Douglas W. Elmendorf, Director of the CBO

The Congressional Budget Office has verified what we all suspected – the Republican outrage over the corporate tax rate is disingenuous. The current corporate tax rate is 35%. Some companies like General Electric and Bank of America paid no taxes at all last year, and others like the oil companies get so much in tax breaks and whatever that we pay them instead of them paying us. The people paying the 35% corporate tax rate tend to be small companies that don’t qualify for all the special interest tax breaks.

The CBO released the latest tax figures. The average corporate tax rate based on taxes paid between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2011, is 12.1%, the lowest level since 1972. From 1987 to 2008, the average rate was 25.6%.

Corporate profits (and tax revenues) fell during the recession, but in the past two years the profits have risen sharply while the tax revenues have not.

Republicans are demanding a reduction in corporate tax rates. It seems more obvious that what we need is to eliminate all those special tax breaks and tax credits first, then reduce the tax rate. It is unfair that small businesses pay the full rate while larger companies do not.

Related articles

• Obama will propose corporate tax rate reductions (sfgate.com)
• Corporate Tax Rates, Then and Now | The Big Picture (tribuneofthepeople.com)
• “Do Low Corporate Tax Rates Attract Inward Investment?” (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Americans Look to Corporate Tax Breaks to Increase Jobs (247wallst.com)
• Bartlett: Cutting the Corporate Tax Rate Is No Economic Panacea (taxprof.typepad.com)
• Eliminate the Complexity (citizeneconomists.com)

Punxsutawney Phil

Thousands gathered in Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania, and various locations around America to watch a rodent who resembles a cross between a squirrel and a beaver with a less interesting tail get pulled out of this home and face the sunrise. He will then be spun around so he can see if he has cast a shadow. If there is little or no cloud cover and the groundhog “sees” his shadow, winter will continue until March 14 or 15, depending on Leap Year. If it is cloudy and the groundhog does not “see” his shadow, we will have an early spring.

I live in Vermont. Having shoveled out a 24″ snow fall on March 17 and been stuck in a snow bank coming home from college in mid-May, I consider mid-March an early spring. I prefer to judge my weather by the squirrels. So far this year, they are not interested in my birdbath filled with sunflower seeds. We’re having a very, very mild winter. I figure that the more I spend on sunflower seeds, the more I’ll be spending on wood pellets to heat my house.

Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney

The whole Groundhog Day thing started in 1887, and the current Punxatawney Phil is the latest over-fed, pampered, caged prognosticator in a furry dynasty. At its peak, in 1920, the town had a population of 10,000 in its 3.4 square miles, 84 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Now, the population is lower than it was in 1900 at 6,271. It used to have coal mines and glassworks, foundries, ironworkds, machine shops and flour, feed and silk mills. Now, it pretty much has the groundhog and a thriving groundhog souvenir business. The town’s name comes from a Native American term that translates into “town of the sandflies,” or maybe it’s mosquitoes.

Punxsatawney Phil and his cohorts in weather forecasting have a pretty abysmal record. They have been right only 37% of the time.

Sarah "Marmot Day" Palin

Pity poor Alaska, they have no groundhogs to forecast their weather, so, in 2009 during her last few months as Governor, Sarah Palin signed a law designating the groundhog-wannabe marmot as their official harbinger of an early spring. Alaskans dealt with their rodent-envy by legislating February 2 as Marmot Day.  Since the Alaskan marmot’s natural range is the extreme north of the state, I’m not sure how the whole sunrise aspect works out.

There are a half-dozen or so theories of the origin of the tradition of Groundhog Day, ranging from the ancient Celtic festival of Imbolc (least likely as Imbolc was linked to spring livestock births) to the folklore of the German settlers in Pennsylvania (most likely).  Groundhog or marmot, shadow or no, I think I’ll stick to Jim Cantore and The Weather Channel to tell me what to expect in the weather.

Related articles

• Groundhog Sees Shadow; 6 More Weeks of Winter (towleroad.com)
• Groundhogs behaving badly: When forecasting critters go rogue (mercurynews.com)

Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana

It is really discouraging to see how much press is being given to the “retirement” plans of Senators and Congressmen this year. Granted, this is a very important election and it is less about the presidency than about retaking the House and Senate. But, seriously, gushing in any direction about retirements in a census-dictated redistricting year is ludicrous.

Senators, obviously run statewide and are not impacted by redistricting. They are, however, impacted by shifts in demographics and the realities of their own lives. After they pass seventy, retirement is a constant possibility. It all depends on how much of a workaholic the Senator is and how their previous elections have gone. Bernie Sanders is 70, but most Vermonters suspect that he would die if he retired. Besides, he won his Senate seat by a 2 to 1 margin. Pat Leahy is 71 and we thought he might retire two years ago, but with the deaths of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, Pat is in that rarified air of senior statesman.

It is Congressmen who are most hurt by redistricting. Even states that don’t lose or gain Congressional seats are redistricting to reflect population movement and a change in control of the states’ legislatures. Dan Burton of Indiana is the latest Congressman to say he is retiring, and his campaign two years ago was a vicious one. He has also been redistricted. This would have been his 16^th term of office. At 73 and after 30 years in the House, with an undisclosed health problem in his family, Burton has decided to pack it in.

On the Republican side, seven Congressmen are retiring and seven others are running for higher office. That removes 14 Republican incumbents so far. On the Democratic side, eleven are retiring and eight are running for higher office. The Dems are down 19 incumbents so far.

Related articles

• IN-05: Veteran Republican Dan Burton to retire (dailykos.com)
• Burton Will Retire In Face of Tough Primary (politicalwire.com)
• GOP Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana to Retire (newser.com)

Public support for unions (red) union membership (blue)

In the late 1960s, a high school student in Pittsburgh could earn $11 an hour sweeping floors after school in the steel mills. At the same time, a legal secretary was considered well-paid if she made the equivalent of $2.25 an hour. The Auto Workers Union negotiated contracts that led to salaries for assembly line workers that hit the $100,000 a year mark, while quality was falling precipitously. The teachers’ union in New York City, in fact all of the New York City public sector unions, had contracts that were even more exorbitant. A maternity leave for a teacher ran to five years. Tenure was so unassailable that a teacher could be on the payroll, at over $100,000 a year and not teach a single class. There are still eight of those non-teachers in New York City drawing paychecks right now. When our economy was booming, the unions cut contracts that were outright outrageous, but sustainable because the companies were making enough money.

Funny thing about those unions. When the Chrysler Corporation was on the rocks in the 1979, it was not the wage scales in UAW contracts that CEO Lee Iacocca talked about the most. It was the cost of health insurance. Some unions had negotiated health insurance policies that are still mindboggling. Iacocca did not cite wages, but health insurance as Japan’s edge in the market. (He wasn’t entirely correct. It was Toyota’s practice of doing the market research first and building the car second that made the difference.) He didn’t mention pension systems, but they too were high-end.

As American industries were shipped overseas, it became a tenet of the right wing ideology that the unions were at fault. It absolutely could not be the fault of owners or shareholders. It had to be the unions, and in a simplistic way it was, through the health insurance policies and pension costs. But Iacocca was petitioning for nationalized health care, not an end to unions in 1979. He understood that what the UAW had negotiated was equivalent to the kind of health care that was available in Japan, France and Germany in their nationalized systems, at a much lower cost than the private insurance Chrysler was forced to buy.

Shifting blame away from business owners for the outsourcing of American industry has become second nature in the Republican Party. The best example is the textile industry. Many years ago, the suburbs of Boston all the way to Concord, New Hampshire, were filled with textile mills and clothing factories. Then, they all moved to the Carolinas to take advantage of the “right to work” laws there. The presence of a “right to work” law practically guarantees the absence of unions, unions wages and union safety requirements for workers. The Carolinas worked fairly well for a couple of decades, in spite of the attempts to “Norma Rae” the mills down there. But even the child labor restrictions, minimum wage requirements and OSHA regulations of Federal law were unacceptable to the mill owners. They packed up and moved to Central America, where a worker made as much in a week as a Carolinian made in an hour. It had nothing whatsoever to do with unions. There were no unions in the Carolinas. It was a management decision made to increase the profit margin and shareholder dividends. Just don’t try to tell that to a Republican. Even Carolinians find someone else to blame, usually Bill Clinton and NAFTA, though neither had anything to do with this. Bush41 negotiated NAFTA and Central America is not part of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the late 1940s and 1950′s private sector union membership was over 40% of the American workforce, the top tax rate was 90% and not only was our economy thriving, but we paid down the 125% of GDP national debt left from the Great Depression and World War II. The middle class exploded. City neighborhoods and small towns could not accommodate all the veterans who had spent the war dreaming of wives, babies and single-family homes, so the planned suburb was born and tens of thousands of homes were built. It was “The American Dream” and it was fed by those very unions that the Republican Party hates so much.

But the big factories closed and with them, the unions shrank until less than 12% of Americans belong to unions and those are mostly in the public sector, sports and entertainment.

It is against this background of “unions are bad” that Indiana passed a “right to work” law last week. It will be signed by Governor Mitch Daniels this week. Most civilians think of “right to work” laws as guaranteeing that a company or individual can hire non-union workers and not be boycotted by the unions that govern the industry involved. That’s just the surface part of “right to work” laws.

There are two different types of unions – labor unions that deal with employees of things like auto manufacturers, textile mills and mines, and trade unions that deal with people who work in a specific field like plumbers and electricians. In many ways, it is the impact that “right to work” laws have on trade unions that is the larger problem.

Trade unions provide a framework within which a person earns the right to call himself or herself a professional. They have steps, normally apprentice, journeyman and master, that define how far a person has come in the training process and what he or she is competently capable of doing. A trade union is a guarantee to the consumer that the person being hired can do what he/she is being hired to do. In short, in a state that has trade unions, there is less need for Angie’s List.

The standards for trade unions exceed state licensing standards in most cases. “Right to work” states can, and most do, have very lax standards for licensing of trade professionals. That means any jerk with a toolbelt can call himself a plumber, like that person who came to be known as “Joe the Plumber” in 2008. He was not a plumber, not even an apprentice plumber. But in several “right to work” states, he could call himself a plumber, take out an ad in the phone book, run a website and walk into someone’s home not knowing an intake valve from a u-joint. We ran into this in Georgia when we needed a “plumber” to verify that our incoming water line had ruptured, causing the $1,000 water bill, and had been replaced, to void the $1,000 water bill. We were literally told that anyone could sign the forms. We did not need a certified Master Plumber to oversee or do the work. There was no such thing as a certified Master Plumber in the whole county.

A “right to work” law is attractive for some because it means a homeowner or landlord can hire someone on the cheap and not have to pay the fees that the trade union has set for jobs. The cost cutting is welcomed, but the consequences are never taken into consideration. My hundred-year-old house has been wired and re-wired four times that we’re sure of. The first three did not involve trade union-trained electricians. That is part of why it cost so much for the fourth. No one could figure out where the freaking wires ran. Worse, some of them ran wrapped around copper plumbing lines and behind joists and rafters. A secondary circuit box had been jumped off the first instead of being installed separately. We have wires on top of wires strung all through the walls and ceilings. That this house didn’t burn down in the past fifty years is a testament to dumb luck, not to properly-done renovation work.

The least obvious impact of “right to work” laws is worker safety. People are unaware of the fact that unions were born on the graves of workers. OSHA is relatively new. It was unions who created the first safety standards for workplaces such as mills and mines. If you remember Norma Rae, you will remember that one of the primary issues was face masks for the mill employees to prevent them breathing in the fibers that are released into the air by the machinery. Those fibers cause “white lung” a disease no less deadly than a miner’s “black lung” because the fibers coat the inside of the lungs and prevent oxygen from being absorbed. Unions forced face masks in the northern mills long before OSHA was formed. Unions fought for the regulations that protect workers, and maybe that’s why the Republicans hate them so much.

The Walton family jokes that liberals blame Walmart for everything, well, in this case, they deserve it. Walmart began in the Southern “right to work” states and used the lack of unions and lax regulations to create a system of employment that has become the standard for retail and hospitality. States have thresholds for an employer to provide access to health insurance, typically between 32 and 36 hours per week for the employee. For this reason, there is no such thing as full time in retail. Without a union to fight for health insurance access, the retail and hospitality industries don’t offer it, except to salaried management. And that part-time employment thing is a real trap. It is rare for retail and hospitality employees to have very stable schedules. It would be so easy if one knew, okay, I work 9 to 1, Thursday to Monday, so I can schedule a doctor’s appointment for after 2 or on Wednesday. Doesn’t happen. Employees have to make appointments and then ask for the time off. Many retailers will absolutely not allow any requests for time off during “holiday periods,” like from the week before Thanksgiving to the week after New Years. And then there’s what happens if one is lucky enough to be with a company long enough to make, say, 50¢ an hour above starting pay. That person can expect to lose half their weekly hours while the company hires someone to work those lost hours at 50¢ an hour less than they pay the established employee.

There’s also the “discipline” forms. If one makes a mistake, one is expected to confess to it in writing. If one doesn’t sign the form, one is fired. There is a grace period in most companies where, if one is super good, the form will be expunged. But, if one racks up three or four or whatever number of them, one is fired and one’s signature on those forms bars one from collecting unemployment insurance. That’s being “fired with cause,” and it kicks in a waiting period for unemployment benefits. That benefits the company because it reduces their liability with unemployment insurance. Got all that? A worker keeps his/her job by confessing to doing something wrong, and forfeits unemployment benefits in the process. There is no appeal and no recourse without a union. The employee is always wrong, even in cases of customer complaint. There is no objective means of settling these things, just the subjective opinion of management that the employee is expendable.

“Right to work” laws result in lower wages for workers, fewer if any benefits, no guarantee of the competence of contractors, unchallenged abuses by employers, a reduction of safety standards for workers. The only people who gain anything from “right to work” laws are corporations that are freed to intimidate their employees to prevent unionization.

In the end, it is not about giving people the right to work. It is about giving those poor helpless corporations protection from the big, nasty, ugly unions that “destroyed” America. It is about “taking America back” to the 1890s and the sweat shops, child labor, workplace diseases and injuries, mine collapses and factory fires. When the Tea Party (or the people who created the Tea Party while convincing idiots that it was a grassroots movement) coined the phrase “take back our country,” they chose not to answer two questions: “Take it back from whom?” and “Take it back to when?” The answer is take it back from middle class and take it back to 1890.

Republicans are engaged in a double-whammy to create The Corporate States of America — bust unions and deregulate.  They might want to remember something.  When we had neither unions nor regulations to protect workers, that when we had class warfare in its purest sense, the workers’ riots and the Harlan County War in Kentucky. 

Related articles

• Indiana right-to-work law to get final push this week – Reuters (reuters.com)
• After 70 years, right-to-work issue remains a hot potato – USA TODAY (usatoday.com)
• Indiana joins GOP union-bashing with right-to-work law | Michael Paarlberg (guardian.co.uk)
• What Is a ‘Right to Work’ Law? (blogs.wsj.com)
• Anti-Union “Right-To-Work” Laws Really A Tax On Unions (seeingtheforest.com)
• Indiana passes right-to-work law and is now open for business – and jobs (winteryknight.wordpress.com)

Anti-ACTA protest in Paris

29 January 2012
by Pauline Malmqvist

On the initiative of Anonymous a hundred of people protested this Saturday in Paris against ACTA. They also asked to protest in 36 other french cities.

ACTA, known as Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is an international treaty that aims at reinforcing the copyright laws. It wants to reinforce the cooperation between all the countries that has signed ACTA. Like SOPA and PIPA, ACTA threatens the liberty of internet and the freedom of expression. This treaty has been secretly negotiated by the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland. Which is the first controversial issue about ACTA: the States hid it away from us during the process of the law which lead us to know nothing about this treaty. 

The agreement expands the copyrights law by criminalizing file-sharing, which firstly was a civil infringement. It will give the right for the governments worldwide that has signed the treaty to allow right holders to seek personal data through ISPs (Internet Service Providers). It will also give copyright holders legal means to pursue people suspected of bypassing copyright protections. It also allows to seize goods at theirs borders if suspected of containing infringing content. 

In order to reinforce the copyright laws ACTA has severe penalties. The judicial authorities have the authority to order the person engaged in infringing activity:
- To pay the right holder damages adequate to compensate for the injury the right holder has suffered as a result of the infringement. (Section 2: Civil Enforcement, Article 9: Damages, paragraph 1 – ACTA)

- For offences specified in paragraphs 1, 2, and 4 of Article 23 (Criminal Offences), each Party shall provide penalties that include imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement, consistently with the level of penalties applied for crimes of a corresponding gravity.(ACTA in section 4: Criminal Enforcement, Article 24: Penalties). 

Anti-ACTA protester

In the European Union 22 members has signed the treaty on Thursday 26^th January in Tokyo, including France. However, it still must be signed by the European parliament. The hope that the treaty can still be stopped lead to protests from the internet hacker group Anonymous but also non-member of the group. As a matter of fact, a European Parliament official, Kader Arif, resigned and stated: “I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organizations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly”.

This was a awakening alarm for some of us, unfortunately to few. Only a couple of hundreds of people gathered in Paris to protest on Saturday 28^th. The French medias did not put the spotlight on ACTA, that might explain also why the crowd was not as big as expected. 

Behind the Guy Fawkes masks people yelled “No to ACTA” and “We are legion”. They stated that they want to defend the liberty and rights of each individual.

Protests were particularly strong in Poland, where a thousands of citizens marched together against ACTA. There were also several government officials that showed their disapproval of ACTA by wearing the now very famous mask of Guy Fawkes. 

To show their disapproval of ACTA, Anonymous has launched several attacks against Governmental and entertainment websites, including the FBI and also the french Governments. Until the European parliament has not signed ACTA there is still hope that ACTA will not be enacted. On avaaz.org there is a petition, that they plan on taking to the European parliament so the voice of the citizens may count for something. It did for SOPA and PIPA, why not for ACTA? 

Anti-ACTA troll

Davos, Switzerland

There are some stories which, though very serious, lead to uncontrollable bouts of the giggles. This is such a story…..

When the recession hit Europe, the effects were devastating. Too many countries were operating on combinations of high government spending and low taxation. Germany was the exception. Though incomes had stagnated, Chancellor Merkel was aggressive in her attitude about taxation. She has been trying for years to organize all the Western industrialized countries into reining in tax shelters and collecting from tax cheats. Germany’s economy, while not explosive, is solid. It is built on small, high-grade manufacturing to provide a middle class which supports the service industry. But Germany is part of the European Union, and too many in the EU are looking to Germany to bail out the rest of the Union. It is Germany that is pushing hardest for deep budget cuts in other European countries. A leaked document has suggested that Germany is pushing for Greece to be put in a sort of receivership — surrendering control of its finances to the EU.

At his first economic summit, President Obama tried to make the case for the Keynesian model of recovery, the one that had pulled the United States out of the Great Depression faster than Europe. But, in response to the recession, Europeans had elected conservative governments that wanted to follow the same economic policies being advocated by our Republican Party. In a few European nations – Greece, Italy and Spain specifically – it is part of a six decade pendulum between socialist and fascist governments, with none of them going all the way to communism or corporatism. So, President Obama’s recommendations were met with the same kind of dismissive attitude that his policies have met in America.

Right now, in the Republican candidate battle, the President is constantly being accused of trying to turn America into Europe….translation: he wants us to become a socialist nation with cradle to grave welfare. Here’s where the giggles set in. Europe has dug itself in deeper into the economic morass because they turned their backs on Keynesian economics and embraces the trickle-down model.

IMF head Christine Lagarde with partner Xavier Giocante, Paris, June 22

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, warned at the Davos summit this week that spending cuts could “strangle” economic growth, and any cuts must be made on a nation-by-nation, program-by-program basis instead of being made “across the board.”

This is a perfect time to take a look at what Margaret Thatcher really did. She allowed the British manufacturing base to disappear. She also “privatized” everything she could sell off, from British Petroleum to the railway system. The privatization was supposed to create jobs and super-charge the economy. It certainly pumped a lot of money into the British treasury – once. She traded the yearly income for a one-shot payment. BP moved itself out of the country. The owners of Britrail closed smaller lines, forcing people to buy cars, all of which were built overseas, forcing major upgrades to roads. Get the picture? Thousands of Brits lost their middle-class incomes when the factories shut down and there was nothing to replace them. The lower wages of service industry jobs, if one could get a job, weren’t enough to sustain a family, so government support systems were expanded. Older people who had lost their jobs and pensions were particularly susceptible to not being able to find work and were not easily retrained to new jobs. The result – life-long dependence on “the dole.” If you watch Brit-coms and British movies, you’ve seen parts of this, in The Full Monty and the character of Onslow in Keeping Up Appearances.

Lagarde is not advocating any one-size solution to Europe. In fact, combining their problems across the EU is the last thing Lagarde wants. “Some countries have to go full-speed ahead to do this fiscal consolidation, but other countries have space and room. They should explore what to do…in order to help themselves. It has to be tailor-made.”

And into this debate comes U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. He warned that there is a risk of a recessionary cycle if the austerity measures aren’t done properly. “There is a risk that every disappointment in growth will be met with an austerity that will feed the decline, and that is a cycle you have to arrest to solve financial crises. For parts of Europe for a long time, there will be no alternative to very substantial adjustment in budget deficits.”

Billionaire financier George Soros, who was very involved in the transition of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe to capitalist economies, warned that the extreme austerity advocated by the conservative governments of Europe could lead to a “lost decade” of economic stagnation. “This German insistence on austerity could destroy the European Union. This is reality, this is the harsh reality that we need to face. It is not written in stone, the future is not predetermined. We determine the future, so it would be well within the possibility of the authorities to change it.”

There is a second story at Davos that is less headline-making but equally important. Davos is a ski area in Switzerland that has been used for these economic summits for years. The story involves Swiss banking, that guardian of money that people want to keep hidden from government authorities for various reasons.

Swiss Finance Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf

Switzerland’s oldest bank, Wegelin, announced on Friday that it is breaking up into separate divisions in response to a disagreement with the United States over men like Mitt Romney who have some or most of their money in Swiss banks to avoid paying American taxes. Just the way the city of Burlington, Vermont, is chasing people who didn’t pay their parking fines (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars), the Obama administration is chasing down the tax avoiders who have stashed their cash in Switzerland. The administration agrees with German Chancellor Merkel that countries are deeply damaged by the ability of international corporations and individuals to hid their money in Swiss bank accounts and tax shelter countries like the Cayman Islands (another Romney bank site) and avoid paying taxes. But it would take an international effort to shut down these countries and the consequences to their economies would be horrific. A nation like the Cayman Islands has no other revenue source than the fees paid by corporations to register their “corporate headquarters” in post office boxes or virtually empty office buildings, like the little two story one a reporter tracked down last year that houses 20,000 corporations.

Wegelin was facing the possibility of multiple indictments on charges of helping Americans evade taxes. Swiss finance minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf called Wegelin’s decision “very regrettable,” and went on to say that “This development show how important it is that we come to solutions in the discussions, negotiations with the United States which hopefully prevent other banks getting into similar situations.”

The Justice Department has targeted 11 Swiss banks, including Credit Suisse, Julius Baer and Basler Kantonalbank. Widmer-Schlumpf told the press, “I don’t know whether other banks are in a similar or same situation…but what I know is that various banks are being threatened by the United States with prosecution and we will try to do everything…to come to a solution.” Switzerland wants the investigations halted in exchange for paying a large fine and handing over the names of thousands of American bank clients suspected of dodging taxes. UBS (which is not the initials of anything) paid $780 million in fines and handed over the names of 4,500 clients in 2009 to avoid prosecution.

Widmer-Schlumpf has been holding talks with Secretary Geithner this week in Davos. Switzerland struck deals with Britain and Germany last year that allowed clients to retain their secrecy while collecting taxes for their governments. But the EU Commission wants to force Switzerland into an automatic revelation of client information. Widmer-Schlumpf is part of the seven-member council that acts as a joint head of state for Switzerland and one of the rotating presidents.

The Great Depression ended in the Second World War, in part because of the way the Depression and the First World War were handled. This Great Recession does not need to end in a global war, but it may lead to some enormous changes in the world’s economic relationships, if it is handled properly. This country does not need to become Europe, as the Republicans want us to be. We also do not need to be isolationist, as some would have us be. It is essential that we work with the world, all of the world, to find global solutions to a global economy.

Related articles

• Switzerland’s Oldest Bank Is Selling Its Non-US Business After Tax Evasion Charges (businessinsider.com)
• Swiss Officials Urge U.S. Tax Deal to Shield Country’s Banks (ibtimes.com)
• Davos 2012: IMF issues austerity warning (direcmood.wordpress.com)
• IMF chief asks for more cash at Davos – Sydney Morning Herald (news.smh.com.au)
• More Pressure on Europe for Solution to Debt Crisis – New York Times (nytimes.com)
• Brussels takes control of taxation and spending in eurozone countries (telegraph.co.uk)
• IMF issues austerity cuts warning (bbc.co.uk)
• IMF Chief At Davos: ‘I Am Here With My Little Bag, To Collect A Bit Of Money’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• European austerity measures could be ‘grave’ for world (cbc.ca)
• Swiss leader: Must restore faith in Swiss banking (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Emblem of the Arab League

The Arab League on Saturday suspended its monitoring operations in Syria because it is too dangerous to continue. There has been a “critical deterioration of the situation” with armed clashes between rebel and security forces in the suburbs of Damascus. The al-Assad regime has always considered Damascus and Aleppo their secure territory.

Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby said that the issue of Syria will be taken up by the council at some future date. A spokesman for the regime said it could not comment on the suspension until the regime receives a formal notification of the suspension of the monitoring mission.

The al-Assad family with Maher and Bashar standing on the left, parents seated.

The Arab League had hoped to avoid a full-blown civil war in Syria. That hope is dead. The al-Assad regime deluded itself that the protests were a repeat of the 1983 Muslim Brotherhood-inspired protests in Hama and they could do what Daddy Hafez al-Assad did back then – level the city and kill over 20,000 residents. It was a fatal error. President Bashar al-Assad has made dozens of promises of government reform in the past ten months and kept none of them. His speeches are simply being ignored now. This rebellion is nation-wide, not centered in one city. It has been simmering below the surface in Damascus and Aleppo, where the economy was stronger than in the rest of the country, but the political realities were felt. So far, nothing has budged the regime, their belief in their absolute power is that strong. Nothing can convince Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher, head of the security forces, that this isn’t Daddy’s rebellion. And since the United Nations has confirmed that ten percent of the dead in this conflict have been children, it is doubtful that the wives and children of the regime’s leaders would be treated with sympathy or mercy dictated by the Qur’an.  But, since the regime chose to violate Ramadan to attack villages, this conflict went outside any bounds of Islamic rules of engagement back in March.

A handful of foreign journalists entered Syria with the Arab League monitors and for the first time we have had independent confirmation of the atrocities being carried out by the al-Assad regime.    A group of them were intentionally targeted by Syrian military shelling in Homs, and French journalist Gilles Jacquier was killed.

Related articles

• Arab League Advisors Say Withdraw Monitors (lezgetreal.com)
• Arab League suspends Syria monitoring mission – The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)
• Arab League Halts Syria Mission; 9 More Dead (newser.com)
• Arab League halts Syria mission (bbc.co.uk)
• Arab League halts mission in Syria (thehindu.com)
• UN split on Syria action even as killings spike (vancouversun.com)

Oklahoma State Sen. Ralph Shortey

Based on something he saw on the Internet about companies thinking about using embryonic stem cells to develope artificial flavors, Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortey has proposed a law banning the use of aborted human fetuses in human food.

Yeah, you read that right. The man read something on the Net that convinced him we are on the verge of the age of Soylent Green.

A moment for the logic to set in. Using human stem cells to create artificial flavors make no sense whatsoever. Using plant stem cells to generate flavor-producing compounds does. It’s not like humans are all that tasty. Even using animal stem cells makes sense. As Anthony Bourdain famously observed, the number one reason for not becoming a vegan is bacon. Of course, a pig in its natural state does not taste like bacon, but that’s picking nits.

The thing is, laws like this, which ban something that isn’t even being considered except in the warped mind of someone speculating on an obscure website, are a waste of legislative time and money. Shortey can’t even cite the source of this idea. His bill would prohibit the manufacture or sale of any food in which aborted fetuses were used to develop any of the ingredients. Even right-to-life groups say they have no idea where this concept came from.

Senator Brian Crain, the chairman of the Oklahoma State Senate Human Services Committee, which would take up this bill, said “If it can be demonstrated that this is a challenge facing our food supply, then I think we need to act quickly, but there’s been no demonstration that this is going on. I’d hate to think we’re going to spend our time coming up with possibilities of things we need to stop.”

Maybe Oklahoma and the rest of the states should take up a bill that requires legislators to provide proof that a bill addresses a real issue, a real threat, a real problem before it can be accepted for consideration. Just finding some nonsense on the Net should not be enough to get a bill into committee in any state legislature. If it were, we would be passing bills addressing the need to protect ourselves from zombies and werewolves.

Related articles

• Did you see this article? This is why the Republican right scares the s#%t out of me… (underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com)
• Oklahoma Lawmaker Wants To Outlaw Use Of Human Fetuses In Production Of Food (thinkprogress.org)
• Oklahoma Republican Files Bill to Ban Food Containing Aborted Fetuses (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Soylent Green Revisited? Nah, Just the Crazy Season in High Gear (skydancingblog.com)
• Get Shortey: Cannibals Target Oklahoma Senator After Bill To Bar Use Of Human Fetuses In Food (jonathanturley.org)
• Bill would outlaw using embryonic stem cells in food testing (newsok.com)
• Okla. senator wants ban on human fetuses in food (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Okla. Senator Wants Ban on Human Fetuses in Food (abcnews.go.com)
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Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Last month, I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought — and several thousand gave their lives.

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.

We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known. My grandfather, a veteran of Patton’s Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.

The two of them shared the optimism of a Nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism. They understood they were part of something larger; that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share — the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.

The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.

Let’s remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren’t, and personal debt that kept piling up.

In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money. Regulators had looked the other way, or didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behavior.

It was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag. In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect.

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we’ve put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.

The state of our Union is getting stronger. And we’ve come too far to turn back now. As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.

No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

This blueprint begins with American manufacturing.

On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.

We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.

What’s happening in Detroit can happen in other industries. It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh. We can’t bring back every job that’s left our shores. But right now, it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China. Meanwhile, America is more productive. A few weeks ago, the CEO of Master Lock told me that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home. Today, for the first time in fifteen years, Master Lock’s unionized plant in Milwaukee is running at full capacity.

So we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.

We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.

So let’s change it. First, if you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it. That money should be used to cover moving expenses for companies like Master Lock that decide to bring jobs home.

Second, no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here.

Third, if you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making products here. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers.

My message is simple. It’s time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms, and I’ll sign them right away.

We’re also making it easier for American businesses to sell products all over the world. Two years ago, I set a goal of doubling U.S. exports over five years. With the bipartisan trade agreements I signed into law, we are on track to meet that goal — ahead of schedule. Soon, there will be millions of new customers for American goods in Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. Soon, there will be new cars on the streets of Seoul imported from Detroit, and Toledo, and Chicago.

I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products. And I will not stand by when our competitors don’t play by the rules. We’ve brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration — and it’s made a difference. Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires. But we need to do more. It’s not right when another country lets our movies, music, and software be pirated. It’s not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg up on ours only because they’re heavily subsidized.

Tonight, I’m announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade practices in countries like China. There will be more inspections to prevent counterfeit or unsafe goods from crossing our borders. And this Congress should make sure that no foreign company has an advantage over American manufacturing when it comes to accessing finance or new markets like Russia. Our workers are the most productive on Earth, and if the playing field is level, I promise you — America will always win.

I also hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can’t find workers with the right skills. Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that — openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.

That’s inexcusable. And we know how to fix it.

Jackie Bray is a single mom from North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic. Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College. The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training. It paid Jackie’s tuition, then hired her to help operate their plant.

I want every American looking for work to have the same opportunity as Jackie did. Join me in a national commitment to train two million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job. My Administration has already lined up more companies that want to help. Model partnerships between businesses like Siemens and community colleges in places like Charlotte, Orlando, and Louisville are up and running. Now you need to give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers — places that teach people skills that local businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.

And I want to cut through the maze of confusing training programs, so that from now on, people like Jackie have one program, one website, and one place to go for all the information and help they need. It’s time to turn our unemployment system into a reemployment system that puts people to work.

These reforms will help people get jobs that are open today. But to prepare for the jobs of tomorrow, our commitment to skills and education has to start earlier.

For less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every State in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning — the first time that’s happened in a generation.

But challenges remain. And we know how to solve them.

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies — just to make a difference.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

We also know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

When kids do graduate, the most daunting challenge can be the cost of college. At a time when Americans owe more in tuition debt than credit card debt, this Congress needs to stop the interest rates on student loans from doubling in July. Extend the tuition tax credit we started that saves middle-class families thousands of dollars. And give more young people the chance to earn their way through college by doubling the number of work-study jobs in the next five years.

Of course, it’s not enough for us to increase student aid. We can’t just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we’ll run out of money. States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who’ve done just that. Some schools re-design courses to help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point is, it’s possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury — it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

Let’s also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

That doesn’t make sense.

I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration. That’s why my Administration has put more boots on the border than ever before. That’s why there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office.

The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now. But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.

You see, an economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country. That means women should earn equal pay for equal work. It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.

After all, innovation is what America has always been about. Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed. Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs. Both parties agree on these ideas. So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.

Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally-financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don’t gut these investments in our budget. Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.

Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right — eight years. Not only that — last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.

But with only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, oil isn’t enough. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy — a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my Administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock — reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

What’s true for natural gas is true for clean energy. In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

When Bryan Ritterby was laid off from his job making furniture, he said he worried that at 55, no one would give him a second chance. But he found work at Energetx, a wind turbine manufacturer in Michigan. Before the recession, the factory only made luxury yachts. Today, it’s hiring workers like Bryan, who said, “I’m proud to be working in the industry of the future.”

Our experience with shale gas shows us that the payoffs on these public investments don’t always come right away. Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail. But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy. I will not walk away from workers like Bryan. I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising. Pass clean energy tax credits and create these jobs.

We can also spur energy innovation with new incentives. The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there’s no reason why Congress shouldn’t at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven’t acted. Well tonight, I will. I’m directing my Administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes. And I’m proud to announce that the Department of Defense, the world’s largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history — with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year.

Of course, the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy. So here’s another proposal: Help manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and give businesses incentives to upgrade their buildings. Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, and more jobs for construction workers who need them. Send me a bill that creates these jobs.

Building this new energy future should be just one part of a broader agenda to repair America’s infrastructure. So much of America needs to be rebuilt. We’ve got crumbling roads and bridges. A power grid that wastes too much energy. An incomplete high-speed broadband network that prevents a small business owner in rural America from selling her products all over the world.

During the Great Depression, America built the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. After World War II, we connected our States with a system of highways. Democratic and Republican administrations invested in great projects that benefited everybody, from the workers who built them to the businesses that still use them today.

In the next few weeks, I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

There’s never been a better time to build, especially since the construction industry was one of the hardest-hit when the housing bubble burst. Of course, construction workers weren’t the only ones hurt. So were millions of innocent Americans who’ve seen their home values decline. And while Government can’t fix the problem on its own, responsible homeowners shouldn’t have to sit and wait for the housing market to hit bottom to get some relief.

That’s why I’m sending this Congress a plan that gives every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage, by refinancing at historically low interest rates. No more red tape. No more runaround from the banks. A small fee on the largest financial institutions will ensure that it won’t add to the deficit, and will give banks that were rescued by taxpayers a chance to repay a deficit of trust.

Let’s never forget: Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a Government and a financial system that do the same. It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.

We’ve all paid the price for lenders who sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, and buyers who knew they couldn’t afford them. That’s why we need smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior. Rules to prevent financial fraud, or toxic dumping, or faulty medical devices, don’t destroy the free market. They make the free market work better.

There is no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, or too costly. In fact, I’ve approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his. I’ve ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don’t make sense. We’ve already announced over 500 reforms, and just a fraction of them will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years. We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill — because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.

I’m confident a farmer can contain a milk spill without a federal agency looking over his shoulder. But I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago. I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury pollution, or making sure that our food is safe and our water is clean. I will not go back to the days when health insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men.

And I will not go back to the days when Wall Street was allowed to play by its own set of rules. The new rules we passed restore what should be any financial system’s core purpose: Getting funding to entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and getting loans to responsible families who want to buy a home, start a business, or send a kid to college.

So if you’re a big bank or financial institution, you are no longer allowed to make risky bets with your customers’ deposits. You’re required to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail — because the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again. And if you’re a mortgage lender or a payday lender or a credit card company, the days of signing people up for products they can’t afford with confusing forms and deceptive practices are over. Today, American consumers finally have a watchdog in Richard Cordray with one job: To look out for them.

We will also establish a Financial Crimes Unit of highly trained investigators to crack down on large-scale fraud and protect people’s investments. Some financial firms violate major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a repeat offender. That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the right thing. So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud count.

And tonight, I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.
A return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility will help us protect our people and our economy. But it should also guide us as we look to pay down our debt and invest in our future.

Right now, our most immediate priority is stopping a tax hike on 160 million working Americans while the recovery is still fragile. People cannot afford losing $40 out of each paycheck this year. There are plenty of ways to get this done. So let’s agree right here, right now: No side issues. No drama. Pass the payroll tax cut without delay.

When it comes to the deficit, we’ve already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings. But we need to do more, and that means making choices. Right now, we’re poised to spend nearly $1 trillion more on what was supposed to be a temporary tax break for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else – like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans? Because if we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t do both.

The American people know what the right choice is. So do I. As I told the Speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors.

But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right: Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires. In fact, if you’re earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn’t get special tax subsidies or deductions. On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up. You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages. You’re the ones who need relief.

Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference — like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right. Americans know it’s not right. They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to their country’s future, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility. That’s how we’ll reduce our deficit. That’s an America built to last.

I recognize that people watching tonight have differing views about taxes and debt; energy and health care. But no matter what party they belong to, I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now: Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken.

Can you blame them for feeling a little cynical?

The greatest blow to confidence in our economy last year didn’t come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco?

I’ve talked tonight about the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad — and it seems to get worse every year.

Some of this has to do with the corrosive influence of money in politics. So together, let’s take some steps to fix that. Send me a bill that bans insider trading by Members of Congress, and I will sign it tomorrow. Let’s limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact. Let’s make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress can’t lobby Congress, and vice versa — an idea that has bipartisan support, at least outside of Washington.

Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything — even routine business — passed through the Senate. Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.

The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote. That’s why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our Government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.

Finally, none of these reforms can happen unless we also lower the temperature in this town. We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas.

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

On the other hand, even my Republican friends who complain the most about Government spending have supported federally-financed roads, and clean energy projects, and federal offices for the folks back home.

The point is, we should all want a smarter, more effective Government. And while we may not be able to bridge our biggest philosophical differences this year, we can make real progress. With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow. But I can do a whole lot more with your help. Because when we act together, there is nothing the United States of America can’t achieve.

That is the lesson we’ve learned from our actions abroad over the last few years.

Ending the Iraq war has allowed us to strike decisive blows against our enemies. From Pakistan to Yemen, the al Qaeda operatives who remain are scrambling, knowing that they can’t escape the reach of the United States of America.

From this position of strength, we’ve begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Ten thousand of our troops have come home. Twenty-three thousand more will leave by the end of this summer. This transition to Afghan lead will continue, and we will build an enduring partnership with Afghanistan, so that it is never again a source of attacks against America.

As the tide of war recedes, a wave of change has washed across the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunis to Cairo; from Sana’a to Tripoli. A year ago, Qadhafi was one of the world’s longest-serving dictators — a murderer with American blood on his hands. Today, he is gone. And in Syria, I have no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change can’t be reversed, and that human dignity can’t be denied.

How this incredible transformation will end remains uncertain. But we have a huge stake in the outcome. And while it is ultimately up to the people of the region to decide their fate, we will advocate for those values that have served our own country so well. We will stand against violence and intimidation. We will stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings – men and women; Christians, Muslims, and Jews. We will support policies that lead to strong and stable democracies and open markets, because tyranny is no match for liberty.

And we will safeguard America’s own security against those who threaten our citizens, our friends, and our interests. Look at Iran. Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one. The regime is more isolated than ever before; its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions, and as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent. Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better, and if Iran changes course and meets its obligations, it can rejoin the community of nations.

The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe. Our oldest alliances in Europe and Asia are stronger than ever. Our ties to the Americas are deeper. Our iron-clad commitment to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history. We’ve made it clear that America is a Pacific power, and a new beginning in Burma has lit a new hope. From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies; to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back.

Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. That’s not the message we get from leaders around the world, all of whom are eager to work with us. That’s not how people feel from Tokyo to Berlin; from Cape Town to Rio; where opinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years. Yes, the world is changing; no, we can’t control every event. But America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs — and as long as I’m President, I intend to keep it that way.

That’s why, working with our military leaders, I have proposed a new defense strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world, while saving nearly half a trillion dollars in our budget. To stay one step ahead of our adversaries, I have already sent this Congress legislation that will secure our country from the growing danger of cyber-threats.

Above all, our freedom endures because of the men and women in uniform who defend it. As they come home, we must serve them as well as they served us. That includes giving them the care and benefits they have earned — which is why we’ve increased annual VA spending every year I’ve been President. And it means enlisting our veterans in the work of rebuilding our Nation.

With the bipartisan support of this Congress, we are providing new tax credits to companies that hire vets. Michelle and Jill Biden have worked with American businesses to secure a pledge of 135,000 jobs for veterans and their families. And tonight, I’m proposing a Veterans Job Corps that will help our communities hire veterans as cops and firefighters, so that America is as strong as those who defend her.

Which brings me back to where I began. Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one Nation, leaving no one behind.

One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL Team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden. On it are each of their names. Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation Room, when I sat next to Bob Gates – a man who was George Bush’s defense secretary; and Hillary Clinton, a woman who ran against me for president.

All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves. One of the young men involved in the raid later told me that he didn’t deserve credit for the mission. It only succeeded, he said, because every single member of that unit did their job — the pilot who landed the helicopter that spun out of control; the translator who kept others from entering the compound; the troops who separated the women and children from the fight; the SEALs who charged up the stairs. More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other – because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.

So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes. No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we’re joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

Occupy London's information centre

The City of London is an unusual entity, dating back into the Middle Ages. It is a Corporation, and that corporation has won the right, in the High Court, to evict the Occupy protesters who have been camped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. That’s one nice piece of irony.

Occupy has been outside the Cathedral since October 15. The Anglican church has tried to evict them, but finally gave up. Then the city corporation went after them. Occupy London will appeal the decision to the Court of Appeals on Thursday.

The city has agreed to withhold the actual eviction until 4 p.m. Greenwich time on January 27, pending the appeal. A spokesman for the camp said they will not be moved until January 31, at which time they are planning a meeting.

The corporation sued on the grounds that the camp is a nuisance. The appeal, according to their attorney John Cooper, will be based on “whether the injunction and actions taken by the corporation are proportionate in terms of what is happening outside the cathedral, in other words, whether they have gone over the top.” The delay in the eviction order will give Occupy London time to forment “potential exit strategies” if they lose the right to appeal the decision, according to Cooper.

The city claims that it is not arguing the right to peaceful protest, just the right to create a semi-permanent encampment. Stuart Fraser, the corporation’s policy chairman, said, “Lawful protests are a regular part of City life, but tents, equipment and increasingly, quite a lot of mess and nuisance, is not what a highway is for and the public generally is losing out – as evidence before the court made clear.” The encampment has edged off the grounds of the Cathedral and into the street in front of it, as well as into Finsbury Square and an empty building owned by the Swiss bank UBS in Sun Street, east London, and the empty Old Street Magistrates Court.

The camp has been a source of dispute between the city and the Cathedral. Initially, the Cathedral closed its doors because of the camp. But after the Cathedral reopened, dean Rt. Rev. Graeme Knowles and canon Dr. Giles Fraser resigned to protest the city demanding the protesters clear the area. Dr. Fraser commented on the court decision, saying “The voice of protest needs continually to be heard. The church must not be seen to side with the 1% and against the 99%.” The Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Richard Chartres, added, “The protest has brought a number of vital themes to prominence. These are themes that the St. Paul’s Institute remains committed to exploring and, now through London Connection, we want to ensure they continue to have a voice.”

Losing the St. Paul’s site would not damage the movement too much. It would simply remove the most visible Occupy site.

In support of SOPA and PIPA protests, we are providing no links to this story.  Original story material came from BBC and various British newspapers, including the Guardian and the London Times.

U. S. Incarceration rates, 1920 - 2006

During the Monday night Republican candidate debate (was it number 8 or number 23?) the issue of voting rights for convicted felons came up. They are running out of things to ask the candidates. Next time, look for a question about boxers versus briefs now that Bachmann is out.

Anyway, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney were being asked about their opposing positions on this. Santorum favors allowing ex-convicts to reclaim their right to vote, while Romney, after a rather long lead-in, said he opposes it.

So, I have a question. Why shouldn’t someone have his/her voting privileges restored once he/she has paid his/her “debt to society” and completed his/her sentence? Sorry about how awkward that sentence is. I’m old-school feminist and like gender neutral statements.

During a Vermont legislative debate over regulations for day care homes, I raised the fact with our legislators that there were laws on our state’s books that are no longer crimes…like providing an abortion. Laws change. Sometimes, what was once a felony becomes decriminalized. Sometimes, what was once a misdemeanor becomes a felony because some idiot decides that using an illegal drug should carry the same long sentence that selling it does. What happens when a law changes? Is everyone who was convicted of a crime that is no longer a crime get an automatic clean slate? Is their record expunged? And what about those who were slapped on the wrist for what is now a ten-year sentence? Should they be rounded up and incarcerated?

Do you remember the TV series Northern Exposure? There was an episode about John Corbett’s character Chris not being able to vote because of a felony conviction. It was a quiet, beautiful argument for ending the practice of barring ex-convicts from the polls.

I’m not even sure we should be denying the right to vote while in prison. Why do we do that? Is it part of the idea that we should be taking all rights away from someone who has committed any crime? We’ve already got them in prison. We’ve taken away their freedom to move about, their freedom to choose their roommates and their meals, their freedom to choose when they will get up and when they will sleep. Why do we also remove their right to vote? Is the purpose to dehumanize them by in effect taking away their citizenship? And isn’t dehumanizing a prisoner counter-productive to rehabilitation?

I think the issue of restoring voting rights goes to the heart of what we consider a member of society. When we deny a person the right to vote, we tell that person that he or she isn’t worthy of being part of our society. And if they are not worthy of our society, why should he or she care about our society? It’s sort of that simple to me. We tell our children that they are adults and have responsibilities as adults when they are old enough to vote. If we want a person to care enough to be a useful member of society, the first place we can tell them that is by restoring the right to vote, or maybe by not taking it away from them in the first place. Over 5 million American adults are denied the right to vote because of a past conviction, while over 7 million people are still in the system – in prison, on probation or on parole. That’s an awful lot of disenfranchised voters.

Related articles

• Felon disenfranchisement gets brief spotlight in latest GOP debate (sentencing.typepad.com)
• Santorum and Romney Square Off On Felon Disenfranchisement (unprison.com)
• On MLK Day, Santorum Criticizes Romney For Undermining Voting Rights (thinkprogress.org)
• Rick Santorum Blasts Mitt Romney Over Voting Rights (huffingtonpost.com)
• Duluth Jails Detroit: Man Sentences To 15-Months For Voting As Convicted Felon (jonathanturley.org)

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg of the United Kingdom

The modern state of Israel has had one thing going for it for over 60 years – sympathy. Jews were the victims of the Holocaust, give them the Holy Land! Israelis are targets of terrorism, protect them! Victimhood has worked well for Israel. It has allowed Israel to refuse IAEA inspections and build up the best military in the region. It has allowed Israel to pretty much do anything it wants without condemnation from the Western nations that created it out of their own guilt.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas understood that, and decided that sympathy can work against Israel. He has no control over the Gaza and Hamas, but he has managed for the most part to convince the people of the West Bank to avoid terrorist acts and become what the Israelis have always been – the victims. He hasn’t always been successful. The settler murders last spring and an incident where rocks hurled at a settler’s car resulted in him crashing it and killing himself and his son worked against Abbas’ grand strategy. But the Israelis have been very accommodating to him. They have provided the Palestinians with firebombed mosques, unprovoked attacks on Palestinians, destruction of Palestinian farms and homes that have outweighed, in the minds of Israel’s supporters, any acts committed by limited numbers of Palestinians.

This past weekend, Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg condemned the Israeli settlements in the West Bank as acts of “deliberate vandalism” intended to thwart efforts to create a Palestinian state on land that was ceded to the Palestinian people by Jordan. The Israelis are insisting that their people in their settlements must be part of Israel, but the way they have placed the settlements would create a Palestinian state that just looks like so much Swiss cheese – totally unviable as a nation, too broken up for control and lacking some of the best arable land and usable water.

President Obama angered many by saying that the negotiations for a Palestinian state must start with the pre-1967 borders and involve “land swaps” to make the Palestinian state contiguous. That view is held by most Western nations. The Palestinian state cannot contain pockets of Israelis, especially now that the Israelis are the ones committing the acts of terrorism.

Even Hamas in the Gaza seems to be learning this whole sympathy thing. They lobbed one dud shell into the empty desert and Israel responded by shelling a village soccer field and killing a child. The Israelis responded to every act by Hamas with “overwhelming force,” until it began to look like the Israelis were using a bazooka to kill a fly.

Abbas is on a world tour of sorts, building support for the Palestinians’ position in new talks. Negotiations began January 3 to set the parameters for restarting talks about a two-state solution. The settlements are the reason Abbas suspended talks 15 months ago. All parties to the talks have agreed in principle to the idea of a two-state solution. What is at issue is the amount of land the Palestinians will get. The Palestinians control 17% of the land, the Israelis are occupying under nominal Palestinian administration 24% and the Israelis control 59%. The total area is 2,177.6 square miles, smaller than the state of Delaware. There are 1.6 million Palestinians and 300,000 Israelis in the West Bank. That’s about 100,000 fewer people than the state of New Mexico. But to be more accurate, try picturing squeezing the population of Idaho into Indianapolis, which has a population of 820,000.

Israel insists that the two-state talks must proceed without preconditions like stopping the building the new settlements. The Palestinians say the settlements must stop because each new settlement changes the map of the final solution. Clegg supports the idea that the settlements are halting the talks, telling reporters “Once you place physical facts on the ground which make it impossible to deliver what everyone has for years agreed is the ultimate destination, then you do immense damage. It’s an act of deliberate vandalism to the basic premise upon which negotiations have taken place for years and that is why we have expressed our concerns as a government in increasingly forceful terms.”

Britain supported a United Nations condemnation of the settlements, but the United States vetoed it, saying that international condemnations were counter-productive.

Abbas, who is also scheduled to visit Berlin and Moscow, was pleased with Clegg’s remarks, telling the press conference that “This is exactly what we had wanted to hear officially from the government of the United Kingdom.”

Last week, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in a parliamentary briefing, said that “They [the Palestinians] are preparing a groundwork of excuses to shift responsibility for the talk’s’ failure to Israel.” They don’t have to. The Israelis have done a wonderful job of doing that themselves. All Abbas has to do is keep a lid on Palestinian response to Israeli acts and keep pointing out the basic unfairness of the situation in the West Bank. So far, it’s a strategy that is working very well.

Related articles

• Israel Hints At How Borders Would Be Drawn (lezgetreal.com)
• Israeli PM: Palestinians Not Interested in Talks (abcnews.go.com)
• UK’s Clegg Says Israeli Settlements ‘Vandalism’ (abcnews.go.com)
• Israeli, Palestinian negotiators meet for third time (jta.org)
• Netanyahu: I’m ready to get into my car and go to Ramallah for talks – Haaretz (haaretz.com)
• Israel criticises Clegg comments (bbc.co.uk)

The Valley of the Kings

It’s not a king’s tomb, nor even a queen’s. It doesn’t belong to any member of any royal family. It’s not even very old, by Egyptian timelines. It appears to be a recycled tomb. All of that makes the newly found KV64 a unique find.

Nahmes Bastet lived during the 22^nd Dynasty, during which Libyans ruled Egypt from 950 B.C.E. to 720 B.C.E. Luxor, where the Valley of the Kings is located, existed outside the kingdom of Egypt during this period. For reference, King Tut was 1361-1352 B.C.E. and Ramses II the Great was 1304-1237 B.C.E.

Nahmes’ tomb was found by accident, according to the press release from Elena Pauline-Grothe, Swiss director for excavation at the Valley of the Kings for Switzerland’s University of Basel. “We were not looking for new tombs. It was close to another tomb that was discovered 100 years ago.” The tomb was built about 400 years before Nahmes’ death, according to the tomb drawings and artifacts inside the tomb. Reusing tombs is not too unusual in the Valley of the Kings, in fact there is evidence that many tombs originally thought to be robbed in antiquity were actually emptied intentionally and their mummies moved to prevent them being damaged by robbers. Some tombs are warrens of burial chambers for generations of relatives of the primary inhabitant. But what makes Nahmes’ tomb so unique is the fact that she was a court singer, not a member of the court.

Mansour Boraiq, of the Ministry of Antiquities office in Luxor, said that it is the only tomb of a woman not related to a member of a royal family every found in the Valley of the Kings. Nehmes was the daughter of a high priest, and performed at Karnak Temple. Like most tombs, hers contains the story of her life in its wall paintings, and because it is 22^nd Dynasty, it is relatively easy to read the hieroglyphics. Boraiq said they expect to find an intact mummy when they open her coffin later this week.

Nehmes’ name indicates that she was dedicated to the God Bastet, the cat-like god, and her father may have belonged to a Bastet temple group.

Tombs in the Valley of the Kings are numbered according to when they were found, not in the order in which they were built. Nehmes’ tomb will officially be known as KV64 – King’s Valley tomb number 64. The modern city of Luxor is at the site of the ancient city of Thebes (as in “THEBES, city of kings, home of the High Priest Imhotep, birthplace of Anck Su Namun…”) It is second only to the Pyramids of Giza as Egypt’s greatest tourist attraction. Any new tomb, no matter how obscure, only adds to the allure of the site. Limited excavations continue at the Valley for two reasons. One is the possibility that someone will find another tomb to rival Tut’s, probably by falling through a hole, and the other is that some larger tombs have never been fully excavated because it was unknown when first found that they had side tunnels which had filled with silt and rubble over the centuries.

The presence of a commoner’s tomb in the Valley of Kings has doubtlessly excited Dr. Zahi Hawass whose focus for the past couple of decades has been the villages and graves of ordinary people.  It raises the possibility that there are many more small tombs in the Valley built for court or temple dignitaries. 

It will probably be at least a year before one of the major museums mounts an exhibit of the artifacts from KV64. Modern techniques will make it possible to fully examine Nehmes without disturbing her wrappings and gather evidence about her life and death.

Related articles

• Female singer’s 1,100-year-old tomb unearthed in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings (mirror.co.uk)
• Exclusive: Egyptian researchers discover 1,100 year old mask of female singer in Valley of the Kings Tomb (bazaardaily.com)
• Rare tomb of woman found in Egypt Valley of Kings (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Friday rotest sites in Syria

The longer the Libyan revolution went on, the crazier we thought Moammar Qaddafi was. His constant insistence that his people loved him edged on psychotic. But Bashar al-Assad is making Qaddafi look sane and reasonable.

Just how crazy does one have to be to sign a ceasefire agreement with the Arab League, and then break every provision of it while the monitors are in the country? How on earth does one think he can get away with gathering up a group of foreign journalists and then lobbing shells at them, while the monitors are just around the corner? Al-Assad isn’t even trying to keep secret his troops and tanks attacking a city? He’s taunting the monitors, telling the Arab League that they have no power over him and he will continue to kill “his” people at will.

On Thursday, Turkey reported that a cargo ship called The Chariot, flying the St. Vincent and Grenadines flag, and owned by the Russian company Westberg, Ltd., had been given harbor in Cyprus during a storm. The Cypriot authorities had searched the vessel and discovered it was carrying arms intended for Syria, manifested by a Russian company called Rosoboronexport. The ship was told that there was an embargo on arms deliveries to Syria, and the crew agreed to bypass that portion of their schedule and go directly to Turkey. Instead, they docked at the Syrian port of Tartous.

The children's protest in Zabadani

On Friday, the Syrians attacked the city of Zabadani, near the Lebanese border, initially killing 12 civilians, including three children. The Free Syrian Army, a group of defectors from the Syrian Army, have a major presence in Zabadani. Reports of the attack reached activists in Jordan before communications were cut off, shortly after photos were transmitted of children rallying against al-Assad. The neighboring town of Madaya was also attacked. Heavy fighting continued in Homs, the site of the attack on foreign journalists which killed Frenchman Gilles Jacquier.

Al-Assad’s support in Damascus and Aleppo has disintegrated. There were demonstrations in both cities on Friday, as well as in Deir-al-Zour, Hama and Idlib. With almost 200 Arab League monitors in-country, the regime is continuing its violent repression of protests that it calls an invasion by foreign-backed terrorists.

The head of the Arab League, Nabil al-Arabi, said on Friday, “I fear a civil war and the events that we see and hear about now could lead to a civil war.”

January 11, "impromptu" al-Assad rally in Damascus

In what was allegedly an unscheduled, impromptu appearance by al-Assad on the streets of Damascus. One government man “escorting” foreign journalists said “…he just decided to stop to talk on the square because he’s that kind of person. He lives among the people. You can often see him in a local shop buying sweets for his children.” He’s so comfortable among “the people” that he’s only made four public appearances in the past nine months, and he made certain that his wife and children were seen in public this week to squash rumors he had sent them to her family in Acton, Great Britain.

But in his extemporaneous speech, al-Assad went beyond the norm of blaming foreign-backed terrorists to blame the United States and the Arab nation of Qatar for the uprising. Qatar has now suggested that the monitors be removed, in part because the monitors’ vehicles have been attacked, supposedly by ordinary Syrians who see them as “interfering” in Syrian affairs. That kind of flies in the face of the fact that it was the people of the dissident towns and cities who asked for monitors in the first place and those town are where the attacks are taking place.

Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa-al-Thani is fed up with the double-talk, the defiance and the lunacy. On Friday, he told CBS News for broadcast on Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes that “For such a situation, to stop the killing, some troops should go to stop the killing.” He is the first Arab leader to suggest that the Arab League might consider using troops to take down the al-Assad regime. It is a warning that al-Assad should take seriously. This time, the Arab League won’t bother with the United Nations and NATO, they will simply act on their own. They saw during the Libyan operation that involving nations outside the Arab League is a course of action that can be used to reinforce rogue regimes and recruit terrorists. If they go in on their own, the action will have a credibility within the Muslim world that a United Nations or NATO operation does not have.

Syria isn’t nearing a civil war. Syria is in a civil war. And the longer Bashar al-Assad plays these stupid games with the Arab League, the closer he comes to being violently overthrown by them.

Related articles

• Qatar emir suggests sending Arab troops to Syria (vancouversun.com)
• Arab League Boss: I Fear a Civil War in Syria (newser.com)
• SAC Urges the Arab League to Take a Strong Stance, Stop Watching the Syrian Regime’s Crimes (prweb.com)
• Assad mocks Arab League, vows to restore order in Syria (macleans.ca)
• Syrian attack stutters, more Arab monitors ready – Reuters (reuters.com)
• Syria heading for civil war, Arab League claims (telegraph.co.uk)
• Qatar advocates Syria intervention (laaska.wordpress.com)
• No incentive for outside military intervention in Syria: League chief … – Al-Arabiya (english.alarabiya.net)
• ‘I was threatened with death for doing my job’, says Arab League observer to Syria (telegraph.co.uk)

The U.S.S. New Orleans

One of the big buzzes on the news shows and internet Friday is video of three Iranian Republican Guard ships, small but heavily armed, speeding around the USS New Orelans, an amphibious transport ship, and the U. S. Coast Guard cutter Adak. Much is being made of the threats that the Iranian government has been making about　the Straits of Hormuz.

The intent is to provoke a response from one of our vessels. Then the Iranians can claim that the big bad Americans attacked them. The commanders of our vessels know this and have been very careful not to respond. Pentagon spokeswoman Captain Jane Campbell, said that “This interaction between U. S. naval vessels and the Iranian vessels is commonplace. There is nothing in these that shows any kind of hostile intent.”

The videos were released at the request of news agencies, though the Pentagon has not said which agencies. The release at this time would tend to reinforce the Republican hawks calls for an invasion or bombing of Iran.

We are at this time swapping out ships at Bahrain. A new aircraft carrier has arrived, and the USS John C. Stennis will be departing shortly. This is a routine rotation. There are also 15,000 additional troops in Kuwait, who were moved there from Iraq and are finishing out their deployment before coming home. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the press that this increase in troops is not permanent.

The United States and the European Union have both threatened greater levels of sanction against Iran over their continuing development of nuclear material. The next level would probably halt Iranian oil exports and collapse their economy. As part of the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress authorized sanctions on any business that has any interaction with the Iranian Central Bank, but there is a provision that allows the President to withhold action in the interests of national security. Iran has been conducting exercises in the Strait of Hormuz to prove that they could live up to their threat to close the Strait, and block the transport of 40% of the world’s oil, if the new sanctions are imposed. The oil that would be most impacted by closure of the Strait would be that shipped from the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia has the ability to bypass the Persian Gulf and ship through the Red Sea instead.

Related articles

• US, Iranian ships involved in incidents in Strait of Hormuz (foxnews.com)
• Official: U.S. vessels harassed by high-speed Iranian boats (cnn.com)
• US: Encounter with Iran ship not hostile (worldnews.msnbc.msn.com)
• US Navy: Iran Fishing Boat Rescued From Suspected Pirates (huffingtonpost.com)
• 2 US-Iran ship encounters last week in Gulf (sfgate.com)
• Iran: a quickly evolving geopolitical imbroglio – part IV (irannewpearlharbour.wordpress.com)

Trachea in green

Christopher Lyles of Abingdon, Maryland, was dying. His tracheal cancer was inoperable and seven rounds of chemo and 33 radiation treatments had failed to clear him of the cancer, which extended below his thyroid gland and vocal chords. Then, he read about a stem-cell created trachea that Swedish surgeons had transplanted into a patient, and he contacted Dr. Paolo Macchiarini at the Karolijnksa Institute in Stockholm.

Macchiarini’s team removed bone marrow from Lyles, extracted the stem cells from it, and forced the stem cells to replicate rapidly. Then, they coated a donor trachea, which is mostly cartilage, and “grew” a new trachea that, because it was created with Lyles’ own stem cells, would not be rejected as foreign tissue. A replacement trachea requires two different types of stem cell growths to replicate the two types of tissue in a trachea.

The new trachea was transplanted in November in a 12 hour procedure. Lyles developed pneumonia in both lungs, which delayed his recovery, but he is now breathing and eating and speaking on his own, and has returned to the United States.

The “experimental” surgery is not covered by medical insurance. It costs between $300,000 and $600,000. The Lyles family was asked to make at least a $300,000 donation to the Help Hope Live organization to help others who are uninsured receive transplants. Macchiarini and his team did their first trachea transplant in 2008 on a tuberculosis victim. In 2010, they started working with victims of tracheal cancer.

If you want to cure multiple sclerosis, go to England. If you want to cure congestive heart disease, go to Thailand. If you want a new trachea, go to Sweden. Just don’t try to get any of these life saving procedures in America. We are so far behind the curve on stem cell therapies, we are in the medical dark ages. The Thai and Swedish therapies have used adult stem cells gathered from the patients from the very beginning, never using embryonic cells. The MS treatments began with embryonic cells. And don’t expect insurance to pay for these therapies, because they are “experimental” even though the MS treatment has been used for over ten years and the congestive heart treatment for over six.

The United States has the most expensive health care system in the world, at well over $7,000 per capita, with Americans paying almost twice as much as the next most expensive country in the world. We rank 37^th in health care delivery, or dead last against the top six industrialized nations in the world, take you pick of bad reviews. Universal health care would improve our ranking, since all other industrialized nations have that, but even the Affordable Care Act won’t create that.

Related articles

• Synthetic windpipe successfully transplanted using stem cells (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• World Stem Cell Markets Analyzed in New Report Published at MarketPublishers.com (prweb.com)
• Scottsdale Dentist Now Offering Patients the Option to Bank Their Dental Stem Cells (prweb.com)
• Stem Cell Cure For Osteoarthritis (lezgetreal.com)
• Cancer Patient Receives a Man-Made Windpipe (healthland.time.com)
• Stem Cells in Ophthalmology Update 14: Current Stem Cell Clinical Trials (irvaronsjournal.blogspot.com)

Every President since Jimmy Carter has promised to “streamline” the bureaucracy, cut the paperwork and red tape, make the government more responsive more quickly. Each and every one of them – Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush have made that promise. So far, the closest we have come is a paper reduction program overseen by Vice-President Al Gore, which was actually pretty easy to accomplish as the government moved into the computer age. The computers became a whole other issue.

So, now President Obama wants to eliminate the overlap in departments that deal with small businesses. Great idea. It goes along with his request of all departments to examine regulations and eliminate overlaps and outdated, useless ones. It is claimed that the consolidation with eliminate 1,000 Federal jobs and save $3 billion over ten years. Not bad, since the Republicans want to cut around $4 billion from the budget over the next ten years. It all sounds like a win-win for everyone, as long as those thousand jobs are eliminated by attrition, as people retire, and not by laying them all off.

So, what could possibly go wrong? Everything, starting with the fact that the right wing has gone around the bend over the idea. If this idea had come out of a Republican, as it did three times in the past 30 years, they would be cheering in the streets. But it has come out of the President-from-Hell, the man they have smeared, slandered, libeled, defamed, lied about, and blocked at every turn. And the President needs Congressional approval to restructure departments that were established by Congress and whose jobs were defined by Congress with laws. The last thing the Republicans want is to give President Obama something positive to point at during the next ten months. Some have even claimed that this proposal is part of Obama’s plan to grab unlimited power so that he can create a communist dictatorship. I’m not kidding. These are the same people who say that Obama has “overseen the greatest expansion of government in our history.” They don’t have a single thing to support that idea, but that’s what they believe.

IF the President managed to get approval for this, the next hurdle is getting it done. Federal agencies, hell, any agency, is extremely jealous of their territory. All those jokes and plot lines on TV cop shows about pissing contests over law enforcement jurisdiction are not jokes. They reflect the truth. The people who are working in the departments and portions of departments that would be effected are going to make this a very hard process. They will insist “you can’t do that” and “that won’t work” until the people trying to do this will back down and give in.

Then there is the matter of who designs this new super-agency. The folks who did Homeland Security were the kind of corporate minds that write flow charts, the kind who either never worked the line or have forgotten how to do the nuts and bolts of what is done on the line. Flow charts are very pretty graphics that show nothing important. The restructuring needs to be done by the people who actually do the work. Almost all of us have worked for some boss who made things more complicated, or with equipment that some genius designed that made our work harder, or in a building that was designed so badly it made work instead of improving it.

Once upon almost 40 years ago, there was a school system in upstate New York that let the teachers work out the best way to do their jobs. The teachers in each grade got together one week before school started and created a master lesson plan that was based on the reading textbooks. They matched the material in the reading lesson with the best lesson in the spelling book and the best one in the grammar book, so the three reinforced each other. It meant jumping from chapter 5 in reading to chapter 12 in spelling to chapter 2 in grammar, but the three worked together instead of splitting up things like adverb usage. Giving the teachers the power to create the best way to teach the material had very positive results in the school’s grades, and that was what mattered. That kind of involvement of the people who actually do the work is far better than having those decisions made by someone on the outside who doesn’t understand what would work best.

If President Obama can approach this re-organization from a bottom-up perspective instead of bringing in some “expert” to do it, this is truly a great idea. If he brings in an outsider, it will be no better than the creation of Homeland Security…a giant bureaucratic mess that costs more than what the splintered agencies cost us now.

Related articles

• GOP Warms To Obama’s Plan To Trim And Merge (huffingtonpost.com)
• Obama Seeks Greater Power To Shrink The Federal Government (huffingtonpost.com)
• Obama seeks power to merge government agencies (mercurynews.com)
• Department Consolidation: Obama’s Latest Hopeless Good Government Project (swampland.time.com)
• Obama to Merge 6 Government Agencies, Cut 2,000 Employees (usnews.com)
• The President’s Agency Consolidation Proposal (volokh.com)
• Obama seeks power to shrink government (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

DeForest Kelley and one type of tricorder

The official description is “a sensing, computing and data communications device” for medical diagnosis. It consists of a hand-held reader a little larger than a paperback book and a separate device that originally was made out of a salt shaker. No shit, most of the little stuff on the original Star Trek was “created” with a variety of salt and pepper shakers. Made things tricky when they finally needed salt and pepper shakers.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, a competition was announced. Ten million dollars to the person who builds a working medical tricorder, a la Star Trek. The specs say it has to weigh less than five pounds, which is really way heavier than Bones’ tricorder.

Did I ever mention I adore Karl Urban? DeForest Kelley’s not-quite-Atlanta accent was really hard to recreate, but he nailed it perfectly.

There are a variety of small devices that are used in medical diagnosis, but none that combines all the scans that the tricorder did, and does them semi-remotely. The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize is for a device that can read “key health metrics” and diagnosis “a set of 15 diseases.” The prize organizers hope they will inspire someone to “make 23^rd century science fiction a 21^st century reality.” Peter Diamandis, the X Prize Foundation chairman, said “I’m probably the first guy who’s here in Vegas who would be happy to lost $10 million. The tricorder that was used by Spock and Bones inspires a vision of what healthcare will be like in the future. It will be wireless, mobile and minimally- or non-invasive. It may use digital imaging, it may be sequencing your DNA on the spot to tell you if you are allergic to something you just ate.”

A while ago, the Canadian Army had some success building a Star Trek diagnostic bed. It wasn’t as broad-spectrum as the one on the show, but it was a great start. Star Trek, like all science fiction, had the problem of staying ahead of real science. In one episode of Next Generation, Worf sustained a spinal injury and the doctor who treated him was experimenting with a procedure to rebuild his spine. We are about 250 years ahead of the curve on that one.

There has been some success with the X Prizes in the past. Much of the technology used for the Ansari X Prize, a reusable spacecraft, in 2004, was utilized by Virgin Galactic. The tricorder is a bit more complicated than figuring out how to build a spaceship with private funds instead of the nearly unlimited funds of a government. The important thing that Diamandis wants to do is inspire. Whatever comes out of the research could impact other aspects of medical diagnostics.

Mr. Diamandis said that there is one thing about the original Star Trek tricorder that is not in the prize specs. “We don’t have a requirement that it makes the same noise.”

Related articles

• CES 2012: Invent a real Star Trek tricorder, win $10m (techradar.com)
• $10m prize for ‘Star Trek’ gadget (bbc.co.uk)
• Star Trek tricorder inspires new X Prize contest (cbc.ca)
• Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize Offers $10M for Real Tricorder (geeky-gadgets.com)
• Wanted: Star Trek Tricorder (ubergizmo.com)
• CosmicLog: Plans set for ‘Tricorder’ contest (cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com)
• Making the Science Fiction-Inspired Star Trek Tricorder a Reality (bigthink.com)
• Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize looks for Star Trek health tech now (pocket-lint.com)
• $10 Million X Prize Aims to Realize ‘Star Trek’ Medical Tricorder (space.com)

Fidel and Raul Castro

When the Soviet Union’s communist government collapsed, chaos ensued. The government owned everything. They wrote all the paychecks, everyone from farm workers to party leaders. Without the government, no one was getting paid. It was months before they started sorting the mess out. In that time, the fastest entrepreneurs in the world stepped in – organized crime. Over time, things became so bad that the Russian people longed for stability and order, so they elected Vladimir Putin and have allowed him to reinstate much of what was familiar, like secret police and arresting political opponents. Putin brought some order to the country, but he also restored dictatorship.

The manner in which the Soviet Union fell apart ended up being a priceless lesson for the remaining communist countries. China has encouraged private ownership of businesses and is slowly educating the people on voting in multi-party elections. So far, these elections have been limited to town councils in the boondocks, but it is a beginning.

Now, Cuba has begun the process. They started by allowing foreign companies to open hotels for the tourist industry. Now, they are letting private citizens to own cafes and restaurants, cafeterias and snack shops. The experiment is being held in the provincial capital of Holguin, on the eastern end of the island.about twenty miles inland from the north coast. The city contained 211 state-owned eateries, and Osvaldo Santos Diaz, head of food services for the province, told the press that they would be moving “to other forms of management” in the next year.

The experiment is not being publicized nationally, thereby avoiding any pressure to start doing the same thing everywhere. There will be small steps like this, a controlled transition to a free market economy and private ownership. This could take a couple of decades, but it will be much better than what happened in the Soviet Union.

Among the businesses that have already transitioned are barbershops, beauty parlors and small service businesses like watch and appliance repair and carpentry shops. These have been leased to the employees. None of this has been national announced. The change-over in the food service shops will be done the same way – a lease agreement until the business can become self-sufficient. In a way, the move to privatize the cafes and restaurants is in response to thousands of home-based cafeterias that have opened around the country. The government would rather have businesses that are in the open and pay taxes instead of this underground economy that is developing.

The big incentive for the government is the idea of taking all the businesses in Cuba and convert them from something subsidized and owned by the government into something that creates tax revenue.

The Cuba before Castro was very corrupt and home to many criminals, both local and American. Fidel Castro won the support of the people by promising to end the corruption and crime. Now, his brother and heir Raul Castro will begin the process of returning the country to a free economy while controlling corruption and criminal influence. European countries are already participating in Cuba’s transition. Cuba is ready for this, and the United States should be ready to ease the embargo on the country in the near future. That means convincing our right wing that communism really is on its deathbed and their obsession with the “communist/socialist conspiracy” they claim is running the Democratic Party runs so counter to the claim that it was their Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush who killed communism.

Assistant Attorney General Virginia Seitz

The Office of Legal Counsel, those guys at the Justice Department who decide if the President is acting in a Constitutional manner, have issued their opinion about the so-called recess appointments the President has been making. They are Constitutionally legal.

Among the almost 300 bills that the Senate Republicans filibustered were dozens of appointments for everything from judges to mid-level administrators in Executive Branch departments. The filibusters have created a crisis in the Federal Judiciary because there are not enough judges to hear cases in a timely manner. In the past year, they have blocked any attempts by the President to make appointments necessary to finally implement the Dodd-Frank financial services law. The President can make appointments whenever the Congress is in recess, so prevent that, the Republicans decided to spend the Christmas recess holding pro-forma sessions three days a week. A pro-forma session consists of a Republican sitting in the big chair, calling the session to order and then adjourning it. The thing is, the Republicans are not in control of the Senate, at least that’s the finding of the Justice Department.

The opinion, authored by Virginia Seitz, Assistant Attorney General, specifically says, “We conclude that while Congress can prevent the president from making any recess appointments by remaining continuously in session and available to receive and act on nominations, it cannot do so by conducting pro-forma sessions during a recess….The Senate as a body does not uniformly appear to consider its recess broken by pre-set pro forma sessions.” The half-dozen Senators who are showing up for these sessions are Republicans who live close to Washington. The leader of the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, didn’t call for these sessions and they do not constitute a quorum for votes on appointments.

The U. S. Chamber of Commerce has been considering suing to block the appointment of Richard Cordray to the new consumer protection division created by Dodd-Frank. They are basing their possible suit on the idea that anyone who would be subject to the rules created by Cordray can challenge his appointment.

The written opinion was issued January 6, two days after the appointments, though it was orally relayed to the President before the appointments. The Congress, both chambers, are scheduled to return to Washington on January 23^rd.

Related articles

• DOJ: President Obama’s Recess Appointments Were Legal (legaltimes.typepad.com)
• Memo Defends Obama on Recess Appointments – New York Times (nytimes.com)
• DOJ approved recess appointments (politico.com)
• Lyle Denniston: Constitution Check: Can the Senate Block the President’s Appointment Powers? (huffingtonpost.com)
• OLC Opinion on Pro Forma Sessions and Recess Appointments Published (volokh.com)
• Noted fan of using pro forma Senate sessions to block recess appointments suddenly not such a fan (hotair.com)

James O'Keefe and one of his identity thieves

Once again, to prove fraud exists, James O’Keefe solicited acts of fraud. This time, however, he and his co-conspirators at Project Veritas may be facing serious Federal and state charges.

The right wing uses the term “voter fraud” to cover people who vote using someone else’s identity, vote count frauds, voting machine tampering and voter registration fraud. Decades of investigations at the state and federal level have proven that voter registration fraud happens when people are paid to register voters. Voting machine tampering has been proven to be possible, though no proof of such tampering has ever emerged, in part because many states have laws prohibiting the use of video or cell phone cameras inside the polling place, and vote count frauds have been proven in multiple jurisdictions. But the one thing that has never been proven in more than a handful of cases over the past quarter-century is widespread incidents of people voting using other people’s identities. The cases that have been proven have mostly involved convicted felons who are barred from voting, and use a friend’s or relative’s identity to cast a vote. But the right wing and more specifically the Republican party wherever they have a legislative majority, have used the proven cases of voter registration fraud from 2008 to “prove” voter fraud and push laws that require state-certified birth certificates to be registered and photo ID to vote. The Democrats have objected, as have advocacy groups for the elderly, the disabled, minorities and the poor.

To “prove” that voter identity fraud happens, Project Veritas found the names of New Hampshire residents who died in December, too recently for their names to have been stricken from the voter rolls. Then, several recruits went into the polling places and used these names to vote. One was detected on site because he was using the name of a man known to at least one poll worker. He disappeared before the police arrived. No problem, he might have escaped, but the rest of the crew is on video…James O’Keefe’s video, the one he has proudly put on the web and handed over to mentor Andrew Brietbart and Fox News as his “evidence” of voter fraud.

Where to start, where to start….

Talking Points Memo thinks that James O’Keefe will, once again, walk away from this. That opinion is based on the way O’Keefe operates. People come to him with ideas, such as filing fraudulent applications for Medicaid, and he sort of approves of the idea, but never in such a way that it appears he’s solicited the action. Plausible deniability at its best. But, O’Keefe had foreknowledge of this plan and was the one who distributed the videos. He may not be guilty of actually committing the fraud, or of soliciting the fraud, but it should be possible to get him on multiple charges of conspiracy at commit fraud. Then, there are these little provisions in New Hampshire law about knowing that voter fraud has been committed and not reporting it to law enforcement or the town or state election boards. That’s called a “gotcha.”

The rest of the crew, well, they are on record using false identities to obtain ballots. In fact, the video O’Keefe produced shows the birth and death dates of the people whose identities were stolen. These people are in violation of both state and federal election laws. Period. The Justice Department can let the State of New Hampshire have at them first, and then prosecute them just as they finish up their state sentences.

Of course, a good prosecutor is going to go for a deal in order to get O’Keefe. This man has been getting away with sending others in to commit frauds and commit crimes just so that he can “prove” these frauds and crimes happen. Others have and are continuing to pay for his phony investigative journalism. The entire ACORN assistance network was shut down because O’Keefe’s video “proved” misconduct on the part of ACORN workers and he has “proven” fraud in state agencies. At least that’s what Brietbart and Fox have insisted. Actually, all his videos proved was that his people filed fraudulent applications. No one proved that those applications were processed or approved. If some guy walked into your office and wanted help housing a dozen or more underage girls being smuggled into the country, would you help him? Or, would you take down all his information and the moment he walked out the door, call the proper authorities to go capture him in the act of human smuggling? O’Keefe is being sued in civil court by the man who called the authorities and had his reputation destroyed and his ACORN office shut by O’Keefe, who had no idea his fraud had triggered a border patrol investigation when he presented his video “proof” of ACORN’s illegal activities.

So, this is where we stand in the latest saga of James O’Keefe. He has presented video of his associates falsely obtaining ballots in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. He edited the video. His associates committed identity theft and voter fraud. It appears they did not break any law in using their cameras inside polling places, but they may have broken state laws concerning a zone of privacy for voters. The United States Attorney’s office in New Hampshire is reviewing the videos as are members of the New Hampshire State’s Attoney’s office and their Secretary of State’s office. It is necessary to assemble the charges, and having spent way too much time with the New Hampshire Statutes Annotated this morning, it could take a while to find all the relevant ones.

But one thing is an absolute. Governor John Lynch needs to be convinced that these acts should not go unprosecuted, even if all anyone can prove is a misdemeanor or two. O’Keefe has left a swath of destruction in his wake, trying to make himself into something he isn’t – a real journalist. He thinks he is necessary to the conservative effort to establish a one-party nation. He is a fraud and solicits frauds. He dodged a charge of sexual assault, unlawful imprisonment and harassment involving a woman who wanted to work for him. He pulled too little jail time and too much community service for trying to wiretap a United States Senator’s office. He gets away it over and over. It is time someone had the balls to hit him with a shelf or two of state and federal statute books.

Related articles

• James O’Keefe Allies Try to Commit Felony Voter Fraud (crooksandliars.com)
• Did James O’Keefe Commit Voter Fraud While Investigating Voter Fraud? (alan.com)
• James O’Keefe Commits Voter Fraud to ‘Prove’ Voter Fraud (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• James O’Keefe’s Group Appears To Commit Voter Fraud In Order To Gin Up Hysteria Over Non-Existent Fraud Problem (thinkprogress.org)
• Will James O’Keefe face election fraud charges? (americablog.com)
• Nubby O’Keefe in Trouble for Voter Fraud (hidinginurcloset.wordpress.com)
• New James O’Keefe Hoax Video Purports to Detail Fraudulent Cases of ‘Voter Fraud’ in New Hampshire (bradblog.com)
• BREAKING: James O’Keefe Catches Dead People Voting in New Hampshire – Could Oregon Be Next? (5440fight.com)
• New Hampshire Officials Call For O’Keefe’s Assistants To Be ‘Arrested And Prosecuted’ (hidinginurcloset.wordpress.com)

Seven week ultrasound

The suit to bar the Texas law requiring women who want an abortion to see or hear a description of a sonogram of their fetus has been rejected in the Federal Appeals Court. Writing for the three-judge panel U. S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit, Chief Judge Edith Jones wrote, “The required disclosures of a sonogram, the fetal heartbeat and the their medical descriptions are the epitome of truthful, non-misleading information.” They overturned a lower court’s decision that the ultrasound requirement infringed on the abortion providers’ free speech rights.

The law was enacted in 2011. It allows a woman to refuse to view the ultrasound images, but not to decline to hear what is on the image, unless she has been the victim of rape, incest or fetal abnormality.

The basis of the lawsuit, brought by a coalition of medical providers in June, was that the law forces doctors to be a “mouthpiece” for the state’s anti-abortion message. The First Amendment provides protection against compelled speech. They also argued that the sonogram and fetal heartbeat were not “medically necessary” and therefore the state cannot compel them. The judges wrote that “Only if one assumes…that pregnancy is a condition to be terminated, can one assume that such information about the fetus is medically irrelevant.” Um, isn’t that why the woman is in the abortion clinic – to terminate the pregnancy? This part of the ruling makes no logical sense.

Six states require abortion providers to perform an ultrasound and allow women to see them, but only Texas requires women to hear a description of the image. The law reflects a belief that women seek abortions later in pregnancy than is usually the case. The CDC reports that 88% to 92% of all abortions in America are performed before the 13^th week, when the fetus is 3″ long and weighs an ounce. That’s the length of an index finger and the weight of a slice of white bread. Only 8% to 12% of abortions occur after 13 weeks. One would hope that during the course of the two trials the abortion providers showed the judges what is visible on an ultrasound at, say, six weeks or ten weeks or even thirteen weeks and asked them to verbalize what they were looking at.

The networks don’t necessarily want a carte blanche to have the f-bomb being used every other word, but they do want some consistency. An accident on a live awards show can trigger large fines, but the same word can clear Standards and Practices if it is used in a movie like Saving Private Ryan. The suit, which has been working its way through the system for a while, cites the fines imposed for a shot of a naked lady’s buttocks in an episode of NYPD Blue which aired in that post 10 p.m. timeslot on the East Coast, but at 9 p.m. Central and Mountain time, as well as those awards show slip-ups. The networks have made the argument that the standards are confusing.

The government has countered that the broadcast networks need to be retained as a “safe have” of family-safe programming, though that idea is debatable. The standards may control language and nudity, but there are plenty of conservatives who will argue that programming like Modern Family is not “family safe.”

Advocates of changing the rules have made the point that nearly nine in ten households in America are hooked up to either cable or satellite, where the majority of the programming has no standards and that people have really lost track of whether they are remoting onto cable channels or broadcast anymore. It’s an insulting argument, presuming that people are too dumb to know that traditional broadcast stations are the single digits on the cable channels. The broadcast networks continue to draw in much larger numbers of viewers than the cable channels.

No matter what the FCC tries to do with regulations, it will be too complicated because of the nature of language.

The simple truth about cuss words is the more they are used the less power they have. Words are not intrinsically bad or good. They are whatever we declare them to be, nothing more. The f-bomb began as a legal term, an abbreviation for the reason someone was incarcerated, a notation in the prison records. It stands for “for unlawful carnal knowledge,” and has been around for at least 200 years. It is people who have made it a dirty word, along with any slang word for any bodily part or function. These are not the same as real cursing, which involves blasphemy and the Third Commandment. Offensive words also include any derogatory slang word for an ethnic group or person – a real tricky area since these words are frequently acceptable when used by the people they refer to but not out of the mouth of anyone else. What is offensive to one person can be perfectly acceptable to others. Years ago, I had a student complain to me that another child had used a dirty word. When I asked about it, I discovered that the “offensive” student had been telling the other kids about a horny toad he had captured. And just try teaching Richard III without using the word “bastard.” What is and isn’t offensive can get seriously nutso. As hard as it is with figuring out FCC regulations, try teaching. It’s far worse.

As with all Supreme Court decisions, it will be weeks before we know the results of today’s hearing.

Related articles

• Indecency on TV: Supreme Court reluctant to ease profanity rules (latimes.com)
• Justices appear to lean toward FCC in case over broadcast TV ‘indecency’ (cnn.com)
• Supreme Court Weighs Relevance of Decades-Old Broadcast Decency Rules (nytimes.com)
• Nudity and profanity debated by US Supreme Court – Montreal Gazette (montrealgazette.com)
• Will Supreme Court Bring Porn To Broadcast TV? (forbes.com)
• High court weighs policy against curse words on TV (newsok.com)

Balsams Grand Resort Hotel, Dixville Notch's polling place

At 11:30 p.m., the nine registered voters in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, gathered in the Balsam Grand Resort Hotel for coffee, cookies and doughnuts in advance of casting their ballots in the first primary election.  There are 2 registered Democrats in Dixville Notch, 3 registered Republicans and 4 undeclared, who could vote in either primary.  They voted at midnight, and at 12:04, a.m., the votes had been counted

And the results: Republicans: 2 Jon Huntsman, 2 Mitt Romney, 1 Newt Gingrich, 1 Ron Paul, Democrats: 3 Barack Obama

The important thing here is Dixville Notch just blew its reputation.  They consistently pick the eventual nominee, but with a tie, they may or may not have just annointed the nominee with a caveat.  At least they kept their record on the Democrats’ side.

Meanwhile, further south, in Hart’s Location there are 30 registered voters. This town gets far less press coverage, so there are no information on how many registered voters for each party.  It is also not being covered tonight.  Everyone had a reporter in Dixville Notch, but it is now 12:30 and we do not have results from Hart’s Location.   Sorry, folks.  I really, really need to get to bed.

Hart's Location Town Hall, polling place, 12:20 a.m.

The 9,000 square foot termite house

Last week, the headlines screamed about how Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods’ ex-wife, was cavalierly knocking down a $12 million mansion. The comment streams went nuts. How awful of her, how wasteful, how utterly 1%!!!

The headlines today told a slightly different story. It turns out the mansion was a steal at $12 million, prime beachfront property in North Palm Beach, Florida. Well, that looks like beach in the aerial photos, but it might be a huge golf course sand trap. Would probably have gone for a few million more if it didn’t have a bevy of tenants in it – a massive colony of termites.

Ms. Nordegren could have let the house fall over in a hurricane next summer, if she was fortunate enough to have one take a bead on North Palm Beach, but then she could not have let Habitat for Humanities do a salvage job on whatever was reusable in the buildings.

Since no one who reported this story last week bothered to pick up a phone and get an explanation, thereby exposing Ms. Nordegren to a lot of very hostile criticism, the very least all those breathless reporters could do is apologize. The pond scum who took her apart on the comment streams could do the same.

Related articles

• Elin Nordegren Demolished $12 Million Mansion Due to Termites (celebs.gather.com)
• Why Did Elin Nordegren Demolish Her $12 Million Mansion? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Elin Nordegren Demolishes $12 Million Home In North Palm Beach (now1031.radio.com)
• Elin Nordegren knocks down house (examiner.com)
• Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods’ Ex-Wife, Demolishes $12.3 Million Florida Mansion (newsfeed.time.com)
• Elin Nordegren is still standing but her $12 million North Palm Beach mansion isn’t (onlineupdaters.wordpress.com)

Judge J. Mac Davis (left) administering oath of office to Daniel Vrakas, 2007

With complete disdain for state law, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin filed suit to force the state Government Accountability Board to have human beings check every single one of the over half-million signatures on the recall petitions being collected against him.

Judge J. Mac Davis of Waukesha County was a Republican state senator over 20 years ago. Toward the end of the Bush administration, he was nominated for a Federal judgeship, but the nomination was held up by the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. He very carefully crafted his ruling so that it would not be appealed at the Federal level, leaving it completely within the realm of the state’s laws for recall petition. To make their case, the Republicans managed to dredge up a recall petition from last year that contained the signature “Bugs Bunny.” It was on a Republican petition to recall a Democratic state senator. The GAB does verify the petitions, but according to the rules, if a person being recalled wants to check every single signature, they have to pay for it.

The GAB director, Kevin Kennedy, said that buying a computer program that could scan and verify the signatures would cost the state $94,000. Otherwise, it’s going to take up hours of state employees’ time at taxpayers’ expense.

The recall committee will not back down. If Walker hoped to anger the voters in Wisconsin by forcing this to be paid for by the taxpayer, he has miscalculated. With Walker’s budget cutting $1 billion out of local government funds, pushing this cost onto the state was a mistake. The people of Wisconsin know that he could have paid for the verification with all the money he has had donated for SuperPAC ads. When one is known for personally taking calls from the Koch brothers, costing the state unnecessary money is a dumb move.

Related articles

• Scott Walker Wants To Waste Wisconsin’s Money On Himself (lezgetreal.com)
• Wisconsin’s Recall Law Bent By Walker Supporter (lezgetreal.com)
• United Wisconsin Closing In On Recall Signatures (lezgetreal.com)
• The Gifts Keep Coming In Wisconsin (lezgetreal.com)
• Scott Walker Recall Effort Could Add Up (huffingtonpost.com)
• Scott Walker’s Price Tag (huffingtonpost.com)
• Scott Walker Recall Campaign Gets Ugly As Allegations Fly (huffingtonpost.com)

Saint Anselm College, site of the Lesser Known Candidate Forums

We all know how few people managed to get on the Virginia Republican primary ballot, but how about the number who made the cut for New Hampshire? Think it comes down to President Obama and the six Stooges? Think again.

Vermont’s WCAX-TV’s news director emeritus, Marselis Parsons, gave us those of us who are not C-SPAN addicts the heads-up on this last night, in a trailer for his special report during Monday’s evening news show. Marselis was with WCAX for so long, no one can remember when he wasn’t, until he retired. Now, he files stories that interest him. Once a reporter, always a reporter.

The reason New Hampshire has such a large field is because if you have $1,000 and are a registered party member, you can just sign up. It’s that simple…no signatures to collect, no poll threshold to meet, just pay the money and sign an affidavit. New Hampshire is a semi-open primary. If one is a registered party member, one cannot vote in the other party’s primary, but if one is an independent (40% of us nationally say we are) one can choose which party’s primary one will vote in. In a closed primary, independents cannot vote. In a full-open primary, one can cross party lines.

C-SPAN has been showing the “Lesser-Known Candidates Forums” for these people, who never make the list for the major debates.

There are fourteen candidates on the Democratic Primary Ballot. The candidates are listed alphabetically in a way. The first three candidates are “T” and “W”, then it switches to “C” and goes alphabetically to “S” and you will not believe who is at the top – Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry. Yup, that Randall Terry – the homophobic, anti-choice, take-no-prisoners Randall Terry. The rest of the group consists of Aldous C. Tyler, the “pagan” candidate from Madison Wisconsin; John Wolfe, Jr., the self-described “very progressive” of Chattanooga, Tennessee; Ed Cowan of Moretown, Vermont; Bob Ely of Lake Forest, Illinois; Craig “Tax Freeze” Freis of Lake Elsinore, California; Bob Greene of Mountain View, California; John D. Haywood, who advocates nationalized health, of Durham, North Carolina; Robert B. Jordan, the “drill now, drill everywhere” candidate of Garden Grove, California; Cornelius Edward O’Connor of West Palm Beach, Florida; Edward T. O’Donnell, Jr. of Wilmington, Delaware; Darcy G. Richardson of Jacksonville, Florida; Vermin Supreme of Rockport, Massachusetts, who is a perennial runner as the satirical candidate, and, of course, President Obama. Most of the candidates are further to the left than the President and are running because, on their personal issue, he hasn’t lived up to what they wanted from him. The exception is Terry, who believes that President Obama will go down in history as one of our worst presidents. Between his positions and his opinion of the President, it’s hard to explain why Terry thinks he’s a Democrat.

Richardson and Supreme are men, so this is a skirt-free primary. My view is that serious female candidates aren’t going to waste time, money or political clout on a nowhere candidacy.

The Republican field is even more staggering. There are thirty candidates. Also, listed alphabetically, sort of. The list starts with “S”, then “V” and “W” before hitting Michele Bachmann and continuing alphabetically from there down to Rick Santorum. Yes, Bachmann is still on that ballot, as is Herman Cain. That means there are 22 other candidates, only three of whom are nationally recognized – Gary Johnson, Fred Karger and Buddy Roemer.

The nineteen unknowns are Joe Story of Jacksonville, Florida; Linden Swift of Plainfield, Indiana; James A. Verstermark of Taylor Mountain, Kentucky; Vern Wuensche of Houston, Texas; Bear Betzler of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Timothy Brewer of Dayton, Ohio; Mark Callahan of Eugene, Oregon; Hugh Cort of Birmingham, Alabama; Randy Crow of Kelly, North Carolina; L. John Davis, Jr. of Grand Junction, Colorado; Keith Drummond of Katy, Texas; Stewart J. Greenleaf of Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania; Christopher V. Hill of Prospect, Kentucky; Jeff Lawman of Derry, New Hampshire; Benjamin Linn of Milford, New Hampshire; Andy Martin of Chicago, Illinois, Michael J. Meehan of St. Louis, Missouri; Joe Robinson of Newton, Massachusetts; and Kevin Rubash of Wilmette, Illinois.

The most memorable of the pack is Dr. Cort. He believes that Iran will launch a nuclear attack on America in the new future and warns of an Iran-Venezuela-Mexico pipeline” that the Iranians will use to smuggle a few nukes into the country. Dr. Cort also believes that Iran is hoping to bring about the revelation of a messiah by nuking us. That part is really amusing, since in Islam, Christ is the Messiah and they believe that He will return, preceded by the arrival of the al-Mahdi, a variation on the Christian belief in the Second Coming. The rest of the group reflects the divisions within the Republican party. They range from Tea Partiers to fiscal conservatives who are social moderates.

Several of the other primaries will have equally full ballots. None of the marginal candidates, with the possible exception of Buddy Roemer, believes they have a real chance. They want to have their voices heard and their input in the party platform. There is always that remote possibility. Some states allocate their delegates to the convention, and if enough of these marginal candidates can have delegates assigned to them, they might have leverage at the party level, as in “include my issue in the platform and I’ll give you my delegates.”

Given the size of the field, Mitt Romney’s 38% poll number makes more sense. John Huntsman, who totally bypassed Iowa and concentrated on New Hampshire, is polling in the number two slot.

Related articles

• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Randall Terry Gets Glitter-Bombed By Performance Artist (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Man With Boot On His Head Glitterbombs Anti-Gay Racist Randall Terry (queerty.com)
• Vermin Supreme: When I’m President everyone will get a free pony (dangerousminds.net)
• Republican Candidates Become New Hampshire Tourist Traps (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Most Boring New Hampshire Primary Ever (politicalwire.com)

Pat Buchanan

Conservative commentator and former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan finally went too far with MSNBC. He is one of several conservatives kept on payroll by the network to act as a balance for the mostly liberal show hosts. Former Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele is on staff, and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough has the dawn program.

But Buchanan’s latest book went too far over the edge for even MSNBC to accept. His new book Suicide of a Superpower has chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” Buchanan’s positions have always bordered on white supremacy, railing against affirmative action (which he claimed was responsible for President Obama’s election) and non-white immigration. Buchanan has made no secret of his belief that the United States is going to hell because of our demographic shift from a predominantly male, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant power structure.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin made no excuses for their suspension of Buchanan. The Associated Press quoted Griffin as saying that “Because of the content of the book, I didn’t think it should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC” There has been no decision on the future of Buchanan’s contract.

The activist group Color of Change issued its own statement about the suspension. “ColorOfChange.org welcomes MSNBC’s decision to indefinitely suspend Pat Buchanan. However, it’s time for MSNBC to permanently end their relationship with Pat Buchanan and the hateful, outdated ideas he represents. We appreciate this first step and urge MSNBC to take the important final step to ensure that their brand it no longer associated with Buchanan’s history of passing off white supremacy ideology as mainstream political commentary.”

Buchanan would be a great fit on Fox News now that he could easily be released from his MSNBC contract.

Dick and Liz Cheney

And speaking of Fox….Liz Cheney, hyper-opinionated daughter of our former Vice President, is moving from occasional contributor to paid staff contributor at Fox. She will provide analysis during the primary cycle on several Fox programs, bringing her unique perspective as an administrative insider. She worked at the State Department in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs during the Bush adminsitration and was a foreign policy advisor to Mitt Romney, as well as national co-chair of the 2008 Fred Thompson presidential campaign. Cheney is best known for her unwaivering defense of her father’s opinions about Iraq and Afghanistan.

Related articles

• MSNBC Chief: Not Sure Whether Pat Buchanan Will Be Allowed Back (crooksandliars.com)
• Pat Buchanan out indefinitely at MSNBC (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Pat Buchanan May Be Done At MSNBC: Phil Griffin (huffingtonpost.com)
• Media Decoder Blog: Fox News Hires Liz Cheney as Analyst and Substitute Host (mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Hypocracie Of The Gatekeeper Media: Pat Buchanan Out Indefinitely At MSNBC? (tarpon.wordpress.com)

The Lottery division offered to pay any bank fees that the recipients of the checks may have incurred, has apologized for the error and is sending free scratch-off tickets to the people who got the bad checks. They also need to provide a letter of explanation “To Whom It May Concern.” In situations like this, it is possible for the person whose deposit was bounced to, in turn, bounce a check that they write because notification of the bounced deposit doesn’t reach them in a timely manner. That can lead to some problems with retailers, including ending up on a “manager’s approval” list for future checks. A letter of explanation from the effected “bouncee” would be really appreciated to avoid future embarrassments.

Related articles

• Illinois Lottery apologizes for bounced checks (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Illinois Lottery Winners Get Stiffed When State Checks Don’t Cash (chicago.cbslocal.com)

Baroness Thatcher with P. M. Cameron, 2010

If U. K. Prime Minister David Cameron had his way, Meryl Streep’s new movie would be shelved for years. He doesn’t like the wrapping narrative, where former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is shown suffering from Alzheimer and recalling her years as PM with her late husband. Cameron’s take on the movie is “It is a film more about aging and elements of dementia rather than about an amazing prime minister, and my sort of sense was a great piece of acting, a really staggering piece of acting, but a film I wish they could have made another day.” He would have preferred that it be made after Thatcher, who is 86, was dead and buried.

My problem with The Iron Lady is that Thatcher is reasonably sane during those dementia scenes. Okay, so she’s talking to her dead husband, but she’s not cussing, not hitting people, not spitting her food at people, not walking around shoplifting, not fighting every attempt to help her, not grinning nastily while her aide changes her shitty diaper, not lying on her bed screaming for a long-dead grandmother. Like most portrayals of Alzheimers, her case is shown as being fairly benign.

My mother’s wasn’t. A nurse who took care of my mother thought that it might be able to predict how Alzheimers would effect people if we knew what their childhoods were like, since eventually, they will regress that far. One victim that we knew must have had the happiest childhood in history, judging from how happily she spent her time dressing her dolls, coloring, drawing, cutting out snowflakes, cuddling her stuffies. She didn’t have a bad day from the moment she entered that phase until her death. I’d have given anything for that. My mother spent the last six months of her life trapped in the worst days of her childhood, days of confusion, fear, pain and panic.

Alzheimers is a very difficult disease to explain because it impacts each patient differently. Possibly the only trait most Alzheimers patients share comes near the end of their lives, when the seem to sleep almost constantly. At that point, I think they are either trying to cope with not understanding anything around them or they have retreated into infancy. But too many people only know that Alzheimers robs people of memories, makes them forget the events of yesterday while remembering the events of ten years ago. But, when they begin to understand that they are not suffering from “senior moments” but actually losing memories, they panic, they lash out in anger, they are in pain. Alzheimers is more terrifying that cancer for seniors. Alzheimers means losing who they are.

I had a patient last year who had a massive stroke. She lost most of her memory because of it. One morning, she was crying because she couldn’t remember when her husband died. But, eventually, she did remember and she told me about it. She was surrounded by her possessions, in her own apartment, and those visual reminders helped her to bypass the damage in her brain and remember things. That doesn’t happen in Alzheimers. There is no recovery of memories. And it goes far beyond simply forgetting. Many Alzheimers patients literally go back in time. In their minds, they are living at some point in their past. An incident with my mother made we realize that we may be misinterpreting the wandering of Alzheimers patients. I’m not sure they wander off because of confusion. I think it’s possible they wander off because they are trying to get to wherever it is they think they are still living, some home they had in the past. My mother was determined to get to her old house across town. She didn’t live in this other place. She had to get home to make dinner for my father. Dad had been dead for over 25 years.

If The Iron Lady is accurate about Alzheimers, it shows Maggie Thatcher walking into a room and telling “Dennis” about her day, just as she did when she was Prime Minister. She would not be relating things in her past, but reliving those days as though he were still there to listen to her complain about her job.

The Reagan family went into major denial over Ronnie’s Alzheimers. They still are to an extent. Ron Reagan’s admission that maybe his father had it in office is partial denial. President Reagan needed a seating chart to conduct Cabinet meetings, according to those who were there. We don’t need denial. We don’t need movies that deny the worst things that Alzheimers can do. Our population is aging – ask me, I’m a true post-war baby boomer. As bad as the numbers are now for Alzheimers, mostly because our population is living longer, it is about to get much worse. We need to show that dirty old men are not a joke, but many times they are Alzheimers victims who think they are 30-year-old studs again. They don’t perceive themselves as fat old men covered with liver spots. They see themselves the way they were.

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher

In David Cameron’s mind, the movie might be an embarrassment to Maggie Thatcher. I deeply doubt that. I doubt she’s aware of it, and even if she sees it, she probably won’t associate it with herself. I also think that if she were capable, just for one day, to step out of her condition and comment on the film, I think she would approve. I think every Alzheimers patient would approve if films could educate the general public about what these people are going through and lift the myths, expose the horrors, make friends and relatives understand. The Iron Lady does not take away from who Margaret Thatcher was and what she accomplished. It will not make her detractors love her or make her fans hate her. It might make some people more sympathetic toward her, but that’s as far as the impact would go. She will always be the first female Prime Minister, the person with her name on an era of British history, the person credited with or blamed for the greatest peace-time shift in British culture and economics ever. It is not wrong for her in her last years to also be someone who helps educate the public about Alzheimers. Not many of us get to make a contribution to society when we can’t remember how to put on our knickers.

Related articles

• David Cameron: The Iron Lady should have been delayed (telegraph.co.uk)
• UK PM David Cameron criticizes ‘The Iron Lady’ (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• David Cameron blasts Margaret Thatcher film The Iron Lady (dailymail.co.uk)
• Iron Lady film made too soon, says David Cameron (independent.co.uk)
• British PM criticizes timing of The Iron Lady (cbc.ca)

Rick Santorum

 An interesting graphic has emerged from the Gallup organization. It tracks the last seven relevant Republican presidential primaries and where the candidates stood in the polls before and after Iowa and then after New Hampshire. It was the post-New Hampshire polls’ results that predicted the eventual candidate, not Iowas.

Take 2008, for example. It was Giuliani in the lead before Iowa, Huckabee after and then McCain after New Hampshire. In 1980, it was Reagan before Iowa, G.H.W. Bush after and then Reagan after New Hampshire. The polls can show gains or losses for the leading candidate across the three time periods or they show complete changes in the front runner. The important thing is, the post-New Hampshire polls are the most accurate predictor of the eventual winner.

Sooner or later, people are going to stop concentrating on the farthest right social stances Santorum takes and finally analyze his jobs program. According to him, strong families create jobs. Sorry, that’s backwards. Good jobs build strong families. Marriages fall off during recessions and depressions. The greatest cause of divorce is money problems. Unemployment stresses marriages and committed relationships.

One last note about Iowa. The evangelical political machine wants you to know that if you take Santorum’s 25% of the votes and add the 25% that didn’t vote for Romney or Paul, you get a solid 50% of Iowans who support a Christian values agenda.

Related articles

• New Hampshire Polls: Will We See An Iowa Bump? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Evangelicals Discuss ‘Encouraging’ Gingrich And Perry To Get Behind Santorum (huffingtonpost.com)
• Santorum’s hopes of winning may be squashed in the middle (guardian.co.uk)
• Romney Leads in South Carolina Poll; Santorum Second (ibtimes.com)
• Romney retains strong lead in New Hampshire as Santorum gains in polls (guardian.co.uk)
• Santorum’s Electability Factor (thedailybeast.com)

Government employment since 1946. Orange federal, green state, pink local, blue total.

President Obama has included a half-a-percent pay raise for Federal employees in next year’s budget. You read the right, a half-a-percent, 0.5%, one penny for each $2.00 of salary, a dollar for each $200.00. The Republicans will probably block it, because according to them, Federal employees are overpaid and over-benefitted. Both are bald-faced lies.

Those who watch Fox News and listen to right wing radio will tell you that Feds get free health care, are grossly overpaid and retire at 75% of their last salaries. The facts are very different. In the late 1970s, Federal rank-and-file employees made 60% of what private sector employees made in the same jobs. That is, where there were comparable jobs. There is no such thing as a private sector forest ranger or probation officer. They can only be compared to state employees. Federal pay is up to around 80% of private sector these days, except in highly professional fields. The doctors and scientists who work at the CDC, for example, earn better than a doctor in private practice. It is these professionals who are cited by the Republicans, not the file clerks and court security officers and forest rangers. All Federal employees have, once again, been subjected to pay freezes to “balance the budget.” Congress and the White House have been trying to balance the budget on the backs of Federal employees since Reagan.

That “free health care” that Feds are supposed to get? Not hardly. The only person who gets free health care is the President. The rest pay for it, and some pay through the nose. The Feds enjoy an insurance exchange, with multiple plans to choose from and a couple of national fee-for-service plans. The employees pay more than half the premiums and co-pays and deductibles that can be killers. One of those national plans has four separate deductibles – prescriptions, doctors appointments, hospitalization and testing. When we left them in 2005, it came to a total of $1,600 in deductibles for the two of us. A full-range fee-for-service plan for a family can run almost $500 a month with a 20% co-pay and $600 in deductibles. It is not Cadillac health benefits. General Electric has Cadillac benefits, not the Feds.

When Reagan was president, someone told him that Federal employees didn’t pay into Social Security. To “save” Social Security, Reagan ordered the Feds into the system. What no one told Reagan was that Feds didn’t get Social Security either. They were not part of the problem. The Federal retirement system was entirely self-contained and self-sustaining. Now, Feds pay into Social Security and make contributions to a much smaller pension system, just as they would in private industry. They also have a 401k plan of sorts called the TSP. The government makes contributions to this plan, and will match any employee’s contributions. The money is invested in stocks, hence helping the stock market.

And no, no Congressperson gets full pension after one term at the age of 40. That’s such complete bullshit. The rules are pretty complex about when and how anyone in the system gets their pensions. The important thing is, it’s not free money for life.

Just as in Social Security, a Federal pensioner loses $1 for each $2 they earn above the earnings limit. If they are also collecting Social Security, they lose $2 for ever $2 above the limit – one from Social Security and one from the pension. And, if they have retired before turning 62, they can collect their pension, but it gets cut drastically on their 62^nd birthday, a full sixty days before they can collect reduced Social Security benefits. Feds don’t have the option of waiting until 66 to collect Social Security. They are forced into it at 62.

A penny raise for every $2 earned is hardly a huge amount of money for an individual. But the Republicans will drag out every one of their lies about how overpaid the Federal rank-and-file are and allow the lies about pensions and benefits stay out there among their base, and they will get election points for denying Federal employees a few pennies raise. The Feds have a few unions, the principle ones are the Civil Service and the Federal Judiciary. They have limited collective bargaining powers, mostly limited to providing a union rep in the event of dismissal. They have no power to negotiate salary and no legal right to strike, as Ronald Reagan so dramatically proved. The Federal employees unions are a waste of the word “union.”

My husband was fairly typical of a Federal employee. In thirty years, he never topped the national median wage. Every time he got a raise, he’d lose it to increases in taxes or contributions to health premiums. If he actually managed a bigger take-home check after a raise, it was a miracle. When he became a Fed, during the Carter administration, there was only one reason to choose Federal employment over private sector – the benefits. Four Presidents and their Congresses have stripped that incentive for working for the Federal government. The budget cuts that have reduced the Federal workforce as also a disincentive to work for the Fed – too much work and too few people to do it. The population has expanded, but the number of people who have to serve it has shrunk.

Of course, the Republicans in Congress would never dream of dragging themselves back to their Carter-era pay levels or make serious dents in their expense accounts or reduce their in-Washington and at-home office staffs to a significant degree. That would impede their ability to do their jobs, which next year are scheduled to be performed on a whole 109 days out of a potential 260. Since our children are in school for 180, maybe the legislators should get paid what public school teachers get?

Related articles

• White House proposes pay increase for federal workers (hotair.com)
• Federal Salary Cuts To Pay For Payroll Tax Extension? (lezgetreal.com)
• Santorum criticizes Ronald Reagan on Social Security (hotair.com)
• 5 little-known facts about Social Security … Bankrate.com (ynative77.wordpress.com)
• White House seeks to end government pay freeze (alternet.org)

About that one, Santorum back in February 2004, stated “This is an issue just like 9-11. We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law?”

So far, no one has died from lesbians and gays being allowed to marry, but it could be said that many lesbians and gays have died prematurely or had their lives made problematic by not being allowed to marry.

Back in 2003, Santorum said something even more inaccurate and the very thing that is haunting him now. Back then he stated “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

First of all, Santorum really should try doing more reading than the Bible and the back of a cereal box since there is documentation of same-sex marriage among numerous Native American tribes, and indications of same-sex marriage in early Christianity, under Celtic Brehonic law, and in several other cultures.

Of course, Santorum is now trying to say he never said this..

However, New York Mag notes that “since 2003, when Santorum made the comments, acceptance of gay rights and gay marriage has soared. Santorum hopes to become a viable, mainstream candidate, but his past remarks on homosexuality — not just opposition to gay marriage, but disparagement of gays in general — are no longer part of the mainstream. Best to just pretend they never happened.”

Here he is on CNN trying to walk back his statements:

Santorum also went on Bill O’Reilly’s show to try and burnish his image and make himself more mainstream. When confronted by O’Reilly about his recent statements about abortion, lesbians and gays in the military and same-sex marriage, Santorum said his views were not extreme and said “I don’t think being for marriage between man and a woman is extreme, Bill.” O’Reilly countered saying “To rescind licenses already given? That’s a big deal.”

And Santorum replied with “The federal government would have to pass a constitutional amendment and if the Constitution says that marriage is between a man and woman, then things that are inconsistent with that would not — would be inconsistent with the Constitution…”

He also tried to show how he has not be obsessed with the whole gay thing by saying “…this is the fundamental issue in this campaign is whether government is going to be big and obtrusive and telling people how to manage their — their lives or — and are they going to support the basic values of faith and family that allow government to be limited and allow our economy to be strong.”

Of course, Santorum wants the government to be big and intrusive- so long as it is big and intrusive in your bedroom and not, say, in the corporate boardroom.

H/T Towleroad
Via NY Mag
Via Mcall

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge

ABCNews Good Morning America breathlessly reported that “Kate Middleton is drawing further comparisons to her late mother-in-law Princess Diana of Wales after she chose an array of charitable organizations to donate her time and draw attention to this week.”

That’s lazy reporting. The lady’s name is not Middleton. It is either Catherine Windsor or Catherine Wales. The first is legal, the second is the name under which Prince William serves. Correctly, she is Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. Call her Kate if you must, but not Kate Middleton.

Now, about those charities. There is a very, very long list of royal charities – organizations that count on the attention drawn to them by the Royal family. None of them can in any way be political. Many of the Royals have also established new charities, such as the Prince’s Trust and the charity Princes William and Harry set up in Africa. During the two months that the Queen is in residence at her estate at Sandringham (which is private, family property, by the way, not the property of the government), usually early in January, the entire family gets together with the necessary functionaries and sets out the schedules for the coming six months to a year. This year will be more involved than most because of the Queen’s 60^th anniversary and the foreign travel being undertaken. They divvy up the list, trying not to step on each other’s areas. Allegedly, at one point, the Duchess of York picked an AIDS charity and Princess Diana called her up and read her the riot act for infringing on her territory. There is a certain degree of personal interests involved, but the charities chosen also reflect the age of the Royal. Hence, the youngest member of the immediate family will typically get the kiddy charities.

That Princess Catherine chose many of the same charities that Princess Diana did is perfectly understandable. After the divorces, members of the family had to take up both Diana’s and Fergie’s charities. The only “channeling” (as ABC put it in their on-line headline) that is going on here is the secretaries and bookers channeling certain ideas toward Princess Catherine.

The Royals are as much a business as a family. Princess Anne makes more personal appearances for charity in the course of a year than there are days. As her parents have aged, she has taken on many of their sponsorships.

A Royal charity is an organization that benefits from granting an honorary board membership or chairmanship to a member of the Royal family. The so-honored Royal will put in at least one appearance a year at a fund raising event. The one limitation placed on these activities is that they cannot involve anything in the political arena. The Royals are forbidden, by the British constitution, to stick their noses into politics. This is the reason Princess Diana chose land mines when she divorced Prince Charles. It’s a political charity. It was the one area where she would not compete with the Royals. It could be hers and hers alone.

If the media is going to insist on reporting on the Royals, they should at least do a little homework. Naturally, the “unnamed Palace source” quoted in People magazine will say that Princess Catherine did all this research and chose with her heart, but the charities are what the Royals do. It’s part of the job description.

The New York Times got it right in their “Year in Style” review. In their piece on Princess Catherine, they only mentioned Princess Diana once, and that was to say that, unlike Princess Diana, Princess Grace and Jackie Kennedy, Kate isn’t a clothes horse.

Princess Catherine is not Diana. She will never be Diana. She wasn’t fifth on the short list of acceptable Princesses of Wales. She was first in the heart of a man who clearly loves her.  She is a strong, mature, educated young woman who had years to decide if she would be able to deal with the rigors of Royal life. It’s not a freaking fairy tale with designer gowns and palaces out the wahzoo. It can be dressing up in some antique-style military uniform to “inspect” your personal army unit from the back of a horse sitting in the broiling sun. It can be sitting through endless boring dinners with boring speakers eating foreign “delicacies” that would turn most of our stomachs. It’s learning to keep your opinions to yourself and don’t ever refer to the leader of a political party as a gnome. It’s spending the rest of your life with a couple of bodyguards on your heels, knowing that there are people out there in the world who think it would be a peachy-keen political statement to blow you to hell. Yeah, there are millions of people who adored Princess Diana, but she’s dead. Get over it. Let Princess Catherine be herself without the idiot comparisons.

Related articles

• Kate Middleton Drawing More Comparisons to Diana (abcnews.go.com)
• Catherine Middleton unveils her chosen charity causes (cnn.com)
• Kate Middleton – Mistakes won’t be made with her like they were with Diana (celebs.gather.com)
• Kate Middleton and Prince William palace security secrets revealed (mirror.co.uk)

Joseph Patrick Kennedy III

When Barney Frank announced his impending retirement, the first thing Democrats said was “Oh, no, say it ain’t so!” The second thing Massachusetts Democrats said was ”Bring us a Kennedy!” Well, the Kennedy has stepped forward.

Joseph P. Kennedy III, son of environmental activist Joseph P. Kennedy II (he’s not a junior) and grandson of the late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, has resigned his post in the Middlesex District Attorney General’s office to run for Barney’s re-structured district. The 31-year old has served in the Peace Corps and worked as a prosecutor on Cape Cod before joining the Middlesex District Attorney’s office in September.

In his statement Thursday, Kennedy said “I am announcing today my intention to explore a candidacy for the United States Congress in the Fourth District of Massachusetts. My decision to look seriously at elected office is grounded in a deep commitment to public service and my experience – both my own and that of my family in finding just, practical, and bi-partisan solutions to difficult challenges….it is a commitment instilled in me at a young age and one that inspired me to join the Peace Corps after college and to become a prosecutor after law school.”

He also criticized the situation in Washington, saying “fairness, the foundation of American’s social compact, seems to be in short supply these days. We wage war, pass skewed tax breaks, and expand benefits by spendthrift borrowing, saddling the next generation of Americans with unsustainable debt. Then, when it comes time for restoring fiscal sanity to our budget, we see the middle class and the poor take the hit while the weatlthy get more tax breaks. The lack of common sense and fairness in Washington is a byproduct of the partisan gridlock that has turned obstruction into victory. Americans are better than that. Each and every day, we work with people of different backgrounds and political views to achieve a common purpose. Washington can and should do the same.”

The census-driven redistricting in Massachusetts shifted the boundaries of Barney Frank’s district. He felt that he was too old to start learning thousands of new people and their problems. The district is even more Democratic than it was with the previous boundaries. It would be a very difficult district for a Democrat to lose.  In fact, the only way to do it would be the way Martha Coakley lost to Scott Brown, by not taking the election seriously and making people believe he wants the job.

Related articles

• Joseph P. Kennedy III Eyes Barney Frank’s Congressional Seat (inquisitr.com)
• Joseph Kennedy III Considers Bid for Frank Seat (thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Joseph P Kennedy III aims to resurrect famous political dynasty (telegraph.co.uk)
• Joseph Kennedy III likely to run for Barney Frank’s seat in Congress (guardian.co.uk)
• Joseph Kennedy III Exploring Run For Congress (boston.cbslocal.com)
• Analysis: Candidacy seems assured (boston.com)
• Joseph P. Kennedy III to launch exploratory committee; Kennedy family scion … – Boston.com (boston.com)

Top: Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Huntsman. Bottom: Paul, Perry, Romney, Santorum. By Donkey Hotey

The pollsters were correct. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul were almost tied. Jon Huntsman, who did not campaign in Iowa to any great extent, came in last among named candidates. A total of 122,166 Republicans participated in over 90 caucuses around the state, about 30,000 fewer than the organizers had hoped for.

The results are as follows:

Mitt Romney, 30,015 votes, 24.6% – Rick Santorum, 30,007 votes, 24.5% – Ron Paul, 26,219 votes 21.4% – Newt Gingrich, 16,251 votes 13.3% – Rick Perry, 12,604 votes 10.3% – Michele Bachmann, 6,073 votes 5% – Jon Huntsman, 745 votes 0.6% – Herman Cain, 58 votes, 0% – Buddy Roemer, 31 votes 0% – No Preference, 135 votes 0.1% – Other, 117 votes 0.1%.

Roemer, by Donkey Hotey

Michele Bachmann has said she is still in the race in spite of her low vote tally. Huntsman expects to do better in more moderate states, where Santorum will garner fewer votes. Iowa is considered a strong values-voter state, which is the explanation for Santorum’s rise to the tie position with Romney.

Next up is the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday, January 10; then South Carolina’s primary on Saturday, January 21 and finally for this month, Florida’s primary on Tuesday, January 31.

U.S.S. John C. Stennis

Iran’s army chief, Ataolla Salehi, announced to the Iranian people that because of the 10-day naval exercises that Iran had held in the Strait of Hormuz ”…the enemy’s carrier has been moved to the Sea of Oman because of our drill. I advise, recommend and warn them over the return of this carrier to the Persian Gulf because we are not in the habit of warning more than once.”

The U.S.S. John C. Stennis did sail from its base in Bahrain through the Straits of Hormuz into the Sea of Oman, but that was in defiance of the “blockade” the Iranian navy had created during their exercises. Excuse us while we laugh our butts off. This is sort of like the mouse inside its hole claiming it chased off the cat when the cat left to use the litter box. The Stennis will be returning to Bahrain.

Pentagon Press Secretary George Little issued a statement saying “The deployment of U. S. military assets in the Persian Gulf region will continue as it has for decades. These are regularly scheduled movements in accordance wiht our longstanding commitments to the security and stability of the region and in support of ongoing operations. The U. S. Navy operates under international maritime conventions to maintain a constant state of high vigilance in order to ensure the continued, safe flow of maritime traffic in waterways critical to global commerce. We are committed to protecting maritime freedoms that are the basis for global prosperity; this is one of the main reasons our military forces operate in the region.” Translation: you’ve got to be kidding. You could probably stack half the Iranian Navy on the deck of the Stennis.

The whole “warning” thing is just the Iranian government telling its citizens how big and powerful it is and how it stood up to the mightiest nation on Earth. And probably, somewhere in Iran, there are people who give a damn about this boast. But most Iranians are worried about a few basic things – where they will get enough food to feed their families, what’s going to happen if global sanctions collapse their economy, who will be the next dissident to disappear and when the little jerk in the cloth jacket and the guy with the white beard will figure out who is really in charge of their country.

Iran has offered to return to the talks they walked out of with the major powers. The government understands what will happen if the rest of the West goes through with cutting off their Central Bank from financial transactions and they are not eager to find out the consequences at home should that happen. They are “waiting for unveiling date and venue for talks with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told the Iran Student News Agency on Tuesday. The European Union, however, has not received a request for the meeting. The so-called P5+1 group consists of the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China. They last met a year ago, but made no progress on resolving the issue of nuclear development in Iran.

Related articles

• Iran ‘recommends’ US stay out of Persian Gulf (rt.com)
• Iran warns U.S. over aircraft carrier (cnn.com)
• Pentagon: U.S. Navy will remain in Persian Gulf (ctv.ca)
• Iran Threatens U.S. Navy – Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com)

Montana Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike McGrath

For a century, the state of Montana has banned corporate donations to election campaigns. In the aftermath of the United States Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that corporations are people and entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship, Western Tradition Partnership, Champion Painting and the Montana Shooting Sports Association sued in Montana’s state courts to have the state law overturned. A lower court ruled in favor of the corporation.

By a five to two vote, the State Supreme Court re-affirmed the validity of the law.

In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Mike McGrath wrote a history of Montana’ determination to prevent corporate interference with elections, citing the Anaconda Copper Mining Company which “controlled 90% of the press in the state and a majority of the legislature,” before passage of the 1912 Corrupt Practices Act. McGrath noted that the company continued “controlling ownership of all but one of Montana’s major newspapers until 1959.”

But it was Associate Justice James C. Nelson who took aim at the U. S. Supreme Court in the clearest possible terms. In his dissenting opinion, Nelson wrote, “Corporations are artificial creatures of law…Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people – human beings – to share fundamental natural right with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that hte death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.” Yes, he dissented with the majority in this ruling, because he believes the state has to follow the SCOTUS ruling, but he doesn’t agree with the Supreme Court.

It might have been nice if the justices had added one more bit of legal logic to their opinions. Corporations cannot vote. Only those who can vote should be allowed to participate in our electoral process.

Western Tradition Partnership, which has since changed its name to American Tradition Partnerships, is a 501(c)4 PAC which attacks what it describes as “environmental extremism.” Instead of focusing on environmental law, the PAC concentrates on filing lawsuits to overturn the Corrupt Practices Act. With Champion Painting and the Montana Shooting Sports Association, their lawyers are considering an appeal to the same Roberts Court that gave us Citizens United. Now, that one could be a truly fascinating suit, since the Constitution grants states substantial power in establishing their own voting laws.

Related articles

• Montana Supreme Court Defies Citizens United Decision (blogs.wsj.com)
• Montana High Court Says ‘Citizens United’ Does Not Apply In Big Sky State (alternet.org)
• Meanwhile, in Montana, Citizens United Need Not Apply (esquire.com)
• Montana Supreme Court vs. the United States Supreme Court (volokh.com)
• Court restores ban on corporate political money (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Petition to Overturn Citizens United Decision (luminaria.wordpress.com)

Sheik Abdul-Aziz al Sheikh

In 2006, a law was passed in Saudi Arabia that only women could work in women’s clothing and cosmetic shops. It was never enforced because the religious hardliners were conflicted between having men selling bras and having women work at all in places where both men and women might co-mingle, like a mall. Now, Saudi Arabia will enforce the law, because Saudi women have been boycotting lingerie stores in protest to having to deal with men when buying their undies.

Saudi Arabia, which is dominated by the ultra-conservative form of Islam called Wahhabism, has strict laws concerning the mingling of the genders. Men and women are segregated, women can only go in public when escorted by male relatives and men and women are not allowed to mix in public. It’s just like the situation that ultra-Orthodox Jews practice and want to impose on the non-Orthodox population in Israel. The ultra-conservative interpretation of the Qur’anic admonishments for modesty have led to the uncomfortable encounters between women wanting to buy unmentionables, having to do so in the company of embarrassed male relatives from a male stranger.

Thousands of men will lose their jobs in the Saudi equivalent of Victoria’s Secret, Claire’s and make-up stores. Over 28,000 women have alread applied for the jobs, many of them South Asian immigrants.

Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh condemned the decision, saying “The employment of women in stores that sell female apparel and a woman standing face to face with a man selling to him without modesty or shame can lead to wrongdoing, of which the burden of this will fall on the owners of the stores.” He then urged store owners to fear God’s wrath and not give in on this. Now, first of all, why would a man be in a woman’s lingerie or make-up store to begin with? We’re not talking America here, where men buy sexy lingerie for their ladies, but Saudi Arabia, where women are almost completely covered all the time. This change is being requested by women who don’t want to be “standing face to face with a man selling” to them. If this can lead to wrongdoing if the woman is selling, why not when a man is selling?

But these gender segregation laws always make me wonder one thing about the ultra-conservative. Why is it that ultra-conservative men have the dirtiest minds? It seems that their culture is based on a belief that no man is capable of looking upon a woman with anything less than uncontrollable lust. Why is that?

Related articles

• Saudi Arabia to apply law for women only to sell lingerie (telegraph.co.uk)
• Saudi Arabia to apply law that allows only women to sell lingerie (thestar.com)
• The Acton princess leading the fight for Saudi freedom (independent.co.uk)

Sen. Vaneta Becker

Indiana State Senator Vaneta Becker is fed up with people not singing “The Star Spangled Banner” properly, so she has proposed legislation to deal with those persons in Indiana’s public schools and universities who do not respect the “performance standards” of our national anthem.

Becker says the bill is in response to a call she received from a constituent who objected to a rendition of the anthem that he called “disrespectful.”

The bill calls for schools to record every performance of the anthem and keep it for a period of two years. They must develop procedures for complaints if a musician does not strictly follow the lyrical and melodic guidelines. Private schools which receive vouchers from the state could lose their support if some kid with a trombone slides too long. Performers, school band members and any professionals hired to play at schools or universities, would have to sign a contract stating that they would follow the guidelines.

The proposed bill raises the possibility of a university glee club being fined for singing the original lyrics to the song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Francis Scott Key “borrowed” the melody from an English drinking son dedicated to a gay lover. It could also fine a school’s theatrical club if they performed Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Puccini was not above a little plagarism. And let’s not forget any performances of Hair. “Oh, say can you see my eyes? If you can, then my hair’s too short.”

But most troubling for Indiana, at a time of budget tightening, is the specter of the bill actually passing and being challenged in a Federal Court. Indiana could be picking up the tab for defending a bill written by an ignoramus and passed by patriotic dimwits who think they are protesting Roseanne Barr. The Supreme Court already ruled that burning the flag is protected free speech. So are parodies or variations on the national anthem.

The melody for “The Star Spangled Banner” is so far beyond public domain it’s never even heard the word copyright. It’s over 250 years old, and has been used for more than our national anthem. There have been some stunning renditions of the national anthem over time, performed by jazz artists who could add scat elements that took it beyond it’s pedestrian melody. It has also been butchered by folks who forgot the lyrics or couldn’t hit the high notes with a baseball bat. Most of us could probably agree to a fine for anyone who ends the anthem by spitting and grabbing her crotch, or forgets the lyrics halfway through or can’t carry the tune, but fining a university or school for performing Madame Butterfly or Hair is just too appalling.

Someone should ask Sen. Becker if she’s ever heard of Gulliver’s Travels. It was deemed so scandalous, because it satirized the British government, it was originally published anonymously. The writers of our Bill of Rights understood that people had been imprisoned for their words, had even been executed. That is why they guaranteed us the right of free speech. Leave it to a Republican conservative to try to demonstrate how patriotic he or she is by demanding a restriction on our First Amendment rights.

Related articles

• Indiana bill would outlaw singing national anthem ‘inappropriately’ – Eric Dolan via The Raw Story (underpaidgenius.com)
• You just cannot outlaw bad singing (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• Bill Seeks To Punish Inappropriate National Anthem Performances (huffingtonpost.com)

President Obama finally arriving in Hawaii for Christmas

President Obama probably thought he could never sign anything as controversial as the Affordable Care Act. He underestimated the power of the right wing to make mountains out of anthills.

The National Defense Authorization Act is the $662 billion law that authorizes the Treasury Department to fund the Defense Department. It’s the bill that pays our soldiers’ salaries, buys their ammunition and equipment, pays our contractors, the whole nine-yards. It is an absolute, must-have bill. So, naturally, the Republicans added a nasty little provision that made the President quake in his wing-tips.

The bill sort of suspends all Constitutional rights for American citizens if they are declared to be involved in plotting or carrying out terrorist acts. Originally, President Obama threatened to veto the whole bill if that portion wasn’t removed. So, the Republicans made a few minor adjustments. They didn’t make the provisions any less heinous. They did, however, forget one important thing. Our President used to teach Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago.  He didn’t veto it.  Instead, the President signed the bill in Hawaii, where he is vacationing for Christmas.

The provisions, if actually put into use, are unconstitutional. Period. They deny basic rights guaranteed under the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 8^th Amendments. Even the Roberts Court could not pass on these provisions. The provisions are useless, a political exercise designed to “prove” to the sheep that our President aspires to dictatorship.

If our President is as politically savvy as everyone says he is, he will find some way to challenge these provisions in court and have them removed. That would be the smart way to diffuse this political bomb before it does any real damage.

The bill also removed from the President the decision about sanctions against Iran. It began the process of making foreign financial institutions choose between doing business with America or doing business with Iran’s Central Bank. It gives the administration a waiver that it can use for “national security” if it is determined that the sanctions against Iranian oil would jeopardize world supplies. The administration opposes this abuse of Congressional power because Congress is threatening the choices and decisions of the international coalition that is dealing with Iran. It is another potentially unconstitutional provision. The Constitution does not grant diplomatic authority to Congress.

There are, however, some very good things in the bill, besides making sure our military personnel get their paychecks. It deals with the problem of sexual abuse, rape and sexual harassment of female service members at our military academies and in the services.

Marine Lance Cpl Maria Lauterbach

The impetus behind these changes in military policy is the murder of Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach in 2007. She was eight months pregnant as a consequence of a sexual assault by fellow Marine Cesar Laurean. After filing charges against Laurean, Lauterbach was denied a base transfer. She disappeared on December 14, 2007 and her charred remains were found in a shallow pit in Laurean’s backyard in Jacksonville, North Carolina, on January 11, 2008. Laurean is serving a life sentence for her murder, but has petitioned for a new trial on the grounds that the jury was not given the option of a second-degree murder charge.

The NDAA includes provisions for legal counsel for sexual assault victims and the right to request a base transfer. U. S. Representative Mike Turner (R-Ohio) explained his crusade to get these provisions. “In civilian life, you have complete control of your movements, and if you’re in an unsafe situation, you can remove yourself. In military life, the victim needs permission to take even basic self-preservation actions.” The Defense Department is taking a lot of criticism lately over sexual abuse cases, the failure to investigate and prosecute rape cases, the inability of military personnel to get abortions after rapes, and the every increasing incidents on military bases and in our academies. These provisions in the NDAA are a first step to providing the needed protection and care for our personnel.

Here is Part 2

Related articles

• Pentagon Finds Major Mistakes By Marines In Murder Of Maria Lauterbach (lezgetreal.com)
• President Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law (greenreview.blogspot.com)
• Obama signs NDAA, but says he doesn’t agree with entirety of the bill (100gf.wordpress.com)
• Obama Signs Off on NDAA “With Serious Reservations” (crooksandliars.com)
• Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law (alethonews.wordpress.com)
• Happy New Year: Obama Signs NDAA, Indefinite Detention Now Law of the Land (mountainrepublic.net)

Our nation was founded in radicalism and enlightenment, not conservatism and superstition masking as religion. It was the intention of our founding fathers that we always move forward, not backwards. It was the intention of our founders that we open our land and our hearts to all who long for freedom. But we cannot simply welcome those who do not have freedom in their own lands, this country isn’t that big. And we cannot impose democracy upon others. All we can do is lead by example and encourage those willing to fight and die for the liberties we take for granted. It is not our manifest destiny to rule the world. We can however, as Bill Clinton said, be first among equals, but only if we help others become our equals.

We cannot do that if we ourselves are not equal in rights and opportunity. We have been evolving for 235 years, slowly enlarging the definition of who is equal and what their rights are. Most of that equality has been achieved in just the past 91 years. We thought we had made a major move in that direction in 1868, but laws were passed that abridged the rights granted in the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. So we had to fight for those rights twice.

We have been moving backwards in the past few years. It is acceptable again to be openly racist, anti-immigrant and attack others because of their religion. Our constitution was written, amended and interpreted to support the radical idea that the majority rules only as long as they do not abridge the rights of minorities. That is what we have been losing…the belief that we must protect the rights of minorities instead of imposing the will of the majority.

The battle cry of the right wing has been “take our country back.” The irony is, they did take our country back – back to the fear and bigotry of the Great Depression, when people lashed out at anyone who was different and blamed them for the hardships. But in the 1930s we didn’t have a mass media that fed those fears and that bigotry, while persuading the gullible that only one source of information is valid. We are fighting for the soul of this nation, but not its Christian soul as the right wing implies. We are fighting to restore the ideals and principles upon which it was conceived – that all are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.

I will leave you this year with two quotes.

The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

First from our beloved Terry Pratchett. In The Truth, he wrote “Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It is the only way to make progress. That and, of course, moving with the times.” Remember those words every time someone talks about a permanent Republican majority or ending gridlock through conformity.

And from Hendrik van Loon: “Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.”

May the coming year be better for you, and thank you for joining us, staying with us and keeping us going.

Gov. Bob McDonnell (photo by Gage Skidmore)

On Thursday, Governor Robert F. McDonnell signed the Virginia law that requires abortion facilities to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical facilities instead of doctors’ offices. The law is similar to that passed in Kansas, which were put on hold by Federal Judge Carlos Murguia in July. It establishes new regulations for room sizes and equipment that would probably close down many of Virginia’s abortion clinics.

Taylor Thornley, McDonnell’s deputy communications director, issued a written statement. “The governor believes these common-sense regulations will help ensure that this procedure takes place in facilities that are modern, safe and well-regulated, in order to help ensure the safety and well-being of all patients.”

Wrong.

The more difficult it is for women to obtain legal, safe abortions, the greater the risk that they will seek out illegal abortion providers. As Professor Melissa Harris-Perry has said repeatedly, making abortions illegal doesn’t stop abortions, it just makes them illegal. And deadly. There are no accurate statistics for the number of women who died because of illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade. Many are listed on their death certificates as having died of peritonitis, like my great-aunt. There are any number of ways to die from an illegal abortion, and never have the abortion itself even admitted. That is part of why these women died. They went into the hospital with massive hemorrhaging, were too afraid to admit why, and the doctors had no way to know that they had had their uteruses punctured until it was too late. Most of the time, even their families didn’t know, or only part of their families knew as in mine. My grandmother and mother knew, my eldest aunt didn’t.

Illegal abortions, when they didn’t kill, were very likely to cause sterilization, as in the case of movie star Jane Russell. She was an unmarried, poor country teen-aged girl who made the only choice she thought she could, and paid for it the rest of her life when she could not have the children she really wanted.

Roe v. Wade did more than make abortion legal. It made abortion safe. It made it more possible to get an abortion at the very earliest stages of a pregnancy, when it could be done with the least surgical intrusion. Now, the people who want to make abortion illegal again are using “safety” as a means of restricting access. That’s hypocrisy. They don’t care about the safety of an abortion, they want the abortion prevented. Period.

These laws would make sense if there were a history of infections, illnesses, injuries or sterilization caused by the abortions performed in the existing clinics. There isn’t.

The first lawsuit will probably be filed early in the New Year.

Related articles

• Romney Used Poll To Determine Stance On Key Issue (huffingtonpost.com)
• Mitt Romney switched ’94 abortion stance based on polling results (dailykos.com)

Dr. Nicola Riley (mug shot, Salt Lake City jail)

After a 16 month investigation, the state of Maryland has requested the extradition of Dr. Steven Brigham of Voorhees, New Jersey, aned Dr. Nicola Riley of Salt Lake City, Utah, for performing late-term abortions on viable fetuses. The two were indicted by a Maryland grand jury for their operation in Elkton.

The investigation began with an August 2010 procedure in which a young woman’s uterus and bowel were ruptured. Brigham and Riley drove her to a hospital and basically dumped her in the emergency room. She had been in the 21^st week of her pregnancy.  In 1994, in New York State, Dr. Brigham was found guilty of  professional misconduct in an almost identical case. 

A search of the clinic after this found a freezer with 35 late-term fetuses, including one suspected of being aborted at 36 weeks.

Dr. Steven Brigham

Maryland has some of the most liberal abortion laws in the country. All abortions are legal if the fetus is not viable, defined in law as the doctor deciding that the fetus has a reasonable likelihood of survival outside the womb. With current medical technology, that would make a requested abortion completely legal through the 21^st week or so, depending on the condition of the fetus. An abortion is legal at any stage when the life or health of the mother is at risk or the fetus shows a serious genetic defect/abnormality that would make that fetus unviable. In Maryland, a doctor is not liable if the decision to abort was made in good faith and in the best medical judgement. Minors can only receive abortions with parental notification, except in cases of abuse, assault, incest or neglect, but a judge can bypass the parental notification.

The news reports did not mention if the women who had these abortions have been identified or if they were residents of Maryland. There was also no mention of whether or not the women involved would be charged with any crimes if identified.

The two doctors are not being charged under Maryland’s abortion laws, but under a 2005 law that allows murder charges for causing the death of a viable fetus. It was a law intended to punish those who assault a pregnant woman and cause the fetus’ death. Brigham faces five charges of first-degree murder, five counts of second-degree murder and one count of conspiracy. Riley, is charged with one count each of first- and second-degree murder and one count of conspiracy. Maryland has legal abortion and doctors who provide this service. It also allows for use of government funds for abortions, so their clinic and their travel to operate the clinic are not consistent with the need for out-of-state doctors that one sees in states which heavily restrict abortion.

This is the first time Maryland prosecutors have used the “assault” law to prosecute an abortion doctor. This case does not threaten the legal abortion operations of Maryland doctors, who would not have performed these late-term abortions without urgent medical need. But this case does feed into the anti-abortion propaganda machine, and that should make abortion advocates the last people to support the defense of these two. We have been fighting for years against the perception that women get abortions cavalierly and without thought, that viable fetuses are routinely aborted on demand, that women seeking abortions don’t know what they are doing. These two doctors have just handed ammunition to the pro-life groups who are pressuring Maryland legislators to pass laws that restrict abortion.

Related articles

• South Jersey Abortion Doctor One Of Two Arrested And Charged With Murder (philadelphia.cbslocal.com)
• Murder charges for out-of-state doctors who performed abortions in Maryland (guardian.co.uk)
• Maryland Doctors Charged With Murder For Late-Term Abortions [Roe V World] (jezebel.com)

The late Kim Jung-Il

The videos that have made it out of North Korea are puzzling. State television is showing people lining the streets, wailing, weeping, beating their breasts, falling down because they are so overcome with grief. I’ve seen a lot of public figure funerals in my life, both as they happened as in historical film footage. This was the most over-the-top display of public grief I can remember. Even Evita Peron’s funeral wasn’t this riddled with hysteria, and she was considered a saint by her people, not the cause of starvation and destitution. So, the disclaimers from reporters that there is no way to tell how much of this display was real and how much was staged for television is very understandable. This man was not a young man or woman cut down in his or her prime by a bullet, a car crash or a virulent disease. This was, by North Korean standards, an old man, a man who had been ill for years. After all, life expectancy in North Korean is a full three years shorter than South Korea, even shorter if one is a member of the 25% of the nation that never has enough to eat because Kim Jung Il put all the nation’s money into its military.

Kim Jung Il lay in state for ten days. His funeral’s been going on for two so far. And it’s not over. There will be three-minute silences and the co-ordinated sounding of train and ship horns.

Possibly the weirdest moment was compliments of Seo Ju-rim, a female soldier. Through her sobs, she told state television, “Seeing this white snow fall has made me think of the general’s efforts and this brings tears to my eyes.” Seems that among his multitudinous accomplishments, Kim Jung-Il could control the weather. Not sure if she believes he ordered the snowfall from the other side or if the snow instead of the decent weather that he could have ordered was what made Seo Ju-rim so weepy.

Whenever they get around to finishing off this very expensive spectacle, the curtain will fall on North Korea again and the rest of the world can just speculate on what is really going on.

Kim Jung-Un is Kim Jung-Il’s third son, mother unknown, age not specified. He was chosen as the successor because his older brothers preferred life outside the country pretending that their impoverished nation is Brunei or Dubai. The real power lies with Kim Jung-Il’s brother, Kim Yong-nam. Officially, Kim Jong-Un is being called the “supreme leader of the party, state and army,” but that does not mean he’s actually leading the country. He has only been in line for the throne for less than a year, not enough time for him to acquire any real experience. But the nation functions on the personality cult of the Kim family, not on logic or elections. Kim Jong-Il’s father, Kim Il-sung “liberated” the country from South Korea and established the nation.

No foreign delegations or foreign leaders attended the funeral, and neither did Kim Jung-Un’s brothers. Flags at United Nations offices around the world were at half-mast, which is standard protocol for the death of any country’s leader.

Related articles

• North Korea’s Farewell To Kim Jong-il (news.sky.com)
• Kim Jong-il memorial begins (cbc.ca)
• NKorea calls Kim Jong Un ‘supreme leader’ – CBS News (cbsnews.com)
• Kim Jong Il Funeral Reportedly Begins In North Korea (huffingtonpost.com)

Old Sturbridge Village Meeting House

Once upon a time….well, actually 51 years ago in October, my family made one of their visits to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. It is a living museum of early America, houses brought to the site and arranged as a real town would have been, shops and a working farm and craft exhibits and an astounding collection of antiques. But, this particular day, there was a cold mist in the air and very few tourists around.

As we crested the hill after the entrance, we heard organ music. We traced it to the Meeting House, but on entering, we saw no one. A voice called down to us, and a few moments later, we were greeted by a tall, white-haired Englishman.

I don’t recall his name. I have never been able to. He explained that he was on sabbatical from his Anglican parish and that he had been born “halfway between Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge.” I came to understand, over time, that in that simple statement, he had explained his unusual vision of religion.

We spoke with him for over an hour. None of us were in any hurry. We’d visited the Village so many times and this day, with its lack of tourists, was our opportunity to linger and chat with those who worked there.

On the wall behind the lectern was an antique wall sconce, a candle-holder with reflector. The reflector was about the size of a pie pan, concave and fitted out with dozens of tiny pieces of mirror. The minister lit the candle, turned to us and said…

                 “Just as no one mirror sees all of the light of the candle, no one church sees all of the light of God.”

Delores Hart, circa 1960

At the age of nine, Delores Hart appeared in the movie Forever Amber in 1947. Then, she finished school. In 1957 she returned to the screen, making 11 movies and guesting on 6 television series before walking away from Hollywood in 1963. Her most famous films were the original Where the Boys Are and Loving You, in which she was the recipient of Elvis Presley’s first screen kiss. Not exactly Twelve Angry Men or To Kill a Mockingbird, but a respectable career for the times, when movies were suffering from the competition of television.

Delores Hart left Hollywood to follow a greater calling – she became a nun, and let me tell you, we all thought she was nuts. There wasn’t a Catholic girl that I knew who would have traded a movie career for the habit. She joined a small cloistered order in Bethlehem, Connecticut. She maintained some friendships from her Hollywood days, because her order did not ask the nuns to give up their real names or cut themselves off completely from the world. One of those was the late, great actress Patricia Neal, who asked to be interred at the abbey when she passed on.

Mother Delores Hart

The order, which was founded in 1947, has been self-sufficient all these years, surviving on the proceeds of sales of artisan cheeses made from milk from their own livestock, handmade pottery and recordings of their choir. There are 40 nuns in the order, living and working on a small farm, independent of the Archdiocese of Hartford. Now, they have a really big problem.

The former brass factory which houses the nuns is in desperate need of upgrades and renovations to meet fire and safety codes and make their home more accessible for those nuns who are reaching a certain age, like Mother Delores, who is 73 and suffers from neuropathy. The order has remained vibrant even while other orders have stagnated. They have two new postulants arriving next month.

The county is co-operating with the order, allowing them the time necessary to make the renovations instead of shutting them down over the violations, and the community is helping out as well. The local dance school raised $600 for the effort, but the estimate for the entire job is close to $4 million.

The Abbey of Regina Laudis is one of several small, self-sufficient religious communities around the country. We have one here in Vermont, the Weston Priory. Many of them are sanctuaries for the lost and the disenfranchised. Many run very quiet programs of community assistance, like one that pairs up homeless pregnant teens with families who will care for them while they await their child’s birth. They operate without fanfare or spotlights, and are the best of Catholicism.

So, we are sending on the appeal for donations, small ones, big ones, whatever anyone can donate, for this group of independent women who have created a wonderful community where they live in harmony with each other and those who surround them. Donations (tax deductible of course) can be sent to New Horizons, The Abbey of Regina Laudis, 73 Flanders Road, Bethlehem, CN 06751. They are working on being able to accept on-line donations at their website, www.abbeyofreginalaudis.com. Pass it along, please.

The Kiss - Elvis Presley and Delores Hart, "Loving You" 1957

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O'Keefebeing ignored at OWS

James Edward O’Keefe III is 27 years old, runs what he calls an investigative journalism organization to expose liberals and lives with his parents. I just had to get that in.

A criminal complaint was filed against O’Keefe, not by one of the hundreds of people he has damaged with his “investigative reports,” but by one of the people he enlisted to assist him in a sting. Boston conservative blogger Nadia Naffe was enlisted by O’Keefe to assist with an operation at Occupy Wall Street. She took the train to Newark, New Jersey on October 2, where O’Keefe picked her up and drove her to his parents house, after stopping for some booze.

At O’Keefe’s home, she got into an argument with O’Keefe and refused to help him at OWS. She demanded that he take her back to the train station, but he insisted that she spend the night in the barn. Naffe threatened to call the police. At this point, her memories are a bit blurred. She says that “I found it hard to move and control my muscles.” Eventually, O’Keefe and a friend drove her to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, but she passed out in the car and awoke in the station. Upon her return to Boston, she discovered that her luggage had been rifled and things were missing – underwear and a wireless mouse.

Nadia Naffe

Then, things got nasty. Naffe received a message from O’Keefe offering her money to keep quiet about the incident. When she refused, she started getting harassing messages from O’Keefe and then from others, some sent to mutual friends to be passed on to her. On November 17, O’Keefe posted a video of her on his website, calling her “filthy” and “dirty.” The video portrayed Naffe as “a tramp.” It has been removed from the site. Naffe says that O’Keefe used other people to torment her.

Unfortunately, Naffe cannot prove that all the harassment originated in the county where O’Keefe lives and where she filed the complaint. For that reason, the court in Westwood had no choice but to dismiss the charges. But as he dismissed the criminal charges, Judge Alan Karch did something unusual. He advised Naffe that she could file a civil suit against O’Keefe. What Karch didn’t say, but hopefully Naffe’s lawyer understands, is that the interstate nature of O’Keefe’s “organization” and the fact that the harassment took place across state lines, puts the potential civil suit into Federal jurisdiction.

O’Keefe became famous because of his staged and edited visits to ACORN offices posing as a pimp with his whore in tow. O’Keefe used these videos to “prove” that ACORN was corrupt and force the organization to be defunded and taken apart. O’Keefe is currently being sued by at least one of the people his little stunt destroyed – a man who listened very attentively to O’Keefe’s spiel about bringing in illegal girls to work at prostitutes, and after O’Keefe left, notified the police. The interview was featured on O’Keefe’s video, but not the aftermath. The aftermath never does – the official notifications to authorities about fake terrorists seeking Medicaid or pimps looking for homes for illegal girls.

His latest attacks involve Occupy Wall Street, where he was spotted and laughed at by the protesters and what is allegedly a video of teacher’s union members in New Jersey posted a year ago bragging about fixed elections. The union disavows the people in the video while Governor Chris Christie praises it as proof of the insidious intentions of teachers’ unions.

O’Keefe is on probation for a conviction arising from his attempts to place listening devices in the telephone system of Senator Mary Landrieu of Lousiana.

Naffe refused to speak with the press after the hearing, and dragged her lawyer away from reporters. A civil suit is devouted to be wished at this point. Everyone who has been harmed by this man should sue. His “exposés” are intentionally deceptive, lacking anything that resembles basic journalistic balance and ethics. He’s not a journalist, he’s a propagandist who is used by Fox News and others to create “moral outrage” over some liberal organization and put an end to it. The only defense against someone like him is the full force of the legal system.

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Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, June 2010

On Wednesday, former Representative Anthony Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin became the proud parents of a little boy they have named Jordan Zain Wiener.

Mrs. Weiner is a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and recent photos of Sec. Clinton at various meetings with world leaders had shown the very pregnant Mrs. Weiner in the background. The Weiners had confirmed the pregnancy just before all hell broke loose over Weiner’s addiction to sexting. He resigned from the House in June and the special election for his seat was won by Republican Bob Turner. The district covers portions of the Brooklyn (Kings) and Queens boroughs in New York City.

The Weiners were married in July of 2010, and Jordan is their first child. Like her boss and mentor, Sec. Clinton, Mrs. Weiner has chosen to remain married and work to save her marriage instead of filing for divorce.

Weiner is about to become primary caregiver for Jordan, as Mrs. Weiner continues in her career. And so we offer this important piece of advice for the new father – always lay the new diaper over Jordan before you remove the old one. Otherwise, you might end up discovering how large an arc he can produce. Little boys have an incredible sense of timing for that and a faceful is really disgusting. 

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First Lady's rear view

Many years ago, there was a bookmaker and sports commentator named Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder. In January, 1988, he was fired by CBS Sports for making an observation about black athletes’ physical advantages. The remark drew attention to the fact that there is a genetic trait that is visible in some black football players because of the tight uniform. It is a long muscle connection between the back of the thighs and the lower back and provides a certain degree of advantage when running. It’s something you can actually see in some black football players. The remark was deemed racist and Jimmy was fired.

With all due respect, there are genetic traits in all of us that relate to our ancestors – whether it’s the color of our hair or the shape of our bodies. It’s just part of the genetic crap shoot. In all the conversations and debates about the late Karen Carpenter’s anorexia, one factor kept being overlooked. Her genes made her very bottom heavy. It was like she had two bodies spliced together – the top half was a size 1 and the bottom half was a size 16. I have never doubted that trying to cope with that imbalance was responsible in part for her obsession with dieting that morphed into anorexia.

Michelle Obama also inherited a tendency to have a disproportionate body, though more localized than Carpenter’s. She’s got a big ass. Though it’s a genetic tendency that shows up more in black women than white, it’s not exclusive to black women. Jennifer Lopez has the same problem. There are just some women who are condemned to have broad beams. They can starve themselves, and the imbalance will still exist.

But, Michelle Obama is the First Lady, and in the tradition of First Ladies, at least since Jackie Kennedy, Mrs. Obama has chosen a personal campaign. It’s not planting wildflowers on highway medians, it’s the American diet. She wants to see our children eating more healthy foods. It is a campaign that hits at more than just the issue of the fat level at McDonalds, but also at the issues of poverty and culture. Poor people do tend to be fat, not because food stamps buy too much food, but because starches are cheaper than fresh vegetables and processed foods are easier for working poor mothers to throw together.

Rush Limbaugh

Well, Mrs. Obama’s wide load is a target of insults from the right. Rush Limbaugh, who is the last person on earth who should criticize someone else’s size, loves to attack Mrs. Obama’s bottom, calling it a matter of enlightening the public to the absurdity of a woman with a large bottom advocating healthy eating. The right wing still rants about a single incident a couple of years ago when Mrs. Obama ordered ribs in a restaurant, though any diet expert can tell you that an occasional indulgence keeps people on their diets. Limbaugh’s latest was a fake introduction of the First Lady – “here at our microphone” – followed by the playing of a rap song praising black women’s big asses.

That’s Limbaugh, the man who should never, ever bounce up and down in time with his applause. That clip from his appearance at a Republican Party event was the best human representation of a bowl of jell-o in history. We can ignore Limbaugh.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner

But a member of the House of Representatives should have more respect for the First Lady. One of Wisconsin’s finest, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, was overheard in Reagan National Airport telling someone about an incident that took place at an Episcopal church auction three weeks ago. A woman came up to him at the action and was praising Mrs. Obama. He told the woman that Michelle “…lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” He was supposedly talking to a staff member about requests for a comment about the incident, but he characterized the criticism as “liberal media bias” and “stands by his remarks.” This is another man who is pulling a “pot calling the kettle black” over body size. The man is a self-confessed Cheetos addict.

Rep. Sensenbrenner has issued an apology, sort of. He doesn’t approve of the First Lady’s healthy food initiative. He probably prefers First Lady’s to stick to wildflower planting and redecorating the White House and telling people to “just say no” to drugs. God forbid a First Lady should take an interest in the welfare of our children in the fattest nation on earth. God forbid that a First Lady should address the explosion in cases of diabetes and other obesity-related diseases, when they have been shown to be precipitated in childhood. Schools all over the country have cut out recess and cut back on phys ed because of budget cuts. Our kids can’t safely play out-of-doors in too many communities. Gone are the days when kids could start a game of stickball in the street and spend an hour running around the “bases.” Mrs. Obama’s initiative includes cheap ways for kids to get up off the couch, put down the game controller and move their bodies.

The First Lady’s initiative is not dissimilar to one started years ago by former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s okay for a Republican governor to do this, but not a Democratic First Lady. That’s been the bitch ever since Barack Obama was elected. No matter what he or his family do, it will be wrong in the eyes of Republicans. I’m still waiting for a single one of these bigots to cite just one thing the President has done that is Marxist, socialist, communist or fascist. The last time we had a President who was blindly hated this much, Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah building. The scary part is, it doesn’t matter how many people die, the right wing will not stop spreading the hate.

Our ugly-butt First Lady, Michelle Obama (Vogue magazine)

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