Again? Another NY Times Columnist Compares Tea Party G.O.P. to Terrorist Group
July 27, 2011 No CommentWhat is it with New York Times columnists likening Republicans to terrorist groups? On Sunday Nicholas Kristof
Continue reading …Wingnut extraordinaire Rep. Paul Broun wants to lower — not raise — the debt ceiling
July 27, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media As the debt ceiling vote looms over the head of America — along with our credit rating being held in the balance — Rep. Paul Broun not only won’t vote to raise the debt ceiling, he wants to lower it . I’m not lying to you. Andrea Mitchell was asking Rep. Broun if he would vote for John Boehner’s plan and actually he stood there with a straight face and said he introduced a bill to lower the debt ceiling. Broun: I introduced a bill to lower the debt ceiling, not raise it. And i just think raising the debt ceiling is not the way to go. We need to lower it. We need to pay off the debt. We need to deal with the debt and we need to create a stronger economy. We just disagree on the tactics here. We both want to get to the same end result. That’s to create jobs out in the — throughout America. Mitchell: Congressman, when you talk about lowering the debt ceiling, the debt ceiling is being raised to pay for money that has been appropriated by this Congress and previous Congresses, but in particular by this Congress. You’re paying for what has already been charged not for future expenses. Broun: Well, Andrea, the thing is when someone is overextended and broke they don’t continue paying for expensive automobiles. They sell the expensive automobiles and buy a cheaper one. They don’t continue paying for country club dues. They drop out of the country club. We need to pay down the debt. We need to create a strong economy, create jobs, and raising the debt ceiling is just going to make it worse long-term in my opinion. That’s the reason that I think we need to go back to the drawing board. We need to do everything we can to cut expenses across the board to the federal government, so that we can put this financial house back in order. we cannot continue this fiscal fiasco here in Washington. Andrea tries to explain to him what the debt ceiling is, but he either lacks the intelligence or is too stuck in ideology to be open, or even able, to hear what she has to say. What Broun’s essentially telling her is that he hopes the US economy will crash and burn, and that we become relegated to the economic status of a Third-World nation. This might be the craziest thing I’ve heard coming from Republicans throughout this whole debt ceiling fiasco. And he’s generated a lot of off-the-wall quotes in Congress over the course of his career. Here’s a sampling: Rep. Paul Broun wants to throw up when Democrats talk about “children” as he holds up picture of “children” Rep. Paul Broun compares Progressives to Al-Qaeda
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“I hope we gave a little lesson to the people in Washington because the debt ceiling is a lot easier to fix than this was.” — ROBERT KRAFT, New England Patriots owner, speaking about the end of the NFL lockout (via CNN)
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Top law official agrees to discuss progress of FBI investigation into allegations against journalists working for News Corp Relatives of victims of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York are to meet with America’s top law enforcement official to discuss allegations that journalists working for News Corporation tried to gain access to the phone records of the dead. The US attorney general Eric Holder has agreed to see a group of family members and their legal representative to discuss the progress of an FBI investigation. A date for the meeting has yet to be set, but the agreement to hold it is a sign of how seriously the inquiry is being taken. Norman Siegel, a New York-based lawyer who represents 20 families who lost loved ones on 11 September 2001, confirmed the meeting and said he intended to take as many of the relatives as possible to see Holder in Washington. “We are hoping the allegations of hacking prove to be untrue but we want a thorough investigation to determine what happened,” he said. The allegation that News of the World reporters attempted to gain unauthorised access to victims’ voicemails was made in an article in the Mirror earlier this month. The paper said the journalists had approached a former New York police officer working as a private detective and asked him to do the hacking, which he declined to do. So far no evidence has emerged to corroborate the Mirror’s story but, should the allegations firm up, News Corp could face a rash of civil litigation from family members. Lawyers have begun preliminary discussions with relatives pointing out their legal options. “If there is something to the story, then there are a number of different claims that people could file,” said Mark Vlasic, a Washington-based lawyer and professor at Georgetown University. Vlasic said one possible legal recourse open to families would be to sue under the electronic communications and privacy act. Title 18 USC section 2701, which carries a minimum fine of $1,000 (£612) for every event proved, makes it unlawful to obtain unauthorised access to stored communications, including voicemail. Title 18 USC section 1030, barring unauthorised access to protected computers, could also be invoked in relation to the mainframe computers on which the phone companies store voicemails. Siegel said that he had pointed out to the families he represents that civil legal action could be open to them. Any attempt by News of the World reporters to gain access to voicemails, even if such an attempt were unsuccessful, could be liable to penalties. But Siegel said that the priority at this stage was to find out whether the allegations were true. “Family members are painfully going back to the period of 9/11 and trying to recall whether there were articles about their loved ones that could only have been written on the basis of hacking of calls or computers.” Sally Regenhard, who lost her firefighter son Christian at the World Trade Centre, said families were adopting a wait-and-see policy: “We just want to know what’s happening with the investigation.” Another victim’s relative, who asked not to be named, said she had been talking to a lawyer about a possible lawsuit. “Between Osama bin Laden’s death and the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in September, this is a very stressful time for us. If the phone-hacking allegations turn out to be true it would be very upsetting for us – it would be such a violation.” During his testimony to the UK parliament earlier this month Rupert Murdoch referred to the 9/11 phone-hacking claim and said “we have seen no evidence at all and as far as we know the FBI haven’t either”. But he added that he did not know whether News of the World employees or the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire could have taken it upon themselves to do the hacking. On Wednesday Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Daily Mirror, denied for the second time in a week that he printed stories obtained through phone hacking. CNN, which employs him as a chatshow host, issued the latest denial over comments Morgan made when he was on Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs. FBI United States Phone hacking Newspapers & magazines National newspapers Newspapers News of the World News Corporation Media business Daily Mirror Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …NBC’s ‘Today’ Touts ‘Big Setback’ for Boehner Plan, Lauer Lobs Softballs to Dick Durbin
July 27, 2011 No Comment
At the top of Wednesday's NBC Today, as co-host Ann Curry declared that “Americans are just fed up with the stalemate” over the debt ceiling, fellow co-host Matt Lauer announced: “The latest setback came last night when House Speaker Boehner was told by the Congressional Budget Office that his proposal would cut spending far less than advertised.” In the report that followed, correspondent Kelly O'Donnell noted: “Speaker Boehner's team is going back to work to find more cuts, just as the public is so increasingly frustrated.” O'Donnell went on to reiterate “a big setback” for the plan as “The Congressional Budget Office did the math and found the Boehner plan came up short on spending cuts.” O'Donnell continued to pile on criticism of the plan: “More trouble came from an agency that rates the country's credit. Appearing on CNBC Tuesday night, Standard & Poor's was critical of the Boehner plan's two stages for raising the debt limit.” She portrayed Democrats as pushing for a deal: “The White House urged Congress to take the deadline seriously….Senate Democrats have their own plan in the wings, predicting Boehner's will fail.” O'Donnell ignored the fact that the Reid plan had little chance of passing either. Following O'Donnell's one-sided report, Lauer interviewed Senator Dick Durbin, allowing the Illinois Democrat to thoroughly bash the Boehner plan unchallenged. Lauer began with this softball: “You've seen all the plans, you've seen the counter proposals. Is there anything on paper, on the table, or on the horizon right now, Senator, that you think stands a chance of being passed in time?” Durbin took his first shot at the Speaker: “By yesterday, his plan had been rejected by the ratings agencies and even by his own caucus….We've got to understand that we can show a lot of bravery and bluff when we're playing with other people's chips.” Lauer wondered if changes could be made to the Boehner proposal to make it more likely to pass, Durbin continued to attack: “I can tell you that what we're facing here is a Republican caucus that is basically showing its political bravery by giving up Medicare benefits for elderly people, by increasing the cost of student loans for working families, by cutting money for medical research.” The most critical question from Lauer was when he speculated President Obama's threat to veto the Boehner plan may just be “political posturing.” Durbin quickly turned the question around and focused on the GOP: “Speaker Boehner has to realize that this is more than the cheers of his caucus that he's looking for. We've got to lead a nation and put some of these party considerations aside.” Lauer followed up by noting public anger: “…the American people are fed up. After dueling speeches on Monday night where the President pointed a finger of blame at the Republicans and the Speaker of the House pointed a finger of blame at the President.” But rather that holding Durbin and fellow Democrats to account for that anger, Lauer simply asked: “What are you personally hearing in your office from your constituents on this matter?” Again, Durbing used the opportunity to hit Boehner: “…what I'm appealing to Speaker Boehner to do is to set aside some of the partisan differences. Both sides have to come together, both sides have to be willing to give. But this idea of my way or the highway, the old cliche, it just doesn't work when we've got the American economy at stake.” Wrapping up the segment, Lauer gave Durbin an opportunity to appear above the fray, observing: “Don't the American people deserve better than this?” Durbin replied: “Absolutely, Matt. They look at Congress and they say, 'This is so dysfunctional, if you can't get it together and reach an agreement like grown-ups, for goodness sakes, we may need another team on the field.'”
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Business secretary Vince Cable announces first phase of bureaucracy tidy-up aimed at helping high street stores Retailers will no longer have to hand over addresses of TV buyers to the television licensing authorities as part of a red-tape overhaul. Nearly two-thirds of regulations specifically aimed at shop owners will be scrapped or reformed, as part of a bureaucratic tidying-up exercise by ministers. The business secretary, Vince Cable, announced the first phase of the government’s “Red Tape Challenge” and expressed hopes that lowering the age at which one can buy Christmas crackers, among other regulatory tweaks, would help restore confidence on the high street. “There is a very serious confidence problem on the high street. Making the business environment more friendly will hopefully make a difference,” said Cable. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) said that 160 out of 257 regulations for retailers would disappear or be changed, including an amendment to the Wireless Telegraphy Act that obliges retailers to notify TV Licensing of any sales or rentals of television sets – the bane of generations of students. However, the changes must go to a public consultation first. Asda was among the retailers which called for the rule to be scrapped, because it forces staff to concentrate on form-filling rather than the shop floor. The BBC, which relies on the licence fee for most of its income, has not not objected. Asked to nominate the worst regulations he had come across, Cable said rules on sales of poisons, including fly spray and toilet cleaner, were subject to an overly strict regime. “All sales of acids are based on the impression that we are all Dr Crippens wanting to dispose of bodies,” said Cable. Cable’s department has pledged to look at simplifying guidelines for selling poisons. Shopkeepers agitating to mount a Valentine’s Day window display featuring lingerie and liqueur chocolates will no longer require an alcohol licence to do so under the proposals. Marks & Spencer complained that restrictions on liqueur chocolate sales had stymied a romantic display idea at one of its stores, helping persuade BIS officials that retailers should not have to apply for an alcohol licence before stocking cognac-infused truffles. The move will require a consultation because it is covered by the 2003 Alcohol Licensing Act, but ministers are confident it will be pushed through. Mark Prisk, the business minister, said: “The idea that we have to protect younger people from liqueur chocolates in this country is one that has to be got rid of.” Age restrictions also feature in the BIS proposals and include a planned reduction in the minimum age for acquiring Christmas crackers. The current limit of 16 years of age will be reduced to the European Union limit of 12. That proposal will also have to go to public consultation. The department is also looking at standard ID requirements for purchasing alcohol and cigarettes, such as in Scotland where proof of age has to come from either a passport, a driver’s licence or a government-approved proof-of-age card. Many regulations will be swept away in the repeals bill, which is due to enter parliament early next year. Those include the Trading with the Enemy Act, which contains provisions that bar UK companies from trading with states that the country is at war with. Nearly 100 amendments to the act that are still on the statute books that permit UK businesses to trade with countries that no longer exist, such as Yugoslavia, Siam and French Indo-China. Cable said the Red Tape Challenge would be extended to 25 more themes and sectors, including employment law, by next summer. Retail industry Vince Cable Asda Marks & Spencer Dan Milmo guardian.co.uk
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• Default could cost America triple-A credit rating • Barack Obama warns of economic ‘Armageddon’ • Threat grows of government shutdown next week Congress remained deadlocked over the debt crisis on Wednesday, with House Republicans unable to muster the votes needed to pass emergency legislation before next week’s deadline. Faced with a revolt by hardline members of his own party, House leader John Boehner was having to hastily rewrite a bill he proposed earlier in the week to cut $3 trillion (£1.83tn) in federal government spending. Boehner hopes to put his new bill to the vote on Thursday after being forced to cancel a planned vote because of lack of numbers. Although the Treasury may be able to conjure up a short-term solution to prevent default on Tuesday, the row and the failure of America to tackle its burgeoning debt problem could now lose the US its triple-A credit rating, a move that could have damaging consequences for the US economy and beyond. The country’s national debt reached its congressionally set $14.3tn ceiling on 16 May and Washington has since been forced to use spending and accounting adjustments, as well as higher-than-expected tax receipts, to continue operating normally, but it can only do so until 2 August. Without agreement, the US will probably become unable to pay all its bills some time the following week. Federal spending would have to be reduced by as much as 44% for the remainder of the month, forcing the treasury to decide whether to suspend social security benefits, defence spending or stop paying government employees. Finance and business leaders have warned that failure to raise the US debt ceiling by then would send shockwaves through the fragile world economy, while President Barack Obama has predicted that a default would trigger economic “Armageddon”. Boehner needs to secure 217 votes to get his bill through, a job made more difficult by a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) saying that the Republican leader’s bill would only reduce the deficit initially by $850bn, not the $1.2tn that Boehner had claimed. Hardline conservatives are demanding still bigger spending cuts. However, even if the bill were to be passed, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, promised that the Senate would kill it and Obama has said that he would veto it. A solution is most likely to come from negotiations between Reid and the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell. Reid is proposing raising the debt ceiling from $14.3tn until after the 2012 elections, in return for immediate spending cuts of $1.7tn. But the CBO has also challenged Reid’s budget cuts. The office concluded that his plan would deliver $500bn less in deficit reduction than the $2.7tn Democratic lawmakers had said it would save over 10
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( The Kennedy Tax Cut Proposal – Sweeping Changes – not everybody was happy ) Click here to view this media Note: This is a repost from last year on this day. Seems the story just doesn’t change. In what became the most sweeping set of changes to Tax Cut legislation, House Bill HR-8368 passed by a vote of 271-175. It represented a radical change in the economic structure of the country by basing its operations on the theory of deficit financing . President Kennedy: “No more important legislation will come before the Congress this year than the bill before the House to reduce Federal Taxes. In fact, no more important domestic economic legislation has come before the Congress in some fifteen years.” A little too radical for some. Most Republicans voted against it as did the bloc of Dixiecrats who warned it would mean fiscal ruin for the U.S. It didn’t and the bill passed the Senate in February 1964 created the largest tax cut in history and it’s still argued about today , as no doubt this post will provoke. History is very often the gift that keeps on giving.
Continue reading …This is Your Brain After Listening to Too Many Right Wing Talking Points on the Debt Ceiling
July 27, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media I try to monitor C-SPAN’s morning call-in show Washington Journal when I get a chance just to see what viewers of that network and the public are saying about the topics of the day and this one jumped out at me this morning as being from someone who’s been watching too much Fox News or for that matter possibly a lot of the rest of our corporate media with the right wing talking points this woman rattled off when weighing in on this debt ceiling kabuki theater. How someone comes off thinking that President Obama sounds like a partisan when he has, to the dismay of liberals, bent over backwards to make concessions to Republicans, or says he’s playing the “class warfare card” is beyond me, but obviously this person has no idea what “class warfare” even means, or that they’re probably losing that war. She also was informed enough to realize that there was a deficit commission put together that went nowhere and in her defense, the one thing she said here that I agreed with completely is that doing that again may very well be a colossal waste of time, but then she lost me with saying she really didn’t understand this whole concept of the debt ceiling at all, and even though she admitted she was clueless on what they’re debating about, claimed the whole thing is just some scare tactic by both sides. It goes without saying that since she does not understand what the debt ceiling is and thought it was about future spending, she obviously has no clue that this is about approving raising the debt ceiling for spending that the Congress has already approved, and not what they might spend in the future. It also seems pretty obvious she did not listen to the president’s speech at all this week or she would already know that. It pains me to hear just how misinformed our citizens are in the United States and this is just one example coming from someone who actually knows just enough to know that a deficit commission existed but not a whole lot else on the specifics of what’s going on in this debate. This is your brain on Fox or after hearing too much right wing propaganda from somewhere else. There is class warfare going on. Unfortunately too many people don’t even understand what that means or who is waging it. Rough transcript below the fold. BRAWNER: Martha, a Republican in Kalamazoo, Michigan. MARTHA: Hi, I watched the debate last night and I was kind of hoping to hear something from Obama that would encourage the discussion. Instead it felt like it was very partisan. And I felt that he really played the class warfare card. I was expecting something a little more presidential that would help the debate. Instead, I left feeling very… I don’t know, upset with the country, for both Republicans and Democrats because I felt Obama really lacked the leadership. BRAWNER: So, Martha, on this issue of the two proposals put up by House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one thing they have in common is this idea of a super committee, that they would put together a bipartisan panel of lawmakers to recommend further cuts than the House and the Senate would have to vote up or down on. What do you make of that and to your point about leadership, do you think that that’s something that the two sides, the two parties should get behind? MARTHA: Well, I thought there was a similar committee that was meeting a year ago that came up with the way to reduce the deficit. Am I incorrect on that? BRAWNER: Yeah, the bipartisan deficit commission that the president put together. MARTHA: But nothing really came of that. I don’t understand why that did not go forward and why that doesn’t work. Yeah, I agree. I mean, we have to go back to a time when people would just talk and communicate and compromise. I totally agree with the Republicans that we cannot continue to spend. I don’t understand the whole debt limit thing. It seems like there’s a lot of scare tactics going on here, probably on both sides. But I don’t understand this scare tactic game that everyone is falling for. But what bothers me most is seeing the class warfare and seeing one group of citizens against another and playing one as the bad guy and one as the good guy. There are no bad guys or good guys. Everybody cares about the United States. Why can’t they just come to some way of working together? Karoli adds : After I read this post I started looking through my DVR recordings for some of the talking points Heather mentioned. This was today’s meme o’ the day from Fox & Friends. Point 1: President Obama’s speech was all partisan. Point 2: It was a campaign speech, not a leadership speech. Point 3: He used the term “balanced approach” SEVEN times. SEVEN. Can you remember the number SEVEN, kids? If you can remember that he said that SEVEN times, you might forget everything else he said. Or what it is he said seven times. These people probably employ CIA brainwashing operatives to write their copy. Heavy sigh. Click here to view this media
Continue reading …‘Oldest bird’ Archaeopteryx knocked off its perch in controversial new study
July 27, 2011 No Comment
The fossil Archaeopteryx may not have been one of the earliest birds but just another feathered dinosaur, claim scientists Archaeopteryx, the famous icon of evolution and supposedly the oldest, most primitive bird on Earth, might not have been a bird after all, scientists say. The controversial claim, if confirmed, is something of a bombshell for researchers, who have viewed the evolution of birds and feathered flight through the lens of the species since it was discovered 150 years ago. The finding leaves palaeontologists in the awkward position of having to identify another creature as the oldest and original avian on which to base the story of birdlife. Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861, just two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The spectacular fossils of an animal with the feathered wings of a bird, but the teeth and tail of a dinosaur, caused an immediate sensation in Victorian England where society was wrestling with the consequences of evolution through natural selection. Though descriptions of Archaeopteryx as a “missing link” are widely frowned upon by scientists, the creature became renowned as the most primitive bird on the planet. That view has now been challenged by researchers in China, who have tried to knock the feathered fossil off its perch in a reassessment of the bird-dinosaur family tree. Xing Xu at Linyi University and colleagues ran the fresh analysis after studying a new Archaeopteryx-like fossil bought from a dealer by the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, the world’s largest dinosaur museum . The fossil was likely excavated from the 155 million-year-old Tiaojishan Formation in eastern China. The chicken-sized creature, named Xiaotingia zhengi in honour of the scientist who established the museum as a repository for vertebrate fossils, shared several features with Archaeopteryx, including long, sturdy forelimbs that presumably allowed it to fly. But when Xu’s team reconstructed family trees to include Xiaotingia , they found the creature belonged not in the lineage of birds, but to a group of dinosaurs called deinonychosaurs. More strikingly, Archaeopteryx appeared in the same group, according to the study in Nature . Deinonychosaurs, such as the velociraptor, walked on two legs, ate meat and had viscious, retractable claws. The finding is tentative, but builds on doubts that have emerged over the special status of Archaeopteryx following the discovery of other bird-like dinosaurs and dinosaur-like birds over the past decade or so. In an accompanying article, Lawrence Witmer at Ohio University wrote: “There has been growing unease about the avian status of Archaeopteryx as, one by one, its ‘avian’ attributes (feathers, wishbone, three-fingered hand) started showing up in non-avian dinosaurs. Perhaps the time has come to finally accept that Archaeopteryx was just another small, feathered, bird-like theropod fluttering around in the Jurassic.” If Archaeopteryx was a dinosaur, this means flight evolved at least four times in vertebrates: in reptiles, birds, dinosaurs, and most recently in bats. Witmer adds that with Archaeopteryx dethroned, more recently discovered fossils, including Epidexipteryx , Jeholornis and Sapeornis , become candidates for the world’s oldest bird. On a cautionary note, he adds that the next feathered fossil unearthed in China could easily restore the premier status of Archaeopteryx. Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum in London , said: “The overall picture of birds being descended from meat-eating dinosaurs is now very firmly established. This is an argument over a relatively small rearrangement of some of the twigs on the evolutionary tree close to the origin of birds. It doesn’t affect much of our big picture view of how birds came from dinosaurs, but some of the minutiae: the small changes that are important to the biology of the animals. “This part of the evolutionary tree is very sensitive to small changes in how we interpret the anatomy and the combination of anatomical features we see in these animals as they are discovered. As a result, the structure of that evolutionary tree is very unstable and can flip around. Maybe Archaeopteryx wasn’t on the direct ancestral line to birds, but was part of an early experimentation in how to build a bird-like body.” Dinosaurs Fossils Evolution Zoology Controversies in science Birds Animals China Ian Sample guardian.co.uk
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