Saturday Reads

Good Morning !

The Reason blog hit & run has a fun post up today that highlights attack ads by pols circa 1800s. There’s a youtube up there but the historical sources are even better. Well, we really don’t have to go that far back to wallow in it, however.  Check out Plum Line at Wapo. I’m not doing the youtube for this one.

The spot shows Angle running away from reporters. The claim that she’s “pathological” is a reference to Nevada journalist Jon Ralston’s tireless efforts to document what he describes as her “pathological” tendency to rewrite history and pretend she never said what she plainly did say.

Has any campaign ever been quite this direct in claiming that their opponent is, well, a complete whack-job? The Reid team has completely emptied the thesaurus.

If that’s not bad enough, how about being told by your employer that you need to vote Republican because your pay and benefits might be impacted in the future?

… with their recent paychecks, employees received a pamphlet from their employer on company letter head that stated “as the election season is here, we wanted you to know which candidates will help our business grow in the future.” While pointing out that the vote is the employee’s “personal decision,” the pamphlet explicitly states, “if the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels. If others are elected we will not

That was from a Think Progress quote given at Crooks and Liars.  They have  the note left in the employee’s pay envelopes posted there.  The franchise owner did apologize but still it’s creepy. I’m ready for Tuesday to be over.

[MABlue here] I read this fascinating story in the hardcover of Der Spiegel this week. Luckily, they uploaded in on their international site. Just check it out:

An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging

Brooke Greenberg is almost 18, but she has remained mentally and physically at the level of a toddler. An American physician is trying to uncover the child’s secret, because he wants to give mankind the gift of eternal life.

[…]

She has no hormonal problems, and her chromosomes seem normal. But her development is proceeding “extremely slowly,” says Walker. If scientists can figure out what is causing the disorder, it might be possible to unlock the mysteries of aging itself. “Then we’ve got the golden ring,” says Walker. He hopes to simply eliminate age-related diseases like cancer, dementia and diabetes. People who no longer age will no longer get sick, he reasons. But he also thinks eternal life is conceivable. “Biological immortality is possible,” says Walker. “If you don’t get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years.”

Do we even want to live that long?

Ezra Klein has post a list of

Six things Obama has done wrong

1) The tax cut that failed: The administration likes to brag that the stimulus was comprised substantially of tax cuts. Look how bipartisan! Only the tax cut they included was the Making Work Pay tax cut from the campaign.

[…]

2) Neglecting the Federal Reserve: Matthew Yglesias has made this critique better than I could’ve, so I’ll outsource it to him. “A party whose leaders realized that economic results were the most important driver of public opinion wouldn’t have renominated a conservative Republican to head the Federal Reserve. Even more astoundingly, having given Ben Bernanke a second term in office, the Obama administration didn’t get around to nominating anyone to fill the other vacant posts on the Federal Reserve Board until April 2010.” [Oh noes! Somebody keep Matt Yglesias away fron Kat…ed]

3) The Fiscal Commission: I’ve come to see the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” as a major error on at least a few levels. Remember, first, that it’s a powerless executive body created after Republicans filibustered a bill that would’ve created a similar, but more powerful, commission in Congress.

[…]

4) The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: I struggle with this one. The stimulus included measures designed to create jobs and help the economy immediately and measures designed to make investments and strengthen the economy over the longer-term. As a matter of policy, I fully support that.

[…]

5) The size and sale of the stimulus: By now, this is a familiar critique. Christina Romer thought we needed $1.2 trillion in stimulus. Then the recession turned out to be larger than we’d calculated. Then we got just $787 billion — and not all of that was stimulus.

[…]

6) It’s the procedure, stupid: Here are four words we’ve really not heard out of the Obama administration: “Up-or-down vote.” Obama has spoken occasionally about the filibuster, but the relentless perversion of the legislative process has not been made into a sufficient issue. […]

So, what do you think and what would you add to that list?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today

Friday Reads

Good morning !!!

I’ve gotten in the habit of posting and sharing links in the morning so, here’s some to get your day started.

It’s the 75th anniversary of the National Labor Relations Act. Richard B Freeman, a labor economist from Harvard, has a paper out that argues our labor laws are sorely out of date.  Here’s an overview from ECONOMIX

… the percentage of private-sector workers in unions has fallen to 7 percent, down from nearly 40 percent in the 1950s.

He [Freeman] argued that the penalties in the National Labor Relations Act were weak and “have failed to deter firms from illegal actions to prevent unionization.” He wrote that in the early 1950s firms fired about 0.5 workers for every 100 workers who voted in N.L.R.B. elections, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, firms “fired 4.5 workers for every 100 union voters,” with that percentage dropping slightly in recent years.

“Far from a laboratory conditions experiment in democracy,” he wrote, “the N.L.R.B. process turned into the same costly fight between unions and firms that union organizing was before the act, albeit in a different venue with different weapons.” He wrote that the N.L.R.B. process has “failed to make it easy or natural for workers who want union representation to achieve this goal.”

He noted that there was a 20  to 30 percent gap between the percentage of workers who said they wanted union representation and those who had unions – the largest gap among advanced English-speaking countries.

Well, this is no surprise.  Here’s the latest Rasmussen. Most every one wants to throw the bums out!

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 65% of Likely U.S. Voters say if they had the option next week, they would vote to get rid of the entire Congress and start all over again. Only 20% would opt to keep the entire Congress instead. Fifteen percent (15%) aren’t sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Of course, the Political Class strongly disagrees.  While 84% of Mainstream voters would opt to get rid of the entire Congress, 64% of the Political Class would vote instead to keep them all.

Not surprisingly, 82% of Republicans and 78% of unaffiliateds say dump them all. Despite their party’s control of both the House and Senate, Democratic voters are fairly evenly divided: 44% say it’s better to keep the entire Congress, but 38% would prefer to give all the national legislators the heave-ho.

Thirty-eight percent (38%) of all voters have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party after its two years of controlling both the White House and Congress. But 53% view the Democrats unfavorably.

As for the party out of power but knocking on the door, just 29% view Republicans favorably, while 54% hold an unfavorable opinion of them.

Ouch!!!

Okay, this is one of the weirdest headlines I’ve ever read and it’s from AlterNet. Seems like Squeaky Thomas is more off the deep end then we originally presumed.

“Ginni Thomas’ Think Tank Allied With Group That Celebrates Spanish Inquisition”

The Tea Party think tank run by Justice Thomas’ wife counts among its friends the far-right Catholic group Tradition, Family and Property.

FP is an all-male organization that finds its recruits among adolescent boys, whom it trains in the use of the combat regalia of the Middle Ages — maces, crossbows, and the like — according to the late Penny Lernoux’s 1989 book, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism. The medieval games in which the boys partake are so brutal, Lernoux reported, that one recruit told her his arm had been broken three times in the exercises.

…

At the time Lernoux was reporting, recruits were taught to worship not only the Blessed Virgin Mary, the holiest woman in Catholicism, but also the flesh-and-blood mother of TFP founder Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, whom he referred to as Santa Monica. Oliveira, who died in 1995,  loved the Spanish Inquisition, he wrote, “because, while it went on, the Catholic Church managed to cleanse itself of heretics.” (Never mind that many of those so-called heretics were Jews who wanted nothing more than to practice their own faith, or people whose politics were inconvenient to the Spanish throne.)

Okay.  Tea party on dudes!  Still stalking Anita  Squeaky?

Well, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism leaves no prisoners on this thread on Obama on the banking and financial crisis.  The backyard bank is looking better all the time. It links to the infamous Obama Daily Show appearance.

I’m so offended by the latest Obama canard, that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 cost less than 1% of GDP, that I barely know where to begin. Not only does this Administration lie on a routine basis, it doesn’t even bother to tell credible lies. .And this one came directly from the top, not via minions. It’s not that this misrepresentation is earth-shaking, but that it epitomizes why the Obama Administration is well on its way to being an abject failure.

Okay, well that was full of truthiness.

The depth of hate expressed to the GLBT community just never ceases to amaze.  AC 360 covered this jerk of an Arkansas school official last night, here’s a written version from Politics Daily concerning Clint McCance’s hate speech on Facebook and his apologies on CNN.

McCance, who lives in Pleasant Plains, Ark., 70 miles north of Little Rock, said he was unaware, like many other people in rural America, about the recent rash of suicides linked to sexuality and bullying.

“I brought more hurt on them . . . they didn’t deserve that and I do feel genuinely bad for them,” McCance said. He added that he had hurt people on “a broad spectrum” and called his posts “ignorant.”

“I’m not a bad guy . . . not a monster,” he said.

McCance said that his core beliefs haven’t changed about what he reads in the Bible but that he will change the way he acts.

“I’m reaping what I’ve sown,” he said.

He seemed more humble on TV but I wonder how much of it has to do with wanting to stop the hate mail and threats which are also horrible and were extended to his wife and children.  I have no idea all what we need to do to educate people on to becoming more tolerant but speaking out has to be one of the first things.  If you want to see the CNN story and AC 360 interview you can go here.

Why do people feel that disparaging others is acceptable behavior?

What’s on your reading and blogging list this morning?