Chester D.T. Baldwin & Music Ministry Mass. Hailing from Texas, Baldwin fronts a 200-voice aggregation in a live recording held at the Shoreline Christian Center in Austin. Sing It On Sunday Morning! is accessible, traditional church all the way.
This album doesn’t just contain a few sure-fire hits —it’s literally stacked with them from beginning to end.
Baldwin ‘handles’ lead vocals on most cuts, but that’s hardly a verb that does justice to what he does with these songs. He is blessed with rich, soulful cords that express every ounce of heart and joy evidently bursting from his soul, and he’s able to translate that joy to those who will simply listen.
October 09, 2011
From Huntsman to Paul
Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has finally done it: he scored a perfect “0” yesterday in the Values Voter Summit’s straw poll.
Hunstman’s 1 percent popularity among the GOP base was, it seems, too much of a strain.
Is it mathematically possible to do three times better than zero? Only if one is a really, really Big Idea man, who came in at 3 percent, which nonetheless was only 1 point behind the inevitable GOP nominee’s percentage of 4. Doubtless, Newt will now start claiming that he’s running about even with Mitt.
Somebody by the name of “Santorum” scored 16 percent in the straw poll (hence the premise is proved: 16 times zero is indeed zero), which was precisely twice the percentage racked up by both one-time GOP frontrunners, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Oh, how the flighty have fallen.
Which brings us into the home stretch, where famed political philosopher Herman Cain thumped, with a resounding 23 percent of the vote, nearly all his competitors.
Yet Ron Paul he thumped not, for Ron Paul, with 37 percent, won the blue at the blood-red Values Voter Summit.
What does it all mean? How are we to interpret these highest of irregularities?
Let us allow one of the VVS’ prime speakers to answer those questions. Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association, has, from time to time, dropped such pearls as this one: that “The purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the free exercise of the Christian religion” only. And yesterday, at the Summit, Mr. Fischer’s values shone: homosexuality, said he, is a “threat to public health”; Islam is a “religion of war and violence and death”; and, naturally, evolution is a “bankrupt theory.”
Did that paragraph answer either of my two questions? Of course not. I just wanted to quote Bryan Fischer.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2011/10/from-huntsman-to-paul.html
Cain Still Unable: It’s All In My Head
By Zandar on October 9th, 2011
Herman Cain is now saying the fact that he exists means racism isn’t holding minorities back. It’s all in your head.
When asked by CNN Chief Political Correspondent Candy Crowley if he thought African Americans had a level playing field, Cain said he thought most of them did, using his own experience in corporations as an example.
“Many of them do have a level playing field,” Cain said. “I absolutely believe that. Not only because of the businesses that I have run, which has had the combination of whites, blacks, Hispanics – you know, we had a total diversity. But also because of the corporations whose board I’ve served on for the last 20 years. I have seen blacks in middle management move up to top management in some of the biggest corporations in America.”
As for African Americans who remain economically disadvantaged, Cain said they often only had themselves to blame.
“They weren’t held back because of racism,” Cain said. “People sometimes hold themselves back because they want to use racism as an excuse for them not being able to achieve what they want to achieve.”
I didn’t honestly think Herman Cain could be any more repugnant, but saying that racism is all in the heads of African-Americans is just ludicrous to the point of self-parody involving what people think about black CEOs running for the GOP White House ticket.
The cognitive dissonance is staggering to me. Herman Cain was in college during the civil rights era in the 60′s. When federal civil rights laws were codified, Cain benefited from them on the way to his lofty perch as Godfather’s Pizza CEO. At no point have I ever heard of Cain saying he was going to pass up civil rights programs or not take advantage of them because he thought the playing field was level. He admits in the interview that educational and economic disparity still exists, and then blames poor minorities for it. How does one escape a hell like that, you wonder? Through a college scholarship, perhaps?
Hell, look at the racism that spewed out when candidate Obama entered the race in 2007. It’s only gotten worse since then, and Cain honestly believes there’s a level playing field? Is he blind to all the assistance he received? Did he ever turn down a position because a company had an affirmative action policy in place? How the hell is he so damn sure that he received zero assistance from any of the civil rights measures that followed on his way to CEO?
Of course, Crowley asked none of that. But I sure as hell want to know.
http://www.angryblacklady.com/2011/10/09/cain-still-unable-its-all-in-my-head/#comment-19594
Martin Bashir contrasts Steve Jobs’ American exceptionalism with Sarah Palin’s crass opportunism
Martin Bashir of MSNBC completely nails it with his contrast between the extraordinary genius Steve Jobs and the extraordinary grifter, Sarah Palin (the transcript is below.)
It’s time now to clear the air and today, we’ve marked two important stories: the tragic and sad passing of a true creative genius at the age of just 56 and, hopefully, the end of a charade that’s been going on for three years. One individual represents the very best of American exceptionalism: brilliant, determined, creative. The other represents the very worst form of American opportunism: vacuous, crass, and according to almost every biographer, vindictive too.
He played himself to the very end, casually dressed, focused on producing product after product, that would transform culture, information, and our social interaction. Over the last three years, she created nothing, produced nothing, and served no one but herself.
And, while the vast majority of consumers have expressed high levels of satisfaction with the products he produced, imagine how her most ardent followers must feel today. They were misled into buying ghost-written and vain glorious books that attempted to create the illusion of leadership and character. They bought tickets to see a documentary that ignored fact and was a celluloid whitewash of her life. Even on the day that she confirmed that all of us knew, that she wouldn’t be running for president, she still dropped a video asking for more donations. Amazing.
But, although the death of Steve Jobs coincided with Sarah Palin’s announcement, it has been a helpful accident of fate, because it allows us to realize and commemorate the greatness of one individual’s contribution and the utter futility of another’s.
The right wing is going absolutely bonkers over this, apoplectic in their disgust. When the curtain gets pulled back, they don’t like it one bit. But Bashir’s commentary is important because there is a philosophical debate happening in this country about the very topic of American exceptionalism. On one side you have people like President Obama exhorting us to be better than we are, to hold justice and fairness in high regard and for everyone to contribute to the greater good of the country in a way that’s fair and decent. In this way, we create an environment where entrepreneurs can flourish; where geniuses like Steve Jobs can rise from a geeky college kid to creating and heading a company that at one time had more money than the U.S. Treasury.
On the other side of the debate you have people like Sarah Palin, a woman who, as Bashir so eloquently points out, has created nothing but attention and a cash machine for herself. In her version of American exceptionalism, and that of her fellow conservatives like Herman Cain and others, you are exceptional only if you are successful. In other words, exceptionalism is individual-oriented rather than collective-oriented. If you aren’t successful, you do not deserve even the chance to better yourself because it’s your own fault that you are where you are. And, if you are successful, you have no obligation to give something back to the system that made your success and wealth possible. Any requests to do so are anti-American in their view.
So, while the conservative pundits on the right make claims that Bashir is somehow exploiting Jobs’ death simply as a way of attacking Sarah Palin, they miss the crux of his argument; that there is a great divide and a stark contrast between these two Americans. And it’s a contrast that should be recognized and discussed so that we are sure to hold the truly exceptional Americans like Steve Jobs in the highest regard while we relegate the crassly opportunistic Americans like Sarah Palin to their properly inconsequential position in history.
Cross-posted from Eclectablog.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2011/10/martin-bashir-contrasts-steve-jobs.html
Police officers from the Uniformed Division of the U.S. Secret Service arrest a demonstrator, allegedly for throwing a shoe at one of them, in front of the White House in Washington, October 9, 2011.
How Obama’s data-crunching prowess may get him re-elected
By Micah Sifry, Special to CNN
In July, KDNuggets.com, an online newsite focused on data mining and analytics software, ran an unusual listing in its jobs section.
“We are looking for Predictive Modeling/Data Mining Scientists and Analysts, at both the senior and junior level, to join our department through November 2012 at our Chicago Headquarters,” read the ad. “We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, predictive modelers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers – all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama.”
The job listing caught the attention of Alex Lundry, a Republican data-mining expert at TargetPoint Consulting. He tweeted a link to the ad, commenting, “The Obama campaign is taking #bigdata seriously; what about the GOP candidates?”
The question almost answers itself. So far in the presidential election of 2012, there is only one campaign that is doing cutting-edge work with data.
Obama may be struggling in the polls and even losing support among his core boosters, but when it comes to the modern mechanics of identifying, connecting with and mobilizing voters, as well as the challenge of integrating voter information with the complex internal workings of a national campaign, his team is way ahead of the Republican pack.
Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million “likes” (roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running), it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters.
Users of the Obama 2012 – Are You In? app are not only giving the campaign personal data like their name, gender, birthday, current city, religion and political views, they are sharing their list of friends and information those friends share, like their birthday, current city, religion and political views. As Facebook is now offering the geo-targeting of ads down to ZIP code, this kind of fine-grained information is invaluable.
Inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. Modeled on Facebook, the tool connects all levels of staff to the information they are gathering as they work on tasks like signing up volunteers, knocking on doors, identifying likely voters and dealing with problems. Managers can set goals for field organizers — number of calls made, number of doors knocked — and see, in real time, how people are doing against all kinds of metrics.
In additional to all the hard data, users can share qualitative information: what points or themes worked for them in a one-on-one conversation with voters, for example. “Ups,” “Downs” and “Solutions” are color-coded, so people can see where successes are happening or challenges brewing.
And unlike an open social network, where everyone is equal, NationalField runs on a hierarchical social graph: Higher-level staff get a broader view of the state and local work below them.
For a campaign that tapped the volunteer energies of millions of people in 2008 and appears to need all the help it can get in 2012, these kinds of fine-grained technologies could make a key difference. While the Republican field (and bloggers and the press) has been focused on how their candidates are doing with social networking, Obama’s campaign operatives are devising a new kind of social intelligence that will help drive campaign resources where they are most needed.
It all sounds like common sense, but actually, connecting and synchronizing the data a campaign collects from its field operation, fundraising operation and Web operation isn’t a trivial task.
“The holy grail of data analysis is data harmonization, or master data management,” Lundry said. “To have political talking to finance and finance talking to field, and data is flowing back and forth and informing the actions of each other — it sounds easy, but it’s incredibly hard to implement.”
Most political campaigns tend to rely on consultants to carry out part or all of these functions, resulting in even greater obstacles to sharing information.
Like Lundry, Republican technology consultant Martin Avila is worried. His firm, Terra Eclipse, built Ron Paul’s 2008 Web operation and works closely with the tea party movement. This year, it did some work on Tim Pawlenty’s website until that campaign folded.
Avila’s flagship project is a conservative social-networking hub called Freedom Connector, which has grown to 150,000 members in a matter of months by giving right-wing activists tools to organize local meetings and discussions. Avila doesn’t think any of the Republican presidential campaigns fully understand the power of data today.
“They have to stop seeing a website as a piece of direct mail that people will receive,” he said. “They have to see a website as the equivalent of a campaign office in Iowa, one that is open 24/7.” And campaigns need to know how to take quick and well-targeted action to respond to every expression of interest they may get online, he argues, because voter interest in politicians is fickle. Simply sending a generic e-mail reply isn’t enough.
“If you can make that initial response a phone call from someone in their town or a neighbor, asking them to come to a county fair tomorrow, that’s much more powerful.
Without good data management, the different legs of a national campaign can trip over each other.
“One hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing quite often in campaigns,” Lundry said. “With master data management across a campaign, you can see how often you’re talking to a person” and thus not bombard them with untimely or poorly targeted requests.
But, according to Avila, “Not many on the Republican side know how to technically accomplish that.” Their approach to the Web, he adds, is still too much shaped by pre-Internet politicking using broadcast advertising. “The ability to connect to people on a one-to-one basis, and encourage them to connect with one another, is way more powerful than that.”
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/09/tech/innovation/obama-data-crunching-election/index.html
The GOP’s sad, intolerant 2012 field
By Robert Shrum | The Week – 10 hrs ago
At the weekend’s Values Voters Summit, Republican presidential candidates and conservative kingmakers proved that bigotry is among their chief values
There’s a good reason for the otherwise inexplicable reality that in most surveys President Obama, despite his currently desiccated job approval ratings, leads all but one of his Republican rivals — and even against him, the president nonetheless runs neck and neck.
And there’s a deeper reason, beyond the inchoate, predictable, and perennial yearning to find an alternative, why so many of the GOP’s smartest strategists and most prodigious fundraisers fought so hard to broaden their field of candidates. They sought someone else, anyone both serious and authentic — from Indiana’s diminutive but economically literate Gov. Mitch Daniels, who once committed the conservative capital offense of contemplating a tax increase, to New Jersey’s blunt, at times bullying, and comprehensively heavyweight Gov. Chris Christie, who believes in the heresy of global warming.
Those who looked elsewhere were implicitly confirming the judgment of the public at large. In the probable nadir of the Obama years, Americans feel overwhelmingly that the country is on the wrong track, but they think the GOP has the wrong candidates. In fact, there’s hardly a plausible president in the current lineup, which is finally settled; in the resigned and now quieter recesses of Republican fear — they know they have to settle for what’s there — that portends a clear and present danger of ultimate defeat.
What’s unfolding in the Republican arena is not a campaign but a spectacle that repels mainstream voters and rejects or infects mainstream conservative candidates.
What’s unfolding in the Republican arena is not a campaign but a spectacle that repels mainstream voters and rejects or infects mainstream conservative candidates.
Thus Jon Huntsman, once an asteroid streaking into the GOP sky, has become an asterisk. And that’s despite his intimidated ascent to the absurd proposition that he, too, wouldn’t countenance even $1 in new taxes for $9 in spending cuts. Huntsman, as Tish Durkin argued, has qualities that ought to recommend him — among them, that: “He’s not Romney… He’s not crazy… He’s not swearing on a stack of Bibles.” Yet these very qualities are disqualifying in today’s Republican Party. Huntsman doesn’t want, or can’t get, a séance with Donald Trump, who’s become the grinning Joker of today’s GOP. And Huntsman won’t get a second look or a second chance — not this time around.
Instead the party marches to the tin drums of ideological extremism and angry fantasy, while its stiff and fragile frontrunner compliantly frog-marches to the right. Mitt Romney isn’t setting the pace; he’s trying to do just enough to placate a party where crazy now flourishes in many forms.
Last week’s big event, blessedly for Rick Perry, was not a debate, but something called the Values Voters Summit — an inquisition on the religious Right where intolerance proved to be one of the highest values.
There, Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator resoundingly repudiated in his own state in 2006, denounced the president for not defending the Defense of Marriage Act — and then weirdly invited the audience to judge candidates by imagining “who they lay down with at night.” According to the chairman of Mike Huckabee’s upset win in Iowa four years ago, Santorum is the man who “has the chance to be the Huckabee” of 2012. That says it all about the delusional state of this season’s Republican politics.
But there’s more — endlessly more.
Newt Gingrich, who has climbed back to 10 percent in some national polls agrees with Santorum in disdaining gay couples, although presumably Gingrich believes marriage is between one man and three women. He promised the so-called values voters that he would “ignore the Supreme Court on issues of national security” — just as he said FDR did during World War II when he ordered German saboteurs caught on American soil to be tried by a military tribunal. Gingrich, a self-fancied polymath, is more accurately a poly-mythologist: In this case, the Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt’s decision in Ex parte Quirin. But Gingrich couldn’t even bother to check Wikipedia, let alone the opinion itself.
Michele Bachmann can’t be the nominee; but as the night closes in on her hubristic reach for the White House, her excesses and gaffes still deface the image of the GOP. She promised to abolish the Department of Education — a vow to Values Voters who apparently don’t value education, at least the public kind. Two days earlier, typically tongue-tripping, she said on Fox News that she “want[ed] to see the tax cuts on job creators lowered.” Huh?
The Tea Partiers have fled Bachmann, first for Rick Perry and then for former pizza magnate Herman Cain. (As my stepson Michael asked, have they ever actually tasted a Godfather’s pizza?) Perry in turn proved wanting and waned in the polls — and Cain soon will. But they have both reinforced the notion of an out-of-touch, out-of-bounds Republican Party. Perry, who raised $17 million in just a few weeks — he has more money than verbs — has stumbled from savaging Social Security to salvaging a transparent cover story about the N-word name of his Texas hunting camp. Cain riled up the Values Summit with his revelation that he had prayed his way to a presidential candidacy. I guess God is not only a Republican; this time, he’s choosing Cain over the abler Romney.
So are a lot of Republicans — for the moment. It won’t turn out that way. It’s okay to applaud Cain, even to the rafters, but not to nominate him. Instead, we’re witnessing a second gasp attempt to re-inflate Perry — whose fall should have been a windfall for Romney, but has given him only a small lead over Cain. For now, Romney just can’t seem to get above 25 percent. Introducing and endorsing the Texas governor at the weekend’s summit, the Rev. Robert Jeffress, the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, hailed Perry as “a believer in Jesus Christ” — in contrast to Romney, a Mormon and therefore “a member of a cult.”
There’s persistent resistance to Romney — on the shameful ground of religious bigotry and on the defensible ground of doubts about his sincerity, his personality, and his principles. The result: The extremism and pratfalls of his opponents, which should benefit the Mitt-man by making him seem relatively sensible and reasonable, have generated a miasma that’s enveloping the Romney campaign. Not only has he toed a bright right line on social issues; he’s adopted the GOP habit of fact-free argument — almost certainly the easy reaction of someone who’s already treated his public life as record-free.
http://news.yahoo.com/gops-sad-intolerant-2012-field-171500652.html;_ylt=Aqt6vj5KSh1lreRuHrlSqKptzwcF;_ylu=X3oDMTRocXF0ZjFrBGNjb2RlA2dtcHRvcDIwMHBvb2xyZXN0BG1pdANOZXdzIGZvciB5b3UEcGtnAzcwYzBhNWIzLTNiODYtMzZiMy1hNDNkLWNmMTI0NGY4NDEwYQRwb3MDNgRzZWMDbmV3c19mb3JfeW91BHZlcgMyZTE0YmY4MC1mMmJjLTExZTAtOGVmYy04ZDhhNGE5YjUwZWM-;_ylg=X3oDMTJsaWRqYTZyBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDZTM5ZTA5N2MtMDVhNy0zNzIyLTgwMTctYjQ1ODQzMTAzYWIyBHBzdGNhdAN1cwRwdANzdG9yeXBhZ2U-;_ylv=3
Obama thanks civil rights icon Lowery who is 90
The Rev. Joseph Lowery was one of the first believers that a black senator from Illinois could become president, and Barack Obama was among those adding his thanks to the civil rights icon Sunday night during a tribute to the 90-year-old’s legacy.
Lowery, whose birthday was Thursday, was praised for his continued fight against hunger, poverty, racism and injustice. He has lived to see an end to segregation and the rise of the nation’s first black president, and says there is still work for him to do on issues of social justice and equality.
In a brief video tribute for the hundreds in attendance, Obama thanked Lowery for his friendship and counsel.
“I don’t know where I’d be without your support and advice,” Obama said. “I don’t know where this country would be without your leadership.”
Obama awarded Lowery, who turned 90 on Thursday, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010. Lowery was an early and staunch supporter of the president during his historic 2008 campaign for the White House and gave the benediction at Obama’s inauguration.
Lowery told the audience that he believed America would “come home to herself” before 2012 and re-elect Obama.
“America’s going to realize that for the good of the union, for the good of the nation, she needs to tear away from those who would lead us to self-destruct,” Lowery said, adding, “The tea party ain’t my cup of tea.”
Obama’s video was introduced at the Atlanta Symphony Hall by his special adviser, Valerie Jarrett, who spent time with Lowery on the campaign trail three years ago.
“In those early says, Rev. Lowery had the audacity and the optimism to believe that a skinny guy with a funny name could be the president of the United States,” Jarrett said. “He didn’t just believe it, but he put his heart and his soul and his elbow grease into making sure that it happened.”
Attorney General Eric Holder said Lowery preached compassion and inspired courage.
“Dr. Lowery’s words have called forth and brought out the best in generations of Americans,” Holder said.
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-thanks-civil-rights-icon-lowery-90-013238504.html
Braun throws pal under the bus over campaign expenditure filings
Over the phone, I could hear Billie Paige quietly gasp.
Then pause.
Then say, “Tell me again, what did she say?”
Reading from my notes, I repeated what Carol Moseley Braun — former state rep, recorder of deeds, U.S. senator, ambassador, and 2011 mayoral candidate — had told me just minutes earlier about her friend of 34 years.
Braun said Paige, her former campaign treasurer, was “elderly and overwhelmed” and if Braun’s campaign expenditure forms were incomplete, “it doesn’t surprise” because her old friend was “not up to the job.”
Last week the Sun-Times and NBC5 reported on the gaping hole in Braun’s 2011 mayoral campaign committee filings. The paperwork, required by law, provided no explanation to the State Board of Elections, not to mention the public, on how $315,000 in campaign money had been spent.
Paige quit the campaign on April 15, the day the disclosure forms were filed.
Moreover, Paige — a veteran of many campaigns — said she warned those in charge, including Braun, that the forms lacked critical required information.
As I read my notes to Paige, it was clear how hurtful Braun’s words were. And how ludicrous. Paige is a Springfield lobbyist with a blue-chip client list. At 74, perhaps she doesn’t sprint down the Capitol’s marble corridors as she once did. But her brain, based on conversations I’ve had with her, appears to be razor sharp.
At 64, one wonders what could be going on in Braun’s brain to throw under the bus a woman who has had her back for decades. Then again, even at the height of her powers as a politician, Carol Moseley Braun courted controversy as easily as her megawatt smile connected with voters.
In 1992, on the cusp of her historic election to the U.S. Senate, the late WMAQ-TV reporter Paul Hogan broke the story of how Braun had received money from her mother’s property even though her mom was on Medicaid. Braun paid a fine but called the story a smear.
In 1998, the IRS began investigating if Braun and her then-boyfriend/campaign manager, Kgosie Matthews, spent $280,000 in campaign cash on clothes, jewelry and trips. The Clinton Justice Department, despite repeated IRS requests, halted the probe. Proof positive, Braun claimed, she’d done nothing wrong.
Braun entered the mayor’s race last year with nearly $2 million in four mortgages on her Hyde Park condo while struggling to keep her organic beverage company afloat. She wore her financial difficulties as a badge of honor, saying it proved she could relate to citizens struggling in this economy. Those citizens — black, white and Hispanic — resoundingly rejected that argument. And her.
A candidate asking voters to put her in charge of the multibillion-dollar corporation that is Chicago has to be delusional if she thinks she can walk into City Hall with that kind of baggage.
Braun got only 9 percent of the vote.
Billie Paige doesn’t wear the jacket for the chaos of this campaign.
Carol Moseley Braun does.
And the State Board of Elections, often a toothless tiger, better not let her off the hook until she tells us where the money went.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/marin/7964953-452/braun-throws-pal-under-the-bus-over-campaign-expenditure-filings.html
In White Folks With Black Babies News: Kristin Davis Of “Sex And The City” Fame Adopts A Lil Brown Baby Girl
Kristin Davis has a new little bundle of joy:
The Sex and the City star, 46, welcomed daughter Gemma Rose Davis through domestic adoption a few months ago, PEOPLE has confirmed exclusively.
“This is something I have wanted for a very long time,” Davis tells PEOPLE. “Having this wish come true is even more gratifying than I ever had imagined. I feel so blessed.”
http://bossip.com/471707/in-white-folks-with-black-babies-news-kristin-davis-of-sex-and-the-city-fame-adopts-a-lil-brown-baby-girl/
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Can You Village Idiots Please Make Up Your Minds?
Posted by Zandar
This week, the President is, let’s see…too angry no too nice umm….too coporate…errm…too smart OK I give up, what is it this week?
Beyond the economy, the wars and the polls, President Obama has a problem: people.
This president endures with little joy the small talk and back-slapping of retail politics, rarely spends more than a few minutes on a rope line, refuses to coddle even his biggest donors. His relationship with Democrats on Capitol Hill is frosty, to be generous. Personal lobbying on behalf of legislation?
He prefers to leave that to Vice President Biden, an old-school political charmer.
Obama’s circle of close advisers is as small as the cluster of personal friends that predates his presidency. There is no entourage, no Friends of Barack to explain or defend a politician who has confounded many supporters with his cool personality and penchant for compromise.
Obama is, in short, a political loner who prefers policy over the people who make politics in this country work.
“He likes politics,” said a Washington veteran who supports Obama, “but like a campaign manager likes politics, not a candidate.” The former draws energy from science and strategy, the latter from contact with people.
Which raises an odd question: Is it possible to be America’s most popular politician and not be very good at American politics?
Oh I see, we’re back to Obama is a bloodless library dweeb with more than a little dash of “You know people like him are so (whispers) above their station” and let’s throw in the ol’ “affirmative action President/empty suit/not too bright” while we’re at it. Asshole Scott Wilson here can’t do any better than comparing him backhandedly to Joe Biden and unsourced quotes from “Washington veterans”.
My ass. Nice hit piece, jagoff.
http://zandarvts.blogspot.com/2011/10/can-you-village-idiots-please-make-up.html
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Repatriation Nation
Posted by Zandar
What I don’t get about former CBO head and McCain campaign economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin is that of course he lies and says that President Obama’s stimulus plan “failed” America, but then he:
A) admits that the stimulus worked by CBO standards, that
B) the “private sector stimulus plan” he’s pushing for a repatriated profit tax holiday wouldn’t go towards job creation with anywhere near the level of efficiency as the either the ARRA or the proposed new jobs bill,
C) that the exact same strategy was tried in 2004 and according to his own criteria that he holds the ARRA to, it too “failed” America as only 23 percent of repatriated tax funds went to job creation, then
D) says if we “double down on the same failed strategy” (as he calls the American Jobs Act), and repatriate again it will count as a $1.4 trillion stimulus and create almost 3 million new jobs.
What I don’t get is that American corporations have record profits on hand right now in order to create jobs, and are simply choosing to create them overseas because that’s where the growing demand for their products and services are. Repatriation would make sense if the issue was somehow that businesses were strapped for capital to invest in payrolls. They’re not. They’re making record profits quarter after quarter, most sectors. Not banks, currently.
And banks are suffering all kinds of losses right now and they are shedding jobs by the tens of thousands. Repatriation wouldn’t fix any of that. They’d just keep the money. All repatriation would do is give corporations even more profits. Maybe they would invest them here. In 2004, when times were good, they only invested 23% in new jobs. Why would that rate increase?
OK, the Senate McCain-Hagan plan would offer a better tax rate if businesses added to payroll. But how much do they need to add to get the lower tax rate? At best that would change that 23% by a few points. And worst case scenario, those repatriated profits went straight to the bubble economy in Bush’s second term.
No matter how you look at it, Holtz-Eakin’s own numbers wreck his own theories. Hell, Eakin’s own math cited is that repatriation is $482,000 per job created ($1.4 trillion, 2.9 million jobs.) Obama’s stimulus was a “failure” at $278,000 per job created, remember? What happened to the efficiency of the free market over government waste?
Sure would be good for CEOs however.
http://zandarvts.blogspot.com/2011/10/repatriation-nation.html
President Barack Obama talks with Andrew Kline, outgoing Chief of Staff, Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, in the Oval Office, July 12, 2011. Kline’s daughter, Logan, sits atop the Resolute Desk.
little Logan is just too CA-UTE!
Little Logan Kline is just too precious!
Mark Knoller
Tomorrow is a government holiday. Pres Obama will spend about 3 hours at Walter Reed visiting with wounded military personnel.
Michelle Obama Makes ESPN SportsCenter Top 10 Plays (VIDEO, PHOTOS)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/08/michelle-obama-makes-sportscenter-top-10_n_1001349.html
Mitt Told Auto Industry to Drop Dead
by BooMan
Sun Oct 9th, 2011 at 06:55:13 PM EST
Actually, it’s true. If Mitt Romney had been president in 2009, we would no longer have an auto industry in Detroit. I know this because Mitt Romney said we should let Detroit go broke.
It’s not debatable.
IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
Nope. They needed a check. They got a check, and now they’re making better cars than they’ve made at any time since the 1970’s.
Anyone from Michigan or who has any connection to the auto industry should be very clear that they they are indebted to Obama and that Romney would have ruined their lives irreparably.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/10/9/185513/982
Obama’s infrastructure bank proposal faces first test in Republican-led House
By Keith Laing – 10/09/11 05:29 AM ET
President Obama’s shifting sales pitch for transportation spending will be put to the test when the GOP-led House takes up his proposal for a national infrastructure bank next week.
Advocates for reshaping the nation’s roads and bridges have criticized Obama for focusing his message on infrastructure. The president’s argument loses some effectiveness when it is focused on hard-to-visualize infrastructure rather than readily apparent crumbling roads and bridges, they say.
Lately though, the president has talked about roads and bridges almost exclusively. In campaigning for his jobs package, he has even gone to a bridge that connects House Speaker John Boehner’s (R) home state of Ohio with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R) home state of Kentucky.
The Republican leadership is lukewarm at best about Obama’s proposal to spend $10 billion to create a national infrastructure bank to lure private investment for road projects.
“While I support innovative financing to meet our nation’s infrastructure needs, the multibillion-dollar, Washington bureaucracy-based infrastructure bank President Obama is advocating raises many concerns,” House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) said in a statement this week.
Mica’s committee has scheduled a hearing Wednesday to consider the president’s proposal, a key part of Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill.
But Mica has already made clear he is not inclined to follow Obama down the road to a national infrastructure bank.
“A more positive approach would be to build on the 33 existing state infrastructure banks which lack financial backing but are in place, can get projects selected and moving and put people to work on an expedited basis,” Mica said.
While Obama’s “pass this bill” mantra has drawn comparisons to former President Harry Truman’s “give ’em hell” campaign in 1948, liberal commentators have pushed the normally-reserved Obama to also channel another former President, Franklin Roosevelt, and make the case for re-building the nation as literally as possible.
“President Obama should identify construction projects…roads that need fixing, bridges that are in danger of collapsing, and dare the Republicans to vote against these projects and the jobs they create in their own areas,” MSNBC host Chris Matthews said on a recent broadcast of his show “Hardball.”
Obama appears to have taken the advice.
In addition to visiting the bridge that connects Kentucky and Ohio, he cited specific projects this week in an hour-long news conference to promote the Jobs Act.
“Some of you were with me when we visited a bridge between Ohio and Kentucky that’s been classified as ‘functionally obsolete,’” Obama said this past Thursday. “That’s a fancy way of saying it’s old and breaking down. We’ve heard about bridges in both states that are falling apart, and that’s true all across the country.”
If Obama’s message has changed, it hasn’t been enough to convince Republicans so far. They are not only cool to the idea of the bank; they also haven’t warmed to Obama’s plan to spend $50 billion on transportation projects.
Mica gave little reason to believe the debate would change any this week.
“This hearing will focus on questions relating to the estimated $270 million yearlong process of creating another federally backed agency designed to pick project winners and losers,” Mica said in comments that seemed to dismiss Obama’s proposals.
The phrase “picking winners and losers” could foreshadow references in the forthcoming hearing on the Solyndra energy loan controversy, which some observers have worried could damper even further the GOP’s receptiveness to a loan-based program like the infrastructure bank.
http://thehill.com/blogs/transportation-report/infrastructure/186371-obamas-infrastructure-bank-faces-hurdles-in-republican-led-house
My Thoughts In Flux About Occupy Wall Street
By Shoq, on October 9, 2011, at 2:41 am
I am not going to go into my entire history of thinking about the Occupy Wall street movement (OWS). It’s too painful and annoying, but I want to get this out. It’s late, I am tired, and this will probably be filled with really bad typos and worse grammar. It’s going to go out anyway. I’ll have the cat edit it in the morning.
After first being contemptuous of what I saw as an ill-conceived vanity protest movement, about ten days ago, I sensed a tipping point in public and global attitude toward the OWS “movement,” and feared it would sweep all of our hard work to rebuild the President’s stature away.
Uncertain of its origins, questioning of its founders, and entirely doubtful of its fundamentals, I was nonetheless disturbed by how dismissive the Progressive community was being toward an expression of anger at what has become, unquestionably, a dysfunctional society that is on the verge of total meltdown. Sure, the kids banging drums and holding up dog-earred signs were disheveled and disorganized, but… they were also quite right. The system our ancestors built for us has devolved into a vicious plutocratic fireswamp that is consuming almost everything and everyone, and they are damned right to be scared and angry about it. We should ALL be scared and angry about it. And at least they were doing what mainstream progressives should have done years ago: taken this fight to the streets.
But I was also conflicted. I know the value of organization and planning. I know the value of messaging. I know the value of inclusiveness and pluralism, and I also know that anarchist societal modeling is fun theory to talk about over coffee, but as a practical matter, its track record at governance is exactly nothing. After poking around for 10 days, I came to the realization that the structural deficiencies of this “organization” were enormous. Not the logistics of the protesting; that was actually being handled fairly well. But rather, they had no real collaborative scheme to craft any kind of substantive policy goals or legislative missions. There was just no there there. It was, in the words of @JAMeyerson, “all about creating the crisis” and “letting *them* solve the problem.” (Them, I assumed, being the very people who had destroyed our country in the first place. Just not my first choice of fixers.)
Whether it had any real chance of success or not, I felt there would be three primary outcomes. It would either peter out and die quickly, or reach a take-off point where it would be in a position to hurt of help Obama’s re-election effort. The latter was something that I feel must happen, or such protests may never be likely to happen again. Call that hyperbole if you wish, but I believe it. This right wing has virtually no respect for people or precedent, and they won’t give total voter suppression a second thought from here on out. A 2nd term Obama veto is the ONLY chance we have of mitigating what is almost certainly going to be a Republican Senate. We may not have solutions to anything yet, but losing control of that body to these insane Republicans, would be like trying to fix a hole in the hull of a sinking boat by first widening the hole.
And yes, while it was helping the President’s re-election, it might also popularize some really good policy ideas I’ve advocated for a long time, including campaign reform, financial reform, and a return to a more progressive income tax
Until Van Jones and Natalie Foster revealed the amount of planning that had gone into the Rebuild The Dream movement, I really had little faith in our fragmented Left doing much of anything by November of 2012, that could save the White House or the Senate. Ironically, just a few days before they did reveal it at the Takeback11 conference, I decided to get involved with #ows and see if this “movement” was really as open and pluralistic as they were suggesting it was, and whether we could channel all that anger and energy in a productive way toward re-electing the President and enough progressives to actually reboot the nation. Since I quickly learned that they needed server capacity at Occupywallst.org, I was able to get my friends at @alternet to underwrite it. Doing this, and other good deeds for them, let me see some of the inner workings a bit closer up, and try to approach things as any good faith supporter might.
And I did see some good things. I saw an interesting process of formless, leaderless organizing, that, as with the Open Source Software community from whence it came, achieve some pretty interesting results in some cases. But I also so endless layers of disorganization and fail, and a Pollyanna vision of the world that seemed to suggest that revolution would be as simple as a first session of Angry Birds on an Ipad. I knew better.
Then came the John Lewis video. I had made many apologies thus far, but how in the fuck could anyone with any capacity to forge solutions or coalitions, not get that John Lewis wasn’t just another politician they could mute with their “no top down hierarchical leadership icons ever” dictum. He was the closet thing to a role model living today when it comes to organizing and protesting for change. What the hell were they thinking?
And the disrespect of Lewis wasn’t even as hard to take as the uncomfortable squirminess I felt at the chanting and pop-psychobabble cum empowerment training seminar gooblygook I was hearing in this “General assembly.” While watching it, I was struck by just how unscalable the model really was. I mean, if it took six minutes to decide if one man should speak, what if there had been 50? And what if all of Atlanta wanted to be at this assembly? That couldn’t work, right? So they’d need “representatives.” And that would be like… like… a legislature! OMG! A “Congress.”
While all this is going on, my trusted “liberal friends” were abandoning me, because they felt I betrayed them by “cheerleading” for an angst-ridden, pro-left-pimped fantasy revolution without a chance in hell of doing anything but firing up the Paulites, the Fedbusters, and the general cadre of anti-government types who might completely undermine Obama and the chances of saving a Democratic senate with their amorphous concepts of a sleep-over rebellion.
Perhaps my friends were right all along. But I don’t do group think, and I could not know more unless I looked further. That’s just the way I approach everything. I am loathe to condemn things which I don’t understand. So I did look, and what I saw was not completely weak, but that is not the same as being very strong. Most disturbing? While quite cordial and pleasant, the people were not particularly open, nor eager to explore alternative ideas for approaching our problems. They were mostly… well.. anarchists. And they do what most anarchists do: they aspire, while sounding as if all human problems can be solved with enough seminars, high-minded theories which are not open to debate, a lot of personal self-actualization, and far too much economic hooey.
Read more: http://shoqvalue.com/my-thoughts-in-flux-about-occupy-wall-street#ixzz1aKTHJmDp
Why We Can’t Fix Our Problems
by BooMan
Sun Oct 9th, 2011 at 10:35:46 AM EST
Mitt Romney’s speech (pdf) before the Values Voter Summit yesterday spells out his argument against the reelection of President Obama. He makes a grotesquely unfair argument that makes no acknowledgment of any blame the Republican Party has for the economic conditions facing the country. But it’s a frighteningly strong argument, nonetheless. He made a good speech that was a preview of the general campaign. Then he won the support of four percent of the conferees in their Straw Poll. Ron Paul won the Straw Poll, followed by Herman Cain. Rick Perry came in a weak third, with just 8% support.
Romney didn’t fail to pander. He promised to do all he can to overturn Roe v. Wade, to stop all funding to Planned Parenthood, and to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. He also promised to grant a waiver to all 50 states so that they don’t have to comply with the Affordable Care Act. He promised to end every “job-killing” regulation in the Dodd-Frank bill. And he basically said we will “Drill, Baby, Drill.” The only base he failed to cover was the defunding of public broadcasting.
He said all these things and then less than one in twenty of the people who had listened to him lent him their support. Meanwhile, Rick Perry, who should be a natural fit for this audience of evangelicals, fared little better. His problem is immigration. These “values voters” really hate Latinos. It’s interesting that border-state Republicans like Perry and Sen. John McCain are the most sensible about immigration policy. But even the hint of reasonableness is a major liability for a Republican candidate these days.
When Rick Perry is too moderate, your party is unhinged. But the larger problem is that we can’t fix our problems in this country because anyone who will acknowledge reality is shunned by the right. Mitt Romney may very well be the Republican nominee simply because no one else is plausible. And he might try to move the Republican Party back a few steps towards the real world. But he’s already promised to govern as a wing-nut, and he’ll have no choice but to staff up his administration with wing-nuts. There is no space left on the right for a moderate.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/10/9/103546/462
Could this time have been different?
Posted by Ezra Klein at 04:24 PM ET, 10/08/2011
Christina Romer had traveled to Chicago to perform an unpleasant task: she needed to scare her new boss. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s top political adviser, had been very clear about that. He thought the president-elect needed to know exactly what he would be walking into when he took the oath of office in January. But it fell to Romer to deliver the bad news.
So Romer, a preternaturally cheerful economist whose expertise on the Great Depression made her an obvious choice to head the Council of Economic Advisers, gathered her tables and her charts and, on a snowy day in mid-December, sat down to explain to the next President of the United States of America exactly what sort of mess he was inheriting.
Axelrod had warned her against pulling her punches, and so she didn’t. It was not a pleasant presentation to sit through. Afterward, Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s friend from Chicago and Romer’s successor, remarked that “that must be the worst briefing any president-elect has ever had.”
But Romer wasn’t trying to be alarmist. Her numbers were based, at least in part, on everybody else’s numbers: There were models from forecasting firms such as Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Analytics. There were preliminary data pouring in from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve. Romer’s predictions were more pessimistic than the consensus, but not by much.
By that point, the shape of the crisis was clear: The housing bubble had burst, and it was taking the banks that held the loans, and the households that did the borrowing, down with it. Romer estimated that the damage would be about $2 trillion over the next two years and recommended a $1.2 trillion stimulus plan. The political team balked at that price tag, but with the support of Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary who would soon lead the National Economic Council, she persuaded the administration to support an $800 billion plan.
The next challenge was to persuade Congress. There had never been a stimulus that big, and there hadn’t been many financial crises this severe. So how to estimate precisely what a dollar of infrastructure spending or small-business relief would do when let loose into the economy under these unusual conditions? Romer was asked to calculate how many jobs a stimulus might create. Jared Bernstein, a labor economist who would be working out of Vice President Biden’s office, was assigned to join the effort.
Romer and Bernstein gathered data from the Federal Reserve, from Mark Zandi at Moody’s, from anywhere they could think of. The incoming administration loved their report and wanted to release it publicly. Romer took it home over Christmas to double-check, rewrite and pick over. At 6 a.m. Jan. 10, just days before Obama would be sworn in as president, his transition team lifted the embargo on “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” It was a smash hit.
“It will be a joy to argue policy with an administration that provides comprehensible, honest reports,” enthused columnist Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
There was only one problem: It was wrong.
The issue is the graph on Page 1. It shows two blue lines sloping gently upward and then drifting back down. The darker line — “With recovery plan” — forecasts unemployment peaking at 8 percent in 2009 and falling back below 7 percent in late 2010.
Three years later, with the economy still in tatters, that line has formed the core of the case against the Obama administration’s economic policies. That line lets Republicans talk about “the failed stimulus.” That line has discredited the White House’s economic policy.
But the other line — “Without recovery plan” — is more instructive. It shows unemployment peaking at 9 percent in 2010 and falling below 7 percent by the end of this year. That’s the line the administration used to scare Congress into passing the single largest economic recovery package in American history. That line is the nightmare scenario.
And yet this is the cold, hard fact of the past three years: The reality has been worse than the administration’s nightmare scenario. Even with the stimulus, unemployment shot past 10 percent in 2009. (See the updated graph here.)
To understand how the administration got it so wrong, we need to look at the data it was looking at.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the agency charged with measuring the size and growth of the U.S. economy, initially projected that the economy shrank at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the last quarter of 2008. Months later, the bureau almost doubled that estimate, saying the number was 6.2 percent. Then it was revised to 6.3 percent. But it wasn’t until this year that the actual number was revealed: 8.9 percent. That makes it one of the worst quarters in American history. Bernstein and Romer knew in 2008 that the economy had sustained a tough blow; t hey didn’t know that it had been run over by a truck.
There were certainly economists who argued that the recession was going to be worse than the forecasts. Nobel laureates Krugman and Joe Stiglitz were among the most vocal, but they were by no means alone. In December 2008, Bernstein, who had been named Biden’s chief economist, told the Times, “We’ll be lucky if the unemployment rate is below double digits by the end of next year.”
REST OF ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/could-this-time-have-been-different/2011/08/25/gIQAiJo0VL_blog.html
October 09, 2011 11:55 AM
A message that ‘should be obvious’
By Steve Benen
The common concern about the Occupy Wall Street protests is that their message is not yet clear. It’s impossible, or at least should be, to deny the economic anguish that has helped generate the demonstrations, but unlike more traditional political movements, the Occupy Wall Street activists aren’t explicitly bringing a set of demands to those who will listen.
That said, the New York Times editorial board argues today that the “message — and the solutions — should be obvious” given the economic conditions.
At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity. […]
The protests, though, are more than a youth uprising. The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery. […]
Extreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment.
When the protesters say they represent 99 percent of Americans, they are referring to the concentration of income in today’s deeply unequal society.
While the Times’ editorial board gets it, Republican hostility towards the protests continues to grow. This past week, both Mitt Romney and Eric Cantor condemned those calling for a commitment to economic justice, and on the Sunday shows this morning, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain denounce the protests, too.
House Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), meanwhile, said this morning she supports the demonstrations.
The NYT editorial said the larger problem “is that no one in Washington has been listening.” I’m not sure if that’s true. Many in Washington are listening — with some deciding that it’s time to focus on rebuilding the middle class and some deciding that such efforts are “class warfare” that distract from the need to cut taxes for the wealthy again.
Which of those visions excels will depend on which voters bother to show up at the polls in 13 months.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/a_message_that_should_be_obvio032704.php
October 09, 2011 11:30 AM
What to do with a ‘top-tier’ candidate
By Steve Benen
Republican Herman Cain boasted the other day that he’s a “top-tier” presidential candidate, and the rest of the GOP field is afraid “that this long shot may not be a long shot any longer.”
At a certain level, I suppose there’s some truth to this. Though the Republican top tier has fluctuated quite a bit over the last several months — including, at various times, Romney, Perry, Pawlenty, and Bachmann — Cain can credibly claim a slot, at least for now. Recent polling shows him at or near the top of the multi-candidate field, even surging to the lead in some states.
And yet, when the political world asks whether Cain is to be taken seriously as a presidential contender, the answer isn’t obvious.
Matt Yglesias joked the other day he “can’t believe we’ve reached the point where I’m going to have to start doing hits on Herman Cain’s policy ideas,” adding yesterday:
Not that Herman Cain is going to win the GOP nomination, but can I just note for a minute how absurd it is that he’s doing well enough in the polls that those of us in the media need to pay some attention to what he’s saying and his ideas?
He’s not a real politician. He’s not a notably successful businessman. And most of all, he hasn’t spent any time learning about the issues.
To help prove the point, Cain said yesterday, “When they ask me who’s the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know. Do you know?”
How presidential of him.
Part of the problem here is that it’s hard to be sure Cain is actually a presidential candidate, as opposed to being the head of a vanity exercise intended to sell books and line up a post-2012 media career. He’s not only failing to invest the time to learn the basics about public policy, he’s also spending very little time campaigning. The New York Times noted the other day that Cain arranged a “whirlwind trip through New York City” this week, which included some media appearances and power lunches, but Cain “did all but one thing — campaign.”
He doesn’t maintain much of a schedule —- according to his public campaign calendar of events, “19 of the 31 days of October are blank” — and doesn’t bother raising a lot of money. Cain has hired staffers for key posts, but they have a nasty habit of resigning after being around the candidate for a short while. Cain hasn’t even bothered to put together any meaningful ideas for an agenda, other than the deeply silly “9-9-9” tax plan, which includes numbers that don’t come close to adding up.
This week, Cain even admitted he’s open to running as the GOP nominee’s running mate — the kind of thing real candidates simply never say, because they’re supposed to be focused on winning the nomination. Cain has also admitted that he’s considered ending his campaign more than once, and he planned to take time from his presidential bid to launch a separate book tour.
I can read the polls as closely as the next observer, but I haven’t seen much in the way of evidence that Cain deserves to be taken seriously.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/what_to_do_with_a_toptier_cand032703.php
October 09, 2011 9:35 AM
Mitt Romney hasn’t given up on social issues
By Steve Benen
Four years ago, Mitt Romney abandoned his persona as a moderate GOP governor to become an aggressive culture warrior. As Romney saw it, that’s what it would take to win in Iowa, so that’s the character he would play.
It didn’t work. Mike Huckabee, who could sell the role with more sincerity, excelled with social conservatives and Romney quickly ran out of constituencies to pander to.
Four years later, Romney generally downplays hot-button social issues, but as he demonstrated in his speech at the Values Voter Summit yesterday, Romney version 5.0 hasn’t forgotten the culture war altogether.
“[I]t’s so important to preserve traditional marriage, the joining together of one man and one woman. And that’s why I will appoint an attorney general who will defend the bipartisan law passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, the Defense of Marriage Act. […]
“Our values must also encompass the life of an unborn child…. I support the Hyde Amendment, which broadly bars the use of federal funds for abortions. As president, I’ll end federal funding for abortion advocates like Planned Parenthood. I’ll protect a health care worker’s right to follow their conscience in their work. And I will nominate judges who know the difference between personal opinion and law. It is long past time for the Supreme Court to return the issue of abortion back to the states by overturning Roe v. Wade.”
I’ve heard from a few center-left voters in recent months who’ve suggested a Romney presidency may not be that offensive, since, once in office, he may turn out to govern closer to the way he did in his one term in Massachusetts.
Romney is making some fairly specific promises to some very conservative folks, suggesting he’ll be pretty far to the right in every key area of public policy.
Also note, it wasn’t just this one speech. A week earlier, Romney told Fox News he would, if elected, seek more federal abortion restrictions and said he would “absolutely” support state constitutional measures to define “life” as “beginning at conception.”
Obviously, this is wholly at odds with previous versions of Mitt Romney, but the most recent version is the one voters are going to have to consider. And this iteration would, according to his own rhetoric, push culture-war measures that are pretty offensive to much of the country.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/mitt_romney_hasnt_given_up_on032701.php
Herman Cain: Tax Poor People’s Food To Finance Massive Tax Break For The Rich
By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Oct 9, 2011 at 11:20 am
The centerpiece of former pizza czar Herman Cain’s presidential campaign is his “999″ plan, which would slash taxes on the wealthy, drive up deficits to the worst point since World War II, and force low-income Americans to pay a massive nine times their current tax rate. In an interview this morning with CNN’s Candy Crowley, Cain even said food and clothing would not be exempt from the 9 percent national sales tax he would put in place if elected president. Indeed, he said it would be “fair” for a poor person to pay as much in sales taxes as Crowley does:
CROWLEY: Is there any exception, as you see it, in this consumption tax? Except for clothing, perhaps? Except for food? […]
CAIN: Nope, you don’t have to do that. Nope, you don’t have to do that. […]
CROWLEY: So a poor person is paying the same amount of taxes on groceries as I am? Does that sound fair to you, just in a vacuum?
CAIN: Yes, it does sound fair because of the other point I’m about to make. If they need to buy a car or a home or some hard goods that are used, they pay no taxes.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/09/339783/herman-cain-tax-food/
Herman Cain: Tax Poor People’s Food To Finance Massive Tax Break For The Rich
No he didn’t? Herman Cain is buck dancing hard for the Koch brothers!
Political Animal
Blog
October 09, 2011 8:45 AM
Perry’s immigration problem
By Steve Benen
It’s safe to say Rick Perry has given up his perch as the Republican presidential frontrunner. In fact, the apparent collapse happened rather suddenly, with a debate in Florida marking the pivot point. Almost immediately, the question in GOP circles went from, “Is Perry too conservative to win in a general election?” to, “Does anyone have Chris Christie’s phone number?”
But some of the analysis of Perry’s sudden decline has been off the mark over the last two weeks. I’ve seen more than a few pundits suggest that one debate performance ruined Perry because he seemed like such a lightweight — ignorant, inarticulate, and unlikable.
Those assessments are fair, but it’s not what’s dragged Perry down. Immigration is.
Rick Perry has an immigration problem. In all three of his appearances in Iowa on Saturday, voters pressed the Texas governor and GOP presidential candidate on the issue, specifically his decision to grant in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants.
Perry has acknowledged that he made a mistake when he referred to people who opposed his policy as heartless during a debate last month. But he has stood fast on his decision to grant the tuition break in Texas.
Responding to voters’ questions here, Perry argued that in Texas, helping the children of illegal immigrants was a way to create “taxpayers, not tax-wasters.” He assured one questioner that there were “no free rides” in Texas for the children of illegal immigrants, although the dispute is over whether to grant reduced in-state tuition, not free college, for illegal immigrants.
And Perry emphasized that in Texas he opposed legislation that would have allowed illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses and supported a provision that requires Texans to show some form of identification to vote.
But it’s not working. For one thing, the “have a heart” comment during the debate lingers, and offended the right in a rather fundamental way (they hate it when the left makes the accusation, but they really hate it when it comes from one of their own). For another, Perry backed off the “heartless” rhetoric, but he hasn’t flip-flopped on the policy itself.
And as a result, as Politico noted, “Perry’s immigration problem isn’t going away. It’s getting bigger.”
At a certain level, it may seem ridiculous that a right-wing Texas governor and one-time frontrunner would be brought down by such a mundane issue — in-state tuition rates for kids who live in the state. But far-right activists are in an unforgiving mood; their disgust for undocumented immigrants has only intensified in recent years; and Perry hurt their feelings with the whole “heartless” comment.
Mitt Romney seems far more willing to simply tell the Republican base whatever they want to hear, and pretending his record simply doesn’t exist. It may very well mean the difference between winning the nomination and losing it.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/perrys_immigration_problem032700.php
Al Davis was a champion of football diversity
By Ron Glover
2:55 PM on 10/08/2011
Tom Flores was the first Hispanic quarterback to play in the NFL, he was a backup to Len Dawson when the Kansas City Chiefs won Super Bowl IV. A decade later Flores would become the first minority coach to win a Super Bowl when he led the Oakland Raiders to victory over the Philadelphia Eagles.
Art Shell is one of the greatest offensive lineman who ever lived. In 1989, Shell became the first African-American coach of the NFL’s modern era when he was named head coach of the Oakland Raiders. Davis also hired the NFL’s first female CEO in Amy Trask.
These are just some of the many testaments to the legacy of the late Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis.
Davis passed away this morning according to a spokesman for the Oakland Raiders. Davis had been ill for sometime as his health over the years gradually deteriorated.
Al Davis will be best remembered as a nonconformist to the path laid out for the NFL by Commissioner Pete Rozelle. Davis wanted that persona to be channeled through his players — many of whom were castoffs or players that were given up on by their teams and in some cases the NFL itself.
Many of these players were either black or Hispanic.
Davis created an “Us against the world” atmosphere that would lead to three Super Bowl Victories and one of the greatest winning percentages in team sports. It also made the Raiders one of the NFL’s most feared and hated franchises.
The Raiders’ epic wars with the Dolphins and Steelers created an environment of violence on the field that will live forever through NFL Films and the first hand accounts of the many players in those games.
The Raiders three Super Bowl victories came in true underdog fashion, in 1976 against the Minnesota Vikings, in 1980 against the Philadelphia Eagles and in 1983 against the Washington Redskins. Davis’ Raiders were propelled to victory on the backs of players like Otis Sistrunk, Willie Brown, Jack Tatum, Lester Hayes, Rod Martin, Lyle Alzado, Kenny King, Jim Plunkett and Mike Haynes.
Many of these players at some point in their careers were given up on by their former teams. Davis felt that if he had enough players who felt like they had something to prove that the sky was the limit. Even in the 1990’s and 2000’s, Davis continued to take on Black players that the league considered too much of a risk or too old, players like Eric Dickerson, Randy Moss, Rod Woodson, Warren Sapp, Richard Seymour and most recently Jason Campbell.
Last season, Davis acquired Campbell in a trade with the Washington Redskins. Before last season Davis talked about how he liked what he saw in Campbell and a Raiders team that was on their way back, likening the acquisition of Campbell to that of Jim Plunkett, a former number one pick who played like anything but that in New England and San Francisco. In 1980, Plunkett would lead the Raiders to a Super Bowl XV victory over the favored Eagles.
The effect of Davis legacy continues today as Campbell remains the starter for the 2-2 Raiders who are now under the tutelage of Hue Jackson, the team’s second African-American head coach.
http://www.thegrio.com/sports/al-davis-was-a-champion-of-football-diversity.php
My Thoughts In Flux About Occupy Wall Street
By Shoq, on October 9, 2011, at 2:41 am
I am not going to go into my entire history of thinking about the Occupy Wall street movement (OWS). It’s too painful and annoying, but I want to get this out. It’s late, I am tired, and this will probably be filled with really bad typos and worse grammar. It’s going to go out anyway. I’ll have the cat edit it in the morning.
After first being contemptuous of what I saw as an ill-conceived vanity protest movement, about ten days ago, I sensed a tipping point in public and global attitude toward the OWS “movement,” and feared it would sweep all of our hard work to rebuild the President’s stature away.
Uncertain of its origins, questioning of its founders, and entirely doubtful of its fundamentals, I was nonetheless disturbed by how dismissive the Progressive community was being toward an expression of anger at what has become, unquestionably, a dysfunctional society that is on the verge of total meltdown. Sure, the kids banging drums and holding up dog-earred signs were disheveled and disorganized, but… they were also quite right. The system our ancestors built for us has devolved into a vicious plutocratic fireswamp that is consuming almost everything and everyone, and they are damned right to be scared and angry about it. We should ALL be scared and angry about it. And at least they were doing what mainstream progressives should have done years ago: taken this fight to the streets.
But I was also conflicted. I know the value of organization and planning. I know the value of messaging. I know the value of inclusiveness and pluralism, and I also know that anarchist societal modeling is fun theory to talk about over coffee, but as a practical matter, its track record at governance is exactly nothing. After poking around for 10 days, I came to the realization that the structural deficiencies of this “organization” were enormous. Not the logistics of the protesting; that was actually being handled fairly well. But rather, they had no real collaborative scheme to craft any kind of substantive policy goals or legislative missions. There was just no there there. It was, in the words of @JAMeyerson, “all about creating the crisis” and “letting *them* solve the problem.” (Them, I assumed, being the very people who had destroyed our country in the first place. Just not my first choice of fixers.)
Whether it had any real chance of success or not, I felt there would be three primary outcomes. It would either peter out and die quickly, or reach a take-off point where it would be in a position to hurt of help Obama’s re-election effort. The latter was something that I feel must happen, or such protests may never be likely to happen again. Call that hyperbole if you wish, but I believe it. This right wing has virtually no respect for people or precedent, and they won’t give total voter suppression a second thought from here on out. A 2nd term Obama veto is the ONLY chance we have of mitigating what is almost certainly going to be a Republican Senate. We may not have solutions to anything yet, but losing control of that body to these insane Republicans, would be like trying to fix a hole in the hull of a sinking boat by first widening the hole.
And yes, while it was helping the President’s re-election, it might also popularize some really good policy ideas I’ve advocated for a long time, including campaign reform, financial reform, and a return to a more progressive income tax
Until Van Jones and Natalie Foster revealed the amount of planning that had gone into the Rebuild The Dream movement, I really had little faith in our fragmented Left doing much of anything by November of 2012, that could save the White House or the Senate. Ironically, just a few days before they did reveal it at the Takeback11 conference, I decided to get involved with #ows and see if this “movement” was really as open and pluralistic as they were suggesting it was, and whether we could channel all that anger and energy in a productive way toward re-electing the President and enough progressives to actually reboot the nation. Since I quickly learned that they needed server capacity at Occupywallst.org, I was able to get my friends at @alternet to underwrite it. Doing this, and other good deeds for them, let me see some of the inner workings a bit closer up, and try to approach things as any good faith supporter might.
And I did see some good things. I saw an interesting process of formless, leaderless organizing, that, as with the Open Source Software community from whence it came, achieve some pretty interesting results in some cases. But I also so endless layers of disorganization and fail, and a Pollyanna vision of the world that seemed to suggest that revolution would be as simple as a first session of Angry Birds on an Ipad. I knew better.
Then came the John Lewis video. I had made many apologies thus far, but how in the fuck could anyone with any capacity to forge solutions or coalitions, not get that John Lewis wasn’t just another politician they could mute with their “no top down hierarchical leadership icons ever” dictum. He was the closet thing to a role model living today when it comes to organizing and protesting for change. What the hell were they thinking?
And the disrespect of Lewis wasn’t even as hard to take as the uncomfortable squirminess I felt at the chanting and pop-psychobabble cum empowerment training seminar gooblygook I was hearing in this “General assembly.” While watching it, I was struck by just how unscalable the model really was. I mean, if it took six minutes to decide if one man should speak, what if there had been 50? And what if all of Atlanta wanted to be at this assembly? That couldn’t work, right? So they’d need “representatives.” And that would be like… like… a legislature! OMG! A “Congress.”
Read more: http://shoqvalue.com/my-thoughts-in-flux-about-occupy-wall-street#ixzz1aIJrDoWI
Aren’t these the same idiots who did let Hamsher, West, Ingrham speak?
That cleared up a lot of my skepticism.
They to hear their ‘lead dogess’ Klein telling folks not to vote?
Please.
Worst of all she is Canadian and telling Americans not to exercise their right to vote?
GMAFB.
This group appears to be just another tool for the right with teabaggers and poutrage progressives.
The cause may be worthwhile but the group is dangerous to American governmnent, unless you want the oligarch’s and GOP to rule.
Well howdy do, ms. OPULENT! Long time no see or hear. Glad to see you weighing in on this. My 2 cents. SUPPORT THE AJA bill and GET OUT THE VOTE!
Hey Ametia!!
So glad to be able to post.
Long story short..significant health issues.
I am now at NIH.
Miss you and SG2!!
You are right!!
Get registered.
Get your ID’s
and
VOTE!!
and support AJA
Merkel, Sarkozy tackle differences over euro crisis
By Sarah Marsh and Yann Le Guernigou
BERLIN | Sun Oct 9, 2011 8:32am EDT
BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel will thrash out differences with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Sunday over how to use the euro zone’s financial firepower to counter a sovereign debt crisis threatening the global economy.
With the turmoil threatening to spiral into financial meltdown as the value of banks’ sovereign bond holdings slide, Merkel and Sarkozy are likely to discuss in Berlin both how to manage Greece, prevent contagion and strengthen lenders.
The implosion of Belgian lender Dexia, the first victim of the crisis, has added a sense of urgency to the talks. The French and Belgian prime ministers are set to finalize the break-up on Sunday.
“Dexia will be among the topics that will be discussed but the main topic is Greece and the euro zone, as banks are only a consequence” of the crisis, a source at the French finance ministry told Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/09/us-eurozone-idUSTRE7953D520111009?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning
Biggest identity theft bust of its type in U.S. history
By Aman Ali
NEW YORK | Fri Oct 7, 2011 4:02pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Police said on Friday they eavesdropped on thieves speaking Russian, Mandarin and Arabic to make the biggest identity theft bust of its kind in U.S. history against a $13 million crime ring specializing mainly in selling Apple electronics overseas.
Authorities said “Operation Swiper” indicted 111 people from five criminal enterprises in Queens, New York, the nation’s most ethnically diverse county, where 138 languages are spoken and more than half the population is foreign born.
“The schemes and the imagination of these thieves is mind boggling,” said New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly at a press conference.
“These crimes are getting more sophisticated and thieves have amazing knowledge of how to use technology,” Kelly said.
A two-year investigation revealed the enterprises had ties to larger syndicates in Africa, Europe,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/07/us-crime-idtheft-idUSTRE7965TS20111007?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews
TeeHee…isn’t this the type of ingenuity our President wants to include in the Dream Act to bring back American prominence?
Ahhhhh goood ol capitalism with avarice as the primary motivator.
Haven’t forgot that dumbass WH press corp why the administration did not file charges against the wall street marauders. POTUS had to break it down, what they did was immoral and irresponsible but not illegal. Which is why the DoddFrank Act is so important but the dumbass WH press corp…still pushes GOP talking points and says…regulations against business/financial services…means no jobs.
The entire WH press corp is just worthless having abdicated all sense of duty and rights in the US Constitution for a free press!!
Good Morning, Everybody. :-)
Good Morning, 3 Chics, Friends & Visitors!
Mornin’, SG2!
Love this rose and the falling rain…just beautiful.
Happy Sunday SG2!!
Good afternoon, Opulent!
It’s raining here today. We haven’t seen rain forever. It’s a blessing!
Join me: http://community.cbs47.tv/blogs/files/5005/4324331/coffee-cup-01.jpg
I’d be delighted! Thank you!
The GOP CLOWNS ran rampant on the Sunday morning gabfests. Herman Cain, Paul Ryan… UGGH
Morning!
Good Evening, Everyone :)