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Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.
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New Hampshire crowd calls Rick Santorum a bigot
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/120110/new-hampshire-rick-santorum-bigot
Rick Santorum was greeted by chants of “bigot” from a crowd in New Hampshire on Monday night.
Santorum, a former US senator from Pennsylvania, was harangued outside his campaign rally at Jillian’s Billiards Club in Manchester, New Hampshire, Washington Blade reported. It was his final campaign event before the state’s primary vote on Tuesday.
Santorum is currently in second place among republican voters, according to the latest Rasmussen poll. Taken the night after the caucuses, the poll shows Romney in first place to be the GOP presidential candidate, with 29 percent of likely Republican votes. Santorum has 21 percent.
AttackWatch:
AttackWatch.com RT @mmurraypolitics: Romney says Obama “apologizes for America.” Every independent fact-checking organization has said that isn’t true
Romney lies without blinking an eye. He doesn’t let facts get in the way of his lies.
Tue Jan 10, 2012 at 05:37 AM PST.
Overton Window on Mortgage Walk Away Moving, Banks Scared
MSNBC had and interesting article yesterday about the increasing number of “strategic defaults” on mortgages. This is where the home owner has the money to pay their mortgage, but are so far “upside-down” (owing more than they can sell the house for) that they don’t see any benefit in keeping that home.
Even with the recent positive news about housing starts, the price of homes sold in the United States continues to decline. This is leaving more and more homeowners “upside-down” in their mortgages.
A recent study showed that in 2010 (last year that they have enough data for) the percent of mortgage defaults by folks who could afford their payments rose from 22% to 30 percent. When nearly one in three homeowners who default are choosing, not being forced but choosing, to walk away from their mortgage because they don’t see any economic upside to it, that is a big deal.
From the MSNBC article:
“It’s a looming problem that’s in the shadows,” said Jason Kopcak, a mortgage trader at Cantor Fitzgerald who advises lenders on how to value the loans on their books. “It’s very worrisome to mortgage lenders.”
Researchers point to a number of forces that are driving borrowers to walk away from their mortgages. At the top of the list is the estimated 12 million homes that are underwater, meaning the owners owe more than they are worth.
.
Mortgage bankers should be worried. One of the reasons that the credit crunch happened was that banks had tons of loans on the books where the property securing it was not worth the amount loaned on it. When it came time to revalue those loans or “mark to market” they found themselves without enough other assets to be solvent.
The continuing drop in housing prices keeps this pressure on them. And now public opinion is changing as to what is acceptable in terms of personal conduct.
Having lost a house to foreclosure I can tell you personally that there is a lot of unreasonable guilt. We did everything we could (including dumb things like emptying our 401K) to keep up with our bills when both of us became unemployed in 2009.
In the end there was no alternative and the bank came and took our house of 15 years. Even though they refused a short sale and slow walked us through mortgage modification the old ethic of honoring debts you agreed to pay really gave me a few sleepless nights (I’ve since gotten over it).
Now that the numbers of strategic defaults is growing, the social pressure to honor your debts is changing. People have seen that businesses don’t push a bad situation; they go bankrupt even when they have capital to pay some of their debts and start over. After five years of housing crisis, the American people are starting to ask why they should not do that same?
Most people who own a home know of someone — a friend, a colleague a family member — who has defaulted, especially in housing markets that have taken a big hit,” said Chad Ruyle, co-founder of youwalkaway.com, a service that advises homeowners on walking away from their mortgage. “They realize these are not bad people. They’re not deadbeats. They’re just like them.”
The Overton window on how we think about mortgages has begun to move and it has to scare the crap out of the bankers. But you know, I have exactly zero sympathy for them. There has been opportunity after opportunity for them to do the right thing by the communities that they have made so much money off of and at every turn they have either declined to act or dragged their feet when they were forced to by the Federal Government.
It is one thing to have some loyalty to a company that acts as though it is trying to help you, to make things work. It is quite another to expect anyone to have loyalty to a company that treats you like dirt and says no at every opportunity.
This is another example of the 99% waking up and realizing they have more power than they thought. As long as the banks seemed like they were acting in responsible ways and there were so few people who defaulted on their mortgages, people would hang in there, even if the terms were highly unfavorable to them.
Now that it is clear that the banks don’t care at all about their customers (with things like debit card fees) there is no reason why the what is good for the banks should be given any consideration.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/10/1053302/-Overton-Window-on-Mortgage-Walk-Away-Moving,-Banks-Scared?via=siderec
Newt really thinks he’s ALL THAT. Huntsman is just as PHONEY, and Ron Paul is as KOOKIE as Mad Hatter.
Team Romney: The Obama White House is unstable and its policies are dangerous
Posted By Josh Rogin Tuesday, January 10, 2012 – 6:59 PM
The resignation of President Barack Obama’s chief of staff shows that the White House is unstable and its national security policies remain dangerous, a top surrogate for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney told The Cable today.
“This unexpected move of Bill Daley out points to a lack of stability,” said former Senator Jim Talent in a Tuesday interview.
Talent, who is one of Romney’s closest advisors on national security, also harshly criticized Obama’s decision to revamp U.S. military strategy, which he announced at the Pentagon on Jan. 5. The new strategy review, released only weeks ahead of Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget request, calls for a “smaller and leaner” military and backs off from previous strategy documents that mandated the U.S. military maintain the capability to fight two major wars at the same time.
“I think it’s going to encourage provocative actions around the world,” said Talent. “It’s a signal that America’s not going to continue exercising a leadership role, it’s very dangerous. And you know that one of the amazing things about it is that it’s explicitly a budget-driven decision, in other words there’s no pretense that this is a change based on strategic analysis.”
When announcing the new defense strategy, Obama said, “The tide of war is receding” — but the Romney team doesn’t see it that way at all.
“That sends the wrong message, it encourages other countries to believe that they can provoke and challenge us, and it will end up costing us more money,” said Talent. “It’s so much an explicit confession of bankruptcy in terms of defense policy, I almost don’t know how to respond to it.”
In fact, Talent said that Obama’s strategic review is more damaging than the military cuts made by President Bill Clinton’s administration following the end of the Cold War.
“That two-war standard was continued in the post-Cold War era by the Clinton administration and was deemed necessary in the 1990s — and that was before the 9/11 attacks, that was before the rise of Chinese power, and that was before Russia reassumed a more aggressive posture,” said Talent. “So if it was necessary according to President Clinton in the 1990s before those additional risks … how could it not be necessary now?”
Talent laid out four of the top foreign policy priorities in a Romney administration, framing them as areas where it was necessary to fix Obama’s missteps. These include a new policy to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, the importance of channeling China in a direction of peaceful competition rather than aggression, the need to reestablish the strength of traditional allies, and the need for the United States to play a larger leadership role in the international community.
“Governor Romney believes that the Obama administration has pursued a policy of weakness across the spectrum of areas,” Talent said.
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/10/team_romney_the_obama_white_house_is_unstable_and_its_policies_are_dangerous
Talking Points Memo
Palin on Perry: “There’s still no need for him to drop out.”
Palin<<<<<<<<<THIS bish here!
No matter what happens, the Professor wins the grift…
by Dennis G.
The Professor is on the move again. He has a sugar daddy funding his PAC and is preparing a can of whoop-ass for Mittens. He just released an ad for South Carolina hitting Romney for being pro-abortion and his PAC will release their “King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town” campaign documentary on Wednesday. The elbows are getting sharper and GOP potentates are getting nervous over criticisms of Mittens for earning millions by screwing American workers. Some like Kristol are in the public hand-wringing phase—more will follow him.
Meanwhile folks attribute motives of rage and vengeance to the Professor and very few folks see any method to his madness. And yet, this is Newt’s best play to win the nomination. If Romney can’t stand up to the intense bashing and drops in support, then folks in wingnutopia will thank Newt for exposing the squish before President Obama had a chance to crush him—and if Mittens is brought low, then the only choices left will be Newt, Ron, John and the Ricks. The Professor is betting that he’ll win that fight. This line of attack is a smart play and his best chance to become the Republican nominee. It is also a very low risk strategy for Newt—there are no hits to his reputation that could damage his future earning power. He will always be able to run a new grift and this confrontational path just might win him the GOP nomination and fantasies of being elected President.
And best of all, if it doesn’t work out Newt will be fine. He’ll have branded himself as a fighter who tried to stop the Party from making the mistake of nominating a squish like Romney. If Mittens takes the hits and wins in November folks will just say it was Newt being Newt and thank him for toughening Romney up. OTHO, if Romney is beaten by President Obama, Newt will get to say he tried to warn folks—that he tried to save the party—and was just a lonely prophet. Regardless of any outcome Newt’s stock and earning power will increase. His grift will keep going.
I expect him to come in fourth tonight—maybe even third. However it turns out, he’ll call himself the comeback kid and keep on keepin’ on. At a certain level semi-pro grifters like Romney must just be in awe.
Cheers
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/01/10/no-matter-what-happens-the-professor-wins-the-grift/#comment-2980704
MEDIA ALERT! Gayle King interview with First Lady Michelle Obama airs tomorrow morning on CBS’ This Morning at 7am EST!
Thank you, Rikyrah
Rev. Al just smacked down Steve Scmitz’s bullshit meme about AMERICANS being jealous/envious of Richie Rich, Romney. Romney said this in his speech tonight in New Hampshire. We’re jealous! That punk ass, fake ass, bitch. Class WARFARE; that’s what this punk is playing and Rev. Al is RIGHT. it will backfire on that bitch, M itt.
go REV. AL!!
got a link to the video?
Not yet; it’s live coverage. When/if the video is available, it would be nice to post it.
Oh, so Mitt is puffed up about it? Arrogant punk ass mofo!
Bring on the general election so President Obama can hand Mitt’s ass to him!
These clowns don’t know when to unpitch their tents.
Update: @NBCNews projects Ron Paul will finish in 2nd place behind Mitt Romney in New Hampshire primary
Gayle King to interview first lady
The White House press room is buzzing with news that Oprah’s best friend — and new “CBS This Morning” co-host — Gayle King is scheduled to interview Michelle Obama this afternoon.
Piles of broadcast equipment are stacked outside the West Wing press quarters, and reporters headquartered here say King will meet with the first lady at 1:30 p.m.
King has interviewed Obama before. Last year, she appeared on King’s self-titled show on the Oprah WInfrey Network and spoke about efforts to help military families.
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/gayle-king-to-interview-first-lady-110295.html
Starve, You Bastards
by BooMan
Tue Jan 10th, 2012 at 07:04:56 PM EST
How do you squeeze the last dime out of a starving person? Elect a Republican:
Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has announced a major assault on the food stamp program that feeds 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania’s Department of Public Welfare announced that on May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets will be barred from receiving food stamps. People over 60 would have a $3,250 cap.
As the Inquirer points out in a detailed look, the move to cut food stamps is way out of line with what other states are doing: “Pennsylvania plans to make the amount of food stamps that people receive contingent on the assets they possess — an unexpected move that bucks national trends and places the commonwealth among a minority of states.”
The trend during the Great Recession, with millions falling into poverty, has been to remove such barriers to assistance. Gov. Ed Rendell eliminated the state’s asset test in 2008. Pennsylvania now joins 11 states with asset tests — including Indiana, Kansas, Missouri and South Dakota.
Eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” is an old and recurrent refrain from those who seek to dismantle the country’s social welfare system. But it’s a cynical ruse: 30 percent of those eligible for food stamps in Pennsylvania don’t receive them. According to federal data, the Inquirer notes, Pennsylvania has a fraud rate of just one-tenth of 1 percent.
Conservatives frequently bristle at the idea that poor people might have nice things while receiving public assistance (“they have a television on welfare!”). But Pennsylvania will now create the most bizarre of disincentives: dissuading poor people from saving.
Don’t blame me. I voted for his crappy opponent.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/1/10/153014/340
.Romney’s Bogus Jobs Claim, A Review
Forget Mitt Romney’s verbal gaffes for a moment. Something more important has happened in the last few days. The linchpin of Romney’s most powerful argument has turned out to be bogus.
I’m talking about Romney’s claim about job creation – specifically, that Obama lost 2 million jobs as president while Romney, as a leader of Bain Capital, created 100,000 jobs. It’s taken a few weeks, and what seems like a few hundred posts by the indefatigable Greg Sargent, to get the media to focus on this claim. But now they are. And it turns out to be even more laughable than it appeared upon initial inspection.
Here’s the story, in case you haven’t read it elsewhere:
From the get-go, Romney’s argument was weak. Among the many flaws: Romney calculates the Obama era job losses by using, as a baseline, the employment rate as of January, 2009, when Obama first took office. That’s absurd. The economy was in free-fall when Obama took over. But job losses slowed, then turned into job gains, once the Recovery Act kicked in. Job growth was slower than it could have been, with the right policies. But the shift is obvious if you look at a graph like the one Paul Krugman has supplied. (See above.) Keep in mind, as Krugman has pointed out, that when Republicans talk about President Bush’s jobs records, they typically use as a baseline June 2003, the low point of his term but also seventeen months into it.
Still, that was only part of the story. The real whopper turns out to be the 100,000 figure, which the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler picked apart. At Kessler’s request, the Romney campaign supplied the source for that claim. Was it a calculation from respected economists? A report from an investment or management consulting firm? Uh, no. It was three newspaper clips, reporting jobs gains from the companies that Bain had taken over. No effort was made to calculate offsetting jobs losses. And did I mention that the job gain figures were recent, from long after Romney had left Bain?
Sargent puts it all together:
Romney is only counting jobs gained at companies restructured at Bain during and after his years there — and is notfactoring in jobs lost — in claiming he created over 100,000 jobs
Meanwhile, as the Romney camp concedes to Kessler, in making the claim Obama is a job destroyer, Romney is factoring in the jobs that were lost during Obama’s presidency — before Obama’s policies went into effect. In other words, Romney is calculating a “net” number for Obama, and isn’t calculating a net number for himself. Just wow. As the charts drawn up by Steve Benen and Paul Krugman show, if you apply to Obama the metric Romney is applying to himself, around 2.3 million jobs were created on Obama’s watch.
Of course, comparing how a president managed the economy and how an investor managed firms is apples and oranges. And while Romney frequently says “helped create” rather than “create,” that qualification hardly accounts for the misleading nature of the comparison. Kessler says the Romney jobs claim does not “pass the laugh test.” He’s right.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/99462/romneys-bogus-jobs-claim-review#.Twx0zgA9dXE.twitter
CNN projecting Romney as winner: http://tpm.ly/yELpyY
It Happened to Kathie
By Laura on January 10, 2012
“I had that deer-in-the-headlights look—these kinds of things just don’t happen to me.”
That’s how Kathie, a Head Start teacher for special-needs kids, felt when she got the call about being one of four campaign supporters to sit down to a meal with President Obama.
Kathie has been a supporter of Barack Obama since 2008, when she began reaching out to “closet Democrats” in her home state of Nevada:
“A friend of ours had a house party. We watched a video of the speech that Barack Obama had given in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention, and a staffer told us more about Barack Obama as a person and what he wanted to achieve. And from that time on, it was, ‘Yes, we need to support this man. We need to get this man elected.’
Kathie even met then-Senator Obama out on the campaign trail:
“I had the privilege of shaking his hand back when he was campaigning in Nevada in 2008. In the moment you think you’ll say something witty or clever, and what I said was, ‘Thanks for the hope.’
“This time, when he walked in and I shook his hand, it was so neat for me—I told him I was so excited to shake his hand again, as President of the United States.”
As she waited for President Obama to arrive, Kathie thought about the questions she would ask, and got to know the other guests—Valarie, Scott, and Bill.
“We were sitting in the hotel lobby and Valarie said, ‘I think we should figure out who’s going to ask the first question.’ Which was a great idea, except we decided that it would be me! I’m not comfortable in the limelight—but I said, ‘I will do it.’
“I had seen the video of the previous Dinner with Barack, so I knew he would make us feel comfortable. But it was not a huge table! We were really close, and I was right across from him. The question that I started out with was: ‘Thinking about 2012 and the dual tasks of governing and the campaign, do you feel more stress? Or does it feel exhilarating?’ He talked a little bit about the isolation of the presidency—but said he was excited to get out there and talk to people about what he’s accomplished.
“After that the conversation just flowed. He asked about our families and what was happening in our area, and the work that we do. The President ordered a burger and fries, a spinach salad, and iced tea. And then the waiter came to me and I was thinking, ‘How am I going to eat?’ But the President was so warm and considerate—he offered us some of his fries! And I thought, ‘This is the leader of the free world.’
“People have pictures of themselves shaking hands with the President, like industry leaders and Hollywood personalities. I was just thinking that here we are having a meal with him—it’s a sign that we have a connection, that he’s listening to what we think is important. He did say that he really enjoys these meals and that he really looks forward to them. You could tell.”
http://www.barackobama.com/news/entry/it-happened-to-kathie
George Lucas: Hollywood Didn’t Want To Fund My Film Because Of Its Black Cast
By Adam Serwer
| Tue Jan. 10, 2012 9:05 AM PST
After Jar-Jar Binks, it’s hard to not to give George Lucas’ new film Red Tails the side-eye. The movie is World War II-era action flick based on the Tuskegee Airmen, the heroic and decorated pilots who were first black servicemembers to fly combat missions at a time when black Americans were not recognized as full citizens on the United States, despite their willingness to fight and die in its defense.
Snip:
After watching Lucas’ interview with Stewart, I’m more likely to see the movie than before. It’s hard to forget the galactic coonery of Jar-Jar Binks. On the other hand, one of the screenwriters for Red Tails is Aaron McGruder, the writer behind the newspaper comic strip turned TV show The Boondocks. When the Star Wars prequels were first released, McGruder justifiably blasted Lucas over Jar-Jar from the perspective of a Star Wars fan. Lucas then hired him to write a movie. It’s not quite enough to get me to forgive him for ruining the original Star Wars trilogy, but it’s enough to get me to want to see Red Tails.
http://motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/01/george-lucas-hollywood-didnt-want-fund-my-mostly-black-film-red-tails
DNC Chair on MSNBC: Romney was Callous and Insensitive Towards Workers, Middle Class
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxkiwR_gYRE
John McCain: Choosing Sarah Palin In 2008 ‘The Best Decision I’ve Ever Made’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/mccain-palin-best-decision_n_1197772.html#comments
WASHINGTON — John McCain has no regrets about the biggest and most controversial decision of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. Speaking to Sean Hannity on Tuesday evening in New Hampshire, McCain said naming Sarah Palin his running mate was “still the best decision I’ve ever made.”
Much drama has occurred since the McCain-Palin ticket lost to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. In 2009, several members of McCain’s campaign team trashed Palin in a Vanity Fair article, and in 2010, McCain’s daughter Meghan claimed Palin caused “stress, drama, panic” on the campaign trail.
McCain was on Hannity’s show to promote his 2008 rival, Mitt Romney, whose Republican presidential candidacy he endorsed last week, after Romney won the Iowa caucus by eight votes.
You put the country at risk with that empty head, nothing in the skull but empty fluid Sarah Palin. Your campaign had this to say about your choice for VP candidate…
One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family — clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards.
A disgusted McCain aide calls the Palins “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”
http://www.yelp.com/topic/new-york-wasilla-hillbillies-looting-neiman-marcus-from-coast-to-coast
Now that the election is over, GOP campaign insiders are now starting to spill the beans on Palin’s stupidity and diva behavior.
“She didn’t understand, McCain aides told me today, that Africa was a continent and not a country, and actually asked them … if South Africa wasn’t just part of the country as opposed to a country in the continent.”
Tue Jan 10, 2012 at 09:48 AM PST.
Wall Street posts huge numbers against Elizabeth Warren
by Chris Bowers.
Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown has a huge, record-setting pile of cash to throw at Elizabeth Warren:
Senator Scott Brown raised $3.2 million in the last three months of the year, boosting his campaign war chest to $12.8 million, the most that any Massachusetts candidate has accumulated at this stage of a statewide race.
Brown’s campaign said the Republican senator raised $8.5 million in 2011, a robust tally that signals that the GOP is again ready to rally behind Brown. The Senate campaign is expected to be one of the most watched in the country as Brown faces off against a Democratic field led by Elizabeth Warren.
The only Massachusetts campaign account close to the size of Brown’s was that of Senator John F. Kerry, who had $9.9 million in the first month of his 2008 reelection campaign, much of it left over from his 2004 presidential race.
This is a monstrous tally for Brown. Wall Street is clearly not messing around when it comes to stopping Warren:
Financial service lobbyists and other K Street advocates have for weeks been working hard to help the freshman senator win his high-stakes battle for re-election against Elizabeth Warren, a liberal Harvard law professor. Warren is anathema for many finance-sector lobbyists and Wall Street leaders who abhor the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau— a centerpiece of the financial services overhaul—of which Warren was the intellectual architect. […]
In his two Senate races, Brown’s top five contributors included four financial giants: Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., and Liberty Mutual Insurance, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The most generous donor has been FMR Corp., the parent of Fidelity Investments, chipping in at least $97,000 to his campaign committees from executives and the firm’s PAC.
Executives and PACs affiliated with Goldman Sachs pumped at least $60,500 into Brown’s coffers; at least $51,000 from Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance; and at least $46,000 from Liberty Mutual Insurance. […]
Inside the Beltway, fundraising has been heating up too. On Nov. 30, veteran financial services lobbyist Dan Crowley, a partner at K & L Gates, hosted a breakfast fundraiser for the senator that drew about a dozen other lobbyists. “There is no Senate race that more clearly reflects the choice for the future direction of the country,” Crowley said, pitting the role of government versus the role of the private sector.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/10/1053386/-Wall-Street-posts-huge-numbers-against-Elizabeth-Warren?via=blog_1
does anyone here watch Dance Moms?
No; what channel and when does it air?
it’s on Lifetime. I saw it once or twice…the mothers scare me.
Progressive Defeatism
by BooMan
Tue Jan 10th, 2012 at 10:51:38 AM EST
Matt Stoller recently penned a piece that got a lot of attention, including a favorable recommendation from Glenn Greenwald. Personally, I found Stoller’s piece a little hard to follow. I had to read it more than once to be sure I understood his main points. He confused me at the beginning when he began talking about “a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing.” How does a country use a decentralized method of financing war? Is he talking about the Democratic Party or the liberal wing of the party? Why is he focused on war financing at all?
The answer, which becomes apparent many paragraphs later, is that he is talking about war financing because libertarians care about it in a way that liberals do not. Stoller says that libertarians hate Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt because they all waged “big-ass wars” that had to be financed, and the way those wars were financed involved structural reforms that libertarians dislike. I don’t think that Stoller is saying that liberals should hate Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, but he is suggesting that we ought to take a look at the legacies of their war financing. For me, it’s the kind of boutique point that makes libertarianism so boring. Stoller’s argument then moves to detailing the history of war financing, but he conflates it with abuses of federal power like the Palmer Raids. If there is a causal connection here, Stoller doesn’t make it for us. When it comes to FDR, he reduces the complex process by which we reacted to the nuclear age by building a military-industrial complex to this simple formula:
FDR also fused the liberal and union establishments with the corporate world, creating the hybrid “military-industrial” complex that is with us to this day (see Alan Brinkley’s “End of Reform” for a good treatment of this process).
Do I have to read the book to know how FDR erred?
Stoller goes on to argue that the centralization that occurred under FDR was used for the dual-purposes of financing and fighting wars and implementing the modern social welfare system. As he sees it, liberals cannot support one without supporting the other. In the interest of fairness, I will let Stoller make his own argument for this thesis:
Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.
This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects.
Stoller is touching on something I wrote about a couple of months ago. I talked about how progressives need to act like they are the natural leaders of this country again. But we can’t do that because we have too much distrust of power. We’re so busy standing on the outside critiquing the Establishment that no one is going to hand us the keys to become the Establishment. And too many liberals don’t want that responsibility because it would tarnish their purity. Stoller doesn’t have an answer to Ron Paul because he’s decided the system is so rotten that it is not only indefensible, but irredeemable. That leaves him with no solutions. And a progressive without a belief in progress is just a crank.
If you look at Ron Paul’s political philosophy in toto, you’ll realize that Paul basically opposes every progressive accomplishment since about 1913. I’ve never heard him oppose female suffrage, but he’d like to roll back just about every other thing the federal government has done since the creation of the Federal Reserve. The only way a progressive can reach the point where their beliefs converge with Ron Paul’s is if they’ve basically given up on this country and on progressivism. It takes a certain kind of personality to come to this type of conclusion during the most productive Democratic term of office since LBJ pushed through the civil rights legislation and enacted the Great Society.
There’s a bizarre myopia in a progressive ignoring that Ron Paul’s philosophy is the complete negation of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Era, and the Great Society just because he’s right about the War of Drugs and he shares a belief that the U.S. is overcommitted militarily and is infringing on our privacy and civil rights. Naturally, you can make common cause with him on areas of shared concern, but we’re talking about making him president here, are we not?
Stoller and Greenwald will tell us that they’re not talking about Paul as president, that they’re only talking about him to raise awareness about issues. Part of the problem with that assertion is that most of us are talking about Paul as a presidential candidate. When we say he’s an unreconstructed neo-confederate who is the mortal enemy of progressivism, we’re not diminishing that he’s right on the War on Drugs or torture or a variety of other things. We’re saying that we’re not taking him seriously as a presidential candidate. We’re saying that we can’t support his campaign.
Ultimately, Stoller’s argument comes back to war financing, which I think he equates with the Federal Reserve. He doesn’t, however, make a compelling case that the Fed is the cause of U.S. militarism, nor does he explain how we ought to finance the Pentagon or our debt differently.
I don’t understand why anyone thought this article was profound or important. It has some interesting observations, but it’s incoherent. If I were his prof, I’d make him write it again and see if he could make a point.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/1/10/105138/085
The Party is Just Broken
by BooMan
Tue Jan 10th, 2012 at 12:41:05 PM EST
Ryan Lizza is right that Bush’s crappy presidency contributed to the weak field of candidates that we see today:
“A successful Presidency can produce a new crop of future Presidential candidates for the party that controls the White House. The vice president and cabinet officials, as well as governors and senators elected over the course of the administration, are historically major sources for a party’s next round of candidates. The Bush years had the opposite effect. It was unthinkable that his vice president would run for higher office and much of his cabinet left Washington tainted by the President’s unpopularity. Moreover, Bush helped sink his party in the 2006 and 2008 elections, thus depleting the ranks of potential Republican candidates for 2012.”
But, the problem is a bit deeper. It’s hard to come up with a Republican who would make a plausible president and who, at the same time, could actually win the nomination. People talk about some of the less insane governors, like Bobby Jindal, Mitch Daniels, and Chris Christie. Maybe someone telegenic and non-threatening like Sen. John Thune could make a run, although he wouldn’t necessarily win the love of the Republican base. If you’re honest, the cupboard is pretty bare. The biggest problem is that the candidates have so little room to maneuver on the issues. It’s like they all have to learn the Rush Limbaugh catechism and they can’t deviate from it. In other words, it’s just packaging. All the candidates are going to make the same argument and do largely the same things in office. Maybe this is increasing Ron Paul’s appeal. At root, this is still the party of Tom DeLay. It is built to plunder. It rejects empathy. And it is giant reservoir for hate.
It’s not capable of providing us with a hopeful, optimistic, inclusive vision of the future. Ronald Reagan would be a RINO in today’s party, treated no better than Jon Huntsman. A lot of this is the legacy of Bush, but it has been building for much longer than that.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/1/10/12415/8116
The Real Problem With Romney’s Gaffe
Here is Romney’s “I like being able to fire people” quote, in context:
I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.
Aaron Carroll takes issue with the point Romney intended:
The real issue, unfortunately, is that very, very few people have the luxury that Gov. Romney is endorsing. Let’s say that you are self-employed, and lucky enough to have found a company to provide you with health insurance. Then, let’s say you develop cancer. You suddenly find out that your insurance company stinks. So you fire them, right?
Of course not. You’re screwed.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/
Is New Hampshire Now “Off-Broadway” For The GOP?
The big opening is in South Carolina:
While Romney has been campaigning here, his poll numbers in South Carolina, and even in Florida, have been steadily rising. A recent Rasmussen survey of South Carolina showed Romney, who was back in the pack not too long ago, in the lead, slightly ahead of Santorum, and farther ahead of former South Carolina front-runner Newt Gingrich. … The fact is, for a Republican presidential candidate, the South is the big prize. It is the rock-solid base of the Republican Party.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/how-much-does-new-hampshire-matter.html
The GOP vs China
Jacob Heilbrunn is deeply concerned that “bellicosity about China has become fashionable among Republicans”:
[A] Republican president who actually followed the prescriptions being enunicated during the primaries would wreak havoc in foreign affairs. The truculence of the candidates, apart from Ron Paul, suggests that they have learned little or nothing from the Bush era. It’s a testament to hubris or obduracy, or perhaps both at the very same time. Whether a new sobriety would prevail once a Republican candidate was actually in office is another matter. It’s hard to believe that Romney, for one, actually believes what he is saying. But there is no gainsaying the fact that bashing China is acquiring a new and unfortunate respectability among Republicans.
What’s staggering to me is that after the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, the GOP, while never mentioning anyone with the name Bush, remains, with the exception of Paul and Huntsman, even more gung-ho about military interventionism and a new Cold War with China than ever.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/the-gop-vs-china.html
January 10, 2012
Explaining is losing
By being more calculatingly precise than he ever needed to be, Mitt Romney has, characteristically, opened a multifront offensive — against himself. All that Mittsifying business about creating or helping to create a cool 100,000 jobs? The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has now revised its earlier one Pinocchio to three, and this revision would seem to come, in no small part, from Bain Capital itself, now hunkered into self-defense mode:
[In refuting the Wall Street Journal’s analysis] Bain appears to be rejecting a central premise of Romney’s calculation — that years after the investment ended, one can attribute either good news or bad news about the company to Bain’s involvement.
Romney Inc., it further appears, either never learned or has forgotten perhaps the most fundamental rule of campaigning: Explaining is losing. His invention of the 100,000-jobs-created is clearly deficient, yet he must now explain it and justify it and defend it in perpetuity against all investigative journalists and political opponents — an explanation-justification-defense he can no longer credibly revise. He’s stuck with explaining, which, in politics, is losing. And he did it to himself.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/01/explaining-is-losing.html
January 10, 2012
The independence of dumb
While following tonight’s New Hampshire primary returns, you are hereby forgiven should you dismiss Huntsman’s surge, Paul’s maneuvering, Santorum’s plunge and Gingrich’s venomous bouncing about, (oh, and some Texas governor’s absence), because you should dismiss all that static. There’s only one return that portends events in the general: How Romney performs among independents.
The primary provides the former Massachusetts governor with a critical test of his support among middle-class swing voters after a disappointing performance among independents in Iowa [writes Politico]…. Since Jan. 1, Romney’s support among independents planning to vote in the GOP primary here has dropped from 39 percent to 31 percent in the Suffolk University Poll daily tracker.
I’ll cut Romney this much slack: Independent voters are incontrovertibly as flaky as voters get, hence losing their support, gradually or tornadically, is not always a function of the politician’s competence. To wit …
Jon Hopwood, 52, an unemployed editor from the Concord [NH] area … was an enthusiastic, anti-war supporter of Obama’s in 2008 but turned on the president after he extended the tenure of George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, who implemented the White House plan for the Afghanistan surge.
“I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life, but I might this time,” said Hopwood.
Right, go get ’em, tiger, that’ll show ’em. To demonstrate your dissatisfaction with a Democratic president who inherited a Himalayan passel of problems created by Republicans, you go out there, Jon, and vote for the guys who created — not inherited — the problems.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/01/the-independence-of-dumb.html
January 10, 2012 10:35 AM
Fighting on Democrats’ turf
By Steve Benen
Take a guess who said this yesterday: “Voters are just now meeting the Real Romney — the buyout tycoon who executed takeovers, bankrupted businesses, and sent jobs overseas while killing American jobs.”
MoveOn.org? No, it was Rick Perry.
Let’s try another one: “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money? I do draw a distinction between looting a company, leaving behind broken families and broken neighborhoods, and then leaving a factory that should be there.”
Bernie Sanders? No, it was Newt Gingrich.
Just over the last few days, Republicans targeting Mitt Romney have decided to go all in, going after the frontrunner’s career as a vulture capitalist — the guy who got rich orchestrating leveraged buyouts and laying off thousands of American workers. As John Dickerson noted, Romney’s GOP rivals are, whether they care to admit it or not, validating the larger Democratic line against Romney.
These attacks may help Romney’s primary challengers, and they will certainly soften up Mitt Romney for the general election. Importantly, they give credibility to an entire line of Democratic argument about income inequality and the destructive force of commerce. Before, Republican candidates could label those who would manage the excesses of the economy as socialists. The GOP critique of Romney ratifies the Democratic idea that the free market can breed excesses.
None of Romney’s rivals would admit they’re saying that, but when you pile on this completely and in such blunt terms you are embracing the anti-corporate energy that has always been behind the Democratic attack. When Barack Obama talks about the excesses of Wall Street, conservatives say he is punishing success. If so, then Romney’s rivals are doing the same thing
Ed Kilgore had a similar item, noting that the GOP field is, in its quest to stop Romney, undermining “a central element of conservative ideology” and creating “a pretty good foundation for Democrats to build on.”
I’d take this just a bit further and ask a related question: why are so many Republican presidential candidates taking this line? Obviously because they think it’ll be effective, but do they believe that?
Romney has tried to argue that critics of his private-sector layoffs are borderline communists, trying to “put free enterprise on trial.” And yet, when there is no difference whatsoever between the message Dems are pushing and the attacks from Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Jon Huntsman, it suggests the Romney line is a bust.
But more importantly, it also suggests the progressive line is what resonates with voters — even Republican voters. After all, it’s likely Perry, Gingrich, and Huntsman relied on polls and focus groups to identify the most potent message, and they all quickly found that this is the criticism that resonates.
For all the talk about this being a center-right nation, there’s a realization that Americans are uncomfortable with excessive greed and the kind of ruthless, screw-the-workers style of capitalism Romney used to get rich. If this discomfort didn’t exist, we wouldn’t see conservative Republican candidates using the argument to make appeals to conservative Republican voters
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/fighting_on_democrats_turf034659.php
January 10, 2012 1:25 PM
Taking a sledgehammer to the foundation
By Steve Benen
Mitt Romney has run into quite a bit of scrutiny lately, most notably about his background as it relates to jobs.
He said there have been times he worried about getting fired, and that wasn’t true. He said he “likes being able to fire people,” and that became a big headache. He’s being haunted by many of his unemployed victims. Romney’s also made all kinds of claims about President Obama’s jobs record, all of which have been debunked.
But the one claim that really matters is Romney’s insistence that he deserves credit for creating “over 100,000 jobs” at his private-equity firm.
The Romney campaign initially refused to substantiate the claim, which is never a good sign. Then it said the number is accurate just so long as one excludes all of the layoffs Romney’s firm made, and includes jobs created after he left the firm. Then Romney himself said the figure is a net total, after the layoffs are factored in.
Glenn Kessler returns to the subject today, and his assessment is less than kind.
Romney never could have raised money from investors if the prospectus seeking $1-million investments from the super wealthy had said it would focus on creating jobs. Instead, it said: “The objective of the fund is to achieve an annual rate of return on invested capital in excess of the returns generated by conventional investments in the public equity market and the private equity market.”
Indeed, the prospectus never mentions “jobs,” “job,” or “employees.”
Second, it has become increasingly hard to understand how Romney’s personal involvement played a role in creating these jobs, especially years later. He clearly is adding up all the jobs now at the companies that are thriving, arguing these numbers far outweigh the job losses at companies that failed. But as the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the failure rate one can attribute to Bain Capital changes significantly if one counts five years from an investment or eight years from an investment.
Bain, in fact, rejected the Journal’s analysis, saying it “uses a fundamentally flawed methodology that unfairly assigns responsibility to us for many events that occurred in companies when we did not own or control them, and disregards dozens of successful venture capital investments.”
In other words, Bain appears to be rejecting a central premise of Romney’s calculation — that years after the investment ended, one can attribute either good news or bad news about the company to Bain’s involvement.
Kessler’s analysis concludes no part of Romney’s claim is credible or supported by evidence, and that much of the candidate’s argument fails to “pass the laugh test.”
This is no small revelation. As Jonathan Cohn put it, “The linchpin of Romney’s most powerful argument has turned out to be bogus.”
That’s not an exaggeration in the slightest — this analysis is taking a sledgehammer to the foundation of the Republican frontrunner’s entire campaign. Romney’s message can be summarized in one sentence: “I’m a successful businessman with a track record of creating jobs.” Romney doesn’t like to talk about health care (his plan was mirrored by the president); he doesn’t like to talk about his gubernatorial record (he failed miserably to create jobs); and he doesn’t like to talk about social issues (he was a liberal on these issues up until quite recently). The raison d’etre for Romney’s effort comes down to his private-sector record and the “over 100,000 jobs” he created.
And that talking point has been debunked, leaving Romney with no credibility on his campaign’s top issue.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/taking_a_sledgehammer_to_the_f034668.php
UNDER BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA NEWS…
OR KNEEGROW, PLEASE NEWS…
…………………………………..
Tavis Smiley: Don’t call me an Obama critic
By theGrio
12:17 PM on 09/12/2011
Broadcaster and author Tavis Smiley has courted controversy in recent months, as he and his friend and mentor, Dr. Cornel West, embarked on a “poverty tour” that included sharp jabs at President Barack Obama.
On Monday, theGrio spoke with Smiley about his upcoming PBS Special “Too Important to Fail,” which debuts on PBS on Tuesday at 8 p.m. EST. The special, and an associated E-book, tackle the issue of education as it specifically relates to the plight of black boys, who statistics show are consistently falling behind their white peers.
During the interview, Smiley voiced skepticism about the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” federal initiative, saying education is a “fundamental right, not a race,” and that “if it is a race,” black boys are losing. He said federal policy should specifically address the needs of black male students, who Smiley said are taught overwhelmingly by “white women,” while he said they need to be talked to and educated in a very specific way in order to achieve success.
Asked about his past criticisms of Obama, and his statements, reported by the Huffington Post, that the president had failed to invite him to the White House or appear on Smiley’s radio or television program, West insisted he has never uttered a personal criticism of the president, and that the statements about not being invited to the White House were simply an answer to the reporters question.
Still, he called Obama the first president of many to not extend such an invitation, though he said he “doesn’t lose sleep about it.”
Smiley insisted that he is wrongly called a “critic” of the president, saying that holding the president accountable is his “job.”
He said he’d done the same when it came to former president Bill Clinton, and former President George W. Bush and his father, former president George H.W. Bush.
“My job has always been to hold presidents accountable to the best interest of all Americans but specifically and unapologetically for [African-Americans],” he said.
http://www.thegrio.com/politics/tavis-smiley-dont-call-me-an-obama-critic.php
Asked about his past criticisms of Obama, and his statements, reported by the Huffington Post, that the president had failed to invite him to the White House or appear on Smiley’s radio or television program, West insisted he has never uttered a personal criticism of the president, and that the statements about not being invited to the White House were simply an answer to the reporters question.
Dear Tavis,
You don’t get to insult the President’s wife, go on a shuckin and buckin tour across the country bashing the President and think you’ll roll into the White House with welcoming arms. You can’t be serious?! What you need to realize Tavis…is you done fk’d up.
BWA HA HA HA Tell’em, SG2!
Right on, SG2! That’s how you tell ’em: “Tavis, you done fk’d up. You know that dontcha?” Brilliant!
1/9/2012
For the fifth day in a row, Mitt Romney has fallen in overnight tracking, but lack of movement by second place Ron Paul has insulated a likely Romney victory, according to the latest two-day Suffolk University/7News tracking poll of likely voters in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.
Romney dropped 2 more percentage points overnight but still holds a 13-point lead at 33 percent. The former Massachusetts governor has dropped a full 10 points from five days ago, when he had 43 percent of likely GOP voters.
Romney is followed by Paul (20 percent), Jon Huntsman (13 percent), Newt Gingrich (11 percent) and Rick Santorum (10 percent), while Rick Perry and Buddy Roemer combined for 3 percent with 12 percent undecided.
“Mitt Romney’s biggest asset is the large number of candidates in this group that are dividing up the remainder of the vote,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston. “With just a 33 percent stake, he can control his destiny, so long as the others in his group continue to battle each other. So the more people in the group the merrier for Romney.”
Romney showed weakness among younger voters and in the north/west region of the state which includes the counties of Carroll, Cheshire, Coos, Grafton, and Sullivan. Among younger voters ages 18-34 years, Romney now trails Paul, who leads 36 percent to 22 percent. In the north/west region, Paul led Romney 25 percent to 21 percent.
http://www.suffolk.edu/50463.html
Pat Buchanan Denies Being Suspended, Says He’s On Medical Leave
http://www.mediaite.com/online/pat-buchanan-denies-being-suspended-says-hes-on-medical-leave/
Pat Buchanan is disputing reports he was suspended from MSNBC and contends that he was instead on medical leave. “Well, you know I’ve had some medical issues at the end of the year which were pretty problematic, and so I’ve sort of been out of speaking and things like that,” Buchanan told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Monday night. “I’ve started back writing the column in December, and I’ve got the column going. I’m doing McLaughlin Group. But we haven’t gotten up on MSNBC
There is no fool like an old fool.
ColorofChange opened up a can of WHUP AZZ on Ole Pat BucKKKLANAN.
He doesn’t want to admit the people he so despise & hate ran his ass away from MSNBC.
****dust off hands***** adios mofo!
January 9, 2012
The Lizza List: Five People Conservatives Should Blame if Mitt Romney Wins
Posted by Ryan Lizza
The 2012 Republican race has largely been shaped by the Republicans who declined to run. Mitt Romney has run a very smart and competent campaign, but he has also been unusually fortunate in that his competition over the last year has been almost comically inept. Here are the people conservatives can blame if Romney ends up winning.
1. George W. Bush
More than anyone else Bush is responsible for decimating the ranks of qualified Republicans who could take on Obama. A successful Presidency can produce a new crop of future Presidential candidates for the party that controls the White House. The vice president and cabinet officials, as well as governors and senators elected over the course of the administration, are historically major sources for a party’s next round of candidates. The Bush years had the opposite effect. It was unthinkable that his vice president would run for higher office and much of his cabinet left Washington tainted by the President’s unpopularity. Moreover, Bush helped sink his party in the 2006 and 2008 elections, thus depleting the ranks of potential Republican candidates for 2012.
The Republican Party rebounded in 2010, but it will take longer than two years for many Presidential-caliber candidates to emerge after the wreckage of the late Bush years.
2. Michele Bachmann
In hindsight, Bachmann had only one important role in the campaign: in August, she forced Tim Pawlenty, who was potentially Romney’s toughest competitor, out of the race. First, Bachmann attacked Pawlenty in an important debate, and then she defeated him at the Iowa Straw Poll, on which he had staked his candidacy. It was especially bitter for Pawlenty that Bachmann caused his demise. Back in Minnesota, she had made his life difficult when he was governor and she was a rabble-rousing legislator forcing anti-gay marriage measures onto his agenda.
3. Cheri Daniels
The wife of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels reportedly halted her husband’s Presidential ambitions on the eve of his entry into the race over concerns about their privacy. (Given what it’s like to run for President, who can blame her?) Candidates often appear stronger when they are sitting on the sidelines, but Daniels did seem to have the potential to consolidate a large bloc of Republicans behind his candidacy. Ideally, a successful Republican candidate will have a mix of three characteristics: electability, conservative credentials, and a respectable resume. Daniels had all three.
Of course, there were many others who also declined to run, including Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, Haley Barbour, Sarah Palin, George Pataki, Paul Ryan, John Thune, and Rudy Giuliani. In the absence of Daniels and these other high-profile Republicans, Texas Governor Rick Perry decided he could fill the vacuum left by their timidity. He had a great resume and a fairly solid conservative record, but was found lacking after a series of embarrassing debate performances. (He still has one last chance to make an impact in the race in the South Carolina primary.)
4. Barack Obama
Jon Huntsman is making his last stand in New Hampshire, and there is some upward movement for him in the polls. But if he doesn’t defeat Romney there (or at least come in a close second), we can trace Huntsman’s loss to his decision to accept Barack Obama’s offer to be ambassador to China in 2009. That single decision transformed Huntsman from a successful, popular governor from the most conservative state in the country into an employee of Obama, the most despised figure among G.O.P. primary voters
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/01/the-lizza-list-five-people.html#ixzz1j53Wi2sP
HuffPost Politics:
@UnionLeader publisher disputes the notion only Romney can beat Obama: http://huff.to/A5nH8P #fitn
Seriously, the only way any of the GOP clowns can beat Obama is with a club, and they’d have to get close enough to him with Secret Service in order to carry out that deed.
Melissa Harris-Perry Deconstructs Stereotypes to Colbert [Video]
by Jorge Rivas, Tuesday, January 10 2012, 11:41 AM EST
Expereincing racism is not the same as talking about it, and we must talk about it. iTalking about it doesn’t divide us..
http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/01/melissa_harris-perry_deconstructs_stereotypes_to_colbert_video.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28ColorLines%29
it’s interesting that anytime I bring up racism with a white woman, they say, it’s not just black women who are discriminated against. They just bring the issue back to them. It’s always about them. That’s how buried their heads are us their asses.
This really is a MUST see clip above of MHP on Colbert Report.
January 10, 2012 11:25 AM
Four out of six
By Steve Benen
Igor Volsky flagged a great piece from Nancy French, who reported the other day that Rick Santorum supported an individual health care mandate when he ran for the Senate in 1994. His primary opponent, Joe Watkins, supported the same policy.
French highlighted this report from April 1994:
Santorum and Watkins both oppose having businesses provide health care for their employees. Instead, they would require individuals to purchase insurance.
And this report, published a month later:
Santorum and Watkins would require individuals to buy health insurance rather than forcing employers to pay for employee benefits.
For those keeping score at home, that means there are six Republican presidential candidates, and four of them, at one time or another, supported an individual health care mandate — an idea GOP officials now consider an unconstitutional, authoritarian nightmare.
Given Santorum’s far-right ideology, does this news come as something of a surprise? Actually, no. Santorum’s position in 1994, and that of his primary challenger, was entirely in line with mainstream Republican thought.
In case anyone’s forgotten, this was a Republican idea in the first place. Nixon embraced the mandate in the 1970s, and George H.W. Bush supported the idea in the 1980s. When Bob Dole endorsed the mandate in 1994, it was in keeping with the party’s prevailing attitudes at the time. Mitt Romney embraced the mandate as governor and it was largely ignored during the 2008 campaign, since it was such a common GOP position.
In recent years, the mandate has been embraced by the likes of John McCain, Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Scott Brown, and Judd Gregg, among many others. Indeed, several of them not only endorsed the policy, they literally co-sponsored legislation that included a mandate.
In the summer of 2009, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), one of the leading Republican lawmakers in the talks over health care reform, told Fox News, “I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate.” Did Fox News freak out? Did GOP leaders immediately distance themselves from the comments? Was Grassley forced to immediately backpedal? No, none of those things happened. Grassley said there was a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate because there was a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate.
But that was before Republicans decided they’re against the ideas they’re for, and this issue could be twisted into a political weapon to be used against the president.
Santorum backed a mandate in 1994? Well, sure, of course he did. It would have been more surprising he had hadn’t.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/four_out_of_six034661.php
Explaining is losing
PM Carpenter
Jan 10, 2012
By being more calculatingly precise than he ever needed to be, Mitt Romney has, characteristically, opened a multifront offensive — against himself. All that Mittsifying business about creating or helping to create a cool 100,000 jobs? The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has now revised its earlier one Pinocchio to three, and this revision would seem to come, in no small part, from Bain Capital itself, now hunkered into self-defense mode..
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/01/explaining-is-losing.html
Romney Surrogate: Bain was About Wealth Management, Firing People Comment Was Good
LOL Spinning like a MAYTAG! What a douchebag.
LOL Colbert NAILS the racist Santorum.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/405560/january-09-2012/rick-santorum-on-gays—bla-people
jbaby56:
GOP have no plans for jobs, economy, ending wars, just involved in banning birth control, making money & spouting nonsense about Obama.
Yes, war against women. Even as whacky as Bachmann is, there was no way in HELL the GOP would ever let her win the presidential nomination.
January 10, 2012 8:00 AM
‘It’s going to be absolutely huge’
By Steve Benen
When Mitt Romney talked to the Nashua Chamber of Commerce yesterday morning about his take on premium support in health care policy, he couldn’t possibly have known the mess he was about to create for himself.
By the end of the day, Romney’s “I like being able to fire people” had become quite a story, context notwithstanding. Jon Huntsman said the line makes the Republican frontrunner “completely unelectable.” Rick Perry’s campaign began offering a downloadable ringtone that plays Romney’s words “I like being able to fire people” over and over again. The DNC is joining in on the fun, too.
Had I even been in the room when Romney said this, I probably couldn’t have predicted the blowback.
What makes the line so potent? James Fallows, hardly a partisan bomb-thrower, had a thoughtful item on this last night. Fallows acknowledged the context, but said Romney’s choice of words hurts him because “it touches something so emotional and raw.”
It’s the word fire…. [P]eople with any experience on either side of a firing know that, necessary as it might be, it is hard. Or it should be. It’s wrenching, it’s humiliating, it disrupts families, it creates shame and anger alike — notwithstanding the fact that often it absolutely has to happen. Anyone not troubled by the process — well, there is something wrong with that person. We might want such a person to do dirty work for us…. We might value him or her as a takeover specialist or at a private equity firm. But as someone we trust, as a leader? No — not any more than you can trust a military leader who is not deeply troubled when his troops are killed.
Here’s a test: If you were making the point about the need for competition, can you imagine yourself saying, “I like being able to fire people…” ?
It’s very hard to predict what kind of political stories will have staying power, and I have no idea if folks will still be talking about this a week, a month, or a season from now. But The Hill reported late yesterday, “Democrats on Monday described the statement as one of several ‘silver bullets’ they plan to use in the summer and fall, if Romney becomes the Republican nominee.”
One labor official said of the planned advertising assault, “It’s going to be absolutely huge.”
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/its_going_to_be_absolutely_hug034655.php
Posted: Tue, Jan. 10, 2012, 3:01 AM
Pennsylvania to impose asset test for food stamps
By Alfred Lubrano
Inquirer Staff Writer
Pennsylvania plans to make the amount of food stamps that people receive contingent on the assets they possess – an unexpected move that bucks national trends and places the commonwealth among a minority of states.
Specifically, the Department of Public Welfare said that as of May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings and other assets would no longer be eligible for food stamps. For people over 60, the limit would be $3,250.
Houses and retirement benefits would be exempt from being counted as assets. If a person owns a car, that vehicle also would also be exempt, but any additional vehicle worth more than $4,650 would be considered a countable asset.
Anne Bale, a spokeswoman for DPW, said the asset test was a way to ensure that “people with resources are not taking advantage of the food-stamp program,” funded by federal money.
In addition, Bale said, the test was related to DPW Secretary Gary Alexander’s initiative to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse across all department programs.
Bale said DPW estimated that 2 percent of the 1.8 million Pennsylvanians receiving food stamps would be affected by the asset test.
The DPW plan caught many by surprise, but has been widely condemned by Philadelphia city officials, business leaders statewide, and advocates for the poor.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20120110_Pennsylvania_to_impose_asset_test_for_food_stamps.html?cmpid=124488489
Posted at 08:53 AM ET, 01/10/2012
The Morning Plum
By Greg Sargent
* Romney’s claims about jobs continue to crumble: A colleague emails: “Can you remember another time a candidate did as much damage to himself as Romney has done in the last 24 hours? I cannot.”
In that amount of time, two things happened. First, Romney has provided Dems with the perfect fodder for misleading but potentially devastating attacks on his primary vulnerability — his corporate past, which Dems will paint as emblematic of the predatory and unfettered capitalism that has produced untold economic misery for millions. And second, the national political press — and even some leading Republicans and conservatives — have come around to the conclusion that the foundation of the whole case driving his candidacy, his career as an alleged “job creator” at Bain Capital, is based on a series of claims that are entirely untenable.
Here’s the latest, from Glenn Kessler, who weighs in with an epic fact check of Romney’s claim that he created over 100,000 jobs at Bain, and concludes that it’s unsupportable on every level:
Romney certainly has a good story to tell about knowing how to manage a business, spotting opportunities and understanding high finance. But if he is to continue to make claims about job creation, the Romney campaign needs to provide a real accounting of how many jobs were gained or lost through Bain Capital investments while the firm managed these companies — and while Romney was chief executive. Any jobs counted after either of those data points simply do not pass the laugh test.
A big victory for Romney in New Hampshire today could help put all this behind him, and he is still obviously on track to win the nomination and mount a very stiff challenge to Obama. But it’s important to emphasize again that a claim that is absolutely central to the entire rationale for Romney’s presidential campaign — the number of jobs he created at Bain shows he’d be able to turn the economy around — has been entirely discredited.
As we’ve seen, there’s no shaming the Romney campaign into stopping the dissembling and lies, but this particular assertion has now been exposed as so ludicrous that he very well may drop it out of sheer political self-interest. As one of the first to call out this claim, I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how aggressively the press has subsequently taken it apart and with the media’s scrutiny of Romney’s Bain years in general.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum/2012/01/10/gIQAoHbxnP_blog.html
‘We Can’t Go Back’
Pennsylvania to impose asset test for food stamps | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/10/2012 http://bit.ly/xkRUc8
North Carolina task force recommends state pay $50,000 each to sterilization survivors – @AP, @ABC http://abcn.ws/y5KJwP
Colorlines:
Racist Jabs at Michelle Obama–and the Apologies That Make Them Worse http://bit.ly/wfMMaf
IRS Gives Another Chance to U.S. Citizens With Undeclared Assets
By Steven Sloan – Jan 9, 2012 11:01 PM CT
The Internal Revenue Service is giving U.S. citizens who have shielded assets offshore a third opportunity to come clean, pay a penalty and avoid criminal prosecution.
After collecting $4.4 billion in two so-called voluntary disclosure programs for offshore accounts, the IRS announced plans yesterday to revive the program. Participants will pay as much as 27.5 percent of their most valuable offshore assets or their biggest overseas bank account. They also must disclose the banks and advisers that helped them escape U.S. tax laws.
The program’s revival is part of the U.S. government’s efforts to track down and prevent tax evasion around the world. Since 2009, the U.S. has prosecuted clients of UBS AG (UBSN) and HSBC Holdings Plc. (HSBA) Switzerland’s Weglin & Co. said on Jan. 4 that three of its bankers have been charged with conspiring to help U.S. clients hide more than $1.2 billion from the IRS.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/irs-reopens-voluntary-disclosure-program-for-offshore-assets.html
January 10, 2012 8:40 AM
Quite a field
By Steve Benen
Reader F.B. flagged an interesting exchange on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” yesterday in which Joe Scarborough passed along assessments of the Republican presidential field from veteran political journalists. Here’s the clip:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Folks who’ve been covering politics for 40 years told Scarborough, “‘This is the worst field.’ …This is the weakest field they’ve seen, by far. Not even a close second.” Mike Barnicle added, “It used to be up here, there was a libertarian candidate, Lyndon LaRouche and you’d cover him for comic relief…. Now you can cover almost the entire Republican field for comic relief.”
That’s cruel, but it’s not inaccurate.
GOP voters have noticed, too. A new CBS News poll found that only 37% of self-identified Republicans are satisfied with their current choices — and the number of Republicans who want more choices is going up, not down, as the process continues to unfold.
You’d expect to see the opposite at this point, as GOP voters get a better look at their presidential field. But as it turns out, the more Republicans learn about their choices, the more they’d like to support someone else.
And that’s just the rank and file. Among the prominent party voices, Ross Douthat called this “the weakest presidential field of any major party in a generation”; Bill Kristol has invested quite a bit of time urging late-entrants to get into the race; and Fred Barnes put it this way last week: “Would Romney be odds-on to win the nomination if Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie or Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush were in the race? Not likely.”
All of these assessments are quite persuasive. At times, it’s tough to watch the race for the Republican nomination and not think, “Wow, these are some really awful candidates.”
Last month, disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was in the lead. Not too long before that, Herman Cain was taken seriously as a candidate for national office. Over the summer, Michele Bachmann — Michele Bachmann — appeared to be a top-tier challenger.
The 2012 presidential race was one many Republicans expected to win fairly easily, creating a unique opportunity for those with national ambitions, and yet, the party is left with a field that can generously be described as “mediocrities.”
I have to wonder whether some of those who considered the race but decided not to pull the trigger are kicking themselves at this point.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/quite_a_field034656.php
Good morning! I like your new header.
Hi Anson,thank you. Happy New Year!
Good Morning, Anson! Nice to see you. And thank you!
BUSINESS-JANUARY 10, 2012.
Twinkies Maker Preparing for Chapter 11 Filing
By MIKE SPECTOR And JULIE JARGON
Hostess Brands Inc. is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as soon as this week, said people familiar with the matter, a move that would mark the second significant court restructuring for the Twinkies and Wonder Bread baker in the past several years.
The privately held Irving, Texas, company, which employs roughly 19,000 people and carries more than $860 million in debt, has been facing a cash squeeze amid high labor costs and rising prices for sugar, flour and other ingredients, according to people familiar with the matter. Those costs together have proved higher than the company’s roughly $2.5 billion in annual sales, creating losses and cash shortfalls, the people said.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204124204577151211961572458.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection
REALLY?
How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: January 5, 2012
On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do. Many of his regular clients came to him for bodywork or rehabilitation following yoga injuries. This was the situation I found myself in. In my 30s, I had somehow managed to rupture a disk in my lower back and found I could prevent bouts of pain with a selection of yoga postures and abdominal exercises. Then, in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?pagewanted=all
Learning from Newt
by mistermix
One of the big ironies of the anti-Bain attack on Romney is that Newt is the one doing what the Democrats should be doing, namely, painting Bain as part of the Wall Street problem:
“You have to ask the question, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?” […]
The former Speaker is making the case that, in contrast to good old fashioned businesses who make stuff, Romney and his ilk have instead gamed the system to create a soulless machine that profits from the misery of others. […]
“I am totally for capitalism, I am for free markets,” Gingrich assured reporters on Monday. “Nobody objects to Bill Gates being extraordinarily rich, they provide a service.” What he instead is concerned about is when an investor receives “six-to-one returns, and the company goes bankrupt.”
I haven’t seen a Democratic attack on Bain phrased this crisply. Democrats attack Romney’s math on job creation and they are using Randy Johnson, who was laid off in Bain’s gutting of Ampad, as a spokesman. While it’s true that Bain laid people off, the fact that they did so doesn’t in itself make Bain a bad business. Good companies sometimes lay people off. Newt’s attack has more bite because he’s putting Bain in the same boat as the rest of the hated Wall Streeters who almost took this country to ruin and haven’t been punished for their actions.
If Democrats can make this connection, which seems to be an obvious one, they can harness some of the anger that remains over the mortgage crisis and the resulting Great Recession. I might have missed it, but I don’t see that happening. I wonder if it’s because Democrats are afraid of offending deep-pocket Wall Street donors, or because they are afraid of being cast as socialists, or simply because they’re generally inept. But so far, Newt is doing a better job than the DNC.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/01/10/learning-from-newt/
DNC Chair DWS is calling out the fake, Richie Rich, Mitterns. Let the GOP implode; they sseem to do this quite well. I’m pretty sure PBO’s campaign staff are collecting all the popccorn-watching videos of the clowns pulling the tightrope from under each other.
Congress, rules keep Obama from closing Guantanamo Bay
The last two prisoners to leave the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay were dead. On February 1, Awal Gul, a 48-year-old Afghan, collapsed in the shower and died of an apparent heart attack after working out on an exercise machine. Then, at dawn one morning in May, Haji Nassim, a 37-year-old man also from Afghanistan, was found hanging from bed linen in a prison camp recreation yard.
In both cases, the Pentagon conducted swift autopsies and the U.S. military sent the bodies back to Afghanistan for traditional Muslim burials. These voyages were something the Pentagon had not planned for either man: Each was an “indefinite detainee,” categorized by the Obama administration’s 2009 Guantánamo Review Task Force as someone against whom the United States had no evidence to convict of a war crime but had concluded was too dangerous to let go. Today, this category of detainees makes up 46 of the last 171 captives held at Guantánamo. The only guaranteed route out of Guantánamo these days for a detainee, it seems, is in a body bag.
The responsibility lies not so much with the White House but with Congress, which has thwarted President Barack Obama’s plans to close the detention center, which the Bush administration opened on Jan. 11, 2002, with 20 captives.
Congress has used its spending oversight authority both to forbid the White House from financing trials of Guantánamo captives on U.S. soil and to block the acquisition of a state prison in Illinois to hold captives currently held in Cuba who would not be put on trial — a sort of Guantánamo North.
The latest defense bill adopted by Congress moved to mandate military detention for most future al Qaida cases. The White House withdrew a veto threat on the eve of passage, and then Obama signed it into law with a “signing statement” that suggested he could lawfully ignore it.
On paper, at least, the Obama administration would be set to release almost half the current captives at Guantánamo. The 2009 Task Force Review concluded that about 80 of the 171 detainees now held at Guantánamo could be let go if their home country was stable enough to help resettle them or if a foreign country could safely give them a new start.
But Congress has made it nearly impossible to transfer captives anywhere. Legislation passed since Obama took office has created a series of roadblocks that mean that only a federal court order or a national security waiver issued by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta could trump Congress and permit the release of a detainee to another country.
Neither is likely: U.S. District Court judges are not ruling in favor of captives in the dozens of unlawful detention suits winding their way from Cuba to the federal court in Washington. And on the occasions when those judges have ruled for detainees, the U.S. Court of Appeals has consistently overruled them in an ever-widening definition of who can be held as an affiliate of al Qaida or the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, believes that Congress crafted the transfer waivers a year ago in such a way that Panetta (and Robert Gates before him) would be ill-advised to sign them. (In essence, the Secretary of Defense is supposed to guarantee that the detainee would never in the future engage in violence against any American citizen or U.S. interest.)
In a strange twist of history, Congress, through its control of government funds, is now imposing curbs on the very executive powers that the Bush administration invoked to establish the camps at Guantánamo in the first place. Much of its intransigence is driven by the politics of fear: What if, for example, a captive is acquitted in a civilian trial because the judge bars evidence obtained by the military without benefit of counsel? When will another freed Guantánamo detainee attack a U.S. target or interest, such as when Abdullah al Ajami, who was transferred to Kuwait in 2005, blew himself up in a truck bomb attack in Iraq in 2008?
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/09/135179/congress-rule-keep-obama-from.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy
Jan 10, 2012
Dixville Notch, N.H.: A tight race
It’s a tight Republican race in New Hampshire so far.
The good citizens of Dixville Notch, N.H. — in their traditional post-midnight vote — split their ballots early this morning.
Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman got two votes each, while Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul both got one vote.
The two Ricks — Santorum and Perry — got shut out in the first precinct vote of today’s Republican primary.
All the Republicans trailed another candidate: President Obama, who is unopposed in today’s New Hampshire Democratic Party.
The rest of the state votes today in the traditional first-in-the-nation primaries.
For a half-century, Dixville Notch, in far northern New Hampshire, votes right after midnight on Election Day, both for the New Hampshire primary and the general election in November.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2012/01/dixville-notch-nh-a-tight-race/1?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet
CBC Mainstays Challenged
Longtime lawmakers face new competition for posts they’ve served in for years.
A trend appears to be emerging as we look toward the 2012 elections and it seems to be happening right under our noses. Some of the most loyal and trusted members of the Congressional Black Caucus establishment are now bracing to compete for positions they’re typically shoe-ins for.
Black lawmakers being challenged in an election year may not exactly be breaking news. But it is at least worth noting that it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a substantial number of CBC A-listers have to actually campaign for their seats.
Granted, re-districting has become an issue for members like Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), Rep. Laura Richardson (D-California) and Rep. William Clay (D-Missouri).
But a band of new blood is taking aim at seats held by the likes of Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York), Rep. Donald Payne (D-New Jersey), Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-New York) and Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Georgia).
Why some of the more seasoned Black lawmakers are being challenged at this time is anyone’s guess. But some political watchers are pointing to inspiration from President Obama’s unconventional, even meteoric rise to power as a source of inspiration for congressional hopefuls.
Brian Taylor, political consultant and former CBC staffer said, “Some of these CBC members have been there forever and Obama challenged the system without having the African-American establishment behind him.”
One other motivating factor is the general discontent the electorate has been having about the way that Congress is doing, or not doing, its job. The latest statistics from Real Clear Politics, which periodically compiles an average of several polls, found that Congress’ approval rating is only 12 percent.
“The perception is that they simply are not doing a whole lot, so these challenges may be telling us that there needs to be fresh blood and if not now, then when?” queried Taylor.
Between Conyers, Rangel and Lewis alone, they have a combined 114 years of service in Congress.
“A lot of people have gotten to the point that they’ve gotten comfortable and don’t want to let it go. They’re at the top of the heap, so sometimes there’s not a desire to look beyond that,” says Taylor.
The fact remains that the top-tier lawmakers in question have incredible track-records and wield a considerable amount of influence on some of the most powerful committees and sub-committees in Congress. But if a newbie was somehow able to take their place, hard-won power would be lost.
There are some who believe that in the interest of adding new perspective to the mix, that’s a risk worth taking. “To be clear, I’m not saying these longtime members are not needed and their time has passed. If they are no longer in office, it does come at a loss. But you can’t have gain without loss. At the end of the day, you can’t stay in office forever,” said Taylor.
http://www.bet.com/news/politics/2012/01/09/cbc-mainstays-challenged.html
If ONLY these old-timers were interested in working with younger folks, instead of clinging to the power of their positions. I’m sooo glad the CBC is being challenged; it’s time for these black folks to wake up and figure out why their ways of service are NOT working
I tell you, sometimes the further ahead we get, the further behind we become
Brian Taylor, political consultant and former CBC staffer said, “Some of these CBC members have been there forever and Obama challenged the system without having the African-American establishment behind him.”
THIS
“. . .Obama challenged the system without having the African-American establishment behind him.”
Some of those CBC heffers, I mean staffers, weren’t behind him because he wouldn’t let them be “all up on him.”
Oh shit>>>>>>>>>>>you went there!
Come on wit…lay it on me…..gimme some daps!
Good Morning, EVERYONE :)
Mornin, SG2. Join me with a cup of coffee: http://community.cbs47.tv/blogs/files/5005/4324331/coffee-cup-01.jpg
Thank you! I’d be delighted. It’s just what I need.
Bagels: http://www.countryliving.com/cm/countryliving/images/F1/bagel-de.gif
Yummy!
Good Morning, Everybody! :-)