Shock! Obama Hugs Derrick Bell! Derrick Bell “Visits” White House! OMG!!

Posted: March 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

1991: Harvard graduate student Barack Obama hugs Harvard Professor Derrick Bell

Last night Peggy Sue wrote a great post about the late Andrew Breitbart’s supposed big revelation–that in 1991 Barack Obama appeared at a demonstration in favor of extending tenure to a female African American professor. Apparently, the most horrifying part of the story was that Obama publicly hugged Professor Derrick Bell at this event.

I’ve been noticing the development of this “story” over the past couple of days, but I’ve mostly ignored it in the hopes that it would simply go away. Sadly, the right wing bloggers, with support from Fox News personalities, are still screaming about it (here is just one example). What exactly are they trying to accomplish? Do they really want to make themselves look like complete idiots?

I honestly can’t figure out what awful crime either Obama or Bell is supposed to have committed, according to the Breitbartians, and frankly I just don’t want to submit myself to the horrors of reading their blogs. Based on a quick perusal of the some of the links on Memeorandum, I think they’ve taken to the fainting couch because more than 20 years ago, now President Obama supported racial and gender diversity at Harvard–something that Harvard desperately needed in 1991, and probably still needs today.

When these hate spasms periodically break out of the right wing blogs and into the corporate media, it’s hard for me to muster more than a heavy sigh. Like Peggy Sue, I’m obviously no great fan of Barack Obama and I didn’t vote for him in 2008. But my complaints about him aren’t that he supported racial and gender diversity at one time. When I hear about such incidents in Obama’s past, I can only wonder why he doesn’t seem to really support such issues as president. I wonder why professors like Derrick Bell and Charles Ogletree had so little positive influence on Obama that today he supports policies that remove rather than advance civil liberties in this country.

And if Breitbart was such a great muckraker, why didn’t he know that the footage of Obama speaking in favor of campus diversity and hugging Derrick Bell, far from being hidden by the Obama campaign, had been shown on PBS’ Frontline in 2008?

And what about the Heritage Foundation’s “discovery” that Derrick Bell visited the White House twice? Jake Tapper explains that little bit of stupidity:

The conservative Heritage Foundation shows some pluck by searching for the late law school professor Derrick A. Bell in the White House visitor’s logs, and finds that “Visitor logs show that Derrick A. Bell visited the White House twice since President Obama took office. The logs show two visits by an individual of that name on January 29 and 31, 2010.”

OK, so what happened? Did he have lunch with the President?

There are two problems with the Heritage post. One: it excludes some details from the visitors’ logs. There are 28 columns on the publicly released records, the Heritage blog lists seven. The data they omit includes a description of what the visit was for: in this case, for both visits: TOURS. A White House tour – not MEETING or APPOINTMENT. Another data point: TOTAL PEOPLE. This is a reference to how many people were present for the tour, meeting or appointment – in this case 304 people and 282 people.

Check out the visitors’ logs HERE.

But Bell surely could have taken a tour or two and then met with President Obama, right? Sure, it’s possible – and I asked the White House about it. The answer from a White House official: this was not the same Derrick A. Bell. He had a different birthday than the late law professor, whose birthday was November 6, 1930.

Another heavy sigh….

Eric Wemple of the WaPo decided to check with Bell’s widow to see if he’d ever met with President Obama. Here’s what she had to say:

Reached at her New York home this afternoon, Janet Bell was fully informed of the Breitbartian publicity. “I think there is no there there,” she said. “And I think that it’s pathetic and desperate on their part that they would think that this was such a bombshell. It’s typical in one sense: It’s the radical right wing making a mountain out of a molehill with distortion and misinformation.”

She watched the Breitbart editors promoting their “scoop” on Fox News’s “Hannity.” “I saw Sean Hannity — he had to twist himself up in so many pretzels to try to justify the dramatic nature of this footage.”

Yeah, but the late professor and Obama were buds, right? “They had very little contact” after Obama left Harvard Law School. “He never had contact with the president as president” — at least as far as Janet Bell can recall.

Personally, I’d think a lot more of President Obama if he had invited Professor Bell to the White House for lunch! Sorry to speak negatively of the recently departed, but Breitbart was an idiot and and his staff are just as idiotic as their former boss. All this fuss over a non-story!

The real problem is the motivation behind the hyping of this non-story. It’s beginning to look like we may be in for a long bout of out-front racism in the upcoming general election campaign–and that’s on top of the war on women that seems unlikely to end anytime soon. At the American Prospect, Paul Waldman is also fed up:

From the beginning of Breitbart’s enterprise, race-baiting was a key element of his attack on Barack Obama, one that continues even after his death. And he always had plenty of company, from Glenn Beck saying Obama “has a deep-seated hatred of white people,” to Rush Limbaugh’s repeated insistence to his white listeners that Obama was motivated by racial hatred in everything he did. “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations,” Limbaugh proclaimed. “The days of [minorities] not having any power are over, and they are angry,” he said. “And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang.” When in 2009 he found a story about a white kid getting beaten up by a black kid on a school bus, Limbaugh said, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on.'” And yes, he did that last part in an exaggerated “black” accent.

The message is always the same: Obama and the blacks are mad, and they’re coming for you. Yet people like the Breitbart folks and Limbaugh have two problems. First, they’re running out of material. There aren’t any more shocking revelations to be had. The best they can do is try to make mountains of racial resentment out of the most innocuous molehills, like the fact that Obama supported Derrick Bell’s effort to diversify the faculty when he was a law student. And second, by now anyone who can be convinced that Obama is a secret Black Panther never thought otherwise. The guy has been president for three years. Americans are pretty familiar with him. He hasn’t actually started herding white people into concentration camps, and it’s an awfully tough sell to tell people that he might any day now.

It’s a tough sell to rational people, but the right wingers are eating it up. It’s not going to be pleasant–and we’ll also have to deal with either Mitt Romney’s or Rick Santorum’s war on poor people.

Heavy sigh….

Thursday Reads

Posted: January 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: First Amendment, morning reads, Republican presidential politics, SOPA, the internet, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 39 Comments

Good Morning!!

There’s another Republican Debate in South Carolina tonight. Can you believe it? This one is hosted by CNN. How much more of this torture can American stand? These debates just keep on coming! We’ll live blog this one later on, perhaps with some interesting variations on the theme.

Speaking of horrible things that never end, can you believe Obama is considering appointing Larry Summers to head the World Bank? Here I thought we were finally free of Summers, but the guy just won’t go away. He keeps coming back, no matter how ghastly of job he does. From Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama is considering nominating Lawrence Summers, his former National Economic Council director, to lead the World Bank when Robert Zoellick’s term expires later this year, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Summers has expressed interest in the job to White House officials and has backers inside the administration, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and current NEC Director Gene Sperling, said one of the people. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also being considered, along with other candidates, said the other person. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations….

A nomination of Summers would bring scrutiny of his previous stints in government, both as former President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and Obama’s NEC director, as well as his tenure as president of Harvard University.

“Larry is controversial,” said Erskine Bowles, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff. “Anything you appoint Larry to, you know there are going to be some people who are going to take shots at him. But you know he’s a brilliant economist, which I think everybody recognizes.”

Oh really? If he’s so brilliant, then why is teaching college freshman? Why doesn’t he publish in academic journals? Why did he get fired by Harvard and the Obama administration? Enough with the retreads, Mr. President.

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Mitt Romney has admitted he pays somewhere close to 15% of his income in Federal taxes. NPR’s Here and Now had an interesting discussion yesterday about how he and other richie-rich folks get away with this. I recommend listening to the show if you have time. Here’s a bit from the write-up:

“Carried interest is the way that hedge fund managers and private equity firm managers get paid when they do a deal,” Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Institute told Here & Now‘s Robin Young.

Gleckman says private equity firms bring in outside investors. To get in on the deals, investors pay the firms in two ways– an initial fee, and a 20 percent cut of future profits.

When the owners of private equity firms pay taxes on that compensation from the investors, they pay as if it were capital gains– so that means they are paying a top rate of no more than 15 percent.

“Ordinarily if they were paid like the rest of us in wages and salaries, they’d be paying a top rate of up to 35 percent,” he said.

Gleckman said the carried interest tax arrangement is completely legal and not uncommon.

Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice said that this kind of income comes from work and should be taxed as such. And Gleckman agreed, saying that capital gains taxes are lower because the goal is to encourage people to risk their own money. Romney isn’t doing that.

Here’s another explanation at Bloomberg:

Romney, one of the richest men to seek the presidency, probably benefits from a controversial tax break that allows him to pay a lower overall rate than do millions of American wage-earners whose votes he’ll need to capture the White House.

That’s because private equity executives, as Romney was for 15 years when he ran Boston-based Bain Capital LLC, receive much of their compensation as “carried interest.” That enables them to treat what would be ordinary income for other service providers, taxed at rates as high as 35 percent, as capital gains taxed at 15 percent….

Yet those investments were largely made by Romney’s former partners with other investors’ money, not his personal funds. The vast majority of the resulting gains represent compensation for Bain’s work acquiring, sprucing up and selling individual companies, critics say.

“This is labor income for them, not a return on capital invested,” said Victor Fleischer, an associate law professor at the University of Colorado whose 2007 paper on the topic helped spark a move in Congress to try to change the law. “It’s a method of converting one’s labor into capital gains in a way that’s unusual outside the investment management industry. Ordinary people wouldn’t be able to do this.”

If Romney just paid his taxes like the rest of us, he’d probably be doing a much greater service to the country than if he becomes president. BTW, the articles says that Obama has paid 31% of his income in taxes for the last three years.

But that’s not all. Romney keeps millions of dollars of his vast wealth in the Cayman Islands, a well-know tax shelter.

Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.

Romney campaign officials and those at Bain Capital tell ABC News that the purpose of setting up those accounts in the Cayman Islands is to help attract money from foreign investors, and that the accounts provide no tax advantage to American investors like Romney. Romney, the campaign said, has paid all U.S. taxes on income derived from those investments.

“The tax consequences to the Romneys are the very same whether the fund is domiciled here or another country,” a campaign official said in response to questions. “Gov. and Mrs. Romney have money invested in funds that the trustee has determined to be attractive investment opportunities, and those funds are domiciled wherever the fund sponsors happen to organize the funds.”

Bain officials called the decision to locate some funds offshore routine, and a benefit only to foreign investors who do not want to be subjected to U.S. taxes.

Whatever. The guy is filthy rich, pays very little of his income in taxes, and has no clue how most Americans live. His attitude is that capitalism is sacred and if millions of “little people” are hurt by the machinations of people like him, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. And we shouldn’t have any safety nets for when things go wrong either. This man should never be POTUS.

A few more Romney items …

While he was at Bain Mitt used large donations of stock to the Mormon church to avoid paying taxes.

The New York Daily News got ahold of John McCain’s oppo research on Romney from 2008. “Talk about awkward,” the first line reads.

And here’s another awkward moment for the Mittster: Mitt Romney Allegedly Pulls Back Handshake Upon Learning That DREAM Act Advocate Is Undocumented.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney suddenly pulled back his hand after hearing that a young college student who greeted him at a New York fundraiser Tuesday night was undocumented, according to DREAM Act activists.

“He extended his hand to shake mine,” the young woman told The Huffington Post. “But once I said I was undocumented, he pulled his hand away from me.”

The 19-year-old college student, who asked to be identified only as Lucy because of her undocumented status, said she was also booed by Romney supporters as she was escorted out of a New York City fundraiser. One of the supporters told her to “go back to Mexico,” and she responded that she was “actually from Peru,” according to her account of the event.

Oops! There goes the Latino vote….

But we can’t forget that Romney still has at least one viable competitor for South Carolina’s delegates–food stamp obsessive and child labor advocate Newt Gingrich. Guess what Newt’s been up to? He’s using a fund-raising letter to threaten to punch out Barack Obama

Newt Gingrich’s campaign sent out a fundraising request to supporters this afternoon touting that the former speaker said he wants to knock Obama out, because, as the subject line of the email suggests, “A Bloody Nose Just Won’t Cut It.” The comment comes from a recent town hall where a questioner asked Gingrich how he would “bloody Obama’s nose.” “I don’t want to bloody his nose, I want to knock him out!” Gingrich responded. “This is exactly why Newt Gingrich is the candidate who must face Obama,” campaign spokesman RC Hammond says in the email, above a bright red “Donate” button.

You just can’t make this stuff up!

Conor Friedersdorf has an excellent response to Andrew Sullivan’s silly Newsweek article defending Obama’s accomplishments as President. I think Friedersdorf is a liberatarian, but his assessment on Obama is still on point. Check it out. I’ll just reproduce his list of Obama’s “accomplishments” here:

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (14) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

Unfortunately, he didn’t include Obama’s many contributions to the war on women.

Speaking of Obama’s war on the Constitution, Chris Hedges is going to court to sue Obama over the indefinite detention portion of the NDAA.

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Thanks to Hedges for putting his money where his mouth is.

I’ll end with this piece from Reuters: Sunk! How Hollywood Lost the PR Battle Over SOPA.

In the space of a couple of days, Hollywood and its content creators lost the public relations war over Internet piracy SOPA legislation — which now appears poised to crumble into a million bits of dust.

Wow.

The messaging industry never had control of the message.

The tech guys found a simple, shareable idea — the Stop Online Piracy Act is Censorship — made it viral, and made it stick.

Hollywood had Chris Dodd and a press release. Silicon Valley had Facebook.

It shouldacoulda been a fair fight. But it wasn’t.

It seems that Hollywood still does not realize that it is in the information age. Knowledge moves in real time, and events move accordingly. The medium is the message in a fight like this.

I disagree that the fight is over, but it’s nice to see the battle for free speech and privacy getting some corporate media ink.

So … what are you reading and blogging about today?

“If you want to have a party, have a party but don’t ask me to pay for it.”

Posted: July 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, fetus fetishists, Planned Parenthood, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

NH Executive Council with Governor Lynch

New Hampshire’s all-male Executive Council has voted to terminate the state’s contract with Planned Parenthood. As a result, Planned Parenthood will no longer be able to offer birth control services.

The Republicans that compose New Hampshire’s five-member executive council voted 3-2 to reject funding for Planned Parenthood’s six clinics in the state on June 22.

The council, a vestige of the state’s colonial government that is independent of the governor, must approve all state contracts greater than $10,000.

“I am opposed to abortion,” said Raymond Wieczorek, a council member who voted against the contract. “I am opposed to providing condoms to someone. If you want to have a party, have a party but don’t ask me to pay for it.”

Wieczorek is the second man from the right behind the Governor.

Under federal law, Planned Parenthood cannot use government funds to provide abortion, and Frizzell said it the group is subject to regular audits to ensure that only private money is used to pay for abortions.

You can read about the duties and powers of the NH Executive Council on their website here.

It sounds like the NH governor is a rather weak executive, but I don’t know that much about it.

From the Concord (NH) Monitor:

The six Planned Parenthood centers in New Hampshire stopped dispensing contraception last week after the Executive Council rejected a new contract with the organization.

Planned Parenthood had operated under a limited retail pharmacy license that was contingent on having a state contract, said Steve Trombley, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. Two weeks ago, the all-Republican Executive Council voted 3-2 against a new contract that would have provided the organization $1.8 million in state and federal money for the two years starting this month.

This will really hurt low income women in New Hampshire.

The Planned Parenthood contract, which accounts for about 20 percent of its annual New Hampshire budget, would have paid for education, distributing contraception, and the testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections. The organization’s abortion practice is paid for by private donations, Trombley said, with audits ensuring no public money is used.

Last year, Planned Parenthood provided contraception for 13,242 patients in New Hampshire, Trombley said. The organization also provided 6,112 breast exams, 5,548 screenings for cervical cancer and 18,858 tests for sexually transmitted infections. If the contract is not renewed, Planned Parenthood will drastically reduce its services, Trombley said. The organization employs 80 people in New Hampshire.

NH Planned Parenthood charges clients on a sliding scale based on yearly income. Seventy percent of clients pay nothing or a very small amount because they are under the state’s poverty line of $10,890 for an individual and $22,350 for a family.

The War on Women by the PLUBs continues unabated.

Friday Reads

Posted: June 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Economy, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, fetus fetishists, Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton, Libya, Middle East, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Rights, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , | 30 Comments

Good Morning!!!

The news continues to be fairly depressing as news tends to be, but we’ll try to cover some interesting things today!

It’s really hard to believe, but we’re about to mark the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic.  All of us that came of age during that period have a lot of lost friends and stories to tell. Thankfully, AIDS is a manageable disease now.  Unfortunately, too many people still don’t do what it takes to protect themselves.  Here’s an interesting story of how Congress came to realize that we had a growing health threat on our hands.

Oddly enough, it was the specter of Republican budget cuts that led to the first awareness of the AIDS epidemic in Congress. Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, had targeted public health agencies for massive cuts. A Waxman staffer, concerned about their potential effects, had gone to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to do reconnaissance. CDC scientists were alarmed and predicted that the cuts would lead to an epidemic, although they imagined it would involve a preventable childhood illness, since Reagan had proposed cutting the immunization budget in half. Waxman was worried enough by what he learned to join with a Republican colleague, Pete Domenici, to protect the immunization budget.
The epidemic came anyway. While in Atlanta, the Waxman staffer was told that he should meet with a doctor named Jim Curran, who had noticed an outbreak of an unusual and deadly pneumonia among gay men in Los Angeles. Today, Curran is renowned as the doctor who first raised the alarm among epidemiologists. But back then, he declined the offer of a congressional hearing to help direct research funding to his work because he was afraid that the attention would interfere with his access to a gay community that was fearful of the government (homosexuality was a felony in many states). “I’ll call you when I’m ready,” he told Waxman’s staff. Let’s pause here to note that before AIDS even had a name, members of Congress were aware of the disease and working to help.

Curran called a year later. In 1982, Congress held its first hearing on what was now called AIDS, a field hearing in Los Angeles. A single reporter showed up. But eventually Waxman and a group of colleagues succeeded in drawing attention to the epidemic

Texas continues its attacks on women’s right to choose.  It has revived an anti-abortion measure to omnibus legislation. It’s also continuing the Republican extremist attack on Planned Parenthood.

Besides the two health care provisions to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, the Texas House attached several anti-abortion amendments to the omnibus legislation: (1) a bill to “ban hospital districts from using local tax revenue to fund abortions, except in emergency situations — or else risk losing state funding,” (2) “limit the state family planning funds received by Planned Parenthood,” (3) force physicians who provide abortions to collect more data on their patients.

More Kind and Kompassionate Konservative philosophy comes from a Republican in Massachussetts who believes that any undocumented worker who has been raped “should be afraid to come foreward”.

Massachusetts GOP state Rep. Ryan Fattman has such contempt for illegal immigrants that he believes undocumented women who are raped should be afraid to go to the police. Yesterday, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported on Fattman’s incendiary comments, which he made while defending a controversial federal immigration program that many say will damage the relationship between law enforcement and immigrant communities. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) has refused to join the program out of concern that immigrants who are victims of violent crimes will be afraid to report them and seek help…

Representative Fattman supports deporting any undocumented rape victim who goes to the police immediately.  That appears to be more important to him than preventing crimes and supporting victims of crime.  Unbelievable.

Robert Reich continues to be an outspoken advocate for the unemployed and for a stimulus to correct the current economic problem.  He accuses Obama of going over to the supply side fairy tale spun by Republicans.  Yup, it’s not about more business incentives, it’s all about the lack of customers.  He joins me and other economists who say it’s all about the Demand side right now.

Obama says he’s interested in exploring with Republicans extending some of the measures that were part of that tax-cut package “to make sure that we get this recovery up and running in a robust way.”

Accordingly, the White House is mulling a temporary cut in the payroll taxes businesses pay on wages. White House advisors figure this may appeal to Republican lawmakers who have been discussing the same idea. It would, in essence, match the 2 percent reduction in employee contributions to payroll taxes this year, enacted as part of the deal to extend the Bush tax cuts.

Other ideas under consideration at the White House include a corporate tax cut, accompanied by the closing of some corporate tax loopholes.

Can we get real for a moment? Businesses don’t need more financial incentives. They’re already sitting on a vast cash horde estimated to be upwards of $1.6 trillion. Besides, large and middle-sized companies are having no difficulty getting loans at bargain-basement rates, courtesy of the Fed.

In consequence, businesses are already spending as much as they can justify economically. Almost two-thirds of the measly growth in the economy so far this year has come from businesses rebuilding their inventories. But without more consumer spending, businesses won’t spend more. A robust economy can’t be built on inventory replacements.

The problem isn’t on the supply side. It’s on the demand side. Businesses are reluctant to spend more and create more jobs because there aren’t enough consumers out there able and willing to buy what businesses have to sell.

The so-called Gang of Six are close to releasing their budget ideas.  They’ve shared what they’ve come up with so far with some members they feel may be responsive.  Will it be enough to head off Republican calls for default on US debt?

Freshman Republican Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who was in the meeting, said she was open to looking into any potential plan that would address the deficit in a serious and responsible way. She characterized the meeting as an update on the group’s progress.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) who is spearheading the group’s efforts with Chambliss was tight-lipped about the presentation and refused to take any questions or even vaguely describe the mood of the meeting.

“Do you really think, as somebody who’s obsessed about this that I’m going to do anything to screw it up now?” Warner said emphatically Thursday afternoon.

Even Dick Durbin, another Gang member and the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, was coy with reporters after the meeting. The Illinois Democrat is typically quick to present even a basic line expressing optimism or progress made in the meeting, instead opting to playfully pretend with reporters he knew nothing about the group or the meeting.

“I can neither, confirm, deny or retract [anything about the meeting,” Durbin teased with reporters.

Aides on the Hill are quick to point out that lawmakers will talk more when things are going poorly and less when things are going well. Perhaps after a few weeks of uncertainty, the remaining “Five Guys” trying to forge a deal are close to one.

NATO has upped the ante in Libya by hammering Tripoli and directly targeting Colonel Gaddafi. Some countries are seeking to give access to the country’s frozen assets to the rebels.  Many believe that the regime’s days are coming to an end shortly.  Qaddafi is said to have ordered mass rape and to have handed out Viagra to troops. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in the middle east working with other nations to plan for a post-Gaddafi Libya.

But another U.S. official indicated there was a conscious effort by NATO military planners to target air strikes closer to where Gaddafi is thought to have been taking shelter — and the Obama administration  is privately supporting the intensified strikes.

So, that’s a little bit of what I found is going on in the world.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Friday Reads

Posted: June 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, fetus fetishists, financial institutions, morning reads, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , | 28 Comments

Good Morning!

So, you should be able to tell that I’m knee deep in research and preparing to teach an MBA course because I’ve been writing so many finance and econ posts recently.  This morning is going to continue that trend. Plus, the War on Women is still on!  Some mornings it just doesn’t pay to read the news, I swear!

Feeling poorer?  There’s good reason!  According to statistics analyzed by Investor’s Business Daily “10-Year Real Wage Gains Worse Than During Depression”. That’s why no one has any money to spend.  This is especially true when you couple that with sagging wealth from your incredible shrinking home equity.

The past decade of wage growth has been one for the record books — but not one to celebrate.

The increase in total private-sector wages, adjusted for inflation, from the start of 2001 has fallen far short of any 10-year period since World War II, according to Commerce Department data. In fact, if the data are to be believed, economywide wage gains have even lagged those in the decade of the Great Depression (adjusted for deflation).

Two years into the recovery, and 10 years after the nation fell into a post-dot-com bubble recession, this legacy of near-stagnant wages has helped ground the economy despite unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus — and even an impressive bull market.

Over the past decade, real private-sector wage growth has scraped bottom at 4%, just below the 5% increase from 1929 to 1939, government data show.

Oh, and Moody’s is preparing for a US Government purposeful default on its sovereign debt.  Feel like you’re in Hooverville yet?  Just wait until Republicans looking to tank Obama’s reelection chances wind up tanking the US economy.

Moody’s Investors Service said today that if there is no progress on increasing the statutory debt limit in coming weeks, it expects to place the US government’s rating under review for possible downgrade, due to the very small but rising risk of a short-lived default. If the debt limit is raised and default avoided, the Aaa rating will be maintained. However, the rating outlook will depend on the outcome of negotiations on deficit reduction. A credible agreement on substantial deficit reduction would support a continued stable outlook; lack of such an agreement could prompt Moody’s to change its outlook to negative on the Aaa rating.

Although Moody’s fully expected political wrangling prior to an increase in the statutory debt limit, the degree of entrenchment into conflicting positions has exceeded expectations. The heightened polarization over the debt limit has increased the odds of a short-lived default. If this situation remains unchanged in coming weeks, Moody’s will place the rating under review.

Moody’s had previously indicated that its stable outlook on the Aaa rating was based on the assumption that meaningful progress would be made within the next eighteen months in adopting measures to reverse the country’s upward debt trajectory. The debt limit negotiations represent a real near-term opportunity for agreement on a plan for fiscal consolidation. If this current opportunity passes, Moody’s believes that the likelihood of anything significant being accomplished before the next presidential election is reduced, in part because the two parties each hopes to capture both a congressional majority and the presidency in the 2012 election, after which the winning party could achieve its own agenda. Therefore, failure to reach an agreement as part of the current negotiations would increase the likelihood of a negative outlook in the near term, because the upward debt trajectory would still be in place. At present, this appears the most likely outcome, in Moody’s opinion.

The Nation reports that the Banking Lobby joins the Republican party in attacking Elizabeth Warren. The fight continues to stop implementation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) and to stop Warren from head it up.  The bureau’s main mission is to stop bad lending practices that were rampant and damaging during the subprime mortgage crisis.

During last year’s financial reform debate, Congressional Republicans, along with some bank-friendly Democrats, launched a furious campaign to defeat the bureau. The US Chamber of Commerce led a $2 million industrywide ad campaign opposing the CFPB, using a butcher as its unlikely public face. “Virtually every business that extends credit to American consumers would be affected—even the local butcher,” one ad claimed. “I don’t know how many of your butchers are offering financial services,” quipped President Obama after meeting victims of lending abuses. The financial services firms that will fall under CFPB purview—big and small banks, payday lenders, mortgage brokers—did all they could to weaken it and create special exemptions for their industries, yet the consumer bureau improbably became “one of the central aspects of financial reform,” according to Obama, and the most tangible victory for consumers. Under pressure from consumer advocates, the administration named Warren a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, her onetime foe, and the bureau’s interim director. Now Congressional Republicans and their industry backers are mounting a last-ditch effort to constrain the CFPB before its launch. Warren, according to associates, views this as an attempt to “pull the arms and legs off of the agency.”

Okay, so I’ll change the topic to how religionists are attempting to outlaw birth control and in vitro fertilization.  They’re doing it by attempting to redefine personhood again.

“The definition of personhood ranges if you’re talking about property law, or inheritance, or how the census is taken,” says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

All those differences are exactly what Keith Mason wants to change. He’s president of Personhood USA, a group that’s trying to rewrite the laws and constitutions of every state — and some countries — to recognize someone as a person “exactly at creation,” he says. “It’s fertilization; it’s when the sperm meets the egg.”

Mason says the basic problem is that science has advanced faster than policymaking.

“We know, without a shadow of a doubt, when human life begins,” he says. “But our laws have not caught up to what we know.”

And according to his organization, those laws should recognize every fertilized egg as an individual and complete human being.

This movement is basically trying to push a definition that contradicts medical definitions.  A redefinition law is currently being considered in Colorado, Mississippi. and Alabama.

Medical experts say pregnancy begins when the egg implants in the uterus, not at fertilization. It is at this point that a woman’s hormone levels change and pregnancy can be detected through a urine test. Dan Grossman, an ob-gyn at the University of California-San Francisco who works with Ibis Reproductive Health, noted that about half of fertilized eggs implant and result in pregnancy.

Considering a fertilized egg a person with full rights also could outlaw popular forms of contraception, Grossman said. “This redefinition really could end up reclassifying all of these effective and safe birth control methods as abortifacients, or agents that induce abortions,” because some contraceptives can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, he explained. Grossman added that the idea that birth control methods that can block implantation are the equivalent of abortion is “certainly not a view that’s held by the medical profession or that’s based on medical evidence, and it’s certainly not consistent with what American women and couples want and use to plan their families.”

Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney with ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said personhood proponents’ intent is to ban abortion and birth control. She said that giving rights to a fertilized egg could have far-reaching and dangerous consequences by legally separating a woman from her pregnancy. For example, in cases of potentially lethal ectopic pregnancies, personhood would give “all fertilized eggs legal rights under the law [and] calls into question what kind of methods a doctor can actually use to save a woman’s life,” she said.

Amanda Marcotte–writing for Slate–describes the laws as even “weirder than imaged”.  Basically, you can sum it up this way:  women are receptacles and fertilized eggs are people.  This seems unbelievable but it’s unfortunately real and represents just the  latest threat to our autonomy.

Even some anti-abortion groups oppose personhood bills, not because they disagree with the aims of the proponents—who want to ban all abortion, IVF treatment, stem cell research, and many forms of contraception—but because it’s bad and confusing law.  And part of the reason for this is that it creates a lot of confusion over the gap between belief and fact.  For instance, it’s clear that many supporters of personhood laws hope the laws can be used to ban hormonal birth control and IUDs, which they argue work by killing fertilized eggs.  However, attempts to use the law in this way are complicated by the fact that this is not how these contraception methods work; hormonal methods work by suppressing ovulation and IUDs work by making the uterus a hostile environment for sperm (which isn’t going to do much to quell the emasculation concerns of anti-choicers). Realistically speaking, if you believe fertilized eggs are “people” and losing one is equivalent to losing a child, then women who use the pill to prevent ovulation are actually the least murderous amongst us, since they are losing the fewest number of fertilized eggs.  Using these laws to stop the distribution of these kinds of contraception would likely depend on a number of factors, including judges’ willingness to treat made-up beliefs as equal to scientific information.

There’s way more at stake than even abortion and contraception, in fact.  The haziness of these bills could create all sorts of nightmarish scenarios. For one thing, they would absolutely make IVF illegal, but it would also call into question how you handle all the embryos that have already been created in labs.  With IVF being banned, it’s pointless to keep them around anymore, but disposing of them is killing “people.”  Are we prepared to throw people in jail for this?  There’s also a concern about how miscarriages are handled once you’ve determined that a “child” has been lost every time a woman miscarries, no matter how early in her pregnancy. These laws open the possibility of every woman miscarrying being detained for a legal investigation to determine if she has criminal liability for miscarriage. If you think I’m being ridiculous about this, consider that women are already being thrown in jail for giving birth to babies that don’t survive. Personhood laws could roll back the clock on your criminal liability to before you were even pregnant. Unfortunately, there are zealots in law enforcement that are willing to throw a woman who miscarries at eight weeks in jail because someone saw her drinking in a bar six weeks ago, before she probably even knew she was pregnant.

So, want some even more disheartening news?   Melissa at Shakesville finds yet another article tailored for young women that basically says you can avoid most rapes if you just don’t drink alcohol.  No kidding!

The Frisky‘s “Girl Talk: Why Being Drunk Is a Feminist Issue,” by Kate Torgovnick, who totes isn’t a victim-blamer, she swears! It’s just that we don’t live in an ideal world, so because women “do not have control over what men, drunk or sober, will do when presented with our drunkeness,” women should take control over “our side of the equation—how much we drink.”

There is a lot wrong with that article (not least of which is the author’s confusion about what actually constitutes rape), but I’m not going to waste my time fisking garbage. I’ll merely note that the entire premise is fundamentally flawed in the same ways that every other piece in this despicable genre is, in addition to the evident issue that victim-blaming, even if cynically rebranded as “taking control,” inexorably shifts responsibility from rapist to victim

Where have all the consciousness raising groups gone?

So, I really don’t want to talk about Wienergate or who is in New Hampshire or why Chris Christie thinks it’s okay to take state helicopters on personal jaunts.   So, maybe you’ve got something else to offer up?  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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