] would undo the damage that President Obama has done,” he said. “He would take the economy in a very different direction and, as a result of that, produce very substantial job gains and growth for men and women.”

Al-righty-then.

Dakinikat covered that story really well yesterday, so if you haven’t read her post yet, be sure to check it out.

RNC chairman Reince Priebus announced yesterday that he isn’t backing down on his comparison of the notion of a Republican war on women to a war on caterpillars. Politico:

Reince Priebus said Wednesday he has no intention of taking back his “war on caterpillars” comment that landed him at the center of criticism last week — in fact, the chairman of the Republican National Committee vowed he’d gladly “double down” on the remark.

“I’m not going to walk back — I’ll double down on it,” Priebus said on MSNBC when asked whether he wanted to walk back or clarify his choice of words. “This war of women is a fiction that the Democrats have created, and the real war on women is the war that this president has put forward on the American people by not following through on his promises, by having women disproportionately affected by the Obama economy.”

He continued, “Go read Anita Dunn’s book if you want to go read about a war on women in the workplace — go read that book and you’ll see what the White House’s record is on women.”

Yes, Obama treated women working in the White House like shit. I read Confidence Men. So because Obama is a dick, Priebus wants us to vote for the party of personhood bills, vaginal probes, and birth control bans? A plague on both their houses.

Remember “killer bees?” A beekeeper in East Tennessee was stung 30 times by “partially Africanized bees” AKA “killer bees.”

Africanized bee swarm

A swarm of as many as 100,000 bees attacked a Tennessee beekeeper last month, and genetic testing of the angry critters has now revealed that they were partially Africanized bees. This is the first time that Africanized bees have been found in Tennessee.

Africanized bees, often referred to as “killer bees,” are a hybrid cross between the bee species normally found in America and African honey bees (Apis mellifera scutellata), which were originally introduced to the Americas as a productive source of honey. But the African honey bees take over hives wherever they spread, killing the hives’ original queens and hybridizing with resident populations. The hybridized Africanized bees are significantly more aggressive than other bees and more likely to attack in massive swarms when defending their nests. Their stings are no worse than those of other bees, but the sheer number of them can create more life-threatening situations, especially in anyone who is allergic to bee stings.

According to the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, genetic tests on the recent swarm found that the bees were less than 17 percent Africanized, which is why they are considered “partially Africanized.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture considers truly Africanized bees to have 50 percent African genetics.

Eeeeeek!

In related news, Africanized bees are suspected in a recent Texas swarm that attacked three people and a horse. The horse, which was observed almost completely covered in bees, later died from allergic reactions to the stings.

Finally, Connie from Orlando (AKA ecocatwoman) sent me a link to an interview that Terry Gross conducted yesterday with singer/songwriter Carole King. I grew up listening to Goffin-King songs, so I plan to listen to it ASAP. The occasion for the interview was her memoir A Natural Woman.

King, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, has written for everyone from Little Eva to Aretha Franklin to James Taylor. Her 1971 solo album Tapestry spent 15 weeks at the top of the charts, and stayed on the charts for more than six years.

But King was just 15 when she and three classmates formed a vocal quartet called the Co-Sines at James Madison High School. At night, she attended disc jockey Alan Freed’s concerts — a veritable “who’s who” of rock ‘n’ roll performers — and later set up a meeting with Freed, an internationally known rock promoter she thought could help her break into the songwriting business. Freed told her to look up the names of record companies in the phone book.

She recounts the story in her new memoir, A Natural Woman, explaining that she called Atlantic Records and arranged a meeting. Soon after, she wrote her first big hit — the Shirelles number, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” — with Gerry Goffin, who would later become her husband.

So in honor of the woman who helped to create the soundtrack to my pre-teen and teenage years:

Now what’s on your reading and listening list today?

Why is Romney the Almost-Human?

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , | 12 Comments

Everybody — well, me, and Charles Pierce, and bostonboomer, and well, everybody — sees him as a stiff awkward robot with less charm than a Roomba.
Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner with lights on. Photo: benfulton, cc on flickr

Yes, that’s at least partly because he’s a rich guy who has to mix with the rubes on nothing stronger than caffeine-free Coke. And it’s partly because he’s been lying for votes for so long, it takes more and more time to get the right lies out of storage. A Roomba doesn’t have to do either of those things.

But, really, are those issues unusual for a politician? They all have to campaign among the manyheaded and sanitize their hands every few minutes. They all lie like tombstones, and we know it. So what is it with Romney? Why are the other politicians just doing what politicians do, but Romney gets called a robot?

I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s because he’s so bad at lying. It’s written all over his face that he doesn’t believe any of the drivel himself, that he’s reading his speeches to the proletariat because that’s what you have to do, that he’s going through the motions.

He’s such a bad liar, we can see him doing it. But truth-telling is so far off the table it’s in the Marianas Trench somewhere. That means we have to examine the only alternative. Good liars.

In the RE (Rove Era), elections are about piling on the most stimulating lies. For three and a half years we’ve had someone doing pretty much the diametric opposite of everything he campaigned on, and when he goes out campaigning now … people still believe him when he says the next four years will be different. He’s one of the best liars in all history.

It’s like a choice between being swindled out of your money or your house. Both alternatives are repulsive, but with a bad liar, we might be on our guard and actually get ripped off less. With a sweet-talking bamboozler, in Vastleft’s inimitable words, half the country accepts it while the other half demands even worse.

Crossposted from Acid Test

They must think Women are Really Stupid

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , | 31 Comments

Unless Harvard MBA math is radically different from the math taught in this universe, the Romney campaign must have decided that women are really gullible and stupid.  They realize they have a gender gap and have decided giving us bad math and no answers is the answer.  The Republican moves to regain ground with women are akin to an ad campaign coming from the writers of Mad Men. It’s a blast from the stereotype past.  Not only is the ad lame and dated, but it doesn’t hold up to fact checking and questioning which is very easy to do on today’s internet database.  Etcha Sketch positions and lies don’t cut it with most of the women I know.

First, we learned Romney keeps in touch with women by sending his wife–the great white rich huntress–out to stalk the elusive beasts that are rare animals in the world of venture and plunder finance. How does Romney answer questions about women’s concerns?

Virtually every time, Romney answers by invoking his wife of 43 years, and reports what’s she’s told him about what women want.

“She reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy, and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves,” Romney told the Newspaper Association of America on Wednesday. “They are concerned about gasoline prices, the cost of getting to and from work, taking their kids to school or to practice and so forth after school. That is what women care about in this country, and my vision is to get America working again.”

A few days earlier in Middleton, he was asked how he’d counter the Democrats’ narrative on contraception. He prefaced his answer this way: “I wish Ann were here … to answer that question in particular.”

Then, we saw Republican Fembots out on the talk circuit–Nikki Haley being one–to say that women really want good jobs for their sons and don’t care at all about their health concerns like pregnancy prevention and access to mammograms for women without private health insurance.

During an appearance on ABC’s The View, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked Haley how conservatives could make the case that Republicans represent the interest of women.

“All of my policy is not based on a label,” Haley remarked. “It’s based on what I’ve lived and what I know: Women don’t care about contraception. They care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all of those things.”

Then, they send Prince Reibus to the chat spin zone who says the War on Women was a campaign ploy with as much validity as a War on Caterpillars after we’ve endured about two years with of laws to defund Planned Parenthood, remove state equal pay laws, and block women’s constitutional right to access abortion, birth control, and health care in general. Then there are the Ryan spending priorities which hit women, the elderly and children hardest while giving millionaires more tax breaks.  Here’s a few headlines just to remind you what they’ve been up to the first two weeks of April alone.  Notice that the list of restrictions aimed at women are aren’t exactly coming from the most blue states with Democratic Governors.   Don’t forget Romney has vowed to get rid of Planned Parenthood and Title X and supports the Blunt Amendment.

The Los Angeles Times: Mississippi could close state’s sole abortion clinic, by Richard Fausset

ABC News: Texas Teacher Fired for Unwed Pregnancy Offered to Get Married, by Christina Ng

USA Today: Ariz. House OKs bill banning abortions after 20 weeks, by Alia Beard Rau

WEAU-TV: Controversial abortion bill among several Walker quietly signed into law, by Aaron Dimick

ACLU press release: ACLU and Women’s Health Groups File Lawsuit to Protect Vital Health Services in Oklahoma

Let’s put that in perspective for the years 2011 and 2012 to date.

“We’re looking at about 430 abortion restrictions that have been introduced into state legislatures this year, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as 2011,” says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy group that focuses on health and reproductive rights. This year, Nash says, “is shaping up to be quite busy.”

Keep in mind, 2011 was already a watershed year for abortion restrictions: States passed 83 such laws, more than triple the 23 laws passed in 2010. And much of that had to do with the 2010 election, when Republicans gained control of many state legislatures. With the political makeup of state capitols unchanged, lawmakers are continuing to put more limits abortion.

The latest Romney lie should make Romney’s nose reach all the way around the world to touch the back of his head. Romney just doesn’t spin a story to his advantage, he makes things up from whole cloth.  This time he’s playing numbers games with unemployment statistics.

Mitt Romney’s campaign wants you to know that the same president who argues for contraceptive coverage and suggests that a Congress with more female members would get more accomplished has also presided over disproportionate job losses among women.

On April 6, 2012, Romney’s press secretary Andrea Saul tweeted, “FACT: Women account for 92.3% of the jobs lost under @BarackObama, a claim also made on Romney’s website.

She followed it up a few hours later with this: “@BarackObama touts policies for women & 92.3% jobs lost under him r women’s. He’s even more clueless than we thought.”

When we asked for backup for the claim, the campaign cited national employment figures spanning four years. We found that though the numbers are accurate, their reading of them isn’t.

Here is the real bottom line from PolitiFact.

… if you count all those jobs lost beginning in 2007, women account for just 39.7 percent of the total.

Romney denies that his gender gap is due to the many laws passed recently to restrict women’s civil liberties and rights.

As the Republican field winnowed Tuesday, Mitt Romney made an appeal to a voting bloc key to any candidate’s success in November: women.

Though the day’s headlines revolved around a decision by former Sen. Rick Santorum to suspend his campaign, Mitt Romney barreled forward with a push against Democrats as to who could best appeal to female voters.

Speaking at a Delaware structural steel factory, Romney responded to Democratic claims his party had waged a “war on women” and alienated female voters. Romney turned the argument around, accusing President Barack Obama’s administration of failing working women.

“The real war on women has been the job losses as the result of the Obama economy,” he told an audience in Wilmington, saying women had lost 92.3% of jobs lost under the Obama administration.

Romney said his private sector career had helped him understand what women worry about: jobs and the economy.

“If we’re going to get women back to work and help women with the real issues women care about – good jobs, good wages, a bright future for themselves, their families, and their kids, we’re going to have to elect a president who understands how the economy works, and I do.”

I would argue that understanding the unemployment  rates would be one of them.   So given that, wouldn’t you think Romney would know what he thinks about the Lilly Ledbetter Act and its status as Obama’s signature law to help women and pay?  This happened this morning. 

Given that Tea Party/Koch Puppet Governor Walker of Wisconsin just repealed his state’s equal pay act, you think some one in the Romney campaign would realize it’s an important question for women who work.  Obviously, the DNC and the Obama campaign have already asked the question.

The Democratic National Committee chairwoman called out Republican Gov. Scott Walker today for repealing Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, a law intended to lower the cost for plaintiffs suing employers for pay discrimination.

“He tried to quietly repeal the Equal Pay Act. Women aren’t going to stand for that,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The law allowed for victims to sue employers in state court which is often less expensive than filing in federal court.

The Republican controlled state Senate passed the measure in November, followed by passage in the state Legislature in February. Walker then repealed it Thursday.

“The focus of the Republican Party on turning back the clock for women really is something that’s unacceptable and shows how callus and insensitive they are towards women’s priorities,” the Florida congresswoman said.

National Republicans have yet to comment on the Wisconsin repeal but the Obama campaign has seized the opportunity to tie Walker’s law to Mitt Romney, who has argued that women voters in 2012 only care about pocketbook issues.

“Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?” Obama campaign representative Lis Smith said Friday.

This sounds a lot like Romney’s journey to the Blunt Amendment this year.  First, Romney says no state is trying to make birth control illegal, then he says that birth control is a private issue, then, he supports the intrusive Blunt Amendment within the hour of not supporting it.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Wednesday he opposed Senate Republicans’ effort that critics say would limit insurance coverage of birth control, then reversed himself quickly in a second interview saying he misunderstood the question.

Romney told Ohio News Network during an interview that he opposed a measure by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., that was scheduled for a vote Thursday. “I’m not for the bill,” Romney said before urging the interviewer to move on.

Romney later said he didn’t understand the question.

“Of course I support the Blunt amendment. I thought he was talking about some state law that prevented people from getting contraception so I was simply — misunderstood the question and of course I support the Blunt amendment,” Romney later told Howie Carr’s radio program in Boston, noting that Blunt is his campaign’s point man in the Senate.

Just hours earlier, ONN reporter Jim Heath asked Romney about rival Rick Santorum and the cultural debate happening in the campaign and the legislation proposed by Blunt and co-sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

“He’s brought contraception into this campaign. The issue of birth control — contraception, Blunt-Rubio — is being debated, I believe, later this week. It deals with banning or allowing employers to ban providing female contraception. Have you taken a position on it?” Heath said. “He (Santorum) said he was for that. We’ll talk about personhood in a second, but he’s for that. Have you taken a position?”

Romney replied: “I’m not for the bill, but look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.”

So, the Romney camp holds a campaign call on “women’s issues”, wants to talk about women and jobs, then has no idea what the Lilly Ledbetter Act is or what Romney thinks about it.  This is major fail imho and just like the clueless response on the Blunt Amendment Dosado.  Maddow sums this up succinctly.

Romney has cited a misleading statistic, and his aides couldn’t defend it. Romney has said current policies are keeping women from getting more jobs, and given three separate chances to say something coherent, his aides couldn’t explain what would change if the former governor is elected president. Were they not expecting these kinds of question?

To borrow a Casey Stengel line, can’t anybody here play this game?

As for the Fair Pay law, Lilly Ledbetter released a statement shortly after the Romney campaign wouldn’t state the former governor’s position on this.

“I was shocked and disappointed to hear that Mitt Romney is not willing to stand up for women and their families. If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This Act not only ensures women have the tools to get equal pay for equal work, but it means their families will be better served also. Women earn just 77 cents to every dollar that men earn for the same job, which is why President Obama took decisive action and made this the first bill that he signed when he took office. Women should have the ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers.

“Anyone who wants to be President of the United States shouldn’t have to think about whether they support pursuing every possible avenue to ensuring women get the same pay for the same work as men. Our economic security depends on it.”

Eventually, after Ledbetter’s statement was released to the media, the Republican campaign said a Romney administration wouldn’t try to repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but wouldn’t say whether Romney supported the law itself. (Remember, the vast majority of congressional Republicans opposed the law when it passed in 2009.)

I can’t imagine the circumstances under which I would vote for this schmuck.  I say this as women who ran as a Republican in the 1990s and who is squarely an independent today.  You have to be a seriously self loathing woman to consider voting for today’s Republican Party.  They’ve gone way off the deep end and Willard’s gone right with them.

Breaking: George Zimmerman to be Charged in Trayvon Martin Shooting

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Crime, racism | Tags: , , , , , , | 28 Comments

Florida Special Prosecutor Angela Corey

Florida Special Prosecutor Angela Corey will hold a press conference at 6PM today to announce state charges against George Zimmerman, who admitted to shooting Miami high school student Trayvon Martin on the evening of February 26 as he returned to the home of his father’s fiancee in a gated community in Sanford, Florida. Sanford Police released Zimmerman the same night, apparently believing his claim that he killed Martin in self-defenst

Multiple news sources are saying there will be charges filed against Zimmerman, but not what crime he will be charged with. Corey had told reporters on Tuesday night that she would give them three hours notice before she announced new details in the Trayvon Martin case.

ABC News:

The prosecutor’s ruling is certain to provoke controversy in Sanford, Fla., where shooting took place and across the country.

Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic neighborhood watch captain, shot and killed Martin, who was 17 and black, on Feb. 26 after following the teenager for several minutes.

The special prosecutor’s ruling came one day after Zimmerman’s legal team quit because they had lost contact with him, and suggested that the pressure of the case had “pushed him over the edge.”

His lawyers said that Zimmerman was no longer in Florida and ABC News has learned that prosecutors do not know his exact location.

I’m hoping that Corey knows where Zimmerman is. His former attorneys had said earlier that he would willingly turn himself in if a decision were made to charge him. Will he follow through on the promise now that he has reportedly gone rogue?

State tuned. I’ll update this post with any new information that I can find.

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