MILWAUKEE – One man saw the creature for only a few bone-chilling seconds, but he remembers that it was big, with heavy brown fur and a long tail, and not in any particular hurry as it walked through his neighborhood in Milwaukee and then disappeared into a thickly wooded ravine.
…
It could be a young African lion that was purchased on the open market, kept as a pet and then released when it became too large to handle, one wildlife expert speculated. (Wisconsin state law is notably relaxed on the possession of exotic animals.) Or it could be a cougar, an animal that has been spotted more frequently in populated areas of the Midwest in recent years. The Milwaukee County Zoo announced last week that all of its lions were safe and accounted for.
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Jeff Kozlowski, owner of the Wisconsin Big Cat Rescue in Rock Springs, Wis., said that if that was the case, there was little hope of finding the person who lost control of the animal. “If you had a pet lion and it got out and it was causing this much uproar,” he said dryly, “would you call in and say it was yours?”
KEENE, N.H. (AP) – The only thing missing was the waffles.
Authorities in Keene, New Hampshire, were in for some sticky times when a load of maple syrup shifted in a tractor trailer and leaked very slowly all over a main highway.
Police Sgt. Thaddeus Derendal says about 220 gallons of the sweet-smelling pancake-topper from a Vermont producer oozed onto Route 101 on Monday afternoon.
Firefighters used squeegees to corral the mess and poured something like kitty litter on it to speed the drying process. The two eastbound lanes were reduced to one lane while the cleanup was underway.
“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”.
U.S.-Iranian Relations Emerge from a 30-Year Cold War
Don’t sweat the details of the July nuclear accord between the United States and Iran. What matters is that the calculus of power in the Middle East just changed in significant ways. [..]
If we’re not all yet insta-experts on centrifuges and enrichment ratios, the media will ensure that in the next two months — during which Congress will debate and weigh approving the agreement — we’ll become so. Verification strategies will be debated. The Israelis will claim that the apocalypse is nigh. And everyone who is anyone will swear to the skies that the devil is in the details. On Sunday talk shows, war hawks will fuss endlessly about the nightmare to come, as well as the weak-kneedness of the president and his “delusional” secretary of state, John Kerry. (No one of note, however, will ask why the president’s past decisions to launch or continue wars in the Middle East were not greeted with at least the same sort of skepticism as his present efforts to forestall one.)
There are two crucial points to take away from all the angry chatter to come: first, none of this matters and second, the devil is not in the details, though he may indeed appear on those Sunday talk shows.
For decades it has been widely accepted to only frame police officers as people who save us, protect us and stop the ‘bad guys.’ They have been the superheroes of countless stories, always getting the bad guy – a bad guy who just so happens to always be black. While there is nothing wrong with a good superhero in any story, we shouldn’t assume that just because someone carries a gun and wears a uniform that they are always the hero and can do nothing wrong.
As more and more media reports are released showing us the ways in which police aren’t always the hero, like in the case of unarmed Walter Scott being shot and killed, that image is quickly being challenged.
And with it comes a possibility for mainstream America that we may have been rooting for the wrong person for some time now. But can we really be seen as at fault when the story is always told with such a positive spin for the cop – especially when they tell it?
I have been helping countries to overcome financial crises for 30 years, and have studied the economic crises of the twentieth century as background to my advisory work. In all crises, there is an inherent imbalance of power between creditor and debtor. Successful crisis management therefore depends on the creditor’s wisdom. In this regard, I strongly urge Germany to rethink its approach to Greece.
A financial crisis is caused by a country’s excessive indebtedness, which generally reflects a combination of mismanagement by the debtor country, over-optimism, corruption, and the poor judgment and weak incentives of creditor banks. Greece fits that bill. [..]
When a country’s prosperity depends on the continued inflow of capital, a sudden stop or reversal of financial flows triggers a sharp contraction. In Greece, the easy lending stopped with the 2008 global financial crisis. The economy shrunk by 18 percent from 2008 to 2011, and unemployment soared from 8 percent to 18 percent.
The most obvious cause was lower government spending, which reduced aggregate demand. Public-sector workers lost their jobs, and construction projects ground to a halt. As incomes declined, other domestic sectors collapsed.
The crumbling of Boston’s 2024 Olympic bid is a victory for activists and a loss for the city’s most entrenched business interests.
“What we do matters.” “We are many, they are few.” “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
These phrases are what people trying to affect change often say quietly to avoid slouching into despair. Today, they are what crews of Bostonians are singing to one another over rowdy, joyous toasts, confident that their actions just beat back the most powerful plutocrats in town. Make no mistake about it: The 2024 Summer Olympics were on a runaway freight train toward Boston until serious groups of committed citizens got in the way. Local sports legends like Larry Bird and David Ortiz were part of the thirty person ceremonial board of directors preaching that the Olympics would be all financial boom and patriotic pageantry. The powerful-and less telegenic-brokers behind them had the money, the media, and the mayor. But they did not have the people and that made all the difference. [..]
This is an absolute victory for the people of Boston. It is particularly critical for those who would have been most likely to suffer under the weight of a massive police and military presence in the city. But it is also a very positive development for everyone who loves Olympic sports. The IOC is only going to change its methods of extortion when city after city across the globe say ‘hell no’ to their outlandish demands, always conjoined with the economic prerogatives of local business titans and the politicians they grease. Boston should be proud. They have now joined Kraków and Oslo among those who have sent the IOC packing. Now it’s the turn of Los Angeles, Toronto, Budapest, Hamburg, Paris, and Rome, all in the running for 2024, to add their names to this list. Thank you Boston for saving your city and rebuffing those who would ruthlessly exploit what we love about sports and remake our cities into unrecognizable dystopian theme parks.
Washington’s engagement with the continent continues to prioritize security over human rights and economic partnership
President Barack Obama today concludes his triumphant fourth trip to Africa, which featured a return to Kenya and a controversial stopover in Ethiopia, the seat of the African Union. During the visit, he attended an entrepreneurial summit in Nairobi and held discussions with Kenyan, Ethiopian and other regional leaders on matters ranging from U.S.-Africa trade and investment and regional security to human rights.
Obama is the first sitting U.S. president to visit the two countries. And as the first African-American president, he is still a subject of pride to Africans and their vast diaspora. Yet the question must be asked: What exactly is Obama’s Africa legacy? What are the symbolism and substance of what is likely his final trip to Africa as president? Did the U.S. Africa policy evolve or regress during his administration? Although I would like to join those celebrating the homecoming of a local son, I am filled with melancholy and mixed emotions. Obama’s presidency has fallen short of our admittedly high expectations.
Civilian incidents shouldn’t overshadow dangers of letting police drones rule the skies
In the last few years, media reports on hobbyist drones have flown in a frightening and predictable pattern. Nearly every week, these small, camera-equipped, radio-controlled helicopters are framed as public hazards or futuristic tools for criminals – crashing on the White House lawn, attempting cross-border drug deliveries, flying too close to airplanes or attacking Enrique Iglesias on stage. Too often and much to their users’ dismay, they’re conflated with the military death machines (regrettably also called drones) that fire missiles at suspected terrorists and unsuspecting civilians overseas under dubious legal justifications. [..]
While these stories clearly resonate with members of the drone-fearing public, the hype and hysteria can overshadow the fact that drones, like all technologies, are imperfect tools: not good or evil or neutral, beholden to their users and hard coded with the biases of their creators. And if there’s a group of drone users that deserves scrutiny and fear, it’s not our next-door neighbors; it’s the police.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Outbreak of World War One; Troops disperse ‘Bonus Army’ marchers; A U.S. Army bomber crashes into the Empire State Building; Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and author Beatrix Potter born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
When Harvard men say they have graduated from Radcliffe, then we’ve made it.
In the decades after its adoption, the equal protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law. However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which announced federal toleration of the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. However, “colored” facilities were never equal to their white counterparts, and African Americans suffered through decades of debilitating discrimination in the South and elsewhere. In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held that blacks could not be citizens of the United States.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 4 confirmed the legitimacy of all United States public debt appropriated by the Congress. It also confirmed that neither the United States nor any state would pay for the loss of slaves or debts that had been incurred by the Confederacy. For example, several English and French banks had lent money to the South during the war. In Perry v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court ruled that under Section 4 voiding a United States government bond “went beyond the congressional power.” Section 4 has been cited (during the debate in July of 2011 over whether to raise the U.S. debt ceiling) by some legal experts and Democratic members in the U.S. House Democratic caucus, as giving current President Barack Obama the authority to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling if the Congress does not appear to be able to pass an agreement by Tuesday, August 2, 2011. The White House Press Office and President Obama have said that it will not be resorted to, though Democratic members of the House that support the move are formally petitioning him to do so “for the sake of the country’s fiscal stability.” A final resolution to the crisis has not yet been decided upon.
Who knows what madness Ted will spout but he desparately needs to pump up his polls before next week’s Republican debate and The Donald has no monopoly on crazy.
The Church of Scientology says that a human is an immortal, spiritual being (thetan) that is resident in a physical body. The thetan has had innumerable past lives and it is observed in advanced Scientology texts that lives preceding the thetan’s arrival on Earth were lived in extraterrestrial cultures.
See?
But there are no Black people in Maine
You just don’t hang with the right people.
Maine is the Arkansas of the northeast and basically everyone who doesn’t live in the touristy areas is dirt poor and doesn’t have all the teeth they were born with. The rest steal everything they can from the ‘aways’ who stare and take pictures of rocks, water, and trees WHICH WE HAVE MORE OF THAN YOU, YOU NEW HAMPSHIRE BASTARDS!
Yeah, come February and I’ll tell you what upstate New York, New Hampshire and Maine are all about. Cold and dark, on the positive side there aren’t as many bugs.
Me, I live in the armpit of New England where we hide the stinky and smelly by products of the Industrial Revolution with a thin screen of trees because we have class.
The term “Neoliberal” is used a lot here at Daily Kos: 203 posts included the term during the first half of 2015 alone, a little more than one every day. Many of these posts stimulate lively discussion, especially regarding the alleged neoliberalism of various Democratic Party figures, most notably President Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Quantity is not always a sign of quality, however, and many of these discussions suffer from a failure to define neoliberalism adequately or even at all, leading to understandable confusion and misplaced accusations that the term is meaningless. This post will try to avoid that pitfall by proposing a definition of neoliberalism that emphasizes its nature as an ideology, and will then apply that definition to one of Clinton’s most important recent speeches, in which she was widely reported to have returned to traditional liberalism.
In the wake of the agreement with Iran on in nuclear energy program, there has been a lot of shouting from the war hawks that this is a bad deal and characterizing it with hyperbolic rhetoric. Anti-Iran deal lobbies have taken the fight to the airways spending $20 million to $40 million to trash the agreement. The Obama administration has taken to Twitter.
The problem with all of these arguments, whether pro or con, is that they are all based on a false narrative that was created by the Bush administration after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In an article at the Middle East Eye, Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, has no problem with the Iran accord except one: the Obama administration’s the false narrative that Iran is a rogue nuclear state.
The common assumption about Iran’s nuclear policy is never debated or even discussed because it is so firmly entrenched in the political discourse by now that there is no need to discuss it. The choice between two hardline views of Iran is hardly coincidental. The Obama administration accepted from day one the narrative about the Iranian nuclear programme that the Israelis and their American allies had crafted during the Bush administration.
The Bush administration’s narrative, adopted after the invasion of Iraq, described a covert nuclear programme run by Iran for two decades, the main purpose of which was to serve as a cover for a secret nuclear weapons programme. Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Vice-President Dick Cheney, who were managing the policy, cleverly used leaks to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in 2005 to introduce into the domestic political discussion alleged evidence from a collection of documents of then unknown provenance that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons research programme from 2001 to 2003.
The administration also passed the documents on to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005, as part of a Bush strategy aimed to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council on the charge of violating its commitments to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Bolton and Cheney were working with Israel to create a justification for regime change in Iran based on the idea that Iran was working on nuclear weapons under the cover of its nuclear programme.
The entire Bush-Israeli narrative was false, however. It ignored or suppressed fundamental historical facts that contradicted it as this writer found from deeper research on the issue:
>Iran was the one state in the entire world that had a history of abjuring weapons of mass destruction on religious grounds. During the Iran-Iraq war the military leadership had asked Ayatollah Khomeini to approve the manufacture of chemical weapons to retaliate against repeated chemical attacks by Iraqi forces. But Khomeini forbade their possession or use forbidden by the Shia interpretation of the Quran and Shia jurisprudence.
>Iran had begun to pursue uranium enrichment in the mid-1980s only after the Reagan administration had declared publicly that it would prevent Iran from relying on an international consortium in France to provide nuclear fuel for the Bushehr reactor.
>Iran did not inform the IAEA about its acquisition of enrichment technology, its experiments with centrifuges and laser enrichment or its first enrichment facility because of the continued US attempt to suppress the Iranian nuclear programme. Releasing such information would have made it easier for the United States to prevent continued procurement of necessary parts and material and to pressure China to end all nuclear cooperation with Iran.
>The US intelligence community found no hard evidence, either from human intelligence or other forms of intelligence, of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. US national intelligence estimates during the Bush administration concluding that Iran had run such a programme, including the most famous estimate issued in November 2007, were based on inference, not on hard intelligence. That fact stood in sharp contrast to the very unambiguous human and electronic intelligence the CIA had been able to obtain on covert nuclear weapons programmes in Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa and South Korea.
Barack Obama came to the White House with a highly critical view of Bush policy towards both Iran and Iraq and was publicly committed to diplomatic engagement with Iran. But his administration’s acceptance of the Bush line that Iran was a nuclear outlaw can be explained by the continuity of policy that the national security bureaucracy generally maintains in the transition from one administration to another, with rare exceptions.
Bureaucracies create the “facts” about any particular issue that support their interests. Defining the Iranian nuclear threat as a threat to proliferate was clearly in the interests of the counter-proliferation offices in the White House, State Department, and CIA, which wielded strong influence over the issue within their respective institutions.
When will the media, the US and European governments demand that Israel account for its nuclear weapons and be subjected to the same standards that are being imposed on Iran? Israel is the only nation in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons and capable of starting a nuclear holocaust.
This aversion to the truth and facts about Iran and Israel by the media, Europe and the US are major obstacles to peaceful resolutions and good relations in the Middle East.
“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”.
Medicare turns 50 this week, and it has been a very good half-century. Before the program went into effect, Ronald Reagan warned that it would destroy American freedom; it didn’t, as far as anyone can tell. What it did do was provide a huge improvement in financial security (pdf) for seniors and their families, and in many cases it has literally been a lifesaver as well.
But the right has never abandoned its dream of killing the program. So it’s really no surprise that Jeb Bush recently declared that while he wants to let those already on Medicare keep their benefits, “We need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others.” [..]
Right now is, in other words, a very odd time to be going on about the impossibility of preserving Medicare, a program whose finances will be strained by an aging population but no longer look disastrous. One can only guess that Mr. Bush is unaware of all this, that he’s living inside the conservative information bubble, whose impervious shield blocks all positive news about health reform.
Meanwhile, what the rest of us need to know is that Medicare at 50 still looks very good. It needs to keep working on costs, it will need some additional resources, but it looks eminently sustainable. The only real threat it faces is that of attack by right-wing zombies.
This is the season when we hear calls to cut Social Security. That’s because of the annual trustees report on the system’s financial condition.
Last week, the trustees reported that Social Security can pay all of its projected obligations through about 2034. To keep faith with today’s workers and tomorrow’s retirees, Social Security will need additional funds, though the shortfall is entirely manageable if we act in the next few years.
The report prompted the usual rightwing blarney about cutting benefits or privatizing Social Security, as well as familiar bleatings from billionaire deficit-hawks about the need to delay the retirement age for people far less fortunate.
One part of the system, the disability insurance fund, needs additional resources by 2016 — and of course Republicans are calling for cuts in benefits to some of society’s most needy people.
AS the Greek crisis proceeds to its next stage, Germany, Greece and the triumvirate of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission (now better known as the troika) have all faced serious criticism. While there is plenty of blame to share, we shouldn’t lose sight of what is really going on. I’ve been watching this Greek tragedy closely for five years, engaged with those on all sides. Having spent the last week in Athens talking to ordinary citizens, young and old, as well as current and past officials, I’ve come to the view that this is about far more than just Greece and the euro.
Some of the basic laws demanded by the troika deal with taxes and expenditures and the balance between the two, and some deal with the rules and regulations affecting specific markets. What is striking about the new program (called “the third memorandum”) is that on both scores it makes no sense either for Greece or for its creditors.
Buying into the narrative that Iran is a rogue nuclear state could harm the thawing of relations between the country and the US.
I’m glad that the United States and Iran reached an agreement in Vienna after nearly two years of negotiations and 35 years of enmity. A failure to do so under present political conditions would certainly have left a festering conflict with unpredictably bad consequences. And the successful negotiation of such a far-reaching agreement in which both sides made significant concessions should help to moderate the extreme hostility that has been building up in the United States over the years.
But my enthusiasm for the agreement is tempered by the fact that the US political process surrounding the Congressional consideration of the agreement is going to have the opposite effect. And a big part of the problem is that the Obama administration is not going to do anything to refute the extremist view of Iran as determined to get nuclear weapons. Instead the administration is integrating the idea of Iran as rogue nuclear state into its messaging on the agreement. [..]
The common assumption about Iran’s nuclear policy is never debated or even discussed because it is so firmly entrenched in the political discourse by now that there is no need to discuss it. The choice between two hardline views of Iran is hardly coincidental. The Obama administration accepted from day one the narrative about the Iranian nuclear programme that the Israelis and their American allies had crafted during the Bush administration. [..]
The entire Bush-Israeli narrative was false, however. It ignored or suppressed fundamental historical facts that contradicted it as this writer found from deeper research on the issue:
The rise of the donor class and the influx of corporate cash have caused many voters to lose faith in politics
New U.S. Census data released on July 19 confirm what we already knew about American elections: Voter turnout in the United States is among the lowest in the developed world. Only 42 percent of Americans voted in the 2014 midterm elections, the lowest level of voter turnout since 1978. And midterm voters tend to be older, whiter and richer than the general population. The aggregate number is important but turnout among different groups is even more crucial.
Politicians are more accountable and responsive to wealthy voters, not just because rich people vote in elections, but because they are also more likely to donate to campaigns or work on them to get their candidates elected. And the effects of the gap in voter turnout are far-reaching because, for many Americans, elections are one of the only ways in which they can participate in democracy.
Corporations have reaped trillion-dollar benefits from 60 years of public education in the U.S., but they’re skipping out on the taxes meant to sustain the educational system. Children suffer from repeated school cutbacks. And parents subsidize the deadbeat corporations through increases in property taxes and sales taxes. [..]
All of our technology, securities trading, medicine, infrastructure, and national security have their roots in public research and development. The majority (57 percent) of basic research, the essential startup work for products that don’t yet yield profits, is paid for by our tax dollars.
But big business apparently views its tax responsibility as a burden to be avoided at the expense of the rest of us.
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