Catch-22

So I respond to this piece by making an online comment (The Inquirer  doesn't always, but most of the time and in this particular case, deletes all the comments and re-formats their pieces the next day). I over-stated my case, making the claim that there's no documented case of voter fraud (Where an individual pretends to be someone he's not in order to vote illegitimately) ever having occurred. A commenter posted three URLs to stories of documented voter fraud. I replied okay, fine, there are a few isolated cases of voter fraud, but the documented cases of vote suppression, where the government denies voters their Constitutional right to vote vastly, enormously outnumbers cases of voter fraud and included this URL that documented a few of those many, many cases

The commenter replied that Think Progress is a lefty website and therefore a provider of suspect information and then made comments indicating that he read the URL, but clearly didn't follow the link to the story. Then, today, I saw this piece.

So, if Think Progress is a provider of information of suspect quality because it has a clear political viewpoint and therefore, an agenda, but the national media has decided to black out the issue of the Governor of Florida suppressing votes, then we've got a classic Catch-22. We don't learn of vote suppression from the national media because the national media isn't covering it. Why? Because there's no way to make both sides, the Republicans and the Democrats, seem equivalent. The national media simply can't say that the Rs and the Ds are being equally bad. This is very clearly a story of the Republicans being bad, full stop. There's simply no way to take a middle view that blames both sides or that allows the media to take an above-it-all approach. In order to tell the story, they have to place the blame squarely on the Republican Governor of Florida. Think Progress doesn't have a problem doing that, because as we've already established, they're an openly lefty website anyway.

But if regular folks like myself can't use lefty websites to make political arguments, if we can't point out documentation of the problem that websites such as Think Progress have assembled, then how are we supposed to make online political arguments????? I never asked for a list of objective websites I could use because I don't really believe there are any in any event. PolitiFact.com once purported to be an objective, reliable website, but recently disgraced itself by declaring that Democrats made a "pants-on-fire lie" by saying that Republicans had voted to "end Medicare."

At worst, Democrats perhaps overstated their case a bit by saying that altering Medicare beyond recognition (By changing it from a single-payer type program into a voucher program) was the same thing as ending it. So we can toss Politi"Fact" onto the rubbish heap of once-credible sites. So to me, how we determine how credible a story is relies on vastly more than just who produces it. Back in 2002, the George W. Bush Administration declared that President Bill Clinton had permitted Saddam Hussein of Iraq to kick out US weapons inspectors. I had been paying attention at the time and knew that this claim was not true. Fair.org looked at that claim a short time later, showing the stories as they were relayed in December 1998 and the same news organizations reporting in August 2002.

This convinced me quite some time ago that there's simply no such thing as an always-reliable news organization. I stick with the lefty sites myself because I find them to be very highly reliable and willing to follow the facts, even when they make "our side" look bad. I was a History major back in college and in my military work, had to take an objective and cold-bloodedly factual view of what I was reporting on. I learned very early to document what I was saying and to not make statements that I wasn't able to back up with credible evidence. My background gives me a highly reliable BS detector. I can't simply read who produces a story and glance at the title and tell you whether a story is credible or not, I need to read the actual story, as I did in response to a comment here.

As I like to put it "If Sean Hannity of Fox News says the sky is blue, does that mean the sky is actually green or does it mean that even Hannity is right once in a while?"

Update

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.

Wikiquote

ThinkProgress is exonerated in a piece by FireDogLake.

I should add that the DoJ letter refers to “news reports” that alerted them to the voter purge scheme. Think Progress in particular should be commended for bringing this issue to light. Practically all of the traditional media ignored it; the New York Times, even today, gives it short shrift at the end of a story on the judge’s ruling on voter registration suppression. It took progressive media to raise awareness of this scheme to take away the voting rights of thousands of Floridians, part of a larger war on voting being attempted in Republican legislatures across the country.

The piece is about how the DOJ is finally catching up to the State Government of Florida and is insisting that Florida live up to the Voting Rights Act.

A liberal commentator on CNN

You can tell that I'm conditioned by certain sights and phrases. I looked at a blog post and saw a photo of an attractive woman on CNN who questioned Tony Perkins (The post accurately identified Perkins as the "SPLC-certified hate group leader") and immediately thought "Aw yeesh! How his this woman embarrassed the liberal cause? What wingnut phrases has she adopted wholesale? What right-wing misinformation has she been spreading?"

Why do I suspect CNN of hosting right-wing-favoring stenographers? Because of CNN commenters like Erick Ericson and Dana Loesch. Ericson is a right-wing blogger who also write for the Red State blog and has things like this to say about how the political left views women and blacks:

The Democrats seem to believe that all women believe what they believe and are the same. Instead of unique individuals, they are a stereotyped class of women who care only about birth control, abortion, and government benefits. Stay at home moms who fall outside this view are viewed as second class citizens who really can’t be related to and who cannot relate to women in the workforce. Liberal women who prided themselves on feminist advances into society and think of themselves as unique individuals go on twitter and television and radio to proclaim all women same thinking, same liking, same knowing, and . . . well . . . same.

Like black Republicans such as Condelezza Rice, Michael Steel, and Herman Cain who are ridiculed by the left as oreos, Uncle Toms, or worse, women who think differently are treated as second class citizens, inferior, or somehow “other.”

What a catch CNN! Gee, what a perceptive fellow! You can tell Erickson spends lots of time with lefties because he understands us so well [/snark]! What about CNNs' other right-winger Dana Loesch?

In January 2007, the smear that President Obama attended a "madrassa" as a boy was sparked by a vague Internet report, then spread by Fox News, and finally debunked by CNN -- within the span of a week.

...

Instead of correcting the caller by pointing out that Obama is a Christian and not a Muslim, Loesch said: "Well, yeah, I mean, he did study -- he went to one of the madrassas over in Indonesia for a while. So he knows -- I mean, he -- which is kind of like the equivalent in Islam of a Catholic school in Catholicism. So there's that."

CNN has loyally stood by both commentators and has refused to can either of them, so I was pleasantly surprised to read the FireDogLake post further and saw that, actually, the CNN person Brooke Baldwin, gave our "SPLC-certified hate group leader" Tony Perkins a pretty hard time (The CNN clip is presented here on an Americablog post). Baldwin "asked [Perkins] he would explain to a married gay couple that they should not have the protections of marriage. He did not answer." Perkins said lots of words in response to her question, but they all amounted to him trying to change the subject from the human, emotional question of "How can you say my marriage is not legitimate?" to the more prosaic ones of "public policy" and "research" and how the Obama Administration is taking away the "rights" of homophobes to discriminate against gay people.
So good on CNN for a commentator of theirs to seriously challenge a known homophobe and to defend the perspective of LGBT people who want to be treated as equals under the law.

On noon on June 10th, Philadelphia will commence an LGBT Pride March from 13th & Locust Streets or from 243 S. 13th Street. A statemen trom our local organizer R.W. Dennen:

It's colorful different and exciting as people welcome us with open arms. This will stick with you and never forgotten. This will be sponsored by the Peace Veterans and accompanied by other activists. Since President Obama evolved that gays are equal to other human beings, this will be an important Pride Parade for "Law of the Land" marriage equality and dignity. We must fight this nefarious bigotry and live up to freedom for all.
We implore you to spread the word to your friends. This wll be our fourth year
and we are growing every year.

Besides which, Garden State Equality of New Jersey is holding the 2012 Equality Walk at 4:00pm June 23rd at Erie Park in Montclair NJ. From Philadelphia, that's about a 90-mile or a nearly two-hour drive or you can take the NJ Transit train from the 30th Street Station to New York and then change to the Montclair-Boonton line.

Bush to blame for economy?

On May 20th, the Inky ran a letters column and a commenter asked: “Three and a half years into Obama's presidency and you still continue to blame Bush?” to which I responded:

• Uh, coniljw, Bush oversaw the housing bubble that was noticed by liberal Keynesian economists in 2002 and popped at the end of 2007. Yes, Obama has spent his entire term trying to dig his way out of the mess that Bush created. The downturn of 2007 that continues to this day hasn't been called the “Great Recession” for nothing. Granted, the fact that Republicans have been fighting tooth and nail to keep Americans poor and hungry and unemployed along with Obama's “pivot” from ending the recession to reducing the deficit from early 2010 to mid-2011 are also part of the problem, but yes, Bush is the primary cause of our economic troubles today.

• rich2506

Posted 4:25 PM, 05/20/2012

It was Jimmy Carter that signed the CRA in to law, not Bush. [Community Reinvestment Act – how it allegedly led to the housing bubble]

It was Clinton who gave it teeth - http://clinton6.nara.gov/1993/12/1993-12-08-briefing-by-bentsen-and-rubin.text.html

It was Barack H Obama who sued citibank under the CRA in 1998 to force then to lead money to 'minorities' - Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank

The Bush administration warned about Fannie and Freddie. They got push back from Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and Chris Dodd and the rest of the democrats. You can youtube it

• Philly.Tru

To which I responded:

• All that Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke had to do to pop the housing bubble was to call attention to it. Had they called attention to the fact that housing prices were out of line with rental prices, the free market would have done the rest to deflate the bubble. They failed to do so. Also, prices for commercial construction were consistent with residential housing, it was way overpriced. Bush could very easily have caused the housing bubble to deflate. Was he oblivious or did he deliberately allow it? It's the old question, stupid or evil? Eh, hard to say.

• rich2506

Posted 7:43 PM, 05/20/2012

I don't see such a simplistic solution as being effective. Greenspan tried it in 1996 with stock market and his "irrational exuberance" phrase. In the long run, no one listened but he sure did get the tar beat out himself for saying it.

• Philly.Tru

Posted 8:29 PM, 05/20/2012

Rich, even AFTER the collapse, C. Dodd was STILL pushing for "More Minority Home Ownership". (This was in the spring of '09 he voiced his ongoing support for the policy.)

It was that idealistic push, sell by skin color, not financial ability, that CAUSED the collapse, yet he still was pushing for more of the same.

Ya, same old question... Was Dodd Stupid? or Evil?

Good intentions are fine, but when they cause more harm than good, you would THINK it would be a wake up call to stop, unless you WANTED them to be harmed.

• turkytom

And oh yeah turkeytom, speaking of "idealistic pushes," remember G.W. Bush and the "Ownership Society" where Bush pressed for more homeownership? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNqQx7sjoS8 Ya didn't? Yep, more of that ol' "memory hole" that folks have for inconvenient fact. And Phillytru, if the Federal Reserve Chairman can't speak plainly, why does he exist? What's the point of having a spokesperson who can't speak?

• rich2506

Essentially, my take on the housing bubble is that Bush was “on watch,” i.e., the “guy on the bridge” and in command when the housing bubble occurred. Is it reasonable to look at the immediate past at what one's predecessor might have done? To a point, yes. Right-wing figures have tried to blame President Obama for job losses that occurred during Obama's “first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect." Is it reasonable to use the same idea to let Bush off the hook for 9-11? Not really, as military and political policies are easier to change quickly than are economic ones. And one might notice that Media Matters wasn't arguing for nine months, the time Bush had to change the policies that made 9-11 possible, but for just a few months to allow Obama time to put new policies into effect. Yes, it's reasonable to give a president some time to establish new policies, but if Bush had a problem with the CRA, he had more than enouh time to do something about it.

As the housing bubble was noticed in 2002, that gave the Bush Administration five years to notice that there was a problem with housing prices not being consistent with rental prices, that is, that there was a bubble. Bush's Administration then had to the end of 2007 to do something about it. Above, a commenter states the right-wing claim that

The Bush administration warned about Fannie and Freddie. They got push back from Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and Chris Dodd and the rest of the democrats.

My major problem with this claim of Democratic pushback being a decisive factor is that I just can't reconcile this claim with Bush's fight with Democrats over warrantless surveillance. In early 2008, a year after Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate, Democrats seemed enegized to bring Bush's policies to heel:

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) successfully led an effort to block immunity in December, just before Congress' holiday recess, and the Senate returned to the issue last week, considering dual proposals from the Intelligence and Judiciary committees. Last Thursday, Republicans and a dozen Democrats blocked Judiciary's proposal to update FISA without immunity, but the GOP then refused an agreement that would have required a mere 51-vote majority to pass further amendments.

Were Democratic efforts successful? No, because Bush has the veto pen, a Republican Party that voted in lockstep to support his policies and traitorous Blue Dog Democrats who broke with their party to vote with him. Remember, when the FISA/warrantless surveillance battle occurred, Bush's approval rating was down to 28%, a rating that competed with that of Nixon and Truman at their lowest, but his disapproval rating was 71%, the worst that an American president has ever received. Considering that Bush successfully prevailed anyway on an issue that was important to him, I just can't see how Democratic pushback on the housing issue could possibly have swayed him or the Republican Party.

Also, as I pointed out in my final message, Bush stood behind what he called the “Ownership Society,” where people would own their own homes. From a 2004 White House press release:

Expanding Homeownership. The President believes that homeownership is the cornerstone of America's vibrant communities and benefits individual families by building stability and long-term financial security. In June 2002, President Bush issued America's Homeownership Challenge to the real estate and mortgage finance industries to encourage them to join the effort to close the gap that exists between the homeownership rates of minorities and non-minorities. The President also announced the goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families before the end of the decade. Under his leadership, the overall U.S. homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2004 was at an all time high of 69.2 percent. Minority homeownership set a new record of 51 percent in the second quarter, up 0.2 percentage point from the first quarter and up 2.1 percentage points from a year ago. President Bush's initiative to dismantle the barriers to homeownership includes:

• American Dream Downpayment Initiative, which provides down payment assistance to approximately 40,000 low-income families;
• Affordable Housing. The President has proposed the Single-Family Affordable Housing Tax Credit, which would increase the supply of affordable homes;
• Helping Families Help Themselves. The President has proposed increasing support for the Self-Help Homeownership Opportunities Program; and
• Simplifying Homebuying and Increasing Education. The President and HUD want to empower homebuyers by simplifying the home buying process so consumers can better understand and benefit from cost savings. The President also wants to expand financial education efforts so that families can understand what they need to do to become homeowners.
  

Right-wingers, of course, tend to “disappear” this embarrassing bit of history and try to make it sound as though Democrats were pushing for more homeownership against Republican resistance.

Could Alan Greenspan have worded his “Irrational Exuberance” statement better and more skillfully? There's no question that his statement had an immediate impact. But “in typically enigmatic fashion, Greenspan didn't actually say what most people think he did. His famous utterance was actually part of a question, not a statement of fact or opinion.” So no, I don't believe that Federal Reserve Chairmen are doomed to never state their true opinions, just that they should do so in a carefully-planned manner.

Dark Shadows

Good flick, but I think if I were five years to a decade a few years older (My sister, only four years older, watched it "religiously"), I would have enjoyed it more as I would have been more familiar with the original source material. As it is, I remember watching parts of a few of the shows from the Dark Shadows series, which went from 1966 to 1971. I think at that time, I was more into the Batman and the Star Trek series (Both of which ran from 1966 to 1968).
As a nostalgia remake, the movie reminds me of the Quentin Tarantino trilogy, Planet Terror, Grindhouse and Death Proof. It's a really high-powered, professionally-done remake of stuff I barely remembered or hardly caught the first time around. Of course, in the trilogy, it didn't hurt that Rose McGowan was such a cutie. There's really no one in Dark Shadows, then or now, who's as attractive.

The Avengers

Fun stuff! Really cool to see super-powered beings really pushed to their limits. Yeah, they're super-powered and have amazing abilities, but here you really see them sweat and strain to keep up with the challenges that are being tossed at them. One of the things I recognized from the comics when I watched the first Fantastic Four, the item that just rang absolutely true, was the bickering and arguing. Same is true in The Avengers, they're not all happy, loyal, obedient warriors, they're individuals who let each other know when they disagree, but when the chips are down and their backs are to the wall, they pull together and they all act in concert.

The Hunger Games

Very cool! Our heroine, Katrina Everdeen (Played by Jennifer Lawrence), manages to combine both ninja babe-style fighting competence and solid, down-to-earth humanity and decency. Our dictator looks more and more troubled as the movie progresses because, well, no matter how solid and stable a dictatorship appears to be, the whole carefully-built house of cards can collapse rather quickly. Many of the players who should be brutally and mindlessly playing the roles assigned to them display stubborn flashes of human solidarity, for something better and higher than mere survival-at-any-cost. These flashes are counter to their self-interest of course, which is what's ultimately so inspiring about the film.

Primary season truly begins

With convincing victories in several large states, Mitt Romney is now firmly cemented as the Republican nominee for President (With the sad exception of Newt Gingrich and no one ever expected Ron Paul to win anyway). Romney's speech on victory night was very good in some respects.

Everywhere I go, Americans are tired of being tired, and many of those who are fortunate enough to have a job are working harder for less. For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job … for grandparents who can’t afford the gas to visit their grandchildren … for the mom and dad who never thought they’d be on food stamps … for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month – ...

My question is, of course, how did this sad state of affairs come about? As CEPRs "Scorecard on Development" series shows, these are hardly problems that suddenly began on January 21st, 2009. They are problems that the Republican Party has been actively collaborating in creating for the past 30+ years. Europe has been trying to do things according to Republican blueprints for the past several years and now appears to be undergoing a real change of heart.

The public generally doesn’t know what the technical economic solutions are, and the media keeps telling them, falsely, there are no good alternatives, because the deficit hysterics still control a conversation disconnected from the reality staring them in the face.  But voters now know their elites don’t have a clue and don’t seem to care that the elite solutions fashioned mostly for banks and bond holders are worsening the human suffering without solving any underlying economic problems.

Does the Romney speech contain any ideas for how we solve our economic problems? I certainly didn't hear any new or potentially workable or even interesting ideas and actually, solutions are precisely where Romney's speech really falls short.

Then we get into Romney’s vision….

Romney never makes the turn to how he would achieve this America. Believing in it is apparently enough. The end result isn’t so much a preview of how Romney would govern the country as a game of “I Spy: America the Beautiful” edition.

At least back in 2010, President Obama realized that the solution to an insufficiently stimulated economy was more stimulus and tried to get some through a Congress where the Republican Party could significantly obstruct and delay Democratic programs.

The Democrats have a better way, the Republicans just want more of the same disastrously failed policies that got us into this mess to begin with.

The Rosen-Romney spat and other campaign issues

Mitt Romney awarded his wife Ann the sorta, kinda official-like position of the representative of America's women to the Romney campaign/future administration. Was Ann qualified to hold such a position? According to CNN contributor Hilary Rosen:

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing.

Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we -- why do we worry about their future?

Is the claim that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life" true? Actually, if you want to get all technical about it, yes, that is true. The Federal Government does not classify being a stay-at-home mother and homemaker as "work." Nevertheless, Romney found defenders everywhere who were outraged that her many years of being a mother of five sons and a homemaker were being contemptuously brushed aside. The First Lady promptly tweeted: "Every mother works hard and every woman deserves to be respected."

Of course, nobody has challenged the sentence after that because it's so clearly and obviously true. Romney was a child of wealth and privilege who married into a family of wealth and privilege. Romney has never suffered any kind of economic insecurity and has never had to choose between, say, health insurance and a third meal for the day for her boys. A mother who came to motherhood late in life explains:

But Romney nevertheless had a huge advantage over mothers with less money: She could hire help. She could engage baby sitters, nannies, cooks and housecleaners.

That doesn't mean she didn't find her days filled with managing schedules, overseeing homework, buying new sneakers and, yes, even wiping snotty noses. With five kids, she probably never had enough help around to avoid that duty.

Still, Romney's experience of motherhood is significantly different from that of moms around the country whose family incomes hover at the median of $50,000 a year.

Romney later said:

"Look, I know what it's like to struggle. Maybe I haven't struggled as much financially as some people have, but I can promise you that I've had struggles in my life. And I would love for people to understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling, and that's why we're running."

Which us all very fine and well, but her husband has endorsed the "Path to Prosperity" plan put out by Representative Paul Ryan (R-MI) that would cut deeply and savagely into benefits for those who are less wealthy and privileged that the Romney family is. According to the economist Dean Baker, the Ryan budget plan:

...essentially eliminates [by 2050] all spending on items other than Social Security, health care and defense. By the end of the 10-year budget horizon most of the areas that we think of as the domain of the federal government (e.g. federal highways and airports, federal courts and law enforcement, drug research and safety, the State Department and Justice Department) will be cut by around 50 percent under the Ryan plan.

It's all very fine and well for Ann Romney to "have compassion for people," but how does that "compassion" translate into actual policy proposals? Well...it doesn't.

Bottom line is that Mitt Romney doesn't need to fire his wife as the Romney campaign's liaison to American women, but he needs to find other representatives to tell him what American women are feeling and going through. His wife Ann is a good start, but she knows about the economic struggles of American women essentially second-hand, from people she has spoken with on the campaign trail, blog posts,magazine articles, TV shows and probably books. She can't contribute any wisdom on how non-millionaires are dealing with the economy these days through her own personal experience.


Speaking of the Ryan "Path to Prosperity," Roman Catholic theologians, priests, nuns, social workers and others have condemned the Ryan plan:

If Rep. Ryan thinks a budget that takes food and healthcare away from millions of vulnerable people upholds Catholic values, then he also probably believes Jesus was a Tea Partier who lectured the poor to stop being so lazy and work harder,” said John Gehring, Catholic Outreach Coordinator at Faith in Public Life. “This budget turns centuries of Catholic social teaching on its head. These Catholic leaders and many Catholics in the pews are tired of faith being misused to bless an immoral agenda."

Allegedly, Ryan wants to liberate the poor from dependency on the government, but the 59 Catholics say that his plan is "anathema to the Catholic social tradition."


Also, Obama has decided to put his full weight behind getting the "Buffett Rule" put into legislation. Is there any chance that any such legislation will pass? Nah, but it's a good campaign issue as it reveals a stark difference between the two parties.  Right-wing media sources have decided on some pushback. The Washington Beacon has charged that "[Obama] has yet to propose a comprehensive plan to reform the byzantine tax code," but the Obama Administration has begun work on exactly that. Problem is, tax simplification is a good deal harder and more complex and much less likely to produce new revenues than simply raising taxes would. Every provision in the tax code was put in there by majorities of Congress. Nothing is there that hasn't been considered and argued over and voted on. If a provision is in there, it's there for a defensible and probably a justifiable reason.

As far as other campaign issues go, Mitt Romney has come down firmly on the anti-abortion side of the abortion issue. And no, there's no reason to think that the Republican "War on Women" has been halted or that the two sides are now equal because of the outrage concerning Ann Romney and Hillary Rosen.

George Zimmerman appeared in court and invoked the "Stand Your Ground" law as a justification for killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, that was pressed by ALEC,the American Legislative Exchange Council that writes bills that are later adopted, often wholesale, by right-wing legislatures. The good news is that corporations have been having second thoughts about staying with ALEC and have begun withdrawing their support.

Santorum, anti-porn warrior

Robbery and homicide were at a little over two per 100,000 and around five per 100,000 respectively in the early 1960s. They rose to around nine in the mid-1970s and largely staying between 10 and eight until spiking in the early 1990s, going up to 11 for robbery and almost 10 for murder. Both stats have declined since then to under six. Now, if Rick Santorum were correct and pornography was a cause for rape and sexual assaults, then considering that porn has grown dramatically from its jump from still photos in magazines with the film “Deep Throat” in 1974 and grew rapidly during the late 1980s with first the introduction of the VCR, then even more so with the introduction of the DVD in the mid-1990s and then even more so with online porn in the late 1990s, we should have then seen a pretty steady and by now, a dramatic rise in rape and sexual assaults, right? Well, covering only the years 2000 through 2009, the Department of Justice concluded (Page 2 of the PDF) that rape and sexual assault declined at pretty much the same rate that all other crimes declined during that same period. As pornography became increasingly easy to get and to view privately during this period, I'd say Santorum's thesis, that America is “suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography” is a complete fail.

Update: To gauge how much the adult film industry grew, I looked at adult videos released according to Adult Video News on October 2000 and October 2007. The numbers were 150 and 345 respectively. Since the industry crashed along with everyone else since the end of 2007, it's a pretty good presumption using Santorum's thesis, that the crash would have made some visible difference to the amount of rape and sexual assault. According to Santorum, however, sexual crimes grew since President Obama took office, so again, Santorum achieves a complete fail.

The return of austerity on the Democratic side of the aisle

Paul Krugman reviews the baneful effects of austerity on the current economic recovery. His essential case is that:

Under President Obama, however, the dire fiscal condition of state and local governments — the result of a sustained slump, which in turn was caused largely by that private debt explosion before 2008 — has led to forced spending cuts. The fiscal straits of lower-level governments could and should have been alleviated by aid from Washington, which remains able to borrow at incredibly low interest rates. But this aid was never provided on a remotely adequate scale.

This policy malpractice is doing double damage to America. On one side, it’s helping lose the future — because that’s what happens when you neglect education and public investment. At the same time, it’s hurting us right now, by helping keep growth low and unemployment high.

So, with austerity policies doing a double whammy on America, what is the proposed course of action by House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer? Why of course, he's pushing for austerity! I mean, naturally, what else should one do under these circumstances? America is suffering, as Krugman points out, because the Federal Government is refusing to take advantage of very low interest rates to borrow money and then give that money to state and local governments.

As any parent knows, you can't re-do years of a child's life. Once their third grade has passed them by because the local government couldn't afford to keep their school in operation, you can't just hit a re-set button and re-do that year once properity returns. That year of the child's life is gone forever and the child will simply have to work harder to simply keep up with his or her peers who weren't deprived of that year of education.

Columbia University put out a study (PDF) on the job losses of the 1982 recession, showing that the long-term effects were quite bad and that they've lasted to this day. Earning losses for people who lost that year of employment were 30% and after 15 to 20 years, were still 20% lower than for their peers in similar economic circumstances.

But, the right wing says, we don't want to be "another Greece," now, do we? Greece is currently sufferings lots of economic troubles, true, but the CEPR pins the blame for those troubles on European Finance Ministers.

"Given the underestimation of Greek losses so far, and the recessionary impact of budget tightening, mass layoffs, a 20 percent reduction of the minimum wage, and other austerity measures – I think the pessimistic scenario outlined in the leaked document is a very plausible scenario," said Weisbrot.

...

"The bottom line is that you can't shrink your way out of a recession – you have to grow your way out. What they are doing to Greece really makes no economic sense. At this point, it looks like the economy would do better if Greece were to exit from the euro, as opposed to enduring indefinite recession and stagnation, extremely high and persistent unemployment, and increasing poverty. The European authorities are certainly pushing Greece toward the exit and default option." [emphasis added]

How's the American economy doing at this point? It's doing relatively okay, but not great and there might be serious trouble on the horizon. This is hardly the time to be engaged in budget-cutting and "other austerity measures," but that's apparently just what Hoyer is determined to do.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Monday that he and other House centrists are working to put together a “concrete” deficit-reduction compromise...

What Hoyer wants is to contract the American economy at a time when we're hardly out of the woods, when we're nowhere near full recovery and when contractionary policies are absolutely the worst possible option on the menu right now. The recent announcement of the centrist Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) that she will retire prompted me to review how the centrists generally have done as far as progressives are concerned. Quite frankly, I think they've been pretty gosh-darned worthless and far too concerned with their own short-term political fortunes to give a hang about how America in general is doing.

Sorta, kinda half-true

President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals. The right’s image of Obama, though, is more a figment of its imagination than the left’s image of W. was.
Maureen Dowd 26Feb2012

Is this a true statement? Sort of. We progressives felt Bush was a war criminal:

The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that “To initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

and that his work on the economy places him comfortably within the list of the five worst Presidents America has ever had.

The administration crows that the economy grew—by some 16 percent—during its first six years, but the growth helped mainly people who had no need of any help, and failed to help those who need plenty. A rising tide lifted all yachts. Inequality is now widening in America, and at a rate not seen in three-quarters of a century.

Allowing an American city to be flooded was absolutely inexcusable (Selected items from timeline):

Friday, August 26

GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN LOUISIANA [Office of the Governor]

Sunday, August 28

AFTERNOON — BUSH, BROWN, CHERTOFF WARNED OF LEVEE FAILURE BY NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER DIRECTOR...

Monday, August 29

7:30 AM CDT — BUSH ADMINISTRATION NOTIFIED OF THE LEVEE BREACH...

MORNING — BUSH SHARES BIRTHDAY CAKE PHOTO-OP WITH SEN. JOHN MCCAIN [White House]

Tuesday, August 30

MASS LOOTING REPORTED, SECURITY SHORTAGE CITED...

2PM CDT — PRESIDENT BUSH PLAYS GUITAR WITH COUNTRY SINGER MARK WILLIS [AP]

Wednesday, August 31

PRESIDENT BUSH FINALLY ORGANIZES TASK FORCE TO COORDINATE FEDERAL RESPONSE...

And those are just the "highlights" of Bush's disastrous eight years. Now, Dowd sorta, kinda redeems her statement with her second sentence by pointing out that the right wing's view of Obama is much less reality-based than the left's view of Bush ever was. Birther stories, anyone?

As should be apparent to anyone with half a brain, the whole Birther bs is code for: President Obama is illegitimate.

By which Birthers mean either he’s black;  he’s a liberal;  or he’s not the guy I voted for. Or more likely, a combination of all three.

Obama's release of his long-form birth certificate was well-timed to deflate Donald Trump's budding presidential campaign.

No, sorry, but to compare progressive's "Bush Derangement Syndrome" with right-wing "Obama Derangement Syndrome" is an example of the traditional media's love for "false equivalence."

Women in the military vs being anti-war

We in the UFPJ-DVN are peaceniks, we think peaceful methods of resolving disagreements should always be our nation's first resort. We think resorts to military force should be way down the list of acceptable responses to these disagreements. That said, how do we view women serving in our armed forces? Liz Trotta of Fox News feels that women should not be serving in the military at all. She feels that for male soldiers to rape their female fellow soldiers, their comrades-in-arms, is not so much an acceptable thing to do as it is an inevitable result of males living in close quarters with each other and of needing to be brutal towards the bad guys, the nation's enemies.

Trotta was condemned for expressing this view, but she decided to double down on it anyway. Is the military being used as, in Trotta's words, “a social services operation or a testing ground for gender wars” or is it and should it be “a fighting machine”? Trotta's reasoning, in her defense of keeping women out of the military, is that the mission of the military must come first and that allowing females to serve alongside males is partially based on the (rather obsolete) idea that success in war depends on the physical strength of the combatants.

How critical is it that combatants be physically capable? I was told a rather amusing story when I was back in the Navy, a small group of sailors was listening to an officer (Not sure whether he was from the Army or the Marines) who tried to get them all motivated and bloodthirsty towards the enemy of the day (This was during the Clinton Administration, so not really sure who the enemy of the day was) and said “You guys are killers!” My fellow sailors gave the officer the outward appearance of agreement, but thought to themselves “Yeah, we kill. We push a button and ten miles away something blows up. But no, we don't go around sticking bayonets into bad guys and getting their blood all over our uniforms. Yeah, technically, we're killers, but not in the sense like this officer is relating to us.”

The Army and the Marines are indeed close-up killers, who take on the enemy in a hand-to-hand manner, but the Navy and the Air Force are more technical services who mostly do their fighting at a distance. Back in Roman times, every single person on the field engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Nobody was in a separate supply corps because soldiers foraged for their food each night, taking meals from either the woods and forests or from the civilian population. By the time of the America Civil War, military units were beginning to develop a long “tail,” a supply line that stretched back to the home front that carried not only ammunition, but food, uniform items and other necessities.

It simply isn't necessary for everyone who wear a military uniform to be a physically strong, hand-to-hand-combat-capable male. That's why it's entirely possible to have females serve alongside males without any loss of combat effectiveness. Can females serve in an actual combat capacity? Well, they did just that in Iraq and are doing so in Afghanistan, where they aren't formally part of combat units but there are no real, formal front lines there anyway, so their official status as combatants or non-combatants isn't terribly relevant. Mibazaar list all current female casualties of the Iraq War and it says that as of February 2012, there are 102 of them. As of December 2011, another site lists 45 female casualties in Afghanistan.

Who's to “blame” for females serving alongside males in combat? Liz Trotta blames feminists, I blame the people who first developed artillery pieces in China (1132) and who then introduced them to Europe (1415). With the move away from swords and spears to artillery and then hand-held rifles, combat was no longer the exclusive province of the rough, tough guys who could engage in hand-to-hand combat.

So, why do females and gays and other minorities wish to take part in the military and/or combat? What's in it for them? Well, blacks during the Civil War recognized that if they were to take an active role in helping to free their brothers and sisters who were still in bondage in the Southern states, then they would have a moral claim to a dignified and respected citizenship in the society that would follow. In the Reconstruction period, this theory wasn't always observed or adhered to, but they sure gave it a good try.

Central to Reconstruction was the effort of former slaves to breathe full meaning into their newly acquired freedom, and to claim their rights as citizens. Rather than passive victims of the actions of others, African Americans were active agents in shaping Reconstruction.

Seems pretty obvious to me that females and gays are building on the example of African-Americans to gain full citizenship and, contrary to Trotta's assertions, it's far from clear that US military effectiveness has to be sacrificed as a result. I've collected a number of pieces at the United for Peace & Justice - Delaware Valley Network - Education Committee page under the tag of “Military Rape,” which heartbreakingly, details the struggle that our military sisters are having to wage in order to gain full citizenship.

Postscript: Interestingly, Trotta agrees with the lefties who claimed back in 2003 that PFC Jessica Lynch was in no real danger after being taken into custody by the Iraqi army, that she was being medically cared for by humane and dedicated Iraqi doctors. In contrast to the early, melodramatic incarnation of the Lynch story, the leftist Guardian of Britain covered the revised view of the story in May 2003. ABC News followed along in June of that year. Lynch herself gave formal testimony in February 2009. Of course, in April 2003, a few days after the event in question, the Toronto Star was noting archly that the Lynch story was a propaganda victory, an

...archetypal, blonde-in-peril, made-for-TV movie coming to a ratings sweeps period near you. (And doesn't Saddam Hussein make the perfect Oil Can Harry, tying the pure-hearted heroine to the railroad tracks?)

Trotta's view that Lynch was presented as a feminist archetype, as a capable, kick-ass female heroine was something that I'm quite, certain no one thought of at the time. A woman getting captured by sinister bad guys and rescued by “elite teams of hunky U.S. Army Rangers and U.S. Navy SEALs” is hardly the stuff of feminist propaganda, but rather the stuff of Karl Rove's public-distracting PR machine and that of other propagandists going way, way back in history. We lefties thought the main purpose of the story was to distract from the non-existent WMDs and the fearful toll in blood that was being spilled for no good reason. In that, the Lynch story served its purpose.

The "joke" from Rick Santorum's funder

Okay, okay, after pondering the question for a bit, I now understand that Rick Santorum's billionaire funder who suggested that women could simply place as aspirin between their legs as a method of contraception was joking and that he was suggesting pure abstinence as a way to make any real form of contraception irrelevant. The reason that literal-minded people like myself said “I don't get it. What's the joke?” is that abstinence-only educational programs have proven to be utterly ineffective in delaying sexual intercourse among adolescents.

Santorum said on February 17^th that: "I've also supported abstinence-based education, because I believe that is a healthier alternative. I have been a very strong promoter of that.” The study I provided a link to above agrees that abstinence is the first best strategy for preventing not just pregnancy, but a host of other complications. Problem is, it is by no means sufficient all by itself to really accomplish much of anything. The Federal Government has been providing funding for abstinence-only programs since 1982 and has spent many tens of millions of dollars on it per year. All that money though, is money that might as well have been tossed down the sewer or dumped into a landfill for all the good it did.

Santorum's angry reaction, that "It was a bad joke. It was a stupid joke. It is not reflective of me or my record on this issue," may be entirely true, but as Foster Friess provides a very major chunk of Santorum's campaign funding, it's hardly irrelevant what the 71-year-old billionaire thinks.

Update: In the video conversation with Lawrence O'Donnell, Foster Friess tries to compare Roman Catholic hospitals being made to provide abortions and other pregnancy-related services to female patients and a Muslim-owned restaurant being forced to provide pork to its customers. Problem: Pregnancy-related services are a great deal more difficult to obtain than pork and are a great deal more expensive. Let's say a woman is taken to an emergency room after being raped. She knows that the rapist climaxed while inside of her and that the calendar says it's "that time of the month." If the hospital does not promptly provide birth control services, she could very well end up pregnant. Yes, in theory, in a perfect world where everybody is completely mindful and perfectly capable and has the necessary money, she could shop around by telephone and get herself transferred to another hospital where that service would be taken care of, but why on earth would people force a rape victim to jump through those kinds of hoops? Sorry, but if Catholic hospitals don't wish to provide those services, they shouldn't be in the hospital business to start with.

Motivated! Dedicated!

From page 300 of The Great Game. In 1860, a Russian officer completes his mission in China and jumps on his horse:

Six weeks after leaving Peking (Nowadays called Beijing), Ignatiev arrived in St. Petersburg (About 5150 miles or 122 miles a day). Once again he had ridden the whole way across Asia, this time in the middle of winter. After his filthy clothes, crawling with lice and fleas, had been removed and burned, he was summoned to report to the Tsar at the Winter Palace.

And, not surprisingly after his diplomatic feat in China as well as that heroic feat of travel

There, in recognition of his remarkable services to his country, he was awarded the coveted Order of St. Vladimir by the delighted Alexander.

Sounds like a highly deserved reward! In the Navy, we'd call that

Motivated!
Dedicated!
Rah! Rah! Rah!

Supernatural: "Heart"

Watched "Heart." Sam Winchester is a character that isn't lucky with the ladies at all while his brother Dean usually has no trouble hooking up with them. Sam meets a nice and attractive woman and the two of them hit it off. Wouldn't ya know it? She turns out to be a werewolf! Yeesh! Ain't that always the way? And no, there's no cure for being one of those, so Sam is very unhappy with the way he has to end their all-too-brief affair.

The Housing Crisis - updated

When Congress was debating G.W. Bush's warrantless surveillance of American citizens (Allegedly, he and his people were just monitoring al Qaeda, but there's never been any formal, credible confirmation of that), US telecommunications companies made it quite clear that they didn't wish to be held accountable for anything they did. Congress was very accommodating and failed to apply what we quaintly term the “Rule of Law.” Apparently, the same general rule applies to banks and their mortgages and their wrongdoing vis-a-vis homeowners.

Bank executives argue that New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman is using the lawsuit to go after claims already covered under the settlement

The NY AG Eric Schneiderman is the fellow who has distinguished himself as the hero of the foreclosure crisis that has already resulted in several million homeowners losing their dwellings. The chart at the Calculated Risk blog, the “Total Delinquent and Foreclosure Percent by Month” shows that foreclosures held steady at under 5% per month until around mid-2006 and then stopped rising at the end of 2010 at a little under 11% per month. The drop in foreclosures at that point was not due to a greater rate of compliance and solvency among homeowners, “Foreclosures were in full delay mode in 2011,” which means that “only” 804,000 homes were repossessed and “foreclosure filings jumped 21 percent in the third quarter of 2011,” meaning that banks are cleaning up their procedures and clearing their decks for many, many more foreclosures.

The problem, as far as the mega-banks (Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) are concerned, is that they thought they had a 50-state settlement negotiation in place that would wipe the books clean with a minimal slap-on-the-wrist fine for them ($25 billion) and continued or slightly altered foreclosure mills for homeowners. But in August 2011, Schneiderman made it clear that there was far too much illegality and far too many questions as to why homeowners were being foreclosed upon to just blindly continue, so he began pursuing criminal charges against the banks.

Initially, homeowners at risk of foreclosure and activist groups representing them were wary that President Obama was going to neutralize Schneiderman by appointing him to the state/federal task force on securitization and origination issues, but thankfully, Schneiderman and the California Attorney General Kamela Harris agreed that the offered settlement was inadequate.

In exchange [for the $25 billion settlement], attorneys general would agree to release the banks from further action related to the improper servicing of loans as well as claims against originating mortgages. Several attorneys general, including New York's Eric Schneiderman and California's Harris, have voiced concerns that those releases are overly broad and would preclude them from carrying out ongoing investigations.

Prospects for serious homeowner relief are looking good and it appears that that ol' quaint “Rule of Law” just might prevail in the end, not because of any action at the Federal level, but because the state attorneys general have been doing their jobs and looking out for citizens and homeowners.

Update:

Well, the settlement is complete and the Attorneys General failed American citizens by agreeing to a truly horrible deal.

As former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Kouril said on FDL this morning, “The court system will be permanently corrupted by forged and perjurious documents…This settlement is an incredible breach of the social contract between the government and the governed.”

So, how's the anti-war movement doing?

With the down-shifting of the Iraq War into a period not unlike that of the Vietnam War from "Vietnamization" and the pull-out of US combat troops in 1973, Iraq has grown a good deal quieter and has largely slipped off of the US cultural radar screen. The Iraq War brought the anti-war movement back into the streets and back into the public eye. But as there was never any threat of a draft, the youth of America were never mobilized as they were back in the 60s.
Although I would truly love to say that there has been a lot of intellectual back and forth and discussion in the anti-war movement, anyone who really wanted to get their teeth into a real discussion soon ran up against the fact that the justifications given for invading Iraq were transparently bad and didn't really stand up to any serious examinations.
Unlike the Vietnam War with its' "Domino Theory," there was no clear and compelling reason for the US to be fighting in Iraq once the WMD reason had been disposed of (The movie Fair Game concentrates on being an entertaining film, but it's quite clear from the narrative of the film that the WMD excuse was bogus and that the Bush Administration knowingly, consciously and deliberately put out bad information). The belief among the opponents of the war that either  the Bush Administration was seeking Iraq's oil or that it had messianic ambitions to remake the Middle East (In July 2010, The Guardian had a good discussion of the possible motivations behind Britain's joining in) served to explain to the public why the US invaded and then remained in Iraq, but the relative absence of any coherent, publicly-announced reasoning behind sticking with the war after the WMD reason fell apart made the severe splits within American families and the heated anti-communist-inspired arguments of the Vietnam War moot.
So the essential problem that the anti-war movement faced in making its case to the American people was not so much that The Establishment was making intellectually challenging justifications for the war, but that anti-war spokespeople were not in any position to get their message out. For many years, we tried large street demonstrations, marches, vigils, rallies, even an occupation of Dilworth Plaza in Philadelphia.
Of course, Indymedia has been enormously helpful to the cause for the past decade. In just the past month or so, taking a look at the Newswire of PhillyIMC, the anti-war movement has been documenting quite a few activities and reporting on a number of upcoming and potential problems. Frequent IMC contributor Stephen Lendman detailed various aggressive US moves against Iran. The radio show Between the Lines looked at the terrorist assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist and the Socialist Party USA presidential candidate Stewart Alexander called upon the US to stop threatening Iran. A member of several anti-war groups, Rich Gardner, looked at why the US appears to be suffering a "pyrrhic victory" in Afghanistan, not because the US is suffering disastrous casualties there, but because the war requires resources that the US simply can't assign to that theater (The US Government now apparently agrees, as "the US is [currently] treating the Taliban as a political force and a political stakeholder"). Finally, the Filipino Citizens Action Party, feeling that the Philippines are being squeezed between the US and China, is calling on both of them to resolve their differences peacefully.
The fight to keep America informed continues! Looking forward, United for Peace and Justice will conduct a meet & greet on Friday, February 24th at the Mexican Post, 1601 Cherry Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102 at 5:00pm as the kickoff to several days of meetings. Also, the United National Antiwar Coalition will be holding their National Conference starting Friday, March 23rd at 4:00pm at the Hilton Hotel in Stamford, CT.

improved and updated with editorial assistance from fellow IMCer Amy Dalton

Two reactions to a Kathleen Parker piece

Kathleen Parker has a piece up about abortion fights taking place. In the first, she claims that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity has the right to stop giving Planned Parenthood $680,000 a year. That's absolutely correct. Komen is a private organization and does indeed have that right. Yes, "given the rabid response from abortion-rights supporters, you’d think that Brinker and her organization were running puppy mills for soup vendors." That's true, because Komen executive made their decision for blatantly political reasons and then tried lying and dissembling and fudging about it. Komen decided to dive into the pool of a heated and divisive political issue and then acted surprised when the people on the other side of that issue started yelling about it.

Parker suggests: "Don’t like it? Don’t run in Komen’s fundraising races. Don’t buy a pink blender. Give directly to Planned Parenthood." What's Parkers' problem? That's precisely what lefty critics have done. No one has threatened to launch any sort of legal action, no one has threatened to burn down their buildings and no one has been beating up or assassinating Komen personnel. Critics have indeed loudly protested Komen's decision, but that's just as much our right as it is Komens' right to decide how to allocate their cash. Parker's complaints about "Coercion and intimidation" are just so much hyperbole. I'm not at all clear on where critics have gone overboard in their reaction to Komen's very bad decision and what Parker thinks the correct response should have been.

BTW, I think it's absolutely hilarious that the Bush Administration spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, is connected to the Komen story. "Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the position of 'Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations' at Komen last December." Very tellingly, "Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood," meaning that, no, the decision to cut off Planned Parenthood was made several months ago and they thought up the whole BS "if you're involved in an investigation" story as a very deliberate way to single out PP for getting cut off. The hilarious part is that "Whu-u-uh?!?! A former Bush Administration official made a clumsy and stupid PR move?!?! Na-a-a-ahh!"I mean, gee, those guys were so nimble and light on their feet when it came to PR [/snark].

The second part is that Parker is upset that Roman Catholic hospitals are being told to "provide health insurance that covers contraception, including in some cases abortifacient drugs." She and the Roman Catholic hierarchy feel that this constitutes an infringement on Catholic religious liberty and she and they also fear that "these requirements are the edge of the wedge." Sorry, I have absolutely zero sympathy for her arguments.

Back when I was in the Navy, Muslims who wanted to get military ID cards for their wives wanted to get them with their wives' faces veiled. We said no. We were willing to have the ID photo taken by a female, with no males nearby to see the wifes' unveiled face, but we were not willing to take a photo of a veiled face for an ID card. The military needed to be absolutely certain that the person holding an ID card was indeed the person they said they were. The religious desires of devout Muslims were incompatible with our military needs, so their religous desires took second place. Some devout Native Americans want to smoke peyote as part of their religious rites. As they were doing so long before white, Anglo-Saxon settlers occupied their land, the usual classification of peyote as a "controlled substance in Schedule I" is lifted, but it's lifted specifically for Native Americans so that they can continue their religious practices uninterrupted.

In both cases, the law and what the Federal Government needs, trumps the law of religious freedom and liberty. If Catholics don't like providing women with the means to control their wombs, then they can sell off their hospitals to private entrepreneurs who are willing to abide by the national law. If Catholics who practice medicine within those hospitals don't like it, they can go to another country or they can find another occupation. Under no circumstances does religious liberty take precedence over a woman's Constitutional rights.

Update: What Digby said.

Round-up late January 2012

In the war in Afghanistan: US troops are not losing, nor are they suffering enormous casualties. But they're paying an enormous price in money, manpower, time and effort to take ground. US troops successfully secured the Afghan city of Kandahar and more or less kicked the Taliban out, but it took 18,000 troops to do so. Kandahar is the Afghan city nearest to Quetta, Pakistan and thereby the one that's the easiest to supply. Every Afghan city that gets similarly secured and pacified is going to cost even more in resources.

The real problem, of course, is that the US still lacks what it obviously lacked at the fall of Baghdad in 2003, what I would call a "colonial corps," a group that I'd model on the Army Corps of Engineers. Essentially, a person would be assigned to each city section, town or group of villages and that person would look over each section, decide what was needed to rebuild and build it up, would request money and/or materials and/or engineering personnel from the US and would stay on to see to it that the money was properly spent. This would not be a military job as it has nothing to do with shooting and killing. The corps would need protection from the Taliban via the US military of course, but as the population benefits and prospers from US money and personnel conducting rebuilding operations, they'd hopefully need less military protection as the population would then feel encouraged and motivated to resist Taliban infiltrations.

Problem is, the US has no such corps and it's hard to see how any such group could be established at this point, over a decade after the initial invasion of Afghanistan. Back around the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Rudyard Kipling wrote stirring tales about the "Great Game" between Britain and Russia as they battled across great, largely empty spaces between Russia and India (Afghanistan was a frequently-used location for their battles). Well, there's nowhere near the enthusiasm in America now that there was then in Britain. Where is the occupation of Afghanistan in American culture? Where was the occupation of Iraq in our culture? Both the more-or-less concluded struggle in Iraq and the current struggle in Afghanistan are pretty much entirely absent from American popular culture. The cultural heroes of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman and Blake Miller, who, aside from leaders like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General David Petraeus, these are probably the most prominent. well-known personalities to emerge out of these conflicts and they all turned out to have stories that were considerably less heroic and inspiring then what was first reported on them.

There was a recent pro-troops rally celebrating the service of Iraq War veterans in St. Louis, MO, showing that the American people don't blame the troops at all. Americans feel that the troops just did as they were instructd to do, but the piece on the rally was interesting for what it didn't say, i.e., what the troops actually accomplished while they were there.  


Heh! Miss Piggy weighs in on an accusation from Fox News that the Muppets were a bunch of subversive Marxists. In a somewhat more-or-less related piece, doll protesters bewilder Russian police.


We'll probably hear this one repeated. A right-wing columnist claims that Mitt Romney gave 42% of his income in charitable giving. Problem: much of that 42% was actually taxes and a really big chunk of what remained was what he was expected to contribute to the Mormon Church.


Very happy to see that political commentators are finally getting over their romance with the idea of bipartisanship.

There is nothing wrong with a party running on its platform, then implementing that platform if elected. If people don’t like the result, they can vote for a new party with a different platform and expect it to be implemented. This is how most democracies work.

I regard the Occupy movement and the drive for austerity as directly opposed movements. One is the nemesis of the other. Very good case laid out against austerity. Good quote:

Thus in October 2010 David Broder, who virtually embodied conventional wisdom, praised Mr. Cameron for his boldness, and in particular for “brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain’s economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession.” He then called on President Obama to “do a Cameron” and pursue “a radical rollback of the welfare state now.”

Strange to say, however, those warnings from economists proved all too accurate. And we’re quite fortunate that Mr. Obama did not, in fact, do a Cameron.

Obsession with government debt is dragging down the recovery and making it difficult to recover from the Great Recession. When you freeze Federal Government spending and refuse to help out the state and local governments, the result is not useful savings for the rest of us, the result is fewer critically-needed government services for all of us.

As a columnist for my local paper phrases it: "If you have few skills and little education, you face a big problem." Well, yes, I agree that that such people do indeed face a big problem and it's a far bigger problem than it was a few decades ago thanks to globalization. What annoys me about the piece is that the author simply takes that state of affairs as a given and doesn't suggest any solutions for it. His attitude appears as simply "The gods have decreed..." an attitude that strikes me as very fatalistic. The economist Dean Baker finds that the Washington Post has the same problem. He quotes the WaPo as saying:

"But it is not clear that the measures [those proposed by President Obama]— or any others — could compensate for the factors behind the decline of the middle class, including the rise of nations with abundant cheap labor and the development of new technologies that allow companies to operate with far fewer workers."

The problem in both cases is the fatalism that says "That's the way things are" and does not see fit to suggest any way to counter "the way things are." Our economic conditions have been created by human beings making deliberate, conscious decisions and can be unmade by using precisely the same process. "Is" does not automatically translate to "should be." As Baker puts it:

The reason that globalization has put downward pressure on the living standards of the middle class is that it has been deliberate policy under both Republican and Democratic administrations to force middle class workers to compete with their low-paid counterparts in the developing world, while protecting the most highly educated workers from the same competition. The predicted and actual result of this policy has been an enormous upward redistribution of income.

We can change this state of affairs. It's not just a given that we must simply adjust to. We may face a lot of resistance from the 1%, but that's to be expected. That's no reason not to wage the struggle.

The Client List

Interesting flick! Just saw it on a rental. Jennifer Love Hewitt plays someone who was the prettiest girl in high school, then a happily-married mother of three, then...a hooker! No question, Hewitt sure enough was a purty thang in I know what you did last summer, Heartbreakers (With Gene Hackman and Sigourney Weaver) and the TV series Ghost Whisperer, so I could see the role as being a natural for her in some respects. Before the movie goes into the sin, the downfall and then the redemption of Samantha Horton (Hewitt's character), she does something interesting, she adopts that good ol' American can-do, entrepreneurial attitude and gives some serious thought as to how she can improve her appeal and increase her share of customers. She comes up with an interesting answer.

BTW, I notice that the movie was apparently pretty successful as it's going to be a TV series!

Housing Crisis

After President Obama settled the question of the stimulus (The stimulus didn't end the recession, but successfully prevented another Great Depression), he turned his attention to housing. With many millions of homeowners underwater on their mortgages or having difficulty keeping up payments on them, Representative Boehner of the Republican Party asked:

“Does your plan compensate banks for the bad mortgages they should never have made in the first place?” Mr. Boehner asked. “Will individuals who misrepresented their income or assets on their original mortgage application be eligible to get taxpayer-funded assistance?”

Obama had already shown he was sensitive to criticism concerning perceptions of excessive government spending and had acquiesced in reducing his stimulus proposal from $1.2 trillion to a little under $800 billion. An essential problem with that approach however, was and is that criminal fraud plays a very substantial role in the housing crisis. 

Up until August 2011, all 50 State Attorney Generals were negotiating with five banks (Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) that were accused of “robo-signing” documents and conducting illegal home seizures. In that month, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided to oppose what he felt was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's undue haste in trying to get a settlement and to instead pursue criminal charges against the five banks. 

This month, Schneiderman accused Bank of New York Mellon, the 11th-largest U.S. bank by assets, of "repeated fraud and illegality" when it came to its actions as a trustee for various mortgage securities, and he accused Bank of America of fabricating missing documents when foreclosing on some homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages.

Other State Attorney Generals have followed Schneiderman off of the settlement group. By October, the blatant illegality of what the five “robo-signing” banks were up to was becoming really plainly obvious:

A Florida lawyer says financial institutions, trying to rush through thousands of home foreclosures, hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and former assembly line employees to work as the "foreclosure experts" that have come to be known as robo-signers.

[…]

The testimony is from 150 robo-signers -- so called because some of them signed as many as 10,000 affidavits a month.

By November 2011, three other State AG's had left the group and the Obama Administration's responses were becoming increasingly unsatisfactory:

To date, the Obama administration has attempted a seemingly endless number of programs designed to prevent foreclosures and heal the housing market. Each has been introduced with great fanfare and as an innovation that will not suffer from the failures of the previous program. Each has then failed.

One of the casualties of the foreclosure crisis in late 2011 was a firm that threw a Halloween bash in which employees dressed up as people who had lost their homes. Thankfully, the firm went bankrupt three weeks later.

In December, the State AG's that were still part of the national settlement was only 43 as the number of drop-outs was now seven. Still more illegality had been uncovered:

A criminal investigator for the Nevada Attorney General’s office said that out of tens of thousands of documents from LPS that his investigation of the fraud examined, an overwhelming majority seemed suspicious.

“It’s hard to find [a document] that you wouldn’t be suspicious of,” the investigator said, adding that legitimate documents from the company seemed to be the exception instead of the rule.

It wasn’t just the signatures that were fraudulent. According to the investigator, some of the forged documents contained information that had not been verified by those signing them. This sometimes led to the wrongful foreclosure of houses because of the innacuracies [sic].

“One out of every 69 homes in America received a foreclosure filing last year,” and with “newly aggressive Attorneys General investigating, and a new Occupy Our Homes movement raising awareness of the crimes, I [FireDogLake blogger David Dayen] think that the prediction of a resolution to processing problems will be just as shortsighted as ever.”

Foreclosures have been a very serious problem, but much worse is down the road. “Foreclosures were in full delay mode in 2011,” which means that “only” 804,000 homes were repossessed and “foreclosure filings jumped 21 percent in the third quarter of 2011,” meaning that banks are clearing up their procedures and clearing their decks for many, many more foreclosures. We're expecting foreclosures to jump even further in 2012. “[T]he New York Federal Reserve anticipates that 3.6 million foreclosures will occur in the next two years.”

Thoughts on flyers

From a Facebook buddy:

I think that a future event should have a well thought out flyer a month before event, to build up anticipation.

I agree completely. Having both produced and distributed many pre-event flyers, I believe each one needs the following elements:

• Identification of the group(s) sponsoring the event (Many groups like listing all of their co-sponsors, as well)
• Eye-catching graphic(s) - should be around a quarter of the page. Ken Heard feels children are necessary elements, I like flags myself, close-ups of people are good, pictures should be upbeat and on the cheerful side
• Time/date/place event will take place
• Sponsor contact information
• Any specifics, such as if payment/contribution is requested

For most events, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for much else. As flyers are also posted in coffee shops, churches, colleges, etc., we also have to make sure that the flyer is designed cleanly enough to be read at a fair distance.