Thursday Reads

Posted: April 14, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, Medicare, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Good Morning!! I have a real grab bag of news items for you this morning.

Via Ezra Klein, a Gallup poll found that nobody, including most Republicans, wants the government fooling around with Medicare. I can’t embed the chart, but you can see it at either of the above links. Klein:

The Republican Party has a bit of a problem: Their coalition is heavily weighted toward seniors. But their agenda is heavily weighted toward cuts to entitlement programs that benefit seniors. In 2010, they handled this by relentlessly attacking Democrats for the Medicare cuts in the Affordable Care Act. In 2011, they’re trying to handle it by saying that Paul Ryan’s Medicare cuts will exempt anyone under 55 — but because he’s keeping all the Medicare cuts from the Affordable Care Act and implementing them on schedule, that isn’t, by the GOP’s own logic, actually true….

The most popular position in the GOP’s coalition isn’t that Medicare needs a complete overhaul, as Ryan thinks. It isn’t that it needs major changes, or even that it needs minor changes. It’s that we shouldn’t try and control costs at all.

ROFLOL!

Speaking of arrogant and deluded Republicans, The Smoking Gun obtained FAA documents relating to an incident in which James Inhofe “scared the crap out of” a bunch of Airport employees when the elderly GOP Senator landed his plan on a closed runway.

Newly released Federal Aviation Administration documents and audiotapes shed a scary new light on a bizarre incident late last year during which U.S. Senator James Inhofe landed his Cessna on a closed runway at a south Texas airport, scattering construction workers who ran for their lives as the politician’s plane hopscotched over them and six vehicles.

The FAA material, provided in response to a TSG Freedom of Information Act request, details how Inhofe, 76, chose to land on the main runway at the Cameron County Airport on October 21 despite being aware that it was closed and had a large ‘X’ on its threshold….

Shortly after Inhofe landed, Sidney Boyd, who was supervising construction on the closed runway, called the FAA to report that Inhofe’s plane, a twin-engine six-seater, initially touched down on the runway and then “’sky hopped’ over the six vehicles and personnel working on the runway, and then landed.”

During the call, which was recorded by the FAA, Boyd said Inhofe’s antics “scared the crap out of” workers, adding that the Cessna “damn near hit” a red truck. Referring to the vehicle’s driver, Boyd added, “I think he actually wet his britches, he was scared to death. I mean, hell, he started trying to head for the side of the runway. The pilot could see him, or he should have been able to, he was right on him.”

Inhofe agreed to “complete a program of remedial training” so he wouldn’t lose his pilot’s license.

According to a report by the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, released today, Goldman Sachs “Misled Clients, Lawmakers on CDOs.”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) designed, marketed and sold collateralized debt obligations that misled investors and created conflicts of interest as the company built short positions before the U.S. housing market collapsed, a Senate panel said in its report on the financial crisis.

In the case of one CDO, Hudson Mezzanine Funding 2006-1, Goldman Sachs told investors its interests were aligned with theirs while the firm held 100 percent of the short side, according to the report released today by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who leads the panel, urged regulators to review all of the structured finance transactions described in the report.

At a briefing today, Levin said he believed Goldman Sachs executives weren’t truthful about the company’s transactions in testimony before the subcommittee at an April 2010 hearing. He said he would refer the testimony to the Justice Department for possible perjury charges.

Good. I sure would like to see some prosecutions of these lying, cheating frauds.

Via Tennesee Guerrilla Women, Ashley Judd is “speaking out against misogyny.” She wrote a couple of paragraphs in her new memoir about rap artists promoting hatred and violence against women:

While speaking about an AIDS awareness program she works with, Judd writes, “Along with other performers, YouthAIDS was supported by rap and hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg and P. Diddy to spread the message…um, who? Those names were a red flag.”

Judd continued, “As far as I’m concerned, most rap and hip-hop music – with its rape culture and insanely abusive lyrics and depictions of girls and women as ‘ho’s’ – is the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny.”

She concludes, “I believe that the social construction of gender – the cultural beliefs and practices that divide the sexes and institutionalize and normalize the unequal treatment of girls and women, privilege the interests of boys and men, and, most nefariously, incessantly sexualize girls and women – is the root cause of poverty and suffering around the world.”

The backlash was immediate and vicious, and included death threats. Judd apologized for generalizing about all rap and hip hop music, but ended with this:

“Hatred of girls and women, I will oppose with spiritual and non-violent principles every day,” she concludes, adding that the Twitter responses to her remarks included death threats. “Abuse and violence in any form, at any time, in any expression, are never okay. Period. I, and other girls and women, are not afraid of you. You can keep on hating, but I am going to keep on loving.”

More power to Ashley Judd!

In more violence against women news, the search for bodies is continuing on Long Island. After finding ten bodies so far on beaches, searchers are looking underwater for more remains. In addition the FBI is helping out with “high-tech planes.”

“This is not an episode of CSI. This is an intensive long term investigation that includes the use of sophisticated technology as well as good old fashioned detective work,” said Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer at a press conference today.

Dormer said that the FBI will provide investigators with planes and choppers that use sophisticated aerial imaging technology of the Long Island beach area where the skeletal remains of at least nine bodies have been found so far.

“Weather permitting this operation will commence later this week…We’re hoping the technology will help identify skeletal remains that may still be out there,” Dormer said.

Police believe that there are no links between the bodies found on Long Island in 2010 and 2011 and four bodies that were found in Atlantic City in 2006.

According to the NY Post, some of the bones found in the past couple of days could be victims of another Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin.

The skull and torso found on a desolate Nassau County beachfront are too old to be connected to the serial killings of four Craigslist call girls — and could belong to long-lost victims of notorious Long Island butcher Joel Rifkin, a source said yesterday.

“These are so old that roots were growing around the vertebrae and the skull,” the source told The Post.

“These could be one or two of Joel Rifkin’s victims who were never found,” or the work of another killer, the source said.

Further complicating the case, the bodies of a man and a young child have been found during the search.

Austria is the latest country waking up to the abuse of its children by Catholic priests.

Over 800 cases of abuse in Catholic institutions in Austria have been reported so far, a commission tasked with investigating abuse cases announced on Wednesday.

A total 837 abuse victims approached the commission, which was set up by the Austrian Catholic Church last year after it was hit by a wave of abuse revelations, commission head Waltraud Klasnic told a press conference.

Three quarters of the victims were male, with the most cases — about 20 percent — reported in northern Upper Austria province, followed by Vienna and western Tyrol, according to a commission report summarising its first-year findings.

Back in the good old USA, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League says the kids were asking for it.

The group bought an expensive full-page ad in The New York Times Monday that places the blames for the church’s scandals on “homosexuality, not pedophilia.”

And perhaps most shockingly, it also claimed that some children were active participants in the abuse.

“The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight — they weren’t children and they weren’t raped,” self-appointed Catholic League president Bill Donohue wrote in the ad.

“We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape),” he added, referencing a 2004 study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which was funded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that ‘more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.’ In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia,” Donohue wrote.

Another issue is that priests are in a position of power and should not take advantage of that position to gratify their sexual desires. But I’m sure Donohue would disagree. And where I come from adolescents are still children.

In science news, a new study revealed that Climate change affects tectonic plate movement, causing earthquakes

Understanding why plates change direction and speed is key to unlocking huge seismic events such as last month’s Japan earthquake, which shifted the Earth’s axis by several inches, or February’s New Zealand quake.

An Australian-led team of researchers from France and Germany found that the strengthening Indian monsoon had accelerated movement of the Indian plate over the past 10 million years by a factor of about 20 percent.

Lead researcher Giampiero Iaffaldano said Wednesday that although scientists have long known that tectonic movements influence climate by creating new mountains and sea trenches, his study was the first to show the reverse.

Dakninikat sent me this one from the BBC: Yellowstone supervolcano fed by bigger plume

The underground volcanic plume at Yellowstone in the US may be bigger than previously thought, according to a new study by geologists.

The volcanic hotspot below Yellowstone feeds the hot springs, mud pots and geysers that bring millions of visitors to the US national park each year.

There have been three huge eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano: 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago and 640,000 years ago. Two of these eruptions blanketed a large area of North America with volcanic ash.

The most recent full-scale eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano ejected some 1,000 cubic km (240 cubic miles) of hot ash and rock into the atmosphere. There have been smaller eruptions in between the largest outpourings; the most recent of these occurred 70,000 years ago.

Of course that can’t be true because the earth can’t possibly be that old, right?

That’s all I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

Tuesday Reads

Posted: April 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | 44 Comments

Good Morning! There is lots of news out there, none of it good.

We just have one more day to go until President Obama gives the country the bad news that the poor folks and the working and middle classes are going to have to “share the sacrifice” so that billionaires like Jamie Dimon can continue to live in the style to which they’ve become accustomed.

John Amato had a terrific post up yesterday afternoon about Obama’s upcoming speech in which he’ll outline his plan to destroy the Democratic party by throwing out the legacies of FDR, JFK, and LBJ. I highly recommend it. Read it and you’ll get the background on the final sellout along with some other useful opinions from around the blogosphere.

I’ll just tell you who is behind the destruction of the safety net: Timmy Geithner and his Treasury gang, along with “economic adviser” Gene Sperling and his deputy Jason Furman. God forbid Obama should get economic advice from real economists! That would be wrong.

I know you’ll all be very happy to know that John Boehner says his relationship with President Obama has improved after the recent budget negotiations. Well I should think so. After all, Boehner got everything he wanted and more! From The Hill:

“Clearly, we understand each other better,” Boehner said during an interview on Fox News, his first after Republicans and Democrats reached a deal late Friday to fund the government through September. “I think we have developed a process that may allow the debate to move forward.”

The Speaker’s comments reveal a contrast between the nature of the negotaitions that went on behind closed doors and the public jousting between both parties that went on until the 11th hour before the government was set to shut down.

That strengthened relationship could come in handy over the next several months — Congress is set to debate whether to raise the nation’s debt limit, as well as a 2012 budget proposal.

I’m so happy for the Speaker and the President!

There’s another storm brewing in Wisconsin. It appears that Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, who suddenly *found* just the right number of votes to push her former boss David Prosser over the top in his close election fight for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, may have lied when she claimed a Democratic colleague could back up her claims about *finding* that magically appropriate number of votes on her hard drive.

The Waukesha County Democratic Party released a statement Monday ascribed to Ramona Kitzinger, 80, a member of the canvassing board since 2004.

In the statement, Kitzinger said that even during the canvass of Brookfield’s votes during the day Thursday, no mention was made of the big mistake, something in retrospect she called “shocking and somewhat appalling.”

Meanwhile, in Madison, the state’s top election official referred to “apparent negligence” by Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus. At a news conference Monday, Kevin Kennedy, executive director of the Government Accountability Board, said she needs to change her practices to bolster public confidence.

The state agency will not certify the election results until it finishes its review of what happened in Waukesha County, spokesman Reid Magney said.

Here is Kitzinger’s statement. Those Republicans sure do know how to fix election results. Back in the day, Democrats could do that kind of thing, but no more. Democrats are nothing but doormats these days.

Oh dear, Cornell West sounds kind of mad at President Obama.

In an interview last week, he suggested that Obama has sold out and become “a puppet” of powerful interests, merely promising change and not delivering. West warned that this would trust the U.S. into a “democratic awakening” the likes of which the nation had not seen in decades.

Appearing on an MSNBC panel recently, West remained outspoken.

Amid a very heated discussion of whether President Obama is doing enough for black people in America, he called the president “another black mascot” of “Wall Street oligarchs.”

Here’s the video.

Of course, technically Obama didn’t sell out. He was always Wall Street’s puppet.

There’s a lengthy article on the effects of the BP oil spill in The New York Times: Gulf’s Complexity and Resilience Seen in Studies of Oil Spill. It’s too extensive to summarize. Go read it if you’re interested.

The TSA is still on the job, this time groping and drug testing a six-year-old girl.

Doesn’t that just inspire pride in being an American?

What’s the deal with Long Island and serial killers?

Some towns and counties have cancer clusters. Others have high rates of traffic fatalities or foreclosures. In New York, Long Island has been grappling with its own disturbing demographic: Three serial killers who targeted the same type of victims have operated in the same tidy suburbs in the span of 22 years.

Since 1989, when the first victim was killed, the three have been active in Long Island’s two counties — Suffolk and Nassau — in apparently unrelated cases. Joel Rifkin, a 34-year-old unemployed landscaper from East Meadow, confessed to killing 17 women he said were prostitutes following his arrest in 1993. Robert Shulman, a 42-year-old postal worker from Hicksville, was convicted of killing five prostitutes after he was arrested in 1996. The third killer has yet to be apprehended, but the police know that he or she exists: the bodies of eight people — at least four of them female prostitutes — have been found in the thick brush near a Suffolk County beach since December.

Or maybe it’s four killers?

More bones were found today along the Long Island beaches and have been sent to the medical examiner’s office to determine whether they are from one or two people. One of the remains is just a skull.

Authorities involved in the painstaking probe along the popular stretch of public beach now involves more than 125 state, federal investigators and local investigators from two neighboring counties.

Investigators have said they believe that a serial killer was responsible for the murders….But probers now says [sic] that they cannot rule out the likelihood that more than one killer will be linked to the bodies which total seven sets of adult human remains, a toddler’s remains and the bones found today that may be from one or two people….

According to authorities, any differences in the method of murder, disposal, burial, and any DNA evidence will be among the elements of a rigorous forensic examination. The probe will include the assistance of state police and FBI agents including evidence collection experts, behavior science investigators and profiling gurus.

We live in a very sick culture.

That’s all I’ve got, and I wish I could have found some good news but no luck. What are you reading and blogging about today?

Monday Reads

Posted: April 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Federal Budget, Foreign Affairs, Libya, morning reads, Republican presidential politics, SCOTUS, Surreality, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Good Morning!

Well, today I’m starting with a quote from  Robert Kuttner for The American Prospect about Larry Summers’ appearance at the INET conference.  INET is the acronym for the Institute for New Economic Thinking. It was created with a $100 million grant from George Soros and no, I wasn’t invited and I didn’t attend.  Mark Thoma and Brad De Long did. You can read their blogs if you want other views.

Larry Summers, now back at Harvard, was the after-dinner entertainment, interviewed by the prodigious Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, the world’s most respected financial journalist.

Summers was terrific, acknowledging that the stimulus of February 2009 was too small, that the idea of deflating our way to recovery is insane, that de-regulation had been excessive, and that much of the economics profession missed the developing crisis because its infatuation with self-correcting markets.

If only this man had been Obama’s chief economic adviser!

He’s referring to this:

Also worth mentioning is this op-ed by former Obama economist Christina Romer on why we have abysmal unemployment. If you read and listen to both of them, it’s going to be obvious that Obama must not have listened to either of them.  No wonder they quit so early on.  That leaves Timothy-in-the-well Geithner holding the bag for this miserable recovery, imho.  Evidently, the two of them thought  what most economists were thinking for several years now but it just wasn’t evident from policy.  I guess if I heard this austerity crap was coming down the hopper during this miserable recovery, I’d have bailed before my professional credibility went to the crapper too.  Guess Timothy always has the shadow banking industry to keep him warm.  Meanwhile, Summers continues his apology tour and Romer clarifies the unemployment situation.

Strong evidence suggests that the natural rate of unemployment actually hasn’t risen very much. Instead, the elevated unemployment rate appears to reflect mainly cyclical factors, particularly a lingering shortfall in consumer spending and business investment.

Okay. The important phrase here is “lingering shortfall in consumer spending and business investment”.  That means none of these idiotic tax cuts worked.  It also means the stimulus was woefully small and ill-directed.  It also means that it’s absolutely no time to worry about austerity unless you want yet another recession.  Frankly, I think the Republicans are secretly trying to bring one on and Obama is just not that informed about economics and more concerned about chasing the mythical bi-partisan unicorn to wake the frick up.

Since BB knows that I’m a wannabe astrophysicist (or Egyptologist depending on the day of the week), she sent me another kewl science link about a star torn apart by a blackhole! NEATO!!!

On March 28, 2011, NASA’s Swift satellite caught a flash of high-energy X-rays pouring in from deep space. Swift is designed to do this, and since its launch in 2004 has seen hundreds of such things, usually caused by stars exploding at the ends of their lives.

But this time was hardly “usual”. It didn’t see a star exploding as a supernova, it saw a star literally getting torn apart as it fell too close to a black hole!

The African Union’s been chatting up their “Brother Leader”  Whacko Ghadafo and have announced the possibility of an end to the fighting in Libya. And, raise your hand if you’d like to buy the Crescent City connection because I’m entertaining offers since the Brooklyn bridge sold so well last week.

“We have completed our mission with the brother leader, and the brother leader’s delegation has accepted the road map as presented by us,” Jacob Zuma, the South African president, said.

The AU mission, headed by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the Mauritanian president, arrived in Tripoli on Sunday.

Besides Zuma and Abdel Aziz, the delegation includes Amadou Toumani Toure, Denis Sassou Nguessou and Yoweri Museveni – respectively the presidents of Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.

Gaddafi made his first appearance in front of the foreign media in weeks when he joined the AU delegation at his Bab al-Aziziyah compound.

The committee said in a statement that it had decided to go along with a road map adopted in March, which calls for an end to hostilities, “diligent conveying of humanitarian aid” and “dialogue between the Libyan parties”.

Speaking in Tripoli, Ramtane Lamamra, the AU Commissioner for Peace and Security, said the issue of Gaddafi’s departure had come up in the talks but declined to give details.

Why is it I want to sing I wanna zooma zooma zooma zooma zoom every time I read something about South Africa these days?  Well, as long as it’s not one of those horn thingies that ruined the world cup this last time out.

More crap from Crazy Republicans via Think Progress: Cantor Sees Current Medicare and Medicaid Programs As A ‘Safety Net’ For ‘People Who Frankly Don’t Need One’

Today on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace questioned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) support for a plan in which Americans “pay more out of pocket.” Defending the proposal, Cantor argued that these programs sometimes provide a “safety net” for “people who frankly don’t need one” and that the shift of the burden from the government to the beneficiary will teach government “to do more with less”:

CANTOR: We are in a situation where we have a safety net in place in this country for people who frankly don’t need one. We have to focus on making sure we have a safety net for those who need it.

WALLACE: The Medicaid people — you’re going to cut that by $750 billion.

CANTOR: The medicaid reductions are off the baseline. so what we’re saying is allow states to have the flexibility to deal with their populations, their indigent populations and the healthcare needs the way they know how to deal with them. Not to impose some mandate from a bureaucrat in washington.

WALLACE: But you are giving them less money to do it.

CANTOR: In terms of the baseline, that is correct…What we’re saying is there is so much imposition of a mandate that doesn’t relate to the actual quality of care. We believe if you put in place the mechanism that allow for personal choice as far as Medicare is concerned, as well as the programs in Medicaid, that we can actually get to a better resolve and do what most Americans are learning how to do, which is to do more with less.

Actually, 99% of Americans are doing less with less.  One percent of Americans are doing more with the corporate and rich people’s welfare that folks like Cantor have handed them on a golden platter for the last ten years.  If you have the stomach for it, the link to the TV interview is over at TP too. Frankly, I’ve been sick enough recently and don’t need to see anything that just makes me sicker.

I don’t know about you, but watching Donald Trump–the man who lost his father’s billions and then ran through government subsidies and finally made some money as a really bad reality TV star–as a potential presidential candidate has been sort’ve a surreal trip. James Polis at Richochet says that Trump is Final Proof that the Political Class Has Failed.  Trump’s potential candidacy is like an extension of his reality show with gobs of opportunism, self-promotion and narcissism. It’s bad hair gone wild.

There are two main theories cooperating to explain the Trump phenomenon:

  1. Donald Trump is today’s best self-promoter and professional opportunist.
  2. The Republican field of presumptive candidates for president is lame.

But neither of these, nor even both together, can adequately explain what’s going on. We can’t even turn for supplemental help to subtheories that emphasize the rise of celebreality culture, the fall of Sarah Palin, or The Continuing Story of Bungling Barry. These variables all appear somewhere in the equation that has produced the Trump phenomenon. But none of them explain it.

Trump is suddenly “winning” as a political figure because the political class has failed. The authority of our political institutions is weak and getting weaker; it’s not that Americans ‘lack trust’ in them, as blue ribbon pundits and sociologists often lament, so much as they lack respect for the people inside them.

My theory is that he’s just a summer replacement, along with Michelle Bachmann, that will set the stage for fall when the blue suited, pompadour-sporting  set take over to bore us to death with talks of tax cuts and subsidies ala President Dementia.  Other Republican Presidential wannabes must be thinking we’ll be tired of self-promoting, idea-less hacks by then and that they’ll look refreshing by comparison in a few months.   Oddly enough, the P woman is keeping a low profile in all of this.  Maybe she’s finally figured out that discretion is the better part of valor for a change or it could be she just has enough money  for an excellent summer vacation and has decided to exercise her options.

Okay, so I’m going to move on to something light (weirdly, spinning light, emanating from the patterned Chinese lantern covering the naked bulb in my dorm room while a John Lennon album plays Power to the People on my old turntable … oops, wrong flashback) from New Scientist. Thought mushrooms were just for old hippies and Native American Shaman?  Think again.  Here’s the headline:  Earliest evidence for magic mushroom use in Europe.

EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain, which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties – the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.

The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi Psilocybe hispanica, a local species with hallucinogenic properties.

Like the objects depicted in the mural, P. hispanica has a bell-shaped cap topped with a dome, and lacks an annulus – a ring around the stalk. “Its stalks also vary from straight to sinuous, as they do in the mural,” says Akers (Economic Botany, DOI: 10.1007/s12231-011-9152-5).

This isn’t the oldest prehistoric painting thought to depict magic mushrooms, though. An Algerian mural that may show the species Psilocybe mairei is 7000 to 9000 years old.

What a long strange ride it’s been ever since.

More on Obama-style Justice for Guantanamo detainees as the Supremes decline to clarify their rights.

The Obama administration has fought all attempts by lawyers for detainees to have the Supreme Court review those rulings. And while the news was overshadowed by the administration’s concession that alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-defendants will be tried by a military commission rather than federal jury — a separate issue — the court last week turned away three detainee challenges arising from Boumediene.

One group active in representing the detainees, the Center for Constitutional Rights, decried what it called the court’s refusal “to defend its Boumediene decision and other precedents from the open defiance of the D.C. Circuit.”

The government told justices that there is no reason for them to believe anything other than “lower courts have properly performed the task that this court assigned them in Boumediene v. Bush.”

“Open defiance” may go a bit far in describing the D.C. Circuit’s rulings, but there is no doubt that the court’s action in Boumediene — and its inaction since — has left few happy.

While detainee advocates complain about the court’s timidity, D.C. Senior Circuit Judge A. Raymond Randolph has received wide attention for a speech he gave last year in which he compared the justices to characters in “The Great Gatsby,” who have created a mess they expect others to clean up.

You don’t need me to start in on the Supremes this morning since BB did such a great job last night.  Please go read her thread on just exactly how bankrupt our government has become.  Believe me, it’s not an article on the deficit either.

Here’s an important information on the Koch Brothers, grand wizards of the kleptocracy.  Alternet says they’re worse than you thought and they’re the astroturf beneathe the Tea Party’s wings.

Then look at a recent position pushed by Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party-allied astroturf group founded and funded by David Koch (and whose sibling organization, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, he chairs):

Similarly, Americans for Prosperity supports the House continuing resolution that cuts spending by $61 billion. Those cuts would reduce the budget for the CFTC by one-third. Make no mistake: Gutting the CFTC or limiting its authority would be a boon to Wall Street businesses that use complex financial instruments. But while the result is more profits for oil companies, it means everyone else pays more at the pump.

Okay, now have a look at the Kochs’ recent direct contributions to political candidates:

The Kochs donated directly to 62 of the 87 members of the House GOP freshman class…and to 12 of the new members of the U.S. Senate.

Don’t look now. It’s Atlas Shrugged, the Movie.  Bad fiction just refuses to die when it gives erections to obsessive white men. I’m just waiting for next year’s Razzies. It’s the tale of a businessman obsessed. No, not the movie …the making of the movie …

It has taken businessman John Aglialoro nearly 20 years to realize his ambition of making a movie out of “Atlas Shrugged,” the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand that has sold more than 7 million copies and has as passionate a following among many political conservatives and libertarians as “Twilight” has among teen girls.

But the version of the book coming to theaters Friday is decidedly independent, low-cost and even makeshift. Shot for a modest $10 million by a first-time director with a cast of little-known actors, “Atlas Shrugged: Part I,” the first in an expected trilogy, will play on about 300 screens in 80 markets. It’s being marketed with the help of conservative media and “tea party” organizing groups and put into theaters by a small, Salt Lake City-based booking service.

I think I’ll pass.  I prefer those nice little British films.  I’m anxiously awaiting the redo of Upstairs, Downstairs.  I never could make it through that silly John Galt speech even when I was young and my mind was an open book.  Now, where are those lights on the ceiling when you need them?

What’s on your blogging and reading list today?

Saturday: Cerebral Is as Cerebral Does

Posted: April 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | 54 Comments

Hillary at Blair House, April 4, 2011 (during a bilateral with Shimon Peres).

Morning, news junkies.

First up… a personal note of congratulations to my blogger friend, Lake Lady, who on Wednesday was elected mayor of her small town in MO. Mayor Lake Lady, you are a true inspiration! Throughout your campaign, I’ve been reminded of this quote from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Now, onto my Saturday reads…

Once the politics are over, we can assess the policy with clear eyes. And I think you’ll find that the failure to put the 2011 budget to bed in the last Congress cost the economy $60 billion.

  • ABC News asks the $64,000 question: Where were the women in the budget debate? Here’s the other $64,000 question, the one that the MSM–as well as most of the prog blogs for that matter–won’t ask: What happened when Nancy Pelosi and “This is what a feminist looks like” Obama were at the Stupakistan table? (The war on women didn’t start with the Republican midterm gains…it just got an upgrade from easily ignored tropical storm to Cat 5 hurricane.)
  • The Atlantic’s James Fallows has a couple of posts up on the “uncertainty tax” that the possibility alone of a government shutdown has imposed on government operations, particularly at Hillary Clinton’s State Department… the first post is called Third World on the Potomac, followed up by Government-Shutdown Watch: An Inside View. The good news: Whether or not there was a shutdown, Hillary’s meeting with the highest-ranking woman in the Chinese government, State Councilor Liu Yandong, got the okay to proceed as planned next week. The not-so-good news: According to a reader whose wife works at the State department and wrote in to Fallows (see the “Inside View” link above), “it seems as though the government has been doing nothing this week other than preparing for the shutdown.” Another interesting tidbit from Fallows’ reader:

A semi-hard news tidbit: the disagreement over Planned Parenthood is a smokescreen to hide the fact that they can’t agree on the numbers. What I find so troubling about this is that the WH has met the Republicans about 70% of the way, yet Boehner keep moving the goal posts. Why the WH can’t this storyline into the media is beyond me. But then again, as Dan Balz observes today, we are seeing perhaps yet another example of a cerebral leadership style that is still not working.

  • I’d also like to say that when it comes to the kind of intelligence that matters, cerebral is as cerebral does. It’s not mere lack of ideas that is plaguing our politics, nor is it as benign as the sanitized “cerebral style” meme would like you to believe. What is plaguing our politics is lack of action and political will. Simple and reasonable ideas like ones on closing the corporate tax loopholes only get floated by the Bernie Sanders in our political class, precisely to be designated as outside the realm of what’s achievable in our current political system.
  • Speaking of political bankruptcy, and to link to James Fallows again… he has written an excellent takedown of the “brave and serious” Mr. Ryan, in which he elaborates on his contention that Ryan’s budget proposal is neither brave nor serious but rather “partisan and gimmicky,” which — as Fallows notes — would be par for the course as far as these sorts of plans go, if it weren’t for the laudatory way it has been received.
  • Meanwhile, here are the two descriptors Krugman uses for Ryan’s plan: Ludicrous and Cruel. From the link:

In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance.

So the pundits who praised this proposal when it was released were punked. The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.

  • Predictable as ever, David Brooks says Ryan’s proposal is the stuff of his political wet dreams: “Liberals are on the warpath. Republicans are aroused. This is great. It’s democracy — how change begins.” Ick. If what is meant by ‘change’ is the American public losing their lunch while listening to the chattering classes hail the destruction of what’s left of the FDR/LBJ social policy legacy, then I’m sure Republicans and DINOs alike will continue to get off on such change short-changing of the American people.
  • Where was the beltway punditry last month? Why didn’t they breathlessly praise Bernie Sanders for his Emergency Deficit Reduction Act? Did he not boldly provoke a debate we need to have in this country? Moreover, Sanders’ ideas were actually sound and in line with what the public wants. Paul Ryan’s ideas are neither. Again, we don’t just have a Where’s Waldo president. We have a Where’s Waldo fourth estate.

Are you fighting for freedom of speech and assembly and representative government, those supporters must be asking, or is it inadvertently a fight that will ultimately bring you your own versions of Tea-Partiers and gridlock and the complete sacrifice of national interests on the altar of cheap political showmanship?

  • Switching gears back to Hillaryland… John McCain at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast earlier this week, upon being asked to rate Obama’s national security team: “I think the international star is Secretary Clinton. She has done a really tremendous job.” Can’t argue with that.

  • Here’s some of that tremendous job our Energizer Secretary is doing… via NPR, Clinton Has Tough Words For China On Human Rights. The headline is in reference to yesterday when Hillary unveiled the 35th annual report to Congress on human rights. Click on the link for a transcript of Hillary’s remarks. (Hillary also announced a new website: humanrights.gov. In Hillary’s words, “This site will offer one-stop shopping for information about global human rights from across the United States Government. It will pull together reports, statements, and current updates from around the world.“)

As Hooper put it in a Tweet this morning, “Today, my friends, we have more proof that exposure to our lives = @freedomtomarry.”

  • Trump, not content to shit or get off the presidential pot just yet, has sent a crack investigative team into Hawaii looking for god only knows what. The only ‘shocking’ discovery Trump could dig up as far as I’m concerned is the whereabouts of Obama’s long lost core convictions. This is the only mystery worth considering when it comes to any ESOTUS (Empty Suit of the United States.) The rest is static…or, to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt… Great minds look for core convictions, average minds seek to be part of ‘cool’ events, and small minds continue to ask for Obama’s or Trig’s birth certificate.
  • Salon’s Alex Pareene: South Carolina GOP confirms five clowns for first 2012 debate. A depressing slate of bozos — Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Gingrich, Buddy Roemer, and Rick Santorum — but as Pareene says, “This is the preliminary list of losers, so there is still time for more clowns to RSVP.” I think that pretty much sums up the outlook for 2012, both the primaries and the general.

  • Keeping up with the one chance we have at something other than a bozo, even though it’s a long shot… CNN: Huntsman heading to South Carolina in May — to deliver a commencement address on the the 7th. “But a source close to Huntsman’s potential presidential campaign told CNN that it’s unlikely he will participate in the debate. The source said, though, that no final decision will be made until he returns from China.” Huntsman is also scheduled to give a commencement address in New Hampshire on the 21st.
  • Public Policy Polling says at this point, only Romney would make NH competitive. Blech. No mention of Huntsman in any of the other matchups either. I have a hunch he’d make it more competitive than Romney would.

The presumption that Barack Obama, no matter what he does or doesn’t do, enjoys nearly unanimous black support is a veritable wall around the president. But who does it protect him against? Republicans? Banksters? Tea partyers, warmongers, torturers? Or black people and the left, his supposed base?

  • Last Saturday I highlighted the plight of black migrant workers in Libya. BAR’s Glen Ford has an update. The NYT Sunday magazine and the UK Globe and Mail have finally devoted some ink to this story. Like Ford says, “As usual, it is only after the U.S. government has embarked irrevocably on the warpath that corporate media reveal the flaws in the rationale.”
  • I’ve been watching The Kennedys on the Reelz channel, and I have to say, despite all the critical pans of the series and even with its glaring weaknesses (chief among them, the omission of a whole lot of Kennedys), I am enjoying it. Perhaps it’s just the RFK fan in me, but I love watching Bobby and the relationship between Bobby and Jack through the lens of fine acting and a humanizing script. Anyhow, for anyone who’s missed out… there’s a Saturday marathon to catch up on episodes 1-6 today (April 9th), starting at 2 pm eastern. There will be another replay of episodes 1-6 tomorrow before the miniseries concludes in a 2-hour finale (episodes 7 and 8.)
  • I also just finished up a tv marathon of my own the other day trying to get through all of the second season of Top Chef Masters before all the episodes disappeared from my cable provider’s On Demand rotation. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone else, just in case you’re like me and end up catching up on most tv shows after they’ve already aired–so don’t click on either of the following links if you don’t want to be spoiled. I’ll just put it this way, without giving too much away: I was really thrilled to see that the charity the winner picked for the money he/she won is working toward a cause that our Madame Secretary has been working to draw attention and awareness to.

Suddenly, this week, physics enthusiasts’ eyes turned to Tevatron, a much smaller and less powerful particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois, that is scheduled to be shut down for good after September. And, depending on what happens with the budget crisis on Capitol Hill, it could be even sooner. At Tevatron, part of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), scientists said they may have found evidence of a particle never observed before.

  • Via Ron Cowen at Wired Science, Mysterious Cosmic Blast Keeps on Going. Cowen reports that “Astronomers have witnessed a cosmic explosion so strange they don’t even know what to call it.” Sounds like a metaphor for our times.

This Day in History (April 9th)

What’s on your blogging list this Saturday?

[originally posted at Let Them Listen; crossposted at Taylor Marsh and Liberal Rapture]

Friday Reads: Fresh Hells brought forth by Republicans

Posted: April 8, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, black women's reproductive health, morning reads, Violence against women, We are so F'd, Women's Rights | 16 Comments

I wish I could really say good morning, but I have to say that I’m getting more discouraged all the time.  It feels like the Republicans are destined to bring on The Handmaid’s Tale future.  There should be no complaining around here about burkhas because it seems we’re being enslaved by the same narrow minds here in this country with the same degree of ignorance and intolerance.  We’ve turned from a nation of scientists, inventors, and pioneers into something completely different.  We better start fighting the ignorance coming from pews and Republican Congressional districts now or everything we have come to know and love about this country will be gone.  One hundred fifty years after the beginning of the Civil War, we now have another war seeking to create slaves rather than free them.

First, a selection of how a few robed men with their own religious jihad have become jurists in favor of dismantling some one of the most central tenets of The Constititution:  The Establishment Clause. Every citizen in this day and age should be able to show the damage done by religionists in this country.  It will be a difficult task, however.

In a decision earlier this week in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, the five conservative Justices on the Supreme Court (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito) carved a large hole out of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Although the issue in the case was subtle, the consequences are not.

The First Amendment prohibits government to make any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” A central concern of the Establishment Clause, in the words of James Madison, was to forbid government “to force a citizen to contribute” even “three pence of his property for the support of” religion. As the Supreme Court recognized more than forty years ago, as a general proposition the Establishment Clause prohibits government from using its “taxing and spending power… to favor one religion over another or to support religion in general.” Thus, the Establishment Clause forbids government to fund churches to enable them to spread their religious beliefs or to award special tax credits to individuals to reimburse them for their contributions to religious organizations.

There is a complication, however. Even though such government programs violate the Establishment Clause, it is not clear whether anyone can legally challenge them. To bring a lawsuit contesting a law’s constitutionality, a plaintiff must have “standing” to sue. To have standing, a plaintiff must have suffered a distinct “injury in fact” as a result of the government action he wants to challenge. Standing is necessary because we want the parties to have a meaningful stake in the outcome of litigation. Otherwise, they might not adequately represent their position, which could result in a waste of judicial resources or, even worse, erroneous decisions.

Why should I have to subsidize some one’s superstitions?  I certainly will get no benefit from it nor will society.

Idaho lawmakers are seeking to force raped women to bring pregnancies to term because it is the will of “The Almighty”. (H/T to BB) That some one’s imaginary friend should hold every one hostage is anathema to me.  We have to ask when the witch burning will begin, when will we return to biblical stoning, and under what conditions will slavery be okay?  This also completely bans induced labor under strict term.  There are no ‘abortions’ in the third trimester.  That’s one of those word games religionists play to confuse the easily confused.  So, what happens if you have a brain dead baby or one that’s dead and the remains go septic?  Do you just sit around and wait for their imaginary friend to do something?  How are all these radical measures coming to pass?  Where are the reasonable people in this country?

The Idaho legislature on Tuesday gave final approval to a measure that would outlaw abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and subject abortion providers to criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.

The Senate-backed bill cleared the House in a 54-14 vote and now heads to Governor Butch Otter, who is expected to sign it.

This person actually believes a rapist is the hand of god?  Representative Shannon McMillan needs to go back and figure out that a fertilized egg is in no way a child and that forcing women to hangers and back alleys isn’t going to save lives.

“Is not the child of that rape or incest also a victim?” asked Rep. Shannon McMillan, R-Silverton. “It didn’t ask to be here. It was here under violent circumstances perhaps, but that was through no fault of its own.”[…]

The Idaho bill’s House sponsor, state Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, told legislators that the “hand of the Almighty” was at work. “His ways are higher than our ways,” Crane said. “He has the ability to take difficult, tragic, horrific circumstances and then turn them into wonderful examples.”

It looks like “clerical error” has returned the vote advantage to Right Wing Radical extremist David Prosser to the Supreme Court in Wisconsin.  He’s best known for calling a colleague a bitch.  The assault on women’s rights, worker’s rights,  and ordinary people will continue there.

Nickolaus says the reason for the big change is that data transmitted from the City of Brookfield was imported but that she failed to save those results to the database. Brookfield cast 14,315 votes on April 5 — 10,859 of those votes went to Prosser and 3,456 went to JoAnne Kloppenburg.

Congressional Republicans are trying to blame the budget stalemate and the ensuing bad PR of not paying soldiers in combat on Democrats.  The truth comes out that they are quibbling over funding Planned Parenthood and not the numbers.  It’s really quite shameful.  Maybe the Democrats and Obama are figuring out that these people do not negotiate, they only take hostages.  The Democrats offered to pass a troop funding standalone bill 3 times but were turned down.

Today, House Republicans pushed through their stopgap measure in a 247-181 vote. The bill, H.R. 1363, quickly came under fire for demanding a series of non-budget related policy riders, including an anti-abortion policy restriction banning D.C. from using its own local funds for abortions and anti-environmental restrictions to limit the EPA from regulating green house gas emissions, on top of an extra $12 billion in cuts. “With an eye to protecting themselves politically” from blame, the GOP quickly redefined H.R. 1363 today as the “troop funding bill.”

Slate’s Dave Weigel noted that five minutes after the White House declared H.R. 1363 unacceptable, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) slammed President Obama for threatening to veto a bill to “ensure that our troops are paid.” Minutes later, Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) ripped Democrats for “girding to oppose a ‘troop-funding bill.’” Republican lawmakers quickly picked up the rallying cry. Reps. Mike Pence (R-IN) and Harold Rodgers (R-KY) called it “astonishing” and “inexplicable” that Obama would, as GOP shutdown architect Newt Gingrich put it, use the troops as “bargaining chips for budget negotiations.”

There’s only one problem with this talking point — it’s the opposite of true. Today, the House Democrats tried three times to pass a measure that would ensure the troops received pay. The Republicans overwhelmingly opposed every single “troop-funding” opportunity  …

Nancy Pelosi is now saying there is a war one women and predicts a ‘strong Democrat Response to the recent events. One has to wonder where it was when they sold out on tax cuts that would bring on this situation.  One also has to wonder about where these folks were when they were eviscerating women’s right to have private insurance with abortion riders a year ago too.

“I think you’ll see a strong Democratic ‘no’ on that,” Pelosi said of the funding measure, “and I would hope that the president would veto that bill.”

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), senior Democrat on the House Budget panel, called the Pentagon funding “a cynical ploy to use our troops to try to impose the Republican agenda through the budget process.”

Pelosi agreed, and predicted the attempt to lure Democratic votes won’t work.

“For them to hide behind our troops while they build a future unworthy of the sacrifice of our troops … is a contradiction in terms,” she said. “I believe we’ll have a solid vote against that.”

These are truly trying times.  We have people who do not embrace modernity, science, or reason making policy right now.  They’ve also had time to stack a lot of courts with justices who appear to care more about their religion than The Constitution.  We’re assaulted on all fronts by radicals who seek to redefine this country in theocratic terms and are willing to ruin it to bring about an end to everything that protects the pubic interest and public assets.  The costs will be huge if this stuff succeeds.

Anyway, I can’t read any more of the headlines without wanting to ask Canada for sanctuary.  If you’ve got anything better on your reading or blogging list, please share it.  I just would like to get my assets and my daughters out of here before they’re declared breeders and kidnapped by some infertile white couple in the name of their angry sky god.

Uppity Woman suggests that we join the ACLU and women in the state of Florida and “incorporate” each and every uterus in the country so the Republicans will want to deregulate them and free them from taxes.  Here’s the link to Incorporate My Uterus!  Sigh.

So many religionists, so few lions.

Oh, and if you want to get stirred up, go watch CSPAN and the Stand Up for Women’s Health Rally:

Stand Up for Women’s Health Rally Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and more than 20 other organizations will hold a Stand Up for Women’s Health rally at the U.S. Capitol in opposition to proposals in Congress.

From the NYT:

On Thursday, Republicans passed a one-week spending bill — one almost surely destined to fail in the Senate — that featured one of the key provisions they are seeking.

The measure would reinstate a policy, scotched a few years ago by Democrats, that prevented the District of Columbia from using locally generated taxes to provide financial help to poor women for abortions. (The use of federal funds for abortion is already prohibited.) Because this law was on the books for years — passed by Democrats as a rider to unrelated bills — it has perhaps the best chance of surviving in any spending compromise.

Republicans also seek to prohibit payments for abortions overseas — a measure known as the “Mexico City” policy that was overturned by an executive order from Mr. Obama. Another rider seeks to end the United States’ contribution to the United Nations Population Fund, which focuses on reproductive health.

Finally, rather than cut all federal funds for Planned Parenthood, House Republicans would like to take the money given to it and other family planning organizations and give it to state health departments to spread at their discretion.

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