Michael Rose (born 11 July 1957) is a Grammy award winning reggae singer from Jamaica. Possessing a wide-ranged voice, Rose would regularly meet in Kingston with singers, musicians, writers, and producers such as Dennis Brown, Big Youth, The Wailers, Gregory Isaacs, Sly and Robbie, and others.
Rose started his recording career as a solo artist for record producers Yabby You and Niney the Observer. He joined Black Uhuru in 1977 after the departure of Don Carlos and Garth Dennis. He led them to international success in the early 1980s, having written most of their popular material. They won the first-ever Grammy Award for reggae in 1985 for the album Anthem,[2] with the hallmark voice of Rose in the forefront.
No Papa John’s, maybe Five Guys: The Obamacare supporter’s diet
Posted by Sandhya Somashekhar on March 18, 2013 at 12:43 pm
First came Olive Garden. Then Papa John’s. But for Avram Goldstein, communications director for the liberal Health Care for America Now, the real punch to the gut came last week. “Oh jeez,” he said to himself. “Not Five Guys.”
Goldstein is a regular at the Arlington-based burger chain, where he never gets any guff for ordering fries, hold the salt. Could he keep going if the company joined the ranks of business sounding the alarm about price spikes or job cuts because of Obamacare?
Happily for him, it turns out it was a franchise owner in North Carolina, not the burger chain as a whole, promising higher prices over the health law. But it isn’t a new dilemma for pro-health-reform activists, who have put their money where their mouths are after a wave of companies foretold of dire consequences when the law’s insurance mandate kicks in.
Last year, Darden Restaurants Inc., the parent company of Olive Garden and Red Lobster, said it was considering moving a number of its employees to part-time status to avoid a requirement that they offer health insurance to anyone working 30 hours per week or more. They later pulled back because the bad PR hurt sales.
Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter provoked ridicule after saying the law would add as much as 14 cents to the cost of a pizza. Perhaps more problematic for the progressive-minded were remarks by Whole Food CEO John Mackey, who compared the law to “fascism.” The noted libertarian later apologized for his language, though he has continued to predict higher prices.
How will Obamacare affect businesses’ bottom line? It’s one of the most debated questions arising from the new health law.
When it comes to worker hours, the response by companies will probably be mixed, according to the folks at ADP, a benefits-administration and payroll services firm, which has been asking this very question of its clients. What they’ve found is that companies with larger profit margins that already provide health coverage to most of its employees might not have much of a problem. But for businesses with slim margins and a low-wage, high turnover workforce – the fast food biz, for instance – there may well be an incentive to rely on more part-timers to keep costs down.
When it comes to prices, in many cases, the higher cost of insurance will most likely make its way to the consumer in some form, the firm argues.
But the bigger picture is more complex, and businesses will have to make individualized decisions. Christopher Ryan, ADP’s vice president of strategic advisory services, has been traveling the country talking to businesses about the Affordable Care Act. He offered the example of a boutique retailer he recently visited that initially thought it would have to rely on more part-timers because of the law. But then the owner looked at the business’s cash register receipts by tenure. Turns out the workers who’d been there longer brought in more money than their less experienced colleagues.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/18/no-papa-johns-maybe-five-guys-the-obamacare-supporters-diet/
Forty Years Behind on Sick-Leave Policy, But Catching Up
Sharon Lerner
March 18, 2013
The United States stands almost alone in not guaranteeing workers paid time-off when they are sick, but momentum is building around the country to change that.
It’s too late for Tonisha Howard, the mother of three in Milwaukee who was fired for leaving work to be with her hospitalized two-year-old. And for Felix Trinidad, who was so afraid of losing his job at Golden Farm fruit store in Brooklyn that he didn’t take time off to go to the doctor—even after he vomited blood. Trinidad, a father of two who had stomach cancer, continued to work until just days before his death at age 34. But for workers in Portland and perhaps Philadelphia, paid sick days just got much closer to becoming reality.
Last Wednesday, the city council in Portland, Oregon, voted unanimously for a bill granting most employees up to 40 hours of paid sick leave per year. On Thursday, the Philadelphia City Council passed a similar law—and, with only one vote short of a veto-proof majority, advocates are hopeful they can find the last member they need to get it past Michael Nutter, who vetoed a similar bill in 2011. Meanwhile, in New York City, advocates geared up for a hearing on a paid-sick-leave bill, even though Council Speaker Christine Quinn still stubbornly refuses to bring it to a vote. Overall, the sentiment seems to that be more paid leave victories are inevitable.
“We’re going to see a wave of wins,” predicts Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @Work, an advocacy group that has been working on paid sick days laws throughout the country for more than five years. “I think we’re growing toward a tipping point
http://prospect.org/article/forty-years-behind-sick-leave-policy-catching
The Boehner Rule
Jonathan Bernstein
March 18, 2013
The House Speaker abandons the Hastert Rule—when circumstances require it—to use his own ingenious legislative scheme.
After months of Republican resistance, the House of Representative finally renewed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) late last month. What many casual political observers may not know is that there were always enough votes in the House for the bill to pass, but it couldn’t get a vote because of something called the “Hastert Rule”—an informal practice in the House by which only legislation supported by a majority of the majority party (in this case, Republicans) is allowed to come to a vote. How Speaker John Boehner got VAWA passed tells us a lot about what the next two years is going to be like in Washington.
The Hastert Rule was coined during the speakership of Republican Denny Hastert, who said he would bring nothing to the floor of the House of Representatives unless a majority of the Republican conference supported it. As University of Miami political scientist Greg Koger explains, the logic behind such a rule is basically one of “an organizational conspiracy”—one that allows members to avoid certain types of tough votes. Take a bill that is popular with the majority of constituents in a legislator’s district but would be unpopular with voters in his or her primary. By invoking the Hastert rule, that bill never comes to a vote, and so members avoid a vote that would anger their base. That’s what happened to the Violence Against Women Act in 2012. When the Senate passed a version that was generally popular but which most House Republicans opposed, Boehner invoked the Hastert rule.
Notice that this is a relatively weak form of a legislative cartel. A stronger “conspiracy” would not only prevent items unpopular with the Republican conference, but guarantee passage of anything that the majority of the majority wanted by having all Republicans pledge to support everything the speaker brought to the floor (or, perhaps, a subset of measures which are designated as particularly important). Generally, however, legislative parties in the United States have never been that strong; individual members, for a variety
http://prospect.org/article/boehner-rule
John Boehner Not Thrilled About Possible Budget Bargain
—By Kevin Drum
| Mon Mar. 18, 2013 9:57 AM PDT
Here is Sen. Bob Corker (R–Tenn.) on the prospects of a compromise budget deal with Democrats:
I think Republicans, if they saw true entitlement reform, would be glad to look at tax reform that generates additional revenues. And that doesn’t mean increasing rates, that means closing loopholes. It also means arranging our tax system so that we have economic growth.
Corker’s final sentence is an obvious escape hatch, but ignore that for the moment. He says Republicans will seriously consider closing loopholes in return for cutting entitlements. That sounds like progress! Let’s check in with the Speaker of the House to see if he agrees. This conversation is a little hard to follow, but I think it’s pretty clear in the end:
……………..
Maybe Boehner is just talking tough. But he sure sounds like the entire rest of the House GOP caucus, doesn’t he? Nor does he seem willing to talk about any actual entitlement cuts he’d like to see. There’s been vague hand waving about Paul Ryan’s budget, which is a pretty obvious nonstarter, but not much more.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/03/john-boehner-not-thrilled-about-possible-budget-bargain
The Morning Plum: So who’s winning the sequester fight?
Posted by Greg Sargent on March 19, 2013 at 9:10 am
Beltway commentators have not begun to feel the sting of the sequester just yet. But individual lawmakers have — and they’re the ones who matter.
Republicans have assumed an air of triumphalism in the sequester fight; today GOP party officials are gleefully pointing to the news that the White House has warned that an Easter Egg Roll could be canceled thanks to the sequester, which is presumably supposed to prove that the White House is playing politics with the cuts.
But the superficial skirmishing about egg hunts and White House tours belies the fact that the sequester cuts are very real and that this is a long game that’s only just begun. Politico makes this clear in a must read piece on the impact the sequester cuts are having on two districts — one Republican, the other Democratic — and the political pressure those cuts are putting on two lawmakers to do something about them.
The Republican lawmaker, Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, and the Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Bill Enyart, are already taking blame for the 4,500 civilian workers at a local air force base who are set to receive furlough notices. Both are also worried about federal funding drying up for a host of other institutions and social services in their districts.
The Senate is set today to pass a bill funding the government beyond the March 27th shutdown deadline that allows for some flexibility in the allocation of non-defense cuts. The measure, which is expected to clear the House, could mitigate the pain somewhat.
But lawmakers are discovering that the cuts are real and they are going to have political consequences, and there are already signs that they may be taking a political toll. A new CNN poll finds that Obama’s approval rating has dipped below 50 percent. But the news is worse for Republicans: only 38 percent have a favorable view of the GOP, versus 54 percent who view it unfavorably. Fully 79 percent disapprove of how the GOP is handling the budget and spending — more than the 67 percent who disapprove of Obama’s handling of them. Seventy percent say Republicans are not doing enough to cooperate with Obama, versus 57 percent who say Obama isn’t cooperative enough. A plurality says the GOP is too “extreme” and 68 percent say the party favors the rich.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/03/19/the-morning-plum-so-whos-winning-the-sequester-fight/
https://twitter.com/CatholicNewsSvc/status/313972637292453888/photo/1
The Decline of Marriage and the Rise of Unwed Mothers: An Economic Mystery
The real question here isn’t “Why so many babies?” It’s “Why so few marriages?” And we have an answer.
Derek ThompsonMar 18 2013, 12:01 PM ET
This was the most shocking statistic I read this weekend: 58 percent of first births in lower-middle-class households are now to unmarried women. Meanwhile, two in five of all births are to unwed mothers, an all-time high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Why?
The thesis of this fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal says the real mystery here isn’t “Why so many babies?” but rather “Why so few marriages?” — particularly among less-educated men and women.
This is a complex economic mystery that we’ve explored often at The Atlantic, but we can take a big bite out of it by focusing on three factors: (1) The changing meaning of marriage in America; (2) declining wages for low-skill men; and (3) the declining costs of being a single person.
A New Union
Marriage has changed. Once upon a time, the typical marriage, as Justin Wolfers has explained, involved special roles for the husband and wife. He would work. She would stay home. It was efficient arrangement in which opposites attracted. Men who wanted to be executives would marry women who wanted to be housewives. And, since almost half of women had no independent earnings 40 years ago, there were a lot of women who just wanted to work at home and raise a family.
Several factors mussed up this traditional union. Today women expect to work much, much more than they used to — and they do. They make up the majority of new college graduates and their labor participation rate has soared over 60 percent. Since 1950, hours of work by married women have increased by roughly a factor of three, according to the Minneapolis Fed.
Now that women are better educated, with greater control over both their fertility and their earnings, modern marriage has changed from an arrangement where men marry for a housewife to a “hedonic” model where both partners can be the breadwinner. As marriage has shifted from opposites-attract to like-attracts-like, researchers have found that sorting has increased all along the educational scale. College graduates are more likely than ever to marry college graduates,as Charles Murray has written. High school dropouts are more likely to marry high school dropouts.
Think of marriage like any other contract or investment. It’s most likely to happen when the gains are big. So we should expect marriages among low-income Americans to decline if women perceive declining gains from hitching themselves to the men around them.
That’s precisely what we’ve seen…
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-decline-of-marriage-and-the-rise-of-unwed-mothers-an-economic-mystery/274111/
hat tip – The Daily Dish:
Graffiti by Nuxuno Xän, in Fort De France, Martinique. Photo by Rosali Rodrigues via Street Art Utopia.
Cool
Ugghhhhhhh, the cable networks are sucking up to Hillary’s video on gay marriage. Joan Walsh just told Chris Matthews that she went beyond “OBAMA.” GTFOH
I saw that…just rolled the eyes
Sanford cop fired over racial Facebook post.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-sanford-cop-fired-20130318,0,1993798.story …
U.S. Department of State’s Gilman International Scholarship Partners with JAY Z’s Shawn Carter Foundation
March 18, 2013—The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and JAY Z’s Shawn Carter Foundation announce a partnership to support study abroad scholarships for U.S. undergraduate students with financial need. Four inaugural Shawn Carter Foundation-Gilman International Scholarships have been awarded for the spring 2013 semester. The four scholarship winners for this year include:
Brittany Hardy, a first-generation college student from Gary, Indiana, and religion major at Princeton University, will study abroad for a semester in Athens, Greece.
Natalie Holman, who is from Chicago studying anthropology, public health, and Spanish at Northwestern University, will study and live with a host family in Barcelona, Spain.
Laquisha Springer, a first-generation college student from Hartford studying behavioral neuroscience at Connecticut College, will study psychology in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Quenton White, from Detroit and attending Wayne State University with the goal of going on to law school, will study at the University of Salford in Manchester, United Kingdom.
The collaboration between the Shawn Carter Foundation and the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program supports the State Department’s goal of expanding opportunities for students with diverse backgrounds to study abroad and builds on the foundation’s efforts to broaden the horizons of its scholars. The four Shawn Carter Foundation-Gilman International Scholarships will be implemented by the Institute of International Education (IIE).
http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=1c2990d53535fcb3c05526d43&id=d579b14fd5&e=cbfbe32374
The RNC’s Tom Perez Problem
Brian Beutler March 18, 2013, 1:49 PM
The two biggest political stories of the day — the RNC’s release of its reaction to the party’s 2012 drubbing, and Tom Perez’s nomination to be President Obama’s Labor Secretary — couldn’t be more perfectly suited for each other. Two great tastes that taste great together.
The RNC report is called the Growth and Opportunity Project, and it effectively turns the GOP’s determination to avoid rethinking its economic policies — and to instead focus exclusively on making marginal inroads with minority voters —- into the party’s official strategy.
Enter Tom Perez.
If you’re just tuning in, Perez is a Hispanic leader and as head of DOJ’s civil rights division one of the Obama administration’s most progressive officials. But in recent years he’s also been the target of racialized attacks by familiar characters in the conservative media.
For both of those reasons, he’s the sort of nominee Republicans can’t help but filibuster. Thus, on the day of its unveiling, the Growth And Opportunity Project faces a major challenge to its own raison d’être. The report notes, “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”
That’s hard enough to do when the party’s simultaneously filibustering a qualified candidate to be the only Latino in Obama’s second-term cabinet. But it’ll be even harder if the conservative media lapses into another Sotomayor-like spectacle of racial panic and drags elected officials with them.
“In the modern media environment a poorly phrased argument or out-of-context statement can spiral out of control and reflect poorly on the Party as a whole,” the Opportunity Project warns.
Unfortunately for the GOP the right is primed to make Perez another cause célèbre for what you might call the ethnic resentment wing of the conservative movement.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/03/the_rncs_tom_perez_problem.php?ref=fpblg
Boehner agrees: there is no debt crisis
By Steve Benen
–
Mon Mar 18, 2013 8:00 AM EDT
Last week, President Obama sat down with George Stephanopoulos, and when the discussion turned to the national debt, the president shared a simple fact: “We don’t have an immediate crisis.”
For reasons unclear, the comment was not well received by Republicans and many in the media, with some suggesting a bipartisan debt-reduction agreement may be dependent, at least in part, on Obama saying the opposite.
But then a funny thing happened. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveiled his budget plan, and it also conceded there is no immediate debt crisis. Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made the same concession to Martha Raddatz.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/03/18/17356904-boehner-agrees-there-is-no-debt-crisis?lite
Smartypants addresses the game being played out by Boehner and the House
WTH is up with Republican House leadership?
Yesterday Speaker John Boehner didn’t just agree with President Obama that we have no immediate debt crisis. He took it one step further and said that he “absolutely” trusts the President. You think the lunatics didn’t notice? (warning: wingnut link)
With Republicans fighting tooth and nail to implement solutions necessary to reducing the national debt, Boehner’s language certainly undermines the public relations narrative set by conservatives. A House GOP aide angrily told Breitbart News today, “This undercuts the fight House conservatives have waged since 2010. Our efforts to prevent a debt crisis we will certainly face should never be minimized.”
But that’s not all. Even their boy-wonder Rep. Paul Ryan said the same thing about there being no immediate debt crisis. And that’s after his opening line in a WSJ op-ed defending his budget proposal was an attempt to scare folks about our $16 trillion debt.
http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2013/03/wth-is-up-with-republican-house.html
Ben Carson revels in GOP spotlight
By Steve Benen
–
Mon Mar 18, 2013 9:08 AM EDT
Dozens of Republican lawmakers, activists, and media figures graced the stage during this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but most of the speeches were not aired live on national television. Fox News, for example, chose not to broadcast remarks from Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, or even Mitt Romney.
But the network did offer live coverage of Dr. Benjamin Carson’s CPAC speech on Saturday morning. For folks who don’t watch Fox News regularly, I suspect the next question is, who’s Dr. Benjamin Carson?
Regular readers may recall we talked about Carson a month ago, when he appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast. Though the traditions of the event mandate that speakers avoid partisan attacks or sharply political speeches, Carson used his time at the podium to condemn the Affordable Care Act, with President Obama a few feet away.
To put it mildly, the Republican base was thrilled, and a video of Carson’s speech went viral in right-wing circles, generating 2.5 million views on YouTube.
Over the course of about a month, he became something of a Republican celebrity. Carson started appearing on Sean Hannity’s program; Sunday show invitations soon followed from ABC and CNN; and the religious right and the Wall Street Journal editorial page quickly began encouraging the far-right physician to run for president in 2016, despite never having held public office at any level.
One gets the sense he’s enjoying the attention.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/03/18/17357637-ben-carson-revels-in-gop-spotlight?lite
Carson’s another buck-dancin’ coon, who gives cover to the 2520’s to deny they aren’t racists. just another MORE well-educated Herman Cain, clamoring for his 15 minutes of fame.
Obama nominates Thomas Perez for Labor Secretary
By Steve Benen
–
Mon Mar 18, 2013 1:59 PM EDT
The fight over Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s nomination was, at times, contentious. Republicans were so incensed by President Obama’s nomination of another Republican, we saw a Senate minority, for the first time ever, deny an up-or-down vote to a cabinet nominee.
GOP opposition to Thomas Perez, introduced this morning as Obama’s choice for Secretary of Labor, is very likely to be considerably more intense.
Capitol Hill watchers may recall that when the president nominated Perez to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which was gutted during the Bush/Cheney era, Republicans held up the nomination for six months.
Why? Because the Justice Department had decided to dismiss a 2008 voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party, and Senate Republicans blamed him for the decision — even though Perez wasn’t even a Justice Department employee at the time.
Perez was eventually confirmed, and as Adam Serwer recently explained, did some exceptional wor
[S]ince Perez took the helm [at the Department of Justice’s civil rights division], the division has blocked partisan voting schemes, cracked down on police brutality, protected gay and lesbian students from harassment, sued anti-immigrant Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio for racial profiling, stood up against Islamophobia, and forced the two largest fair-housing settlements in history from banks that discriminated against minority homeowners.
Perez says he doesn’t think of civil rights as a partisan issue — he takes pride in the fact that he was first hired by the civil rights division as a career attorney under President George H.W. Bush. But now that conservatives are working hard to roll back civil-rights-era legislation, Perez’s unapologetic civil rights advocacy stands out and makes him a target for the right.
Quite right. It’s not a question of whether the upcoming fight will get ugly, but rather, just how ugly it’s going to get.
Indeed, it’s arguably fair to say Perez is Obama’s most progressive cabinet nominee to date, and enjoys the enthusiastic backing of labor unions and civil-rights organizations. But Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has long had a problem with the nominee.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/03/18/17359952-obama-nominates-thomas-perez-for-labor-secretary?lite
High court weighs Arizona voter-registration law
By Steve Benen
–
Mon Mar 18, 2013 3:36 PM EDT
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, better known as the federal “motor-voter law,” allows people to register to vote while renewing drivers licenses or applying for social services. As part of the documentation process, folks have to say that they’re American citizens.
Arizona, however, approved something called Proposition 200, which gave the federal law a little touch-up — those registering can’t just say they’re American citizens; in this state, folks are expected to prove it.
And this, in turn, has led to an interesting Supreme Court case.
Supreme Court justices expressed some skepticism on Monday about an Arizona law that requires people registering to vote in federal elections to show proof of citizenship.
The legal question before the nine justices is whether the voter registration provision of the 2004 state law is trumped by a federal law, the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which outlines various ways in which people can register to vote in federal elections.
That law requires no proof of citizenship. Would-be voters simply sign a statement saying they are citizens.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/03/18/17360615-high-court-weighs-arizona-voter-registration-law?lite
Case against Menendez unravels further
By Steve Benen
Mon Mar 18, 2013 4:06 PM EDT
Several months ago, The Daily Caller reported that Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) allegedly paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. The article appeared to be based on largely non-existent evidence; the FBI found nothing to support the allegations, and two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that a Dominican escort now says she was “paid to make up the claims and has never met or seen the senator.”
In response, the conservative online news outlet said it had relied on a different Dominican escort, so it saw no need to retract the story. Today, we’re learning that more than one Dominican escort was paid to lie about the Democratic senator.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/03/18/17360841-case-against-menendez-unravels-further?lite
TVOne original movie – The Undershepherd – starring Isiah Washington – March 30th. …about a minister that ain’t so holy…lol
LOL Wow! Isiah’s still alive. LOL haven’t seen him around since he left Grey’s Anatomy. I’ll have to check out this movie.
Boehner Admits There is No Immediate Debt Crisis; Wants to Gut Social Security and Medicare Anyway
By: Jason Easley
On ABC’s This Week, Speaker John Boehner admitted that there is no immediate debt crisis, but in the next breath argued that the country should gut Medicare and Social Security anyway.
The Speaker claimed that nobody knows how long we have to deal with the debt, but this was a total lie. Social Security will be solvent until 2033, and the Republican claim that Medicare is going bankrupt is an epic exaggeration. The Medicare hospital trust fund is expected to be exhausted by 2024, but this is nothing new. As FactCheck.org pointed out, “In 1980, insolvency was expected in 1994. In 1990, the exhaustion date was 2003. But those dates have been pushed back mainly by repeated tax increases.”
If there is no immediate crisis, why are Republicans so hellbent on cutting Social Security and Medicare? The answer is ideology. Republicans have hated Social Security and Medicare from the day they each became law. The ginned up fake immediate debt crisis as championed most loudly by Paul Ryan is the latest cover story for the right wing war on the social safety net.
This isn’t about solvency and insolvency. Notice how Republicans always ignore the official numbers when talking about Social Security and Medicare. Republicans are ideologically committed to destroying the social safety net. Speaker Boehner’s comments today were an admission that cuts don’t need to be made, but Republicans want them just because.
http://www.politicususa.com/boehner-admits-debt-crisis-gut-social-security-medicare.html
The GOP’s Mercenary Evolution on Same-Sex Marriage
By: Becky Sarwate
Mar. 18th, 2013
.
The Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) was conceived by Republican leaders in the runup to the 2004 election as a social wedge issue. A disingenuous diversion from the real conversation many Americans wanted to have – how to resolve the Iraq quagmire, the expensive war of choice – the opportunity to use the marginalization of gay citizens as a method of uniting the right wing base ultimately proved irresistible to the era’s “compassionate” conservatives.
The story wasn’t much different by the time we came around to President Obama’s successful 2012 reelection bid. Just under two years after the historical repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward the enlistment of gay and lesbian soldiers, the Republican party continued to offer a platform offensive to any and all supporters of equal rights for every American. An August 29, 2012 Associated Press report directly quoted the GOP’s official stance: “The platform affirms the rights of states and the federal government not to recognize same-sex marriage. It backs a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”
………………………………………………..
Well it’s a new year and the Republican Party would now like you to believe that its’ stance on this key issue is “evolving,” – yes, the very same sort of transition for which the party once mocked the POTUS. Christian Science Monitor published an article last week purporting to take a closer look at the discourse surrounding LGBTQ issues at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The sub-header of this piece framed the debate as an internal struggle between emerging conservative candidates who might actually like to win an election someday and the stubborn old guard committed to critically slow suicide. Brad Knickerbocker writes, “Some Republicans worry that the GOP may be alienating the next generation of young conservatives if the party continues to oppose gay marriage.”
A number of polls have confirmed that a majority of American voters now support same-sex marriage. In a normal Darwinian political climate, one might assume Republicans are coming around due to the twin influences of cultural normalization and a need for electoral survival. But that sort of logical thinking is checked when one remembers the party’s embarrassing, ongoing backslide surrounding woman’s issues. A woman’s Constitutional right to control her own body was affirmed in 1973, yet rhetoric from Republican candidates throughout the 2012 election cycle often hearkened back to 1950s water cooler talk, bemoaning hard-earned female advances in family planning autonomy.
So what is really behind the Republican party’s incremental about face on the subject of same-sex marriage? I would offer that the evolution is based on the one important resource we can always count on the GOP to covet: money. Simply put, once you remove corporate contributions and the corrosive influence of various industry lobbyists, the party of obstructionism is running out of individual donors to tap. They have successfully alienated the majority of young, female, African-American, Latino and Asian voters. Our own Jason Easley wrote a February 19 post for this site entitled, House Democrats Crush Republicans With Their Best Fundraising Month Ever. The writing is on the wall for the GOP. With an urgent need to convey the perception of populist appeal, the easiest cherry to pick is a slow warmth toward marriage parity.
http://www.politicususa.com/gops-mercenary-evolution-same-sex-marriage.html
LOL
Fox News Is Dying: For the Second Straight Year the Network Adds No New Viewers
By: Jason Easley
Mar. 18th, 2013
The new Pew State of the Media report confirmed that Fox News could be facing future economic woes because for the second straight year they have failed to add any new viewers.
According to Pew, Fox News and MSNBC continued to grow and reach record profits, but their growth came at a slower rate. The difference between the two is that MSNBC was the only cable news network to experience ratings growth across the board. Over at Fox News, there are could be some ominious storm clouds growing, “And Fox News Channel, though still by far the ratings leader, saw viewership figures that, by at least one critical measure, were flat—even in an election year. That could curb its robust economic growth in the years to come.”
Pew also detailed the fact that Fox News’ viewership numbers have gone flat, “Fox News Channel, which still has higher ratings than CNN and MSNBC combined, experienced weaker ratings gains than MSNBC. That comparatively small growth was striking given that 2012 was an election year, playing to Fox’s near singular focus on political news. During daytime hours, Fox was up 4%. Across the total 24-hour day, Fox was up just 2%. And in prime time, Fox was basically flat (with a loss just under 1% compared to its 2011 median viewership). This follows two years of small but real prime-time declines for the top cable news channel and may suggest that the challenge of growing an audience on cable can extend beyond CNN and HLN.”
http://www.politicususa.com/fox-news-dying-straight-year-network-adds-viewers.html
The End of the Party of Reagan
by BooMan
Mon Mar 18th, 2013 at 01:18:45 PM EST
………………………………..
What’s actually happened here is that the Republicans have discovered that the strategy they used successfully in 2004 will no longer work. John McCain had a variety of options in 2008 but chose to tack to the right to shore up an unenthusiastic base. Romney repeated the same flawed strategy.
One way to think about this is to look at the three legs of the stool. In Rubin’s formulation, one leg is based on a strong national defense, one leg is based on economic conservatism, and one leg is based on social conservatism. All three legs have been hollowed out by termites. On defense, it’s not just that the Bush administration destroyed the party’s advantage by invading Iraq; they split the conservative movement which now has a powerful new isolationist strain represented most recently by Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster focusing on the drone program. That Paul’s filibuster was about more than just some theoretical domestic drone program became clear when Lindsey Graham and John McCain denounced it on the Senate floor. A seam has opened up on the right regarding our role in the world, and the neo-conservatives are feeling isolated.
The strains are showing on the economic front, too, as Tea Party absolutists are forcing a policy on the Republican leadership that they don’t actually support. John Boehner doesn’t want the sequester. He doesn’t want to toy with the debt ceiling. But he doesn’t have a choice. His own party will not allow him to cut a deal and he has given up negotiating with the president because he cannot deliver a deal. This isn’t just dysfunction. This is unacceptable to the business community, from the national Chamber of Commerce, to Wall Street, to countless people who do business with the government, including the entire defense industry. The economy collapsed on Bush’s watch, which is bad enough for the GOP, but the current iteration of the Republican Party is doing everything in it’s power to weaken today’s economy. And business leaders know this.
If mismanaging our foreign policy and our economy were unforced errors, the problem with the third leg, social conservatism, is largely a demographic problem over which the Republicans have little control. There are at least three problems that conservatives have on the social front. The first is related to sexual morality, and it includes attitudes about homosexuality, abortion, contraception, marriage, and women’s role in the workplace. The Republicans have adopted a minority position on all these issues, and among the younger generations, the GOP’s positions are starkly out of the mainstream.
The second problem is really a racial issue that traces back to the adoption of the Southern Strategy by Richard Nixon and the realignment of the Republican Party as a Southern party that appeals to the white working class’s sense of grievance and resentment. With the election of a black president, a lot of this grievance and resentment that had been subterranean or dormant suddenly came to the surface and did severe damage to the Republicans’ image with not only blacks but Latinos, Asian-Americans, and even Native-Americans. All the talk about the president’s birth certificate really polarized the country, and not to the advantage of the Republicans.
The third problem is basically religious, but only as it pertains to a fundamentalist view that discounts science and higher education. This attitude was best expressed by Rick Santorum in the primaries when he said, “We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.” Santorum also called the president a “snob” for wanting people to get a college education. This attitude has thoroughly alienated the academic and scientific communities, but also a huge segment of the professional class. And it’s severe enough that it manifests itself in things like climate change-denialism becoming an orthodox position in the Republican Party.
So, it’s not just that the three traditional legs of the Republican Party are now insufficient. It’s not just that the three legs are no longer working in harmony. The legs themselves are rotted out.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/3/18/131845/219
The War is Now On
by BooMan
Mon Mar 18th, 2013 at 09:38:31 AM EST
Michael O’Brien of NBC News has a useful breakdown of the details in GOP chairman Reince Priebus’s 100-page report, the “Growth and Opportunity Project.” The report is part analysis of why the Republicans did poorly in the 2012 election cycle and part blueprint for how they can make a comeback.
My immediate reaction is that it is a declaration of war by the Republican establishment on the party’s base. You can see this in several distinct elements of the report. On the policy front, the report is explicit about comprehensive immigration reform.
“We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,” the report says, nodding at other points to the bipartisan reform efforts currently before Congress. “If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”
Needless to say, the base of the party to inalterably opposed to comprehensive immigration reform. Things are no better when it comes to gay rights.
The report also notes a growing generational divide on the issue of gay rights, calling the issue a “gateway” for young voters deciding whether to align with the GOP.
It doesn’t appear that the report touches more broadly on sexual issues, although that is probably just a bridge too far. The report also pits the establishment against the base by complaining about third-party groups who enforce “purity,” which is a clear shot at the Club for Growth. The report recognizes the danger of Super PACs that blast the eventual nominee in the primary season.
As Mr. O’Brien points out, the all-out assault on political consultants at last week’s CPAC conference anticipated this RNC report
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/3/18/93831/6524
So the so-called saner GOPers are trying to clean up the CPAC craziness from last week, huh?
Brilliant comment by Town about the 10 million to be spent on ‘Minority outreach’ by the GOP:
Town 4 hours ago
In order to reach out to someone else, you have to decide you want to deal with that person. If you don’t all your outreach means nothing because the other person sees your insincerity and tunes you out.
The GOP has spent 40+ years demonizing black people, calling black people thugs, welfare queens, lazy, stupid, criminals, etc. and putting forth policies, reflecting that attitude.
The 2012 campaign alone had:
GOP governors coast to coast restricting black & hispanic areas from voting.
Presidential Candidate Santorum claiming he’s tired of giving black people “our” money and he will cut that out if he’s president.
Presidential Candidate Gingrich claiming black people have no work ethics or role models whatsoever so it’s time to teach black people how to work by forcing black children to be janitors in exchange for their education.
Presidential Candidate Bachmann claiming black people were better off under slavery then under President Obama.
Presidential Candidate Paul claiming he would not have signed the Civil Rights Amendment if he had been president.
Presidential Candidate Romney claiming unlike Obama, people know where HE was born, right here in America.
Presidential Candidate Romney running endless commercials about welfare.
Presidential Candidate Romney telling white donors that since they (blacks) like free stuff so much, they need to just vote for Obama.
Presidential Candidate Romney telling white donors that 47% of the country is so lazy & lost they’ll never vote for him so he ain’t concerned with them.
Presidential Campaign Surrogates straight up getting on TV saying Obama is stupid & lazy.
Failed Presidential Candidate Romney claiming the only reason Obama won was because he promised minorities free stuff & gifts.
Let’s keep it real: “Minority Outreach” means “Hispanic & Asian Outreach.” The GOP does not like black people & you cannot reverse 40+ years of demonizing black people with a $10 million dollar PR campaign. Black outreach will mean they pay Ben Carson a couple of dollars for lipservice.
YOU CANNOT REACH OUT TO PEOPLE YOU DO NOT LIKE. THE REPUBLICAN PARTY DOES NOT LIKE BLACK PEOPLE. NEVER HAVE, NEVER WILL.
http://pragmaticobotsunite.com/monday-open-thread-prominent-black-educators/#comment-833668412
FDNY Heir Really Outdid Himself With the Racist Tweets
New York City Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano is doing his best to get his 23-year-old son into the family business. Joseph Cassano currently works as an FDNY EMT “in an apparent bid to fast-track his promotion to firefighter,” the New York Post reports, but the kid isn’t doing himself any favors, using Twitter to publicly broadcast his various prejudices against black people, women, Jews, and his job. “Getting sick of picking up all these obama lovers and taking them to the hospital because their medicare pays for an ambulance and not a cab,” he tweeted last month. And that’s one of the delicate ones.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/03/joseph-cassano-fdny-boss-racist-on-twitter.html
3 women were paid to falsely claim they had sex with Menendez, Dominican police say
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Police in the Dominican Republic say they have determined that three women who said they had sex with a U.S. senator for money were in fact paid to make false claims by an attorney in the Caribbean country.
Police spokesman Maximo Baez says officers traced the payments to attorney Melanio Figueroa. Baez says two women received about $425 each and the other was paid about $300 to falsely state on camera that they had sex with U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
Baez said at a news conference today that authorities were seeking to interrogate Figueroa about the payments. Figueroa did not respond to messages left at his office. The women’s videotaped statements were published on a conservative U.S. website. Menendez denied the allegations.
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/03/3_women_were_paid_to_say_they.html
This is Unusual
by BooMan
Mon Mar 18th, 2013 at 01:11:19 AM EST
The first sentence of this Politico article caught my attention.
An outside group aligned with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has commissioned a report…
I don’t remember reading about outside groups aligned with Steny Hoyer commissioning reports. If one of the parties wants polling data, they normally pay someone to do some polling for the party.
But here we have a report from “YG Network polling, conducted by the GOP firm McLaughlin & Associates” that is supposedly aligned with Eric Cantor.
And what is the message of their report?
The message is that obsessing over the national debt is a goddamned loser that doesn’t resonate with the American people.
So, what are we to make of this? Why does Cantor want this message sent to the Republican caucus? Is he tired of fighting over the debt ceiling? Is he trying to prepare them for making a deal with the president? Is Cantor the messenger because he is more trusted than Boehner?
What’s the game here?
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/3/18/11119/8380
How The Media Took Sides In The Steubenville Rape Case
By Annie-Rose Strasser and Tara Culp-Ressler on Mar 18, 2013 at 9:15 am
The media’s coverage focused on the rapists’ emotions, instead of the the victim’s.
When the guilty verdict was announced in the Steubenville rape case on Sunday, journalists had to figure out how they would frame the story. Perhaps because of the lack of details about the unnamed 16-year-old “Jane Doe” victim, the collective media narrative became centered on her assailants.
Stories about the case relied far too heavily on the public details about the defendants, 17-year-old Trent Mays and 16-year-old Ma’lik Richmond, to set up a sympathetic portrayal of two bright young football stars whose lives have been ruined by the criminal justice system. By emphasizing the boys’ good grades and bright futures, as well as by describing the victim as “drunk” without clarifying that the defendants were also drinking, many mainstream media outlets became active participants in furthering victim-blaming rape culture:
1. CNN discusses how the boys were “promising students.” The cable channel came under fire on Sunday after focusing their coverage on the two defendants as “young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students” and emphasizing the emotional atmosphere in the courtroom when the boys were convicted and felt “their lives fall apart.” Anchor Candy Crowley even interviewed a legal expert about the lasting ramifications that being convicted of rape will have on the young, vulnerable boys — noting that registering as sex offenders will “haunt them for the rest of their lives.”
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/03/18/1732701/media-steubenville/
17-year-old Trent Mays and 16-year-old Ma’lik Richmond are RAPISTS. Let the rest of the teenaged boys take note of their guilt. SEX OFFENDERS- You can go on the NSOR National Sex Offender Registry and type in their names. Wonder if they’re listed.
It’s The Policy, Stupid: 4 Policies That Undermine The GOP’s New Voter Outreach Strategy
By Igor Volsky on Mar 18, 2013 at 9:13 am
On Monday, following its loss in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee (RNC) released an autopsy report that aims to “grow the Party and improve Republican campaigns.” The so-called “Growth and Opportunity Project” spoke with “more than 2,600 people, both outside Washington and inside the Beltway” about how the party can appeal to the nation’s changing demographics of voters and start winning elections, and produced more than 200 recommendations to help Republicans connect with every-day Americans.
And while the project seeks to position the GOP as a more caring and inclusive party, a closer examination of the report reveals a big disconnect between the principles and rhetoric the RNC espouses and the policies the party continues to advance:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/03/18/1732711/the-gops-growth-and-opportunity-project-debunked-in-one-table/
The Rising Electorate May Flip the Red House to Blue
Evidence Based Data Shows a Tectonic Shift In The Political Landscape
I attended a meeting of political leaders recently and someone raised a point that struck me as insightful. The comment, “It’s sad to say but the GOP hasn’t made any progress in reducing their enormous cultural blind spots,” was referring to Jeb Bush. Recently he described a path to citizenship as an affront to our legal system.
The point made by the political leader was that this statement sounds like self-deportation to most progressive whites and People of Color (POC). While that might not have been the intent, this is the exact “dog whistle” that not only turned off Latino voters in 2012 but helped turn them out in historic numbers. This time, it may not only cost the GOP eight seats in the House but the majority.
In 2012, the Democrats won over 1 million more votes than Republicans nationally and took out eleven Tea Party members from the class of 2010. If this trend holds, the 2014 midterm election will look a lot like 2006. The Democrats, powered by the new rising electorate, could produce the 17 seat gain that flips the House.
It’s hard to miss the facts explaining this tectonic shift in the political landscape:
Over 6 percent of GOP House members are representing districts won by President Obama; there are more than 17 GOP members in susceptible districts.
Redistricting has placed a significant number of Voters of Color (VOC) in 223 districts of influence – Congressional districts that are not necessarily majority minority but have enough diversity to effect the election.
A number of these districts of influence are Republican and ideologically” hostile to VOC. This may boomerang and drive progressive voters to enthusiastically express their discontent.
GOP House members no longer have the 2010 “obstruction card” to play. They have played that card a few times before and this electorate is inoculated so the conservative vote share may drop to 2006 levels next year.
http://pacplus.org/index.php?/main/blog/the-rising-electorate-may-flip-the-red-house-to-blue
Republicans Can’t Hide Their Racist Obama Hate
By: Rmuse
Mar. 17th, 2013
Most people would do whatever it takes to give the appearance they are doing something as well as possible to try to make a good impression, and perform in a way that causes other people to have a good opinion of them. Organizations take care that their agents represent the best and brightest of their particular industry and it is certain that political parties carefully groom and prepare their best advocates to embody their mission and agenda. Over the past three days, conservatives paraded their best spokespeople to advance their cause, and if they were trying to make a good impression on each other and observant voters, they failed miserably. Between the nutjobs and failed Republican candidates, the CPAC2013 gathering represented American extremism at its finest and a group clinging to a version of reality unique to out-of-touch conservatives.
One did not have to follow the daily recapitulation of crazy to comprehend the conservative conclave’s purpose was to put on a torrid display of groundless anti-Obama rhetoric based on the roster of speakers. One by one, conservatism’s best and brightest fired up the crowds preaching that America’s salvation is steeped in religion, austerity, guns, and voiding the federal government, and the speakers each reiterated that Republicans lost the November election because the GOP failed to articulate conservative’s values and not that voters rejected conservative extremism. Marco Rubio opined that “We don’t need new ideas. The idea is called America, and it still works” and it revealed that to Republicans, extremism defines America, and voters are out of touch with America.
The featured speakers at CPAC represented fanaticism at its finest with Donald Trump, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan rambling on about America’s demise stemming from voter’s rejecting conservative ideas. To educate Americans on the value of embracing their vision of, and for, America, CPAC brought conservative’s marquee spokesperson out of retirement and turned her loose to lay the nation’s woes at the feet of President Obama. In fact, Palin reiterated nearly every criticism about the President for twenty minutes she has dutifully uttered since 2008, and still failed to put forth a coherent thought, much less one based in reality, but that is the Palin Americans have come to know and disparage. However, although Palin cemented her role as one of conservative’s premier dunces, it was a racist at the assembly that stole the show and reminded Americans that intrinsic to Republicans’ inability to win elections, or appeal to voters is their racial animus.
http://www.politicususa.com/republicans-hide-racist-obama-hate.html
The Washington Post to charge frequent users of its Web site
By Steven Mufson,
This summer, The Washington Post will start charging frequent users of its Web site, asking those who look at more than 20 articles or multimedia features a month to pay a fee, although the company has not yet decided how much it will charge.
The paper said, however, that it would exempt large parts of its audience from having to pay the fees. Its home-delivery subscribers will continue to have free access to all of The Post’s digital products. And students, teachers, school administrators, government employees and military personnel will have unlimited access to The Post while in their schools and workplaces.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-washington-post-to-charge-frequent-web-users/2013/03/18/adc0ba46-8fe5-11e2-bdea-e32ad90da239_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboNE_b
Oscar Grant Film ‘Fruitvale’ Gets Official Release Date
by Jorge Rivas, Monday, March 18 2013, 1:49 PM EST
“Fruitvale,” written and directed by first-time filmmaker Ryan Coogler will be released on October 18th.
The Sundance grand jury prize for dramatic film winner depicts the final 24 hours in the life of Oscar Grant—the 22-year-old Oakland, Calif., resident shot by police at the Fruitvale subway stop in 2009.
The Weinstein Company acquired the distribution rights for the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, and South Africa; and worldwide international sales rights for “Fruitvale.” Deadline Hollywood reports The Weinstein Company agreed to “a commitment for a big theatrical release.
http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/03/oscar_grant_film_fruitvale_gets_official_release_date.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28ColorLines%29
Twitter Just Crushed Wall Street After The Cyprus Bailout
Joe Weisenthal |
This process has been happening for a long time, but for those in finance, the value of Twitter is increasingly equaling or surpassing the value of traditional sell-side research from Wall Street analysts.
This weekend’s surprise bailout of Cyprus (surprise, because of the fact that depositors in Cypriot banks are seeing a ‘one-off’ tax) is a major moment in the evolution of financial information.
Because the news was so surprising, and because there’s so little time between when the bailout was announced early Saturday morning, and when trading begins Sunday evening, there’s been an aggressive thirst for information and analysis on what it all means.
But the sell-side has been fairly slow, and the Twittersphere has come to the rescue.
The man everyone is reading is the pseudonymous twitterer @pawelmorski, who has written two must-read posts already on the Cypriot bailout. The first is here, and the second is here.
In the second one he writes:
After a surprisingly long gap, the verdicts from the Investment Bank research departments are dripping in. In short if you can sell euros at Friday’s close you probably should (you can’t – pre-pre-market at 6pm London or 7am Auckland is about a percent off) but the tone is one of wariness rather than panic. The absence of Street research interest probably tells a bigger story than what they actually say. Only Barclays bothered with the Sunday conference call, but we’ll probably get more chances to dial in and be told that the research houses don’t really know what’s going on. We can also enjoy the spectacle of people who right now couldn’t name him interpret the importance of the intervention of Archbishop Chrysostomos. Not for the first time, Twitter was ahead of expensive analysts in concern about deposit haircuts.
Among the few analysts who have put out stuff this weekend are SocGen’s Kit Juckes and Sebastien Galy, currency experts who both happen to be on Twitter, and are extremely plugged into the pace of demand for information.
In his latest email blast, SocGen’s Kit Juckes basically tells trader clients to go read blogs and tweets:
There are links to three (critical) analyses of the move below, from the FT’s Alphaville blog, from the Schumpeter blog in the Economist and from the ‘tweeter’ Pawelmorski. I think they are the three best summations of the response of market respondents over the weekend.
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/03/16/1425732/a-stupid-idea-whose-time-had-come/ http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/03/cyprus-bail-out http://pawelmorski.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/cyprus-a-brutal-lesson-in-realpolitik-2/
That is pretty cool.
Other journalists noted the same thing, how fully Twitter dominated traditional research shops.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-beats-the-sell-side-after-cyprus-bailout-2013-3#ixzz2Nuxt2wMA
Report: Conn. shooter-MURDERER kept mass-murder ‘score sheet
A source tells Mike Lupica of the “Daily News” that police found evidence that Adam Lanza studied mass killings for years.
Adam Lanza, the gunman in the shooting rampage at a Connecticut school, was obsessed with past mass killings and even created a detailed spreadsheet more than 7-feet long documenting hundreds of killing sprees and attempted murders, the New York Daily News reports.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/lupica-lanza-plotted-massacre-years-article-1.1291408#ixzz2NtvOe2pX
Mike Lupica, a Daily News sports columnist, quotes an unidentified “law enforcement veteran” as saying the chilling details of the Newtown massacre were presented at a conference of the International Association of Police Chiefs and Colonels last week in New Orleans.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/18/newtown-sandy-hook-adam-lanza-massacre-school/1996455/
ROUND 2
Supreme Court dubious of Arizona voter registration law
Justices are sympathetic to Arizona’s goal of registering only U.S. citizens, but a majority of them seem to believe the state’s 2004 voter referendum renders the federal “motor voter” law impotent
WASHINGTON — Federal efforts to simplify voter registration procedures clashed with states’ efforts to require proof of citizenship Monday before a Supreme Court that seemed closely split — but perhaps leaning slightly against Arizona’s controversial statute.
The eventual result, expected this spring, could hinge less on sweeping arguments about the integrity of elections and the suppression of votes than the sanctity of a federal registration form and the difference between “may” and “shall.”
The case, pitting Arizona against voter groups challenging the state’s 2004 proof-of-citizenship requirement, is important on at least two levels: It could establish precedents for whether Washington or the states control elections, as well as give a red or green light to other states seeking to institute their own restrictions.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/03/18/supreme-court-arizona-voting-registration/1996615/
Sorry, but all these polls in support of gay marriage are getting on my last nerve.
How about polls in support of JOBS, hmmm?
Dr. Ben Carson aka
Hollaring!!!!!!!!!
Somebody call 911; I’m choking from laughing.
PATHETIC
House GOP Budget Would Give Millionaires A $200,000 Tax Cut
By Travis Waldron
posted from ThinkProgress Economy on Mar 18, 2013 at 12:54 p
he latest House Republican budget would grant taxpayers with incomes above $1 million at least $200,000 in tax cuts even if the GOP closes tax loopholes to help pay for the plan, according to an analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice.
The GOP plan, authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), aims to reduce the top income tax rate to 25 percent and repeals many other taxes on the rich, including the Alternative Minimum Tax and increases included in Obamacare. Ryan wants to pay for the tax cut by closing loopholes and ending tax expenditures. The budget didn’t specify which loopholes and expenditures would be eliminated, but even if all of them that benefit the rich were done away with (except for preferences for capital gains and other investments, which Ryan has said he will keep), the budget would grant millionaires a tax cut in excess of $200,000. If it doesn’t eliminate loopholes, the tax cut would only grow larger, CTJ found:
In fact, under Ryan’s plan taxpayers with income exceeding $1 million in 2014 would receive an average net tax decrease of over $200,000 that year even if they had to give up all of their tax expenditures. These taxpayers would see an even larger net tax decrease if Congress failed to limit or eliminate enough tax expenditures to offset the costs of the proposed tax cuts.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03/18/1732981/gop-budget-millionaires-tax-cut/
This budget of Ryan’s stinks. It does NOT reduce the debt; it ADDS to it. SMGDH
he Changing TV News Landscape
by Mark Jurkowitz, Paul Hitlin, Amy Mitchell, Laura Santhanam, Steve Adams, Monica Anderson and Nancy Vogt of Pew Research Center
The news programs that Americans watch on national cable channels and their local television stations have changed significantly in recent years while the network evening newscasts have remained remarkably stable, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.
On cable, the news structure of the three channels—the mix of interviews, packaged segments and live coverage—has changed. After relying on significantly distinct formats five years ago, the three rivals now look strikingly similar.
At the same time, some of the differences that demarcated daytime cable from prime time have also eroded in the past five years. Traditionally known for its attention to breaking news, daytime cable’s cuts in live event coverage and its growing reliance on interviews suggest it may be moving more toward the talk-oriented evening shows. This transition may cut the costs of having a crew and correspondent provide live event coverage.
CNN, which has branded itself around reporting resources and reach, cut back between 2007 and 2012 on two areas tied to that brand—in-depth story packages and live event coverage. Even so, CNN is the only one of the three big cable news channels to produce more straight reporting than commentary over all. At the other end of that spectrum lies MSNBC, where opinion fills a full 85% of the channel’s airtime.1
SNIP
In prime time, opinion exceeds reporting at all three channels. Not so in the daytime. CNN maintains higher levels of straight reporting in both the morning and mid-day. Fox’s morning programming is a pretty even mix of reporting and opinion, with opinion overtaking reporting in mid-day. At MSNBC, opinion overwhelms reporting in both the morning and at mid-day.
SNIP
So this study is showing Fox as airing more FACTUAL reporting? GTFOH
http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/special-reports-landing-page/the-changing-tv-news-landscape/
Exhibit A
Posted at 12:51 PM ET, 03/18/2013
‘Hip to be square’: Jack Dorsey on wanting to run for NYC mayor and whether he’s nerdier than Steve Jobs
By Emi Kolawole
Watch this profile from CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and try not to hum Huey Lewis and the News’s “Hip to be Square” — especially after seeing this photo of Dorsey complete with dreadlocks and a nose-ring.
n additional to his foundational work on Twitter, Dorsey is also the co-founder of Square — the mobile payment system that can turn a smartphone user into a vendor. And, thanks to his inventions, he’s now a billionaire who seeks to follow in the footsteps of yet another billionaire — New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
That’s right, Jack Dorsey wants to run for mayor of New York. Not that it’s news — he said as much to Vanity Fair in 2011. But Dorsey’s ambitions are very much in line with this call from reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian for more geeks to run for office.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/hip-to-be-square-jack-dorsey-on-wanting-to-run-for-ny-mayor-and-whether-hes-nerdier-than-steve-jobs/2013/03/18/5d359c9a-8fe0-11e2-9cfd-36d6c9b5d7ad_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_tech
BUSINESS | 3/18/2013 @ 12:01AM |963 views
Pew Study: Americans Abandoning News Outlets, Citing Lower Quality
In the year 2013, with the impending death of the newspaper industry a commonplace, it’s difficult to shock anyone with fresh evidence of just how fast it’s foundering, but a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism accomplishes that trick pretty neatly.
Ready for this? In March 2012, a survey of 40 papers found that they were losing print advertising revenue at seven times the rate they were gaining digital ad dollar. By the end of 2012 — a mere nine months later — that had accelerated to $16 of lost print for every digital dollar gained.
Now for the good news. The PEJ report is actually a look at papers that are bucking the trend, whether by successfully managing their existing revenue streams or by discovering promising new ones. These are the four case studies (blockquote below taken directly from the report):
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/11/pew-case-studies-highlight-promising-avenues-plus-some-pitfalls-for-struggling-newspapers/
And the htis just keep on coming!
See Michael, YT is claiming they didn’t have the know how in 2009 when you where still RNC Chair. That doesn’t explain 2012. But you know they’re going to call on the good negro to help’em continue down the path to FAILURE.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6RP9pbKMJ7c
Uh huh
Sorry Hil Bill signed DOMA into law and it’s really a bit late isn’t it? 2016 is on the horizon, folks.
Tell it.
I don’t mean to be funny, but for real?
the time to come out was when the VP and the President did.
the time to come out was when your HUSBAND signed that piece of shyt DOMA.
this is too little, too late.
Hillary prolly hasn’t laid down since stepping down as SoS. She’s been working that program for 2016 campaign.
Repost
Monday, March 18, 2013
Zealots, Lunatics, and Fanatics
Posted by Zandar
President Obama is finally learning that zealots, fanatics and lunatics are immune to negotiation. They only understand power and its applications. Zealots like Paul Ryan…
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) told CBS’ “Face The Nation” Sunday that he believes Obamacare will “destroy” the country’s health care system, even though his budget assumes key savings from the law.
“I really believe it’s going to destroy the health care system in America,” Ryan said. “We believe the law will collapse under its own weight and that people will be eager for alternatives as the gorey details unfold in the future with its implementation.”
Lunatics like Kevin McCarthy…
House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) signaled Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that there is no acceptable ratio of spending cuts to new revenues because tax increases are unacceptable to Republicans, period.
“There are no new tax increases because you don’t need it,” he said.
His exact words to David Gregory? “You’re going to get nothing.”
http://zandarvts.blogspot.com/2013/03/zealots-lunatics-and-fanatics.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ZVTS+%28Zandar+Versus+The+Stupid%29
Michelle Obama invites Hadiya Pendleton family to White House Easter egg roll
by Alexandria Fisher, NBC Chicago | March 18, 2013 at 8:38 AM
he family of slain teen Hadiya Pendleton has reportedly been invited to another White House function by First Lady Michelle Obama.
Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton and her 10-year-old son Nathaniel Pendleton were invited to the annual White House Easter Egg Roll held on April 1, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The Pendleton family has been present at various political events such as the President’s State of the Union speech. The first lady also attended the funeral of the slain teen.
The death of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who was gunned down just weeks after performing at the President’s inauguration festivities, continues to be the pinnacle of Chicago violence.
Click here to read more.
http://thegrio.com/2013/03/18/michelle-obama-invites-hadiya-pendleton-family-to-white-house-easter-egg-roll/
SG2 loves Michael Rose!
Micahel Rose ROCKS! LOL Nothing like being married to an Island man… *skips to the naughty corner*
Michael Rose with that deep sexy voice….. Bow Chicka Bow Wow!
AP NewsBreak: Top Steubenville official says city backs wider rape investigation
By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, March 18, 9:39 AM
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The top official in an eastern Ohio city facing a broad criminal investigation following a girl’s rape says the community will support the inquiry.
Steubenville city manager Cathy Davison says the community wants to see justice done and will stand behind a grand jury announced by the Ohio attorney general, whose targets include numerous high school football coaches.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/rape-trial-ended-ohio-city-and-storied-football-program-remain-under-investigators-scrutiny/2013/03/18/e9713e20-8f96-11e2-9173-7f87cda73b49_story.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet
Repost
History Channel’s Satan Looks A Lot Like Barack Obama
The character is part of The Bible, a 10-hour television series airing on the History Channel.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/history-channels-satan-looks-a-lot-like-barack-obama
Greetings from MinneSNOWta, Everyone! It’s a winter wonderland here this morning.:-)
Good morning, everyone!
Did you see the link above from Buzz. SMGDH The nuts are completely OVER the edge now. Trying to portray PBO as satan on tv.
This is what losers do. They can’t beat him so they try to smear him. It’s full blown derangement!
All kinds of CRAZY…
Good Afternoon, Everyone :)
Hi Rik. Can’t wait for your commentary on Hillary’s stance on gay marriage.