UFC on FX 1: Main Event Weigh-in Videos

[johnnynoname]

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

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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. 

The Nominee Will Be Romney and the GOP Will Like Him
by Eli Lehrer


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.

[johnnynoname]

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.



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):
[ Invalid YouTube link ]

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.

[johnnynoname]

    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.

[haider]

 

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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. 

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

O'Donnell destroys Hermann Cain's 999 Plan

The 411 on 9-9-9: Herman Cain's Deceptive Economic Plan Would Bankrupt The Country

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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.

============================================================
                        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
------------------------------------------------------------
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
============================================================

[johnnynoname]

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.

[johnnynoname]

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


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! 

[johnnynoname]

The Slogan is "Yes WE Can" Not "Yes HE Can"



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.”

[johnnynoname]

September 30, 2011
Anwar al-Awlaki, American-Born Qaeda Leader, Is Killed in Yemen
By LAURA KASINOF and ALAN COWELL



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.