Category: Politics As Usual
Child sexual abuse
In the world of Romney’s top LDS donors – and Bain Capital.
Rocky
Imagine what it would be like to vote for someone like Rocky Anderson, whose policies you actually support!
What if you tip the balance and there’s a President Romney come 2013?
Well, the question about the spoiler is actually what kept me from doing this for a long time. The reason I decided to do what I’m doing now is because, if the threat of being a spoiler is always going to trump trying to alter the system, then we will never see that kind of change. You cannot let the fear of being a spoiler stop us from raising our voices and taking action, doing everything we can to change the dangerous course on which this country is headed.
Do you agree that there are some areas where Obama has been fairly progressive: gay marriage, for example?
No, he’s a phony. What he did on gay marriage was so boldly political. He used to say he was against it. Then he said his position was evolving. Really? His position on equality was evolving? Now he says he supports marriage equality, but what does that equate to? He says, “I favor it, but it should be left up to the states.” Would he have said that about racial or religious equality? Equality for members of the GLBT community doesn’t rise to the level of importance to provide federal protections? That’s why he’s so dangerous, because there’s this pretense.
Do you worry your candidacy could help enable an extreme-right Republican Party?
No. It could be I take more votes away from Mitt Romney. In the first poll that was done after I announced my candidacy, when Romney and Obama were paired just the two of them, Romney won by 2 or 3 percent. When I was added in, Obama won. I took more votes away from Romney than Obama. The reason for that is there are people who, no matter what, will never vote for Barack Obama. When I’m put into the mix, they’ll go with me instead of Romney.
A miracle happens: you get elected in 2012 and re-elected in 2016. After eight years of a Rocky Anderson presidency, what does the country look like?
The country is back on constitutional moorings. We will not make war without an explicit authorization from Congress. We won’t be engaging in illegal wars of aggression anymore. We will never again waver on the right of habeas corpus, due process. We will not have the kind of enormous disparity of wealth and income that we see now. We will be past this new Gilded Age, back to a time where we have a healthy, thriving middle class, where we have good jobs, the strongest educational system in the world, where we provide early preschool programs through higher education, equal educational opportunities for everyone. This nation would be one where no one is above the law and everyone—at every level, regardless of wealth, regardless of political position—knows that he or she will be held accountable for violations of the law. We’ll talk about all of us being in this together, all of us paying our fair share, all of us sacrificing for the good of the country and enjoying the benefits. The prohibition of drugs will be eliminated, and substance abuse will be treated as a public health and education issue. We will finally be providing the essential leadership on climate protection, because if we don’t do that, that window of opportunity that’s so narrow right now is going to be slammed shut.
Jobs report
Unemployment didn’t get worse, which is what counts for a win with your political elite. Yay!
Oops
Honestly, anyone who still thinks DHS wasn’t monitoring the Occupy protests is just too silly to live. Once you have a full-scale operation that’s supposed to monitor threats, they’re going to look at everything – because they’re paranoid they’re going to miss something. This is particularly amusing that they tried to push back on “inaccuracies” that were, in fact, true:
Senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials debated whether they should pressure award-winning reporter Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings to “pull down” a report he published on the magazine’s web site about the agency’s role in monitoring Occupy Wall Street (OWS), claiming it was riddled with “inaccuracies,” according to hundreds of pages of internal DHS emails related to OWS Truthout obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed last October.
But it wasn’t Hastings’ February 28 report that was incorrect. Rather, it was an unauthorized five-page internal report prepared last October by DHS employees, who acted “outside the scope of their authority” and violated “privacy standards,” according to the emails, about the potential threat posed by OWS that was flawed. The internal report strongly suggested DHS had been mining social media, such as OWS’s Twitter feeds, for intelligence on the protest movement.
That document, which Hastings had accurately represented in his story, formed the basis for his Rolling Stone story. It was found in more than 5 million hacked emails from private intelligence firm Stratfor that Wikileaks released earlier this year. Hastings obtained the internal report from WikiLeaks, which entered into an investigative partnership with Rolling Stone.
It was Hastings’ characterization of the internal report that struck a nerve with top officials at DHS, who spent two days discussing how they should publicly respond to it, according to the heavily redacted emails.
The general welfare
Fortunately for the Republicans, their supporters are too stupid to figure out this will cost them more money.
Virtually Speaking Thursday
Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd 6pm pacific | 9pm eastern
Tonight Melissa Thomasson, Associate Professor of Economics. She and Jay discuss her work on the economic history of medical care and health insurance in the US.
• Read: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/
• Listen to Melissa on ‘This American Life’ http://www.thisamericanlife.
• Watch Melissa on vimeo http://vimeo.com/15660730Listen live and later on BTR
Tweet questions to #AskVS
My kind of candidate
Jill Stein is the person I’d like to see in the White House:
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate have been arrested at a sit-in at a Philadelphia bank over housing foreclosures.
The arrests came after about 50 party supporters staged a protest Wednesday against Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage lender.
Some tried to reach Fannie Mae’s downtown office through the adjacent bank. They staged a sit-in when they were denied access to the office building.
Stein and her running mate, Philadelphia activist Cheri Honkala (HAHN’-kah-lah), are among five people arrested. Police say they will face charges of defiant trespassing.
The demonstrators included several city residents struggling to keep their homes. Two met with Fannie Mae officials.
Tax cuts for the rich, forever
“Never assume,” as the say, except when it comes to Republicans in Congress, who will always champion the wealthy few, regardless of how badly things are going for the rest of us:
Defying US President Barack Obama, the Republican-held House voted to extend tax cuts for all Americans, framing a partisan divide over an issue that will not be resolved before November’s election.
House lawmakers on Wednesday rejected a substitute Democratic plan that would have let taxes rise for top earners, and then voted 256 to 171 to extend a package of Bush-era tax cuts for everyone for another year.
The move collides with a recently approved Senate bill that would extend the tax breaks for families making under $250,000 a year — about 98 percent of Americans. Obama has threatened to veto a bill that also extends the cuts for those making more than that threshold…
Neil Barofsky
On why Washington is so screwed up. I’m reading his great new book, “Bail Out”: