Thanks for Spandan (Deaniac) for giving us this platform and thanks to all the brilliant people who comment here.

I associate this song with New Years for some reason. Happy new years to all.

Glenn Greenwald: Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil. [..] He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield.

This is the bill Ron Paul introduced in Congress in 2001.

The President of the United States is authorized to place a money bounty, drawn in his discretion from the $40,000,000,000 appropriated on September 14, 2001, in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Re- covery from and Response to Terrorists Attacks on the United States or from private sources, for the capture, alive or dead, of Osama bin Laden or any other al Qaeda conspirator responsible for the act of air piracy upon the United States on September 11, 2001, under the authority of any letter of marque or reprisal issued under this Act.  

So Greenwald thinks that private pirates licensed to kill roaming the world is morally pure, but the US government taking violent action against an armed enemy is evil. The moral bankruptcy of Libertarianism has never been more starkly on display. Paul reintroduced that bill in 2007. By the way, the only US Congressional Representative to vote against the Afghan war was Barbara Lee.  Paul voted for it.  Lee is black, female and a supporter of President Obama so she fails the moral purity test, I guess. Part of Paul's appeal for the fake-left must be his steadfast commitment to making symbolic moral stands that don't mean anything, but always voting with the GOP when needed - that and his convenient moral flexibility.
( tip of the hat to ProSense at Democratic Underground.)

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Towards 2012

by Nancy A. Heitzeg

"I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings..." from Sympathy, by Paul Dunbar, 1899

Another year comes to a close, and what to say???

There are always too many words, and yet never enough...

Eternal freedom now! to all those we lost to the vast machinery of criminal injustice -- those whose names we know and those we don't.

Peace and strength to all those who carry on -- those inside the walls, and those who resist from without.

So much gratitude and special thanks to Critical Mass Progress and Seeta Persaud, Kay Whitlock, Angola 3 News, Victoria Law, Scottie Thomaston, The People's View, and our comrades at Prison Culture.

Thanks to all of you for your support.

I am not much on New's Year's Resolutions ~ save one:

See you in 2012 and, as always ~ Abolition!

Yesterday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius published a piece highlighting the impacts of health reform in 2011. Among the results she highlights are 2.5 million additional young adults who now have health care thanks to the Affordable Care Act, improved benefits under Medicare include free preventive services, regulations on insurance companies including requiring them to spend 80-85% of your premiums on health care, putting more doctors in our communities, improving patient safety, and fighting fraud.

Among the things she didn't mention were the end of lifetime benefit caps and moving towards eliminating annual benefit caps, the end of insurance industry practice to drop you when you get sick, outlawing of pre-exisiting condition discrimination against children, and a 50% discount for seniors on brand name prescription drugs. And big effing deal was the federally funded high-risk pools that allows people with pre-existing conditions to get insurance until the exchanges open in 2014 and all pre-existing condition discrimination is outlawed. While these other programs I mentioned went into effect in 2010, they continue to act as a lifesaver for countless Americans.

The Nation editorialized about the Presidents Osawatomie talk given December 6 2011.

The president called out the Republicans, whose deregulatory, anti-tax mania brought us the “you’re on your own” economy and whose solution to the crisis is more of the same. Perhaps most important, he made an argument about inequality—not just on moral terms, although there was plenty of that, but on economic ones as well. As long as middle-class Americans can’t buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, he explained, the entire economy will drag. It was the speech Obama should have given years ago; it took the Occupy movement to make him do it. The Nation January 2012 [bold added]

The President, September 15 2009. 

But here's the problem. Even before this last financial crisis, the economy had problems. Just last week, a Census report came out showing that in 2008, before the downturn, family income fell to its lowest point in over a decade, and more families slid into poverty. Folks at the top 1 percent did pretty good. Everybody else saw their wages and income flat. That's unacceptable. And I refuse to let America go back to the culture of irresponsibility and greed that made it possible -- (applause) -- back to an economy with soaring CEO salaries and shrinking middle class incomes; back to the days when banks made reckless decisions that hurt Wall Street and Main Street alike. (Applause.) We're not going to go back to those days. It would be bad for unions, bad for the middle class, and bad for the United States of America. We're not turning back. We're moving forward. (Applause.)  The President, September 15 2009.

There are many other examples that can be found by intrepid researchers who will bother to look at the list of speeches at  www.whitehouse.gov.

This is what the President's opponents were afraid of:

An improving job outlook helped the Consumer Confidence Index soar to the highest level since April and near a post-recession peak, according to a monthly survey by The Conference Board.

The second straight monthly surge coincided with a decent holiday shopping season for retailers, though stores had to heavily discount to attract shoppers. [...]

The Conference Board, a private research group, said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index rose almost 10 points to 64.5 in December, up from a revised 55.2 in November. Analysts had expected 59. The level is close to the post-recession high of 72, reached in February.

Combine that with the news from earlier in December that according to the Household survey (as opposed to the employer survey), 1.28 million jobs were created in the last four months along with a lower cost of financing the US debt (we are drawing more bids for every dollar sold in bonds and treasuries than ever thanks to investors flocking to US treasuries as the safest investment), and the economy might indeed not be heeding the dire warnings of the Republican party and falling off a cliff due to the infamous "spending problem."

Ben Franklin arrived in Philadelphia dead broke and without a job. David Packard and Bill Hewlett started their company with $500 investment. Amazon.com and Apple were started in garages. But Tea Party sponsor David Koch got $300 million when Dad died and he has a different, more aristocratic view of how the world should be. So he's funded a lot of people to sell the slogan "I've never got a job from a poor man" - something Thomas Jefferson would have considered more appropriate for peasants under old France than for citizens in America. After seeing poverty in France, Thomas Jefferson wrote home about his:

train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe. The property of this country is absolutely concentred in a very few hands [..]. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not laboring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers and tradesmen, and lastly the class of laboring husbandmen. But after all there comes the most numerous of all classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work.

That was indeed a world where you had to thank a rich man for work like todays tea-bag Republicans urge us to do. A world where ordinary people competed to get jobs as servants for the rich and where the rich were able to shelter themselves from competition and taxation.

Keeping a tax break for the majority of Americans in place just like Republicans fought for on behalf of skabillionaires last year was, of course, "the right thing to do". A clear no-brainer, barely worth the breath it takes to discuss it. One would have thought all those House Republicans that signed the Grover Norquist pledge not to raise taxes would have bent over backwards to get this extension passed. Somehow, however, they managed to bend themselves into pretzels, instead, figuring out why it's okay to raise takes on most Americans but not gajillionaires after signing the Norquist pledge.

But there's one piece from yesterday's massive and epic GOPfail that really stood out from me. Here's House Speaker John Boehner, leader of the House Republicans:

“Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing, and sometimes it’s politically difficult to do the right thing. But you know, when everybody called for a one-year extension of the payroll tax deduction, when everybody wanted a full year of extended unemployment benefits, we were here fighting for the right things. It may not have been politically the smartest thing in the world, but let me tell you what: I think our members waged a good fight.”

And, more significantly:

“It’s not always easy to do the right thing, but we believe that we came here to change the way this town does business.

And, even more significantly:

[W]hy not do the right thing for the American people, even though it’s not exactly what we want?

As 2011 comes to an end, I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, a wonderful new year, and an invigorating holiday season. As we celebrate, it should be a time not just for consuming, but for sharing and giving. Whether you can give time or money, help a cause near and dear to your heart. Whether you can help a neighbor or the local food bank, please do whatever you can.

The next year holds a lot for us, in terms of the direction of this country. We must re-elect the President, return the House to Democratic hands, and expanding the Democratic majority in the Senate. This year will be our time to turn back the Tea Party tide and move our country to a more progressive direction with President Obama at the helm. Right now is the time to rest and enjoy the holidays with your family and friends, but get ready for a big fight. The GOP won't let this be easy, and we won't have much help from some on "our" side. But then, WE are the ones we've been waiting for.

Yes. We. Can. Again.

The President has just signed a temporary extension of the payroll tax cut, after John Boehner and the House Republicans caved under tremendous pressure from the American people.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. Barack Obama is the most brilliant political strategist of our time - hell he's one of the most brilliant of any time. When the Republican Teabaggers in the House thought they could raise taxes on working Americans in order to protect giveaways to multinationals and the ultra rich, someone in Washington wasn't ready to let it go. President Obama wasn't ready to go. The payroll tax cut - the first tax cut in recent memory for the working poor - was due to expire at the end of this year, and the Republicans wanted to end it. Yes, they will tell you that they wanted to keep it in place, but make no mistake about their real intent: ending it by putting in poison pills.

I had an argument with Dean Baker ( here and here) about a passage of his which illustrates why the "progressive"  economists have been so utterly useless for the last 30 years. 

If President Obama had been doing his job, he would have immediately begun pushing for more stimulus the day after the first one passed. He should have been straightforward with the American people and said that the stimulus approved by Congress was an important first step, but that the severity of the downturn was so great we would likely need more

Baker is under the mistaken impression that he's offering technical economic expertise in this passage but he's actually making a ridiculously naive argument that the way to get economic policy implemented is to be "straightforward" and simply explain the economic reasoning.  It's not just that people make political decisions on more grounds than immediate economic policy or that the President has multiple crisis to juggle, or that Nobel prize winning economists have explained the irrational basis of decision making, or that we have not recently seen people demanding that "Government get its hands off Medicare" because there are deeply embedded myths about economics and government.  It's also that somehow the "progressive" agenda has come to be fraudulently post-racial. Here's what a politician said about how to win power in America just 50 years ago:

"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor." 

Maybe Dr. Baker should have been there to tell George Wallace that he needed to "do his job" and be "straightforward", but from FDR's crushing defeat at the hands of racists in 1938 - a defeat that started rolling the New Deal back - to Nixon's Southern Strategy, to Reagan's speech in Philadelphia Mississippi, to the current day and back to the days of Tom Watson and before, racism is the wrecking ball of progressive politics in America. President Obama cannot maintain political power without confronting and working around the race fueled narrative of "small government" that has powered the right since the Confederacy. Taking the offensive on the deficit is not only sensible but essential. Yet we have all these clueless people loudly declaiming that  President Obama must follow their simplistic prescriptions - and make it snappy - for all the world like boorish callers on a sports radio program explaining how a Major League  baseball player "just needs to hit the ball". The President may be doing it wrong, but the insistence by "progressives" that their wildly impractical suggestions are obviously correct is a fundamental intellectual failure. And the "progressives"  derision of more sophisticated explanations, ones that take history, race, class, and power politics into account, as "kabuki" and "11 dimensional chess" just digs the hole deeper.

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

The Demise of Death ??? by Nancy A Heitzeg

"The struggle for justice doesn't end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me..." ~ Troy Anthony Davis, lynched by the State of Georgia, 11:00 PM Sept 21, 2011

In spite of the recent execution of Troy Davis (or perhaps in part, because of it?), the year marked a steady decline in both the application and public appeal of the death penalty. The Death Penalty Information Center's Annual Report (pdf) note that executions fell to the lowest point since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. Richard Dieter, DPIC* Executive Director:

"This year, the use of the death penalty continued to decline by almost every measure. Executions, death sentences, public support, the number of states with the death penalty all dropped from previous years. Whether it’s concerns about unfairness, executing the innocent, the high costs of the death penalty, or the general feeling that the government just can’t get it right, Americans moved further away from capital punishment in 2011."

Roosevelt's speech accepting the nomination in 1936


 out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people's money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

In a rather stunning rebuke this week, the Obama adminstration, through the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services denied an effort by the Republican Snyder administration in Michigan to thwart part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

The federal government has denied a request by the Michigan Office of Insurance Regulation to delay a regulation under health care reform that requires insurers to return $89 million to people who have purchased health insurance.

The decision means that eight health insurers in Michigan will return the $89 million to their subscribers, said Gary Cohen, acting director of oversight with the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"After careful consideration, the evidence does not establish reasonable likelihood (that the regulation would) destabilize the market," Cohen said in a conference call this afternoon.

"Most issuers are profitable or would be profitable once they adjust their business model" to spend 80 cents of each health care dollar on health care or related costs, Cohen said.

In a letter to Snyder administration (PDF), the CCIIO told them they found no reason to grant the Michigan Office of Insurance Regulation's (MIOR) request to delay and phase in the requirement that insurers use at least 80% of their revenues on actual health care and that the rebates should continue as scheduled if the insurers don't get in line.

The "liberal/left" economists have been lecturing President Obama on practical economics for three years, showing all the courtesy, humility, and knowledge you'd expect from a gaggle of Creationists "exposing" Richard Dawkins errors on evolution. Here's the insufferably pompous Dean Baker writing in the Guardian:

If President Obama had been doing his job, he would have immediately begun pushing for more stimulus the day after the first one passed. He should have been straightforward with the American people and said that the stimulus approved by Congress was an important first step, but that the severity of the downturn was so great we would likely need more

Apparently if the President had only let Dr. Baker direct his speech-writers, both the public and Congress would have been won over to the watered down version of Keynes that Baker considers to be the revealed truth of economics. And apparently the President is such a political lightweight that he foolishly embarked on a silly discussion of the deficit instead of doing his assigned task of explaining stimulus to the public as Professor Baker clearly instructed him. The implicit racism of this pompous blathering is maybe not even so implicit- certainly Baker never adopted such a lecturing tone with Bill Clinton- but the political tone-deafness is a good clue to why this wing of the Democratic party never wins any elections.

The original stimulus bill only passed the US Senate with the votes of conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson and three Republican defectors. It had to be pitched to win those votes, because Congress allocates the budget in the US political system, no matter whether Dean Baker finds this fact an annoying triviality beneath his notice or not. And there is no magic speech the President could have made to change underlying political realities. Keynes himself noted that his policies were politically impractical until there was a world war, but this doesn't bother Dr. Baker who trots out the tired excuse that Keynsian economics is so "counter-intuitive" that it needs to be explained in small words to the dumb public by the President. Actually, it is pretty simple and the President explains it often during his speeches - but it's not a winning political argument on its own. It's not even true. Lite-Keynes is not a solution to our existing economic problems - and the President knows it even if the news has not come to Baker.

This morning, President Obama signed an Executive Order establishing a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security. You can read the Executive Order HERE (pdf) and the comprehensive plan itself HERE (pdf). This is the part of the Executive Order that is most compelling for me:

Sec. 2. National Action Plan. A National Action Plan shall be created pursuant to the process outlined in Presidential Policy Directive 1 and shall identify and develop activities and initiatives in the following areas:

(a) National integration and institutionalization. Through interagency coordination, policy development, enhanced professional training and education, and evaluation, the United States Government will institutionalize a gender-responsive approach to its diplomatic, development, and defense-related work in conflict-affected environments.

(b) Participation in peace processes and decisionmaking. The United States Government will improve the prospects for inclusive, just, and sustainable peace by promoting and strengthening women's rights and effective leadership and substantive participation in peace processes, conflict prevention, peacebuilding, transitional processes, and decisionmaking institutions in conflict-affected environments.

(c) Protection from violence. The United States Government will strengthen its efforts to prevent -- and protect women and children from -- harm, exploitation, discrimination, and abuse, including sexual and gender-based violence and trafficking in persons, and to hold perpetrators accountable in conflict-affected environments.

(d) Conflict prevention. The United States Government will promote women's roles in conflict prevention, improve conflict early-warning and response systems through the integration of gender perspectives, and invest in women and girls' health, education, and economic opportunity to create conditions for stable societies and lasting peace.

(e) Access to relief and recovery. The United States Government will respond to the distinct needs of women and children in conflict-affected disasters and crises, including by providing safe, equitable access to humanitarian assistance.

I'm particularly enamored of these parts:

The goal is as simple as it is profound: to empower half the world’s population as equal partners in preventing conflict and building peace in countries threatened and affected by war, violence and insecurity. Achieving this goal is critical to our national and global security (from the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security.)

The U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security embodies and sets forth the United States’ commitment to ensuring that women around the world play an equal role in promoting peace and achieving just and enduring security. Today and in the years to come, the Obama Administration dedicates itself to bringing the ideas behind the National Action Plan to life in pursuit of this essential goal (from the Fact Sheet.)

This is more than just words or simple pandering to a specific group. This meaningful action and the Obama administration is to be commended for it.

Fact sheet after the jump.

Hiya folks!  Do you want to see an interesting Chirpstory?


Ok so I'm becoming addicted to Twitter.   The thing that so fascinated me about the internet when I first achieved high speed access was the ability to almost instantly talk to mega watt smart people.  I chat with people from Astrophysicists to The Rev. Al Sharpton who read my tweet on the air Friday regarding Black conservatives.

@TheRevAl a Black man voting conservative in this day and age is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders #southernstrategy

Heh, Anyhow as I jumped into the Twitterpool I pretty much rushed to follow opinion makers etc. from my side of the political spectrum I could think of but there were a few people who were pretty much always on my follow list and one was The  Angry Black Lady.  A person I've pretty much always read from those magical high speed days, but more than that despite her name and reputation a truly sweet person who provided support for me when I got the ban hammer from the DK.

So anyway I'm following Nicole Sandler for the above reason and she's going all in on the recent Defense Authorization.  Now I will admit and would have that I replied initially to the wrong tweet.  The tweet I meant to respond to actually asked the question am I wrong, but like I said I'm a newbie twit.

No language has words adequate to express the thanks of a grateful nation to those who have risked and given their lives at the call of duty. But perhaps the closest we come is the sentiment behind these two words: welcome home.

Today the President of the United States delivered that message to the American soldiers coming home from Iraq. If the tribute of the President and the reaction of our bravest don't make you proud to be an American and choke you up a little, well, I don't know what will. Without further ado, here are the President and the First Lady.

Part 1:

Today, data released from the National Center for Health Statistics shows something astonishing, but also something that shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us who have fought to get health reform done: between September 23, 2010 and June 2011, 2.5 million addition young adults have gained health insurance coverage thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

The Affordable Care Act isn't fully implemented yet, but the parts of it that are now in effect are helping real people. One such coverage related provision that's been in effect since September 23, 2010 is the ability of parents to keep or enroll their young adult children, up to the age of 26, into their health plans. Between then and June of this year (the time the latest data is available), the coverage rate  for young adults increased a by 9 percentage points, from 64% to 73%.

Glenn Greenwald - the Right wing libertarian nut who pretends to be a Lefty - is at it again. This time, the poor thing has confused Wall Street and the CIA and is very mad that the President told the truth in his 60 Minutes interview about the the reason why not a slew of prosecutions took place on Wall Street. Because previous Congresses (and presidents, plural, I'm sad to say) legalized bribery, gambling, and insider trading.

Ever the disingenuous troll, Greenwald at first did not even include the President's explanation. He cut the quote off here:

Obama replied:

I can’t, as President of the United States, comment on the decisions about particular prosecutions. That’s the job of the Justice Department, and we keep those separate so that there’s no political influence on decisions made by professional prosecutors.

See, what he held back from his readers, at least at first, in true Fox-lover fashion, is what the president said in his interview immediately following that line. Luckily, this being the age of the Internet and what not, some of us insist on finding out the truth on our own.

THE PRESIDENT: I can tell you, just from 40,000 feet, that some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn't illegal.

Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic to complain about the crappy journalism in the 60 minutes interview of the President. That's an easy critique to make. The questions were stupid. But Friedersdorf then does something more difficult: he proposes alternative questions that are far worse. Here's Friedersdorf setting the stage:

Here's a journalist (ostensibly) working on behalf of a polity that has seen populist movements in the streets on the left and right, largely because they believe that there is an unseemly relationship between the federal government and Wall Street.

The theory that the Koch funded Tea Party is a "populist movement" motivated by a belief that there is an " unseemly relationship between the federal government and Wall Street" is in a phrase, effing stupid. The Tea Party began with a rant by a business "reporter" about how it pissed him off that there was going to be help for people who were in trouble on their mortgages, its rallies were inchoate combinations of anger and open racism, and it featured slogans like "Get your government hands off my medicare." The  stupid narrative of the "liberal" media, though asks us to pretend that this ugly eruption of white privilege, one shown by many studies to be a movement predominantly of older right wing Republicans was really a "populist" rebellion against the Obama administration.  How silly of me not to appreciate the populist bone-fides of a Tea Party member waving a photo-shopped poster of the President with a bone through his nose.  Truly a pathetic effort, but a good introduction to a series of questions that combine a kind of bitchy peevishness and an apparently boundless ignorance of basic civics with sheer disregard for facts.

After insisting that American citizen terrorism suspects arrested on American soil "shut up" and give up their Constitutional right to legal counsel, Senator Lindsey Graham (R, Not-Closeted-Gay) has put his finger on the real fascist, Stalinist practices of the government: Consumer protection! Yes, the government ought to be allowed to hold its own citizens without legal representation in perpetuity, but you see, that's just national security. But the government protecting consumers? Why, that just reeks of Stalin!

Senate Republicans last week blocked Richard Cordray, the President's nominee to head the historic, first ever consumer financial watchdog agency established in the most significant regulatory reform of Wall Street since the Great Depression. The Senate failed to overcome the Republican filibuster, although 53 senators voted in favor of the president's nominee for the top consumer cop. In the United States Senate, a 53-yes 45-no vote means that the 'no' side wins.

President Obama is not backing off. He is not going to take 'no' for an answer, especially a tyranny-of-the-minority 'no' in which a majority of the Senate actually voted 'yes:'

Every day that the country must wait for a director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau "is another day that dishonest businesses can target and take advantage of students, seniors and service members," Mr. Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address.

"So I refuse to take 'no' for an answer. Financial institutions have plenty of high-powered lawyers and lobbyists looking out for them. It's time consumers had someone on their side."

The time has come for us to start concerning ourselves with how people will vote in 2012. I’ve noticed a fair amount of panic setting in online. Who hasn’t read this blog comment/tweet: "The Dems better get it together and get out the vote!"? It’s understandable given what happened in 2010. It’s important to remember, however, that 2010 was not a National Election. 2010 was 50 elections, and each State Democratic Party was responsible for their own GOTV efforts. I’m lucky to live in a safe blue State with a very strong Party apparatus that had a very good strategy revolving around one sub-group of voters referred to as ‘lazy voters’. We spent every single day leading up to the election reaching out to lazy voters, not to the exclusion of all others, but as a primary focus. We were successful on the Federal level and had mixed results on the State and local level. Far too many State races came down to fewer than 200 votes.

2012 will be completely different. Presidential elections are the headline election that many more people pay attention to as voters. Plus it is the one race that is not decided by the popular vote. There is only one thing that matters in the Presidential race: The Electoral College. 270 votes. When it comes to wondering if the President will win reelection, it honestly doesn’t even matter who the opponent is; all that matters is how do we get 270 Electoral College votes.

---

Beyond that, there's a question of privilege. It's simply true that white Christian men don't enjoy the kind of luxuries that their grandfathers did, particularly the luxury of knowing, outright, that there is some class of people that -- no matter what -- will always be under you. That must have given people some amount of psychological comfort. Whatever your fights, you knew that you and people like you, always had a place in America. Not so much anymore.

I think back to the great John C. Calhoun:

    With us the two great divisions of society are not rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

What you had, before, was a weird kind of socialism -- exclusive rights for a mass aristocracy. Better neighborhoods, better schools, better water fountains, better rest-rooms, better pools, better everything.

And now you don't. [ Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic]

---

Coates is writing about Rick Perry, that pathetic marionette, but what he says applies to liberals as well as conservatives - the same resentment, the same anxiety, the same longing for the good old days.
(Via Delong ) 

There's a video now making the rounds purporting to be "proof Obama will sign/will not veto" because of the military detention provisions in the FY 2012 Budget. Just Google either of those phrases and you will find it handily. The "proof" clip isn't but a few minutes long as part of an exchange with Senator Udall and consists of this statement:

Is the Senator familiar with the fact that the language which precluded the application of section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved in the Armed Services committee and the Administration asked us to remove the language which says that U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section? Is the Senator familiar with the fact that it was the administration that asked us to remove the very language -- which we had in the bill which passed the committee, and that we removed it at the request of the administration -- that would have said that this determination would not apply to U.S. citizens and lawful residents?

Naturally, this was embraced as definitive proof Obama will not veto the budget over the detainee provisions, which translates to Obama will now be wantonly detaining Americans for, say, making fun of Bo. Taken out of context as it is, it does sound fairly convincing, I must say. But that exchange occurred somewhere around the 4:42:00ish mark. If one listened to the whole proceeding, especially starting around 1:30:00 or so, one would have heard Levin say these things as well:

Mike Konzcal's contribution to the world of Obama condescension  appears (where else?) in The Nation and takes the standard form of a finger wagging lecture as if from an exasperated teaching assistant to a particularly dim undergraduate. There's an implicit presumption in these lectures that Barack Obama stumbled into the Presidency via some kind of affirmative action plan -oddly, exactly what the far right believes as well.  And this offensive assumption is often accompanied by  a peculiarly limited understanding of economics and of the political process and some very slapdash, shoddy reporting. Here's Konzcal:

In the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama stated that he would freeze 2011 discretionary spending even though unemployment was projected to be above 8 percent, 

The President put it a little differently:

So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. [..] Now, most of the cuts and savings I've proposed only address annual domestic spending, which represents a little more than 12 percent of our budget.

How many of Konzcal's readers know that the President proposed freezing 12% of the budget: not Medicare, not Medicaid, not health care reform, not Social Security, not Pell Grants, and certainly not spending on energy or education? "The President proposed freezing 12% of the budget" kind of lacks the impact of Konzcal's formulation, but has the virtue of being accurate.

† The Criminal InJustice Series is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

“Felon Fitness": Thoughts on Cultural Commodification of Prisoners

by Kay Whitlock

A Word of Caution: I include a link to the book mentioned below so that readers will know I’m not making this up. But I urge you to think twice before following the link to the book website. These profiteers do not deserve your page clicks.

I wish it had been a joke, the existence and recent promotion of a new book called Felon Fitness: How to Get a Hard Body without Doing Hard Time, by Trey Teufel and William S. Kroger.

“Includes 50 ass-kicking exercises and workout routines from REAL INMATES” screams promotional copy. By purchasing this book, you could learn to “get in shanking shape.”

But even if it had been a joke, it wouldn’t have been even slightly amusing. I learned about this book via a promotional email forwarded on to CI editor Nancy Heitzeg and me by CI reader and frequent commenter conlakappa.

Just the idea infuriated me, but I began to literally choke on my anger as I read more:

Here's Jesus' response to Rick Perry's gay-bashing, "war on religion" dickishness.



Thank you, Jesus!

This will no doubt piss off Rick Santorum. But hey, that's life. President Obama has issued an executive order directing foreign aid agencies, including the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and the USAID to use American foreign aid to promote the human rights of LGBT people everywhere.

In a memorandum issued Tuesday, President Barack Obama directed U.S. agencies working abroad, including the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, to use foreign aid to assist gays and lesbians who are facing human rights violations. And he ordered U.S. agencies to protect vulnerable gay and lesbian refugees and asylum seekers.

“The struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons is a global challenge, and one that is central to the United States’ commitment to promoting human rights,” Obama said in a statement.

 From the White House's own press release on it, the President and his administration is already using diplomatic means to fight criminalization of homosexuality, protecting LGBT asylum seekers and refugees, and supporting pride events and facilitating private and public discussions around the globe.

Yes, that's harsh. I'm talking about the Jon Walker of Firedoglake. And damn it, it's true. You see, Firebagger Central's know-it-all doesn't like the fact that Spike Dolomite Ward was helped - perhaps her life saved - by President Obama's health reform. So instead of apologizing to the President for his employer trying to kill the president's reform that saved Ward's life, Walker doubled down, trying to berate reform. Reform, without which, remember, Ms. Ward may not have lived. So I'm done with mincing words. This leaves only one conclusion: Jon Walker would have let her die. The whole lot of the Firebagger crew would have. Her and a lot of people who are being helped by "ObamaCare".

Walker starts his criticism of lifesaving with - you guessed it - the tried and true Professional Left mantra of not-enough-people-are-helped-so-don't-help-anyone:

I’m very glad that Ms. Ward was lucky enough to be able to qualify for insurance help through this program. Not everyone was so lucky. As of August, 2011, less than 35,000 people have enrolled in the plan, due to its cost and strict requirements. That is just 0.01 percent of the country.

Ah, yes. Why isn't 100% of the country enrolled in a high risk pool? Oh, the poutrage! Let me say something clearly. That Walker is glad that Ms. Ward got help is a damned lie. I don't think Walker is glad at all, and I think that he is pissed that her story is making waves and decimating his and his employer's propaganda. And less than 35,000 people were enrolled in a pre-existing condition insurance plan not because of the cost of the plan - I will show you in a moment how entirely stupid that claim is.

President Obama delivered a great speech on the economy and fairness in Osawatamie Kansas today. Osawatamie is the site where John Brown and other supporters of freedom battled pro-slavery terrorists just before the civil war and also where Theodore Roosevelt described the "fair deal". Ari Berman, writing in The Nation tried to fit this speech into his narrative in which the President is this disappointing puppet like figure:

It’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed our country’s political conversation. But if you want to know exactly how the Occupy movement has impacted the debate in Washington, read Barack Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, today. For much of 2011, Obama’s speeches were all about the deficit. Today the central theme of his speech was income inequality—and how this mounting problem weakens our economy and our democracy. At long last, the president sounded like he was channeling his inner Elizabeth Warren. Obama’s pivot away from austerity orthodoxy and toward public investment began with his jobs speech in September, but he’s subsequently sharpened his language and focus in recent months in response to pressure from Occupy Wall Street. He’s now tackling issues of basic fairness and attacking the GOP’s brand of “your-on-your-own economics” in a much more direct way. His nod to Teddy Roosevelt, who delivered his “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie in 1910, could not have come at a more appropriate time.

The level of dishonesty in this argument is simply appalling. The President has been talking about social justice and income inequality since the primary elections in 2008. A journalist could have gone to the White House web portal and looked at the President's speeches,but Mr. Berman is no journalist so I'll do the work for him. Here is the President in August - before this "pivot" that has become part of the self-serving narrative of the fake-left.

I had changed my registration from Democrat to Independent, and I had blacked out the top of the "h" on my Obama bumper sticker, so that it read, "Got nope" instead of "got hope." I felt like he had let down the struggling middle class. My son and I had campaigned for him, but since he took office, we felt he had let us down.

So this is my public apology. I'm sorry I didn't do enough of my own research to find out what promises the president has made good on. I'm sorry I didn't realize that he really has stood up for me and my family, and for so many others like us. I'm getting a new bumper sticker to cover the one that says "Got nope." It will say "ObamaCares."

When I read those words, I got a chill. These are words by Spike Dolomite Ward, a breast cancer patient and an Obama volunteer in 2008 who felt that the President had let her down, and who now calls ObamaCare a "lifesaver - perhaps literally." The plan she is talking about is the Pre-existing Conditions Insurance Plan (PCIP), provided under the Affordable Care Act with a federal funding of $5 billion as a bridge for patients with pre-existing conditions until 2014, when the exchanges start, pre-existing conditions discrimination ends forever and the subsidies kick in.

Spike is not someone who was predisposed to dislike the President, and as we see, she is certainly an American willing to let facts change her mind. But for her, it took staring cancer down to realize that the Affordable Care Act is saving her life, and that "ObamaCare" is the answer to the prayers of so many to fix our broken health care system. Whose job was it to keep her informed throughout the health care debate? Who were claiming to be the vanguard of progressivism and denying her the opportunity to have information about how the ACA could change her life, instead engaging in what they thought was a "fight" in order to amplify legislative ponies to the point where the legislative meat got all shoved aside?

Still My Proudest Moment - When We Got Health Care Done with President Obama!

It turns out that Republicans might be right about health reform costing some jobs. The jobs of health insurance company lobbyists. Aww. From the second to third quarter of this year, the health insurance industry is cutting lobbying budgets.

WellPoint Inc. ( WLP ), the largest health insurer based on membership, spent $870,000 on lobbying in the third quarter, up 9% from the prior-year quarter. However, the cost was down by a substantial 34% from the second quarter of 2011.

The second-largest health insurer based on membership and largest in terms of total revenue, UnitedHealth Group Inc. ( UNH ), also recorded a significant 18% year-over-year hike to $650,000, while it witnessed a sizeable 24% decline from the prior quarter.

Meanwhile, CIGNA Corporation ( CI ), the fourth largest health insurer on the basis of membership, bucked the trend by reducing its lobbying cost by a considerable 34% from the year-ago quarter to $470,000, while the amount was 24% higher than $380,000 spent in the second quarter of 2011.

Humana Inc. ( HUM ), which is the fifth-largest on enrollment basis, recorded a 43% year-over-year and 11% sequential decline in lobbying expenses to $160,000.

Watch this advertisement for Al Gore's 2000 campaign in which Gore accuses Bush of planning to give away the budget surplus to the ONE PERCENT.  At the time, Michael Moore was explaining to people that Gore was the same as Bush and even if Ralph Nader were not running, Moore would not vote Democratic because he was too disgusted.


By the way, that video is from here: http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1952
Also - this advert from LBJ in 1964 is interesting.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine what America would look like if President Obama was now several years into a term following 8 years of President Gore.  The "both parties are the same"  folks who keep uring symbolic actions, lines in the sand, avoidance of ugly compromise - those folks have a lot to be ashamed of.

It’s not often you’ll see someone advocate the destruction of a profitable business venture they are engaged in, but yeah I did it, and now the fuse lit with the passage of our healthcare law has hit the explosive.

Forbes article

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.  Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ration will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

Why? Because there is absolutely no way for-profit health insurers are going to be able to learn how to get by and still make a profit while being forced to spend at least 80 percent of their receipts providing their customers with the coverage for which they paid. If they could, we likely would never have seen the extraordinary efforts made by these companies to avoid paying benefits to their customers at the very moment they need it the most.

Today, that bomb goes off.

I know it's rare that I write about something going on in the world of technology. What some of you may not know is that in addition to being a politics nerd, I am also a tech world aficionado. But that's a different story for a different day. The reason I am writing today is there is something that has concerned me very much for the past week: Carrier IQ, a hidden software that at least reads every single one of your keystrokes and other common activities you do on your phone as well as your location, without you even knowing it. It is installed on your phone by your carrier. If you own a cell phone - whether it's a smartphone or not, you need to read this.

This video by Trevor Eckhart, the security researcher who found this, is pretty clear. Even if you are not a techwiz, you can see the Carrier IQ software always running, and logging everything you do on your phone:

I hope this isn't too self-horn-tooting. If it is, let me know and I'll pull it.

Last night I made my television debut on Fox News Detroit's "Let it Rip" show. I shared the riser with Lansing, Michigan Mayor Virg Bernero who ran against Rick Snyder in the gubernatorial race last year and Nolan Finley, the very conservative Editorial Page Editor from the Detroit News. The topic was the announcement that Governor Rick Snyder will be starting the process that could result in an Emergency Manager for Detroit.

With five of us on the show and only 15 minutes to work with, there wasn't a lot of time for anyone to say much of anything but I felt like I was able to make a couple of decent points in the few minutes I got.

I'm the bald dude in the middle.

Let It Rip: Detroit Draws a 'Line in the Sand': MyFoxDETROIT.com

This month's jobs report was a pleasant surprise to the American people, with the unemployment rate dropping to 8.6% from 9% last month. While the drop in the unemployment rate was due in part to some people leaving the workforce, it is also due in large part to the fact that as 140,000 private sector jobs were added this month (Republican governors and state legislators did their best to hold down employment by eliminating 20,000 public sector jobs last month), the last two months' jobs numbers were also significantly revised up. That brings the number of private sector jobs created this year to nearly 2 million.

President Obama wasted no time promoting his jobs agenda on the occasion of this news, showing up with President Clinton to bolster his case

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.  Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ration will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

Why? Because there is absolutely no way for-profit health insurers are going to be able to learn how to get by and still make a profit while being forced to spend at least 80 percent of their receipts providing their customers with the coverage for which they paid.

From Forbes - read it. 

† The Criminal InJustice Series is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Anti-Transgender Violence: How Hate-Crime Laws Have Failed

by Victoria Law

On the morning of June 5, 2011, a 23-year-old African-American transgender woman, Chrishaun McDonald, and her friends were walking down Lake Street in Minneapolis. As they passed Schooner Tavern, Dean Schmitz, a 47-year-old white man, began shouting racial slurs at McDonald, asking, "Did you think you were going to rape somebody in those girl clothes?" Schmitz and two other bar patrons then attacked McDonald.

During the attack, glass was smashed into McDonald's face and Schmitz was killed. McDonald was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

The details of what happened are still not clear. However, considering the widespread discrimination, harassment and violence that transgender people face every day in the United States, McDonald and her friends had ample reason to fear that Schmitz's attack could lead to serious injury, if not death. A recent report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that 50 percent of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) murders in 2009 and 44 percent of LGBT murders in 2010 were of transgender women. This year, does not seem to be a safer year for transgender people either:

The Republicans in Congress may be singularly focused on destroying the American economy in order to hurt President Obama's chances of re-election, but the American consumer may already be responding to President Obama's relentless focus on helping the middle class be able to spend again, in order to get our economy going. After all, consumer spending accounts for nearly 70% of America's economic activity. So as the holiday shopping season kicked off this past weekend, trends are pointing to economic expansion rather than doom.

A short summary of the Black Friday weekend:

• Consumers spent $52.4 billion from last Thursday to Sunday, up 16% from $45 billion last year.
• The number of shoppers were up, to 227 million from 212 million last year.
• Average spending also climbed to $398.62 from $365.62 the year prior.

The uptick in consumer comfort with spending didn't stop with the end of the weekend, either. November sales for most retailers are beating Wall Street expectations.

Several retailers including Macy's Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp., Limited Brands Inc. and teen retailer Buckle Inc. reported sales gains Thursday that beat Wall Street estimates. [...]

Discount-club operator Costco's revenue at stores open at least a year increased 9 percent in November, thanks to strong performances in the U.S. and overseas. The figure easily beat Wall Street's expectations. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters predicted the metric would climb 6.5 percent.

Department-store chain Macy's posted a 4.8 percent gain, above the 3.9 percent increase that Wall Street analysts had expected.

There has been a LOT of complaining about the poor messaging coming out of the White House. It's hard to find anyone on the anti-Obama left that doesn't have some negative thing to say about it, in fact. What most people don't realize is that the White House has pretty fantastic messaging when it comes to the main media sources. From Daily Press Guidances that give the next day's events along with background to official White House statements, press releases and speech transcripts, they are providing America's media with plenty of fodder for their reporting. So far as I can tell, the vast majority ends up in the trash folder.

I am on the White House Media Office mailing list so, every day, I get the same emails every major media outlet gets. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't see evidence that the White House team is on message, on target and doing all they can to let America know, through the media, what they are thinking, planning and trying to accomplish.

(Reuters) - Boeing Co (BA.N) has made an early deal with its biggest union for a four-year contract extension, which if ratified would end the planemaker's dispute with the National Labor Relations Board and ensure the new 737 MAX single-aisle plane is built in Washington state.

The agreement was driven by both the organizing of the machinists union and the action of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Boeing had invested in a production facility in "right to work for less" South Carolina, openly stating that this was a response to union activism in Washington State. The law forbids retaliation against workers for exercising their rights to bargain collectively - but under Bush (and Clinton) era appointees, the NLRB had essentially stopped enforcing labor laws. As a result of the revived Obama era NLRB, highly skilled work will stay in Washington State - and as a side effect, boneheaded Boeing management will not be able to destroy the company in their short sighted effort to do without skilled labor and crush the union.

Of course, we know that both parties are the same according to the brilliant political strategists of the "left" (who are responsible for so much success for the right!). So as a bonus here's some news from GOP controlled Kansas where the Republicans are working hand in hand with the people who shot down and killed Dr. Tiller as he left Church and from Iraq where the Obama administration is fulfilling its pledge to bring US soldiers home. Just the same.