“Apparently, we are not better than this. An entire political party subservient to a crappy reality television personality. Trump’s Amerika. Shameful.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Happy Independence Day, Number 249, Sky Dancers!
What do we have? A democratic Republic, if we can keep it. I’m not sure it’s mostly gone. Convince me I’m wrong, please!
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent” with its policies, accusing them of “unlawfully undermining” the Trump administration’s agenda.
In a letter made public Monday, the employees wrote that the agency is no longer living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment. The letter represented rare public criticism from agency employees who knew they could face blowback for speaking out against a weakening of funding and federal support for climate, environmental and health science.
In a statement Thursday, the EPA said it has a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting” the Trump administration’s agenda.
Employees were notified that they had been placed in a “temporary, non-duty, paid status” for the next two weeks, pending an “administrative investigation,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The Associated Press. “It is important that you understand that this is not a disciplinary action,” the email read.
More than 170 EPA employees put their names to the document, with about 100 more signing anonymously out of fear of retaliation, according to Jeremy Berg, a former editor-in-chief of Science magazine who is not an EPA employee but was among non-EPA scientists or academics to also sign.
Read more at the link. It’s hard to know what exactly to say about this bit of news from CNN. I guess we’ve known who he is since his “very fine people on both sides paraded past a Synagogue for a MAGA rally, shouting “Jews will not replace us” in the Charlottesville protests in 2017. His fascination with Hitler is one big, ugly clue. “Trump says he had ‘never heard’ Shylock as an anti-semitic term after using it at rally.”
President Donald Trump said early Friday that he wasn’t aware that some people view the word “Shylock” as antisemitic after using the term during a rally to decry amoral money lenders.
“I’ve never heard it that way. To me, Shylock is somebody that’s a money lender at high rates,” Trump told reporters after getting off Air Force One. “I’ve never heard it that way, you view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.”
Trump was arriving back in Washington after an event in Iowa marking the kick-off to nationwide celebrations marking the country’s 250th anniversary next year.
In his speech, he used the word when touting aspects of the major domestic policy bill that had been approved by Congress a few hours earlier.
“Think of that: no death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowings from in some cases a fine banker. And in some cases, Shylocks and bad people,” he said during his event in Des Moines. “They took away a lot of, a lot of family. They destroyed a lot of families, but we did the opposite.”
The name “Shylock” derives from the name of the antagonist in William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” Shylock, a Jew, was a ruthless moneylender in the play, and he’s remembered for demanding a “pound of flesh” from the merchant Antonio if he failed to repay a loan.
The Anti-Defamation League condemned Trump’s use of the word Friday morning.
“The term ‘Shylock’ evokes a centuries-old antisemitic trope about Jews and greed that is extremely offensive and dangerous. President Trump’s use of the term is very troubling and irresponsible,” the organization wrote in a statement on X. “It underscores how lies and conspiracies about Jews remain deeply entrenched in our country. Words from our leaders matter and we expect more from the President of the United States.”
I learned this when we started studying Shakespeare in the 5th grade. I can’t imagine any person educated after World War 2 not knowing this. Trump’s maleducation is so obvious. Do you remember when we used to have these great Fourth of July celebrations to watch on PBS, like The Boston Pops orchestra playing in front of the giant fireworks display? Well, it’s a tacky Fourth of July for the MAGATs, with proceeds going to his friends. This is from AXIOS. “Trump to host UFC fight at White House as part of ‘America250’ celebrations.”
President Trump will host a UFC fight at the White House as part of celebrations marking 250 years since the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he announced at a Thursday rally in Iowa.
The big picture: “Every one of our national park battlefields and historic sites are going to have special events in honor of ‘America250‘ and I even think we’re going to have a UFC fight,” Trump said on the eve of the July Fourth holiday during a speech at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines that kicked off yearlong 250th anniversary celebrations.
The president’s links to the Ultimate Fighting Championship date back to at least 2001, when the since-closed Trump Taj Mahal hosted the mixed martial arts enterprise.
Zoom in: Trump said White would organize the White House UFC event.
“It’s going to be a championship fight, full fight, like 20,000 to 25,000 people and we’re going to do that as part of ‘250’ also,” he said.
Other celebrations will include “the great American State Fair” that will “bring America250 programming for fairgrounds across the country, culminating in a giant patriotic festival next summer on the National Mall, featuring exhibits from all 50 states,” according to Trump.
What they’re saying: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is “dead serious” about the UFC fight plans, per a White House pool report.
Temple and I started our own celebration of deposing Mad Kings this morning in the Bywater. Perhaps by our afternoon, we will have more than 2 people and 2 dogs.
If the dead part weren’t followed by the word serious, I might’ve planned a big celebration myself. Temple and I already had our parade this morning. The partner of Anti-Semitism was right there along Yam Tits at his rally in Iowa. This is from The Hill. “Trump goes after Mamdani at Iowa rally.” Islamaphobia is so on brand for him. Nothing says “Let Freedom Ring” like hating on religious minorities.
President Trump used Thursday remarks in Iowa ahead of Independence Day to take aim at Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City who has become a favorite target of criticism for Republicans.
“This guy is a communist at the highest level, and he wants to destroy New York. I love New York, and we’re not going to let him do that,” Trump said at an event in Des Moines.
“Generations of Americans before us did not shed their blood only so that we could surrender our country to Marxist lunatics on the eve of our 250th year,” Trump continued. “As president of the United States, I’m proclaiming here and now that America is never going to be communist in any way, shape or form, and that includes New York City.”
The comments marked the latest attack from Trump, a New York City native, against Mamdani, who earlier this week officially secured the Democratic nomination for November’s mayoral race and instantly became a lightning rod for GOP attacks.
Trump earlier this week threatened to investigate Mamdani’s immigration status and arrest him if he stood in the way of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s raids in the city.
Generations of Americans did not shed their blood only to surrender our county to another Mad King, Plantation Slaveholder, and NAZI either. Mine were around everywhere since the Revolution. I’m pretty sure my great-uncle John Parke Custis didn’t die being an aide-de-camp to his stepfather, George Washington, at the Siege of Yorktown from camp fever, just for us to have another Mad King. Also, sure that all my great-great-grandfathers who fought for the Union didn’t expect to see an American President try to strip the rights away from the African-Americans freed from slavery. Also, sure my Dad who bombed NAZIs and my uncles who served in the navy and in army intelligence didn’t expect to have a fascist as president too. Yet, here we are.
More indications of his madness and warped view of the country’s form of government and rule of law are on display in Politico today. Rachel Blade has this interview and analysis. “What Trump Told Me About His Complete Domination of Congress. Demanding a bill by Independence Day was a telling flourish for someone with zero tolerance for independence in the legislative branch.” It’s obvious he didn’t care or probably even read what was in it. He just cares about the control and the photo op, signing the deaths of millions of Americans, including the elderly and children.
When I reached President Donald Trump by phone Tuesday night, with his “big, beautiful” bill on a clear track for passage, he seemed to be in a buoyant mood. And no wonder.
In a span of two weeks, he greenlit an unprecedented U.S. strike on Iran, then brokered an almost immediate cease-fire. He watched NATO allies bow to his decade-old demand to pony up more defense spending, then saw the Supreme Court curtail judges’ power to block his policies.
And when he picked up the phone, the president realized he was on the precipice of a major legislative achievement — cementing his campaign-trail promises of “no tax on tips,” increased border enforcement and more.
“It’s been an incredible two weeks,” he said. “Really — it’s been a great six months.”
Particularly on Capitol Hill, things could have gone much different. In fact, they did in his first term. Even with a much larger House majority, he struggled to corral lawmakers who had their own conceptions of what a unified Republican government ought to be doing. Early dreams of tossing Obamacare into the dustbin evaporated; so, too, did the GOP’s House majority.
Much felt similar this time around. You have fiscal hard-liners like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas groaning about deficits and moderates like Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska balking at health care cuts — to say nothing of the various parochial factions pulling the bill back and forth.
But this time, with the Republican Party almost entirely remade at Trump’s bidding, hardly any corralling was necessary. Yes, there were a pair of overnight vote-a-ramas and last-ditch negotiating standoffs. But it all felt awfully fait accompli — as those on Capitol Hill fully realized.
“If anybody’s griping, I can tell you right now, it’s the same actors, the same movie,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) said Wednesday as Freedom Caucus holdouts made their final stand. “It’s gonna be the same ending.”
True to form, Trump did it while exhibiting only the lightest interest in the policy details. He was very invested in delivering on his campaign tax promises and boosting immigration enforcement, but rarely much beyond that.
I’m still worried about our economy.
Gee, I wonder what happened in January of this year to make the dollar lose its value so precipitously . . .
Now, I worry for poor Rooster and his girlfriends in the house 3 doors down from me. Oh, and everyone around here since our trees are full of them and many keep chickens in their backyards here.
RFK's proposal to let bird flu spread through poultry could set us up for a pandemic, experts warn->Live Science | #BirdFlu #Pandemic | More info from EcoSearch
Still, it’s that damnable Big Ugly Bill that may yet take this country down. This is from G. Elliott Morris writing at Strength in Numbers. “One Big Unpopular Bill. The Republican budget bill, which now heads to Trump’s desk, will be the most unpopular major law in at least 30 years.”
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (yes, that is its official government name) is a huge package of different policies, including tax cuts for the wealthy and the largest ever yearly increase (hundreds of billions of dollars) in funding for the Pentagon, ICE, and CBP. Republicans have “paid for” those tax cuts and spending increases by making the largest ever cuts to Medicaid and government food benefits, among other programs.
I place “paid for” in quotes because despite the claims from Trump’s White House advisors, the reduction in spending on various social programs does not come close to covering the cost of the tax cuts. The Republican budget bill is a historic shifting of taxpayer money previously allocated to government assistance to the needy, to rich people, and immigration enforcement. This chart from The Economist lays out the math:
The OBBBA is also historic in another way: It is likely the most unpopular budget ever, is the second most unpopular piece of key legislation since the 1990s, and the most unpopular key law, period, over the same period.
I have been an economist for about 50 years now, and it takes a lot to turn me into a Deficit Hawk. This did it. It’s fiscal policy gone deadly. Drunk Secretary Hegseth has turned me into a fan of bombs overnight. This is from NBC News. “Hegseth halted weapons for Ukraine despite military analysis that the aid wouldn’t jeopardize U.S. readiness. The move blindsided the State Department, Ukraine, European allies, and members of Congress, who demanded an explanation from the Pentagon.”
The Defense Department held up a shipment of U.S. weapons for Ukraine this week over what officials said were concerns about its low stockpiles. But an analysis by senior military officers found that the aid package would not jeopardize the American military’s own ammunition supplies, according to three U.S. officials.
The move to halt the weapons shipment blindsided the State Department, members of Congress, officials in Kyiv and European allies, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.
Critics of the decision included Republicans and Democrats who support aiding Ukraine’s fight against Russia. A leading House Democrat, Adam Smith of Washington, said it was disingenuous of the Pentagon to use military readiness to justify halting aid when the real reason appears to be simply to pursue an agenda of cutting off American aid to Ukraine.
“We are not at any lower point, stockpile-wise, than we’ve been in the 3½ years of the Ukraine conflict,” Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told NBC News.
Smith said that his staff has “seen the numbers” and, without going into detail, that there was no indication of a shortage that would justify suspending aid to Ukraine.
Suspending the shipment of military aid to Ukraine was a unilateral step by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to three congressional aides and a former U.S. official familiar with the matter. It was the third time Hegseth on his own has stopped shipments of aid to Ukraine, the sources said. In the two previous cases, in February and in May, his actions were reversed days later.
According to AXIOS,Trump might be providing more aid to Ukraine shortly. “Trump tells Zelensky he wants to help Ukraine with air defense, sources say.” Did Putin piss him off or is he that hell-bent on getting a Nobel Peace Prize?
Why it matters: Earlier this week the Pentagon paused a weapons shipment, including air defense interceptors and ammunition, to Ukraine’s army.
The decision caught Ukraine and many Trump administration officials surprise.
Behind the scenes: The two sources said the call between Trump and Zelensky lasted around 40 minutes, with a major focus on Ukraine’s air defense needs.
One source said Trump was aware of the recent Russia escalation, including both air strikes on Ukrainian cities and on the frontline.
“Trump said he wants to help with air defense and that he will check what was put on hold if anything,” the source said.
The Ukrainian official said Trump and Zelensky agreed that teams from the U.S. and Ukraine soon will meet to discuss air defense and other weapons supplies.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Okay, that’s enough. I’m going to play crazy cat lady and make sure my little feral girl is eating the food I put out today. Try to remember the sacrifice of all the people who worked hard to make this country a beacon of freedom. Then vow to do what you can to help keep it.
My friend in Miami called me in tears yesterday afternoon. She has been self-employed for over three years and is reliant on the Affordable Healthcare Act for her insurance. She has an incredible number of pre-existing conditions and is under the care of a neurologist for a motor neuron disease. She received a letter from Aetna yesterday that said she will lose her coverage on January 1 because they will no longer provide anything connected to the ACA that goes defunct after the next midterms. It seems businesses are not waiting until the last minute to bail from that and Medicaid. I can only imagine what this will do to Medicare.
But hey, one more billionaire can buy Venice for $25 million or even more for a wedding. Can you imagine how many starving children, or children with diseases, or children with special needs could benefit from that?
What’s on your Blogging and Reading list today?
I pulled Martina McBride’s Independence Day song and video off with the 8 men on the Diddy jury in mind. Women do not ask to be raped, assaulted, trafficked or slut slammed for what men do to them even when it may have started out as consensual. A lot of us in this country are still waiting for our independence.
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Recently, I’ve been cooking a lot of my Nana’s depression years recipes and thinking of ways to tighten my belt. I’ve been watching the stock market go crazy and corporate profits improve in the macroeconomy. It’s beginning to translate into the labor markets but it really varies state to state. As you know, my right wing Republican Governor Bobby Jindal has been running away from his responsibilities and record here in Louisiana and spending time on the road. He’s made visits to CPAC and FOX and even the lawn of the White House trying unsuccessfully to draw attention to his “possible” presidential bid. He’s going nowhere but down in Republican Straw polls which is karma as far as I’m concerned.
What has been getting attention is his record of failure here. It’s a doozy. It doesn’t get much worse than having MSN’s Wall Street 24/7 call your state the worst place to do business and then list the reasons that your state resembles Somalia more than a developed nation.
> Real GDP growth, 2012-2013: 1.3% (17th lowest)
> Average wages and salaries, 2013: $44,828 (23rd lowest)
> Pct. of adults with bachelor’s degree, 2013: 22.5% (5th lowest)
> Patents issued to residents, 2013: 395 (13th lowest)
> Projected working-age population growth, 2010-2020: -3.2% (13th lowest)
No state fared worse on 24/7 Wall St.’s business climate index than Louisiana. The state is not the worst place to run all businesses, however. The manufacturing sector accounted for more than 20% of Louisiana’s economic output in 2013, the fourth highest such contribution in the country. Despite the strong sector, Louisiana generally provides poor conditions for business.
Nearly one in five residents lived in poverty in 2013 — nearly the worst rate in the nation — contributing to both the low quality of the labor force as well as a low quality of life in the state. The working-age population was projected to decline by 3.2% from 2010 through 2020, one of the worst declines in the nation. While nearly 30% of Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree as of 2013, only 22.5% of Louisiana adults had at least such a degree, also nearly the lowest rate. Poor education contributed to poor scores in innovation. The state was one of only a handful of states where the average venture capital investment was less than $1 million.
Jindal’s been slavishly following Grover Norquist’s prescriptions for drowning the state government in his bathtub. He’s also part and parcel passed legislation straight from ALEC and the Koch Brothers. As a result, we have a $1.6 million dollar deficit that’s going to be challenging to eliminate. This is especially true since he’s spent the last 6 years pulling every slight of hand accounting trick in the book, sold off all possible state assets, and siphoned most all reserve funds. His first draft basically put all the state’s public universities in financial exigency which is a public entity’s version of bankruptcy reorganization. It also looks like the public health system is on the verge of collapse.
Years of deep cuts to state funding for Louisiana’s colleges and universities — and the threat of even further reductions in the near future — have some leaders looking at drastic measures that could change the face of Louisiana higher education.
One idea that has recently been floated: Why not encourage some of the state’s public schools to go private?
The idea, which experts agree is radical and may not ever be feasible, came up during a recent meeting of the state Board of Regents, a group appointed by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, whose administration has led the charge for recent state budgets that have left Louisiana with some of the nation’s most severe cuts to higher education funding. Regents board members have instructed state higher education staff members to examine the concept and report back on whether the plan would work and what it would take.
“You look at some areas of the state, there may be a university or a college inside of a university that could do better as a private entity,” Board of Regents Chairman Roy Martin said in a follow-up interview with The Advocate.
Martin stressed that he was speaking as an individual, not for the board.
It’s hard to describe how the years of defunding basic education, roads, and public health and safety service has impacted everyone’s life around here. I see homeless people on every major street corner. I have friends looking for second jobs or first jobs. Many people I know have either left town or moved out of the historical districts. This is not the post Katrina revival that we were promised. However, it’s not that way for some folks.
The top-of-the-market houses are “rising in price at least as fast as the market as a whole,” Ragas said, based on conversations with Realtors.
“In the higher market, it is a much brisker market now,” said Rick Haase, president of Latter & Blum Inc., which sold nearly one-third of the 158 homes priced at $1 million or more that were sold during the 12-month period ending Jan. 31.
The highest-priced home to sell in the New Orleans area last year was advertised as a “stately Queen Anne home” featuring seven bedrooms, 5 ½ bathrooms, “lush gardens with organically grown citrus trees and grapes,” and a heated pool. The property at 3 Audubon Place was listed for sale at $5.25 million and sold 86 days later for $5 million, or $583.57 per square foot.
Haase said the average number of days that properties selling at more than $1 million stay on the market has dropped from more than 150 to 90.
It took just one day for the sixth most-expensive New Orleans-area property to sell last year. The three-bedroom, three-bathroom single-family home at 828 Chartres St. in the French Quarter sold for its full asking price of $2.3 million, or $575 a square foot.
“It’s not like every house flies off the market. But if it’s priced appropriately, in the right location, has the right pedigree, then, yeah, the numbers are going up and up,” said Keller Williams Realtor Ricky Lemann, who was the listing agent on a $2.25 million property on First Street that sold last year. “There will be no adjustment in that luxury market until the (interest) rates go up.”
I’ve really noticed that the kinds of people moving into my part of town are not the same kinds of people that are selling and leaving. The house next door went from rental property to a starter home using the Obama Tax incentives to a home away from home for two Northeasterners within a period of about 5 years. It now spends most of its time as an unlicensed short term rental which is basically illegal. But, one owner is in NJ and the other came from Philadelphia so they don’t seem to care much about that.
For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.
The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.
“We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” said Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved. “A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.”
City centers around the country are becoming younger, more affluent and more educated, while inner suburbs are seeing poverty rates rise, according to a new study from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
The new study is based on an analysis of demographic changes in 66 cities between 1990 and 2012. It comes just months after a surge of headlines about suburban poverty following a Brookings Institution study that found that more Americans are now living in poverty in the suburbs than in rural or urban areas.
News of this demographic shift comes as no surprise to suburban school superintendents and school boards. They know their student populations are shifting, and they are wrestling with how to adequately serve the rising number of poor children who come to class with far more needs than their more affluent peers.
Children and Seniors are being particularly hard hit by the defunding of services on both the state and federal level but zealous Republicans look to score points by poor shaming. They make scapegoats of the nation’s most vulnerable people. While Social Security has been indexed to increase with price increases, Seniors are not exempt from income inequality. Part of the issue with Social Security funding is the cap on income subject to FICA taxes. The cap has created a funding gap.
As America recovers from the recession, wealthy households are recovering faster than low-income ones, whose incomes have stagnated or declined since the crash. A new report says that this widening gap is sapping Social Security.
Currently, two-thirds of seniors rely on the program for their retirement income. The wage gap may have cost Social Security$1 trillion over the last 30 years, according to a report last week from the Center for American Progress.
And as more Americans reach retirement age, Social Security is set to eat through its funding by 2033, assuming that Congress takes no action to bolster it. After that it would only be able to cover 77 percent of its claims.
“For low-income seniors, Social Security represents nearly 85 percent of income. Even for seniors right in the middle, Social Security represents nearly two-thirds of their retirement income,” said Rebecca Vallas, director of CAP’s poverty program.
Small wages, big shortfalls
The pension and disability insurance program is funded by a payroll tax that applies to wages of $118,500 and below. But the money flowing into the program is not as large as it could be, according to the report, now that an increasing share of wage growth is going to people who make more than that, and low-wage workers make less.
Why does that matter for Social Security? Because highest earners reach the$118,500 “cap” quickly and stop paying into the fund for the rest of the year. “Social Security funding is directly tied to the full wages of low and middle income workers,” Vallas says. “It’s their wages that matter.”
The payroll tax cap was set in 1983 by President Reagan, which at the time captured 90 percent of wages. “Reagan essentially said, let’s go for 90 percent, and we will let 10 percent go,” says Vallas.
But since 1983, that cap hasn’t been adjusted for wage growth to keep up with the 90 percent goal. “What they didn’t anticipate is income inequality,” says Vallas. “The highest earners have seen growth much faster than the average worker.”
Now the tax cap only captures 83 percent of wages, instead of 90. The missing 7 percent is part of the Social Security shortfall.
Of course, all of these issues have come because we’ve shifted the burden of paying for things from businesses and the wealthiest. We’ve also shifted the subsidizes to businesses and the wealthiest. As a result, fewer and fewer services are being offered, few people are covered, and fewer jobs are available.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside Washington, DC, Wisconsin Governor and likely presidential candidate Scott Walker was asked what his plan would be, were he in the White House, to combat the terrorism perpetuated by the Islamic State In Syria (ISIS).
As an enthusiastic crowd cheered, he responded not with a plan but with an argument for why his battles against organized labor in his state makes him the most qualified for the job.
“We need have someone who leads and ultimately will send a message that not only will we protect American soil, but…freedom-loving people anywhere else in the world. We need that confidence,” he said. “If I can take on a hundred thousand protesters, I can do the same across the world.”
In 2011, Walker pushed through a law, Act 10, that slashed the power of public employee unions to bargain, and cut pay for most public sector workers. As a special slap to teachers, Walker exempted the unions of police, firefighters and state troopers from the changes in collective bargaining rights but not educators. Teachers protested for a long time, closing schools for days, but the law passed, and the impact on teachers unions in Wisconsin has been dramatic: according to this piece by my Post colleague Robert Samuels. The state branch of the National Education Association, once 100,000 strong, has seen its membership drop by a third, and the American Federation of Teachers, which organized in the college system, has seen a 50 percent decline.
This week may bring down a central tenet of the ACA which has brought private health insurance to millions of people. It has been one policy that has successfully increased the day to day life of ordinary people. Will the Supremes bring it down? Will it be drowned in Scalia’s bathtub? I am one of the 7 1/2 million people who were forced onto the federal exchange because my Republican governor is an asshole. Will I join the ranks of uninsured this week? Me with a chronic condition and a cancer history?
Shortly after the A.C.A. passed, in 2010, a group of conservative lawyers met at a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, and scoured the nine-hundred-page text of the law, looking for grist for possible lawsuits. Michael Greve, a board member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian outfit funded by, among others, the Koch brothers, said, of the law, “This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.” In time, lawyers hired by the C.E.I. discovered four words buried in Section 36B, which refers to the exchanges—now known as marketplaces—where people can buy health-insurance policies. The A.C.A. created federal tax subsidies for those earning less than a certain income to help pay for their premiums and other expenses, and, in describing who is eligible, Section 36B refers to exchanges “established by the State.” However, thirty-four states, most of them under Republican control, refused to create exchanges; for residents of such states, the law had established a federal exchange. But, according to the conjurings of the C.E.I. attorneys, the subsidies should be granted only to people who bought policies on the state exchanges, because of those four words in Section 36B. The lawyers recruited plaintiffs and filed a lawsuit; their goal is to revoke the subsidies provided to the roughly seven and a half million people who were left no choice by the states where they live but to buy on the federal exchange.
The claim borders on the frivolous. The plaintiffs can’t assert that the A.C.A. violates the Constitution, because the Justices narrowly upheld the validity of the law in 2012. Rather, the suit claims that the Obama Administration is violating the terms of its own law. But the A.C.A. never even suggests that customers on the federal exchange are ineligible for subsidies. In fact, there’s a provision that says that, if a state refuses to open an exchange, the federal government will “establish and operate such Exchange within the State.” The congressional debate over the A.C.A. included fifty-three meetings of the Senate Finance Committee and seven days of committee debates on amendments. The full Senate spent twenty-five consecutive days on it, the second-longest session ever on a single piece of legislation. There were similar marathons in the House. Yet no member of Congress ever suggested that the subsidies were available only on the state exchanges. This lawsuit is not an attempt to enforce the terms of the law; it’s an attempt to use what is at most a semantic infelicity to kill the law altogether.
I spent the weekend and a few days before that watching people I went to high school with that mostly didn’t attend college squawk about people on disability, unemployment, and government waste and give away. They say all Obama supporters are the ones that want benefits but no jobs. It’s just all kinds of drivel that Fox spews that’s easy to debunk with facts but impossible to debunk to hard core idiots who aren’t interested in facts, truth, or reality. What has happened to the country that I grew up in and even to the state that I moved to 20 years ago? I turn 60 this year. I’ve never seen so much vitriol aimed at the wrong people in my life and for what?
I want to point you back to the kind of crap spewed by Republicans recently with a quote from an Indiana office seeker from the last election. This guy basically said let the poor “wither and die”. It’s basically what they all think but don’t say.
“For almost three generations people, in some cases, have been given handouts. They have been ‘enabled’ so much that their paradigm in life is simply being given the stuff of life, however meager.
What you see is a setting for a life of misery is life to them never-the-less. No one has the guts to just let them wither and die. No one who wants votes is willing to call a spade a spade. As long as the Dems can get their votes the enabling will continue. The Republicans need their votes and dare not cut the fiscal tether. It is really a political Catch-22.”
Sheriff Richard Mack is the right wing former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona. He is the head of an organization called “Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association,” a member of the NRA’s Hall Of Fame, and a staunch opponent of the policies of President Obama, including Obamacare.
Richard Mack has run into some medical problems and since he is uninsured, he’s asking for help. Mack suffered a heart attack on January 12. This apparently came right on the heels of some serious medical issues that were suffered by his wife. His son, Jimmy Mack, has set up a GoFundMe campaign, asking for donations to help offset the cost of medical treatment. Apparently the Macks were expecting right wing supporters to step up to the plate and help out but, judging by the comments that accompany many of the donations, Mack is getting the bulk of his support from liberals.
As of this writing, Mack has received close to $20,000 in donations from 439 people. The commenters are sympathetic to Mack’s situation — far more sympathetic than Mack and his supporters have been to the plight of those without health insurance. Many hope that he will use it as a learning experience, to change his views about the Affordable Care Act.
Some times I just want to cook my Nana’s hamhocks and beans and read Grapes of Wrath while never turning on the TV or computer again. However, that never happens either. I rant, therefore I blog. I blog, therefore I wonder why so few people really get it?
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I decided to write about a few interesting things today that are more issue-related than anything. I’m trying to avoid the continuing onslaught of bad journalism on what the next two years will hold.
Just to start it off, here’s a negative ad running from Mary Landrieu that will give you an idea of why I don’t want Doctor Strange Eyes for a Senator. Then, we will move on to other things!!
A virus that infects human brains and makes us more stupid has been discovered, according to scientists in the US.
The algae virus, never before observed in healthy people, was found to affect cognitive functions including visual processing and spatial awareness.
Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska stumbled upon the discovery when they were undertaking an unrelated study into throat microbes.
Surprisingly, the researchers found DNA in the throats of healthy individuals that matched the DNA of a virus known to infect green algae.
Dr Robert Yolken, a virologist who led the original study, said: “This is a striking example showing that the ‘innocuous’ microorganisms we carry can affect behaviour and cognition.
ONCE A THRIVING INDUSTRIAL CENTER, home of RCA Victor and the Campbell Soup Company, Camden saw decades of white flight as the manufacturing sector disappeared. By 2000, five years after Edin arrived, 53 percent of Camden’s residents were black, 39 percent were Hispanic, and 36 percent lived below the poverty line. The year she moved in was the city’s bloodiest on record, with 58 murders among 86,000 residents.
About a block away from the blue clapboard Victorian where Edin lived is the former Presbyterian church where she taught Sunday school—one of the ways she got to know people in the community, along with volunteering at an after-school program. On the warm fall day I visited, the voice of a holy roller bellowing at his flock rang clear across the street.
Teaching Sunday school wasn’t just a research ploy. Edin hails from rural Minnesota, where she “grew up in the back of the van” that her mother drove for a Swedish Lutheran church. She worked there with needy families whose kids often cycled in and out of jail and foster care. “The religious tradition I came up in was very focused on social justice,” Edin says, citing Micah 6:8 (“To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God”).
She attended North Park University, a small Christian college in Chicago with a social-justice focus. There, she took extra-credit assignments working in the notorious Cabrini-Green public housing project. In her free time she did things like watch Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Franco Zeffirelli’s film about St. Francis of Assisi, and walk around campus barefoot in the winter to emulate the saint.
Sunday school in Camden was different. One day, Edin recalls, she drew on a common evangelical trope, asking the kids what one thing they would save if their house were on fire. The answer is supposed to be “the Bible,” but for these kids the question was not a hypothetical. Most of the kids had actually been in that situation and could tell her exactly what they took. (Sometimes it was the Bible.)
Tragedy was endemic to her small class. In the space of a month, the fathers of two of the five students were killed in gun violence. Trauma made the kids “very vigilant,” she says. “They notice everything about you.” Some of their comments yielded unexpected insights for her research on low-income women’s attitudes toward marriage, which they tended to view as hard work more than a source of pleasure. “One girl said to me, ‘You white women are really into your husbands,'” she says with a laugh. “Watching people respond to you reveals a lot.”
Not long after she and Nelson moved in, a teenager avoiding pursuers jumped through an open bathroom window, then raced out their front door. She recalls the time she put her baby’s empty car seat down in the front yard while unloading groceries. When she turned around, it was gone. She ran down the street to a garage that served as the neighborhood’s unofficial flea market, and found it already for sale.
Edin says her willingness to put up with the same routine annoyances as her neighbors helped persuade them to open up. “Lots of people said, ‘We know you’re the real thing. You’re not here just to study us, because you live here, too.'”
It’s a common adjective in the Lower 9th Ward to describe Tuesday’s statewide voter rejection of a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the city to sell vacant lots in that struggling neighborhood to aspiring homeowners for as little as $100.
But disappointment has come often and in many sizes to the Lower 9, one of the neighborhoods most thoroughly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and the residents and activists who have taken up the cause of repopulating the area are perhaps more capable than anyone of putting a setback at the ballot box behind them.
“For nine years, there have been many, many challenges — challenges far greater than (the failure of) this amendment,” said activist Vanessa Gueringer, who along with state Rep. Wesley Bishop came up with the idea they thought might jump-start residential development in the neighborhood. “We had to struggle to even come home. It’s not bigger than that.”
Thom Pepper, of the nonprofit group Common Ground Relief, put it a little more colorfully.
“No one is crying in their bourbon over it,” he said. The idea of $100 lots was “like one of the things to throw it on the wall and see if it sticks. It didn’t, but we’ll go on.”
The amendment, which was needed to override the constitutional prohibition against the government donating or selling public property at less than fair market value, needed a majority both in New Orleans and statewide. It was overwhelmingly supported by Lower 9 voters, but it lost 51 to 49 percent in Orleans Parish and failed badly statewide, 59 to 41 percent.
Had it been approved, a state law passed earlier this year would have taken effect. That law would have directed the city to sell vacant lots in the neighborhood for $100 each to, in order of priority: adjacent property owners; people who have leased property in the Lower 9th Ward for at least 18 months; former residents; veterans, teachers, retired teachers and emergency responders; and anyone who agreed to build on the property and live there for at least five years.
Developers, corporate entities and anyone with an active code enforcement violation or outstanding tax lien would have been barred from buying the lots, which the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority acquired through the Road Home program.
If you do your grocery shopping at Whole Foods, you probably live in area more likely to vote Democratic. On the other hand, if you buy your food at Kroger’s, people in your area probably voted Republican in Tuesday’s election. That’s what Time magazine found when it looked at how Congressional districts voted on Tuesday and crossed referenced it with the prevalence of brick-and-mortar retail chains in those areas.
To create their interactive chart, Time matched some 2 million store locations to how a district voted in this week’s midterm elections. The publication found that certain brands, like Ben & Jerry, American Apparel, Tesla and Trader Joe’s were more likely found in Democratic-voting districts, while brands like Cracker Barrel, Dillard’s, and Waffle House had more of a presence in Republican-voting districts.
While at first glance, this might seem more like a red state/blue state map (brands like Waffle House, Cracker Barrel, and Hobby Lobby have more presence in Southern states, for example), there may be a bit of consumer psychology behind it.
Ben & Jerry’s, American Apparel, and Tesla, for example, have been perceived as companies with a more progressive agenda. Ben & Jerry’s co-founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are famous for their support of progressive candidates and causes, Tesla founder Elon Musk is an advocate of green-energy technologies, and American Apparel — despite serious sexual-harassment allegations against its founder Dov Charney — supports immigration reform, gay rights, and sustainability.
Conversely, corporations such as Hobby Lobby, Cracker Barrel, and Chick-fil-A, which are found in more conservatives areas, have generated controversy for their respective conservative stances on birth control, racial and sexual-orientation discrimination, and same-sex marriage.
Several corporations are so ubiquitous throughout the U.S. landscape that their presence is somewhat politically neutral, at least in this recent election cycle. These retail chains include In-and-Out Burger, Chipotle, Starbucks, and Planet Fitness.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate fell to 5.8 percent after employers added 214,000 jobs in October. The average monthly gain throughout the past year was 222,000. The BLS said the industries that added the most jobs were “food services and drinking places, retail trade, and health care.”
Guardian U.S. finance and economics editor Heidi Moore pointed to analysts who disputed the cheery view of the report. The National Women’s Law Center, she wrote on Friday, “objected that most of the gains… were in low-paying minimum-wage jobs.”
Moore parsed the report as follows:
While the so-called topline numbers – the number of jobs added and the unemployment rate–- are often cited in discussions, they have their flaws. The jobless rate, for instance, has been dropping in part because it only measures people who have been actively looking for jobs; when people stop looking, they are no longer counted as “unemployed” according to the government figures. In addition, the number of jobs added is frequently revised, often by large margin; the BLS reserves a margin of error of 100,000 jobs.
One alternative measure Moore pointed out is “discouraged workers.” These are people who have given up looking for jobs because they think there are none available. A whopping 770,000 Americans fit that description. The number is essentially unchanged from the same time last year.
One of these telling statistics is the “U-6 unemployment rate,” a more expansive measure that counts the “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force.” That means all people who are unemployed as well as those who have taken jobs they don’t want out of financial desperation.
That U-6 number remains elevated, suggesting that 11.5% of the country is unemployed – in contrast to the milder 5.8% top-line unemployment rate. The U-6 rate has dropped in October, however, from 11.8% in September.
Additionally, at 10.9 percent, black unemployment remains more than twice the rate of white Americans.
Not long after the polls closed on Tuesday night, Georgia Congressman John Barrow earned his place in history when he lost his reelection campaign to Republican Rick Allen by almost 10 points—a peculiar place he undoubtedly didn’t want. Barrow, a five-term Democratic incumbent with a conservative voting record that earned him endorsements from both the National Rifle Association and the Chamber of Commerce, was the last white Democrat in Congress from the Deep South.
This fact has occasioned some eloquent obituaries for that most endangered of political species, which is on the verge of extinction. Not only will there be no white Southern Democrats left in the House come January, but it’s a good bet there won’t be any white Southern Democrats in the Senate either (Mary Landrieu is likely to lose in the Louisiana run-off next month). Throw in theelection of South Carolina’s Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate and, as The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson pointed out on Twitter, “there are now more black Republicans than white Democrats from the Deep South.”
Much as this is a problem for white southern Democrats, it’s a crisis for black ones. That’s because blacks in the South—who, notwithstanding the very compelling counter-example of Tim Scott, are almost invariably Democrats—have for decades relied on coalitions with white Democrats to increase their political power. Lacking white politicians with whom they can build coalitions, black politicians are increasingly rendered powerless. (See myarticle in August about what this has meant for black people in Alabama.) The situation for southern black Democrats has only grown more dire after Tuesday’s midterms. To truly grasp the severity of the crisis, it’s instructive to look not at Congress and Barrow, but at state legislatures and a Democratic state senator from Alabama named Roger Bedford.
Clinton can’t present herself as a novelty. She’ll be sixty-nine on Election Day in 2016 and has been a national figure for a quarter century. The last politician to become President after a similarly long and distinguished career was George H. W. Bush. Since then, the office has been won by relative newcomers: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. “The one time in my political life that we’ve gone back a generation was Carter to Reagan,” Dean said. “Once you change the page on generations, you don’t go back.” He added that Clinton could be the exception.
For some reason, there’s a movement afoot for Maryland’s outgoing Governor O’ Malley. Here we go again.
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I don’t even know where to begin this morning. I wish I could write a coherent diatribe like the one Dakinikat wrote yesterday, but I can’t do it. I have a sense that things are very wrong, but I can’t explain the feeling in any rational way.
As we head into the holiday season, I feel as if the country is leaderless. The public focus of the Obama administration and the media is on the glitches in a website; and yet in the background are terrible problems that are building and growing more and more intractable as our political “leadership” fiddles with nonsensical issues like Obamacare and Benghazi.
As Dakinikat noted yesterday, there is a problem of growing poverty and income inequality become institutionalized and normalized. There is the issue of gun violence and our total failure to respond to it with any kind of rational regulations on guns. There is the devolution of education in the U.S., and of course there is the continuing attack on women’s autonomy and Democratic politicians seeming willingness to use women’s bodies as bargaining chips. Finally there are the already institutionalized problems of racism and hatred of immigrants. What have I missed?
As our real problem grow, it seems the American political and media classes, either don’t notice because as part of the wealthy 1% they simply aren’t affected, or because they’ve got theirs and they just don’t care about the mass of people who are struggling to survive in a poisonous system. And because of the obsessive focus on the end-of-year holidays, nothing will happen in Washington until we hit the next debt limit and our “leaders” mobilize briefly to kick the can of our economic and social problems down the road once again and so they can return to their focus on minutiae.
Is there any solution to the political and economic stagnation we find ourselves in? Is the situation really as surreal as it feels to me on this Tuesday morning? Am I nuts?
Anyway, here a some of the stories leading the news at the moment.
Amazon.com hopes to deliver small packages to your home in just 30 minutes by unmanned drones within five years, chief executive Jeff Bezos said Sunday.
Bezos said Amazon already had the technology in place and had even flown a working prototype, which he showed off in a video the company published Sunday:
He promised “half-hour delivery, and we can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds, which covers 86 percent of the items that we deliver.”
The rest of the work, Bezos said, is in quality control and getting the plan OK’d by the Federal Aviation Administration — something technology experts said was unlikely on Bezos’ time frame.
So basically, this is just a silly idea that has no chance of actually happening anytime soon. But the media sees it as more urgent than poverty, income inequality, and people getting killed with guns day in and day out.
Scores in math, reading and science posted by 15-year-olds in the United States were flat while their counterparts elsewhere — particularly in Shanghai, Singapore and other Asian provinces or countries — soared ahead, according to results of a well-regarded international exam released Tuesday.
While U.S. teenagers scored slightly above average in reading, their scores were average in science and below average in math, compared to 64 other countries and economies that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which was administered last fall. That pattern has not changed much since PISA was first administered in 2000.
Gee, I wonder why this is happening? It seems like something that should concern our “leaders.”
The test scores offer fresh evidence for those who argue that the United States is losing ground to competitors in the global market and others who say a decade’s worth of school reform has done little to improve educational outcomes.
“While the intentions may have been good, a decade of top-down, test-based schooling created by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top — focused on hyper-testing students, sanctioning teachers and closing schools — has failed to improve the quality of American public education,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. The AFT released a video on Monday in which it implored the public not to blame teachers, the unions, parents or students for poor PISA results.
But were intentions really good? Check out these years-old headlines on profiteers (including the Bush family) who cleaned up after passage of the Orwellianly titled “No Child Left Behind” law was passed.
And yet, nearly a decade later, we’re stuck with that awful law and the damage it has done to our public education system. Why have Democrats done nothing to reverse it? Most likely because they too profit from the continuing privatization of education.
What about the latest media narrative on Obama care?
The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who have chosen health plans through the online federal insurance marketplace contain errors — generated by the computer system — that mean they might not get the coverage they’re expecting next month.
The errors cumulatively have affected roughly one-third of the people who have signed up for health plans since Oct. 1, according to two government and health-care industry officials. The White House disputed the figure but declined to provide its own.
The mistakes include failure to notify insurers about new customers, duplicate enrollments or cancellation notices for the same person, incorrect information about family members, and mistakes involving federal subsidies. The errors have been accumulating since HealthCare.gov opened two months ago, even as the Obama administration has been working to make it easier for consumers to sign up for coverage, the government and industry officials said.
Figuring out how to clean up the backlog of errors and prevent similar ones in the future is emerging as the new imperative if the federal insurance exchange is to work as intended. The problems were the subject of a meeting Monday between administration officials and a new “Payer Exchange Performance Team” made up of insurance industry leaders.
Okay, but what is with the bizarre impatience about some computer glitches from a media that couldn’t care less about institutionalized poverty, racism, and gun violence? And then there’s the Obama administration’s defensive response, as reported by USA Today: Obama to launch new health care law campaign
President Obama and his aides will seek to rally public support for his embattled health care plan in the coming weeks, starting with a White House event Tuesday.
Obama will promote the effort in a speech while surrounded by people who have benefited from the new law, according to an addition to the White House schedule.
The Affordable Care Act has come under heavy political attack since its rollout in October. Problems have included a malfunctioning website and the cancellations of polices that do not meet new federal standards.
In the coming days, Obama and aides will highlight what they call successful aspects of the law. They include provisions that prevent insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing health conditions, and allow young people to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until age 26.
A few writers have tried to look at the “Obamacare crisis” slightly more rationally than the mainstream corporate media.
It’s been 11 days since The National Journal‘s Ron Fournier wrote that Obamacare is President Obama’s Katrina. Oh, and it’s also his Iraq, Fournier wrote. Obama’s Katrina and Iraq. Both.
Since then, however, the Healthcare.gov website has been vastly improved and many of the bugs initially reported have been fixed, according to the administration late Sunday.
Back on November 20, Fournier made sure to provide himself with an escape hatch, though, noting that Healthcare.gov isn’t the same in terms of the actual events during and after Katrina, or throughout the Iraq War. Instead, Fournier wrote, the similarities had more to do with incompetence in the execution of a major policy initiative.
Yeah, so incompetence that lasted literally for years in both Iraq and New Orleans, leading to massive body counts on both fronts, is the same as a glitchy website launch. Okeedokee. Roger that. In reality, yes, both administrations made mistakes, but those mistakes were vastly different in terms of magnitude — not to mention that the Bush administration’s response to its mistakes was to, well, make even more mistakes. Again, foryears.
On the other hand, the Obama administration realized there were problems with the website and rushed to address those errors. Within two months most of those problems have been resolved, and, bonus, no one died.
For more rational perspective, read the rest of the post at the link.
You may remember that about a month ago, which is four score and seven years ago to the iPhone generation for whom a Japandroids download that takes over 20 seconds is an eternity times infinity, that the Great Socialism Project That Will Stomp America Flat (aka Obamacareor Communism) had some internet user problems which is why there are absolutely no healthcare services available in America right now so you should just rub some dirt on your burst appendix, suck it up, and quit yer bellyaching. In an effort to fix what wasn’t working, the Obama White House brought in some better quality nerds who, fortified with 5 Hour Energy IV drips, promised to get it up and working by Dec 1 or GTFO.
Please go read the rest.
Charles Pierce also had a few choice words for Ron Fournier and the rest of the Obama-hating press.
Ace reporter Ron Fournier of the Associated Press has another scoop for y’all. There is absolutely no fking way on god’s green and pleasant earth that this Obama fellow will be elected president again. He has blown his chance for that third term, and probably the fourth and fifth as well. Ron would like the Pulitzer committee to leave the medallion on the doorstep. Watch out, Obama. The Horsemen ride at daybreak! [….]
I heard my friend Eric Boehlert on the radio this morning, warning us that the traditional end-of-the-year retrospectives are likely to sing in close harmony on the theme of the collapsing Obama administration, even though his poll numbers are pretty much where they’ve been for a couple of years now, and even though the Republicans in Congress continue to have the approval ratings of skin disease. I think he’s right, and I think Fournier, who’s been a tool so long they ought to sell him at Home Depot, is just trying to get a jump on things here.
A faculty member at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Shannon Gibney, received a formal reprimand for her handling of a discussion about structural racism in her Introduction to Mass Communication course.
According to Gibney in an interview with City College News, a white male student asked her, “Why do we have to talk about this in every class? Why do we have to talk about this?”
She claims she was shocked, because “[h]is whole demeanor was very defensive. He was taking it personally. I tried to explain, of course, in a reasonable manner — as reasonable as I could given the fact that I was being interrupted and put on the spot in the middle of class — that this is unfortunately the context of 21st century America.”
Gibney says another white male student followed the first, saying “Yeah, I don’t get this either. It’s like people are trying to say that white men are always the villains, the bad guys. Why do we have to say this?”
When Gibney attempted, again, to inform the students that they were mistaking a systemic critique for a personal attack, the students continued to argue. Eventually, she told them that “if you’re really upset, feel free to go down to legal affairs and file a racial harassment discrimination complaint.” This is exactly what they did.
This probably has something to do with our f’d up education system too . . . . As far as I can tell, critical thinking has been banned.
Okay, I’ve ranted long enough. What interesting news have you been reading? Let us know in the comment thread.
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Between the Red Sox being in the World Series and having to have a root canal on Saturday, I’ve been a little bit disconnected from politics. The Sox won again last night in St. Louis, and they’ll be coming back home to Fenway Park leading the series 3 games to 2; so they could end it tomorrow night. If this post is a little late, my aching jaw and baseball are the reasons why.
We’ve been talking a lot about libertarians lately, because so-called progressives have been aligning with those Ayn Rand fans since libertarian Edward Snowden began leaking top secret documents about the NSA and libertarian Glenn Greenwald began lecturing the world about what a great hero Snowden is for defecting to Russia and revealing the most secret counterintelligence methods of the U.S. and U.K.
The latest shameful episode was Saturday’s “Stop Watching Us” rally in Washington, at which supposedly “progressive” groups joined with anti-woman right-wingers like Justin Amash and neo-confederates like Ron and Rand Paul to protest the NSA doing its job of collecting foreign intelligence.
I cannot support this coalition or the rally. It is fatally compromised by the prominent leadership and participation of the Libertarian Party and other libertarian student groups; their hardcore ideology stands in direct opposition to almost everything I believe in as a social democrat.
Yet my progressive friends would take the stage with the representatives of this political movement? Why? The loss is much greater than the gain. Organizers trade their own good names and reputations to stand alongside — and convey legitimacy to — a party that opposes communitarian participation in liberal society, and rejects the very role of government itself. And their own argument for privacy is weakened by the pollution of an ideology that uses its few positive civil liberties positions as a predator uses candy with a child.
This is an abandonment of core principles, in my view, out of anger over Edward Snowden’s still-recent revelations about the National Security Agency and its spying activity, particularly domestic access to telephone and online networks and metadata. It represents trading long-held beliefs in social and economic justice for a current hot-button issue that — while clearly of concern to all Americans — doesn’t come close to trumping a host of other issues areas that require “the long game” of electoral politics and organizing. Going “all in” with the libertarian purists is a fatal and unnecessary compromise; reform is clearly needed, but the presence of anti-government laissez-faire wingers at the beating heart of the privacy movement will surely sour the very political actors that movement desperately needs to make actual — and not symbolic, link bait — progress in its fight.
But it was to no avail. Watson was attacked for his argument that the anti-surveillance fever is distracting from other important issues. People like Greenwald and Snowden couldn’t possibly care less about alleviating poverty, protecting women’s rights or the right to vote. They’d have no problem with Social Security and Medicare being eliminated, and as for voting, they’re anti-government anyway. Glenn Greenwald–whom some uninformed people believe is a “progressive,” saves his worst attacks for Democrats and in the past has supported Ron Paul and Gary Johnson for president. To Greenwald, sacrificing the entire legacy of FDR and the civil rights and women’s movements is no big deal. Here’s how he characterized the values of liberals who reject Ron Paul in 2011:
Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.
Of course, Greenwald is admitting that he’d sacrifice the social safety net and the rights of millions of Americans in a hopeless effort to defeat the military-industrial complex and its technologies. If you can stand to read the whole piece, you’ll also learn that Greenwald thinks Matt Stoller is a “brilliant” writer. Greenwald is a libertarian purist, with no understanding of how politics actually works. This is the pied piper that many “progressives” are following these days.
I guess I’m getting a little carried away here, so I’ll stop ranting and offer some pertinent links.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Read more at the link. It’s hard to know what exactly to say about this bit of news from CNN. I guess we’ve known who he is since his “very fine people on both sides paraded past a Synagogue for a MAGA rally, shouting “Jews will not replace us” in the 
More indications of his madness and warped view of the country’s form of government and rule of law are on display in 
I have been an economist for about 50 years now, and it takes a lot to turn me into a Deficit Hawk. This did it. It’s fiscal policy gone deadly. Drunk Secretary Hegseth has turned me into a fan of bombs overnight. This is from 
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