Technical issues seem resolved, so please excuse these somewhat stale items. Perhaps there are a few you missed. You can access all the past editions of The Daily Planet on the green Category bar on the top of each page under the heading PlanetPOV.

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BUDGET

Just As Predicted 

Bob Cesca:

Just as predicted, the Republicans are now floating a proposal to delay the automatic triggers that were passed into law under the Budget Control Act (the debt ceiling bill)

Senate Republicans unveiled a proposal Thursday to avoid or delay looming, automatic cuts to defense and security programs by reducing the federal work force by five percent and freezing federal pay for two and a half years.

In a bid to recruit Democratic support for their legislation, the authors of the plan say it saves enough money to forestall automatic cuts to domestic programs, also set to kick in on January 2013. But they continue to oppose using any new tax revenues to offset any of these costs — and in so doing they exposed a contradiction at the heart of their fiscal policy. They oppose tax increases, they say, because of their impact on economic growth — yet their plan to avoid tax increases involves deliberately shrinking demand for jobs.

It’s easy to see the Democrats going along with a pay-freeze because that’s something congress can easily reverse, however it’s unlikely they will agree to cutting the federal workforce by 5 percent.

Will the Republicans accept just a pay-freeze in exchange for delaying the automatic triggers? If the Democrats play their cards right, absolutely. And for their part, the Democrats do seem to be playing this correctly by vowing to stick by the cuts while it is politically convenient to do so. The tune will change when we get closer to fiscal 2013.

I’ll go out on a limb now and predict that if the automatic triggers do end up being delayed, they will never happen.

House GOP Denies The Deficit Exists: 

Jordan Ashby:

According to House Republicans the Bush Tax Cuts, the single largest contributor to our national deficit, didn’t actually add anything to the deficit. Or something.

Every House Republican voted Thursday to reject the proposition that the Bush tax cuts added to the deficit.

Joined by just a handful of Democrats, the full Republican conference rejected a measure that would have affirmed what nearly all budget experts and economists recognized: President George W. Bush’s debt-financed tax cuts blew up the budget in the last decade, leaving the country in a hole that sank into a chasm after the 2008 financial crisis.

The final tally was 174-244. If it had passed, it would have amended a GOP-backed bill that would have changed the way neutral budget score-keepers analyze the effects of taxation —to make it appear as if unpaid-for tax cuts don’t deepen deficits.

Because tax cuts pay for themselves, right?

BUSINESS

ABC News: McDonald’s Announces End to ‘Pink Slime’ in Burgers

McDonald’s has announced that it will be discontinuing the use of the controversial meat product known as boneless lean beef trimmings in its burgers.

The product was recently brought to the attention of the public by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who derisively referred to it as “pinkslime” on an episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.

These trimmings, which consist of what’s left of the meat after all the choice cuts of beef are taken, are banned for human consumption in the U.K, where they are instead used for dog and chicken food. They are legal for consumption in the United States, however, where they are treated with ammonium hydroxide in order to kill off bacteria such as E. coli and make it safe for human consumption.

Beef Products Incorporated, the company that had previously supplied McDonald’s with boneless lean beef trimmings, denied that Oliver’s show had anything to do with decision, saying it was made long before the show aired and was based on BPI’s inability to supply McDonald’s on a global basis.

5.6 Million Americans Have Switched Their Banks In The Last 90 Days 

ThinkProgress:

Back in November, the Occupy Wall Street movement inspired “Bank Transfer Day,” a day for Americans fed up with the actions of the nation’s biggest banks to move their money to a different institution. Initial estimates of the impact of Bank Transfer Day placed the number of accounts moved at around 600,000, but later estimates revised that downward to around 200,000.

However, new estimates from Javelin Strategy and Research, a research and consulting firm, show that the original numbers were closer to the truth. Javelin found that 5.6 million people have moved their bank accounts in the last 90 days, with 610,000 citing Bank Transfer Day as their reason:

Bank Transfer Day and the Occupy Movement have received tremendous attention, and for the first time we have market research data to measure the impact on the financial services industry. Javelin’s research estimates that 5.6 million U.S. adults with a banking relationship changed providers in the past 90 days. Of those switchers, 610,000 US adults (or 11% of the 5.6 million) cited Bank Transfer Day as their reason and actually moved their accounts from a large to a small institution.

Javelin noted that this pace of account closing is three times the normal rate. While 11 percent of people moving their accounts cited Bank Transfer Day, one quarter said they moved their money because their old institution charged too many fees. Account closures at Bank of America, the nation’s second largest bank, actually jumped 20 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, potentially driven by the bank’s ill-fated decision to implement a $5 monthly fee for its debt cards.

According to the consulting firm cg42, the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose as much as $185 billion in deposits this year due to customer defections. Of those banks, “Bank of America is the most vulnerable and could lose up to 10% of its customers and $42 billion in consumer deposits.” (HT: Business Insider)

ECONOMY

Reuters: Fed will protect U.S. from Europe fallout: Bernanke 

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday defended the U.S. central bank’s policies against charges from Republican lawmakers they risked sparking inflation, saying the economy still needs plenty of support.

Testifying before Congress, the Fed chief was repeatedly thrown on the defensive as he parried critiques from Republican lawmakersover the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, its focus on employment and its policy prescriptions for housing.

Bernanke told the House Budget Committee that Europe’s financial crisis still threatened the U.S. recovery, and said the Fed would do everything it can to ward off damage.

“The basic reason for low long-term rates, which are also a feature of every other industrial economy, are low inflation, slow expected growth and the fact that the dollar is a safe haven,” Bernanke said.

Paul Ryan, the committee’s Republican chairman, took issue with the central bank’s new 2 percent inflation target, saying a Fed policy statement last week suggested it would be willing to tolerate higher inflation nonetheless.

Bernanke pushed back against that idea: “We are not seeking higher inflation, we do not want higher inflation and we’re not tolerating higher inflation.”

After slashing rates to near zero in late 2008, the Fed bought $2.3 trillion in bonds in a further effort to spur the economy. Many analysts expect it will further expand its portfolio in the months ahead with another round of purchases.

Last week, the Fed said U.S. overnight interest rates would likely remain near zero until at least through late 2014, a pledge widely seen as an effort to push other borrowing costs lower to spur stronger growth and job creation.

NOT SATISFIED

Bernanke said he was seeing signs that some of the factors dampening U.S. business investment, including uncertainty surrounding European bank woes, might be waning. But he added it was far too soon to say whether the United States would remain unscathed by troubles beyond its borders.

“Risks remain that developments in Europe or elsewhere may unfold unfavorably and could worsen economic prospects here at home,” Bernanke said. “We will continue to monitor the situation closely and take every available step to protect the U.S. financial system and the economy.” […]

The Fed chief reiterated his hedge on U.S. budget policy. He argued that long-term deficits raised the possibility of a crisis but warned against near-term fiscal tightening that might threaten the recovery.

“Even as fiscal policymakers address the urgent issue of fiscal sustainability, they should take care not to unnecessarily impede the current economic recovery,” Bernanke said. “The sluggish expansion has left the economy vulnerable to shocks.”

THE REAL CLASS WARFARE: Dissecting Romney’s Statement: What Are Problems the Middle-Class Has That the Poor Don’t?

Rortybomb:

I’m sure you’ve seen the latest by Mitt Romney. On CNN he said:

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95% of Americans that are struggling.”

He clarified by saying:

“I’m sure there are places where people fall between the cracks,” Romney said. “And finding those places is one of the things that is the responsibility of government. We do have a very ample safety net in America, with Medicaid, housing vouchers, food stamps, earned income tax credit. We have a number of ways of helping the poor. And yet my focus and the area that I think is the greatest challenge that the country faces right now is not, is not to focus our effort on how we help the poor as much as to focus our effort on how to help the middle class in America, and get more people in the middle class and get people out of being poor and becoming middle income.”

Andrew Sullivan has a set of links on the right-wing going into defense and worry mode over the comment – it’s good stuff.  Jared Bernstein has an excellent post noting that Romney’s budget would destroy this safety net.

Since Romney’s defending it and probably believes it, let’s dissect this argument.  A quick glance would show that things like unemployment are worse in places that are poorer.  Yet Romney’s comments are predicated on there being a set of problems – problems that have policy solutions – that impact middle-class people but do not impact the poor.  Let’s try to make a list of these problems, stipulating in advance we might not find them convincing.

Problem 1.  Middle-Class People Have to Work

The most obvious take-away is that the poor receive a near-middle class lifestyle off the generosity of the government, and don’t even have to pay or work for it.  Here’s Bethany Mandel at Commentary:  ”Compare this $28,000 [of means-tested programs] to what the average middle class American receives from the government in comparable subsidies, $0.”

Or as this lucky ducky cartoon put it:

Atrios is completely right that Romney “isn’t saying fuck the poor. He’s saying that the really poor actually have it really really good! The government basically gives them free cars and housing and medical care and food stamps they can use at the liquor store etc. The rest of you struggling to get by, you don’t get anything. In fact, the really poor (and we know who they are) are taking your hard earned money.”  As Joshua Cohen tweeted, it’s a view where the poor aren’t people who happen to make a small income but instead a separate group that exists entirely outside the labor market.

It’s interesting that Mandel thinks Romney’s statement are a liability to him on the right: “To the right, it verifies that Romney is as liberal as they fear, complacent with the welfare state as it currently stands.”

(It’s also possible, and amusing, to think that Romney also has a very distorted view of “middle-income people”, where middle-income people are worried about how the real-time price transparency regulations of credit default swap clearinghouses will be implemented under Dodd-Frank and whether they’ll be able to count their labor income as capital gains under a second Obama administration. )

Unlike food stamps, nobody is debating making middle-class households take a drug test to qualify for the mortgage-interest tax deduction version of welfare.  I’ll note that the wayinclusiveness is defined is very important for the regulatory state and that democratic feudalism and upside-down populism is very relevant to Corey Robin’s new book on the conservative movement, and move on to the next concern.

Problem 2:  Loss Aversion and Reproducing the Middle-Class

People often display loss aversion: they hate losing something more than they enjoyed gaining it.  Everybody wants a better life for their children, but middle-income people expect to enjoy and be able to hand down a certain quality of life to their children as a baseline.  Even more, once that quality of life is achieved, it needs to be defended, because falling out of the middle-class is a serious cost – personally, socially, and materially.  One can create a whole theory of middle-class-ness centered around this “Fear of Falling”, asBarbara Ehrenreich has.

This is becoming harder to maintain for middle-income people themselves (as we’ll discuss in the next few problems), but generationally it is currently a mess.  Youth unemployment is very high, even for kids with college degrees.  Young people are living at home much longer, which has to be causing anxiety for a huge amount of middle-income parents who expected their kids to thrive.  The research tells us that the long recession will have serious impacts on young people’s lifetime opportunities.

Problem 3:  Relative Cost Inflation

There was a series of econometric arguments about why inequality isn’t so bad based on the idea that the poor have a different inflation rate than the rich.  In what sense the poor “have” this rate wasn’t clear, but basically the argument went that a lot of basic goods were becoming much cheaper while the things rich people consume are getting expensive faster, therefore we should adjust the bottom numbers up and the top numbers down.  Digging into the data, this is driven in large-part by food inequality, where poor people are able to survive on a cheaper diet.

But how does this impact middle-income people? As Elizabeth Warren argues in Two-Income Trap (and this Boston Review summary of the argument), the middle-class isn’t in trouble because of “luxury fever.” Instead it is because a few, core, middle-class staples have skyrocketed in cost:

The answer begins with the most expensive and most important thing most Americans will ever buy: a home….for similar homes, school quality was the single most important determinant of neighborhood prices…housing prices for families with at least one minor child at home grew at a rate three times that of other families…

other major types of expenses are worth singling out as new burdens for the middle class. We have considered one of them already: the higher cost of cars. Yes, the per-car cost has dropped, but with Mom joining the work force and families living farther than ever from city centers, the second car has become essential for many. The family on average now spends an additional $4,000 every year to buy, lease, and maintain all its cars.

The rising cost of health care has also taken a bite out of the family budget, even for healthy families. In one generation, the average out-of-pocket cost of employer-subsidized health insurance has jumped by about 90 percent.

The last decade saw a giant housing bubble (see next problem), high costs – direct or implied – in schooling for children, more spent on cars (cost of gas, distance, number of drivers, lack of public options) and the runaway cost-inflation of health care.  Poor people need places to live, good health, good schools and the ability to get around, but these goods almost by definition create and define the American middle-class.

Problem 4:  Debt, Housing

It’s expensive to be poor.  A quick glance at the distributional impact of overdraft feesshow that the financial system puts the poor through a ringer just to get access to the basic financial means of participating in a market economy.

But the huge run-up in debt, especially housing debt, was primarily a middle-income phenomenon.  From the Federal Reserve’s Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2004 to 2007: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances:

Or from the LA Times, The consumer isn’t overleveraged — the middle class is, based on a BofA Merrill report:

“The consumer debt problem in the economy really is a debt problem for the middle class. The need to work off a chunk of that debt will sap middle-class families’ spending power for perhaps years to come.”  The chaos in the housing market could be argued to impact middle-income people more, or at least differently, than the poor.  Middle-income people are more likely to have to figure out what to do with an underwater mortgage.

Problem #5:  Retirement Savings

The poor save very little, because, by definition, they have very little.  Middle-income people have more and hope to save some of it.

Here’s a little secret.   One reason people don’t project what the employment-population ratio should look like at full-employment is that they have no idea what the elderly are going to do.  The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: ”Even though their unemployment rate more than doubled over the past three years, older workers have generally stayed in or entered the labor force….The upward trend may continue in the near future. The trends in retirement and health benefits will probably remain in place and the recession’s severe shock to wealth will likely compel even greater numbers of retirement-age workers to stay in the labor force.”  It’s a crime we didn’t make Medicare eligible for those over 55.

What else is missing?  Personally I don’t think these are that useful to split into poor problems and middle-income problems – these are all just problems for the 99%.

ENERGY

Another Victory for Clean Energy

Cesca:

The Obama Administration today shredded miles of red tape and announced the approval of off-shore wind turbine farms off the Atlantic coast, paving the way for private leases.

As part of its clean energy agenda, the Obama administration announced Thursday that it’s moving forward to develop wind power off the coasts of four Mid-Atlantic states.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said federal environmental reviews for designated “wind energy areas” off Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia are now complete and find “no significant environmental impact from the development of wind.” That finding clears the way for companies to seek leases.

“The wind potential off the Atlantic coast is staggering” and “no developer should have to wait nine to 10 years to get a lease,” Salazar told reporters, citing the possible creation of thousands of jobs and power for millions of homes. He said wind power is part of President Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy that also calls for more oil and natural gas development.

But what will all those millionaire shoreline property owners do now that they have their view obstructed by turbines!? I guess they’ll have to visit one of their other homes more frequently.

I joke, but that really was one of the sticking points in the approval or disapproval of off-shore turbines.

Also — just like Bush!

HEALTH

UPI: Blood test detects depressed patients

A blood test analyzing levels of nine biomarkers accurately distinguished patients diagnosed with depression from others, U.S. researchers said.

Lead author Dr. George Papakostas of the Massachusetts General Hospital said previous efforts to develop tests based on a single blood or urinary biomarker did not produce results of sufficient sensitivity.

“The biology of depression suggests that a highly complex series of interactions exists between the brain and biomarkers in the peripheral circulation,” said study co-author John Bilello, chief scientific officer of Ridge Diagnostics, which sponsored the current study.

The test, developed by Ridge Diagnostics, measures levels of nine biomarkers associated with factors such as inflammation, the development and maintenance of neurons and the interaction between brain structures involved with stress response and other key functions.

The measurements are combined using a specific formula to produce a figure called the MDDScore — a number from 1 to 100 indicating in percentage form the likelihood that an individual has major depression. Clinical use the MDDScore would range from 1-10.

“It can be difficult to convince patients of the need for treatment based on the sort of questionnaire now used to rank their reported symptoms,” Bilello said in statement. “We expect that the biological basis of this test may provide patients with insight into their depression as a treatable disease rather than a source of self-doubt and stigma.”

The findings were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

HEALTH CARE

Health Reform, Preventive Services, and Religious Institutions

White House Blog:

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, most health insurance plans will cover women’s preventive services, including contraception, without charging a co-pay or deductible beginning in August, 2012.  This new law will save money for millions of Americans. But more importantly, it will ensure Americans nationwide get the high-quality care they need to stay healthy. Under this policy, women who want contraception will have access to it through their insurance without paying a co-pay or deductible.  But no one will be forced to buy or use contraception.

On January 20th, Secretary Sebelius announced that certain religious organizations including churches would be exempt from paying their insurers to cover contraception. Other religious organizations, including those that employ people of different faiths, can qualify for a one-year transition period as they prepare to comply with the new law. In recent days, there has been some confusion about how this policy affects religious institutions. We want to make sure you have the facts:

• Churches are exempt from the new rules: Churches and other houses of worship will be exempt from the requirement to offer insurance that covers contraception.
• No individual health care provider will be forced to prescribe contraception: The President and this Administration have previously and continue to express strong support for existing conscience protections.  For example, no Catholic doctor is forced to write a prescription for contraception.
•  No individual will be forced to buy or use contraception: This rule only applies to what insurance companies cover.  Under this policy, women who want contraception will have access to it through their insurance without paying a co-pay or deductible.   But no one will be forced to buy or use contraception.
• Drugs that cause abortion are not covered by this policy:  Drugs like RU486 are not covered by this policy, and nothing about this policy changes the President’s firm commitment to maintaining strict limitations on Federal funding for abortions. No Federal tax dollars are used for elective abortions.
• Over half of Americans already live in the 28 States that require insurance companies cover contraception: Several of these States like North Carolina, New York, and California have identical religious employer exemptions.  Some States like Colorado, Georgia and Wisconsin have no exemption at all.
• Contraception is used by most women: According to a study by the Guttmacher Institute, most women, including 98 percent of Catholic women, have used contraception.
• Contraception coverage reduces costs: While the monthly cost of contraception for women ranges from $30 to $50, insurers and experts agree that savings more than offset the cost.  The National Business Group on Health estimated that it would cost employers 15 to 17 percent more not to provide contraceptive coverage than to provide such coverage, after accounting for both the direct medical costs of potentially unintended and unhealthy pregnancy and indirect costs such as employee absence and reduced productivity.

The Obama Administration is committed to both respecting religious beliefs and increasing access to important preventive services. And as we move forward, our strong partnerships with religious organizations will continue. The Administration has provided substantial resources to Catholic organizations over the past three years, in addition to numerous non-financial partnerships to promote healthy communities and serve the common good. This work includes partnerships with Catholic social service agencies on local responsible fatherhood programs and international anti-hunger/food assistance programs. We look forward to continuing this important work.

FACT: ObamaCare saved nearly 4 million seniors over $2.1 billion on prescription drugs in 2011 

Komen is going a step further and defunding stem cell research

LifeNews:

[…]

On November 30, 2011, Komen quietly added a new statement to its web site stating that it does not support embryonic stem cell research but supports the kinds that do not involve the destruction of human life.

“Komen supports research on the isolation, derivation, production, and testing of stem cells that are capable of producing all or almost all of the cell types of the developing body and may result in improved understanding of or treatments for breast cancer, but are derived without creating a human embryo or destroying a human embryo,” Komen says. “A priority in our research funding is to quickly find and deliver effective treatments, especially for the most lethal forms of breast cancer, while seeking effective preventive strategies, enhanced screening methodologies, and solutions to disparities in breast cancer outcomes for diverse women.”

Komen, in its listing of grants for 2011, lists two stem cell studies that do not involve the use of embryonic stem cells.

LifeNews talked with pro-life sources close to the Komen situation who confirmed Komen will categorically not fund any embryonic stem cell research and the purpose of the November 2011 statement is to inform grant seekers that Komen will not do so.

Why Komen’s Decision to Pull Funding Is So Deadly

Colorlines:

African-American women are more likely than all other women to die from breast cancer. Women of color in general are more likely to be diagnosed late and die from breast cancer, due in large part to poor access to early screening and treatment—which is precisely the type of programs Komen used to fund at Planned Parenthood.

In a story published earlier today on Colorlines.com, Akiba Solomon quotes Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards saying the cancer detection and prevention programs Komen funded “saved the lives of women who often had nowhere else to turn for care.”

Below is an infographic from our archives that looks at just how deadly breast cancer is for women of color.

Meet the woman who got Komen to pull funds from Planned Parenthood

Wonkbook:

After the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure’s decisionto defund Planned Parenthood, attention has focused on its Vice President for Policy, Karen Handel. She joined the group last January after a failed run for governor in Georgia, where she had advocated defunding Planned Parenthood.

But there’s another woman who deserves equal credit: Americans United for Life President Charmaine Yoest. It’s her group that issued a report last fall, “The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood,” that led to a probeby the Energy and Commerce Committee. And it’s that investigation that puts Planned Parenthood in violation of Komen’s new policy that bars funding of groups under investigation.

Yoest has run Americans United for Life for three years. She came to the group from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign, and before that, served as the Family Research Council’s vice president for communications. She moved to Washington in the 1980s to work in the Reagan administration. But she counts this as perhaps her biggest victory.

“I have to say, it was some of the best news of my entire life,” Yoest told me in an interview this morning about the Komen decision. She saw the news yesterday afternoon, sitting in her driveway and checking Twitter.

“We’re so used to seeing Planned Parenthood succeed at defining themselves as the trendy place to be, and for Komen to make such a smart decision in recognizing the reality behind Planned Parenthood spin,” she adds. “As a breast cancer survivor, I was always troubled with this whole idea that the nation’s largest abortion provider was enmeshed in the breast cancer fight when they weren’t actually doing mammograms. I look at this as smart stewardship.”

Americans United for Life has, for the past year, aggressively pushed Congress to end Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. It has also drafted model legislation that states can use to bar abortion providers from receiving federal funds. Nine states have passed such laws, although the Obama administration has blocked their implementation.

Yoest hopes that the Komen decision is the beginning of a similar push, on the private side, to curtail Planned Parenthood’s funding, although she does not expect other funders to get on board overnight.

“We’ll be looking at their other supporters,” she said. “Let’s be honest, they’ve been very fashionable amongst a certain philanthropic set. I hope that this is a beginning of people re-looking at associations with the nation’s largest abortion provider.”

As those critical of the decision have shown their support of Planned Parenthood[Yoest says the anti-abortion community is exploring ways to support the group. Her group will, for the first time, have a team in the District of Columbia Race for the Cure, called “Team Life.” Yoest, a marathoner, ran the race about a decade ago, but stopped after learning of Komen’s affiliation with Planned Parenthood.

“Yesterday we were looking at Komen’s Web site and how we can interact with them,” she says. “I want them to get as much of the benefit as possible. We’ll have T-shirts and a pasta dinner. I’ve run in a couple of marathons. That’s why I always wanted to be a part of their great work.”

JUSTICE

Reuters: U.S. Justice Dept indicts Swiss bank Wegelin on charges that it enabled wealthy Americans to evade taxes 

The United States indicted Wegelin, the oldest Swiss private bank, on charges that it enabled wealthy Americans to evade taxes on at least $1.2 billion hidden in offshore bank accounts, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

The announcement, by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, represents the first time an overseas bank has been indicted by the United States for enabling tax fraud by U.S. taxpayers.

The indictment said the U.S. government had seized more than $16 million from Wegelin's correspondent bank, the Swiss giant UBS AG, in Stamford, Connecticut, via a separate civil forfeiture complaint. Because Wegelin has no branches outside Switzerland, it used correspondent banking services, a standard industry practice, to handle money for U.S.-based clients.

UBS could not be reached for immediate comment.

The charges against Wegelin, of fraud and conspiracy, provide a rare glimpse into the world of Swiss private banking in the wake of a crackdown on UBS AG. In 2009, UBS paid $780 million and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department over charges it engaged in fraud and conspiracy by enabling scores of Americans to evade taxes through its private bank. The bank later turned over the names of more than 4,500 clients, a watershed in Swiss bank secrecy, which protects the confidentiality of clients and their data.

The indictment signals a ramping up of pressure on 10 other Swiss banks under investigation by the Justice Department, including Credit Suisse, Julius Baer and Basler Kantonalbank.

Six days ago, Wegelin -- founded in 1741 -- effectively broke itself up by selling the non-U.S. portion of its business. The indictment represents the latest blow to the tradition of Swiss bank secrecy in a long-running U.S. crackdown on tax dodgers.

Switzerland is seeking a global solution for its entire banking industry, not just the 11 banks under criminal scrutiny.

On Tuesday, the Swiss finance ministry handed U.S. authorities encrypted data on bank employees who served U.S. clients suspected of dodging taxes, and said it would only provide the key to decipher the data once the row was settled.

ACCOUNTS FOR FORMER UBS CLIENTS?

The U.S. Justice Department said Wegelin "affirmatively decided to capture for Wegelin the illegal U.S. cross-border banking business lost by UBS and deliberately set out to open new undeclared accounts for US taxpayer-clients leaving UBS," the indictment said. U.S. clients were told that Wegelin presented less risk amid the crackdown because it had no branches outside Switzerland and "had a long tradition of bank secrecy."

The indictment also accused Wegelin of helping two unnamed Swiss banks "repatriate undeclared funds to their own U.S. taxpayer-clients by issuing checks drawn on Wegelin's Stamford correspondent account." The transfers were separated into chunks below the $10,000 threshold at which such transfers are reported to the IRS. Wegelin, the indictment said, "co-mingled" the repatriated funds with other, unrelated funds, to better conceal their origin and nature.

The charges against Wegelin were filed as a superseding indictment of three previously charged Wegelin bankers: Michael Berlinka, Urs Frei and Roger Keller. The three men were charged on January 4 with fraud and conspiracy. The superseding indictment named several unindicted co-conspirators, including one who served as a team leader for the three men at the Zurich branch.

The charges provided new details on how the bank worked to solicit new U.S. clients fleeing UBS. According to the indictment:

* Wegelin, one of the last "pure" private banks, is principally owned by eight managing partners and run by an executive committee that included partners. One unindicted co-conspirator, named as Executive A at the bank, was a member of Wegelin's executive committee and worked in Zurich.

* Wegelin used a special code, "BNQ," on around 70 new U.S. undeclared accounts that were opened over 2008 and 2009. It also sometimes opened accounts for U.S. citizens who held passports from other countries, and opened the accounts through the non-U.S. passports.

* Wegelin recruited U.S. clients through a website, www.SwissPrivateBank.com, that was run by an unidentified third party. The website boasted there that "Swiss bank secrecy is not lifted for tax evasion ... Neither the Swiss government nor any other government can obtain information about your bank account." Unlike the United States, Switzerland generally does not consider tax evasion to be a crime.

* Wegelin gave accounts special names, including "Elvis" and "Limpopo Foundation." The charges detailed the bank's work for nearly three dozen American clients, known only as clients A through JJ.

* Wegelin encouraged clients not to come forward to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and disclose their names in exchange for reduced penalties. Clients who did so in recent years helped provide the Justice Department with a roadmap to the inner workings of Wegelin - a map that led to the bank's indictment.

MEDIA

NYT: Through a Web Site Under Construction, a Secret Donor Is Revealed

Mystery solved. Or at least one of them.

The identities of several major donors to Restore Our Future, the “super PAC” backing Mitt Romney, remain hidden from public view, even after their recent filing with the Federal Election Commission, because their contributions were made through limited liability companies or other entities that seem to exist solely on paper. The issue was highlighted in a front-page article in The New York Times on Wednesday.

One of the mystery donors to the pro-Romney super PAC, contributing $250,000 in late July, was identified only as “Paumanok Partners L.L.C.” in the most recent campaign finance reports, which were filed late Tuesday night. The report listed just a post office box for Paumanok in New Canaan, Conn.

The man who appears to be behind the donation, or at least closely linked to it, is William Laverack Jr., chairman and chief executive officer of Laverack Capital Partners, a private investment firm. He is also identified as a senior adviser to Tiger Infrastructure, a private equity firm that invests inbusinesses in sectors like power, waste and transportation, founded by Julian Robertson and Emil W. Henry in 2009. Mr. Robertson donated $1 million to Restore Our Future in November.

Mr. Laverack has been a major supporter of Mr. Romney, serving as a co-chairman for a fund-raiser for his presidential campaign in September at the Essex House and another one at Cipriani in December. He also attended a reception hosted by Mr. Henry and his wife at their home in the Hamptons in September. Mr. Laverack, his wife and their daughter contributed a combined $7,500 to the Romney campaign in April. Mr. Laverack and his wife also donated $10,000 to Free and Strong America, Mr. Romney’s “leadership PAC,” in March.

Mr. Laverack did not respond to a message left at his office seeking comment.

The Times was able to trace the donation back to Mr. Laverack, essentially, through a nonworking Web site. Unable to find out anything about Paumanok, Matt Ericson, a graphics editor, decided to just plug “Paumanok Partners” into a Web address, typing in paumanokpartners.com. That revealed a Web site that was under construction and did not show up in Google searches.

A quick check on Whois.com showed that the domain name was registered to William Laverack of New Canaan, Conn.

A Paumanok Partners L.L.C. was registered with the New York State Department of State in August 2010, but the company’s articles of organization do not identify any of its officers. It is unclear if that company is the same one that made the donation. The address for the company in East Northport, N.Y., listed with the Department of State, belongs to the certified public accounting firm Sasserath & Zoraian, which filed the articles of organization. The documents identified as the company’s organizer, Lawrence A. Kirsch, an Albany lawyer, who said in a telephone interview that he runs a corporate service firm that helps clients set up corporations and L.L.C.’s.

“I probably do about 50,000 of these a year,” he said, adding that he had no idea who was behind Paumanok Partners.

Politico headline: "Obama: Jesus Would Tax the Rich." Whoever wrote that understood nothing he said. 

Washington Monthly:

So President Obama spoke at this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast, and it’s not just conservative gabbers who are mocking him for allegedly claiming direct divine sanction for his policy proposals. Here’s Politico’s stupid headline: “Obama: Jesus Would Tax the Rich.”

I personally have little doubt that if Jesus of Nazareth had been in charge of determining how much various people were rendering unto Caesar, he would not have been particularly interested in the pleas of job creators that they need to engorge themselves with riches for the common good. And I’m certainly not alone. For example, the current and past teachings of the Roman Catholic Church (you know, the church that Obama is supposedly persecuting because he does not adequately accept the view that it’s all right to pocket government subsidies for health coverage while denying preventive services for contraceptives that most Catholics and non-Catholics alike utilize) emphatically embrace public policies aimed at economic fairness and social justice.

But matter of fact, Obama did not claim Jesus as co-author of his policies: He merely suggested that they are influenced by the values taught by Jesus, as he understands them. He went far out of his way to try to make that clear, saying: “Our goal should not be to declare our policies as biblical. It is God who is infallible, not us.”

This has been a central theme of virtually every major utterance by Barack Obama on the subject of religion and politics, most notably in his famous 2009 commencement address at Notre Dame: a warning against the arrogance of those who presume to speak for the Almighty in pursuit of their highly secular political agendas. It’s an idea that used to be called “the fear of God,” though it is almost entirely lacking among the noisy ranks of Christian Right leaders.

It’s hardly surprising that these folks are projecting their own usurpation of religion onto the president. Nor, sadly, is it surprising that presumably neutral observers like the headline writers at Politico don’t get it at all.

Very interesting piece on journalists rooting for a close GOP race (and admitting it)

Columbia Journalism Review:

In a column earlier this week, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank penned a public love letter—to Newt Gingrich. Taking on the mantle of spurned lover for the entire political press corps, Milbank pleaded with the candidate who loves to pose as the media’s victim:

I speak for many colleagues when I say that we in the news media are great fans of your candidacy: of the 200 people in the room for your “Victory Party” when polls closed Tuesday night, about 185 of them were journalists. And no wonder: You’re the only thing saving us from a long spring of despair, the only person who can, by extending the presidential race, drive up our audience and bring us the revenues we so desperately need.

You give us exactly what political journalists crave. Sure, some of us are ideologically biased, but we are far more biased in favor of conflict — and that’s why we’re all in the tank for you.

While the satiric tone was distinctively Milbank’s, he was going where some other high-profile journalists have recently trod. Just a few days earlier, New York magazine’s John Heilemann argued that the same media Gingrich is forever excoriating is, “in fact, in his corner in his battle with [GOP front-runner Mitt] Romney.” Heilemann offered a few candidate-based explanations for this situation: Gingrich is a sensational traffic magnet; Gingrich “gets” the media game; Romney seems kind of phony—but gave top billing to an alternative account:

“The tone of the coverage depends less on the candidates than on the overall dynamic of the race,” says [Center for Media and Public Affairs]
director Robert Lichter. “Journalists love a horse race and hate a front-runner.”

And Heilemann was following in the footsteps of The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, who in late December penned a tongue-in-cheek blog post in which he worried that the entertaining, colorful GOP primary campaign could become a dull rout:

And yet there is the terrible realization that all this excitement and drama could come crashing down around us in less than two weeks if the sober and reasonable Mitt Romney ends the year of Republican nonsense by winning Iowa and New Hampshire and securing the nomination before things even really get started. Reporters won’t admit it, but they—we—are all rooting for a dramatic primary season in 2012.

Nor is the message confined to wry columns or half-joking confessions. After Gingrich’s win in South Carolina, Broadcasting & Cable found that TV producers were positively giddy about the possibility of a protracted primary contest:

“It’s the best possible outcome for us,” says Jon Banner, executive producer of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. “We want this to be a race.”

Viewers are obviously more interested in a close race than a landslide (CNN saw the audience for its coverage of Gingrich’s unexpected win in South Carolina up 22% over that for the early call for Mitt Romney in New Hampshire), which CNN Washington bureau chief Sam Feist calls particularly interesting given the S.C. coverage happened on a Saturday night.

And as long as Gingrich remains up in the polls, the news networks will continue to cover him as a top contender going forward.

“My only bias is to keep the story going and to have a great story to cover,” says Betsy Fischer, executive producer of NBC’s Meet the Press. “Of course the longer it goes, the more interesting it is and the more there is for us to talk about on the program. Politics is the bread and butter of Meet the Press, so as long as that topic is top of people’s minds, that’s what we like.”

I just root for the story. It’s a line sportswriters use all the time, to defend against the charge that they favor a particular team. The echo is no coincidence. As Jack Shafer recently noted, the professional incentives facing campaign reporters and sportswriters are strikingly similar: both must “maintain reader enthusiasm for the months and months of caucuses or preseason games, primaries or regular season games, conventions or playoffs, and the general election or Super Bowl (or World Series).” In both cases, if you have a colorful underdog, you want him to stick around.

The difference is that to a much greater degree, political writers are participants in the race they’re covering—one way they might “have a great story to cover” is to do what they can “to keep the story going.” The analogy’s not perfect, but it’s sort of like having an umpire with an incentive to keep the underdog close.

Not every political correspondent has been so willing to acknowledge that the press corps has this bias. When, in a recent podcast, Slate editor David Plotz said that political reporters entertain “Rube Goldberg fantasies” about how long-shot candidates still have a chance because “they want there to be something interesting in the spring,” his colleague John Dickerson called the claim “wrong” and “offensive,” and said campaign reporters were—sticking to that sports metaphor—calling the plays as they came, not cheering them along.

But there’s at least some evidence to the contrary. Heilemann cites an analysis from the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which found that Romney received “markedly more negative” coverage “in the ten days leading up to the New Hampshire primary, when the post-Iowa sense of Romney’s inevitability kicked in.”

And anecdotally, while in Iowa I was struck by how readily the media latched onto the story of the “Santorum surge,” which was declared when that underdog candidate was polling in third place. (In that case, at least, the storyline was vindicated—though it’s hard to know how Santorum would have fared in Iowa without the media’s eager attention.)

Or consider this headline from the Los Angeles Times, which practically pleads with readers not to lose interest after Romney’s resounding Florida victory: “Mitt Romney’s Florida win won’t seal race: Despite his landslide victory, the battle for enough delegates to secure the Republican presidential nomination could run for weeks or months.”

(Politico, typically, covers every angle here: a media piece noting the press’s need for drama, a straight news piece that hammers home Romney’s inevitable win, and an analysis piece that argues that the next month is “uncharted territory” and “conservatives are still resisting Romney.” Even Mitt Romney’s inevitability, it seems, flip-flops. Update: Also,this.)

When CJR contributor Brendan Nyhan grappled with this subject after Iowa, he urged reporters to recognize their role in creating campaign “momentum.” Similarly, during the Santorum surge, I argued that the press should exercise “some self-awareness and restraint.”

If Milbank, Heilemann, Lizza et al are any indication, we have plenty of recognition and self-awareness in the press. Now how about that restraint?

‘Huffington Post’ Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine

Shocked and saddened witnesses at the Huffington Post’s news-aggregation facility have confirmed that employee Henry Evers, 25, died Wednesday after being sucked into the website’s powerful news-repurposing turbine, where his body was immediately torn to pieces.

The 200-ton content-compiling device, developed by Greek multimillionaire and site co-founder Ari­anna Huffington, sucks up original articles from around the web with its massive rotor assembly, re-brands them with the Huffington Post name, and then spits them back out on the company’s home page.

Workers said that when the machine ground to a halt at approximately 11:30 a.m., Evers reached inside to dislodge a particularly thoughtful 700-word Cristian Science Monitor essay on the unrest in Syria that had become jammed.

Apparently unprepared for the aggregator mechanism’s quick restart, Evers was gruesomely dismembered by its rapidly spinning blades, which soaked the room in blood and unprocessed news content.

“I heard this grinding noise, and then I saw all these Washington Post stories, sexy pictures of people in the workplace, and celebr­ity anti-vaccine editorials start to back up on the factory floor,” said Huffington Post editor Emily Paxton, who monitors an array of computer screens displaying news sites like NYTimes.com and then presses enter on a keyboard, sending the content into the turbine, which through sheer axial force posts each piece on HuffingtonPost.com with a 30-word introductory paragraph. “Before I could stop him, Henry had his arm crammed way down in there. He pulled out an article, smiled, and the next thing I knew, he was sucked headfirst into the rotary casing.”

“We couldn’t shut it down,” continued Paxton, adding that the smell of mutilated remains mixed with raw Internet media was gag-inducing. “If we had, it would have taken a full day for the technicians to reset it, and we couldn’t risk missing a breaking story on Brody Jenner.”

Since The Huffington Post was founded in 2005, its headquarters has consisted of two rooms: Arianna Huffington’s spacious, lav­ishly appointed office overlooking New York City, and the windowless 10,000-square-foot subterranean warehouse that houses the turbine. More than 700 low-wage workers, known as writers, clock in every day, and, dressed in their Huffington Post hard hats and coveralls, work in dark, unsafe conditions to ensure the machine runs smoothly and constantly churns out content.

Operating at 5,100 rpm, or the equivalent of 2,500 online articles and videos per minute, the turbine uses its massive power to sweep the Internet for stories or photos that ensure HuffingtonPost.com receives enough page views and mouse clicks to appease advertisers.

Though Evers had worked with the com­pany for 11 months, reports indicate he was unaware the turbine often overheats and malfunctions when tasked with posting an article of more than 400 words.

“Evers was pulverized,” said Aaron Thomas, a spokesperson for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “There was no way to identify him. No dental remains, no hair samples, just eyewitness reports and 17 cell-phone camera videos that the turbine immediately threw up on the site under the tags ‘Funny’ and ‘OMG.’”

“In a way, though, maybe it’s a good thing he was ripped to shreds and killed,” added Thomas, later saying that because The Huffington Post didn’t provide Evers with health insurance, he wouldn’t have been able to afford his hospital bills, anyway. “Working the HuffPo turbine is no way to live.”

According to sources, editor-in-chief Ari­anna Huffington appeared shaken after the incident, asking if the turbine was broken, if it would need to be replaced, and if the horrific accident would affect the posting of a “Worst Hair In Hollywood” celebrity feature.

“When you harvest as much content as we do, there are bound to be some fatalities,” Huffington said in a statement. “That’s just part of the job.”

Representatives from the website said that to honor Evers’ memory, they planned to post a slide show titled “25 Funniest Animal Photobombs We Think Henry Would Have Loved” as early as tomorrow.

MILITARY

Obama’s fast Afghanistan exit is a surprise decision of strategic skill and political courage 

Leslie Gelb, Daily Beast:

[…] News stories and commentaries are dismissing the decision as political grandstanding to gain public applause. Actually, however, it involves some serious political risk. Inevitably, some senior military officers will share their doubts with the press and friends in Congress. They will all say, as they believe, that Obama’s new plan comes just as the tide of war is turning against the Taliban, and that the president is snatching defeat from the potential jaws of victory. These charges will be replayed in the media and given a megaphone by neoconservatives and Republican Party stalwarts. They will swear Obama is putting American security at risk.

The truth is that the president and his team are taking a risk. The risk is that early removal of U.S. and NATO troops from combat could lead to military gains in the field by the Taliban before November. But—and here are the political and strategic smarts—the Obama team is not actually removing the troops from Afghanistan before the U.S. election; they’re just removing them from the fighting. If worse comes to worst, and a calamity approaches, the White House can always send the considerable number of U.S. troops still in country into the breach.

With this strategy, the administration accomplishes three goals: (1) U.S. troops are removed from combat earlier, reducing lives lost and cost; (2) U.S. troops return home earlier; and (3) both security and political risks are made manageable. […]

Press speculation immediately attributed the new U.S. and NATO decision to the machinations and complaints of President Sarkozy of France. He, it is being said, triggered this new White House decision when he announced that French troops would depart by the end of this year. He and France were infuriated by reports that French troops had been killed by Afghan soldiers whom they were training.

In fact, the White House had begun to shape this decision almost two months ago, with National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Vice President Joe Biden, and Defense Secretary Panetta doing the pushing. Key administration officials said these senior leaders had become convinced that U.S. interests in Afghanistan were no longer vital, and that more American deaths and billions in costs were no longer worthwhile. But they hadn’t figured out the details or the politics until about two weeks ago. Specifically, they wouldn’t speed up withdrawals until after the U.S. election, but they would hasten the end of the American combat role. They still have additional big decisions to work out with generals on the ground: what use to make of U.S. airpower in support of Afghan forces and to forestall concentrations of Taliban troops; whether to continue special-forces attacks, etc. Also, and very importantly, they still need to figure out how fast to bring home the remaining 68,000 troops after the U.S. election.

Another surprise and sound part of this strategic package is that the U.S. and NATO will dial back on their goals and financial support for Afghan security forces. The plan had been to increase them to 350,000 from 310,000. In all likelihood, however, these troops will be cut back even from their present level of 310,000 in order to make them affordable to the Kabul government and less costly to the West.

Yes, the U.S. will continue to support the Afghan government in some form and to some dollar degree for some time. Much of the space vacated by the U.S. should be filled by Afghanistan’s neighbors. If they have any good sense about the threats they will face from Afghan refugees, drugs, and Islamic extremism, they will finally step up to their responsibilities.

But for the United States, the war is coming to an end. Its critical goals have been achieved. Osama bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda there is virtually dead. There are no vital interests to justify further great sacrifices. And now it’s time to act upon this reality and bring the heroes home.

OCCUPY

AFL-CIO, UNITE, and Occupy all planning action in Indianapolis for Super Bowl 

ThinkProgress:

Four days before his state hosts Super Bowl XLVI, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) signed anti-union “right-to-work” legislation into law Wednesday afternoon, making Indiana the 23rd right-to-work state in the country. Daniels signed the law despite the fact that thousands of workers gathered outside the statehouse in the days leading up to the law’s passage, and despite his own apparent opposition to such a law back in 2006.

In the days since more than 10,000 protesters marched through downtown Indianapolis, union officials and other organizers have grappled with how, and if, they should make their voices heard during Super Bowl festivities. Daniels has warned opponents of the new law that disrupting the Super Bowl would give the state a “black eye.” Nevertheless, with the National Football League’s Players Association officially opposing the law, labor leaders and organizers affiliated with local Occupy groups have vowed to press on.

“If it does pass, we’ll use this, the world stage that is the Super Bowl, to spread the message that Indiana is an inhospitable place for working men and women,” Jeff Harris, Communications and Outreach Coordinator for the Indiana AFL-CIO, told ThinkProgress before the law passed. “And that the very people that built the stadium in which the Super Bowl is going to be played and the very people who built the city that is enjoying the limelight — the very people who made this possible — are being disrespected.”

The AFL-CIO will have a “constant presence” at Super Bowl events, Harris said, but its actions will be informative rather than disruptive. The union, which encouraged workers to meet with their state representatives in the days before the law passed and organized rallies outside the statehouse Wednesday, will pass out leaflets and pamphlets around Super Bowl village and Lucas Oil Stadium, the site of the game, Harris said.

UNITE HERE, a hotel workers’ union, has organized its own protest of the Hyatt hotel Friday, where several hundred workers will picket to protest low wages, missed overtime pay, and the firing of contract workers. Though its protest isn’t specifically tied to the right-to-work law, UNITE officials say the law will make their ongoing attempts to organize hotel workers harder, and other unions’ protesters will join their picket.

According to a UNITE release, DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, will participate in the protest. Smith has issued a statement and written an editorial against the right-to-work law, and several NFL players, including Indiana native and Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler, have also spoken out.

In a January interview with The Nation’s Dave Zirin, Smith, who sits on the AFL-CIO’s executive board, said that “if the issue is still percolating by the time of Super Bowl, I can promise you that the players of the National Football League and their union will be up front about what we think about this and why.” Though Smith is slated to appear at the UNITE protest, the NFLPA wouldn’t confirm if he or other officials would aide other union protests.

But Smith has made his opposition to the Indiana law clear. “We share all the same issues that the American people share,” he told Zirin. “We want decent wages. We want a fair pension. We want to be taken care of when we get hurt. We want a decent and safe working environment. So when you look at proposed legislation in a place like Indiana that wants to call it something like ‘Right to Work,’ I mean, let’s just put the hammer on the nail. It’s untrue.”

Various local Occupy groups will also take action, local organizers told ThinkProgress, to show their support for Indiana workers. And even though right-to-work is now law in Indiana, protesters have promised to keep fighting. “This is not a fight that is going to go away,” Tithi Bhattacharya, a Purdue professor and Occupy Purdue member, said of the right-to-work struggle. “In the coming days and weeks we are going to have to build this struggle on the street, in the workplace and in our communities. Super Bowl Sunday is another opportunity to make our voices heard.”

POLITICS

Change Happened

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJSa4d-OeMI

EXCLUSIVE: Major Romney bundler is agent of foreign government

ThinkProgress:

Ignacio E. Sanchez is a lobbyist at DLA Piper, an influential global law firm and a major bundler for the Mitt Romney campaign. A ThinkProgress review of public records reveals Sanchez is also a registered foreign agent representing the interests of the United Arab Emirates and of a former president of the Dominican Republic.

While political candidates are not legally required to identify bundlers — volunteer fundraisers who collect bundles of campaign contribution checks for the campaign — a 2007 law requires that federal candidates disclose the names of any registered lobbyists who bundle large amounts for their campaign. On Tuesday, Romney’s campaign reported that 14 lobbyists combined to raise more than $1.6 million last year in bundled contributions.

One of those lobbyist-bundlers was Sanchez, who raked in $86,700 for the former Massachusetts governor. This major fundraising raises questions about the level of access and influence Sanchez — and by extension, his corporate and international clients — would have in a Romney administration.

Unlike the other 13 identified lobbyist-bundlers, Sanchez is a registered foreign agent. A formfiled Monday with the U.S. Department of Justice reveals that he beyond just representing the interests of those domestic clients, Sanchez also represents the embassy of the United Arab Emirates and the presidential campaign of Dominican Republic former president Hipolito Mejia.

Mejia is seeking to reclaim the job he held from 2000 to 2004 and lost in a landslide defeat, amid a national economic crisis and financial near-collapse.

The United Arab Emirates has been among the stronger U.S. allies in the Middle East and is akey player in OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. But the interests of the two countries don’t always converge and groups like Human Rights Watch have raised concerns about the country’s suppression of free speech and political disagreement.

In the past, Sanchez also represented the governments of Turkey and Ethiopia. Current federal lobbying disclosure forms show that he lobbies Congress and the administration on behalf of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide (which includes the Sheraton, W, and St. Regis brands) and Diageo North America, the makers of Guinness, Jose Cuervo, Captain Morgan, and dozens of other alcoholic beverages.

President Obama does not accept campaign contributions donated or bundled by federal lobbyists or foreign agents. In last week’s State of the Union address, he called for a ban on bundlers lobbying saying “Let’s make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress can’t lobby Congress, and vice versa — an idea that has bipartisan support, at least outside of Washington.”

But Romney — who has not voluntarily disclosed any other bundlers — is apparently all too happy to accept money from those who are paid to influence policy decisions on behalf of special interests, foreign and domestic.

GOP refuses to acknowledge Bush tax cuts added $2trillion to deficit. 

Congressman Gary Peters, Michigan:

Every single House Republican votes against the Peters Amendment to insert factual findings about how the Bush Tax Cuts added over $2 trillion to the deficit

Washington, D.C. -- Today every single House Republican voted against an amendment by U.S. Rep. Gary Peters to insert factual findings about the Bush Tax Cuts into a Republican budget bill (H.R. 3582). The Peters Amendment was defeated by a vote of 174 to 244 with every Republican voting no.

“I’m disappointed that every single one of my Republican colleagues refused to admit that the Bush Administration was wrong when they told the American people that the Bush Tax Cuts would pay for themselves,” said U.S. Rep. Gary Peters. “We are in the middle of a jobs crisis and have serious deficit problems that need to be solved, but if the Republicans can’t even acknowledge basic facts about the impact that the Bush Tax Cuts have had on the economy, it’s hard to take their solutions seriously. I can’t say I’m surprised, but once again, Republicans aren’t letting the facts get in the way of their opinions.”

Super PACs Are Already Yesterday’s News 

Kevin Drum:

[…] Right after Citizens United was decided, there was a great debate within the campaign finance world over whether the case would change campaign finance patterns. Some pointed to the fact that in the 2010 election, we saw barely any independent spending directly by corporations. My view had always been that most (for profit) corporations would not want to stick their necks out and risk alienating customers by putting their names on independent ads.For corporate money to really matter, there would have to be a way to filter it through committees and sometimes to hide the money entirely. Thanks to Super PACs and the transformation of 501c4′s, both of these are now possible and we are witnessing the corporate money coming in….We don’t know how much corporate money is coming in now (and as to 501c4s, because of lack of disclosure we likely will never have the full picture). But it seems a safe bet that there is lot more corporate money coming into the system than was (barely) allowed in the pre-Citizens United world.

….My big concern before yesterday was that we would see a lot of transfers of money from 501c4s to affiliated Super PACs to shield the identity of donors to Super PACs. I’m still trying to get a handle on how much of this took place (apparently less than I thought). But the reason these transfers are not taking place is that it appears the 501c4s are engaging in much more directelection-related activity than they have in the past.  That is, we are seeing some 501c4s becoming pure election vehicles. The relation of 501c4s to super pacs is now like the past relation between 527s and pacs—these are now the vehicles of questionable legality to influence elections. While Adam Skaggs is rightly focused on fixing the coordination rules for Super PACs, this seems to be fighting yesterday’s war already. The key is to stop 501c4s from becoming shadow super PACs. Yes, campaign finance reform community, it has become this bad: I want more super PACs, because the 501c4 alternative is worse!

Well, yes, we could rein in 501c(4) spending by requiring that they disclose their donors, and the DISCLOSE Act would have done just that. Needless to say, it failed even in 2010, when Democrats controlled the House and had a huge majority in the Senate. It received, if I recall correctly, two Republican votes in the House and zero Republican votes in the Senate.

So there’s not really much chance that a revived and amended DISCLOSE Act is going to pass now. We are doomed.

Why Mitt Romney And The GOP Want To Convince You That The Poor Have Too Much Money

Political Correction:

Substantively, Mitt Romney’s statement that he isn’t concerned about poor people matches up perfectly with his policy proposals, which demonstrate a callous disregard for the wellbeing of anyone who isn’t already well-off. But that doesn’t mean Romney’s comments were a sincere and straightforward articulation of his agenda: This is, after all, a candidate whose only sincere commitment is to saying whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear. And, indeed, Romney’s explanation for his lack of concern about the poor was characteristically disingenuous, pointing to the very social safety net he proposes to destroy as evidence that we needn’t be concerned for those who rely upon it.

More likely, Romney’s comments were an invocation of a decades-long right-wing narrative designed to drive a wedge between the poor and middle class, to the benefit of a handful of wealthy elites. That narrative is an essential element of the right’s approach to politics: After all, a movement that exists primarily to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of as few people as possible won’t exist long without a successful divide-and-conquer strategy. Recognizing that they need the votes of more than just the nation’s millionaires and billionaires — and that the middle class shows up to vote more reliably than the poor, particularly if youmake it extremely difficult for the poor to do so — conservatives have long worked to convince the middle class that the reason they are struggling is that the poor have it too good. Hence Ronald Reagan’s apocryphal tales of Cadillac-driving “welfare queens”: anything to distract the public from policies that redistribute wealth upwards, not downwards.

Take another look at Romney’s comments about the poor:

I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. …I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling. … The challenge right now — we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor. … My focus is on middle-income Americans. … We have a very ample safety net, … we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.

The message is clear: The middle class — the “very heart of America” — is struggling while we lavish countless benefits on the poor. Never mind that the real reason the middle class is struggling is an economy rigged in favor of the super-rich, resulting in a massive redistribution of wealth towards the very top and away from the poor and middle class alike — and never mind that Romney, a beneficiaryof this rigging, wants to rig things even further. Romney’s comments pit the middle class and poor against each other in a scramble for the table scraps left behind after he and his fellow plutocrats have taken their ever-larger share of the pie.

[...]

In the conservative narrative, not only are poor people squandering government money — your money — they aren’t even poor.  Poor people have refrigerators and VCRs and most of them aren’t actually starving to death in the streets, so they aren’t really poor at all, according to the Heritage Foundation and other propagandists for the one percent. With such luxuries, it’s no wonder the poor spend their government handouts — your money — on Rolls Royces.

As much as conservatives decry “class warfare” that “divides Americans against each other,” the truth is that the modern conservative movement is the most enthusiastic — and successful — practitioner of class warfare in American history. It has waged this war on behalf of the wealthy, against the rest of the nation. And it owes its success in large part to a strategy of instigating a civil class war between people who should be united in opposition to policies that harm them all.

As always, the right’s campaign to drive a wedge between the victims of its coddle-the-wealthy policies and the other victims of its coddle-the-wealthy policies will be well-funded, disciplined and cunning. It’s going to have to be in order to convince people struggling to pay their mortgage that the problem is that people struggling to pay their electric bill have it too good. Especially when the quarter-billionaire Republican presidential frontrunner pays a lower tax rate than they do.

Reuters: Analysis Wall St. cash flows to Romney over Obama

Rep. Heath Shuler (D) won’t seek re-election

RMoney Pays No Gift Taxes on $100M 

Booman Tribune:

Yeah, he did it again (video from Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word):

The idea that someone could pay zero gift taxes on contributions to a $100 million trust fund may surprise people who have heard arguments that the wealthy are overburdened by gift and estate taxes. But the Romneys’ gift-tax avoidance strategy is perfectly legal.[...]

The explanation may stem from how the Romneys were able to value the assets put into the trust. If I’m right, it involves a special tax deal that Congress gives to people who manage investment partnerships, as Romney did at Bain Capital from 1984 to 1999.

This deal allows these managers to receive a kind of compensation known as “carried interest.” As the tax law sees it, carried interest does not represent ownership of stock or other securities, only the right to receive future profits. Because there is no ownership, the IRS lets people value their carried interest at zero for gift tax purposes if they meet certain technical rules.

Mitt Romney And Donald Trump: They Both Like Firing People

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EK3DouK8qJM

AP: Romney stock trades clash with divestment pledge

- During his presidential campaign in 2007, Republican candidate Mitt Romney promised that a trust overseeing his financial portfolio would shed any investments that conflicted with GOP positions toward Iran, China, stem cell research and other issues. But Romney’s family trusts kept some of those stocks and repeatedly bought new investments in similar holdings as recently as 2010, when they were sold in advance of his latest White House campaign, a detailed review of Romney’s financial records by The Associated Press shows.

Recently disclosed 2010 tax returns for three family trust funds for Romney, his wife, Ann, and their adult children show scores of trades in such investments, worth more than $3 million when the holdings were all sold in 2010.

A Romney campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said the former Massachusetts governor has no control over the investments made by his blind trust, but the trustee has tried to manage the trades “in a manner consistent with Gov. Romney’s publicly expressed positions.”

The continual trading between 2006 and 2010 raises questions about why the investments continued for three years, even after Romney said the trust would sell off any conflicted holdings, during a period when Romney has sought to convince voters of his conservative Republican values. The trades also raise questions about whether any of the transactions were vetted for possible conflicts or purposes of political perception before they were made.

“Financially, these would seem to be completely legitimate investments,” said Thomas B. Cooke, a professor of business law at Georgetown University and former president of the National Society of Tax Professionals. “But for someone running for president, there’s also a smell test.”

Romney’s spokeswoman would not respond to questions about the timing or vetting of his investments in his blind trust. She said, however, that the lawyer running the trust occasionally makes adjustments in holdings with Romney’s positions in mind.

Romney has kept many of his investments in a trust he describes as blind since he entered the Massachusetts governor’s race in 2002. The trust is designed to eliminate conflicts of interest by preventing Romney from knowing about trades made on his behalf and from making specific financial decisions. A Boston attorney who runs the trust oversees Romney’s far-flung holdings in stocks, mutual funds and securities.

Romney can set the general direction of his finances, Cooke and other tax experts said. Romney made that clear in August 2007, as he tried to quell a growing furor about his ownership of some stocks that clashed with Republican positions on Iran, China and other issues.

“The trustee of the blind trust has said publicly that he will endeavor to make my investments conform to my positions, and I have confidence that he will do that well,” Romney said in 2007. The lawyer heading Romney’s trust, R. Bradford Malt, had said earlier in 2007 that he was trying to eliminate conflicts between Romney’s holdings and his policy positions.

In some cases, though, it took more than three years for Romney’s trust to sell off stocks in companies whose operations appeared to be problematic for him. The AP review of Romney’s capital gains financial statements indicate that he lost about $70,000 on the trades.

In 2007, Romney held between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of shares in Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company that engages in limited use of stem cells for research. But it was not until October 2010, on the eve of his second White House run, that Romney’s trust sold off the last 27 shares of Novo Nordisk stock -- among 90 shares worth $7,700 that Romney’s trust sold that year.

Romney supported stem cell research during his 2002 race for governor but changed his mind before the 2007 presidential race, saying the turnabout led him to oppose abortion. Now, like many social conservatives and his Republican campaign rivals, Romney opposes any use of human embryonic stem cells for research into diseases and other medical issues because the work could destroy viable human embryos.

Romney’s trust also waited until 2010 to sell more than 900 shares -- worth nearly $50,000 -- that it held since 2006 in Teva Pharmaceutical, an Israeli company that engages in stem cell research. Teva also manufactures “Plan B One-Step,” an emergency contraceptive known as the “morning after pill,” which is opposed by anti-abortion groups.

In 2005, as Massachusetts governor, Romney vetoed an attempt by the state legislature to require hospitals to provide morning-after pills to rape victims and make them available to women and teenaged girls without a prescription. Romney said at the time he opposed the contraceptive’s distribution because the pill would not only prevent conception but “would also terminate life after conception.” His veto was overruled.

The Obama administration recently drew criticism from pro-abortion rights advocates by allowing the Teva contraceptive to be sold over the counter, but not to girls younger than age 17, who would still require a prescription.

As late as 2009, the Romney trusts bought 600 new shares in Fresenius Medical Care, a German firm that also did stem cell work. The trust sold the Fresenius holdings, worth more than $30,000, in 2010.

The head of the Susan B. Anthony List, a political committee that supports anti-abortion candidates, said she was concerned about Romney’s investments in firms whose work is opposed by social conservatives.

“Embryonic stem cell research is the issue that was the catalyst for the governor’s pro-life conversion,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the committee’s president. “He should explain what appears to be a lack of follow-through in coming to terms with an issue about which he expresses great passion.”

Romney’s tax returns, which he released under pressure on Jan. 24, also described numerous recent stock trades in companies tied to the Chinese government or to its censorship and crackdown on free speech. As recently as October 2009, Romney’s trusts were buying stock in companies like China Northshore Oil and China Merchants Holdings. More than 130 shares of the oil company were sold in late January 2010 for $19,000, along with 630 shares of China Merchants worth $21,000. The Chinese government has long incurred criticism for its tight control of the country’s media and internet and for its suppression of dissent.

Shares of other Chinese assets that Romney’s trust bought and sold in 2010 included the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Life Insurance and New Oriental Education, a company sued in 2003 by a U.S. firm for copyright infringement.

The director of an international organization advocating human rights in China said Romney’s personal investments were as important as his political statements in trying to gauge the depth of his support for change inside China.

A presidential candidate “is accountable to the public for his full record, including financial investments and the potential human rights impact of the companies he has invested in,” said Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China.

Some of the largest stock trades made by the Romney trust involved companies that have operated in Iran. Romney has urged toughened sanctions and military steps against Iran and has called for strategic divestment of firms that do business there. In 2007, his trustee said he had sold off Romney investments in French and Italian energy companies with business ties to Iran.

But between mid-2009 and mid-2010, the Romney trusts made large investments in securities from BNP Paribas, a French bank with long-standing operations in Iran. The bank halted new business in Iran in 2007 but is still trying to terminate outstanding loans there. In all, Romney’s family trusts bought more than 2.6 million shares, which were all sold in late 2010 for about $2.5 million.

Romney’s trust for his grown children also bought and sold shares in China North Oil, recently named by the Congressional Research Service as a likely violator of the Iran Sanctions Act, and in Intesa Sanpaolo, an Italian bank that has been under investigation by U.S. authorities for handling of Iranian funds. There were also trades in stock of Gazprom, Schlumberger, Komatsu and Unilever -- all firms that have had business in or with Iran.

Many of those companies are included among an extensive list compiled by United Against Nuclear Iran, a bipartisan group urging pressure on firms with business in Iran. A spokesman for the group, Nathan Carleton, declined to comment on Romney’s holdings. But Carleton noted that the group’s list -- it named several of the firms the Romney trusts bought stock in -- “is available for anyone to investigate.”

Groundhog Day in Congress: Dems again target GOP over Medicare -- Washington Post 

Greg Sargent:

Over the weekend, GOP Rep. Paul Ryan confirmed that the House Republican budget would again contain key elements of his plan to transform Medicare — even though some polls have shown the idea to be deeply unpopular and Dems have vowed to run on it in 2012.

Asked by The New York Times whether he intended to push similar changes to Medicare again this year, Ryan replied: “Yes, absolutely.”

Now the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is set to go on the offensive on the issue in the increasingly close battle for the House — and it’s very possible the issue could have a real impact on the presidential race.

The DCCC will go out today with what it’s calling a “Groundhog Day Alert” in the districts of some 70 vulnerable House Republicans, reminding voters of their last vote on Medicare and warning of the next one to come. Here’s what the alert in the district of Rep. Dan Benishek of Michigan says:

“Michigan voters don’t need a groundhog to come out of the hole in order to tell them how this will end: Voters will reject Dan Benishek putting the ultra wealthy ahead of seniors once again. Even though voters already rejected House Republicans plan to end Medicare, this Groundhog Day Republicans like Benishek are resurrecting their plan to protect billionaires and Big Oil, while leaving seniors out in the cold. It’s the same thing again from Dan Benishek — double health care costs for Michigan seniors, more tax breaks for the ultra wealthy.”

DCCC chair Steve Israel has reportedly instructed House Dem candidates to be relentless in stressing the GOP position on Medicare, to make it a “defining issue in the 2012 elections.” A recent poll by the Dem firm Democracy Corps found that the Dem message — that House Republicans voted to “end Medicare as we know it” — tests well, with 77 percent in 60 House GOP districts saying it raises serious doubts about incumbents.

The Ryan Medicare plan has become a cause celebre on the right. And so Dems are hoping to use its return to paint the House GOP as AWOL on jobs and still in the grip of its Tea Party wing — after the Tea Party caucus helped engineer the debt ceiling and payroll tax cut debacles that helped drag down the GOP’s (and Congress’s) approval ratings to historic lows. Israel has been unwilling to predict that Dems will recapture the House, and House Republicans have been working hard to signal seriousness about jobs by, among other things, rolling out a plan yesterday to cut small business taxes.

But Medicare may again loom large, and one big question is whether it will prove a drag on presumtive GOP nominee Mitt Romney. The fierce competition with Newt Gingrich forced Romney to fully embrace the Ryan Medicare plan, in order to get around to Gingrich’s right. Dems know that it’s crucial that they prevent Romney from achieving separation from the unpopular GOP Congress — and his embrace of the Ryan plan is perhaps the number one shackle Dems will use to attach Romney to the House GOP. How much this will ultimately matter in the general election is an open question, but a rerun of the debate over Ryan and Medicare could make this task that much easier for Dems.

President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast

www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3WCQP5IA1Y

WaPo: Strategic Alliance Between Ron Paul and Romney

[…] But Mitt Romney and Ron Paul haven’t laid a hand on each other.

They never do.

Despite deep differences on a range of issues, Romney and Paul became friends in 2008, the last time both ran for president. So did their wives, Ann Romney and Carol Paul. The former Massachusetts governor compliments the Texas congressman during debates, praising Paul’s religious faith during the last one, in Jacksonville, Fla. Immediately afterward, as is often the case, the Pauls and the Romneys gravitated toward one another to say hello.

The Romney-Paul alliance is more than a curious connection. It is a strategic partnership: for Paul, an opportunity to gain a seat at the table if his long-shot bid for the presidency fails; for Romney, a chance to gain support from one of the most vibrant subgroups within the Republican Party.

“It would be very foolish for anybody in the Republican Party to dismiss a very real constituency,” said one senior GOP aide in Washington who is familiar with both camps. “Ron Paul plays a very valuable part in the process and brings a lot of voters toward the Republican Party and ultimately into the voting booth, and that’s something that can’t be ignored.”

To ensure that they are heard — not just now but after Election Day, too — Paul and his followers are working to gain a permanent foothold in the Republican Party nationwide. One state at a time, Paul’s supporters are seating themselves at county committee meetings, and standing for election as state officers and convention delegates, to make sure their candidate’s libertarian vision is taken into account. The goal is a lasting voice for an army of outsiders thathas long felt ignored and sees the nation headed toward ruin if things don’t change.

That is just fine with the Romney campaign, which would be happy to bring Paul’s constituency — perhaps the most intense and loyal in the country — into the fold.

Romney’s aides are “quietly in touch with Ron Paul,” according to a Republican adviser who is in contact with the Romney campaign and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its internal thinking. The two campaigns have coordinated on minor things, the adviser said — even small details, such as staggering the timing of each candidate’s appearance on television the night of the New Hampshire primary for maximum effect.

One advantage for Romney is that Paul’s presence in the race helps keep the GOP electorate fractured. But there is also a growing recognition that the congressman plans to stay in the contest over the long term — and that accommodating him and his supporters could help unify Republican voters in the general election against President Obama.

“Ron Paul wants a presence at the convention,” the adviser said — and Romney, if he is the nominee, would grant it.

What Paul and his supporters would demand, and what Romney would offer, are subjects of some speculation. One Paul adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely, said prime-time speaking slots for Paul and his son Rand, the junior senator from Kentucky, are obvious goals. On the policy front, Ron Paul’s priorities are reforming the Federal Reserve and reducing federal spending. So promises to audit the Fed and to tackle deficit reduction seriously could appease the congressman and his supporters, the adviser said. […]

Paul’s infiltration strategy began in 2008, after his last presidential bid, when he saw the potential to continue building his movement by working within the Republican Party.

But the idea took off in 2010 when Paul’s son Rand ran for Senate. On an outsider, small-government message very similar to his father’s, Rand Paul won the Republican primary that year against an opponent who was handpicked by Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader and senior senator from Kentucky.

Then, quite strangely, the establishment and the Pauls came together.

At McConnell’s request, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent an adviser to Kentucky to watch over Rand Paul’s general-election campaign — “to be the grown-up in the room,” according to one Washington Republican who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.

The adviser, Trygve Olson, developed a friendship with Rand Paul, and the two realized that they could teach each other a lot — to the benefit of both candidate and party. Olson showed Paul and his campaign establishment tactics: working with the news media, fine-tuning its message. And Paul showed Olson — and by extension, McConnell — how many people were drawn to the GOP by his message of fiscal responsibility.

One day that year, at Paul’s request, McConnell joined him for a tea party gathering in Kentucky, according to a Republican who was there. “Who are these people?” McConnell asked, bewildered by the dearth of familiar faces at a political event in his home state.

And at Rand Paul’s suggestion, Olson joined his father’s presidential campaign this year, basically to do what he did for Rand: help bring the Paul constituency into the Republican coalition without threatening the party. It’s probably no small coincidence that the partnership helps Rand’s burgeoning political career, too.

“You can dress in black and stand on the hill and smash the state and influence nobody, or you can realize the dynamics and the environment and get involved in the most pragmatic way to win minds and win votes and influence change,” said Benton, the campaign manager. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”

POLLS

PublicPolicyPolling: Ron Paul’s strongest candidate with independents in MO, leading Obama 47-36. Trails 45-43 overall though

A recent Pew Research survey showed that just 8% of Americans said they’d be more likely to vote for a Donald Trump-backed presidential candidate while 26% said less they’d be less likely to do so.

PublicPolicyPolling: Romney’s unpopularity is what’s making Obama competitive in Missouri. 30% see Mitt favorably, 54% unfav

Ignore Those Polls! (Influence on the Vote Edition) 

Jonathan Bernstein:

This has come up twice already this week, so I guess it’s time for a reminder: people usually don’t know why they vote for the candidates they choose to vote for, and are not particularly good at assessing how something influenced that vote — let alone how some hypothetical future event would influence them.

Today’s installment was from one of the sillier events on the campaign trail: Donald Trump’s endorsement, which apparently is going to go to Mitt Romney today. Now, in real life no one is going to care one way or another that Donald Trump endorsed a candidate. About the only effect would be a very short blast of publicity, but leading presidential candidates get plenty of that anyway. This isn’t something that will be forgotten by November; this is something that will almost certainly have been forgotten by Saturday, when Nevadans caucus. In other words, it’s not going to affect vote choice at all. And yet if you ask voters, it turns out that some will tell you that they would be more likely, and a somewhat larger number will tell you that they’ll be less likely, to vote for someone with a Trump endorsement. Hey, reporters: don’t believe those polls! You can take it as a measure of what respondents think about Trump, if you care about such things, but there’s no reason to believe that this kind of self-reporting about vote choice is meaningful at all, and it shouldn’t be included in stories about a Trump endorsement as if it was meaningful.

Similarly, there was a ton of coverage about exit polls in Florida that asked about whether ads or debates had influenced vote choice (sorry, no links; most of what I heard was on TV and radio). Hey, reporters: don’t believe those polls! People have no real way of knowing how they were influenced in these sorts of things even if they try real hard, and there’s no reason to believe that exit poll respondents did any such self-examination. Don’t believe me? Ask a room full of people if they vote based on political party. You’ll get only a handful of people who believe that they do — and yet we know very well that party is far and away the biggest factor in partisan elections.

The bottom line here is that polling is a really good tool for reporters to use in many cases, but remember: what polling tells you for sure is only what people will say if they’re asked a question by a pollster. We can be confident (if it’s a competent pollster) that the answer can be extrapolated out to the full relevant population, but only to the extent that we can be confident that everyone would give similar answers to those questions when asked by pollsters. It’s the reporters job to stop and think whether those answers have anything to do with real attitudes or real behavior. They might — polling about vote choice the day before the election is usually very accurate! But in cases when there’s no good reason to think the poll is telling us something meaningful, it’s a disservice to readers to report those poll results.

PEW: Low-Income Republicans Say Government Does Too Little for Poor People 

PEW: 70% of low-income Republican voters say rich & corporations hv too much power compared to 39% of high income GOP voters

SCIENCE

Newfound Alien Planet Is Best Candidate Yet to Support Life, Scientists Say

Scientific American:

A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.

“It’s the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it’s not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. “It’s right smack in the habitable zone — there’s no question or discussion about it. It’s not on the edge, it’s right in there.”

Vogt is one of the authors of the new study, which was led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private, nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C.

“This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it,” Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.

An alien super-Earth
The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion).

“This is basically our next-door neighbor,” Vogt said. “It’s very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one.”

Interestingly enough, the host star, GJ 667C, is a member of a triple-star system. GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star that is about a third of the mass of the sun, and while it is faint, it can be seen by ground-based telescopes, Vogt said. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

“The planet is around one star in a triple-star system,” Vogt explained. “The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky.”

The discovery of a planet around GJ 667C came as a surprise to the astronomers, because the entire star system has a different chemical makeup than our sun. The system has much lower abundances of heavy elements (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), such as iron, carbon and silicon.

“It’s pretty deficient in metals,” Vogt said. “These are the materials out of which planets form — the grains of stuff that coalesce to eventually make up planets — so we shouldn’t have really expected this star to be a likely case for harboring planets.”

The fortuitous discovery could mean that potentially habitable alien worlds could exist in a greater variety of environments than was previously thought possible, the researchers said.

“Statistics tell us we shouldn’t have found something this quickly this soon unless there’s a lot of them out there,” Vogt said. “This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there. It was almost too easy to find, and it happened too quickly.”

The detailed findings of the study will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

MORE>>>

UNIONS

Unions scramble in face of “devastating” Arizona labor bills

TPM:

Union members were searching for a way out of the wilderness on Wednesday in Arizona as the Republican-controlled Senate moved ahead quickly on several bills that could devastate organized labor in the state.

The measures caught many union leaders by surprise, being introduced on Monday night and passed in committee less than 48 hours later.

At issue is a sweeping series of restrictions that would, among other things, ban unions that represent workers in state, county or city governments from engaging in any type of negotiations that affect the terms of their employment. That includes teachers, prison workers and the state’s powerful police and firefighters unions. The move would take away much of the power those unions have and turn them into something more akin to trade groups.

In interviews with TPM throughout the day, union leaders seemed to still be catching their collective breath. With their Democratic allies outnumbered 21-9 in the Senate, the unions appeared to have no clear or coordinated strategy about how they were going to fight the measures, which will need to pass at least one more committee before going to a full vote of the Senate and then moving on to the House.

“The whole thing is a surprise,” said Pete Gorraiz, president of the United Phoenix Fire Fighters Association. “It steamrolled right through.”

Groups like the AFL-CIO were already talking about coordinating some sort of large-scale protest to fight the measures, but the organization’s executive director for Arizona said something like that would possibly take weeks to plan.

“We have a scheduled day of action for March 1, but we may be looking at moving that closer,” Rebekah Friend, the union’s state director, told TPM. “It takes time. You can’t mobilize in a day. You just can’t.”

Friend was optimistic that Arizonans would come out in force against what she sees as extremist legislation. She pointed to recent Democratic victories in the state, including elections of mayors in Phoenix and Tucson, as proof that Arizona is more moderate than it gets credit for.

But she was also exploring several backup plans in case the measures end up becoming law. Lawsuits against the legislation and campaigns against lawmakers who help pass the bill are on the table. She said the AFL-CIO’s national organization was ready to help if needed.

Meanwhile, Brian Livingston, the head of the Arizona Police Association, said he hoped there still might be a way to convince Republicans in the Senate to vote against the package. He said his group, which is the largest police union in the state, was already talking to a number of senators from both sides of the aisle to figure out if a compromise could be reached.

“There are a lot of discussions going on right now,” Livingston said. “We are hoping now because the bills were passed by committee that we can get that dialogue to take place.”

Livingston said he thought the senators had been fed “misinformation” by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank in Phoenix that helped write the bills.

A member of the institute told TPM on Tuesday that his organization believes the state could eventually save $550 million a year by stripping away collective bargaining and other union practices. He also said what happened last year in Wisconsin was “moderate” compared to Arizona’s bills.

But Livingston said the lawmakers needed to be reminded of the facts on the ground, like the dangers of police work and the reality that unions in Arizona aren’t as powerful as many of their critics make them out to be.

Still, Livingston didn’t know what exactly his organization would do if the bills become law.

“It would cause utter chaos,” he said. “You will see a devastating effect to employee moral. You will see, I believe, a hampering of the good services that our services provide to the public as we know it.”

Gorraiz of the Phoenix firefighters said he wasn’t sure massive protests would do the trick. After all, the large scale protests that took place after the passage of the state’s harsh immigration law didn’t stop Gov. Jan Brewer (R) from signing it.

“I think this legislature has demonstrated their indifference to public outcries in past,” he said.

Tim Hill, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona, agreed that it was best to appeal directly to the lawmakers who will be voting on the bills in the future.

“I don’t think I want to publicly discuss strategy,” Hill said. “But the only thing you can do is appeal to their sense of fairness and justice and the American way.”

Yet despite passionate appeals by union representatives at a committee hearing in the Senate on Wednesday, the measures all passed along 4-2 party line vote.

Republican Sen. Lori Klein, who sits on the Government Reform Committee, told the union members that the legislation wasn’t designed to hurt them.

“This is not an attack on them,” she said. “But it is a way to give them new freedom.”

But Democratic Sen. Steve Gallardo said the true motive was for conservatives to try to hurt groups they see as political foes.

“We are pinning up organized labor against the wall,” he said. “We don’t like what they’re saying. We don’t like who they support. And we are going to muzzle them.”

The governor’s office declined to comment, saying Brewer was waiting to see whether the legislation would pass.

WEDGE ISSUES

Was Komen’s Nancy Brinker Lying Yesterday Or Is She Lying Today?

Crooks & Liars:

The Susan G. Komen Foundation has absolutely no credibility left. On Thursday, this is what Nancy Brinker, Komen’s CEO, told Andrea Mitchell.

BRINKER: In 2010, we set about creating excellence in our grants, not just in our community grants, but in our science grants, putting metrics, outcomes and measures to them. [...] Part of that includes taking these grants into communities and being excellent grant givers. Many of the grants we were doing with Planned Parenthood do not meet new standards of criteria for how we can measure our results and effectiveness in communities.

She went on to emphasize that this was the key reason the funding had been withdrawn — and played down the fact that the GOP House was currently investigating Planned Parenthood.

But here’s part of the statement she released Friday.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

So, what happened to those “measures” and “metrics” and “outcomes” Brinker was babbling about on Thursday?

Meanwhile, wingnuts are circulating this piece, which claims a Komen board member says they’ve haven’t reversed themselves at all.

Following a new statement Komen for the Cure released making many observers believe the breast cancer charity reversed position on whether it would fund grants to Planned Parenthood,one Komen board member says it hasn’t caved.

Komen board member John Raffaelli talked with the Washington Post after the statement was released and said the new announcement doesn’t necessarily mean there is any reversal until and unless Planned Parenthood receives additional funding beyond what was already planned before Komen’s December decision.

Based on Komen’s actions this week, does anyone have any confidence that they’ll do the right thing now?

For Komen to regain any credibility at all, Brinker’s got to go. And so does the other wingnut behind this.

Susan G. Komen’s priceless gift

REBECCA TRAISTER AND JOAN WALSH:

The startling intensity that we saw this week in response to Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s decision to pull its grants from Planned Parenthood — an intensity that prompted the Komen foundation to reverse its decision today — may be the best thing that’s happened to the conversation about reproductive rights in this country for decades. It certainly should be.

Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat.

But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency — armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long.

That this week’s blow against Planned Parenthood came not directly from John Boehner’s House of Representatives – which, ever since taking power a year ago promising to focus on jobs, has manfully focused on the single task of attacking women’s reproductive rights – but instead from a popular, officially nonpartisan organization dedicated wholly to women’s healthcare somehow brought this argument into the open.

The response to Komen was surely so tinderbox explosive because it had been building with every politically theatrical investigation launched by Cliff Stearns and every grisly abortion scene enacted on the House floor by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith. But it was not just Washington wonkery, and was not ginned up or amplified by professional political cranks. It was the reflexive kick of a shin hit just below the knee, and the visceral anger spilled everywhere, from a Planned Parenthood Saved Me tumblr and onto Facebook, where people posted images of Komen’s pink ribbon cut in half. It poured from bank accounts, including that of New York Mayor and former Republican Michael Bloomberg.

It came from often dispassionate media figures like Andrea Mitchell, was tweeted by novelists like Judy Blume, Terry McMillan and William Gibson, actors Ellen Barkin and Martha Plimpton, politicos like Donna Brazile, Reps. Gwen Moore and Jackie Speiers, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and from 22 senators including Frank Lautenberg, Al Franken and Kirsten Gillibrand, who signed a letter urging Komen to reverse its decision. It came from callers to radio programs, announcing their intentions to drop out of Komen races, and from the American Association of University Women, which canceled a scheduled service event with Komen. In the three days after Komen’s announcement of its Planned Parenthood break, Planned Parenthood received more than $3 million in donations, said PPFA president Cecile Richards in a press call on Friday.

More than that, though: The starkly observable attack against something as crucial and basic as breast exams for poor women, as well as the fact that so many divergent voices were pulled into it, meant that the conversation was not about partisan politics; it was about women. For the first time in what feels like forever, passion and fury were being loudly, proudly given in a full-throated voice, on behalf of women – women as moral actors; women as citizens with rights, health, bodies, freedoms; women as people with families and economic concerns.

Taken together, these factors mark this as a watershed moment in the contemporary conversation about reproductive rights. This is a story in which we see the possibility of a turned tide, a new way to gauge how the public actually feels about women’s rights and health, and a new way to talk about it, as well. Because what we saw this week was big. It was mass. It was emotional. This was so different from the various polls activists on both sides of the abortion question are always throwing around, polls that depend so much on how a question is asked; polls that offer far less clarity than head-banging confusion about where America stands on the issue of reproductive heath. This was not a poll. This was America announcing that it cared about women’s health, and more specifically, that it cared about Planned Parenthood.

In many ways, the activism that forced Komen to backtrack was ignited by Boehner’s House Republicans a year ago, when they voted to cut off all funding to Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion services. This despite the fact that since 1976’s Hyde Amendment, no federal money has been able to be used to provide abortion services. The organization Republicans want to squash provides more than 800,000 women a year with breast exams, more than 4 million Americans with testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and 2.5 million people with contraception, which prevents unintended pregnancy and thus abortion. But playing to what they must imagine is overriding public sentiment, Republicans have worked tirelessly to lodge the image of Planned Parenthood as an abortion factory deep in the American imagination.

A year ago, some of the anger at this strategy began to bubble over. In response to Smith’s description of a second trimester abortion, read on the House floor, Democratic U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier went to the House well and described her own painful second trimester abortion. “For you to stand on this floor and suggest that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought, is preposterous,” Speier said, directing her comments at Smith. “Planned Parenthood has a right to operate. Planned Parenthood has a right to provide services for family planning. Planned Parenthood has a right to offer abortions. The last time I checked, abortions were legal in this country … I would suggest to you that it would serve us all very well if we moved on with this process and started focusing on creating jobs for the Americans who desperately want them.”

It was around this time that a viral “Thank You Planned Parenthood” meme cropped up online. With participants noting the instances in which they had relied on PPFA for birth control, breast exams, gynelogical care, and yes, abortions. Twitter, Facebook and blogs began to be dotted with “I stand with Planned Parenthood” emblems. Comedian Lizz Winstead kicked off a tour called “Planned Parenthood, I am here for you.”

But this recent wave of defense of Planned Parenthood has remained broad, ambient. The politics of the congressional witch hunt have been so labyrinthine, so convoluted, that it has been difficult to know how to effectively harness an angry response. When, last fall, Rep. Cliff Stearns launched an investigation into PPFA’s bookkeeping, the move was so needless, such a trumped-up piece of political stagecraft (since PPFA does receive federal funds, it must scrupulously account for every dime it spends, no special investigation required) that it was hard to even know how to make sense of it, let alone respond. This week, a caller to WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show” professed her belief that the Stearns investigation centered on whether Planned Parenthood was performing late-term abortions.

The demonization of Planned Parenthood should have awakened the country to the radicalism of the right, and how far it has pushed the political conversation. It’s been hard to measure the degree of the radicalism, so slowly and unceasingly has it crept across our consciousness and the political discourse. But it’s important to remember how mainstream Planned Parenthood used to be. It was the respectable, even Republican, advocate for women’s health, including reproductive services; the leaders of the National Abortion Rights Action League were the activist agitators. Sen. Prescott Bush, the father of President George H.W. Bush, served as treasurer of Planned Parenthood’s first national fundraising campaign. Richard Nixon signed the family planning legislation in 1970 that authorized its federal funding.

As a congressman, George Bush and his wife, Barbara, were reliable friends of the organization. Barry Goldwater’s wife, Betty, was a founding member of Arizona Planned Parenthood; President Gerald Ford’s wife, Betty, was a high-profile supporter of the group. More recently, Ann Romney, wife of the 2012 GOP presidential front-runner, donated $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994. And when a Romney relative died of a botched abortion in 1963, the family asked that memorial donations go to Planned Parenthood.

But what happened this week was a clarifying moment. Right-wing extremism, coming this time not from the partisan mill but from a mainstream women’s organization, was put in a direct and unflattering spotlight. Suddenly, so much was clear, and finally, the response was unified and thunderous. Right-wing overreach — and the backlash it inspired — feels a lot like the way other radical GOP power grabs in the last year have galvanized the public to fight back. Attacks on collective bargaining, public workers and unions by Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana have produced mass mobilization in those states, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. Public workers – cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, paramedics, sanitation workers – once were the proud backbone of the middle class. Now they find themselves derided by the GOP as the new welfare queens who are taking more than their fair share. Ohio voters repealed a law that abolished collective bargaining in November, and pro-union organizers in Wisconsin have forced a recall election for Gov. Scott Walker.

Efforts to restrict voting rights are likewise waking up the citizenry; Maine repealed a law that banned same-day voting and registration in November, and Ohio blocked a voter photo ID bill. Even on the issue of reproductive rights, a draconian “personhood” amendment to the state constitution failed to pass in Mississippi, one of the reddest of the red states. Overreach by the right has re-inspired movements – unions, voting rights, women’s rights — that have too long been dormant and too easily dismissed by their ideological opponents as outside the mainstream of American values, when in fact, they used to represent the most American of values.

For defenders of Planned Parenthood, and more broadly for reproductive rights activists, this moment of repositioning is a valuable one. Until now, it has proven very difficult for advocates to resuscitate their side with language anywhere near as powerful as that used by antiabortion forces. Instead they have relied too heavily on the fungible, limp, endlessly open-ended language of “choice.” (Even among “pro-choice” advocates, the “I choose my choice!” joke from “Sex and the City” has become a ubiquitous critique.)

But what happened this week was powerful. It was mass. It was direct. It was emotional. And it restores women as the moral center of this conversation — which is where they belong.

Ezra Klein — University group ends Komen collaboration after Planned Parenthood decision

CNN: Bloomberg pledges $250,000 to Planned Parenthood in matching funds

Lance Armstrong pledges $100,000 to Planned Parenthood

Planned parenthood raises $3 Million in three days

Will Komen cancel its $7.5 million grant to Penn State, which like PP is under federal investigation? 

Ties Between Ron Paul and White Supremacists Exposed

Pensito Review:

We’ve all wondered about the zealotry of Ron Paul followers and dismissed it as the idealistic naivete of his frequently young apostles. They call into radio shows and protest that their man isn’t being respected. They wave signs from freeway overpasses. They post on Facebook that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Paul still has a path to the White House. And they whisper to each other about a third party run.

But what if there is more to this devotion? What if, like the racist statements in Paul’s newsletters that appeared regularly and for years, it is exactly what it looks like?

Anonymous, the internet hacking group, is exposing close ties between Ron Paul’s campaign and neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Members of the nationalist American Third Position Party (A3P), whose website was defaced by Anonymous, organised Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s meetings and campaigns, according emails hacked by the collective…

“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors,” read a statement from Anonymous.

Paul is apparently unconcerned about these supporters’ views.

It also claims that Paul received financial support from other white power groups, such as the online hate forum Stormfront, founded by Don Black, a white supremacist. There is even a photograph of Paul with Black, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a current member of the American Nazi Party. Paul allegedly refused to return donations from Black and Stormfront. Black told The New York Times that Paul’s newsletter had inspired him to become a supporter.

Earning special scrutiny is Jamie Kelso, a major figure in the white power movement, and adminstrator of the web site, WhiteNewsNow.

Kelso, a former Scientologist and account owner of other German Nazi forums, became an active supporter of Paul in 2007. He was reportedly attracted to Paul because he believed the Republican’s followers would be receptive to his white supremacist views. He described Paul as “implicitly white” and started to actively organise Paul’s events.

“Let’s appreciate this big (Paul) audience that’s overwhelmingly white,” Kelso said in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “This is our audience, this is our public. These are our people. If we can’t persuade these people of the rightness of our cause, then we’re finished,” he said.

Kelso need not worry. The message seems to be getting through. People who hate Obama but don’t feel the need to explain why, and yet who are decidedly not among the 1% or 1% wannabes who support Romney and Gingrich are finding common ground with Paul, who is doing nothing to discourage their support and might even be encouraging it.

The web site Little Green Footballs is exploring this story, which was first reported on the British site, International Business Times. Follow the links in this post to find out more and decide if you think Paul’s relationships with racists can continue to be explained away.

AND IN OTHER NEWS…

The definition of a Liberal, from the West Wing

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVdz985HTJk

TAKE ACTION

Boycott Komen & their Corporate Partners

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Las Vegas is the only place I know where money really talks--it says, ‘Goodbye.’

~~~Frank Sinatra

SO MUCH IMPORTANT STUFF-YOU’LL NEVER READ IT ALL! You can access all the past editions of The Daily Planet on the green Category bar on the top of each page under the heading PlanetPOV.

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BUDGET

California is at risk of running out of money by March 

CNBC:

California needs to come up with more than $3 billion to avoid burning through its cash by March, according to the state controller, who urged borrowing and delaying some payments.

Assuming no additional revenue loss, erosion of borrowable internal funds, or significant spikes in spending, $3.3 billion of cash solutions are needed to address California’s liquidity needs during this period,” State Controller John Chiang said in a letter to the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee released on Tuesday.

BUSINESS

American Airlines may cut up to 15,000 jobs

American Airlines Proposes 20% Cut in Salaries 

PBGC: American Airlines Must Show Why Pensions Have to End

American Airlines today announced that as part of its plan of reorganization, it wants to terminate its pension plans. The pensions are underfunded by about $10 billion, and Americans’ retirees would lose at least $1 billion in benefits if the plans end. Under federal law, if a company in bankruptcy wants to end its pensions, it must demonstrate that doing so is the only way it can reorganize.

PBGC Director Josh Gotbaum had this to say:

“Before American takes such a drastic action as killing the pension plans of 130,000 employees and retirees, it needs to show there is no better alternative. Thus far, they have failed to provide even the most basic information to decide that.”

About PBGC

PBGC protects the pension benefits of 44 million Americans in 27,500 private-sector pension plans. The agency is directly responsible for paying the benefits of more than 1.5 million people in failed pension plans. PBGC receives no taxpayer dollars and never has. Its operations are financed by insurance premiums and with assets and recoveries from failed plans.

ECONOMY

Gallup: U.S. Job Creation at Highest Level since 2008 

Job market conditions improved in the United States in January as Gallup’s U.S. Job Creation Index reached +16, its highest point since September 2008.

Hiring and Firing Improve, Are at Best Levels Since 2008

The Job Creation Index of +16 is based on 33% of workers nationwide saying their employers are hiring workers and expanding the size of their workforce, and 17% saying their employers are letting workers go and reducing the size of their workforce. Hiring and firing have each improved by one percentage point since December. The percentage hiring matches the 33% of June 2011, and the two reflect the highest hiring levels since September 2008. The percentage letting go is the lowest since June 2008.

Job Market Conditions Show Improvement vs. a Year Ago in All Regions

Job market conditions remain best in the Midwest, with a Job Creation Index of +20; the South is second, at +17. The Index is +11 in the East and +12 in the West. The largest year-over-year improvement has been in the Midwest and the West, both of which are up by seven points. The index has increased by four points in the South and three points in the East compared with the same month a year ago.

Implications

January’s increase in Gallup’s Job Creation Index is good news about job market conditions. The index is not seasonally adjusted and the job situation usually deteriorates at this time of year, making the improvement last month even more impressive.

The index also seems consistent with the government’s weekly report on jobless claims, which are running under 400,000. Over time, the Job Creation Index has tended to correlate with this government report.

Job market conditions are uneven across the nation. In the Midwest, they are at their best since April 2008. Similarly, in the South, conditions are at their best since September 2008. This may suggest that manufacturing continues to improve in the middle of the country, helping those regions’ job conditions to outpace conditions on both coasts.

Overall, Gallup’s Job Creation Index suggests an improving job environment in January. This is probably not yet enough to stimulate significant job growth, but is enough to keep job conditions from deteriorating and is sufficient to provide some added optimism about the job situation going forward.

America Spends Less on Food Than Any Other Country

Mother Jones:

Like Kiera—and, I’m sure, many of the readers of her article—I was a bit shocked when I calculated how much I spend on food. I like to think I’m thrifty in my food spending habits—I cook a lot and usually eat out only on the weekends—but I don’t usually add up my food costs and rarely make serious estimates for food spending when I make a budget, instead assuming that I’ll manage to make do with whatever’s left after I cut a check for rent, buy a bus pass, and pay my utility bills.

Of course, this kind of logic is completely insane to most people in the world, for the simple and obvious fact that food is the most important thing to budget for. It’s only because I live in a rich country where having enough to eat isn’t really an issue that I can be so clueless about my food spending habits; as demonstrated by the chart below, the higher a country’s average income, the smaller the percentage of income spent on food.

On some level, this is pretty intuitive—food is a basic need, and there’s only so much you can eat, no matter how much money you have. But even among developed countries, our food spending is ultra-low: people in most European countries spend over 10 percent of their incomes on food. In fact, Americans spend less on food than people in any other country in the world. Even we Americans didn’t always expect our food to be so cheap, though: back in 1963, when Molly Orshansky, an employee of the Social Security Administration, created the nation’s first poverty threshold, she simply tripled the cost of the FDA’s “thrifty” food plan, since at the time most families spent about a third of their incomes on food. So how’d we end up spending just a fraction of that four decades later?

To find the answer, we have to go back four decades to the 1970s, when rising food prices and technological developments led to a host of transformative changes in the US food system whose effects still determine the way many Americans eat. In response to rising food costs and growing demand amongst the expanding middle class, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, turned the country’s agricultural subsidy program—originally instituted to help stabilize food supply and farmers’ incomes after the volatility of the Great Depression—into a support mechanism for the industrial production of corn and soy. Butz’s policy of “get big or get out”—made possible by advancements in industrial food production, including technological developments and an abundance of cheap fossil fuels used to make fertilizer and pesticides—encouraged the consolidation of small farmers’ plots into gigantic holdings and led to the rise of agribusiness in place of the family farm.

The changes Butz wrought are visible in our food supply, too: The amount of corn produced each year in America has tripled since 1970,from 4 billion bushels then to more than 12 billion today. Faced with an abundance of cheap corn, the food industry figured out how to make it into cheap meat, milk, eggs, and sweets. Over time, the cost of things made from highly-subsidized crops like corn, wheat, and soy—things like cheeseburgers and soda—has declined drastically.  While you can debate the merits of local, organic, and seasonal food, and question what it means to eat sustainably, the dominant food production policy in the US is oriented around just one metric: producing calories as cheaply as possible. We’ve gotten so good at producing calories efficiently, in fact, that our problem is no longer that we can’t afford enough food—it’s that the types of calories that are least expensive are the ones that are worst for us.

There are obvious reasons why spending less on food is a good thing—namely, that not having to worry about survival on a daily basis is a pretty basic development goal that we’ve nonetheless only recently managed to achieve. BUT there are also some less obvious reasons why it’s not so great. As Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, and others who study our food system have pointed out, food is as cheap as it is because thetrue costs have been externalized—that is, we pay for them in rising obesity rates, environmental degradation, lax safety measures, and disgraceful labor practices. And if you count the money taxpayers send Big Ag in subsidies—around $261.9 billion between 1995 and 2010—cheap food starts to seem like it might not be such a bargain after all.

Still, it’s not impossible to buy and prepare good food even on a tight budget. Seeking to bust the myth that fast food is cheaper than cooking, Mark Bittman has argued that making a meal of roast chicken, salad, and vegetables costs about half as much as buying a family of four dinner at McDonald’s, and while Tom Philpott points out that cooking at home requires unpaid labor, making a “fuss-free meal” one that’s hard to refuse, he notes that cooking can be enjoyable work once you know what you’re doing. (For more on how to eat well without going broke or burning out, see Kiera’s interview with the chef and author Tamar Adler.) And even eating out a lot isn’t necessarily a bad thing—spending money at locally-owned restaurants is a great way to put money back into your community (though of course it’s harder to find out where your food comes from when you go out to eat without turning into a Portlandia sketch).

It should be clear by now that whether we’re talking about iPhones,anthropomorphic stuffed bacon toys, or actual bacon, expecting to get more for less comes at a cost. I’m not suggesting we should take as our model the days when people spent fully a third of their incomes on food; making food more expensive makes it harder for poor—and middle class—people to afford. But I do think it’s worth reevaluating our spending priorities, and wondering why we’re so reluctant to pay a bit more for something so essential. The big question is how we can value food more without turning healthy food into a luxury item or making people who are already struggling to pay their bills worse off.

Economist’s View: Corporatism

[…] Blaming Capitalism for Corporatism, by Edmund S. Phelps and Saifedean Ammous, Commentary, Project Syndicate: The future of capitalism is again a question. …

The term “capitalism” used to mean an economic system in which capital was privately owned and traded… This system of individual freedom and individual responsibility gave little scope for government… Corporations could exist only as long as free individuals willingly purchased their goods – and would go out of business quickly otherwise. …

Now the capitalist system has been corrupted. The managerial state has assumed responsibility for looking after everything from the incomes of the middle class to the profitability of large corporations to industrial advancement. This system, however, is not capitalism, but rather an economic order that harks back to Bismarck in the late nineteenth century and Mussolini in the twentieth: corporatism.

In various ways, corporatism chokes off the dynamism that makes for engaging work, faster economic growth, and greater opportunity and inclusiveness. It maintains lethargic, wasteful, unproductive, and well-connected firms at the expense of dynamic newcomers and outsiders, and favors declared goals such as industrialization, economic development, and national greatness over individuals’ economic freedom and responsibility. Today, airlines, auto manufacturers, agricultural companies, media, investment banks, hedge funds, and much more has at some point been deemed too important to weather the free market on its own, receiving a helping hand from government in the name of the “public good.”

The costs of corporatism are visible all around us: dysfunctional corporations that survive despite their gross inability to serve their customers; sclerotic economies with slow output growth, a dearth of engaging work, scant opportunities for young people; governments bankrupted by their efforts to palliate these problems; and increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of those connected enough to be on the right side of the corporatist deal.

This shift of power from owners and innovators to state officials is the antithesis of capitalism. Yet this system’s apologists and beneficiaries have the temerity to blame all these failures on “reckless capitalism” and “lack of regulation,” which they argue necessitates more oversight and regulation, which in reality means more corporatism and state favoritism.

It seems unlikely that so disastrous a system is sustainable. … If politicians cannot repeal corporatism, it will bury itself in debt and default, and a capitalist system could re-emerge from the discredited corporatist rubble. …

WaPo: The housing bust appears to be even worse than it was at the nadir of the recession

Since the depths of the recession, key aspects of the economy have rebounded. The nation’s output has grown. The stock market began an ascent. The unemployment rate drifted down.

But housing?

When it comes to the value of what many Americans consider their biggest financial asset, no such return appears in sight.

Data released Tuesday showed that seasonally adjusted housing prices have reached a post-bubble low, as the minor surge that began in 2009 fizzled, to be followed by the almost continuous slide of the past 18 months.

The housing bust, in other words, appears to be even worse than it was at the nadir of the recession.

For millions of homeowners, that’s an unsettling reality, and potentially an issue in the presidential campaign. But the damage may be far more widespread.

By making people feel less wealthy, according to economists, the decline in home values inhibits consumer spending and hampers the nation’s stop-and-start economic recovery.

“The trend is down and there are few, if any, signs in the numbers that a turning point is close at hand,” said David M. Blitzer of S&P Indices. “I spent the weekend scratching my head and saying, ‘Isn’t there some good number in here?’ ”

The Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller seasonally adjusted housing index for 20 cities dropped again in ­November, the last month for which data were available, falling to a level not seen since 2003.

In the Washington region, seasonally adjusted prices have been relatively flat since April 2010, according to the index, but they remain about 27 percent below their peak.

Of the 20 cities in the index, only three — Denver, Minneapolis and Phoenix — showed improvement from the month before.

“Looking forward, continued weakness in the housing market poses a significant barrier to a more vigorous economic recovery,” according to a Federal Reserve white paper issued in January.

The dip in home prices stems from an excess of supply, which has been made worse by foreclosures and tighter mortgage-lending standards, according to analysts at the Fed and elsewhere.

The depth and extended duration of the housing slide — it has been six years since national housing prices peaked — are astounding, even to many economists who have watched it closely.

“Housing starts have been at 60-year lows for 38 months — it’s incredible,” said Karl E. Case, emeritus professor of economics at Wellesley College and co-founder of the housing price index. “It’s a complete depression.”

Case noted, for example, the slump’s profound effect on the residential construction industry: Annual housing starts in the United States peaked at 2.37 million and have fallen to fewer than 700,000.

“Eighty percent of a major industry in the United States just disappeared,” he said.

More generally, economists differ on exactly how much the fall in housing prices has retarded the U.S. economy.

But in a paper last year, Case and colleagues John M. Quigley and Robert J. Shiller found that housing wealth has a “rather large effect” on how much households consume.

It is this lack of demand in the economy that has been one of the persistent problems in the U.S. recovery, according to economists. Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy.

The recent white paper from the Fed noted, for example, that housing prices have fallen an average of about 33 percent from their peak, erasing $7 trillion in household wealth. With that, according to the paper, comes a “ratcheting down” of what people buy.

With new housing plan, Obama again makes unabashed case for government

Greg Sargent:

No matter what the American people tell pollsters about government in the abstract, they broadly support the idea that government has a legitimate role in taking specific steps to combat economic suffering and unfettered free market recklessness and to shore up the shrinking middle class.

That’s the premise of the Obama reelection campaign. And today in Falls Church, Virginia, Obama again staked out this turf, offering a new plan to help homeowners whose mortgages are “under water,” by enabling them to save $3,000 a year by refinancing their mortgages at historically low interest rates. The plan offers a Homeowner Bill of Rights to prevent homeowners from getting screwed over by fees, conflicts of interests, lack of disclosure about mortgages and inappropriate forclosure.

The difference here is that in this case, something actually could get done. Here’s why: It could prove a bit more difficult than usual for Congressional Republicans to oppose this plan — because none other than Mitt Romney himself has edged towards supporting a similar approach.

Matthew Yglesias argues that the plan could be a job-creation “game changer” by putting more money in people’s pockets to spend on other things, helping revive the economy.

How will Congressional Republicans respond, given that Romney has flirted with similar ideas?

A few days ago Romney said he was open to “providing a break to homeowners to get lower interest rates” if it can be done without adding “additional government obligation.” Obama’s plan would be paid for by fees on financial institutions.

What’s more, Romney is heading for a primary in Nevada, where the foreclosure crisis is severe, so the politics of rejecting Obama’s plan would be interesting to say the least.

In his speech today, Obama combined a robust defense of government intervention in the housing market with an implicit slap at Romney for previously claiming we should let the foreclosure process run its course (which is contradicted by his recent support for some type of intervention):

Government certainly can’t fix the entire problem on its own. But it is wrong for anybody to suggest that the only option for struggling responsible homeowners is to sit and wait for the housing market to hit bottom. I refuse to accept that and so do the American people…There are actions we can take right now to provide some relief to folks who have been responsible, have done the right thing, and are making their payments on time.

Obama described homebuying by many Americans as a “downpayment on their dreams,” and the home is the bedrock of security for the middle class. Whatever the shortcomings of Obama’s overall housing policies, this proposal represents in miniature the ideas that much of the 2012 presidential campaign will be fought around.

The draft simplified simplified mortgage disclosure that President Obama held up today can be found here. 

Top consumer watchdog backs Obama administration call for helping homeowners

TPM:
Today President Obama called on Congress to help struggling homeowners take advantage of historically low interest rates. In response, the nation’s top consumer watchdog Richard Cordray endorsed the plan.

The principles articulated by the Obama administration today are good guideposts for much-needed reforms in the mortgage market. The problems that plague consumers are well-documented. Too many consumers were steered into complicated mortgages that they did not understand and couldn’t afford. Too many families were forced into foreclosure because paperwork was lost, phone calls went unanswered, errors were not resolved, or documents were falsified. To protect consumers, there must be clear rules of the road and real consequences for breaking them. The Consumer Bureau is already hard at work making the costs and risks of mortgages clear upfront through our Know Before You Owe project. The financial reform law also requires us to create new mortgage servicing rules that hold servicers accountable for disclosing fees and fixing problems. We are also working with other federal agencies to develop common-sense national servicing standards. But having rules in place isn’t enough. We are closely monitoring mortgage servicers to make sure that no one gains an unfair advantage by breaking the law. Taking these steps to fix the mortgage market is good for consumers, honest businesses, and our entire economy.

HEALTH

1 million packs of birth control pills recalled for inadequate dose

Chicago Trib:

Pfizer said on Tuesday it was recalling about 1 million packets of birth control pills in the United States because they may not contain enough contraceptive to prevent pregnancy.

Pfizer said the birth control pills posed no health threat to women but it urged consumers affected by the recall to “begin using a non-hormonal form of contraception immediately.”

The drugmaker said the issue involved 14 lots of Lo/Ovral-28 tablets and 14 lots of Norgestrel and Ethinyl Estradiol tablets.

It said an investigation had found that some blister packs of the oral contraceptive might contain an inexact count of inert or active ingredients in the tablets.

The pills were manufactured by Pfizer and marketed by Akrimax Pharmaceuticals and shipped to warehouses, clinics and retail pharmacies nationwide, the company said.

HEALTH CARE

“Under the rules in place today, any nerd, any withdrawn, bookish kid, can have Asperger syndrome.”

NYT:

FOR a brief, heady period in the history of autism spectrum diagnosis, in the late ’90s, I had Asperger syndrome.

There’s an educational video from that time, called “Understanding Asperger’s,” in which I appear. I am the affected 20-year-old in the wannabe-hipster vintage polo shirt talking about how keen his understanding of literature is and how misunderstood he was in fifth grade. The film was a research project directed by my mother, a psychology professor and Asperger specialist, and another expert in her department. It presents me as a young man living a full, meaningful life, despite his mental abnormality.

“Understanding Asperger’s” was no act of fraud. Both my mother and her colleague believed I met the diagnostic criteria laid out in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. The manual, still the authoritative text for American therapists, hospitals and insurers, listed the symptoms exhibited by people with Asperger disorder, and, when I was 17, I was judged to fit the bill.

I exhibited a “qualified impairment in social interaction,” specifically “failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level” (I had few friends) and a “lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people” (I spent a lot of time by myself in my room reading novels and listening to music, and when I did hang out with other kids I often tried to speak like an E. M. Forster narrator, annoying them). I exhibited an “encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus” (I memorized poems and spent a lot of time playing the guitar and writing terrible poems and novels).

The general idea with a psychological diagnosis is that it applies when the tendencies involved inhibit a person’s ability to experience a happy, normal life. And in my case, the tendencies seemed to do just that. My high school G.P.A. would have been higher if I had been less intensely focused on books and music. If I had been well-rounded enough to attain basic competence at a few sports, I wouldn’t have provoked rage and contempt in other kids during gym and recess.

The thing is, after college I moved to New York City and became a writer and met some people who shared my obsessions, and I ditched the Forsterian narrator thing, and then I wasn’t that awkward or isolated anymore. According to the diagnostic manual, Asperger syndrome is “a continuous and lifelong disorder,” but my symptoms had vanished.

Last year I sold a novel of the psychological-realism variety, which means that my job became to intuit the unverbalized meanings of social interactions and create fictional social encounters with interesting secret subtexts. By contrast, people with Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders usually struggle to pick up nonverbal social cues. They often prefer the kind of thinking involved in chess and math, activities at which I am almost as inept as I am at soccer.

The biggest single problem with the diagnostic criteria applied to me is this: You can be highly perceptive with regard to social interaction, as a child or adolescent, and still be a spectacular social failure. This is particularly true if you’re bad at sports or nervous or weird-looking.

As I came into my adult personality, it became clear to me and my mother that I didn’t have Asperger syndrome, and she apologized profusely for putting me in the video. For a long time, I sulked in her presence. I yelled at her sometimes, I am ashamed to report. And then I forgave her, after about seven years. Because my mother’s intentions were always noble. She wanted to educate parents and counselors about the disorder. She wanted to erase its stigma.

I wonder: If I had been born five years later and given the diagnosis at the more impressionable age of 12, what would have happened? I might never have tried to write about social interaction, having been told that I was hard-wired to find social interaction baffling.

The authors of the next edition of the diagnostic manual, the D.S.M.-5, are considering a narrower definition of the autism spectrum. This may reverse the drastic increase in Asperger diagnoses that has taken place over the last 10 to 15 years. Many prominent psychologists have reacted to this news with dismay. They protest that children and teenagers on the mild side of the autism spectrum will be denied the services they need if they’re unable to meet the new, more exclusive criteria.

But my experience can’t be unique. Under the rules in place today, any nerd, any withdrawn, bookish kid, can have Asperger syndrome.

The definition should be narrowed. I don’t want a kid with mild autism to go untreated. But I don’t want a school psychologist to give a clumsy, lonely teenager a description of his mind that isn’t true.

IMMIGRATION

How self-deportation works: denying food assistance to American citizens whose parents are undocumented

Faith in Public Life:

As immigration policy took center stage in the Floriday primary this week, Presidential candidates debated “self-deportation” as an answer to legitimate questions of how they would handle the 11 million undocumented immigrants already living and working in the country.

Adam Serwer at Mother Jones explains how this innocuous-sounding phrase is actually code for cruel policies designed to harm and harass immigrant families until their hardship becomes too great to stay in the country.

The most prominent examples of this degrading approach are the anti-immigrant laws in Arizona and Alabama, which have come into the news for the ways they violate the civil rights of their residents, criminalize religious charity, andcause untold economic damage.

One of the key architects behind these laws is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, whose endorsement Mitt Romney proudly touts. So it’s no surprise to see elements of the self-deportation strategy cropping up in the Sunflower state.

A recent change in food-stamp eligibility requirements by Kobach-ally Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration has led to thousands of Kansas kids being denied the nutrition assistance they were relying on. That’s a rather conspicuous policy change for a governor who claims that reducing child poverty is his number-one goal. Conveniently, the change only applies to children (legal citizens) of undocumented immigrants.

The administration denies any anti-immigrant animus, but they don’t seem troubled by 2,000 children of immigrants losing nutritional benefits that keep them from going hungry in their state.

For “self-deportation” proponents, of course, this is exactly the goal. In fact, many anti-immigrant activists want to go even further and roll back the 14th Amendment such that these kids can’t qualify for assistance in the first place.

Presidential candidates may want voters who care about immigration reform to believe that their “self-deportation” policy proposals aren’t harsh and anti-immigrant, but the reality is simply the opposite. If developments like this in Kansas portend the future, putting like-minded people in federal office could do real harm to millions of families.

JUSTICE

Ex-Credit Suisse traders admit cooking subprime books

Reuters:

In a rare criminal prosecution to emerge from the financial crisis, two former Credit Suisse traders admitted on Wednesday to conspiring to manipulate the value of about $3 billion in subprime mortgage-backed securities in order to hide losses as the U.S. real estate market began to collapse in 2007.

The men, London-based David Higgs, 42, and Salmaan Siddiqui, 36, of McLean, Virginia, pleaded guilty in U.S. district court in New York to a criminal charge of conspiracy to falsify books and records and commit wire fraud.

Their one-time boss, Kareem Serageldin, 38, a U.S. citizen who lives in Britain, faces the same conspiracy charge and additional charges of falsifying books and records and wire fraud. Federal prosecutors said they do not consider Serageldin a fugitive even though he has yet to appear in the United States to answer to the charges.

There have been few prosecutions of individuals at high-profile banks for conduct that contributed to the financial crisis, but the Obama administration says it is stepping up investigations over the collapse of the subprime housing market.

Beginning in the fall of 2007, the three men and others began to manipulate the bond markets to alter Profit and Loss (P&L) numbers, according to phone calls recorded under Credit Suisse policy, the indictment of Serageldin said.

“If you want (P&L) to be a big number let me know what you want, then I’ll just go through it with (Higgs) because obviously I can move things back to where they were … if you’re looking for a big number today…” one of the traders said in a September 13, 2007 phone call with Seragaldin, the indictment said.

The investigation stems from $2.85 billion in writedowns that Credit Suisse took on collateralized debt obligations in 2008. Credit Suisse revealed those CDO losses in early 2008 and blamed them on a group of rogue traders who deliberately mispriced securities and on a failure of internal controls.

Credit Suisse was not charged in the case. A spokesman for the bank declined to comment on Wednesday. The company has cooperated with the government’s investigations.

Separately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against Serageldin, Higgs, Salmaan Siddiqui and a fourth trader, Faisal Siddiqui. The Siddiquis are not related.

Serageldin’s lawyer, James McGuire, said his client “believes he has done nothing wrong and nothing illegal.” McGuire said that over a four-year-long investigation, Serageldin had fully cooperated with authorities in Britain and the United States, including five or six interviews.

“The indictment comes as some surprise to us.”

A lawyer for Faisal Siddiqui could not immediately be reached to comment. Higgs’ lawyer declined comment after his court appearance and Salmaan Siddiqui’s lawyer said his client had been cooperating with the probes for some time.

Robert Khuzami, head of the SEC’s enforcement division, said in a statement that “the senior bankers falsely and selfishly inflated the value of more than $3 billion in asset-backed securities in order to protect their bonuses and, in one case, protect a highly coveted promotion.”

In the case of Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, federal prosecutors brought a single conspiracy charge carrying a maximum prison term of up to five years, but not a charge of securities fraud, which carries a prison term of up to 20 years.

The additional substantive charge brought against Serageldin does carry a maximum possible prison term of 20 years. Serageldin had been managing director/global head of structured credit at Credit Suisse in charge of Higgs and other traders.

“While the housing market was collapsing, the defendants profited, not by correctly predicting the trend, but by cooking the books,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Janice K. Fedarcyk said in a statement.

Higgs told a federal judge that while he was a managing director in the investment banking division of Credit Suisse in London in 2007 and 2008, he and others manipulated and inflated the cash bond position markings of a trading book, called ABN1, to hide losses.

“As a result of my actions, senior management of Credit Suisse was given the false impression that the ABN1 book was profitable and caused Credit Suisse to report false year-end numbers for 2007 in their books and records,” Higgs said in court.

He said he altered the records because he wanted to remain in good favor with Serageldin and “enhance” his job performance. He said he stood to receive a year-end bonus. Salmaan Siddiqui, at a separate plea proceeding, told a similar story about the way the traders falsified records.

The indictment said that Serageldin directed the scheme to improve his job performance and make him eligible for bonuses and promotion. His 2007 bonus was more than $1.7 million and his Incentive Share Unit Award was more than $5.2 million, the office of Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said. The $5.2 million was rescinded by Credit Suisse.

Bharara said on a conference call with reporters that Serageldin is not considered a fugitive, but the government would extradite him if necessary to face the charges.

“It is a tale of greed run amok, piggybacking on one of the worst economic dislocations our nation has ever experienced,” Bharara said.

Officials said the victims in this case were really the shareholders of Credit Suisse because Credit Suisse’s proprietary positions had been manipulated.

Higgs, who apologized for his conduct, said in court that his boss and others had known about the manipulation and assisted in it. He looked dejected and spoke quietly in describing his conduct to U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan.

Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui were released on $500,000 bond each. Higgs will be allowed to return to his home in Britain while the investigation continues.

In court, Higgs said traders were required to price securities that they held on a mark-to-market basis of the current market price of the asset or liability or similar assets or liabilities, according to accounting standards and the bank’s policy.

Beginning in 2007 when the U.S. real estate market slumped and mortgage delinquencies increased, the value of securities backed by mortgages decreased and the market lost its liquidity.

Higgs told the judge that he and others manipulated the records “rather than mark these securities down to market as we were required to do.”

House Republicans arrest journalist at fracking hearing

Daily Kos:

A quick diary on a clear violation of the First Amendment. Josh Fox who made the documentary “Gasland” was ordered arrested by House Republicans for attempting to film and report on a hearing concerning fracking in natural gas drilling.
From Huffpo’s Zach Carter:

In a stunning break with First Amendment policy on Capitol Hill, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Republicans also denied the entrance of a credentialed ABC News news team that was attempting to film the event….
Approximately 16 officers entered the hearing room and handcuffed Fox amid audible discussions of “disorderly conduct” charges, according to Democratic sources present at the arrest.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Gasland:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8

Here is some more on the 2005 ‘Haliburton’ loophole that allowed Fracking to start and the impact on residents in Colorado.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NafcuG0U2Eo

lastly, it appears that Josh Fox and his  crew will not be able to return to the hearing.

The meeting of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment had been taking place in room 2318 of the Rayburn building. Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, is currently seeking to secure a procedural maneuver that would allow the detained film crew to re-enter the hearing, which is open to the public. Miller’s motion is not expected to succeed.

This is particularly upsetting, because this hearing is about revealing the secret ingredients in fracking fluids. President Obama made the statement that he wanted Oil and Gas companies to reveal these ingredients in the State of the Union, but it appears House Republicans are not ready to give up that golden goose.

I am starting to agree with Thom Hartmann on the reason for the delay to reveal these ingredients, by the Republicans and the Oil and Gas industry -- not only are they dangerous to us, but these industries are used to having to pay huge sums of money to properly dispose of by-products from refineries -- and this is a convenient way to get rid of these by products -- just inject them 3000 feet underground which also happens to be where our aquifers are.

Reuters: Foreclosure fraud deal would give states enforcement power

A proposed settlement to resolve mortgage abuses by top U.S. banks will give states broad authority to punish firms that mistreat borrowers in the future, according to documents seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

Under the settlement, which states are currently reviewing to decide whether they will join, the states and a separate “monitoring committee” will have the authority to go to court to enforce the terms and seek penalties of up to $5 million per violation.

A strong enforcement mechanism could help the states and the Obama administration sell the deal to the public, after left-leaning activist groups have questioned whether the negotiations were too lenient on the banks.

Negotiations between state and federal officials to resolve allegations of misconduct in servicing home loans have stretched into their second year.

The delay is partly due to some states trying to extract a bigger settlement from the banks and to reserve their ability to file more mortgage-related suits in the future.

However, the deal now looks imminent.

States have just a few more days to make a decision on whether they will sign on. And U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said during a White House briefing on Wednesday that a final legal settlement will be reached “in the coming days.”

The settlement, expected to be filed as a consent judgment in federal court in Washington, D.C., will last for 3-1/2 years, according to documents laying out the pending deal’s enforcement terms.

Joseph Smith, the banking commissioner in North Carolina, is expected to serve as the monitor on the settlement, people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday.

In exchange for up to $25 billion, much in the form of cutting mortgage debt for distressed homeowners, the banks will resolve state and federal lawsuits about servicing misconduct and faulty foreclosures, and some lawsuits about how they made the loans.

Banks have been accused of robo-signing documents and other sloppy paperwork in unlawfully rushing to deal with a flood of foreclosures triggered by the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

The core group of banks involved in settlement talks are Bank of America Corp, Wells Fargo & Co, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc.

The final value of the settlement will depend on which states it includes, and could drop sharply if states like California, one of the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, do not join.

On Wednesday, Oregon Attorney General John Kroger said his state will join the settlement. He said Oregon can expect to receive around $30 million from the settlement, and its distressed homeowners can expect around $100 million to $200 million in relief.

The mortgage settlement is just one piece of a larger plan that the Obama administration hopes will get relief to home buyers and help boost the economy. Also on Wednesday, the Obama administration introduced a $5 billion to $10 billion package to help homeowners refinance their loans.

GIVING THE STATES SOME MUSCLE

Some states have raised concerns that banks have not adequately followed through on prior settlements, a concern that has pushed government negotiators to establish more forceful enforcement mechanisms in this deal than have been used in the past.

“I’d like to see very detailed, specific regulations on mortgage servicers and what they can and cannot do,” said Max Gardner, a nationally known consumer bankruptcy attorney in Shelby, North Carolina. “Not just the proverbial ‘we will obey the law from now on.’”

The enforcement terms mark progress in states’ ability to directly monitor mortgage servicing at national banks. For decades, big banks fought state efforts to enforce consumer protection laws by arguing that national banking laws pre-empted their authority.

Under the settlement, the banks will set up internal quality control groups to assess their mortgage servicing units’ compliance with the terms of the agreement, and turn over quarterly reports to the monitor about servicing complaints.

If the monitor concludes the group “did not correctly implement” the reviews, the monitor can have a third party review the work.

If the monitor finds information that a servicer “may be engaged in a pattern of noncompliance,” he can undertake a more thorough review, and impose even tougher standards.

Servicer compliance will be measured through detailed information about unlawful foreclosure sales and incorrect denials of loan modifications, according to the documents.

If the servicer continues to violate any of the terms, any of the states or a monitoring committee can go to court and seek penalties of up to $1 million for the first “uncured” violation and up to $5 million for a second.

Servicers will pick up the tab for the monitor, the documents said.

The monitoring committee is comprised of representatives of state attorneys general, the U.S. Justice Department, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who will review the work of the monitor.

The document says that all the terms are subject to approval by federal banking regulators.

AP: Woman wins unusual small claims lawsuit against Honda over hybrid’s mpg

A Southern California woman who challenged the legal status-quo by filing a small-claims action against Honda won her lawsuit Wednesday when a judge ruled that the automaker misled her about the potential fuel economy of her hybrid car.

Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Douglas Carnahan awarded Heather Peters $9,867 -- much more than the couple hundred dollars cash that a proposed class-action settlement is offering.

“At a bare minimum Honda was aware … that by the time Peters bought her car there were problems with its living up to its advertised mileage,” Carnahan wrote in the judgment.

MORE>>>

MEDIA

Son of New York Police Commissioner Accused of Rape, Media Smears Alleged Victim 

Alternet:

Here’s what we know: On Jan. 25, an unnamed woman accused Greg Kelly, the co-host of “Good Day New York” and the son of New York police commissioner Ray Kelly, of raping her in October 2011, after they had a few drinks together in a Manhattan bar. She is described as being 30 years old and in the legal profession. We know that the woman had a boyfriend, who publicly confronted both Kellys at a recent public event. That the woman claims she had too much to drink and that Kelly forced himself on her. She says Kelly got her pregnant, that she subsequently had an abortion, and that she reportedly decided to tell her story because Kelly’s father has encouraged crime victims to come forward. Kelly has not been formally charged with any crime.

Here’s what we will likely never know: what really transpired in private between Greg Kelly and the woman, and the extent, if any, to which it was consensual.

And here’s what the press seems to have forgotten: how you report a story like this.

NYT: Romney’s Negative Campaign in Florida Could Have Political Costs 

[…] Mitt Romney showed a worried Republican base a side of himself that it has both longed for and feared that he lacked: the agile political street fighter, willing to mock, scold and ultimately eviscerate his opponent.

But if he has quelled doubts about his toughness, he also emerges from the Florida free-for-all and the three contests that preceded it carrying heavy new baggage.

Mr. Romney was savaged by Mr. Gingrich over his record at Bain Capital, softening him up for the coming Democratic effort to portray him as a heartless capitalist happy to fire people to enrich himself. His release of his tax returns, complete with details about a Swiss bank account, provided new facts for opponents seeking to cast him as out of touch with ordinary Americans.

And the very trait that propelled him in Florida — a willingness to descend into the muck and run a relentlessly negative campaign — distracted from his economic-themed argumentagainst Mr. Obama while deepening his rift with some populist conservatives. Should Mr. Gingrich remain a viable enough candidate to stay in the race through the summer, as he vowed on Tuesday, Mr. Romney could be forced to maintain an angry edge that could undermine his appeal among moderate and independent voters — groups whose views of him, polls suggest, appear to have been harmed by the Florida melee.

“There are questions about his wealth and Bain, but he has not become an intensely polarizing figure yet,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist who worked on Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign in 2008. “The question is, will he become that?”

Mr. Romney himself seemed sensitive to the perception that his campaign has become locked in a bitter — and counterproductive — war of words with his leading Republican rival.

“I would like to spend more of our time focusing on President Obama,” he said in Tampa on Tuesday as voting was under way. “That’s ultimately what’s going to be essential to taking back the White House.”

His challenge is about to become even more complicated. As much as he would like to be punching and counterpunching with Mr. Obama, he must still contend with Mr. Gingrich, who even after his steep loss described the primaries as a two-man nomination fight across 46 more states.

Mr. Romney faces a classic dilemma in presidential politics: Going negative is never anappealing option, but the alternative amounts to unilateral disarmament and a much higher likelihood of defeat, especially against a rival like Mr. Gingrich who has little to lose.

“In primary politics, short-term gains are what matters, because if you don’t have the short-term gains, you won’t be around long enough to deal with the long-term problems,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

Mr. Romney and his “super PAC” allies spent $15.4 million on television and radio advertising in Florida, three times what Mr. Gingrich and his supporters spent, in the most intensive assault of the Republican nominating contest: Over all, 92 percent of the ads from the candidates and outside groups were negative. In Florida, the outcome was what Mr. Romney needed — and possibly enough to all but eliminate Mr. Gingrich as a threat.

But if Mr. Romney has to engage in a long stretch of negative campaigning against Mr. Gingrich, the challenge will be to hit back hard enough that he does not leave himself exposed to another Gingrich comeback without undercutting his own image.

A candidate who comes across as attacking too viciously and personally risks turning off all but the most partisan voters. It happened with Bob Dole, most famously when he lost his temper during the 1988 presidential race, snapping that Vice President George Bush should “stop lying about my record.” That moment haunted him throughout the campaign. That may be one reason that Mr. Romney, in the glow of his Florida victory, praised his competitors and turned his attention to the president.

Mr. Romney has never been especially squeamish about negative campaigning. As jarring as his tone has seemed over the past 10 days, he has a long history of resorting to such tactics.(The exception was 2008, when Mr. Romney bowed out relatively early in the primary season.)

During his 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney ran biting commercials that portrayed his Democratic rival, the state treasurer Shannon O’Brien, as a basset hound asleep on the job as men walked off with bags of money. His poll numbers soon surged, and he pulled out an unexpected victory.

“He has learned along the way that this stuff works pretty well,” said Ms. O’Brien, who called the ads inaccurate and unfair.

This time around, Mr. Romney has been responding to scathing assaults from Mr. Gingrich, who in turn has said he went negative because the super PAC supporting Mr. Romney had unfairly attacked him in Iowa. Determined not to lose in Florida, Mr. Romney unleashed a wave of attacks on Mr. Gingrich’s finances, ethics and even stability — hammered repeatedly in TV commercials, conference calls, e-mails and speeches — that helped stoke the image of Mr. Gingrich as an “erratic” and “unreliable” leader.

The balance that Mr. Romney is trying to strike in his battle against Mr. Gingrich is one he also has to strike if he ends up facing Mr. Obama, whose aides have made clear that a general election campaign against him will be highly personal.

As if to underscore the point, Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, took to Twitter to mock Mr. Romney for a line about Europe in his victory speech.

“If he dislikes it so,” she asked, “why is he betting against the American dollar with his own Swiss bank account?”

MILITARY

POLITICO: Panetta: U.S. combat in Afghanistan ends in 2013

The Obama administration is accelerating the timetable for winding down the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta indicated to reporters on Wednesday.

More than a year ago, President Barack Obama announced a plan for U.S. and allied foreign troops to hand over the lead for security in Afghanistan to local forces through a province-by-province process that would be complete by the end of 2014.

However, Panetta said Wednesday that he hopes the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan will end in 2013 while U.S. troops will remain in the country in a support role through the end of the following year, The Associated Press reported.

“Hopefully by the mid to latter part of 2013, we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role,” Panetta said as he traveled to Brussels for a NATO meeting, according to the AP.

The defense secretary’s comments about speeding up the transition were surprising because U.S. intelligence analysts are reported to be increasingly gloomy about the prospects for Afghan troops and police to take over without a significant deterioration in security and, likely, a resurgence by the Taliban.

However, the U.S. and other NATO allies have come under pressure in recent weeks from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has announced plans to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2013. NATO officials said this week that the alliance planned to stand by the original timetable, but Panetta’s comments signal some effort to accommodate Sarkozy, who has a strong relationship with Obama.

Obama, U.S. allies and Afghan President Hamid Karzai publicly agreed to the 2014 date during a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugual, in November 2010.

“Here in Lisbon, we agreed that early 2011 will mark the beginning of a transition to Afghan responsibility, and we adopted the goal of Afghan forces taking the lead for security across the country by the end of 2014,” Obama said then. “My goal is to make sure that by 2014 we have transitioned, Afghans are in the lead, and it is a goal to make sure that we are not still engaged in combat operations of the sort that we’re involved with now.”

The White House had no official comment on Panetta’s remarks, but one administration official said they were consistent with the vision Obama laid out in 2010.

“As Panetta said, Lisbon remains the program of record and we are committed to the Lisbon framework of a transition that concludes in 2014,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity. “Consultations are ongoing about how to implement that transition. That’s the whole point of Panetta’s trip. And so it’s natural that we’d have consultations with our allies about the steps between now and moving into full Afghan security lead.”

A Pentagon spokesman also issued a statement that stressed continuity in U.S. policy but did not deny that the secretary’s comments broke new ground.

MORE>>>

POLITICS

Think Romney can debate Obama? A Reminder:

This Romney Quote Will Make Your Head Hurt

MoveOn:

Hear about that House vote on “welfare” abuse? What’s really going on is House GOP giving its “base” a lap dance. 

Washington Monthly:

One of the more alarming political phenomena of the last few years has been the very loud return of the “Welfare Queen” meme, back with a vengeance from its apparent burial in the 1990s.

You’d think with work requirements and vastly reduced welfare caseloads and benefit levels, conservative anger about people on welfare would be a thing of the past. And in truth, until very recently, resentment of the less fortunate has taken slightly different forms, beginning with the very powerful conservative belief that shiftless poor and minority families caused the housing meltdown and the financial crisis, and continuing with the subtext that ObamaCare would take Medicare benefits away from virtuous elderly white folks to provide health coverage for people too lazy to take care of themselves.

But now something closer to the original “welfare queen” gospel, based on the idea that people on very basic public assistance are fleecing taxpayers while thumbing their noses at their values, is making a big comeback. It probably started with the rash of state legislative proposals for drug testing of “welfare” or even unemployment insurance beneficiaries. It gained fresh momentum when Newt Gingrich excited rank-and-file Republicans to a fever pitch by chewing out an African-American journalist about the poor work ethic of food stamp recipients.

And now, today, House Republicans are staging a vote to stop people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families dollars at strip clubs, casinos and liquor stores.

Nice. [...]

But no. The whole kerfuffle is highly remiscent of the habit the saintly Ronald Reagan used to indulge of regaling conservative audiences with an apocryphal anecdote about a food stamp recipient getting change in a grocery store line and buying a bottle of vodka.

As CAP Action Fund’s Melissa Boteach noted in her commentary on the Boustany measure, if the U.S. House has time to worry about richly symbolic instances of taxpayers subsidizing bad behavior, there are better targets:

If program integrity were the goal, then conservatives would also be calling for votes forbidding corporations that receive taxpayer subsidies and bailouts from having big conferences in Las Vegas, where there is no shortage of casinos, strip clubs, and liquor stores.

What’s really going on is that House Republicans are treating their base voters to the rhetorical equivalent of a lap dance at taxpayer expense.

Republicans Want to Throw Kids Under the Bus. Literally.

Mother Jones:

On Tuesday, House Republicans released a transportation packagethat environmental groups have labeled as a massive giveaway to oil and gas interests.

It’s got everything that oil companies have asked for over the years and more: drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, increasing oil shale production, allowing much larger trucks on highways, and cutting funds for high-speed rail. And Speaker John Boehner has said he wants to attach a provision to the bill that would force approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline as well.

But here’s where it gets really sad: The bill would also cut the Safe Routes to School program, a $202 million grant program that helps states and school districts make improvements so that kids and their families can walk to school without getting run over. There are many reasons this program is a good idea. Pedestrian deaths have been up in recent years, and this is one way to address that challenge. It’s also better for everyone else when kids don’t need a fleet of polluting minivans to get to school. And walking is good for you. Unless you get run over, that is. Then walking is bad for you.

Mitt Romney, Florida’s Psycho-Killer Superhero Of Cash

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire:

Romney is an appalling liar who won because he had the most money, but he’s also, it turns out, a bully.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0yY5wQZTaU

Here is something else Thomas Paine once said:

“But charters and corporations have a more extensive evil effect than what relates merely to elections. They are sources of endless contentions in the places where they exist, and they lessen the common rights of national society…. This species of feudality is kept up to aggrandise the corporations at the ruin of towns; and the effect is visible.”

And here is something else he said:

“Yet here again the burthen does not fall in equal proportions on the aristocracy with the rest of the community. Their residences, whether in town or country, are not mixed with the habitations of the poor. They live apart from distress, and the expense of relieving it.”

And, finally, here is something else he said:

“When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.”

At this point, I can take almost anything out of Willard Romney’s perfect mouth, out of the perfect teeth through which he so perfectly lies. He won the Inevitability Primary in Florida out-and-out on Tuesday night, and only had to outspend Newt Gingrich five-to-one to do it. So he gets to crow a little. Over the next couple of days, he’s going to be bathed in loving analysis from the smart kidz about how he “turned it around” after being outcrackered in South Carolina. But I’m not going to sit there and listen to the cosseted plutocrat son of a millionnaire auto dealer — one who is running on a platform that will make himself and everyone like him richer while warning the rest of us, as he did in his victory speech in Tampa, that “If you’re looking for cradle-to-grave help from the government, I’m not your candidate” — go and dragoon into that effort Tom Paine, who would have spat in Willard Romney’s face if he’d ever met him. Mitt Romney is someone whose children have a trust fund totaling $100 million. His great-great-grandchildren are not ever going to have to worry about money from their cradles to their graves. Thomas Paine? I’m sorry, but there are levels of bullshit to which I will not agree to descend.

Romney won because he had the most money. And because he had the most money, enough of the Tea Party “base,” which was supposed to hate him like gum disease, decided thusly: What the hell? The important thing is to get the Muslim Kenyan Usurper Negro out of the White House, so this is the horse we have to ride. There were something like 13,000 commercials aired in Florida over the past couple of weeks. Ninety-two percent of them were negative, the overwhelming number of which said negative things about N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of Civilization’s Rules and Leader (Perhaps) of the Civilizing Forces, on behalf of the man who told us on Tuesday night that we should follow him into the old America of hope and joy and not bumper stickers. That is how you win the Inevitability Primary. You buy Inevitability. It doesn’t come cheaply.

Very early in the evening, the MSNBC embed with the Romney campaign opined that following Romney around the last couple of days, when it became clear that the election was in the bag, was something like watching an episode of Dexter, the TV show about the charming-as-hell serial killer. Even the kindly Doctor Maddow was taken somewhat aback, and I suspect the kid is in for an interesting morning, both from his bosses and from the Romney campaign, but, dammit, he was dead-on and I wish I’d thought of it first. In addition to being a singularly appalling liar, Mitt Romney also has all the basic qualities of a considerable bully. He ruthlessly shoved aside a hapless but nonetheless incumbent Republican governor in order get himself elected in Massachusetts. You’ve seen him have to rein it in a little on the debate stage. (Believe me, there’s more of that to come.) And you saw it on Tuesday night, when Willard accepted victory, and then launched into his usual litany of lies about the president (the president doesn’t “want to amass record deficits” — honestly, no, he doesn’t) — spiced with just the right amount of upper-crust sneering.

I was particularly amused by this little aside: ”Like his colleagues in the faculty lounge who think they know better, President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.”

Except, one supposes, the auto industry, which Romney suggested we should let fail. But that “faculty lounge” crack is a good one. There was Willard, knocking back a couple at his corner local with the boys, when they said, “You know, you could do as good a job as that smarty-pants up there on the TV.” Jesus, what a foof.

And that touching anecdote about talking to “a father who was terrified that this would be the last night he would be able to spend in the only house his son had ever known.” Perhaps Willard then explained to this terrified father how much better things would be if we’d just, as he told a newspaper in Las Vegas last October, not tried to ”stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” The fellow would have been comforted, I’m sure.

And, of course, there was the inevitable barefaced non-fact about health care, and about how “President Obama wants to put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” No more, actually, than you did up here, Willard. I went to my doctor a month ago. I did not trip over an Under-Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services on the way.

(Note to Gingrich surrogate Bill McCollum: Where in the hell did you get the talking point you were spouting on Tuesday that we here in Massachusetts “have to wait 48 days to see a primary-care physician?” I suspect it may have come from the extensive research done by the late Professor Otto Yerass, but I could be wrong.)

But it was how Romney delivered the speech that was so revelatory. This is a rich kid who likes flogging The Help. There were just enough shit-eating, country-club grins as he delivered his rancid material to show you what the guy must have been like in those golden moments when he realized that there was more dough in wrecking a company than in investing in it.

As I said here the other day, the nomination of Willard Mitt Romney is inevitable, so we’re all going to have to get used to all of this for a while. But I will not stand for Tom Paine being used in this fashion. I have my limits.

And here’s something else he once said:

“I hope we shall… crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.”

No, wait. That was the other Tom. That Jefferson guy. My bad.

Mitt Romney goes from ‘I’m concerned about the poor,’ to ‘I’m not concerned with the very poor’ 

Daily Kos:

Good news … apparently Mitt Romney only hates the “very poor.” Here he was a few weeks ago:

I’m concerned about the poor in this country. We have to make sure the safety net is strong and able to help those who can’t help themselves.

… and today:

I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there.

Cayman Island tax dodges, Swiss bank accounts, corporations are people, my friend, $10,000 bets, and now this … who knew that Mitt Romney’s greatest strength as a candidate would be to provide the script for Democratic ads that will be running against him?

Keep talking, Mitt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wqyEnJ3b4Mo

Why Romney’s latest gaffe is important

Political Wire:

Mitt Romney’s unforced error this morning isn’t likely to derail his campaign but it certainly adds to the impression he doesn’t care much about people.

First Read: “All political candidates — just like all non-politicians — make verbal gaffes… But in politics, what becomes damaging is when a verbal gaffe fits a pre-existing narrative.”

Jonathan Chait: “It may not be true that, at a personal level, Romney doesn’t care about the poor. He probably does. But his platform doesn’t. In that sense, his slip-up was a gaffe in the classic sense of admitting what he actually thinks.”

Andrew Sullivan: “Just because Romney looks smooth doesn’t mean he is. He is often a dreadfully inept candidate.”

Alexandra Petri: At this rate, he’ll show up at the next debate explaining, “Look, I’m not concerned about the poor. They have cake. I say we let them eat it.”

Romney: Context for me, but not for thee

Greg Sargent:

Get this: At a press gaggle just now, Mitt Romney defended his gaffe this morning — in which he said he’s “not concerned about the very poor”— by pleading with reporters to look at the larger context of his remarks:

“No no no no. I — no, no. You’ve got to take the whole sentence, all right, as opposed to saying, and then change it just a little bit, because then it sounds very different,” said Romney. “I’ve said throughout the campaign my focus, my concern, my energy is gonna be devoted to helping middle income people, all right? We have a safety net for the poor in, and if there are holes in it, I will work to repair that. And if there are people that are falling through the cracks I want to fix that. “

You’ve got to take the whole sentence? Interesting. That rule did not apply when Romney personally approved an ad attacking Obama that lifted his words out of context in a hilariously dishonest way, implying that Obama said something about himself he’d actually attributed to a McCain adviser. The Romney campaign subsequently boasted about all the media attention the ad’s dishonesty earned.

Nor did Romney’s call for context apply when he blasted Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism by cherry-picking a line from an Obama speech in which the President actually did proclaim his belief that America is exceptional. Romney has a whole history of decontextualizing remarks.

By the way, it’s unlikely that Romney’s plea for context will do anything to quiet criticism of the gaffe, which is now being loudly voiced by conservatives, too. Erick Erickson, Jonah Goldberg and others on the right are all arguing that Romney has showcased his political ineptitude by offering Dems a comment that — even if taken out of context — plays perfectly into the Dem strategy of painting Romney as the candidate of the one percent. Not only that, but it’s also worth mentioning that in his comments, Romney confirmed that the Democratic Party does care about the poor.

Romney wasn’t really saying he doesn’t care about the poor, but the context still doesn’t help much. He seemed to be indicating that the plight of the poor isn’t all that worrisome because the safety net is doing such an adequate job in keeping them out of, well, poverty.

For all the talk about Romney’s “electability,” this episode shows that in reality, widespread and rampant doubts about his fitness for the general election are seething just below the surface among a surprisingly large number of conservative observers. Romney’s plea for context — in which he‘s basically asking the press to honor a standard of accuracy his own campaign has made a mockery of — won’t do anything to ally those doubts, either.

Right-wing complaint w/Romney saying he’s “not concerned” about the poor: He’s showing too much concern for the poor

National Review:

I agree with you on the general tin-ear of Romney. He’s extremely un-nimble on the stump, which means that Republicans will be gambling that he can be sufficiently insulated and managed across the finish line without offering up any campaign-detonating hostage to fortune.

But, beyond that, I’m less sanguine about the underlying worldview that “I’m not concerned about the very poor” betrays. Romney:

We will hear from the Democrat party, “the plight of the poor,” and there’s no question, it’s not good being poor. . . . We have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it, but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.

The Pundette responds:

I know Romney gives generously to charity but what a cold fish he is… A conservative candidate would talk about increasing opportunity for the very poor, about lessening the need for food stamps and housing vouchers by reducing government and invigorating the economy, rather than touting the awesomeness of our massive, dependency-inducing welfare state and suggesting it might need some beefing up.

Romney’s is a benevolent patrician’s view of society: The poor are incorrigible, but let’s add a couple more groats to their food stamps and housing vouchers, and they’ll stay quiet. Aside from the fact that that kind of thinking has led the western world to near terminal insolvency, for a candidate whose platitudinous balderdash of a stump speech purports to believe in the most Americanly American America that any American has ever Americanized over, it’s as dismal a vision of permanent trans-generational poverty as any Marxist community organizer with a cozy sinecure on the Acorn board would come up with.

After half-a-century of evidence, what sort of “conservative” offers the poor the Even Greater Society? I don’t know how “electable” Mitt is, but, even if he is, the greater danger, given the emptiness of his campaign to date, is that he’ll be elected with no real mandate for the course correction the Brokest Nation in History urgently needs. In last Monday’s debate, Newt said he wasn’t interested in going to Washington to “manage the decline”. Mitt’s just told us that he’s happy to “manage the decline” for the poor – but who knows who else?

Mitt Romney’s Policy Proposals Reflect Lack of Concern For Poor — And Middle Class

Political Correction:

[…]Romney’s budget proposals demonstrate even greater disregard for the very poor — and the somewhat poor, and the middle class. In his speech in Florida last night, Romney promised that as president, “without raising taxes, I will finally balance the budget.” But balancing the budget while enacting his tax policies and increasing defense spending — another Romney promise — is only possible via massive cuts to programs that poor and middle-class families rely on. 

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Romney’s plan would require cutting every program, including Social Security and Medicare, by 21 percent in 2016 and 36 percent in 2021. If Social Security were excluded from cuts, Romney would have to cut everything else, including Medicare, by 30 percent in 2016 and 54 percent in 2021. And that would have a devastating impact on America’s poor and middle class, as CBPP explained:

• Medicare would be cut by $153 billion in 2016 and $1.4 trillion through 2021.  Achieving cuts of this size solely through reducing payments to hospitals, physicians, and other health care providers would threaten beneficiaries’ access to care. Thus, beneficiaries would almost certainly face large increases in premiums and cost-sharing charges.

• Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) would face cumulative cuts of $946 billion through 2021. … [I]t would leave 34 million people uninsured who would have gained coverage under health reform.

• Cuts in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) would throw 10 million low-income people off the benefit rolls, cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or some combination of the two. These cuts would primarily affect very-low-income families with children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

• Compensation payments for disabled veterans (which average less than $13,000 a year) would be cut by one-fourth, as would pensions for low-income veterans (which average about $11,000 a year) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits for poor aged and disabled individuals (which average about $6,000 a year and leave poor elderly and disabled people far below the poverty line).

Elaborating on his lack of concern for the poor, Romney said: “[W]e have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it, but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.” But Romney has a policy agenda that wouldn’t strengthen those programs — it would tear even larger holes in the safety net.

And, no, Romney won’t be able to enact those cuts without badly hurting beneficiaries: Government programs like food stamps and Medicaid are extremely efficient, with the overwhelming majority of spending going to benefits and services. So Romney would enact dramatic cuts to programs that help poor kids and seniors and disabled veterans pay for food and health care — and use the savings to give millionaires like himself a huge tax cut. That isn’t someone who is merely “not concerned” with the poor and middle class — that’s someone whose policy agenda is actively hostile to the poor and middle class.

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. Take a look at how Romney described his teenage revelation about the poor during his 1994 Senate campaign:

Heading to the first campaign stop of the day on Wednesday, Mr. Romney was asked about his two and a half years as a Mormon missionary in France. “I was 19,” he said. “I had lived a privileged life. I learned how different life was for those who are poor. I learned being poor, you can have joy and fun and have a wonderful life.”

Having grown up “privileged” — the son of a wealthy auto executive who served as Governor of Michigan and Secretary of HUD — Mitt Romney spent two years among people whose “shared bathroom was just a hole in the floor,” according to an August 7, 1994, Boston Herald article. And what he took away from that experience was “being poor, you can have joy and fun and have a wonderful life.” 

That’s true, of course. It’s also true that being so poor you have to use a hole in the floor as a shared bathroom, or have to decide between food and medicine, or can’t afford a winter coat for your kids can be an absolutely brutal existence, and one that is difficult to climb out of without help. If Romney had learned that lesson about “how different life was for those who are poor,” he might not be so quick to cut funding for food stamps and health care in order to give himself, and his fellow super-wealthy, a massive tax cut.

As Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, George Romney understood the system was rigged in favor of the rich:

George Romney, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, suggested today that part of the “housing subsidy” going to middle and high income groups be repealed and the revenue channeled into rebuilding the slums.

“Maybe we ought to repeal part of the right to deduct the interest rate from the income tax return to bring home to middle income and affluent families that they are getting a housing subsidy,” Mr. Romney said. “Maybe that [money] ought to be earmarked to meet the problems of the slums.” [...]

[Romney's press secretary] said Mr. Romney had become increasingly concerned about the fact that while most Americans are “pretty well housed,” the “plight of the poor is getting worse every year.” [New York Times, 10/24/69]

That basic situation, in which the wealthy benefit from subsidies and preferential government treatment, often without recognizing it, and the plight of the poor — and middle class — gets worse, hasn’t changed. What has changed is that now the Romney who wants to be president is more concerned with helping the rich than the rest of the country.

The Difference Between Barack Obama And Mitt Romney In One Graphic 

Barack Obama has raised more money from small-donors than MittRomney has raised from all donors. 

Crossroads groups raise whopping $51 million in 2011

President Obama Slams Romney Over Foreclosure Remarks, Offers Re-Fi Plan 

Daily Kos:

I like this.

You may remember Mitt Romney’s remarks last year that we need to foreclose and foreclose and let the market hit bottom:

As for what to do for the housing industry specifically, and are there things that you can do to encourage housing? One is don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up. The Obama administration has slow-walked the foreclosure processes that have long existed and as a result we still have a foreclosure overhang.

Think Progress, Oct 18, 2011,  Romney Tells State With Country’s Highest Foreclosure Rate ‘Don’t Try And Stop The Foreclosure Process’

Today, President Obama responded on behalf of the 99% in what I think will be the first of many contrasts:

“It is wrong for anyone to suggest that the only option for struggling, responsible homeowners is to sit and wait for the housing market to hit rock bottom. I refuse to accept that and so do the American people.”

Time, The Page

And the President is trying to do something about it:

President Obama on Wednesday rolled out new proposals aimed at helping troubled homeowners, including a plan that would allow more borrowers to take advantage of record-low interest rates and lower their monthly mortgage payments.

Up to 3.5 million people who do not currently have federally backed loans might be eligible for the program, administration officials said. Another 11 million people who currently hold government-backed loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also could potentially benefit.

snip

A central piece of the president’s plan would allow qualified homeowners to refinance their mortgages at current historically low interest rates. Unlike earlier proposals, the new refinance measure will cover not only home loans guaranteed by federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but also those owned by private investors, according to senior administration officials.

The cost of undertaking those refinancings, Obama said last week, would be paid for by a fee on large financial firms to ensure “it won’t add to the deficit and will give those banks that were rescued by the taxpayers a chance to repay a deficit of trust.” The program’s estimated price tag is between $5 billion and $10 billion.

“While the government cannot fix the housing market on its own, the President believes that responsible homeowners should not have to sit and wait for the market to hit bottom to get relief when there are measures at hand that can make a meaningful difference,” a White House statement said Wednesday, “including allowing these homeowners to save thousands of dollars by refinancing at today’s low interest rates.”

WaPo

This may not be a panecea; it may not help everyone.  But it will help some, and, to me, that’s good.  Of course, the Republicans will try to prevent it.  

There will be a clear contrast in the 2012 election.  Mitt Romney is the .0001%  The President represents the people.

Update I: More details from Meteor Blades excellent front page diary:

http://www.dailykos.com/…

• The Department of Justice is establishing a working group of at least 55 DOJ attorneys, analysts, agents and investigators from around the country who will join existing state and federal resources investigating similar misconduct under those authorities.

snip

• A refinancing plan will help “responsible borrowers” save an average of $3,000 per year.

snip

• The Homeowner Bill of Rights will include: access to a simple mortgage disclosure form, so borrowers can better understand the loans they are seeking; full disclosure of fees and penalties; guidelines to prevent conflicts of interest; support to keep responsible families in their homes and out of foreclosure; and protection against inappropriate foreclosure, including right of appeal.

• Provide a full year of mortgage-payment forbearance for borrowers looking for work.

• $15 billion in federal funds to put construction workers on the job rehabilitating and refurbishing hundreds of thousands of vacant and foreclosed homes and businesses.

How the housing market could shape the 2012 election

PBS NewsHour:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, we look at one of the major economic problems on the minds of voters this year, including in Florida: housing.

Jeffrey Brown has the story.

JEFFREY BROWN: Florida may be known as the Sunshine State, but like much of the country, conditions remain poor when it comes to the housing market.

A national report out today, the so-called Case-Shiller index, shows U.S. home prices fell for a third straight month in major metropolitan markets, including Miami and Tampa. In Florida, home values have dropped by 40 percent or more in some areas since the housing bust. Nationwide, prices have dropped by more than a third.

And the foreclosure crisis continues, with nearly 2.7 million foreclosure filings last year. Several states have been particularly hard-hit, including California, Nevada, Arizona, and indeed the site of today’s primary election, Florida.

Some voters in Tampa today said they wanted the candidates to offer more solutions to the problem.

SHARRY STEINER, Florida voter: I’m not thrilled with the reactions from them talking about it. I think they have kind of just gone past it. I really don’t think they want to talk about it.

JEFFREY BROWN: A map from the NewsHour’s Vote 2012 Center helps tell the story.

The Tampa area is one of nearly 30 counties in the state where foreclosure rates have risen substantially, in some cases even doubling, tripling or quadrupling since 2007. The darker the color, the worse shape the county is in.

To date, Republican presidential candidates have largely avoided spelling out specific policies on housing, mainly arguing that fixing the broader economy is the most logical solution. In October, Mitt Romney said in an interview in Las Vegas that it was best to — quote — “let the foreclosure process run its course and hit the bottom.” More recently, in Florida, he’s talked generally about taking measures to turn around the problem.

Most of the focus of the last week, though, has been on the government-owned mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. At last week’s debate in Jacksonville, Romney took aim at Newt Gingrich’s consultancy work with Freddie Mac.

MITT ROMNEY (R): He should have stood up and said, look, these things are a disaster; this is a crisis. He should have been anxiously telling the American people that these entities were causing a housing bubble that would cause a collapse that we’ve seen here in Florida and around the country.

JEFFREY BROWN: Gingrich attacked Romney in return.

NEWT GINGRICH (R): Gov, Romney owns shares of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Governor Romney made a million dollars off of selling some of that. Governor Romney owns share — has an investment in Goldman Sachs, which is today foreclosing on Floridians.

JEFFREY BROWN: In that same debate, Texas Representative Ron Paul and former Senator Rick Santorum both said Fannie and Freddie should be phased out.

For his part, the president used his State of the Union address to call for new legislation aimed at helping those unable to make their mortgage payments.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Responsible homeowners shouldn’t have to sit and wait for the housing market to hit bottom to get some relief. And that’s why I’m sending this Congress a plan that gives every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage by refinancing at historically low rates.

JEFFREY BROWN: The president’s principal program for working with lenders to reduce foreclosures has far helped more than 900,000 homeowners get a permanent modification on their mortgage. But that’s far short of the original goals of the program. Tomorrow, the president is expected to spell out further details of his newest plan.

More now on housing and the campaign from Jed Kolko, chief economist with Trulia, an online residential real estate site that provides information for buyers, sellers, renters, and agents. And Arian Campo-Flores is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who’s been reporting on housing in Florida. He joins us from Miami.

Jed Kolko, before we get to Florida and the campaign, fill in the national picture for us a bit. What do today’s numbers tell us?

JED KOLKO, Chief Economist, Trulia: The housing market is still struggling in most parts of the country, even though we have seen some good news in the past few months. Both sales and construction appear to be picking up a bit, but home prices are still falling, not as much as they did at the worst part of the housing bust, but they are still falling.

And a lot of people have wondered, how can that be? We thought that, if you fixed the economy, the housing market would follow. And we’ve seen employment growing each month for more than the last year. But the problem is, even with more jobs and growing housing demand, there is so much inventory, so much supply, so many vacancies that’s hanging over the housing market that makes it hard for prices to rise.

You may have more people who are demanding housing and are looking to buy, but there are so many homes that are available and could come to market if prices started to rise, that there’s nothing to push prices upward until we get rid of some of this inventory.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, so, Arian Campo-Flores, take us — that national picture and translate it to what you’ve been seeing in counties in Florida. What do you — tell us — give us a little flavor of the current state of the market there.

ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES, The Wall Street Journal: Yeah.

Well, I spent some time reporting in Volusia County, which is in Central Florida at the eastern end of the I-4 Corridor. The western part of that county in particular, cities like Deltona, De Bary and DeLand, have been especially hard-hit. The prices there have come down 54 percent from their peak.

I saw blocks with four or five, six homes that were in foreclosure, “for sale” signs all over the place. And it has — I spoke to a lot of people who either faced foreclosure or went through it. And they just uniformly describe this incredibly excruciating, maddening process that takes years of negotiating with banks and, in the course, ruins their credit, and just — it creates immense frustration.

And I also spoke to those who were their neighbors and feel trapped in their homes because they have seen the property values plummet in their areas, and they just don’t really have a way out.

JEFFREY BROWN: So — just to stay with you, so there you were all week while the campaign was going on. How did this issue play out? What did people tell you they wanted from the candidates, and what were they hearing from the candidates?

ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES: Well, what they said they want is more help for homeowners who are underwater.

They — folks want the principals on their loans to be written down. They would like these refinancing programs and loan modification programs to reach them. You know, there are — figures were cited earlier that the administration has put out — and it’s true — in fact, you know, more than 900,000 people have had permanent modifications.

But none of the people that I spoke to had been able to benefit from any of those programs. And so there’s this sense that those — you know, folks in Washington who have put forth solutions, those have not worked thus far. And what they’re hearing so far from the candidates on the campaign trail, on the GOP side are a lot of generalities, but no specific proposals that, you know, would suggest a way out.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Jed Kolko, what would you add to that? I mean, it sort of presents an interesting dilemma for some of the Republican candidates, because, for the most part, on economic issues, they’re pushing for free market policies. How does that translate into the particulars of the housing market?

JED KOLKO: I think the Republican candidates are in a tough position when it comes to housing policy.

When it comes to voters, housing really is a bipartisan issue. We at Trulia did a survey of consumers, and we found that even a majority of Republicans want the government to support homeownership. And they’re actually in favor of most of the types of proposals that are on the table.

The problem for the candidates, though, is almost any policy that you might come up with, such as refinancing, or reducing principal, loan modification, will either cost somebody some money — and that somebody is probably going to be the government or the banks, or both — and it’s very hard to separate people who are underwater or might lose their homes and it’s entirely not their fault from people who might have taken risks or made bad decisions that maybe they shouldn’t be bailed out for.

Democrats are a lot more willing to accept that some people who may be less deserving could be helped than Republicans are. And Republicans are a lot less willing to burden either the government or banks with more money. So, it means that even though Republican voters want to hear from their candidates some kinds of policies that might help the housing market, Republican candidates face these land mines of the challenge of spending more money and the reluctance among lots of Republicans to help undeserving homeowners.

JEFFREY BROWN: Of course, at the same time, Jed Kolko, the Obama administration, with a more interventionist approach, is still finding this a very tough nut to crack, right? It’s still a big problem.

JED KOLKO: That’s right.

What Obama proposed in the State of the Union address probably needs congressional approval. And we know how that usually goes. But another irony of the whole debate over housing policy is that some of the most innovative and daring ideas have actually come from advisers and economists and other policy wonks who traditionally advise Republicans.

So the ideas are there. It’s just that — current politics that make it hard for the government to spend money. And to have to deal with this question of separating the deserving from the undeserving homeowners make it very hard for Republican candidates to talk about these policies in the campaign.

JEFFREY BROWN: Arian Campo-Flores, bringing it back to Florida, I’m just wondering if you see any bright spots there. Florida still being a very desirable destination for so many people around the country, is there some hope of more people coming in, picking up some of these houses? Are there some signs that people point to?

ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES: There are some.

I mean, you know, in the Miami area, for instance, there’s been a lot of international buyers that have come in that are scooping up properties that were — and all these condominiums that were overbuilt during the boom period, and paying all cash. And so they’re starting to eat up some of that inventory.

In Volusia County, where I spent time reporting, you’re seeing, again, people taking advantage of the really low prices, buying up properties that they’re then renting out or using them sort of as investments. So that is starting to happen and it is helping.

I spoke to the property appraiser in Volusia County, who felt that the market was probably pretty much at the bottom. But there is just still so much inventory left, that it’s just going to take a long time for that to really have a noticeable impact in these neighborhoods.

JEFFREY BROWN: Jed Kolko, just 30 seconds or so here, but does that fit into the national — any part of the national picture?

JED KOLKO: Yes.

On Trulia, we see many more people from outside of Florida searching for homes in Florida than people in Florida looking to leave. Florida’s long been the retirement community for so much of the U.S., and baby boomers will still be retiring. And now that homes are more affordable in Florida, some of those baby boomers who thought they’d have to look for cheaper locations in the South can now consider Florida again for their retirement.

New At C&L: The GOP: Preaching the Prosperity Gospel

C&L:

One of the richest men in the country, ranking in the 0.006 percent of Americans, likes to accuse the President of creating an “entitlement society.” Mitt Romney, the heir apparent, next in line GOP nominee … is against entitlement.

When I hear “entitlement society” I think, “country club.” But When Mitt uses that phrase he doesn’t mean rich guys like him, given all the advantages of wealth, who are now enjoying its comforts – he means the rest of us. Yes, Mitt is against an “entitlement society” because that involves too many people and not just him and his ilk. It’s not the “entitlement” he contests – it’s the entire “society” part.

At the Monday Florida debate last week Mitt noted that under Gingrich’s tax plan Mitt would pay no taxes at all. Gingrich responded with, “Well, if that — and if you created enough jobs doing that — it was Alan Greenspan who first said the best rate, if you want to create jobs for capital gains, is zero.”

So rich people whose money makes their money (it’s literally capital gaining) are so fortunate they get to hire other people to pay taxes for them? Rich people with their alleged mythical power to create jobs even get to outsource their tax obligations to poor saps working for a living?

This is the prosperity gospel as a Super PAC-funded marketing blitz. Money is next to godliness and poverty is the fault of the poor for not being better people.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the Romans job-killing communists.

“Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business,” former George W. Bush budget director Gov. Mitch Daniels said in his State of the Union response last week, “It’s one of the noblest of human pursuits.” This is one of those phrases you (usually) will only hear in business school (funnier if it was one of those rip-off for-profit colleges). Business is one of the noblest of human pursuits? Noble as in aristocratic? That phrase, “noble pursuits,” is usually applied to an avocation not paying much but rewarding in other ways: teachers; firefighters; nurses; foster parents; soldiers; community leaders; social workers; mentors; rescue workers; care givers; farmers. Or to anyone who’s honest, shows up every day and works hard. That’s a noblepursuit.

Are the wealthy really so sensitive they need Mitch Daniels to make them feel better about themselves in a spiritual sense? What they’re doing not only pays off with privilege and cash – it also has to be venerable from a moral perspective? How much reward does one group need? They own everything and they also need to be thanked?!

The rich are not just over-paid – they’re over valued. And generous welfare recipients.

As Senator Tom Coburn points out in his damning Nov. 2011 report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” we are a wealthfare state. It reads, “This reverse Robin Hood style of wealth redistribution is an intentional effort to get all Americans bought into a system where everyone appears to benefit.” In other words: We subsidize the rich by telling the poor to pay their fair share.

It’s been a strange three years under the Obama administration. First the GOP was against empathy. Yes, the party had to vehemently opposed seeing the plight of your fellow human beings because Obama was for it. Now their new hot button word? Fairness. Obama used the word fairness in his third State of the Union. And now the GOP has decided to be against fairness and celebrate inequality as being the thing that makes America great.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the three wise men were shareholders.

The prosperity gospel is not America. It’s not democratic. It’s not even Christian. It’s greed warped into being a virtue by the greedy.

The rich aren’t better, they’re just richer.

Romney Team Silent On Key Offshore Tax Avoidance Question

TPM:
[…] The briefing cleared up several questions, but left others unanswered —including one from TPM that will either exculpate Romney from allegations that he’s used investments in offshore entities to avoid U.S. taxes, or reveal that his campaign has not fully addressed those allegations.

On the call, Romney’s trustee pledged get back to us with this information. But despite multiple inquiries in the days since the conference call, the Romney camp has not set the record straight one way or another.

Romney has disclosed a substantial individual retirement account (IRA) that, as the Wall Street Journal first noted, could have made offshore investments that circumvented an obscure U.S. tax called the Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT).

One benefit of an IRA is that its holder is allowed to defer taxation on deposited income until it’s drawn upon during retirement. In the meantime, the deposits buy investments that can easily return much more than other types of savings vehicles. But there are some things an IRA can’t do without being taxed right away. An IRA can’t finance investments with debt, and, in the United States, it can’t invest in entities that lever up, without being hit by the UBIT.

But if an IRA invests in an offshore fund, and that fund levers up, it can avoid the UBIT altogether. And at 35 percent that’s no small tax to get around, according to multiple tax experts.

When first questioned about this on the call, Romney’s trustee noted, “Governor Romeny’s IRA is not structured in the Caymans, it’s not located in the Cayman’s. It’s tax deferred just like your IRA, and my IRA.”

But in a followup, I asked if his IRA had invested in any offshore entities that would have made it subject to the UBIT if those entities were located on U.S. soil. Romney’s staff has yet to provide the answer.

Though most private equity funds do use leverage, it’s possible that Romney’s IRA hasn’t been used to avoid the UBIT at all. If he and his aides can demonstrate that, or state so unequivocally on the record, it will put one key controversy surrounding his tax advantages to bed.

GOP super PACS way ahead of Dems 

Political Carnival:

I just flipped on the Thom Hartmann radio show, and here’s the first thing I heard:

“200 donors to Mitt Romney’s Super PAC brought in 30 million dollars. In all of John McCain’s primary run, he spent 11 million, yet Romney spent $15 just in Florida to get a win. All Obama has is $6 million.”

I’ve been fuming about this all morning, because this story has been inescapable, it was everywhere I turned. It was on the radio, the Tee Vee machine, and it was in my morning L.A. Times.

Thanks to Citizens United, thanks to (legal) unlimited donations to super PACS, the 1%ers are buying our candidates outright, influencing election outcomes, and the new normal is that we are now, more than ever, at the mercy of the very, very wealthy few who are able to donate as much as they want without restriction.

The Adelson family’s $10 million gift to Newt Gingrich is just one example. That’s right, one family is single-handedly financing Newt’s campaign, potentially keeping him in the race as he struggles against the Romney onslaught of ads bought and paid for by his corporate buddies, or as he likes to call them, “people”.

Is anyone out there still wondering what the Occupy movement stands for?

The Times fills in more details, and they aren’t pretty:

Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Mitt Romney‘s candidacy, raised $30 million during 2011, thanks in part to separate $1-million donations from three New York-based hedge fund executives: Paul Singer, Robert Mercer and Julian Robertson. Two privately held corporations each gave $1 million to Romney as well. [...]

The reports also spotlighted the lopsided fundraising race between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to this new breed of political organizations. Although President Obama is far outstripping his potential challengers when it comes to fundraising, GOP super PACs are pulling in more money than their Democratic counterparts. [...]

American Crossroads [a super PAC founded in part by Karl Rove] disclosed that it received $18.4 million, with $5 million coming from [Dallas billionaire Harold] Simmons personally and an additional $2 million from his privately held holding company, Contran Corp.  An additional $500,000 was reported from Crow Holdings, run by Dallas real estate baron Harlan Crow. Kenny Troutt, a billionaire communications executive based in Dallas, also gave half a million dollars.

A coal industry management firm, Alliance Management Holdings, gave $425,000 and Richard Baxter Gilliam, the founder of a Virginia-based coal mining company, contributed $250,000.

The Times has many more details, but for those who can’t resist bringing up the evil, commie, socialist, Kenyan, French, Alinsky-wannabe, liberal hippie George Soros, who apparently owns every Democratic politician in the country, he gave $100,000 to Majority PAC which supports Democratic Senate candidates. A drop in the bucket next to the GOP heavy hitters.

Please link over and read the whole thing, but only if you don’t mind starting your day with disturbing news.

NYT: Who are the mega-donors behind GOP campaigns? Breakdown of SuperPAC filings

The White House Blog: Rooting Out the Corrosive Influence of Money in Politics

In last week’s State of the Union Address, the President laid out a blueprint for an economy built to last, where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules, especially those elected officials who have been sent here to Washington.

During the speech, the President called on Congress to pass a bill that makes clear that current insider trading laws apply to Members of Congress. No one should be able to trade stocks based on nonpublic information they learned on Capitol Hill. This is a no-brainer.

I’d like to point out that Executive Branch employees are already covered by the insider trading prohibitions. That’s right — there are laws on the books to prevent Executive Branch employees from trading stock based on information that is not public. In fact, the SEC and the Department of Justice have brought insider trading actions against employees of the Executive Branch based on this clear authority under the law. So, the Executive Branch is covered. It’s time to make it clear that Congress is subject to the same rules.

Now, there are some folks out there who suggest the Administration is trying to impose a higher standard on Congress. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only do the insider trading laws already apply to the Executive Branch, but there are other laws on the books that prohibit Executive Branch employees from using their positions to benefit their own personal financial interest. These laws don’t apply to Congress.

For instance, as a matter of criminal law, Executive Branch employees can’t work on matters that would affect their personal financial interest. There is no criminal conflict of interest law that likewise applies to Members of Congress. Additionally, Executive Branch employees must get rid of private assets that conflict with their official duties or be walled off from decisions that affect their private assets. Members of Congress can hang onto those assets and make decisions that could affect them.

The Executive Branch employees are currently held to a higher standard. The STOCK Act simply brings Congress closer to that standard. So, we are pleased the Senate is one step closer to passing the STOCK Act.  We urge Congress to pass this bill, and President will sign it right away.

Republicans Start To Unite Around Call To Allow Billionaires And Corporations To Directly Fund Campaigns

ThinkProgress:

Eight in 10 Americans believe that there istoo much money in American politics, andonly 17 percent agree with the Supreme Court that corporations should be allowed to spend unlimited money to try to influence elections.

Yet top Republicans are coalescing around the idea that current campaign finance laws — which still prohibit corporations and wealthy individuals from giving unlimited money directly to campaigns — are actually too restrictive. Judging from interviews with ThinkProgress and Republican campaign speeches over the past two months, the GOP’s standard response to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling has solidified: allow for unlimited contributions directly to candidates while requiring immediate disclosure.

The language used by different high-ranking Republicans is so similar that it suggests a certain level of message-coordination on the subject. Indeed, from GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) to Republican money man Fred Malek, their reactions to campaign finance laws are virtually identical:

• Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty: “The better position is to allow full and free speech in whatever form, but have instant disclosure.” [1/21/12]
• Top Republican Money Figure Fred Malek: “I would favor unlimited contributions to candidates with full disclosure.” [1/27/12]
• Presidential candidate Mitt Romney: “We’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign. They must report it immediately…” [12/21/11]

Although Republican supporters of unlimited money in politics seem to have decided that supporting campaign disclosures is an important part of their messaging strategy, the GOP’s actions betray any suggestion that they actually stand behind transparency. Following Citizens United, Democrats introduced the DISCLOSE Act to bring more transparency to the murky world of campaign finance. It passed the House in 2010 but failed to break a Republican filibuster by a single vote.

In other words, Republicans seem to care a whole lot more about letting corporations and the very rich buy elections than they do about protecting the American people’s ability to know about it.

Senate Dems introduce ‘Buffett rule’ bill

TPM:

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and seven others introduced “Buffett Rule” legislation Wednesday that implements President Obama’s principle, advocated in the State of the Union, that millionaires and billionaires should pay a minimum tax rate of 30 percent.

The “The Paying a Fair Share Act” is sponsored by Sens. Daniel Akaka (D-HI), Mark Begich (D-AK), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and leadership member Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Whitehouse’s office said it’s still waiting for an official score but expects the legislation to produce tens of billions of dollars in deficit reduction. The policy is structured as a minimum tax for people making over $1 million per year.

“It’s inexcusable that our tax system permits ultra-high income earners to pay a lower tax rate than a truck driver or a janitor, and this legislation would help fix that unfair system,” the Rhode Island Democrat said.

Dem Sen Primary Frontrunners Pull Away

National Journal:

Frontrunning Democrats in contested Senate primaries put some more distance between themselves and their opponents during the 4th quarter, applying further pressure on the underdogs to make up ground in races that are looking more and more one-sided:

-- In Arizona: Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona’s impressive $570,000 haul — in six weeks — outpaced former state Democratic Party Chairman Don Bivens’s $230,000 take and additional $160,000 in self-funding. What’s more, Carmona wasn’t far off Republican Rep. Jeff Flake’s $607,000 mark — and Flake had a full quarter to raise money.

-- In New Mexico: Rep. Martin Heinrich’s $483,000 4th quarter easily outpaced state AuditorHector Balderas’s $108,000. The cash on hand disparity is glaring as well: Heinrich has nearly $1.4 million in the bank while Balderas has just $434,000.

-- In Connecticut: -- Rep. Chris Murphy’s $720,000 and $2.5 million cash on hand is better than the combined quarterly hauls and cash on hand totals of former Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz and state Rep. William Tong. Enough said.

-- In Hawaii: Rep. Mazie Hirono raised $624,000 and ended the period with $1 million in the bank. Former Rep. Ed Case still has not released his numbers. That doesn’t portend a big figure for him, and Hirono has outraised him in previous quarters.

Club for Growth comes out against Boehner’s highway bill.

The Hill:

A key conservative organization warned Republicans today that it will track Speaker John Boehner’s (Ohio) ambitious highway spending and energy development bill and urged conservatives to vote against the measure later this month.

In an alert posted on its website, the Club for Growth said that “a vote on this plan, and perhaps procedural votes, will be included in the Club’s 2012 Congressional Scorecard” and slammed the measure for not reining in federal infrastructure spending.

“Simply put, this is a massive 846-page bill that doesn’t cut any spending at all,” the notice said. “Indeed, it spends at least $30 billion more by supplementing fuel taxes with additional revenue from other sources.”

The key vote notice has raised some eyebrows in the House, because the club’s president, former Rep. Chris Chocola (R-Ind.), voted for a massive 2005 highway bill that Boehner and a handful of conservatives voted against.

Boehner and other backers of the new bill have touted a number of reforms to the 2005 bill that they have included in the measure to bolster its conservative credentials, along with the fact that by tying spending to revenues from domestic energy production, the measure should be budget-neutral.

Club Communications Director Barney Keller dismissed questions about Chocola’s change in positions.

“The Key Vote Alert speaks for itself,” Keller said. “Clearly, some members of the weak-kneed caucus are worried about primary challenges if they vote for this, and they are upset that they won’t be able to vote for a massive spending bill. The voting record of a former Congressman from Indiana who isn’t on the ballot anywhere in the United States is not an excuse for bad behavior.”

Keller added that the club also opposed the 2005 bill and designated it as a key vote, meaning Chocola, along with other conservatives like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and former Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.) who voted for it, was hit by the group for his vote.

In addition to not including reductions in federal spending, other conservative groups have complained, the Boehner measure does not adequately devolve authority to state and local governments.

“Supporters of the bill will claim that there are plenty of positive reforms in the bill, like no earmarks or enhancement projects, but it’s still a remarkably bloated and inefficient piece of legislation,” the club said in its notice. “True reform would devolve infrastructure building and maintenance back to the states and end or greatly reduce the federal gas tax.”

Classic Example of a Dutiful Republican Protecting the Interests of the Koch Brothers

Addicting Info:

Anyone who needs proof of how the 1% who control much of the wealth in this country, use the Republican Party to advance their agenda and stifle any opposition to their greedy activities, need only watch this video record of the very nasty, unpleasant exchange that took place at the House Energy and Commerce Committee last Wednesday.

In spite of Koch brothers disclaimers that they have no “direct” financial interest in the Keystone XLpipeline project, the ranking Democrat on the Committee smelled a rat and tried to pursue it.  Rep. Henry Waxman (D. Calif) asked that the Committee to subpoena Koch Industries to disclose their direct or indirect financial interests in the massive, continental energy project.

Commerce Committee Chair, Rep. Ed Whitfield, (R. KY) angrily shot the liberal Democrat down faster than you can say, “who are my real constituents again?”  Waxman is no shrinking-violet and took the Chair on even after be politely told to shut-up.   While stifling Waxman’s unflattering suggestion that the Koch brothers are not to be trusted,  Whitfield couldn’t resist the opportunity to promote the current Republican-Koch brothers campaign to suggest that President Obama maliciously wasted tax-payer money on failed solar energy company, Solyndra.

The Koch brothers political front organization, “American for Progress,”  has spent 6 million dollars on a commercial being shown across the nation, that suggests that even while knowing the company would  fail, Obama gave Solyndra tax-payer support as pay back for political support.  The narrative of the commercial suggests that Obama is the worst example of a pay-to-play politician.  Considering who sponsored the commercial, the charge gives new meaning to words like “chutzpah,” and hypocrite.  And have you heard about Don Corleone’s meritorious campaign against gambling and violence?

In light of Whitfield’s actions, does any honest American doubt for one minute that he has or will, receive significant financial support from one or more of the  Koch brothers political action committees? Meet you in 20 years at the Koch brothers Palm Springs retirement village for loyal Republican hacks?

Commerce Committee Chair, Rep. Ed Whitfield, (R. KY) angrily shot the liberal Democrat down faster than you can say, “who are my real constituents again?”  Waxman is no shrinking-violet and took the Chair on even after be politely told to shut-up.   While stifling Waxman’s unflattering suggestion that the Koch brothers are not to be trusted,  Whitfield couldn’t resist the opportunity to promote the current Republican-Koch brothers campaign to suggest that President Obama maliciously wasted tax-payer money on failed solar energy company, Solyndra.

The Koch brothers political front organization, “American for Progress,”  has spent 6 million dollars on a commercial being shown across the nation, that suggests that even while knowing the company would  fail, Obama gave Solyndra tax-payer support as pay back for political support.  The narrative of the commercial suggests that Obama is the worst example of a pay-to-play politician.  Considering who sponsored the commercial, the charge gives new meaning to words like “chutzpah,” and hypocrite.  And have you heard about Don Corleone’s meritorious campaign against gambling and violence?

In light of Whitfield’s actions, does any honest American doubt for one minute that he has or will, receive significant financial support from one or more of the  Koch brothers political action committees? Meet you in 20 years at the Koch brothers Palm Springs retirement village for loyal Republican hacks?

Commerce Committee Chair, Rep. Ed Whitfield, (R. KY) angrily shot the liberal Democrat down faster than you can say, “who are my real constituents again?”  Waxman is no shrinking-violet and took the Chair on even after be politely told to shut-up.   While stifling Waxman’s unflattering suggestion that the Koch brothers are not to be trusted,  Whitfield couldn’t resist the opportunity to promote the current Republican-Koch brothers campaign to suggest that President Obama maliciously wasted tax-payer money on failed solar energy company, Solyndra.

The Koch brothers political front organization, “American for Progress,”  has spent 6 million dollars on a commercial being shown across the nation, that suggests that even while knowing the company would  fail, Obama gave Solyndra tax-payer support as pay back for political support.  The narrative of the commercial suggests that Obama is the worst example of a pay-to-play politician.  Considering who sponsored the commercial, the charge gives new meaning to words like “chutzpah,” and hypocrite.  And have you heard about Don Corleone’s meritorious campaign against gambling and violence?

In light of Whitfield’s actions, does any honest American doubt for one minute that he has or will, receive significant financial support from one or more of the  Koch brothers political action committees? Meet you in 20 years at the Koch brothers Palm Springs retirement village for loyal Republican hacks?

POLLS

Gallup: Republicans, Democrats Favor Tax Breaks to Win Back U.S. Jobs

Among five specific economic proposals, both Republicans and Democrats are in favor of giving tax breaks to corporations that bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas and pressuring China for fairer trade. They are sharply divided about increasing federal income taxes on upper-income Americans, increasing federal spending to help the long-term unemployed find jobs, and increasing federal spending on the development of alternative energy sources. The majority of independents favor all five proposals.

The findings are from a Gallup poll conducted Jan. 23, 2012, to gauge support for specific economic proposals President Obama was expected to raise during his State of the Union address. Despite Americans’ dissatisfaction with the size and power of the federal government, they tend to favor specific proposals on how the government could accomplish high-priority goals.

In this case, large majorities of Democrats and independents — and at least 4 in 10 Republicans — favor each of the proposals Gallup asked about, pushing national support for each of the five well above the majority level. Overall support is highest for tax incentives to encourage corporations to bring back manufacturing jobs and for increasing federal spending to help the unemployed find jobs.

Americans’ views of these economic proposals can be partially explained by theirspecific economic concerns. The two most popular proposals — giving tax breaks to companies that bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas, and increasing government spending for education and job training for the long-term unemployed — directly address what Americans clearly perceive as one of the most important problems facing the country — jobs and unemployment.

With Americans less concerned about trade, energy, and taxes, it makes sense that the other three proposals — regarding fair trade with China, the development of alternative energy, and increased taxes on high-income Americans — are less popular.

Implications

Politically, the challenge for President Barack Obama and members of Congress is balancing Americans’ concerns about the role and size of government with their concerns about jobs. These Gallup data make it clear that Americans are more likely to favor federal government action that addresses their top economic concern, jobs and unemployment. Proposals on less top-of-mind concerns are not quite as popular. Still, a majority favors each of these specific proposals Gallup asked about, perhaps because respondents aren’t given a trade-off, such as the specific price tag.

It is also worth noting that despite the large Democratic-Republican divide on increasing taxes on upper-income Americans, federal funding for the development of alternative sources of energy, and education and job training for the long-term unemployed, a majority of independents favor each of these proposals. Further, lawmakers should expect widespread support for legislation that gives tax breaks to corporations that bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas and efforts to pressure China for fairer trade.

PublicPolicyPolling: This is now the 2nd poll in a row where we’ve found Obama up 7-9 pts on Romney in Ohio

SCIENCE

Scientists close to entering Vostok, Antarctica’s biggest subglacial lake

WaPo:

After drilling for two decades through more than two miles of antarctic ice, Russian scientists are on the verge of entering a vast, dark lake that hasn’t been touched by light for more than 20 million years.

Scientists are enormously excited about what life-forms might be found there but are equally worried about contaminating the lake with drilling fluids and bacteria, and the potentially explosive “de-gassing” of a body of water that has especially high concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen.

To prevent a sudden release of gas, the Russian team will not push the drill far into the lake but just deep enough for a limited amount of water — or the slushy ice on the lake’s surface — to flow up the borehole, where it will then freeze.

Reaching Lake Vostok would represent the first direct contact with what scientists now know is a web of more than 200 subglacial lakes in Antarctica — some of which existed when the continent was connected to Australia and was much warmer. They stay liquid because of heat from the core of the planet.

“This is a huge moment for science and exploration, breaking through to this enormous lake that we didn’t even know existed until the 1990s,” said John Priscu, a researcher at Montana State University who has long been involved in antarctic research, including a study of Vostok ice cores.

“If it goes well, a breakthrough opens up a whole new chapter in our understanding of our planet and possibly moons in our solar system and planets far beyond,” he said. “If it doesn’t go well, it casts a pall over the whole effort to explore this wet underside of Antarctica.”

Priscu said Russian scientists on the scene e-mailed him last week to say they had stopped drilling about 40 feet from the expected waterline to measure the pressure levels deep below. Priscu said he expected that they were also sending down a special “hot water” drill to make the final push, but a message from the Russian team Monday reported “no news.”

If the Russians break through as planned within the next week, it will cap more than 50 years of research in what are considered the harshest conditions in the world — where the surface temperatures drop to 100 degrees below zero. That extreme cold is likely to return within a few weeks, at the end of the antarctic summer, putting pressure on the Russians to make the final push or pull out until the next antarctic drilling season, starting in December.

The extreme cold, which limited drilling time, contributed to the long duration of the project. The Russian team also ran into delays caused by financial strains and by efforts to address international worries about their drilling operation.

Valery Lukin, who is leading the effort for the Russians, is on the ice. Last year, he told Reuters that their work is “like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don’t know what we’ll find.”

The ‘crown jewel’

American and English teams are planning drilling campaigns next year into much smaller antarctic lakes as scientists work to understand the dynamics of the continent, which holds more than 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. But Vostok — where the former Soviet Union began work after the United States settled in at the South Pole more than 50 years ago — is now acknowledged to be the “crown jewel” of Antarctica from a scientific perspective.

In recent years, researchers have discovered that microbes live in the ice wherever they explore in Antarctica, including deep in the Vostok borehole. This finding has revolutionized thinking about the snow- and ice-
covered continent and has encouraged researchers, including Priscu, to conclude that life almost certainly will be found in Vostok and the other subglacial lakes.

If microbes are found in Vostok, the discovery would have particular significance for astrobiology, the search for life beyond Earth. That’s because Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus have deep ice crusts that scientists think cover large amounts of liquid water warmed by sources other than the sun — just like Vostok.

Because of the stakes involved, the Russian effort has drawn criticism for its extensive use of kerosene, Freon and other chemicals to enable the drilling and to keep the borehole open during the long winter. Priscu said the Russians have worked with an international group he helped form to come up with cleaner ways to drill the final section of the hole.

Organizations including theAntarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, which is the official environmental umbrella group sitting at Antarctic Treaty organization meetings, have spoken against the drilling methods used by the Russians. Some other groups have called for a ban on scientific research beneath the antarctic ice sheet so the area can remain pristine.

Claire Christian, director of the coalition’s secretariat, said her group generally supports study of the subglacial antarctic lakes but wishes that the first entry would not take place at Vostok because of its importance. Of the Russian team, she said, “They have responded to some concerns but are not drilling to the highest standards available.” The Russian team could not be reached for comment.

Researchers such as Robin Bell, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said learning more about the subglacial world in Antarctica is essential to understanding the changing climate and how it may effect Earth. Because the continent has so much of the world’s freshwater ice, significant changes there would have a major impact on sea-level rise.

Bell, who has studied Vostok using satellite imaging and other above-surface instruments, said the lake is part of a complex system in which ice sheets bring in meltwater at their bottoms and later carry refrozen water elsewhere. She said that although the lake has not “felt the wind” in 20 million to 30 million years, the water in it is not as ancient — in the 100,000s to low millions of years old. The only ancient water present, she said, is probably in the sediment at the bottom.

She, too, has concerns about contamination and equipment failures but said the Russians see their Vostok work as a high-
profile symbol of scientific exploration and prowess and so are taking extra care.

Danger of giant geyser

Vostok, which is about the size of New Jersey, is the world’s third-largest lake by volume of water. Priscu said the gas in the lake makes it like a can of carbonated soda: Open it under high pressure, and it will spurt out.

He said the doomsday scenario for the Russian breakthrough would be if the suddenly released water pushed its way past machinery to block it and shot up the borehole, which is six to eight inches in diameter at the top. The result, he said, could be an enormous geyser that could empty a quarter of the lake. Priscu said he didn’t expect that to happen, but if it did, the sudden addition of substantial water vapor to the antarctic atmosphere could change the continent’s weather in unpredictable ways.

Some American Antarctica specialists think the combination of the Russian technique and the fact that the team is sampling from the “top” of the subterranean lake means that its chances of finding microbes is lower than if it went deeper into the water. Priscu and his former student Brent Christner, now a professor at Louisiana State University, published a paper in 2006 describing a variety of microbes in a Vostok ice core sample, but the Russian team has generally written off the microbes found as contamination.

American researchers will begin drilling into the Whillans Ice Stream in western Antarctica late this year, and the British will drill into the much deeper Lake Ellsworth, also in western Antarctica. Both are using techniques more consistent with best drilling practices than the Russians are doing at Vostok and are better equipped to find microbial life.

“Hopefully, all three projects will succeed, and then we’ll enter a new era of science and maybe cooperation,” Priscu said. “I could imagine an international team going back to Vostok and starting a project to drill much further into the lake with a higher level of technology and innovation.”

  [Just saying.]

UNIONS

Indiana Senate passes Right to Work, protest moves to Super Bowl village 

Indy Star:

Gov. Mitch Daniels signed “right to work” legislation this afternoon without a ceremony, making Indiana the 23rd state in the nation with the law.

Supporters said businesses already were lining up to expand or come to Indiana. Opponents had their eye on November’s elections, hoping the anger that brought thousands of union protesters to the Statehouse will propel them to the ballot box to vote against Republicans who pushed the bill.
Daniels skipped the public signing ceremony that usually accompanies a legislative triumph. He and Republican legislative leaders had made passage of the law, which bans union contracts that require fees from nonmembers, their top priority.

They won, despite repeated strikes by House Democrats to stall the bill and despite the daily protests that peaked with Wednesday’s Senate vote.

The bill was rushed to Daniels’ desk, where he signed it into law several hours after the Senate voted 28-22 for its passage.

In an emailed statement, Daniels said Indiana needed the law to draw employers that wouldn’t locate in the state without it.

“This law won’t be a magic answer, but we’ll be far better off with it,” Daniels said. “I respect those who have objected, but they have alarmed themselves unnecessarily: No one’s wages will go down, no one’s benefits will be reduced and the right to organize and bargain is untouched and intact.”

Indiana becomes the first state in the Rust Belt of the industrial Midwest and Northeast to adopt the bill.

Legislative leaders said that fact is having an immediate impact.

Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, R-Fort Wayne, said a company in Noble County, which he and other lawmakers would not identify, is “planning now to remain in Indiana instead of going to Alabama.”

And, he added, “a company from Michigan was planning to go to a ‘right to work’ state in the South. When they saw what was happening here, (they) invited the state to bid. . . . We are now in consideration for those jobs.”

House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, said he has “been handed emails and listened to voice mails of folks who have made contact with local economic development officers based solely on the passage of this bill. That’s what we’d hoped would occur.”

MORE>>>

WEDGE ISSUES

5 Signs the Christian Right Still Wields Too Much Power in America

Alternet:

This month, in a New Republic article titled “The End of the Christian Right,” historian Michael Kazin confidently asserts that “the Christian Right is a fading force in American life, one which has little chance of achieving its cherished goals.”

I have lost count of how many times the Religious Right has been declared dead as a political force by someone in the mainstream media. Maybe Kazin’s piece seemed absurd to me because I read it the day after watching every Republican presidential candidate take time from their South Carolina debate preparation to stop by Ralph Reed’s “Faith and Freedom Coalition” event and pledge devotion to the Religious Right’s agenda.

Kazin acknowledges this dynamic, but says, “whatever their influence on the Republican primary, the Christian Right is fighting a losing battle with the rest of the country – above all, when it comes to abortion and same-sex marriage, the issues they care most about.”

Really? The Washington Post reports that with GOP now in control of both houses of the Virginia legislature, the state’s “most conservative Republicans aren’t holding back” and are pushing legislation that, among other things, will “roll back gay rights” and “beef up gun rights, property rights, parental rights and fetal rights.”

Here are five reasons why we shouldn’t declare the end of the Christian Right.

1. Redefining Religious Liberty 

Kazin does not address church-state separation or efforts by the Religious Right and its allies, particularly the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to redefine religious liberty. In the name of “religious liberty,” they demand religious exemptions from generally applicable laws, but only for their religious beliefs; take government funding for religiously based programs but cry discrimination when a government grant program has anti-discrimination policies incompatible with their religious beliefs; portray those who oppose government funding of religion as anti-religious bigots and and claim oppression when government officials are made to comply with the separation of church and state.

Under President George W. Bush, Religious Right leaders’ political support was rewarded with weakened legal protections against tax dollars being used to fund religious discrimination and proselytizing, troubling changes that have yet to be fully reversed by the Obama administration. A phalanx of conservative Christian legal organizations fights daily to weaken the legal separation of church and state, and to reverse restrictions on overt electoral activity by tax-exempt churches.

2. Lack of Big Names ≠ Lack of Big Influence  

Kazin cites “the absence of effective, well-known leaders” as a reason for the Religious Right’s decline. It’s true that there’s a shortage of household names among the Religious Right’s leadership, and that the endorsement of Rick Santorum by a group of evangelical leaders didn’t give him the boost they had hoped. But that fact reflects at least in part the decentralization and mainstreaming of the movement. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson were like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw back when the networks were the only game in town. Now the Religious Right influences culture and politics through a massive and diffuse infrastructure of religious ministries, educational institutions, think tanks, political organizations, radio and television empires, and online media -- not to mention the elected officials they have put into power in Congress and all across the country.

Newt Gingrich has spent years cultivating support among Religious Right activists by attacking “secular elites” and insisting in books like Rediscovering God in America that our country’s greatness is tied to the notion of a divinely inspired American exceptionalism. His fans weren’t going to abandon him on the say-so of  a group of self-appointed leaders.

3. The Leadership Pipeline 

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and other conservative leaders are products of the Religious Right’s educational and leadership pipeline, which is training thousands of college and law school students how to bring their “biblical worldview” to bear on government, the courts and society in general. Journalist Sarah Posner has reported on law school students being taught to advise clients to follow God’s law rather than man’s law at Liberty University, the Falwell-founded school where Romney’s new debate coach built a powerhouse debating team.

Virginia Gov. McDonnell got an MA and JD from Pat Robertson’s Regent University; Rep. Michele Bachmann got her law degree from the law school at Oral Roberts University, which was later taken over by Regent. Right-wing foundations pour millions each year into conservative college newspapers, leadership training programs, and fellowships at “think tanks” that allow people like Dinesh D’Souza to claim the title of “scholar” while turning out dreck like his book portraying Kenyan anti-colonialism as the roots of Obama’s “rage.”

The Religious Right and its conservative allies have put a lot of like-minded federal judges on the courts in the past two decades, and they’ve done quite well with the John Roberts-led conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Religious Right leaders are pulling out all the stops to make sure a Republican president and Senate are in place; the American Center for Law & Justice’s Jay Sekulow told a Faith and Freedom gathering in South Carolina just before the primary there that if “President Romney” were to name two more justices, Sekulow wouldn’t have to worry any more about counting to five when he had a case before the court.

Newt Gingrich, who swamped Romney in South Carolina, staked out a more radical approach to the judiciary were he to be elected president. Gingrich says he would ignore rulings he disagrees with and abolish courts that rule in ways that displease him; he frequently cites church-state issues when complaining about the courts.

4. The Assault on Choice and Family Planning  

The 2010 wave of right-wing electoral victories at the state level has brought an accelerated attack on women’s healthcare. According to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 69 anti-choice measures became law in 25 states last year; some of these laws ban pre-viability abortions without meaningful exceptions for women’s health and are clearly designed to challenge Roe v. Wade. Some are designed to force clinics to close and simply make abortion inaccessible for even more women. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 87 percent of U.S. counties already have no abortion providers. A consistent Religious Right rallying cry in recent years has been to “defund Planned Parenthood,” with no apparent regard for the impact on women who count on the organization for basic medical care. Last year, seven states restricted or barred family planning funds from going to Planned Parenthood or any health center that provides abortion care.

Kazin believes it is “exceedingly unlikely” that a President Romney would sign a draconian anti-abortion bill. Why is that? Romney has said repeatedly that he believes life begins “at conception” and would back efforts to enshrine that in law or even in the Constitution. It’s true, as Kazin notes, that Mississippi voters recently rejected a “personhood” amendment. But just this week every GOP candidate except Romney took part in an event organized by PersonhoodUSA  — at which it wasn’t sufficient for candidates to repeat the “at conception” dogma. They had to agree that legal rights begin at the sperm-meets-egg moment. That this extreme and hugely problematic principle is embraced by presidential contenders is a clear sign of the Religious Right’s continuing influence.

Romney, who named Robert Bork to head his legal advisory team, would almost certainly nominate Supreme Court justices who would continue to chip away at a woman’s right to a legal abortion if not overturn Roe v. Wade altogether — another of Romney’s stated goals. That would throw the question of legal access to abortion to the states, where a number of laws criminalizing abortion have already been passed contingent on Roe falling. Does Kazin really believe that if the 2012 elections bring us a Republican president and Republican congressional majorities, the Republican base will not demand — and get — further restrictions on women’s access to abortion and family planning?

5. Massive Resistance to LGBT Equality  

Kazin is correct that the Religious Right is losing the public opinion battle when it comes to support for equality for LGBT Americans, where progress has been extraordinary. The hard-fought end to the ban on military service is a sign that laws are beginning to catch up with public opinion.

But just because the Religious Right is a minority does not make it a powerless one. They and their allies in Congress have managed to prevent passage of federal anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in spite of overwhelming public support for such measures. And they have managed to pass dozens of state-level constitutional amendments denying same-sex couples the right to marry – many of those provisions also preventing even the most basic legal recognition and protection for gay couples and their families. In 2010, Maine voters overturned an equality law after opponents forced it onto the ballot. New Yorkers won marriage equality last year (barely), but residents in Maryland and New Jersey did not. There will be several tests in legislatures and the ballot box, both pro and con, in 2012; we may see additional victories, but they are far from assured.

It is good news that support for equality is high among younger Americans, so time seems to be on our side when it comes to LGBT equality, but to cite an economic aphorism, “in the long run we’re all dead.”  Many individuals and families have been harmed and will continue to be harmed by anti-equality campaigns waged by the Religious Right and its allies in the Catholic and Mormon hierarchies.

—

Progress is not linear or irreversible. Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. Kazin looks at statistics about young people’s attitudes, and at the growing group of Americans who claim no religious affiliation, and declares “the end of the Christian Right.” But the increasing number of secular-minded Americans does not prevent the well-organized forces of the Religious Right from continuing to impact public policy, especially in areas of the country where they are strongest. This political and cultural movement will not be sinking beneath the horizon anytime soon.

Susan G. Komen For The Cure Shamefully Makes Breast Cancer Political

Addicting Info:

Every year you hear it, a voice comes on the TV instructing you to “Save Lids, Save Lives.” That every pink lid you collect Yoplait will make a donation to Susan G. Komen For The Cure. According to Yoplait’s own web site these fundraisers have brought in over $30 million. In fact, Susan G Komen For The Cure is known as the largest breast cancer organization in the entire country. You would think that their primary goal then would be to raise as much money as they could and then use that money for breast cancer research and prevention. It seems, however, that Komen has a different objective, one that outweighs their desire to make breast cancer a thing of the past.  But politics meant more than prevention this week to the Komen Foundation as they made an announcement: They will be pulling all funding from Planned Parenthood.

To some on the right side of the political spectrum this may make sense. They may have the illusion that this foundation is actually doing something good. But the bitter reality is that this foundation just left thousands, possibly millions, of women without the ability to get breast exams and mammograms. And without the ability to get screenings and preventative care, some women will likely die. Planned Parenthood clinics across the country provide vital screening and diagnostic services to those who cannot afford a clinic. And cancer, unlike political leaning, does not seem to change whether you have billions of dollars or just a few. In 2011, several states also defunded Planned Parenthood.

It is a fact that only three percent of Planned Parenthood services are abortion related. The rest of their services? Well these are things that are vital, especially given that many Planned Parenthood clinics are in low income areas. They provide a whole list of non-abortion services including but not limited to, birth control, sexual health education, STD diagnosis and treatment, breast and other cancer diagnosis and prevention. In fact, in many communities, Planned Parenthood is the only place a person can go to learn about sex education. Educating children with accurate information is the first step towards preventing unwanted pregnancies. Unfortunately for all women, Susan G. Komen For The Cure, may have just signed their death wish and death warrants for unknown numbers of low and moderate income women who have no health insurance. The stories are out there. I personally know an individual that only survived breast cancer because Planned Parenthood caught it early. So next time you hear someone attempt to justify cutting funding for this vital organization by using religion, tell them what they’re really doing. Signing a death wish for the poor.  Sounds real “Christian” to me!

Jeremy Ryan

Executive Director

Defending Wisconsin PAC

jry...@defendingwisconsin.org

[Editor's Note: Donations made through this post go to the author, not the website]

Note: Segway Jeremy Ryan has become a full-time member of the protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol. Formerly a businessman, he gave up his business to join the fight for the middle class in the State of Wisconsin. Through videos and writings he has informed hundreds of thousands of people about what was going on at the Wisconsin State Capitol once the mainstream media had mostly abandoned the protests. His full-time activism is completely funded by the people. If you would like to help out please click here.

As the Komen backlash continues: Has feminism been replaced by the pink-ribbon breast cancer cult?

Mother Jones:

Has feminism been replaced by the pink-ribbon breast cancer cult? When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment, which would take abortion rights away even from women who have private insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.

A few weeks later, when the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended that regular screening mammography not start until age 50, all hell broke loose. Sheryl Crow, Whoopi Goldberg, and Olivia Newton-John raised their voices in protest; a few dozen non-boldface women picketed the Department of Health and Human Services.  If you didn’t look too closely, it almost seemed as if the women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s had returned in full force.

Never mind that Dr. Susan Love, author of what the New York Timesdubbed “the bible for women with breast cancer,” endorses the new guidelines along with leading women’s health groups like Breast Cancer Action, the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN). For years, these groups have been warning about the excessive use of screening mammography in the US, which carries its own dangers and leads to no detectible lowering of breast cancer mortality relative to less mammogram-happy nations.

Nonetheless, on CNN last week, we had the unsettling spectacle of NWHN director and noted women’s health advocate Cindy Pearson speaking out for the new guidelines, while ordinary women lined up to attribute their survival from the disease to mammography. Once upon a time, grassroots women challenged the establishment by figuratively burning their bras. Now, in some masochistic perversion of feminism, they are raising their voices to yell, “Squeeze our tits!”

When the Stupak anti-choice amendment passed, and so entered the health reform bill, no congressional representative stood up on the floor of the House to recount how access to abortion had saved her life or her family’s well-being. And where were the tea-baggers when we needed them? If anything represents the true danger of “government involvement” in health care, it’s a health reform bill that – if the Senate enacts something similar—will snatch away all but the wealthiest women’s right to choose.

It’s not just that abortion is deemed a morally trickier issue than mammography. To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity. When a corporation wants to signal that it’s “woman friendly,” what does it do?  It stamps a pink ribbon on its widget and proclaims that some miniscule portion of the profits will go to breast cancer research. I’ve even seen a bottle of Shiraz called “Hope” with a pink ribbon on its label, but no information, alas, on how much you have to drink to achieve the promised effect. When Laura Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2007, what grave issue did she take up with the locals? Not women’s rights (to drive, to go outside without a man, etc.), but “breast cancer awareness.” In the post-feminist United States, issues like rape, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy seem to be too edgy for much public discussion, but breast cancer is all apple pie.

So welcome to the Women’s Movement 2.0: Instead of the proud female symbol—a circle on top of a cross—we have a droopy ribbon. Instead of embracing the full spectrum of human colors—black, brown, red, yellow, and white—we stick to princess pink. While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk “for the cure.” And while we once sought full “consciousness” of all that oppresses us, now we’re content to achieve “awareness,” which has come to mean one thing—dutifully baring our breasts for the annual mammogram.

Look, the issue here isn’t health-care costs. If the current levels of screening mammography demonstrably saved lives, I would say go for it, and damn the expense. But the numbers are increasingly insistent: Routine mammographic screening of women under 50 does not reduce breast cancer mortality in that group, nor do older women necessarily need an annual mammogram. In fact, the whole dogma about “early detection” is shaky, as Susan Love reminds us:  the idea has been to catch cancers early, when they’re still small, but some tiny cancers are viciously aggressive, and some large ones aren’t going anywhere.

One response to the new guidelines has been that numbers don’t matter—only individuals do—and if just one life is saved, that’s good enough. So OK, let me cite my own individualexperience. In 2000, at the age of 59, I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer on the basis of one dubious mammogram followed by a really bad one, followed by a biopsy.  Maybe I should be grateful that the cancer was detected in time, but the truth is, I’m not sure whether these mammograms detected the tumor or, along with many earlier ones, contributed to it: One known environmental cause of breast cancer is radiation, in amounts easily accumulated through regular mammography.

And why was I bothering with this mammogram in the first place? I had long ago made the decision not to spend my golden years undergoing cancer surveillance, but I wanted to get my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) prescription renewed, and the nurse practitioner wouldn’t do that without a fresh mammogram.

As for the HRT, I was taking it because I had been convinced, by the prevailing medical propaganda, that HRT helps prevent heart disease and Alzheimer’s. In 2002, we found out that HRT is itself a risk factor for breast cancer (as well as being ineffective at warding off heart disease and Alzheimer’s), but we didn’t know that in 2000. So did I get breast cancer because of the HRT—and possibly because of the mammograms themselves—or did HRT lead to the detection of a cancer I would have gotten anyway?

I don’t know, but I do know that that biopsy was followed by the worst six months of my life, spent bald and barfing my way through chemotherapy. This is what’s at stake here: Not only the possibility that some women may die because their cancers go undetected, but that many others will lose months or years of their lives to debilitating and possibly unnecessary treatments.

You don’t have to be suffering from “chemobrain” (chemotherapy-induced cognitive decline) to discern evil, iatrogenic, profit-driven forces at work here.  In a recent column on the new guidelines, patient-advocate Naomi Freundlich raises the possibility that “entrenched interests—in screening, surgery, chemotherapy and other treatments associated with diagnosing more and more cancers—are impeding scientific evidence.” I am particularly suspicious of the oncologists, who saw their incomes soar starting in the late 80s when they began administering and selling chemotherapy drugs themselves in their ghastly, pink-themed, “chemotherapy suites.” Mammograms recruit women into chemotherapy, and of course, the pink-ribbon cult recruits women into mammography.

What we really need is a new women’s health movement, one that’s sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly life-style) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments like chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer’s progression from “early” to “late” stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)? What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.

Catholic backlash against President Obama grows 

National Journal:

The American Catholic backlash against the administration’s treatment of contraceptive services in the new health care law continues to grow, threatening President Obama’s support among a key group of swing voters that was critical to his victory in 2008.

In the 11 days since the Health and Human Services Department announced its new policy, the administration has been condemned even by progressive Catholic leaders and, remarkably, denounced from the pulpit in thousands of Catholic churches across the country and by bishops representing more than 100 dioceses. At issue are the regulations released Jan. 20 that require women’s contraceptive services to be covered by insurance policies under the president’s Affordable Care Act. The church had sought a broad exemption for the many Catholic institutions in the country to recognize its canonical opposition to artificial birth control. Instead, HHS excluded only “religious employers” that primarily employ members of their own faith communities. This narrow exception protects those who work directly for Catholic churches, but not the many Catholic universities, hospitals, or social-service agencies such as Catholic Charities.

The explosion of anger from American church leaders was immediate. On Sunday, bishops in at least 125 of the 195 dioceses in the country had letters of protest read from the pulpit at all Masses. Four bishops – in Phoenix; Cincinnati; Green Bay, Wis.; and Lubbock, Texas – warned of civil disobedience. “We cannot – we will not comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens,” said the letter from Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix.

No bishop was swayed by the fact that the administration is giving religious communities a year to figure out how to comply. New York Bishop Timothy M. Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, dismissed this, saying, “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.”  Dolan, a cardinal-designate who will receive his red cap at a ceremony in the Vatican later this month, added, “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their health care is literally unconscionable.”

Dolan is a conservative. But he had met with the president in November and left the meeting optimistic that the ruling would not be so unfriendly to the church. Just as dismayed were liberal Catholics who had rallied behind Obama in 2008 and defended him when he was honored at University of Notre Dame in 2009 despite his advocacy of abortion rights. They believed he understood Catholic sensitivities and appreciated the good works done by Catholic-affiliated agencies. But as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who often writes from the progressive Catholic perspective, wrote this week, the president “utterly botched” the decision, adding, “Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.”

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney dismissed Dionne’s criticism as “a political observation,” contrasting it with what he called “a policy based on the merits.” The administration, he said, “believes that this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious beliefs and increasing access to important preventive services.” He promised to “continue to work closely with religious groups during this transitional period to discuss their concerns.”

He added, “I also would just note that our robust partnerships with the Catholic Church and other communities of faith will continue. The administration has provided over $2 billion to Catholic organizations over the past three years in addition to numerous nonfinancial partnerships that promote healthy communities and serve the common good.” Carney would not be drawn into an argument with the bishops; nor would he comment on those bishops who have threatened civil disobedience. “We understand that not everyone agrees with it,” he said. “All I can tell you is it was made after very careful consideration based on the need to balance those two issues.”

But there is a political warning in the bishops’ protests. It is not that American Catholics march in lockstep behind the bishops. Quite the contrary. Most American Catholics already disregard church teachings against birth control. And the church hierarchy has probably never been held in lower regard by American Catholics angry at attempted cover-ups of sexual crimes and resentful whenever priests try to tell them how to vote. But this is not like 2004 when it was just a handful of conservative prelates threatening to deny Communion to Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, a Catholic. This time, it is the majority of bishops. And this time, it is the church fighting back against Washington telling it what it must do with its own employees.

The numbers contain the political warnings. Fifty-five of the bishops represent dioceses in what will be battleground states in the election – seven from Michigan; six each from Florida and Pennsylvania; five each from Ohio and Wisconsin; three from Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, Arizona, and Colorado.

Additionally, the clout of the Catholic vote is unquestioned. Since 1972, only once has a candidate won the presidency despite losing the Catholic vote, according to network exit polls. That lone exception was 2000 when Democrat Al Gore won 50 percent of Catholics but lost in the Electoral College to Republican George W. Bush, who got 47 percent of Catholics. If Hispanic Catholics are excluded and only white Catholics counted, the winning streak is unbroken: From 1972 to 2008, the candidate who got the most votes from white Catholics won the election.

In 2008, Obama trailed Republican John McCain among all Catholics for most of the campaign, but made a late surge to overtake him. Gallup showed him winning Catholics 53 to 47 percent. The media exit polls had him winning 54 to 45 percent.

The political clout is enhanced by the reality that the battleground states often have the highest concentrations of Catholics. In 2010, there were 77.7 million American Catholics, 25 percent of the population. And Catholics are the big swing vote in the key political states. In 2008 numberscompiled by the Official Catholic Directory, Catholics made up 41 percent in New Jersey, 32 percent in Nevada, 30 percent in Illinois and Wisconsin, 28 percent in Pennsylvania, 25 percent in New Mexico, 24 percent in New Hampshire, 22 percent in Michigan, 21 percent in Minnesota, 18 percent in Ohio, 17 percent in Iowa, and 13 percent in Missouri and Florida.

ABC News: Planned Parenthood Defends Obama Against Catholic Criticism

Following a barrage of criticism of the Obama administration from the Catholic Church, Planned Parenthood today launched a national TV ad campaign praising newly mandated contraception coverage in health insurance plans, including those offered by religiously affiliated institutions.

“President Obama and Secretary Sebelius stood strong to make sure all women — no matter where they work — will have access to birth control without a co-pay, saving them hundreds of dollars,” the narrator says in the 30-second spot. (You can view it HERE.)

The move has been celebrated by women’s rights groups — key supporters ofObama’s re-election bid — but vigorously opposed by Catholic groups, who say the requirement violates religious liberty.  Catholic teaching opposes contraception.

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards dismissed the Catholic concerns about the new policy in a statement accompanying the ad, saying that birth control use is “nearly universal in the U.S., even among Catholic women.”

Richards cites an April 2011 Guttmacher Institute study that found 98 percent of Catholic women reported using birth control at some point in their lives. She also notes an NPR report that many Catholic hospitals and universities already offer health insurance plans that provide birth control coverage to their employees.

“Planned Parenthood respects religious freedom and believes that neither government nor employers should intrude on individuals’ ability to practice their own religions or faiths, including their personal decisions about health care,” Richards said.

The TV ad will air in West Palm Beach, Fla.; Cedar Rapids, Ia.; Lansing, Mich.; Reno, Nev.; Albuquerque, N.M.; Toledo, Ohio.; Charlottesville, Va.; and Madison, Wis.

Meanwhile, Catholic activists and church leaders are vowing to fight the new rules.

“We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law,” Thomas Olmsted, Bishop of Phoenix, wrote in a letter to parishioners Sunday.  “People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens.”

“This is a direct attack on our religious freedom and our First Amendment rights,” Atlanta archbishop Wilton Gregory said in a letter. “I will work with the bishops, other religious leaders and our fellow Americans to remove this unjust regulation.”

The move could also have consequences for Obama in November.

“I don’t think Catholic liberals are en masse going to leave Obama but they are disappointed,” Mathew N. Schmalz, a professor of religion and comparative studies at the College of  the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.,told ABC News. “High-profile Catholics who have supported Obama are put in a more difficult position because of this.”

The Komen Foundation’s Black Eye

The Atlantic:

[…] The skepticism is further fueled by the weirdness of a rule letting any city council member or random state legislator decide to defund a Komen grantee just by starting an “investigation.” The Department of HHS rejected Stearns’ invitation to look into Planned Parenthood months ago, and, even if he were dead on, Stearns isn’t suggesting there’s something wrong with Planned Parenthood’s cancer screening. What if the IRS was looking into a hospital’s tax status? Or almost any member of the Arizona legislature was worrying that an in-state facility with Komen money was harboring illegal immigrants? Would Komen have to pull their funding too?

In a ghastly coincidence, the same day Komen pulled the money from Planned Parenthood because Stearns thought they were spending federal funds on abortions, the Journal of the America Medical Association published a damning study that almost half of women receiving second surgeries after lumpectomies didn’t need the procedure. Painful, disfiguring, unnecessary surgery. At least three of the four sites studied in the JAMA report — the University of Vermont, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, and the Marshfield Clinic — has a relationship with the Komen Foundation. Kaiser Permanente is a “corporate campaign partner,” the University of Vermont received a research grant, the Central Wisconsin Komen affiliate sponsors programs at the Marshfield Clinic. Maybe Komen should concentrate their granting criteria on whether the recipients are actually helping cancer patients.

TAKE ACTION

MoveOn Petition: Susan G. Komen for the Cure: Put Women’s Lives Before Politics

Credo: Tell the board of Susan G. Komen for a Cure: Don’t throw Planned Parenthood under the bus!

Help Reverse Susan G. Komen’s Decision About Funding Planned Parenthood
Shoq Value:

Backstory on this issue

Progressives MUST push back against this kind of political tampering or the Right wing will learn to apply it wherever they can. Please take a few minutes and help to reverse this obscene development.

Ways You Can Help:

1) SWAMP Komen’s contact form with your protest messages.

http://ww5.komen.org/contact.aspx

2) CALL Komen’s switchboard at 1-877-465-6636 them and express your outrage.

If you’re at a loss for your own words, just say this:

“PLEASE RETHINK YOUR POLITICAL AGENDAS AND FOCUS ON WOMEN’S HEALTH.”

3) SIGN this petition:

http://signon.org/sign/susan-g-komen-for-the?source=s.tw&r_by=510875

4) Call a friend and have them join you in GIVING any amount directly to Planned Parenthood.

A big bump in giving to them will send a big message. https://secure.ppaction.org/site/Donation2?df_id=3792&3792.donation=form1&s_src=SGKFundraising_0112_c3_pptw

5) Hammer out your outrage on their Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/susangkomenforthecure/posts/10151256882495157

6) Join us in tweeting (and retweeting) “#NewKomenSlogan.”

Be sure to include @komenForTheCure so they are sure to get the message in their social media inbox. Here is the hashtag stream:
https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23NewKomenSlogan

7) Contact Komen’s Board Directly.

If someone will find their emails and I will post them.

Promote the Facebook version of this page, too. Thanks!

http://www.facebook.com/shoqq/posts/374633399229795

9) Use the tweet button below and pass this page around.

Related

• Susan G. Komen Foundation Begins Backpedaling for the Cure

Full list of Komen corporate partners here: Let them know how you feel.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Words cannot describe the indignation a proud woman feels for her sex in disfranchisement.
~~~Elizabeth Cady Stanton

You can access all the past editions of The Daily Planet on the green Category bar on the top of each page under the heading PlanetPOV.

______________________________________

BUDGET

Obama calls again for capping government contractor pay

WaPo:

The Obama administration is renewing its push to cap the pay of government contracting executives as the House prepares to vote on a bill that would freeze federal and congressional salaries.

Certain federal government contracts permit government contracting firms to bill federal agencies up to $693,951 annually for incurred costs, including employee salaries, meaning many contractor executives and some highly-skilled contractors earn more than top-earning federal employees and President Obama. Since 1995, Congress has tied the contractor pay cap to compensation levels for the nation’s top-earning business executives — a figure that has ballooned in the last two decades.

In December, lawmakers voted to expand the cap at most agencies to cover all government contractors, including highly-skilled engineers and scientists that also earn top pay.

But the changes don’t go far enough for Obama, who proposed last fall that the fiscal “supercommittee” cap the amount of money agencies pay to government contracting executives at $200,000, on par with the amount earned by top career federal employees.

The proposal was ignored, and the White House is trying again.

“Taxpayers are being forced to reimburse contractors at a rate which has outpaced the growth of inflation and the wages of most of America’s working families — as well as the growth of federal salaries,” Lesley Field, the acting White House official for government contracting, said in a White House statement and blog post set for publication Tuesday.

“Just as the Government must be prudent in paying its employees, it must also not overpay contractors,” Field added, noting that Obama’s proposal does not limit how much contractors pay their top earners — only how much agencies would reimburse them.

White House officials said their renewed push on the cap comes as the Office of Management and Budget prepares to raise it to nearly $750,000 in the coming weeks, in line with the congressional mandate to maintain parity with the private sector. Raising the cap would not be necessary if lawmakers vote to cap executive compensation in the next few weeks, the officials said.

BUSINESS

Sen. Brown (D) calls out Citibank for classifying frequent flyer miles as taxable income 

The Hill:

Sen. Sherrod Brown is calling on Citibank to end a practice of treating frequent-flyer miles as taxable income.

In a Monday letter to the banking giant, the Ohio Democrat dismissed Citibank’s assertion that airline miles are a taxable prize or award, and suggested that the bank was piling on American families during a sluggish economy.
“The last thing Citibank should be doing is creating baseless fear in middle-class families, or placing a nonexistent tax burden on the backs of families who are already struggling to make ends meet,” Brown wrote to Vikram Pandit, the chief executive of Citigroup, which runs Citibank.

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that Citibank classified frequent-flyer miles as miscellaneous income — valued at 2.5 cents per mile — on tax forms sent to customers who received thousands of miles as part ofopening an account with the bank.
Citibank said it was basing its decision on the Internal Revenue Code, which says that someone must pay income tax if they receive at least $600 in prizes and awards.
Tax professionals said they had never seen airline miles considered taxable, and the IRS, at the time, said it stood by a 2002 policy declaration that said that the agency “will not assert that any taxpayer has understated his federal tax liability by reason of the receipt or personal use of frequent-flier miles.”
But on Monday, the IRS distinguished between what Citibank was doing and the agency’s previously outlined position.
Michelle Eldridge, an IRS spokeswoman, said that the 2002 announcement was focused on the use of business-related frequent flyer miles, and suggested the Citibank miles would be taxable.
“When frequent-flyer miles are provided as a premium for opening a financial account, it can be a taxable situation subject to reporting under current law,” Eldridge said.
The spokeswoman added that taxpayers unsure of how to proceed should contact their tax professional or the company or entity that sent the tax form in question.
The statement comes just weeks after the IRS announced that the 2006 tax gap — the difference between what taxpayers owe and what is paid on time — had grown to $450 billion.

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ECONOMY

Blasted by GOP, health reform is adding jobs 

MarketWatch:

While Republican presidential hopefuls in Florida decry President Barack Obama’s health-care reform as job-killing, for one big chunk of the economy — the health-care sector itself — the controversial law will likely boost employment.

The health-care industry is already one of the nation’s largest employers. In Florida alone, which holds its key primary Tuesday, there are about 960,000 jobs in health care and social assistance, around 13% of all nonfarm payroll positions in the state.

“Reform may accelerate the trend toward health care’s being the dominant employment sector in the economy,” according to a recent New England Journal of Medicine article.

Much of the growth in health care due to reform could be in support positions, rather than doctors and nurses, economists said.

“As for jobs for health professionals, I doubt that this will or can increase the number of doctors or nurses. While there will be greater demand for their services, there will also be offsetting effects as medically unnecessarily procedures are paid less,” said Amitabh Chandra, an economist and public-policy professor at Harvard University.

As the insured population grows under the federal Affordable Care Act, health-care workers are going to be in high demand. These gains are on top of the growth already spurred by an aging population. In Florida the impact of an aging population may be even more dramatic: about 17% of the state’s population is at least 65 years old, compared with 13% for the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

Going into Florida’s primary, older voters are an important constituency for Republicans. In 2008, people at least 65 made up 22% of voters, and 53% of these voted for Republican candidate John McCain, according to CNN exit polls. Meanwhile, among 50- to 64-year-olds, 54% voted for Obama.

Republican candidates, railing against Obama’s health-care law, understand that health care and cost containment are key issues, particularly in Florida. And no one knows better than Mitt Romney that reform can lead to job growth.

The Massachusetts story

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney was a major player in that commonwealth’s health reform in April 2006. According to the New England Journal of Medicine article, health-care employment in Massachusetts grew 9.5% between December 2005 and September 2010, compared with 5.5% elsewhere in the U.S. There would have been about 18,000 fewer health-care employees in Massachusetts by 2010 if the state’s growth rate had matched the country’s.

Since Massachusetts’s health reform was approved, overall nonfarm employment in the state has declined about 0.2%, compared with a decrease of about 2.9% for the U.S.

To focus on occupation, the authors looked at health-care employment, per capita, comparing the two years leading up to reform in Massachusetts, with the first two years after implementation. Over this time period, administration jobs gained 18%, compared with 8% elsewhere in the U.S. These occupations are in areas such as management, business, and medical records. Meanwhile, nonadministration patient-care support employment — therapists, technicians and aides — also rose 18%, compared with 11% elsewhere. Finally, employment of health-care professionals such as physicians and nurses rose 3% in the state, compared with 6% elsewhere.

“It is not surprising to see an increase in health care employment, particularly in occupations to which people can shift rapidly with brief training time,” according to the journal article’s authors. “It is plausible that additional employees were required to manage the care of the new enrollees, process applications, file insurance claims, submit information to comply with regulatory requirements, and carry out other administrative functions (although such an effect could be large initially and then diminish as processes are refined and made more efficient).”

But while economists point to results in Massachusetts to get a feel for the possible size and nature of U.S. health-care employment growth under reform, there are several important differences between the state and the nation. For example, prior to reform, Massachusetts had a relatively low uninsured population. Second, the state had relatively high per-capita rates of doctors and nurses.

Nonmedical employment gains may not sound glamorous, but these workers can do a lot to improve patients’ outcomes. For example, care coordinators can help patients navigate the health-care system, making sure that doctors’ orders are followed, said David Cutler, an economist at Harvard and health-care adviser to Obama’s last campaign.

Care coordination could help save costs, too.

“One of the big places we waste money is patients who are discharged and there’s not a lot of follow up and they end up in the hospital a month later,” said Leemore Dafny, an economist at Northwestern University who focuses on competition in health-care markets.

She added that reform will also create new primary care physicians and physician “extenders,” such as nurse practitioners, and slow growth in spending on medical specialists.

“If the ACA is repealed, it will be business as usual — except that more of the population is now uninsured — so the demand for primary care professionals will increase much more slowly,” said Dafny.

Overall, there may only be a small increase in labor demand due to reform, as forces work against each other, according to a report from the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank. Expanding Medicaid coverage will increase spending, even as growth slows for Medicare.

“The net effect, however, will be positive — higher net spending on health care services and more employment in the health sector,” according to the report.

Constraints

While reform is expected to lead to employment gains, there are constraints when it comes to graduating new doctors and nurses.

“We do not have enough capacity to match supply needs. We have a shortage of faculty to teach,” said Mary Lou Brunell, a nursing veteran and executive director of Florida Center for Nursing, an Orlando-based public workforce research group.

Under reform, Brunell expects a current shortage of almost 6,000 full-time registered nurses in Florida to increase to more than 50,000 by 2025, she said. Without reform, the shortage would be almost 21,000. Nationally, there could be a shortage of almost 131,000 physicians by 2025, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Nurses will have to be leaders when it comes to figuring out how to deliver care under these conditions, Brunell said.

“We’re talking about the fact that we need to look at how we are delivering care, and how we can deliver care differently to meet the needs of a large population, and a more critically ill population,” Brunell said.

To meet coming care challenges, Republican candidates say Obama’s health-reform plan must be repealed, and that the national individual mandate is unworkable.

Romney, who faces frequent criticism from Republican rivals over the Massachusetts reform, says states should determine the health systems that will work the best for them. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has supported giving people a tax credit or deduction for the value of health insurance, up to a certain amount.

Deficit cuts are about to hurt the economy, a report suggests 

TPM:

MORE>>>

NYT OpEd: Pregnant, and Pushed Out of a Job

FEW people realize that getting pregnant can mean losing your job. Imagine a woman who, seven months into her pregnancy, is fired from her position as a cashier because she needed a few extra bathroom breaks. Or imagine another pregnant employee who was fired from her retail job after giving her supervisors a doctor’s note requesting she be allowed to refrain from heavy lifting and climbing ladders during the month and a half before her maternity leave: that’s what happened to Patricia Leahy. In 2008 a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled that her firing was fair because her employers were not obligated to accommodate her needs.

We see this kind of case in our legal clinic all the time. It happens every day to pregnant women in the United States, and it happens thanks to a gap between discrimination laws and disability laws.

Federal and state laws ban discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace. And amendments to the Americans With Disabilities Act require employers to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled employees (including most employees with medical complications arising from pregnancies) who need them to do their jobs. But because pregnancy itself is not considered a disability, employers are not obligated to accommodate most pregnant workers in any way.

As a result, thousands of pregnant women are pushed out of jobs that they are perfectly capable of performing — either put on unpaid leave or simply fired — when they request an accommodation to help maintain a healthy pregnancy. Many are single mothers or a family’s primary breadwinner. They are disproportionately low-income women, often in physically demanding jobs with little flexibility.

Thankfully, State Senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat from Manhattan, and AssemblywomanAileen Gunther, a Democrat from Sullivan County, have introduced legislation to fill this gap in New York. Their bills — S. 6273 and A. 9114 — would require employers to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnant women whose health care providers say they need them, unless doing so would be an undue hardship for the employer.

These accommodations could include providing a seat for employees who spend long periods standing, allowing more frequent restroom breaks, limiting heavy lifting or transferring an employee to a less strenuous or hazardous position. As of 2010, seven states, including California, had passed laws requiring private employers to provide at least some accommodations. And they have been used countless times to help pregnant women keep their jobs.

This kind of law is a public health necessity. Without its protections, pregnant women are reluctant to ask for the accommodations they need for their own health and for the health of their unborn children. For many women, a choice between working under unhealthy conditions and not working is no choice at all. In addition, women who can work longer into their pregnancies often qualify for longer periods of leave following childbirth, which facilitates breastfeeding, bonding with and caring for a new child and a smoother and healthier recovery from childbirth.

Pregnancy-related accommodations also promote economic security for families. Women who are forced early into unpaid leave are set back with lost wages and, when they return to work, with missed advancement opportunities. Women who are let go don’t just lose out on critical income — they must fight extra hard to re-enter a job market that is especially brutal on the unemployed. Worse yet, they often confront a bias against hiring mothers with small children.

Finally, employers might consider that providing accommodations to pregnant workers would even be good for the bottom line, in the form of reduced turnover, increased loyalty and productivity and healthier workers. With minor job modifications, a woman might be able to work up until the delivery of her child and return to work fairly soon after giving birth. If she were forced out instead, her employer would waste time and money finding a replacement. In the worst-case scenario, employers could be responsible for much higher medical costs if their workers were afraid to ask for accommodations and instead continued doing work that endangered their pregnancies.

Three-quarters of women now entering the work force will become pregnant on the job, yet gaps in our civil rights laws leave this enormous class without the right to the modest accommodations that would protect them. New York’s Legislature should pass this law as soon as possible, and other states should follow. No pregnant woman in this country should have to choose between her job and a healthy pregnancy.

NYT OpEd: A Harder Squeeze on the Poor

House Republicans have hit upon a noxious scheme to help pay for an extension of the payroll tax cut: a tax increase on millions of poor working families. A billpassed by the House and now in conference seeks to deny cash refunds under the child tax credit to those who file tax returns using “individual taxpayer identification numbers” issued by the Internal Revenue Service. Only those using Social Security numbers would be eligible.

The refundable portion of the child tax credit is a life-saver for the working poor. Families that would be cut off by this policy change make an average of $21,000 per year, according to the Treasury Department. They would lose an average of $1,800. About 80 percent of those families are Hispanic. The taxpayer identification numbers are used frequently, though not exclusively, by unauthorized immigrants to pay the taxes because they are not eligible for Social Security numbers. The I.R.S. accepts their tax payments and allows families to claim the child tax credit regardless of immigration status. This policy is an effective antipoverty tool that protects children, most of whom are American-born citizens.

The Republicans who have flatly rejected tax increases on the rich have settled instead on limiting this refund, which kept about 1.3 million children from falling into poverty in 2009.

Leaving aside the cruelty of squeezing the poorest workers for a greater portion of their wages to make a point about illegal immigration, the bill punishes not just the undocumented, but the communities they live in, because a poor family’s hard-earned wages get spent: on things like groceries, child care, utilities, gas and rent. This would be the bottom line of the House bill: a Congress that has failed for years to fix the immigration system, using its failure to harm children and hurting those at the bottom of the ladder to avoid the slightest pressure on millionaires. The Senate would be mad to go along with it.

AP: U.S. home prices fell for a third straight month, as prices in nearly all cities were down in November

Nearly Half Of Americans Live One Financial Shock Away From Poverty 

ThinkProgress:

According to a report from the Corporation for Enterprise Development, a D.C. advocacy group, 43 percent of Americans would fall into poverty within three months if they were to experience a sudden financial shock, such as losing a job or facing a medical emergency. “Growing numbers of families have almost no savings or other assets to see them through if they lose their jobs or face a medical crisis,” said Andrea Levere, president of CFED. “Without savings, few will be able to build a more economically secure future, including buying a home, saving for their children’s college educations or building a retirement nest egg.” The tenuous financial position of so many households is due to a combination of “flat wages, the high cost of medical treatment and the nationwide drop in housing values leaving homeowners with less wealth.”

ENERGY

San Onofre nuclear power plant unit shut down after potential leak

L A Times:

Officials at the San Onofre nuclear power plant shut down one of the facility’s two units Tuesday evening after a sensor detected a possible leak in a steam generator tube.
The potential leak was detected about 4:30 p.m., and the unit was completely shut down about an hour later, Southern California Edison said.

“The potential leak poses no imminent danger to the plant workers or the public,” utility spokeswoman Jennifer Manfre told The Times.
She said there were no evacuations and that crews were assessing the situation to determine if a leak had occurred.

Coal’s not dying–it’s just getting shipped abroad

WaPo:

The U.S. is burning less and less coal each year, thanks to cheap natural gas and new pollution rules. From a climate perspective, that’s a huge deal — less coal means less carbon. But here’s the catch: if the U.S. just exports its unused coal abroad, the end result could actually be more carbon.

Coal use in the United States reallydoes appear to be waning. In 2000, the country got 52 percent of its electricity from coal. In 2010, that dropped to 45 percent. By 2030, the government expectsthat to fall to 39 percent. And even that’s probably over-optimistic. Upcoming EPA rules to crack down on things like leftover coal ash waste and greenhouse-gas emissions could make life even more difficult for U.S. coal-plant operators. Indeed, one Deutsche Bankanalysis predicted that coal’s share of electricity generation would plunge to a mere 22 percent by 2030, largely supplanted by cleaner natural gas, solar and wind.

If that scenario actually transpired (and, admittedly, it’s a bet that natural gas prices will remain low for a long while), it would make a huge difference for America’s global-warming contributions. Deutsche Bank estimates that carbon pollution from the electricity sector would drop 44 percent below 2005 levels — that’s about a 16 percent cut in allU.S. emissions. And that’s without Congress even passing a climate bill.

Except that the story doesn’t end there. The United States still has plenty of coal sitting underground, especially in Wyoming’s vast Powder River Basin. And other countries around the world would love to get their hands on that coal to burn for electricity. That’s why, over the past decade, even as domestic coal use has dropped, exports have surged(mostly to Europe). In 2010, exports accounted for 7.5 percent of all coal production, up from 4.4 percent in 2005. As Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute observes, that boom in overseas demand has helped coal production hold steady in the past decade.

So here’s one possible future: If we’re not going to burn our coal, someone else will. One Tokyo shipping company, Daiichi Chuo Kisen Kaisha, says that U.S. coal exports could double in the next three or four years. In Washington state, coal companies are proposing two large export terminals that would help ship tens of millions of tons of coal from the Powder River Basin to countries like China. That, in turn, could make coal even cheaper in places like China — which might spur the country to build even more coal power plants than its current, already hectic pace. And, since carbon-dioxide heats up the planet no matter where it’s burned, this outcome could cancel out many of the global-warming benefits of the U.S. coal decline.

Now, this outcome is hardly set in stone. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club are trying to block the coal-export terminals in Washington. (It’s quite possible that this could become another Keystone XL pipeline fight, especially since, as Eric De Place points out, the climate impact is potentially much larger.) Green groups are also trying to mount legal challenges to new coal leases in the Powder Basin River area — my colleague Juliet Eilperin wrote an excellent story on that ongoing battle. Alternatively, China has recently started exploiting its own large shale-gas reserves, which might crimp demand for coal overseas.

Still, it’s another reminder that climate change remains a global issue — and one that will take far more than a smattering of U.S. regulations and a boom in cheap natural gas to solve.

ENVIRONMENT

Saudi oil minister calls global warming “humanity’s most pressing concern”

ThinkProgress:

Americans use the term “Saudi Arabia of” to describe an abundance of something — usually energy. We are the “Saudi Arabia of wind,” the “Saudi Arabia of coal,” the “Saudi Arabia of efficiency,” and so on and on and on.

I’ve come to jokingly use this term for anything really huge.  (We are, after all, the Saudi Arabia of climate denial.) So in true American spirit, I am dubbing yesterday’s speech by Saudi Arabia’s Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi the Saudi Arabia of bold statements.

In a speech at the Middle East and North Africa energy conference in London yesterday, Al-Naimi — who once called renewable energya “nightmare” — hailed energy efficiency and solar as important investments, global warming “real” and “pressing,” and explained that drilling for oil “does not create many jobs.”

“We know that pumping oil out of the ground does not create many jobs. It does not foster an entrepreneurial spirit, nor does it sharpen critical faculties.”

In the U.S., which is definitely not the Saudi Arabia of oil (that would be Saudi Arabia), there is a major industry campaign underway to convince Americans that drilling for fossil fuels will create over a million jobs in the country. However, assuming we drill virtually everywhere possible in America, credible analysis puts the real figure at a small fraction of that claim.

Even the Saudis, who pump out 12% of the world’s oil, understand that simply drilling for more oil isn’t a long-term economic strategy.

A business-as-usual path also puts us deeper into environmental debt, a point that the Saudi oil minister seems to understand as well. While Al-Naimi said he believes that oil production “will continue to play a major role in the overall energy mix for many decades,” he also made some very explicit statements about carbon emissions:

“Greenhouse gas emissions and global warming are among humanity’s most pressing concerns. Societal expectations on climate change are real, and our industry is expected to take a leadership role.”

It’s still not really clear what that “leadership role” is — except to pump out more oil and gas. Although, Al-Naimi did give a plug to efficiency and renewables as increasingly important part of the country’s energy strategy:

“The efficient use of energy is as much an issue for Saudi Arabia, with its huge natural resources, as it is for all countries. Increased efficiency makes sense environmentally, but also economically.”

“We are striving, also, to raise awareness among the public, and specifically addressing children and schools about the tangible benefits of energy efficiency. And we are investing manpower, and brainpower, in efforts to develop new thinking when it comes to energy efficiency.”

“I see renewable energy sources as supplementing existing sources, helping to prolong our continued export of crude oil. And this is why we are investing in solar energy, which we also have in abundance. The Kingdom experiences roughly 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, emitting about 7,000 watts of energy per square metre. Saudi Arabia also features empty stretches of desert that can host solar arrays and it is blessed with deposits of quartz that can be used in the manufacture of silicon photovoltaic cells.”

Saudi Arabia is considering a renewable energy law that would help promote a modest increase in solar photovoltaics, solar thermal, biogas and waste-heat-to-energy. However, if the strategy is seen only as a way to “prolong continued export of crude,” it doesn’t really match Al-Naimi’s statement that carbon-based resources are “among humanity’s most pressing concerns.”

Indeed, the gap between rhetoric and the pace of change in global energy production is one big Saudi Arabia of contradictions.

Pythons likely wiping out mammals in the Everglades National Park, new study finds 

HEALTH CARE

Susan G Komen Foundation Pulls Breast Cancer Screening Grants From Planned Parenthood

Karoli, Crooks and Liars:

As someone said on Twitter, breast cancer more or less removes incentives for abortions. Especially undetected breast cancer that goes unscreened because a woman doesn’t have affordable access (yet) to health care. This must be why the Susan G. Komen Foundation yanked the funding rug right out from under Planned Parenthood.

Via Planned Parenthood’s shocking press release:

Planned Parenthood Federation of America today expressed deep disappointment in response to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation’s decision to stop funding breast cancer prevention, screenings and education at Planned Parenthood health centers. Anti-choice groups in America have repeatedly threatened the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation for partnering with Planned Parenthood to provide these lifesaving cancer screenings and news articles suggest that the Komen Foundation ultimately succumbed to these pressures.

“We are alarmed and saddened that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation appears to have succumbed to political pressure. Our greatest desire is for Komen to reconsider this policy and recommit to the partnership on which so many women count,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In the last few weeks, the Komen Foundation has begun notifying local Planned Parenthood programs that their breast cancer initiatives will not be eligible for new grants (beyond existing agreements or plans). The Komen Foundation’s leadership did not respond to Planned Parenthood requests to meet with the Komen Board of Directors about the decision.

Gosh. Right-wing pressure, you say? Here’s a look at some of the key players in a decision like this. There is Julie Teer, VP Development, whoalso was a key Romney fundraiser in 2008. There is Komen’s new senior Vice President of Public Policy, Karen Handel, who has stated publiclythat she does not support Planned Parenthood and vowed to de-fund screenngs back in 2010.

First, let me be clear, since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood. During my time as Chairman of Fulton County, there were federal and state pass-through grants that were awarded to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as a “Healthy Babies Initiative.” The grant was authorized, regulated, administered and distributed through the State of Georgia. Because of the criteria, regulations and parameters of the grant, Planned Parenthood was the only eligible vendor approved to meet the state criteria. Additionally, none of the services in any way involved abortions or abortion-related services. In fact, state and federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for abortions or abortion related services and I strongly support those laws.

Because breast cancer screenings are just like abortions, don’t you know?

Their excuse seems to be concerns over this ridiculous and unfounded investigation started by winger Congressman Cliff Stearns (R-CO).But you know, abortions aren’t breast cancer screenings, and breast cancer screenings do not result in more abortions. No. This is a charity who claims to be dedicated to women’s health acting as a de facto death panel. Of course, it will mostly affect poor women, so what do they care, right?

There will be much more from me on this topic, but for now, could you do two things? First, sign this act.ly petition protesting their decision. And second, please consider supporting Planned Parenthood with your voice or your dollars as you can spare?

Four gutless Dems kill single-payer in California 

digby:

[…] The problem is the gutless Democrats in blue districts who have nothing to lose by voting against single-payer healthcare when there’s actually a chance of passing it, except for the wrath of insurance companies if they go for higher office. But rather than voting for or against the bill, they simpleabstained, in the most gutless move possible.jpmassar at DailyKos has a rundown of who they are and their contact information:

Senator Alex Padilla (Pacoima/LA area)
Email: Sena...@sen.ca.gov
Phone: (916) 651-4020
Fax: 916324-6645

Senator Juan Vargas (San Diego area)
Email: Juan...@sen.ca.gov
Phone: (916) 651-4040
Fax: (916) 327-3522

Senator Michael Rubio (Fresno/Bakersfield area)
Email: Mich...@sen.ca.gov
Phone: (916) 651-4016

Senator Rod Wright (Los Angeles area)
Email: Sena...@sen.ca.gov
Phone: (916) 651-4025
Fax: (916) 445-3712
Some of them have tougher districts than others; Padilla, for instance, is utterly inexcusable as he’s in a solid blue district. But it doesn’t matter. Regardless of how tough the district, and even if one grants the unlikely theory that taking a “yea” vote on single-payer would be career suicide, this issue above all is a bill to fall on one’s sword for. The opportunity to really and truly pass single-payer healthcare is why one gets into Democratic politics. It’s the equivalent of taking the game-winning shot at the buzzer in Game 7 of the finals, or kicking the winning field goal in the Super Bowl. And these sniveling cowards didn’t just miss the shot; they didn’t even pull the trigger.

Then, of course, there are the two truly awful Conservadems in the CA Senate, Ron Calderon and Lou Correa, who voted “no”. Their contact information is below–though getting through to them is like talking to a brick wall:

Senator Ron Calderon
Phone: (916) 651-4030
sena...@sen.ca.gov

Senator Lou Correa
Phone: (916) 651-4034
sena...@sen.ca.gov

JUSTICE

Darrell Issa threatens to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress

Politico:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) threatened Tuesday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress if the Justice Department did not provide certain documents in response to the committee’s subpoena.

In a letter to Holder, Issa wrote that “this committee will have no alternative but to move forward with proceedings to hold you in contempt ofCongress” if Holder and the DOJ didn’t produce documents they demanded relating to the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal.

MORE>>>

GOP Seeks Big Changes In Federal Prison Sentences

NPR:

Every year, federal judges sentence more than 80,000 criminals. Those punishments are supposed to be fair — and predictable. But seven years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court threw a wrench into the system by ruling that the guidelines that judges use to figure out a prison sentence are only suggestions.

Republicans in Congress say that has led to a lot of bad results. They’re calling for an overhaul of the sentencing system, with tough new mandatory prison terms to bring some order back into the process. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, brought up the subject at a recent hearing. […]

Since the Supreme Court acted in 2005 to make the sentencing guidelines advisory — not mandatory — Sensenbrenner said, judges in places like New York City have imposed sentences below the guideline ranges almost half the time. But judges only a few hours further north in New York are still following the guidelines.

Former prosecutor Matt Miner — who also served as GOP congressional aide — says that’s not justice.

“We have a federal system. There should be consistency not just in the same courthouse and on the same floor, or district by district, but across the country, and we’re failing in that,” Miner says.

Douglas Berman, a law professor and sentencing expert at Ohio State University, said, “The way you make sure the guidelines get due respect is to make them respectable.”

A lot of people argue that ever since the Supreme Court weighed in, black men have it a lot worse.

Judge Patti Saris of Massachusetts leads the congressionally created U.S. Sentencing Commission. Saris spoke about the issue at a panel sponsored by the American Constitution Society and the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington earlier this month.

“The average sentence for a black male was 20 percent longer than that for a white male. … And I think what’s important to add there is that no one here is accusing judges of being racist,” Saris said.

So, then, what’s going on?

“It’s not that the black male sentences are going up. It’s that the white male sentences are going down,” Saris said.

Berman, the law professor, says judges think many of the suggested punishments are too tough, especially in the areas of corporate fraud and child pornography, where the guidelines call for people who download images of children to sometimes get upward of 20 years behind bars. […]

Saris said despite all the criticism, the great majority of judges still give out punishments within the range of the old guidelines, even though they’re no longer mandatory. She said she continues to think the best approach is to keep the advisory guidelines for sentencing and to adjust them as needed based on feedback from judges.

Amy Baron-Evans, who works for the Federal Public and Community Defenders, said there’s nothing wrong with the way things are going now, and Congress shouldn’t take away the discretion judges have to evaluate each defendant case by case.

MEDIA

Fox News Marks 10 Years Atop Cable News Ratings Race

Hollywood Reporter:

Officially surpassing CNN in the first month of 2002, this January marks the 10-year anniversary of Fox News Channel becoming most-watched cable news network on television.

The network, which celebrated its 15th anniversary on the air in Sept. 2011, has been unmoved from its ratings throne for a decade and now outpaces both CNN and MSNBC combined in total viewers for 2012. [...]

Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes sounded off on the event in a statement. “We are extremely proud of the phenomenal achievement created by the hard work and talent of the FOX News Channel employees and recognize how difficult it is for a cable network to sustain this level of dominance for a decade,” he said. “America has clearly embraced fair and balanced news.”

How Fox News Is Destroying The Republican Party 

Alternet:

More and more  despondent conservatives are expressing alarm over the unfolding Republican primary season and what they see as the party’sdwindling chances of defeating President Obama in November. Spooked at the general  elections prospects facing frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich (especially Gingrich), members of the so-called Republican Establishment seem to want to reboot the election season and try their nominating luck again.

Sorry, it’s too late.

If the current state of concern transforms into a larger, enveloping blame game, Fox News chairman Ailes ought be a looming target. True, conservatives in recent years have shown virtually no interest in critiquing, let alone trying to reign in, Ailes’ empire. Still, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Fox’s programming and the radical, fear-based agenda it’s setting for Republicans is now doing lasting damage to the Grand Old Party.

That’s because Fox News isn’t simply offering a rightward take on the day’s events, or innocently providing Republican-friendly commentary, of course.  It’s leading an exhausting, day-in, day-out attack campaign against Obama, Democrats and all their liberal allies. (Real or imagined.) Its relentless, paranoid crusade falls well outside the mainstream of American politics, which is why the Republican primary season, so proudly sponsored by Fox News, is shaping up to be such an  embarrassment.

Make no mistake, kingmaker Ailes has made sure his channel’s profoundly un-serious stamp permeates this year’s GOP contest. For more and more spooked Republicans though, it’s a stamp of failure and looming defeat.

For Ailes and company, that slash-and-burn formula works wonders in terms of super-serving its hardcore, hard-right audience of three million viewers. But in terms of supporting a serious, national campaign and a serious, national conversation? It’s not working. At all.

As Fox News has moved in and essentially replaced the RNC as the driving electoral force in Republican politics today, and with Ailes ensconced in his kingmaker role, candidates have had to bow down to Fox in search of votes and the channel’s coveted free airtime. That means campaigns have been forced to become part of the channel’s culture of personal destruction, as well as its signature self-pity.

The truth is, the Republican Establishment all but ceded control of the party, or at least the public face of the party, to Fox News (and Rush Limbaugh) in January, 2009. Party leaders, demoralized by John McCain’s electoral landslide defeat, faded into the background and obediently followed Fox News’ often-hysterical lead as Rupert Murdoch’s cable channel unveiled an unprecedented effort to demonize and delegitimize the newly elected president.  (In the Fox-led world, it’s conventional wisdom  that Obama’s a foreign, race-baiting Marxist who undermines Israel and is determined to destroy the American way of life.)

With Fox News at the irresponsible helm, the conservative movement in America, including the emerging Tea Party, became first and foremost a media movement, and one that gleefully cut ties with common sense and decency.  (See: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh.)

As blogger Andrew Sullivan noted this week:

The Republican Establishment is Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and their mainfold products, from Hannity to Levin. They rule on the talk radio airwaves and on the GOP’s own “news” channel, Fox.

With media outlets setting the conservative agenda, as well as raising campaign funds and boosting GOP candidates, it was Fox News that quickly transformed itself into the Opposition Party. It was Roger Ailes who, officially or unofficially, began to wear two hats: Program Director at Fox News, Chairman of the RNC.

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POLITICS

Money Changed Everything for Mitt Romney in Florida Primary

Paul Begala:

Mitt Romney crushed Newt Gingrich not with charm or wit or eloquence. He buried him in a mountain of money.

Romney and the super PAC supporting him spent more than $15 million on television ads. Team Gingrich spent about $3 million. Both ran almost entirely negative campaigns. One tally estimated that 93 percent of all the ads were negative. The other 7 percent were wasted.

Victory is always sweet, but this one could leave Romney feeling a little sour. Gingrich called Romney’s strategy “carpet-bombing.” Fair enough. But what then do we call Gingrich’s strategy? Kamikaze? Gingrich strapped on his helmet, slugged down some sake, jumped in his Zero, and dive-bombed into the SS Romney. He didn’t sink Romney’s aircraft carrier, but he did some serious damage. Romney is likely to list even farther to starboard, as he is forced to pander even more to the far right.

Gingrich and his allies called Romney “despicable,” “breathlessly dishonest,” and, worst of all, “liberal.” It was not enough to win, or even to make it close, but it was enough to damage Romney in November, should he emerge as the GOP standard bearer. One in four GOP voters in Florida expressed dissatisfaction with the field; a full 53 percent of Gingrich voters said they would not be happy with a Romney-led ticket. To be sure, they’re not going to jump ship and vote for Obama. But they could stay home. They could refuse to give money or make calls or turn out their friends and neighbors. If Romney is the nominee, a lot of Republicans are going to sit on their hands.

As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled across 50 states and seven districts and territories in 2008 there was some bitterness, to be sure. But it was mostly confined to the upper echelons of Hillaryland and Barackistan. At the grassroots you heard time and again, “I’m for Barack, but I’m not against Hillary.” Florida Republicans voted against Newt Gingrich; they did not vote for Mitt Romney.

Money begets money. Romney not only has the greatest personal fortune in the GOP field, he has the most well-funded campaign. And perhaps even more important, the super PAC supporting him dwarfs those of his competitors. An analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project shows outside spending on Campaign 2012 is up 1,600 percent over 2008. Romney’s allies have mastered this new tactic. (Full disclosure: I advise the pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action.)

The campaign will now stagger through the February doldrums. Romney is very likely to win the Nevada caucuses, which he dominated in 2008. He will almost certainly continue to carpet-bomb Gingrich over the airwaves. But there’s a difference between persuading voters to hate Newt Gingrich—which, frankly, is pretty easy—and getting them to love Mitt Romney, which appears to be well-nigh impossible.

The Myth of the American Political Intelligence Gap

Tom Junod, Esquire:

Liberals don’t hate conservatives. They just think they’re stupid.

Conservatives hate liberals, because they know that liberals think they’re smarter than them.

Liberals know that conservatives hate them and can’t figure out why, because they don’t hate conservatives in return.

Conservatives believe that liberals hate them, because it’s easier to feel despised than patronized. And so in addition to hating liberals, they think liberals are liars.

This is the unspoken dynamic of American politics. It pervades blogs on both left and the right, accounting for the fantasies of victimization underlying most conservative discourse and for the strange liberal habit of offending while trying to appease. It explainswhy conservatives aren’t lying when they say they have no problem with Barack Obama being black; their real problem is with Barack Obama being black and smart.

We live in an undereducated country; at the same time, we’re told, again and again, that we’re entering an age in which intellectual capital will be the only capital that matters. It is no wonder that intelligence has become not just a source of insecurity but a stealth political issue that shows up every time a wealthy Republican candidate for president gets cheers for attacking “elites.” Just last week, left-leaning news feeds gleefully distributed the news that a researcher in Canada had established a link “between low intelligence and social conservatism”; just yesterday morning, the Times quoted the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land in a story that attempted to explain Newt Gingrich’s appeal to conservatives in terms of his vaunted intelligence.

“They would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated by a real intellectual,” Land said, speaking of conservatives’ wish to see Newt Gingrich debate the President. “He would tear Obama’s head off.”

In fact, the perceived “intelligence gap” between the two parties — and the conservative defensiveness about liberal condescension — explains the success of the Newt Gingrich campaign for more than his coded appeals to prejudice. It explains how Gingrich’s oft-stated rationale for his candidacy — that he’s the only candidate who could beat Obama “in a series of seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates — went from being a laugh line to a legitimate selling point.

When liberals hear Gingrich sell himself on the basis of his intellect, they hear a blowhard who wants to be president to vindicate his narcissism; when conservatives hear the same thing, they hear someone willing, at long last, to step up for them and be their champion. Conservatives do not think that the mixed-race man who is president can be as smart as he is supposed to be; they don’t think that he can be smarter than them; they think that he is “a false-smarty pants” whose transcripts were altered to clear his way into Harvard, whose books were written by someone else, and whose eloquence leaves him as soon as he leaves the teleprompter. Obama’s intelligence is an affront to them, and so they’ve been depending on Gingrich not just to defeat but also to expose him — to finally get it over with, and, in a single debate, tear down not only the whole edifice of liberal thought but the also the myth of liberal intellectual superiority.

It is no accident that Gingrich’s strategy had its greatest success in South Carolina, a state whose combination of racial animus and genteel pretension guarantees its intellectual insecurity. But the strategy has a built-in weakness, evident now that the Gingrich campaign has ran aground (again) in Florida:

If you base your entire candidacy on your ability to beat Barack Obama in a debate, you damned well better be able to beat Mitt Romney.

ABC News: Romney Gets Secret Service Detail

[…]

Secret Service protection is being given to the campaign not because of a specific threat but because of the increase in crowd sizes as the primary season has progressed over the past few weeks, according to the sources, who refused to be identified because they don’t have authority to comment on such matters publicly.

Senate Democrats plan votes all spring and summer on taxes

Political Wire:

Congressional Democrats “are embracing the populist agenda President Obama outlined in his State of the Union speech,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada is planning votes all spring and summer in an attempt to end the tax breaks that corporations and wealthy individuals like Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney enjoy.”

“Democrats would prefer to frame this election as a choice between the two parties, using these kinds of contrasts, rather than, as Republicans position the campaign, a referendum on Obama’s policies.”

When defensiveness leads to dishonesty

Steve Benen:

No candidate ever wants to give the impression that he or she bought a campaign victory, even if it’s true. Just on principle, it looks unseemly.

With that in mind, it’s understandable that Mitt Romney would feel a little defensive — he’s put his flush coffers to good use in each of the nominating contests thus far, taking full advantage of his massive financial edge. Defensiveness, though, is no excuse for dishonesty.

As Florida voters cast their ballots on Tuesday, Mitt Romney spoke of the lessons he learned from the race he lost to Newt Gingrich in South Carolina just 10 days ago.

“In South Carolina we were vastly outspent with negative ads attacking me and we stood back and spoke about President Obama and suffered the consequence of that,” Romney told reporters outside his campaign headquarters [in Tampa].

Romney wasn’t “vastly outspent” in South Carolina; he was the one vastly outspending. An independent analysis found that Romney and his allied groups spent $4.6 million in the Palmetto State, while Gingrich and his allies spent $2.2 million.

Even Romney should be willing to admit $4.6 million is greater than $2.2 million.

Obama raised $68 million from 538,000 donors in 4th quarter

How to Listen for Racism on the Campaign Trail: Jeffrey Goldberg

Bloomberg: (please see original post for extensive links.)

Here are some things you could learn about black Americans from the recent statements and insinuations of Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radio personalities:

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race- soaked in recenthistory. It is already more race-soaked than the 2008 election, which, of course, marked the first time that a black man became a major-party candidate.

I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because Senator John McCain, the Republican contender in 2008, generally and admirably refused to race-bait. But the Republican candidates in today’s contest aren’t so meticulous about avoiding the temptation to dog-whistle their way to the nomination.

A Dark Art

Dog-whistling — the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters — is one of the darkest political arts. In this race, Newt Gingrich is streets ahead of his nearest competitor in its use. In addition to his comments about black children working as janitors, he has repeatedly referred to Obama as the country’s “food-stamp president.”

Food stamps have been fixed in the minds of many white voters as a government subsidy misused by blacks at least since 1976, when Ronald Reagan complained of “strapping young bucks” who used public assistance to buy “T-bone steaks.” (It is distressing to remember, in light of Reagan’s subsequent beatification, that he was to racial dog-whistling what Pat Buchanan has been to Jew-baiting; it was Reagan who also introduced the “welfare queen” into public discourse.)

The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. It would be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh to run for public office, given his record of fairly straightforward race-baiting. (Limbaugh, who in the words of Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy is an “excellent entrepreneur of racial resentment,” has been on a tear lately. He has accused Obama — who he says “talks honky” around white people — and the first lady of abusing public funds as payback for the ill-treatment afforded their ancestors.)

But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enough that Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, at least during the largely white Republican primaries.

Kennedy, who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamp president” a staple of his stump speeches.

New Realization

Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog- whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. I suspect another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making their own bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and theDemocratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.

The former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who last week endorsed Gingrich, told me in an interview last year that Obama was more “international” than American. He also said that, unlike Obama, he rejects the label “African-American” because he feels “more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa.”

Representative Allen West of Florida, one of two black Republican House members, recently called the Democratic Party a “21st-century plantation” and compared himself to Harriet Tubman. In August, he said, “Today in the black community, we see individuals who are either wedded to a subsistence check or an employment check. Democrat physical enslavement has now become liberal economic enslavement, which is just as horrible.”

How far in intent is West’s message from this one, recently delivered by Rick Santorum in Sioux City, Iowa: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebodyelse’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” (Santorum later denied that he said the word “black,” arguing that what he actually said was “blah.” The denial is not credible.)

The writer Gary Younge has noted that in Woodbury County, which includes Sioux City, nine times more whites use food stamps than blacks do. But it doesn’t matter: Santorum wasn’t driven from the race for making such a blatant appeal to white resentment — instead, he won the Iowa caucus.

An Odd Video

Recently, I watched an educational children’s video produced by a company part-owned by Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (and current Fox News host). The video series, called “Learn Our History,” is meant as a corrective to a left-wing interpretation of the American story.

In one episode, a group of children are transported to Washington, in the late 1970s, a timewhen, we are told, “people are out of work and some of their morals are just gone.” The group, walking down a cartoon version of a street from “The Wire,” is confronted by a black mugger in a tank-top emblazoned with the word “Disco.” (Yes, “Disco.”) The mugger says to the time-travelers, “Gimme yo money!”

I asked Huckabee why the video advanced this particular stereotype. We had been speaking about the rationale for the video series, and he had just finished telling me that the project was meant to encourage moral leadership. Then he told me he had nothing to do with writing the show’s scripts, but it was his impression that the mugger wasn’t meant to be black. In any case, we were talking about a cartoon, he said, and cartoons traffic in “caricature.”

This is something cartoons share with many of today’s leading Republicans.

[And then there was this exchange last night on MSNBC]

Tea Party, with no presidential candidates, focus on saving Scott Walker

Mother Jones:

Walker’s recall election is a referendum on his hard-line conservative agenda, including curbing collective bargaining rights for state workers and slashing education funding. For Walker himself it’s a pivotal moment in his young political career.

The recall fight is also a crucial test for the tea party, the populist movement that helped elect Walker in 2010, vigorously defended him during last winter’s protests over his anti-union “budget repair” bill, and has been organizing to prevent his ouster. The movement’s support is flagging, its clout dwindling, its buzz mostly gone. But now, tea partiers at the state and national levels are rallying around Walker’s recall defense, hoping a victory could bolster the movement in a critical election year. A defeat, on the other hand, would give ammo to liberals and conservatives alike who say the tea party is all but dead.

In recent months, the Tea Party Express, a national organization, and the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, a tea party-linked political action committee, have waded into the recall fight, blasting out more than a dozen emails to supporters and launching a $100,000 “money bomb” fundraiser to help defend Walker. They argue that the outcome has national implications for the 2012 presidential election; a Tea Party Express email to supporters in January announced that Wisconsin is “Ground Zero for the Battle Against Obama’s Liberal Agenda.” […]

Two Wisconsin tea party groups, We the People of the Republic and theWisconsin Grandsons of Liberty, claim to have signed up 11,000 volunteers and trained 4,000 of them to scrutinize theestimated one million signatures gathered by Walker foes. That signature total was nearly two times the 540,208 needed to launch the recall process; nonetheless, the two groups’ vetting operation, VerifyTheRecall.com, was created to root out duplicate signatures and “downright fraud” found in recall petitions for Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, their website says. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin branch of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded group that helped train and grow the tea party, held a town hall earlier this month touting the budget reforms enacted by Walker and state Republicans.

It’s not hard to see why the tea partiers would go all-in to defend Walker. There is no clear tea party favorite left to rally behind in the 2012 GOP presidential nomination fight with Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain all out of the race. Walker, on the other hand, is right in the tea party’s sweet spot: He battles unions, axes state spending, rejects federal funding, and is rigidly pro-life and pro-gun rights.

The tea party also has a lot of political capital invested in Walker. When intense anger over Walker’s anti-union “budget repair” bill spilled into the streets of the state capital of Madison last February, Americans for Prosperity swooped in to hold a counter-protest defending Walker. Other tea party groups also rushed to the aid of Walker and ripped his critics.

“Walker is a central figure to them, their Sir Galahad battling the evil unions,” says Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociology professor and coauthor of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Walker ultimately signed the bill into law in March, and it later survived multiple legal challenges.

Last summer, Tea Party Express and Tea Party Nation, two national groups, launched a four-day bus tour across Wisconsin defending six Republicans facing recall elections for their roles in the battle over Walker’s anti-union bill. (Republicans lost two recall races, but clung to a narrow, one-seat majority in the state senate—a “victory” the tea party claimed credit for.) Tea Party Express also ran TV ads defending Walker’s agenda on the economy.

How much influence does the tea party have at this point? An analysislast July by the liberal blog Think Progress found that the number of events held each month by the Tea Party Patriots, a national group, had dropped by half in the first seven months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Harvard’s Skocpol affirms that tea party events “are falling off some, but there is not a collapse.”

A Pew Research Center analysis published in November found that 23 percent of people in the 60 districts represented nationwide by House Tea Party Caucus members disagreed with the tea party, up from 18 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, 25 percent of respondents in those districts agreed with the tea party, an eight percent drop. And aRasmussen poll this month reported that dislike of the tea party was at an all-time high—and that 46 percent of respondents said the tea party would hurt the GOP in the 2012 elections.

A recent Marquette University poll (PDF) found similarly lackluster support for the tea party in Wisconsin. Forty-one percent of respondents thought poorly of the tea party while 33 percent viewed it favorably.

Still, even if the tea party suffers a major defeat with Walker’s recall, their influence will be felt for years to come given the hard-line agendas promoted by state and federal lawmakers swept into office in 2010. And Skocpol says the recall election could be a galvanizing event for the movement. “Because all of the tea party forces have not been able to unite on a GOP candidate for president, they’re going to redouble on things like the Wisconsin crusade,” she says. “Grassroots tea partiers everywhere will be be following and contributing to the Walker.

Mitch McConnell’s revisionist history: Congress gave Obama everything he wanted! 

TPM:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has embraced the argument that President Obama was able to pass every bit of his legislative agenda in his first two years thanks to large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. It’s intended as a counterpoint to the President’s re-election strategy of attacking the congressional GOP as do-nothing obstructionists. But it’s also a revisionist history of the 111th Congress, during which McConnell more than any other Republican in Washington stood athwart Obama’s agenda to great effect.

The White House has “been trying to pretend like the President just showed up yesterday, just got sworn in and started fresh,” McConnell declared Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “In fact, he’s been in office for three years. He got everything he wanted from a completely compliant Congress for two of those three years… We are living in the Obama economy.”

This isn’t a new claim for McConnell, but it’s audacious even by Washington’s lax standards. It was McConnell, after all, who led Senate Republicans in serial filibusters — a record-setting number — successfully thwarting large chunks of Obama’s agenda.

By forcing Democrats to find 60 votes to nearly every action, McConnell and his members were able to block major initiatives including climate change and immigration reform bills, various appropriations bills, myriad presidential appointments, and arguably also a Democratic effort to let the Bush tax cuts expire for high incomes. Meanwhile, big legislative items that did pass, such as health care reform and the economic stimulus package, were notably scaled back as a result of the GOP filibusters.

McConnell debuted this line of attack last October when Obama began calling out congressional Republicans. “He owned the Congress for the first two years,” he told reporters at the time. “They did everything he wanted. Everything. The only thing they forgot to do — I don’t know why they overlooked this — they forgot to raise taxes.”

What the Kentucky Republican neglected to mention is that Democrats mounted a December 2010 push to end the Bush-era tax cuts on income over $250,000, and for millionaires. The GOP prevented both measures from achieving the 60-vote supermajority required to beat back a filibuster.

McConnell’s Senate minority also thwarted the majority in the Democrats’ DREAM Act, which failed late in 2010 even though they had 55 votes in support.

Senate Republicans blocked key appropriations bills in December 2010 — a gambit that touched off the government shutdown fight in spring of 2011. They prevented confirmation of key bureaucrats, including Donald Berwick, Obama’s pick to run the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Berwick was awarded a rare recess appointment, and led implementation of the health care law until last month as a result. Most others weren’t so lucky.

On the stimulus package, President Obama’s initial proposal was well over $800 billion in new spending and tax breaks, but the 60-vote requirement shrank it to well under $800 billion. GOP opposition to health care reform was a key obstacle to a public insurance option and remained a source of partisan vitriol for months.

McConnell candidly explained the strategy behind the obstruction early 2011, after reaping the benefits in the midterm elections. “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” he told The Atlantic’s Josh Green, arguing that it was important to deny Dems any claim to bipartisanship. “When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

Beyond limiting Obama’s ability to govern, McConnell’s wall of obstruction had the ancillary effect of damaging the President’s public image, as the unified GOP opposition helped them characterize Obama as a polarizing partisan. McConnell, who has said his “singlemost important” goal is to make Obama a one-term president, is now trying to cash in further politically by claiming that his successful campaign of opposition had no impact on Obama’s governance.

The political potency of McConnell’s argument is obvious: If Obama did everything he wanted in his first two years, it follows that his broadsides against Republicans ought to be ignored. In reality, Republicans had a significant impact on policymaking in 2009 and 2010 — and that was largely thanks to McConnell himself.

Politico: GOP eyes contempt of Congress vote 

House Republicans investigating Solyndra will huddle this week to weigh holding a contempt of Congress vote against the White House over its response to subpoenas seeking internal documents involving the bankrupt solar company.

“We are meeting this week to look at a very serious charge, which would be contempt of Congress, because they are not providing us the documents,” Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, told Fox Business News on Monday. “They are slow walking.”

White House lawyers have turned over more than 200 pages of materials to the Energy and Commerce Committee in response to its subpoena on Solyndra’s $535 million loan guarantee. But Republicans counter that they may need to take the extraordinary step of a contempt vote to see more documents.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz dismissed the prospect of a contempt of Congress vote, noting the much larger supply of documents that the Obama administration has delivered to the House panel unrelated to the subpoena.

“We are now approaching the one-year mark of this congressional investigation and everything disclosed in the 185,000 pages of documents, nine committee staff briefings, five congressional hearings, 72,000 pages from Solyndra investors and committee interview with George Kaiser, affirms what we said since day one: This was a merit-based decision made by the Department of Energy,” he said. “We only wish that some of the Commerce Committee’s zeal to investigate was replicated in efforts to create jobs or grow the economy.”

Indiana GOP Rep. Dan Burton to retire.  

Why the Photo of the President and Bo Swept Twitter

Joan Walsh:

Every week Republicans hit a new low in the way they attack President Obama. On Sunday Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus compared Obama to the Italian captain now accused of manslaughter for recklessly sinking and abandoning a cruise ship. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is raising money from Tea Party Obama-haters for shaking her sharp, accusing finger under the president’s nose, then claiming she felt “threatened” by him, and now acting like she deserves credit for standing up to the tyrant of the free world. The sad GOP primary goes on, with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich savaging one another but always saving their most low-down insults  for the president.

That’s why David Axelrod hit a nerve — or a funny bone — when he sent the photo that graces this story to his Twitter followers Monday, with the quip: “How loving owners transport their dogs.” Total cheap shot, playing on the most nagging though politically debatable hit on Romney: That he strapped his Irish Setter Seamus to the roof of the family station wagon, in a regulation dog travel crate, for a long ride, and when the dog didn’t do well, merely hosed off the car as well as Seamus, then put him back in his crate on top of the car and got back on the road. The increasingly timid and fussy Politifact has dinged Gail Collins for her frequent references to the story, but it dogs Romney (sorry) because of the animatronic ambition it symbolizes.

Republican National Committee strategy memo: Obama can’t win Florida

Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times:

below, from the Republican National Committee…..

Memorandum
To: Interested Parties
From: Rick Wiley, RNC Political Director
RE: Obama’s Rainy Day
Date: January 31, 2012

It’s hard to imagine Florida not being the most contested prize along the path to 270 this year. Their 29 Electoral Vote haul is by far the largest among the states in play. The prototypical battleground state has given their Electoral Votes to the eventual winner of nine of the last ten presidential elections. And with so many other battleground states in the toss-up column this year, President Obama’s chances of winning reelection would amount to a four-cushion bank shot if he comes up short in the Sunshine State.

Unfortunately for Obama, Florida isn’t a walk in the park under any circumstances. Each of the last five presidential elections in Florida has been decided by 5 points or less, and three times by 3 points or less. The 537 vote margin of victory for George W. Bush in 2000 was among the closest in modern presidential history (only New Mexico in 2000 and Hawaii in 1960 have been decided by fewer votes). The president himself garnered only 51% of the vote in his 2008 victory over John McCain. He therefore has precious few votes to lose, and there are more than enough opportunities for him to lose them.

The challenge of winning in Florida is the diversity of its electorate. Florida was among the fastest growing states between the last two censuses, ranking 2nd in total population growth, and 8th in rate of growth. Florida ranks 1st in the nation in the percentage of the electorate over the age of 65. Florida has the 2nd largest Jewish population in the nation. Florida has the 3rd largest Hispanic population, and ranks 6th among states with the highest Hispanic percentage of population. Florida’s Hispanic population itself is diverse, with the largest Cuban and second largest Puerto Rican populations in the country. This diversity presents a mixed-bag of challenges for the president, and any of these challenges can jeopardize his chances.

ü While the state population is growing, the Democrat Party’s advantage in partisan registration is shrinking. The Democrat share of overall registration has declined in each of the last 26 months, and since the 2008 election, the Democrat registration advantage has dropped by almost 30% from nearly 700,000 to fewer than 500,000 today.

ü With the highest voter-participation rate among all age groups, Florida’s over-65 population is right now one of the weakest demographic groups for Obama. The most recent Quinnipiac survey shows a 38% job approval rating for the president among voters over 65.

ü After three years of a bumbling foreign policy toward Israel and several embarrassing statements made about Israel by his administration, Jewish voters are second-guessing their support of the president in the last election. As a “core” Democrat constituency, Jewish voters are important to Obama’s fundraising and activist base, as well as his electoral coalition.

ü Florida’s Hispanic voters have been unimpressed by the president. Resurgent Republic’s recent survey of Florida Hispanics showed the president running 11 points behind his 2008 performance. In addition, 56% of Florida’s Hispanic voters said Obama has been a weaker than expected leader, and 60% said his campaign promises remain unfulfilled. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of Cuban voters said it is time to give someone else a chance.

ü Adding insult to injury, Independent voters, who represent the fastest growing partisan group in Florida, also aren’t buying what Obama is selling. Only 39% of “no-party” voters said they approve of the job Obama is doing in a January Suffolk University poll.

The most important change in Florida on Obama’s watch, however, has been the disproportionately high toll the nation’s weak economy has taken. Job loss has hit Florida harder than most states, especially among Hispanic voters and younger voters. Foreclosures are up, property values are down, and barely a quarter of Florida voters think the country is headed in the right direction. The president has to explain to Floridians why he’s placed a higher priority on campaigning than on fixing the economy.

Standing in Obama’s way in Florida is a rejuvenated Republican Party. Higher enthusiasm among Republican voters and strong support from Independents resulted in big wins for Republicans in 2010, including sending one of the GOP’s fastest-rising stars, Senator Marco Rubio, to Washington. Higher enthusiasm among Republicans continues to be the norm, with 51% of Republicans surveyed by Quinnipiac this month saying they are more enthusiastic about the upcoming election than they were four years ago (and for their part, only 33% of Democrats said they were more enthusiastic). Turnout in this week’s GOP Presidential Preference Primary is expected to be record-setting, and Tampa will host the Republican National Convention later this year.

Close elections are about momentum, and the momentum in Florida is moving in the direction of the Republican Party right now. In spite of its nickname, the Sunshine State looks awfully cloudy for Obama, and may very well rain on his parade in November.

Romney Has Raised Over $20 Million: Goes forward in primary with no debt. 

POLLS

Internal Republican poll confirms Americans think House GOP sucks 

Daily Kos:

Republicans are nothing if not consistent—and it’s taking a toll. Politico:

Daily Kos/SEIU Poll: Obama 46, Romney 42; Obama 49, Gingrich 40. Obama 48 Fav, 47 Unfav. Romney 31 Fav, 47 Unfav.

Ppppolls: Mitt Romney’s favorability in Ohio is 28/56.

This is how bad Mitt’s situation is with indys right now. Obama’s approval w/ them in OH is 40/53. And he still leads Romney 45-40 with them

65% of Americans support the “Buffett Rule” to require millionaires to pay at least a 30% tax rate 

Public says Keystone a jobs win 

Romney sinks among independent voters

Moderates, blue collar whites, independents, overall Americans all view Romney’s Bain work unfavorably

SCIENCE

DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All

NYT:

The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins.

The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.

Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. “In a sense, we are a hybrid species,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who is the research leader in human origins at theNatural History Museum in London, said in an interview.

The Denisovans (pronounced dun-EE-suh-vinz) were first described a year ago in agroundbreaking paper in the journal Naturemade possible by genetic sequencing of the girl’s pinky bone and of an oddly shaped molar from a young adult.

Those findings have unleashed a spate of new analyses.

Scientists are trying to envision the ancient couplings and their consequences: when and where they took place, how they happened, how many produced offspring and what effect the archaic genes have on humans today.

Other scientists are trying to learn more about the Denisovans: who they were, where they lived and how they became extinct.

A revolutionary increase in the speed and a decline in the cost of gene-sequencing technology have enabled scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, to map the genomes of both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.

Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes. It is unclear whether Denisovans and Neanderthals also interbred.

A third group of extinct humans, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “the hobbits” because they were so small, also walked the earth until about 17,000 years ago. It is not known whether modern humans bred with them because the hot, humid climate of the Indonesian island of Flores, where their remains were found, impairs the preservation of DNA.

This means that our modern era, since H. floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human history that just one type of human has been alive, said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was the lead author of the Nature paper on the Denisovans.

For many scientists, the epicenter of the emerging story on human origins is the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, where the girl’s finger bone was discovered. It is the only known place on the planet where three types of humans — Denisovan, Neanderthal and modern — lived, probably not all at once.

John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose lab is examining the archaic genomes, visited the cave in July. It has a high arched roof like a Gothic cathedral and a chimney to the sky, he said, adding that being there was like walking in the footsteps of our ancestors.

The cave has been open to the elements for a quarter of a million years and is rich with layers of sediments that may contain other surprises. Some of its chambers are unexplored, and excavators are still finding human remains that are not yet identified. The average temperature for a year, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, bodes well for the preservation of archaic DNA.

Could this cave have been one of the spots where the ancient mating took place? Dr. Hawks said it was possible.

But Dr. Reich and his team have determined through the patterns of archaic DNA replications that a small number of half-Neanderthal, half-modern human hybrids walked the earth between 46,000 and 67,000 years ago, he said in an interview. The half-Denisovan, half-modern humans that contributed to our DNA were more recent.

And Peter Parham, an immunologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has used an analysis of modern and ancient immune-system genetic components — alleles — to figure out that one of the Denisovan-modern couplings most likely took place in what is now southeastern China. He has also found some evidence that a Neanderthal-modern pair mated in west Asia.

He stressed, however, that his study was just the first step in trying to reconstruct where the mating took place.

Dr. Parham’s analysis, which shows that some archaic immune alleles are widespread among modern humans, concludes that as few as six couplings all those tens of thousands of years ago might have led to the current level of ancient immune alleles.

Another paper, by Mathias Currat and Laurent Excoffier, two Swiss geneticists, suggests that breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was rare. Otherwise, they say, modern humans would have far more Neanderthal DNA.

Were they romantic couplings? More likely they were aggressive acts between competing human groups, Dr. Stringer said. For a model, he pointed to modern hunter-gatherer groups that display aggressive behavior among tribes.

The value of the interbreeding shows up in the immune system, Dr. Parham’s analysis suggests. The Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived in Europe and Asia for many thousands of years before modern humans showed up and had developed ways to fight the diseases there, he said in an interview.

When modern humans mated with them, they got an injection of helpful genetic immune material, so useful that it remains in the genome today. This suggests that modern humans needed the archaic DNA to survive.

The downside of archaic immune material is that it may be responsible for autoimmune diseases like diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, Dr. Parham said, stressing that these are preliminary results.

Although little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across Asia, from the cold northern cave to the tropical south. The evidence is that modern populations in Oceania, including aboriginal Australians, carry Denisovan genes.

Dr. Reich and others suggest that the interbreeding that led to this phenomenon probably occurred in the south, rather than in Siberia. If so, the Denisovans were more widely dispersed than Neanderthals, and possibly more successful.

But the questions of how many Denisovans there were and how they became extinct have yet to be answered. Right now, as Dr. Reich put it, they are “a genome in search of an archaeology.”

UNIONS

Tougher Than Wisconsin: Arizona Republicans Launch ‘All Out Assault’ On Public Unions 

TPM:

With a sweeping series of bills introduced Monday night in the state Senate, Republicans in Arizona hoped to make Wisconsin’s battle against public unions last year look like a lightweight sparring match.

The bills include a total ban on collective bargaining for Arizona’s public employees, including at the city and county levels. The move would outpace even the tough bargaining restrictions enacted in Wisconsin in 2011 that led to massive union protests and a Democratic effort to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

“At first glance, it looks like an all out assault on the right of workers to organize,” Senate Minority Leader David Schapira (D) told TPM on Tuesday. “And to me, that’s a serious problem.”

The bills were crafted with the help of the Goldwater Institute, a powerful conservative think tank in Phoenix that flew Walker to the state for an event in November. Nick Dranias, director of the institute’s Center for Constitutional Government, told TPM he sees Walker as a “hero” but that Wisconsin’s laws were “modest” compared to Arizona’s measures.

“In Arizona, we believe that the political will exists to do even more comprehensive reform,” Dranias said. “The environment, the climate that we face in Arizona is much more receptive to these kinds of reforms than Wisconsin is.”

Beyond a ban on collective bargaining, the bills would also prohibit state and local government workers from deducting money from their paychecks to pay union dues.

They would ban state and local governments from paying anyone to spend time doing union work, a practice known as “release time.”

And in another break from the Wisconsin model, the restrictions would affect every type of public union, including police and firefighters.

Arizona is a right-to-work state, which gives unions a much smaller role there than in states like Wisconsin. But laws still currently give labor groups a place at the bargaining table to negotiate pay and other benefits for their members. All of that would change under the proposed rules.

Schapira, who is also running for Congress this year, said he expects the laws to easily pass unless something major happens. Democrats in the Senate are outnumbered 21-9, so he said there isn’t much they can do to stop the bills on their own.

“I think it’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck thing,” Schapira said. “We’ve got to get people down here at the Capitol to talk to their legislators, to contact them by phone or email and if need be to actually spend a significant amount of time here protesting these bills.”

The restrictions are on top of a proposal that Gov. Jan Brewer made earlier this month, saying she would offer state employees their first pay raise in years in exchange for giving up certain protections.

In light of that, Dranias said he expects the governor to be supportive of the new bills. The governor’s office did not return a message seeking comment. Sen. Rick Murphy (R), who introduced three of the four bills, also could not be reached for comment.

Dranias said the measures were inspired by Wisconsin but were more modeled after legislation passed in Virginia about 30 years ago. He said the goal of the measures wasn’t to ban public unions from Arizona but to make them seem obsolete.

“Gradually this would cause people to leave the unions as they recognized that unions no longer have an unfair bargaining advantage given to them by collective bargaining laws,” Dranias said. “They’ll realize that unions don’t do much for them.”

He said the institute has told Arizona’s legislators the state will save as much as $550 million a year if they put an end to collective bargaining.

WEDGE ISSUES

Note to some of my fellow progressives: If we can’t argue about Israel without using anti-Semitic tropes, then the debate is lost before it even begins

Spencer Ackerman, The Tablet:

At the risk of sounding like the shtetl police, there’s a right way and a wrong way for American Jews to argue with one another. The right way focuses on whose ideas are better—for America, for Israel, for the Jewish community, and for the world. The Jewish left should be right at home with this kind of substantive debate, since I believe those ideas are better than those of our cousins on the Jewish right. But the wrong way, regretfully, is now on the rise among Jewish progressives.

Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States. Last week, for example, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald askedAtlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about any loyalty oaths to Israel Goldberg took when he served in the IDF during the early 1990s. (On Tuesday, writer Max Blumenthal used a gross phrase to describe Goldberg: “former Israeli prison guard.”) The obvious implication is that Goldberg’s true loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. For months, M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, has been throwing around the term “Israel Firster” to describe conservatives he disagrees with. One recent Tweet singled out my friend Eli Lake, a reporter for Newsweek: “Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S.” That’s quite mild compared to some of the others.

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize.

Throughout my career, I’ve been associated with the Jewish left—I was to the left of the New Republic staff when I worked there, moved on to Talking Points Memo, hosted my blog at Firedoglake for years, and so on. I’ve criticized the American Jewish right’s myopic, destructive, tribal conception of what it means to love Israel. But it doesn’t deserve to have its Americanness and patriotism questioned. By all means, get into it with people who interpret every disagreement Washington has with Tel Aviv as hostility to the Jewish state. But if you can’t do it without sounding like Pat Buchanan, who has nothing but antipathy and contempt for Jews, then you’ve lost the debate.

This is tiresome to point out. Many of the writers who are fond of the Israel Firster smear are—appropriately—very good at hearing and analyzing dog-whistles when they’re used to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims. I can’t read anyone’s mind or judge anyone’s intention, but by the sound of it these writers are sending out comparable dog-whistles about Jews.

***

A bit of background for the uninitiated: Last month, Josh Block, a former AIPAC spokesman, pushed a series of talking points that targeted several liberal writers at the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank with ties to the Obama Administration. (Full disclosure: My personal blog was very briefly hosted by CAP in 2008; some of Block’s targets are my friends.) The effect was to suggest that CAP was hostile to Israel because it is to Block’s left. A plain reading of the think tank’s work refutes the accusation.

But buried in Block’s overbroad invective was a kernel of truth. Some at CAP, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, and beyond deployed the “Israel First” smear, calling the Americanness of their political opponents into question. Predictably, right-wing Jewish writers took their shots at CAP, Media Matters, and the rest—never wanting to miss an opportunity to indict the left. And the Washington Post revived the contretemps last month in an article that effectively asked if CAP was anti-Israel.

The response to this controversy, and related ones, was ugly. Many toyed with the idea that denigrating someone’s American identity wasn’t so bad after all. Left-wing polemicist Philip Weiss wrote that he considered the term “Israel firster [to be] a perfectly legitimate term in a wide-open American discourse.” Time columnist Joe Klein noted that he’s used the term himself before, weighing in on “Americans who are pushing for war with Iran”—as the question of attacking Iran lurks in the background of this entire debate—and who “place Israel’s national defense priorities above our own.”

Even more disappointingly, the term got a nod of approval from the head of a lobbying organization that represents the Jewish left. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace organization that I’ve written favorably about, told the Washington Post he was cool with the throwing “Israel Firster” around. “If the charge is that you’re putting the interests of another country before the interests of the United States in the way you would advocate that,” he said, “it’s a legitimate question.” So, Ben-Ami’s response to years of getting baselessly attacked for not caring about Israel is to turn around and say his attackers don’t care about America? (Ben-Ami later clarified that, “The conspiracy theory that American Jews have dual loyalty is just that, a conspiracy theory and must be refuted in the strongest possible way.”)

If what Rosenberg and the others on the left want is a debate—by which I understand them to mean a debate about the wisdom of a war with Iran, and about the proper role of the U.S.-Israel relationship—great. The left, I think, will win that debate on the merits, because it recognizes that if Israel is to survive as a Jewish democracy living in peace beside a free Palestine, an assertive United States has to pressure a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran.

But that debate will be shut down and sidetracked by using a term that Charles Lindbergh or Pat Buchanan would be comfortable using. I can’t co-sign that. The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization. It shouldn’t matter that the American Jewish right proliferates the term “anti-Israel.” The easiest way to lose a winnable argument is to get baited into using their tactics. I don’t fetishize false civility; bullies ought to get it twice as bad as they give. People disagree, so they should argue. Shouting is healthier than shutting up.

Call me a squish or a sellout or a concern troll. Whatever. But if you can’t be forceful without recalling some of the ugliest tropes in American Jewish history, you’re doing it wrong.

TAKE ACTION

Petition Susan G. Komen Foundation  to reverse their decision to stop supporting Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood needs at least $700,000 to make up for what Susan G Komen is pulling from them. Please consider a donation 

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference. ~ William James 

You can access all the past editions of The Daily Planet on the green Category bar on the top of each page under the heading PlanetPOV.

_____________________________

BUSINESS

AP: President Obama to ask Congress for small business tax breaks, investment incentives

Fleshing out a year-old initiative, the Obama administration wants Congress to enact or expand tax breaks for small businesses and remove barriers to startups, seizing on some existing bipartisan proposals that could win support even in the polarized climate of an election year.

White House officials say President Barack Obama will call on Congress Tuesday to pass legislation that, among other measures, would eliminate tax rates on capital gains for investments in small businesses and extend for a year the ability of all businesses to immediately deduct all of the costs of equipment and software purchases.

The legislative package, which will be part of Obama’s 2013 budget proposal later this month, also would include a new 10 percent tax credit for small business that add jobs or increase wages in 2012. In addition, the legislation would make it easier for new startup companies to raise money and to go public. It also would expand a government small business investment program from $3 billion to $4 billion.

MORE>>>

In the era of greed, meet America’s good bank 

The Atlantic:

Highly profitable while conservative with lending, and not publicly traded, the United Services Automobile Association is a model for the financial services industry.

It didn’t take a penny in federal bailout money. It grew throughout the financial crisis. It has consistently garnered top customer service rankings. And Fortune magazine just named it one of the 20 best companies to work for in America. Meet America’s good bank: USAA.

USAA is a San Antonio, Texas-based bank, insurance, and financial services company with 22,000 employees, serving 8 million current and former members of the military and their families. The company’s roots go back to 1922, when 25 army officers agreed to insure one another’s cars when no traditional companies would. Since then, USAA, or the United Services Automobile Association, has steadily grown.

By its very definition, USAA serves the middle class. It does business only with current and former members of the military and their families. Studies have shown that the U.S.’s all-volunteer military is dominated by members of the middle class, not the elite.

While other financial and insurance companies flirted with collapse, USAA’s net worth grew from $14.6 billion in 2008 to $19.3 billion in 2011. And it has continued lending money while other banks have tightened their loan operations despite billions in government funding to encourage liquidity. It has a free checking account, has been at the forefront of electronic banking, and reimburses up to $15 in other banks’ ATM fees. Its credit rates are 43 percent lower than the national average.

The firm’s structure is one of its most interesting attributes. Unlike nearly every other Fortune 500 company, USAA is not a corporation.  It is an inter-insurance exchange made up of the people who have taken out policies with the firm. As a group, they are insured by each other and simultaneously own the company’s assets. Instead of paying stockholders, USAA distributes its profits to its members. In 2010, it distributed $1.3 billion.

“USAA is not publicly traded,” Nicole Alley, a company spokesperson, said in an email. “And we take a conservative approach to managing our members’ money.”

The firm is not perfect. A long list of consumer complaints can be found here. Standard& Poor’s lowered their rating of USAA from AAA to AA+ last August but still rates the firm above its peers. And my colleague Felix Salmon correctly criticized USAA’s initial reaction to the Volcker rule, which could force the company to change its structure. It’s likely, though, that a simple restructuring of its own could avoid that.

The reason I’m focusing on USAA is because it represents a different idea about the purpose of companies. It’s also run by former military members, who the last time I checked weren’t considered European style socialists.

MORE>>>

How Bain’s lobbying saved Mitt Romney millions

Mother Jones:

[…] Romney should think twice before setting his sights on the former speaker’s lobbying-related past. That’s because the ex-governor has benefited handsomely from the influence-peddling of Bain Capital, the private equity firm he cofounded in 1983. Though he’s been gone from Bain for over a decade, Romney continues to rake in millions from accounts with the firm—and in 2007, he took Bain’s side in a key lobbying battle with Washington—one that saved him millions of dollars.

2007, as it turns out, was something of a watershed for private equity lobbying: In that year, lobbying expenditures for the industry practically tripled. The spike was the result of an industry-wide effort to preserve a number of tax giveaways for the finance industry and its CEOs—including the carried interest rule, a tax loophole that allows Romney and other private equity mavens to reduce their taxes by millions of dollars. Carried interest refers to the commission that private equity and hedge fund executives receive for managing investors’ money. Although commissions may seem like ordinary income to the rest of us, the carried interest loophole allows some money managers to claim this income as long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a rate much lower (15 percent) than the top tax rate for normal income (35 percent).

After Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in the 2006 midterm elections, they advanced several pieces of legislation that threatened to end this lucrative quirk of the tax code and other tax policies that favor the rich. Mitt Romney, who made just over $20 million in investment income in 2010, wasn’t having any of it. During an August 2007 appearance on Kudlow & Company, Romney was asked what he thought of the effort to close the loophole. He wasn’t happy. “I want people to be able to save their money and invest in America’s economy tax-free,” Romney said. “I want to lower taxes. I want to lower marginal rates across the board. I want to lower taxes for corporations,” he told Kudlow.

Bain was doing its part to make Romney’s vision a reality. The firm spent $300,000 between August of 2007 and April of 2008 lobbying the House and Senate on bills that threatened the carried interest loophole. Along with other private equity titans like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Apollo Management, Bain and its ilk paid lobbying shops, public relations firms, and tradegroups like Ogilvy and the Private Equity Growth Capital Council an estimated $15 million between January 2009 and April 2010 to convince lawmakers to keep the loophole alive. The force of those combined lobbying efforts kept the carried interest loophole wedged open, denying the federal government some $10 billion in revenues in the process. ”Everyone who has looked at this boondoggle [of carried interest] thinks it’s an egregious giveaway,” Jacob Hacker, the co-author (with Paul Pierson) of Winner-Take-All Politics, says. “It still lives because of the lobbying of the industry, and in particular the PEGCC.”

From 1998 to 2006, private equity and investment firms spent $3 million a year lobbying Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Bain got into the game in 2007, registering with prominent Washington lobbying firms Public Strategies, Inc. and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. To date, Bain has paid some $3 million to these firms to make sure corporate taxes stay low and CEOs remain fat and happy.

As the New York Times reported several weeks ago, Bain was a member of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council up until last year, when it abruptly ended its $1-million-a-year membership with the powerful trade group. Its reasons for doing so remain unclear. (PEGCC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Investment fund managers and former CEOs like Mitt Romney suggest that taxing their carried interest as income would crimp investments, and, ultimately, kill jobs. But as Howard Gleckman, a tax policy expert at the Urban Institute, has found, there is little evidence to support that claim. “Losing a couple percentage points off your returns isn’t going to change things very much,” Gleckman says. “Taxing carried interest as if it were wages…wouldn’t really affect these deals very much.”

Now that a small sample of Romney’s tax returns is out in the open, voters may be asking more questions about how policies like the carried interest rule work. Josh Kosman, author of The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the AmericanEconomy, says that’s terrifying for the private equity world. “The private equity industry exists because of tax gimmicks,” Kosman argues. “They want to convince people they create value because if anyone started looking at it, the tax rates don’t make any sense, and they cost the government a lot of money.”

As Hacker explains, today’s favorable tax treatment towards capital gains dates back to the late 1970s, when the lobbying might of business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce successfully sliced the tax on capital gains in half. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 brought the rate back into line with the rate on ordinary income, but business lobbies spent the next decade knocking it back down. “For an industry that’s held up as a paragon of individual entrepreneurship, private equity is strikingly dependent on favorable tax policies,” Hacker said.

[...]

All of this, of course, could pose a huge a problem for Romney—so much so that his campaign recently suggested that he might be open to reconsidering the carried interest loophole if he were to be elected president. Although Bain did not start lobbying until some eight years after Romney left, his just-released tax records indicate that he still collects significant investment income from the firm. Bain’s gain, then, has clearly been Romney’s as well—and the candidate has publicly endorsed the same policies the company has backed.

So when Bain’s lobbyists have tried to sway the political system in Washington, Romney has gained. Maybe he ought to be careful when denigrating the influence peddlers in the nation’s capital.

ECONOMY

U.S. Midwest Jobs Return as Applesauce Joins Cars to Lift Obama

Bloomberg:

From northern Michigan’s iron mines to Pennsylvania’s natural-gas fields, the industrial heartland of America is humming with jobs again as a region once left for dead recovers faster than the rest of the U.S.

The turnaround may shape this year’s race for the White House as President Barack Obama seeks to reverse Republican gains in the Midwest. The title of his State of the Union address, “An America Built to Last,” evoked a theme of manufacturing’s revival meant to resonate on the campaign trail.

The economies of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania — all states Obama won in 2008 -- have improved faster than that of the U.S. since the recession’s depth in April 2009, according to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. Michigan is expected to lead all 50 states during the next six months, the Fed data show.

“We’re going back to a region we abandoned a long time ago to get energy again from rocks that were already drilled a thousand times,” said Clay Williams, chief financial officer for Houston-based National Oilwell Varco Inc. (NOV), which started in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in 1862. “We’re going back to our roots.”

Economic recovery in so-called Rust Belt states may bolster re-election chances for Obama, who pushed the U.S.-backed bailout ofGeneral Motors Co. (GM) and Chrysler Group LLC, both based in Michigan. He visited the state in a three-day campaign swing following his speech, and was greeted by guest editorials in Detroit newspapers from Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus and Michigan GOP Chairman Robert Schostak criticizing his record on the economy.

Penokee Hills Comeback

Yet from Detroit and Pittsburgh to Peoria, Illinois, and the town of Mellen in Wisconsin’s Penokee Hills, employers plan to add jobs and facilities. Automakers are ramping up production as demand returns, energy companies are exploiting oil and natural-gas sources, commodity prices are supporting a return to long-closed iron and copper mines, and agriculture companies are finding new export markets.

National Oilwell Varco, the largest U.S. maker of oilfield equipment, is hiring workers in Ohio and Pennsylvania and opening operations that distribute tools and service equipment to companies extracting oil from shale deposits, Williams said in an interview. The company has beaten theStandard & Poor’s 500 Index, about 135 percent to 43 percent, since July 1, 2009.

Improvement in unemployment, which dropped 19 percent in Ohio and 29 percent in Michigan from April 2009 through the end of last year, is a key driver for the Midwest recovery, said Jason Novak, senior economic analyst for the Philadelphia Fed.

Economic Health

Michigan, Ohio and Indiana all ranked among the top eight performers for improvement of economic health in the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States from the third quarter of 2009 through the third quarter of last year, the most recent period available.

Automakers are increasing production after U.S. light- vehicle sales rose at least 10 percent for two straight years for the first time since 1984. This month, GM announced it had regained the title as the top-selling global automaker, which it lost to Toyota as it slid into bankruptcy.

The Obama campaign is banking on the U.S. auto industry’s comeback to damp the appeal of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Michigan, where his father was a popular governor, as well as to reverse Ohio’s swing to Republicans in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Fracking Payoff

Ohio added 72,400 jobs last year. That included 18,300 manufacturing positions after losing 419,400 such jobs from 1999 to 2009, federal data show.

Vallourec SA announced in February 2010 that it would build a rolling mill in Youngstown next to its V&M Star facility to produce seamless tubes for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The plant is to be completed this quarter and employ 350 people, the company has said.

U.S. Steel invested $100 million in its Lorain Tubular Operations to serve oil and natural-gas customers, creating about 150 temporary construction jobs and 100 full-time positions, spokeswoman Courtney A. Boone said in an e-mail.

Ohio’s unemployment was 8.1 percent in December, down from 9.5 percent a year earlier and the lowest since December 2008, according to the Ohio Bureau of Labor Market Information.

A study commissioned by Ohio’s oil and gas industry projects that by 2015 drilling could help fuel $12 billion in spending while creating and supporting more than 200,000 Ohio- based jobs.

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Exports are driving growth

[...] The estimates of the nation’s economic performance last year, released Friday, highlight a striking trend: Exports have never been more important. Foreign buyers purchased more than $2 trillion in goods and services, the first time exports have topped that threshold. And those exports accounted for almost 14 percent of gross domestic product, the largest share since at least 1929. We usually talk about exports alongside its opposite number, imports, and since the United States buys much more than it sells -- our ‘trade deficit’ — the general impression is that foreign trade is a drag on the economy. But that tends to obscure the importance of exports, which have accounted for about 10 percent of G.D.P. over the last two decades and, since the recession, considerably more. The growth has come from all areas, but the real strength has come from what might be called the old economy: petroleum, metals, chemicals and farm goods.

Consumer confidence ticked up

[...] U.S. consumers think the economy is doing a bit better in January, according to data released Friday. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index for the end of January rose to 75 from a preliminary reading of 74 for the month and 69.9 at the end of December, according to sources who have seen the report. The latest reading was better than the 74.5 expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires…Better job growth in recent months has been boosting consumer spirits, but that has not translated to a burst of spending. Friday’s report on U.S. gross domestic product showed real consumer spending rising at an annual rate of 2%, which was slower than many economists had projected.

Must read authored by a Republican on Who Caused Financial Meltdown: Don’t blame Fannie and Freddie

Mark Zandi:

There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren’t among them.

The biggest culprits in the housing fiasco came from the private sector, and more specifically from a mortgage industry that was out of control. These included lenders who originated home loans, investment bankers who packaged them into securities, rating agencies that misjudged these securities, and global investors who bought them without much, if any, study.

In other words, America’s mortgage securitization machine was fundamentally broken. It created millions of mortgage loans that, even under reasonable economic assumptions, stood little chance of being repaid — and were not. As a result, hundreds of billions of dollars were lost as defaults and write-downs brought the financial system, and the wider economy, to the brink, requiring a massive government bailout.

Also to blame, of course, were regulators, who gave the private mortgage market little, if any, oversight. The market’s watchdogs were lulled to sleep by a misplaced view that self-interested private financial institutions would regulate themselves. This flawed thinking was most pervasive at the nation’s most important financial regulatory agency, the Federal Reserve.

Getting history right for this dark economic period is critical if we are to design a better mortgage finance system for the future. If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are responsible for the debacle, then perhaps government’s role in a future mortgage finance system should be minimal. But if private lenders deserve most of the blame, the case grows for giving government an important role in backstopping and overseeing the system.

“If it grows like a weed, it probably is a weed.” This age-old banking adage aptly applies to the private mortgage lending business during the housing bubble. Between 2004 and 2007, private lenders originated three quarters of all subprime and alt-A mortgage loans. These were loans to financially fragile homeowners with credit scores under 660, well below the U.S. average, which is closer to 700. But only a fourth of such loans were originated by government agencies, including Fannie, Freddie and the Federal Housing Administration.

The dollar amount of subprime and alt-A loans made during this period by the private sector was jaw-dropping, reaching nearly $600 billion at the height of the lending frenzy in 2006. For context, this is about equal to the total amount Americans currently owe on bank credit cards. By contrast, government lenders made just over $100 billion in subprime and alt-A loans in 2006. Even in 2007, when the housing market was beginning its free fall, private lenders still handed out more than $300 billion via these very shaky mortgage loans.

All this can be seen in the share of total residential mortgage debt insured or owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. At the start of 2002, before the housing boom got going, the two agencies’ market share accounted for almost 54 percent of all mortgage debt. By summer 2006, the bubble’s apex, their share had fallen to only 40 percent. It is difficult to see how the agencies could have been responsible for inflating the housing bubble at a time when they were losing a full 14 percentage points of market share. Indeed, the opposite was true, as their position in the housing market rapidly diminished.

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Bloomberg: The USA’s cost of borrowing has declined by 30% since S&P said we were a credit risk. 

EDUCATION

Obama announces a plan to reduce tuition costs

WaPo:

[ ...] President Obama offered a plan Friday to reduce the costs of higher education by increasing the amount of federal grant money available for low-interest loans and tying it directly to colleges’ ability to reduce tuition. In an impassioned speech before 4,000 students at the University of Michigan, Obama delivered an election-year pitch to the type of youthful audience that buoyed his 2008 campaign, saying his administration was putting colleges ‘on notice’ that they must rein in soaring prices…Obama’s proposal would boost federal investment in the Perkins loan program from $1 billion to $8 billion and revamp the formula for distributing the money. Under the plan, colleges would be rewarded based on their success in offering relatively lower tuition prices, providing value and serving low-income students, the White House said.”

The effort is long overdue, writes Kevin Carney: ”At a speech Friday morning at the University of Michigan, Obama elaborated even further. He proposed a ‘Race to the Top’ modeled after his successful efforts to spur state reform of K-12 schools. States would be rewarded for restructuring their college financing systems and continuing to support higher learning. A new ‘College Scorecard’ would rate colleges on price, graduation, debt and employment, helping students and parents decide where to enroll. Work-study jobs would double, and student loan interest rates would be kept low. Most importantly, billions of dollars in federal aid would become contingent on colleges keeping prices reasonable and low. Colleges that successfully enroll and graduate low-income students, educate people well, and help students find jobs and repay debt would get more federal aid for student loans and other programs. Colleges that fail would not.

ENERGY

New estimates show less natural gas in U.S.

NYT:

Just how much natural gas is trapped underground in the United States? The difficulty and uncertainty in predicting natural gas resources was underscored last week when the Energy Information Administration released a report containing sharply lower estimates. The agency estimated that there are 482 trillion cubic feet of shale gas in the United States, down from the 2011 estimate of 827 trillion cubic feet — a drop of more than 40 percent. The report also said the Marcellus region, a rock formation under parts of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, contained 141 trillion cubic feet of gas. That represents a 66 percent drop from the 410 trillion cubic feet estimate offered in the agency’s last report.

HEALTH CARE

 DCCC: Paul Ryan Says House Republicans Will Try To End Medicare Again

[…] This weekend, Ryan said that House Republicans are “not backing off any of our ideas, any of our solutions” in their controversial budget and that this year’s budget will “absolutely” include the same plans. Last year, nearly every House Republican voted for the Republican budget that would end Medicare, almost doubling health care costs for seniors according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), while protecting tax breaks for billionaires and Big Oil.

“Here they go again – House Republicans protecting the ultra wealthy at the expense of Medicare and higher health care costs for seniors,” said Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Republican Budget Chairman Paul Ryan made crystal clear they won’t back away from this ideological crusade to dismantle Medicare that seniors have paid into for a lifetime and depended on for generations. House Republicans will once again show their true priority is the ultra wealthy and will leave seniors to wither on the vine.”

BACKGROUND

Paul Ryan is not Backing Down from His Plan to End Medicare. On January 29, 2012, House Republican Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan appeared on Fox News Sunday. On the program, Ryan said that that he and his fellow House Republicans would not back away from a plan that the Wall Street Journal claimed would “essentially end Medicare.” Regarding the plan, Ryan said on Fox News Sunday: “We’re not backing off any of our ideas, any of our solutions.” [Fox News Sunday via YouTube, 1/29/12; Wall Street Journal, 4/4/11]

Paul Ryan Will “Absolutely” Include Medicare Ending Proposal in Budget. “House Republicans voted overwhelmingly last year for the ‘Ryan budget,’ which would give Medicare beneficiaries a fixed amount of money to buy coverage from competing private health plans. […] But in an interview, Mr. Ryan said that Republicans would try to push a similar budget plan through the House this spring. Asked if it would include similar changes in Medicare, Mr. Ryan said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’” [NY Times, 1/27/12]

Paul Ryan Will Again Push Effort to End Medicare. “House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin says Republicans have no plans to shy away from controversial efforts to reform entitlements when the House GOP drafts its budget this year, including transforming Medicare into a premium-support system.” [ABC News, 1/20/12]

CBO: Elderly People Would Pay More for Health Care Under the Republican Plan. According to the CBO, “most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.” [CBO, 4/5/11]

Republican Budget Would Almost Double Health Care Costs For Seniors. “The Republican congressman’s proposal to privatize Medicare would mean a dramatic hike in U.S. healthcare costs for the elderly, an independent analysis finds. Seniors would pay almost double — more than $12,510 a year.” [Los Angeles Times, 4/7/11]

AARP: Budget Undermines Vital Programs for Older Americans. “Among its provisions, the proposal would drive up costs for people in Medicare, take away needed coverage for long-term care from millions of older and disabled Americans and reduce critical help for seniors facing the threat of hunger.”  [AARP, 4/7/11]

WSJ: Parts of Health Reform Law Gaining in Acceptance 

To be sure, Americans remain sharply divided over the legislation, with slightly more than one-third (36 percent) of U.S. adults saying they want the law repealed and 21 percent saying they want it to remain as is. Twenty-five percent would like to see only certain elements of the law modified.

However, support for certain components of the law seems to be slowly increasing with time. For instance, 71 percent of those polled now back the law’s provision that prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to those already sick. At the end of 2010, a Harris Interactive/HealthDay poll indicated that 64 percent supported this provision.

The poll released today shows some other provisions of the health reform law gaining acceptance. They include:

Allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until they turn 26 — 57 percent in Jan. 2012 versus 55 percent in Nov. 2010.

Creating insurance exchanges where people can shop for insurance — 59 percent versus 51 percent.

Providing tax credits to small businesses to help pay for their employees’ insurance — 70 percent versus 60 percent.

Requiring all employers with 50 or more employees to offer insurance to their employees or pay a penalty — 53 percent versus 48 percent.

Requiring research to measure the effectiveness of different treatments — 53 percent versus 44 percent.

Creating a new Independent Payment Advisory Board to limit the growth of Medicare spending — 38 percent versus 32 percent.

But the most controversial aspect of the law — the so-called individual mandate that requires all adults to have health insurance or face a fine — remains widely unpopular, with only 19 percent of those polled supporting it, regardless of political party affiliation.

“The public is still divided, mainly on partisan lines, as to whether to implement or repeal all, parts, or none of the health care reform bill,” said Harris Poll Chairman Humphrey Taylor.

Read Poll Results here.

MEDIA

Romney Surges in Florida Polls, but Faces Tougher Coverage

Journalism.com:

Despite descriptions of him prevailing over Newt Gingrich in the Florida debates and entering Tuesday’s primary with a double digit lead in many pre-primary polls, coverage of Romney has gotten tougher, according to an ongoing analysis of the tone and volume of presidential candidate coverage conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

One difference for Romney is that more of the coverage of him involves assessments of his candidacy or character than for other candidates.

By contrast, for instance, more of former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s coverage is simply descriptive. One reason might be that Gingrich seems to make himself more accessible, and thus gets more straight coverage of what he says and does. Whatever the reason, the plurality of coverage of Gingrich (44%) is descriptive, while 27% was positive and 29% was negative, despite the assessment in many press accounts that Romney got the better of him in debates and his poll numbers dropped.

The findings suggest the degree to which the coverage of the race is not merely a reflection of polls.

The two top candidates received virtually the same amount of coverage last week. Fully 65% of the campaign stories studied focused significantly on the former House Speaker compared with 63% on Romney. Well back at 6% and 4% respectively were Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.

These are some of the key findings of the January 30 edition of Campaign 2012 in the Media, which tracks the tone and volume of news coverage about the candidates. The analysis, which features interactives that allow users to explore the data themselves, also includes the tone and volume of discussion on Twitter and incorporates an analysis of other public data, such as new tools about search results, YouTube viewings and press mentions from Google News.

The analysis combines traditional research methods involving human coding with the power of algorithmic analysis using software developed by the company Crimson Hexagon. It includes an analysis of more than 11,000 news websites around the United States and the full public feed of tweets on Twitter. In PEJ’s hybrid method, human coders teach the computer to analyze the tone of coverage using PEJ’s methods and rules. Researchers then study the examples cited by the algorithmic results to add a qualitative understanding of the narrative.

The Muppets Laugh at Fox “News”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8YhED4IgQA

Newly discovered JFK assassination tapes made public 

The Hill:

The public can listen to newly discovered audiotapes of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 48 years after the tragedy.

The National Archives and Records Administration is providing public access to the recordings, which consist of conversations among individuals in Washington, Air Force One pilots and officials on board the flight from Dallas to Andrews Air Force Base following the assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

The two-hour-and-22-minute recording, long thought to be lost or destroyed, was found “among other papers and memorabilia ofArmy Gen. Chester ‘Ted’ Clifton Jr., who served as senior military aide to President Kennedy,” according to a statement Monday from the Government Printing Office (GPO).

Clifton was in the Dallas motorcade when Kennedy was shot, and later on Air Force One, according to news reports.

The White House Communications Agency captured the conversations, and later provided the tapes to Clifton, according to the GPO.

“The recording includes references to new code names and incidents,” according to the statement. “Among them are a private conversation by head of the Secret Service Jerry Behn about the disposition of the president’s body; an expanded conversation about how to remove the body from the plane and where to take it; an urgent effort by an aide to Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay to reach Gen. Clifton; and attempts to locate various congressmen from Texas.”

The recording is available to the public on the GPO’s Federal Digital System (www.fdsys.gov), the statement added. This is the first time audio content has been made available on the government information website.

MILITARY

West Point Announces That Islamophobic General Has Withdrawn From Prayer Breakfast 

ThinkProgress:

Just four days after ThinkProgress reported that the United States military academy at West Point was planning to host an Islamophobic general as its featured speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, that general has now pulled out of the event. West Point just issued this news release:

LTG (Ret) William Boykin has decided to withdraw speaking at West Point’s National Prayer Breakfast on 8 February 2012. In fulfilling its commitment to the community, the United States Military Academy will feature another speaker for the event.

VoteVets, the coalition of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, is to be commended for raising this issue and putting pressure on West Point to do the right thing. VoteVets Chairman Jon Soltz told ThinkProgress this evening, “This is why VoteVets exists — the calls from veterans, activists, and civil rights leaders around the country made this decision possible. I’m glad that the cadets will not be forced to hear the words of an anti-Muslim general whose rhetoric does not align with the values of our military and also endangers our troops in combat.”

Boykin has a deep record of anti-Muslim rhetoric. For instance, he said there should be “no mosques in America“; Muslims worship an “idol“; “Islam is a totalitarian way of life, it’s not just a religion”; “it should not be protected under the First Amendment”; Muslims operate “under an obligation to destroy our Constitution.”

Hopefully, Boykin will learn from this incident that his rhetoric is both wrong and hurtful.

POLITICS

Your Interview with the President -- 2012

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeTj5qMGTAI

How Republicans plan to corner Obama on the Keystone pipeline

TPM:
Republicans are pushing full speed ahead to authorize the Keystone XL pipeline via congressional action after President Obama rejected it on the grounds that the narrow time window he had was insufficient to evaluate the environmental consequences. The strategy is aimed at exploiting Democratic divisions and pushing Obama into a corner politically.

Most Senate Republicans — along with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (WV) — are now backing legislation to approve of the Canada-to-Texas pipeline. House Republicans intend to attach it to their upcoming infrastructure bill, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said Sunday.

Even if both chambers of Congress vote to approve the project, Obama can veto the legislation, and it’s unlikely he’ll get overridden. But that’s what Republicans want him to do: repeatedly take a position against the pipeline so they can bludgeon him with it politically.

Democrats argue that the debate largely ceased to be about the pipeline itself after Republicans demanded as part of last month’s payroll tax cut package that Obama make a decision on the project by late February. Even though Obama seemed to be leaning in its favor, he had said earlier that he needed more time to evaluate the environmental and health consequences. And so, his administration argued, the GOP essentially forced him to turn down the application from TransCanada.

Republicans seemed all too aware of this possibility. “It’s a question of whether we’d rather have the pipeline or the issue,” a GOP aide said in December. They chose the issue, bringing into question how much they care about the pipeline itself. Indeed, not forcing a decision would have neutralized the politics surrounding the matter.

But now Republicans have turned it into a weapon, and the politics are win-win for them. Their base overwhelmingly supports the pipeline and its capacity for some temporary job creation puts them on the right side of the most important issue on voters’ minds in this election year.

For Democrats, the issue is a headache because their constituencies are split: environmentalists oppose it, while labor and big business have forged an unlikely alliance in its favor. The GOP push may not yield anything substantive, but it forces Obama to keep taking sides within his base, and answer to Republican attacks that he’s blocking a job creation opportunity.

That’s why Republicans want to keep the Keystone issue atop the agenda for as long as possible.

The GOP primary campaign nastiness has set the Republican party on a path towards self-destruction 

Daily Beast:

The primary campaign nastiness between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich is exhausting Republican loyalists. What in Iowa was a feisty contest between the haughty Mr. Romney and the operatic Mr. Gingrich turned hollow in New Hampshire and harsh in South Carolina. By the close of the Florida scramble, with the Herman Cain Express back from the repair yard to hitch onto the Newt baggage car, what remains of the Republican dialogue does not appear likely to be of much worth for the fall campaign.

The solution to the puzzle may be to admit that the GOP has forfeited 2012 before the general election even starts. How did this happen so suddenly?

“That’s the great mystery of 2012,” a senior Republican journalist told me while watching the brouhaha in Florida. “We have the weakest incumbent president in 32 years, running on the weakest record in 32 years… and who’s taking the stage in South Carolina and Florida? It has to be the weakest field I can remember. Each of these candidates has in his character, in his history, in his idea set—never mind disqualifying—a guarantee for self-destruction. If Newt is the candidate, he’ll lose badly. If Mitt is the candidate, he’ll lose slightly less badly … So what you have is an almost complete guarantee that if these are the candidates, Barack Obama will be reelected.”

I asked another senior GOP professional with decades of experience measuring party intrigue; he pointed to the negative campaigning as the telltale cause. “Negative advertising, why does it exist? It exists because it’s been proven to work. So Gingrich went negative on Romney on the Bain attacks and brought Romney down in South Carolina. The Romney campaign decided they’ve got to fire back in kind, calling Gingrich an influence peddler and a guy with ethics problems. The result is to create a cumulative effect of slime and dirt and muck attached not only to the two candidates but also to the party itself, as a party that fundamentally lacks seriousness about what’s centrally on people’s minds, which is the state of the economy—especially among independent voters, who keep rising; apparently they’re up to 40 percent of the electorate. This is off-putting. You know, Republicans may say we’re having an internal struggle, Newt represents something we believe in and so forth … Still, they’re running the risk of damaging the Republican brand.”

When asked how the GOP fell into this slough of despond, the observer concluded, “This is a function of not having the A team in the campaign. We’ve got the B team.”

The traditional rationalization about intraparty smears is that it’s too early to dismiss the GOP’s chances; that it’s healthy for the party to battle with mud-flinging; that all this will be forgiven in the heat of August when the party embraces the man who would be king. However, the recklessness of Gingrich’s assault on Romney as Long John Silver, and the ruthlessness of the party’s Romney chorusscreeching at Gingrich as the Undead, all this does reinforce doubts already in place with the independent voters, as well as creating a YouTube bonanza of clips for the Obama re-elect ops in Chicago.

“I think Romney will be the nominee,” a veteran Democratic campaign observer told me about the feud with Gingrich. “But he has unplumbed weaknesses. He’s such a terrible candidate. When’s he’s competent, he’s memorizing the talking points and delivering them with a mechanical energy. There’s no mind at work, no evidence that he understands how to do this. You don’t see a brain working, do you?” I agreed that Romney did seem unusually flabby on the stage. “That won’t matter in the end,” the Democratic observer judged. “Mormonism is a great problem. When he said the other night that his father was born in Mexico, do you know why? Because the Mormons had gone there to escape persecution for polygamy.”

I asked about Gingrich, whom stout stalwarts are rallying to as if he were Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45. I mentioned that in conversation with a savvy Florida Republican I had learned that evangelical pastors from the Panhandle were siding with Gingrich regardless of how Romney performed.

“That makes sense,” the Democratic observer returned. “There is the sinner who confesses his sin, and it’s perfect for them. Theycan’t support Romney. Because of the Mormonism. I find Gingrich a weird combination of the effective and highly ineffective. He’s lazy and undisciplined. He doesn’t know how to do this, either. He has character flaws. If you were at all disciplined, you’d put yourself through practice sessions. He hasn’t figured out even basic things. He went into the debates thinking that Romney’s strong points are electability and economic management, so I’m going to challenge these things. That’s it. In 1984, the first national piece about him, he talked to us about colonies on the moon. He hasn’t moved in 30 years.”

The logic of the Romney-Gingrich battle is what a pundit calls the Mutually Assured Destruction of each other’s reputation, and it will continue well into the spring. Romney is like the sheriff of Nottingham: all castle, no conviction; which makes Newt Gingrich the earthy Friar Tuck.  The question is, where is the hero, Robin Hood?

“There comes a point in the party’s desperation and anxiety,” the senior Republican observer told me, “that it has just got to be weighing on some of these individuals who didn’t get in.” We were discussing the could-have-been GOP A team—New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, even telegenic puppies RepresentativePaul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. “I would not be shocked if one of them woke up and said, ‘I’ve got to do it.’ Still, you’ll arrive in June, with one or the other, most probably Romney, with a winning number of delegates, and that’s it. Unless they get off this negative cycle and start offering voters a positive view of what their party represents, they’ve run the risk of terminating this thing earlier than it needs to.

I asked a veteran Republican member of Congress what this year looked like from Capitol Hill following the President’s workman-like State Of The Union address. “A year from now, the president will make the same speech, and the House leaders will still think what they’re doing matters, and the Senate will still be where everything goes to die. No change except I’ll say, ‘Mitt who?’”

The Democratic senior was wearily ironic: “The Democrats will be greatly relieved. Getting Obama reelected is a great burden, and they can get over it. They can relax and go back to their own careers and start the next big thing, the Andrew Cuomo boom, you know, or whatever.”

Wonkbook: Robert Kagan, Obama’s favorite Romney adviser

Robert Kagan is a prominent neoconservative who advised John McCain in the 2008 race and is advising Mitt Romney in 2012. But after publishing a cover story in the New Republic arguing against “the myth of American decline,” he has found himself a new fan: President Obama.

Josh Rogin reports that Obama has been talking Kagan’s article up both in public and in private. In a recent, off-the-record meeting with news anchors, Obama spent more than 10 minutes “going over its arguments paragraph by paragraph, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed.” National Security Advisor Tom Donilon was dispatched to Charlie Rose to “discuss Kagan’s essay and Obama’s love of it.” So it’s not just the president who likes Kagan’s article. It’s the White House communications team who likes the idea of letting people know the president likes Kagan’s article.

Kagan’s essay isn’t really about “the myth of American decline.” It’s about the myth that America was ever omnipotent. “Every day, it seems, brings more evidence that the time has passed when the United States could lead the world and get others to do its bidding.” Kagan writes. But the reality is that “much of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was once a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do.”

Indeed, Kagan says, American preeminence looks much as it always has: we produce about a quarter of the world’s GDP, the same percentage that we’ve produced for the last four decades, and our military remains vastly larger. Nor has the cost of maintaining that preeminence increased: Both in terms of men and money, our military consumes fewer of our resources than it did throughout most of the 20th Century. That doesn’t empower us to control world events in minute detail. But it makes us very rich, very influential, and very dominant.

The real core of the question of American decline is, however, the continued productive capacity of the American economy. If America’s economy can no longer adapt and grow, our military commitments will quickly become unmanageable, our domestic politics will become volatile, and our position in the world will wane. And as Kagan notes, this is backed up in impressions of American power: In the 1990s, when our economy was booming, commentators spoke of our “unipolar moment” and America’s historically unmatched preeminence. Today, with our economy sagging, those same commentators wonder whether we are entering a permanent decline. So the question, really, is where our economy goes from here.

New economic data suggests there’s reason for optimism: the recession has not permanently derailed our economy. Gross domestic product began falling in the fourth quarter of 2007. And for most of the last four years, real GDP — that is, GDP once you account for inflation — has been lower than it was in late 2007. But according to the newest GDP figures, America turned the corner in the third quarter of 2011: our economy was larger in that quarter than it was before the recession. And, in the fourth quarter of 2011, it was even larger than that. Which is not to deny the terrible toll the recession took on the economy, or its continued aftereffects. But the country’s basic productive capacity has endured, and is even growing.

Further underscoring the case for optimism is the fact that America ismuch further along in the deleveraging process — which is, essentially, the recovery process from this sort of recession — than competitor countries. Frankly, it would be better for us if other countries were recovering more swiftly, as it would help our exports and reduce financial uncertainty. But insofar as the question is whether America’s economy is recovering comparatively faster than other advanced economies, and thus displaying its tendency to recover from global recessions in a way that makes us relatively stronger than our peers, the numbers are, for now, encouraging.

TNR subscribers can read Kagan’s article here. Non-TNR subscribers should become subscribers and read Kagan’s article there. But it’s also up for free at the Brookings web site.

Obama’s populism -- circa 2007

Smartypants:

A meme has developed on the left that President Obama has only adopted a “populist” message in reaction to OWS. But take a look at a speech he gave (pdf) way back in 2007 to the Brookings Institution. Keep in mind, this was a full year before the economy crashed and more than 3 years before OWS.

The problem that we have is that social compact is starting to crumble, it’s starting to erode. In our new economy there is no shortage of new wealth, but wages are not keeping pace; workers are more vulnerable to job loss and more worried about retirement. Those Americans fortunate enough to heave health care are paying more for it. Health care premiums have risen nearly 90 percent inthe last six years. Americans are facing deeper personal debt from filling up the gas tank to paying for college education. Everything seems to cost more, and this is not just happening by chance. It’s not just something we can chalk up to temporary shocks; it’s happening in part because of the choices we aremaking and the way we are making those choices. It’s happening because we’ve gone too far from being a country where we’re all in this together to a country where everyone is on their own.

Today I’m going to focus on one aspect of our economic policy where we need to make different choices, because nowhere is the shift in our priorities more evident than in our tax policies. Instead of working to find ways to relieve the burden on working people and the middle class, we’ve developed creative ways to remove the burden from the well-off. Instead of having all of us pay our fair share, we’ve got over $1 trillion worth of loopholes in the corporate tax codes. This isn’t the invisible had of the market at work; it’s the successful work of special interests.

For decades we’ve seen successful strategies to ride anti-tax sentiment in this country towards tax cuts that favor wealth, not work. And for decades we’ve seen the gaps in wealth in this country go idle, while the cost to working people are greater. We’ve got a shift in our tax values that disproportionately benefits the wealthiest Americans, corporate carve-outs that serve no national purpose, tax breaks that allow companies to stash their profits overseas, a government that’s paralyzed when dealing with off-shore tax haven countries, an overload of tax code that’s too complicated for ordinary folks to understand but just complicated enough to work with someone who knows how to work the system.

When big business doesn’t like something in the tax code, they can hire a lobbyist to get it changed. But most working people can’t afford a high-priced lobbyist. Instead of honoring that core American value, opportunity for all, we’ve had a system in Washington where our laws and regulations have carved out opportunities for the few.

Now, the numbers don’t lie. At a time when income inequality is growing sharper, the Bush tax cuts gave the wealthiest one percent of Americans a tax cut that was twice as large as the middle class. At a time when Americans are working harder than ever, we are taxing income from work at nearly twice the levels that we’re taxing gains for investors. If you talk about this in polite society, sooner or later you’ll get accused of waging class warfare, and it’s distasteful to point out that some CEOs made more in 10 minutes than a worker makes in 10 months. Or, as my friend Warren Buffet put it to me, if there’s class warfare going on in America, then my class is winning.

Now, what Warren Buffet knows is what all Americans have to remember: to get through these uncertain times, we have to recognize that we all have a stake in one another’s success When folks are hurting out there on Main Street, it’s not good for Wall Street. When the changes in our economy are leaving too many people behind, the competitiveness of our country risks falling behind. When that dream of opportunity is denied to too many Americans, then ultimately that pain has a way of prickling us.

We welcome success stories here in America. We admire those who have climbed to the top of the ladder. We just need to be sure that the ladder doesn’t get taken away from the rest of us. We want a system based on fairness, not special favors. To steer a course through the chains that’s taking hold, we have to hold tight to that core principle that our economy must advance opportunity for all Americans.

I’d challenge anyone to find one hair’s difference between what he said back in 2007 and his recent speech at Osawatomie, KS or his State of the Union address.

WaPo: Why do Americans admire some wealthy politicians, but resent others? 

[…] One simple answer is that Americans love a self-made man and tend to be suspicious of those born with money. But for a people of a nation founded in rebellion against rule by men with inherited wealth, Americans have happily supported many politicians — Rockefellers, Kennedys, Bushes — who grew up rich.

As Romney has discovered, some wealthy politicians win acceptance from people who are just scraping by, while others get tagged as hopelessly out of touch.

The most important tool wealthy politicians have relied on to win over the public is pure force of personality — and that often includes a gift for self-deprecating humor.

Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt both came from big money, yet the presidents’ larger-than-life affability and celebrity won them admiration across class lines. Kennedy came to elective politics with a dramatic backstory as a war hero that canceled out most suspicions that he might be a rich dandy.

Romney, however, despite several attempts to reshape his message, remains awkward in his discussions about money. When he handed $50 to an unemployed South Carolina woman who told him her hard-luck story, referred to his $370,000 in income from speaking fees as“not very much,” or challenged opponent Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet, Romney unintentionally enriched the narrative that Gingrich is peddling, in which Romney lives in a world “of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic $20 million a year income with no work.”

The popular image of Romney’s wealth is muddled because he both grew up rich and made his own fortune. One reason former pizza magnate Herman Cain rocketed to the top of the charts earlier in this primary season is that he evidently pulled himself up by his own bootstraps — the classic American success story. The same goes for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who started out as a parking-lot attendant and is now listed by Forbes as the nation’s 12th-richest person.

“If Romney is seen as contributing to economic growth, that kind of wealth is very much admired,” says Leslie McCall, a Northwestern University sociologist who is completing a study on American attitudes toward income inequality. “But if it’s obtained through means that aren’t sensitive to the middle class and the poor, that’s another story.”

Even if Romney successfully portrayed himself as a job creator, he may also be victim of a fact that is beyond his control: It turns out that timing is an important factor in determining whether wealthy candidates succeed. McCall’s research suggests that Americans’ attitudes toward the rich wax and wane, with resentment against the wealthy surging especially when the rich are doing well at a time when the average family is struggling.

[…] Aldrich says criticism of Romney’s $20 million in income from investments last year misses the mark: “What matters is not his income, but his wealth. Romney is the hereditary rich. That money is not going to leave his family when these people croak. It doesn’t get used to create jobs for others; it gets used to create advantages that are purchasable by inherited wealth. We’re not talking about yachts, but tutors, the best schools, the cultivation of civilized behavior. Income is what makes possible an equal-opportunity society. Wealth is what prevents it.”

MORE>>>

Obama stakes out `the populist center’

How conservatives lost their moral compass

Neal Gabler, Politico:

Republicans must love to cheer. At their presidential primary debates last year, the audiences boisterously cheered candidates who raised their hands in support of waterboarding; Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s boast about how many prisoners he had sent to the death chamber; Rep. Ron Paul’s declaration that an uninsured 30-year-old man who needs medical care should be left to die; and Herman Cain’s gripe, “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

Liberals chalked it up to a new, strange, coldhearted ultraconservatism that makes “Reservoir Dogs” look like “Mary Poppins.” But there is something much deeper and scarier here than demagogic campaign appeals to conservative rage — something even deeper than the new conservative machismo that treats compassion as a weakness.

What is happening to America is not the rise of a new conservatism. It is the demise of shame.

Conservatives of the past, like conservatives of today, excoriated government efforts to assist the needy. But they were quick to add it was government they hated — not the needy themselves.

They might have grumbled about taxes and government giveaways and even federal incursions into what they considered state matters, like civil rights. But they didn’t take pride in being merciless or hateful. Indeed, even if they harbored those feelings, the nation’s overwhelming sense of Judeo-Christian moral righteousness forced them to at least talk about concern for the underprivileged. No one wanted to seem mean.

Not any more.

Over the past 40 years, as conservatives have complained, this nation has undergone a moral revolution. It’s just not the one they think. They bemoan greater tolerance for homosexuality; loosened sexual strictures; and overall sexualization of the culture, the coarsened language, provocative dress and a general lack of discipline. But gay rights aside, that is largely aesthetics, not morality.

America’s real moral revolution has been the abandonment of those old Judeo-Christian precepts to which both liberals and conservatives subscribed — tolerance, compassion and generosity on the one hand and hard work, honesty and fairness on the other.

Conservatives and liberals have different worldviews. But they were bound by these dual moralities — one of justice, the other of responsibility.

They were also bound by a powerful force that made these operational: shame.

There’s irony here in that liberals have viewed shame as a conservative ally. They associated it with Puritans and the puritanical who used shame, liberals said, to bludgeon people into moralistic behavior that denied their real passions and interests. Much of the 1960s counterculture was a movement to free us from shame — to allow us to embrace the freedom of who we really are and who we want to be. In effect, liberals undermined shame.

But whatever the psychological drawbacks of shame for an individual’s sense of self-worth, there are definitely social benefits for a people who have the capacity to be shamed. Just imagine how far shame might have gone at the infancy of Nazi Germany.

American history can be read as a series of episodes in which we reached what could be called a “tipping point” of shame — when our behavior became so egregious that we, as a people, decided to desist from our worst excesses, whether it was slavery or antipathy to immigrants.

Take civil rights. The majority of Americans, even outside the South, might originally have had little real enthusiasm for the civil rights movement. Most urged patience. It was only after the public saw the beatings during the Freedom Rides, the firehoses and police dogs at Selma and the church bombing in Birmingham that Americans were shamed into accepting the claims of African-Americans to equal justice under the law. Shame was the moralizing force.

Shame also defeated the hatred of Father Charles Coughlin, the famous “radio priest” who laid the Great Depression at the feet of Jewish international bankers, and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who recklessly accused his critics of communist treachery. Both had reached that tipping point at which ordinary Americans felt these provocateurs had gone too far. Americans felt shamed.

There is a reason we have never previously had a hatemonger like Rush Limbaugh enjoy popularity for as long as he has. The reason was shame. You couldn’t find enough people, let alone a broadcaster, who wanted to be identified with that sort of viciousness. The initial enthusiasm for it eventually waned.

But that was then. Surely when a group can publicly cheer a man’s death for not having health insurance, the sense of shame is gone. It faded not only because liberals had subverted it by casting it as a conservative scheme to corset society, but because conservatives managed to delegitimize it. They attacked it as yet another elitist scheme, contrived to neuter strong conservatism.

Conservatives portray shame as a way of making people feel bad about the lesser angels of their nature. Which is exactly what shame should be.

Their bigger trick, though, has not been to delegitimize shame so much as to convert shamelessness into a valid political position. It can be attacked only at the peril of seeming to take sides in our political wars — which the mainstream media steadfastly refuse to do.

This has silenced society from expressing a sense of outrage at positions that seem outside any moral system. It has also prevented us from having a debate not just about policy, but about a national morality that cheers death or poverty.

When shame dies, so does our moral sense. You can already hear the applause at the grave.

NYT: Marco Rubio Won’t Be V.P.

Your parents came to Miami from Cuba in the 1950s. Your dad became a bartender, and your mom worked as a hotel maid, among other jobs. Was it always clear that you wouldn’t follow them into a service job?
The service industry is hard, honorable work, but early on my parents drove it into us that a job is what you do to make a living; a career is when you get paid to do something that you love. They had jobs so I could have a career.

Your official biography emphasized that your parents were political exiles from Castro’s regime. Last year it was reported that in fact they emigrated years before he took power. You said it was an innocent mistake. How did it happen?
All this stuff happened 15 years before I was born, so a lot of it is based on the oral history of the family that kind of recounts their view of their journey here.

Did anyone in your family ever actually say, “We had to escape Castro”?
Ultimately, look, that’s not the way it was discussed in our family or by many people in the exile community. It’s more about a loss of their home country, and the inability to go back to it or be part of it. That was a deep part of our upbringing, growing up in this community surrounded by people who had lost everything, who had been sent here as young children while their parents stayed behind.

After you became the first Cuban-American speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, in 2006, your mentor, Jeb Bush, presented you with a sword. What was that about?
Chang is a mythical conservative warrior. From time to time, if there’s a big issue going on, you’d see Jeb say, “I’m going to unleash Chang.” He gave me the sword of Chang.

From which mythology does this conservative warrior hail?
I think it’s a Jeb Bush creation.

In your 2010 Senate race, it came to light that you charged $100,000 on a Republican Party American Express card, almost $14,000 of which was for personal expenses. Since your big issue is financial responsibility, why didn’t you just use another card?
In hindsight, that’s exactly how I would have handled it. I think the problem was a lot of those expenditures were handled by travel agents, and sometimes the accounts got mixed up. The most important thing people need to understand is that the Republican Party never spent a penny on anything that wasn’t Republican Party-related.

Koch Industries, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are among your top career campaign contributors. What do you say to people who believe that they’re investing in you so that you’ll push to overhaul the tax code to their benefit?
People buy into my agenda. I don’t buy into anyone’s agenda. I tell people what I stand for, and the things I’ve stood for were the same at the very beginning, when none of those people were giving me money.

You are a football fanatic, and your wife, Jeanette, was once a Miami Dolphins cheerleader. Coincidence?
I don’t think she did it because I was a fanatic. Her sister was a cheerleader on the squad, and Jeanette decided to try out. She made it but only did it for a year, and we got married the next year. Cheerleaders don’t get paid a lot of money, but they do get two tickets a game. That was pretty good.

Last year, Bill O’Reilly declared that unless you turn it down, you will be the Republican vice-presidential nominee because you’re from Florida and you’re Hispanic. Does it bother you to be seen to be of value because of where you’re from and your ethnic background?
A lot of factors go into choosing a vice-presidential nominee. But by and large the most important qualification is that they’re qualified to be president, and I imagine that’s the process that Newt or Mitt or any of these other guys are going to go through to decide. So I’m flattered by it, and I think people mean it as a compliment.

Will you take it?
I’m not going to be the vice-presidential nominee. There are many reasons, but one of them is because I’m focused on my job in the United States Senate.

Would you bet me $10,000?
I don’t have $10,000 I can afford to lose right now.

Catholic churches evangelize against Obama en masse

The Raw Story: 

In a surprising move over the weekend, thousands of Catholic parishioners were read letters that condemn the Obama administration and its recent decision to make birth control available to women through virtually all private health insurance plans.

The letters were written by Catholic Bishops in the U.S. and read aloud at hundreds of Catholic churches on Sunday. In one of the letters (PDF), written by a Catholic Bishop in Phoenix, Ariz., the church attacks the Obama administration for having “cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty.”

But far from taking away their religious liberty or any of their “God given rights,” the Obama administration’s decision to make private insurers cover birth control will ensure that the church cannot deny these services to their employees if they choose to utilize them.

“We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law,” Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted wrote in just one of the numerous letters. “People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights.”

The church added that Catholics should pray to ask the virgin Mary to intercede for the nation, and that parishioners look up the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment, a Catholic anti-abortion group.

The only exception to the rule that would allow an employer to deny access to birth control is if the employer is a religious non-profit that hires exclusively within their faith. All other organizations, including non-profits run by religious groups that hire based upon non-discrimination policies, must enact the new rule by August 1, 2013.

While the decision was indeed a victory for pro-choice activists, the Obama administration in December shot down a proposed rule that would have made the morning-after pill available over the counter and without an age restriction, even though the pills are less toxic than the common painkiller Tylenol. Over the counter sales of Plan B had previously been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

CNN: Democrats prime recruits to try to take back house.

[…] To flip control of the House back just one cycle after losing it, the House Democrats’ campaign operation is relying on a class of new recruits, just inducted into its “Red to Blue program” that targets Republican seats.

CNN obtained exclusive access to campaign chief Steve Israel’s briefing for the 18 handpicked candidates earlier this week in Washington.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee brought them to Washington to hear Israel present the latest polls and his assessment of the political landscape. Israel briefed the group on his “Drive to 25″ — the battle plan that banks on their success in defeating Republicans — in a conference room at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, just steps from the Capitol.

Israel, the top strategist for House Democrats, was blunt, telling the group, “We’re not interested in electing you to the minority — been there, done that. It sucks!”

The New York Democrat won’t say outright that Democrats will win, but he put the pressure on the 18 candidates.

“It’s going to be razor-close,” Israel told the group. “The people in this room are going to determine whether we’re on the north side of 25 or the south side of 25.”

There’s no guarantee on the amount of financial help the candidates will get from the national headquarters, but the amount of money they can raise on their own and their ability to organize supporters will help them show they’re ready to go the distance.

New recruits

The DCCC’s “Red to Blue program” — created by its former chief Rahm Emmanuel in 2006, when Democrats took back control of the House for the first time in 12 years — identified three dozen Republican-held seats in swing areas that Democrats believe they can win in 2012. In half of these districts, the committee is backing a candidate. In the other half, it is awaiting results from primaries, but is already committed to helping the Democratic candidate, whoever it may be, with money and other organizational resources this fall.

CNN interviewed three of the 18 candidates who visited Washington: Jose Hernandez, an astronaut whose family worked on farms in central California; Val Demmings, the first female police chief in Orlando, Florida; and Jamie Wall, a businessman from Wisconsin.

Hernandez believes voters who backed tea party candidates in the last election are having second thoughts. He told CNN that they “are getting buyer’s remorse with respect to the change in 2010.”

Two polls released last week bear that out: An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 47% of voters preferred a Democratic-controlled Congress, compared to 41% who supported a Republican-controlled one; and a National Journal poll indicated a wider margin — 48% said they supported a Democratic Congress and 37% said they wanted Republicans to keep control.

Most of the 18 “Red to Blue” candidates have roots in their communities, but only five have held elective office. GOP recruiters in 2010 also sought out prospective candidates who didn’t have a lot of political experience.

The three top-tier recruits CNN interviewed seemed to echo the outsider pitch used two years ago by the freshmen tea party-backed Republicans they aim to defeat: We’re not politicians who care about party ideology; elect us and we can break the partisan gridlock in Washington.

Democratic party officials argue these candidates emphasize “problem solving” and hope they will appeal to independent voters who abandoned Democrats in droves in 2010.

Trying to unseat California freshman Rep. Jeff Denham, Hernandez called himself a “citizen’s politician.” The former NASA employee joked that being a member of Congress “is not rocket science,” and pointed out “I’m an engineer. I’m trained to solve problems, unlike lawyers, which most of our Congress folks are; they’re trained to litigate, argue, and I’m trained to solve problems.”

Demmings, who will face Republican Daniel Webster in November, summed up what the candidates have in common.

“I think we demonstrate the ability to just get it done without political gain, without a political agenda,” she said.

Ignoring the fact their party runs half of the legislative branch, these Democratic hopefuls say they sympathize with voters who don’t like Congress.

“There’s a reason Congress is as popular as head lice right now,” Wall said.

But Wall, who is running against freshman Wisconsin Republican Rep. Reid Ribble, deliberately avoided party labels, and emphasized, “If there’s a good idea in the room I want to hear it whether it comes from a Republican, an independent, a Democrat. It’s that kind of spirit that I think we need more of in Washington.”

Wall says these candidates won’t make the same mistake that Democrats made when they ran the House in the past.

“If there is one thing that Democrats did wrong, it was they didn’t give the impression of focusing enough on the economy,” Wall said.

But as much as these candidates attempt to showcase their independence, Republicans have made it clear they will tie them at every turn to President Barack Obama and what they say is his weak spot — his handling of the economy.

“Ultimately a presidential election is going to revolve around, or be a referendum on the president’s economic policies, and that’s going to be a bad thing for House Democrats,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Paul Lindsay told CNN.

And the GOP intends to remind voters that Democrats ran the House not too long ago. “At the end of the day, Americans have a good memory of what Washington was like … when Democrats controlled the House and Senate, and the president in the White House,” Lindsay said.

Money and redistricting

One of the reasons House Democrats believe the House is in play this year: money. The DCCC out-raised its Republican counterpart in 2011 by $7 million, with the Democrats taking in $61.4 million to the GOP’s $54.1 million.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi noted on Thursday that her party’s cash advantage is part of the equation.

“We’ve out-raised and out-recruited and out-redistricted the Republicans,” she said.

But Dave Wasserman with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report said redistricting is likely to make the Democrats’ hopes for capturing the majority tougher, not easier. Court challenges and states legislatures are still working on the final maps in several states, so the outlines of many congressional districts won’t be complete until later this summer.

“Democrats need to win 35 to 45 Republican-held seats,” Wasserman told CNN.

Republicans believe redistricting will work in their favor. Earlier this week, House Speaker John Boehner told Politico that redistricting will solidify the GOP’s control of the House, which he predicted would last at least through 2020.

Boehner also said, “I think it will be nearly impossible” for Democrats to retake the House.

Pelosi, who said earlier this month she wants to win 35 House seats, tamped down those expectations on Thursday, saying, “I want more, of course, but 25 will do it — I’ll take it.”

Obama rallied House Democrats on Friday, and reminded them that their fate is tied to his in November.

“I believe in you guys. You guys have had my back through some very tough times. I’m going to have your back as well, and together we’re going to move this country forward,” he said to cheers.

99% Problems

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3sf9EpN84E

Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?

Frank Rich: (Please see original for links.)

Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he ­responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was.”

Here we are in 2012, and nothing has changed. What Romney’s former colleague observed of the young Mitt at close range decades ago could stand as the judgment of most Americans watching him at a cable-news remove now. That’s why his campaign has so often been on the ropes. That’s why, in a highly polarized nation, the belief that Romney is a phony may be among the very last convictions still bringing left, right, and center together. As a focus-group participant evocatively told pollster Peter Hart in November, Romney reminded him of the “dad who’s never home.” Nonetheless, this phantom has spent most of the campaign as the “presumed” front-runner for his party’s nomination. Amazingly, this conventional wisdom held up throughout 2011, even though 75 percent of Romney’s own party was searching so frantically for an alternative that Donald Trump enjoyed a nanosecond bump in the polls.

Now much of the 75 percent has identified the non-Mitt candidate who really does express where the GOP is today. Newt Gingrich is proud to stir a dollop of race into the vitriol he hurls at Barack Obama, “the food-stamp president.” He’s a human Vesuvius at spewing populist anger at all elites; attacks by the press or by Republican Establishment talking heads like Karl Rove and Joe Scarborough only make him stronger. And unlike any other GOP leader, he can boast that he actually realized the tea party’s goal of shutting the government down. The morning after Newt shut Mitt down in South Carolina, Rich Lowry, the editor of the pro-Mitt, anti-Newt National Review, channeled the horror of GOP grandees everywhere. “If Romney can’t right himself,” he wrote, then “every major elected Republican in the country will panic” and “every unlikely scenario to get another candidate in the race will be explored.” The names once again being floated—Mitch Daniels! Jeb Bush! Paul Ryan! Bobby Jindal!—have not been known to raise the pulse rate of anyone beyond the 25 percent of the GOPembodied by elite conservative pundits in Washington and New York.

What’s more likely is that the party’s panicked Establishment, and its Wall Street empire, will succeed in their push to crush Gingrich and prop up Romney in any way they can. They still see Mitt as the best available front man for the radical party the Republicans have become—the dutiful Eagle Scout who can hold down the fort as the right’s self-styled revolutionary rabble threaten to overwhelm today’s GOP elites the way the Goldwater insurgents once did Nelson Rockefeller and Romney’s father, George. Some of the same Beltway types who have reinforced Mitt’s presumed victory march since last summer believe he can be rebooted for the fall merely with some stern course correction.

As this narrative has it, Americans are at least comfortable with old, familiar Mitt—heaven knows he’s been running long enough. He may be a bore and a flip-­flopper, but he doesn’t frighten the ­horses. His steady sobriety will win the day once the lunatic Newt has finished blowing himself up. As one prominent Romney surrogate, the Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz, has it, Romney is “the most vetted candidate out there.” Maybe—if you assume there will be no more questions about Bain, the Cayman Islands, the expunged internal records from Romney’s term as governor, or his pre-2010 tax returns. Or about the big dog that has yet to bark, and surely will by October: Romney’s long career as a donor to and lay official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But you can also construct an alternative narrative—that the vetting has barely even begun, and that the “Mitt Romney” we’ve been sold since 2008 is a lazy media construct, a fictional creation, or maybe even a hoax.

For four years now, Republicans have been demonizing Barack Obama for his alleged “otherness”—trashing him as a less-than-real American pushing “anti-colonial,” socialist, and possibly Islamist ideas gleaned from a rogue’s gallery of subversive influences led by his Kenyan father, Saul Alinsky, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And yet Romney is in some ways more exotic and more removed from “real America” than Obama ever was, his gleaming white camouflage notwithstanding. Romney is white, all right, but he’s a white shadow. He can come across like an android who’s been computer-­generated to be the perfect genial candidate. When forced to interact with actual people, he tries hard, but his small talk famously takes the form of guessing a voter’s age or nationality (usually incorrectly) or offering a greeting of “Congratulations!” for no particular reason. Richard Nixon was epically awkward too, but he could pass (in Tom Wicker’s phrase) as “one of us.” Unlike Nixon’s craggy face, or, for that matter, Gingrich’s, Romney’s does not look lived in. His eyes don’t show the mileage of a veteran fighter’s journey through triumphs and hard knocks—the profile that Americans prefer to immaculate perfection in a leader during tough times. Even at Mitt’s most human, he resembles George Hamilton without the self-deprecating humor or the perma-tan.

“A man who sometimes seems to be looking not into your eyes but past them.”

That missing human core, that inauthenticity and inability to connect, has been a daily complaint about Romney. To flesh out the brief, critics usually turn to his blatant political opportunism and rarefied upbringing—his history of ideological about-faces and his cakewalk as the prep-school-­burnished, Harvard-educated son of a fabled auto executive. But the hollowness of Romney is not merely a function of his craven surrender to the rightward tilt of the modern GOP or the patrician blind spots he acquired at too many fancy schools and palatial country clubs. If that were the case, he’d pass for another Bush, and receive some of the love that Bush father and son earned from the party faithful in their salad days. Some think he can get there by learning better performance skills: As Chuck Todd of NBC News put it, he “has to learn how to connect, how to speak emotionally … more from the heart.” If Nixon could learn how to sell himself in 1968 under the tutelage of Roger Ailes, and Bush 41 could receive coaching from the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler in 1980, there might still be hope for Romney under the instruction of, say, Kelsey Grammer. But Romney is too odd, too much a mystery man. We don’t know his history the way we did Nixon’s and Bush’s. His otherness seems not a matter of style and pedigree but existential.

We don’t know who Romney is for the simple reason that he never reveals who he is. Even when he is not lying about his history—whether purporting to have been “a hunter pretty much all my life” (in 2007) or to being a denizen of “the real streets of America” (in 2012)—he is incredibly secretive about almost everything that makes him tick. He has been in hiding throughout his stints in both the private and public sectors. While his career-long refusal to release his tax returns was damaging in itself, it resonated even more so as a proxy for all the other secrets he has kept and still keeps.

Just as Republican caucus votes were being (re-)counted in Iowa, the first serious and thorough Romney biography was published, to deservedly favorable reviews. The authors, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, are Boston Globe investigative reporters who have tracked him for years. Their book, The Real Romney, is manifestly fair and nonpartisan, giving him full credit for his drive and smarts as a pioneer in the entrepreneurial realm of private equity. But it’s a measure of how much voters view Romney as a nonentity that they have shown so little interest in reading it. Not even a rave in the Times the week before the South Carolina primary could catapult The Real Romney into the top 500 of the Amazon list, despite the serious possibility that its protagonist could be the next president of the United States.

The book has no bombshells, and the very lack of them is revealing. For all the encyclopedic detail its authors amassed, and all the sources they mined, their subject remains impenetrable. “A wall. A shell. A mask,” they write at the outset, listing the terms used by many who “have known or worked with Romney” and view him as “a man who sometimes seems to be looking not into your eyes but past them.” Former business and political colleagues are in agreement that he has scant interest in mingling with people in even casual social interactions (in a hallway, for instance) and displays “little desire to know who people are.” He so “rarely went out with the guys in any social venue” that one business associate dubbed him the Tin Man for “his inability to bond.” During his one term as governor of Massachusetts, Romney was inaccessible to legislators, with ropes and elevator settings often restricting access to his suite of offices. He was notorious, one lawmaker explained, for having “no idea what our names were—none.” A longtime Republican, after watching Romney’s vacuous, failed senatorial campaign against Teddy Kennedy in 1994, came to the early conclusion that Mitt’s “main cause appeared to be himself.” This was borne out in 2006, when Romney spent more than 200 days out of Massachusetts ginning up a presidential run rather than attending to his duties as the state’s chief executive.

Aside from his ability to build Bain Capital and pile up profits there, Romney has remarkably few visible accomplishments to show for his 64 years. He can’t prove that he actually generated any jobs as a venture capitalist (beyond those at Bain itself), which is why heconstantly revises the number of jobs he claims to have created (or, as he carefully hedges it, “helped create”). His sole achievement as governor was the Massachusetts prototype for the Obama health-care law—a feat he now alternately fudges or runs away from. The state’s record of job creation on his watch was the fourth worst of the 50 states.

How faith is key to the Romney mystery.

Known for being frugal to a fault, Romney does not seem to particularly relish spending his fortune. He likes data, and his piles of dollars seem to be mainly markers to keep score of his success. Though he now tries to wrap himself in Main Street brands like Staples and Domino’s Pizza that passed through Bain’s clutches, he was not intellectually or managerially engaged in the businesses that Bain bought and sold; he didn’t run any of them. He seems to have no cultural passions beyond his and his wife’s first-date movie, The Sound of Music. He is not a sportsman or conspicuous sports fan. His only real, nonnumerical passions seem to be his photogenic, intact family, which he wields like a weapon whenever an opponent with multiple marriages like John McCain or Gingrich looms into view—and, of course, his faith.

That faith is key to the Romney mystery. Had the 2002 Winter Olympics not been held in Salt Lake City, and not been a major civic project of Mormon leaders there, it’s unlikely Romney would have gotten involved. (Whether his involvement actually prompted a turnaround of that initially troubled enterprise, as he claims, is a subject of debate.) But Romney is even less forthcoming about his religion than he is about his tax returns. When the Evangelical view of Mormonism as a non-Christian cult threatened his 2008 run, Romney delivered what his campaign hyped as a JFK-inspired speech on “Faith in America.” This otherwise forgotten oration was memorable only for the number of times it named Romney’s own faith: once.

In the current campaign, Romney makes frequent reference to faith, God, and his fierce loyalty to “the same church.” But whether in debates, or in the acres of official material on his campaign website, or in a flyer pitched at religious voters in South Carolina, he never names what that faith or church is. In Romneyland, Mormonism is the religion that dare not speak its name. Which leaves him unable to talk about the very subject he seems to care about most, a lifelong source of spiritual, familial, and intellectual sustenance. We’re used to politicians who camouflage their real views about issues, or who practice fraud in their backroom financial and political deal-making, but this is something else. Romney’s very public persona feels like a hoax because it has been so elaborately contrived to keep his core identity under wraps.

His campaign is intent on enforcing the redaction of his religion, not least, one imagines, because a Gallup poll found that 22 percent in both parties say they would not vote for a Mormon for president. (Only 5 percent admit feeling that way about an African-American.)A senior adviser explained the strategy of deflecting any discussion of Romney’s Mormon life to Politico: “Someone takes a shot at the governor’s faith, we put a scarlet letter on them, RB, religious bigot.” Good luck with that. Like Romney’s evasions about his private finances, his conspicuous cone of silence about this major pillar of his biography also leaves you wondering what he is trying to hide. That his faith can be as secretive as he is—Ann Romney’s non-Mormon parents were not allowed to attend the religious ceremony consecrating her marriage to Mitt—only whets the curiosity among the 82 percent of Americans who tell pollsters they know little or nothing about Mormonism.

Weeks before his death, Christopher Hitchens, no more a fan of LDS than of any other denomination, wrote that “we are fully entitled” to ask Romney about the role of his religion in influencing his political formation. Of course we are. Romney is not merely a worshipper sitting in the pews but the scion of a family dynasty integral to the progress of an ­American-born faith that has played a large role in the public square. Since his youthful stint as a missionary, he has served LDS in a variety of significant posts. The answers to questions about Romney’s career as a lay church official may tell us more about who he is than his record at Bain, his sparse tenure as governor, or his tax returns.

The questions are not theological. Nor are they about polygamy, the scandalous credo that earlier Romneys practiced even after the church banned it in 1890. Rather, the questions are about the Mormon church’s political actions during Mitt Romney’s lifetime—and about what role Romney, as both a leader and major donor, might have played or is still playing in those actions. To ask these questions is not to be a religious bigot but to vet a candidate for the nation’s highest job. Given how often Romney himself cites his faith as a defining force in his life, voters have a right to know what role he played when his faith intersected with the secular lives of his fellow citizens.

Why Mitt Romney is a political hack’s idea of an electable conservative president.

As we learn in The Real Romney, Mitt Romney has performed many admirable acts of charity for members of his church in dire straits. But the flip side of this hands-on engagement is whether, in his various positions in the church, he countenanced or enforced its discriminatory treatment of blacks and women, practices it only started to end in earnest well after he had entered adulthood. It wasn’t until 1978, when he was in his thirties, that blacks were given full status in his church—an embarrassing fact that Romney tried to finesse in his last campaign by speaking emotionally on Meet the Press of seeing his father join Martin Luther King on a civil-rights march. (The Boston Phoenix would soon report that this was another lie about his past.) In the seventies, Romney’s church also applied its institutional muscle to battling the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment for women. And these days, no major faith puts more money where its mouth is in battling civil rights for gay Americans. Its actions led Stuart Matis, a faithful graduate of Brigham Young University who’d completed his missionary service, to commit suicide on the steps of a Mormon chapel in 2000 in anguished protest of his dehumanized status within his religion. Unchastened, the Mormon church enlisted its congregants to put over Proposition 8 in California in 2008. Mormons contributed more than $20 million to the effort and constituted an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the campaign’s original volunteers. Romney, who endorsed gay rights when running as a moderate against Kennedy in 1994, has swung so far in the other direction that he ridiculed gay couples when pandering to South Carolina Republicans a few years ago. (“Some are actually having children born to them!” he said with horror.) Did some of his yet undivulged Mormon philanthropy support the Prop 8 campaign?

Even if these questions yield benign answers, we know that Romney’s faith has contributed to his self-segregation from the actual “real streets of America.” His closest circle comes from within his faith, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the fact remains that today the American Mormon population is still only 1 percent black. (Those recent television promo spots marketing LDS as a fount of diversity are a smoke screen.) Much as the isolating cocoon of Romney’s wealth can lead him to dismiss $347,327 in speaking fees as “not very much” (to take just one recent example of his cluelessness about how the other 99 percent lives), so the demographic isolation imposed by his religion takes its own political toll. When he’s forced to interact with the America beyond his hermetically sealed Mormon orbit, we get instant YouTube classics like his attempt to get down and rap with black voters on Martin Luther King Day four years ago by quoting “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

Given Romney’s maladroitness as a retail politician, the failure of even his own fans to convey any enthusiasm for him, and the 75 percent of his party that questions his conservatism, it’s hard to fathom how he kept being judged inevitable by so many observers just as he was losing two of the first three election-year contests. Even a normally hardheaded, data-driven analyst like the Times’ poll maven Nate Silver couldn’t resist being swept up by this narrative, going beyond the numbers to write in a January 16 post that the 90 percent odds given a Romney nomination by the betting market Intrade “may if anything be too conservative.” (Six days later, after South Carolina, Silver wrote, “Perhaps, then, there is profound resistance among Republican voters to nominating Mr. Romney after all.”) Much of the Romney inflation, naturally, has to do with his good fortune in having such a splintered and screwy scrum of opponents. Often we’re told that he “looks like a president” (that would be a pre-Obama president). We also hear constantly about his message discipline, his organization, and his money—attributes that matter more to political consultants and the pundits who pal around with them than to an angry electorate trying to dig out of a recession. To the political class, Romney is the most electable candidate because his mealy-mouthed blandness is what will lure that much-apotheosized yet indistinct band of moderates and independents to his side. But as Michael Kinsley long ago joked that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, so Mitt Romney is a political hack’s idea of an electable conservative president. Voters may have another view, and certainly did in South Carolina, where exit polls found that those who most valued a candidate’s electability rallied to Newt.

But if the power of Mitt’s money and the power of pack journalism helped contribute to his status as indestructible, the power of denial at the higher reaches of the GOP did even more so. The Republican Establishment has been adamant in insisting that economic populism and class warfare do not infect their own ranks, and that economic inequality is strictly a lefty and Democratic gripe. If that’s the case, then Romney’s strong identification with the one percent stigmatized by Occupy Wall Street would indeed present no problem. But a January Pew poll found that a majority of both Republicans and Independents now join Democrats in feeling that there are “strong conflicts” between the rich and poor in America; a recent NBC News–Wall Street Journal survey found that Republican voters were just as likely as Democrats to blame “Wall Street bankers” most of all for the country’s economic problems. It’s hardly a stretch that some of that blame might attach itself to Romney, especially after Gingrich turned a spotlight on his Bain résumé.

MORE>>>

POLLS

For the first time in more than 2 years, Democrats lead in Rasmussen generic congressional ballot

Republicans Increasingly Dislike Presidential Field

Republicans remain unimpressed with their party’s presidential field. According to a new Pew poll, dissatisfaction with the field has increased over the month of January.

52% of Republicans now rate the GOP field as fair or poor, up from 44% in early January.

In 2008, 68% of Republicans rated the Republican nominees as excellent or good. [Pew]

Mitt Romney Reaches New Low in Electability

Bob Cesca:

I never thought we would reach a point where a GOP frontrunner makes a John McCain candidacy smell like roses, but we’ve reached that point.

The un-safe and un-electable Mitt Romney has overwhelmingly higher negatives than any presidential candidate in recent history.

Favorable/ Unfavorable
Barack Obama (1/12/08): 65/30
John McCain (1/12/08): 61/31
John Kerry (3/7/04): 54/26
G.W. Bush (2/27/00): 49/39
Al Gore (2/27/00): 50/40

Mitt Romney’s favorable/unfavorable rating? 31/49 according to the latest ABC/Washington Post poll. Half as favorable as either John McCain or President Obama was four years ago.

Why are Mitt Romney’s negatives so high? Because despite being the supposed inevitable nominee, most Republicans do not like him nor do Democrats of Independents.

Romney’s favorability among independents has dropped 35 percent since the beginning of the primary season. He is paying dearly for his hard-curve to the right to win the nomination.

This is not a case for complacency. On the contrary I advocate kicking him while he’s down.

Gallup swing states poll: Romney 48, Obama 47. Obama 54, Newt 40. 

Obama tops Romney, Gingrich when it comes to “understanding” average Americans

A generic Democrat leads a generic Republican 46-45 in the NC Governor’s race

SCOTUS

Plaintiffs Challenging Affordable Care Act In The Supreme Court Admit That The Law Is Constitutional

ThinkProgress:

One of the oddest arguments made by the plaintiffs now challenging the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court is a claim that, if just one small part of the law is declared unconstitutional, the whole law must fall with it. The overwhelming majority of judges who have heard ACA cases rejected the ridiculous claim that any part of the law is unconstitutional. And, of the handful of judges to strike part of the law down, only one — the guy who included an explicit shout-out to the Tea Party in his opinion — accepted the legally indefensible position that the whole law must fall.

In their attempt to see the entire Affordable Care Act fall, however, several of the plaintiffs challenging the law committed what should be a fatal blunder — they effectively admit that their entire constitutional challenge to the law is garbage.

The primary attack on the ACA targets its provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes — the so-called “individual mandate.” This insurance coverage provision exists because without it, the law’s other provisions ensuring that people with preexisting conditions can obtain insurance cannot be implemented. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, massively driving up costs for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

This problem doesn’t just make the insurance coverage requirement good policy, it also makes it constitutional. The Constitution doesn’t just give Congress sweeping authority to regulate the national economy, it also authorizes it “[t]o make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” regulations of interstate commerce. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explains, this means that, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

So, with this background in mind, consider the following passage from the private plaintiffs’ brief arguing that the entire law must fall if the insurance coverage rule goes down:

The mandate was intended to be a direct subsidy to insurance companies, as compensation for requiring them (in the guaranteed-issue provision) to insure against “risks” that have already come to pass and forbidding them (in the community-rating provision) from using actuarially sound insurance premiums.The mandate thus works to counteract the powerful inflationary impacts of these other provisions, which would otherwise make premiums in the individual insurance market prohibitively expensive, thereby frustrating Congress’ goal of affordable health insurance. And Congress further viewed the mandate as necessary to prevent “adverse selection” to “game” the new insurance rules, which proponents warned would spark a “death spiral” in insurance.

The guaranteed-issue and community-rating requirements thus cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress. Rather, “their associated force—not one or the other but both combined—was deemed by Congress to be necessary to achieve the end sought.” To strike the mandate alone would impermissibly eliminate a central quid pro quo of the Act. If the mandate falls, the guaranteed-issue and community-rating regulations must therefore fall with it, as the Government itself has conceded.

So the plaintiffs admit that, without the insurance coverage requirement, premiums will become “prohibitively expensive” and that the ACA’s provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions or who otherwise are highly likely to need health care (what are known as “guaranteed-issue” and “community-rating” laws in the jargon of health policy) “cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress.” This is a flat out admission that the Scalia Rule applies in this case. Guaranteed issue and community rating are regulations of interstate commerce, and thus Congress has “every power needed” to make them effective — including the power to enact the insurance coverage requirement.

I discuss this rather breathtaking admission at greater length in an amicus brief I filed Friday on behalf of several health provider organizations, which also includes some more details about why the plaintiffs’ attempt to take out the entire ACA has no basis in law. Ultimately, however, there is no need whatsoever for the justices to consider how much of the law stands or falls without the coverage requirement. The private plaintiffs already gave away the farm when they admitted that their entire legal challenge rests on a crumbling foundation.

UNIONS

Unions set to blast Dems for selling out on FAA reauthorization

Greg Sargent:

One of the biggest requests that labor had made of Congressional Dems was this: Don’t sell out unions when the long-term Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization is renegotiated with House Republicans. Unions saw this as a top prioritiy for 2012.

Well, now the verdict is in: Over a dozen unions — including a number of AFL-CIO affiliates, like the Communications Workers of America and the International Association of Machinists; and possibly the SEIU — are preparing to unleash a new letter blasting Senate Dem leaders for reaching a bad deal with Republicans on this core priority, claiming it could compromise their ability to organize in the future. They will demand that Dems pull out of the deal and insist that Dems push the GOP harder for a “clean” reauthorization that doesn’t rewrite labor law.

One labor official told me that the deal has led to “significant union discontent” with the Senate Dem leadership, which may not bode well for Dem-labor relations heading into an election year.

To back up: Last fall, Obama and Senate Dem leaders won applause from labor for standing fast against the House GOP, which was trying to insert a union-busting provision into the FAA reauthorization. That provision would count it as a “No” vote when airline or railway workers failed to vote at all on whether to unionize. After Dems refused to budge, the House GOP backed down and agreed to a “clean” temporary extension.

This increased hopes among unions that Dems would again hold fast when the longer-term reauthorization was negotiated with Republicans.

A few weeks ago, Harry Reid announced a deal, authored by Senator Jay Rockefeller, that would nix the GOP’s desired union-busting provision; in exchange, the threshold required for triggering a union election would be raised from 35 percent worker interest in a union to 50 percent. Labor was mostly quiet on this deal, but now, after closely examining its implications, officials say they’ve concluded it could be disastrous.

Their objection is that the raised threshold will make it harder to organize amid mergers of unionized and non-unionized airlines, a key labor target. They also see opening the door to rewriting longstanding labor law as a terrible precedent. In a draft of the letter to Dem leaders that I’ve obtained, unions will say:

We remain strongly committed to passage of a clean FAA Reauthorization bill. An aviation safety and security bill is no place to impose unrelated and controversial labor provisions that will ultimately serve to harm both airline and railroad workers. The proposed Railway Labor Act changes would drastically rewrite a statute that was crafted by labor-management cooperation and has not been changed for over 75 years without the agreement of both employer and employee representatives. Airline and rail workers would suffer significant losses as contracts are jettisoned, collective bargaining rights are cut and legal hurdles will be placed in the way of gaining a voice at work…

Rewarding the House Republican Leadership’s desire to rewrite decades of long standing labor law in a flash by inserting an unrelated and controversial labor provision in a much needed aviation safety and security bill, without notice, hearing, or debate, sets an extremely dangerous precedent. We urge the Senate to delete the provisions of the bill that would amend the RLA and pass the clean FAA Reauthorization that all concerned recognize this country sorely needs and supports.

This could create a headache for Congressional Dem leaders at a moment when they’re trying to unite the party behind a populist, pro-labor message heading into this year’s elections. More when I learn it…

**************************************

UPDATE: A Senate Democratic aide emails a response:

“ This bill is a compromise – by definition, not everyone got everything they wanted. That said, Democrats stood firm to protect American workers, and forced Republicans to back down on the workplace fairness provision that prompted this fight in the first place, leaving that provision intact and unchanged. At the end of the day, we think that creating 300,000 jobs is good for American workers and our economy overall, and that is likely why many major unions support the compromise.”

UPDATE II: An SEIU spokesman confirms that SEIU will also sign the letter, ratcheting this up another notch.

WEDGE ISSUES

Dem Heroine: You Say Ultrasounds for Women Wanting Abortion, I Say Rectal Exams for Men Needing Viagra 

Newt: Obama’s Attacking Religion: Calls new contraception regulation “war on Christianity.” 

Op-ed: The “Southernisation” of the Republican party is “troubling”

Al Jazeera English:

Much has been said about the Southernisation of the Republican Party, but little about the way Mitt Romney, if he secured the Grand Old Party’s presidential nomination, has a chance to wrest control from the party’s fringe and restore it to political moderation.

Sure, the GOP is justly viewed as the party of big business, and one of the richest men ever to run for the White House won’t change that. But of all the primary candidates, none is more likely to put the brakes on the troubling trend of Southernisation.

I say “troubling” not because I find it so. I’m an observer happy to see the slow unravelling of the Republican Party as it continues to make a fetish of unseating President Barack Obama. Those who find this troubling are establishment Republicans -- for the same reasons. That’s why TV ads and the right-wing echo-chamber have been blasting away at Newt Gingrich since his surprise victory in South Carolina. Other than George W Bush, no other Republican has done more to move the party southward.

“Southernisation” is used most often to connote geography, but it’s more than that. It’s an ideology. You can see this when you compare the way the Party of No has obstructed everything the first African-American president of the United States has proposed with the way Southern slave states dominated national politics from Jefferson’s presidency to Lincoln’s.

If the slave states didn’t get federal laws that protected slavery, they’d threaten to blow up the union, which they did with the first shots of Civil War in South Carolina. It was kamikaze politics then and it’s kamikaze politics now.

Contemporary notions of right and left

Making things worse is Texas Congressman Ron Paul. That he’s running at all suggests an incredible realignment of the stars and planets so that voters who are to the extreme right of the Strom Thurmond and Ayn Rand have a fantastic shot at taking hold of the heart of the Republican Party. Paul’s positions don’t fit into contemporary notions of right and left, and that’s why liberals find him intriguing -- he’s an anti-war, pro-marijuana Republican.

What liberals don’t see is that Paul’s platforms are rooted in pre-modernity. Isolationism is the best foreign policy to Paul, and federal power is always tyrannical power. Federal drug enforcement is bad, but so is enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. States are more or less endowed by their Creator to govern themselves in whatever way they please. If that doesn’t sound familiar, let me kindly remind you -- such was the ideology of the Confederacy.

Southernisation as an ideology is also weakening the party’s chances with the US’ growing Hispanic population, especially Mexicans. Some have noted rightly that many Hispanics are naturally conservative -- hard-working, family-oriented and driven by faith in God.

No such alliance can occur as long as the GOP tolerates guys such as Paul to whom xenophobia and bigotry are the twin pillars of the most reactionary immigration policy proposal since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In addition to walling off the US-Mexican border, Paul would end citizenship for children born in the US to illegal immigrants. Such a move would call into question the citizenship of pretty much everyone in the US, but we know whom he’s targeting -- aliens and their “anchor babies”.

Liberals have long dismissed such fringe thinking as too fantastical to believe, but party Republicans may know something they don’t. Even Bob Dole, the quintessential establishment man, is taking shots at Gingrich, his former colleague. Barring a late entry into the race, they know Romney is their best bet.

Romney’s views

On some social issues, Romney is more or less a moderate. As a former Wall Street executive, he’s naturally uneasy with Tea Party fanaticism. As Mormon, he’s naturally unsympathetic with the evangelical Christian right, which takes a dim view, to say the least, of Mormonism.

As a native Midwesterner and eventual Yankee governor of perhaps the bluest state in the union, his political orientation has never been Southernised. That may go a long way in returning the party its Northeastern patrician roots.

And a Romney nomination (though not a win) might be good for the country. Never in my lifetime has there been so much national discussion over the fundamental unfairness of the US tax system. Progressive Democrats have been saying it, the Occupy Movement has been saying, and billionaires have been saying it, but the GOP is united in its opposition to raising taxes on the one per cent.

Thanks to Gingrich’s attacks in South Carolina, Romney was forced to reveal that he pays 14 per cent in taxes. He’s worth as much as $250 million, but pays less than what most working families pay.

His returns also revealed investments in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, raising another discussion just getting started -- the conditional patriotism of the one per cent. Attention to Romney as a presidential contender will mean attention to these issues.

Florida is more diverse than any state that has thus far held Republican primaries, and its swing voters represent a pretty good cross-section of the country. If Romney pulls off a victory -- and the polls suggest he may - the Party of Lincoln may be on its way out of 40 years in the Southern wilderness.

AND IN OTHER NEWS…

A Dog’s View of Dogs Playing

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Women for Santorum” (H/T Political Carnival)

WaPo: The Lincoln-Douglas debates weren’t as great as Gingrich thinks

For months, Newt Gingrich has floated the same challenge to President Obama that underdogs have hurled at their political rivals for more than a century: Let’s debate. And not just once or twice, but many times, with no moderators to intervene or inhibit us. Just two candidates, head to head — Lincoln-Douglas style.

As a Lincoln historian, I’ve studied the famous meetings between challenger Abraham Lincoln and incumbent Stephen A. Douglas that set the prairies on fire during the 1858 U.S. Senate race in Illinois. Gingrich has even called me to discuss them. As I’ve told Gingrich, the problem is that, as famous as the debates are, their reputation far outweighs their value. And they’re hardly an inspiring model for modern candidates seeking to showcase their oratorical skills.

These lengthy rhetorical bouts tested the endurance of the audiences and the candidates. Rather than inspiring memorable words, they proved for the most part an embarrassment. The encounters were brutally sarcastic, featuring highly personal attacks rather than elevated discourse. And while they were the first major political forums transcribed by stenographers, the debates were not even accurately published. The texts we know today were massaged by partisan editors eager to make their candidate sound less garbled. Newspapers of the era were openly connected to major parties — imagine Fox or MSNBC editing debate tapes before broadcast.

Still, no friendly editing could disguise the debaters’ shortcomings, including their open prejudice. Both men used the N-word — a term that, even then, shocked some. Douglas, who voiced horror at the sight of African American leader Frederick Douglass riding around town in a carriage driven by a white man, maintained that American democracy was created only “for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” While Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence applied to all, he also descended into bigotry, acknowledging the “physical difference” between whites and blacks. In the fourth debate, he went further.

“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he declared in Charleston, Ill., to robust cheers, “nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people.” It was not the future emancipator’s finest hour.

To understand Lincoln-Douglas, we must remember a time when politics focused the frenzy that is today captured by the Super Bowl and “American Idol.” With little to entertain them outside church and county fairs, Americans flocked by the thousands to political events. Spectators stood for hours, toted banners, hocked wares, fired cannons, downed hard drink and raucously interrupted speakers with hurrahs and harassment — there was no Brian Williams-like proscription against audience response.

It was not uncommon for fistfights to break out in the farthest reaches of these large crowds, where the unamplified voices of the debaters seldom reached. During one debate, a Republican smeared excrement on Douglas’s carriage. Such diversions helped audiences endure outdoor marathons at which the opening speaker held forth for an hour, the responder took 90 minutes, and the first debater topped off with a half-hour rejoinder — unthinkable in today’s sound-bite culture.

And the debates were born of shrewd politicking, not high morals. Frustrated by the better-financed Douglas, Lincoln began following the senator around, trying to attract the attention of his large crowds. In July 1858, Lincoln formally challenged Douglas to “divide time, and address the same audiences” as many as 100 times. Douglas felt trapped. If he declined, he might be accused of cowardice. If he accepted, he would cede a platform to a comparatively unknown upstart. In the end, Douglas chose to accommodate Lincoln and debate seven times.

If Gingrich becomes the Republican presidential nominee and demands more than the usual number of debates, Obama should think twice about accepting. Like Douglas, he has much to lose and little to gain. Debates can backfire. In the middle of the Cold War, President Gerald Ford inexplicably claimed that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination during a debate with Jimmy Carter in 1976; Al Gore’s sighs and eye-rolling during a debate with George W. Bush in 2000 came off as condescending.

No one can really say who won the Lincoln-Douglas debates — though Douglas prevailed in the election, he made his opponent a star. Widely reprinted in the national press, the debates proved such a phenomenon that Lincoln’s name became a household word. Two years later, he defeated Douglas for president without ever debating again.

TAKE ACTION

Insist the Kochs Testify Before Congress

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions. ~~Anais Nin

You can access all the past editions of The Daily Planet on the green Category bar on the top of each page under the heading PlanetPOV.

_______________________________________________

BUDGET

One More Must-See Chart On Government Spending Under Obama And Reagan

Business Insider:

MORE>>>

BUSINESS

How Apple Can Solve Its China Problem

Cult of Mac:

[...]

What Apple Is Doing About It

Apple CEO Tim Cook appears to have made the welfare of contract-manufacturing workers a higher priority, and also has made an effort to bring the issue out of the shadows.

Apple says it did 229 audits last year, which is 80 percent more than the year before.

Apple recently published a “Supplier responsibility progress report” to address the problems and what Apple is doing about them. The report included an official list of suppliers — something Apple had refused to do in the past because such a list makes it harder to keep secrets about upcoming products.

Apple claims to have a zero-tolerance for child labor. Audits bring attention to transgressions, and Apple puts some companies on notice: Fix them or we’ll find another company.

To a very large extent, chasing down violations is a cat-and-mouse game between Apple and managers within contract manufacturing firms. It’s like a game of Whack-a-Mole — when they fix the handling of a toxic chemical over here, up pops a spate of worker suicides over there. When they address the suicides with new programs and policies, here comes an unauthorized chemical in use by a supplier. It never ends.

Is That Enough?

What else should be done? Leander Kahney’s recent post on Cult of Mac, “Should Apple Make Its Products In The U.S.?”

The article addresses many of the arguments and counterarguments over this question. But the bottom line is that the US doesn’t have the expertise in the numbers required to do what China can do. And the costs would be astronomical. Not only would each worker have to be paid more, but more workers would have to be employed due to vastly higher legal standards for employee welfare in this country.

Although Apple could build products in the United States, such products would not be the iPhones and iPads that we currently use. The combination of physical perfection and low cost could not be achieved in the United States.

In fact, you could view the Apple product phenomenon of the past decade as something possible only with the killer combination of European design culture, American marketing genius, Taiwanese manufacturing expertise and Chinese improvisational ingenuity and self-sacrifice.

Underpaid, over-worked and abused workers are part of what make iPhones and iPads possible. Nobody wants to hear this, but I’m afraid it’s true.

Apple’s options, oversimplified, are:

1. Move manufacturing out of China.
2. Take a hands-off approach to worker welfare.
3. Aggressively chip away at the problems associated with contract manufacturing with a program of iterative improvement, higher standards, constant audits and growing transparency.
4. Initiate an aggressive program of paying component suppliers and contract manufacturers more in exchange for transparency, worker welfare and environmental safeguards.

The first option shouldn’t make sense to anyone. For those concerned about the welfare of Chinese workers, unemployment isn’t a solution. And for those who love Apple products, moving manufacturing outside China would most likely reduce quality and increase costs.

The second option is another non-starter. The reality is that as the most valuable and profitable technology company, Apple would be destroyed in the court of public opinion, and become the source of global animosity that would tarnish the brand. It’s also unethical on its face. In fact, this is already happening, even though Apple does not pursue this option.

The third option is the best option, and in fact it’s the one that Apple is actively pursuing, to its credit.

And the fourth option is the other best option, which Apple is not pursuing adequately. Several leading Silicon Valley companies, including HP, actively pay component suppliers more to improve conditions. Apple’s current approach of demanding from suppliers nearly impossible schedules, nearly impossible quality at nearly impossibly low prices is driving many of the problems. And Apple clearly can afford to pay a little more here. The idea that Apple squeezes every penny out of its myriad suppliers, forcing them to survive on razor-thin margins while the company reports profits that exceed Google’s revenues is the kind of reality that could make people stop buying Apple products purely on ethical grounds.

So that’s what Apple needs to do: Keep doing 3, and start doing 4. Chip away at the problem, iteratively investigating, auditing and fixing. But also pay a little more to suppliers in order to meet these stringent requirements.

Apple gets more blame than it deserves for worker abuses in China, and doesn’t get enough credit for the enormous effort the company has expended in raising work standards in China.

However, there’s one missing piece to this puzzle, which is the price Apple pays for components.

There’s already plenty of coercive levers involved in Chinese manufacturing. Apple squeezes suppliers, and suppliers squeeze their employees. What’s lacking is the addition of positive incentives and the removal of excuses.

The problem won’t really be solved until the core competency of chinese manufacturing companies is the creation of high quality, low-cost components and products without destroying the lives of employees — instead of the current core competency of cheating without getting caught.

And that’s going to cost a little more. Apple can afford it.

Chevron’s 2011 Profits Jump To $26.9 Billion 

ECONOMY

Obama Expands Aid For Delinquent Homeowners

Bloomberg:

The Obama administration, seeking to help more homeowners lower their interest rates and shed mortgage debt, will relax the rules on a federal loan- modification program and triple its incentives to banks.

The revised Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, also would pay Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (FMCC) to forgive debt on homes that have lost value. The government-owned companies, citing cost, don’t reduce principal, a policy that has limited HAMP’s reach because they own or guarantee nearly half of U.S. home loans.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Assistant Treasury Secretary Tim Massad, and White House National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling announced the program changes yesterday in a phone call with reporters.

“This will expand the reach of HAMP,” Massad said.

The HAMP program changes are separate from a new refinancing plan that President Barack Obama promised to deliver in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 24, Sperling said. That effort will be detailed in coming weeks.

Whether Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accept the administration offer is up to Edward J. DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which is charged with minimizing losses to the companies and to taxpayers. In a written statement, DeMarco said he would analyze the potential costs and benefits of participating in HAMP’s principal writedown effort.

No Principal Forgiveness

FHFA recently released an analysis “concluding that principal forgiveness did not provide benefits that were greater than principal forbearance”, DeMarco said in a written statement.

In that analysis, released to Congress in recent days, DeMarco estimated that forgiving mortgage debt could cost the government-supported companies almost $100 billion. Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac, which have cost taxpayers more than $150 billion so far, guarantee nearly 3 million single-family homes that are underwater, meaning the owners owe more than the property is worth.

The HAMP expansion, called HAMP Tier 2, triples incentives paid to banks that reduce mortgage principal to a maximum of 63 cents for every dollar of debt forgiven.

Investors who rent out their properties would be eligible to refinance under the new rules. The deadline for applying for a HAMP loan modification is extended for a year, to the end of 2013.

Signature Effort

HAMP has been the Obama administration’s signature rescue effort for delinquent homeowners struggling in the aftermath of a lending bubble that inflated property values.

About 900,000 borrowers have successfully used the lifeline to refinance, saving an average of about $500 a month — fewer than the 4 million borrowers HAMP was expected to reach. The program pays mortgage servicers and investors for successfully modifying loans. Because of the low response, about two-thirds of the program’s $29.9 billion budget, which was funded through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, hasn’t been obligated.

HAMP loan modifications are limited to mortgages worth $729,500 or less. The new rules are expected to be effective by May.

Great Interview with Eric Schneiderman and Obama’s Mortgage Crisis Unit (video)

The broader unemployment rate — including discouraged workers & involuntary part-timers — in LA County is 23.5%

A Raucous Hazing at a Wall St. Fraternity

NYT:

The chandelier-filled ballroom was teeming with 200 men in tuxedos — and a smattering of women — whose daily decisions can collectively make or break the global financial markets. Most were picking over a lavish dinner that included rack of lamb and crème brûlée. Others were preparing to sing bawdy show tunes.

Kappa Beta Phi, an exclusive Wall Street fraternity whose members include big-name bankers, hedge fund billionaires and private equity titans, met at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan on Thursday night for its 80th annual black-tie dinner and induction ceremony.

As always, the event was held in strict secrecy, with members being told that “what happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.”

A reporter, however, was able to walk in unquestioned and observe the proceedings.

Neither a rough year in the financial markets nor the animus of the Occupy Wall Street movement was enough to dampen spirits at this year’s dinner, which was attended by members like Alan C. Greenberg, known as Ace, the former chairman of Bear Stearns; Robert H. Benmosche, the chairman of the American International Group; Meredith Whitney of the Whitney Advisory Group; and Martin Lipton, founding partner of the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

The Occupy movement was fodder for several after-dinner skits. In one, a documentary filmed during the protests, James Lebenthal, a bond specialist, joked with a protester whose face was appeared to be tattooed.

“Go home, wash that off your face, and get back to work,” Mr. Lebenthal told the protester.

Reached through his daughter on Friday, Mr. Lebenthal declined to comment.

In another skit, William Mulrow , a senior managing director at the Blackstone Group, put on raggedy clothes to play the part of an Occupy protester. Emil W. Henry Jr., a managing partner at Tiger Infrastructure Partners and a fellow new Kappa, joined him dressed as a wealthy baron.

“Bill, look at you! You’re pathetic, you liberal! You need a bath!” Mr. Henry said, voice full of mock indignation.

“You callow, insensitive Republican!” Mr. Mulrow said. “Don’t you know we need to create jobs?”

A Blackstone spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Mulrow’s behalf. Mr. Henry was not immediately available for comment.

The night’s agenda was twofold: install officers for the coming year and haze incoming members by having them don wigs, gold-sequined skirts and skin-tight tops and put on a comedic variety show for the enjoyment of other members.

Among the 21 inductees featured in the variety show were Marc Lasry, the billionaire founder of the Avenue Capital Group, Warren Stephens, the chief of Stephens Inc. and Ted Virtue, the chief executive of MidOcean Partners.

Kappa Beta Phi, which started in 1929 as a group of Wall Street bigwigs whose social club was named as a send-up of Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, has become a sort of upper-crust Friar’s Club roast.

The group’s leadership consists of a “Grand Swipe,” “Grand Smudge,” “Grand Loaf,” and a “Master-at-Arms.”

Some members wear the group’s insignia, which consists of a beer stein, a Champagne glass, a pointing hand and five stars. The group’s Latin motto, “Dum vivamus edimus et biberimus,” roughly translates as “While we live, we eat and drink.“

Members pay $475 a year in dues for the invitation-only group, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Absent from this year’s gathering were Wall Street exiles like Richard S. Fuld Jr., the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers; James E. Cayne, the former chief of Bear Stearns; and Jon S. Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs head who presided over the failed brokerage firm MF Global. All are still listed in the group’s member directory, though the men are said not to have attended in a few years.

Wilbur L. Ross Jr., the billionaire investor who served as this year’s Grand Swipe, acknowledged the foibles of those prominent Kappas.

“We have members from every firm that has failed, as well as members from those that will fail in the future,” he said to loud laughter.

After Mr. Ross’s opening remarks and a presentation by representatives from the group’s Los Angeles chapter, the inductees broke into their variety acts.

Some jokes took aim at industry outsiders like Representative Barney Frank, the Democrat of Massachusetts who has been an advocate of financial regulation. But most Kappas roasted fellow financiers.

Mr. Corzine, the latest of the prominent Kappas to fall from grace, proved an inviting target. Two initiates did a comedy act lampooning Mr. Corzine and Steven A. Cohen, a prominent hedge fund manager whose firm, SAC Capital Advisors, has had some former employees who have been ensnared in recent insider-trading investigations. (Neither Mr. Cohen, who is not a Kappa, nor Mr. Corzine has been accused of any wrongdoing.)

“What do Steve Cohen and Jon Corzine have in common?” the joke went. “They’re future cellmates!”

The bulk of the entertainment came in the form of musical spoofs.

Inductees sang Wall Street-themed versions of “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” (replacing “cowboys” with “traders”) and Abba’s “Dancing Queen” (which was retitled “Bailout King”). Mr. Lasry, along with two other inductees, dressed as a member of the Village People for a financial rendition of “Y.M.C.A.” Mr. Lasry declined to comment.

As is customary during Kappa events, some audience members threw objects at performers on stage, including petit fours and napkins dipped in wine.

Kappa Beta Phi’s gatherings have become divisive among members in recent years. Some Wall Street executives, wary of taking part in an event that could be construed as tone-deaf to the economic woes facing the country, are choosing not to attend.

“The skits can be offensive and I don’t want to sit through it,” said one fraternity member who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Ross defended Kappa Beta Phi on the grounds that the same freedom of speech rights afforded to Occupy Wall Street should be extended to the group’s members.

“This is not a political convention,” he said by telephone on Friday. “It’s a group of people that are friendly with each other trying to have an enjoyable evening, mostly at each others’ expense.”

While they may not want to attract attention publicly, the members of Kappa Beta Phi are privately finding humor in their vilification. As the night’s musical finale, the entire group of inductees changed into white dress shirts and dark ties to sing a parody of “I Believe,” a song from the hit Broadway show “The Book of Mormon.”

In the original version of the song, a down-and-out Mormon missionary offers a passionate defense of his faith. On this night, though, the financiers turned it into a playful paean to their industry. (“I believe that the Lord God created Wall Street. I believe he got his only son a job at Goldman Sachs.”)

Off-key and raucous, the financiers raised their voices once more.

“I work on Wall Street. And Wall Street just believes.”

EDUCATION

The Decline and Fall of Public Support for Public Education

Kevin Drum:

Atrios writes about the growing cost of a university education:

The basic thinking seems to have been that it was wonderful for university to be free back when most people who attended were quite wealthy, but once the masses started getting ideas about going it was time to force them to pay. And there again is your generational divide.

Actually, I think the dynamic is a bit different from that. It was back in the early 20th century that most people who attended university were wealthy — or at least upper middle class — and at that time, universities were expensive, not free. Private universities cost a lot of money (and handed out only a few scholarships here and there to salve their consciences), and state land grant universities, while not as expensive as Harvard or Yale, still cost too much for most ordinary working class schlubs. Neither of my grandfathers could afford to attend college, for example, even though they wanted to. (One of them joined the Navy instead, and the other drove out to California to make his fortune.)

That changed after World War II, when the economy was booming and everyone suddenly woke up to the fact that there were lots of working class kids who were plenty smart enough to attend college. This happened at exactly the time that America needed lots of college-educated workers, so we made sure they could all go. The GI Bill helped lots of them while all-but-free public universities helped lots of others. This was the golden age of low-cost higher education, and it was an era with more class mixing than ever before or after.

This started to erode in the post-Reagan era, but I don’t think it’s because of a generational divide. That’s just the symptom, not the disease. It’s largely a class divide. For a few decadesfollowing World War II, when state universities were a legitimate ticket into the white collar world for everyone, they were supported by everyone. But after the first generation or two got their tickets punched and moved out of the old neighborhoods and into middle-class suburbia, all the low hanging fruit was gone. Poor and working class neighborhoods were no longer producing lots of kids who had the smarts for college but couldn’t afford to go. More and more, universities were populated by the grandchildren of the GI Bill generation, all of whom were already middle class or better.

And as that happened, public universities began to lose public support. Why should working class and lower middle class taxpayers subsidize the educations of children who had already benefited from a privileged upbringing and whose college degrees would provide them with a lifetime of higher earnings? After all, if well-off kids want a sheepskin that will make them rich, why shouldn’t they pay for it themselves?

And with that, universal support for cheap higher education dwindled, but not really for generational reasons. If poor and working class families still felt like their kids had a good shot at going to college, I’ll bet they’d still support low-cost public universities just as much as they used to.

Virginia opts to keep shorter school year so kids have more time to ride roller coasters 

ThinkProgress:

Yesterday, the Virginia Senate Education and Health Committee put the interests of the tourism industryahead of the needs of students by voting to kill three billsthat would allow school boards to set their own calendar. The bills would have overturned the so called Kings Dominion Law, named for the amusement park in Doswell, Virginia. The law currently prohibits schools from starting before Labor Day, in an effort to boost late season tourism revenue:

The action by the Senate Education and Health Committee followed testimony from a string of tourism representatives, who said that moving the first day of school before the holiday weekend would hurt the industry at a time when it could ill afford to lose revenue.

Putting the tourism industry ahead of the needs of schools is an obvious blow to students. Proponents of rolling back the law cite research showing that students who have more time in school do better on exams and are more likely to go to college. A long summer vacation is particularly detrimental to low-income children who don’t have access to engaging programming during the summer. Indeed, more than 1,000 schools nationwide have broken free from the traditional confines of the school schedule and lengthened the school year to incorporate more time for academics, enrichment and teacher planning.

Speaking at an event at the Center for American Progress last year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made clear that it is time for students to spend more time — not less — in school. “We know that far too many of our nation’s young people get to a certain point by June, thanks to their teachers hard work and commitment, and they come back in September further behind than when they left, and we just have to do something about it,” he said.

The issue is also one of governance. As Delegate Joe Morrissey (D) noted, the persons making the call about when schools should start should not be amusement park owners. “Who is going to make the decisions,” Morrissey asked. “I suggest that it not be Tweety bird orBugs Bunny or Scooby Doo or Sponge Bob that makes those decisions. They ought not to be making education decisions in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Still, many in the state support the Kings Dominion Law. “I’m glad the Senate has done this,” Mayor Will Sessoms of Virginia Beach said of Thursday’s vote to ax the Senate version of the bill. “The main reason is because the economic impact it would have on this city.”

It’s a no brainer that kids will learn more in school than they will riding a rollercoaster. The legislators should focus on helping educators create — and implement — high-quality summer programs rather than caving to Tweety bird and the money hungry tourism industry.

The ugly truth about “school choice”

Alternet:

National School Choice Week, a pet project of big corporations and conservative billionaires like the Kochbrothers, kicked off Monday with celebratory forums throughout the country. Billing itself as a social justice movement committed to “ensuring effective education options for every child,” “school choice” has actually become a deeply divisive wedge issue for the right. But the folks at School Choice Week would prefer that you didn’t know that.

On their website, you can find photographs and videos of shiny happy children of all races and ethnicities. And you’ll see that Bill Cosby is a major supporter. And since he has a doctorate in education and has acted as a philanthropist on behalf of many African-American schools, many will see his endorsement as an important mark of legitimacy.

But there are a few serious problems with the school choice movement. Though it attracts mainstream conservatives like Cosby, as well as Democrats like President Barack Obama, it is not, at its core, a bipartisan endeavor. Its most important backers are rightwing organizations like the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and other groups supported by billionaire rightwing ideologues like the Koch brothers. They want to dismantle public education altogether and run schools as businesses, judged as “successes” or “failures” based on abstract data taken from high-stakes standardized test scores.

Access to opportunity is replaced with demands for universal “excellence” and “achievement,” in which teachers are punished for student “failure.” This pits parents against teachers, and it ultimately sidelines already marginalized children of immigrant families, poor children and/or children of color.

[…]

To counter some of the misinformation School Choice Week organizers are disseminating to the public, I give you the five biggest lies you’ve heard about school choice:

1. It’s not about racial justice and equal opportunity.

In fact, school choice often makes inequality worse. But because public schools have not solved the achievement gap between white and black children in America, proponents of school choice dishonestly take up the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement.

It isn’t that all aspects of school choice are objectionable to educators. Dennis van Roekel, president of America’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), acknowledges that school choice can benefit underserved populations some of the time. He says magnet schools – that is, schools in poor neighborhoods that provide a range of diverse classes for students not usually offered in public schools – are a good model for school choice. Such schools draw students who are attracted, for example, to advanced arts or sciences programs. The extra funding ensures that magnet schools, located in poor areas, become a district’s best schools. Van Roekel sees this as a worthy innovation that furthers equity, and says the NEA supports it.

His organization also supports teacher-led schools that empower teachers to administer schools and tailor them to the needs of students. He even says that some charter schools – that is, independent public schools designed to fill a specific community’s needs and are less regulated that other public schools – are good ones. He thinks there is room in public education for some charter schools.

But he doesn’t think they’re a viable answer to inequality everywhere. He cites a 2009 Stanford study, which foundthat only 17 percent of charter schools provided better education than regular public schools. And that, he says, is not acceptable to the NEA because “it ought to be better than that. It needs to be 100 percent.”

He is not as open to school vouchers, which divert public money away from public schools and allot it to parents to assist with private school tuition. Ultimately, Van Roekel says, vouchers disproportionately serve the wealthy. Less funding for public schools is just not good for poor communities, which usually have to rely on the public system.

Karey Hardwood, an ethics professor at NC State University and public school advocate, is also concerned about how school choice affects poor children. She is an activist with Great Schools in Wake, an organization that formed in2009 to oppose a school choice platform pushed by a newly elected right-wing school board in Wake County, North Carolina. The state chapter of theNAACP has also opposed school choice, arguing that it will lead to the re-segregation of schools in Raleigh, North Carolina and its surrounding suburbs.

Harwood asks: “When they talk about choice, whose choices are they referring to? Are the children of people who are savvy enough to get out of the public schools the only children who are worth educating in our society? What happens to the children who don’t get out? It seems the [people behind School Choice Week] knowingly embrace the idea of creating a second tier of schools for those American citizens who don’t or can’t ‘choose’ – and they are perfectly okay with a divided society of winners and losers.”

Carrie Rogers, a Wake County parent and former teacher who describes herself as a moderate Republican, agrees. She says school choice largely benefits well-educated middle and upper-middle class students. Rogers notes that she devoted 12 hours per week for six months to investigating her children’s options, and says that working class parents who work multiple jobs do not have that kind of free time on their hands. She adds that poor children, who most need access to excellent schools, will end up in the worst schools as a result. Ultimately, she says, “I think ‘school choice movement’ is a misnomer. I view it a movement based on prejudice, xenophobia and racism. The idea sounds good, and we all hate the idea of bussing our children [to outside communities to enforce Wake County’s former economic diversity policy]. But if you don’t want your child bussed, don’t break the entire system. We’ve allowed a very small group of vocal opponents to ruin our schools for everybody.”

Brian Jones is a New York City teacher and activist with the Grassroots Education Movement, an organization that supports progressive school policies. He says, “I think [racial and economic] segregation is the sinister subtext [of school choice]. Very wealthy benefactors are going into Harlem and promoting segregated schools as a solution. But the Civil Rights movement saw racial justice as bound up with economic justice. The school choice movement claims to be about racial justice, but distances itself from questions of economic justice. Under the banner of ‘school excellence,’ school choice advocates would like for us to forget about equity.”

John Wilson, former president of the NEA who now resides in Raleigh, says it is a “travesty that we are allowing our schools to be re-segregated” in the name of social justice. “If you really want to help poor children,” he insists, you have to desegregate your schools.” A native of the South who spends half of his time in North Carolina, Wilson says his background “absolutely informs” his perspective on school choice. When Southern schools were forced to integrate, he remembers, educators ultimately realized that integration was the best way to promote equity.” In other words, it brought home the lesson of Brown v. Board of Education – the groundbreaking 1954 Supreme Court decision mandating school integration on the basis that segregated “separate but equal” schooling always privileged white students and could never be equal in practice.

2. It’s not about making public education stronger

The school choice movement promotes the dismantling of public education at every turn.

Van Roekel says that, for school choice to benefit public education, it must prioritize the needs of students. The problem is that this rarely happens. Instead, school choice is too often a mechanism of privatizing education and defunding public schools. When funds are diverted away from public schools, they are not strengthened, but starved. Teachers end up with so many students per classroom that it is impossible to give every child the attention she needs. Van Roekel says attempts to profit on the back of public education are unacceptable.

Wilson tells AlterNet that he thinks School Choice Week’s primary aim is to promote vouchers at the expense of public education. He says, “Private schools undermine the public school system,” and adds that no evidence suggests they are better than public schools. School Choice Week, he says, is promoting the demise of public education under the guise “excellence.” In the end, he says, they are “doing a disservice to children.”

Judith Armfield, who retired from the Wake County Public School System in 2004 after 31 years in teaching, agrees. She opposes the privatization of education because she thinks diversity is an important aspect of learning. According to Armfield, private schools “encourage withdrawal from reality” such that “students…are not as well-prepared for success in a diverse world. My boys began their school experience in private school in [segregationist George Wallace’s] Alabama, but we realized that they were being sheltered and put them in public school classrooms” where they had access to better school curriculum and learned to coexist with people different from themselves.

MORE>>>

ENERGY

673 Scientists Beg Obama To Slow Arctic Drilling Rush 

ThinkProgress:

In his State of the Union address, President Obama announced he would push forward with new offshore drilling — which includes the pristine waters of the Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea, and Cook Inlet off Alaska’s coast. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) wrote a report in June 2011 that described dozens of areas that required further scientific research before taking the risks of disrupting the uniqueecosystems on behalf of the oil industry. Now, nearly 600 scientists from around the world have signed an open letter urging President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to base Arctic drilling decisions on science, not politics:

We, the undersigned 573 research scientists, call upon the Administration to follow through on its commitment to science by acting on the USGS recommendations. Doing so prior to authorizing new oil and gas activity in the Arctic Ocean will respect the national significance of the environment and cultures of U.S. Arctic waters and demonstrate the value that your Administration places on having a sound scientific basis for managing industrial development of the Outer Continental Shelf.

“Already stressed by rapidly melting summer ice, the whales, walrus, ice seals, polar bears, and other wildlife in these waters are especially vulnerable to oil spills and industrial activity,” the Pew Environment Group and the Ocean Conservancy explain in a full-page ad they will run in the New York Times and Politico highlighting the letter.

Drilling for fossil fuels in a melting Arctic would accelerate the potentially catastrophic destabilization of the planet’s thermostat. As National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco told ThinkProgress Green, “We don’t fully understandwhat the consequences of that are going to be.”

An upcoming report from the Center for American progress, due to be released later this month, will examine in greater detail America’s deficiencies in regard to Arctic infrastructure and oil spill response preparedness, and suggest steps to be taken before activities, such as drilling, commence in the world’s last unspoiled frontier.

ENVIRONMENT

130 Years of Global Warming, Mapped: VIDEO 

A new video from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies maps Earth’s temperatures over the past 130 years:

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880.The finding sustains a trend that has seen the 21st century experience nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York released an analysis of how temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience higher temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) higher than the mid-20th century baseline.

In this animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.

2011 is the ninth warmest year on record.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoOrtvYTKeE

WSJ claims “a large number of scientists don’t believe” (16) that CO2 leads to warming.

A more up-to-date version of the survey of climate scientists can be found here.

Climate Change Goes Back to Square Zero 

Kevin Drum:

[…] Originally, climate denial went through three stages:

1. The world isn’t warming.
2. OK, it’s warming, but it’s not man-made. It’s just natural climate variability.
3. Fine, people are responsible. But it’s not economically worth it to do anything about it.

But conservatives have more recently backpedaled not just a single step in this process, but all the way back to the paleolithic era they’re so fond of pretending to know more about than the folks who actually study it:

0. Global warming is the biggest hoax ever put over on the American public.

This all fits in with the paranoia and conspiracy theorizing of the conservative base these days, which is pretty much identical to the paranoia and conspiracy theorizing of the far right since at least the 1930s. Climate change isn’t merely wrong — that would be boring — it’s an immense conspiracy being waged by a group of nerdy scientists (who want funding) and tree huggers (who are desperate to control everyone else’s lives). And it’s a damn successful conspiracy, too. Despite the fact that it requires thousands and thousands of participants from nearly every country in the world, with new collaborators earning PhDs every month, not a single one of them has broken the climate omerta yet and blown the whole thing open. But someone will, any day now. Just you wait.

HEALTH

FDA Bans Canadian Orange Juice 

CNN:

| The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it had detained orange juice shipments from Canada after they tested positive for low levels of a banned fungicide previously found in Brazilian juice.

Supermarket meat comes from sick animals

Mother Jones:

[….] Reporting for the newly hatched Food and Environment Reporting Network, the excellent food-safety reporter Helena Bottemiller exposes one major example: the widespread use on factory-scale hog farms of ractopamine, a drug that boosts meat production but makes hogs miserable. The drug—fed to 60 to 80 percent of pigs, Bottemiller reports—”mimics stress hormones, making the heart beat faster and relaxing blood vessels.” Its effects are pretty dire:

Since it was introduced [13 years ago], ractopamine had sickened or killed more than 218,000 pigs as of March 2011, more than any other animal drug on the market, a review of FDA veterinary records shows. Pigs suffered from hyperactivity, trembling, broken limbs, inability to walk and death, according to FDA reports released under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Now, 218,000 pigs over 13 years is a rounding error for the pork industry, which slaughters upwards of 110 million hogs every year. The industry has clearly calculated that torturing pigs with pharmaceuticals is worth a few losses, so long as overall meat production gets a boost.

Of course, some of that ractopamine makes it into the pork on the supermarket meat aisles, Bottemiller reports. “While the Department of Agriculture has found traces of ractopamine in American beef and pork,” she writes, “they have not exceeded levels the FDA has determined are safe.” Other countries don’t see it that way, and the bulk of Bottemiller’s piece is about the refusal of the European Union and China—the globe’s two biggest pork markets—to accept meat from ractopamine-treated animals.

But this is hardly the only example of livestock being fed something known to make them sick. Since corn prices skyrocketed a few years ago, industrially-raised pigs have been finding an increasing amount of a cheaper corn byproduct called distillers grains—a leftover from the corn-ethanol process—in their rations. Distillers grains, it turns out, are full of toxins that attack pigs’ hearts, giving rise to a condition called Mulberry Heart Disease. Again, pigs aren’t affected quite enough to offset the industry’s gains from cheaper feed, so the practice goes on.

And as Michael Pollan showed in his classic 2002 article “Power Steer”(later folded into The Omnivore’s Dilemma), the corn-rich diet cows get on feedlots in the months before slaughter literally destroys their livers. Pollan reports that corn raises the pH level of cows’ rumens, making them susceptible to a condition called acidosis. The condition “can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick,” Pollan adds. He goes on:

Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.

Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. “I don’t know how long you could feed this ration before you’d see problems,” [feedlot veterinarian Mel] Metzen said; another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would eventually “blow out their livers” and kill them. As the acids eat away at the rumen wall, bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect in the liver. More than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers. [Emphasis added.]

Again, the beef industry reckons that ruining cows’ health while they’re on the feedlot doesn’t matter, as long as corn fattens cows—as it does—and enough cows can be kept alive on it to reach slaughter weight. (The only way to ensure that, Pollan claims, is to feed them daily doses of antibiotics—but that’s a story for another post.) For the industry, the arrangement means profit. For us, it means that we’re routinely eating beef from sick, miserable animals. I read Pollan’s piece when it came out ten years ago, and have been avoiding feedlot beef ever since.

HEALTH CARE

Ezra Klein: Insurance companies push to delay labeling regs 

See that label above? That’s what a health insurance policy looks like — or is supposed to look like. Under the health reform law, insurance companies are required to summarize each benefit plan in a four-page, easy-to-read document (you can see the full thing here). The Obama administration rolled out a draft format for the summaries this past summer, and they were supposed to roll out this coming March, on the health reform law’s two-year anniversary.

Except, they won’t: In the fall, the Department Labor announced that it would no longer adhere to that March 2012 deadline, and instead would give insurance plans “sufficient time to comply.” Insurance companies have pushed for the delayed implementation. As AHIP, which represents the insurance industry, wrote in its comments, “The proposed rule requires almost a complete redesign of how information is provided to consumers and it will be difficult and costly to implement on this timeline.”

AHIP proposes a regulation that kicks in 18 months after it’s finalized. If the final regulation were to come out tomorrow, that would mean an implementation date in the summer of 2013.

Consumer groups, meanwhile, are getting nervous about when this label will actually come online — and what the final product will look like. Four major health-care groups sent a letter to the White House this week, urging the administration to stick with the template created this summer — and to get it out the door soon.

Consumer advocates worry that the White House may ditch the part of the label shown above, which games how much a subscriber would pay for a particular suite of medical services, such as delivering a baby or seeking breast cancer treatment. “We are very concerned that compared to the proposed rule that was released in August, the final rule we are expecting shortly will be weakened,” the Consumer Union’s Lynn Quincy told the Associated Press recently. “That would be very bad for consumers.”

A lot of this won’t get resolved until we see a final regulation and, right now, there’s no firm release date for that. The Department of Labor has not sent the regulation up to the Office of Budget and Management — one of the last steps in regulatory review — which suggests that we’re still a decent way off from seeing the final document, and from getting a sense of where the administration will land.

UPI: Cost puts dental care out of reach

Dental expenses were among the highest out-of-pocket health expenditures for U.S. consumers in 2008, researchers say.

Study author Paul Glassman, a dentist and director of the Pacific Center for Special Care at University of the Pacific Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry, said the Bureau of Labor Statistics found out-of-pocket dental expenses cost consumers $30.7 billion — 22.2 percent of total out-of-pocket health expenditures.

The study found 37 percent of African-American children, 41 percent of Hispanic children and 25 percent of white children have untreated tooth decay.

Glassman said the factors driving the focus on quality improvement in oral healthcare are the same ones driving the overall healthcare quality movement.

The study outlined the systemic barriers that have slowed change in dental care improvement include:

-- Limited evidence of best practice for most dental procedures has led to widespread variation in clinical decisions among dentists.

-- Government only pays for about 6 percent of dental care nationally, and dental practices and their patients are not part of a larger provider organization pushing for improvements.

-- Incentives to implement quality improvement programs are few.

Increasing costs, inadequate access to care and profound disparities are creating new pressures for the oral health delivery system to focus on value instead of volume of services, Glassman said.

The findings were presented at a national meeting of oral health professionals, government leaders, consumer advocates and others convened by the Kellogg Foundation and DentaQuest Institute.

See for yourself. Romneycare = Affordable Care Act 

Romney’s Defense Of The ‘Individual Mandate’ -- Unexpected And Persuasive

Kaiser Health News:

For a candidate who keeps vowing to repeal the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney sure can make a convincing argument on its behalf.

At least that’s how it appeared to a lot of people after Thursday night’s Republican presidential candidate  debate in Jacksonville, Fla.

During a more than 10-minute back-and-forth on health care largely between Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, Romney ended up delivering a lengthy justification for his state’s decision to pass a 2006 law that included requiring nearly every resident to either have health insurance or pay a tax penalty.

“If you don’t want to buy insurance, then you have to help pay for the cost of the state picking up your bill, because under federal law if someone doesn’t have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care,” said Romney. “So we said, no more, no more free riders. We are insisting on personal responsibility. Either get the insurance or help pay for your care.”

“Does everybody in Massachusetts have a requirement to buy health care?” asked Santorum.

“Everyone has a requirement to either buy it or pay the state for the cost of providing them free care,” Romney shot back. “Because the idea of people getting something for free when they could afford to care for themselves is something that we decided in our state was not a good idea.”

Santorum’s conclusion was that “in Massachusetts, everybody is mandated, as a condition of breathing … to buy health insurance, and if you don’t … you have to pay a fine.”

But backers of the requirement saw Romney’s explanation in a somewhat different light.

Said John McDonough, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, “Romney has given in this entire presidential campaign last evening what I believe is the most effective and persuasive rationale and defense of the individual mandate.”

Of course, that may not be a good thing for Romney as he fights to win over Republicans who dislike the 2010 law in general, and the insurance requirement in particular. Santorum said the Massachusetts law passed under Romney’s stewardship in 2006 is too close to the federal law for Republicans to make health care an issue this fall.

“It does not provide the contrast we need with Barack Obama if we’re going to take on that most important issue. We cannot give the issue of health care away in this election,” he said.

And while Romney insisted that the Massachusetts law and the federal law differ in significant ways, McDonough, who was intimately involved in the development and passage of both the Massachusetts and federal health laws, insists that’s not really the case.

“The similarities go far far beyond the mandate,” he said. For example, “the essential architecture of the insurance reforms in the Affordable Care Act are taken wholly from the Massachusetts health reform law.”

On the other hand, Santorum may have overspoken when he claimed that the Massachusetts law isn’t working very well.

Just this week the policy journal Health Affairs published a study looking at the Massachusetts program’s first five years in operation. 

“We find the state is continuing to do quite well in terms of maintaining high levels of health insurance coverage and improvements in access to care,” said lead author Sharon Long of the University of Minnesota and the Urban Institute. “Including for the first time we’re seeing reductions in emergency department use, and also some improvements in health status. So really, some very positive changes that came with health reform.”

Positive for Massachusetts residents, perhaps. Positive for Mitt Romney’s chances to win the Republican nomination? That still remains to be seen.

Politico: House Dems are crowing this week, planning “truth squad” to correct GOP’sHCR, Medicare lies 

A year ago, House Democrats were downtrodden and depressed, having lost members in sweeping numbers and been relegated to a powerless minority in the House.

Now, they’re upbeat, boasting of renewed optimism in this election year.

Gathered on the Eastern Shore for their annual House strategy retreat, Democrats talked, proclaiming public favor on their side — especially as they look across the aisle and see restive Republicans and an increasingly acrimonious presidential primary fight.

President Barack Obama, who appears more sure-footed as well, is scheduled to deliver remarks Friday at the end of the three-day conference. And Vice President Joe Biden is coming, too.

“There’s very tangible evidence that our unity and our confidence is paying off in areas where it matters,” said Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.). “The tide is running in our direction.”

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who serves as co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the resurgent upbeat mood is the result of a yearlong period of self-examination for Democrats.

“Every human being has to ask themselves, ‘OK, you got smacked around. Why?’” Ellison said. “What are you here for? What are you doing? What do you exist for? What’s your purpose? And we did that.”

Roughly 100 House Democratic lawmakers are huddling this week on the sprawling grounds of the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay to plot their election-year strategy during a retreat called Reigniting the American Dream. Other party notables at the retreat include Clinton White House adviser Paul Begala and MSNBC host Ed Schultz.

One retreat session looked at how Democrats can take the offensive on jobs messaging. Former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn led a seminar on how to deal with the media. And various lawmakers hosted policy-oriented sessions, such as one on trimming defense spending and a series of seminars on election, financial, health care and tax reform.

In his session, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell urged Democrats to seize momentum from Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday to pressure Republicans in the next month to pass the legislation the president wants.

“Too many of us tried to be Republican-lite [before the 2010 elections]. And if you’re going to vote for a Republican, you’re going to choose a real Republican over a Republican-lite,” Rendell said. “That’s where we went astray. We should stand and defend the core principles we believe in.”

Democrats appear ready to do that. Lawmakers even seem eager now to talk up the health care law — the signature policy achievement for Obama that became a political liability for Democrats in 2010 — intent on correcting what they say are misconceptions of the Affordable Care Act.

One method of doing that is a so-called truth squad talked up by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) that would roam the country, meeting seniors groups and hitting the airwaves about Medicare and Social Security.