September 2011 archive

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

New York Times Editorial: Oh, Grow Up

Whenever we think Washington couldn’t get more cynical or more craven, it proves us wrong. So we will resist the temptation to say it’s hard to imagine anything more base than the food fight over President Obama’s planned speech to Congress.

The contemptuous reaction from the House speaker, John Boehner, to the president’s request to address a joint session next Wednesday – the day Congress returns from its summer recess – was appalling. No matter how he feels about Mr. Obama personally or politically, there can be no excuse for his lack of respect for the office, to which he is second in the line of succession. And it was distressing to watch President Obama fail, once again, to stand up to an opposition that won’t brook the smallest compromise.

What made this even more appalling is that the president will be speaking on the country’s most pressing problem – the need to create jobs and stave off another destructive recession.

Paul Krugman: Eric and Irene

“Have you left no sense of decency?” That’s the question Joseph Welch famously asked Joseph McCarthy, as the red-baiting demagogue tried to ruin yet another innocent citizen. And these days, it’s the question I find myself wanting to ask Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who has done more than anyone else to make policy blackmail – using innocent Americans as hostages – standard operating procedure for the G.O.P.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Cantor was the hard man in the confrontation over the debt ceiling; he was willing to endanger America’s financial credibility, putting our whole economy at risk, in order to extract budget concessions from President Obama. Now he’s doing it again, this time over disaster relief, making headlines by insisting that any federal aid to the victims of Hurricane Irene be offset by cuts in other spending. In effect, he is threatening to take Irene’s victims hostage.

In June of 2007, John A. Rizzo had been the C.I.A’s acting general counsel on and off for most of the past six years, including the period in 2002 when the Bush administration was constructing a legal foundation for the agency’s then secret detention and interrogation program. As acting council, it was Mr. Rizzo has guided many agency leaders on the legal labyrinth of clandestine operations and the often ensuing investigations.

During his confirmation hearing’s for the permanent post before the Democratic controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, Senate Democrats pressed Mr. Rizzo about whether he agreed with a 2002 Justice Department memorandum that gave legal guidance to the C.I.A. program. The memorandum argued that nothing short of the pain associated with organ failure constituted illegal torture. The memorandum had been issued at the request from the agency on the use of interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, in secret detention centers overseas. While Mr, Rizzo testified that at the time he did not object to the memorandum, he told the Senators that he now felt that it was overly broad. In September, just before the was to vote to reject him for the position, the White House withdrew the nomination without explanation. Mr. Rizzo remained in his position until the Summer of 2009 when he retired after 30 years.

Now two years since his departure, Mr. Rizzo granted an interview to PBS’s Frontline, “Top Secret America” on September 6 and what he is saying further confirms that President Barack Obama has lied, and continues to lie, to the American people about the CIA’s secret programs and who knows what else.

   I was part of the transition briefings of the incoming Obama team, and they signaled fairly early on that the incoming president believed in a vigorous, aggressive, continuing counterterrorism effort. Although they never said it exactly, it was clear that the interrogation program was going away. We all knew that.

   But his people were signaling to us, I think partly to try to assure us that they weren’t going to come in and dismantle the place, that they were going to be just as tough, if not tougher, than the Bush people.

snip

With a notable exception of the enhanced interrogation program, the incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations. Things continued. Authorities were continued that were originally granted by President Bush beginning shortly after 9/11. Those were all picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.

As a candidate, President Obama had promised “a top to bottom review of the threats we face and our abilities to confront them.” He pledged to overhaul of the Bush administration’s war on terror, which he criticized for compromising American values. He had also promised in 2008, that he would filibuster the reauthorization of FISA without major reforms. He lied then, too, voting for the act’s renewal and “promising”to say, to fix it later. Needless  FISA not been “fixed” nor has the Patriot Act which has been extended for four years, unamended, at the president’s request. For this Mr. Obama has garnered the approval of admitted war criminal and former Bush Vice President, Dick Cheney who proudly proclaimed in an interview with Politico’s Mike Allen

“[Obama] ultimately had to adopt many of the same policies that we had been pursuing because that was the most effective way to defend the nation.”

Obama has continues these core Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, strengthening them and  converting them from right-wing dogma into bipartisan consensus. Dick Cheney must be so proud.

 

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

September 2 is the 245th day of the year (246th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 120 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1969, America’s first automatic teller machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville Center, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank to conduct basic financial transactions. By the 1980s, these money machines had become widely popular and handled many of the functions previously performed by human tellers, such as check deposits and money transfers between accounts. Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people as cell phones and e-mail.

Several inventors worked on early versions of a cash-dispensing machine, but Don Wetzel, an executive at Docutel, a Dallas company that developed automated baggage-handling equipment, is generally credited as coming up with the idea for the modern ATM. Wetzel reportedly conceived of the concept while waiting on line at a bank. The ATM that debuted in New York in 1969 was only able to give out cash, but in 1971, an ATM that could handle multiple functions, including providing customers’ account balances, was introduced.

ATMs eventually expanded beyond the confines of banks and today can be found everywhere from gas stations to convenience stores to cruise ships. There is even an ATM at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Non-banks lease the machines (so-called “off premise” ATMs) or own them outright.

Tip o’ the Hat to Art Pronin @ Taylor Marsh who introduces it thusly-

PPP polls have been dead on accurate for several years now. And boy does their latest show trouble for Obama 2012. Their latest has 54 percent disapproving of the president. I sure wish the folks in the WH would read real polls sometime.

Obama keeps hitting record lows

Tom Jensen, Public Policy Polling

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

In our national polling for Daily Kos Barack Obama has hit a record low approval rating 3 weeks in a row now. He’s gone from 43/53 to 42/53 to now 42/54 in our poll this week.

What might be most noteworthy is this week’s poll is how bad Obama’s numbers are with a few key and usually dependable Democratic constituencies. He’s under water in union households at 44/47. He’s also under water with voters under 30 at 45/48. The Northeast tends to a pretty dependable region for Democrats but Obama’s under water there at 47/49. Obama’s usually been able to hold his ground with female voters but he’s under water with them too at 45/49. And even with African Americans his approval rating’s down to 76%, about as low as we’ve ever found it.

…

(L)ast week … Democratic enthusiasm was at a year long low. Now it’s at a lower year long low with only 47% of the party’s voters ‘very excited’ about voting this year compared to 58% of Republicans.

…

Obama trails a generic opponent 48-44 on our national poll this week, including 51-37 with independents.

Public Policy Polling August 25 – 28

For readers who are allergic to orange I’ve done the best I could.  There are no comments at either link.

I’m sure those Independents and base voters are just champing at the bit to flock back to him after the spectacular cave on the timing of his clueless “Jobs” agenda speech, putting licking John Boehner’s boots before every Red Blooded ‘murkan’s love of the NFL.

You guys are so much smarter than all us serfs and peons.

“When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have somebody that’s strong and wrong than somebody who’s weak and right.” – Bill Clinton

Weak AND Wrong ain’t even in the game.  I’m afraid Archangel M is correct- Obama Concedes Election More Than a Year Before It Happens.

Electoral victory my ass.

It’s called the Dream Antilles, emphasis on dream.  Here’s one now coming in from left field:

My fellow Americans.  And especially those of you who are unemployed.  I have called you to come together today, Labor Day 2011, 61,000 strong to Soldier Field in Chicago, so that I, your president, could explain to you how I am going to get you back to work and how I am going to re-start the economy.  And to ask humbly for your support in pressuring Congress to enact these essential proposals that I will shortly lay out. I was going to tell all of this to Congress.  But I see no reason, in light of Congress’s penchant for obstruction and delay and partisan politics, to talk further with Congress about my plan.  No.  I want to talk to you.  Because you are the people that matter.  And you will help me to increase employment.

I’m sure you understand that Congress is obdurate.  That Congress plays politics with your lives on a regular basis.  And that some of its members are nothing but stooges for the multinational corporations that financed their election.  But that doesn’t matter right now.  What matters is that you don’t have work.  That you are unemployed.  That you and your families are suffering hard times.  And I want to put you back to work.  Immediately.  Without further delay.

I have a good plan that will put you back to work.  I am going to describe it in detail this evening.  But we all need to understand that to pass this bill in this most obstructionist Congress, I will need your active help.  I will need you to stand up for this proposal.  I will need you to be active, to make calls, to send emails, to write letters, to demonstrate, to picket, to speak out.  I am asking you, if you agree with the proposal , to do these things and more to tell Congress clearly and explicitly that you demand that this proposal be enacted.  And that the consequences of failure to enact these proposals are quite simple: those who block it will be replaced in Congress by legislators who understand the plight of the unemployed and who will enact measures to create employment.  It’s that simple.  Vote for the proposal, or go home.

My plan is unspeakably simple.  It is a broad stimulus package, far larger than the previous bipartisan stimulus package, that will make America’s economy run again and will without any question greatly increase employment.  My detractors in the media, and those who sit across the isle in Congress, and even some of those in my own party, and all those who seem to delight in ignoring your misery, will roll their eyes and rent their clothing because these measures will briefly increase the deficit.  These measures will definitely increae the deficit in the short term.

But I tell you, and those who undertand economics will tell you that this increase in the deficit simply does not matter.  At all.  And those who argue that it is a problem will be enacting their ideology.  But they will only demonstrate beyond all question that they do not understand macroeconomics at all and that they are simply pawns of those who would continue to siphon economic wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthiest 1% of our population, and continue unemployment at ridiculously high levels, and deny you the dignity of earning a respectable living.

I will not allow them to paralyze our economy further with their partisan, ideological nonsense.  I will not allow them to increase the suffering of workers further by refusing to enact measures that will spur employment.  I will not allow them to block the taking of necessary, short term steps to re-start the economy and provide employment.

America’s problem is not its debt.  It is not its deficit.  It has never been its problem.  America has always paid its debt and it always will.  America’s problem is simply this: creating jobs.  And there is absolutely no way to create jobs without increasing government spending.  We know this because we’ve tried everything else.  We’ve tried tax cuts and created more misery and it hasn’t created a single job.  The Federal Reserve has already done all it can with monetary policy.  It hasn’t been able to spur employment.  So.  Fiscal policy is the only device left that can spur employment.

When we create jobs, when we get the economy running again, the deficit will heal itself.  Because tax revenues will be increased, because more people will be working and more people will be paying taxes.

Most important, this is not a time to contract government spending by cutting programs.  The contrary is required: we need to spur employment by increasing government spending.  In short, those who insist on balancing the budget, on decreasing the deficit, on cutting spending have a fundamental misunderstanding of macroeconomics.  And I am not going to permit their willful ignorance of economics further to destroy the nation’s economy….

This Week In The Dream Antilles is usually a weekly digest. Sometimes, like now, it is not actually a digest of essays posted in the past week at The Dream Antilles. For that you have to visit The Dream Antilles. Please leave a comment so that your Bloguero will know that you stopped by. Your Bloguero likes to know you’ve visited.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Jobs row, polls a new blow to Obama

By Stephen Collinson, AFP

4 hrs ago

David Axelrod as quoted by Time Magazine- May 21, 2009

WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says

By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Newspapers

Posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2011

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

(h/t Think Progress)

Controversial law prompts a spate of retirements

MADISON, Wis. – When students return today for the first day of school across Wisconsin, many familiar faces will be gone, as teachers chose retirement over coming back following the passage of a bill that would have forced them to pay more for benefits and taken away most of their collective bargaining rights.

Documents obtained by the Associated Press under the state’s open records law show that about twice as many public school teachers decided to retire in the first half of this year as in each of the past two full years, part of a mass exit of public employees.

Their departures came after the bill passed but before the new law took effect. The bill, which was pushed by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature, led to weeks of protests at the Capitol.

The ensuing exodus of teachers and other state employees has spurred fears that the jobs might not be filled and that classroom leadership by veteran teachers will be lost.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Robert Reich: Obama’s Jobs Plan: Will He Offer Policy Miniatures or Give ’em Hell?

Next Thursday President Obama will unveil his jobs plan.

He’ll choose either Plan A or Plan B.

Plan A would be big enough to restart the economy (now barely growing) and reduce unemployment (which continues to grow). That means spending another trillion dollars over the next two years – rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, creating a new WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, and lending money to cash-starved states and cities.

snip

Plan B would be a bunch of policy miniatures that would have almost no effect on the economy or employment but would nonetheless be good things to do (extending the Social Security tax cut, extending unemployment benefits, reauthorizing the highway building trust fund, giving employers a tax incentive to hire the long-term unemployed, ratifying trade agreements).

David Kaye: What to Do With Qaddafi

LIBYA’S rebel leaders say they want to try Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, if and when he is captured, in Libyan courts. In principle, Libyans deserve the satisfaction that only domestic justice can bring. National trials would advance the rule of law and allow Libyans to fully own their political transition.

One problem: the International Criminal Court, based 1,400 miles away in The Hague, has already issued arrest warrants for Colonel Qaddafi, his son and second-in-command Seif al-Islam, and his intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi. The United Nations Security Council, recognizing that Colonel Qaddafi’s alleged crimes were not just against Libyans but against humanity, asked the I.C.C. in February to investigate the situation in Libya. Now the I.C.C. legitimately wants to try the three for atrocities committed since the uprising in Libya began last winter.