Social Security Experts On Payroll Tax Holiday: White House Trying To Jumpstart Recovery, Not Weaken Social Security
December 12, 2010 No Comment
Nancy Altman, author of The Battle for Social Security and co-director of Social Security Works. I was on a conference call yesterday with the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and after listing to experts explain why the proposed payroll tax holiday put Social Security in jeopardy, I asked what I thought was an obvious question: Since there were many smart people working in the White House, did these experts think the White House was oblivious to that risk — or was that the desired effect? They concurred it was more likely a matter of kicking the can down the road, concentrating instead on the weak recovery. “They have to look everywhere for ways to stimulate the economy,” said Nancy Altman, co-director of Social Security Works and author of The Battle for Social Security . “Republicans suggested this, they went for it.” Dean Baker, progressive economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, agreed. “I think that’s speculation, I don’t believe the administration planned in advance for this situation,” he said. “It simply wasn’t a priority for them. First and foremost, [it was to] get a deal with the Republicans. They weren’t really thinking down the line.” Barbara B. Kennelly, President of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said the payroll tax holiday was “a longstanding Republican idea. I have no idea why they went for it. They wanted to give some stimulus to the economy.” They discussed several other issues, including the fact that the Make Work Pay credit was poorly publicized. “That was by design,” Baker said. “They wanted people to spend it, not to think of it as extra.” Kennelly said it would be a better to send a check for the payroll holiday amount directly to workers. “It would be better stimulus without an additional burden on employers,” she said.
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The movement that makes so much of hate crimes legislation seems to think nothing of passing hateful laws in the land of starkest scenery; in fact, the same people who brought you S.B. 1070 wanted to give Arizonans the toughest anti-Sharia protection in the country (.PDF). This nasty little item would have prohibited judges from enforcing “religious sectarian law,” defined as ANY STATUTE, TENET OR BODY OF LAW EVOLVING WITHIN AND BINDING A SPECIFIC RELIGIOUS SECT OR TRIBE. RELIGIOUS SECTARIAN LAW INCLUDES SHARIA LAW, CANON LAW , HALACHA AND KARMA BUT DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY LAW OF THE UNITED STATES OR THE INDIVIDUAL STATES BASED ON ANGLO-AMERICAN LEGAL TRADITION AND PRINCIPLES ON WHICH THE UNITED STATES WAS FOUNDED. (Emphasis mine) See, it’s not about Islam except it is. “Canon law” would presumably apply to Catholicism; that church has seen historical abuse in America. We’ve been spared anti-Semitism activated in Godwinian quantities, but of course there were Japanese internment camps. Masonic lodges have been attacked on religious grounds. This is an old tradition; Islam is just the latest foreign faith boogeyman. But karma? Really? That makes as much sense as a bill against the law of gravitation. Like gravity in empirical cosmology, karma is a bitch who does not take orders from the Arizona legislature . Fear of the world comes attached to ignorance of it. This aspect of the paranoid authoritarian worldview gets aired often by Glenn Beck, who zeroes in on the word “global” with the same relish as “Soros.” He speaks to an audience that consumes Left Behind books and Christian tracts bought at Wal-Mart. There isn’t nearly enough international news anymore. Conservatives actively fight cultural education projects like Goals 2000. As a result, most Americans are utterly, profoundly ignorant of the difference between Sharia and karma or which goes with which religion. They would probably never guess that Buddhist Tamils invented suicide bombing, for example. Whenever someone says that Glenn Beck’s WhiteStock was “more religious than political,” they assume there is a separation between the two in the mind of Beck or his target demographic. This is the same political religion movement that brought you Intelligent Design, after all. The intelligence detectable in the design here is what gamers like to call “lawful evil:” E. THIS SECTION DOES NOT APPLY TO: 1. A STATUTE OR ANY CASE LAW DEVELOPED IN THE UNITED STATES AND ITS TERRITORIES THAT IS BASED ON ANGLO-AMERICAN LEGAL TRADITION AND PRINCIPLES ON WHICH THE UNITED STATES WAS FOUNDED. 2. A STATUTE OR ANY CASE LAW OR LEGAL PRINCIPLE THAT WAS INHERITED FROM GREAT BRITAIN BEFORE THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF THIS ARTICLE. 3. THE RECOGNITION OF A TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN AS OFFICIATED BY THE CLERGY OR A SECULAR OFFICIAL OF THE MATRIMONIAL COUPLE’S CHOICE. See, if your mullah or rabbi or priest doesn’t want to gay marry you, the state of Arizona will back their sharia-halacha-canon-karma legalisms to the hilt. For everything else, you will use the king’s barrister. It’s not just insane, it’s unconstitutional, as “Sharia” consists of several schools touching on many topics including dietary laws and probate. We are talking about halal butcher shops here. Oklahoma’s anti-Sharia law received a permanent injunction after a lawsuit by Muneer Awad, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Oklahoma chapter. In his lawsuit, Awad argues that the law violates his First Amendment rights by creating an “official disapproval of his faith” embedded in the state constitution . He also argues that the ban would make it impossible for his family to carry out his will , much of which is based on Islam. Muneer Awad is a great American. Politicians who pass bills and start ballot initiatives to deny people like Muneer Awad their First Amendment rights? They are not great Americans, and they do not defend liberty. They are authoritarians, they spread ignorance and fear, and there is nothing funny about them except that they’re hilariously wrong. Via MoJo .
Continue reading …Imagine, if you will, an amusement park set to open in the not-too-distant future. But instead of roller coasters and cotton candy, this one will have”juvenile giraffes” and odes to the good ole days. Which to the founders of this wonderland occurred about 6,000 years ago, when man and T-Rex blithely roamed the Earth together. The year will be 2014. And the land of enchantment that commences operation that year will be a creationism theme park, which will exist aboard a “500-foot-long wooden replica of Noah’s Ark containing live animals,” so kids can learn how the Earth really began and ignore all that tripe about the Big Bang. It will accompany the already rocking Creation Museum in Boone County, Kentucky, which is devoted to a literal interpretation of the biblical story. This leads to certain challenges, of course, as Charles Pierce points out in his book Idiot America, such as providing a theoretical basis for how humans and dinosaurs co-existed, before the latter shuffled off this mortal coil. Which explains why Creation-Museum dinosaurs are afforded the privilege of donning an “English saddle, hornless and battered,” to remind them of their main purpose during their brief terrestrial experience: Serving as our Lippizanners. Just imagine how much fun the Kentucky Derby must have been back then! Perhaps, worst of all, not only is this scientific Frankenstein being built, but at the announcement of its pending, um, creation, was not some far-right loon, but the Kentucky Democratic Governor Steve Beshear. Perhaps its simple coincidence that in a year’s time, he shall once again stand before the voters of Kentucky as a candidate for governor. And that he arrived at the unveiling with a potential offering of over $37 bn in taxpayer-funded, tourism development incentives. Yes, I know, surely the Pirates of the Garden of Eden ride will provide jobs and lead to increased tourism for the area, but if the only requirement is to provide visitors with fantasy and pool a few shekels, why not just screen Russ Meyer movies or hand out signed copies of George W. Bush’s Decision Points? More…
Continue reading …Last Word Panel Discusses the Merits of a Primary Challenger to President Obama
December 11, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media Lawrence O’Donnell and hosted a panel segment with Rep. Alan Grayson, the rabbi Michael Lerner, Jane Hamsher and Ralph Nader discussing the merits of a primary challenger to Barack Obama in 2012. Alan Grayson resisted answering whether he’d be willing to challenge the president, even though his name is one that comes up often in liberal circles with potential candidates to challenge Obama. The panel agreed that they didn’t think that the Democratic party needs a spoiler this time around and didn’t think that anyone who might challenge the president would have much of a chance of winning, but they all agreed that there had better be some push back from the left to pull the president back to the middle after his hard tack to the right and his willingness to coddle up to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans and their tax cuts for the rich. Lawrence O’Donnell also made up for his extremely rude behavior when Alan Grayson was on the show the previous night and apologized to him in the first part of this panel discussion which is not included here. More on their discussion below the fold. When asked if President Obama’s proposal had any hope of making it to the floor of the House or if we would just get more business as usual here, Grayson said he felt that the vote Democrats took was more than symbolic and that unless there were some major changes to the proposals, it would not come up for a vote on the floor of the House and that Nancy Pelosi would keep her promise to the caucus. Michael Lerner explained why he thought President Obama should face a primary challenger. As Lerner noted, there’s a “massive disaffection among most Democrats” that’s been wildly underestimated by our media and by President Obama and how the president has abandoned liberals on one issue after another and refused to show any backbone. As he pointed out if we want “to move Obama in any way, there has to be a serious political alternative” and the only way to do that is to run a “serious alternative” in the Democratic primary. Lerner talked about the amount of email he’s received and that most agree with him that this is the only way to push the president back in a progressive direction. And I love this point that Lerner made about how most people don’t even realize what progressives or liberals stand for with allowing Obama to be painted as a liberal, or a progressive, or sadly a Socialist. LERNER: And most Americans don’t even know what liberals and progressives are. They think Obama is the progressive. And if they think Obama is the progressive and the right wing calls him a Socialist, they have no idea that there are actually huge numbers of the people who really care for ordinary people, who care for the well being of each other, who don’t believe that the world can be made safe through domination and control, but recognize that the way to build homeland security is through generosity, through a global Marshall plan… And then O’Donnell cut him off when he was on a roll and asked him who he might support as a primary challenger to Obama. Lerner named Russ Feingold and Jane Hamsher immediately shot down how that prospect was extremely unlikely. Ralph Nader who is talking about running against President Obama in a primary talked about the need to pull Obama back to the left and how there might be quite a few very well qualified candidates that would be taken seriously if they ran against Obama. He also made some really great points on how we’re not spending enough time talking about what’s happened to the wages of the average worker and how we need to quit giving tax cuts to businesses when those cuts aren’t tied into them paying their work force more so they can earn a living wage as well. And as I mentioned before, Grayson declined to say whether he’d challenge Obama or not in a primary race but did say he’d be a lot happier seeing Obama pushed back to the left and getting his base reignited to vote for him again and that he felt it wasn’t too late for Obama to still do that. All in all I think it was a good discussion about what we’re facing now and what we do to move Obama back to the left and at this point, I tend to agree with them that a primary challenge if it forces him to defend abandoning what he campaigned on or start governing in the manner he campaigned on might not be such a bad idea and might be our only hope of moving him. He just took the hippie punching to a new level when he embraced these Bush tax cuts and setting up Social Security for bankruptcy with this latest deal with the Republicans. I think that’s a line in the sand none of us should be willing to cross no matter how bad the threats from the hostage takers. And I could go on from there with what I think about all of this and what we should do as liberals to solve our current dilemma, but I won’t because frankly, I’m just exhausted and disgusted right now and I don’t have any answers to how we deal with this and what’s going to work to move our politicians to do what’s right. I’m just another average person who works for a living and considers myself lucky to still have a job in this terrible economy and who is horrified by watching what’s going on around me and to those who are not as fortunate as I am. I’m also fully aware that myself or anyone else who is still working is only one disaster away from finding ourselves in the same state as well, even if you have a job that most would consider secure, so none of us should be taking what we have for granted in this environment. I find myself fearing that we’re going to be seeing uprising like we’re seeing in Europe now in America before anything gets any better and before our political class finally starts caring about the average working person instead of their wealthy campaign donors. It’s a sad state of affairs that it might come to that to finally get our politicians, especially those on the right, to show any concern for the masses that are suffering before they change their ways. They’ve got those teabaggers sand bagged for now. They had better be worried about what happens when the suckers finally turn on them.
Continue reading …Hannity whines about Obama’s ‘incendiary rhetoric’ — then calls him a ‘failed president’
December 11, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media Frank Luntz and Sean Hannity were all appalled last night at the vicious and harsh language being used by those eeeeevil liberals this week in describing poor, put-upon conservatives as “hostage-takers” for merely holding up unemployment insurance payouts for poor people in order to force tax cuts for the wealthy down everyone’s throat. It was heart-wrenching. Of course, when your scenario is a heavy-duty fantasy like this one, it means that you’re going to be doing a lot of projection. Sure enough : HANNITY: Let me disagree with you. This is the liberals doing this. This is Obama attacking Republicans as hostage-takers. This is the Democratic Party saying, you know, the president f’d up, f him, screw him, he betrayed us, he’s betraying other – give me the example of where are conservatives using this rhetoric? LUNTZ: But nobody is listening. The problem is that the right isn’t listening to the left. The left isn’t listening to the right. HANNITY: I’m talking about the harsh vitriol and rhetoric is coming from the left. LUNTZ: I don’t disagree with the rhetoric, but I’m out with the public and I’m doing this now almost every other night and in all of the focus groups even when it is done for corporate clients or media clients. People aren’t listening to each other and they don’t want to hear what each other says. They are taking their news based on what affirms them rather than what informs them. They don’t even share the same basic facts and basic understanding. Sean, this country is more divided now than it has been since Vietnam. HANNITY: I see that, but — if I were to call President Obama the things that he’s calling conservatives, or that liberals are calling him, I probably would be, you know, victim of a boycott or firing. Hmmm. No small irony in Luntz observing that people are now “taking their news based on what affirms them rather than what informs them” on Fox News , of all places. And goodness, where could this disparaging rhetoric be coming from? Certainly it couldn’t be inspired by right-wing talkers like Sean Hannity, could it? After all, his rhetoric is always calm and reasonable and respectful, right? Well, maybe not so much … HANNITY: Because they are so harsh in their rhetoric, is this going to backfire? In other words, does this hurt the Democrats? Forget about the disagreement, which I think we have two very fundamental different views of which direction the country ought to go. I think Obama has failed as president, but this language, this incendiary rhetoric does that come back to hurt them? Pretty funny, isn’t it, how utterly un-self-aware these right-wing fanatics are. They can utter their own self-contradiction in the same sentence and not even recognize it. And when it comes to Obama, only Glenn Beck outdoes Hannity in terms of vicious and incendiary rhetoric on Fox. Of course, it’s unsurprising that Hannity would declare Obama a failure now, since he and his pal Limbaugh have been openly working for Obama’s failure from the very get-go, and he has constantly predicted that Obama would be a failure. And when it comes to vicious rhetoric toward liberals , he is again outdone on Fox only by Beck. Hannity mostly likes his little eliminationist jokes (“If we get rid of liberals, we solve our problems”). So yeah, Sean, we’re gonna cry you a river over being called out for being the hostage takers you are. Boo freaking hoo.
Continue reading …As Bernie Sanders’s heroic performance on the Senate floor today demonstrates, sometimes endurance is necessary to represent Progressive values. This being the season for altruism as well as activism, here’s another opportunity for tenacious performance to improve the lives of those most hard hit by the economic downturn. The Second City That Never Sleeps is a tradition begun (and thriving ) in Chicago, where a small group of comic improvisers perform for 24 hours straight to raise money for a good cause. In Los Angeles this year, we’re about to perform for 24 hours to benefit Los Angeles Youth Network. The sucktastic economic situation has hit all of us, but it’s hard to find a more vulnerable population than homeless kids. Their situation in LA County is dire, as EVERY SINGLE OTHER youth facility of its type has had to close its doors in recent years due to a lack of funding. Schwarzenegger et al have slashed funding for social services to the bone, and it’s up to the rest of us to pick up the pieces. LAYN has a remarkable, unheard, crap-your-pants fantastic 80 percent success rate in getting its charges through high school and on their way off the streets. They provide 48 beds, counseling, tutoring, arts and academic education, and the support kids need to get off the streets. They’re a spectacular shining star in an area desperately needing some light. So if you’re not in the LA area and can’t come down and join us, please join us online. We’ll be live streaming the event below (nothing fancy, a basic two-camera setup) from Hollywood starting at 10:30PM PST tonight, ending 10:30 tomorrow. We’ll be there with some of the funniest people in LA, sweating it out for the kids. Please, if you’re able to donate, no amount is too small to help. So enjoy the weirdness , the show will feature veterans of shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, MTV’s Wild N Out, Current Television, Groundlings, Second City, SNL, FrankTV, Reno 911, 30 Rock, Last Comic Standing, Colbert Report, Daily Show, Tonight Show, According To Jim, Heroes, Lie To Me. MAD TV, Parks And Recreation, and much much more.
Continue reading …Barbara Walters Edits Mark Levin’s Book From Palin’s Reading List Answer
December 11, 2010 No Comment
On Thursday, NewsBusters made it clear that no matter how Sarah Palin answered Katie Couric's pathetic reading list question back in 2008, the liberal media were going to ridicule her. On Friday, this point was made even clearer when conservative talk radio host Mark Levin revealed that Palin's answer to Barbara Walters concerning this same silly issue was edited from her “10 Most Fascinating People of 2010″ program to remove his book “Liberty and Tyranny” (audio follows courtesy Right Scoop ): read more
Continue reading …Fred Clark from Slacktivist points out something that should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy — or intelligence: The confused conservatives seem to mistakenly believe that during the Great Recession those 8 million workers were simply fired. If that had been the case, the economy would have greeted those 8 million newly unemployed workers with 8 million newly vacant job openings. The relocations, retrainings and logistics of rearranging all of those workers back into the assorted job openings created by their firings would have been unpleasant in the short term, but wouldn’t have created an insurmountable long-term problem for either those 8 million people or for the economy as a whole. That sort of churning and rearranging goes on all the time, which is why economists regard something like a 4 percent unemployment rate as “full employment.” If those workers had all simply been fired, the scenario would have played out as something like the economic equivalent of a Chinese fire drill — everyone get up and find a new seat. That would have been disruptive, but still possible because there would still have been one seat for every displaced worker. But that is not what happened during the Great Recession. Those 8 million workers were not fired, they were laid off. Getting laid off is not the same as getting fired. Those 8 million workers got up and their seats were taken away. They cannot find new seats because there are not nearly enough seats to go around. Those 8 million or so workers cannot simply find new jobs because there are 8 million fewer jobs to be found. The most recent figures, if you want to be precise: 14.2 million looking for work; 3.4 million job openings. That means 10.8 million Americans right now, today, are royally, epically screwed. That means it wouldn’t matter if every unemployed American followed all the advice for what job-seekers are supposed to do. If every single one of them keeps a positive attitude while still being willing to settle for less, if each and every one of them takes classes and volunteers to keep their skills sharp, if each and every one networks furiously, gets up every morning, showers, shaves and gets dressed for the office before sending out dozens of perfect, enticingly crafted résumés all day, every day, then 10.8 million of them will still not find jobs because there are 10.8 million fewer jobs than there are job seekers. That is the situation. That is what we are up against. Millions of people got laid off. They weren’t fired — they were laid off. Their jobs are gone and now there aren’t enough jobs. Getting laid off is not the same as getting fired.
Continue reading …One Irishman’s opinion on the demise of the Celtic Tiger. And for those who’ve never heard of Michael Flatley or Riverdance , go here . Roger Ebert gives it two thumbs way up. (Probably NSFW.)
Continue reading …Krauthammer Scolds Shields for ‘Moaning and Bitching’ About the Tax Plan
December 11, 2010 No Comment
Charles Krauthammer on Friday scolded Mark Shields and other liberals for “moaning and bitching” about the President's compromise tax plan after months of demanding the White House implement a second stimulus package. After Shields on PBS's “Inside Washington” predictably criticized Obama for agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts on the so-called rich, Krauthammer marvelously struck back (video follows with transcript and commentary): read more
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