Sound is much better on this one than the last one, and speech from me is clear though there are some issues with the sound from the interviewer. I think this one is definitely worth a listen. Listen to internet radio with Jay Ackroyd on BlogTalkRadio
So why do I feel as if nothing is really happening? Is it just me, or is this country paralyzed, waiting for–what? The other shoe to drop? Another depression er– “recession?” Is there anything that can get us moving? Can anything force this scaredy-cat President to do something–anything!–to change the disastrous course we are on?
In the big media and at “progressive” blogs Rahm Emanuel is being blamed for the paralysis. The Hill had a long piece by Sam Youngman about this “controversy” yesterday.
A spate of recent reports have portrayed Emanuel, known for his aggressive brand of Washington politics, as either the voice of reason in a weak, liberal White House or the wet blanket preventing President Barack Obama from pursuing the kind of change he promised as a candidate.
Emanuel has become the flash point in those arguments as liberals express betrayal over Obama’s failure to convince Congress to pass a public option in healthcare reform and close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
According to Youngman, “Democratic strategists” are blaming the netroots for the attacks on Rahm, but other anonymous sources say that efforts to undermine him are coming from inside the White House. The article references Huffington Post pieces by Dan Froomkin and Michael Moore. As we at TC know all too well, these “progressives” still can’t face the fact that they helped elect Bush III. They want to believe that Obama is being duped by Emanuel–and the subtext is that it’s the Clinton’s fault. From the Hill article:
But what Rahm represents to the left dates back to liberal anger with Clinton and his kindred spirits at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Emanuel is seen by some progressives as wanting to win, to a fault by sacrificing principles of the party.
“Rahm believes in being elected; not in the glory of losing or failing,” the strategist said.
In another “think piece,” at Business Week, veteran Village insider Al Hunt calls this “faux White House intrique.” Hunt doesn’t seem to want to blame Obama either, but he nibbles around the edges of doing that:
Yet there is a larger self-created problem for which Emanuel and Axelrod are only partly to blame. Go back to the remarkable Obama campaign of 2007-2008. More than any of its rivals, it had a strategic sense of what it was, where it wanted to go.
This provided a shield against setbacks: losing the New Hampshire primary, the candidate’s careless remarks about rural Pennsylvania voters or even the incendiary remarks of Obama’s pastor. These became speed bumps in the strategic narrative.
That is missing in the Obama presidency. Too often it seems situational rather than strategic, reactive more than proactive. Thus setbacks, from minor ones, such as the handling of the Christmas Day bomber, to major ones, like the loss of the Senate seat in Massachusetts, throw team Obama off stride, and leave voters confused.
Hint, hint…but no one wants to come out and say it: Obama is clueless–he has no idea how to lead our country and no goal in mind even if he could lead. How are we going to survive three more years of this kind of inertia? (more…)
I’m not sure that Democrats are getting the message. They still think there is no place for us to go. It’s either them or Republicans and we know that the Republicans are morally bankrupt. Lately, we’ve seen that moral bankruptcy extends to the other party as well. Two recent communiques stand out for me in this respect.
There’s no story in the culture about what the big banks did and why. There is no attempt from the top to push through the key message for the day — financial reform — and to explain what this can do and how. The administration, in effect, is not even trying.
The inner team apparently thinks that 2012 will go just fine — as long as unemployment is down around 6 percent. And, they reason, the people who lose their seats this November won’t be around to complain.
Really?
If the administration fights hard and loses in November, that is one thing. If it fights on clear issues — forcing the other side to support Too Big To Fail structures — they may still lose, but such a loss will clearly communicate that the political strength of the big banks is now out of control. That is an issue to run on — and win big – -in 2012.
And if the administration doesn’t even care and hardly tries now, who will come out for them (or send a check) in two years?
The Obama team — both political and economic wings — seems to feel that their base has nowhere else to go, and all they need to do is drift towards the right in a moderately confused fashion to assure re-election for the president.
In short, the Obama administration is betting that you will be too desperate to salvage what little safety net is left after the GOP retakes control of Congress in 2010 that you will vote for Obama in 2012. That’s what they’re betting on. You will be so strapped, penniless and depleted of your retirement savings that you will automatically vote for Obama as a defense mechanism. Who knows? Maybe in September of 2012, we can expect the stock market to take another dizzying plunge, just to rattle everyones’ cages a bit. Won’t that be fun?
Is that the Hope and Change that Obots voted for or does that sound like the machinations the oligarchy of some third world nation?
The second message is more disturbing considering its source. I love Al Franken. Everyone knows I do. And I would walk over hot coals to vote for him if I were a Minnesotan. But I really did not like the email I got from him on the Health Care Reform bill. He is urging us to put pressure on House members to vote for the Senate bill with reassurances that it will be fixed later in reconciliation. Al, there’s only one thing that Reagan ever said that I took to heart: “Trust, but verify”. Any smart progressive or liberal would have to be nuts to believe that there will be a successful reconciliation *AFTER* the Senate bill passes in its present form. I don’t want to know about secret deals or 11 dimensional chess or any other supposed secret plan to scuttle the Republicans. I want you guys to act like Democrats. If the House members vote for the Senate bill as is, they’re signing their political death warrants with the base. The Senate bill violates core Democratic principles and so does many elements of the House for that matter.
So, let me deliver a message from the base to the Democrats. Here are the things we want to see you guys get your asses in gear to do before November 2010. And remember, there are just enough of us marginal voters out there to really harsh your electoral mellow going forward. Just keep Corzine and Martha Coakley in mind. We don’t have to vote. If you want to stay in power, you need to start kissing up to us and fast. And just forget about our support for Obama in 2012. Nothing could make us vote for him now that he’s proven to be the empty suit, opportunist that we predicted he’d be. If you don’t want a Republican in the White House, you’d better start working on the Obama problem now.
Here’s the CHANGE we want in very simple, straightfoward terms:
NO MANDATES WITHOUT REAL COMPETITION in the health care insurance market. For EVERYONE. That means strengthening antitrust legislation and allowing everyone who has a policy to go shopping for a better one with a standard benefits package. We’ll know it when we see it. So far, we haven’t seen it. Don’t expect support until this requirement is met. You may have to piss off Max Baucus. That is fine with us.
We want you to SOAK THE RICH. This is what you were elected to do. You may have thought you were just riding the coattails of the first black president phenomenon but that’s not true. The CHANGE we wanted was protection of the middle class against the rape and pillagers who had Bush’s ear for 8 years. Go back to the Clinton tax levels for everyone. Claim a national emergency. Put in a sunset provision for 2020. Dump the excise tax or pay for it with your seats.
We want you to SOAK THE RICH when it comes to the financial industry. Get the bonus money back.
We want you to SUPPORT GENDER EQUALITY. No more deals with Stupak. Draw a line in the sand with him and then dare him to cross it. Don’t give him money to run in November. Make HIM the poster child of bad behavior. If you don’t, your party can never again use protecting reproductive rights as an incentive for any woman to vote for you. Your credibility will be permanently shot. No, this is not negotiable. No one will ever believe you again. It’s up to you. There are a lot of American female voters out there. You gotta ask yourself, “Do I feel lucky today?”
We want you to SAVE AMERICAN JOBS. Figure out a way to keep the TARP money from going overseas to speculate in emerging markets. That’s our money and we shouldn’t be betting against ourselves.
DON’T TOUCH SOCIAL SECURITY. Some of us have been paying the extra payroll tax all of our working lives. That’s our insurance policy, we’ve paid for it and we have every expectation that it will be paid to us as advertised. No, don’t even go there. We aren’t buying it. You depleted the trust fund? You figure out how to get that money back. See SOAK THE RICH above.
If you don’t start playing the game by our rules, you’ll be out on your asses before you know what hit you. This is the age of mass communications and viral memes and social networking. Your ability to fool enough of the people most of the time is going to lose it’s mojo pretty soon. Cable news audiences are going away. More and more people are looking at the wreckage of their middle class lives and they’re not buying the propaganda you’re catapulting anymore. They’re starting to trust their lying eyes. All you need is one good movement to catch fire. It ain’t the Tea Party movement.
You will be surprised what people can do from the comfort of their own homes. A protest doesn’t require hordes of people marching in the streets carrying banners and shouting slogans. Self organizing is remarkably easy to do without the sting of tear gas or police batons. It can be quick and painless. Just because it’s quiet out there now doesn’t mean that the atmosphere isn’t charged. Depending on the energy behind the movement, the pendulum may swing a lot farther than you anticipate.
If you have any sense of political self-preservation, you won’t test us.
I met Eric Massa in Las Vegas in 2006 at the first YearlyKos convention. He was milling around the lobby of the Riviera, trying to round up people to walk down the street to the tackiest bar you’ve ever seen for a drink. I thought he was buying. As we sat in the faux fur covered lounge pit groups around a blazing fire, in a scene that was more like apres ski cross pollinated with Hooters, Eric Massa delivered a riveting stump speech. He was an energetic, charismatic, full monty, unapologetic politician with principles. At the end of it, he asked for twenty bucks from all of the rag tag followers hoping to get a free beer from him. I ponied up my share, bought my own drink and thought it was money well spent.
I wasn’t at all surprised when he won his district in 2008. But I was very surprised that there are allegations of harrassment against him. Call me a cockeyed, pollyannaish type but I’m not buying it. In fact, I am not the kind of person who thinks everyone has a heart of incorruptible gold. Most people have something they would prefer to hide from the world. There’s a Stranger lurking in the dark recesses of every human soul. But this ethics charge doesn’t quite ring true. All of the breathless reports from Politico and WaPo sound more like tabloid journalism. It’s all extremely vague. Someone said something about something else and they were brought to the ethics committee in chains and forced under duress to suggest that there was something going on. Well, what can you expect from Politico? You know where they stand. They’re the Fox news of what appears to be legitimate political journalism. They specialize in rumor, innuendo and wild speculation.
I can do wild speculation too. So, here’s my best guess as to why Eric Massa is retiring. He bucked his leadership on the health care reform bill. He held out for single payer. Being a Navy vet, he probably sees the benefits to a single payer system. (We should at least explore the idea) And now he is being made a poster child for what happens to you if you cross Steny Hoyer. Maybe they told him he wouldn’t get any help from the home team in his re-election bid this fall. Massa comes from a swing district. Just to put the cherry on the sundae, Hoyer follows up on Massa’s announcement by idly speculating on the ethics charges. It *almost* sounds like he’s instigating whoever is making them to go to the ethics committee and report Massa. Now, why would you knife one of your own like that? Presumably, you still need Massa’s votes for upcoming bills, at least until he actually goes back to NY. Maybe it’s because Massa isn’t expected to cooperate on much of anything Hoyer wants, to which I say, good for Massa.
But it must be putting a chill on anyone else who doesn’t want to play the establishment political game. Step out of line and not only will we make your re-election difficult, we’ll ruin your reputation and your family life. Nice.
Well, I’ll just leave it at that. What more is there to say? I hope that Massa hasn’t suffered a relapse of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and I really hope that the ethics charges are a whole lot of sound an fury signifying nothing. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Congresscritters with a lot less determination than Massa cave to the demands of the House leadership on health care reform. Let’s face it, most of them are craven, don’t-rock-the-boat, let’s-all-get-along, student council types anyway. Even the bravest among them still want to be loved by their friends. They’ll cave.
President Michelle Bachelet confirmed 47 deaths and said more were possible. Telephone and power lines were down, making damage assessments difficult in the early morning darkness.
“Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it’s like the end of the world,” one man told local television from the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings and forced staff to evacuate the regional hospital.
The quake downed buildings and houses in Santiago and knocked out a major bridge connecting the northern and southern sections of the country.
It struck at 3:34 a.m. local time and was centered about 200 miles southwest of Santiago, at a depth of 22 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The epicenter was some 70 miles from Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, where more than 200,000 people live.
Phone lines were down in Concepcion as of 7:30 a.m. and no reports were coming out of that area. The quake in Chile was 1,000 times more powerful than the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused widespread damage in Haiti on Jan 12, killing at least 230,000, earthquake experts reported on CNN International.
The U.S. Geological Survey and eyewitnesses reported more than a dozen aftershocks, including two measuring magnitude 6.2 and 6.9.
Only hours earlier, there was a 6.9 magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Japan. A tsunami was predicted, but did not take place.
The late late night TC crowd was discussing this insane video of Trent Franks (R-Arizona) being asked about hate radio and Rush Limbaugh and then doing a quick pirouette to talking about abortion and “killing innocent babies.” He calls Obama “the abortion president” and he thinks African Americans were better off under slavery because (he claims) “half of all black babies are aborted.” Oh, and Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox because he cares so much about humanity.
Just who is voting for politicians like this? Thinking about the possible answers to that question gives me the creeps.
Three years ago, Russ Rector, a Fort Lauderdale dolphin trainer turned marine mammal activist, said he wrote SeaWorld a letter warning it was pushing its show mammals too hard to wow audiences, thereby inviting attacks on trainers.
On Wednesday, a killer whale named Tilikum implicated in two previous fatalities attacked a trainer during a show at the Orlando theme park, dragging her around like a toy and drowning her in front of horrified visitors.
“I warned them this was going to happen,” Rector said. “Happy animals don’t kill their trainers.”
Another opinion:
Naomi Rose, a senior scientist for the Humane Society of the United States, which has campaigned at marine parks, said Tilikum’s reputation was well known and that SeaWorld specifically forbade trainers from entering the orca’s tank.
“He clearly has some sort of issue with people in the water with him,” she said of the orca.
Rose and many marine mammal activists believe the stress of life in a tank is acute for orcas, large animals that roam deep waters in close-knit pods.
“They’re moody,” she said. Rector, who has campaigned for years to free Lolita, a female orca that has spent nearly four decades in captivity at the Seaquarium in Miami, says it leaves them “demented.”
Lolita, Rose said, has not been linked to any serious attacks on trainers, but its old tank-mate, Hugo, died of a cranial bleeding in 1980 that activists blamed on the orca ramming its head against the sides of a small tank.
Can you blame a whale for getting mad when he is kept in a tiny container and forced to perform tricks for humans instead of being able to swim freely in the ocean? And get this, another trainer says Dawn Brancheau’s horrible death was all her own fault.
A former co-worker told the station that trainer Dawn Brancheau was to blame when her hair floated over the mouth of killer whale Tilikum. The massive creature responded by dragging her under Wednesday, and she drowned.
Thad Lacinak, a former head trainer at SeaWorld, said the trainers knew to stay away from the whale’s mouth. “The protocol was not to be around Tilikum’s mouth while you’re laying down,” he said.
Reporter Emily Turner explained that Lacinak said Brancheau “became too comfortable with the animal she loved so much.”
And can you believe there are still pictures and video on-line of Breacheau’s last moments? What is wrong with us? Set these beautiful, intelligent animals free!
Did you know that Matt Taibbi and an expat named Mark Ames ran an alternative newspaper in Russia for years? I didn’t. Yesterday I posted a link to an article by Ames on Ayn Rand’s obsession with a vicious serial killer who liked to dismember little girls.
From there, I was directed to Ames’ website and learned that this month’s Vanity Fair has an in-depth story on the “The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s angriest newspaper.” Ames is also the author of a book on workplace and school shootings in which he argues that Americans don’t want to face what is really going on in this rage killings–that bullying and alienation in schools and workplaces are driving both kids and adults to the point where they just can’t take it anymore. Sounds controversial yet interesting. I reserved it at my local library.
“I am eager and willing to move forward with members of both parties on health care if the other side is serious about coming together to resolve our differences and get this done. But I also believe that we cannot lose the opportunity to meet this challenge,” Obama said.
“The tens of millions of men and women who cannot afford their health insurance cannot wait another generation for us to act. Small businesses cannot wait. Americans with pre-existing conditions cannot wait. State and federal budgets cannot sustain these rising costs.
The President didn’t mention that the bill he supports doesn’t do anything to help lower health care costs for ordinary Americans or prevent insurance companies from refusing to pay for care for people with preexisting conditions.
This article in New Scientist reports on research suggesting that ancient humans may have communicated in a written language much earlier than previously thought: The writing on the cave wall
Until now, the accepted view has been that our ancestors underwent a “creative explosion” around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they suddenly began to think abstractly and create rock art. This idea is supported by the plethora of stunning cave paintings, like those at Chauvet, which started to proliferate across Europe around this time. Writing, on the other hand, appeared to come much later, with the earliest records of a pictographic writing system dating back to just 5000 years ago.
Few researchers, though, had given any serious thought to the relatively small and inconspicuous marks around the cave paintings. The evidence of humanity’s early creativity, they thought, was clearly in the elaborate drawings.
While some scholars like Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was surprised to find that no one had brought all these records together to compare signs from different caves. And so, under the supervision of April Nowell, also at the University of Victoria, she devised an ambitious masters project. She compiled a comprehensive database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.
What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful – perhaps even the seeds of written communication.
I’ll wrap this up with a feel-good story from a few days ago about a 3-year-old girl who was saved from freezing to death by her dog Blue: Police Credit Dog With Saving Lost Girl’s Life
“She was able to stay warm with the dog. And it probably was one of things that saved her life. It was extremely cold out here,” Sgt. Jeff Newnum of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office told KPHO, a CBS news affiliate in Phoenix. “God watched over her last night.”
Victoria Bensch vanished while playing outside with the family’s Queensland Heeler around 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. Search teams scoured the rocky terrain surrounding Victoria’s Cordes Lakes, Ariz., home, but as the night wore on, and temperatures dipped into the 30s, there was still no sign of her.
When the sun rose Friday morning, a rescue helicopter spotted movement below. It was Blue, hovering close to the missing girl, nearly half a mile from their home.
Even as medics approached, Blue kept Victoria, who was only wearing a T-shirt, pants and tennis shoes, safe.
“I think the dog was initially apprehensive of me. I was a little concerned he might bite me when I first walked up, but as I just walked right past the dog, the [animal] realized I was there to help,”
Good Morning Conflucians! And congratulations to the New Orleans Saints, their fans, and the City of New Orleans! The Saints are the winners of Super Bowl XLIV!
“I have been watching him since my time in Indiana,” Porter said of Manning. “I watched him put up points on the scoreboard. To come back home to Louisiana and bring a trophy back home, nothing is better.”
Porter, in his second season, is as responsible for the Saints’ Super Bowl triumph as any other Saint. He was one of the Saints’ heroes in the NFC Championship Game, when he intercepted a Brett Favre pass across the middle with 19 seconds left in regulation to stop the Vikings with the score tied at 28 before the Saints won in overtime on a field goal.
Yesterday, Porter intercepted one of the smartest quarterbacks in the history of the game. And he did it by studying just as hard as Manning does before games.
Maybe Dakinikat can tell us what the celebration was like on the ground in New Orleans.
NEW ORLEANS — In an event-packed weekend here that included the New Orleans Saints’ first-ever trip to the Super Bowl and seven Mardi Gras parades, Mitch Landrieu, the state’s lieutenant governor and scion of a well-known Louisiana political family, captured enough attention to become the city’s 61st mayor.
Landrieu received 66% of votes at the polls Saturday, avoiding a runoff. His landslide victory over 10 opponents brings to a close the tumultuous eight years of Ray Nagin, who has been the public face of New Orleans since the floods following Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005. Nagin had served the maximum number of terms allowed by law.
In more sobering news, at least for us in New England, a massive explosion at the Kleen Energy power plant in Middletown, Connecticut (a suburb of Hartford) destroyed the largest building at a giant power plant, which would have been the largest in the region. Five workers are confirmed dead, and twelve are known to be injured, but officials are not yet releasing names.
Workers were running tests yesterday in anticipation of the gas powered plant going on-line soon. No one knows for sure yet what caused the explosion except that a gas line somehow ignited. At a news conference yesterday, Middletown Mayor Sebastian N. Giuliano said that up to 300 workers could have been at the plant, but probably only around 50 were in or near the building that exploded and then burned intensely for about an hour before firefighters could put out the blaze. This morning Governor M. Jodi Rell said that there were probably 100 people at the plant yesterday and most are accounted for. It’s hard to know what to believe, because news accounts are still very vague. The only thing I know for sure is that some workers are still missing.
MIDDLETOWN — – UPDATE (7:18 a.m.): Crews are returning to the Kleen Energy plant this morning to determine when rescuers can resume their search through the rubble for workers who remain unaccounted for.
The search was suspended at about 2:30 a.m. because the debris is unstable, said Middletown Deputy Fire Marshal Al Santostefano.
Lights were brought in and dogs were assisting rescuers, he said. But all were called out when it was determined that the rubble may be dangerous.
He said experts will determine when, and under what circumstances, the search can resume.
The Kleen Energy Systems power plant that was rocked by a deadly explosion Sunday sits on a moonscape of rock and cliff at a former feldspar mine overlooking the Connecticut River.
Proposed in 2001, and funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from one of the largest private energy investment firms in the country, the plant was to be among the biggest new electricity projects in New England, costing nearly $1 billion.
Construction workers had to move 1.6 million yards of rock and earth to claw out a 137-acre site for the plant on land owned by Middletown trash czar Phil Armetta. Armetta is a former partner in the project who withdrew after he was convicted in a federal crackdown on the trash industry.
William Corvo, a former Middletown councilman who is a principal partner in the project, said from the chaotic scene Sunday that the plant was 96 percent complete.
Just about a year ago, there was another power plant explosion in Connecticut–at the Yale’s Central Power Plant:
…Connecticut was suffering through some of the chilliest weather in recent memory, with overnight lows reaching into the single digits. As part of an agreement with Southern Connecticut Gas, the power plant — which runs on natural gas — switches to backup fuel to relieve the strain on SCG’s gas network when it is at high capacity, such as in the case of especially cold temperatures.
As a result, the plant switched off its natural gas lines two weeks ago and began powering its three massive turbines using reserves of diesel fuel held in tanks at the plant, according to power plant officials.
Then something went wrong. At about 2:15 a.m., a violent explosion ripped through the second of the plant’s three turbines, apparently the result of a fuel leak. The explosion was so intense that it blew out several of the doors on the turbine’s metal enclosure, witnesses said.
If any workers had been in the vicinity at the time, they likely would have been seriously injured, if not worse, Starr said.
Luckily no one was hurt in that explosion, but it has to make you wonder about these natural gas plants.
See, here’s the thing I’ve seen in the world of contracts: the people who run a rather large percentage of these companies look only at the short-term profits from the deal, and not the long-term structural needs of the underlying project. They make a bid based on a bunch of BS markups on the fungible labor costs, with a token amount tossed in to make it look like the underlying item will be tested and maintained, usually based on a near-best-case scenario, then outsource as much of the labor as possible to the lowest bidding sub-contractor, pocketing the remainder as profits.
President Barack Obama, seeking to give new momentum to his languishing health-care legislation, said he would sit down with Republican and Democratic lawmakers to exchange ideas on an issue that has deeply divided the parties.
With the GOP united against the Democratic bill, Mr. Obama said Sunday he would ask Republicans “to put their ideas on the table.” The half-day meeting will be Feb. 25 and broadcast live, the White House said.
“I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” the president told CBS in an interview broadcast Sunday.
{Sigh…} This obsession Obama has with bipartisan agreement on everything is starting to look like it could be a sign of a serious psychological disorder. What is his problem? Democrats are asking him to take a leadership role and just say straight out what he wants, but he simply refuses to do that–or maybe he just doesn’t know what he wants.
President Barack Obama has left Democrats as confused as ever about how the White House plans to deliver a health care reform bill this year, after two weeks of inconsistent statements, negligible hands-on involvement and a sudden shift to a jobs-first message.
Democrats on Capitol Hill and beyond say they have no clear understanding of the White House strategy — or even whether there is one — and are growing impatient with Obama’s reluctance to guide them toward a legislative solution.
At a White House meeting Thursday with Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed frustration with the slow pace of the negotiations and the president’s decision not to weigh in publicly on a path forward, according to a Democratic source familiar with the meeting.
And some Democrats feel that every time they look to White House for clarity, they hear something different, as though the strategy is whatever the president or his top advisers said that day.
Gee, what a surprise. But no one could have seen this coming, right? Except a few bitter knitters like us.
The trouble with understanding the U.S. labor situation is that these two key economic indicators are compiled using multiple sources. “Total jobs lost” comes from surveys of businesses that pay payroll taxes and are required to report their monthly personnel gains and losses. The unemployment rate, by contrast, comes from door-to-door surveys of American households where people self-report their employment situation. On average, about 50,000 households are surveyed a month.
Both are imprecise measures, and as evidenced today, jobs lost numbers are frequently revised as new data comes in.
Many experts dismissed the improving numbers as statistical illusions. “There was an inexplicable decline in unemployment in January,” said economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit Washington-based think tank. While the lower unemployment number is a welcome sign, the drop is “largely attributed to the higher volatility of the … household survey,” she said.
Marc Lieberman dismissed the improved unemployment rate outright. “In a situation like we have now, where the job market actually worsened, the unemployment rate is going down because people are giving up looking for work.” Lieberman, Clinical Professor of Economics at NYU, and an expert in labor economics, also noted that the number of people who want a job, but have not looked in the last 12 months, is rising, a fact unaccounted for in the unemployment numbers.
Senate Democrats will miss their self-imposed deadline for bringing a jobs bill to the floor Monday, and they’re hoping that the weekend’s epic snowstorm will give them some cover.
Senate votes scheduled for Monday evening have been pushed back to Tuesday on account of the storm, but it seems unlikely that Democrats would have been ready to proceed Monday, anyway.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said last week that he believed “very emphatically” that the Senate would hold a vote on the first of a series of jobs bills Monday.
But there was no agreement on a bill late Sunday afternoon, and aides to senators involved in the discussions cautioned against expecting much progress by Monday.
That’s it for me. What are you reading this morning?
HAVE A MARVELOUS MONDAY!!!!
I’m just posting this because I really like it. I love trains, and I’ve always wanted to take the train to New Orleans. Willie’s version first and then Arlo’s
When I first wrote that I really thought it was a good morning. I just spent around 2-1/2 hours writing a long morning news post, and when I tried to save it, I discovered that WordPress had logged me out. Therefore, my entire post was wiped out. I’ll try to recreate some of it, but here are some non-political stories to get you started. Too bad I got so involved in writing that I didn’t save till the end…
We were back in the deep freeze this morning in New England–12 degrees where I live, but we aren’t facing what the Twitter folks are calling “snowmageddon” and “snowpocalypse.”
the main event with this storm will be heavy snow in the Mid-Atlantic States. Snow will begin in the Washington area this afternoon and spread northward towards Philadelphia by evening.
Heavy snow will continue into Saturday before winding down by evening. Travel may grind to a halt for a time, especially overnight and Saturday.
By the time the storm ends, many areas in northern Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and southern Pennsylvania will have over a foot of snow. Some places may end up nearly two feet of snow from this storm.
As the low pushes off the coast, it will strengthen quickly and produce very strong winds, especially along the Mid-Atlantic coast. Gusts between 45 and 50 mph are possible from southern New Jersey to the Norfolk area Friday night and Saturday morning.
Blizzard warnings are in effect for southeastern areas of New Jersey as well as much of Delaware.
It is also worth mentioning that this storm will spread snow as far west as the Ohio Valley.
Amazingly, the storm is expected to blow out to sea before it can get up here to New England. It’s our second weekend of nice weather while those south and west of us suffer. I feel for the people in the areas that will be hard-hit, but I’m sure glad I won’t have to shovel snow this weekend (fingers crossed, because you never know with the weather).
A Florida woman has been arrested in connection with the death of a lottery millionaire, whose body was found buried under recently added concrete at a home, authorities said.
Dorice Donegan Moore, 37, was arrested Tuesday evening on charges of accessory after the fact regarding a first-degree murder in the death of Abraham Shakespeare, 43, said Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee.
Moore befriended Shakespeare after he won a $31 million Florida lottery prize in 2006 and was named a person of interest in the case after Shakespeare went missing, authorities said.
Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.
Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact.
The sources said Franken was the most outspoken senator in the meeting, which followed President Barack Obama’s question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats at the Newseum on Wednesday. But they also said the Minnesotan wasn’t the only angry Democrat in the room.
“There was a lot of frustration in there,” said a Democratic senator who declined to be identified.
“People were hot,” another Democratic senator said.
But apparently Franken was the only one with real guts.
What redeems my faith in the system is the fact that every so often, a politician comes along who actually exceeds my expectations, who comports themself the way we expect a politician to — without fear of losing, with more of a focus on the people they represent than the next election. The late, great Sen. Paul Wellstone, DFL-Minn., was one of those politicians. He ran a spirited campaign and talked a good show, but once elected he backed up his words with actions. He walked the talk.
And now, the man who holds his seat in the Senate is doing the same thing.
On Tuesday, Sen. Al Franken, DFL-Minn., served as the keynote speaker for the NARAL Pro-Choice America Roe v. Wade anniversary luncheon. And his remarks to the group were outstanding. Franken gave a full-throated, unapologetic defense of the right of women to choose their own reproductive destinies — and did so with both humor and grace.
Another loudmouthed politician whom I don’t like or trust as much as I used to, Barney Frank, made a very good speech recently about how the Right Wing Noise Machine works.
I have to agree with Frank that John Fund is a slimy, scurrilous liar and he deserves to be shunned.
The verdict in Massachusetts was a verdict on the overall economy. But it was also a commentary on how the entire health care debate was flipped upside down by insurance interests who were able to intervene so that the final product that was offered out of the Senate was nothing more than a sell-out to the insurance industry.
We can still have health care reform in America. We need to take a short-term and a longer-term view. On the short-term: We need to take away the antitrust exemption that insurance companies have. We need to make sure, on the short-term, that we can see everyone with a pre-existing condition have access to insurance. There are things that we can do with single-initiatives to help regain the momentum on health care.
And for the longer-term: The answer is “Medicare for All.” The answer was never to continue to give the insurance companies one out of every three dollars in our health care system.
OK, that’s about all I can remember of my lost post. I know I had more links, but I can’t remember them all. I’ll leave it to you Conflucians to post your stories in the comments. I love you guys!
Warren Hern of Boulder, CO: Is he the last abortionist?
Good Morning Conflucians!!!
It has been quite a week in U.S. politics. So far, it doesn’t seem to have registered with the DC Dems that everything has changed. We can only hope that they will slowly wake up to the new realities in time to prevent the Republicans from completely taking over Congress and the White House in the 2010 and 2012 elections.
With all the upheaval over the Scott Brown’s defeat of Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election for the Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy, we at TC barely took note of the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Friday. Maybe that is because quite a few of us believe that Roe will soon either be overturned completely or that abortion will effectively become unavailable to many women because of the anti-abortion language in the health insurance bill.
Politico talked to some pro-choice activists who are feeling very negative about Roe’s chances in the light of this week’s SCOTUS decision that allows corporations to make unlimited contributions to political candidates.
The Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday overturning a ban on corporate political spending that had been in place for more than a century has left abortion-rights supporters jittery that the justices could be similarly prepared to upend the landmark Roe v. Wade decision the court handed down 37 years ago this week.
“Yesterday’s Roberts court decision, which exhibited a stunning disregard for settled law of decades’ standing, is terrifying to those of us who care deeply about the constitutional protections the court put in place for women’s access to abortion,” said Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We are deeply concerned. … Yesterday’s decision shows the court will reach out to take an opportunity to wholesale reverse a precedent the hard right has never liked.”
“It is worrisome beyond the direct impact of yesterday’s ruling on election law,” said, Jessica Arons, the director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress. “It’s certainly cause for concern.”
Warren Hern is no ordinary doctor. He has lived under siege for 25 years, and seen eight of his colleagues assassinated. Even some of his own patients want him dead. John H Richardson meets the last late-term abortionist in America
Here is a sample of what Hern had to say to Richardson:
“People don’t get it,” he says. “After eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 406 death threats, 179 assaults, and four kidnappings, people are still in denial. They say, ‘Well, this was just some wingnut guy who just decided to go blow up somebody.’ Wrong. This was a cold-blooded, brutal, political assassination that is the logical consequence of 35 years of hate speech and incitement to violence by people from the highest levels of American society, including but in no way limited to George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Bill O’Reilly, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Reagan may not have been a fascist, but he was a tool of the fascists. Bush was most certainly a tool of the fascists. They use this issue to get power. They seem civilised, but underneath you have this seething mass of rabid anger and hatred of freedom that is really frightening, and they support people like the guy who shot George – they’re all pretending to be upset, issuing statements about how much they deplore violence, but it’s just bullshit. This is exactly what they wanted to happen.”
“I won’t stop fighting for you,” he thundered in a campaign-style speech in economically sagging northeastern Ohio, remarks that provided a likely preview of the themes in his first State of the Union speech next Wednesday.
Trying to shore up public support, Obama urged people to “stand by me, even during these tough times.”
Like you stood by us Mr. President? When did you fight for us anyway?
Obama acknowledged that the healthcare overhaul — suddenly in limbo on Capitol Hill — had run into a political “buzz saw.” He dismissed concerns that his lengthy focus on healthcare meant he had taken his eye off the economy, the country’s No. 1 problem.
“Let me dispel this notion that we were somehow focused on that (healthcare) and so as a consequence not focused on the economy. First of all, all I think about is how are we going to create jobs in this area,” Obama said in Elyria, Ohio.
The president’s switch to a more populist tone followed his own admission in an ABC News interview earlier this week that he had lost a direct connection with everyday Americans.
I’m not so sure he ever had a connection with “everyday Americans”–those gun-toting bitter knitters? And those uppity women who don’t know their place? No, I don’t think so.
If Mr. Obama wants to make a “direct connection” with “everyday Americans,” he is going to have to give them more than “just words.” He is going to have to pretty much do a complete about face and become as “transformational” as he pretended to be when he was campaigning. He is going to have to stop impersonating Herbert Hoover and start impersonating Franklin Roosevelt. I’m really not sure if he is capable of that, but if he manages to do it, I’ll be the first to cheer him on.
A defiant President Obama assured Ohioans yesterday that he will continue to fight for health care, banking, and energy reform despite recent political setbacks that some argue have endangered his agenda.
He made the promises at Lorain County Community College even as Ohio announced its unemployment rate had hit 10.9 percent in December, up from 10.6 percent the month before. The national jobless rate is 10 percent.
“I did not run for President to turn away from these challenges,” he told a town-hall meeting of about 1,300 people.
“I didn’t run for President to kick them down the road. I ran for President to confront them once and for all. I ran for this office to rebuild our economy so it works not just for the fortunate few, but for everybody who’s willing to work hard in this country,” he said.
Uh huh. Talk is cheap, Mr. President. Now lets see some action. (more…)
Along with all of the other email I got yesterday from Senators John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Bob Menendez, some DNC ijits and Barack Obama, urging me to help support Martha Coakley, I got yet *another* email from Joseph Cryan, the New Jersey Democratic Party Chair. (Note to Cryan: after the 2008 RBC meeting, I asked to be removed from the Democratic party roster. You can take me off your email list, thank you very much.)
So, the Democrats are in full panic mode if they are going to these lengths to get Coakley elected. Oh, yes you are, guys. You’re having an “Oh, $hit!” moment. Because, let’s face it, if you can’t get a liberal Democrat elected in Massachusetts, what the hell is that saying about your party and the Lightbringer you forced on the rest of us to lead us into the era of “Hope and Change!™”?
You can call voters in Massachusetts and help Martha Coakley continue Senator Ted Kennedy’s remarkable legacy.
As Massachusetts’ first woman senator, Martha Coakley will help advance Kennedy’s legacy – fighting for equal rights, a strong economy, and our families and communities. Without her vote, health care won’t happen.
Ok, here’s the problem with this appeal. First of all, it makes it look like the entire Democratic party is owned by myBarackObama. It is not. Massachusetts and New Jersey did not vote for Obama in the primary of 2008. He was rammed down our throats until we choked on him and only Massachusetts was actually allowed to cast some of their delegate votes for Hillary at the convention. If you want our support, putting the Unity Pony’s name on the URL was a baaaad move. (and let me add that I have spoken to a LOT of people, many of them social conservatives, who really wish Hillary Clinton was our president right now.) Secondly, and this is tied to the first problem, no one likes the health care reform bills proposed by the House or the Senate with Obama’s blessing. We’re not just talking about Republicans and people who watch Fox News. They’re going to vote for Brown anyway. No, we’re talking about Democrats. Democrats do not like this bill. In fact, many of them hate this bill. HATE IT. And they hate it because it wasn’t written with Democratic principles in mind, which is why, if it passes, it will be a reflection of Barack Obama’s lousy negotiation skills and Max Baucus and friends dismissive attitudes towards Democratic voters who put them in office to Change!™ things.
Democrats hate this bill on so many levels that it’s really hard to know where to begin but let’s just start with the latest travesty, the union exemption from the excise tax. Do you party people know how damaging that’s going to be to the public perception of unions? Once again, the White House makes concessions to one group, that is only doing its job to represent its constituents, something Congressional reps should try for a change, and the result is that everyone else who happens to have decent, but not luxurious health care bennies at work will take a hit. The optics of this whole thing are wrong in so many ways that I can’t believe the party would even let this happen. Now, you’ve got working people fighting with each other and hating the party’s guts.
You’ve written a bill that locks average struggling people into insurance policies, forbids the vast majority of them from shopping around for better deals, bent over backwards to kiss the asses of the evangelicals on the issue of women’s reproductive rights, imposed an excise tax on those policies with the anticipated result that the benefits themselves will be trimmed for working people and you’ve made everyone mad at the unions for just doing their jobs. Try to get their endorsement after this once the blowback from non-union people hits them. You forced them into the untenable position of looking like special interests when they are really just trying to protect the workers who gave up wage increases for better health benefits. Suddenly, they look like the bad guys. And now you send out letters to Democrats who haven’t been the least little bit interested in the ridiculous Tea Party movement asking them to help support Coakley for the very same reasons that voters in Massachusetts are pissed off at her.
Have you Democratic big wigs completely lost the plot??
I would LOVE to see another woman in the Senate but I sure am glad I’m not voting in Tuesday’s election. If I were living in Massachusetts, I’d be seeing so much red when I went to the polls, Brown would win by a landslide.
If you really want Coakley to win, take my advice: Table the health care reform bills and go back to the drawing board. Take the bills out of contention and Coakley *may* have a fighting chance. I know that the longer you wait to pass it, the more the Republican message machine will make it harder to pass. But if it’s already a bill nobody wants, not even your friends, then the Wurlitzer isn’t doing as much damage as you’re doing to yourselves. Table it, fix it and try again later. Better later than never. We’ve got employment issues and a broken economy. You’re going to need all 60 votes. Take HCR off the table, tell Michelle Obama to register as a lobbyist for for-profit hospitals just to make it official and start all over again. Make the announcement today before it’s too late. This is Massachusetts where the residents are already living with a health care system imposed on them by the state that is very much like the one you want to hang on the rest of us. There are far more registered Democrats in Massachusetts than there are in other states. If they are willing to vote in a Republican, it’s not because they bought the “big government” schtick. It’s because they don’t buy the post-partisan, across-the-aisle, “let’s put everything on the table and negotiate our principles” away, Unity Pony type Democratic way of doing things.
Good Morning Conflucians!!!! Well it looks like Barack Obama may actually have achieved the impossible dream–turning Massachusetts purple. The latest Suffolk University poll shows Republican candidate Scott Brown leading Democrat Martha Coakley by four points in the race to fill the vacant Massachusetts Senate seat. From the Washingtonn Post:
BOSTON — A new poll in the Massachusetts Senate race shows a shift in favor of the Republican Party and a potential disaster for President Barack Obama and his Democratic political agenda in Tuesday’s special election.
The Suffolk University survey released late Thursday showed Scott Brown, a Republican state senator, with 50 percent of the vote in the race to succeed the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in this overwhelmingly Democratic state.
Democrat Martha Coakley had 46 percent. That was a statistical tie since it was within the poll’s 4.4 percentage point margin of error, but far different from a 15-point lead the Massachusetts attorney general enjoyed in a Boston Globe survey released over the weekend.
Riding a wave of opposition to Democratic health-care reform, GOP upstart Scott Brown is leading in the U.S. Senate race, raising the odds of a historic upset that would reverberate all the way to the White House, a new poll shows.
Although Brown’s 4-point lead over Democrat Martha Coakley is within the Suffolk University/7News survey’s margin of error, the underdog’s position at the top of the results stunned even pollster David Paleologos.
“It’s a Brown-out,” said Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center. “It’s a massive change in the political landscape.”
Martha Coakley
It’s a sad day for my state and it will be even sadder if Brown wins. If only Coakley had stuck to her guns and told the DNC to go f&ck themselves, this might not have happened. This morning I heard Coakley on NPR saying that she would vote for the Senate version of the health care bill despite the anti-abortion language, but she claims to oppose the House version with the Stupak language. But as I see it, there’s not a lot of difference between the two versions–they will both essentially eliminate coverage for abortion. Martha, why didn’t you listen to the people instead of the corrupt, out-of-touch DC Dems. Now we’re all going to pay the price.
With a crucial 60th vote in the Senate at stake, the perceived tightening has sent Democratic operatives scrambling to Massachusetts to help the Coakley campaign and has prompted groups on both sides of the aisle to bombard the state with advertising. Ms. Coakley forcefully attacked Mr. Brown this week, an unusual step for a front-runner, painting him as an acolyte of former President George W. Bush who is out of touch with the state’s values.
Can the Big Dawg save Martha?
Former President Bill Clinton will bring his campaigning power to her aid on Friday, and in the meantime, Ms. Coakley is adding to her schedule the kind of meet-and-greet stump events that she largely ducked for weeks.
What will happen?
Predicting the outcome of the vote on Tuesday grows more difficult each day. Many Democrats still insist that a Republican win is impossible, given that Democrats outnumber Republicans by three to one in the state and that Ms. Coakley, who was elected attorney general in 2006, has far more name recognition, money and organizational support. A poll published Sunday by The Boston Globe gave Ms. Coakley a 15-point lead.
But the poll of 554 likely voters, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, found those who were “extremely interested” in the race virtually split between Ms. Coakley and Mr. Brown. And Democrats are clearly unnerved by other recent polls that found the two neck and neck.
I’m still struggling with what to do myself. I’m repulsed by the idea of voting for Coakley after she stabbed women in the back, but at the same time I don’t want to have to deal with a neanderthal like Scott representing my state in Washington. What to do, what to do?
This is an open thread. Feel free to post other news links in the comments. I’m too worried to focus on anything except the ruination of Massachusetts by the Obama Dems.
Body: What, you think Obama -- and Wellpoint's Liz Fowler, who drafted ObamaCare for Max Baucus while his chief of staff -- would ever do anything to help the unions or collective bargaining? Kidding, right? The Hill:
Digby and McJoan were this week's panelists on Virtually Speaking, talking about prospects for the Grand Bargain and what the various scandals mean. Why is Elijah Cummings the only MD representative to have signed the Grayson pledge? Has your representative signed it? Don't forget to say thanks if so. But if not, ask why. Spocko asks, "Which D […]
I’m not sure that Democrats are getting the message. They still think there is no place for us to go. It’s either them or Republicans and we know that the Republicans are morally bankrupt. Lately, we’ve seen that moral bankruptcy extends to the other party as well. Two recent communiques stand out for me in this respect.
I met Eric Massa in Las Vegas in 2006 at the first YearlyKos convention. He was milling around the lobby of the Riviera, trying to round up people to walk down the street to the tackiest bar you’ve ever seen for a drink. I thought he was buying. As we sat in the faux fur covered lounge pit groups around a blazing fire, in a scene that was more like apres ski cross pollinated with Hooters, Eric Massa delivered a riveting stump speech. He was an energetic, charismatic, full monty, unapologetic politician with principles. At the end of it, he asked for twenty bucks from all of the rag tag followers hoping to get a free beer from him. I ponied up my share, bought my own drink and thought it was money well spent.
Along with all of the other email I got yesterday from Senators John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Bob Menendez, some DNC ijits and Barack Obama, urging me to help support Martha Coakley, I got yet *another* email from Joseph Cryan, the New Jersey Democratic Party Chair. (Note to Cryan: after the 2008 RBC meeting, I asked to be removed from the Democratic party roster. You can take me off your email list, thank you very much.)
