enlarge A word of advice to Speaker of the House Jo hn Boehner : before you go on national television to tout your House Republican debt reduction plan, you might want to check with House Republicans first. Because as AP , the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal among others are reporting, Speaker Boehner doesn’t have the votes from the “ default deniers ” in his own party, forcing him to rewrite his smaller-than-expected bill . All of which means that Democrats are going to have save John Boehner – and the country – from the Republican Party he claims to lead. Two weeks ago , Speaker Boehner acknowledged that as many as 60 GOP Congressmen “who won’t vote to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances.” That includes, the conservative Washington Times reported, Speaker Boehner’s own bill: “There are not 218 Republicans in support of this plan,” Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who heads the powerful conservative caucus in the House, told reporters Tuesday morning. If Mr. Jordan is right, that would mean Speaker John A. Boehner would have to rely on Democrats to pass the $1.2 trillion spending cuts plan — support Democrats’ top vote-counter said he’ll be hard-pressed to gain. As the AP explained , Boehner’s problems with his own caucus grew worse as the day wore on: Boehner wasn’t helped by an official congressional analysis late Tuesday that said his plan would produce smaller savings than originally promised — less than $1 trillion in spending cuts over the coming decade rather than the $1.2 trillion he estimated on Monday. Earlier, responding to the conservative Republican opposition, Boehner quickly went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, then he began one-on-one chats with wavering Republicans on the House floor during midday roll call votes. “He has to convince a few people,” Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wis., observed dryly from a doorway. For his part, House Minority Leader Eric Cantor pleaded with his fellow Republicans to fall into line. Lamenting that “ the debt limit vote sucks ,” he told his GOP colleagues to “ stop whining .” As Politico reported: Republicans have three options, Cantor said: risk default, pass Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) plan — which he thinks gives President Barack Obama a blank check — or “call the president’s bluff” by passing the Boehner plan, which not only cuts deeply into domestic spending but calls for a bipartisan commission to find more savings. At this point, a presidential veto is the least of John Boehner’s worries. While polling shows voters back President Obama in the debt ceiling stand-off, GOP groups like the Club for Growth and presidential candidates like Michele Bachmann came out against his proposal. Meanwhile, House Democrats made clear they will not provide Boehner the votes he needs for passage of his plan. As NPR reported: If Boehner hopes to make up the lost Republican votes with Democratic votes, Rep. Steny Hoyer had a message for him. Don’t count on it… House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) on Tuesday predicted Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) debt-ceiling proposal would win scant support from Democrats. Hoyer declined to say whether Boehner’s bill could clear the House, but stated that “very few” Democrats would support the measure. Two weeks ago, John Boehner attacked President Obama , proclaiming, “This debt-limit increase is his problem.” Less than 24 hours after going “ mano a mano ” with Obama, the problem is Speaker Boehner’s.
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The Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist was living the American dream. But as a child he had been smuggled into the US and lived in fear of deportation. Then he decided to publicly confess Two undocumented US residents tell their stories Scenes from an undocumented life, number one. Jose Antonio Vargas is in his late 20s, a remarkably successful journalist, covering the 2008 presidential campaign for the Washington Post. He takes a call from his editor. There’s a political meeting he needs to attend. Vargas leaves the gay bar he has been visiting for a story in Gun Barrel City, Texas, gets in his car and starts speeding along the highway. A sheriff stops him. Vargas hands over his driving licence, secured through a social security number that was in turn secured through a fake passport. He waits. He tries to control his nerves. He is worried he might wet himself. Only a few of his close friends know he’s what some Americans disparagingly call “an illegal” and others call an undocumented immigrant. “I remember thinking,” he says, “I’m a political reporter for the Washington Post. I’m in Texas, I’m covering the primaries , he’s going to go back to his car, and he’s going to put my details into the system, and how long is it going to take him to find out?” Vargas is certain the sheriff is about to discover his secret: that he was sent to the US from the Philippines by his mother, aged 12; that he then grew up with his grandparents, naturalised US citizens, and only learned he was undocumented by accident, aged 16; that he has been trying to make his way as best he can, not always lawfully, ever since. He confides to the sheriff that he’s on his way to an important story. The sheriff takes pity. Vargas drives on. Scenes from an undocumented life, number two. Vargas finds out he has a Wikipedia page . This shouldn’t be surprising. Since riding his bike to a fire for his first story, for his local paper, the Mountain View Voice, in 1999 , he has pursued his career with blistering drive . His editors at the Washington Post put him forward for a Pulitzer nomination for his moving, deeply researched series about the city’s Aids crisis when he is in his mid-20s. Two years later, aged 27, he actually wins a Pulitzer , as part of the team that covers the Virginia Tech massacre for the paper. After this triumph, he sits in the office bathroom thinking (he mimes slumping despair): “What do I do now? What else can I do?” He interviews Al Gore for Rolling Stone magazine . He is assigned to interview one of the most famous and famously private men in the world, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for the New Yorker (a magazine that tops the wishlist for young, ambitious American writers who hope to be noticed). And all the while he is feeling sick at the growing scrutiny. He chose to become a journalist because it represented a form of validation. “I remember the first article I ever wrote, and I saw my name in the paper, and I already knew I was undocumented and I was thinking: how can they now say I don’t exist?” But this validation came with extraordinary risks. “The more successful I got, the more scared I got,” he says, when we meet on a sultry summer day in Manhattan. “My name was all over Google. I had a Wikipedia page I was terrified to look at. And so I just snapped. I thought: if I’m going to come out with this, I’m going to do it in a big way. And not just for myself. This can’t just be my story.” When Vargas revealed his secret in a 4,000-word article in the New York Times last month, it became the most-shared article on Google that week, and he became the best-known undocumented immigrant in the US. You might think it would be easy to achieve this last distinction. After all, as Vargas says, the life of the undocumented immigrant is “to lay low. You don’t talk about it.” Many are forced to cut short their education, and make their living in a shadow economy, in low-paid, cash-in-hand jobs. But over the past few years, in a country with an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, some have tired of the constraints, slurs and stigma, the emptiness and oddness of an immigration debate devoid of undocumented immigrants themselves. And so they have been coming out, declaring themselves “undocumented and unafraid” , and putting themselves at immediate risk of deportation. They have staged marches , rallies , sit-ins , and public coming-out actions . Many are young people, students. People such as Gaby Pacheco, a 26-year-old woman whose parents are originally from Ecuador, who has lived in the US since she was eight. Last year, Pacheco and three fellow activists walked from Florida to Washington DC – 1,500 miles – to demand change ; three, including Pacheco, were undocumented immigrants, one had just obtained legal residency. They were marching for access to higher education, worker’s rights, and to stop deportations and the separation of families. “We were seeing so many children who were being sent from house to house, with neighbours taking care of them, because their parents had been deported,” she says. In 2006, after Pacheco talked openly about her status, someone reported her to the authorities. “One morning, very early, immigration knocked really loudly, and came into our house and rounded us up. That was terrifying.” Pacheco had a temporary student visa, so was released, and continued to speak out. She now works as national co-ordinator of the group Education Not Deportation (End), helps people challenge removal proceedings against them, and is also furthering her own ambitions. When she was 17, she says, she naively thought, “I would have my PhD by now. My dream is to open a music therapy centre and create curriculums specifically for autistic adults, and people with Down’s syndrome.” She has finished her bachelor’s degree, but is ineligible for funding for further study. If a vote on the Dream Act had been successful last year, Pacheco might have had a clear path to her ambitions. Dream stands for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. The act was first proposed 10 years ago, and polls suggest it is supported by a majority of the US population . It would allow people brought to the country as minors a path to permanent residency status, either by pursuing a college education, or through military service. Pacheco and her fellow activists lobbied hard for this legal change, but were unsuccessful. On 18 December last year, the senate voted on the bill ; 60 votes in favour were needed for it to proceed. It fell just short at 55 (41 voted against it). Pacheco was devastated, and moved to Washington DC so the legislators would have a human face to answer to. “I decided to come and live here, to continue fighting, to be a constant reminder to senators that they voted no to an individual, an individual who wants to work in special education.” Vargas had been watching Pacheco’s walk with interest, as well as following groups such as UnitedWeDream and DreamActivist on Twitter. When the Dream Act failed, it was a turning point for him too. That day, he took a long walk from his home in Manhattan to the Brooklyn bridge, and decided it was time to tell his story . Coming out as an undocumented immigrant involves obvious risks. Last week, for instance, Vargas’s driving licence – his main proof of identity – was revoked . This was inevitable, he says, when he published the article, because it documented the subterfuge involved in securing the licence, and so he had already decided to stop driving. “I came forward in the article to say I had broken these laws, and I don’t want to break them any more, and now I have to live an alternative kind of life,” he says. It was on a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), aged 16, to obtain a driving permit, that he first discovered he wasn’t a legal US resident. When he handed over his green card, the clerk told him it was fake, and he suddenly faced a very different life from the one he had expected. One lawyer told Vargas that publishing his story was “legal suicide”, but he decided he was ready for the consequences. The conversation around immigration in the US is as febrile as ever – think of all the bizarre, often offensive debate that took place around Barack Obama’s citizenship status, the dogged pursuit of his birth certificate by those in the “birther movement” . As that debate raged, deportations were taking place at an enormous rate: almost 800,000 people have been deported during Obama’s time in office . And Vargas could potentially follow them. Since telling his story, Vargas has been criticised for the lies he has told to get by. Some have suggested these undermine his entire career as a journalist, which depends on truth and transparency. But for him, he says, the question is: “What did I lie about, and why did I have to lie about it? It would be another issue if they found lies in the news articles. In many ways I think I’ve always overcompensated. I was always almost too careful, because I knew if anybody ever found any way to doubt my work, then they’d start picking my life apart too. The question I’ve been asking everybody is: what would you have done? Would you have just stopped? Would you have just started waiting tables? Would you have just gotten married, even though you were gay?” Vargas came out as gay in his late teens, causing a short rift with his grandfather, who, as a Catholic, was upset on religious grounds – and also because this closed the most obvious path to citizenship. A few years later, Vargas visited a lawyer for advice. He was told his only chance for legal residency was to go back to the Philippines, stay for 10 years, and then apply to return. The conversation left him devastated. This would mean travelling back to a country he hardly knew, and a family he hadn’t seen for years; it’s now 18 years since he last saw his mother. He hasn’t seen his half-sister since she was two (she is now 20), and he has never met his 14-year-old half-brother. Now Vargas has dedicated himself to re-framing and elevating the debate around immigration. He has started a group called Define American , and emails have been flooding in, both from undocumented immigrants and the people who help and protect them. He says he set up the group because “the way we talk about immigration is broken. The only reason my story got the traction it did online is because other people see themselves in it. They see themselves as me, or as one of the people who helped me.” His story includes many instances of exemplary kindness: his school principal went so far as to consider adopting him , his choir teacher switched a school trip from Japan to Hawaii so he could attend, one of his mentors at the Washington Post put his own job and reputation on the line to keep Vargas employed there after he told him his secret . “That’s the only reason why this story spoke as much as it did, because so many people are involved . . . The strategy now is how do we make sure we’re not just talking among ourselves with this issue? How do we talk to people who don’t agree with us? How do we target people who haven’t quite made up their minds? How do we reach the persuadable middle, who we can persuade through facts and individual stories?” There will be hard questions along the way about where immigration lines are drawn. Vargas says he’s ready to face them. “I’m more than willing to go to places and talk to people who believe that I am an illegal alien, who deserves to be jailed. I want to look them in the eye and say: ‘What makes you think I’m any different from you?’ I think for our generation immigration rights is a civil rights issue.” He has already, unsurprisingly, faced racist comments, with people online telling him to “go home”. “I think, which home?” he says. “My home is 30 blocks away. I’m home right now. Where do you want me to go?” More information: defineamerican.com US immigration Kira Cochrane guardian.co.uk
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Even if you want it, divorce is about as much fun as running your tongue along the edge of a new razor blade. It also leaves a similarly painful wound. My divorce was no different. Overnight the once solid furniture of my life had been rearranged. And the dream of a happy ending had vanished like smoke on the wind. So, I did what every newly untethered, fifty-something divorcee would do — I moved to Vegas. In retrospect, I have no idea why moving to Sin City sounded like a good plan. Maybe it wasn’t so much a plan as a blind leap, like hurling myself off a cliff. Vegas had never been on my to-do list. Oh, I’d been there . . . once. As I recall I’d been overwhelmed by Siegfried and Roy’s show and underwhelmed by everything else. Maybe I moved to Vegas because it was different. For a girl raised in the South during the last gasp of the Donna Reed era, Vegas was as close to Somewhere Over the Rainbow as it was possible to get. Perhaps I’d gone temporarily ’round the bend. Maybe my move was a desperate cry, a shout into the darkness to the me I used to be. Who knows? What I do know is that the rules that had governed my existence no longer applied. In light of the fact that the bedrock of my life had recently crumbled beneath my feet, this struck me as a good thing. Disconcerting, but good. I remember standing in front of my new little condo, which was a third the size of the house I’d left, with all I had in the world stacked in boxes on the driveway, and thinking, This is it? This is all I have to show for all the years I’ve put in? Yup, that was it — the sum total, of a life I’d left behind. I called the Goodwill folks and gave it all away. Well, except for a handful of clothes — and those didn’t last long. My first big dinner out in Vegas was at the restaurant with some friends I had known “before” — before marriage, before divorce — old, old friends. They were already seated at the Coyote Café when I arrived. Without preamble or social grace, my girlfriend gave her husband a knowing look then said to me, “Honey, those clothes have got to go. You look so . . . East Coast. In Vegas, preppie just screams clueless.” Well, if it looks like a duck . . . I smiled at the waiter perched expectantly at my elbow. “A gin and tonic, no tonic, please.” While I gulped my drink, I surreptitiously watched the people around me. Most of the outfits I saw would’ve been appropriate for working the street corners back in Dallas. A grin tickled my lips. This could be fun. At some point in the evening, my friend and I excused ourselves and headed toward the bathroom. We followed a short woman with long blond hair tottering on five-inch heels. She wore fishnet hose and a Lycra mini so short that dignity, if she had any, would necessitate remaining in an upright position. A leather biker jacket with the face of Elvis pieced together in multi-colored suede on the back completed her ensemble. Needless to say, she turned heads all the way across the casino. I elbowed my friend, “Is that how I should dress?” Apparently I’d had too many gins with no tonic, as the woman turned at what I thought was my whisper. She was eighty, if she was a day. In an instant, I sobered. Man, even the octogenarians rocked mini-skirts and knock-me-down-and-f@#k-me shoes. Humiliated, I looked with scorn at my khakis and cashmere cardigan and felt . . . hope. I needed new. I craved new. New clothes seemed like a good place to start. So, I designed a budget and a plan of attack. A new skirt here. A pair of skinny jeans there. I had to wait for a sale to buy that killer pair of stilettos, but eventually they, too found their way into my tiny closet. Growing bolder, one day I spied a cute figure in a tennis skirt with a matching sweater bending over the meat display at the local supermarket. Having just joined a tennis league, I thought I could use an ensemble like that. I tapped my fellow tennis enthusiast on the shoulder. “Excuse me. Sorry to bother you. But could you tell me where you bought your outfit?” The figure turned. It was a guy . . . with great legs. I didn’t bat an eye. I noted the name of the store, thanked him profusely, then went shopping. With each new acquisition, I pitched an old one, until none remained. All that glittered was new . . . literally. Slowly, like a chick pecking at the shell, a new me pushed her way into the light. Who knew that changing the outer would change the inner as well? Yes, I’ve found the me I was meant to be . . . in Sin City. I try not to overanalyze that. The other night, I came downstairs in a slinky, off-one-shoulder, fitted dress with a rather strategic cut-out . . . oh, and those kick-ass shoes. The new man in my life whistled and said, “Back where I come from, that is a stay-at-home dress. But, you look amazing.” I took in his East Coast attire– double-breasted blue blazer, creased gray slacks and loafers– and grinned. Hooking my arm though his, I whispered, “Welcome to the new me.”
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Members of the New York Jets were back at work Tuesday, a day after NFL players agreed to a deal to end the four-month lockout. Jets owner Woody Johnson spoke to reporters as did tight end Dustin Keller and guard Brandon Moore. (July 26)
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At a private funeral ceremony in London, friends and family bid farewell to Amy Winehouse, while tributes continue to flood in outside her house. (July 26)
Continue reading …Operation Fast and Furious, the bungled ATF gun-trafficking probe , was even more bungled than originally thought: Federal agents lost track of more than 1,000 firearms purchased by suspected gun smugglers during the Arizona investigation. The information comes from a new congressional report ahead of a House hearing today examining…
Continue reading …The Wall Street Journal did a lousy job of initially covering Rupert Murdoch’s phone hacking scandal, admits the paper’s special editorial committee. The paper was “slower than it should have been at the outset to pursue the phone-hacking scandal story” and failed to ask tough questions when it interviewed Rupert…
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Speaker of the House John Boehner is back defending a GOP plan to raise the national debt ceiling this year and revisit the issue in the spring. (July 26)
Continue reading …Bloomberg reports that Boehner and Republicans voted for all the Debt they now Blame on Obama
July 26, 2011 No CommentJohn Boehner, FOX News, the Tea Party and all of the GOP continue to make the claim that the Obama administration is almost entirely responsible for what they consider to be America’s debt problem. Bloomberg News did just a little digging and reports what we’ve been claiming all along. These Republicans are all a bunch of hypocrites. The same Republicans that are so outraged by the deficit voted to help put it there in the first place: “In Washington, more spending and more debt is business as usual,” the Republican leader from Ohio said in a televised address yesterday amid debate over the U.S. debt. “I’ve got news for Washington – those days are over.” Yet the speaker, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all voted for major drivers of the nation’s debt during the past decade: Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that rescued financial institutions and the auto industry. Together, a Bloomberg News analysis shows, these initiatives added $3.4 trillion to the nation’s accumulated debt and to its current annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion. Obviously a few Democrats helped Bush out, but Boehner, Cantor and Paul Ryan have done their best to vote for bills that spend, spend, spend. Bush Tax Cuts The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which lowered tax rates on income, dividends and capital gains, increased the federal budget deficit by $1.7 trillion over a decade, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan left-of- center group in Washington that studies fiscal policy. The two-year extension of those tax cuts that Obama signed will cost $857.8 billion, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Boehner has defended the tax cuts, arguing that they didn’t lead to the deficit. “The revenue problem we have today is a result of what happened in the economic collapse some 18 months ago,” he told reporters on June 10, according to The Hill newspaper. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost almost $1.3 trillion since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, according to a March 29 analysis by the Congressional Research Service. Operations in Iraq have cost $806 billion, and in Afghanistan $444 billion. The analysis shows the government has spent an additional $29 billion for enhanced security on militia bases and $6 billion remains unallocated. Medicare Drug Benefit The 2003 Medicare prescription program approved by President George W. Bush and a Republican-dominated Congress has cost $369 billion over a 10-year time frame, less than initially projected by Medicare actuaries. Nine Senate Republicans, including Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel, along with 25 Republicans in the House, voted against the bill. Hagel argued that it failed to control costs and would add trillions in debt for future generations. “Republicans used to believe in fiscal responsibility,” Hagel wrote in a 2003 editorial in the Omaha World Herald. “We have lost our way.” TARP, the $700-billion bailout of banks, insurance and auto companies, has cost less than expected. McConnell, Boehner, Cantor and Ryan all voted in October 2008 for the program, which stoked the rise of the Tea Party movement. Many institutions have repaid the government. The latest estimated lifetime cost of the program is $49.33 billion, according to a June 2011 report by the Treasury Department. That figure includes the $45.61 billion cost of a housing program which the administration never expected to recoup. Rank-and-file Republicans are eager to pin the blame on Democrats, frequently pointing to the economic stimulus signed by Obama in 2009. The total cost of the stimulus will be $830 billion by 2019, according to a May 2011 Congressional Budget Office report. That’s half the cost of the Bush tax cuts and less than two-thirds of what has been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But of course there was a Republican president at the time, so as Dick Cheney famously said, deficits don’t matter. The new GOP leaders are as guilty as sin and are fooling only the beltway media establisment.
Continue reading …NBC’s Gregory Claims Obama ‘Trying to Help’ Boehner by Pressuring House GOP to Accept ‘Balanced Approach’ of Tax Hikes
July 26, 2011 No Comment
During an NBC News special report following President Obama's Monday night speech that blamed the GOP for the debt ceiling stalemate, Meet the Press host David Gregory argued the President was doing John Boehner a favor: “…this is a president trying to help the Speaker of the House make the case to freshman Republicans who won't give at all on the idea of tax increases.” Gregory declared that Obama was “trying to create more pressure on them [Republicans] among the public, who are fed up with this, to say we've got to find some way to compromise here…. he's actually trying to create some political room for his adversary in this fight.” Nightly News anchor Brian Williams began the exchange by observing: “…a big item on the President's list that is a deal-breaker for so many on the other side, the wealthy Americans, millionaires, billionaires, can afford to pay more.” Gregory repeated Obama's talking points: “Well, you heard him, time and again, say a balanced approach is reasonable here.” Interestingly, special coverage of the speech on ABC had a very different take on the political impact of the President's address, suggesting it may actually energize the GOP. Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos noted that Obama was trying to “put pressure” on Republicans, but wondered: “…is there a chance that it could actually backfire and unify those House Republicans?” Correspondent Jon Karl replied: “You are exactly right, George. The House Republicans who don't want to vote for an increase can now be told, “This is your chance to stick it to the President, to go against the President who is trying to force us to do something we don't want to do,” so I think this will actually help John Boehner, kind of rally those really, on the right of his caucus, the real conservatives.” Here is a transcript of the July 25 NBC exchange between Williams and Gregory: (…) BRIAN WILLIAMS: Let's bring David Gregory back in, he's watching all of this with us from Boston. And David, of course a big item on the President's list that is a deal-breaker for so many on the other side, the wealthy Americans, millionaires, billionaires, can afford to pay more. DAVID GREGORY: Well, you heard him, time and again, say a balanced approach is reasonable here. It took us a long time to get this far into debt. And we know the debt has gone up 35% since the President came into office. If the debt limit is extended through 2012, it would be up 54%. But his point was, it took us a long time to get here. And behind the scenes here, Brian, the message, this is a president trying to help the Speaker of the House make the case to freshman Republicans who won't give at all on the idea of tax increases. He's trying to create more pressure on them among the public, who are fed up with this, to say we've got to find some way to compromise here, and do it in a way that will have the rest of the world, including the credit agencies, think that U.S. is taking a serious step here, and get us through the 2012 election. It's a big argument, but he's actually trying to create some political room for his adversary in this fight. WILLIAMS: That's right. David Gregory, again, watching from Boston. (…) Here is a transcript of the July 25 ABC exchange between Stephanopoulos and Carl: (…) GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Jon, the President clearly hoping that by going to the public tonight he'll be able to put pressure on those Republicans, but is there a chance that it could actually backfire and unify those House Republicans? JON KARL: You are exactly right, George. The House Republicans who don't want to vote for an increase can now be told, “This is your chance to stick it to the President, to go against the President who is trying to force us to do something we don't want to do,” so I think this will actually help John Boehner, kind of rally those really, on the right of his caucus, the real conservatives. STEPHANOPOULOS: But as he was coming into this speech tonight, he was not sure that he had those Tea Party Republicans, the most conservative members of his caucus behind this plan. (…)
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