Thursday Reads

Posted: January 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Psychopaths in charge, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Good Morning!!

I’m still in shock from the realization that Willard “Mitt” Romney is most likely going to be the Republican nominee. I never thought the day would come when a candidate would appear who is more soulless, more shallow, more banal, and less prepared to be president than Barack Obama. But Romney is all those things. I don’t think he knows any more about politics or economics than Donald Trump, and he’s just as much of a blowhard. What could possess anyone to vote for him? The American experiment has truly failed when these two psychopaths are the choices to lead the nation.

I was looking forward to Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s corporate raider past, but as Minkoff Minx reported last night, someone got to Newt and told him to cool it.

Newt Gingrich on Wednesday suggested his attacks on rival Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital have not been rational – though a spokesman insisted Gingrich is not backing off the attacks.

Gingrich’s comment came after a voter in Spartanburg, South Carolina, told Gingrich that he believed the former House speaker has “missed the target on the way you’re addressing Romney’s weaknesses.”

“I want to beg you to redirect and go after his obvious disingenuosness about his conservatism and lay off the corporatist versus the free market,” said the voter.

Gingrich replied: “I agree – I agree with you.”

“I think it’s an impossible theme to talk about with Obama in the background,” Gingrich continued. “Obama just makes it impossible to talk rationally in that area because he is so deeply into class warfare that automatically you get an echo effect which, as a Reagan Republican it frankly never occurred to me until it happened. So I agree with you entirely.”

Gingrich, who has harshly criticized Romney for his record at Bain, seemed to be saying he cannot “talk rationally” about Romney’s record because of the way Mr. Obama frames the issue.

He sure doesn’t sound rational there. I can’t figure out what he’s even trying to say. But it sounds like he’s claiming that somehow Obama made him attack Romney. Sadly, I’m afraid we may never see that “When Romney Came to Town” video now. Rats!

According to an article in the NYT, Romney’s advisers have been “shaken by attacks” on the candidate’s record at Bain Capital.

Although the advisers had always expected that Democrats would malign Mr. Romney’s work of buying and selling companies, they were largely unprepared for an assault that came so early in the campaign and from within the ranks of their own party, those involved in the campaign discussions said.

Even as Mr. Romney coasted to victory in New Hampshire, they worry that the critique could prove more potent as the race shifts to South Carolina, where shuttered mills dot the landscape, unemployment is higher and suspicion of financial elites is not limited to left-leaning voters.

Both Iowa and New Hampshire have unemployment rates in the 5% range.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Mr. Romney lamented that “desperate Republicans” were attacking the free enterprise system and the very notion of success.

“This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation,” he said. “The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.”

That message was echoed by Mr. Romney’s surrogates and embraced by a number of influential conservatives on Tuesday, from Rush Limbaugh to Michelle Malkin and the Club for Growth.

Unfortunately, the attacks seem to have caused many conservative who were previously unenthusiastic about Romney to rise to his defense.

At conservative blog Patterico’s Pontifications, “Karl” points out that it’s a little strange that Romney’s advisers weren’t expecting this, since Republican rivals have brought the issue up in Romney’s previous campaigns. I’m curious to see how all this will play in South Carolina.

Charlie Pierce had a bit of interesting Massachusetts gossip yesterday afternoon. Apparently one of Romney’s close advisers, Eric Fehrnstrom, is also an adviser to Senator Scott Brown, who as we all know is involved in a tough reelection fight with Elizabeth Warren.

Anyway, the gossip around the Massachusetts GOP — which is a small enough group that gossip can circulate at speeds at which matter is spontaneously created — is that some people in McDreamy’s re-election campaign have begun to complain that Fehrnstrom is spending too much time with Willard and not enough with their man, who’s in a much tougher fight with Elizabeth Warren than Romney is with the assemblage of second-raters in the Republican primary. It’s hard to see how Fehrnstrom can keep both of those balls in the air at the same time and, if he can’t, my guess is that McDreamy is the loser. This will not be a good thing for that campaign.

And speaking of Liz Warren, she raised twice as much money as Brown in the last quarter.

She has just over $6 million on hand, her campaign reported this afternoon.

Warren’s overall fund-raising for those few final months of 2011 outpaced Republican Senator Scott Brown’s total for the same time period. On Monday, Brown’s campaign released figures showing that he collected $3.2 million in the final quarter of 2011 and raised a total of $8.5 million last year.

Still, Brown holds a strong advantage, having accumulated $12.8 million in his campaign account, a record amount for any Massachusetts candidate this early in the election cycle.

Michelle Obama denies that she ever had any disagreements with Rahm Emanuel, as was reported in the new book “The Obamas” by NYT writer Jodi Kantor.

Obama said in an interview that aired on CBS’s “This Morning” that she does not routinely interfere in West Wing business despite reports that she clashed with top West Wing aides and has expressed her concerns and displeasure about policy and politics through back channels.

“I don’t have conversations with my husband’s staff. I don’t go to the meetings,” she told King. “I guess it’s more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here, a strong woman. But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day that Barack announced — that I’m some angry black woman.”

Obama said that she and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel “never had a cross word” — despite Kantor’s reporting that they clashed over strategy and policy during Emanuel’s tenure.

In foreign news, another Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated. From the Globe and Mail:

Amid escalating threats, the covert war to thwart Iran’s efforts to get nuclear weapons took an ugly – if gruesomely familiar – turn Wednesday with the murder of a young Iranian nuclear scientist on a Tehran street.

It was the fourth such reported targeted assassination in two years, adding a dangerous new element to the escalating conflict over Iran’s refusal to rein in its nuclear program or to open it to international inspection.

Wednesday’s killing in North Tehran was similar to previous attacks. Using powerful magnets, a motorcyclist attached a small delayed-action bomb to a car carrying Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, a nuclear scientist and university professor.

The explosion killed the 32-year-old chemistry professor, who worked at the sprawling Natanz nuclear facility, and another person in the car, reports said. The pinpoint attack focused the blast into the car during the morning rush hour.

Wonderful. Are we being pushed into another war after just beginning to extricate ourselves from Iraq? The NYT reports that the covert actions are believed by “experts” to be coming from Israel, the Iranians, probably with good reason, assume the U.S. is also involved.

Iranian officials immediately blamed both Israel and the United States for the latest death, which came less than two months after a suspicious explosion at an Iranian missile base that killed a top general and 16 other people. While American officials deny a role in lethal activities, the United States is believed to engage in other covert efforts against the Iranian nuclear program.

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks, which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton denied any U.S. involvement. Sure.

Finally, there’s a wonderful article by the late Christopher Hitchens in the new Vanity Fair: Charles Dickens’s Inner Child. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but so far I’m very much enjoying it. I love Dickens and reading the piece made me want to pick up on of his novels again soon–maybe I’ll reread my favorite one–“Our Mutual Friend.” What a great book it is!

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

They are Shocked, Shocked I tell you!

Posted: January 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: John Birch Society in Charge, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: , | 51 Comments

I’ve written a lot about my experience watching the Republican party gut support for the ERA, women’s reproductive rights, and eventually mainstream economics, science and rational thought. I became an unintentional activist in the 1980s when the Nebraska State Chair of the Democratic Party signed me up for a Republican county convention and told me to go fight to keep women’s rights in the Republican Party Platform.  Starry-eyed kid that I was, I said that I’d give it a try even though I really wanted to just work on the issues I cared about like the ERA.  Every time I wanted to give up, she sent me back in to try again.  She told me that nothing good would ever come to the country if both parties weren’t filled with reasonable people.

What I witnessed in the 1980s in Omaha, Nebraska was a series of elections where storefront churches sent women and men into Republican conventions and organizations with little white cards that basically had marching orders and talking points.  The women had long, straight, lifeless hair and faces.  The wore empire waist, gingham, home made dresses.  I came in with my dress for success power suit and my newly minted economics MS.  I was no match for what I discovered was Eric Hoffer’s True Believer in the flesh.  I’d read that book for a  High School English class and thought it only explained Nazis.  The fembots read their objections to the ERA and to birth control and abortion access from their cards written by their male pastors with their nodding, smiling husbands at their side.  I never considered sisterhood to be universal after that.

By about my second convention, I was being shouted down and called names that I won’t mention here.  The Party establishment–mostly members of the Omaha Country Club–represented the city’s business interests, lawyers and doctors.  They were completely unprepared for the ruckus.  The meme for the decade was that platforms don’t matter.  Let them put in whatever they want.  They needed the votes for their own agendas.  It was implied that all of this was lip service.  I left the party quite a few years before Pat Robertson won Iowa but let me tell you I wasn’t surprised.  My own run for the unicameral was an eye-opening experience.  You’ve never experienced fascism in quite a personal way until you have a campaign run against you from the pulpits of catholic and evangelical churches.  Those folks will do and say anything, literally. Forget Stalin, christofascists believe their ends justify the use of any means necessary, and the scary thing is that their neighbors will believe them.  It’s nothing less than a crusade of lies, anger and mean.

I’ve been reading The Politics Blog written by Charles P. Pierce at Esquire Magazine with encouragement from SkyDancing reader Ralph.  He’s got a great piece up today on how the chickens are coming home to roost for those country club Republicans that really, really want Mitt Romney or some other country club Republican to be likable enough to beat Barack Obama.  The powers that be want to gut Frank-Dodd and ensure that we can drill relentlessly in whatever garden of Eden they choose. They are fully aware that independents like me will run from the likes of Santorum and Perry.  Rove and his cronies are salivating over the vulnerability of the president.  They are also savvy enough to know they are riding in a clown car that they bought and paid for with funds and fundie ass-kissing.  They should’ve thought a bit more about the ride before they gave the keys to insane people.

Precisely how many times are we going to be treated to public expressions of mock horror from Important Conservatives that 40 years of allying themselves with nativist hooligans, anti-intellectual crackpots, Christomaniacs, and the sad detritus of American apartheid finally has produced a field of presidential candidates that these same Important Conservatives find less than adequate? Once again, the whole exercise requires both the writer and the reader to ignore the obvious consequences of four decades of political history and conclude that the Republican party has lost its mind only recently. And it requires both the writer and reader to convince themselves that out there, somewhere, is a superior candidate to the ones presently available, and to ignore the obvious conclusion that titans like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Paul Ryan chose not to run because they suspected they might get beaten like gongs, if not by President Obama, then by the wholly unacceptable Willard Romney.

And Bobby Jindal? Just stop, okay? You’re killing me.

(By the way, Politico? Quoting Fred Barnes on anything is the recognized international I Got Nothin’ signal. Quoting Fred Barnes on American politics is the functional equivalent of asking a fruit bat what it thinks about the trade deficit.)

Yes, the stern father is trying to get the keys to the clown car back from people completely dedicated to a crusade to turn the US into something completely disdained by the founders; a theocracy. The delightful Pierce read is a response to this “think” piece at Politico on the batch of wackos and the dull ideal-less Willard that have gone in and come out of Iowa. Not one of them is wholly acceptable to the mishmash of sociopaths associated with today’ Republican party.  Some are anathema to the Tea Party.  Santorum and Gingrich are the ultimate corrupt, lobbying insiders.  Others are not trusted by the christofascist crusaders.  The two sane candidates on deck are Mormons and way too reasonable–in the manner of reason that only today’s Republican faithful can define–and way too attached to reality to be acceptable to a group of people who reject modern civilization. Huntsman and Romney can’t be enthusiastically elected in today’s pared down Republican party which requires a pathological detachment from reality. Examine the evidence of Eric Cantor, who went into a state of apoplexy on 60 minutes last week when being told that Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 times and compromised with Democrats many more times than that.

This is what happens when you sell your souls for votes and unfettered greed.  We’re in about the 7th ring of a Republican-made hell right now and the country club dudes want out of their Faustian bargain so they can stay there.  Their compadres at the wheel want to go straight to ring 10.  We’re living their Divine Comedy with the rich grabbing everything, endless unemployment driving wages down, and absolute lax enforcement of the remaining Nixonian regulation. Yet, they could capture both the Senate and the White House.

Republicans this year find themselves in something of generational slackwater in this election cycle.

There are younger, talented Republicans, such as Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who judged themselves not ready to run for president this time.

There were also a number of potentially formidable Republican governors — Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels — of an older generation who chose for various reasons not to run.

This left Romney not competing against the most promising presidential-level talent this time.

“It’s not like the old days of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan,” said Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone. “They were all pretty well-known candidates. It’s just sort of a weak field.”

Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes went a step further, asking: “Would Romney be odds-on to win the nomination if Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie or Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush were in the race?

Not likely.”

That doesn’t mean, Barnes and others argued, that Romney couldn’t grow into a more forceful standard-bearer for his party in the process of campaigning against President Barack Obama.

Whoever wrote this piece has never spent any serious time researching Bobby “the exorcist” Jindal who has absolutely gutted our state’s universities and hospitals so that he can say he didn’t increase the number of people on the state’s payroll.  They haven’t checked the state’s unemployment rate which has doubled under his watch.  They certainly haven’t listened to him speak.  You have to be a speed listener to do that.  It takes special powers  Then, there is Paul Ryan that’s as big of a crank as any one I’ve seen in public office recently.  Even Newt Gingrich recognized his entitlement reforms as right wing engineering before he was called out by the other cranks.

This is the problem.  The Republican Party has spent 40 years purging their ranks.  There is nothing left but candidates so flexible with their positions they’ve been on every side of every issue or people so frightening that you wouldn’t want them near your children.  Consider Senator David Vitter whose record is simply impeccable for every one in the clown car.  Ask people if they’d want to spend time with him and every one runs for the door and hides their daughters.  Consider the number of Republicans from which you’d hide your young sons.  You name any Republican these days and you can point to either the freewheeling old school hypocrisy or the creepy “I don’t believe in science, math, history, and reality” factor.  They elect soci0paths in safe districts because they are reliable voters for the party’s special interests.

Consider Bachmann’s insistence today–as she headed for the hatchback door–that Obama is a socialist as best represented by Obamacare. It seems her evangelical fundie friends just couldn’t do it for a woman. She hit the eject button.  But, she’s still doling out the crazy.  Consider that Obamacare with its individual mandate is the Heritage Foundation/Republican Senate Health care response to Hillary Clinton’s health care study.  Republicans got a Republican plan that both Romney and Gingrich supported in the 1990s because it was the Republican plan and came from the Heritage Foundation.  Some how they’ve pinned it on Obama and deemed it socialist.  How can any one reconcile this with out some part of their brain imploding?  The individual mandate was the hallmark of the Republican plan.  All you have to do is check the Legislative record or the press articles of the day.  It was one of the things Obama supposedly opposed when he ran as a Democrat.  How can any Republican candidate that’s had enough experience to be the president run away from former Republican policy initiatives and conveniently forget that Obama opposed it before he loved it?

The concept of the individual health insurance mandate originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO). In 2007, Democrats and Republicans introduced a bi-partisan bill containing the mandate.

In 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama was opposed to the individual mandate. He stated the following in a Feb. 28, 2008 interview on the Ellen DeGeneres show about his divergent views with Hillary Clinton:

“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it. So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

The Republican clowncar ride these days enforces a strict policy of historical amnesia.  Pierce sees the contortionist sideshow that’s become the Romney candidacy.  Romney’s put himself into a denial pretzel to runaway from Republican past.

It is at moments like this in which I feel just the faintest twinge of sympathy for our man Willard. I mean, what more does the poor sap have to do? He’s walked back his previous ironclad commitments and then he walked back many of his own walk-backs. He has abased himself before all the steaming iron gods of modern conservatism. He’s grabbed control of the wild-west landscape produced by the Citizens United decision and demonstrated that he has absolutely no conscience regarding using anonymous corporate button men on the opposition while pretending all the while that he’s Michael Corleone at his nephew’s christening. And still he’s got people sniping at him, and dreaming their dreamy dreams about thuggish governors of New Jersey, diminutive governors of Indiana, and zombie-eyed granny-starvers from Wisconsin. It can’t be easy being the cousin that every Important Conservative winds up having to take to the prom.

Willard, if you want to play up to today’s Republicans, you’re going to have to literally have a come to Jesus moment.  Like Bobby Jindal, you’re going to have to give up the religion of your family and force your wife and kids to convert.  You’re going to have to say you were deceived by Satan and that explains the entire Massachusetts Governor thing.  It almost worked for Newt right?  The best deal is that you can contort yourself into the new Willard and Newt will forever be Newt.

I have no intention of ever voting Republican again.  That does not mean, however, that the Democratic Party gets my vote by default as I think Obama and others are expecting.  I am clearly looking for something else.  I do not intend to sell out all of my education and principles to settle for the anti-war but otherwise incredibly cracked crackpot Ron Paul who is a throwback to the confederacy. There is no way Donald Trump’s narcissism and hype traps me into forgetting how he took all that parental money and government money and parlayed it into bankruptcy.  He is not the greatest showman on earth.  Nader pretty much encompasses all of those complaints and more.  Bloomberg?  Forget about it!  This could very well be the first major election that I will give a resounding pass.  In that case, consider Mary Landrieu a lost cause.  She’ll never squeak through in today’s Louisiana where the electorate was changed by a Rovian exodus.  The only thing that could drive me to the polls is fear of Mitch McConnell as majority leader.  Is this what the democratic experience has come to?

This maybe the worst election year ever.

Indefinite Detention without Trial Open Thread

Posted: December 31, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Psychopaths in charge, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , | 37 Comments

Today President Barack Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which, among other things, gives the President the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. It also enshrines in law the ability of the government to use the military against American citizens.

At the same time, Obama issued a signing statement in which he says he will not use on the indefinite detention authority. As we know from three years experience, the President is a liar. Furthermore, the power will be passed on to future Presidents, and they may be less hesitant to use it. Here is the text of the signing statement (PDF), via the Washington Post. Some exerpts:

The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it. In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists. Over the last several years, my Administration has developed an effective, sustainable framework for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected terrorists that allows us to maximize both our ability to collect intelligence and to incapacitate dangerous individuals in rapidly developing situations, and the results we have achieved are undeniable. Our success against al-Qa’ida and its affiliates and adherents has derived in significant measure from providing our counterterrorism professionals with the clarity and flexibility they need to adapt to changing circumstances and to utilize whichever authorities best protect the American people, and our accomplishments have respected the values that make our country an example for the world….

Section 1021 affirms the executive branch’s authority to detain persons covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541
note).

This section breaks no new ground and is unnecessary. The authority it describes was included in the 2001 AUMF, as recognized by the Supreme Court and confirmed through lower court decisions since then. Two critical limitations in section 1021 confirm that it solely codifies established authorities. First, under section 1021(d), the bill does not “limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Second, under section 1021(e), the bill may not be construed to affect any “existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” My Administration strongly supported the inclusion of these limitations in order to make clear beyond doubt that the legislation does nothing more than confirm authorities that the Federal courts have recognized as lawful under the 2001 AUMF. Moreover, I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law.

In other words, Obama already had the power to detain American citizens, but because he is a great and magnanimous leader he will not act on the power, so we shouldn’t worry our pretty heads about it. Habeas Corpus is available only if granted by our benign and glorious leader.

Here’s the statement released by the ACLU on the President’s decision to sign the bill into law.

President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.

“President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

….

“We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court,” said Romero. “Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today.

There’s more at the link.


World War III Alert

Another dangerous portion of this new law imposes sanctions on Iran’s central bank. From the National Journal article cited above:

The bill also sets in motion strong sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank, in an attempt to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program, by impeding Iran’s ability to process payments for the roughly $90 billion in oil and gas it sells each year. The measures, which would penalize any foreign financial institution that does business with the central bank, sparked threats by Iranian officials to cut off access to the Strait of Hormuz, which could block transportation of most oil exports from the Persian Gulf.

The administration retains a national security waiver for the sanctions – and one to waive the petroleum sanctions if it determines there isn’t enough global supply to offset the lost Iranian oil – but has said it opposes being held to a timeline that could fragment to the international coalition working to isolate Iran or potentially spike oil prices.

Please discuss the NDAA, the signing statement, or any other topics that are on your mind.

They call it Riding the Gravy Train

Posted: December 27, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, Politics as Usual, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , | 13 Comments

It recently came to every one’s attention that many members of congress are dealing with legislation while owning stocks that will soar depending on the results of that legislation.  We’ve even found out that Eric Cantor bet against the country while  stalling legislation designed to increase the US debt level.

In academic studies from the Journal of Financial and Qualitative Analysis, statistically significant results demonstrate that both Republican and Democratic politicians are outperforming the market, with the Democrats enjoying a whopping 9 percent annual outperformance. Senators were the biggest winners, displaying Houdini-like magic and beating the S&P by 12 percent annually. These results are not due to luck or financial acumen, but are rather the result of trades based on non-public information that these politicians are privy to in closed-door sessions. For the rest of us hard-working and investing Americans, this type of advantage is called insider trading.

Obviously, behavior that is criminal for everyday Americans should not be okay for lawmakers who have the power to gin up laws that affect companies while simultaneously keeping an eye on their own spreadsheets and brokerage accounts. Sadly, however, this is in fact the case.

Congressional immorality seems to extend beyond this insider debacle. Recent reports have revealed that Countrywide provided special VIP loans with publically unavailable discounted interest rates to representatives. There was even a rumor this past month concerning student loans given to congressional family members that are later forgiven. Further research by Snoops.com and others revealed that these forgiven student loans are just for a limited group of staff members who work for our elected officials. Well, there you go; finally some moral fiber. It leaves those of us struggling to get our retirement portfolios on track to wonder if there is a way to pick up one of these staff member positions, or better yet become a lawmaker to get to the real juice.

We now have additional news that the global recession seems to have eroded the net worth of every one but the congress.

Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.

But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent.

The wealth gap may go largely unnoticed in good times. “But with the American public feeling all this economic pain, people just resent it more,” said Alan J. Ziobrowski, a professor at Georgia State who studied lawmakers’ stock investments.

There is broad debate about just why the wealth gap appears to be growing. For starters, the prohibitive costs of political campaigning may discourage the less affluent from even considering a candidacy. Beyond that, loose ethics controls, shrewd stock picks, profitable land deals, favorable tax laws, inheritances and even marriages to wealthy spouses are all cited as possible explanations for the rising fortunes on Capitol Hill.

What is clear is that members of Congress are getting richer compared not only with the average American worker, but also with other very rich Americans.

The founders of this country came very much from the landed gentry and bourgeois merchant class that had a great deal at stake in the revolution.  Their businesses were severely restricted by government monopolies granted to royal favorites. They were forced to pay the costs to garret troops and were taxed on items to support favored businesses.  Yes, most of those patriots were exceptionally educated and wealthy by the standards of colonial America.  It wasn’t until much later that representatives found that they could use their offices and the legislation to their advantage.  We’ve had many scandals involving graft and congress.  We have not, however, seen congress become a systematic path to wealth until recently.  There is terrible injustice in this.

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

The comparisons exclude home equity because it is not included in congressional reporting, and 1984 was chosen because it is the earliest year for which consistent wealth statistics are available.

The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.

There are things that could be done to stop  this.  The problem, however, is tha the foxes are in charge of the hen house.  There is legislation proposed to stop insider trading by congress.  Creepy Eric Cantor is blocking this.  There is legislation to separate the political class from their corporate donor teats.  Bernie Saunders has proposed a constitutional amendment to remove the power of SuperPacs in his “Saving American Democracy Amendment”.

Something really needs to be done about this

Gingrich Jumps the Shark

Posted: December 18, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , | 25 Comments

What won’t this man say for  a vote?  Since when do Presidents get to arrest judges that disagree with them?  Where did this guy get his history degree?

Right wing attacks on the judiciary are a campaign staple but this takes it a new level.You would think something in this “historian’s” education would have shown him that there are the co-equal branches of government.

Continuing his crusade on the judicial system, GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich said Sunday morning that he wouldn’t mind arresting any judge who he disagreed with.

When asked by CBS’ Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer him if he would “send capital police down” to make any arrest, Gingrich specified further his comments from Saturday.

“Sure, if you had to,” he said. “Or you’d instruct the Justice Department to send a U.S. Marshal.”

Gingrich called the judicial branch of the U.S. government “the weakest branch of the three.”

Damn!  How much of the constitution are you willing to sell out just to pander to the angry, ignorant base?

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