Sounds like Arlen Specter is dying.
Category: Politics As Usual
Go Tweety
This morning on Morning Joe, Tweety lets Reince Priebus have it:
Rocky
Chris Christie
Apparently wouldn’t resign to run as VP because he doesn’t think Romney can win.
Great
Crime-ridden Camden, New Jersey – often referred to as the most dangerous city in the United States—is getting rid of its police department.
In the latest example of a cash-strapped municipality taking drastic measures to deal with swollen public sector liabilities and shrinking budgets, the city plans to disband its 460-member police department and replace it with a non-union “Metro Division” of the Camden County Police. Backers of the plan say it will save millions of dollars for taxpayers while ensuring public safety, but police unions say it is simply a way to get out of collective bargaining with the men and women in blue.
“This is definitely a form of union-busting,” Camden Fraternal Order of Police President John Williamson told FoxNews.com. “This method is unproven and untested, to put your faith in an agency that doesn’t even [yet] exist.”
Camden County Mayor Dana Redd has said layoffs of the city’s police force will begin by the end of the month. Only 49 percent of current city police officers will be transferred to the new county division, whose members will begin a four- to five-month training program.
“The officers who are getting laid off are going to have to be the ones who train their replacements,” Williamson said.
Invisible poor people
It’s just astonishing to us how long this campaign has gone on with no discussion of what’s happening to poor people. Official Washington continues to see poverty with tunnel vision – “out of sight, out of mind.”
And we’re not speaking just of Paul Ryan and his Draconian budget plan or Mitt Romney and their fellow Republicans. Tipping their hats to America’s impoverished while themselves seeking handouts from billionaires and corporations is a bad habit that includes President Obama, who of all people should know better.
Go read the rest.
School choice
Talk about letting the fox guard the henhouse! Not so surprising if you’ve been following Corbett’s privatization frenzy:
IT MIGHT HAVE once seemed unthinkable: Handing the keys to a large, troubled public-school district over to a high-profile advocate for increasing privatization, including vouchers and for-profit private schools.
But activists said that last Friday’s surprise announcement that Gov. Corbett had named the Rev. Joe Watkins – an MSNBC pundit who headed the Students First PAC, the pro-voucher group that’s dumped millions of campaign dollars on Corbett and other pols – as chief recovery officer to run the Chester Upland schools in Delaware County marks a tipping point.
They said the choice proves that the Corbett administration is accelerating its push to privatize education in Pennsylvania and benefit charter schools like the Chester Community Charter School – managed by the governor’s largest single donor, Vahan Gureghian – at the expense of traditional public schools that are losing dollars, teachers and students.
Watkins acknowledged he’d also done some recent work as a consultant for Gureghian’s school, which educates more than half of Chester Upland’s elementary- and kindergarten-age kids and has a huge stake in key decisions Watkins will make.
Nationally known education pundit Diane Ravitch – a former assistant U.S. secretary of education who once supported school-choice measures such as vouchers but now opposes them – took to her blog this week to call the choice of Watkins “so astonishing, so breathtaking, and simultaneously so disturbing that I don’t know how to characterize it.”
In a phone interview, Ravitch said that she found the choice so dismaying because “they sent in someone with an agenda” – in favor of charter schools run by for-profit companies like Chester Community, managed by Gureghian’s CMSI LLC.
The gold standard
Krugman says it looks like the Republicans will include a plank advocating a return to the gold standard in their platform. I can think of a number of reasons they would include something that freakin’ crazy: First, and most important, to attract as many Ron Paul supporters as possible; second, Ayn Rand fanboys (I mention no names!) will love the idea; and third, they would love to shut down the ability of the government to print stimulus money.
Brilliant plan! What could possibly go wrong?
But seriously, it appears that a push for a return to the gold standard — theGolden Fetters that played such a large role in propagating the Great Depression — is going to be part of the Republican platform.
Bear in mind that the incessant warnings of runaway inflation from the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet have been wrong, wrong, wrong; and that exchange rate flexibility has been crucial to most of the success stories of this crisis, from Poland to Sweden to Iceland. Nonetheless, the GOP is convinced that what we need to do is base future monetary policy on a doctrine that has totally failed in recent years. After all, Francisco d’Anconia says that it’s the only way.
A return to the gold standard would make business cycles
WI’s largest paper blacking out Ryan abortion extremism
Paul Ryan sponsored an act that would allow rapists to sue victims who wanted an abortion.
This is, to say the least, bizarre. Sure, a little rooting for the local hero is expected – but when the biggest national news story is the Akin insanity, the biggest paper in Wisconsin takes a pass? The Paul Ryan Watch reports:
Paul Ryan is all over the national news stories about the Republican anti-choice agenda, since Todd Akin made the mistake of saying what he really thinks. Today’s front page NY Times story, headlined Akin Controversy Stirs Up Abortion Issue in Campaign features Ryan prominently:
That agenda — largely eclipsed for two years by a protracted fiscal crisis and the fight over how to manage the federal deficit — has wedged its way, for now at least, to the center of the 2012 campaign. It is focusing attention on an issue that helped earn Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a reputation as a flip-flopper, threatening the Republican quest for control of the Senate, and leaving Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, Mr. Romney’s vice-presidential pick, in the uncomfortable position of distinguishing himself from Mr. Akin, with whom he has often concurred…
[…] But this story, incredibly, continues to be missing from Wisconsin media coverage of the campaign. Ryan’s role, his views on the issue, his phone call to Akin, their joint sponsorships of many far-out pieces of anti-abortion legislation — scarcely a mention.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel certainly isn’t ignoring Ryan or the race. Some very competent reporters — Craig Gilbert, Don Walker and Dan Bice among them — are covering the race and writing about it. But we keep reading “Local Boy Makes Good” stories and little or nothing about the controversy swirling around Ryan.
We are inclined to blame their editors, who must not be encouraging –if not actively discouraging — their people from doing the real reporting they are capable of. That’s a shame, as Wisconsin, a battleground state, gets a sanitized version of the news from its biggest circulation newspaper.
Squandered hope
From Salon, an interview with Thomas Frank. Go read the whole thing:
This is the point in a presidential election when people begin talking about the lesser of two evils, when the weaknesses in one’s own candidate pale in comparison to the reality of the other side taking over. But in a remarkable essay in the new issue of Harper’s magazine, the political thinker Thomas Frank levels President Obama’s first term as a dramatic failure compared to the rhetoric that landed him in office, and the potential he had to truly transform the country.
Frank, whose books include “What’s the Matter With Kansas” and “Pity the Billionaire,” makes the case that Obama’s conciliatory nature has been a tragic flaw, one exploited by conservatives in Congress again and again. But he also argues that Obama has “enthusiastically adopted” the ideas of the right when it comes to deficit spending, Wall Street regulation, torture policies, healthcare and more. And his reward for reaching for compromise and grand bargains, “for bowing to their household gods,” has been to be depicted as a socialist and a radical leftist.
The end result? Frank writes that “What Barack Obama has saved is a bankrupt elite that by all means should have met its end back in 2009. He came to the White House amid circumstances similar to 1933, but proceeded to rule like Herbert Hoover.”