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Getbig Main Boards => Gossip & Opinions => Topic started by: Benny B on January 19, 2012, 06:54:50 PM
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The main event pits two lightweights trying to fight their ways back into title contention, as Melvin Guillard squares off with Jim Miller.
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UFC has peaked
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racist fights reported
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UFC has peaked
With the mainstream tv FOX contract starting this year and the UFC going to Brazil (TUF will be Wanderlei v. Belfort) and other new places around the world, Dana & The Fertitta Bros. think that the company is just beginning its ascent.
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With the mainstream tv FOX contract starting this year and the UFC going to Brazil (TUF will be Wanderlei v. Belfort) and other new places around the world, Dana & The Fertitta Bros. think that the company is just beginning its ascent.
mainstream? its a fringe sport that contract doesnt guarantee success, yes UFC is probably the most popular combat sport in Brazil for the moment but aside from the appeal isnt that international not even in Japan where mma and k1 have taken a backseat to boxing
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thanks for reminding me. i forgot about this. i hope miller chokes him out
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thanks for reminding me. i forgot about this. i hope miller chokes him out
IF Melvin loses, this is how it well happen. If someone can handle his initial attack, then he usually gives up his back for the choke.
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Don't worry Paultards, he'll run again in 2016 when he's 80. Then he'll pass the baton to his son, and you all can vote for the Paul family franchise for the rest of your lives.
(http://img2-cdn.newser.com/square-image/86059-20110331200917/sorry-ron-paul-fans-romney-is-no-1.jpeg)
(http://martybraemer.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/ron-paul-poster-drop-out.jpg)
(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_RdB-VYVkSI/Te5gO-c4tEI/AAAAAAAAAiw/t669CCxRDZQ/s1600/loser.jpg)
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GM regains title of top-selling carmaker
January 20, 2012 - 7:53AM
General Motors has regained the title of world's top-selling carmaker selling just over nine million cars and trucks across the globe.
The company says it sold 9.03 million vehicles worldwide last year up 7.6 per cent from 2010. That's more than one million better than Toyota which took the title from GM in 2008.
GM also beat Germany's fast-growing Volkswagen which last week reported record global sales of 8.16 million in 2011 up 14 per cent from the year before.
Toyota said it sold 7.9 million vehicles worldwide last year. GM had held the global sales crown for more than seven decades before losing it to Toyota as GM's sales tanked while it headed toward financial ruin.
In 2009 GM filed for bankruptcy protection needing a US government bailout to survive. Now GM is profitable again and its vehicles are selling well across the globe.
On Thursday the company reported net income of $US7.1 billion ($6.83 billion) for the first three quarters of last year and it is expected to add to that number when it reports fourth-quarter and full-year results in February.
Toyota is aiming for a comeback this year and has predicted that it will sell 8.48 million vehicles in 2012. Its sales were hurt last year because the March earthquake in Japan slowed its factories and dealers ran short of cars to sell.
Industry analysts predict a tight race this year between GM, Volkswagen, Toyota and the joint venture between Nissan and Renault. Some analysts have said that VW is the world's biggest carmaker because GM's figures include vehicles made by its Wuling joint venture in China.
Many don't count Wuling because GM doesn't have controlling interest in the company but GM includes it in global sales figures. Excluding Wuling, GM would have been topped by Volkswagen.
Being the world's top-selling carmaker doesn't mean much for the bottom line. But GM retaking the title is an example of how far the company has come since its 2009 bankruptcy.
GM CEO Dan Akerson said last week the company isn't that concerned about posting large sales numbers and is focused more on making money so it can reinvest in products and generate returns for shareholders.
But he says strong sales can bring strong finances.
''You're not going to achieve the financial goals we want to achieve and have declining market share or declining numbers of units sold,'' he said. '' So it's one indicator among many.''
GM said its sales were up in all four of its regions: North America Europe South America and International Operations which includes Asia.
The Chevrolet brand led the way selling a record 4.76 million vehicles across the world. GM sold 640 000 more cars and trucks last year than it did in 2010 when it sold 8.39 million.
(http://irregulartimes.com/aapaypalfiles/images/americaforbarackobamabuntingbutton2012thumb.png)
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This is the man who claimed in the last debate, in defense of his anti-semetic and racist newsletters, that "Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of my heroes." Yet, when it was his turn to vote on the King holiday, HE VOTED AGAINST IT. The bill that Dr. King risked his life and received constant death threats to see pass into law, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Ron Paul was not in favor of, and STILL says he would have voted against...IN 2012.
We don't even need to go into the vile, disgusting comments he made about Dr. King in his news rag. ::)
But I digress...
Paul fights Washington spending, flies first class
Associated PressBy BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE and STEPHEN BRAUN | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has been spending large amounts on airfare as a congressman, flying first class on dozens of taxpayer-funded flights to his home state. The practice conflicts with the image that Paul portrays as the only presidential candidate serious about cutting federal spending.
Paul flew first class on at least 31 round-trip flights and 12 one-way flights since May 2009 when he was traveling between Washington and his district in Texas, according to a review by The Associated Press of his congressional office expenses. Four other round-trip tickets and two other one-way tickets purchased during the period were eligible for upgrades to first-class after they were bought, but those upgrades would not be documented in the expense records.
Paul, whose distrust of big government is the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, trusts the more expensive government rate for Continental Airlines when buying his tickets. Paul chose not to buy the cheaper economy tickets at a fraction of the price because they aren't refundable or as flexible for scheduling, his congressional staff said.
"We always get him full refundable tickets since the congressional schedule sometimes changes quickly," said Jeff Deist, Paul's chief of staff. Paul might have to pay out of his own pocket for canceled flights in some cases if he didn't buy refundable tickets, Deist said.
But records show that most of the flights for Paul were purchased well in advance and few schedule changes were necessary. Nearly two-thirds of the 49 tickets were purchased at least two weeks in advance, and 42 percent were bought at least three weeks in advance, the AP's review found.
Paul charged taxpayers nearly $52,000 on the more expensive tickets, or $27,621 more than the average Continental airfare for the flights between Washington and Houston, according to the AP's review of his congressional expenses and average airfares compiled by the Department of Transportation.
The more expensive tickets have other benefits as well, including allowing Paul to upgrade to first class when his staff reserves a flight because his frequent government travel gives him membership in an elite class of Continental customers who earn travel perks. Upgrades to first-class with cheaper fares are possible, at times limited to available seats days before the flight. But those upgrades are not guaranteed and some require ticket changes at the airport, according to the airline's frequent flyer rules.
The AP reviewed congressional travel before the Iowa caucuses for the two members of Congress running at the time — Paul and Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. Bachmann later ended her presidential campaign.
House records show Bachmann, like most other congressional members, also paid the more expensive government rate for airfare. But her staff would not provide access to more detailed expense records that show when and what type of tickets were purchased.
Paul's congressional staff provided access to all expense records requested.
Congressional members don't have to pay the government rate for travel, but most do, including many like Paul and Bachmann who advocate cuts in federal spending.
"You could almost always beat the government rate," said Steve Ellis, vice president of the Washington-based Taxpayers for Common Sense, a federal budget watchdog group. "They need to be walking the walk, and one of the ways they can do that is to be fiscally responsible for how they spend their member office money."
Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign manager, didn't respond to a written request to explain how Paul's use of more expensive airfare, which allows him to fly first class, corresponds with his commitment to cut federal spending. Instead, he sent a statement that started, "No one is more committed to cutting spending than Dr. Paul."
But Paul's congressional travel conflicts with claims in campaign appearances that he's the most frugal and serious deficit hawk in the race.
"The talk you hear in Washington is pure talk, because there is nobody suggesting, the other candidates are not talking about real cuts," Paul said in a speech to supporters last week after his second-place finish in New Hampshire.
He has proposed cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget during his first year as president, and has confronted other candidates in public forums as "big government conservatives."
"You're a big spender, that's all there is to it," Paul told former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania during a GOP debate in New Hampshire.
Paul boasts on his website about declining other congressional perks, such as a pension and all-expense-paid travel "junkets" that other lawmakers take. And he says he regularly returns money from his congressional account to the treasury.
But when it comes to his congressional travel, Paul has opted not to search for cheaper airfares that could mean returning more of his office account to the treasury, which uses any money returned by House or Senate members to help reduce the federal deficit.
Paul paid $51,972 for his government-rate flights between Washington and Houston between May 2009 and March 2011, or more than twice the $24,351 average airfare on Continental for travel between Washington and Houston. The average airfare figure represents the price for all tickets purchased for Continental flights between Washington and Houston, including economy and first-class travel, according to the Transportation Department's Domestic Airline Fares Consumer Report, which collects airfare information for the nation's busiest travel routes.
Paul's staff regularly booked him in first class on flights when tickets were purchased, according to expense records. His office paid between $1,217 and $1,311 for each round-trip flight, compared to the average airfare for that trip ranging from $528 to $760, according to the airline fares consumer report.
The period reviewed by the AP was the most recent period for which complete congressional expense records were available.
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mainstream? its a fringe sport that contract doesnt guarantee success, yes UFC is probably the most popular combat sport in Brazil for the moment but aside from the appeal isnt that international not even in Japan where mma and k1 have taken a backseat to boxing
Try reading my statement again a little more closely.
FOX is a mainstream television network, giving the UFC a much larger audience for their fights. Nothing "guarantees success", but with boxing flailing with only one viable fight that people really want to see at this time and no really big new stars on the horizon, my personal opinion is that the UFC will have combat sports on lock down in the U.S. for quite some time to come.
Its not about the UFC dominating Brazil, or all other international markets. That wasn't my point. It's just about making inroads and creating an enlarged revenue stream for Zuffa. No different than Walmart going to China, or any number of other American multinationals expanding to different markets overseas. They don't instantly become the #1 brand the moment they expand, but they are damn sure making money.
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Why Wall Street Is Grudglingly Supporting Obama
Super-rich bankers and investors are nursing a bitter grudge over Obama’s populist rhetoric. But the president has hurt their feelings more than their pocketbooks, and there are still big reasons to stay on his side, writes Avi Zenilman.
by Avi Zenilman | January 14, 2012
Wall Street Democrats aren't especially happy with the words coming out of Barack Obama's mouth, but most of them are biting their tongue—and still writing him checks.
On Friday morning, less than a week before the president visits New York to raise money at both the four-star restaurant Daniel—the last time he dropped by was in July—and Harlem's Apollo Theater, his reelection campaign echoed Newt Gingrich's recent populist attacks on Mitt Romney for his record as an investor and executive at Bain Capital. In a public memo, deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter called Romney a "corporate raider" who exploited the middle class before adding that President Obama would "level the playing field" and "restore fairness for consumers."
Obama Chicago
(http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2012/01/14/why-wall-street-is-grudglingly-supporting-obama/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage.img.jpg/1326597505219.jpg)
Paul Beaty / AP
The language, coming as public concern about income inequality has reached record highs, strikes an already raw nerve. While the campaign has been raking in cash at a faster pace than his record-setting 2008 campaign—it announced last week that it raised $42 million in the fourth quarter of 2011—the enthusiasm has not spread to the bankers and investors who Democrats have relied on in recent decades to partially counter the historic alliance between the Republican Party and big business. "There's this deep-seated feeling that he really doesn't understand how business operates," said a financial executive who has remained a strong Obama supporter. "This talk about fairness sounds whiny—they need to talk about collective responsibility. 'Fairness' calls for rectifying injustice and businesspeople don't think of their calling as unjust."
The root of the discomfort predates Obama's recent push for higher taxes on the wealthy, and often seems more than just a policy disagreement. After all, many on the left point out, Obama didn't break up the big banks that were propped up by the government because they were too big fail. The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill of 2010, which placed limits on certain kinds of trading and created the Consumer Finance Protection Board, may have kicked up simmering anger, but the complaints—at conferences or in investor letters or in interviews—are often tinged with a sense of personal betrayal. (They also nearly always cite a December 2009 interview in which the president called out "fat cat" bankers.)
While Obama’s populist rhetoric might underwhelm Wall Street, the threat of a Republican Party gripped by the cultural conservatism of the Tea Party still looms.
The most recent public example came in November, when private equity billionaire Leon Cooperman, who like many finance executives expressed support of the idea of higher taxes and a social safety net, wrote a scathing open letter to the president. “I can justifiably hold you accountable for your and your minions' role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us,” the private-equity billionaire wrote. “To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment.”
It's a striking departure from the last presidential cycle, when employees of Goldman Sachs donated more to the Obama campaign than any other company. In the spring and summer of 2007, Obama raised $7.7 million from the financial industry, while Romney brought in $5.1 million. Four years and one great recession later, they've basically switched places, with Romney raking in nearly $8 million and Obama—who has watched former supporters like Chicago hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin go back to support only Republicans—has seen his haul fall to $4.2 million. (Fourth-quarter-industry data is not yet available.)
Both donors and operatives, speaking to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity because their universe is full of hushed personal rivalries and petty grudges, said that, for now, much of the money from the financial sector was rolling in out of a sense of obligation. “They're whining because Obama hurt their feelings,” said House Financial Services chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who guided the financial reform bill through Wall Street and is grudgingly respected by Wall Street. “He’s not really interfered with their income.”
While Obama’s populist rhetoric—and his oft-noted inability to schmooze as well as Bill Clinton—might underwhelm Wall Street, the threat of a Republican Party gripped by the cultural conservatism of the Tea Party and the religious right still looms. In New York, where the financial community provided much of the support for Gov. Andrew Cuomo's successful push to legalize gay marriage, and other urban financial centers, the unanimous opposition by Republican candidates to abortion rights, opening up immigration, and gay marriage doesn't go over well. In a defense of Bain’s record published in Friday's Politico, Stephen Rattner, a former investment banker who was perhaps the most powerful Democratic fundraiser in Manhattan until he joined the Obama administration to oversee the rescue of the auto industry, made sure to go out of his way to mock Romney’s “come-lately embrace of hard-right conservatism.”
There’s no indication that the president will have trouble funding his reelection campaign, but to some degree it might be more important than ever for politicians to get the mega-rich excited. In Iowa and South Carolina, billionaires have taken advantage of recent changes in campaign finance laws and kept the primary campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman alive by plowing millions of dollars into super PACs, organizations that aren’t bound by normal contribution limits and run as many attack ads as they can afford. Which means that the 70-plus fundraisers Obama attended last year could go a long way if he successfully assuaged the feelings of a few cranky men and women. “I've seen a 180-degree turn from where we were, even a year ago, in terms of support for the President,” said a source close to a wide range of major Democratic donors.
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January 14, 2012
What They Don’t Want to Talk About
Ever since Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry started criticizing Mitt Romney’s actions at Bain Capital — and talking about the thousands of people laid off as a result of Bain’s investments — party leaders have essentially told them to shut up. That response is a pretty good indication of how deeply party elders fear the issue of economic inequality in the campaign to come.
“What the hell are you doing, Newt?” Rudolph Giuliani asked Thursday on Fox News. “This is what Saul Alinsky taught Barack Obama, and what you’re saying is part of the reason we’re in so much trouble right now.”
Mr. Giuliani has one thing right: Republicans are indeed in growing trouble as more voters begin to realize how much the party’s policies — dismantling regulations, slashing taxes for the rich, weakening unions — have contributed to inequality and the yawning distance between the middle class and the top end.
The more President Obama talks about narrowing that gap, the more his popularity ratings have risen while those of Congress plummet. Two-thirds of Americans now say there is a strong conflict between the rich and the poor, according to a Pew survey released last week, making it the greatest source of tension in American society.
That makes Mr. Romney and his party vulnerable, as he clearly knows. He said on Wednesday that issues of wealth distribution should be discussed only “in quiet rooms.” And he accused the president of using an “envy-oriented, attack-oriented” approach, “entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”
Mr. Romney’s image of a country where workers have nothing but admiration for benevolent, job-creating capitalists (and no one is so impolite as to mention jobs destroyed) bears very little relationship to reality. But his suggestion that it is un-American to talk about rising populist resentment is self-serving and hypocritical. Republicans, in particular, have eagerly stoked such resentments against minorities and the poor.
That was the essence of the “Southern strategy” that Republicans, beginning with Richard Nixon, used to urge white voters to defect from a Democratic Party that supported civil rights. It continued for decades with attacks on busing, affirmative action, immigration and welfare, and was sounded most recently by Mr. Gingrich, with his attacks on Mr. Obama as “the food stamp president.”
Fanning resentment of the poor — and deflecting attention from the relentless Republican defense of the rich — is also central to the party’s current political strategy. That’s why so many Republican candidates and lawmakers keep talking so angrily about poor people not paying federal income taxes. That’s how the Tea Party got started in 2009, when Mr. Obama proposed lowering interest rates for homeowners who were behind on their mortgages and conservative activists saw an opportunity to pit the affluent against their struggling neighbors. And that’s why Mr. Romney constantly accuses the president of trying to create “an entitlement society,” which is simply a variant on Ronald Reagan’s welfare-queen anecdotes.
And yet if Democrats dare to point out that the income gains of the top 1 percent have dwarfed everyone else’s in the last few decades, they are accused of whipping up class envy. Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, noted in a speech on Thursday that the median income in the United States had actually declined since 1999, shrinking the middle class while the income of the top 1 percent soared. Such inequality is corrosive. And pointing it out has nothing to do with envy and everything to do with pressing for policies to help America’s struggling middle class.
Anyone who criticizes Mr. Romney’s business practices now faces the absurd charge of putting free-market capitalism on trial. No one is trying to end capitalism, but President Obama is calling for more effective regulation to protect consumers. While Republicans attack a supposed “entitlement culture,” Mr. Obama is calling for strengthening a desperately needed safety net. And he is calling for raising taxes on the wealthy, particularly for those on Wall Street and in private equity, to protect that safety net and reduce the deficit.
Mr. Romney has based his campaign on his business experience. Americans need to know how that experience was gained, and what values — if any — it represents. Class reality has nothing to do with class warfare.
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By Ruben Navarrette Jr., CNN Contributor
This is ironic given that I've spent the last 20 years criticizing politicians who twist the facts, propose simple solutions and pick on those who don't have a voice.
And Romney has spent the last several months doing precisely that, just like he did during his failed 2008 presidential bid.He has used illegal immigration as a weapon against Republican opponents who propose reasonable solutions and in the process portrayed illegal immigrants, most of whom come from Mexico, as takers who come to the United States for free public benefits and ought not be rewarded with "amnesty."
We can expect Romney to continue that theme over the next week as he campaigns in South Carolina, where Republican primary voters will cast ballots on January 21 and where illegal immigration is a bigger issue than in Iowa or New Hampshire.
Lawmakers in the Palmetto State recently passed a tough Arizona-style immigration law that requires local and state police to determine the immigration status of anyone they suspect to be an illegal immigrant (read: Latinos).
It's an approach that is wildly unpopular with Latinos and which has the blessing of most of the Republicans running for president, including Mitt Romney.
And that's one reason why Romney, even if he is the GOP nominee for president, doesn't have much of a chance with Latino voters. Political experts say that a Republican would have to earn at least 30% of the Latino vote to win the White House. Given how he behaved in the primaries, Romney will be lucky to get 20%.
In fact, a recent poll of Latino voters by the Pew Hispanic Center put the figure at 23%. While it found a high level of anger with President Barack Obama among Latinos over his aggressive deportation policies, the poll also found that -- in a Obama-Romney matchup -- the Democrat would easily beat the Republican, 68% to 23%. That's saying something given that, according to the survey, Obama's job approval rating with Latinos is just 49%. The takeaway: You want to make Obama more popular with Latinos? Easy. Pit him against Romney.
Listen to Lionel Sosa, a San Antonio-based advertising executive and Republican strategist who has advised George W. Bush and John McCain. A few months ago, Sosa told The New York Times that Romney had blown his chance with Latinos.
"(Romney) can make as many trips to Florida and New Mexico and Colorado and other swing states that have a large Latino population," said Sosa, "but he can write off the Latino vote."
It was Romney who recently promised to veto the Dream Act if he's elected president and if Congress passes the bill. The legislation, which would allow undocumented students to stay in the country legally if they complete a college degree or join the military, is extremely popular with Latinos.[
It was Romney who first attacked Texas Gov. Rick Perry for signing a law that allows illegal immigrants who live in Texas to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities. And it was Romney who later attacked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for declaring that the GOP shouldn't support splitting up families and proposing a pathway for the undocumented to work legally in the United States.
It was Romney who, in the debates, came across as naive by suggesting that the illegal immigration problem could be solved by simply putting more "boots on the ground" and as dishonest by not acknowledging the contributions that illegal immigrants make to the local, state and national economies.
And it was Romney whose campaign put up, in New Hampshire, an offensive television ad that attacked Perry by linking him to Mexico and former Mexican President Vicente Fox, because Fox happened to agree with the Texas governor on letting illegal immigrants pay in-state tuition.
So the candidate who winds up vilifying Mexico is the same one whose father was born in Mexico? Who can make sense of this?
Listen up, Primo Mitt. You've made your bed. You're persona non grata with Latino voters, and it's your own fault. You can't win without them, but they can help make sure you lose.
We don't care where your family's from. What matters is where your heart is.
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but with boxing flailing with only one viable fight that people really want to see at this time
whats that de la hoya/trinidad ::)
the UFC will have combat sports on lock down in the U.S. for quite some time to come.
the PPV buys say otherwise, not to mention Brocks 'graceful' retirement
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Unemployment rate falls as economy adds 200K jobs
Employers add 200,000 jobs, unemployment rate falls to 8.5 percent, lowest in nearly 3 years.
Associated PressBy Christopher s. Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A burst of hiring in December pushed the unemployment rate to its lowest level in nearly three years, giving the economy a boost at the end of 2011.
The Labor Department said Friday that employers added a net 200,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent, the lowest since February 2009. The rate has dropped for four straight months.
The hiring gains cap a six-month stretch in which the economy generated 100,000 jobs or more in each month. That hasn't happened since April 2006.
The steady drop is a positive sign for President Barack Obama, who is bound to face voters with the highest unemployment rate of any sitting president since World War II. Unemployment was 7.8 percent when Obama took office in January 2009.
Still, the level may matter less to his re-election chances if the rate continues to fall.History suggests that presidents' re-election prospects hinge less on the unemployment rate itself than on the rate's direction during the year or two before Election Day.
For all of 2011, the economy added 1.6 million jobs, better than the 940,000 added in 2010. The unemployment rate averaged 8.9 percent last year, down from 9.6 percent the previous year.
Economists forecast that the job gains will top 2.1 million this year.
The December report painted a picture of a broadly improving job market. Average hourly pay rose, providing consumers with more income to spend. The average work week lengthened, a sign that business is picking up and companies may soon need more workers. And hiring was strong across almost all major industries.
Manufacturing added 23,000 jobs. Transportation and warehousing added 50,000 jobs. Retailers added 28,000 jobs. Even the beleaguered construction industry added 17,000 workers.
A more robust hiring market coincides with other positive data that show the economy ended the year with some momentum.
Weekly applications for unemployment benefits have fallen to levels last seen more than three years ago. Holiday sales were solid. And November and December were the strongest months of 2011 for U.S. auto sales.
Many businesses say they are ready to step up hiring in early 2012 after seeing stronger consumer confidence and greater demand for their products.
(http://themetapicture.com/media/funny-obama-laughing-republicans-2012-elections.jpg)
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Crackpots Do Not Make Good Messengers
By Kevin Drum | Mon Jan. 2, 2012
So then: Ron Paul. Should we lefties be happy he's in the presidential race, giving non-interventionism a voice, even if he has other beliefs we find less agreeable? Should we be happy that his non-mainstream positions are finally getting a public hearing? This is a depressingly common view. For example:
(http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/blog_ron_paul_tweet.jpg)
Can we talk? Ron Paul is not a charming oddball with a few peculiar notions. He's not merely "out of the mainstream." Ron Paul is a full bore crank. In fact he's practically the dictionary definition of a crank: a person who has a single obsessive, all-encompassing idea for how the world should work and is utterly blinded to the value of any competing ideas or competing interests.
This obsessive idea has, at various times in his career, led him to: denounce the Civil Rights Act because it infringed the free-market right of a monolithic white establishment to immiserate blacks; dabble in gold buggery and advocate the elimination of the Federal Reserve, apparently because the global economy worked so well back in the era before central banks; suggest that the border fence is being built to keep Americans from leaving the country; claim that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional and should be dismantled; mount repeated warnings that hyperinflation is right around the corner; insist that global warming is a gigantic hoax; hint that maybe the CIA helped to coordinate the 9/11 attacks; oppose government-sponsored flu shots; and allege that the UN wants to confiscate our guns.
This isn't the biography of a person with one or two unusual hobbyhorses. It's not something you can pretend doesn't matter. This is Grade A crankery, and all by itself it's reason enough to want nothing to do with Ron Paul. But of course, that's not all. As we've all known for the past four years, you can layer on top of this Paul's now infamous newsletters, in which he condoned a political strategy consciously designed to appeal to the worst strains of American homophobia, racial paranoia, militia hucksterism, and new-world-order fear-mongering. And on top of that, you can layer on the fact that Paul is plainly lying about these newsletters and his role in them.
Now, balanced against that you have the fact that Paul opposes the War on Drugs and supports a non-interventionist foreign policy. But guess what? Even there, he's a crank. Even if you're a hard-core non-interventionist yourself, you probably think World War II was a war worth fighting. But not Ron Paul. He thinks we should have just minded our own damn business. And even if you're a hardcore opponent of our current drug policy — if you think not just that marijuana should be legalized, not just that hard drugs should be decriminalized, but that all illicit drugs should be fully legalized — I'll bet you still think that maybe we should retain some regulations on a few of the worst drugs. They're pretty dangerous, after all, and no matter how much you hate the War on Drugs you might have a few qualms about a global marketing behemoth like RJ Reynolds having free rein to advertise and sell anything it wants, anywhere it wants, in any way it wants. But not Ron Paul. As near as I can tell, he just wants everything legalized, full stop.
Bottom line: Ron Paul is not merely a "flawed messenger" for these views. He's an absolutely toxic, far-right, crackpot messenger for these views. This is, granted, not Mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time levels of toxic, but still: if you truly support civil liberties at home and non-interventionism abroad, you should run, not walk, as fast as you can to keep your distance from Ron Paul. He's not the first or only person opposed to pre-emptive wars, after all, and his occasional denouncements of interventionism are hardly making this a hot topic of conversation among the masses. In fact, to the extent that his foreign policy views aren't simply being ignored, I'd guess that the only thing he's accomplishing is to make non-interventionism even more of a fringe view in American politics than it already is. Crackpots don't make good messengers.
Now, if you literally think that Ron Paul's views on drugs and national security are so important that they outweigh all of this — multiple decades of unmitigated crackpottery, cynical fear-mongering, and attitudes toward social welfare so retrograde they make Rick Perry look progressive — and if you've somehow convinced yourself that non-interventionism has no other significant voices except Ron Paul — well, if that's the case, then maybe you should be happy to count Paul as an ally. But the truth is that you don't need to. Ron Paul is not a major candidate for president. He's never even been a significant presence as a congressman. In a couple of months he'll disappear back into the obscurity he so richly deserves. So why get in bed with him? All you'll do is wake up in March with a mountain of fleas. Find other allies. Make your arguments without bothering to mention him. And remember: Ron Paul has never once done any of his causes any good. There's a good reason for that.
(http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j186/DonaldDouglas/Second%20Americaneocon/No-Ron-Paul.jpg)
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The LIES continue as a South Carolina audience kicks Paul's ass last night. ::)
Ron Paul Denies Saying He Wouldn’t Have Ordered Bin Laden Raid in Pakistan — But Here’s the Video
Last night’s GOP debate in South Carolina may be one that causes Ron Paul some problems in the “honesty” department.
Mr. Paul‘s truthfulness is being questioned after he told Fox News’ Brett Baier that he never said that he would not have given the order to go into Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden:
[ Invalid YouTube link ]
There‘s just one small problem with Paul’s denial, he did say it, several times.
Back in May of 2011, and featured here on The Blaze, Ron Paul said three times in a two minute discussion of the topic, that as President of the United States, he would not have ordered bin Laden killed in the manner that President Obama did.
Simon Conway was quite clear in his questions, first asking;
So President Ron Paul would therefore not have ordered the kill of bin Laden, which could have only have taken place by entering another sovereign nation?
And Dr. Paul was equally clear in his response:
I don’t think it was necessary. No.
Less than a minute later, Conway attempted to further clarify by again asking the congressman”
So President Ron Paul would not have ordered the kill of bin Laden, to take place, as it took place in Pakistan?
Ron Paul’s response was consistent with his two previous answers.
Not the way it took place, no. I mean he was unarmed, you know… and all these other arguments.
Watch the two minute excerpt as Simon Conway of WHO Radio in Iowa repeatedly asks the Texas Congressman whether he would have given the order to kill Osama bin Laden.
Ron Paul explains that if he were elected President, he would not have ordered Osama bin Laden killed.
That clip from WHO Newsradio 1040 appeared on The Blaze on May 11th.
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(http://in-this-economy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Rick-Perry-with-gun.jpg)
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America's mainstream media is being accused of playing with fire for playing-up the prospect of war, between Iran and the West. It's a sensitive time with the military stand-off in the Strait of Hormuz, and looming sanctions over Iran's nuclear program. But, as Gayane Chichakyan reports, viewers in the States are repeatedly hearing how war is virtually inescapable.
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informative hijack, johnnynoname
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how did hid shorts wheigh 1/2 a pound? :-\ :-\
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Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, the President visited the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, welcomed this year's NBA Champs, the Dallas Mavericks, addressed the EPA, announced a new Chief of Staff, and introduced the White House's Insourcing Initiative. That's January 6th to January 12th or, "Insourcing: Bringing Jobs Back to America."
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hahaha...oh, brother
This 2012 version is a complete FRAUD
Footage from the Romney/Kennedy Debate, October 1994
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I am around Wall Street guys like this every day. I don't think most Americans are going to relate to this, sorry.
Good luck, Willard! :-\
Mitt Romney on Wall Street and inequality
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(http://www.addictinginfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Romney-Bain-Capital-money-shot.jpg)
(http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll240/cluezo2/gekko.jpg)
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(http://www.winningprogressive.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/img-mg-egypt-protests-10_1418184273132.jpg)
Yesterday was a huge day in Egypt, as that country’s President/dictator for the past 30 years ceded power in the face of massive peaceful protests by his people. While much work remains to be done to ensure that real democracy takes hold in Egypt, we should celebrate the amazing victory by and for the Egyptian people. It was truly a day for progressives and other supporters of democracy and peaceful protest to savor.
Mubarak’s departure is also, however, a victory for the Obama Administration’s patient and reasoned approach to promoting democracy in Egypt and other countries. This approach started with President Obama’s stellar June 2009 speech in Cairo that signaled that the peoples of Egypt and other countries would have to choose democracy, but we would be there to support them if they made moves to achieve it peacefully. And it has continued over the past 18 days of protests, as President Obama has taken a measured approach of private diplomacy with Mubarak, Egypt’s military, and other Egyptian leaders, combined with slowly increasing public pressure that focused on supporting the will of the Egyptian people. As yesterday’s developments show, President Obama’s approach is working.
Throughout the protests, many on the left and from the Bush Administration have harshly criticized President Obama for not being more publicly vocal about the need for Mubarak to leave and in support of the protesters. Apparently these folks wanted President Obama to try to lead the protest movement, demand democracy and regime change immediately, and/or engage in the type of loud public saber rattling that marred our foreign policy under the Bush Administration. Such an approach (which, notably, did not lead to the peaceful toppling of any leaders in the Middle East under Bush) would have been misguided for a number of reasons.
* First, the publicly vocal approach that the critics wanted President Obama to take would have made the protesters look like tools of the U.S., which would undermine their credibility at home.
* Second, such an approach would have limited President Obama’s ability to work privately to make the protests successful by making sure that Mubarak or the Egyptian military did not overreact and have the situation devolve into chaos. It is remarkable that a thirty year dictator did not violently crush the protests and stepped down with hardly a shot fired, and the Obama Administration’s private diplomacy is likely a large reason why such violence did not occur.
* Third, the critics’ approach ignores the fact that democracy has to come from the people of Egypt, not outside pressure from the U.S. That is not to say that we had no role in how things turn out in Egypt, but the thought that we could essentially dictate the results in Egypt reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics and foreign policy works, as both leaders and citizens of countries do not react well to outsiders publicly meddling in their affairs.
Peacefully toppling a dictatorial regime is a difficult thing to achieve. It requires more than just protests from a country’s citizens and demands of “regime change” from other world leaders. Instead, it requires patient and reasoned diplomacy focused on moving the dictator out of power and supporting the will of the people that a protesting. This is the approach that the Obama Administration has taken so far and now, as a result, we are in a position to help the people of Egypt establish a path to a peaceful transition to democracy.
As progressives, it is important that we help spread the word of the success of the Obama Administration’s approach to Egypt for at least two reasons. First, it helps counteract the misconception that the Administration is not being successful. Second, and more importantly, it helps build support for the more reasoned approach of this Administration and helps push back on the supporters of the loud saber rattling that led our foreign policy so far astray under the Bush Administration.
So, we urge you to write a letter to your local newspaper editor celebrating the events in Egypt, and highlighting the importance of the Obama Administration’s approach to enabling those events to occur.
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Senator Barack Obama has fulfilled the promise of his earlier climate plan with a detailed and comprehensive "New Energy for America" plan.
This is easily the best energy plan ever put forward by a nominee of either party. By comparison, the plan of John "Nothing but Nukes" McCain is a joke, with nothing on energy efficiency and a pointless $300 million battery prize and long-standing opposition to renewable energy. In contrast, Obama's plan has real depth and breath:
* Increase Fuel Economy Standards: Obama will increase fuel economy standards 4 percent per each year while protecting the financial future of domestic automakers....
* Invest in Developing Advanced Vehicles and Put 1 Million Plugin Electric Vehicles on the Road by 2015: As a U.S. senator, Barack Obama has led efforts to jumpstart federal investment in advanced vehicles, including combined plug‐in hybrid/flexible fuel vehicles, which can get over 150 miles per gallon of gas... [more details below]
* Partner with Domestic Automakers: Obama will also provide $4 billion retooling tax credits and
loan guarantees for domestic auto plants and parts manufacturers, so that the new fuel‐efficient
cars can be built in the U.S. by American workers rather than overseas.
* Mandate All New Vehicles are Flexible Fuel Vehicles
* Develop the Next Generation of Sustainable Biofuels and Infrastructure
* Establish a National Low Carbon Fuel Standard: ... The standard requires fuels suppliers in 2010 to begin to reduce the carbon of their fuel by 5 percent within 5 years and 10 percent within 10 years.
This is the only way to jumpstart an end to our addiction to oil in a climate friendly way. Indeed, an accelerated transition to plug-in hybrids and electric cars -- a core climate solution-- must be the cornerstone of any serious effort to dramatically reduce oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. That is the crucial litmus test for any presidential candidate's energy independence or clean transportation policy.
As for the test of a candidate's grasp of electricity policy, energy efficiency is obviously The only cheap power left and a limitless resource and THE core climate solution. Obama understands energy efficiency in a way few other major politicians do, as his plan makes clear:
* Deploy the Cheapest, Cleanest, Fastest Energy Source--Energy Efficiency: Barack Obama will set an aggressive energy efficiency goal--to reduce electricity demand 15 percent from DOE's projected levels by 2020. Implementing this program will save consumers a total of $130 billion, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 5 billion tons through 2030, and create jobs. A portion of this goal would be met by setting annual demand reduction targets that utilities would need to meet.
* Set National Building Efficiency Goals: Obama will establish a goal of making all new buildings carbon neutral, or produce zero emissions, by 2030. He'll also establish a national goal of improving new building efficiency by 50 percent and existing building efficiency by 25 percent over the next decade to help us meet the 2030 goal.
* Overhaul Federal Efficiency Standards: The current Department of Energy has missed 34 deadlines for setting updated appliance efficiency standards....
* Reduce Federal Energy Consumption: ... He will make the federal government a leader in the green building market, achieving a 40 percent increase in efficiency in all new federal buildings within five years and ensuring that all new federal buildings are zero‐emissions by 2025. He will invest in cost‐effective retrofits to achieve a 25 percent increase in efficiency of existing federal buildings within 5 years.
* Invest in a Smart Grid: ... Obama will pursue a major investment in our national utility grid using smart metering, distributed storage and other advanced technologies to accommodate 21st century energy requirements: greatly improved electric grid reliability and security, a tremendous increase in renewable generation and greater customer choice and energy affordability.
* Weatherize One Million Homes Annually....
* Build More Livable and Sustainable Communities....
* Flip Incentives to Energy Utilities: An Obama administration will "flip" incentives to utility companies by: requiring states to conduct proceedings to implement incentive changes; and offering them targeted technical assistance. These measures will benefit utilities for improving energy efficiency, rather than just from supporting higher energy consumption. This "regulatory equity" starts with the decoupling of profits from increased energy usage, which will incentivize utilities to partner with consumers and the federal and state governments to reduce monthly energy bills for families and businesses. The federal government under an Obama administration will play an important and positive role in flipping the profit model for the utility sector so that shareholder profit is based on reliability and performance as opposed to total production.
Finally, a presidential nominee that really gets it (see "Energy efficiency, Part 4: How does California do it so consistently and cost-effectively?").
The proposal has lots of other details on short-term solutions and promoting the supply of domestic energy. But let me focus on his low-carbon electricity supply plan:
* Require 10 Percent of Electricity to Come from Renewable Sources by 2012 [and 25 percent by 2025]. Barack Obama will establish a 10 percent federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to require that 10 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S. is derived from clean, sustainable energy sources, like solar, wind and geothermal by 2012. Many states are already well on their way to achieving statewide goals and it's time for the federal government to provide leadership for the entire country to support these new industries. This national requirement will spur significant private sector investment in renewable sources of energy and create thousands of new American jobs, especially in rural areas. And Obama will also extend the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC) for 5 years to encourage the production of renewable energy.
* Develop and Deploy Clean Coal Technology....
* Safe and Secure Nuclear Energy: ... It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power as an option. However, before an expansion of nuclear power is considered, key issues must be addressed including: security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation.... As president, Obama will make safeguarding nuclear material both abroad and in the U.S. a top anti‐terrorism priority. In terms of waste storage, Obama does not believe that Yucca Mountain is a suitable site. He will lead federal efforts to look for safe, long‐term disposal solutions based on objective, scientific analysis. In the meantime, Obama will develop requirements to ensure that the waste stored at current reactor sites is contained using the most advanced dry‐cask storage technology available.
He also repeats his climate pledge and his jobs pledge:
* Implement an economy‐wide cap‐and‐trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.
* Invest In A Clean Energy Economy and Help Create 5 Million New Green Jobs. Obama will strategically invest $150 billion over 10 years...
Finally, back to the details of the plug-in hybrid proposal:
As president, Obama will continue this leadership by investing in advanced vehicle technology with a specific focus on R&D in advanced battery technology. The increased federal funding will leverage private sector funds and support our domestic automakers to bring plug‐in hybrids and other advanced vehicles to American consumers. Obama will also provide a $7,000 tax credit for the purchase of advanced technology vehicles as well as conversion tax credits. And to help create a market and show government leadership in purchasing highly efficient cars, an Obama administration will commit to:
* Within one year of becoming President, the entire White House fleet will be converted to plug‐ins as security permits; and
* Half of all cars purchased by the federal government will be plug‐in hybrids or all‐electric by 2012.
This is an aggressive, achievable, and most important of all, a necessary energy plan. Kudos to Senator Obama and his energy team. Maybe he is The One.
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Wall Street at 5-month high
By Chuck Mikolajczak
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks climbed to a five-month high on Tuesday, led by materials stocks after an upbeat forecast by aluminum company Alcoa and strong gains in bank shares.
Alcoa Inc (NYSE:AA - News) posted revenue that topped expectations late Monday and gave a bullish outlook for the aluminum industry. The stock gave up early gains to end at $9.44, up 1 cent. However, data showing strong Chinese imports of copper helped buoy the rest of the sector.
A gauge of materials companies' shares (:.GSPM) was among the leaders of S&P 500 sectors, with a gain of 1.8 percent.
The U.S. equity market continued its recent divergence from the woes of the euro zone. Recent economic reports and optimism about the U.S. earnings season have pushed stocks higher in the start of the new year, with the benchmark S&P 500 rising in five of six sessions.
"Investors are still focusing on Europe but not putting as much weight on Europe as they were in November," said Jonathan Corpina, head of NYSE floor operations for Meridian Equity Partners in New York.
That focus could change quickly. Key bond auctions later this week from Italy and Spain, two countries at the center of the euro zone crisis, could hurt sentiment if they go poorly.
"Historically, earnings season has helped the market shift higher - so let's hang our hats on this for now, but let's not forget about what is going on in Europe," Corpina said.
Industrial and materials stocks, closely tied to economic performance, were the day's biggest gainers. Caterpillar Inc (NYSE:CAT - News) shares were up 3 percent at $99.96, leading the Dow index higher.
U.S. bank stocks continued a rebound that has lifted the KBW banks index (Philadelphia:^BKX - News) nearly 9 percent so far this year. The KBW rose 1.9 percent on Tuesday.
JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM - News) rose 2.1 percent to $36.05.
Easing some concerns about Europe, Fitch said it does not expect to cut France's AAA credit rating this year, but countries under review such as Italy or Spain could be downgraded by one or two notches.
The Dow Jones industrial average (DJI:^DJI - News) gained 69.78 points, or 0.56 percent, to 12,462.47. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index (SNP:^GSPC - News) rose 11.38 points, or 0.89 percent, to 1,292.08. The Nasdaq Composite Index (Nasdaq:^IXIC - News) climbed 25.94 points, or 0.97 percent, to 2,702.50.
The Dow and S&P 500 hit their highest intraday levels in five months. The S&P 500 close above 1,285.09 is the highest since the end of July and marked a breach of technical resistance, which could spur further gains.
Copper prices rose 3.1 percent, the best performance since late November, after China reported copper imports rose to a record high last month.
The CBOE Volatility Index VIX (Chicago Options:^VIX - News), Wall Street's so-called fear gauge, fell 2.9 percent to 20.46, making another test of the psychologically key 20 level, according to WhatsTrading.com options strategist Frederic Ruffy.
The VIX is down 11.6 percent so far in 2012 and falling to levels last seen in late July as the S&P 500 has seen average daily price moves of fewer than 8 points so far this year, he said.
Volume was solid, with about 7.02 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Amex and Nasdaq, above the daily average of 6.7 billion.
Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by 2,305 to 687, while on the Nasdaq, advancers beat decliners 1,833 to 699.
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Santorum:1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.
Rick Santorum, Get Ready for Your Close-Up
By David A. Graham
The Pennsylvanian crested late enough that he didn't get the full frontrunner media treatment before Iowa. Now it's coming, and it won't be fun.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/Wires/Online/2012-01-05/AP/Images/Santorum%202012.JPEG-09590.jpg)
Whatever else you can say for Rick Santorum, he's got great timing. Since his bubble inflated so late, there was no time for the press and opposition researchers to give him the full treatment that greets top-tier contenders. Even in the era of diminished media importance, that scrutiny can be destructive -- just ask Herman Cain. It's yet another stone in the pathway for Santorum, who dramatically trails Romney in New Hampshire polls, as well as in national fundraising and name-recognition.
After a day to let the Iowa hangover fade, the onslaught has started. You won't find anyone betting on the squeaky-clean Santorum getting embroiled in a Cain-style sex scandal, but with a 16-year record in Congress, there's plenty of material in the public record and lots of embarrassing quotes to dredge up (plus the infamous "Google problem").
Over at National Journal, John Aloysius Farrell details the former senator's aggressive and often divisive style on the Hill, which sometimes alienated colleagues.ABC has a report up detailing allegations brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington back in 2006, the year he lost his Senate seat by an 18-point margin. CREW suggests that Santorum helped steer an $8 million earmark to a charity staffed by former staffers that included major campaign donors on its board. CREW also raised questions about how he paid for a house:
Perhaps the most jarring detail from his tenure in office is the unorthodox $500,000 mortgage that Santorum and his wife secured on the home in rural Virginia they had purchased for $643,361. According to a series of reports in the Philadelphia Daily News, the mortgage came from Philadelphia Trust Company, a fledgling private bank catering to "affluent investors and institutions" whose officers had contributed $24,000 to Santorum's political action committees and re-election campaign.
In advertising, the lender said it only offered its preferred rates to well-heeled borrowers who also used their investment services. But Santorum's public disclosure forms showed he did not have the required minimum $250,000 in liquid assets and was not an investor with Philadelphia Trust. His ability to secure the five-year loan led Sloan to file a complaint under a Senate ethics rule that specifically prohibits members from accepting a loan on terms not available to members of the general public. At the time, a Santorum spokeswoman told the Daily News that the mortgage terms were set at "market rates," but did not provide further comment.
It's not just ethical questions, though. From the left, The New Republic rounds up Santorum's most embarrassing quotes, including the famous occasion on which he likened same-sex marriage to bestiality.From the right, RedState's Erick Erickson points out that not only that Santorum's spoken up for earmarks -- bad news for conservatives -- but that in doing so he's unwisely picking a fight with Sen. Jim DeMint, a very popular figure among Republicans in the state where anti-Romney forces will likely get their last shot at stopping the Iowa caucuses victor. (Erickson's ongoing criticism of Santorum also show how difficult-to-organize and unlikely a coordinated anybody-but-Romney effort among conservatives will be.)
That's all just 24 hours' worth of digging, and it doesn't even touch Santorum's platform. Right now, many voters know him mostly as a conservative who isn't Mitt Romney. How will voters respond to both his current policy proposals and the things he's supported in the past? Even in the heavily pro-life Republican party, do voters want a nominee who believes contraception is immoral? And like Newt Gingrich, Santorum doesn't have the cash to respond to every negative attack. He'd better brace himself.
(http://www.bartcop.com/santorum-goggle-me.jpg)
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IF Melvin loses, this is how it well happen. If someone can handle his initial attack, then he usually gives up his back for the choke.
yeah he has been the victim of the choke on more than one occassion lol
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For a man with absolutely ZERO chance to be president, this crazy 90 year old man from Texas may just gift-wrap the nomination for Willard "Mitts" Romney. :P
Paul Poised to Win Iowa; GOP Establishment on Edge
Written by Michael Tennant
Tuesday, 20 December 2011 09:11
With the Iowa caucuses just two weeks away, Ron Paul has taken the lead in two caucus forecasts — a development that has the GOP establishment on edge.
A December 18 Public Policy Polling survey found that the Texas Congressman was the choice of 23 percent of likely Republican caucus voters. Mitt Romney came in second at 20 percent, with Newt Gingrich in third at 14 percent and Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum tied at 10 percent. “Someone else/Not sure” was next at 7 percent, followed by Jon Huntsman at 4 percent and Gary Johnson at 2 percent.
Gingrich was the biggest loser in the poll, having plunged from 27 percent support three weeks ago to 14 percent now. In addition, he possesses the highest “unfavorable” rating of any candidate in the race (47 percent). Paul, meanwhile, led the pack on the positive side with 54 percent of voters viewing him favorably.
On matters of principle, Paul, not surprisingly, is the champion in voters’ minds. Seventy-three percent said he has strong principles, while only 50 percent thought the same of Romney and 36 percent of Gingrich. (The question was not asked about the other candidates.)
The New York Times is also forecasting a Paul win in the Hawkeye State, but with even more certainty than PPP. As of this writing the Gray Lady believes Paul has a 52 percent chance of winning the Iowa caucuses. His closest competitor, Romney, stands just a 28 percent chance of being the victor; Gingrich is given a mere 8 percent likelihood of success.
Feeling fairly confident that Paul will take Iowa, the Times’ Nate Silver argues:
It may now be as important to watch his New Hampshire polls as those in Iowa. Our New Hampshire forecasts now give Mr. Paul about a 17 percent chance of winning the state, but those odds would improve with a win in Iowa. Although Mr. Romney might prefer that Mr. Paul win Iowa … all bets would be off if Mr. Paul won New Hampshire too.
What happens if Paul does indeed win the caucuses? “The Republican presidential primary … will get downright ugly,” predicts the Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney. His reasoning? “The principled, antiwar, Constitution-obeying, Fed-hating, libertarian Republican congressman from Texas stands firmly outside the bounds of permissible dissent as drawn by either the Republican establishment or the mainstream media.”
Three things are likely to occur following a Paul victory in Iowa, Carney says.
First, he forecasts, "Much of the media will ignore him (expect headlines like 'Romney Beats out Gingrich for Second Place in Iowa')." There is precedent for this. Paul was virtually ignored when he practically tied Bachmann for first place in the Ames Straw Poll in August, and his many subsequent straw poll victories have gone equally unreported. Even Carney’s joke headline isn’t much of a stretch: When a September poll showed Romney in first place in New Hampshire, distantly followed by Paul, Huntsman, and Perry, in that order, Yahoo! News actually posted a story about it with the banner “Romney leads in New Hampshire, Huntsman third, Perry in fourth.”
Second, according to Carney, “Some in the Republican establishment and the conservative media will panic.” This is, in fact, already happening. Rush Limbaugh has taken to lampooning Paul for his noninterventionist foreign policy, a sure sign that the Republican Party fears people might actually listen to Paul.
Sean Hannity, another reliable bellwether of GOP establishment opinion, “felt the need on [December 14] to bring Bill Bennett on his show for a segment of unsaturated Paul-bashing,” Salon’s Steve Kornacki reported. “Bennett articulated an increasingly common concern among GOP elites, saying that Paul’s candidacy “isn’t going anywhere — except if he wins Iowa.”
“And what happens if he does?” asks Kornacki.
If you have a mischievous streak, it’s a fun possibility to consider, because the short answer is that guys like Bennett and Hannity will freak out — and their freak-out could last for a while. An Iowa victory would make Paul the center of the political media world, flood his campaign treasury with even more small-dollar donations, and boost his prospects in subsequent states. He might be able to parlay it into an impressive showing in libertarian-friendly New Hampshire, weather losses in South Carolina and Florida (where the numbers just aren’t very promising), then surge again in February, when his caucus state strategy kicks in. If the rest of the field remains unsettled then — with, say, Romney winning New Hampshire and Newt Gingrich taking South Carolina and Florida — Paul could find himself at or near the top of the delegate race, pushing the Hannity/Bennett panic level through the roof.
The third probable result of a Paul caucus win, Carney suggests, is that “others [in the GOP establishment and conservative media] will calmly move to crush him, with the full cooperation of the liberal mainstream media.”
Indeed, Fox News’ Chris Wallace has already set the stage for just such an eventuality, saying that if Paul wins in Iowa, “it will discredit the Iowa caucuses because … most of the Republican establishment thinks he’s not going to end up as the nominee, so therefore Iowa won’t count.”
Wallace’s remark, however, is a mere pinprick compared to the onslaught Carney envisions. He predicts nothing less than full-scale character assassination: “[Paul’s] conservative critics and the mainstream media will imply that he is a racist, a kook, and a conspiracy theorist” — just as they smeared Pat Buchanan as a racist and anti-Semite following his victory in the 1996 New Hampshire primary.
This, too, is already under way. Last week the neoconservative media, including Limbaugh, Hannity, and National Review, had a grand old party repeating the canard that Paul believes in 9/11 conspiracy theories when, in reality, he simply believes that the whole story, particularly those portions that demonstrate government incompetence, has yet to be told.
As to charges of racism, recall that on the day of the 2008 New Hampshire primary, the New Republic published a hit piece claiming that Paul had authored several articles with potentially offensive, but mostly just politically incorrect, content that appeared in a newsletter bearing his name. The article, Justin Raimondo observed at the time, was “intellectually dishonest, inauthentic in its outrage, and unintentionally humorous at times.” Those who know Paul, including CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and the president of the Austin, Texas, chapter of the NAACP, did not believe that he had written the articles in question. Nevertheless, Paul was forced to respond to the attack, admitting that the articles had indeed appeared in his newsletter but repeatedly stating that he had neither authored nor approved them. Expect this story to be dredged up again if Paul begins to look like a real threat to a Romney or Gingrich nomination.
Paul is looking more and more like a serious contender for the GOP nomination, and the outcome of the Iowa caucuses may provide the first hard evidence of that. For constitutionalists, a Paul victory in Iowa will offer a glimmer of hope that America’s slide into socialism and empire can be reversed. “But for the enforcers of Republican orthodoxy,” avers Carney, it “will be an act of impudence that must be punished.”
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Willard's fading fast...c'mon Newt! ;D
Mitt Romney's Losing $10,000 Bet at Iowa Debate
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Romney's wager to Perry serves as a reminder of the vast gulf in wealth between citizens and elected officials
Texas Gov. Rick Perry finally turned the tables on Mitt Romney Saturday night in an exchange at the debate in Des Moines that saw the former Massachusetts governor fumble in just the way Perry had previously, after being goaded into a making a fool-hardy remark.
Perry, addressing himself once again to a critique of Romney's health-care policy in Massachusetts, said: "You know, I'm just saying you were for individual mandates my friend."
"You know what, you've raised that before, Rick. And you're still wrong," Romney retorted.
"It was true then. It's true now," Perry replied, laughing.
"10,000 bucks? 10,000 dollar bet?" Romney shot out his hand looking for Perry to take the bait.
Perry laughed again. "I'm not in the bettin' business, but I'll show you the book."
"I've got the book," snipped Romney.
It may have been intended as a figure of speech, but for a candidate who was in his youth photographed with money falling out of his suit, who is known for coming from a plush background and having made an even vaster fortune, and who was not able to name a single instance of material want, ever, when probed on the subject at the debate, it didn't seem so metaphorical. "I didn't grow up poor. And if somebody is looking for someone who's grown up with that background, I'm -- I'm not the person," Romney said at the debate.
But who has $10,000 to bet with -- these days, or any other?
TPM reported the Newt Gingrich's spokesperson R.C. Hammond twisted the knife after the debate, asking in the spin room in Des Moines, "My only question is, did he have the cash in his pocket?"
Democrats who have been prepping for a general election contest against Romney could not contain their glee. After the hashtag #What10Kbuys began trending worldwide within the hour after the debate ended, the Democratic National Committee alerted people to that and started using the tag (the only place it was still trending by next morning, however, was Washington, D.C.). And while the debate was ongoing the Democratic National Committee sent out a release, "Here's What the Average American Family Can Buy with $10,000."
In tonight's Iowa Debate Mitt Romney casually offered a $10,000 bet, after calling a $1,500 tax break for the middle class a band-aid. Mitt Romney may not know what $10,000 means to middle class families, but here's what the average American family can buy with $10,000:
$10,000 Is More Than Four Months Pay For Most Americans (Median Income Was $26,197 in 2010) [Census.gov, accessed 12/10/11]
$10,000 Is More Than The Average Public In-State Four-Year College Tuition ($8,244) [CollegeBoard, accessed 12/10/11]
$10,000 Is Almost Three Times What The Average Family Spends On Groceries In A Year ($3624) [BLS.gov, accessed 12/10/11]
$10,000 Would Cover More Than A Year's Worth Of Mortgage Payments For The Typical American Home Purchased Today ($8,376) [National Association of Realtors, 10/6/11]
The campaign of Jon Huntsman -- who was barred from the debate stage for low polling numbers -- quickly snapped up the 10KBet.com url, though which it will doubtless goad Romney at some time in the future.
The real problem for Romney though is that his foul-up came just as he's begun to lose control of the front-runner narrative he'd established. But perhaps that's the point -- it's possible Romney is simply better in debates as the presumed likely front-runner than as the seemingly permanent understudy to a rotating cast of pugnacious GOP personalities who need to fail before people can settle on him. And that now that he has proved unable to solidify his position, and voting is set to begin in just weeks, the shifting sands on which he finds himself have unsettled him.
Still, a $10,000 bet in Iowa, where the per capita income in 2010 was $38,084?
That he would have said such a thing shows that Romney's lack of on the ground campaigning in the state has really hurt him, if only because it's allowed him to forget the audience he was speaking before.
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The Grinch That Stole Christmas revisited. ;D
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(http://content.cartoonbox.slate.com/?feature=4041d9df25d054adc2cb54234dac6376)
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Why a Newt Gingrich Candidacy Would Doom the Tea Party
By Conor Friedersdorf
The movement can't support him without compromising itself. And opposing him if he's the GOP nominee? They likely don't have it in them.
(http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/elephants%20never%20forget.jpg)
Gallup finds that 82 percent of Tea Party affiliated voters deem Newt Gingrich an acceptable Republican presidential nominee in 2012. They don't seem to realize that if he wins the nod their movement is doomed, regardless of how the general election goes. The Tea Party cannot support Gingrich without betraying its core principles. But the movement also cannot disclaim him once he is the Republican nominee.
Tea Partiers with a better instinct for self-preservation would see that none of the Mitt Romney alternatives still running would be as corrosive to their cause as the former Speaker of the House.
Why?
The Tea Party wasn't just a reaction to President Obama or the financial industry bailouts. As Jonah Goldberg puts it, "a major motivating passion of the tea-party movement was a long-delayed backlash against George W. Bush and his big-government conservatism." Support for the War on Terrorism and the invasion of Iraq caused many conservatives to stay loyal to Bush. But that didn't mean they liked No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, the attempt at a guest worker program, TARP, or the Harriet Miers nomination. Especially after the defeat of John McCain, many on the right insisted they'd never again support Bush-Rove conservatism.
And Gingrich supported almost all the most controversial Bush-Rove policies!
He favored No Child Left Behind, an unprecedented federal intervention in education. He supported Medicare Part D, a brand new, budget-busting drug entitlement. He supported "comprehensive immigration reform," perhaps the most divisive-among-conservatives policy initiative of the aughts. He urged the passage of TARP. And he even spoke favorably about the infamous Harriet Miers nomination, a George W. Bush misstep that caused many of his most loyal supporters to rebel.
Tea Partiers pledged that if they had their way the GOP would never again have as its champion a federal government enlarging, entitlement expanding, amnesty urging, Bush-style Republican.
To do so just four years on would be a significant failure.
Another Tea Party talking point is its suspicion of Washington, D.C., insiders. For all Sarah Palin's flaws, the Tea Partiers who rallied around her could at least justifiably claim that she had authentic roots far from Washington and a record in Alaska of taking on corrupt political insiders who sought to enrich themselves at public expense. Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain -- all these flawed Tea Party favorites have at least some claim to outsider status.
But Gingrich? He is the epitome of the Inside the Beltway insider, and not only because of his long stint in Congress. After retiring, he profited lavishly off connections he made on the taxpayer dime, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars influence-pedaling. Most famously, he got $1.6 million from Freddie Mac, the very entity that many conservatives regard as most culpable for the financial crisis. And then he had the temerity to insist that he was paid as "a historian," an explanation so transparently farcical that it can justifiably be seen as an insult to the intelligence of GOP primary voters.
As if supporting such a man weren't incoherent enough already, a movement that valorizes Joe the Plumber, family values and hockey moms is now rallying behind a long-winded former academic turned career politician with an affinity for private planes, chauffeurs, and buying Tiffany and Co. jewelry for his third wife. It's as if Kanye West wrote a politician into his last album.
Runaway, Tea Partiers! Why don't you just runaway?
Ron Paul supporting Tea Partiers would be the first to bail from a coalition that reshaped itself around Gingrich. In Reason magazine, Jacob Sullum runs through some of Gingrich's appalling positions on civil liberties: that the War on Terrorism somehow makes null certain rights to free speech and due process; that the government should stop the construction of a mosque until the day when Saudi Arabia permits churches and synagogues to be built; the proposal to escalate the War on Drugs by executing drug smugglers; support for warrantless wiretaps; and extreme hostility toward the co-equal judicial branch. It's true that only a small subset of Tea Party voters actually care about civil liberties with any kind of consistency, but Gingrich will alienate them.
And the rest of the movement? Confronted with Gingrich's heresies, which are sure to spill from his novelty-addled mind regularly, they'd have to decide on their next move: leave or live with it.
Some affiliated voters won't support in good conscience a guy who favored all the things they railed against after it happened under Bush. Others will be disgusted by the revolving door cronyism, and still others will be upset that the Republicans nominated a twice-divorced adulterer (with a record of supporting an individual mandate in health care). There is a small chance that a narrow Gingrich win at the end of a long, drawn out primary, wherein his Tea Party support suffers, could result in a third party run that divides the right side of the political spectrum.
Much more likely is that Republicans, including most Tea Partiers, rally around the GOP nominee, even if it is Gingrich. That might do even more damage to the Tea Party, as it would be the ultimate act of compromising principle and ideological purity for the sake of beating the Democrats.
It would seem worthwhile in the immediate aftermath of a Gingrich win. And then President Gingrich would take office, and proceed to behave like... well, a decades-long Washington insider who supported No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, the attempt at a guest worker program, TARP, and the Harriet Miers nomination. Every conservative betrayal would be a reminder that the Tea Party helped elect just the sort of man they'd so righteously vowed to eschew.
The label wouldn't stand for anything anymore.
And a Gingrich loss to Obama? In a world where the Tea Party was seen as responsible for his rise, it would be discrediting, as losses always are for the faction that urges a divisive candidate. Along with the blame game, there'd be four more years of Obama, which Tea Partiers regard as the ultimate failure. No wonder that a Gingrich win is Nancy Pelosi's dark, twisted fantasy.
Surely the Tea Party can come up with a better plan?
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I wholeheartedly endorse this man to be the nominee of the repube party. Go Newt, go! You're in first place now...you've got Willard squirming!
Newt Gingrich expands on his support for child labor
The Republican presidential front-runner says 'really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and nobody around them who works' to earn money — 'unless it's illegal.'
By Paul West, Washington Bureau
December 1, 2011
Reporting from Johnston, Iowa
Doubling down on a plan that stirred controversy about his views on child labor, leading Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich said Thursday that poor kids have no habit of earning money "unless it's illegal" and should be put to work in their schools.
At a party fundraising dinner in the Des Moines suburbs, the former House speaker launched into a defense of his proposal to teach the nation's poorest children the connection between "showing up" and earning money — by putting them to work in their schools in the country's poorest neighborhoods.
"I believe the kids could mop the floor and clean up the bathroom and get paid for it, and it would be OK," he said to applause.
Gingrich said, mockingly, that those on the left would oppose his idea because it might prompt the children to earn more money and eventually escape poverty, "and then who would rich liberals worry about?"
Earlier in the day, Gingrich offered more explosive rhetoric on the subject. During a meeting with Nationwide Insurance employees in Des Moines, he was asked to clarify his views on child labor laws, which he recently described as "truly stupid."
"Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and nobody around them who works," Gingrich replied. "So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash,' unless it's illegal."
He said he favored putting children to work in paid jobs at the schools they attend "as early as is reasonable and practical."
Gingrich initially drew criticism for the idea after an appearance at Harvard last month, when he promised "extraordinarily radical proposals" to change America's "culture of poverty," such as allowing children as young as 9 to replace adult janitors at schools.
As he campaigned in Iowa on Thursday, Gingrich also outlined what he described as a rethinking of his candidacy, "sobered," he said, by the realization that he was emerging as a favorite to win his party's nomination.
"The longer I have thought about the very real possibility that I might have to serve, the more I realize that we have to clean up the Congress" as well as the executive branch, Gingrich said at the party dinner.
He said he had come to the realization that he would need to run "an American campaign," not merely a Republican one. And in an apparent reference to the need to diversify the GOP beyond its overwhelmingly white base, he said his campaign would be "open to people of every background."
"You and I know that is going to make some of our friends very uncomfortable," Gingrich said. But "if we truly want to rebuild America, we have to be prepared to make some of our friends very uncomfortable." The remark drew only a smattering of applause from the Polk County Republican crowd of 450, described by one dinner speaker as a mix of social moderates and conservatives.
The former speaker delivered a tongue-in-cheek warning to those who, he said, might be thinking about volunteering for his campaign, stating: "I have a passionate dedication to the work ethic."
Speaking to reporters after his dinner speech, Gingrich said he found his swift rise in the polls "disorienting," adding: "This is such a rapid change that we are having to rethink our own internal operations right now and where we are."
He said that as recently as two weeks ago, he would have not given such a sweeping speech about the future.
"Given where we are, I think this is the right stage setting to start saying to people, 'This is what a Gingrich presidency would look like. This is how really different it would be,'" he said.
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December 3, 2011
Out of Africa and Into Iowa
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
NEWT GINGRICH’S mind is in love with itself.
It has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker.
His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.
He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.
“Part of the question I had to ask myself,” he said in a 1985 Wall Street Journal piece about war wimps, “was what difference I would have made.”
Newt swims easily in a sea of duality and byzantine ideas that don’t add up. As The Washington Post reported on Friday, an America under President Gingrich would have two Social Security systems — “one old, one new, running side by side” — two tax systems and two versions of Medicare.
Consider his confusion of views on colonialism. In the 1971 Ph.D. dissertation he wrote at Tulane University, titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960,” he is anti-anticolonialism.
“If the Congolese are to confront the future with realism they will need a solid understanding of their own past and an awareness of the good as well as the bad aspects of colonialism,” he argued. “It would be just as misleading to speak in generalities of ‘white exploitation’ as it once was to talk about ‘native backwardness.’ ”
He warned against political pressures encouraging “Black xenophobia.” What’s xenophobic about Africans wanting their oppressors to go away? It’s like saying abused wives who want their husbands to leave are anti-men.
He sees colonialism as a complicated thing with good and bad effects rather than a terrible thing with collateral benefits.
Laura Seay, an assistant professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta and an expert on Africa, blogged that Gingrich’s thesis was “kind of a glorified white man’s burden take on colonial policy that was almost certainly out of vogue in the early 1970s. Gingrich wrote this as the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements were approaching their pinnacles. It was most decidedly not the time to be arguing that white European masters did a swell job ruling black Africans through a system that ensured that most Congolese would never get a real education.”
When it comes to America’s British overlords, Gingrich is not so sympathetic. The bludgeon of American exceptionalism that he uses on President Obama was forged at Valley Forge.
In the introduction to his novel about George Washington and the Revolutionary War, “To Try Men’s Souls,” written with William R. Forstchen, Gingrich writes: “The British elites believed this was a conflict about money and about minor irritations. They simply could not believe the colonists were serious about their rights as free men and women.”
Gingrich, a radical precursor to the modern Tea Party when he staged what conservatives considered the second American Revolution in the House in the ’90s, wrote with delight of London’s shock when Samuel Adams started the original Tea Party.
But while an anticolonial disposition is good if you’re Adams, Washington and Jefferson, it’s bad if you’re Barack Obama’s Kenyan father living under British rule two centuries later.
Gingrich made one of his classic outrageous overreaches last year when he praised a Dinesh D’Souza article in Forbes, saying you could only understand how “fundamentally out of touch” and “outside our comprehension” President Obama is “if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
D’Souza’s absurd ad hominem theory tying Obama to his father goes like this: “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
This was a typical Newt mental six-car pileup. The man who espouses Christian values being un-Christian in visiting the alleged sins of the father upon the son; the man who reveres the anticolonialism of the founding fathers ranting against the anticolonialism of the father of America’s first African-American president. How do you rail against the Evil Empire and urge overthrowing Saddam and not celebrate liberation in Africa?
Newt is like the Great White Hunter out on campaign safari, trying to bag a Mitt, an animal with ever-changing stripes. Certainly, the 68-year-old’s haughty suggestions on child labor last week in Iowa smacked of harsh paternalism and exploitation.
He expanded on Dickensian remarks he’d made recently at Harvard, where he said “it is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid,” adding that 9-year-olds could work as school janitors.
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” he asserted in an ignorant barrage of stereotypes in Des Moines. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.”
Has he not heard of the working poor? The problem isn’t that these kids aren’t working; it’s that they don’t have time with their parents, who often toil day and night, at more than one job, and earn next to nothing.
Newt’s the kind of person whom child labor laws were created to curb. He sounds like a benign despot with a colonial subtext: Until I bring you the benefits of civilization, we will regard you as savages.
He’s Belgium. The poor are Congo.
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General Election: Romney vs. Obama
Poll Date Sample Obama (D) Romney (R) Spread
RCP Average 11/8 - 11/22 -- 45.9 44.4 Obama +1.5
Rasmussen Reports 11/21 - 11/22 1000 LV 44 38 Obama +6
Quinnipiac 11/14 - 11/20 2552 RV 45 44 Obama +1
FOX News 11/13 - 11/15 914 RV 42 44 Romney +2
CNN/Opinion Research 11/11 - 11/13 925 RV 47 51 Romney +4
Pew Research 11/9 - 11/14 1576 RV 49 47 Obama +2
PPP (D) 11/10 - 11/13 800 RV 46 43 Obama +3
McClatchy/Marist 11/8 - 11/10 872 RV 48 44 Obama +4
General Election: Gingrich vs. Obama
Poll Date Sample Obama (D) Gingrich (R) Spread
RCP Average 11/8 - 11/20 -- 49.1 42.3 Obama +6.8
Rasmussen Reports 11/19 - 11/20 1000 LV 46 40 Obama +6
Quinnipiac 11/14 - 11/20 2552 RV 49 40 Obama +9
FOX News 11/13 - 11/15 914 RV 46 41 Obama +5
CNN/Opinion Research 11/11 - 11/13 925 RV 53 45 Obama +8
Pew Research 11/9 - 11/14 1576 RV 54 42 Obama +12
PPP (D) 11/10 - 11/13 800 RV 49 43 Obama +6
McClatchy/Marist 11/8 - 11/10 872 RV 47 45 Obama +2
General Election: Cain vs. Obama
Poll Date Sample Obama (D) Cain (R) Spread
RCP Average 11/8 - 11/27 -- 49.6 39.4 Obama +10.2
Rasmussen Reports 11/27 - 11/27 1000 LV 46 36 Obama +10
Quinnipiac 11/14 - 11/20 2552 RV 50 37 Obama +13
FOX News 11/13 - 11/15 914 RV 47 38 Obama +9
CNN/Opinion Research 11/11 - 11/13 925 RV 53 43 Obama +10
Pew Research 11/9 - 11/14 1576 RV 54 42 Obama +12
PPP (D) 11/10 - 11/13 800 RV 48 41 Obama +7
McClatchy/Marist 11/8 - 11/10 872 RV 49 39 Obama +10
General Election: Perry vs. Obama
Poll Date Sample Obama (D) Perry (R) Spread
RCP Average 11/5 - 11/14 -- 49.8 40.2 Obama +9.6
CNN/Opinion Research 11/11 - 11/13 925 RV 52 45 Obama +7
PPP (D) 11/10 - 11/13 800 RV 49 39 Obama +10
Pew Research 11/9 - 11/14 1576 RV 53 42 Obama +11
McClatchy/Marist 11/8 - 11/10 872 RV 51 40 Obama +11
Rasmussen Reports 11/5 - 11/6 1000 LV 44 35 Obama +9
General Election: Paul vs. Obama
Poll Date Sample Obama (D) Paul (R) Spread
RCP Average 10/28 - 11/13 -- 46.7 39.0 Obama +7.7
PPP (D) 11/10 - 11/13 800 RV 47 41 Obama +6
McClatchy/Marist 11/8 - 11/10 872 RV 49 41 Obama +8
Rasmussen Reports 10/28 - 10/29 1000 LV 44 35 Obama +9
General Election: Bachmann vs. Obama
Poll Date Sample Obama (D) Bachmann (R) Spread
RCP Average 11/8 - 11/16 -- 49.7 35.7 Obama +14.0
Rasmussen Reports 11/15 - 11/16 1000 LV 45 33 Obama +12
PPP (D) 11/10 - 11/13 800 RV 50 39 Obama +11
McClatchy/Marist 11/8 - 11/10 872 RV 54 35 Obama +19
General Election: Huntsman vs. Obama
Poll Date Sample Obama (D) Huntsman (R) Spread
RCP Average 8/29 - 10/21 -- 45.7 37.0 Obama +8.7
Rasmussen Reports 10/20 - 10/21 1000 LV 39 32 Obama +7
Reuters/Ipsos 9/8 - 9/12 932 RV 51 37 Obama +14
ABC News/Wash Post 8/29 - 9/1 RV 47 42 Obama +5
General Election: Santorum vs. Obama
Poll Date Sample Obama (D) Santorum (R) Spread
Rasmussen Reports 10/2 - 10/3 1000 LV 45 34 Obama +11
Rasmussen Reports 7/10 - 7/11 1000 LV 45 31 Obama +14
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Newt Gingrich wants to fire union janitors and hire kids to clean schools instead. Seriously. He wants to assign 9-year-old kids to do hard manual labor cleaning up after their more fortunate classmates. It's vicious, backwards and wrong.
Really, Newt? Let him know what you think of his 'idea.':
http://www.afscme.org/reallynewt
The US outlawed child labor because it denied children the chance at a real education and allowed employers to exploit children — and because children were often injured or killed on the job. That's why labor unions fought to pass laws outlawing child labor and protecting all workers.
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Newt in His Own Words: 33 Years of Bomb-Throwing
Gingrich is announcing he's running for president. Too bad he can't run from comments like these.
By Tim Murphy and David Corn | Wed Apr. 6, 2011
Your guide to Gingrich's greatest rhetorical hits.
Editor's Note (5/10/11): Well, it kind of seems official. On Monday, a spokesman for Newt Gingrich announced that on Wednesday Gingrich would announce on Twitter and Facebook that he is running for president. (How suspenseful!) And in the days since commentators have been dissecting the former House speaker's past: his messy personal life (two divorces, three marriages), his erratic policy pronouncements, his combative politicking. But given that Gingrich has thirty-plus years of extreme conduct, many of his past excesses end up being truncated and compacted into characterizations. ("Known for his often controversial remarks...") The full Newt is often given short shrift. But a month ago, Tim Murphy and David Corn set out to chronicle Gingrich's 33 years of rhetorical extremism. They ended up with a long list. A very long list.
Newt Gingrich, a preseason 2012 Republican contender, likes to present himself as an ideas man. He is a former college professor and the architect of the ideology-driven 1994 Republican Revolution. But for all his references to Camus and Clausewitz, there's another side to the former House speaker—a verbal bomb-thrower who's never met a political crisis he couldn't analogize to the annexation of the Sudetenland.
Gingrich was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1978. He learned quickly that a back-bencher in the minority party could distinguish himself and gain attention in Washington by employing extreme rhetoric. Ever in attack-mode, Gingrich swiftly moved up the ranks within the House GOP caucus. Democrats accused him of practicing "skinhead politics," and a 1989 Washington Post profile declared him "notorious [3]" and "defiant." But his political thuggery worked, and he led the GOPers in their historic retaking of the House and became speaker. He did not last long in the post. After a rocky stint—marked by a government shutdown, his party's sex-and-lies impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton, and several ethics controversies involving Gingrich—the GOP lost seats in the 1998 election, and Gingrich resigned as speaker and left the House. (During this time, he was having an extramarital affair with a congressional aide who would eventually become his third [4], and present, wife.)
In his post-House years, Gingrich, at times, toned down the rhetoric. He worked with Hillary Clinton on health care IT issues [5]. He sat on a couch [6] with Nancy Pelosi to highlight their joint support for climate change action. After the 2008 election, he called for policymaking that would unite [7] Democrats, Republicans, and independents. He blasted [8] a candidate for GOP chairman who circulated a parody song called "Barack the Magic Negro." Still, he wasn't able to escape the siren call of overheated oratory. He repeatedly bashed the "secular left [9]" for attempting to destroy the country, and as he has moved closer to declaring a presidential bid, he increasingly has returned to the hooligan ways of his past.
So here's a rather incomplete guide to Gingrich's greatest (or worst) hits of the past 33 years. As he might say, it's the most accurate, predictive model for his future behavior.
1978 In an address to College Republicans before he was elected to the House, Gingrich says [10]: "I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words." He added, "Richard Nixon…Gerald Ford…They have done a terrible job, a pathetic job. In my lifetime, in my lifetime—I was born in 1943—we have not had a competent national Republican leader. Not ever."
1980 On the House floor, Gingrich states, "The reality is that this country is in greater danger than at any time since 1939."
1980 Gingrich says [11]: "We need a military four times the size of our present defense system." (See 1984.)
1983 A major milestone: Gingrich cites former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the House floor: "If in fact we are to follow the Chamberlain liberal Democratic line of withdrawal from the planet," he explains [12], "we would truly have tyranny everywhere, and we in America could experience the joys of Soviet-style brutality and murdering of women and children."
1983 He compares Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill to Chamberlain: "He may not know any better. He may not understand freedom versus slavery...in the tradition of [former British Prime Ministers] Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, whose only weakness was they left their nation with war with Nazi Germany."
1984 "I am not a super hawk."
1984 Gingrich takes advantage of the arrival of C-Span to deliver scathing condemnations of his colleagues. He accuses Democrats of appeasement and distributing "communist propaganda [13]," and threatens to press charges against them for writing a letter to Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega. House Speaker Tip O'Neill calls it "the lowest thing that I've ever seen in my 32 years in Congress."
1984 Gingrich touts a study being compiled by conservative House Republicans, noting it "will argue that it is time to stop challenging or seeming to challenge the patriotism of Democrats and liberals. Enough historical evidence exists."
1984 "It used to be called socialism. It is now just sort of liberal Democratic platform pledges."
1985 Gingrich calls [14] Reagan's upcoming meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev ''the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.''
1985 Gingrich compares a disputed House election [15] in Indiana to the Holocaust. "We have talked a lot in recent weeks about the Holocaust, about the incredible period in which Nazi Germany killed millions of people and, in particular, came close to wiping out European Jewry. Someone said to me two days ago, talking frankly about the McIntyre affair [in which Democrats refused to seat the winner of a House race until they'd conducted a recount] and the efforts by the Democratic leadership not to allow the people of Indiana to have their representative but, instead, to impose upon them somebody else, something in which he quotes [German poet Martin] Niemoller, and I have never quite until tonight been able to link it together—Niemoller, the great German theologian, said at one point [16]: 'When the Nazis came for the Jews, I did nothing…and when the Nazis came for me, there was no one left.'"
1985 Upset with Democrats' foreign policy stance, Gingrich observes, "Adolph Hitler must somewhere be burning in hell, wishing he had lived two generations later, so he could manipulate Americans instead of Englishmen."
1985 He's got the world in the palm of his hand: "I have an enormous personal ambition [17]. I want to shift the entire planet…I just had breakfast with [administration officials Richard] Darman and [David] Stockman [18] because I'm unavoidable. I represent real power."
1987 Gingrich takes to the House floor to decry…pretty much everything about the Democratic-run House: "After the first five months of this Congress, I must report to my fellow citizens that this 100th Congress may be the most irresponsible, destructive, corrupt, and unrepresentative Congress of the modern era... In future weeks, I will make a series of speeches outlining the threats of corruption, of communism, and of the left-wing machine which runs the House."
1988 Gingrich discusses his midlife crisis: "I spent a fair length of time trying to come to grips with who I was and the habits I had, and what they did to people that I truly loved [19]. I really spent a period of time where, I suspect, I cried three or four times a week. I read Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them and I found frightening pieces that related to...my own life."
1989 He explains to the Washington Post why he fights with his second wife, Marianne: "It's not even that it matters to me. It's just the habit of dominance [20], the habit of being the center of my staff and the center of the news media." Newt gives the marriage a "53–47" shot of surviving.
1989 After taking down Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) by filing a string of ethics charges, Gingrich basks in his role as giant-killer. "If you're not in the Washington Post every day," he says [21], "you might as well not exist."
1989 Gingrich lays out [22] his electoral roadmap: "The left-wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness, and the total right to cripple innocent people in the name of letting hooligans loose."
1989 "These people are sick," he says [23] of congressional Democrats. "They are so consumed by their own power, by a Mussolini-like ego, that their willingness to run over normal human beings and to destroy honest institutions is unending." He also warns that unless the Democrats are stopped, "we may literally see our freedom decay and decline."
1990 Gingrich's political action committee, GOPAC, sends out a memo titled [24] "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" to several thousand Republican candidates running for state and local offices. It includes a list of words they should use to describe Democrats:
decay, failure (fail) collapse(ing) deeper, crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they/them, unionized bureaucracy, "compassion" is not enough, betray, consequences, limit(s), shallow, traitors, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocricy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitude, destructive, impose, self-serving, greed, ideological, insecure, anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare, corrupt, selfish, insensitive, status quo, mandate(s) taxes, spend (ing) shame, disgrace, punish (poor...) bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abuse of power, machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape, patronage.
1990 Speaking privately to a group of supporters, Gingrich says he's changing his public role from "explainer of political tactics to explainer of cultural change."
1992 While campaigning for President George H. W. Bush in Georgia, Gingrich uses Woody Allen [25] as a symbol for what Democrats want to do to America: "Woody Allen had non-incest with his non-daughter because they were a non-family." He adds, "It fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly." Bush distances himself from the remarks.
1994 A South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, murders her two sons. Gingrich draws the only logical conclusion [26]: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican."
1994 He sums up [27] his political philosophy: "People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day."
1995 Following the House GOP's triumphant 1994 election victory, Gingrich sends all the Republican freshman House members copies of the GOPAC memo suggesting they refer to their opponents as "traitors [24]."
1995 Gingrich releases a novel he co-authored, 1945, in which the Waffen-SS invades eastern Tennessee. But most critics fixate on the opening scene [28], in which a high-ranking Washington politico, unsatisfied with his marriage, engages in an affair that ultimately brings about his own political demise:
Playfully, to drive home the potential loss, she bit his shoulder, then kissed it better.
"Aw, hell, I don't want to...I wish I could just divorce Mrs. Little Goodie Two-Shoes!"
"I like this arrangement," she laughed softly. "Mistress to the chief of staff of the President of the United States. Nice title, don't you think? Such a book I could write." ...Suddenly the pouting sex kitten gave way to Diana the Huntress. She rolled onto him and somehow was sitting athwart his chest, her knees pinning his shoulders. "Tell me, or I will make you do terrible things," she hissed.
Gingrich calls the book "PG-13 [29]."
1995 Marianne tells Vanity Fair she will "undermine everything [30]" if Gingrich runs for president in 1996. Gignrich tells reporters [31] his wife was "just making the point hypothetically."
1995 Gingrich examines the United States' handling of the conflict in Bosnia and falls back on a familiar refrain [32]: "The UN acts totally impotently and undermines the morale of every law-abiding democracy on the planet. This is the worst performance by the democracies since the 1930s."
1996 Gingrich applies the same analogy to President Clinton's policies in the Middle East, in a speech [33] to the Center for Security Policy: "The democracies are in a greater danger than they have been at any time since [British Prime Minister] Stanley Baldwin lied to the English people about the Luftwaffe and Hitler's Germany."
1998 Gingrich steps down as Speaker, amid ethics complaints and rumors of an extramarital affair. He frames his decision in pragmatic terms [34]: "I'm willing to lead, but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals."
1998 Gingrich divorces Marianne. A later Esquire profile [35] offers a glimpse of the last days, from Marianne's point of view:
Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. "'I can't handle a Jaguar right now.' He said that many times. 'All I want is a Chevrolet.'"
2004 Gingrich tells Fox News [36] that liberal financier George Soros' opposition to George W. Bush might be due to his ties to drug cartels: "[He] wants to spend $75 million defeating [President] George W. Bush because Soros wants to legalize heroin."
2005 Gingrich's latest greatest threat to America is the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's almost as though they were into destruction for its own sake and weakening and undermining America for its own sake." He also labels the group [37] "a consistently destructive organization that is opposed to and undermines the values of most Americans, and takes positions that are consistently weakening the security of the United States."
2006 Asked whether he agrees with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's comments that opposition to the Bush administration's Iraq policy is tantamount to appeasing Hitler, Gingrich responds, "Yes [38]."
2006 Gingrich casts the Bush administration's War on Terror in the kind of sweeping terms [39] he normally reserves for, well, everything else: "We're in the early stages of what I would describe as the third World War."
2007 Gingrich makes the case for war in Iran and Syria by using his favorite analogy [40]: "It makes no sense to have a Holocaust Museum in Washington and yet have no honest assessment of the threat of a 21st century Holocaust."
2007 "We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto [41]." Two years later, Gingrich unveils a new Spanish-language website, The Americano [42].
2008 Following the presidential election, Gingrich calls for a new era of "tri-partisan [7]" cooperation in Washington.
2008 Gingrich tells Bill O'Reilly that "there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us." The gay and secular fascist movement, Gingrich charges [43], is "prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it."
2009 On Democratic opposition to the continuing war in Afghanistan, Gingrich breaks out a familiar line [44]: "The last few weeks have been worse than Chamberlain. This is Baldwin in 1935, just willfully blind because he didn't want to tell the British people the truth because it would offend them."
2009 Gingrich compares [45] the Obama administration to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. "I just have this interesting idea of asking [then White House communications director] Anita Dunn if this is her idea of a cultural revolution and if she really wishes that she could get Sean Hannity and the other Fox commentators to go to a farm and work the way Mao sent the intellectuals out."
2010 Gingrich warns [46] that Obama's agenda "would mean the end of America as it has been for the last 400 years."
2010 Gingrich argues [47] that Muslims don't have a right to build a mosque in Lower Manhattan: "They're trying to make a case about supremacy…Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington."
2010 Sign of the times: Gingrich swaps gay secular fascism for "secular-socialist machine [48]"—which he says "represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."
2010 A year after writing a book about noted anti-colonialist George Washington, Gingrich suggests that the current president holds a radical, anti-British worldview of his own. "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asks [49]. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."
2010 Gingrich sounds the alarm [50] about a new threat facing America: "We should have a federal law that says Sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States."
2011 Gingrich tells [51] the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody that he was driven to his cheat on his previous two wives because of his one true love: America. "There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate."
2011 Secular-socialists give way to atheist-Islamists [52]: "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [his grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American." His spokesman later clarified that Gingrich meant either Islamists or atheists would take over America, not both.
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Will child labor laws be repealed if Republican Newt Gingrich defeats President Obama's reelection bid in 2012? The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur explains.
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The Herman Cain Meltdown
By Molly Ball
The hits keep on coming for the businessman and onetime GOP front-runner, who seems determined to go down in flames
(http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/cainmouth.banner.jpg)
The Herman Cain implosion is under way.
Once the Republican front-runner, Cain now seems to be self-destructing before our very eyes. Beset on all sides and sinking in the polls, he's not content to go out with a whimper. Instead, his campaign has become a spectacular series of blunders.
The latest: While trying to fend off criticism of his recent foreign policy gaffes on Thursday, Cain mounted a spirited defense of ignorance and even illiteracy.
"Who knows every detail of every country on the planet? Nobody!" Cain told reporters following him on the campaign trail in New Hampshire. And: "We need a leader, not a reader!"
That line's unfortunate echo of the buffoonish president from The Simpsons Movie seemed telling. All along, Cain has been a sort of cartoon version of a presidential candidate, entertaining, silly, and preposterously exaggerated.
Meanwhile Thursday, Cain abruptly canceled a planned interview with New Hampshire's most important conservative editorial page, the Manchester Union Leader. It appeared to be a belated, and narrowly targeted, attempt to prevent the candidate from facing further questioning and doing further self-damage. But it only served to invite criticism from another quarter, and it certainly didn't prevent Cain from making more inadvisable remarks (see above).
The implosion's beginning can be traced to another newspaper editorial-board interview, with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, on Monday. That's when Cain got tripped up by a simple, open-ended question on Libya -- you know, the site of the last major U.S. military intervention. His helpless fumbling gave Rick Perry's "oops" some serious competition in the brain-freeze sweepstakes.
Then, on Wednesday, Cain made a pilgrimage to Miami's Little Havana, without apparently bothering to do any homework on Cuba: He professed ignorance of the U.S.'s "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy, called a query about Obama's Cuba policy a "gotcha question" and inquired with apparent seriousness, "How do you say 'delicious' in Cuban?"
At this point, stories about Cain aren't even mentioning the sexual harassment accusations he spent weeks trying to fend off. That's ancient history. Heck, compared to all these random countries people keep asking him about, Cain might like to be talking about the allegations again -- at least that's something he has some practice answering questions about.
Though the harassment scandal isn't the source of his present difficulties, it seems likely that it's at the root of Cain's unraveling. The revelations about accusations of sexual harassment against Cain from four different women clearly set him off-balance and planted a seed of doubt in voters' minds.
His erstwhile supporters might have wanted to tiptoe discreetly off his sinking ship. But Cain, it seems, would rather chase them off with sirens blaring.
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Remember John Lewis' Warning About Violent Talk?
By: Joel Dreyfuss
Posted: January 11, 2011
During the 2008 presidential campaign, the civil rights veteran warned against overheated rhetoric. It's no wonder, given black Americans' experience as targets of political violence. But the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, reminds us that it's advice all Americans should heed.
We were warned by Rep. John Lewis two years ago. He took John McCain and Sarah Palin to task during the 2008 presidential campaign for "sowing the seeds of hatred and division." Lewis knew well the consequences of political violence; he was badly beaten during civil rights protests in the South a half century ago.
Throughout last year, alerts continued, delivered by black politicians and pundits who expressed alarm about weapons at Tea Party rallies and brutal, sometimes racist rhetoric that cast President Barack Obama as a Nazi, a communist, a Middle East terrorist or, worse, an illegal alien who had somehow fooled the American people into putting him in the White House. But like a lot of the wisdom that comes out of the mouths of black folks, these warnings didn't get much play in the mainstream media.
When Lewis and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) reported that they had been called names and spat upon last summer by a crowd protesting health care reform, their credibility and even their motives for walking through a hostile crowd were questioned by the right. One conservative talk-show host offered a reward for a video proving that the two men had been mistreated -- essentially calling them liars.
When the NAACP's Benjamin Justice urged the Tea Party to purge its ranks of racists, he was greeted with derision or accused of playing the race card -- until a Tea Party leader's outburst proved him right.
For the moment, at least, the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and the accompanying massacre have focused mainstream attention on the verbal -- and occasionally violent -- excesses of the American political system. Within minutes of the alleged rampage by 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, the punditocracy began an inflamed debate on whether the brutal political dialogue of the last two years had played a role in instigating or nurturing an atmosphere that led to the shootings.
The sheriff of Arizona's Pima County, Clarence Dubnik, had no doubts: It's clear, "when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government," he said. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous."
Up to now, politicians, news commentators, talk-radio hosts and others who engage in political dialogue have tended to shrug off, tolerate and even sometimes instigate violent political language. News stories in the last few days have cataloged the excessive verbiage that has been a constant thread in political discussions in the last two years.
There were the brutal anti-Obama signs at Tea Party functions. There were those who came to political rallies armed. There were the bull's-eyes on Sarah Palin's maps and her provocative "Don't Retreat. Reload!" language. There was senatorial candidate Sharron Angle hinting that citizens should resort to their Second Amendment privileges (the right to bear arms) if they didn't like the outcome of elections or Supreme Court decisions.
Liberals have rushed to make the link between the violence and heated political dialogue of the last two years. "We need to put the guns down," said MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann. "Just as importantly, we need to put the gun metaphors away, and permanently." But within hours, the conservative blogs were already questioning the connection. Right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin posted this on her site: "Twitter and the left-wing blogs -- and now a Fox-bashing Democrat congressman -- have gone completely insane trying to politicize the shootings. Best to tune that all out."
Conservative Mark Thiessen, writing for the Washington Post, opined: "What is really outrageous is how quickly so many jumped at the opportunity to politicize this tragic shooting -- blaming the Tea Party and conservative political rhetoric without a shred of evidence to back those claims." Even the editorial page of the Washington Post, owned by The Root's parent company, put a distance between cause and effect: "But metaphors don't kill people -- guns kill people." The paper called for tighter gun-control laws.
Loughner may well turn out to be a deeply disturbed young man with no coherent political philosophy. But how assuredly can we separate his convoluted thinking from an environment of brutal language, threats, poisonous letters and warlike metaphors -- yes, metaphors? Even if Loughner's alleged deadly act was not an explosive response to the fuse of excessive language, are we now assured that there are no other individuals out there convinced they must do something to stop that communist/socialist/Nazi/foreigner president and his minions from ruining our country? I doubt that the head of the U.S. Secret Service will let out a sigh of relief if Loughner's apparent lack of political acumen or purpose is confirmed.
It's not surprising that African-American leaders have been alarmed for some time about this level of nasty rhetoric. Black Americans were long the targets of horrific political violence in the name of democracy. We have a long list of leaders and allies, from Medgar Evers to Viola Liuzzo, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Robert Kennedy, who paid with their lives for their beliefs -- and all in a climate of extremist language that gave legitimacy to acts cast as a means of saving America from the evil of integration or black empowerment. And that's why, even 40 years later, we are sensitive to the dangers of excessive language.
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November 10, 2011
Legends of the Fail
By PAUL KRUGMAN
This is the way the euro ends — not with a bang but with bunga bunga. Not long ago, European leaders were insisting that Greece could and should stay on the euro while paying its debts in full. Now, with Italy falling off a cliff, it’s hard to see how the euro can survive at all.
But what’s the meaning of the eurodebacle? As always happens when disaster strikes, there’s a rush by ideologues to claim that the disaster vindicates their views. So it’s time to start debunking.
First things first: The attempt to create a common European currency was one of those ideas that cut across the usual ideological lines. It was cheered on by American right-wingers, who saw it as the next best thing to a revived gold standard, and by Britain’s left, which saw it as a big step toward a social-democratic Europe. But it was opposed by British conservatives, who also saw it as a step toward a social-democratic Europe. And it was questioned by American liberals, who worried — rightly, I’d say (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) — about what would happen if countries couldn’t use monetary and fiscal policy to fight recessions.
So now that the euro project is on the rocks, what lessons should we draw?
I’ve been hearing two claims, both false: that Europe’s woes reflect the failure of welfare states in general, and that Europe’s crisis makes the case for immediate fiscal austerity in the United States.
The assertion that Europe’s crisis proves that the welfare state doesn’t work comes from many Republicans. For example, Mitt Romney has accused President Obama of taking his inspiration from European “socialist democrats” and asserted that “Europe isn’t working in Europe.” The idea, presumably, is that the crisis countries are in trouble because they’re groaning under the burden of high government spending. But the facts say otherwise.
It’s true that all European countries have more generous social benefits — including universal health care — and higher government spending than America does. But the nations now in crisis don’t have bigger welfare states than the nations doing well — if anything, the correlation runs the other way. Sweden, with its famously high benefits, is a star performer, one of the few countries whose G.D.P. is now higher than it was before the crisis. Meanwhile, before the crisis, “social expenditure” — spending on welfare-state programs — was lower, as a percentage of national income, in all of the nations now in trouble than in Germany, let alone Sweden.
Oh, and Canada, which has universal health care and much more generous aid to the poor than the United States, has weathered the crisis better than we have.
The euro crisis, then, says nothing about the sustainability of the welfare state. But does it make the case for belt-tightening in a depressed economy?
You hear that claim all the time. America, we’re told, had better slash spending right away or we’ll end up like Greece or Italy. Again, however, the facts tell a different story.
First, if you look around the world you see that the big determining factor for interest rates isn’t the level of government debt but whether a government borrows in its own currency. Japan is much more deeply in debt than Italy, but the interest rate on long-term Japanese bonds is only about 1 percent to Italy’s 7 percent. Britain’s fiscal prospects look worse than Spain’s, but Britain can borrow at just a bit over 2 percent, while Spain is paying almost 6 percent.
What has happened, it turns out, is that by going on the euro, Spain and Italy in effect reduced themselves to the status of third-world countries that have to borrow in someone else’s currency, with all the loss of flexibility that implies. In particular, since euro-area countries can’t print money even in an emergency, they’re subject to funding disruptions in a way that nations that kept their own currencies aren’t — and the result is what you see right now. America, which borrows in dollars, doesn’t have that problem.
The other thing you need to know is that in the face of the current crisis, austerity has been a failure everywhere it has been tried: no country with significant debts has managed to slash its way back into the good graces of the financial markets. For example, Ireland is the good boy of Europe, having responded to its debt problems with savage austerity that has driven its unemployment rate to 14 percent. Yet the interest rate on Irish bonds is still above 8 percent — worse than Italy.
The moral of the story, then, is to beware of ideologues who are trying to hijack the European crisis on behalf of their agendas. If we listen to those ideologues, all we’ll end up doing is making our own problems — which are different from Europe’s, but arguably just as severe — even worse.
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The Kings Of Comedy Tour continues tonight. This time the comedians are performing in Spartanburg, SC. ;D
What to Watch For in Tonight's Republican Debate in South Carolina
By Molly Ball
The Republican presidential candidates meet Saturday evening for a foreign policy-focused debate hosted by CBS and National Journal
(http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/midebate.banner.jpg)
1. Perry, Perry, and...uh...what was that third one? Oh, right, Perry. Rick Perry's mammoth mix-up in Wednesday night's debate in Michigan raises the stakes for the Texas governor in tonight's face-off. Will he choose the risk-averse path of staying quiet and on the sidelines as much as possible? Or will he step up to try to correct the impression that he doesn't have it together? Just kidding! Perry doesn't really have a choice at all. If he could simply flip a switch and suddenly become a commanding debater, he surely would have done that by now. It seems abundantly clear that turning in a strong performance is not an option available to him. Ironically, he was on course to turn in his strongest performance yet on Wednesday when he face-planted. Barring a brain transplant, he'd probably better play it safe from here on out.
2. Real divisions on foreign policy. This debate is the first of two on the schedule that aim to shine a light on the candidates' foreign policy views, and it could indeed be illuminating. While the two economically focused debates served to illustrate the broad economic consensus among the candidates, there's a notable lack of consensus on foreign policy in the GOP field -- and the Republican Party as a whole -- these days. The candidates show varying degrees of military interventionism: Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul want to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan quickly; Michele Bachmann was a forceful opponent of U.S. intervention in Libya, a prospect Newt Gingrich was in favor of before he was against it. Then there's the issue of China, which Mitt Romney has made a central plank of his economic plan, while Huntsman, the former Chinese ambassador, has accused him of wanting to start a trade war.
3. Do they know what they're talking about? As a whole, the field is notably short on international expertise, with the exception of ex-diplomat Huntsman. That's led to some memorable blunders, such as an extremely garbled answer from Perry to a question on Pakistan, Bachmann seeming not to know what continent Libya is on and Herman Cain apparently not realizing China has nuclear weapons. It's especially unfortunate for Perry that the debate where he'll be called upon to prove he can remember a three-item list is on a topic he's so poorly versed in. But foreign-policy blunders have afflicted nearly all of the candidates.
4. How do you solve a problem like Newt? The supposedly impending Newt Gingrich surge has been hyped by his campaign for so long that it's unnerving to have to acknowledge that it actually does seem to happening, according to recent polls, whose respondents either have genuinely embraced the next-in-line Romney alternative, like a serial monogamist forgetting the last three breakups -- or else they are drunk with power and just toying with us. In any case, now that the Gingrich surge is officially a thing, expect a renewed focus on the former speaker. One hopes the moderators have taken a tip from the feisty Maria Bartiromo and won't take Gingrich's tiresome, predictable media-tweaking shtick lying down.
5. Oh, right, Herman Cain. After weeks of intense focus on the former Godfather's Pizza CEO, he was oddly not central to Wednesday's debate, especially after Perry grabbed the big headline for all the wrong reasons. There are, however, signs that supporters are starting to quietly peel away from the onetime front-runner. How his rivals approach him should be telling -- if they basically ignore him, it's probably because they sense the air is going out of the Cain balloon.
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November 9, 2011
Back to Common Sense at the Polls
It might have been “too much too soon,” a chastened Gov. John Kasich of Ohio admitted on Tuesday night, after his state’s voters overwhelmingly rejected his attempt to break public employee unions. He certainly was right about “too much,” an analysis that also applies to other examples of Republican overreach around the country that were kicked into the gutter: an anti-abortion amendment in Mississippi, a voting restriction in Maine, the radical anti-immigrant agenda of a politician in Arizona.
These policies, and similar ones in other states, were passed in an arrogant frenzy by a Tea Party-tide of Republicans elected in 2010. Many of them decided that they had a mandate to dismantle some of the basic protections and restrictions of government. They went too far, and weary voters had to drag them back toward the center.
As a result, Tuesday brought an overdue return of common sense to government policy in many states. Many voters are tired of legislation driven more by ideology than practicality, of measures that impoverish the middle class or deprive people of basic rights in order to prove some discredited economic theory or cultural belief.
That was most evident in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly repealed a law pushed through last spring by Republicans to shred collective-bargaining rights for public employees. It prohibited bargaining on health benefits for state and local workers, including teachers, police officers and firefighters, and made it much harder to collect union dues or negotiate on staffing.
Many states are bleeding because of high salaries and lavish benefits, but, as New York and Connecticut have shown, it is possible to reduce them without breaking unions. The roughshod course chosen by Ohio, as well as Wisconsin and Indiana, made the real agenda all too clear: breaking the political power of public unions. Blue-collar voters in Ohio, many of whom got to the middle class through collective bargaining, understood the game.
Many of those same voters also supported a powerless amendment repudiating health care reform. With the matter up to the courts, there was little campaigning on the issue to explain its benefits to the uninsured.
In Arizona, voters recoiling from anti-immigrant stridency recalled the State Senate’s president, Russell Pearce, who was the main sponsor and public face of Arizona’s immigration law, which imposed sweeping police-state powers to harass and expel people without papers. The law, largely blocked in federal court, has done huge damage to the state’s economy and reputation, and voters in Mr. Pearce’s district clearly had had enough.
Maine voters saw right through the partisanship behind Republican attempts to eliminate same-day voter registration and reinstated it. In state after state, Republicans have tried to make it harder to vote, knowing that restrictions tend to hit lower-income and minority voters — traditional supporters of Democrats. Unfortunately, Mississippi voters were not as enlightened, approving a new requirement for identification cards at the polls.
But, even the voters in that state, one of the country’s most conservative, decisively rejected an amendment to ban abortion by declaring a fertilized egg as a person. The measure also would have effectively banned some forms of contraception and even in-vitro fertilization, and 58 percent of voters said that was going too far.
It is not clear that Tuesday’s votes add up to a national trend that will have an effect on 2012 or even the deadlock in Congress. But they do offer a ray of hope to any candidate who runs on pragmatic solutions, not magical realism, to create jobs and reduce the pressures of inequality on the middle class and the poor.
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(http://www.winningprogressive.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/img-mg-egypt-protests-10_1418184273132.jpg)
Yesterday was a huge day in Egypt, as that country’s President/dictator for the past 30 years ceded power in the face of massive peaceful protests by his people. While much work remains to be done to ensure that real democracy takes hold in Egypt, we should celebrate the amazing victory by and for the Egyptian people. It was truly a day for progressives and other supporters of democracy and peaceful protest to savor.
Mubarak’s departure is also, however, a victory for the Obama Administration’s patient and reasoned approach to promoting democracy in Egypt and other countries. This approach started with President Obama’s stellar June 2009 speech in Cairo that signaled that the peoples of Egypt and other countries would have to choose democracy, but we would be there to support them if they made moves to achieve it peacefully. And it has continued over the past 18 days of protests, as President Obama has taken a measured approach of private diplomacy with Mubarak, Egypt’s military, and other Egyptian leaders, combined with slowly increasing public pressure that focused on supporting the will of the Egyptian people. As yesterday’s developments show, President Obama’s approach is working.
Throughout the protests, many on the left and from the Bush Administration have harshly criticized President Obama for not being more publicly vocal about the need for Mubarak to leave and in support of the protesters. Apparently these folks wanted President Obama to try to lead the protest movement, demand democracy and regime change immediately, and/or engage in the type of loud public saber rattling that marred our foreign policy under the Bush Administration. Such an approach (which, notably, did not lead to the peaceful toppling of any leaders in the Middle East under Bush) would have been misguided for a number of reasons.
* First, the publicly vocal approach that the critics wanted President Obama to take would have made the protesters look like tools of the U.S., which would undermine their credibility at home.
* Second, such an approach would have limited President Obama’s ability to work privately to make the protests successful by making sure that Mubarak or the Egyptian military did not overreact and have the situation devolve into chaos. It is remarkable that a thirty year dictator did not violently crush the protests and stepped down with hardly a shot fired, and the Obama Administration’s private diplomacy is likely a large reason why such violence did not occur.
* Third, the critics’ approach ignores the fact that democracy has to come from the people of Egypt, not outside pressure from the U.S. That is not to say that we had no role in how things turn out in Egypt, but the thought that we could essentially dictate the results in Egypt reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics and foreign policy works, as both leaders and citizens of countries do not react well to outsiders publicly meddling in their affairs.
Peacefully toppling a dictatorial regime is a difficult thing to achieve. It requires more than just protests from a country’s citizens and demands of “regime change” from other world leaders. Instead, it requires patient and reasoned diplomacy focused on moving the dictator out of power and supporting the will of the people that a protesting. This is the approach that the Obama Administration has taken so far and now, as a result, we are in a position to help the people of Egypt establish a path to a peaceful transition to democracy.
As progressives, it is important that we help spread the word of the success of the Obama Administration’s approach to Egypt for at least two reasons. First, it helps counteract the misconception that the Administration is not being successful. Second, and more importantly, it helps build support for the more reasoned approach of this Administration and helps push back on the supporters of the loud saber rattling that led our foreign policy so far astray under the Bush Administration.
So, we urge you to write a letter to your local newspaper editor celebrating the events in Egypt, and highlighting the importance of the Obama Administration’s approach to enabling those events to occur.
That's very interesting.. I found this line (Bolded below) very peculiar.
(http://www.winningprogressive.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/img-mg-egypt-protests-10_1418184273132.jpg)
Yesterday was a huge day in Egypt, as that country’s President/dictator for the past 30 years ceded power in the face of massive peaceful protests by his people. While much work remains to be done to ensure that real democracy takes hold in Egypt, we should celebrate the amazing victory by and for the Egyptian people. It was truly a day for progressives and other supporters of democracy and peaceful protest to savor.
Mubarak’s departure is also, however, a victory for the Obama Administration’s patient and reasoned approach to promoting democracy in Egypt and other countries. This approach started with President Obama’s stellar June 2009 speech in Cairo that signaled that the peoples of Egypt and other countries would have to choose democracy, but we would be there to support them if they made moves to achieve it peacefully. And it has continued over the past 18 days of protests, as President Obama has taken a measured approach of private diplomacy with Mubarak, Egypt’s military, and other Egyptian leaders, combined with slowly increasing public pressure that focused on supporting the will of the Egyptian people. As yesterday’s developments show, President Obama’s approach is working.
Throughout the protests, many on the left and from the Bush Administration have harshly criticized President Obama for not being more publicly vocal about the need for Mubarak to leave and in support of the protesters. Apparently these folks wanted President Obama to try to lead the protest movement, demand democracy and regime change immediately, and/or engage in the type of loud public saber rattling that marred our foreign policy under the Bush Administration. Such an approach (which, notably, did not lead to the peaceful toppling of any leaders in the Middle East under Bush) would have been misguided for a number of reasons.
* First, the publicly vocal approach that the critics wanted President Obama to take would have made the protesters look like tools of the U.S., which would undermine their credibility at home.
* Second, such an approach would have limited President Obama’s ability to work privately to make the protests successful by making sure that Mubarak or the Egyptian military did not overreact and have the situation devolve into chaos. It is remarkable that a thirty year dictator did not violently crush the protests and stepped down with hardly a shot fired, and the Obama Administration’s private diplomacy is likely a large reason why such violence did not occur.
* Third, the critics’ approach ignores the fact that democracy has to come from the people of Egypt, not outside pressure from the U.S. That is not to say that we had no role in how things turn out in Egypt, but the thought that we could essentially dictate the results in Egypt reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics and foreign policy works, as both leaders and citizens of countries do not react well to outsiders publicly meddling in their affairs.
Peacefully toppling a dictatorial regime is a difficult thing to achieve. It requires more than just protests from a country’s citizens and demands of “regime change” from other world leaders. Instead, it requires patient and reasoned diplomacy focused on moving the dictator out of power and supporting the will of the people that a protesting. This is the approach that the Obama Administration has taken so far and now, as a result, we are in a position to help the people of Egypt establish a path to a peaceful transition to democracy.
As progressives, it is important that we help spread the word of the success of the Obama Administration’s approach to Egypt for at least two reasons. First, it helps counteract the misconception that the Administration is not being successful. Second, and more importantly, it helps build support for the more reasoned approach of this Administration and helps push back on the supporters of the loud saber rattling that led our foreign policy so far astray under the Bush Administration.
So, we urge you to write a letter to your local newspaper editor celebrating the events in Egypt, and highlighting the importance of the Obama Administration’s approach to enabling those events to occur.
"1"
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This field of repube candidates is truly embarrassing. And to think some clown on the politics board said that I should get used to saying "president Perry" when he entered the race. ::) ;D
Ford. Quayle. Stockdale. Now, Poor Rick Perry
By James Fallows
In the long annals of presidential-campaign debating, there had until this evening been three famous-disaster moments:
1) 1976, Gerald Ford and Poland. This one wasn't quite fair. Ford was trying to make a reasonable point -- that the Polish people would never consider themselves a vanquished population. But what he actually said was, "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and under a Ford Administration there never will be." And since the background imagery of those days was an (also unfair) mainly SNL-based theme that Ford was not really that bright ... well, it made trouble for him. And the Jimmy Carter campaign, for which I was working at the time, did all we could to rub it in.
2) 1988, Dan Quayle and Jack Kennedy. He walked right into this one -- and Lloyd Bentsen was there, crocodile-like, just waiting for him.
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3) 1992, James Stockdale, "who am I?" Sigh. (For the young: he was Ross Perot's running mate, and was in a debate against the other VP candidates, Quayle and Al Gore.)
4) 2011. Now, sadly, there is a fourth. I think anyone watching had to feel bad for Perry. I do.
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More from Garance Franke-Ruta. Poor Perry.
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Libya's post-Gaddafi world is showing a lurch towards radical Islam, with strict Sharia law and Al-Qaeda flags in evidence there. It's barely a week since NATO moved out after the campaign to swap a dictator for democracy, yet the Alliance and the U.S. don't seem too concerned about the shape it's taking.
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Jobs Bill Defeated: The Republican Calculated Campaign To Sabotage President Obama
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November 6, 2011
The Next Fight Over Jobs
The way the job market is going, it will never be robust enough to bring down the unemployment rate, now at 9 percent, or 13.9 million people. Monthly job growth has slowed to an average of just 90,000 new jobs a month over the past six months, a pace at which growth in the working-age population will always exceed the number of new jobs being created.
High unemployment and low job growth, which have plagued the economy all through the current “recovery,” hurt both consumer spending and economic growth. But don’t count on government to do the obvious and urgent thing — intervene to create jobs.
Tragically, the more entrenched the jobs shortage becomes, the more paralyzed Congress becomes,with Republicans committed to doing nothing in the hopes that the faltering economy will cost President Obama his job in 2012. Last week, for instance, Senate Republicans filibustered a $60 billion proposal by Mr. Obama to create jobs by repairing and upgrading the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure. They were outraged that the bill would have been paid for by a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million.
Things may be about to get worse.
Federal unemployment benefits, which generally kick in after 26 weeks of state-provided benefits, are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. That would be a disaster for many of the estimated 3.5 million Americans who get by on extended benefits — an average of $295 a week. It would also be a blow to the economy, because it would reduce consumer spending by about $50 billion in 2012 — which would mean slower economic growth and 275,000 lost jobs. Unfortunately, given Republicans’ demonstrated willingness to ignore human needs and economic logic, it is more likely than not that jobless benefits will be a major battle in the months ahead.
There are no plausible arguments against an extension — in fact, Congress has never let federal benefits expire when the unemployment rate was higher than 7.2 percent. But there are many specious arguments, chief among them that providing benefits reduces the incentive to get a new job. The evidence says otherwise.
A recent paper by Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows that benefit extensions in early 2011 raised the jobless rate by about 0.1 to 0.5 percentage points, but most of that was due to benefit recipients staying in the labor force and actively looking for work during the time they are collecting benefits, rather than, say, dropping out in despair.
Unemployment benefits are the first line of defense against ruin from job loss that is beyond an individual’s control. In a time of historically elevated long-term unemployment, they are an important way to keep workers connected to the job-search market. They are also crucial to ensuring that the weak economy doesn’t weaken further.
They clearly need to be extended, though we have no illusion that it will happen without a fight.
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Former Republican Mayor of Meridian, Mississippi and current President of Reconnecting America, John Robert Smith talks about the urgent need for Congress to come together and support the President's call for infrastructure investment. http://whitehouse.gov/jobsact
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November 3, 2011
Putting Millionaires Before Jobs
There’s nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport; Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On Thursday, though, when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster.
That’s because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000 taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills. Protecting that elite group — and hewing to their rigid antitax vows — was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports.
Senate Republicans filibustered the president’s full jobs act last month for the same reasons. And they have vowed to block the individual pieces of that bill that Democrats are now bringing to the floor. Senate Democrats have also accused them of opposing any good idea that might put people back to work and rev the economy a bit before next year’s presidential election.
There is no question that the infrastructure bill would be good for the flagging economy — and good for the country’s future development. It would directly spend $50 billion on roads, bridges, airports and mass transit systems, and it would then provide another $10 billion to an infrastructure bank to encourage private-sector investment in big public works projects.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican of Texas, co-sponsored an infrastructure-bank bill in March, and other Republicans have supported similar efforts over the years. But the Republicans’ determination to stick to an antitax pledge clearly trumps even their own good ideas.
A competing Republican bill, which also failed on Thursday, was cobbled together in an attempt to make it appear as if the party has equally valid ideas on job creation and rebuilding. It would have extended the existing highway and public transportation financing for two years, paying for it with a $40 billion cut to other domestic programs. Republican senators also threw in a provision that would block the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing new clean air rules. Only in the fevered dreams of corporate polluters could that help create jobs.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, bitterly accused Democrats of designing their infrastructure bill to fail by paying for it with a millionaire’s tax, as if his party’s intransigence was so indomitable that daring to challenge it is somehow underhanded.
The only good news is that the Democrats aren’t going to stop. There are many more jobs bills to come, including extension of unemployment insurance and the payroll-tax cut. If Republicans are so proud of blocking all progress, they will have to keep doing it over and over again, testing the patience of American voters.
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The politics we believe in starts not with expensive TV ads or extravaganzas, but with you — with people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers and friends.
And that kind of campaign takes time to build. So even though the race may not reach full speed for a year or more, the work of laying the foundation for our campaign must start today.
In the coming days, supporters like you will begin forging a new organization that we'll build together in cities and towns across the country. And we'll need you to help shape our plan as we create a campaign that's farther reaching, more focused, and more innovative than anything we've built before.
We'll start by doing something unprecedented: coordinating millions of one-on-one conversations between supporters across every single state, reconnecting old friends, inspiring new ones to join the cause, and readying ourselves for next year's fight.
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Libya's new interim prime minister has promised to make national reconciliation one of his top priorities, but in the town of Bani Walid, a former stronghold of Muammar Gaddafi, this may prove to be difficult.
The new head of the main hospital in Bani Walid is a pharmacist turned NTC fighter, and it is apparent that this is not a place where the anti-Gaddafi fighters are welcomed like heroes.
There is little communication between the fighters and the visitors, even if both stem from the same tribe.
Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid reports from Bani Walid, Libya.
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Interesting that repubes will have to hold their collective noses and vote for the man the head of the party (Limbaugh) has stated is not a conservative. ;D
The Nominee Will Be Romney and the GOP Will Like Him
by Eli Lehrer
(http://www.frumforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Romney3.jpg)
Although I’m hardly optimistic that he’ll take the presidency, there’s every reason to think that Mitt Romney is going win the Republican nomination and attract the votes of his own party members.
Thus, while I would still bet on Obama to win reelection, I disagree with David Frum’s contention that Romney’s current level of support in his own party ought to be a topic of concern.
In a very large nominating field where only residents in a few states will cast primary votes anytime soon, primary candidate preference polls are roughly the equivalent of asking a sci-fi geek to pick between Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. All of the choices are pretty good and saying that you like one doesn’t exclude a deep and even geeky affection for the others.
The fact that Romney is a slightly bland individual–Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman are all a lot more fun to watch–probably depresses the number of people picking him as their first choice a bit further. With the possible exception of Ron Paul’s supporters (many of whom may stay home or vote Libertarian on election day) almost all primary voters will rally around the party’s eventual nominee.
The polling firm Rassmussen Reports–generally pretty accurate although known to lean a bit towards the R side–estimates that 33.9 percent of the electorate self-identifies as Republican. And the number of people who will vote R almost no matter what is higher than that. Barry Goldwater, the worst-performing post World War II Republican candidate, still landed just about 40 percent of the vote.
For Romney this means he’s still the true frontrunner even if others briefly surpass him in the polls. If he can avoid being utterly embarrassed with finishes below third place in closely watched primaries, his well oiled fundraising machine and the organizational resources he built up in his last run for the presidency will likely let him win the nomination the same way they did for plenty of other people (e.g.John McCain) who stumbled in early contests.
This still doesn’t mean that things are going to be easy for Romney. Anyone taking on an incumbent has an up-hill fight. But, unless the rules of American politics get rewritten, Romney shouldn’t have to worry much about what Republicans think of him. They’ll come around.
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Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh: The Right's Leading Race-Baiters
By Conor Friedersdorf
How have they reacted to Occupy Wall Street and harassment allegations against Herman Cain? Playing the card conservatives claim to abhor most.
(http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/Rush%20Limbaugh%20-%20JOSEPH%20KACZMAREK%20AP%20-%20banner.jpg)
In college and for some time afterward, I believed that the conservative movement was earnestly against using race as a political cudgel. It isn't that I had no knowledge of political history. I knew about the Southern strategy, the wrongheaded opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and the stubborn persistence of racists on the fringes of the political right (and the political left). But hadn't things changed? On college campuses, I saw that invocations of racism were sometimes cynical, intended to empower the accuser -- shortly after I graduated, for example, a professor faked a hate crime against herself -- and seeing 18, 19, and 20 year-old campus conservatives speak out against such nonsense, even as they were earnestly anti-racism, made it that much easier to nod along to the conservative movement's critiques of Al Sharpton's bad behavior and certain attacks on Ward Connerly, who sought to repeal affirmative action policies at California public universities, and other incidents too. The critics made sound points.
I still think some on the left are guilty of cynically using race as a political cudgel. I've written about the Duke players falsely accused of rape and prosecuted by both a grandstanding Mike Nifong and the left-wing media; about the New York Times columnist who said that minorities who attended a Tea Party rally were minstrels; and about Lawrence O'Donnell questioning Herman Cain in a way it's difficult to imagine him questioning a black Democrat. It is true, as Matt Yglesias is fond of pointing out, that racism remains a much bigger and more urgent problem than false accusations of it. Nevertheless, using race as a political cudgel is corrosive and ought to be called out.
What I no longer believe is that the conservative movement (as opposed to many individual conservatives) is earnestly against the cynical use of race as a cudgel. I haven't believed it for a long time now. You'll still see peripheral figures on the left, the present day equivalents of Sharpton and Nifong, behaving dishonorably. But the new status quo in the conservative movement is something different. In the conservative movement, extremely prominent figures race bait in the ugliest, most transparent ways. And no one complains. Despite decades of denouncing this sort of behavior as ugly, illegitimate, and immoral, the movement right is unperturbed.
How bad have things gotten? Recall the outrage on the right when people like Janeane Garofalo tarred the whole Tea Party as racist, citing some racist signs in their midst. To be clear, Garofalo was absurdly sweeping in her comments. Now look at how Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, is characterizing Occupy Wall Street in a new ad put out by a group he leads (he's quickly becoming America's foremost producer of disgusting video spots):
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The antisemitism in those clips are execrable, and ought to be roundly denounced, but how little integrity must you possess to present such hate speech as if it defines all of your adversaries in a political controversy? And in just the way that your ideological allies were complaining about mere months before! (See Reason TV's excellent coverage from Occupy Los Angeles for an example of journalists who neither shied away from the creepy racist element in the protests nor misled their viewers into an exaggerated impression of its prominence.)
Kristol is hardly alone.
On Rush Limbaugh's Web site, under the headline "We should not be surprised by the left's racist hit job on Herman Cain," the talk radio host characterizes Politico's sexual harassment story as follows:
What's next, folks? A cartoon on MSNBC showing Herman Cain with huge lips eating a watermelon? What are they gonna do next? No, Snerdley, I'm not kidding. The racial stereotypes that these people are using to go after Herman Cain, what is the one thing that it tells us? It tells us who the real racists are, yeah, but it tells us that Herman Cain is somebody. Something's going on out there. Herman Cain obviously is making some people nervous for this kind of thing to happen.
Did anyone object that he labeled an entire half of the political spectrum racist based on a sexual harassment story in a single publication that didn't in fact contain any racial stereotypes?
Nope.
And no surprise.
As I've pointed out at great length, Limbaugh frivolously accuses more people of racism these days than anyone else in public life. And the conservative movement is happy to consider him an ally.
Thus the pathology spreads:
Ann Coulter led the charge soon after the story broke on Sunday night, evoking Clarence Thomas's words in his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, that this was "another high-tech lynching," saying, "There's nothing liberals fear more than a black conservative."
The racial theme, and evocations of Thomas, were echoed across conservative talk radio on Monday. Laura Ingraham, who clerked for Thomas on the Supreme Court in the 1990s, said "Doesn't this all sound so familiar? A black man who thinks for himself...He needs to be put in his place, a lot of people think. Time to put this man in, hate to say it, the back of the bus."
...Brent Bozell, the founder and president of the conservative media watchdog the Media Research Center, wrote a post called "Stop the High-tech Lynching of Herman Cain" that argued that "anyone in the press that gives this story oxygen" is "hypocritical."
Should there be any confusion, that's the same Ann Coulter who said that "liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race," the same Laura Ingraham who thinks disagreeing with Obama gets you demonized as a racist, and the same Brent Bozell who authored columns including Team Obama's Race Baiting and Selective Race Baiting.
How depressing to think an ideological movement is actually opposed to something in principle, to nod along to the abstract, righteous arguments it marshals, only to watch as some of its leading figures cynically engage in the very awful behavior that they once claimed to abhor.
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TODAY'S MARKETS
JULY 21, 2011, 6:40 P.M. ET
Progress On Debt Rubs Off On Stocks
By TOM LAURICELLA
Signs of progress in dealing with debt woes on both sides of the Atlantic Thursday propelled U.S. stocks, European bonds and the euro sharply higher in volatile trading.
In the U.S., the good news came in the form of hints that talks between the White House and congressional Republicans are moving closer to a deal that would raise the federal debt ceiling and slice the U.S. government's deficit.
Market Data Center
In Europe, officials agreed to a plan designed to reduce Greece's debt burden and, more important for most investors, limit the potential for contagion that could send Italy and Spain into crisis.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its second straight day of triple-digit gains, rising 152.50 points, or 1.2%, to 12724.41. The blue-chip index is now less than 100 points shy of its 2011 high of 12810.54 reached in late April. In Europe, Spanish and Italian stock markets were the big winners, gaining 2.9% and 3.8%, respectively, recovering ground lost in recent weeks.
The euro went for a roller-coaster ride on its way higher, as traders were once again whipsawed by comments from European officials. During European trading hours, it fell to around $1.4150 from more than $1.42 on news suggesting a meeting of European leaders wouldn't result in a comprehensive plan aimed at thwarting contagion. But then traders were spun around as news of a deal trickled out. The euro was up 1.5% against the U.S. dollar at $1.4424 in late New York trade.
The hope among investors is that the day's events bring the financial markets another step closer to resolving the major risks that have been bedeviling investors. In recent weeks, fears have been growing that the political bickering over the U.S. debt ceiling could lead ratings firms to take away the U.S. government's AAA rating. At the same time, Italy and Spain were once again being dragged down by worries that a default by Greece would ricochet through financial markets.
Blue-chip stocks surged as hopes for a major budget deal in Washington and efforts to contain Europe's sovereign-debt crisis whetted investors' risk appetite. Steven Russolillo has details. Plus, earnings from Microsoft.
Still, the deal also brings Greece closer to default, the prospects of which could keep investors unsettled. At the same time, the U.S. is still far from resolving its own debt problems.
Given the potential risks from a U.S. downgrade or a disorderly default by Greece, many hedge funds have been stockpiling cash. Those that have been trading have been chewed up by sharp back-and-forth price swings as markets respond to the latest comments from U.S. or European politicians.
"Everyone says the resolution of the debt crisis is good for the euro and the resolution of the debt ceiling is good for the dollar, but it's not so much that it's good or bad but that it adds certainty, and therefore trends, back into the market," says Jon Stein, managing director at Parker Global Strategies.
In the currency markets, daily big swings in the euro against the dollar have made for a challenging environment for many hedge-fund managers. The bias among many so-called macro funds, which invest based on big economic themes, has been to bet that the crisis will lead to a lower euro. While the euro has fallen against some currencies, especially the Swiss franc, it has gained against the U.S. dollar.
That volatility has extended to stocks, where the Dow has been swinging in a wide range since February. Making things especially difficult for stock pickers is that many individual stocks have been moving in lock-step.
"It's been a ping-pong market, and you really haven't been rewarded for individual stock-picking during the first half of the year," said Jonathon Trugman, who runs New York-based equities hedge fund Pendulum Capital Management. To make money, "you've had to play the big macro moves. Now we can shift back to being more stock-specific."
The news out of the European summit helped Italian and Spanish bonds extend a rally that began Tuesday. The yield on Spanish 10-year debt fell to 5.7% Thursday from 5.9% Wednesday, having topped 6.2% Monday, according to Tradeweb. The yield on Italian 10-year bonds fell to 5.3% from 5.6%.
Analysts said the summit appeared to address many concerns. And while it offers some breathing room, it likely doesn't mean the end of the crisis.
"They have said all that the markets could have hoped them to say, and it is creating some relief in terms of the immediate concerns," said Robert Sinche, currency strategist art RBS Global Banking & Markets.
He said the focus will shift to Greece's ability to implement reforms, with key deadlines in September and December.
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;D
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Oct. 27, 2011, 4:50 p.m. EDT
U.S. stocks surge on accord in Europe, GDP
America’s growth in third-quarter dispels recession talk
By Kate Gibson, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. stocks on Thursday blasted to near three-month highs, lifting the S&P 500 back into positive turf for 2011 and with banks in particular rallying in relief over Europe’s debt accord. Quarterly data illustrating the largest jump for the U.S. economy in more than a year added to the bulls’ rampage.
“There is a lot of talk about how do you get 27 countries to agree -- we have far more adult leadership from these leaders than many members of the U.S. Congress and supercommittee. As is often the case, the greatest threat to the U.S. economy comes from partisanship,” said David Kelly, chief market strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, referring to the joint deficit-cutting panel.
“The GDP report is the strongest evidence yet that the U.S. isn’t in a recession, and it didn’t scare itself into a recession in the third quarter,” Kelly added.
Closing above 12,000 for the first time since Aug. 1, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI:DJIA) rose as much as 415 points and ended at 12,208.55, up 339.51 points, or 2.9%. Up 5.5% for 2011, the blue-chip index is up nearly 12% for October, with two trading sessions to go in the month.
All 30 of the Dow’s components advanced, led by Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC) , up 9.6%.
The S&P 500 Index (SNC:SPX) gained 42.59 points, or 3.4%, to 1,284.59, with financials and natural-resource companies rallying the most among its 10 sectors, all of which advanced. The index closed up 2.1% for the year and nearly 14% up on the month.
Among the noteworthy gainers, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) rallied 17%.
The Nasdaq Composite Index (NASDAQ:COMP) rose 87.96 points, or 3.3%, to 2,738.63, up 13% for October and 3.2% for 2011.
It was the highest close for the Dow average since July 28, and the highest close for the Nasdaq and S&P 500 since Aug. 1.
For every stock on the decline, more than seven gained on the New York Stock Exchange, where 1.4 billion shares traded. Composite volume topped 6.6 billion.
Equities, commodities and the euro leaped as investors in Greek debt accepted a voluntary write-down of 50% and European leaders widened a rescue fund to $1.4 trillion.
“The most positive news was after months and months of wrangling, European leaders reached broad agreement,” said Alan Skrainka, chief investment officer at Cornerstone Wealth Management, of the effort to contain Europe’s debt crisis. Read more on Europe's sovereign-debt deal.
“The market jumped because of the Europe news, but what shouldn’t be lost is a very is a very solid report on the economy. It’s not very robust, but it’s a far cry from recession,” said Skrainka of the Commerce Department report, which found the U.S. economy grew 2.5% in the third quarter. .
Another report, this one from the Labor Department, had first-time jobless claims declining by 2,000 to 402,000 last week.
Dow component Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE:XOM) rose 1% after the oil giant reported net income that topped $10 billion in the third quarter as the price of oil advanced.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude futures climbed, with the futures contract for December delivery (NMN:CL1Z) up $3.76 to end at $92.94 a barrel. Gold futures (CNS:GC1Z) added $24.20 to close at $1,747.70 an ounce.
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Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
Conservative states spend most on porn (Image: Raymond Gehmann/Corbis)
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.
Political divide
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.
After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.
Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Old-fashioned values
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.
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President and Mrs Obama on the American Jobs Act Bus Tour
First Lady Michelle Obama announces commitments from 270 companies to hire 25,000 veterans and their spouses. October 19, 2011.
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Republicans are opposing the majority of President Obama's jobs bill, including a provision that $35 billion dollars to states so that teachers and firefighters can be re-hired. A new poll shows 75% of Americans agree with this provision even if it adds to the budget deficit. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur explains from Occupy Wall Street in New York City.
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This week's address from our President and fearless leader. Getting things done, baby. :)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/02/28/Keeping-Promises/
Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Washington, DC
Two years ago, we set out on a journey to change the way that Washington works.
We sought a government that served not the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few, but the middle-class Americans I met every day in every community along the campaign trail – responsible men and women who are working harder than ever, worrying about their jobs, and struggling to raise their families. In so many town halls and backyards, they spoke of their hopes for a government that finally confronts the challenges that their families face every day; a government that treats their tax dollars as responsibly as they treat their own hard-earned paychecks.
That is the change I promised as a candidate for president. It is the change the American people voted for in November. And it is the change represented by the budget I sent to Congress this week.
During the campaign, I promised a fair and balanced tax code that would cut taxes for 95% of working Americans, roll back the tax breaks for those making over $250,000 a year, and end the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas. This budget does that.
I promised an economy run on clean, renewable energy that will create new American jobs, new American industries, and free us from the dangerous grip of foreign oil. This budget puts us on that path, through a market-based cap on carbon pollution that will make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy; through investments in wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient American cars and American trucks.
I promised to bring down the crushing cost of health care – a cost that bankrupts one American every thirty seconds, forces small businesses to close their doors, and saddles our government with more debt. This budget keeps that promise, with a historic commitment to reform that will lead to lower costs and quality, affordable health care for every American.
I promised an education system that will prepare every American to compete, so Americans can win in a global economy. This budget will help us meet that goal, with new incentives for teacher performance and pathways for advancement; new tax credits that will make college more affordable for all who want to go; and new support to ensure that those who do go finish their degree.
This budget also reflects the stark reality of what we’ve inherited – a trillion dollar deficit, a financial crisis, and a costly recession. Given this reality, we’ll have to be more vigilant than ever in eliminating the programs we don’t need in order to make room for the investments we do need. I promised to do this by going through the federal budget page by page, and line by line. That is a process we have already begun, and I am pleased to say that we’ve already identified two trillion dollars worth of deficit-reductions over the next decade. We’ve also restored a sense of honesty and transparency to our budget, which is why this one accounts for spending that was hidden or left out under the old rules.
I realize that passing this budget won’t be easy. Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington. I know that the insurance industry won’t like the idea that they’ll have to bid competitively to continue offering Medicare coverage, but that’s how we’ll help preserve and protect Medicare and lower health care costs for American families. I know that banks and big student lenders won’t like the idea that we’re ending their huge taxpayer subsidies, but that’s how we’ll save taxpayers nearly $50 billion and make college more affordable. I know that oil and gas companies won’t like us ending nearly $30 billion in tax breaks, but that’s how we’ll help fund a renewable energy economy that will create new jobs and new industries. In other words, I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this:
So am I.
The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long, but I don’t. I work for the American people. I didn’t come here to do the same thing we’ve been doing or to take small steps forward, I came to provide the sweeping change that this country demanded when it went to the polls in November. That is the change this budget starts to make, and that is the change I’ll be fighting for in the weeks ahead – change that will grow our economy, expand our middle-class, and keep the American Dream alive for all those men and women who have believed in this journey from the day it began.
Thanks for listening.
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WASHINGTON -- Herman Cain's now-famous "9-9-9" tax plan was crafted by a rank-and-file investment adviser working at a Wells Fargo branch in an affluent rural Ohio town with a population of about 6,000 people.
Cain name-checked Richard Lowrie during Tuesday night's Republican debate on economic policy, and his campaign confirmed to HuffPost that Richard Lowrie Jr., a Wells Fargo employee in Pepper Pike, Ohio, outside of Cleveland, was the official adviser to his campaign who hammered out the "9-9-9" plan. The plan calls for creating a new 9 percent federal sales tax on everything consumers buy, while cutting the corporate tax rate to 9 percent and imposing a flat 9 percent income tax on all wages.
Cain said on "Meet the Press" that his program is "revenue-neutral," meaning it will raise exactly the same amount of tax money as the current tax system. By cutting corporate taxes and taxes for the wealthy,the program puts a heavy new tax burden on the poor and the middle class.
It is unusual for a presidential campaign to employ a local investment adviser as an economic policy expert. Major electoral campaigns typically seek out high-profile economists with federal policymaking experience or academic gravitas.
According to Lowrie's LinkedIn profile, his education tops out with a Bachelor of Science in accountancy from Case Western University. He has no formal training in economics, and there is no indication that he has ever worked on public policy. According to that same profile, Lowrie's political experience includes working on the board of advisers for Americans For Prosperity, a hardline conservative outfit founded by the Koch Brothers, until 2008. In 2011, the group ran into trouble for posting fake eviction notices on the doors of Detroit families. Lowrie's LinkedIn profile also says he works on the volunteer advisory panel for the American Conservative Union.
Lowrie was not immediately available for comment.
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In his remarks at The National Mall President Obama said, "For this day, we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s return to the National Mall. In this place, he will stand for all time, among monuments to those who fathered this nation and those who defended it; a black preacher with no official rank or title who somehow gave voice to our deepest dreams and our most lasting ideals, a man who stirred our conscience and thereby helped make our union more perfect." October 16, 2011
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March 7, 2009
Miracles Take Time
By BOB HERBERT
Barack Obama has only been president for six weeks, but there is a surprising amount of ire, anger, even outrage that he hasn’t yet solved the problems of the U.S. economy, that he hasn’t saved us from the increasingly tragic devastation wrought by the clownish ideas of right-wing conservatives and the many long years of radical Republican misrule.
This intense, impatient, often self-righteous, frequently wrongheaded and at times willfully destructive criticism has come in waves, and not just from the right. Mr. Obama is as legitimate a target for criticism as any president. But there is a weird hysterical quality to some of the recent attacks that suggests an underlying fear or barely suppressed rage. It’s a quality that seems not just unhelpful but unhealthy.
Mr. Obama is being hammered — depending on the point of view of the critics — for the continuing collapse of the stock market, for not moving fast enough to revive the suicidal financial industry, for trying to stem the flood tide of home foreclosures, for trying to bring health insurance coverage to some of the millions of Americans who don’t have any, for running up huge budget deficits as he tries to fend off the worst economic emergency since World War II and for not taking time out from all of the above to deal with — get this — earmarks.
Earmarks.
More than 4.4 million jobs have been lost since this monster recession officially got under way in December 2007, and we’ve got people wigging out over earmarks. Folks, get a grip. Some earmarks are good, some are not, but collectively they account for a tiny, tiny portion of the national budget — less than 1 percent.
Freaking out over earmarks is like watching a neighborhood that is being consumed by flames and complaining that there is crabgrass on some of the lawns.
In the midst of the craziness, conservatives are busy trying to blame this epic economic catastrophe — a conflagration of their own making — on the new president. Forget Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and George Herbert Hoover Bush and the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich and all the rest. The right-wingers would have you believe this is Obama’s downturn.
The bear market would no doubt have magically turned around by now, and those failing geniuses at the helm of our flat-lined megacorporations would no doubt be busy manufacturing new profits and putting people back to work — if only Mr. Obama had solved the banking crisis, had lowered taxes on the rich, had refused to consider running up those giant deficits (a difficult thing to do at the same time that you are saving banks and lowering taxes), and had abandoned any inclination that he might have had to reform health care and make it a little easier for ordinary American kids to get a better education.
As the columnist Charles Krauthammer was kind enough to inform us: “The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his ‘big-bang’ agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.”
That’s a more genteel version of the sentiment expressed a couple of weeks ago by the perpetually hysterical Alan Keyes, a Republican who was beaten by Mr. Obama in the Illinois Senate race in 2004. “Obama is a radical communist,” said Mr. Keyes, “and I think it is becoming clear. That is what I told people in Illinois, and now everybody realizes it’s true.”
I don’t know whether President Obama’s ultimate rescue plan for the financial industry will work. He is a thoughtful man running a thoughtful administration and the plan, a staggeringly complex and difficult work in progress, hasn’t been revealed yet.
What I know is that the renegade clowns who ruined this economy, the Republican right in alliance with big business and a fair number of feckless Democrats — all working in opposition to the interests of working families — have no credible basis for waging war against serious efforts to get us out of their mess.
Maybe the markets are down because demand has dried up, because many of the nation’s biggest firms have imploded and because Americans are losing their jobs and their homes by the millions. Maybe a dose of reality is in order, as opposed to the childish desire for yet another stock market bubble.
Maybe the nuns in grammar school were right when they counseled that patience is a virtue. The man has been president for six weeks.
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Herman Cain...King of all House Negroes. ::)
2012 Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain was on the radio show of right-winger Neal Boortz and Cain had a laugh over Boortz's comments regarding slave ancestors. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
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O'Donnell destroys Hermann Cain's 999 Plan
The 411 on 9-9-9: Herman Cain's Deceptive Economic Plan Would Bankrupt The Country
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Iranians charged in U.S. over assassination plot
ReutersBy Basil Katz in New York, James Vicini and Mark Hosenball in Washington |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. authorities broke up an alleged plot to bomb the Israeli and Saudi Arabian embassies in Washington and assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, court documents and a U.S. official said on Tuesday.
The alleged plotters were identified as Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri -- both originally from Iran -- in the criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in New York City.
Arbabsiar, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested in late September. Shakuri is still at large.
The plot was disrupted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration.
U.S. officials said one overarching question is whether elements of the Iranian government were behind the plot. Court documents identified Shakuri as a member of the Quds Force, a branch of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Shakuri approved the plan to try to kill the Saudi ambassador during telephone conversations with Arbabsiar, the complaint said.
In July and August, Arbabsiar paid $100,000 to a DEA informant for the murder of Saudi ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir, court documents said.
Arbabsiar was arrested late last month at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. After his arrest, court papers said, Arbabsiar confessed to authorities.
The men are charged with one count of conspiracy to murder a foreign official, two counts of foreign travel and use of interstate and foreign commerce facilities in the commission of murder for hire and one count each of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism.
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October 9, 2011
Panic of the Plutocrats
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
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Obama’s Jobs Plan Prevents Election-Year Recession in Survey of Economists
By Timothy R. Homan - Sep 28, 2011
President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said.
Economists in the survey are less optimistic than Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has cited estimates for a 1.5 percent boost to gross domestic product. Even so, the program may bolster Obama’s re-election prospects by lowering a jobless rate that has stayed near 9 percent or more since April 2009.
The plan “prevents a contraction of the economy in the first quarter” of next year, said John Herrmann, a senior fixed-income strategist at State Street Global Markets LLC in Boston, who participated in the survey. “It leads to more retention of workers than net new hires.”
Some 13,000 jobs would be created in 2013, bringing the total to 288,000 over two years, according to the survey. Employers in the U.S. added 1.26 million workers in the past 12 months, Labor Department data show.
Obama’s plan, announced on Sept. 8, calls for cutting the payroll taxes paid by workers and small businesses while extending unemployment insurance. It also includes an increase in infrastructure spending and more aid for cash-strapped state governments.
‘What Happens?’
“The important thing to consider is: What happens if we don’t do anything?” said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James & Associates Inc. in St. Petersburg, Florida. He said the program “very well could” forestall a recession in early 2012.
“Most of all, it prevents a serious drag on the economy next year” from current programs expiring, said Brown, who estimates the Obama plan would add 0.5 percent to GDP in 2012.
A reduction in government spending, the end of the payroll- tax holiday and an expiration of extended unemployment benefits would cut GDP by 1.7 percent in 2012, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli in New York. Instead, the Obama proposal makes up for that potential loss and may add a net 0.1 percent to the economy, he estimates.
State Aid
Tax cuts account for more than half the dollar value of the Obama plan, which also includes $105 billion in spending for school modernization, transportation projects and rehabilitation of vacant properties, according to a White House fact sheet. The proposal includes $35 billion in direct aid to state and local governments to stem dismissals of educators and emergency personnel.
“Some of this is just extending support that was already in place,” said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York. “The actual jobs programs themselves, I don’t think that they’re a game-changer.”
She estimates the proposal will add 200,000 new workers, while retaining about 300,000 jobs that might otherwise be lost.
Republican lawmakers in Congress have expressed opposition to parts of the White House legislation. House leaders object to Obama’s plan to cut payroll taxes, saying it would lead to an overly large boost in taxes when the temporary break ended.
Tax Burden
In a memo to House Republicans on Sept. 16, House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and other leaders detailed several criticisms of the payroll-tax idea. The lawmakers said an added tax burden would result when, under the president’s plan, an extension and expansion of a “holiday” on such taxes for employees and employers would expire in 2013.
Herrmann agreed. “We’re setting ourselves up for a big end to the sugar high in the first half of 2013,” he said.
A majority of Americans don’t believe Obama’s jobs proposal will help lower the unemployment rate, according to a Bloomberg National Poll conducted Sept. 9-12 by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, Iowa.
“It’s not really going to have anything more than a marginal impact,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “It’s just maintaining the status quo: extending the payroll-tax cuts and unemployment benefits. The bulk of the money is going to go to firms that would’ve hired anyway.”
Stanley estimated the program would increase payrolls by 50,000 and add 0.25 percent to GDP next year.
Fiscal Policy
While the White House hasn’t given an estimate of how the proposal would affect GDP, Geithner cited the plan Sept. 24 in an address at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Without additional near-term support, “fiscal policy in the U.S. will be overly contractionary and the U.S. economy will likely grow below its potential in 2012,” Geithner said.
He said private economists estimate the proposal could increase real economic growth next year by around “one and a half percentage points and create more than 1 million jobs at a critical moment in the recovery.”
In the Bloomberg survey, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimated the plan would add 1.5 percent to the economy, while Macroeconomic Advisers LLC said 1.3 percent and UniCredit Research, up to 2 percent.
The U.S. economy faces “significant downside risks,” the Federal Reserve said in a statement on Sept. 21 as it announced a plan to shift $400 billion of its Treasury securities holdings into longer-term debt to bring down borrowing costs.
The world’s largest economy grew 3 percent last year before slowing to a 0.4 percent annual pace in the first three months of 2011, followed by 1 percent in the second quarter, according to Commerce Department figures.
The economy will expand 2.2 percent next year, according to a separate Bloomberg survey of economists conducted Sept. 2 to Sept. 7. The same survey said the unemployment rate would average 8.8 percent in 2012.
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Table of Forecasts
============================================================
GDP GDP Jobs (thous) UR Change
2012 2013 2012 2013 2012 2013
============================================================
Median 0.6 0.2 275 13 -0.2 -0.1
Count 34 30 28 28 28 26
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Action Eco 0.0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0
AIG 0.7 0.1 250 100 -0.5 -0.2
Aletti 0.4 0.0 n/a n/a n/a n/a
Anderson Eco 0.5 0.5 500 500 -0.5 n/a
BBVA 1.3 0.9 900 900 -0.8 -0.7
BNP Paribas 0.5 -0.3 500 -300 n/a n/a
Clearview Eco 0.8 0.8 750 750 -0.5 -0.5
DB 0.0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0
Econoclast 0.0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0
Euler Hermes 0.0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0
Fact & Opinion 0.5 0.5 500 1,000 -0.1 -0.3
Faifield n/a n/a 300 200 -0.2 -0.3
Fannie Mae 0.7 0.0 500 0 0.0 0.0
Goldberg Inv n/a n/a 150 100 n/a n/a
Goldman Sachs 1.5 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a
Guerrilla 1.5 -1.0 200 0 -0.2 n/a
H. Johnson 0.2 0.3 25 45 0.2 0.2
JP Morgan 0.1 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a
MacroEco 1.3 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a
MacroFin 1.5 1.5 1,000 1,000 -1.0 -1.0
Manulife 1.5 0.5 2,000 700 -1.0 -0.3
Mizuho 0.2 0.0 n/a n/a n/a n/a
Moodys 2.0 1.0 1,000 0 -1.0 -0.4
NFIB 0.0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0.0
Niagara 1.0 0.1 125 0 0.0 0.0
Nord 0.4 0.5 n/a n/a -0.2 -0.4
Parsanec 0.5 0.5 1,100 700 -1.0 -0.5
Pierpont 0.3 0.0 50 0 -0.2 0.0
Raymond James 0.3 0.2 350 25 -0.5 -0.1
SPSU 0.9 0.1 110 0 0.0 0.0
SocGen 1.7 0.8 1 1 -0.4 -0.2
State Street 1.2 -1.0 340 -370 -0.2 0.3
Standard Charter 1.0 0.5 600 300 0.0 0.0
Unicredit 2.0 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a
W Hummer 0.2 0.2 150 200 -0.1 -0.1
J Forest 1.0 1.0 n/a n/a -1.0 -0.5
============================================================
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N.J. Gov. Chris Christie can't douse buzz over possible presidential bid
Michael Finnegan | McClatchy-Tribune News Service
September 28, 2011 06:31:14 AM
LOS ANGELES — With speculation swirling anew about whether he intends to join the field of Republican presidential candidates, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie referred a crowd in California on Tuesday to a string of his previous comments on the matter, strung together in a Web video.
The video, on the Politico website, represented his "answers back to back to back together on the question of running for the presidency," he told hundreds of Republicans gathered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley - several of whom asked him to run.
Among the responses on the video: "I'm 100 percent certain I'm not going to run," "I don't want to run" and "I don't feel ready in my heart to be president."
Despite the demurrals, the latest surge of Christie-mania - particularly among some party donors anxious for new options - has only raised Christie's national profile and enhanced his draw on the campaign money circuit. He's scooping up checks for the New Jersey Republican Party this week at events in Beverly Hills, Santa Ana, Silicon Valley, Missouri and Louisiana.
So it came as little surprise that Christie added another dash of fuel to the talk by taking a shot at Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a leading Republican contender for president.
Responding to a question from the audience, Christie said he opposed laws that allow the children of illegal immigrants to pay lower in-state tuition at public colleges. Perry, who has taken heat from rivals for approving such a law in Texas, has said critics of the policy have no heart.
"From my perspective, that is not a heartless position," Christie said. "That is a common-sense position."
In a half-hour speech paying tribute to Reagan, Christie also took swipes at President Barack Obama, saying the Democratic incumbent was trying to "divide our nation to achieve re-election."
"This is not a leadership style," Christie said, referring to the president's proposal to raise taxes on high-income earners. "This is a re-election strategy - telling those who are scared and struggling that the only way their lives can get better is to diminish the success of others ... insisting that we must tax and take and demonize those who have already achieved the American dream."
"That may turn out to be a good re-election strategy, Mr. President, but it is a demoralizing message for America," Christie said. The crowd burst into applause.
While saying Obama lacked "the courage to lead," Christie was more mild in his implied criticism of fellow Republicans who control the House of Representatives.
"We watch a Congress at war with itself because they're unwilling to leave campaign-style politics at the Capitol's door," he said. "The result is a debt ceiling limitation debate that made our democracy appear as if we could no longer effectively govern ourselves."
Rumors on Christie's potential presidential run were stoked earlier in the day in a National Review report that Thomas Kean, a former New Jersey governor, said Christie was giving a lot of thought to appeals "from major figures around the country."
"I think the odds are a lot better now than they were a couple weeks ago," Kean said.
During questioning, the subject of a run was raised by three people in the Reagan Library audience. One woman got a standing ovation after telling him, "I really implore you as a citizen of this country to please, sir, reconsider."
"Your country needs you," she said.
Christie joked that only "a crazy egomaniac" would see such appeals as a burden.
"It's extraordinarily flattering," he said. "But by the same token, that heartfelt message you gave me is also not a reason for me to do it. That reason has to reside inside me."
Michael Finnegan writes for the Los Angeles Times. Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com.
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5 reasons Chris "Krispy Creme" Christie can't win the GOP nomination
Many Republicans are practically begging Christie to run for president. But would they feel differently if he actually jumped into the race?
Published September 30, 2011
(http://1.images.theweek.com/img/dir_0066/33372_article_main/new-jersey-gov-chris-christie-may-be-eyeing-a-run-for-the-republican-presidential-ticket-but.jpg)
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be eyeing a run for the Republican presidential ticket, but critics say his stance on immigration and gun control will hold him back. Photo: Robert Sciarrino/Star Ledger/Corbis
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has said over and over again that he isn't running for president in 2012 — a line he repeated once again just this week. Still, Republicans dissatisfied with their options are turning up the pressure on Christie to jump into the race. The GOP base has gotten its hopes up before — over Donald Trump, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and, most recently, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — only to promptly find fault with each new candidate (or, in Trump's case, would-be candidate) and resume the search for a savior. Here are five reasons Christie would fare no better:
1. Christie is no hardliner on immigration
"The biggest chink in Rick Perry's armor so far has been his record on illegal immigration," says Dan Amira at New York. It's a problem for Christie, too. He has said being in the country without proper papers is an "administrative matter," not a crime. And between 2002 and 2007, as U.S. attorney in New Jersey, he prosecuted so few illegal immigration cases that then-CNN host Lou Dobbs said Christie was "an utter embarrassment."
2. He has a soft spot for gun control
In 1995, when Christie was running for state general assembly, he distributed flyers calling opponents "radical" and "crazy" for supporting repeal of the federal assault-weapons ban, says Daniel Foster at National Review. And he still fights any move to let people carry concealed weapons in New Jersey. In 2009, he told conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity that New Jersey had a "handgun problem," and that he supports some of the gun-control measures the state uses to contain it. "Bad idea," Hannity said.
3. Hardliners won't like his stand on the "ground zero mosque"
Last year, Christie accused politicians on the Left and Right of using the proposed "ground zero mosque" as a "political football," says Thomas Fitzgerald at The Philadelphia Inquirer, suggesting he thought conservatives were exploiting anti-Muslim emotions stirred up by the 9/11 attacks. This summer, he faced another backlash after appointing Sohail Mohammed, a Muslim lawyer, to be a New Jersey Superior Court judge. Critics were angry that he would appoint a lawyer who had defended a cleric accused of terrorist sympathies. Christie responded: "I'm tired of dealing with the crazies."
4. He's got an uncomfortable Madoff connection
In his days as a lobbyist, Christie once fought for the rights of Wall Street. On his client list: The Securities Industry Association, then led by none other than Bernie Madoff. That, says Abe Sauer at The Awl, is the kind of thing "that's easy to understand no matter who you are, involves a universally despised villain who has come to represent all the illegality of the 2008 market collapse, and it would be devastating to Christie in much-needed Florida" — a critical presidential swing state where many Madoff victims lived.
5. A possible clincher: He believes people are causing climate change
Perry delights the Right by saying that climate change is "phony," says James Oliphant at the Los Angeles Times. Christie says 90 percent of the world's scientists have concluded that the climate is changing and humans are playing a role, so "it's time to defer to the experts." If Republican voters are looking to nominate a hardcore conservative, this is pretty solid proof that Christie "does not fit the mold."
Bonus:
6. Dude is morbidly obese. I mean, c'mon! His lack of willpower is sickening! >:(
(http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSP3Z7rwUlHbwm4GrgVleVoZgBzclDAu8byRcOOx8RdvrcTEhsW_Bmw82WHhA)
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The Slogan is "Yes WE Can" Not "Yes HE Can"
(http://www.winningprogressive.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/itbegins.jpg)
A significant challenge facing the Obama Administration as it gears up for the 2012 re-election campaign is that the President is not positively defined in the minds of many voters. A look at the entire record of President Obama shows that he has been a pragmatist who, while far from perfect, has led our country through daunting times and achieved significant progressive victories in the face of intractable opposition. Yet far too many progressives see him as a compromiser always ready to sell out progressive values, while many moderates see our President as a failure who has achieved very little. Neither of these views is accurate and, consistent with the slogan “Yes We Can,” we must all pitch in to help get out to the public an accurate portrayal of the Obama Administration, its successes, and the areas where improvement is needed.
Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller recently addressed the ill-defined perception of the Obama Presidency in a recent column entitled “Fill in the Blanks.” In it, Mr. Keller identifies four reasons why, in many people’s eyes, the President has been defined by the circumstances around him rather than defining himself:
the intractable legacy bequeathed by George W. Bush; Republican resistance amounting to sabotage; the unrealistic expectations and inevitable disenchantment of some of the president’s supporters; and, to be sure, the man himself.
Each of these points has merit. President Bush handed President Obama the keys to a car that was firmly in the ditch and, after President Obama got the car out of the ditch, the GOP has done everything they can to push it back in. And there can be no dispute that the Obama Presidency has been far from perfect from a progressive perspective. For example, President Obama’s record on civil liberties has been highly problematic, some of his education policies troubling, the dive on the ozone air quality standards inexcusable, and the decision to focus on deficits over jobs earlier this year a mistake.
But Keller’s third point – “unrealistic expectations and inevitable disenchantment of some of the president’s supporters” - gets at a key issue – the failure of progressives to help define our President in a fair but positive light. While we have noted a number of disappointments above, the Obama Administration has also moved the progressive agenda forward more than any President since Johnson. Under President Obama’s leadership, we have passed historic health care reform legislation, repealed DADT and taken numerous other significant steps towards LGBT equality, enacted air quality standards that will save tens of thousands of lives, made significant investments in energy efficiency and renewable energies, passed significant reforms of the financial and credit card industries, created a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, kept the economy from sinking into a depression, held off radical Republicans who are hell-bent on destroying government as a tool for social good, and helped unseat tyrants in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. These are progressive victories that we should all be shouting from the rooftops about.
Yet instead of focusing our efforts on highlighting these successes and attacking the conservative critics of those successes, far too many progressive activists focus almost all of their energy on attacking the President for compromises and disappointments. Some even go so far as to make the laughable claim that President Obama is no better than Bush.
The problem with this approach is that it means that voters – most of whom spend very little time thinking about politics – virtually never hear a positive message about President Obama or Democrats. The simple fact is that the President cannot do the work of defining his Administration alone given the intractable opposition from a well-funded and organized conservative movement and a media that largely echoes right-wing talking points or engages in “he-said, she-said” reporting that does little to educate its viewers and readers. That is why we progressives must be involved in helping to highlight the progressive successes of President Obama, challenging conservative attacks, and offering criticism of the Administration that is constructive rather than destructive.
The need for progressives to be actively involved in defining, supporting, and constructively critiquing President Obama has always been at the heart of Obama’s campaigns and Presidency. It is why the campaign slogan in 2008 was “Yes We Can” rather than “Yes He Can.” As Obama explained in his Presidential campaign announcement speech back in 2007:
That is why this campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us – it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice – to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.
And it is a theme that President Obama returned to in his fiery speech to the Congressional Black Caucus last weekend:
The future rewards those who press on. (Applause.) With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. (Applause.) I’m going to press on for equality. (Applause.) I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. (Applause.) I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on. (Applause.)
I expect all of you to march with me and press on. (Applause.) Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. (Applause.) Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do, CBC. (Applause.)
None of this means blind adherence to everything that President Obama does. A key part to advancing the progressive agenda is to constructively push back when the President or congressional Democrats make the wrong decision and to build the political pressure necessary to get them to do the right thing. But advancing the progressive agenda also requires being able to distinguish between one’s friends and enemies. And the record today is clear that the GOP is the political enemy of our progressive goals, while President Obama, for all of his faults, is the best friend that progressives have had in the White House in a long time. Let’s act accordingly and make sure that as we enter the 2012 election season, our rallying cry is still “Yes We Can.”
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September 30, 2011
Anwar al-Awlaki, American-Born Qaeda Leader, Is Killed in Yemen
By LAURA KASINOF and ALAN COWELL
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/30/world/31awlaqi-cnd-inline1/31awlaqi-cnd-inline1-hpMedium.jpg)
SANA, Yemen — In a significant and dramatic strike in the campaign against Al Qaeda, the Defense Ministry here said American-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, a leading figure in the group’s outpost in Yemen, was killed on Friday morning.
In Washington a senior Obama administration official confirmed that Mr. Awlaki was dead. But the circumstances surrounding the killing remained unclear.
It was not immediately known whether Yemeni forces carried out the attack or if American intelligence forces, which have been pursuing Mr. Awlaki for months, were involved in the operation.
A Defense Ministry statement said that a number of Mr. Awlaki’s bodyguards also were killed.
A high-ranking Yemeni security official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Mr. Awlaki was killed while traveling between Marib and al-Jawf provinces in northern Yemen — areas known for having an Al Qaeda presence, where there is very little central government control. The official did not say how he was killed.
Mr. Awlaki’s name has been associated with many plots in the United States and elsewhere after individuals planning violence were drawn to his engaging lectures broadcast over the Internet.
Those individuals included Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged in the 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, Texas in which 13 people were killed; the young men who planned to attack Fort Dix, N.J.; and a 21-year-old British student who told the police she stabbed a member of Parliament after watching 100 hours of Awlaki videos.
Mr. Awlaki’s death could well be used by beleaguered President Ali Abdullah Saleh to reinforce his refusal to leave office in face of months of protests against his 30-year rule, arguing in part that he is a critical American ally in the war against Al Qaeda.
Earlier this year, the American military renewed its campaign of airstrikes in Yemen, using drone aircraft and fighter jets to attack Qaeda militants. One of the attacks was aimed at Mr. Awlaki, one of the most prominent members of the affiliate group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Mr. Awlaki’s death seemed likely to be welcomed in the United States, where Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said in July that two of his top goals were to remove Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s new leader after the death of Osama Bin Laden in May, and Mr. Awlaki.
Word of the killing came after months of sustained American efforts to seriously weaken the terrorist group.
In August an American official said a drone strike killed Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who in the last year had taken over as Al Qaeda’s top operational planner after Bin Laden was killed.
In July, Mr. Panetta said during a visit to Kabul, Afghanistan that the United States was “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda” and that the American focus had narrowed to capturing or killing 10 to 20 crucial leaders of the terrorist group in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
A month earlier, an American official said the Central Intelligence Agency was building a secret air base in the Middle East to serve as a launching pad for strikes in Yemen using armed drones.
The construction of the base was seen at the time a sign that the Obama administration was planning an extended war in Yemen against an affiliate of Al Qaeda, called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has repeatedly tried to carry out terrorist plots against the United States.
The American official would not disclose the country where the C.I.A. base was being built, but the official said that it would most likely be completed by the end of the year.
Last year, the leader of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen sought to install Mr. Awlaki as the leader of the group in Yemen, which apparently thought Mr. Awlaki’s knowledge of the United States and his status as an Internet celebrity might help the group’s operations and fund-raising efforts.
Mr. Awlaki was accused of having connections to the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a former engineering student at University College London, who is awaiting trial in the United States for his attempt to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it landed in Detroit on Dec. 25, 2009. The bomb did not explode.
Mr. Awlaki has been linked to numerous plots against the United States, including the botched underwear bombing. He has taken to the Internet with stirring battle cries directed at young American Muslims. “Many of your scholars,” Mr. Awlaki warned last year, are “standing between you and your duty of jihad.”
Major Hasan, the American Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood had exchanged e-mails with Mr. Awlaki beforehand. Mr. Awlaki’s lectures and sermons have been linked to more than a dozen terrorist investigations in the United States, Britain and Canada. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in May, 2010, cited Mr. Awlaki as an inspiration.
Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, Yemen, and Alan Cowell from London. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
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September 17, 2011
Israel: Adrift at Sea Alone
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I’VE never been more worried about Israel’s future. The crumbling of key pillars of Israel’s security — the peace with Egypt, the stability of Syria and the friendship of Turkey and Jordan — coupled with the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent government in Israel’s history have put Israel in a very dangerous situation.
This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.
Israel is not responsible for the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt or for the uprising in Syria or for Turkey’s decision to seek regional leadership by cynically trashing Israel or for the fracturing of the Palestinian national movement between the West Bank and Gaza. What Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, is responsible for is failing to put forth a strategy to respond to all of these in a way that protects Israel’s long-term interests.
O.K., Mr. Netanyahu has a strategy: Do nothing vis-à-vis the Palestinians or Turkey that will require him to go against his base, compromise his ideology or antagonize his key coalition partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an extreme right-winger. Then, call on the U.S. to stop Iran’s nuclear program and help Israel out of every pickle, but make sure that President Obama can’t ask for anything in return — like halting Israeli settlements — by mobilizing Republicans in Congress to box in Obama and by encouraging Jewish leaders to suggest that Obama is hostile to Israel and is losing the Jewish vote. And meanwhile, get the Israel lobby to hammer anyone in the administration or Congress who says aloud that maybe Bibi has made some mistakes, not just Barack. There, who says Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t have a strategy?
“The years-long diplomatic effort to integrate Israel as an accepted neighbor in the Middle East collapsed this week, with the expulsion of the Israeli ambassadors from Ankara and Cairo, and the rushed evacuation of the embassy staff from Amman,” wrote Haaretz newspaper’s Aluf Benn. “The region is spewing out the Jewish state, which is increasingly shutting itself off behind fortified walls, under a leadership that refuses any change, movement or reform ... Netanyahu demonstrated utter passivity in the face of the dramatic changes in the region, and allowed his rivals to seize the initiative and set the agenda.”
What could Israel have done? The Palestinian Authority, which has made concrete strides in the past five years at building the institutions and security forces of a state in the West Bank — making life there quieter than ever for Israel — finally said to itself: “Our state-building has not prompted Israel to halt settlements or engage in steps to separate, so all we’re doing is sustaining Israel’s occupation. Let’s go to the U.N., get recognized as a state within the 1967 borders and fight Israel that way.” Once this was clear, Israel should have either put out its own peace plan or tried to shape the U.N. diplomacy with its own resolution that reaffirmed the right of both the Palestinian and the Jewish people to a state in historic Palestine and reignited negotiations.
Mr. Netanyahu did neither. Now the U.S. is scrambling to defuse the crisis, so the U.S. does not have to cast a U.N. veto on a Palestinian state, which could be disastrous in an Arab world increasingly moving toward more popular self-rule.
On Turkey, the Obama team and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers worked tirelessly these last two months to resolve the crisis stemming from the killing by Israeli commandos of Turkish civilians in the May 2010 Turkish aid flotilla that recklessly tried to land in Gaza. Turkey was demanding an apology. According to an exhaustive article about the talks by the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea of the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, the two sides agreed that Israel would apologize only for “operational mistakes” and the Turks would agree to not raise legal claims. Bibi then undercut his own lawyers and rejected the deal, out of national pride and fear that Mr. Lieberman would use it against him. So Turkey threw out the Israeli ambassador.
As for Egypt, stability has left the building there and any new Egyptian government is going to be subjected to more populist pressures on Israel. Some of this is unavoidable, but why not have a strategy to minimize it by Israel putting a real peace map on the table?
I have great sympathy for Israel’s strategic dilemma and no illusions about its enemies. But Israel today is giving its friends — and President Obama’s one of them — nothing to defend it with. Israel can fight with everyone or it can choose not to surrender but to blunt these trends with a peace overture that fair-minded people would recognize as serious, and thereby reduce its isolation.
Unfortunately, Israel today does not have a leader or a cabinet for such subtle diplomacy. One can only hope that the Israeli people will recognize this before this government plunges Israel into deeper global isolation and drags America along with it.
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Get his back
Middle-class families shouldn't have to pay a higher tax rate than millionaires and billionaires.
So President Obama has proposed the "Buffett Rule," which would require the wealthiest Americans to pay a tax rate at least as high as the middle class. Republicans are already calling this "class warfare," and they will fight this plan with everything they have.
But it's just common sense. Tell the President you've got his back on this one.
Warren Buffett doesn't think his secretary should pay a higher percentage of income in taxes than he does, and most Americans agree. Tell Congress it's time for millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share!
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Fox News host Bill O'Reilly threatened to stop doing his job if President Obama raises the top marginal tax rate on the richest Americans. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur gives his take.
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Dow gains nearly 240 on good news on banks, GM
Thursday March 12, 4:44 pm ET
By Madlen Read, AP Business Writer
Dow gains nearly 240 on day of good news about banks, General Motors and retailers
NEW YORK (AP) -- Investors have been clamoring for months for a bit of good news. On Thursday, they got a load of it. The Dow Jones industrials shot up 240 points, bringing its gains over the past three days to 622 points. It was the index's biggest three-day jump since last November.
This week's rally got an extra dose of adrenalin after an accounting board told Congress Thursday it may recommend a let-up in accounting rules for troubled banks in three weeks.
Hope that financial institutions might finally get relief in how they value their bad assets spurred a flurry of buying on Wall Street, which accelerated when Bank of America Corp.'s CEO told reporters his bank was profitable in January and February. Citigroup Inc. triggered this week's rally Tuesday with similar remarks.
"We might find that the banks are not as bad, or not bad at all, if these assets are marked differently," said Doreen Mogavero, president of the New York floor brokerage Mogavero, Lee & Co.
Stocks also got a boost as retail sales figures came in better than anticipated, General Electric Co. got its credit rating cut by less than expected and General Motors Corp. said it will not need a $2 billion loan it previously requested from the government.
"There's a lot of money on the sidelines, and a lot of people who've been waiting for the turn to come," Mogavero said.
According to preliminary calculations, the Dow rose 239.66, or 3.5 percent, to 7,170.06. The Standard & Poor's 500 index climbed 29.38, or 4.1 percent, to 750.74. The Nasdaq composite index gained 54.46, or 4 percent, to 1,426.10.
After a modest decline Monday and three days of buying, the Dow is up 8.2 percent so far for the week. The S&P 500 index is up 9.9 percent and the Nasdaq is up 10.2 percent.
Stocks Power to Close, S&P 500 Up 4 Percent
Posted By: Cindy Perman | Writer
CNBC.com
| 12 Mar 2009 | 04:02 PM ET
Stocks powered into the market close Thursday, completing a strong rally that took the major indexes up more than 3 percent and nearly 8 percent for the week.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained nearly 240 points, or 3.3 percent, led by bank and pharma stocks as well as General Electric. The Standard & Poor's 500 jumped more than 4 percent to 750, while the Nasdaq tech gauge gained 4 percent.
The surge marked the third straight gain for the Dow, after a tiny gain on Wednesday and a nearly 6-percent burst on Wednesday, the best rally in more than three months. Stocks have been getting pounded this year, and this week fulfilled hopes for a bear rally long in coming even as the averages remain 18 percent lower for 2009.
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Stock Answer
Quit blaming the market's collapse on Obama.
Jonathan Chait, The New Republic Published: March 13 2009
The one conservative talking point that has gotten the most traction since Barack Obama won the election is that he's killing the stock market with his big-government agenda. Conservatives pundits started saying this in November, and mainstream news implies it constantly. "Stocks are down almost 19 percent since the Obama administration took office," reported ABC News recently. MSNBC has been endlessly featuring a graph of the stock market's decline since Obama took office. While Obama's economic policies have gotten plenty of things wrong, the idea that they can be judged by the stock market is unbelievably fatuous.
To understand this ubiquitous notion, let us start at the bottom of the conservative intellectual food chain and work our way up. The crudest version of the Obama Bear Market hypothesis is put forward by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fred Barnes. Their favorite data point is that the market tanked at several key moments: the day after the 2008 presidential election, the day of Obama's inauguration, and the day he signed the economic stimulus bill. Clearly the markets panicked in reaction to Obama's incipient big-government, wealth-confiscating agenda, right?
Sure, unless you realize that those events just might have been priced into the market already. Obama, in case you forgot, was considered a lock before Election Day. (On election eve, Intrade had given Obama a 92 percent chance of winning.) Likewise, the vote that made the stimulus bill a fait accompli took place several days before the bill's signing. The real market-driving news came even earlier, when Obama unveiled his plan. Contemporaneous reports on the market reaction-The New York Times, December 9: "WALL STREET SURGES ON STIMULUS HOPES"-dug up little evidence of fears about socialism.
You may not believe me that pundits are citing the market's drop on January 20 as an indictment of Obama. It's true! "The Dow fell 332.13 points on inauguration day," noted Barnes, holding this up as evidence that "The market's view is that an Obamanomics-driven economy looks grim." I'm trying to figure out the operating theory here. One possibility is that, before January 20, investors thought Obama would get cold feet, or that maybe President Bush would surround the White House with tanks and stay forever. Alternatively, the markets did know Obama would assume the presidency that day, but got really depressed when it actually happened. Neither of these possibilities speak well of the stock market as a rational gauge of the country's economic future.
It is true, of course, that stocks have fallen sharply since Obama won the election. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 25 percent over the first two months of the year. "The dismaying message here," fretted the oh-so-earnest Journal editors, "is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem."
Well, this is more persuasive than the "Oh my God, some long-anticipated event has finally happened so I'm selling my stocks" hypothesis. But it still lacks some key details. Such as: maybe some other economic events triggered the sell-off? No way, continues the Journal:
So what has happened in the last two months? The economy has received no great new outside shock. . . . What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama's agenda and his approach to governance.
Huh? First of all, Obama's agenda was unveiled well before the election. Second, there have been constant new economic shocks, from the massive downward revision of fourth quarter (pre-Obama) GDP to the collapse of economies across the world.
Indeed, American stocks are merely suffering the same drop as stocks in countries not subject to Obama's socialist agenda. While the Dow did fall by 25 percent over the first two months of 2009, the Global Dow fell by 26 percent. If Obama's agenda was the problem, then you'd think U.S. stocks would fall further and faster.
The larger fallacy here is to assume that the stock market is a proxy for the entire economy. Many people realize that the stock market is an imperfect gauge. But it's not just an imperfect gauge of the economy-it doesn't even attempt to measure the economy. Stock prices represent the market's guess at the profitability of corporations. While that's related to the health of the overall economy, it's not the same thing, and sometimes the two diverge sharply. During the Bush administration, for instance, corporate profits soared while wages for most families flatlined.
One clear instance where Obama hurt the stock market came when Tim Geithner announced the administration's financial rescue plan. Stocks dropped that day. Was this a fair indictment of the plan? Or a reaction to the possibility that the government might wipe out shareholders? In other words, was the market drop a signal that Obama's plan was bad for the economy as a whole or just bad for bank stocks? The two propositions mean very different things.
This, alas, is the very distinction the stock-mongers on television fail to grasp. The stock market has become the media's real-time economic report card. Economic statistics that actually measure broader material well-being come out once a month, some once a year, others once a decade. The stock market updates instantly, making it irresistible.
Cable channels, especially CNBC, have come to represent the stock-centric view of the world. Stock televangelist Jim Cramer, who has assailed Obama for "wealth destruction," perfectly embodies the narrowness of this view. "Stocks, along with housing, are our principal forms of wealth in this country," he asserts. In fact, according to University of Wisconsin economist John Karl Scholz, the richest 10 percent has more than half its net worth in stocks, but those in the middle have less than 4 percent of their net worth in equities.
As a case in point, Cramer assailed Obama for "destroying the profits in health care companies (one of the few areas still robust in the economy)." The United States has the most expensive, least efficient health care sector in the advanced world. The flipside of that inefficiency is massive profits in the health care sector. Anything that reduces waste necessarily reduces that profit. Cramer naturally sees this as a disaster. But why should the rest of us care?
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor of The New Republic.