You have to hope there's a grand play at work in the economic recovery plan. Josh Marshall notes:

And yet the desire to get a substantial number of Republicans to vote for the bill appears to be having a big impact on the proposal's size and shape. Quite likely, leaving it too small and too tilted toward tax cuts to get the job done.

Paul Krugman and others have shown the current plans for the stimulus are not keeping up with the growing crater left by Republican policies. As Krugman shows, economic output is down by 8% but plans will only cover 3%.

We're hemorrhaging 1/2 million jobs per month now - but the Republicans are obsessed with defending their ideology and the Democrats are obsessing with pleasing Republicans.

Hopefully, that's not all there is to the plan. It's clear that more of us need to advocate for a larger stimulus.

Crossposted at my other blog.

Hi there, come on in.  On second thought, let's take a moment or two to appreciate that gorgeous moon up there.  When it's full like this, I swear I can see forever in it's brillance.  The sun is so magnificent, yet so one-note ... the moon is like the gifted sibling, warming up in the corner.  Starting out as a sliver - barely even slicing through the darkness.  Slowly, quietly, as time wanders along it begins to find itself.  And then it shines.  Proudly, fully aware of the fact that for that one evening nothing can deflect attention from it's glory.  Not even the stars; they themselves seem spellbound.  Okay, okay, I know.  It is a bit chilly, so let's head inside.

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(Your Tax Dollars at Work in the Middle East)

As the civilian death toll in Gaza rises and Israel snubs international calls for a ceasefire, worldwide anger has sparked large protests as well as renewed calls for a global boycott against Israel. In London, at least 20,000 and as many as 100,000 people demonstrated Saturday outside the Israeli embassy while leading British Jews issued a call on Israel to halt alled the "horror" in Gaza. Some 30,000 demonstrators marched in Paris against Israel's war on Gaza while another 90,000 joined protests in other cities throughout France (AFP). Demonstrations in other European cities, including Dublin, Berlin, Athens, Rome, and Amsterdam also drew tens of thousands (DW). In the United States, large demonstrations against the Israeli slaughter of innocent civilians in Gaza were staged on Saturday in cities including New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Israeli peace activists protested also in Tel Aviv, a signal to the world that opposition to the killing in Gaza is widespread even within Israel (Haaretz, Al-Jazeera). Friday and Saturday also saw large protests against Israeli actions in cities across the Muslim world including Algiers, Alexandria, Ramallah, Baghdad, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur (AFP). Meanwhile, there are renewed calls for a global boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel from groups such as the Global BDS Movement, while Canadian journalist Naomi Klein writes: "The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa." Some are also calling for a boycott of US exports for its continuing support of Israel.

Has the world finally had enough? 

Slide show: Gaza Massacre by Sabbah.

Photo gallery: Child victims of Gaza violence.

Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com

The US government -- as a condition of extending loans to GM -- is prohibiting GM workers from striking. The US government has a financial mess on its hands. It's abusive, as a condition for a bailout, for workers to be barred from striking.

Comments at truthout.

Not all strikes or slowdowns are illegal. Non-GM workers are not (yet) expressly barred from taking to the streets, striking in support of the GM workers, and refusing to cooperate reckless US Congress which has turned a blind eye to the economy.

American workers have the leverage. Without economic activity, there is no revenue, and the US government would not have the financial leverage to deny other rights.

 

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As the Bush gang moves out and the new administration moves in, there is the pressing issue of how now do we categorize the Bush dogs of the Democratic party?  There is always the time-tested guideline "if it looks like, smells like, tastes like, then..." And is this the guideline to judge the President-Elect? Clearly his paramount concern is to occupy the center-right, regardless of the necessary policies this country in crisis requires. This is pretty much the same political territory that our current crop of Bush dogs occupy and certainly many of the certifiable worst, right-leaning, Bush-excusing in Congress and elsewhere have been recruited for his DLC-heavy right-leaning administration. Even on the matter of the stimulus, Obama and his economic team are on the right of the Democratic party with their new trickle-down stimulus proposals. His latest appointments include  Sanjay Gupta who has proved his mainstream bonafides by his gratuitous and specious attacks on Michael Moore's "Sicko". John Brennan, the outspoken torture apologist has made his way back into the administration and Admiral Blair has apparently a sordid history of defending and promoting the blood-soaked hands of the Indonesian military in its massacring the East Timorese (described here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/0110/1231515470074.html  as follows)

"Congress cut off ties to the Indonesian military in 1999 after paramilitary groups backed by the military and supported by the US had killed more than 200,000 people in East Timor over a period of 20 years. Admiral Blair, who was US Pacific Command chief, told the Senate armed services committee in March 1999 that the Indonesian military had played "a difficult but generally positive role" in East Timor.

The following month, he met Gen Wiranto, the Indonesian military commander, offering his support for a restoration of US relations while groups backed by the general rampaged through East Timor, attacking a church and executing dozens of civilians."

Now we also hear from the Black Agenda report about Obama's basketball partner who is to become Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Please read what they say about this truly execrable choice:

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=944&Itemid=1

Let me quote the beginning of the article:

Did Barack Obama Just Appoint An Underqualified Stooge and Privatizer Secretary of  Education?

 

"The short answer seems to be "yes."  Before being appointed CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan never saw the inside of a classroom as a teacher.  This is probably a good thing, since Duncan does not possess the academic qualifications to be even a substitute teacher.  Worse still, Duncan's idea of improving inner-city schools in Chicago is handing them over to corporate-run charter schools or converting them to military academies.  This, says longtime Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt, is not the change we voted for"

It seems to me using the guidelines above that indeed Obama has become for the purposes of being Chief Executive a Bush dog.

I hope the Obamas will use Camp David a lot, make it their regular weekend getaway, take kids and friends and grandma and go to the woods, away from the ceremonial fishbowl of the White House.

I stopped in at Mother Jones and perused the Jan/Feb issue which means it was probably written in December. MJ was always a place I could go to at the library before I got back on the net and I sometimes spent all afternoon catching up on old issues.  Today I came across a particularly distasteful piece entitled ten ways to prove you are a liberal, or some such nonsense.  The list included a suggestion that you may be a liberal if you order your pizza rather than picking it up.

MJ is having problems.  I am not saying it is dead, I am just saying that it is ailing. 

How do I know this?  For me TPM is like the neighborhood, to me.  It is relatively small, yet recognized.  The best of all possible worlds.  Everyday there are better pieces written here than the article I refer to, above.

I decided to start my  own list to prove my point.  I am really seeking other items to add to this list from my community here at TPM. So here goes,

TEN SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS THAT MAY INDICATE YOU ARE A LIBERAL:

1.  Do you believe that the B-Movie Actor Ronald Reagan had as much to do with the Reagan Administration as the hood ornament on a Mac Truck?

2.  Do you end up having to clean your TV screen every time you mislocate your remote and find yourself listening to Brit Hume with a tomato in your hand?

3.  Do you find, unlike many Americans, that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a terrible film full of sound and fury and signifying nothing?

4.  Is it your belief that not only should they remove 'under god' from the pledge of allegiance, but that you would rather pledge allegiance to the United States Constitution rather than a semifore?

5.  Do you agree that there should be a law finding that anyone who displays a Confederate Flag has committed an act of treason as a secessionist?

6.  Do you feel a little tinge of nausea everytime you see Nancy Reagan?

7.  Is it your belief that there probably is no heaven when you die, but that every time you see Dick Cheney you find yourself praying that there is a hell?

8.  Which of the following would you rather do:

       Go to a function sponsored by the GOP or

       Donate one of your own kidneys to a stranger for no recompense?

9.  Do you find yourself slightly in favor of the death penalty every time you see Bolton or Feith?

10.  Does your sex live get livelier every time an advocate of family values gets caught paying for homosexual sex?

Please, let us work together to get this list up to one hundred items.

There is an airport that serves our national capitol which is named after Ronald Reagan and when he died, and almost daily since then, we are forced to listen to discussions about his greatness.

The other day a man named Charles Morgan, Jr. passed away and next to nothing was said about him, aside from this comment on DK.

It is quite likely that if there had no been a Chuck Morgan, though, we would not be on the eve of the most eagerly awaited presidential inauguration since 1933. And the most urgent task awaiting our new president is to blot out the damage done to our country by the man who blamed government as the problem, and the acolytes, including so many who report the news and inhabit the capitol, who have followed President Reagan and his destructive mantra almost over a cliff.

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[Like the prophets of old, this blog cried out for expression.]

There is no adequate way to describe the contrast - so you'll have to use your imagination:

On Wednesday we showed up at the Medical Center at 10 am.  We were expected.  It was quiet and peaceful in the waiting room.  The parking lot was nearly full but the surgery waiting area had plenty of seating and lots of dividers for privacy.  Very soon we were led back into a private room about the size of an ER room - but with adjoining bathroom.  A parade of medical personnel quietly and efficiently went about their business.  No rush.  No sense of urgency.  Lots of TLC, information, opportunities for questions.  Very professional, soothing, reassuring - especially no sense of pressure.  Everything just happening in its own time.  More than anything that's what impressed me - no rush, total peace. 

At the same time we could not help thinking of the contrast - people wounded in Gaza, lying there in pain waiting to be found.  People in overcrowded hospitals.  Everyone running around.  Everything crowded together.  Hardly a moment to breathe for patient or family or medical staff.  Sounds of whimpering children?  Groans of adults?  Did they have anesthesia for surgery?  Were they even on the list for surgery? 

We wondered about things like that as we waited in total comfort, as the medical system slowly and deliberately did each procedure with complete calm.  Everything was at hand.  Everyone had time to introduce themselves - including the surgery nurses.  The anesthesiologist was so calming she could practically induce a trance with just her voice I told her.  IV line was started.  Surgeon stopped in.  All was in order.  No one rushed.  Peace and calm prevailed.

Back in the waiting room I found a quiet spot, put my feet up on a stool and settled back with my New York Times and a few books.  It was a strange contrast:  Was it that day I read about the 4 very young children found beside the two dead mothers in Gaza?  Or was it the next?  On the one hand I waited with total peace and calm for an ongoing surgery - even getting an update from Linda (the surgery nurse) - who seemed to expect I would be nervous while waiting.  No, not at all.  I had total faith in the surgeon, in the staff, in the medical center.  Meanwhile, people were fighting and dying in Gaza.  People who had no choice.  There was no peace and calm in Gaza.   I was in a strange state - between personal calm and concern for those I could only reach in my imagination.

That night was very long.  I stayed in the hospital with Mr. TheraP.  Neither of us getting much sleep at all, due to the careful looking in once or twice every hour.  Mr. TheraP was in pain, but on a morphine pump and trying to remain as still as he could to prevent the "stabbing pain" of making any movement - and just have the dull background pain.  He couldn't even talk - due to concentrating so hard on being still.  But every so often he mentioned the comparison - his pain versus the pain of people suffering in Gaza.  We were aware of that all night long.  It was quiet.  It was peaceful.  There was no rushing.  There were no sounds of people in pain or bombs or mortars.  No crowding.  Just a quiet room with one patient in bed hooked up to every kind of monitor and another in a fold-out chair with pillows and hospital garb along with every kindness - even as a visitor staying for the night.

It was a very, very hard time to be having a scheduled surgery under the best medical conditions - enough supplies, calm expertise, and above all the cheerful TLC of everyone from a to z.  Very hard time to experience all that - when we KNEW - that there in Gaza people lay suffering and dying, in pain, maybe lying among the dead - wondering when they'd join them in death.  All that dirt and noise and the cries of others - the keening of grief, the agony of wounds.

Very, very painful:  Guernica in words.
 

Boeing Whistleblower, Gerald Eastman, urges employees of industry to write to the incoming Obama/Biden President/Vice President Elect's offices to request true whistleblower protections are put into place immediately for all whistleblowers, industry employees or government employees. 

 

 

After all of the pain and trouble Mr. Eastman has had to go through after trying to make his former employer, Boeing, fly straight, and having them target him for destruction, it is good to see he's really found his voice here.  You will want to read it.  Here is the link to that specific entry:

 

http://eastmans.web.aplus.net/pblog/index.php?entry=entry090104-214935

 

 

Or you can go to his website: http://www.thelastinspector.com

 

Wow.  On inauguration day, Obama will be riding around in The Beast, parading up Pennsylvania Ave.  The Beast can withstand chemical and rocket attacks. 

Get a look at The Beast! 

There will be a three mile security perimeter and The Beast will be the only vehicle allowed to operate in it.  Two million visitors are expected and everyone has to be in place three hours before the swearing in ceremony.  The Beast appears to be a representation of the very real cocooning that the Obamas are going to experience in the next 4 years. 

I hope that while living in The Great White Jail/The Beast, our president-elect will not become a distant figure, an arid, bloodless, cardboard template of a real person as so many before him have done.  Almost as if The Beast of DC swallowed them and all we got left with was the cut-out shell to see and talk to.  That's what is so sad about many of the people who preceded him into that office.  Their loss of touch with real people affected many of the past residents of The Great White Jail - as if The Beast ate them and then we the people got all these policies and agreements they signed and wars they waged.  And yes, I am thinking specifically of the last 9 years. 

In interviews Obama has asserted that he wants to remain real and engaged.    In an interview he said --

And I've got to look for every opportunity to do that - ways that aren't scripted, ways that aren't controlled, ways where.. people aren't just complimenting you or standing up when you enter into a room, ways of staying grounded.

'And if I can manage that over the next four years, I think that will help me serve the American people better because I'm going to be hearing their voices.

I hope he will break the mold.  I really do.  So far he has done exactly that and I hope he continues to do so.  I hope he will serve the country and hear our voices.  In the mean time, I wish him safety, and real life in The Beast.

I would never disagree with Eric or David about how bizarre Blagojevich's recent press conferences are. But as pathological as Blagojevich may be, he has relatively little to lose and perhaps something to gain from his shenanigans.

Consider the magnificent hole which Blagojevich has dug for himself:

1) His political career is over. It is beyond salvage.

2) At this point, he can count on the harshest legal treatment available. Every potential decision-maker involved in the case has been antagonized the full extent possible. Some are outright hostile to Blago, while others, like Patrick Fitzgerald, are merely implacable and Javert-like. In any case, Blagojevich should not expect any breaks. Quite the reverse.

3) Unlike the typical high-ranking American politician at the center of a scandal, Blagojevich is also on the brink of financial ruin. Blagojevich is a guy who tries to shake down a union for a $300,000 salary, because Blagojevich actually lives on his salary. Blagojevich doesn't have the means to retire from public life, the way a Scooter Libby or Elliot Spitzer might. He can't just head off to his country estate and live in quiet disgrace. When he loses the governor's chair, he will actually lose his primary source of income.

Factor in some extravagant upcoming legal fees, likely disbarment, and a reputation that will make him largely unemployable, and you're looking at a man who's facing financial catastrophe, whether he avoids prison or not. You can fall from grace in the public life and come back, but it's much harder in America to fall out of the middle class and come back. Blagojevich is on the verge of plunging from the upper middle class to something very like penury.

The only hope for Blagojevich's financial survival is, in fact, the media circus. It's the only business in which he might still find a profitable niche. There is ample room in American discourse for a colorful, irresponsible and self-destructive windbag: ask the folks on cable news, or talk radio. Ask some of the folks on book tour. And those people make better money than a lot of better people with better and more responsible jobs. We might be appalled by the freakshow of his press conferences, but the freakshow is Rod Blagojevich's only hope right now. He's going to be living the freakshow for the rest of his life, because it's the only place where he can make a living.

While the rest of us might focus rationally on the larger Problem #1 and Problem #2, Blagojevich is right: there's nothing to be done about those things at this point. Any efforts made to fix them are largely going to be wasted. But Problem #3 is going to be with Blago, one way or another, for the rest of his life. The press conferences make more sense when you realize that Blago isn't trying to get out of trouble. He can't get out of trouble. He's not defending himself. He's auditioning.

After viewing the video clip from the BBC read this snippet from Naomi Klein's article in the Guardian.

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity.(...) The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

This is an idea whose time has certainly come.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

Here is a portion from Nate at 538.com:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/01/obamas-price-is-right-negotiating.html

"Now consider what Obama told CNBC the other day:

Obama also confirmed that he plans to lay out a roughly $775 billion economic stimulus plan on Thursday but indicated that the amount could grow once it gets taken up by Congress.

"We've seen ranges from $800 (billion) to $1.3 trillion," he said. "And our attitude was that given the legislative process, if we start towards the low end of that, we'll see how it develops."

Obama isn't picking these numbers out on accident. This range -- $800 billion to $1.3 trillion -- is most likely the range of outcomes that his administration considers acceptable. He says that "given the legislative process", he's deliberately chosen a number on the lower end of that range.

What does this mean? It means he wants the Senate Democrats to do his dirty work for him. All of the sudden, the administration, which is about to spend at least $800 billion, gets to play the role of the fiscally prudent tightwads, negotiating against the Senate Democrats. This has at least two benefits. One, it requires less of the administration's political capital to sell the package. And two, it completely co-opts the conservative opposition. Unless you're Paul Krugman or Greg Mankiw, you probably don't really have any idea whether $300 billion or $800 billion or $1.2 trillion is the right amount to spend; the numbers are too large, the scope of the stimulus too unprecedented, to provide for any absolute frame of reference. So the frame of reference is relative rather than absolute. If you're Mitch McConnell or Mary Landireu or Bob Corker and you see that John Kerry thinks that $800 billion is too little -- well then, 'gal darn it, this Obama fella must be doing something right..."

Where is all this 'the recession isn't as bad as 1982' talk coming from?  I lived the early 80's recession...and all the others since.  

The recession we are in now is a bad one.  Bad, bad, bad.  Calculations and methodology and historical contexts cannot replace removing one's head from their ass and taking a good look around.

The recession isn't that bad?  Phooey.

Are we living in the same country?

(This same question ran through my mind whenever I heard a report from the Bush Administration that life was the rosiest it's ever been.  Honest.  It's great, folks. No more planes through towers and everybody is getting rich! Well, except for you, flowerchild.  Sorry about that, but really, it's all your own fault for following your bliss instead of working hard like the rest of us. What's that?  You were working hard?  I didn't see that on your tax return.  Bottom line says the taxes you paid barely amount to the spit it takes to lick the stamp on your refund.  So, you don't count.  Ha-ha-ha-ha...don't make me laugh, flowerchild.  You don't count and don't tell me you do.  Now run along.  Us real Americans have money to...er work to do.)  

But, I digress.

We had been told we're not in a recession.
We're not in a recession.
The economy is sound.
We're not in a recession.
Oh, wait a minute, we are in a recession.  We have been for a year.
We're not in a depression, though.  So, don't get yer boxers in a bunch.
A recession isn't the same as a depression and we're not in a depression.
We're not in a depression.
We're not in a depression.

Please, please, please.  Just give me a government that doesn't lie to me anymore.  I am a grown up.  And in my best Jack Nicholson impersonation misquote, "I can handle the truth."

Transparency in government.  I can't wait.

I'm going to run over to change.gov now and read the new report on the 'Recovery and Reinvestment'.  Yeah, I know it's secret code for  'tax cuts and new spending' and the Obama team has probably hired what amounts to an advertisement agency to make us feel swell and all, but I only have enough time for one outrage a day.

Migwetch.

Today's featured Bush Era parody of the day is "POSITION WANTED" -- to "I'm A Little Teapot" -- about stem cell research & Bush.

Prior featured parodies of the VERSUS Bush Era Retrospective:

"GUANTANAMO!" -- to "Camelot" -- about Guantanamo & torture & Bush.  Also on YouTube.

"A BUSH IS A BUSH IS A BUSH" -- to "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden" -- about Bush's international leadership.

The Retrospective will continue with a different Bush Era parody from the VERSUS catalogue featured every day until the inauguration.

It's not incredibly easy to be pro-Israel lately. Of course, there are very powerful big picture reasons to side with Israel. But with the death toll raising above 800, more than half of whom are civilians, the heart revolts against the logic of supporting Israel from time to time. I just wanted to highlight some powerful Pro-Israel arguments from the past week.

Most significantly is the campaign of J Street, the self proclaimed "political arm of the pro-Israel pro-peace movement." Pointed out earlier this week at TPM cafe, they have started an online ceasefire petition that argues that a ceasefire is politically and morally the right move for Israel. They also provide answers to frequently asked questions about being pro-Israel during this campaign in Gaza.

Also From M.J. Rosenberg at TPM Cafe:  "Ceasefire Now!"

And Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic:"The Moral Responsibilities of Israeli Soldiers"

You're not Hamas. You're better than Hamas. So act it. [...] So when you operate, operate with the children in mind. It's a burden Hamas has placed on you -- it's no joy to fight an enemy who hides behind his children. But that's what you're facing. And when you come across scenes like the one described in this Washington Post story, help the children.

You can protect your country and be the moral superior at the same time. Ruthlessly target those responsible for anti-Israel attacks. But do everything possible to reduce civilian casualties, especially among children. And help the innocents of the other side whenever possible. That's how you earn the trust of international public opinion.

Three Steps Forward

I heard Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel interviewed on a local NPR station this morning; you can go here for it.  He is Rahm's brother, and is a part of the Obama administration's health care team.  This is a brief summary from what I heard:

Forget single payer; everyone will have reasonable insurance rates; insurers cannot exclude people for pre-existing conditions, or overcharge them for being sick.  The insurance companies will get paid extra for the sicker people that they cover via a "value added tax."  Insurance will no longer be linked to employment and will be completely portable.  He says this will be "revenue neutral."

MEDICARE AND MEDICAID WILL BE PHASED OUT.

In other words, the one thing that is providing absolutely no service --> the "insurers" will keep their part of the pie.  They will continue to make money for doing NOTHING (now THAT's revenue NEUTRAL alright!).  He talked about it as though it is a done deal.

This is the first I have heard of this, and I am not happy.  Any comments?

 

 

Alphonse D'Amato, former GOP senator from NY, knows a crook when he sees one. From the Southwest Sewer District to Mitchell Field to Wedtech to Stratton Oakmont, there were few financial scandals on Long Island in the last thirty years Senator Al wasn't involved in.

I busted out laughing when I read his 1/7/09 op-ed piece in the Long Island Businss News.

Senator Al nails it:

"Supposedly, Mark and Andrew, in a state of shock and disbelief, claimed to know nothing of their father's shenanigans, and turned him in to the federal government. To tell you this smells is an understatement. I find it ludicrous to believe that Madoff's sons, who worked with their father every day, were not aware of what was going on. We are told to believe that working alone, Madoff was able to manage billions of dollars, sending out fraudulent statements to thousands of investors, and was able to keep his sons who worked alongside him from knowing about his illegal activities. Maybe the Securities and Exchange Commission would fall for that story but I believe this is nothing more than a scheme to try and shield his sons from their culpability.

In 1996, the Securities and Exchange Commission fell for Senator D'Amato's story that he made $37,125 in a single day by trading honestly in the stock market.

(Ironically, D'Amato was conducting the Whitewater investigation at the time which encompassed Hillary Clinton's big score in the commodities market.)

Few people know Jordan Belfort, Senator Al's "stockbroker", testified in court in 2000 that he lied when he told the Senate Ethics Committee he did not arrange D'Amato's stock windfall. In his testimony, Belfort said he arranged the deal on D'Amato's request.

 10/26/00 Newsday story by Susan Harrigan and Graham Rayman:

"D'Amato Probe Called A Whitewash / Original complainant says committees protect senators",

In the wake of pump-and-dump boiler-room king Jordan Belfort's claim that he lied to the Senate Ethics Committee during the 1996 probe of former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, the man who filed the original ethics complaint against the senator blasted the committee for failing to thoroughly investigate the allegations.

"It was pretty clear that there was never much of an investigation into the complaint," said Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project, which initially filed allegations in June, 1996, over D'Amato's one-day $37,125 stock-market killing. The trades were made by Belfort's firm, Stratton Oakmont, a notorious Lake Success-based stock brokerage. "The biggest lesson of this is that both the Senate and House ethics committees does not investigate corruption. They are set up to protect senators."

Belfort testified Tuesday in the federal money-laundering trial in Brooklyn of former Stratton Oakmont accountant Dennis Gaito that he lied when he told the Senate Ethics Committee he did not arrange D'Amato's stock windfall. In his testimony Tuesday, he said he arranged the deal on D'Amato's request.

Belfort had also told federal investigators he arranged the D'Amato stock trade after he was indicted on securities-fraud and money-laundering charges in September, 1998, as part of negotiations over a plea agreement, according to documents. Belfort pleaded guilty to fraud charges last year.

In September, 1996, the Ethics Committee found no wrongdoing on D'Amato's part. D'Amato spokeswoman Lisa Dewald said yesterday, "The perjured testimony of a self-confessed swindler has absolutely no credibility. The SEC, as well as the Senate Ethics Committee, did investigate this matter and found no inappropriate conduct on the part of the senator...Everything the senator did was right and proper."...

Here on Long Island, government is so corrupt, we named the new and very expensive federal courthouse in Central Islip after Alphonse D'Amato instead of putting him in it.

The general opinion is: Israel may have some right to retaliate for the rockets Hamas is firing rockets at Israelis (technically it's not even Israel territory as it is legally not part of the UN recognized borders).but the retaliation is grossly disproportionate and the random killing of civilians especially children is unacceptable. Unacceptable is also the humanitarian disaster caused by the UN suspension of deliveries within Israel fired on an Israeli approved UN contractor killing the driver.

Additional accusations are the herding of civilians in a building and blasting it and the apparent neglect of children left alone without care to stay by there dead or dying mothers in view of the Israeli soldiers while the Red Cross was prevented by the same army from entering the area.

How the Israel government sees it: Hamas is firing rockets at Israel and Israel has every right to defense. Adequate care is given to avoiding civilian casualties by dropping leaflets. The stated goal is to permanently prevent Hamas from firing rockets.

The USA has adopted an unconvincing position that Israel has the right to defense yet halfheartedly supported a lame UN move towards a cease fire.
Understandably the Security Council resolution didn't impress the main culprits to fthe conflict and they continued the massacre of civilians.

There is widespread understanding that the Arab countries don't support Hamas and even find the current conflict dangerous as it inspires the extremists in their own countries with Iran as the only remaining sponsor.

No wonder the Security Council resolution is a waste of words and my and your tax money as it is concocted without the agreement of the main participants and their sponsors Iran and the USA respectively. The Americans actually took part in the discussions only to abstain in the voting thus sending the right signal to Israel: ignore.

The UN has called for an investigation of war crimes and that I think can be a step in the right direction. A "Balkanization" or "Yugoslavization" of the Israeli conflict consisting of two steps: 1 Foreign occupation of the region by peacekeepers preferably from Europe (but not Turkey) and 2 Arrest of the suspects an international trial to discover guilty for the war crimes. That should satisfy the international community, especially the USA  and above all the people of Israel and Gaza (and Lebanon) who won't fear for their lives.

Unfortunately the most probable development will probably be a half-cooked ceasefire leaving open the possibility for future Hamas rocket attacks and Israeli reprisals that plays in the interests of the corrupt militant elements in both Hamas and Israeli government.

What could the new administration do?

Talk to those responsible. It may be hard to talk to Iran but the Russians might help. Next is to decide what America really wants from Israel and ask nicely. I'm sure they won't say no.

Ever wonder what Hans Van Spakovsky would do once Obama and the Democrats took power in Washington?

Wonder no more.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and when your working for the Heritage foundation, you'd better bag your quota of liberals candidates/elected officials,

even during the first weeks of an Obama administration.

So Hans has moved south, (editorially speaking)  to the fruited plains of Republican South Carolina.

Things are still reliably Republican here, but lately, the Southern Strategy has been fraying at the edges.  Obama lost the state in the general election, but gained closed to ten points on Kerry's '04 showing.  

And Ann Peterson Hutto, a liberal Democrat candidate for State Senator in suburban Charleston won a narrow victory over Republican incumbent Wallace Scarborough, who, among other things, had been caught:

a. cheating on his wife with another married state senator.

b. pulling a pistol and firing it at fleeing local electric utility workers who were working on lines at his parents backyard after a blackout. (while aforesaid married colleague was in said house with him) one dark and stormy night.

Anyway Hutto narrowly won the election, which was followed by this sequence of events narrated by  newspaper columnist Will Moredock:

The problem was that Scarborough had lost the Nov. 4 election to Democrat Anne Peterson Hutto by 211 votes. The county Board of Elections certified the results. Scarborough appealed to the S.C. Election Commission, claiming massive vote fraud. The Election Commission rejected his appeal unanimously.

People might have been even more surprised to know the twisted logic and tortured evidence Scarborough used in his protest before the Election Commission.

Before the Dec. 3 hearing, Scarborough's attorney gave to the commission -- and to Peterson Hutto's attorney -- two electronic spreadsheets which reportedly contained evidence of vote fraud. Both lists were generated by the National Change of Address listing of the U.S. Postal Service. One list contained 115 names and addresses of residents who apparently had moved within the district and voted fraudulently. The second list contained over 450 names and addresses of residents who appeared to have moved out of the district and voted fraudulently in the district.

With so many votes in question, Scarborough was asking the Election Commission to throw out the Nov. 4 results and order a new election.

In the days before the hearing, Democratic volunteers spent the Thanksgiving holidays tracking down the people named on the two spreadsheets. It was an arduous task, with volunteers knocking on as many doors and calling as many phone numbers as possible before the hearing. As they contacted residents, a pattern emerged. The change-of-address lists were not evidence of massive vote fraud, as Scarborough claimed. They were simply a reflection of modern American life.

Many of the people on Scarborough's lists were professionals and business people who received their mail at their offices, according to Susan Breslin, an organizer of the canvassers. Others were students, who lived outside District 115, but still claimed it as their home and had their mail forwarded to their parents' addresses there.

Still others were Americans living abroad and voting absentee. They claimed District 115 as their home, as the law required, because it was their last stateside residence. In another case, Breslin says, Scarborough accused four elderly residents of Bishop Gadsden, a James Island retirement home, of vote fraud because they had their mail forwarded to family members.

Many were shocked to learn that they were being accused of vote fraud, Breslin said. One angry resident, an 81-year-old James Island man, said he had his mail forwarded to his daughter's home in Boone, N.C., because he spends much of his time there.

In the hearing, it came out that Scarborough apparently had not contacted anyone on his lists in an effort to give them the opportunity to defend themselves.

"He tried to take the people's right to vote away by circumstantial evidence," says Lachlan McIntosh, a Democratic activist who worked with Hutto on this appeal. "I find this offensive. I've been doing this for 16 years, and I have never seen a candidate declare war on his constituents in an effort to hold onto power."

On the day of the hearing in Columbia, Scarborough's attorney Butch Bowers presented commission members and the Peterson Hutto legal team with a third list, this one in a four-inch thick, black-ring binder. It was a list of 365 District 115 residents and their driving violations. The violations dated back years and included such offenses as speeding, reckless driving, driving under suspension, and driving without insurance. The names and offenses were placed in the public record, and the drivers were accused of vote fraud because their drivers license addresses did not coincide with their home addresses. Depending on circumstances, this may or may not have been a violation of highway law, Breslin says, but it is not vote fraud.

One more thing the people of District 115 need to know: When S.C. Democratic Party workers analyzed the second electronic spreadsheet of people accused of vote fraud, they noticed that row 368 had been "folded" out of sight. A Democratic worker performed a simple function to open the hidden name and was surprised to find that it was none other than Wallace Scarborough! The former state representative had apparently made his own list of alleged frauds because he maintains a downtown post office box.

Scarborough is now appealing to the House of Representatives to have the election thrown out.

And here's where Hans Van Spakovsky shows up in the Charleston Post and Courier Op-Ed page on Friday, January 9th:

http://www.charleston.net/news/2009/jan/09/will_s_c_house_protect_integrity_electio67892/

Will the S.C. House protect integrity of election process? BY HANS VON SPAKOVSKY Friday, January 9, 2009

Von Spakovsky breezes over the facts of the case, not mentioning that Scarborough's evidence of vote fraud would have disqualified the Republican candidate himself. And that all of the "evidence" produced was a normal by-product of people changing their addresses in a mobile society, with no evidence of voter fraud, even after investigation.  

Read it and laugh.  But its even money that the overwhelmingly Republican State Legislature will take Von Spakovsky's expert counsel and order a new election.  One without Obama on the ballot to boost Democratic turnout.

Ann Peterson Hutto has been officially sworn in and seated, but it may not last for long.

Labor never ceases for a hard working and determined  man like Hans!

How did it happen that the Wall Street Journal is describing the nightmare in Gaza more honestly than the Democratic President-Elect? Israel's current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes.  Meanwhile, Barack Obama, he don't say nothing! But we know that Obama is really on the side of truth, justice, and the AIPAC Way, because he just appointed Dennis Ross, who formerly served as Israel's lawyer under Bill Clinton, as the chief US negotiator in the Middle East. Ross has apparently been advising Obama about Israel and Palestine ever since Obama outraged Muslims all over the world by declaring that Jerusalem must remain the undivided capital of Israel forever, in a speech to AIPAC in June 2008. Paul Woodward's reaction at The War in Context was typical of disappointed progressives, at least the few who were actually paying attention to details instead of just glomming on Obama's TV charisma. Yesterday was the day the "change" bubble burst. Obama's performance at AIPAC shows that his grasp of Middle East politics has yet to rise to the level of George Bush's! That's an incredible thing to have to say (especially for someone who still intends to vote Democrat) but what Obama demonstrated was the myopia of a candidate who has thrown principle to the wind and decided he will say anything to secure votes and donations. In the same speech, Obama also made sure everybody knows there is absolutely no limit to what he will do to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons: "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything." Understand? Everything in his power! And the President of the United States has a lot of power! He has tactical nuclear weapons. He has cruise missiles to deliver them anywhere. "Everything!" When you add this into Obama's previous sabre-rattling at Iran, "we should take no option, including military action, off the table" to shut down Iran's nuclear program, you get a very ugly brew, as described by the great war-correspondent Chris Hedges in TruthDig: The failure by Barack Obama to chart another course in the Middle East, to defy the Israel lobby and to denounce the Bush administration's inexorable march toward a conflict with Iran is a failure to challenge the collective insanity that has gripped the political leadership in the United States and Israel. Obama, in a miscalculation that will have grave consequences, has given his blessing to the widening circle of violence and abuse of the Palestinians by Israel and, most dangerously, to those in the Bush White House and Jerusalem now plotting a war against Iran. He illustrates how the lust for power is morally corrosive. And while he may win the White House, by the time he takes power he will be trapped in George Bush's alternative reality. So now we have a President-Elect who's even dumber than George W. Bush about the Middle East, the same President-Elect who is happy to look the other way while Israel commits war crimes so blatantly that even the Wall Street Journal can't look the other way, and he's threatening to use everything in our gigantic arsenal against Iran. Congratulations to us!

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0901/PIA07997_spiritmars.jpg

We anticipate the Obama Administration, seeking to open doors to indirect talks with Hamas, will face residual resistance from Bush Administration allies overseas.

We anticipate President-elect Obama will issue an executive order imposing legal consequences on US personnel, undercover agents, and others indirectly connected with the US to do the following:

Send a clear signal that confrontation with Hamas using Bush Administration policies will not be acceptable, and subject to disciplinary action and other sanctions.

We discuss the basis for this assessment after the jump:

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What if BUSH PARDONED BLAGO????

Stealing from the taxpayer must be an art passed down from one generation of Paulsons to the next. While Henry M. Paulson Jr., former chairman of Goldman Sachs, has been busy lining his bank account with Treasury and Fed cash*,  his son, H. Merritt Paulson III, has been sending Oregon state officials on lavish junkets to NY so they will lay out $85 million for his bullshit soccer stadium.

You can get an idea of how much money Hank Paulson Jr. stole from Goldman Sachs shareholders by the fancy name his son goes by. H. Merritt III - gag me, puhl-eeze. No surprise "H. Merritt III" married a "Heather", is there? 

(Heather Lynn Paulson nee Mahar either went to the University of Michigan or was first in her class at Cornell as per her 10/2/05 NY Times wedding announcement.) 

A sadly underreported but hilarious bit of Paulson family trivia is about the time Heather Lynn did a Rosie Ruiz when she was a contestant on "The Amazing Race" (CBS 2006-10-01. No. 3, season 10). Thanks to an honest cameraman, Heather Lynn got nabbed taking a cab when she was supposed to be walking.

Read the 990s filed by the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund - EIN 31-1678646 to get an idea about what constitutes good deeds in Henry Paulson's mind. The fund ostensibly was set up in 2001 to provide approximately $300k annually in scholarships to eligible minority students. 

But in 2004, the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund received a contribution of $35 million from "HWY LLC", a Delaware corporation, in the form of ecologically important property on the island of  Tierra Del Fuego on both the Chilean and  Argentinan sides. The GS Charitable Fund tuned around and donated the land to the Wildlife Conservation Society that same year. 

Coincidence or not, H. Merritt Paulson III became a trustee of the Wildlife Conservation Society in 2005, thus enhancing his resume in time for his New York Times wedding announcement.

How HWY LLC came to own valuable timberland which probably should belong to the people of Chile and Argentina was not disclosed in either the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund nor  the Wildlife Conservation Society 990s. 

Would anyone be surprised if Henry M. Paulson, Goldman Sachs chairman, laundered $35 million for an Argentinian or Chilean general who disappeared people and then took a tax deduction for his "good deed"?  

More to come.

* If he objects to my characterization of him, Henry Paulson can disclose his and his family's financial holdings publicly. If he and his family are not benefitting from the biggest taxpayer ripoff in history, I will retract my statement. Paulson made a big deal out of divesting his Goldman Sachs stock before he took the Treasury job but it looked more like insider trading to me.

And we'd love to see you in Chat. 

Much love,
Lis

Anchorage Daily News Editor Pat Dougherty has finally fessed up to a three-month coverup, namely that, in the weeks before the Nov. 4 general election, he DID have a reporter, namely Lisa Demer, investigating the (still-unanswered) rumors around Trig Palin's birth. The revelation comes as part of an exchange of e-mails between him and the governor, excerpted on my blog.

Texas progressive pundit Jim Hightower's most famous book is probably "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos."

Well, in case Dougherty didn't realize it before, in current Alaskan politics, there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow editors and live wildcat Sarah Palin.

That said, he should have realized it.

In his blog post on ADN's editor's blog where he admits the deception, while at the same time dissing people with questions about Trig's birth (or Tripp's now) as conspiracy theorists, he tells Palin, in his New Year's Eve e-mail response to her, just how little cooperation his reoprter, Lisa Demer got from Mayor Whazzup and her staff and others.

In spite of that, in spite of the election upcoming, etc., shades of the 2004 New York Times, he decided to sit on Demer's reportage. And still is.

Hello???

Here's my blog take on this. Needless to say, Doughertyis getting royally reamed in comments.

[Note:  This was written as a response to Professor Todd Gitlin's post.  His point, if I may paraphrase, is that even those who, like him, oppose Israel's attack on Gaza will have to come to terms with what to do about Hamas.  It's a problem I don't believe has been adequately addressed by those who support Israel but oppose the war and leaves my own questions about the necessity, wisdom and morality of what is happening unanswered.  Anyway, I took some time to write it, so I decided to re-print it on this side of the "cafe."  I welcome your thoughts.]

 

Mr. Burris will be going back to Washington as the junior Senator from Illinois. And if his lawyers read the opinion handed down today from the Illinois Supreme Court, the three of them will return with sprin in their steps and feeling (rightfully) pretty damn smug.

But wait, you say... didn't the Court rule against him? Didn't all the media say he's right back where he started? Didn't Sen. Dick Durbin say he still needs to have that pesky signature from the recalcitrant Jessie White, Illinois Secretary of State?

Yes, to all of the above. But the one thing all of the above failed to do was really READ the opinion.

Here are the salient parts (and that means I will not be making fun of the mausoleum Mr. Burris has built for himself or the fact that his children, Roland and Rolanda, are named after him.)

Mr. Burris filed a writ of mandamus, specifically, an attempt to order ("we command") the Secretary of State of Illinois to perform what the petitioner (Mr. Burris) deemed to be the Secretary's duty of signing the certification of the apoointment of Burris as the next Senator of Illinois by the Governor.  Burris filed the writ pursuant to Jessie White's refusal to sign the certificate because of the scandal regarding the Senate seat in question.

The state's Supreme Court reviewed the matter and presented its findings:

The appointment by the Governor is valid with or without the signature of the Secretary of State:

The issue presented by this original action for mandamus is whether Jesse White, the Secretary of State of the State of Illinois, is required by section 5(1) of the Secretary of State Act (15 ILCS 305/5(1) (West 2006)) to countersign and affix the seal of the state to the document issued by Governor Rod R. Blagojevich on December 31, 2008, certifying the Governor's appointment of Roland Burris to the United States Senate. For the reasons that follow, we hold that section 5(1) of the Secretary of State Act (15 ILCS 305/5(1) (West 2006)) is inapplicable to the Burris appointment, and that no further action is required by any officer of this state to make that appointment valid.

We further hold that the only ministerial act required of the Secretary of State in this case is that he register the appointment in accordance with section 5(2) of the Secretary of State Act (15 ILCS 305/5(2) (West 2006)). The Secretary of State having performed that responsibility on December 31, 2008, the writ of mandamus is denied.

Thus the Illinois Supreme Court has upheld what Mr. Burris and his attorneys have been saying all along: the appointment is legal (regardless of the status of the Governor) and is valid because the Secretary of State recorded the appointment in the legally proscribed manner. According the laws of the State of Illinois, Mr, Burris is a US Senator.

The Court goes on to distinguish between "commissions" and "commissioners" and when the Secretary of State must issue, sign and seal any commissions. The appointment to US Senate does not require appointment to any "commission:"

Because gubernatorial appointments only require issuance of an actual commission when the governing law so provides and because no provision of law makes issuance of a commission necessary for the validity of a gubernatorial appointee to a United States Senate vacancy, no commission was required by law to effectuate the appointment of Mr. Burris to the United States Senate. And because the Secretary of State's "sign and seal" duty is triggered only in cases where commissions are required by law, it necessarily follows that the Secretary of State had no duty to sign and seal the certificate of appointment issued by the Governor in this case. Under section 5(2) of the Secretary of State Act (15 ILCS 305/5(2) (West 2006)), the Secretary of State's sole duty was to register the appointment, which he has done.

The Court then smacks down the US Senate and its stance that its tradition is of overarching importance. (Both Reid and Durbin have claimed that Senate tradition, since the 1800s has required dual signatures on the credentials presented by new Senators.) The Senate's own language undercuts the Reid-Durbin argument:

In their pleadings, Petitioners suggest that the United States Senate has taken the view that the Governor's signed, hand-delivered certificate of appointment is insufficient to meet the requirements of the Senate's own internal rules. We note, however, that nothing in the published rules of the Senate, including Rule II, appears to require that Senate appointments made by state executives pursuant to the seventeenth amendment must be signed and sealed by the state's secretary of state. Moreover, no explanation has been given as to how any rule of the Senate, whether it be formal or merely a matter of tradition, could supercede the authority to fill vacancies conferred on the states by the federal constitution. Under these circumstances, the Senate's actions cannot serve as the predicate for a mandamus action against the Secretary of State. The only issue before us is whether the Secretary of State, an official of this state, failed to perform an act required of him by the law of Illinois. He did not. [Emphasis added.]

Finally, the Court gives Team Burris the road map to Washington, D.C.:

There is one final point we feel constrained to mention. While the Secretary of State has no duty under Illinois law to sign and affix the state seal to the certificate of appointment issued by the Governor, he does have a duty under section 5(4) of the Secretary of State Act (15 ILCS 305/5(4) (West 2006)) "to give any person requiring the same paying the lawful fees therefor, a copy of any law, act, resolution, record or paper in his office, and attach thereto his certificate, under the seal of the state."

The registration of the appointment of Mr. Burris made by the Secretary of State is a "record or paper" within the meaning of this statute. A copy of it is available from the Secretary of State to anyone who requests it. For payment of the normal fee charged by the Secretary of State in accordance with this statute, Petitioners could obtain a certified copy bearing the state's seal. Because such relief is possible, no order by this court is necessary or appropriate. See People ex rel. Devine v. Stralka, 226 Ill. 2d 445, 450 (2007) (for mandamus to issue, the petitioner must be without any other adequate remedy).

In other words, Mr. Burris and his lawyers need to hightail it to the Secretary of State's office with the cash needed to "buy" the signature of Jessie White on the pages of the Great Big Book of Registrations, complete with the seal of the Great State of the Land of the Great Emancipator. If Mr, White objects, a new writ of mandamus can be filed, as Mr. White would have failed to perform one of his duties, to wit, providing any person who asks for it, and pays for it, a copy of the registration of one "Roland Burris, Trailblazer" as the third African-American Senator from the State of Illinois.

The Court has also thrown down the gauntlet, challenging Mr. Reid and Mr, Durbin to reject the opinion of the Supreme Court of Illinois, the legal and binding record of the State of Illinois, and the legal and binding appointment of the Senator made by the legally elected (albeit currently impeached) Governor of the Great State of Illinois.

Game, Set, Match to Mr, Burris, the junior Senator from Illinois.

Josh posted reader LG's comments about this earlier today, and I agree.

Can the MSM, like CNN in this case, talking about 2008's job losses being the worst since 1945 put the job-loss figures into some historical context? The 1945 population was about half of today. In fact, it's not as bad as 1982, even.

See my blog link for more about this vs. 1982, if you're under 40, and for concerns about the "worst since Depression" line becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, it is true, as Kevin Phillips has so well noted, that unemployment calculation methodology has been, to be blunt, "fudged" since 1982. That said, some of the fudging had been done before then, as Phillips has also written.

That said, as I note, there's a full percentage point difference between 2008 job losses and 1982. Even with allowance for fudging, I don't think you can say problems now are significantly worse than they were then.

We now have more evidence that 1982 was worse. I know that under-35s, and perhaps to some degree, even those in the 35-39 range don't grasp this, or else aren't old enough to remember, it, but 1980-82 was a real recession, not like the Poppy Bush recession that got Clinton elected, or the Clinton/Shrub Bush recession.

LOL

One of the most disheartening and disgusting displays of cover-your-ass flippancy has to be Vice President Cheney's assertions that torture helped keep us safe from post-9/11 terror attacks. That odious meme has been picked up, of course, by what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the FCM - Fawning Corporate Media - to help bolster the dodgy idea that at least the Bush Administration got something right in eight grueling years of corrupt incompetence.

Cheney probably is more interested in laying the groundwork for his defense against any future war-crimes and malfeasance warrants, and our shattered surrogates in London, Madrid and Mumbai may question just what we mean by "safe". But acceptance of this claim is testament to the still-virulent fear of terror attacks, magnified now since our Mideast incursions have spread Islamic radicalism, in the opinion of this country's top intellligence analysts. We don't have to worry only about the candidate martyrs who hated us on Sept. 10, 2001 - now, thanks to unfathomable missteps by the Decider, we must fret about blowback.

To anyone who's been living at the bottom of a coal mine during our long, demented War on Terror, blowback is the unintended - and breathtakingly violent - consequence of our own action. British commuters got a horrific taste of that in the summer of 2005, when that country's decision to be our empire-building helpmate blew up in the faces of stunned customers using London's transit system.

But when any nation goes forth seeking foreign dragons to destroy - and plant its flag on distant, bountiful shores - there's another kind of blowback. This is one is... homegrown. It trickles down to us from the rarified atmosphere of our own leadership, from the power locus of our own government.

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Here are the two leading stories in today's "Jewish Daily Forward", which is probably America's oldest and certainly its most prestigious Jewish community newspaper.

Peace Groups Lose First Major Gaza Challenge On Capitol Hill
As Israel's military campaign in Gaza entered its second week, Capitol Hill became the latest battleground where Jewish hawks and doves are trying to shape the American response to the ongoing violence. Dovish groups bombarded lawmakers with calls and e-mails in an attempt to influence the wording of pro-Israel resolutions being shaped in the House and Senate. The groups' line in the sand on those resolutions was straightforward: Unless the House and Senate included a call for an immediate cease-fire, the dovish groups would call on their supporters to actively oppose them. For the Jewish peace camp, the first Middle East crisis of the new Congress and administration was an opportunity to flex its muscles and show presence on the national scene. But in the end, they lost.

And

AJCongress Crippled by Madoff Scandal
One of the Jewish community's most storied national organizations revealed that it has been gutted by the financial collapse of investor Bernard Madoff, losing the vast majority of its endowment. Officials at the 90-year-old American Jewish Congress disclosed that apparent fraud at Madoff's investment firm had cost the organization roughly $21 million of the $24 million in endowments that supported the AJCongress and its programs.(...) It's ironic that the Madoff scandal, with its tales of exclusive country club life and high-priced international hedge funds, has been so destructive to an organization that was founded to be the voice of the Jewish masses. The AJCongress was founded in 1918 and became a populist counterbalance to the American Jewish Committee, which was dominated by the wealthy and conservative German-Jewish establishment. Under the leadership of its legendary founder, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the AJCongress was one of the first national organizations to support Zionism and to protest the Nazi regime, and it established a reputation for being politically liberal. After World War II, it made its mark as an active litigant on church-state issues and civil rights.

When these two stories are juxtaposed in The Forward, it seems to me that a certain American-Jewish "golden age" is coming to an end, one whose beginning we might put arbitrarily in World War One, when financier Bernard Baruch became an adviser to president Wilson and the chairman of the War Industries Board or perhaps in 1932 when Herbert Hoover named Benjamin Cardozo to the US Supreme Court... or maybe even a bit earlier in 1924 when composer George Gershwin premiered his "Rhapsody in Blue".

We are talking about a golden age of the Jewish diaspora that compares favorably with those of Babylon, Al-Andalus or Wilhelmine Germany.

More than a golden age, a love affair.

It is impossible to exaggerate the significance and harmful consequences of this disenchantment and the effects it will have on the fabric of American life, cultural, social and political in years to come.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

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This sounds like the post-9-11 excuse:

Cheney: "I don't think anybody saw it coming"

Why not?

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A recent article in Newsweek lauds Obama's Mid-East peace initiative under Dennis Ross.
(http://www.newsweek.com/id/178470)
According to his bio on Wikipedia, Dennis Ross was the co-founder of AIPAC. How can someone so tied to the Israeli side of the process claim to be an unbiased arbiter of the peace in Palestine. It sounds to me like Obama is vulnerable to appointing a lot of people that previously served in the Clinton administration or are tied in some way to past failed efforts. This shows a lack of vision and imagination in what is needed for real "change". Real change requires an infusion of new thinking which does not seem to be materializing in the new administration.

If I learned anything from watching the campaign,  it was that Obama was really good at making judgments that were two or three steps ahead of what his opponents were doing, and that in general it was best to just watch things unfold and chill.  

As has become abundantly clear over the past few years there are no "good" solutions to the energy crisis. Clean coal has been revealed to be anything but. Tar sands rip up the landscape, create huge pools of contaminated water and tailings and have a low net energy yield. Corn and other plant-derived ethanol consumes resources needed for crops and doesn't yield much net energy. Oil and gas remain the most economic choices, but suffer from variable availability, price uncertainty and declining reserves.

In addition, all of these fossil fuels contribute to the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Efforts to sequester the waste gases are not available and many proposals lack scientific rigor.

Wind, wave and solar will become increasingly important, but it is unlikely that they will provide enough of a solution to meet demand. At this point I usually argue for cutting down on demand by re-framing the consuming societies so that they are not so wasteful.

I think that there is another alternative that we should consider - nuclear power. The world has enormous stocks of highly refined Uranium and Plutonium which could be reprocessed and used as fuel for nuclear power stations. In addition existing spent fuel can be reprocessed and provide fresh fuel. In addition there is the possibility of building more breeder reactors to provide further supplies.

There are several objections to nuclear power. The ones about control of nuclear material are based upon unfounded fears. The risk of "proliferation" because there is fuel in a reactor is irrational. The world handles huge amounts of radioactive material every day for use in medical and industrial applications. Radiation from Cobalt is more deadly that that from Uranium fuel rods, yet adequate controls keep the number of incidents to a handful each year.

There are new generations of nuclear power plant designs which avoid the problems of the past. Several of these are currently in use and several others being considered for new plants. Part of the problem with nuclear plants has been poor citing decisions, poor planning for storage of spent fuel, and a lack of community involvement. If a plan to build huge solar arrays, far from population centers in the US desert, can be considered then so can citing nuclear plants in similar locations.

One of the big issues has to do with funding new nuclear plants. Some studies claim that if total costs are included they are not economical. The latest number being bandied around is in the range of $0.20 per kilowatt hour, about ten times what the industry claims. For the sake of argument, let's assume that this true.

This cost is only excessive when compared against flawed analysis of alternatives. The two biggest costs that are ignored when calculating the cost of fossil fuel plants are the value of the non-replaceable fuel and the cost of the emissions on the health of the planet. At some point such costs become unacceptable and only those processes which avoid them are a viable choice. We don't put a price on depletion and pollution because we can't, not because they don't have a cost.

I propose we decommission all nuclear weapons over time and use the nuclear material for power generation - the swords into plowshares of the title. In addition I propose that all aspects of nuclear power generation be run by government agencies set up specifically for this purpose. In the US the TVA has provided power to an under-served region for many decades. The government undertook this because a private solution was unworkable.

As the recent disaster with a TVA coal-fired plant shows, even government agencies can become complacent and sloppy. The solution to weak supervision is better monitoring, not condemning government administration. The number of disasters associated with private power generation shows that who owns the plant is no indication of safety or good management.

I don't like nuclear power, I think the risks are minimized, but I think this is because private firms need to make a profit from something which cannot compete economically with fossil fuel. Eliminating the profit motive and the need to cut corners can help ensure that plants are built and run safely. If it costs more, it costs more. It's better than seeing our coastlines underwater in a few decades.

Nuclear power won't be a permanent solution, that's where my usual push for reforming our social systems so they aren't based upon excessive consumption and consumerism. However, if done wisely, it can provide a bridge to a new system and allow time for alternative technologies to be developed. I'm still hopeful that some sort of controlled fusion can be made to work, but we need to get there from here and burning more oil is not the way to do it.

When faced with only unpleasant choices one still has to chose. Even doing nothing is a choice, a fact that those who want to minimize the climate threat seem not to realize. I'm not trying to rehash all the debates on nuclear power from technological or economic views, these seem never to end and how you feel about the issues seems more to be based upon personal prejudices than on the available information.

I'm arguing for nuclear power as a moral issue. We need to get rid of nuclear weapons, a moral choice. We need to reduce greenhouse gasses, a moral choice. We need to leave a habitable planet for future generations, a moral choice. For too long decisions have been based upon economic arguments. Since when did money become the measure rather than morality?

Obama has a very long list of things to clean up from the disastrous George W. Bush Administration and there may be more urgent issues, but this issue has to be addressed as a priority before we head further down the road to a military dictatorship.  A symptom of this proposition that we are headed in that very direction is the trend in the matter of torture  to have the Army Field Services Manual be the standard for whether an interrogation technique should be considered torture.   Seriously?  Are we going to let the military inform us whether they are torturing based on their own definition of torture, or is the military subject to the will of the people and therefore required to respond to the definition presented by Congress, if not the Geneva Convention of which the United States is a member? 

The military is getting away from democracy and becoming its own self-serving entity but for the fact that they operate funded by the US taxpayers.  It seems a moot point, however, when one considers that they receive billions of dollars from the US Treasury with little if no resistance anyway.  However, with the concurrent trend of privitizing military functions, we are already letting a separate military develop even further from the will of the people.

While Obama wrestles with the economy and the issue of torture, he also needs to see the larger picture of how the relationship between armed forces and the government has changed.  There is an urgent need to restore a military that serves a government of the people, by the people and for the people, rather then a profit-seeking entity determined to make their own rules.

The financial mess that we are in, that nobody saw coming, is a load of rubbish.

Our government didn't see 9/11 coming either even though our government possesed the information it needed in order to know something was coming.

Nobody saw it coming is just a lame excuse for failure.

Politicians are nothing more than salesmen by a different name. And salesmen are totally clueless.

A big news story in my area:  A company that owns and manages residential rentals in Sioux City, IA, is going bankrupt.  Hundreds of people have been given less than a month's notice to move out of more than a dozen buildings scattered around the midtown area of the city. 

These are people who were already living on the edge financially.  The apartments were below standard because the landlord wasn't maintaining them properly but the tenants couldn't afford to move anywhere else.  Now, there are not enough apartments available elsewhere to house them all.  It's also creating headaches for the police who will have to keep an eye on all these vacant buildings in what's already a high crime area (by Iowa standards).

Added to that, the only grocery store within miles of that same neighborhood, inhabited largely by elderly, disabled and low income people, is going out of business. 

Whatever the "burdens" might be for Madoff's investors and others, none of them have to worry about having food to eat and a roof over their heads.  The same can't be said for my friends and neighbors. 

Stock market crash?  Pshaw.  None of these folks had money to invest in the stock market - they were lucky to be able to scrape together enough to rent the roach infested and inadequately heated hovels they were living in.  And now, even that has been taken away.

cross-posted at Debbie Does Nothing

Have you ever noticed how bread does not last long enough? You'll buy a loaf, use four slices immediately, and then let it sit on the shelf for two weeks. By the time you try to use the remaining slices, its stale, or even worse, moldy. Well this loaf is a lot like Barack Obama's political capital if it is not used quickly and correctly. In his first 100 days, President Obama could make delicious tuna and PB&J sandwiches. But recently it looks like he'll let the bread mold grasping for bi-partisanship.

It's clear that Obama's economic stimulus plan doesn't cut the mustard. By trying to get 80 votes in the Senate, he risks losing too much trying to appease Republicans. Obama doesn't have to do this. The stimulus plan will pass easily with the 59 Democrats and a handful of moderate Republican Senators who support it.

But Obama is making good on the promise to be the President for everyone, not just liberals. While this is a laudable goal, Obama risks wasting his mandate even before his first term begins. When you have political capital, use it to make big advances on important issues, not to grab 15 unnecessary votes that will only weaken a desperately needed economic stimulus plan.

Obama's popularity complex worries John Judas, too. He is concerned that "the president elect is underestimating the problem he and the country faces." Judis calls for a much more extensive stimulus plan that includes funds to increase high speed public transportation. The closest equivalent we have to Europe's impressive example is Amtrak's Acela line, which is limited largely to the northeast corner of the country and is very expensive. But the extension of high speed transit would require a massive investment, which Congress has not even come close to supporting. 

Judas continues:

Investing in high-speed rails would be very expensive, but unlike tax cuts--the benefits of which can be siphoned off in the purchase of imported goods--the money spent would go directly to reviving American industry and improving the country's trade balance. That doesn't just mean jobs creating dedicated tracks or new rail stations: Though the U.S. abandoned train manufacturing decades ago to the French, Germans, Canadians, and Japanese, this kind of production could be undertaken by our ailing auto companies or aircraft companies--if the federal and state governments were to place orders. And building trains that would run on electricity would be a paradigmatic example of the "green jobs" that Obama often touts.

In short, its worth the investment. Krugman agrees. $800 Billion is a lot of money, but if it funds an incomplete and insufficient plan, then it is wasted. I'd rather see a more expensive stimulus plan that serves as the final word and gets us back on track. We can kill two birds with one giant, expensive stone. Build a much-need U.S. high-speed transit system and stimulate the economy. This is possible without pandering to Senate Republicans.

Congressional Democrats are rightly frustrated by Obama's concessions, and they are not afraid to show it. The stimulus issue was the final and most important disappointment in a week of Democratic division which included the Blago/Burris Illinios scandal, the Panetta/Fienstein miscommunication, and the choice of TV star Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. 

Obama is the President of all Americans, red, blue, and purple. But he won a huge mandate in November's election, supported by large majorities in the House and Senate. Obama needs to use that advantage to pass a working stimulus plan, even if it squeaks by with 61 votes.

Otherwise, he's wasting perfectly good bread. 

Read more: threestepsforward.wordpress.com

[Go to http://livingbetweenworlds.blogspot.com/2009/01/righteous-kills.html if the links don't work here.]

I did not know (as stated here) that Gideon Levy was a former IDF soldier, but that's maybe why he can be such an honest and sharp commentator. This is probably why Levy doesn't tip toe in the name of 'balance' when he writes about his own society. He will--no doubt--be called a self-hating Jew by some (as if bashing Bush had made half of the US citizens "self-hating Americans"), but I've always found substance and intelligence in his columns.

I tried to write about the debate of morality versus expediency in Israel; I also commented about how to believe in moral intentions faced with immoral actions; and finally there is a great sense that Israel is getting blind, tone deaf and endangering itself, and I tried to discuss this also. I did it in my own clumsy way, but this column of Levy kind of sums it up with clearer -- also more severe -- language.

The one argument I rarely follow, however, is that of numbers. The rightness of a war is not judged by the differential body count. Some commentators (including Levy below) sound as if the indicator of how wrong the war is is how many Palestinians died (versus IDF soldiers or Sderot random victims). But in modern times, those who have won wars have done so by being ruthless. The best example of that is the US. The Civil War was won by "gutting out" the South -- and that meant killing a lot of civilian. At the end of WWII we pressed Germany to capitulation by merciless artillery bombings of Dresden, Frankfurt, etc., killing mostly civilians. And need I mention the Pacific front and Japan? In a cold-blooded pragmatic world, if you decide to go to war, maybe ruthlessness pays off (certainly does in sparing your soldiers, if not 'colateral dammage'). The differential just shows how much better equipped, trained or smarter you are than your enemy.

So the numbers can be shocking as they translate into civilians, innocent, flesh and blood women and children. And my friends. But to me, Israel is not wrong because of the casualty rate, but because the occupation and subtle rejection of peace efforts which forces unending war as the only logic. It's not a matter of degree of violence, it's a matter of the nature of the choices which have been made--the choice of violence embodied in conquest and occupation.

Levy's column is in Haaretz but you can read it below.

Help me not despair.

Elrig
Photo credit: www.flickr.com/photos/aheram/283162678/
---------------------------------
The Time of the Righteous - Gideon Levy
This war, perhaps more than its predecessors, is exposing the true deep veins of Israeli society. Racism and hatred are rearing their heads, as is the impulse for revenge and the thirst for blood. The "inclination of the commander" in the Israel Defense Forces is now "to kill as many as possible," as the military correspondents on television describe it. And even if the reference is to Hamas fighters, this inclination is still chilling.

The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as "exercising caution": the frightening balance of blood - about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn't raising any questions, as if we've decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism.

Rightists, nationalists, chauvinists and militarists are the only legitimate bon ton in town. Don't bother us about humaneness and compassion. Only at the edges of the camp can a voice of protest be heard - illegitimate, ostracized and ignored by media coverage - from a small but brave group of Jews and Arabs.

Alongside all this, rings another voice, perhaps the worst of all. This is the voice of the righteous and the hypocritical. My colleague, Ari Shavit, seems to be their eloquent spokesman. This week, Shavit wrote here ("Israel must double, triple, quadruple its medical aid to Gaza," Haaretz, January 7): "The Israeli offensive in Gaza is justified ... Only an immediate and generous humanitarian initiative will prove that even during the brutal warfare that has been forced on us, we remember that there are human beings on the other side."

To Shavit, who defended the justness of this war and insisted that it mustn't be lost, the price is immaterial, as is the fact that there are no victories in such unjust wars. And he dares, in the same breath, to preach "humaneness."

Does Shavit wish for us to kill and kill, and afterward to set up field hospitals and send medicine to care for the wounded? He knows that a war against a helpless population, perhaps the most helpless one in the world, that has nowhere to escape to, can only be cruel and despicable. But these people always want to come out of it looking good. We'll drop bombs on residential buildings, and then we'll treat the wounded at Ichilov; we'll shell meager places of refuge in United Nations schools, and then we'll rehabilitate the disabled at Beit Lewinstein. We'll shoot and then we'll cry, we'll kill and then we'll lament, we'll cut down women and children like automatic killing machines, and we'll also preserve our dignity.

The problem is - it just doesn't work that way. This is outrageous hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Those who make inflammatory calls for more and more violence without regard for the consequences are at least being more honest about it.

You can't have it both ways. The only "purity" in this war is the "purification from terrorists," which really means the sowing of horrendous tragedies. What's happening in Gaza is not a natural disaster, an earthquake or flood, for which it would be our duty and right to extend a helping hand to those affected, to send rescue squads, as we so love to do. Of all the rotten luck, all the disasters now occurring in Gaza are manmade - by us. Aid cannot be offered with bloodstained hands. Compassion cannot sprout from brutality.

Yet there are some who still want it both ways. To kill and destroy indiscriminately and also to come out looking good, with a clean conscience. To go ahead with war crimes without any sense of the heavy guilt that should accompany them. It takes some nerve. Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who preaches for this war and believes in the justness of the mass killing it is inflicting has no right whatsoever to speak about morality and humaneness. There is no such thing as simultaneously killing and nurturing. This attitude is a faithful representation of the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: To commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate - and be right, not to mention righteous. The righteous warmongers will not be able to allow themselves these luxuries.

Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who sees it as a defensive war must bear the moral responsibility for its consequences. Anyone who now encourages the politicians and the army to continue will also have to bear the mark of Cain that will be branded on his forehead after the war. All those who support the war also support the horror.

This is Meet the Press with David Gregory

Sitting in for David today is Christopher Hitchens


Hitchens:    Good  morning this is Christopher Hitchens sitting in for David Gregory this morning. David was unavoidably detained earlier this morning in a DC cab. It appears that the cabby was an undercover police officer involved in some sort of escort sting. Apparently Mr. Gregory had entered the cab with an associate, let us say by the name of Che Che LaFemme a/k/a Tony the Rose, a local escort, let us say.  The cabby issued a short statement announcing the detention of Mr. Gregory and that charges would be formally made sometime tomorrow morning. Che Che was interviewed and asked if indeed she/he had been propositioned-so to speak by the man in custody and whether or not the suspect was really David Gregory. Che Che responded, "Well David is a very large man, and also very tall. I do not watch news shows too often, but I have seen him in White House briefings along with some of my other clients..er uh acquaintances.        

Hitchens:    Be that as it may, today our guest at Meet the Press is Vice President Cheney who will leave office in ten days.  Mr. Vice President, it is a pleasure to see you again. It has been some time since we last met.

Cheney:    Good to see you Chris.

Hitchens:    Mr. Vice President, you are leaving an administration responsible for the highest unemployment rate in forty years, an economy in a crisis not seen in 60 years, two wars that seem to have no end, Wall Street in shambles, millions thrown out of their homes, retirement funds light some two trillion dollars, a ten trillion dollar national debt and a so called bailout package worth three quarters of a trillion dollars, a good portion of which is being used to pay the bonuses of the people more than partially responsible for the financial mess we are in.  What are your comments with regard to these charges?

Cheney:    Well, Chris, our current economic condition is really not this Administration's fault.  I mean, nobody saw this coming.  Not the Democrats in Congress or those in the Executive Branch.

Hitchens:    I will get back to the economic issues, but could you tell our viewers exactly what your Administration has accomplished over eight years besides seeing that the war criminal Sadaam Hussein was tracked down, tried and executed?

Cheney:    Why yes, Chris. We instituted the No Child Left Behind legislation that guaranteed that no child would be left behind in this country, unless of course due to problems with genes or lack of responsibility of the parents he or she did not pass the tests. You will also note that there was a huge increase in gross GDP over seven of those years and the creation of millions of jobs during the same time period.  But most importantly, we have not been invaded by or attacked by terrorists since 9/11 and that is because of the measures we took, when we need to take those measures.

Hitchens:    But isn't it also true that most of the so-called wealth that was created during your Administration go to the top one percent of the population and was actually wiped out anyway during the last three or four months?

Cheney:    Again Chris, no one saw this economic crisis coming.  Especially the Democrats who were responsible for Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac.

Hitchens:    So, just to set the record straight, Mr. Vice President, providing home loans to poorer people was the single reason for the economic collapse?  And was that not, sir, the entire aim and purpose of the Bailey Savings and Loan in the film It's a Wonderful Life?

Cheney:    The lack of regulation of these giant New Deal Organizations by the Democrats is the single greatest reason for the collapse, Chris.  And may I add, no one saw this coming. And I mean no one saw this coming.

Hitchens:    Now looking over my notes Mr. Vice President it appears that you have stated on prior occasions that no one saw the attacks of 9/11/01 coming. That no one thought that there were no WMDs in Iraq.  That no one saw that some children would be left behind due to poor test scores, poor parenting and poor genes. That no one saw the current economic crisis coming. That no one saw the greatest theft in World History of investment funds. That no one could have predicted our national prestige go down the loo. That no one could have predicted in 2000 that your Administration would be responsible for the single greatest restraint upon Civil Rights in this country since the Alien and Sedition Acts instituted during the waning years of the eighteenth century. That no one could have predicted that your Administration would be responsible for an actual net loss of jobs over eight years. That no one could have predicted that millions of Americans would find themselves on the street with the loss of their homes, jobs and pensions. Is that correct Mr. Vice President?

Cheney:    FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR MOTHER. (Cheney storms out of press room)after which there is a commercial break)

Hitchens:    We are back after some technical difficulties along with the apparent retreat of the Vice President.  We turn now to our panel.....


Hitchens:    Ms. Roberts, what are your thoughts concerning the cowardice just shown by the outgoing Vice President?

Cokie Rob:    This isn't ABC Studios.  I am not supposed to be here.

Hitchens:    Mr. Olbermann. What are your thoughts?

Keith O:    I thought you pointed out, quite rightly I may add, that the fascist corporate warmongering lackies are going out with a flourish and that criminal investigations should begin immediately.  You know Chris, I have never been in this studio before.  They called me an hour ago to fill in for that conservative guy. They figured since I was available to fill in for McCain on CBS, that I would show up on this show.  I forgot.  Are not you a British Citizen? I thought you had to be a citizen to anchor this show.  At least that is what fathead Dobbs told me.

At this point the proceedings were ended and a message concerning the New Forman Grill was 

Bloomberg reports that President-elect Barack Obama is using data from polls and focus groups to shape the debate over his stimulus plan:

David Axelrod, Obama's chief political adviser, along with campaign media adviser Jim Margolis, are encouraging lawmakers to use the word "recovery" instead of recession, and "investment" instead of "infrastructure." Those recommendations came from focus-group research indicating that such framing would make the package more appealing to voters.

This is a good thing.  A President not only has to set the right course for the country but convince the country it is the right thing to do an garner their support:

"Not unlike news organizations, we poll public attitudes about where the economy is," Robert Gibbs, Obama's choice for White House press secretary, said in an interview. "We're not polling to see what should be in an economic-recovery plan."

Public support trumps politics.

Obama officials are polling on how to frame the economic proposals for voters and what language should be used, Gibbs said. They want to know "how America reacts" to the president- elect's stimulus proposals and the public's "attitudes toward the economy," he said.

In a Nov. 26 news conference Obama said he has instructed his advisers "to make sure that we are proceeding on projects and investments based on national priorities and not based on politics."  I believe he is a man of word.  A President we can believe in.

A small step, but an important one, if true. I'm eager to hear more about this.

So it's come to this. Anti-gay Prop 8 supporters in California have sued to keep donors who supported the initiative secret, in defiance of state campaign finance laws, because they "should [not] have to worry about getting a death threat because of the way he or she votes."

 

For the record: the campaign of terror against this assortment of Mormons and homophobes includes a Prop 8 opponent who told a supporter he would gun her down for her support of the initiative "if I had a gun." Other features of the homosexual hate parade--a broken window, a flyer calling a supporter a "bigot," and the ever-popular envelope-filled-with-harmless-white-powder. Medgar Evers should have been so threatened.

 

I'm from the old school - I think when a bigoted majority oppresses a minority, you should burn the mother down. But in this case, if a few vague threats and some broken windows are enough to send Prop 8 supporters into a quivering fit of vapors, all the better. I'm heading to Cali next week and I intend to get that list of supporters off the CA Sec. of State's website, and personally TP all their yards. That'll teach 'em not to mess with my homies.

As democrats and progressive pundits begin to nitpick the Obama stimulus plan, invariably by criticizing the size of the tax cuts including the middle classs tax cuts, hopefully they will keep in mind that the entire economic downturn is an issue of TRUST.  3 month T-bills offering next to zero % interest are the equivalent of the proverbial cash in the mattress = no trust in the financial system whatsovever.

If the public at large trusts the new Administration and the Congress to make things better with its economic plan, things will get better much much quicker.  If they don't trust that the plan will make things better, it won't matter what form it takes (see Bush tax cut 2008).

However, when a Presidential candidate makes middle class tax cuts the centerpiece of his plan, and doesn't deliver [no matter how ineffective a Senator or pundit may think a tax cut is] the public loses TRUST in that candidate.

Right now, more than anytime since the Great Depression, we need to trust that the government, especially the new President, will get it right.

This doesn't mean that Congress shouldn't do its job.  But some of the criticism needs to be done in house and not to make headlines ("I'm standing up to Barack Obama".)  Let the Republicans do that.

The John Judis piece linked to by Josh seems to be of this vein (Barack is wrong) and has the headline "Not Enough". It then goes on to say we need a national rail system and a new Bretton Woods Agreement.

Whie both of those ideas may have great merit, I really don't think either idea has anything to do solving the immediate crisis.  But it's a good headline disagreeing with Obama and making one trust him less.  Academically, OK; politically, not so good.

A big freaking spending plan ($800-900 billion+) passed with all deliberate speed will be more important to the recovery than whether every pundit and every Congressperson has publicly had a chance to state their "two cents".   

 

It always amazes me to read or hear someone talk about the need for the era of big government to be over; yet when something goes wrong in our nation or someone needs relief in some way -- government is the first place they go to ask for help.

 

I wonder how many of those citizens whose homes were destroyed by Katrina or that latest tornado, the last hurricane or wide spread flooding are believers of ending the era of big government? 

 

How many of those demanding medicine, health care, safe toys or food be made available to anyone are believers of ending the era of big government?

 

How many of those demanding that we help the homeless, the starving or the abused in some other nation are believers of ending the era of big government?

 

How many of those demanding college grants for their kids, tax cuts for their businesses or special attention for being disabled are believers of ending the era of big government?

 

How many men, women, blacks, Latinos' or gays demanding equal rights and pay are believers of ending the era of big government?

 

How many businesses or homeowners that are having financial problems demanding relief from paying bills are believers of ending the era of big government?

 

Who would most of us turn to if a wide spread killer disease or bugs (like the killer bees from Africa) were to take over our nation?  Would we consider ourselves to be 'on our own' or would we demand government step in?

 

Our constitution says,

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

 

I guess most Americans believe the meaning of "insure domestic tranquility" and "promote the general welfare" means that the government should be like a parent.  "Don't tell me how to live; but if I need help - Be there!"

 

Once again our nation is in deep domestic and foreign policy trouble.  Mom, Dad - help us.

 

Government has been and always will be our backup system.  Without it, we'd be lost.

 

So to those of you demanding the era of big government be over; be careful what you wish for.  You may be the next person in need of help.

 

 

(I wrote this before Gaza broke out -- it's even more appropriate now. Click here for original blog.)

A question is haunting me. It's a question which should only haunt young idealistic minds, not seasoned pragmatic minds like mine.
Still, it's there.

It's a question for me and it might be a question for you -- particularly if you're not thinking about it. But I'm embarrassed; I dare not ask it for fear of showing a lack of realism, a lack of understanding about how the world works.

College or high school have nothing better to do but point the finger at the world and they ask questions like that. In my opinion, that makes them sound like Debbie-Downer. (Debbie-Downer is a Saturday Night Live or Mad TV character who kills dinner parties with one-liners reminding everyone of all the horrors in the world, which we can do nothing about.)

Still, I have this question, so I must ask:

If our country (our government) is passively or actively complicit in wrong-doing while we are sleeping, will we be held responsible for that? How about if our government is the best possible government we could dream of, and still has a blind spot and does not see that it is passively or actively complicit in wrong-doing, will we still be held responsible for that?

I think back on history. The European powers in the 1920s and 1930s weren't doing much evil, except for some colonization here and there, and only with the best intentions in the world at that. We also felt we were rightly exacting due punishment on the Germans for World War I. Nobody felt too involved in the rising anti-Semitism among impoverished Germans. We didn't react much to Adolph writing "My Kampf." Could the French and British really be held responsible for the brew mixing in Germany? Not really. Payment for war damages was crushing to the German population, but that was just a consequence of WWI. What could possibly be the responsibility of the average citizen in that? Pointing to what was happening in Germany at that time, both what was happening to the German population and what was happening within the German population would certainly have felt like a Debbie-Downer moment. Neither appropriate during the roaring 20s, nor during the 30s' financial crisis. The average French or Brit honestly could not feel overly responsible for the story unfolding in Germany.

50 to 72 million people -- most of them "average people" -- died in World War II.

We may not speak of responsibility, but we can speak of consequences.

So I ask my question again.

Michael Scheuer who used to work for the CIA and specifically led the hunt for Osama bin Laden (OBL), neither a poet nor a peacenick, made a simple point in his books+: muslim terrorists do not try to kill us because of who we are but primarily because of what we (the "West") do in their countries. And we all know--by now--what happened to all those weapons and all the guerilla training we provided to moujahideens in Afghanistan.

After the first Gulf War (which had international law behind it, regardless of how you feel about the decision to go to war), the US and the British stayed in Iraq. Directly or indirectly we contributed to the death of at least 500,000 children in 10 years through economic sanctions--even if responsibility was shared with the actions of a nutcase dictator (Hussein)--and we also contributed to a severe worsening in the health of the Iraqi population (notably through the use of depleted uranium bombs). Between the first and the second Gulf War, local papers kept repeating that 'we would have to go back into Iraq and finish the job.' A friend of mine shocked me on the verge of the 2000 US election by stating that the US was "at peace with everyone."

Direct links of causality are not easily drawn, but a picture emerges with inescapable causes and consequences. We were sleeping. We were not responsible. We were not willingly bothering anyone. But the cycle of action-reaction spun one more time around. We got 9/11, we got Madrid, we got London, and we're now in another unending war in Iraq.*

So, looking further back, I ask my question again.

What about the US Founding Fathers, as remarkable as they were, and their blind spot on slavery? What about the average Joe in Louisiana, who didn't know any better, and was even "nice" to his slaves? How about the average Jim in Pennsylvania, who opposed slavery but understood that the priority was to consolidate the Union, that this would have to wait? Would they be responsible for the consequences of that stain?

700,000 people died in the Civil War, from both the North and the South.

This leads me to today.

For good reasons, we (the West, but even more specifically the US) support Israel and we support it blindly. I say for good reasons, because there are actually good reasons, valid historical reasons, even more grey-zone cultural reasons for recognizing and supporting Israel--just maybe not so blindly.

Our own understanding is that we're fighting terrorism. And who wouldn't want to be fighting terrorism? Who wants to stand up and say "heck no! I support terrorism." So we have a global war on terror. We don't speak to terrorists--consequently we don't speak to the democratically elected leaders of the Palestinian people. Our government even plays a part in fostering violence between different factions. We even allow--against our own laws--the use of military equipment against civilian populations. Of course, we're "sorry" for the collateral damage, but what are we going to do? Obama said it, 'hey, if you shoot rockets in my house, I'll do something about it!' That's sensible enough to the average Joe. In fact, there are no more than 30-35 US Congressmen and Senators, Democrats and Republicans, who stand against that logic, who question whether Israel is the liberal, democratic state respectful of human rights and decency.

400 people died in Gaza in the last two weeks.
Our policies support the total subjection of 1.5 million Arabs in Gaza to the whims of a foreign occupier.
These 1.5 million people (75% of whom were driven by force from their homes) are born and live in the largest open-air prison in the world.
Israel continues to conquer and control in the West Bank.

But the average Joe cannot understand the details. "Haven't these people hated each other for centuries?" (The answer is "no", but how would we know?)
"Anyway, the Jews have the right to defend themselves." (Certainly, but is it what is happening when a village is locked behind a wall and the farmers lose their field?)
The average Joe has to listen to the politicians and the media. And if we were that wrong about the whole thing, someone would say it. Right?
"Plus we give a lot of money to the Palestinians, why don't they just get along and build Switzerland behind a wall?"
"What?"
"OK - they can build it behind 5 or 6 separate walls, but why would they care so much if they can't go and see their cousin? I don't care much for my cousins, why should they?"
"Anyway, it's not solvable."

Certainly it's a mess. How can we be responsible? We're the good guys.
Now, let me ask one more time,

What if...

...the people who struggle for peace, whether Humanists, Jewish, Christian, Muslims, those who tell us that there is a great injustice being carried out, were right?

...our US tax dollar and our US-made weapons of targeted destruction were in fact used to occupy, dispossess, humiliate and kill? [CNN would tell us, right?]

...it were actually a bad thing to lock up 1.5 million people and every day decide whether it's one or ten who are classified as 'militants' and are 'taken out?'

...our money (our abundant money), our weapons (our many weapons), our explicit support or our silence made us complicit of injustice?

...the Israeli government were led by flawed humans [is it that hard to imagine? then you haven't been watching], with their biases, sometimes racism, and a growing delusion -- as other governments in the past have-- in the pursuit of the national interest?

...we (Americans) were really really well-meaning and wouldn't hurt a fly -- and there's hardly a nicer people group than Americans as a whole** -- but for some reason our media and politicians had it wrong?

Well, what then? Could we be held responsible tomorrow for driving an entire population to despair?

I don't really know what being held responsible means, but here is my hunch:

If these things are true (and sadly they are true),

whether we sleep or wake,

whether confused or enraged,

whether honest in our error or cynically calculating,

whether we just think there will be one joyous nuclear Armageddon to spare us from all this, or we expect that in the fullness of time Jesus will make all things right and it's not our job to think too much for now,

whether we support the status quo out of genuine affection for a people which has also suffered more than its share, or out of ignorance,

whether we have serious concerns, like the economy and our 401k to worry about,

in this lifetime, on this planet, for you and I and our children, I am quite certain that there will be consequences to both the action and inaction of our countries today.

I'm sorry for being a Debbie-Downer. But I also think we can strive to change this before it's too late.

And that could have consequences too.

Salaam - Shalom - Peace. At least if we rise before it's too late this time.


Elrig

+'Through the eyes of our enemies' and 'Imperial Hubris'
* Of course for now "the surge has worked." More boots on the ground and $325 million a month in protection money to radical groups have led to improvements, which 'of course will be sustained.' I think the Sadr Army and others must be using the $325 million to send their kids to Disney World or Peace School, or to launch massive fun-with-macrame programs. Well- I'm not sure of the details, but with that much money coming from the DOD, we can be sure it is being put to good use, can't we?.
**OK - I'm just buttering you up right now, but you guys are suckers for that and you are nice folks; it simply wouldn't work on the Brits. They're not "nice" and they're cool with that.

this is a post!

An Analysis of Leading Congressional Health Care Bills,

2007-2008: Part I, Insurance Coverage

January 09, 2009 | Volume 102

Authors: Sara R. Collins, Ph.D, Jennifer L. Nicholson, and Sheila D. Rustgi

Paul Krugman is not in the mood for bipartisanship.

The Nobel laureate today declares Obama's stimulus package "somewhat disappointing," because it "just doesn't look adequate to the economy's need." Krugman raises the possibility that the Obama team's desire to please the other side is the culprit behind what Krugman sees as a stingy economic plan:

Press reports last month indicated that Obama aides were anxious to keep the final price tag on the plan below the politically sensitive trillion-dollar mark. There also have been suggestions that the plan's inclusion of large business tax cuts, which add to its cost but will do little for the economy, is an attempt to win Republican votes in Congress.

 

Americans are basically good people who are fooled by snake-oil salesmen. They believe the system must be changed; but, each time they fall into the trap of the "two party system" and nothing changes. But for a time they are happy that they have elected a new person who brings change "We can Believe in"; and, that keep the system going.

Obama is nothing but the continuation of the system and in every passing day he proves this point.

1. Obama was the "nominee of the system" because we need to change our Logo if we want to clean our tarnish image abroad. Who is better than Obama and his UN representative Rice to improve the arrogant murderous and brutal image of America as was represented by Bush!

2. Obama is not what the liberals believe him to be! He is for the War in Afghanistan that US Peace Institute has declared it to be a lost war for a lost cause!

3. War on Iraq has become the forgotten War. It is not news anymore. Yet we are paying for more than 300,000 GIs, mercenaries and contractors.
There is a Seamless transition in Defense. Robert Gate and Petreas would stay the course!!
The Move On.com has been put on the back burner.

4. Closing of Guantanamo Bay and similar torture Chambers in Afghanistan and Iraq with far greater victims are not discussed.

5. Joe Lieberman,  the non-Democrat right wing turn coat is re-installed as Senate Homeland Security Chair, on Obama's insistence.

6. In economy Obama was the first person who twisted arms so the First 750 billions was given to Bush to transfer it to his Bankers and Stock Brokers to facilitate "Socialism for the Rich"!
He is borrowing another 1-3 trillion dollars and would increase the National Debt to 13 Trillion Dollars by 2010. That is we print money out of thin air and become indebted to China, India and whosoever would buy our Treasury Bills. No speak of Budget deficit or trade deficit!
No mention of the fact that without investing in America, without  discarding Reaganomics, without Modification of NAFTA, without manufacturing in America and a "Buy America" plan we are not going anywhere.
 Investing in roads and bridges which brings manufactured products from Mexico and China  would not help America and would not reduce our balance of trade or cure our budget deficit, it would actually increase our dependence! Real Change starts with banning out-sourcing jobs and investing in American manufacturing. Our steal Mills closures and Wal-Mart expansion are death bell for American working class.
Obama's first TARP was for the Bankers and his second "Bail-out" is for a superficial infrastructure, Green Technology and service jobs   and not a fundamental change to bring manufacturing and thriving Unions as a back bone of American Economy.

Reaganomics by shifting manufacturing to China destroyed not only the Union but America and we have to get our country back from the reactionary system which under the mask of Globalization destroyed America.
7. Obama who talked about everything and every day goes in front of TV for the most trivial event has kept his silence about Israelis murder of Palestinians in Gaza so by the time he takes power the massacre of Refugees who have been thrown out of their original home in Northern Israel and have been living in Refugee camps in Gaza during the past 50 years. Silence when people are starved to death and have been left without medical supplies and clean water is a Crime. Obama's assertion of there is only "One President" has no justification and make him an accomplice in this crime against humanity. If he wants to cleanse America of the bad image that Bush created he has to show sympathy, as an individual, for the human suffering of helpless  
Unlike the US public which is kept in dark by the Corporate Media, Obama has access to real reports from US Intelligence Agencies and International press, and should assert his personal views, his timidity is shameful and would not be good for the American Image in the world.     

Original Title: Obama Short On Specifics For Recovery

President-elect Obama at George Mason University urged Congress to implement his economic stimulus package. The speech was not characteristic of Obama in that he presented more of a written statement than provided verbal assurances and hope.

Amazingly, Cheney would have us believe that nobody saw it coming. Congress needs to step up to the plate and provide some answers to the public. It remains to be seen who, besides the TARP IG, might provide this insight. The Congress and the IGs dropped the ball, and the public needs to know why Congress was sleeping like ("with"! cough, cough) the SEC.

This note discusses in detail the questions raised here about mitigating financial fragility.

This note comments on the governance problems; makes some suggestions for the President-elect and his staff to generate public support; and offers an approach to confront Members of Congress.

Read more »

I was going to start this out with an appeal to our better nature and some hackneyed nostalgia for donating to the Obama campaign.  Then I realized how late it was.  Please forgive me my brevity.

I know a lot of us here are concerned about the situation in Gaza, and the effects on ordinary Palestinian civilians.  That said, there's a world of difference between writing angry blogs and actually getting involved.  Volunteering in Gaza is obviously not an option that many can take, but we can still support those who are willing and able -- and do it from the comfort and safety of our own homes.

Here are a few organizations that I hope you'll consider donating to.  All are highly rated in terms of efficiency and bang for buck.  None are linked to Hamas, and you should not fear getting watch- or no-fly-listed as a consequence of helping.

MAP - Medical Aid for Palestinians
MAP is a British charity that has working in the area since 1984.  MAP's priorities are in providing healthcare and improving nutrition and hygiene in Palestinian refugee camps.  They also work to better environmental health by providing proper sewage disposal and road paving.  Since it is a British charity, the online donation form is in pounds.  Online currency converters are a dime a dozen, but as a rough guide, £33 is about equal to $50.

Oxfam America's Gaza Fund
Oxfam is a confederation of organizations working in over 120 countries with a stated goal of "finding lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and injustice."  They work on a wide array of issues, but the Gaza fund in particular has been set up to provide emergency medical care, food supply, shelter, and sanitation.  Once conditions improve, they will turn towards rebuilding.

Médecins Sans Frontières
AKA Doctors Without Borders.  MSF has no fund specifically targeting Gaza, but they are active in the region and you can rest assured your money is being put to good use no matter where it ends up.  Wherever there are people in crisis, MSF is there to help.  Apart from emergency medical care, MSF provides services to impoverished hospitals (vaccines, medical equipment, and training), access to safe water, AIDS treatment and testing, and so on.

Palestinian Fair Trade Association/Canaan Fair Trade
Support Palestinians directly by buying fair trade goods from area farmers.  You can buy a variety of goods (many of them organically and sustainably manufactured), or donate cash for farmers to buy more olive trees.  CFT also funds scholarships for rural and refugee Palestinian students.

And just incase your sympathies are elsewhere, you can always buy pizza, ice cream, and Coke for IDF troops.  (Or more seriously, Oxfam also has an Israeli fund, but I feel it's pretty easy to distinguish who is in greater need at the moment).

Anything you're able to give is, I'm sure, greatly appreciated.

your complaints are not about class but a matter of being class-less white trash... since when is being a class-less piece of white trash something to be desired?  americans have suffered 8 years of a class-less piece of white trash in the white house... americans desire someone in the white house whom they can point as an example to their children... certainly, there's nothing about you, Sarah Palin, which is a proper example of decent americans...

While Glen Greenwald, Digby and other liberal blogs condemn torture and analyze other important current issues on a daily basis, the self-described "DC gossip" blog Wonkette currently holds the lead with almost twice as many votes as TPM and way ahead of the others in the "best liberal blog" category of the 2008 Weblog awards.

Hi there, come on in.  Thanks for dropping by, I was hoping you would.  Seems like most everyone else is busy talking to others about all sorts of important stuff.  Yes, yes, of course you're right.  With everything going on in this great big world of ours discussion of the highest magnitude is necessary.  Essential, even.  It's just that sometimes ... well, you know what I mean.  You always do.  Anyway, appears as though it may just be the two of us this evening - so I thought we'd make it special.  I've a couple of bottles of wine chilling, the Zinfandel is in the bucket on ice.  Real glasses, too!  Some munchies on the table; various cheeses and dips, crackers and veggies.  Don't worry, I know you.  Plenty of chips and pretzels.  If you don't see what you want, just wander into the kitchen and find it.  It's all about being at home, with me, tonight.

Read more »

While Tom Whipple tries to predict the future of personal transportation:

Cars - Redux

The very nature of the car will likely evolve to a smaller more utilitarian device to compensate for declining incomes and high gas prices. Consumer perceptions about what constitutes a desirable car that grew up in last 50 years will no longer matter. Various forms of government intervention into the automobile and oil industries - ranging from tax policies to ownership — will have a major influence in the evolution of cars during the coming decades. In Europe, 30 years of high liquid fuel taxes have resulted in a civilization that uses about half the oil per capita that we use in America. There are already calls in the U.S. for much higher, possibly varying, gasoline taxes to stem roller coaster gasoline prices.

… Richard Heinberg wonders if we will have anywhere to go:

Slo Mo Splat

Everything we thought we knew about the economy is suddenly wrong. Regarding China, we are accustomed to hearing of a new power plant being constructed each week, of energy consumption growing at a rate of 10 percent per year or more, of hordes of farmers from the western provinces rushing to the coastal cities to get manufacturing jobs so they can buy refrigerators and cars. The current reality: Chinese factories are now closing by the thousands, workers are rioting and leaving the coastal cities to return to their farms, energy consumption is actually declining.

In the US, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are falling dramatically for the first time since records have been kept. During past recessions or gas price spikes, people bought smaller cars or drove slower; now they’re just not driving. Explanation? The use of public transit is up, but so is unemployment: people without jobs don’t commute to work. And deliveries of raw materials and finished goods are way down, so trucks are driving less, too. Gasoline and diesel consumption is down. Nobody’s buying cars—large OR small—and as a result GM, Ford, and Chrysler are on deathwatch (even the Japanese automakers are reeling). Retail businesses are closing so fast that it’s tough to keep track of who’s still open and who isn’t.

I suspect that once authorities bow to necessity, we’ll see the same variety of cheap and casual transportation we see in the third world.

Cross-Posted at Project Vote's Voting Matter's Blog

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

by Erin Ferns

Despite the 2008 election showing that the minority and low-income voting bloc is quickly growing, the effort to keep voters from actually casting a ballot persists through the introduction and passage of restrictive election reforms, wrote syndicated columnist and former state representative, William A. Collins in a recent opinion piece. "As we all know, becoming and remaining a voter is not just a theoretical exercise. At least in this country that right is hotly contested in hard-fought political combat. He who controls the voter lists often controls the election."

Read more »

WBAI Radio's Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report
            Monday, January 5, 2009, 7 - 8 p.m. EST, over 99.5 FM
              
                   ****************************************
A Tri-State Protest: Stop Israel's Assault On Gaza
 
Gaza is under attack by one of the most deadly military machines

on the planet - the Israeli military, and, silence in the face of such

suffering is unsupportable for anyone devoted to peace and social

justice. The U.S. government supplied Israel with the military means

to carry out this attack and has generously underwritten the Israeli

government and military with tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars. 

Building Bridges brings you the voices of those piercing the silence

and raising their support for a Free, Free Palestine at a  rally in

Times Square which was several blocks long. 

*********
Baristas Beat Starbucks
with
Isis Saenz,victorious barista,member, Starbucks Workers Union, IWW
and
Daniel Gross, barista, Starbucks Workers Union, IWW &

co-author with Staughton Lynd of the new edition of "Labor

Law for the Rank & Filer"
 
Starbucks calls its employees partners, but when they tried to unionize

it was so long partner.  But, the baristas took legal action against the

company that masquerades as socially conscious and now a judge

has ordered that the baristas be reinstated and receive back wages.

The judge also called on Starbucks to end discriminatory treatment of

other pro-union workers at four Manhattan locations named in the case.

The decision marks the end of an 18-month trial in New York City that

pitted the ubiquitous multinational corp. against a group of twenty

something baristas who are part of the Industrial Workers of the World.
**********
Battling the Economic Monster
with
Stanley Aronowitz,  Prof. of sociology, cultural studies, and

urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center. 

 
The main news these days is the global economic crisis, an event

ascribed by economists and most pundits to a 'financial' meltdown

caused by the irresponsibility of mainly, but not exclusively, US

lending institutions and consumers in offering-and accepting

'sub-prime' mortgages.  But, Prof. Stanley Aronowitz instructs that the

crisis is buried deep within the structure of capitalism and that there

is little or no prospect that, within the current framework of neo-liberal,

market capitalism, that the deepening economic crisis can be

significantly reversed and a stimulus package bring prosperity. 

But, Prof. Aronowitz opens a dialogue on how the left can wrestle

 the economic monster until it cries uncle.

 

Play

Or  Download

 

 

 

When I was a kid, as I sat in the classroom of my now-a-park elementary school, I tried to figure out the rulers on the wall.  Elm Grove, the school, was really just a long hallway.  Fifth graders at one end, kindergarten at the other.  I made my way up from one end to the other, all the while figuring that the rulers were holding the school together. 

Really, they were measuring the mine subsidence cracks.  They appeared a couple of years before I started there.   Turns out Montour Mine had flooded and started to cave.  Insurance companies wouldn't pay, of course, because it wasn't an Act of God, but manmade.  Course, I kept going in, every day for six years after they saw the first cracks.  They ended up razing the old gal a couple years later.  She stood for only thirty some years. 

Ah, anthracite coal.  Black diamonds.   Right.  About 4 hours from here is where anthracite coal got started here in the states.  Pottsville, Pennslyvania.  Legend has it Necho Allen, a hunter, or some say a farmer, stumbled upon it.  Someone else would have done it, sure, but strange to think we were might have been had that day never happened.  So.  Necho.  Well, depending on who you ask, the story goes something like this: He did battle with a panther, and presumably won.  Sat down afterward at the lull of the mountain and lit up a fire to rest and recover from the mauling he'd taken.  Dozed off in his buckskins and coonskin cap.  A Quaker trader from from the City of Brotherly Love had seen a glow in the distance and climbed to the camp site to wake ol' Necho, who explained he had set a campfire and "several hours later I was awakened by summer-like heat. . . . Then I saw that the solid earth all about me seemed to be afire."  I think it's more likely that he woke up scared to death, but hey, that kind of stuff doesn't sit well with local legends.  Pottsville, incidentally, also gave us Yuengling and the Pottsville Maroons.

20 minutes from there, underground, rests The Mammoth.  That's what they call the richest known anthracite vein in the world. 

And another 20 minutes from there is Centralia.  Centralia is, well, the stuff movies are made of.  It's got it all: disaster, heroics, death, secret societies, corporatism, conspiracy theories, outlaws.  And so on. 

Being from Pennsylvania, I've been regaled with stories of working in the mines and the mills for years.  If the steel mills were Hell's Inferno, the mines were the Gates. 

1841, guy named J. Faust built a tavern in what would become Centralia.  Called it The Bull's Head.  He didn't own the land, and to build the place he, "appropriated the timber without compunction."  That tavern was Centralia, at that point.  He sold the place about 9 years later, but the tavern ended up being part of Main Street, and the local watering hole. 1855.  Guy named Alexander Rea comes into town.  The first engineer from Locust Mountain colliery, he fixed himself up with an apartment above the tavern, and set about laying plans for streets and lots for the new town.  In 1865, they laid rail through the town and people started to come in, looking for work in the mines.  Rea stuck around and worked as superintendent of the mines. 

It was a bustling little mining town in its heyday.  The town was dotted with twenty saloons, five churches, a convent, and a polka dance hall, among other things.  A saloon for every 200 people, the town was known for, at one point. 

About three years after they laid the rail, Alexander Rea's body was found in the bushes on the road between Centralia and Mount Carmel. 

Ah, but I've skipped something.  Around the time of the Civil War, up through the 1870s, the Molly Maguires were at the height of their fame in the region.   No one can say much with certitude about the Mollys.  I've got a vivid imagination and a tendency to side with the Irish.  But I'll let you decide. 

3 Mollys were pegged with Rea's murder.  Which mind you, wasn't the first.  6 murders in the region up to that point, all pegged on Maguireism.  Damn near anyone who spoke of unions back then was pegged as a Molly.  (If you have access to the historical NY Times, check out some of the old articles on it. Great stuff.)

Rough and Tumble Centralia. 

Most of that died down after the 1870s.  Unions were starting to form and after the big Molly executions, well...who really knows.  History is nothing but a mystery anyway, no matter what we tell ourselves.

Fast forward a little less than a century.

1954.  The company that owned most of Centralia's coal deeded it to the town.  For one dollar.

8 years later the fire started.  There's some debate over how, but basically the incineration of trash crept down into the abandoned labyrinth of mines that Centralia sat on.  It spread through the vein and the nooks and crannies created by bootleg mining over the years.  It's been burning ever since then.  Some say it will burn for another 50, 100, 200 years.  Seems anyone's guess to me.  That mountain Down Under has been burning for somewhere between two to six thousand years.  Steam and smoke seeps out of the ground, holes, and roads in Centralia.  Roads are shredded from the fire. 

Valentine's Day. 1981.  I was somewhere between a twinkle in the eye of my parents and those first school days staring at those rulers, a few months from being born.

A group of men showed up in Centralia that day, and, being a small town like any small town, people noticed.  Carrie called her daughter Florence who sent her 12 year old kid Todd out to see what was up.  I've been sent on those types of missions before.  Hell, we had one lady in our neighborhood who just stood at the window with binoculars half the day.  Suburbia and small town life can do that to you, I guess.  So this kid goes out to check it out, cuts through the yards, stops to check out something on the motorbike his cousin is working on, and keeps going.  He saw some smoke coming from the ground and did what most curious kids would do: went to check it out.  And the ground opened up and almost swallowed him.  He grabbed the roots of the trees, screamed for help, and his cousin came over and pulled him out.  Whole thing lasted about 45 seconds, and they stumbled through the door of the grandma's house.  She figured out what had happened, and then sent the cousin to find out who the men were.  Cause you know, she still didn't know. 

Turns out to be the Congressman and the group of politicians and officials who had come to talk about the mine fire.  Irony, eh?

Today there are about 10 residents left in Centralia.  As a 2004 Harper's article put it:

In the papers, Centralians had become a stubborn breed with "stubborn offspring" who, despite a "vast," "huge," "gigantic," and "spreading" fire that had poisoned people with gases and tried to eat a child, "refused to acknowledge their impending doom." "The remaining old timers," reported the Times of London, "just laugh!"

Maybe that's just the power of home. 

Couple of guys made a movie about the fire last year.  Or, two years, I guess it now is.  They called it The Town that Was.

But, there's a lot of towns like that around here.  Towns that were. And everywhere.  They've all got their stories.  

This isn't where I thought I'd end up when I started writing.  I thought it might go somewhere into the havoc wrought by mining.  The many things we've done wrong in the name of progress.  It started with me putzing around looking for abandoned buildings and ghost towns to haunt, when I stumbled into Centralia and back to the 19^th century and met some Molly Maguires.  C'est la vie.  Sometimes you start walking and end up somewhere better than your destination.

Those of you who actually ARE cool will know, of course, who made this saying famous.  Conan O'Brien says it frequently when his audience gets a little crazy, and I thought it an appropriate comment right about now.

I've been keeping a low profile since the election; partly from exhaustion, partly from just the miraculous marvel of it all, and partly from simply observing all the hoopla going on from politicians to pundits as Obama, taking the road less traveled, has found it necessary to pull out the machete to hack his way through the tangled underbrush of the What Is He Thinking weeds, the He's Selling Out shrubs, the This Has Never Been Done Before So It Probably Won't Work plants, the So Many Strong Personalities in the West Wing Will Produce Chaos perinneals, the He's Letting Congress Push Him Around brush, and so on.

Even al Qaeda weighed in, blaming Obama for the mess in the Gaza, even though he has not yet even taken the oath of office.  Yeeeah, democracy's tough to understand for some people, I guess.

And so I just have to say to everyone:  Be cool my bebbes.  Listen to Mama.

For the past two years I've read not just Obama's books, but every major policy paper he ever wrote, as well as every speech he gave in the primaries and general election that I could find online.  I've also read the columnists and op-edders and bloggers from both sides of the aisle, from way back when they merely sneered at him to the time they realized they'd underestimated him to the time they realized his time was here, like, NOW, to their obsessive wrestling with just what and who he is and what the hell he's going to do.

It's really not that hard to figure out.  He has laid it all out, in great detail, for months now.  It's just that nobody was paying attention because we had so many more important things to concern ourselves with.

Like Jeremiah Wright.  And Bill Ayers.  And Sarah Palin.

Plus, everybody's busy.  I get that.  I have the time to read all this stuff that most people just don't have, and I'm grateful for that, but I wish that the people WHO ACTUALLY MAKE A LIVING AT THIS would have been paying just a wee bit more attention themselves.

I've also been around long enough to remember how Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn twisted arms to get landmark legislation through, like Civil Rights and Medicare, when his own party was, at the time, the party of Southern Bigots.  I've been around long enough to have seen Ronald Reagan wheedle, cajole, charm, and trick a recalcitrant Democratic congress to give him what he wanted.

I've also seen leaders such as Bill Clinton, who could have been great, but their approach was sloppy and undisciplined and their mistakes sometimes just too serious to overcome.

(For instance, letting the right-wing steal his honeymoon by cranking up the whole gays-in-the-military controversy right after he got elected, which set the tone for how he would be bullied by them when they took over in '94.)

And George W. Bush, who has not the slightest clue what it means to lead.

I mean, he plays a leader on TV.  That, he can do.  He can play the part of Andover cheerleader in the rubble with a megaphone, but he can't lead.  He has delegated his entire presidency to those stronger and more determined, from Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld to Gen. Petraeus to HeckuvajobBrownie to Hank Paulsen.  Then he went off for a bike ride.

So what I'm saying is that there is an entire generation who simply does not comprehend what true national leadership looks like, and who, for that matter, has no real understanding of what GOVERNING is.

In the age of Karl Rove, we've been brainwashed to believe that anyone on the opposing side is an enemy we should hate, not an opponent we need to work with.  The word "compromise" has come to mean "selling out" or "caving in."

Obama likes to use the word "pragmatic" a lot, but I'm not sure many political watchers these days really understand what that means.

Once in every other generation or so, a true visionary will come along, one who doesn't just "see things as they should be," but sees the way things WILL be in the future and the way they CAN be with enough foresight and energy and willpower.

And the thing about a visionary is...well...nobody else sees the vision.  Not for a long time, anyway.

A few do, those who catch on early, who realize they're near that phenomenon, and who are smart enough and savvy enough to see it as well, and to help that visionary bring that vision to pass.

But the thing is...It's a messy process.

At first, most everybody will complain because their golden calf didn't get the proper worship.

Also, most people are afraid of change.  They are afraid of it in their private lives and very very afraid of it when it comes to a behemoth like the government.

So they fight.

This past campaign was as vicious as it was because Obama was running a 21st century campaign to redesign a government that would be ready for the 21st century and not the 20th.  Most people could not see it, or if they did, they did not believe it could be possible. 

Some outright feared it.

So he had to really fight just to get the opportunity to make it happen.

Now everybody's running around all anxious and worried because he's talking about, and doing things, that represent a vision he can see but they can't, even if they want to, really really badly.  Or, they see it but they don't think he's going to be able to pull it off, or maybe they see it, but they think that every time he reaches some sort of agreement with his opponents, that he has sold out, caved in, lost The Dream.

His supporters just trust him to do it, but the skeptics think that kind of trust is foolish if not downright dangerous. 

But what really amuses me is all the speculation about HOW he's going about it; the people he's picked and the changes he's making--mostly behind the scenes.  You have to be paying attention, really paying attention, to see how he intends to get things done.

What I have read, over and over again, is quotes from people who used to work for Clinton, or used to work for Bush, or used to work for Carter.

And time and again, they comment about how this is getting away from him, how he's going to be railroaded by his own people, how the strong personalities he has entrusted with these responsibilities will have their own turf and their own agendas and his plans will get stonewalled.

These comments are based on these people's experiences.

And none of them worked for a true, strong leader.

A strong leader, like say, Franklin Roosevelt, surrounded himself with his Brain Trust, and he worked in an extremely hostile environment where everything he tried to do was called socialism or fascism by his enemies and opposed by his friends because they'd never seen it done before.

In Lincoln's Cabinet, there were stong personalities who vigorously tried to undermine him for their own political ambitions, and it appeared to those who were not paying that much attention that they were getting away with it.

During the Cuban Missile Crises, Kennedy's own military advisors--to a man--urged him to go to war with Russia over the missiles.  One admiral even tried to go behind his back, without authorization.  They all thought he was crazy-weak.

In all these cases, these men were furiously criticized both within and without their administrations, but because they understood the true nature of leadership, they were able to accomplish extraordinary, historic things after all.

They had clear visions; they did not fear opposing points of view from advisors; they reached out to the best minds available to them; and no matter what anybody said, they remained true to what they had set out to do.

Yes, current events can mold and shape an administration.  Lincoln wasn't sure about emancipating the slaves at the beginning of the war and did it, at the end, against every advisor he had.

And yes, of course, they all made mistakes.  FDR overstepped his bounds when he tried to overhaul the Supreme Court to keep it from ruling against the New Deal programs.  Kennedy fell into the Bay of Pigs.  Lincoln put up with obstructionist generals for far too long.

But overall, their accomplishments far outweighed their mis-steps.

What Obama's detractors need to understand is that he and his people have been studying the workings of past administrations, past Congresses, and history itself to see what has worked and has not worked, and they have put together some extraordinary ideas for how to make this administration a successful one.  They were working on this long before he received the nomination.

Detractors would call that hubris.  But a visionary ACTS on that vision long before it starts to come true.  For Obama, it was simple pragmatism.  On the one hand, he would do everything in his power to win the nomination and election, and on the other hand, he would begin to prepare for the eventuality that he WOULD win, so that he would be ready, as Hillary famously said, from Day One.

I have many many links to many articles that would lay out these steps that the Obama team is making.  They are very exciting and quite thorough.

I'm not going to do that with this post because my kids only just got in this week for our Christmas celebrations, and I don't want to spend their rare time at home hunched over the computer.

But I have been accumulating a file of material, and after this weekend, I'll start putting together for you links that will show you the breadth, depth, and reach of the plans of this new administration to work dramatic--and lasting--changes to streamline and modernize our government and to accomplish what will come to look, in time, miraculous.

It won't be, though.

It will just be true leadership.

So be cool, my bebbes.  Enjoy the Inauguration.  Then buckle your seatbelts, because it will be a wild, but very satisfying, ride.

Senator Feingold from my sister state of Wisconsin has been one of my favorite senators for some time.  At times for the last ten years he has been a voice crying in the wilderness for justice, for the rule of law.  Sometimes he was all alone and seemed to some like a nutcase.

I always knew he was not a nutcase, but a man who believed in America and in our values.

John Nichols on 01/07/2009 @ 2:15pm writes in the nation

about my favorite senator and his attempts to contact the President-Elect through correspondence about reining in the executive.  He gives 6 crisp demands/requests:

1.) Close the facility at Guantanamo Bay.

This  has been promised by Obama. And I think few on the left would disagree with this proposition.

2.) Ban torture and establish a single, government-wide standard of humane detainee treatment.

This is a prayer from the left.  Blogs like TPM make it real clear how important and symbolic an Executive Order would be right from the get go.

3.) Conduct a comprehensive review of Office of Legal Counsel opinions and repudiate or revise those that overstate executive authority.

My sentiments exactly. The time for comic book briefs is over.

4.) Support significant legislative changes to the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act.

This would begin to repair a wrong perpetrated by the Republicans as well as many Democrats.

5.) Cooperate with congressional oversight, including providing full information to intelligence committees.

I will be watching this closely.  The dictatorship must be abolished and the eschewing of Congressional Subpoenas must stop now.

6.) Establish presumptions of openness and disclosure in making decisions on the classification of information and respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. 

Transparency is of paramount importance.  There will still be national secrets. There have to be even in a democracy.  But our level of secrecy in this country over the last eight years mirrors the secrecy of the USSR during the Cold War.

These six short demands would go a long way to helping the United States live up to its own propaganda.  In the eyes of its own citizens and the other nations of the world.

Post-revolution, the interval between useful idiot and useless idiot disappears, and the rose-strewn streets, so lately sites of delirious parades and energetic visionaries, become littered with riddled remains of the expendable.

I'm trying hard to hold onto my belief in hope and change. I think Obama and his people are very smart, and they attract other smart, talented - visionary - people. And we need them and we need that process to rescue this country. We have wars busting out all over, in addition to our own grinding atrocities in the Middle East and South Asia.

Read more »

...and nobody is there to hear it did it actually make a noise?

Well if a $3000 tax cut to an employer to hire or retain an employee doesn't immediately inspire a lot of hiring so what? A tax cut that isn't used doesn't cost the government anything. But once hiring does pick up it'll make the job recovery that much faster. 

Remember Bush's jobless recovery of 2002-2005? Want a repeat of that? I don't. So why wouldn't a Democratic president want to promote hiring? We have an $11 trillion dollar debt as it is. We can't afford half a decade of double digit unemployment. Maybe this isn't the best way to do it. But if not then let's hear some better ideas.



 

     So Sara's at it again, bashing the godless mainstream media elites for not scrutinizing Caroline Kennedy as closely as Miss Alaska herself.

"It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out and I think that as we watch that we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be."

The implication of this rambling run-on, if I understand it correctly, is that the media ought to skewer Caroline like they did Sara, but they won't because Caroline's pedigreed.

 So, Sara, here's some scrutiny for you. Let's compare apples to apples.

Caroline Kennedy is an attorney with a law degree from Columbia.

Sara Palin is the governor of a po-dunk state with a bachelor's degree from a community college in journalism.

Caroline Kennedy, having obtained a degree in law from an ivy-league law school has demonstrated direct knowledge of the law, and is poised to enter the legislative branch of government. While still an august position, it is hardly the highest office in the land and doesn't warrant the same scrutiny as, say, President or VP. 

Sara Palin, though she aspired to the second highest office in the land, a cardiac arrhythmia away from the highest, at a time of national and international economic crisis and with two wars going, has failed to demonstrate an even cursory knowledge of basic civics, foreign affairs, geography, or even proper English sentence structure, much less law.

Now, I'm sure one could argue that education is, in fact, a class issue, but that would be getting off point. Wasilly-Sara is talking about media bias against what exactly? Is she positioning herself as lower-class? News flash, Sara: Not many lower-class people, win beauty pageants, become mayors, are appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and then become governors and hire lobbyists. 

The only class issue here is that Caroline went to class, and Sara didn't.

Former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, President-elect Barack Obama and President George W. Bush
All posed for a group picture in the Oval Office of the White House Wednesday. (White House photo by Eric Draper). It was a very momentous occasion, requested by President-elect Obama and hosted by our current president (OCP). First there was a private meeting at which reportedly, the old heads advised our new president-to-be on how he could avoid being caught in a White House bubble of group-think, and how a President Obama could make it more possible for his people to bring him bad news. At the end there was a dynamite photo-op for everyone, during which these distinguished gentlemen were discussing the current Oval Office rug.

In an escalating Israeli/Palestinian conflict, at the same time half way around the world, there were people working very hard to kill each other . The headlines had been very troubling for several days: The Raw Story: A Norwegian doctor reports that "Israel intentionally targeted civilians*" (1/5/09). McClatchy: "Airstrike kills 3 at Gaza school-UN*" (1/6/08). Informed Comment: "Israel/Gaza Cyberwar and parallels to Abu Ghraib*" (1/6/09). And recently, Informed Comment: "Something Horrible has been Discovered*" (1/7/09) Cole's post linked to The Telegraph/UK headline: "Gaza medics describe horror of strike which killed 70" (1/8/09).

Any talk of the Middle East? One could wonder whether the Oval Office occupants had anything to say in their meeting about how the United States has been forever unable to help generations of these determined combatants achieve a lasting peace. In turn each of these powerful "leaders of the free world" have been singularly unsuccessful as Middle East peacemakers. War-makers, yes; temporary agreements, yes; but peacemakers with permanence, no.

Madeleine Albright's book, "Madam Secretary" recounts a great deal about how hard former presidents have tried for peace. About Carter, elected in 1976, she said,

President Carter was one of our most intelligent chief executives and one who showed a fierce dedication to conflict prevention and individual human dignity both during and after his term in office. He was a proactive President who achieved much in foreign policy, including the historic Middle East Peace Accords at Camp David. . . . Politically, however he was unlucky.

About Bush 41, Albright observed, regarding her work in the Clinton administration in 1997,

People were worried about Saddam's weapons and asking what we were going to do. . . No serious consideration was given to actually invading Iraq. The senior President Bush had not invaded when given the chance with hundreds of thousands of troops already in the region during the Gulf War.

In Albright's Chronology of her diplomatic work are included these pertinent entries: 11/4/92 - Bill Clinton elected President. 6/26/93 - U.S. bombs Iraqi intelligence headquarters in retaliation for assassination attempt against former President George Bush. 9/13/93 - Israeli and Palestinian leaders sign Oslo Declaration of Principles. 1/23/97 - MKA sworn in as 64th secretary of state. 10/15/98 - Middle East talks result in Wye River Memorandum. 7/11-25/2000 - Middle East summit. 9/28/2000 - Israeli politician Ariel Sharon visits the Temple Mount/Haram alSharif, violence breaks out. January 2001 - Last efforts to negotiate Middle East settlement failed.

"More than meets the eye." Following shortly after that we saw the Republicans take over. For a time the Middle East appeared to be quiescent. It was not of great concern to George W. Bush, until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. That tragic loss of American life set the U.S. on a path in the Middle East that largely ignored the unsolved conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Walls went up, Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas won an election, Ariel Sharon left the picture and tensions grew. The war in Lebanon happened. In all of these things the U.S. efforts were absent or made relatively little difference. All eyes have been on Afghanistan and mostly, Iraq.

President-elect Obama has promised to turn attention form Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And he is not talking much about Israel and Palestine, reminding that "we have one president at a time." At the end of last year an important article appeared on Steve Clemons' blog, The Washington Note: "Daniel Levy: What Next on Israel/Gaza? Why Should Americans Care?" (12/28/08). This brilliant thinker asked a number of important questions that should have prompted some actions or answers from the Republican administration or former Republican leaders or opinion makers.

But these are the stories that appeared. From at-Largely came this story, "John Bolton continues to have no clue but plenty of propaganda...*" (1/5/09). See also Think Progress: "Gaza Crisis Means We Should Attack Iran Now#" (1/1/09). And this appeared at ThinkProgress: "Perino: Ground Invasion Will Help 'Create A More Stable And Secure Area' For People Of Gaza*" (1/5/09). AlterNet asks my question: "Why Do So Few Speak Up for Gaza?*" (1/7/08). And now this Happy News -- AlterNet: "Israeli Militants Poised to Resettle Gaza After Assault*" (1/7/09).

I have not listened to the news today. Absolutely everything might have changed. It will not make any difference what the Bush administration does because, as Politico says: "Gaza reshuffles [the] Israeli political deck" (1/8/09) for Barack Obama. And none of his predecessors in the Oval Office can tell him what to do, because they do not know. None of them figured out the magic formula. Perhaps there is none. But one thing upon which you can count is that our new President will give it his best. He sees the world with very different eyes than the people in the picture, and that is a good thing.


Hat Tip Key: Regular contributors of links to leads are "betmo*" and Jon#.

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)

My "creativity and dreaming" post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Technorati tags: news news and politics president israel gaza middle east

Josh asks whether there is a constituency for building green infrastructure as part of the stimulus. The answer is: we must be the constituency. This is precisely the moment when the careful movement building of the primaries and general must begin to pay off, if it ever will. Every one of us must contact our representatives to let them know that we endorse these measures, and contact our friends to urge them to do the same (after due reflection, of course). We must not adopt the attitude (implicit, i’m afraid, in Josh’s post) that congressional action is a spectator sport for us to sit back and enjoy or despair about. Yes we can!

This is CBC's headline.
UN halts aid to Gaza

New update from the Moran campaign - a chance for a ticket to the inauguration!

Win a ticket to history and help organize Virginia

This January 20th, America will make history.  We've all worked so hard for so long to make this a reality - if you're like me, you can't wait.  Barack Obama knew that what mattered most were the grassroots - everyday Americans committing to build a better future for themselves and their kids.

Unfortunately, there won't be nearly enough tickets to the inauguration for every Virginia volunteer and grassroots organizer to go. That's why I'm going to be giving away inauguration tickets to dedicated Democratic leaders who sign up on our website. If you sign up today organize.brianmoran.com, you'll be entered into a drawing to win a ticket to President-elect Obama's swearing in, and we'll let you know the winners by January 16.

In a few weeks, our campaign for Governor will launch a groundbreaking new online system organize.brianmoran.com to help organize Virginia for my campaign in 2009 and keep Virginia Democrats organized going forward. I've worked all over Virginia, fighting for Virginia Democrats. I've knocked doors, made phone calls, and held rallies for nearly a decade. But I bet you're as tired as I am of building a statewide network for Virginia Democrats only to dismantle it after every election. Once the technical work is completed, this new social networking system will help Democrats organize Virginia for my campaign, all our other campaigns for that November, and beyond.  

And don't forget - grassroots leaders who sign up now for the drawing to go the inauguration will be invited to a sneak peek when the new organize.brianmoran.com launches. Sign up today!

Thanks for all you did in 2008. Let's get rolling on 2009.

Your Friend,

Brian

Cross posted from: http://www.brianmoran.com/2009/1/7/win-a-ticket-to-history-and-help-organize-virginia

In THE FIRM the pretty wife of Cruise pleads with him to leave the law firm of evil and give up the Big Career.  "Remember when we would just go through all our coat pockets and find enough change so that we could order a pizza?" she asked.

I search my couch, my kitchen drawers, my old pants sometimes and find a quarter or two  once in a while.

Muckraker reports that they found over 170 million dollars in checks in Madoff's desk drawer.  These represented bonuses he was going to pay his co-conspirators. This at a time when the entire assets of his firm consist of two or three times the amount of these checks.

And let us not mince words here.  Co-conspirators. 

x is an officer whose duties involve oversight of the company's treasury.  You are a co-conspirator.

y is an officer whose duties include running the accounting division of the company.  You are a co-conspirator.

z is one of the top ten in management of the company.  You are a co-conspirator.

"Oh, if only I'd known."

No.   The standard is whether or not you knew or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. " I had no idea there was a bullet in the chamber.  I just intended to scare him and then the gun went off." That is not a defense.  The shooter is guilty of anything from first degree murder to manslaughter.

"Oh, there were mistakes made.  I admit it.  But it was never my intent."

The driver gets in his car after a few martini's and runs over an old man in the crosswalk. "It was never my intent to hurt that man."  If the driver's BAC is .1%, the driver is guilty of manslaughter.

No. Gross negligence is enough to get someone convicted, get their assets confiscated and get their ass thrown in jail.  Mishandling 50 billion dollars is gross negligence.

Someone flies back to the states and they find a packet of heroin in a suitcase.  "Oh I did not know it was in there.  I brought it back for someone else who would return later.  I did it as a favor."  Not necessarily a defense in the criminal action.

"How could I have known?"  No you are a professional.  You have a license to practice law.  You are a certified public accountant, certified by the state or states you work in.  You have an MBA, and an economics degree.

All you have to do is pull out the resumes these felons created before being hired.  The resumes will maintain that the writer was capable, competent, educated, experienced and ready to hit the ground running.

All you have to do is pull out their weekly, monthly and yearly corporate reports.  They all will 'document" good months, good returns on investments, good predictions for the future, solid financial foundations.

All you have to do is pull out the weekly, monthly and yearly corporate reports that were required by government to governmental regulators.  These represent gross returns, these represent costs, these represent payments to shareholders/investors.  These represent capital.

Charge them all under RICO, and during trial read all these false reports to the jury. Sure, this will be boring, but play some good music in the background to keep the jury awake.

Then you read the financial history of each and every defendant to the jury. 

2006, defendant x 'earned' 1.5 mill in salary, 1mill in bonuses, .5 mill in stock options (that were eventually sold for 4 mill).....

If the judge happens to throw a case or two out of court, do an investigation on the judge a check all of his finances going back five or ten years.

If the private sector can run for-profit prisons, then why can't the government?  After all, a sheriff's gotta eat.

Cue the one-note chorus from Colorado Springs...

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by Ted Kennedy, hears testimony from Health and Human Services Secretary-Nominee Tom Daschle today. This isn't a confirmation hearing, but it signals the high priority that both Congress and the Obama Administration plan to give to serious health care reform this year.

The prominence of health care on Washington's radar even in the midst of the economic mess should give hope to many Americans (the uninsured, those facing bankruptcy from medical bills, those of us with high-deductible plans that don't cover maternity...).

Leave it to Focus on the Family to try taking everyone's eyes off the ball. Denise Ross (who has some medical bills coming up soon--congratulations and best wishes for a smooth delivery, Denise!) points us toward a screed from the Dobson wolf-PAC exhorting voters to call the senators on the HELP committee and tell them to vote against Daschle's nomination. "Tom Daschle is a disaster appointment," says blogger Jill Stanek in the post. "Daschle ardently supports abortion... and he disdains abstinence education." FotF's Ashley Horne adds, "Citizens who care about family values should be concerned about Daschle's nomination."

Family values? I got your family values right here. While Jom Dobson's minions bloviate, Joe and Missy Urbaniak are fighting to pay their son Cooper's medical bills. Doctors have removed brain and spine tumors from the three-year-old boy, and now say he needs high-dose chemo and a stem-cell transplant. Cost; $400,000. Their insurer, Sanford Health Plan, is refusing to pay for the treatment, saying it's "experimental." A similar treatment worked for a Wisconsin boy, whose family also had to take their insurer to court to get coverage (the family won). The Urbaniaks' lawyer, Mike Abourezk, notes Sanford appears to be doing a selective reading of the medical studies on the treatment, citing only the parts that uphold their rejection [details in "Family Fights for Boy's Cancer Care," Mitchell Daily Republic, 2009.01.07].

Tom Daschle is coming to Washington to work on health care reform that would help Cooper Urbaniak and millions of other Americans get affordable health care without having to take big corporations to court. That sounds like a focus on the family to me. But you won't hear a word about that from the one-note chorus from Colorado Springs.

Jill Stanek claims, "The only reason Obama appointed Daschle was to assure Obama's radical support of the abortion industry would be extended through HHS." That's absurd. But Focus on the Family needs to believe that absurdity. The radical right must cast every government action as part of a war on family values; otherwise, their raison d'être (and raison de fundraising) disappears.

Part of me wishes Jim Dobson would just accept his irrelevance. But another part me hopes he keeps up the nuttery. The more Focus on the Family brays, the more Americans will see the difference between fighting a contrived culture war (that's Dobson's need) and solving practical policy problems (that's Obama and Daschle's plan).

If you really value families, call your senators, and tell them to give two thumbs up to Tom Daschle and health care reform.

------------
In case you need proof that Stanek, Dobson, et al. live in a reality of their own making: Obama didn't pick Daschle because of abortion. He picked Daschle because Daschle knows how to pass legislation. See this smart piece by Carrie Budoff Brown, "Daschle's Approach: Anything But Clinton," in today's Politico.com.

At the outset let me make this abundantly clear, I hold no brief for Leon Panetta. And if the President-elect Barack Obama wants him as a Director of the CIA, he must have him. It should'nt be Senator Diane Feinstein who decides what the appropriate qualification for that CIA Director position should be. After all Feinstein has been one of the most surreptiously pro-George Bush members of the Senator. In the last 8 years she has sided with Republicans on many pseudo-security issues. Recently she undermined Democratic efforts in the Senate's Judicial  Committee to vote down the nomination of Judge John Muckasey for attorney-general. She is now nit-picking on, and seem intent on derailing Panetta's nomination on the grounds that Panetta lacks intelligence experience. This woman's effort to undermine his nomination is as treacherous to President-elect's transition effort as her  undercutting Democratic efforts to derail Muckasey's nomination. Feinstein did this selling-out despite Muckasey's undisguised propensity toward blind and extreme partisan support of Bush's anti-human rights and authoritanian security measures against American citizens. Even before she can even be made to account for those earlier transgression against her party, she is intent on another transgression, and, this time against Obama's Presidential transition process. Mark my word, if this woman is not sufficiently upbraided for this, she will get away with even more serious anti-Democratic infringements, with unconstructive consequences to the Obama-Democratic agenda.

Obama acknowledged this week the country could face trillion-dollar deficits for years to come. He has pledged to try to rid government of wasteful spending and to look at ways to address costly entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

I have a new business plan in the works.  I live in a small town that has just had a big influx of 30 year olds, with families, working at our factory at lifetime jobs.  I'm going to set up a bank, and persuade those folks to send me about 5% of their paycheck every two weeks, so I can hold it for them.  I will tell them I will add 5% interest, compounded monthly to the money they send, and after 30 years they can buy the house of their dreams in Florida.

Move the clock forward 30 years.

John Smith takes early retirement, comes to see me and says he is going to take the $500,000 shown on his monthly statement as the value of his account, and buy a house in Florida, on the beach.  I, of course, chuckle and say, how can you do that?  You just have a piece of paper with numbers on it, not actual money.  It takes actual money to buy a house.  Not only that, but your co-workers all want to do the same thing, and I don't have anywhere near that much money to give you.  So, you will have to borrow $500,000 from me, at 6% interest, and $50,000 in loan fees, if you want to buy that house.

John says, but I sent you money for 30 years, I know I have it here.  

So, I say, sure you did, but look at this big bank building we are in.  Your money paid for it.  Look at my house.  Your money paid for it.  Look at how much my employees make.  Your money paid for that.  You can't expect to still have any money, you just have a piece of paper with numbers on it.

Now, what's wrong with my business plan?

Kit Bond is retiring from the Senate.

Before torture became fashionable--and legal--Kit Bond was one of only ten Senators sick and amoral enough to endorse Dick Cheney's abominable bill that would have authorized the CIA and the President to torture terror suspects. Ten Senators. Out of a hundred. Ninety decent men and women refused to vote for that outrage.

But that was about a year BEFORE the Military Commissions Act, which eventually DID give our Pervert-in-Chief the 'legal authority' to allow waterboarding, extreme positioning, threats, etc to obtain questionable intelligence. It passed with a comfortable margin, but it accomplished the exact same goal Cheney's bill tried to earlier--legalizing torture ordered by George W. Bush.

Against every international law on the subject, including the Geneva Conventions, which is, last time I checked with a constitutional scholar, a treaty that TRUMPS any mere statutes passed by Congress. When a law contradicts another law, there are precedents long ago set that determine which has the right to overrule the other. Treaties are the highest laws in the land, yet they are routinely ignored or tossed aside if inconvenient--especially by conservative Republican Presidents.

I'd been hearing rumors for months now that Bond was going to retire. He looks ill. He probably is. I'd also heard rumors that he would resign immediately, and at the last second outgoing extreme conservative Republican MO governor Matt Blunt would appoint his own father, Roy Blunt Jr, to the remainder of Bond's term. Blunt is politically dead, so it couldn't send his image any further down the toilet if he did that.

We'll just have to wait and see, and this scenario has just an outside chance of becoming reality.

As many may or may not know there are some devastating wildfire happening in Colorado right now. And because of them over 11,500 people have been evacuated from there homes. One of those evacuated, ex FEMA Michael "your doing a heckuva job Brownie" Brown.

Josh:

You have asked whether there is a constinuency in Congress or the US for this Green Economy investment that is in a sense the core element of the Stimulus Package outside direct aid to States, individuals and infrastructure programs that need immediate funding?

Ironically Obama and his team is already ahead of this as they have already invested in keeping together the 1.4M volunteer organizations that made up the grass roots army that got him nominated and elected. The purpose of keeping together the constinuency which held to a great degree the change movement that included Green Economy purporters was to effectively put local and political pressure on the process, specifically Congress from this channel.

This force remains highly motivated and organized where there were over 50,000 post election house parties in December just to keep the organization fused. Obama has called for his grass roots organization to have a National Day of Service the day before the inauguration to demonstrate support and breath of this organization on a local levels.

I for one believe I can in a quick notice muster over 200 local volunteers in Colorado Springs and team with 10 other Colorado cities and groups and begin phone banking and canvassing seeking to organize support for the stimulus package and apply that to Udall, Bennet, and the five Democratic Congresspersons petitioning support. We can make a lot of focused noise, louder than many organized labor or single issue constinuency groups.

I think you are still looking at this like Antonio Salieri in the story of Amadeus when he was looking through the prism of those damn 8th notes while Mozart was composing in a whole new world. Obama is not of the old Democratic prism that locked up the progressive movement in micro constinuencies like how Mark Penn viewed the world---remember. Obama see's the world as a whole and how to move it forward.

Here is the bottom line:  The Bush Administration has a deficit of 11.5M jobs in his eight years. In fact when it is done it will show his economics only created 2.95M jobs in his eight years. Each year we have to create 1.8M jobs just to incorporate in the workforce from population. Clinton created 23M jobs, roughly twice as many that were needed and why we were at full employment from '96-'00. Obama needs to grow the economy 27M jobs just to make up Bush's deficit and the annual demand by the growing workforce, that puts us back to normal employment.

The only way to do this is creating a new economy---Green Economy which solves the oil based economy and the global warming economy at the same time. I think the political reality is that there is nothing but this. The by-product is taking the healthcare system on the table and relieving the business community of this albatross and transfering the economy to the public sector in this regards. The providers who resist will be identified as selfish and greedy for that is the only sector not in a Depression.

 

NYT article has Bush dead-enders again (at yesterday's lunch) preaching to our new President what geniuses they were -- don't you change a thing!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/us/politics/08web-baker.html?hp

 

"It would be a tragedy if they threw over those policies simply because they had campaigned against them," intoned our delusional VEEP, amidst a flurry of other ridiculous and unwanted advice from various losers.  Oblivious they are in their inane hubris, to how harshly history will judge them, idiotic recommendations and all.  Overreach THIS, you fucks!