Category: Politics As Usual

ICYMI – or I could really use some Allen West stupid…

~ Boohunney

The Manning sentencing and the Greenwald story did speed up this kind of slow news week, but, I sure could use some real stupid like Allen West…

Oh! Look!

Empty suit with bow tie reports on the color of White House dogs…

In an attempt at satire, the Daily Caller posted a piece on the new White House Portuguese Water Dog, Sunny. Funny details included the unemployment rate of Sunny’s home state, Michigan. The article also included questions regarding the need for Valerie Jarrett to greet visitors with the addition of the new puppy to the White House. Of course, there are “snarky fun” comments regarding the cost of the new pet (as if the POTUS should not be able to afford such a breed.)

Yes, I DO know that the post was supposed to be satire.

On a side note, the article did mention that the First Family does not have any “white dogs.”

Hardy har har…..

BTW, the new pup is DANGEROUSLY CUTE…

Accounting Today finds documentation on Left leaning group scrutiny by IRS…

It seems a wide variety of “social welfare groups” with political sounding titles were targeted by the IRS.

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones:

Anyway, it seems that the tireless Sander Levin has unearthed yet another IRS PowerPoint presentation from around 2010 that tells screeners to watch out for groups asking for tax-exempt status who might actually be primarily engaged in political activities….

Aside from providing yet more evidence in favor of a federal ban on PowerPoint presentations, the astute observer will note that the first slide features both an elephant and a donkey. (Sorry, Green Party.) The next slide does indeed list Tea Party, and then Patriots and 9/12 Project. But guess what? Next up are Emerge, Progressive, and We the People. This sure doesn’t look like an IRS jihad against conservative organizations, does it?…

Look! Up in the sky! It’s Benghazi!

Well, I guess it was another fake “conspiragasm” …

R.I.P. Elmore Leonard…

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite crime novelists Elmore Leonard has passed away.

“Elmore Leonard — the award-winning mystery writer whose snappy dialogue, misfit characters and laconic sense of humor produced such popular works as “Get Shorty,” “Hombre,” “Fifty-Two Pickup” and “Out of Sight” — has died, according to his literary agent, Jeffrey Posternak. He was 87.

The cause of death was not given, but Leonard had suffered a stroke two weeks ago. According to his website, the author died at his home in Bloomfield Village, Michigan.

Leonard’s succinct writing style — he favored brief exchanges of dialogue leavened with wit and a keen sense of person and place — made him a favorite of Hollywood, which turned several Leonard novels and stories into films and TV programs. (The newest Leonard adaptation, the film “Life of Crime,” based on his novel “The Switch,” will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month.)”

Leonard, a few years back wrote his 10 rules for writing:

  1.  Never open a book with weather.
  2.  Avoid prologues.
  3.  Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
  4.  Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
  5.  Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
  6.  Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
  7.  Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
  8.  Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
  9.  Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
  10.  Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

You gave much enjoyment, thank you!

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not a trade agreement

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

tpp-why-so-secret

It’s a corporate coup. Jim Hightower:

Where does your mayor, school board, governor, or any other “public shopper” go to purchase fixtures, food, furniture, ferns, and whatnot? Where I live, various agencies have Buy Austin, Buy Texas, Buy American, Buy Green, Buy Sweatshop-Free, and other targeted policies that apply our tax dollars to our values. This sensible idea has swept across the country, most likely including where you live, and these agency purchases add up to a big financial boost for start-ups, independents, women-owned, and other homegrown enterprises. Rather than buying everything from Walmart or China (excuse the redundancy there)–thus shipping truckloads and boatloads of cash out of our communities–plow that public money back into the home turf for grassroots economic growth and the flowering of local jobs.

Imagine the uproar if President Obama and Congress tried to pass a bill to outlaw such “preferential procurement” policies, summarily cancelling our democratic right to decide where to make public purchases. I’d get pretty PO’d, wouldn’t you? And what if they also proposed that foreign corporations in Brunei, New Zealand, Vietnam, and other nations must be given the right to make the sale on any and all products purchased with our tax dollars? That’d set my hair on fire!

The American people would never stand for this brazen affront to our sovereignty, so I can assure you that Obama and Congress will definitely NOT be proposing any such thing. Not directly, that is.

Instead, their hope is to tiptoe it around us. The nullification of our people’s right to direct expenditures of our own tax dollars is but one of the horror stories being quietly packed into a political-and-economic bombshell benignly labeled TPP –the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

This thing is a supersized and nuclearized NAFTA, the 1994 trade scam rammed through Congress by Bill Clinton, Wall Street’s Robert Rubin, and the entire corporate establishment. They promised that the “glories of globalization” would shower prosperity across our land. They lied. Corporations got the gold. We got the shaft–thousands of factories closed, millions of middle-class jobs went south, and the economies of hundreds of towns and cities (including Detroit) were hollowed out. (Most Mexicans got the NAFTA shafta, too. US grain traders like ADM dumped corn into Mexico, wiping out millions of peasant farmers’ livelihoods, and thousands of local businesses were crushed when Walmart invaded with its Chinese-made wares.)

Twenty years later, the corporate gang that stuck us with NAFTA is back, hoping to fool us with an even more destructive multinational deal. (This calls for another immortal quote from George W: “Fool me once, shame on–shame on you. Fool me–you can’t get fooled again.” Well, you know what he meant).

This time we really must pay attention, because TPP is not just another trade deal. First, it is massive and open-ended. It would hitch us immediately to 11 Pacific Rim nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam), and its door would remain wide open to lure China, Indonesia, Russia, and other nations to come in. Second, note that many of those countries already have trade agreements with the US. Hence, THIS AMAZING FACT: TPP is a “trade deal” that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!

The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish “partnership” for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new “rights” and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments… and to us. Here are a few of TPP’s provisos that would make our daily lives riskier, poorer, and less free:

Go read the whole damned thing.

‘Structural unemployment’?

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

unemployment

Why NOT throw money at the problem?

Dean Baker: Paul Solman takes me and my grumpy friend Paul Krugman to task for insisting that there is a growing consensus within the economics profession that we are not suffering from structural unemployment. Krugman and I used our blogs to complain about Aug. 2’s segment in which Brooks suggested structural unemployment was the economy’s main problem and that there was little that could be done about it.

The United States currently has about 9 million fewer people working than if it had continued on its trend of growth from 2002 to 2007.

The question is whether the unemployment problem is a lack of demand due to a loss of $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth, or whether there are structural problems that would prevent most of these 9 million people from being re-employed even if the demand were there. Krugman and I support the former idea; those who see unemployment as structural are in the latter camp. Here’s another way to think about the problem. Imagine someone found a $1 trillion bill in the street and decided that, as a public service, she would spend the money over the next 12 months to boost the economy. For simplicity, let’s assume that she decides to divide her $1 trillion so that it is spent in exactly the same way that the economy’s current $16 trillion in annual spending is spent.

In my view, this $1 trillion of new spending would cause output to increase by roughly 6 percent. (I’m ignoring multiplier effects to keep things simple.) Employment would also rise by roughly the same amount, filling the bulk of the 9-million-jobs hole. In other words, this would be great news for the country.
Continue reading “‘Structural unemployment’?” →

‘Grow up’

~ susie

Well, yes:

Christians in Britain and the US who claim that they are persecuted should “grow up” and not exaggerate what amounts to feeling “mildly uncomfortable”, according to Rowan Williams, who last year stepped down as archbishop of Canterbury after an often turbulent decade.

“When you’ve had any contact with real persecuted minorities you learn to use the word very chastely,” he said. “Persecution is not being made to feel mildly uncomfortable. ‘For goodness sake, grow up,’ I want to say.”

True persecution was “systematic brutality and often murderous hostility that means that every morning you wonder if you and your children are going to live through the day”. He cited the experience of a woman he met in India “who had seen her husband butchered by a mob”.

Lord Williams’s years as archbishop of Canterbury were marked by turbulence over the church’s stance on the role of gay priests and bishops; gay marriage; and homophobia in the wider Anglican communion – with many members of the church expressing disappointment at a perceived hardening in its position on homosexuality.

Asked if he had let down gay and lesbian people, he said after a pause: “I know that a very great many of my gay and lesbian friends would say that I did. The best thing I can say is that is a question that I ask myself really rather a lot and I don’t quite know the answer.”

Weaker than the storm

~ susie

So Chris Christie really is using the marketing money to glorify himself, and not to help storm victims:

ATLANTIC CITY – Hurricane Sandy victims told members of the New Jersey Legislature during a session here Thursday that they have grown weary of “Stronger Than the Storm” ads, and are exhausted by months of futile attempts to seek assistance in repairing and holding on to their storm-ravaged homes. “I haven’t seen one billboard or ad that tells people exactly how they can be stronger than the storm. . . . So many people still don’t know where to go for help,” said Staci Berger, executive director of the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey.

Berger testified before the Joint Senate and Assembly Environment Committee about the hundreds of Shore homeowners her agency has been trying to assist since the Oct. 29 storm. The session was held at the Atlantic City Convention Center so legislators – among them State Sen. James Whelan (D., Atlantic) and Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi (R., Bergen) – could hear about the status of rebuilding efforts at the Shore. And that status, nearly 10 months after the horrific storm created $38 billion in damage in New Jersey, is: Not so great.

Hmm

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Well, he said at Netroots Nation he was thinking about running. It would be good to have someone in the Democratic field pushing the candidates to the left:

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who says he’s open to making another bid for president, will travel next week to Iowa, a move that will surely stoke further speculation that Dean may run in 2016.

The former presidential candidate will speak Wednesday at the Iowa Federation of Labor convention, taking him back to the same state where he finished third in the 2004 Iowa caucuses and made his infamous “Dean Scream.”

A spokesman for Dean’s independent group, Democracy for America, said Dean will be talking next week about the organization’s “Purple to Blue Project,” a plan aimed to help Democrats win state House and Senate seats.

While the project is focused on five races in Virginia this year, the group plans to expand to other states next year, including an effort to win the majority in Iowa’s state House.

Mayor Nutter says city will borrow $50 million to open schools

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

But I think it only postpones the long-term plan:

NOTE: Council President Clarke is holding a news conference momentarily. This post will be updated throughout the day.

Unable to reach an agreement with City Council on Philly’s school-funding crisis, Mayor Nutter today pledged that the city will borrow the $50 million needed for schools to open on time Sept. 9. “I will not risk a catastrophe,” Nutter told reporters in City Hall. “Schools are going to open on time and safely.”

The borrowing will be a general obligation bond. The mayor hopes to pay for it with revenue from the extension of a 1 percentage point city sales-tax increase that was supposed to expire after this year. But he and Council President Darrell Clarke have been sparring over how to handle the sales tax. If Council does not adopt the extension, Nutter said, the borrowing costs will be paid out of the city’s General Fund.