Of “Bring Justice to Justice,” where people whose houses have been stolen by the banks call for Holder to prosecute.This is the third day of arrests: Live video from your iPhone using Ustream Bookmark It
… it appears that our Congress was paying absolutely no attention at all. Greg Sargent’s Plum Line has the gritty details about how Republicans, and some Democrats, are planning to vote down Obama’s jobs bill. The entrails do not look good for Democrats in red states that oppose the bill according to Stan Greenberg:
Top pollster Stanley Greenberg is not shy about criticizing the White House when he thinks it’s warranted, and his opinion is widely respected by Democrats in Congress. So if Greenberg tells moderate Senate Democrats that they vote against Obama’s jobs bill at their ownperil, will they believe him?
In an interview with me this morning, Greenberg made a strong case that moderate Senate Democrats in red states would be foolish and shortsighted if they vote against the American Jobs Act today, as some of them appear to be prepared to do. The White House and Dems have been railing against Republicans for opposing the jobs bill, but if a few Senate Dems defect, and a simple majority of the Senate doesn’t support it, that will dilute the Dem message that Republicans are the key obstacle to progress on the economy.
But Greenberg’s case for voting for the bill went significantly beyond this concern about overall party messaging. He argued that moderate Democrats who vote against it are actually imperiling their ownreelection chances.
“They reduce their risks for reelection by showing support for a jobs bill that’s going to be increasingly popular as voters learn more about it,” Greenberg said. “They have to be for something on the economy, and this the kind of proposal they should support. If I were advising them, I’d say you want to be backing a jobs bill with middle class tax cuts paid for by tax hikes on millionaires. Moderate voters in these states very much want to raise taxes on the wealthy to meet our obligations.”
That bill leaves a lot to be desired for sure, but those of us out of work need jobs. If the OccupyWallStreet movement hasn’t gotten through to Congresscritters yet, let me spell it out: Any organized opposition to putting people to work is going to be extremely unpopular. Maybe that will fall most heavily on the Republicans, but I recall that it wasn’t too long ago that Tim Geithner said on behalf of the Obama Treasury Department that life was about to get a lot more unpleasant for the unemployed.
You know, I just find that unacceptable.
If the (inadequate) jobs bill goes down, expect a lot more unpleasantness between the 99% and the people who are standing in the way of living wages and decent healthcare. If Congress is this politically tone deaf, a good number of them need to be replaced. If I were them, I’d be cautious because OccupyWallStreet looks like the perfect forum to explore starting a third party and there is enough time between now and November 2012 to make a difference.
I don’t know what you guys are up to but from the outside, it looks like a bunch of chickens who just cut their own heads off. You guys were once dominant in politics and gave us Medicare and the Peace Corps and Sesame Street. You looked after the post office (BTW, do you have any idea how expensive it is to send a high school logo sweatshirt and a pound of Skittles to your former French exchange student in Avignon by FedEx? I sent it USPS for a small fraction of the FedEx quote. Yeah, put THAT in some campaign ads.)
The optics are not good. There is no unity. There doesn’t seem to be a plan. And your leadership is too busy kneecapping its own players to pay attention to how it’s being rolled. Amateur hour is over. We in the rest of the country, particularly the unemployed, do not have the luxury of 14 more months of this incompetence. Our COBRA payments are going to suck 50% of our unemployment checks and our kids still need to be fed and educated. And it’s incredibly heartless the way you have overlooked the plight of families who have been broken up by distance or have lost their houses when a wage earner has lost his or her job.
I’m disappointed. I was hoping you would rally and make this jobs bill greater than the sum of its parts. Instead, you seem determined to save your own asses first. We care very much whether a jobs bill passes this year, don’t underestimate its importance, but what we really want to see is some kind of spirited effort on your part to challenge the Republican message machine. As a commenter on another blog said yesterday, “If I want to vote Republican, I’d rather do it directly”. Your efforts to accommodate the Right Wing Noise Machine is never going to be enough for them. Know why? Because you’re Democrats. No matter how much you come over to their side, they are still going to hate you and take great delight in making your life miserable and your attempts to get things done come to nothing. They want a one party system and they are perilously close to getting one.
Maybe you guys need therapy. You’ve been shouldering the guilt so long that you’ve lost perspective. These problems are not insurmountable. It will not be a catastrophe if you lose your seat. What will be catastrophic is if you don’t put your collective heads together and put together a bill to end all bills. If you’re so convinced you’re going to lose the argument anyway, why not go big? Add health care provisions to it, reform the patent system in an unexpected way that encourages long term investment to save our jobs, crack down on visas, create a pharmaceutical company to discover therapeutic areas abandoned by the big guys. Challenge these bastards. If they tell you government can’t create jobs, give them a “Oh, yeah? Says who?”. Stop handing over our social safety net to stop the beatings. TAKE the beatings and stand up and keep on going. It matters that a bill pass but not if it’s so watered down that its effects are negligible. Much more important is that we actually see you fighting for the right things even if you fail.
Don’t let us down. Turn off the TV monitors. They’re only going to distract and discourage you. Besides, it’s not your job to make Fox News happy. That’s impossible anyway. Your job is to pull the country back up and put it on its feet. Shut every other distraction out and focus solely on that.
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
Body: (I should start by saying that this is a report from Jackson-Hewitt, and it couldn't have been more clear to me from my H&R Block experience this year that the tax preparers want a piece of the action from ObamaCare's stream of rents. I mean, here's the screaming headline on their corporate site: "April 15 is Now the Most Impor […]
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 […]
… it appears that our Congress was paying absolutely no attention at all. Greg Sargent’s Plum Line has the gritty details about how Republicans, and some Democrats, are planning to vote down Obama’s jobs bill. The entrails do not look good for Democrats in red states that oppose the bill according to Stan Greenberg:
