Thursday Reads
Posted: May 2, 2013 Filed under: Barack Obama, corporate greed, hunger, income inequality, morning reads, net-neutrality, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, science, The Bonus Class, the internet, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: archaeology, cannibalism, CEO pay, Commerce Department, DOJ, emergency contraception, FCC, fracking, Jamestown Colony, JC Penney Co., North Dakota, Obama bundlers, Penny Pritzker, Plan B, Ron Johnson, Tom Wheeler 45 Comments
Good Morning!!
President Obama isn’t looking so “progressive” this morning (what else is new?). Yesterday, his “Justice” department announced they will ignore science as well as the health needs of women and girls by fighting a judge’s order to make Plan B emergency contraception available over-the-counter without age limits. NYT:
The appeal reaffirms an election-year decision by Mr. Obama’s administration to block the drug’s maker from selling it without a prescription or consideration of age, and puts the White House back into the politically charged issue of access to emergency contraception.
The Justice Department’s decision to appeal is in line with the views of dozens of conservative, anti-abortion groups who do not want contraceptives made available to young girls. But the decision was criticized by advocates for women’s reproductive health and abortion rights who cite years of scientific research saying the drug is safe and effective for all ages.
“Age barriers to emergency contraception are not supported by science, and they should be eliminated,” Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement on Wednesday.
In December 2011 the secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, blocked the sale of the drug to young girls without a prescription, saying there was not enough data to prove it would be safe. In doing so, Ms. Sebelius took the unprecedented step of overruling the Food and Drug Administration, which had moved, based on scientific research, to lift all age restrictions.
I could use some profane language here, but I’ll spare you for the moment. You may be mumbling to yourself too, after you read about Obama’s latest picks for the FCC and Commerce Department.
First the FCC. The New York Times reports: Telecom Investor Named to Be F.C.C. Chairman.
Tom Wheeler, President Obama’s pick to be the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, knows all about the most advanced telecommunications systems — of the 19th century.
In his 2008 book “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War,” Mr. Wheeler, an investor in start-up technology and communications companies, documents how Lincoln was an “early adopter” of what has been called “the Victorian Internet.”
Lincoln’s championing and advancement of popular uses of the telegraph are not unlike the challenges Mr. Wheeler is likely to face as chairman of the F.C.C., which is waging an intense battle to keep Internet service free of commercial roadblocks and widely available in its most affordable, up-to-date capabilities.
Mr. Wheeler’s qualifications for “one of the toughest jobs in Washington,” Mr. Obama said, include a long history “at the forefront of some of the very dramatic changes that we’ve seen in the way we communicate and how we live our lives.”
“He was one of the leaders of a company that helped create thousands of good, high-tech jobs,” Mr. Obama said, referring to Core Capital Partners, the Washington investment firm where Mr. Wheeler is a managing director. “He’s in charge of the group that advises the F.C.C. on the latest technology issues,” adding that “he’s helped give American consumers more choices and better products.”
They look happy, don’t they?
But does all that qualify Wheeler to protect consumers at the FCC? From Ars Technica:
President Barack Obama today announced his choice to run the Federal Communications Commission. As reported yesterday, the nominee is Tom Wheeler, a venture capitalist who was formerly a lobbyist at the top of the cable and wireless industries, leading the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA).
The nomination continues the parade of lobbyists becoming government officials and vice versa, a trend that has favored moneyed interests over the average American citizen and consumer time and again. One can take solace in the fact that Wheeler will be tasked with implementing the communications policies of President Obama, who says he is eager to fight on behalf of consumers and to maintain thriving and open Internet and wireless marketplaces.
But the same President who said “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over” when he was running for office has given the FCC’s top job to a former lobbyist. Wheeler donated $38,500 to Obama’s election efforts and helped raise additional money for Obama by becoming a “bundler,” arranging for large contributions from other donors after hitting legal limits on personal contributions.
Not surprisingly, the cable and telecom companies that Wheeler springs from are ecstatic about the nomination.
Gotta get rid of those nasty regulations that protect Americans from price gauging, internet censorship, and all that bad stuff.
Penny Pritzker
Next up, behold Obama’s nomination for Commerce Secretary, old pal Penny Pritzker.
Making official what many Democrats have expected for weeks, President Obama plans to nominate Chicago business executive Penny Pritzker, a longtime political supporter and heavyweight fundraiser, as his new Commerce secretary on Thursday morning.
Pritzker’s nomination could prove controversial. She is on the board of Hyatt Hotels Corp., which was founded by her family and has had rocky relations with labor unions, and she could face questions about the failure of a bank partly owned by her family.
With a personal fortune estimated at $1.85 billion, Pritzker is listed by Forbes magazine among the 300 wealthiest Americans. She is the founder, chair and CEO of PSP Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and its affiliated real estate investment firm, Pritzker Realty Group. She played an influential role in Obama’s rise from Illinois state senator to the nation’s 44th president, serving as Obama’s national finance chair in his first campaign for the White House and co-chair of his reelection campaign.
The president is expected to make the announcement at 10 a.m. at the White House.
If confirmed by the Senate, Pritzker would take charge of the administration’s efforts to build relations with business leaders who were often on the sharp end of the president’s first-term rhetoric.
Sigh . . .
This next story is guaranteed to make your blood boil. Bloomberg reports:
It’s been almost three years since Congress directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to require public companies to disclose the ratio of their chief executive officers’ compensation to the median of the rest of their employees’. The agency has yet to produce a rule.
So Bloomberg decided not to wait around any longer and figured out the ratios for us. See the chart at the above link. More:
CEO Pay 1,795-to-1 Multiple of Wages Skirts U.S. Law
Former fashion jewelry saleswoman Rebecca Gonzales and former Chief Executive Officer Ron Johnson have one thing in common: J.C. Penney Co. (JCP) no longer employs either.
The similarity ends there. Johnson, 54, got a compensation package worth 1,795 times the average wage and benefits of a U.S. department store worker when he was hired in November 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Gonzales’s hourly wage was $8.30 that year.
Across the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of companies, theaverage multiple of CEO compensation to that of rank-and-file workers is 204, up 20 percent since 2009, the data show. The numbers are based on industry-specific estimates for worker compensation.
Almost three years after Congress ordered public companies to reveal actual CEO-to-worker pay ratios under the Dodd-Frank law, the numbers remain unknown. As theOccupy Wall Street movement and 2012 election made income inequality a social flashpoint, mandatory disclosure of the ratios remained bottled up at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which hasn’t yet drawn up the rules to implement it. Some of America’s biggest companies are lobbying against the requirement.
“It’s a simple piece of information shareholders ought to have,” said Phil Angelides, who led the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which investigated the economic collapse of 2008. “The fact that corporate executives wouldn’t want to display the number speaks volumes.” The lobbying is part of “a street-by-street, block-by-block fight waged by large corporations and their Wall Street colleagues” to obstruct the Dodd-Frank law, he said.
Are you angry yet? These greedheads are going to keep pushing the envelope until Americans wake up and take to the streets with pitchforks and dust off the guillotines.
My birthplace, North Dakota is changing rapidly–and maybe not in a good way. It turns out the state’s oil is even more plentiful than anyone has realized up till now.
The sea of oil and natural gas underneath North Dakota is far larger than first thought.
There are 7.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the western part of the state and extending into Montana, according to the latest estimate by the U.S. Geological Survey.
That’s more than twice the oil the USGS estimated could be recovered five years ago. What’s more, the USGS has nearly tripled its estimate of the natural gas available in the area.
The revised totals could make the North Dakota field the greatest oil and gas find ever in the continental United States, topping the fabled East Texas field that made Texas synonymous with oil wealth. And it would put North Dakota second to Prudhoe Bay as the largest oil producer in U.S. history.
And even this estimate may have to be “revised upward”:
“We think it’s even a little bit conservative,’’ said Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council.
The new estimate will give fresh momentum to an economic boom within the state that has made it the fastest growing in the nation in both population and incomes. Per capita income has risen to $52,000 a year, sixth-highest in the nation, and once quiet farm towns have been overwhelmed by oil field workers, creating shortages of housing and services.
The USGS said the drilling of 4,000 wells since 2008 in what is known as the Bakken formation has given geologists a better idea of the riches underground. The new analysis also highlights the rapid ascent of North American oil and gas production driven by the advent of the technique known as hydraulic fracturing.
I guess I’m happy about the new jobs and population growth, but it will be sad if North Dakota no longer has clean air and vast open spaces.
Four shallow chop marks on the top of the girl’s skull, evidence of cannibalism during the “starving time” over the winter of 1609-1610. (Smithsonian Institution / Don Hurlbert)
You may have heard about this fascinating story–it was up toward the top of Google News much of yesterday. Archaeologists have found strong evidence that Starving Settlers in [the] Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism. From Smithsonian Magazine:
The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.
“The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. “Then, the body was turned over, and there were four strikes to the back of the head, one of which was the strongest and split the skull in half. A penetrating wound was then made to the left temple, probably by a single-sided knife, which was used to pry open the head and remove the brain.”
Much is still unknown about the circumstances of this grisly meal: Who exactly the girl researchers are calling “Jane” was, whether she was murdered or died of natural causes, whether multiple people participated in the butchering or it was a solo act. But as Owsley revealed along with lead archaeologist William Kelso today at a press conference at the National Museum of Natural History, we now have the first direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas. “Historians have gone back and forth on whether this sort of thing really happened there,” Owsley says. “Given these bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped up, it’s clear that this body was dismembered for consumption.”
There’s much more at the link.
Now it’s your turn. What are you reading and blogging about today? Please post your links on any topic in the comment thread, and have a great day!
A Flaccid Boehner
Posted: December 20, 2012 Filed under: Breaking News | Tags: fiscal cliff, Plan B 48 Comments
We currently have a Speaker of the House that couldn’t deliver the mail with an army of letter carriers at his bid. John Boehner’s spurious Plan B has turned into fiasco. The Plan was not brought to the floor for a vote because the speaker and his limp whip couldn’t get the math straight.
Plan B had been loaded down with so many goodies that all the establishment nuts–like Grover Norquist–were putting themselves into pretzels to get members to vote. Obama had promised it veto and Senate Majority Leader Reid had said it would not pass. Boehner and cronies couldn’t do it.
Beneath the fracas on the fiscal cliff fight, the Republicans’ Plan B proposal would check off many items on the GOP’s financial services wish-list, gutting core pieces at the heart of the Dodd-Frank 2010 reform law and terminating one of the administration’s main housing relief programs, under the radar.
The bill, which would extend Bush-era tax cuts for earners who make up to $1 million a year, would erode Dodd-Frank by cutting the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s automatic funding from the Federal Reserve and subjecting it to the annual appropriations process.
Plan B would repeal a section of the reform law that gives federal regulators tools to unwind ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions, known as “orderly liquidation authority.”
The Republican proposal for addressing the fiscal cliff would check off another GOP banking goal of shuttering the Office of Financial Research, which is meant to churn analytical data from financial companies to help regulators identify and knock down emerging threats to the financial system.
The financial services measures in Plan B also include a provision to terminate the Home Affordable Modification Program, one of the administration’s main homeowner assistance programs.
In April, the House Financial Services Committee passed the same package of financial services provisions along with a flood insurance reform component as a way to come up with $35 billion in spending cuts. The package was rolled into the GOP-backed Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act that passed the House in May.
But much of the savings from eliminating the “too big to fail” provision were attributable to a budget gimmick, by finding artificial savings, which National Journal reported at the time.
Boehner made an impassioned plea to his caucus. He begged them to for vote for the plan. There are rumors of screaming matches within the caucus meeting. This puts into question his job security and makes it more likely that nothing will be done this year. That means it’s its fiscal cliff time!
The fate of US negotiations to avert the fiscal cliff were thrown into turmoil after efforts by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to pass their back-up plan to avert most of the tax hikes collapsed amid a conservative backlash.
After calling an emergency meeting of his own party’s lawmakers, Mr Boehner issued a statement saying there would be no vote on Thursday night on the Republican “plan B”, as planned.
“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass. Now it is up to the president to work with Senator [Harry] Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff,” Mr Boehner said, referring the Democratic Senate majority leader.
The failure to hold a vote – after a short but dramatic arm-twisting campaign by Republican leaders – will cast serious doubt on Mr Boehner’s ability to muster support for any deal he might cut with Barack Obama, US president, leading to pessimism about the prospects for any agreement. If no budget deal is reached by January 1, the US will be hit by a series of $600bn in automatic tax increases and spending cuts next year, threatening a new recession. US equities futures markets dove sharply on the news.
The failure of plan B came towards the end of a week that had begun with widespread optimism over the prospects of a bipartisan agreement between Mr Boehner and Mr Obama to reduce the deficit and avert the fiscal cliff. Both Mr Obama and Mr Boehner had made significant concessions on both taxes and spending last weekend, narrowing their differences sharply. But they failed to close the deal, and Mr Boehner decided to take his chances and move ahead with a purely Republican proposal, in order to exert more pressure on Mr Obama and boost his leverage.
But the plan backfired, as conservative rank-and-file members balked at “plan B” – which would have raised taxes on income over $1m but extended tax rates for all other taxpayers. This would have been the first vote for a tax increase in more than two decades for House Republicans.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The vote here is all about establishing an argument. That’s all it is about. And what Boehner will say — he said it in the clip you showed — is the president hasn’t offered anything. What he’s offering, what he spoke about yesterday in the news conference where he said ‘I’ve offered a balanced plan,’ is a swindle. There’s nothing but essentially tax hikes. And not only revenue hikes but increases in rates, where the Republicans have caved, as Obama himself has said. Boehner himself has admitted. And they have gotten nothing of any importance, any significance, on spending — whether discretionary and nothing on entitlements of any importance.
So what he’s doing by passing “Plan B” is to say we’re ready to do exactly what the president has said he wants to do. He says I campaigned on taxing, raising the rates on millionaires. Well the definition of a millionaire is a guy who makes a million dollars a year, that’s exactly what we’re passing. So, the president has no argument to justify a veto or the Senate rejection of this. And I think that is a smart move because they’re going to lose either way and at least he can now say in resisting the swindle — the deal he offered is a swindle, I can’t see him accepting it if the president isn’t going to move — at least he can say we gave the president what he wanted and what he said he campaigned on.
I’ll just add one thing. If the “Plan B” does not succeed, if he fails in the House, Boehner has a “Plan C.” That’s the Mayan apocalypse tomorrow.
Questions:
Did Cantor really work this thing or is he planning a coup?
Will the Tea Party Republicans bring down the party?
Will Dancing Dave and his Disco Party be able to inject enough media blue pill magic into the conversation to make themselves all feel better about themselves?
Wednesday Reads: Red, Red, Moon…Nope, it isn’t a Monkey’s Butt!
Posted: December 14, 2011 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Japan, legislation, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, Republican Tax Fetishists, Syria, Women's Rights | Tags: Bashar al-Assad, Belguim, Google Street View, Lowe's, Lunar Eclipse, Plan B, tsunami 34 Comments
Good Morning!
Ah…that was quite a title, yes?
Well, I originally had this post called Red, Red, Moon…not Gingrich’s ass, but thought it would be a bit over the top. Of course I am referring to the latest Axelrod comment:
“The higher a monkey climbs on the pole the more you can see his butt.”.
I have personally used a monkey’s ass as an insult…in third grade, I told JoNell Costello that she had a face like a baboon’s ass. (Yes, I changed the name to protect the innocent.) It did not go over well, but it is a great memory for me because I was standing up for myself.
I’m mentioning it now because it ties in with some items I have for your morning news round up…so lets get to it.
Obama has already wimped out on the women’s front this past week…yes, that war reference is on purpose! Well, there are some Democrats in Congress who are really acting like Democrats.
It isn’t every day that 14 Senators aggressively call out their own party’s Health and Human Services Secretary, imply that a major decision made their own party’s adminstration was not based on science, and demand proof to the contrary. But that’s exactly what’s happening right now in the dust up over the Obama administration’s decision not to relax restrictions on access to Plan B.
Fourteen Democratic Senators have just sent this letter to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelieus, repeatedly insisting that she produce a convincing scientific rationale for the decision:
Dear Secretary Sebelius,
We are writing to express our disappointment with your December 7, 2011 decision to block the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recommendation to make Plan B One-Step available over-the-counter. We feel strongly that FDA regulations should be based on science. We write to you today to ask that you provide us with the rationale for this decision.
As numerous medical societies and patient advocates have argued, improved access to birth control, including emergency contraception, has been proven to reduce unintended pregnancies. Nearly half of all pregnancies that occur in the United States each year are unintended. Keeping Plan B behind the counter makes it harder for all women to obtain a safe and effective product they may need to prevent an unintended pregnancy.
We ask that you share with us your specific rationale and the scientific data you relied on for the decision to overrule the FDA recommendation. On behalf of the millions of women we represent, we want to be assured that this and future decisions affecting women’s health will be based on medical and scientific evidence.
And who are the senators that put there John Hancock on this letter?
Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Daniel Akaka (Hawaii), Carl Levin (Mich.), John Kerry (Mass.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Al Franken (Minn.), Frank Lautenberg (N.J.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Maria Cantwell (Wash.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.). Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
Good for them!
This leads us to the next Obama, “will he or won’t he” moment. I am talking of the House passing the Payroll Tax Cut extension with all that Keystone crap stuffed in the bill.
Defying a veto threat from President Obama, the House on Tuesday passed a bill extending a cut in Social Security payroll taxes for 160 million Americans for another year. But the Democratic majority in the Senate vowed to reject the measure because of objections to other provisions, including one to speed construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.
Threats of veto? From Obama? (I wonder if he really means it…)
In general, the vote followed party lines. Ten Democrats voted for the bill, and 14 Republicans voted against it.
Less than an hour after the vote, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, went to the Senate floor and declared: “The bill passed by House Republicans tonight is a pointless partisan exercise. The bill is dead on arrival in the Senate. It was dead before it got to the Senate.”
Portrayed by House Republican leaders as an engine of job creation, the payroll tax bill became entangled Tuesday with a separate omnibus spending bill to finance much of the government for the remainder of the current fiscal year.
Democrats threatened to delay action on the spending bill to ensure that Republicans would address their concerns about the Keystone XL pipeline and other provisions of the tax measure.
So, what do you think will come of this monkey’s ass? (No derogatory sentiment against monkey asses, or monkeys for that matter, is meant by that statement.) I wonder what the odds are in Vegas on what action Obama will take…
Speaking of asses, do you think the recent Christine O’Donnell endorsement for Mittens is considered a “welcomed” endorsement or a “thanks but you shouldn’t have” endorsement?
Christine O’Donnell, the former Republican Senate candidate and a tea party favorite during the 2010 election, has officially endorsed Mitt Romney for president.
O’Donnell made her endorsement during an appearance this evening on Fox News’ “Hannity.”
“It was not an easy decision because I too think any of our candidates would make a great president and a great candidate going against Barack Obama,” O’Donnell said. “But I think there are certain tie breakers and I know that in making my decision I might be hurting some people but I think infrastructure and executive experience are important, and for that reason I’m endorsing Mitt Romney.”
“I’m very happy,” she added. “This is not anti-[Newt] Gingrich or anyone else, it’s a pro Gov. Romney endorsement.
Oh, I can hear the commentary from those extremely devout right-wing Christians on the 700 Club now…A former witch endorsing a Mormon? I bet Newt is busting with appreciation of O’Donnell…
Newt is also busting with approval numbers from a recent NBC/WSJ poll…ready for it?
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has taken a commanding lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, hitting the 40 percent mark for the first time in the campaign, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday.
Gingrich is the first choice of 40 percent of Republican primary voters compared with 23 percent support for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the poll found.
Granted, Newt does not have such a high polling percent when paired with Obama, he is 10 points behind Obama, while Romney is just 2 points behind the “O” man.
Here are a few global news links, did you read about the vicious grenade attack in Belgium?
Eyewitness Greg Ienco: “We saw the explosions and the panic, it was quite incredible”
Police in Belgium are trying to determine what motivated a local man to open fire on a busy marketplace in Liege, killing at least four people.
Nearly 125 people were wounded, some critically, when 33-year-old Nordine Amrani fired bullets and hurled grenades before killing himself.
Police have said he was known to them for previous drugs and firearms offences and acted alone in the attack.
Authorities are looking for a motive in this attack:
Amrani, a resident of Liege, had been jailed for 58 months in September 2008 for possessing firearms and drugs, media reports said.
Officials did not confirm this, but said they were aware he had spent some time in prison.
“At no moment in any of the judicial proceedings against him was there a sign of unbalance,” Daniele Reynders, the public prosecutor for Liege, told reporters.
Amrani is reported to have been on parole and on Tuesday, had been asked to attend a police station for an interview in connection with charges against him.Instead, he took an assault rifle, revolver and hand grenades into the busy town centre square, close to the courthouse.
It is horrible…I feel terrible for those families, one of the victims who was killed was a 17–month old little girl.
In Syria, the numbers of people who have been killed in connection with the uprising and protest of the Syrian government has grown…
At least 32 people were killed across Syria on Tuesday, including seven members of the security forces, amid rising sectarian tensions in some places, opposition groups said.
The deaths added to a toll that was estimated by a United Nations official on Monday at more than 5,000 people since the uprising began in March.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 19 people died in the northern province of Idlib, near the Turkish border, when security forces loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad fired at them. Five were killed in the province of Homs, in central Syria, and one in the nearby province of Hama.
In addition, seven members of the security forces were killed in an attack on their military vehicle in the Bab al-Hawa area in Idlib Province, according to the observatory, an opposition group based in London. The attack, it said, was in retaliation for the shooting of antigovernment protesters earlier in the day in the province.
It seems like the spilling of Syrian blood is showing no signs of stopping.
The violence came amid the backdrop of worsening sectarian tensions in Homs, which is populated by a Sunni Muslim majority and a minority of Alawites, a heterodox Muslim sect from which Mr. Assad draws much of his leadership. Mohammed Saleh, an activist from Homs, said that two Alawites were kidnapped in Homs on Tuesday, and that one of them was the brother of Yasser Jawhar, an opposition activist who was jailed for 12 years.
The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said on Monday that the death toll was now 1,000 higher than the estimate she had released at the beginning of the month. Ms. Pillay said that this number included civilians, army defectors and soldiers who refused to shoot at protesters. It did not, however, include security forces killed by the opposition.
(Sigh)
That is the only response I can muster…
Google Street View explores post-tsunami Japan, the Google camera cars have documented the before and after street views of areas hit by the Japanese tsunami in March. That link will take you to a gallery of photos. (And you thought the images from space of before and after the tsunami were devastating.) This brings the devastation up close and personal.
I know that the recent “American Muslim” ad boycott decision from home improvement, and terrorist super store, Lowe’s has been discussed here on Sky Dancing, but I had to include a link to this video from Jon Stewart.
Lowe’s Boycott Of TLC Muslim Reality Show Leaves Jon Stewart Flabbergasted
Aasif Mandvi, the Daily Show’s senior Muslim correspondent’s report in front of the Denver Lowe’s is fabulous! Take a look at Mediaite link above.
And now I will end with an amazing image of this weekend’s Red Moon, a total lunar eclipse, what a beautiful picture:
This spectacular image by photographer Joseph Brimacombe shows the moon in a startling bl0od-red color this weekend during a total eclipse. The Universe Today explains the coloration this way:
The red tint of the Moon during an eclipse is caused by sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere, in effect projecting the colors of all the world’s sunsets onto the Moon’s near face.
Brilliant isn’t it?
We had an overcast night in Banjoville, so the view was obscured…but this picture is magnificent and I am so happy to share it with you!
That is all for me today, catch y’all later in the comments!
What are you reading and blogging about? Get to it!
(Wow, like Elaine, I went a little overboard with my exclamation points! Perhaps I should not use them so haphazardly…)
Thursday Reads
Posted: December 8, 2011 Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, birth control, children, Crime, Media, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, Team Obama, U.S. Politics | Tags: Department of Health and Human Services, Detroit, Elizabeth Warren, Eric Boehlert, FBI, FDA, food stamps, Gov. Rick Snyder, Iowa Caucuses, Jame's O'Keefe, Jorleys Rivera murder, Karl Rove, Kathleen Sebelius, Lobbyists, Massachusetts Senate race, Michigan emergency managers, Missouri, Mitt Romney, New Hampshire primary, Newt Gingrich, Ohio, Plan B, polls, rape, Red Sox, Rep. John Conyers, Rep. Peter King, Ryan Brunn, South Carolina, Verizon scam 19 Comments
Good Morning! It has been dark and dreary here for weeks it seems. I know the sun has come out a few times, but most of the time it has been either raining or about to rain. I think I’m beginning to suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Or maybe it’s just watching the 2012 presidential campaign. Either way, we’re talking dark and depressing.
On Tuesday Newt Gingrich told Larry Kudlow (yeah, I know) of CNBC that Obama is the “food stamp president,” and he (Gingrich) will be running against him as the “candidate of paychecks.”
“We are going to have the candidate of food stamps, the finest food stamp president in the American history in Barack Obama and we are going to have a candidate of paychecks.”
The former House Speaker went on to say Obama represents a hard-left radicalism. He, on the other hand, wants big tax cuts and big cuts in the federal government.
LOL! Obama is the furthest thing from a radical, and I doubt if he gives a damn about food stamps. I don’t know how Gingrich gets away with this stuff. Oh yeah, the media sucks. He spewed more lies too:
Gingrich also reiterated his claim that he is not a lobbyist. While he’s been steadily rising in the polls, he’s also been under scrutiny for his consulting work with mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
“I do no lobbying; I’ve never done any lobbying. It’s written in our contracts that we do not do any lobbying of any kind. I offer strategic advice,” he said. “The advice I offered Freddie Mac was, in fact, aimed at how do you help people get into housing.”
Gingrich also referred to himself in the third person in talking about the sad ending of his career as Speaker of the House.
“The job of the Democrats was to get Newt Gingrich. They couldn’t beat any of our ideas so they decided to try to beat the messenger,” he said. “I think it actually will help people understand what happened in that period and how much of it was partisan.”
Poor Newt. He’s filthy rich, but he can’t stop obsessing about the paltry help poor and unemployed people get from food stamps. Last week he claimed that food stamp use has increased dramatically under Obama and that recipients use their food stamp money to take vacations in Hawaii. According to Politifact as reported in USA Today:
PolitiFact, a fact-checking project of the Tampa Bay Times, noted in May that Bush made “more aggressive efforts to get eligible Americans to apply for benefits,” and new rules took effect to broaden eligibility for the assistance. At the time, PolitiFact said:
Gingrich oversimplifies when he suggests that Obama should be considered “the most successful food stamp president in American history,” because much — though probably not all — of the reason for the increase was a combination of the economic problems Obama inherited and a longstanding upward trend from policy changes. On balance, we rate Gingrich’s statement Half True.
As for Gingrich’s claim that food stamps can be used to go to Hawaii, the federal government has clear rules about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP). Basically, you can buy groceries or the seeds and plants from which you can grow your own food.
Right now Gingrich is the clear front runner for the Republican nomination. According to a new CNN poll, he has double-digit leads in three of the first four primaries, Iowa, South Carolina, and Florida. And he is catching up with Romney in New Hampshire. According to the poll, much of Gingrich’s support is coming from tea party types.
I wonder if these folks realize that when back in the day, when Newt was one of the most powerful people in DC, his fellow Conservatives worked hard to get rid of him? And some of them still don’t want him back in power.
As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich trumpets his leadership skills in his quest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, a different picture of his stewardship emerges from some GOP lawmakers who served with him during a failed 1997 coup attempt against the controversial speaker.
Twenty disgruntled Republicans in the House of Representatives squeezed into then-Rep. Lindsey Graham’s office in July 1997 and rebelliously vented about Gingrich. They were tired of his chaotic management style, worried that he was caving in to then-President Bill Clinton, and sick of constantly having to defend him publicly on questions about his ethics or his latest bombastic statement.
“Newt Gingrich was a disaster as speaker,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.
As Gingrich seeks to gain the world’s most powerful office, it’s worth recalling that when he once held great power in Washington, his own conservative Republican lieutenants rebelled against his rule less than four years after he led them to House majority status for the first time in 40 years. And their disaffection evidently helped persuade him to step down as speaker the next year and leave office.
King, for one, still believes that Gingrich’s widely disparaged egotistical complaining about the poor treatment he perceived from then-President Clinton on an Air Force One flight in 1995 is why Republicans suffered blame for federal government shutdowns later that year.
“Everything was self-centered. There was a lack of intellectual discipline,” King said
Karl Rove has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal in which he blasts Gingrich’s pathetic campaign organization.
In the short run, Mr. Gingrich must temper runaway expectations. For example, his lead in the RealClearPolitics average in Iowa is 12 points. But what happens on Jan. 3 if he doesn’t win Iowa, or comes in first with a smaller margin than people expect?
That could happen in part because Mr. Gingrich has little or no campaign organization in Iowa and most other states. He didn’t file a complete slate of New Hampshire delegates and alternates. He is the only candidate who didn’t qualify for the Missouri primary, and on Wednesday he failed to present enough signatures to get on the ballot in Ohio. Redistricting squabbles may lead the legislature to move the primary to a later date and re-open filing, but it’s still embarrassing to be so poorly organized.
That’s because Gingrich had no expectation of doing this well. He just entered the race so he could sell his books and his wife’s films. But it turns out Gingrich will be on the ballot in Ohio after all. As for Missouri, Gingrich claims he didn’t want to be on the ballot there because the primary is non-binding.
In a press conference in New York City today, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared that he never intended to qualify for the ballot in Missouri and that failing to meet the deadline was “a conscious decision, not an oversight.”
The primary is non-binding; it is followed a month later by caucuses where Missourians pick their convention delegates. But every other major candidate is participating in the primary, which gives the public an idea of where Show Me State voters stand.
“We have never participated in beauty contests,” Gingrich said when asked about his failure to qualify for the ballot. “We didnt participate in Ames [the Iowa straw poll], we didnt participate in P5 [a Florida straw poll].” ….
But failing to qualify for the ballot was widely seen as a sign of Gingrich’s lack of campaign organization.
Another sign is the papers he filed in New Hampshire. His papers were sloppily written in pen and he fell 13 short of the required 40 delegates.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. I think Romney should still win New Hampshire, but the question is how many Southern states he can carry. Of course I’d be enjoying watching the Republican primary mess a lot more if there were a liberal Democratic candidate to vote for.
Oh, Romney did come in first in one poll: the one that counted the number of jokes told about the Republican candidates on late night TV.
OK, I’ll let go of my obsession with Republican nomination campaign for now and give you some other things to read.
Last Friday, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters may have been the intended victim of a right wing James O’Keefe-type scam designed to make him look like hypocrite for writing in support of the Occupy movement.
It was the middle of the day on Friday, and Eric Boehlert heard a knock on the door. A senior fellow at Media Matters, a nonprofit watchdog that challenges conservative news outlets, Boehlert works from his Montclair, N.J., home.
A short, bearded man stood outside, holding a clipboard and wearing a Verizon uniform. He asked Boehlert if he’d be willing to take a customer survey. Verizon had, perhaps coincidentally, been at the house a week earlier to handle a downed wire. Boehlert quickly agreed and noted that a Verizon worker had actually failed to show up when he said he would.
But the interview questions got weird and then weirder. The man kept talking about Boehlert being rich and being able to work at home, Boehlert began to smell a ratf*ck.
“After he mentioned my salary and that I work from home, all the bells went off, and this is not who this guy says he is. Therefore, I kind of lost track of the exact wording of the question, but it definitely was like very accusatory of me and I’m a hypocrite and how do I have this supposedly cushy job while I’m writing about real workers and the people of the 99 percent,” said Boehlert.
“So there was this pause, and I said, ‘You work for Verizon?’ And he just sort of looks back at me and [says], ‘Will you answer the question? Will you answer the question?’ And I said, ‘Can I see your Verizon ID?’ And he wouldn’t produce any Verizon ID, and I think he asked me another time to answer the question. And basically I just said, ‘I’m done so you can leave now.'” ….
By now he [Boehlert] had realized that the man was likely pulling a political stunt, and James O’Keefe’s notorious “To Catch a Journalist” project came to mind as a possibility.
“The only sort of comical part was he forget which way he was supposed to run in case I started following. He ended up sort of in the road, and he sort of turned left and then right,” said Boehlert. “The last I saw him he was in a full sprint down my street running away from my house.”
In the Massachusetts Senate race, Elizabeth Warren is ahead of Scott Brown 49% to 42%, her biggest lead so far. But some people are *very concerned* because at a recent candidate’s event Warren was asked if she knew in which recent years the Red Sox had won the World Series, and she answered 2004 and 2008 instead of 2004 and 2007. Horrors! Paul Waldman has a very funny piece about it in The American Prospect.
In today’s election news, a candidate for the World’s Most Deliberative Body is facing an earth-shattering scandal because she said “2008” when she should have said “2007,” demonstrating to all that she is utterly incapable of representing the interests of ordinary people. As the normally even-tempered Taegan Goddard indignantly described it, “Elizabeth Warren (D) and the rest of the Democratic field for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts couldn’t answer a simple question about the Boston Red Sox at a forum yesterday. Apparently, they learned nothing from Martha Coakley’s (D) defeat two years ago…”
Here’s what Waldman had to say about this nonsense:
I don’t think anyone in Massachusetts could in good conscience vote for someone who is unable to identify both the state’s fourth-largest city and its third most commonly spoken language. I mean, what are we supposed to do, send someone to the Senate who doesn’t have a command of all master of state-related trivia? The answer is clearly to amend the Constitution so 12-year-old winners of the state geography bee can become senators.
Reporters, I beg you: If you’re going to discuss this “gaffe” and others like it, do your audience a service and explain why this is supposed to matter. And I don’t mean just by saying, “This reminds people of when Martha Coakley called Curt Schilling a Yankee fan, damaging her candidacy.” I mean explain specifically what exactly misremembering the Sox series victories as 2004 and 2008 instead of 2004 and 2007 tells us about the kind of senator Elizabeth Warren would be. Does it mean that despite all the other evidence to the contrary, she really doesn’t care about ordinary people and will upon taking office immediately introduce legislation to make the purchase of brandy snifters and riding crops tax-deductible? Then what?
Yesterday a got an e-mail from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) about an attempted Republican takeover of the Detroit city government. Bloomberg had a piece about it yesterday.
Detroit has the highest concentration of blacks among U.S. cities with more than 100,000 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. It will exhaust its cash by April and may run up a deficit topping $200 million by June.
Last week, Governor Rick Snyder, a white Republican, ordered a review that may lead to appointment of an emergency manager, rekindling rancor in a city scarred by race riots in 1967. Detroit lost one-quarter of its population since 2000 — much of it to largely white suburbs.
Four Michigan cities are controlled by emergency managers. All have populations that are mostly black. If Detroit joins them, 49.7 percent of the state’s black residents would live under city governments in which they have little say.
Michigan’s emergency managers have sweeping authority to nullify union contracts, sell assets and fire workers. Snyder has said he doesn’t want one for Detroit, though he called the city’s financial condition severe enough to warrant help.
Michigan citizens are currently collecting signatures to put repeal of the law on the ballot in 2012.
A maintenance man Ryan Brunn, 20,has been charged with the brutal sexual assault and murder of 7-year-old Jorleys Rivera, who disappeared on Friday in Canton, GA.
Keenan said Brunn, who has no known criminal record, had keys to both the empty apartment and the trash compactor bin where Rivera’s body was placed.
“We are confident that Brunn is the killer and that is why he is in custody,” Keenan said, declining to detail what evidence investigators have against him….
Keenan said investigators focused on Brunn after receiving information from the public. Brunn had been under police surveillance since Tuesday night. Keenan said the investigation will continue for several months.
“This is a mammoth case,” Keenan told reporters at a news conference in Canton. “We believe that this horrendous crime was planned and calculated, and we’ve recovered a lot of evidence.”
At least he was caught quickly. But another innocent young child is gone.
Yesterday the Obama administration overruled the decision of the FDA to make Plan B available without a prescription to women of all ages.
Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services upheld their decision to dispense Plan B One-Step—a one-pill emergency contraceptive—to young women only with a doctor’s prescription, overruling an FDA request to make the drug available over the counter to women of all ages. The restriction only applies to women under the age of 17. In a statement on the HHS website, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius outlined the administration’s reasoning: The FDA’s conclusion that the drug is safe, she says, did not contain sufficient data to show that people of all ages “can understand the label and use the product appropriately.” The outliers, she says, are the 10 percent of girls who are physically capable of child-bearing at 11.1 years old, and “have significant cognitive and behavioral differences.” HHS makes no mention of women older than 11 and younger than 17—statistically, those far more likely to be having sex, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services upheld their decision to dispense Plan B One-Step—a one-pill emergency contraceptive—to young women only with a doctor’s prescription, overruling an FDA request to make the drug available over the counter to women of all ages. The restriction only applies to women under the age of 17. In a statement on the HHS website, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius outlined the administration’s reasoning: The FDA’s conclusion that the drug is safe, she says, did not contain sufficient data to show that people of all ages “can understand the label and use the product appropriately.” The outliers, she says, are the 10 percent of girls who are physically capable of child-bearing at 11.1 years old, and “have significant cognitive and behavioral differences.” HHS makes no mention of women older than 11 and younger than 17—statistically, those far more likely to be having sex, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
So if you’re under 17 and you’re raped, you’re going to have to figure out how to see a doctor and get a prescription. Isn’t that just ducky?
I’ll end with some better news for women. The FBI has decided to expand the definition of rape.
An October vote by the Advisory Policy Board’s UCR subcommittee recommended the board at-large change the definition of “rape” to “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
Activists said the new definition was needed because the current one does not recognize that men can be raped, women can rape women, inanimate objects can be used to commit rape or that rapes can occur while the victim is unconscious.
Many local law enforcement agencies use a much broader definition of “rape” than the FBI, causing thousands of sex crimes to go unreported in federal statistics.
The FBI had been under pressure by the Feminist Majority Foundation, which launched an email drive urging the agency to update the definition.
Now let’s start doing more to protect women and children from rapists.
That’s all I’ve got. What are you reading and blogging about today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
grayslady
mablue2
JJ Lopez aka Minkoff Minx
NW Luna
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quixote
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Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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