Campaign for America’s Future Bob Borosage takes a look at the Obama presidency and doesn’t let him off the hook – although I don’t quite understand how Obama can be progressive and establishment at the same time.
Who didn’t see this orgy of media “analysis” coming? According to the media, anything at all that happens is good news for Republicans, as Atrios says.
You know how crazy it is when Bob Schieffer’s making sense.
But the question is, why are Democrats such wankers? Really. We just gained two more proudly progressive seats in Congress (one of them replacing a Blue Dog), but instead they’re fixated on 1) a state that has always voted for the out-of-power party in gubernatorial races, helped along by a very bad Democratic candidate and 2) another state that, like the self-destructive electorate of California, loves to vote for anyone who says they have a magic secret formula to cut property taxes. Sheesh.
Do they really not understand the point of healthcare reform? There are many reasons, but the economic argument is simple: It’s so people who lose their jobs won’t have to worry. It’s so employers who are afraid to hire because of premium costs can afford to do so. This has everything to do with jobs – and it’s their job to make that clear.
Are they really that appallingly bad at the sales and marketing of this simple idea?
Democrats on Capitol Hill began a nervous debate Wednesday about the course President Obama has set for their party, with some questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president’s agenda.
The conversations came as White House officials insisted that the party’s gubernatorial defeats in Virginia and New Jersey had few implications for Obama’s standing or for Democratic prospects in the 2010 midterm elections.
But moderate and conservative Democrats (Editor’s note: Or, as we like to call them, aspiring Republicans) took a clear signal from Tuesday’s voting, warning that the results prove that independent voters are wary of Obama’s far-reaching proposals and mounting spending, as well as the growing federal debt. Liberal lawmakers, meanwhile, said the party’s shortcoming came in moving too slowly on health-care reform and other items that would satisfy a base becoming disenchanted with the failure to deliver rapid change in government.
Voters in both states cited the economy as by far their top concern, and many lawmakers said the outcomes were a blunt wake-up call to put the issue front and center.
“The question is, do people think we’re tending to the things they care about?” said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) as he left a meeting of Senate leaders. He said there was palpable concern among his colleagues Wednesday that the main agenda items Democrats are pursuing — health care and climate change — resonate very little with voters focused on finding or keeping jobs.
Are they kidding me? Do they actually know any unemployed people? Because I do, a ton of ‘em. And every single one over 40 talks about how they can’t wait until they get some help with health care.
Why, oh why are Democrats so out of touch with reality? I guess because they don’t have to worry about paying for health care or getting another job if they lose this one – they can always become lobbyists. Really, they need to sit down with some bloggers and stop listening to Beltway soothsayers.
» Some have worried that internet use limits people’s participation in their local communities, but we find that most internet activities have little or a positive relationship to local activity. For instance, internet users are as likely as anyone else to visit with their neighbors in person. Cell phone users, those who use the internet frequently at work, and bloggers are more likely to belong to a local voluntary association, such as a youth group or a charitable organization. However, we find some evidence that use of social networking services (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) substitutes for some neighborhood involvement.
» Internet use does not pull people away from public places. Rather, it is associated with engagement in places such as parks, cafes, and restaurants, the kinds of locales where research shows that people are likely to encounter a wider array of people and diverse points of view. Indeed, internet access has become a common component of people’s experiences within many public spaces. For instance, of those Americans who have been in a library within the past month, 38% logged on to the internet while they were there, 18% have done so in a café or coffee shop.
» People’s mobile phone use outpaces their use of landline phones as a primary method of staying in touch with their closest family and friends, but face-to-face contact still trumps all other methods. On average in a typical year, people have in-person contact with their core network ties on about 210 days; they have mobile-phone contact on 195 days of the year; landline phone contact on 125 days; text-messaging contact on the mobile phone 125 days; email contact 72 days; instant messaging contact 55 days; contact via social networking websites 39 days; and contact via letters or cards on 8 days.
» Challenging the assumption that internet use encourages social contact across vast distances, we find that many internet technologies are used as much for local contact as they are for distant communication.
Well! I’m glad that’s settled, at least until the next study comes along.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:
* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
* * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
* * That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
* * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)
While we appreciate USTR’s recognition that increased participation is important, and its efforts in that regard, this process is still miles away from anything approaching real, public transparency. In terms of openness, a lot of the tension between what USTR says it wants to do and what has been done so far seems to come from the characterization of ACTA as a trade agreement, when its aims seem considerably broader than that. If we’re going to be seeing a new kind of trade agreement that more broadly affects policy and legal interpretation, we’re going to need a new, more open kind of process that lets the public see what agenda its government is pushing.
Nothing makes me more angry than corporations using the U.S. government for their own private security force – and the feds cooperating. I suppose we’ll now require that copy machines register copyrights every time someone makes a copy?
The Founding Fathers wanted copyrights that lasted no longer than 10 years. This isn’t how America is supposed to be – and we have no right to demand it of everyone else, unless we’re finally admitting we’re more interested in protecting plantation corporate profits than we are in being a nation of laws.
Moderate Senate Democrats uncomfortable with Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) health care reform plans are coalescing around Sen. Olympia Snowe and are looking to the centrist Maine Republican to provide them political cover at home and viable policy alternatives on the floor.
Reid’s bill remains largely under wraps pending a Congressional Budget Office analysis. But moderate Democrats — particularly those representing conservative-leaning states — are nervous about what they do know. They are pushing to replace Reid’s public insurance option proposal, which includes an opt-out provision for the states, with Snowe’s plan for a public option “trigger” — preferably before any floor debate on health care reform begins.
On Tuesday, moderate Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) made clear she supports Snowe’s proposal for a public insurance option that would only be triggered in the future if private insurers failed to adequately lower health premiums. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), a leading centrist, confirmed that the moderates were continuing to meet with Snowe to strategize a way forward that brings the Republican on board and softens Reid’s bill.
“There’s a possibility that that could occur,” Nelson said. “Right now, we don’t know what the actual version of the plan is because it hasn’t come back from CBO. … My expectation is that it probably doesn’t have enough to get 60 votes to get off the floor if it gets on the floor.”
Added Sen. Tom Carper (Del.), another leading centrist: “I think we as Democrats will rue the day if we don’t find a thoughtful way to make sure that Sen. Snowe’s central premise, perhaps modified … finds a home in the legislation that we finally vote on.”
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing personal bankruptcies surged 9% in October and were on target for the highest annual total in four years, according to a report issued Wednesday.
The American Bankruptcy Institute, an industry research firm that relies on data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center, said 135,914 consumers filed for bankruptcy last month. Almost a third of the bankruptcies were filed under Chapter 13, in which consumers are put on a repayment plan of up to five years.
“The nearly 9% increase in consumer bankruptcy filings in October, together with a 7% jump reported in business cases, demonstrates the sustained stress on the U.S. economy,” said ABI executive director Samuel Gerdano.
The group forecasts total bankruptcies to exceed 1.4 million in 2009, which would be the highest since 2005. It would also be an increase of at least 30% from last year.
Okay, I threw in half a chicken, a chopped onion, some celery and some carrots. I also poured in a whole bunch of Mrs. Dash, and hopefully this will taste good by dinner time. If not, there’s always hot sauce.
MILAN — An Italian court on Wednesday convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he said he was later tortured.
The judge in the case, Oscar Magi, said three other Americans, including the former Rome station chief for the CIA, were covered by diplomatic immunity.
The Americans were all tried in abstentia. A Milan prosecutor said his office would seek to have them extradited from the Untied States, but a formal decision will be made later by the Italian Justice Ministry.
The case is the only instance in which CIA operatives have faced a criminal trial for the controversial tactic of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects are seized in one country and forcibly transported to another without judicial oversight. A similar case involving a German citizen kidnapped in the Balkans has resulted in arrest warrants and a civil lawsuit but has not gone to trial.
Prosecutors said the Americans snatched Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Egyptian imam also known as Abu Omar, from a Milan intersection in broad daylight. They said he was flown to Cairo, where he was subject to electroshocks and physical abuse at the behest of the CIA.
Among the Americans charged in the case were Jeffrey Castelli, the former CIA station chief in Rome who allegedly oversaw the plot, and Robert Seldon Lady, the spy agency’s chief in Milan, who was accused of orchestrating the kidnapping. Prosecutors sought a 13-year prison term for Castelli and a 12-year sentence for Lady.
Armando Spataro, the deputy public prosecutor in Milan, said in his closing argument Wednesday that it was “unthinkable” that the U.S. policy of extraordinary rendition should trump Italian law, which forbids kidnapping.
A lot of unthinkable things have happened in the past eight years or so. You’d be surprised.
Headed “The Rich Would Like Your Attention For A Moment,” I found this in my in-box this morning:
Let’s be frank, you’ll never win the lottery.
The chances are pretty good that you’ll slave away at some miserable job the rest of your life. That’s because you were born into the wrong social class. Let’s face facts, you’re a member of the working caste. Sorry!
As a result, you don’t have the education, upbringing, connections, manners, appearance, and good taste to ever become one of us. In fact, you’d probably need a book the size of the yellow pages to list all the unfair advantages we have over you. That’s why we’re so relieved to know that you continue to believe all those silly fairy tales about “justice” and “equal opportunity” in America.
Of course, in a hierarchical social system like ours, there’s never been much room at the top to begin with. Besides, it’s already occupied by us and we like it up here so much that we intend to keep it that way. There’s often someone lower in the social hierarchy you can feel superior to and kick in the teeth once in a while. Even a lowly dishwasher can easily find some poor slob further down in the pecking order to spit on. So be thankful for immigrants, migrant workers, prostitutes, and the homeless.
Always remember that if everyone were economically secure and socially privileged like us there would be no one left to fill all those boring, dangerous, low-paid jobs in our economy. And no one to fight our wars for us, or blindly follow orders in our corporate mills. And certainly no one to meekly go to their grave without having lived a full and creative life. So please, keep up the good work!
You also probably don’t have the same compulsive drive to possess wealth, power, and prestige that we have. Even though you might sincerely want to change the way you live, you’re also afraid of the very change you desire, thus keeping you and others like you in a nervous state of limbo. You go through life mechanically playing your assigned social role, terrified what others would think should you ever dare to rise above your station.
Yes, we try to play you off against each other whenever it suits our purposes: high-waged workers against low-waged, unionized against non-unionized, black against white, male against female, American workers against Japanese workers against Mexican against…. We continually push your wages down by invoking “foreign competition,” “the law of supply and demand,” “national security,” or “the bloated federal deficit.” We throw you on the unemployed scrap heap if you step out of line or jeopardize our profits. And to give you an occasional break from the monotony of our daily economic blackmail, we allow you to participate in our stage-managed electoral shell games, better known to you ordinary folks as “elections.” Happily, you haven’t a clue as to what’s really happening – instead, you blame “aliens,” “tree-hugging environmentalists,” “niggers,” “Jews,” “welfare Queens,” and countless others for your troubled situation.
We’re also very pleased that many of you still embrace the work ethic even though most jobs in our economy degrade the environment, undermine your physical and emotional health, and basically suck your life right out of you. We obviously don’t know much about work, but we’re sure glad you do!
