Injury added to insult as Democrats lose New York seat | Ana Marie Cox
September 14, 2011 No Comment
Ceding Anthony Weiner’s former seat to Republican Bob Turner is a humiliation. But voters right now are angry at everyone Americans’ prudishness almost never looks good (or quite sincere) in retrospect. In the case of the special election in New York’s 9th district , which straddles of Brooklyn and Queens, to replace congressional sexter Anthony Weiner, the Democratic party is probably pining for a chance to re-examine its decision to boot the randy representative: Republican Bob Turner becomes the first Republican elected to Congress from that district since 1920 . Conservative pundits claim that the defeat of the Democratic nominee, David Weprin , signals the depth of voters’ disappointment in the Obama administration. That may be true, but it’s not exactly bad news – or at least, it’s not as though it’s much of a surprise. Voters in special elections tend to vote according to whatever emotions are running high at the moment; with Obama’s approval rating in the district running at 31%, it’s no wonder that constituents would strike a symbolic vote against the administration by rejecting the candidate that represents the status quo. It’s just a good thing for the GOP that they didn’t already control that seat – a referendum on the job they’re doing would probably reflect their 15% approval rating. (These numbers reflect Americans’ negative and “negativer” feelings about the President and Congress nationwide.) The loss is embarrassing to the Democratic party, there’s no doubt – it might even be more embarrassing than a member’s inability to mind his member. Certainly, the Democratic congressional campaign committee’s belated, desperate dumping of almost half a million dollars into the race suggests as much. But the election that actually counts – at least, counts on a national level (intensely though poor Weprin may feel this loss) – is 14 long months away. Time enough for the economy to recover – or not – if only barely enough time for Turner to enjoy his victory before redistricting likely disappears the seat entirely (also in 2012). Then again! Turner may get a chance to vote against Obama’s jobs bill, an action that itself could be much more meaningful, or at least symbolic, when it comes to 2012. Republicans are counting on the economy to continue to drag Obama down; how far will they go to ensure that he and it remain as downcast as they are now? Will they vote against measures that have a chance of making Americans’ lives better? Will they water down those measures and hope for the worst? Will they vamp madly until it’s too late and hope to play Obama off the stage? Turner, in his life before politics, was a producer of “The Jerry Springer Show”, a three-ring circus of transvestites who had their uncles’ baby and chair-throwing adulterous housewives. In all seriousness (I guess?), episodes included guests opining on such topics as “I’m Happy I Cut Off my Legs” and “I’m a Breeder for the [Klu Klux] Klan”. Democrats who thought ousting Weiner would conform to Americans’ desire for propriety clearly don’t watch enough TV. New York US politics Republicans Democrats Anthony Weiner United States US Congress Obama administration Ana Marie Cox guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …In through the out door: how lobbyists rule Congress | Pratap Chatterjee
September 14, 2011 No Comment
The revolving door between the lobbying industry and Capitol Hill makes the lavishly funded K Street the real hub of power Every weekday, groups of scrubbed and shiny 14 year olds pile out of the Washington subway on school trips to visit the halls of the US Congress on Capitol Hill. They come to watch how their elected representatives govern “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in the real-life version of what they have studied in their civics textbooks. Alas, every last student goes to the wrong place. The real power in Washington is not on Capitol Hill, nor even at the White House, but rather a few blocks to the north on the much less exciting road of nondescript modern office buildings known as K street. Indeed, K street has become a euphemism for the world of lobbyists. According to an exhaustive new study just published by LegiStorm , a Washington watchdog group, there are 11,700 registered lobbyists in Washington, DC – almost one for each of the 14,000 staff that work in Congress. “You can’t tell your story unless you get your foot in the door,” a lobbyist by the name of William Chasey once told filmmaker Michael Moore in 1994 . “And if you already have your foot in the door it makes it a lot easier.” For the measly sum of $5,000, Chasey agreed to try to convince Congress to name one day in the year after “TV Nation” – the name of Moore’s satirical TV news show. Not only was Chasey able to introduce a bill, he even got a Republican (Howard Coble of North Carolina) to sponsor it. Moore got himself a bargain. Perhaps the most scandalous operative on K street was lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who charged six Native American tribes $85m between 1995 to 2004 to lobby on behalf of their casinos, even as he accepted money from other interests to do the opposite. Many a member of Congress accepted lavish gifts from such lobbyists – although few match Tom DeLay of Texas. In 2006, two activist groups – Campaign for America’s Future and Public Campaign Action Fund – took out a TV ad to hammer home how much DeLay had received: “Forty-eight trips to golf resorts, 100 flights aboard company jets, 200 nights at world-class resorts and hotels. One million dollars from Russian tycoons to allegedly influence his vote,” intones the announcer. In a 2005 report published by Public Citizen , “The Journey from Congress to K Street”, the watchdog group calculated that more than four out of ten members of Congress had gone to work on K Street after they left elected office. Six years later, the story hasn’t really changed. In the last decade, 393 members of Congress have gone to work on K street to lobby their former colleagues, according to LegiStorm. All told, some 5,400 congressional staffers have worked as lobbyists over the same time period. And the revolving door works both ways – today, 605 former lobbyists work for members of Congress. There is a very simple reason – there is a lot of money to be made. Last year, these lobbyists spent a whopping $3.5bn, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics . Over the last 13 years, one group alone – the US Chamber of Commerce – spent over $750m trying to push its agenda in Congress . In 1863, Abraham Lincoln invoked the idea of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as his vision for the country, in his famous Gettysburg address. A century and a half later, LegiStorm’s new study suggests that Washington has become a government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, for special interest groups. But you won’t find that in a civics book. The lobbyists will make sure of that. US Congress Washington DC United States US politics Pratap Chatterjee guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …In through the out door: how lobbyists rule Congress | Pratap Chatterjee
September 14, 2011 No CommentThe revolving door between the lobbying industry and Capitol Hill makes the lavishly funded K Street the real hub of power Every weekday, groups of scrubbed and shiny 14 year olds pile out of the Washington subway on school trips to visit the halls of the US Congress on Capitol Hill. They come to watch how their elected representatives govern “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in the real-life version of what they have studied in their civics textbooks. Alas, every last student goes to the wrong place. The real power in Washington is not on Capitol Hill, nor even at the White House, but rather a few blocks to the north on the much less exciting road of nondescript modern office buildings known as K street. Indeed, K street has become a euphemism for the world of lobbyists. According to an exhaustive new study just published by LegiStorm , a Washington watchdog group, there are 11,700 registered lobbyists in Washington, DC – almost one for each of the 14,000 staff that work in Congress. “You can’t tell your story unless you get your foot in the door,” a lobbyist by the name of William Chasey once told filmmaker Michael Moore in 1994 . “And if you already have your foot in the door it makes it a lot easier.” For the measly sum of $5,000, Chasey agreed to try to convince Congress to name one day in the year after “TV Nation” – the name of Moore’s satirical TV news show. Not only was Chasey able to introduce a bill, he even got a Republican (Howard Coble of North Carolina) to sponsor it. Moore got himself a bargain. Perhaps the most scandalous operative on K street was lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who charged six Native American tribes $85m between 1995 to 2004 to lobby on behalf of their casinos, even as he accepted money from other interests to do the opposite. Many a member of Congress accepted lavish gifts from such lobbyists – although few match Tom DeLay of Texas. In 2006, two activist groups – Campaign for America’s Future and Public Campaign Action Fund – took out a TV ad to hammer home how much DeLay had received: “Forty-eight trips to golf resorts, 100 flights aboard company jets, 200 nights at world-class resorts and hotels. One million dollars from Russian tycoons to allegedly influence his vote,” intones the announcer. In a 2005 report published by Public Citizen , “The Journey from Congress to K Street”, the watchdog group calculated that more than four out of ten members of Congress had gone to work on K Street after they left elected office. Six years later, the story hasn’t really changed. In the last decade, 393 members of Congress have gone to work on K street to lobby their former colleagues, according to LegiStorm. All told, some 5,400 congressional staffers have worked as lobbyists over the same time period. And the revolving door works both ways – today, 605 former lobbyists work for members of Congress. There is a very simple reason – there is a lot of money to be made. Last year, these lobbyists spent a whopping $3.5bn, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics . Over the last 13 years, one group alone – the US Chamber of Commerce – spent over $750m trying to push its agenda in Congress . In 1863, Abraham Lincoln invoked the idea of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as his vision for the country, in his famous Gettysburg address. A century and a half later, LegiStorm’s new study suggests that Washington has become a government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, for special interest groups. But you won’t find that in a civics book. The lobbyists will make sure of that. US Congress Washington DC United States US politics Pratap Chatterjee guardian.co.uk
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My time with the Unitarians provided a welcome break from some of the more violent undertones of Christian worship I went to a Unitarian service on Sunday, near where I’m living in Brooklyn. I didn’t know much about this denomination. I knew that they don’t believe in the Trinity, but that doesn’t narrow things down very much – nor do Muslims or Richard Dawkins. Do they believe in God at all? They don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, but do they nevertheless see him as a unique moral teacher? I knew that they originally believed very strongly in God, back in the late 18th century, and rejected his threeness as irrational: they believed in the God of the rational Enlightenment, and saw Jesus as the heroic communicator of this superstition-busting deity. Could it be that they still believed in that? I also knew that, in its early days, this movement was favoured by some of the Founding Fathers. Jefferson once expressed the hope that soon all young men in America would be Unitarians (I suppose he was less optimistic about young women). John Adams was also a big fan. And some decades later the movement influenced the Transcendentalism of Emerson and others. I wanted to know what had become of this early strain of the American soul. We gathered in a surprisingly crowded church hall. The service was led by a group of laywomen who had recently put on a play called Mother Wove the Morning. Between gentle, participatory songs, some accompanied by a ukelele, these women spoke on a jittery hand-held mike. The first spoke of her “journey into the goddess”. She briefly mentioned her childhood image of God, a cross between Santa Claus and Jesus – this produced a small ripple of knowing laughter in the congregation. It was the only time that Jesus was mentioned I think. Another woman spoke of the sexism she had encountered in the financial industry, and of the succour she had found in Native American folklore, and of the need to keep taking “buffalo medicine” which I think was a metaphorical substance. Another spoke “as a therapist” about some of the issues raised in the play they had performed. Another, who identified herself as a humanist, noted that Unitarianism had in the past “committed heresy” by overemphasising oneness, as if there were just one path to the divine. As she spoke I noticed a row of old photographs of men, many wearing facial hair, all wearing serious expressions, as if pondering the saving oneness of God. They looked on unimpressed at our final song, Ancient Mother, I Hear you Calling, for which baskets containing percussion instruments were handed round. It was a fun atmosphere; some people got really into it and made surprising whooping animal noises. I have no idea whether this spiritualised feminism is a regular component of this community; maybe most weeks it’s burly men doing the talking, about the sense of rational peace they have while out fishing. But at least three quarters of the congregation was female. And it felt as if the language of therapeutic self-affirmation, whether feminist or not, was very well rooted here. It is now seemingly the Unitarian fashion to deny any single path to truth, but there is still an element of oneness to justify the denomination’s name: its very deep respect for Number One. I came away with the feeling that it was very harmless. And maybe that’s the key difference from Christian worship. In Christian worship there’s a certain sense of risk: we risk affirming an idea of truth that is somewhat at odds with natural wisdom, inner peace. And we risk affirming a tradition that has an aura of violence – the violent rhetoric about the Lord of hosts and so forth – and the references to death and blood in the sombre ritual. There’s a sense of potential danger in Christianity – this religion has been used for violent ends, and people have suffered martyrdom for it too. There’s a disturbing absoluteness. Unitarianism carries about as much sense of dangerous otherness as a tots’ singalong at the local library. Christianity Religion New York United States Theo Hobson guardian.co.uk
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Troy Davis faces execution on 21 September, despite seven of nine non-police witnesses recanting. Where is the justice in that? Death brings cheers these days in America. In the most recent Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Florida , when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked, hypothetically, if a man who chose to carry no medical insurance, then was stricken with a grave illness, should be left to die, cheers of “Yeah!” filled the hall. When, in the prior debate, Governor Rick Perry was asked about his enthusiastic use of the death penalty in Texas, the crowd erupted into sustained applause and cheers. The reaction from the audience prompted debate moderator Brian Williams of NBC News to follow up with the question, “What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?” That “dynamic” is why challenging the death sentence to be carried out against Troy Davis by the state of Georgia on 21 September is so important. Davis has been on Georgia’s death row for close to 20 years, after being convicted of killing off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah. Since his conviction, seven of the nine non-police witnesses have recanted their testimony, alleging police coercion and intimidation in obtaining the testimony. There is no physical evidence linking Davis to the murder. Last March, the US supreme court ruled that Davis should receive an evidentiary hearing, to make his case for innocence. Several witnesses have identified one of the remaining witnesses who has not recanted, Sylvester “Redd” Coles, as the shooter. US District Judge William T Moore Jr refused, on a technicality, to allow the testimony of witnesses who claimed that, after Davis had been convicted, Coles admitted to shooting MacPhail. In his August court order, Moore summarised , “Mr Davis is not innocent.” One of the jurors, Brenda Forrest, disagrees. She told CNN in 2009, recalling the trial of Davis , “All of the witnesses – they were able to ID him as the person who actually did it.” Since the seven witnesses recanted, she says: “If I knew then what I know now, Troy Davis would not be on death row. The verdict would be not guilty.” Troy Davis has three major strikes against him. First, he is an African American man. Second, he was charged with killing a white police officer. And third, he is in Georgia. More than a century ago, the legendary muckraking journalist Ida B Wells risked her life when she began reporting on the epidemic of lynchings in the Deep South. She published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases in 1892 and followed up with The Red Record in 1895, detailing hundreds of lynchings. She wrote: “In Brooks County, Georgia, 23 December, while this Christian country was preparing for Christmas celebration, seven Negroes were lynched in 24 hours because they refused, or were unable to tell the whereabouts of a colored man named Pike, who killed a white man … Georgia heads the list of lynching states.” The planned execution of Davis will not be at the hands of an unruly mob, but in the sterile, fluorescently lit confines of Georgia diagnostic and classification prison in Butts County, near the town of Jackson. The state doesn’t intend to hang Troy Davis from a tree with a rope or a chain – to hang, as Billie Holiday sang, like a strange fruit: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black body swinging in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” The state of Georgia, unless its board of pardons and paroles intervenes, will administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital. Georgia is using this new execution drug because the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized its supply of sodium thiopental last March, accusing the state of illegally importing the poison. “This is our justice system at its very worst,” said Ben Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Amnesty International has called on the state board of pardons and paroles to commute Davis’ sentence. “The board stayed Davis’ execution in 2007, stating that capital punishment was not an option when doubts about guilt remained,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Since then, two more execution dates have come and gone, and there is still little clarity, much less proof, that Davis committed any crime. Amnesty International respectfully asks the board to commute Davis’ sentence to life and prevent Georgia from making a catastrophic mistake.” It’s not just the human rights groups the parole board should listen to. Pope Benedict XVI and Nobel peace prize laureates President Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others, also have called for clemency. Or the board can listen to mobs who cheer for death. • Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column. © 2011 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate Capital punishment State of Georgia United States Human rights US supreme court Amy Goodman guardian.co.uk
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Palin’s strategic genius has been leveraging speculation about a 2012 presidential run to create an unassailable political celebrity There’s always been a strong undercurrent of jealousy and fear in the venomous attacks on former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, not only from liberals and the left, but increasingly from Republicans. Republicans like Karl Rove, the former top George W Bush adviser, who’s tried every which way to force Palin out of contention for the GOP nomination, while promoting his own favoured “centre-right” candidates, most notably Bush’s younger brother, Jeb. And yet, in the face of open hostility from the men who largely built the current GOP, there the shameless diva sits jealously guarding third place in the latest Washington Post/ABC and CNN opinion polls . Without even announcing that she will run – and despite many predictions that she has no intention of so doing – Palin’s not only within striking distance of Mitt Romney (for months, the GOP’s putative “front-runner”), Palin is also far ahead of Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann. Bachmann became a Tea party darling in her own right and has tried desperately hard to inherit Palin’s mantle. But, judging from her sagging poll numbers and her listless performance in last week’s GOP debate at the Reagan Library in California, she is already falling short of that ambition. Monday’s GOP debate in Tampa, Florida (site of next year’s GOP nominating convention, in fact) won’t include Palin, of course – because she is not a formally declared candidate and is keeping everyone guessing, to the chagrin of many Republicans anxious to declare their party’s contest a “two man race”. But don’t think the “Thrilla from Wasilla”, who recently wowed audiences with rousing campaign-style speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire , won’t be there in spirit. The event’s chief host, the Tea Party Express, is about as pro-Palin as the Tea Party gets, and indeed, it is far more so than its two friendly rivals, the Tea Party Patriots, an arm of which just launched a broadside against Palin for her media antics , and FreedomWorks USA, a group founded by former House majority leader Dick Armey, which is so staunchly libertarian and, at times, pro-big business, that the other two Tea Party groups have all but denounced it as a “fraud”. The founder of the Tea Party Express, Sal Russo , started his career as a young operative for Ronald Reagan, and he’s gone on to support numerous Republican campaigns, including, of course, Palin’s in 2008, when she ran with John McCain as his VP candidate. Russo was one of the first to sense the enormous political potential of the Tea Party concept, and alone among the three national groups, he’s proven highly adept at organising – and personally profiting from – its national advertising campaigns and nationwide bus tours. Palin has leveraged her access to these to emerge as one of the Tea Party’s most powerful and recognisable advocates. But significantly, unlike Bachmann, Palin has never really billed herself as a Tea Party leader . She’s built strong ties to key figures in the GOP establishment like McCain and, of course, Rick Perry, whom she helped get elected last November. She has even opposed local Tea Party candidates when it suited her, including a key figure in New Hampshire, which could cost Palin in the Granite State, should she still decide to run. But her special gift from the start has been her ability to bridge the Tea Party and the establishment – a role that Perry now seems anxious to assume, and which Palin’s continued presence on the scene clearly jeopardises. It’s the unspoken, but simmering, Perry-Palin rivalry that accounts for the content and tone of remarkable – but little-noticed – 40-minute speech in Iowa two weeks ago. In a clear swipe at Perry, she lambasted the “permanent political class” and the corrupt “crony capitalists” who like to co-opt grassroots movements like the Tea Party, she claimed, promising them smaller government and lower taxes, but running up huge deficits and expanding the reach of government into their daily lives. And she reminded her adoring fans – many of them cheering, as always, “Run, Sarah, Run” – that she’d taken on the “good ol’ boys” of the GOP when she ran for and served as Alaska governor, and would gladly do so again, if needed. Palin, it seems, is recalculating her political options and recalibrating her message. She clearly wants to be taken seriously as a party spokesperson; and with funds from her still-thriving SarahPAC, she functions as a playmaker. Running for president still seems one possible option, but keeping her profile in the GOP race high enough to serve as an influential power-broker among the candidates is another. She seemed to relish the fact that Romney appeared in New Hampshire the same day she did, but to much smaller crowds. If only to further tweak Perry, she even hinted that she’d support Romney if he ended up the nominee. But don’t think that Palin is necessarily limiting her political horizons to the 2012 residential race. Judging from her actions and remarks over the past several months , she is also seriously considering moving in the direction of a third-party bid, perhaps on a separate Tea Party ticket, following in the footsteps of an independent candidate like H Ross Perot, who built an enormous following and name for himself by launching the Reform America movement in the early 1990s. He won a remarkable 20% of the popular vote in 1992 – the year that Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president with just 43%, a historic low. Another option? She might run for the Arizona Senate seat soon to become open thanks to the impending retirement of Republican Jon Kyl. Palin this year bought property and moved her residence part-time to Scottsdale, a suburb north of Phoenix, ostensibly to be close to the Palin daughter attending school there. But Palin’s constantly using her progeny as props and pretexts of various kinds, so the idea that she’s actually laying the groundwork for a Senate bid , where she would be able to count on strong support from her former running mate McCain, can’t be ruled out. The fact that Palin’s plan B option would likely be another person’s lifetime dream job would indicate the unbridled magnitude of Palin’s vision for herself on the national stage. Can you imagine any other politician who could appear before a Christian audience, and after citing recent opinion polls, jokingly note that polls [or "poles"], in her view, “should be left to strippers and skiers”? And it would take some front for Palin to make a bid for a Senate seat in Arizona that has been coveted by Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Democratic congresswoman who was shot in Tucson shortly after the Palin campaign had placed a sniper’s cross-hairs over Giffords’s name on a map posted on its website. But does anyone doubt she lacks the will? Palin is like a pop celebrity who makes up her own rules, and then changes them on a whim. There appears nothing anyone anywhere can do to stop her. One thing we can be sure of: Palin’s not about to fade away. Sarah Palin Republicans Tea Party movement US politics US elections 2012 Karl Rove Rick Perry Michele Bachmann United States Mitt Romney Stewart J Lawrence guardian.co.uk
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A city known for its sea of yellow taxis and crowded streets, New York is becoming a place no one thought was possible: bikeable New York City is at the tipping point of becoming one of the world’s great bicycling cities. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and the New York City Department of Transportation (DoT) have done a tremendous job creating a more bicycle-friendly New York. According to the DoT, commuter cycling increased by 13% between 2009 and 2010. In the last five years, bicycle ridership has doubled. Since 2009, the city has added more than 200 miles of bike lanes. As president and CEO of Bike New York , I applaud and support DoT’s ambitious goal of having 1,800 miles of bikelanes on the streets, in parks and along paths, by 2030. With the announcement Tuesday that Alta Bicycle Share has been selected as the company to bring bike sharing to New York City, the landscape of the Big Apple is going to change even more. Next summer, 10,000 bike share bicycles will be all over the city at 600 stations, creating the biggest bike share program in the nation. In cities all across the world, it has been proven to be a successful and popular transportation option – checking out a bike at one station and riding it to another station close to your destination. It’ll alleviate congestion and crowds on the streets, buses and subways. It’s an easy and accessible way to fight obesity and pollution. You don’t have to worry about your bike getting stolen. You don’t have to worry about maintenance. You don’t have to worry about storing it in your small New York apartment. Press recently noted that the Washington DC bike share system is so successful that they need to install more stations and bikes to meet the demand. I foresee the same situation in NYC. While innovative programs such as bike sharing may take a while to understand, when people see the benefits of such a program, support and participation grows exponentially. With 10,000 more bikes available on the streets of New York City next year, it is extremely important – now more than ever – to promote safe, courteous cycling skills. The city is continuing to build a fantastic network of bike lanes to make it easier and safer to get around, but a bicycle is only as safe as the person riding it. Bike New York is dedicated to bicycling and bicycling safety through education, public events and collaboration with community organisations and government. Besides running the famous annual Five Boro Bike Tour, with 30,000 riders, we teach more than 2,000 adults and kids how to ride bikes every summer, and work with thousands more at parks, summer camps and after-school programs. We offer free classes to people of all ages and of all bicycling skill levels, promoting and creating safe bicycling habits. So we support our city’s bike sharing program – not only because it will make bicycling more accessible and appealing, but because it will force us, as New Yorkers, to ride responsibly, safely and share the road. A city known for its sea of yellow taxis and crowded streets, New York City is becoming a town no one thought was possible. With this bike share plan, New York City will transform itself into the nation’s top bicycling city. All eyes will be on us to see if the program succeeds or fails. Bike sharing is such an important change, and change is always challenging. But this will be a game-changer for NYC; get ready for it. New York Cycling United States Ken Podziba guardian.co.uk
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enlarge There you go. Orrin Hatch has sent the signal: If we want a jobs plan, we’ll have to give up any right to access our current health care system. Of course, he buries the threat inside a rant about the individual mandate, because that’s unpopular with many, not just those on the right. So now we have Republicans saying “Want a job? Die.” These people make me sick. Oops. Guess that’s their goal . Update: Eric Cantor has taken up the hostage-taking on behalf of the House. Washington Post: But by putting the disaster aid funding on a separate piece of legislation that’s required to keep the government running, House leaders seem to be calculating that the Senate will have no choice but to go along or risk a partial government shutdown. Oh, and this: Besides being about half the overall size of the Senate’s disaster aid measure, the House bill ties cuts to an Obama-backed loan program to encourage the production of fuel efficient vehicles to pay for the $1 billion in immediate aid for 2011 . Typically disaster aid is added to the budget as an emergency expense, and the insistence by Republicans on so-called offsets has Democrats fuming.
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Click here to view this media Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul explained Wednesday that famines in Africa were a result of a lack of a “free market systems.” “All I know is if you look at history and if you compare good medical care and you compare famine, the countries that are more socialistic have more famines,” Paul told CNN’s T.J. Holmes. “If you look at Africa, they don’t have any free market systems and property rights and they have famines and no medical care. So the freer the system, the better the health care.” Writing for the World Bank in 1996, Australian economist Martin Ravallion noted the importance of a social safety net for preventing famines. “The literature on famines reviewed here has suggested that failures of both market and nonmarket institutions lie at the heart of famine causation; so it can be argued that famines can be ameliorated by longer-term development policies which strengthen the social and economic institutions (both governmental and non-governmental) which help protect poor people from economy-wide shocks,” he wrote. “Evidence in the famines literature and elsewhere also suggests that an effective social safety net for protecting poor households from severe shocks is consistent with longer-term goals of economic growth and environmental protection.” Holmes also gave Paul a chance to respond to a controversy that ensued after the tea party audience at Monday night’s Republican presidential debate cheered the notion that an uninsured man in a coma would be left to die. “This whole idea that they world will not provide for people if you don’t depend on government — freedom provides more prosperity and better health care than all the socialism and welfarism in the world,” Paul said. “Nobody can compete with me about compassion because I know and understand how free markets and sound money and a sensible foreign policy is the most compassionate system ever known to mankind. So if you care about people you have to look to the freedom philosophy and limited government.”
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Click here to view this media Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul explained Wednesday that famines in Africa were a result of a lack of a “free market systems.” “All I know is if you look at history and if you compare good medical care and you compare famine, the countries that are more socialistic have more famines,” Paul told CNN’s T.J. Holmes. “If you look at Africa, they don’t have any free market systems and property rights and they have famines and no medical care. So the freer the system, the better the health care.” Writing for the World Bank in 1996, Australian economist Martin Ravallion noted the importance of a social safety net for preventing famines. “The literature on famines reviewed here has suggested that failures of both market and nonmarket institutions lie at the heart of famine causation; so it can be argued that famines can be ameliorated by longer-term development policies which strengthen the social and economic institutions (both governmental and non-governmental) which help protect poor people from economy-wide shocks,” he wrote. “Evidence in the famines literature and elsewhere also suggests that an effective social safety net for protecting poor households from severe shocks is consistent with longer-term goals of economic growth and environmental protection.” Holmes also gave Paul a chance to respond to a controversy that ensued after the tea party audience at Monday night’s Republican presidential debate cheered the notion that an uninsured man in a coma would be left to die. “This whole idea that they world will not provide for people if you don’t depend on government — freedom provides more prosperity and better health care than all the socialism and welfarism in the world,” Paul said. “Nobody can compete with me about compassion because I know and understand how free markets and sound money and a sensible foreign policy is the most compassionate system ever known to mankind. So if you care about people you have to look to the freedom philosophy and limited government.”
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