Click here to view this media Tim Pawlenty unveiled his budget proposal today and as MSNBC’s Cenk Uygur pointed out here, “it’s got a lot of rainbows and unicorns” and is little more than already discredited Voodoo economics and more tax cuts for giant corporations. The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen was just as critical — The ignominy of Pawlenty’s paltry pitch : Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty realizes the economy is the most pressing issue on the minds of voters, so today the Minnesotan presented his economic vision at the University of Chicago. Pawlenty is calling it his “Better Deal.” If the goal was to position Pawlenty as a serious, credible candidate who knows something about economic policy, the speech was an ignominious failure. Pawlenty’s pitch was so weak, it’s startling his campaign staff and speechwriters even let him deliver it. As the former governor (and former moderate) sees it, he can usher in an era of 5% growth through “ a breathtaking series of tax cuts ,” including a massive reduction in the corporate tax rate and the total elimination of taxes on capital gains, dividends, and estates. How would Pawlenty pay for all of this? By capping federal spending at 18% of GDP — a target that makes the right-wing House Republican budget plan look fairly moderate by comparison. Don’t worry, Pawlenty says. His enormous tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations will be so great, they’ll produce enormous wealth that will make all of our problems go away. To help prove his point, Pawlenty points to the economic successes of the 1980s and 1990s — apparently unaware of the fact that he was citing years that followed tax increases . After scrutinizing some of Pawlenty’s more outlandish projections, Ezra Klein concluded : This plan isn’t optimistic. It isn’t a bit vague. It’s a joke. And I don’t know which is worse: The thought that Pawlenty knows that and went forward with this pandering, fantasy-based proposal anyway, or the thought that he doesn’t know it, and he really thinks this could work. And as Steve pointed out, Pawlenty is supposedly one of the “grown ups” or the candidates we’re supposed to take seriously as having an actual chance of winning the GOP nomination. Think Progress also has more on Pawlenty’s claim that a 5 percent growth rate sustained over a ten year period has been “done before” — Fuzzy Math: Blasting Obama, Pawlenty Falsely Claims A Decade Of 5% Growth Has Been ‘Done Before’ . Transcript of Cenk below the fold. UYGUR: In our Con-Job of the day we have Tim Pawlenty’s comical new budget proposal. Pawlenty unveiled his economic plan for America today and it’s got a lot of rainbows and unicorns. PAWLENTY: Let’s grow the economy by 5% instead of the anemic 2% currently envisioned. UYGUR: Wow, 5% growth sounds great. I wish we could get that. And even better Pawlenty’s calling for this level of growth over a ten year period. Fantastic! Can I get a pony with that? But why in the world would you think this is remotely doable Tim? PAWLENTY: We’ve done it before and with the right policies, we can do it again. Between 1983 and 1987, the Reagan recovery grew at 4.9%. And between 1996 and 1999 under President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress, the economy grew at more than 4.7%. UYGUR: So let’s get this right. You’re saying that because during two of the fastest growth periods in modern history, the economy grew at a rate of less than 5% for a few years, it’s possible to grow the economy at a higher rate, for an entire decade. Well that sounds absurd, but hey, I’m willing to listen. How would you do it? PAWLENTY: We should start by overhauling the tax code. […] We should cut the business tax rate by more than half. I propose reducing the current rate from 35% to 15%. UYGUR: Of course! […] Of course it’s giant tax cuts for corporate America. That’s always the Republican answer. Look, we just showed you in the last segment how huge tax cuts have totally hurt our economy, not helped. Besides which, taxes are lower now than they were at any time under Clinton or Reagan. So if low taxes were the magic answer, why aren’t they creating such great economic growth now? None of this comes close to adding up. In fact Ezra Klein from the Washington Post who wrote a great analysis of this plan today called Pawlenty’s plan a “joke.” And you shouldn’t be surprised. Pawlenty loves to brag about how he balanced the budget in Minnesota when he was governor, but his short term fixes left the state with what is now the fourth largest deficit in the country. Pawlenty may try to sell himself as the great fiscal “truth teller” but what he’s really selling is tired old, Voodoo economics and that’s our Con-Job of the day.
Continue reading …Joe Lieberman becomes Glenn Beck’s newest fanboy and will attend his ‘Restoring Courage’ Rally
June 8, 2011 No CommentJoe Lieberman joined Glenn beck on his FOX Show the other day and boy, was it a love-fest. Joe played Beck’s fanboy and showered him with hugs and kisses. Once upon a time this man ran as VP in 2000 for the Democratic Party. Beck said Joe was inspired by his insane 8/28 Rally in DC which he says was not political, but which was boring, really white and political. I guess Joe didn’t read anything about that event. Joe is going to join Beck for his Restoring Courage event which he says is going to Jerusalem. On his radio show, Beck immediately started in on the hyperbole. After discussing the details of the event, Beck warned his followers that “the very gates of hell are gonna open up against us” and declared, “I believe we live in historic times. I believe historians will remember what we do and what we say.” Restoring Courage will be “the same kind of feel that you experienced” at Restoring Honor, Beck said , “except I will tell you: much more profound. This is a life-changing, life-altering event.” Beck even said that the rally would “define” its participants: “This will be a — I think, a pinnacle moment in your life. It will define you. In the end, this event will define you.” Beck continued the hyperbole on his TV show today, paraphrasing the Gettysburg Address to say that at his rally in Jerusalem, “possibly for the first time in man’s history, God will remember and make note of what we do there. ” It’s an event to stand up for what you believe in, said Beck. Later he said that Lieberman helped him get into Yale University also. We know Sen. Lieberman blocks bills just to piss off Liberals out of spite like when he stripped out the Medicare-For-All provision in HCR when just three months before he was for it. But now he’s embarrassing himself in front of his Beltway media elite friends by being a foil for Beck. What would David Broder say about that? In the vid, Lieberman appeared to go further than the current Senate deal, which would expand Medicare to those aged 55-64, saying he supported the idea of expanding it to people aged 50 and over. Lieberman referenced his proposal along these lines during the 2006 campaign, and added: “My proposals were to basically expand the existing successful public health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid… “When it came to Medicare I was very focused on a group — post 50, maybe more like post 55. People who have retired early, or unfortunately have been laid off early, who lose their health insurance and they’re too young to qualify for Medicare. “What I was proposing was that they have an option to buy into Medicare early and again on the premise that that would be less expensive than the enormous cost. If you’re 55 or 60 and you’re without health insurance and you go in to try to buy it, because you’re older … you’re rated as a risk so you pay a lot of money.” It’s not entirely clear that Lieberman was offering a full-throated current endorsement of the proposal, but his tone is clearly positive and approving. It’s yet another sign, as if you needed one, that Lieberman’s current opposition to the Senate proposal doesn’t appear to have any roots in a genuine policy disagreement. So he hurt American families when it mattered the most and now he’s aligning himself with Beck, really?
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Media critics, decidedly un-conservative for the most part, are piling on Arianna-OL in the wake of
Continue reading …Jon Stewart shed some real blood during a mock press conference last night on the Daily Show . The host, while offering his “resignation” for going too easy on his old friend Anthony Weiner, accidentally slashed his hand on some broken glass while making a margarita, reports Mediaite . He wasn’t seriously…
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The R-rated revelation from Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) that may wreck his marriage, ruin his career and destroy his reputation appears to be the result of a one-letter typo: “@” instead of “D.” Weiner, who admitted Monday to posting a lewd photo of his bulging briefs on Twitter, is hardly a social media newbie. Dubbed a “technophile” by The New York Times, Weiner has been an avid tweeter: he posts to the social networking service multiple times a day, writes from his BlackBerry, makes generous use of hashtags to add color to his tweets, and frequently engages his followers in one-on-one conversations. And that’s exactly where his problems began. He committed a rookie mistake on the social networking service by fumbling Twitter’s Direct Message (DM) feature — used to send private messages between two Twitter users — turning a private missive into a public tweet. “Last Friday night, I tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle,” Weiner admitted during a press conference Monday, adding he deeply regrets the way he has used Twitter to date. He is hardly the first to fall victim to a “DM fail,” as this type of error is known on Twitter: Economist Nouriel Roubini tweeted — then deleted — an insult that that was presumably meant for a DM conversation, saying of a reporter, “Off the record […] he is a loser and like all parasite losers he hopes for attention and traffic.” So if a social media savvy politician who’s helped shape net neutrality legislation can’t quite keep Twitter straight, what’s everyone else to do? What can others learn from Weiner’s Twitter troubles? Privacy experts say that Weinergate underscores the importance of users understanding these social networking sites for what they are: social platforms meant to help people connect with one another, broadcast their ideas and create stores of personal information online. Services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are built for sharing, not secrets. “Twitter was not really designed for privacy. If you do not want it public, don’t put it on Twitter,” said Chet Wisniewski, a security expert who writes for a blog run by Sophos, a software provider. “People shouldn’t consider social networks a place to communicate private things. … These services are designed to share, and privacy is a second consideration.” In Weiner’s defense, it’s extremely easy to slip-up and turn a private Twitter message into a public posting. Weiner apparently confused a DM with an “@ mention,” a public Twitter post directed at a specific user but visible to anyone on the service. To send a DM to a Twitter follower using TweetDeck, the Twitter application Weiner was reportedly using when he sent the fateful photo, a user prefaces a tweet with the letter D, followed by the Twitter username of the person he or she wants to communicate with privately (e.g. “D bbosker”). To send an @ mention, a user would preface a tweet with the @ symbol followed by the Twitter username of the person he or she wants to converse with in a targeted, but public, way (e.g. “@ bbosker”). Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com, which helps people manage their online reputations, says the accidental exposure of messages that were meant to be private happens “millions of times a day.” Not only can human error lead to embarrassing disclosures, but technical troubles have been known to expose Twitter DMs in the past. For example, security flaws with third party Twitter applications, such as GroupTweet, have revealed users’ direct messages on several occasions. And last year, Twitter settled Federal Trade Commission charges that it put its customers’ privacy at risk — and compromised “nonpublic user information” — due to “lapses in the company’s data security.” Weiner also got himself into trouble by using a a photo-sharing service, yFrog, that makes photos posted to the service public. The National Journal explained: yFrog (and other popular Twitter photo-sharing services, like Twitpic, for that matter) display photos in a timeline format. So anyone who ventured to this site (before Weiner deleted all of his photos) could have simply clicked through and seen all the photos he uploaded, regardless of whether or not they were publicly tweeted. Among the other lapses in judgment of which Weiner stands accused, he might consider reflecting on one more: blaming hackers for his own mistake. Weiner initially chalked up the crotch-shot photo to a “hacker,” whom Weiner claimed had cracked his account. That accusation came on the heels of some of the most serious computer security breaches in history: Over 100 million customers had their personal information compromised after cyber attackers infiltrated Sony’s PlayStation Network servers; Epsilon suffered an attack that revealed the names, email addresses, and more of millions of people; and just days after Weiner’s underwear appeared, Gmail accounts belonging to hundreds of users — among them senior U.S. officials — were breached by hackers. Weiner is the “boy who cried hack.” His blame game is concerning to some security experts, who fear accusations of this kind could take attention away from the seriousness of the threat from cyber attackers. “I personally thought it was distasteful,” said Wisniewski of Weiner’s hacker claims. “We have enough real cybercrime going on in today’s world, we don’t need to confuse it by blaming accidents, mistakes and security lapses with the real thing.”
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Whether the ultimate episode of “The Oprah Show” was really the end or just the beginning, the daytime talk-show diva has clearly moved on. If you’re afraid that Oprah’s mindful-eating coach, Geneen Roth, has moved on, too, rest assured. The best-selling anti-diet book writer who inspired Oprah to stop dieting is not abandoning food issues for money problems as some fans fear. But after losing her life savings to Bernie Madoff (of all people) and living to write about it, Roth has expanded her focus to include food and money. Her new memoir, “Lost and Found,” not only chronicles that traumatic loss, but explores food, money and her complicated relationship to both. More specifically, the compulsive-overeater-turned-mindful-memoirist is now writing about how the emotional issues with money mirror those all-too-familiar issues with food. When I realized that the ultimate episode of “The Oprah Show” aired one year after Oprah had declared she’d found the answer to yo-yo dieting in Roth’s bestseller, “Women Food and God,” I realized America could use help understanding how anyone could make such a declaration and yet remain visibly unchanged. What’s more, I thought veteran dieters could benefit from a fresh perspective on comparative judgments. That’s what Roth calls statements like “At least I’m not as fat as …” I could have dashed off a blog on the topic myself or quoted long passages from “Lost and Found.” Here’s a short one: “I hardly have the words to tell you what it was like to see the exact same patterns with money as I’d once had with food. I splurged the way I once binged, and budgeted the way I once dieted. I lied about the money I had in the same way that I once lied about how much I ate. I rationalized buying sweaters on sale in the same way that I once rationalized eating broken cookies.” But what I know for sure: Two compassionate minds are better than one. So I phoned Roth, and we got to talking about all of the above: women, food, money and Oprah. What follows are questions and answers from our recent conversation. Q: Oprah has moved on to her OWN network, and you’ve moved on, or so it seems, to money … A: I haven’t moved on. Food is still my main focus. People get turned off [by the book] because they haven’t dealt with the food thing, and they don’t want to deal with money. It’s overwhelming. I want them to know food and money problems are very similar. Photo by Stroud Schelling Q: What’s money got to do with food? A: After my husband and I lost our life savings, many of the patterns I thought I’d worked through with food were surfacing in my relationship with money. It was losing everything and being confronted with the decisions I’d made about money that catapulted me into questions about what is enough, and the sense that no matter how much I had, it was never enough. It was the very same thing I’d experienced with food on an emotional, psychological and, dare I say, spiritual level. Q: Why do you say the old adage of “You can never be too thin or too rich” isn’t true? A: Most people are so focused on what they don’t have, what they’re not allowed to eat, what they shouldn’t eat, what they’ll be able to eat when they finish the diet, lose the weight … it’s a constant feeling of “If only I had this, then I’d be happy.” But they’ve already lost 10, 20, 30, 40 pounds 30 or 40 times, and it didn’t make them happy. It gave them a thinner body, but it didn’t give them the sense that “Now I can rest, now I will be seen for who I really am, now I can be happy.” The same is true with money. Let’s face it, we need money for food and shelter, but after those needs are met, this insane desire for more and more and more … it doesn’t make people happy. Q: How do you explain how Oprah could say she found the answer in “Women Food and God,” and yet still struggles with her weight? A: I can’t speak for Oprah or about Oprah, but I can say when you find something that speaks to you, when you find something that feels like “Now I’m at home,” that’s the beginning, not the end. That “a-ha” moment is wonderful, but when it ends, and it always does, it needs to be followed by some kind of commitment to take action on your own behalf, a daily decision to be there for yourself. Q: How do you decide to be there for yourself? A: You can’t do it alone. Support helps you follow through, and the desire to follow through helps you get support. It can’t just be the support of one friend giving you advice. Advice doesn’t help so much. The problem with all the advice we’ve been given is we don’t know how to follow it. When people don’t feel instant change, they think it’s not working. This is a failure. I’m a failure. At that point, they need support in asking the right questions, like: What am I feeling? What happened in that moment when I went to eat when I wasn’t hungry? When I went to spend when I was feeling hurt? Unless you become interested in those moments, you’ll always turn to food or money to fill them. Q: Is that how you survived losing all your money? A: I felt the loss, the grief, but I also had a lot of support. It [the support] helped me see that everything that really mattered was still here, and that helped me see objectively what I needed to do next. Q: It’s easy to be critical of anyone’s weight, especially a public figure like Oprah’s. What do you know for sure about making comparative judgments? A: It doesn’t help to compare yourself to another or to yourself [at another time] because it’s not about you. When you’re not interested in yourself, whatever is driving you to diet or binge, restrict or splurge isn’t being touched. When you judge and blame and shame yourself, you feel weak, diminished, collapsed and paralyzed. It’s hard to think or move or know what to do next. Q: What do you know about quick fixes? A: [Real] change is not always visible, especially not at first. While there’s a pay-off to being conscious about eating — losing weight — with money, there’s a different kind of pay-off. I’m not saying if you’re conscious about money, you’ll get rich. I am saying your relationship with what you have in life will change. Everyone reading your blog in this moment has five things they have enough of, but because they’re focused on what they don’t have, they’re focused on lack. If all you’re valuing is what you can see, touch and accomplish in this second, it’s going to be hard going. You have to value your inner process. Q. Both you and Oprah have made private issues a public service. Ever wished you’d kept your issues private? A. Part of my job description here on earth is to write about things most people wouldn’t dare tell their friends. After I was anorexic, I doubled my weight, from 80 to 160 pounds, in two months. I also went on every diet there was, fasted, purged. I was a crazed, mad person around food. I didn’t exactly have a sane relationship with money either. There’s a value to having a tour guide, someone who’s been there. Because I’ve been there, you don’t have to go there. If I can come back from the brink, anyone can. Q: Anything else you want to say? A: There’s nothing I want to add, but if readers have questions, I’m starting an online retreat June 7. It’s six weeks, 90 minutes each week, with me on the phone. I’ll be answering questions and talking about my eating guidelines, which are the core of my approach. [For a fee,] they can listen live or they can download it [the recorded phone call] and listen anywhere, anytime. ## Q: Anything I want to add? A: Not really, but, I will say about Geneen the one thing she would say about Oprah: “She was lovely and gracious with me.” Q: Anything else? A: As I bring this blog to a close, I’m reminded of Oprah’s famous last words: “Until we meet again.” ** Jean Fain is a Harvard Medical School-affiliated psychotherapist specializing in eating issues, and the author of “The Self-Compassion Diet.” For more information, see www.jeanfain.com. Anything you want to add?? Please post it below.
Continue reading …IATA’s Checkpoint of the Future uses biometric IDs to separate do-gooders from terrorists (video)
June 8, 2011 No Comment
This, ladies and gentlemen, could be your Checkpoint of the Future — a new airport security prototype that promises to move away “from a system that looks for bad objects, to one that can find bad people.” Unveiled at the IATA’s annual conference in Singapore yesterday, the setup is comprised of three, 20-foot long detectors — one for “known travelers,” one for high-risk flyers, and one for everyone else. Instead of funneling passengers through the same checkpoint, then, the prototype would use eye scanners and biometric chips to verify their identities and analyze their personal history, before dividing them into groups. People who complete and pass government background checks would waltz through the fast pass lane with their carry-on luggage in tow, whereas those deemed particularly risky would have to undergo a more intensive, full-body scan within the “Enhanced” security lane. The rest of us, meanwhile, would be directed to the “Normal” detector, which would automatically scan us for liquids, metals and everything that is evil. The IATA says this risk-based approach would reduce security lines and lower airport costs, but it would still require governments to share data on their own citizens, which could pose a major hurdle to widespread adoption. For now, the IATA and governmental agencies are still hammering away at the details and have yet to announce a pilot program, but you can check out an audio-less demo video of the prototype, after the break. Continue reading IATA’s Checkpoint of the Future uses biometric IDs to separate do-gooders from terrorists (video) IATA’s Checkpoint of the Future uses biometric IDs to separate do-gooders from terrorists (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Anthony Baxter, director of You’ve Been Trumped, on the dangers of taking on Donald Trump’s Aberdonian golf resort as the subject of his documentary Shehani Fernando Ken Macfarlane Elliot Smith
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Voice actor found fame on Rainbow as well as Doctor Who Roy Skelton, the voice of the Daleks and George and Zippy from Rainbow, has died aged 79. He brought Doctor Who’s arch-enemies to life between 1967 and 1988, and also provided voices for the Cybermen. But viewers will probably know him best as the voices of Zippy and George, the orange and pink puppets from ITV’s long running children’s show Rainbow. Geoffrey Hayes, who fronted Rainbow, told BBC News that Skelton was “fabulous at improvising if something went wrong”. “The most wonderful thing was if Zippy and George were having an argument between themselves, it sounded like he’d double-tracked it as they seemed to be talking over each other. It was a wonderful technique and I don’t know how he did it.” Rainbow was axed in 1992, but Skelton reprised Zippy’s voice in the BBC1 retro-drama Ashes to Ashes in 2008, and again in a special puppet edition of Weakest Link. Skelton’s agent Carole Deaner told MediaGuardian.co.uk: “He was an unassuming and brilliant man … He had been ill for some time and was in a wheelchair. We kept hoping he was going to improve but sadly he did not. He was a lovely man, everyone who worked with him said that.” In addition to writing around 100 scripts for Rainbow, Skelton also wrote Naughty Rainbow , a humerous double-entendre laden version that became a cult hit. Skelton’s wife Hilary told Mediaguardian.co.uk: “Roy had a great sense of humour. He wrote Naughty Rainbow for a competition. We still have the original script.” She said that the Brighton-based actor and musician was not the first voice of Zippy: “Originally he was played by Peter Hawkins, a great friend of Roy’s who he worked with on Doctor Who. “Zippy was a very benign sort of puppet then. Roy felt he needed to have a bit of an alter ego so he changed him to be a troublesome character. George came along later as they didn’t have a foil for Zippy.” Hilary added: “Roy loved going to work every day. His first love had been theatre but he brought theatre to Rainbow.” She said Skelton had requested a “green funeral”, to be buried in a cardboard coffin which he wanted people to write on. •
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