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Jun 06 2011
Punting the Pundits
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”.
Peter A. Diamond: When a Nobel Prize Isn’t Enough
LAST October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve – at least according to the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination. How can this be?
The easy answer is to point to shortcomings in our confirmation process and to partisan polarization in Washington. The more troubling answer, though, points to a fundamental misunderstanding: a failure to recognize that analysis of unemployment is crucial to conducting monetary policy.
In April 2010, President Obama nominated me to be one of the seven governors of the Fed. He renominated me in September, and again in January, after Senate Republicans blocked a floor vote on my confirmation. When the Senate Banking Committee took up my nomination in July and again in November, three Republican senators voted for me each time. But the third time around, the Republicans on the committee voted in lockstep against my appointment, making it extremely unlikely that the opposition to a full Senate vote can be overcome. It is time for me to withdraw, as I plan to inform the White House.
Paul Krugman: Vouchercare Is Not Medicare
What’s in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would “end Medicare.” This, the letter insisted, was a false claim: the plan would simply install a “new, sustainable version of Medicare.”
But Comcast, the station’s owner, rejected the demand – and rightly so. For Republicans are indeed seeking to dismantle Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a much worse program.
I’m seeing many attempts to shout down anyone making this obvious point, and not just from Republican politicians. For some reason, many commentators seem to believe that accurately describing what the G.O.P. is actually proposing amounts to demagoguery. But there’s nothing demagogic about telling the truth.
The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?
Republicans don’t want to do anything about jobs and wages. They’re so intent on unseating Obama they’d like the economy to remain in the dumps through Election Day. They also see the lousy economy as an opportunity to sell Americans their big lie that government spending is the culprit – and jobs will return if spending is cut and government shrinks.
Democrats, meanwhile, don’t want to admit the recovery has stalled. They worry such talk will further undermine consumer confidence or spook the bond market. They don’t want to head into the election year sounding downbeat. And they don’t think they have the votes for anything that will have much effect before Election Day anyway.
Max Eternity: Dr. Cornel West: Greetings From a 21st-Century Prophet
“There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.”
-Dr. Cornel West“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Can America’s collective economics inform who we are as a people, whereby, through obsessive bean-counting, we sculpt our destiny, tacitly sanctioning the stripping of basic dignity from fellow citizens, the erosion of civil liberties, the evisceration of public education policies, of the arts and humanities, bankrupting entire communities, tarnishing longstanding values of the populace and its self-image, thus ultimately destroying all that was once valuable to society?
For even after the world swooned from the megahype of England’s latest royal wedding and the hip, hip, hurrah of President Obama’s ordered assassination of Osama bin Laden, a cornucopia of catastrophic socioeconomic horrors – in addition to America’s continued unpreparedness for natural disaster – still face this nation: endless war, long-term unemployment, swelling prison populations and multiple years of record-breaking home foreclosures.
Joe Conason: Playing With Default
The current puppet play in Congress, where Republicans sponsored a bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling only because they wanted to vote it down, would be funny, if only they weren’t risking economic disaster. Unfortunately they’re not joking, as they push the country closer and closer to a potentially ruinous default.
If the showdown over debt and spending between the House majority and the White House isn’t resolved before the first week of August, the federal government will no longer be able to send out Social Security checks, run Veterans Administration hospitals, pay Medicare costs or operate the national park system, to mention just a few significant items. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed without pay, and millions of seniors would stop spending money, slamming an economy that already seems stalled.
But the consequences of that unprecedented situation would reverberate around the world, as nearly every expert, from the top bond trader, Mohamed El-Rian, to former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, has warned.
Dana Milbank: Hubris and humility: Sarah Palin and Robert Gates on tour
“It’s not about me,” Sarah Palin said as she rode a bus emblazoned with her name in three-foot letters. “It’s not a publicity-seeking tour,” she told her Fox News interviewer, as the cameras rolled.
It was, rather, “about highlighting the great things about America.” Such as: Donald Trump’s digs at Trump Tower and Fox News headquarters in New York, both stops on her “One Nation” bus tour.
Actually, there is a tour underway that highlights the great things about America, but it isn’t Palin’s. It’s the farewell tour of Robert Gates, defense secretary to presidents George W. Bush and Obama, whose work over the past 41 / 2 years has dramatically improved the state of the U.S. military. While Palin played cat-and-mouse with the press corps on Interstate 95, Gates set off on a tour of Asia and Europe, where he is receiving the gratitude of soldiers and the acclaim of allies.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. Romney’s flawed view of freedom
The bales of hay were stacked strategically in the hope that they’d make it into the television screen. The sturdy white barn nearby provided an image worthy of a Christmas card, the symbol of a solid, calm, industrious and confident country. The slogan behind the candidate, “Believe in America,” did not invite debate.
Whatever the punditocracy may have made of Mitt Romney’s formal announcement of his presidential candidacy last week, we could all give the guy credit for trying to reassure us that not everything in politics has changed.
In an age of media flying circuses where you never know who is running for president and who is just trying to boost book sales and speaking fees, Romney did it the old-fashioned way. He really, really wants to be president, and he offered pretty pictures to encourage us to watch him saying so. It was the venerable liturgy of our civil religion.
Jun 06 2011
On This Day In History June 6
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
Click on image to enlarge
June 6 is the 157th day of the year (158th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 208 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 1933, eager motorists park their automobiles on the grounds of Park-In Theaters, the first-ever drive-in movie theater, located on Crescent Boulevard in Camden, New Jersey.
The drive-in theater was the creation of Camden, New Jersey, chemical company magnate Richard M. Hollingshead, Jr., whose family owned and operated the R.M. Hollingshead Corporation chemical plant in Camden. In 1932, Hollingshead conducted outdoor theater tests in his driveway at 212 Thomas Avenue in Riverton. After nailing a screen to trees in his backyard, he set a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car and put a radio behind the screen, testing different sound levels with his car windows down and up. Blocks under vehicles in the driveway enabled him to determine the size and spacing of ramps so all automobiles could have a clear view of the screen. Following these experiments, he applied August 6, 1932, for a patent of his invention, and he was given U.S. Patent 1,909,537 on May 16, 1933. That patent was declared invalid 17 years later by the Delaware District Court.
Hollingshead’s drive-in opened in New Jersey June 6, 1933, on Admiral Wilson Boulevard at the Airport Circle in Pennsauken, a short distance from Cooper River Park. It offered 500 slots and a 40 by 50 ft (12 by 15 m) screen. He advertised his drive-in theater with the slogan, “The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” (The first film shown was the Adolphe Menjou film Wife Beware.) The facility only operated three years, but during that time the concept caught on in other states. The April 15, 1934, opening of Shankweiler’s Auto Park in Orefield, Pennsylvania, was followed by Galveston’s Drive-In Short Reel Theater (July 5, 1934), the Pico in Los Angeles (September 9, 1934) and the Weymouth Drive-In Theatre in Weymouth, Massachusetts (May 6, 1936). In 1937, three more opened in Ohio, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with another 12 during 1938 and 1939 in California, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Texas and Virginia. Michigan’s first drive-in was the Eastside, which opened May 26, 1938, in Harper Woods near Detroit.
Early drive-in theaters had to deal with noise pollution issues. The original Hollingshead drive-in had speakers installed on the tower itself which caused a sound delay affecting patrons at the rear of the drive-in’s field. Attempts at outdoor speakers next to the vehicle did not produce satisfactory results. In 1941, RCA introduced in-car speakers with individual volume controls which solved the noise pollution issue and provided satisfactory sound to drive-in patrons.
Jun 06 2011
Immigrants For Sale
Prisons for profits, with our tax dollars
Immigrants are for sale in this country. Sold to private prison corporations who are locking them up for obscene profits!
Here are the top 3 things YOU need to know about the Private Prison money scheme:
The victims: Private prisons don’t care about who they lock up. At a rate of $200 per immigrant a night at their prisons, this is a money making scheme that destroys families and lives.
The players: CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), The Geo Group and Management and Training corporations-combined these private prisons currently profit more than $5 billion a year.
The money: These private prisons have spent over $20 million lobbying state legislators to make sure they get state anti-immigrant laws approved and ensure access to more immigrant inmates.
Exposing The Immigrants For Sale Scheme
Georgia is the latest state to pass an anti-immigrant bill like SB1070, with Governor Deal having signed it on Friday. Georgia is ALSO home to the largest private prison in the country.
It’s hardly a secret that private prison corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO group, along with right-wing lobbying group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and a few pocketed state legislators like Russell Pearce in Arizona, have been at it-deliberately promoting and designing laws aimed at incarcerating immigrants and turning the prison system into an incredibly lucrative business.
Just last year the private prison industry secured close to $5 billion through state and government elicited contracts of which an increasing percentage is attributed to migrant detention facilities and bed spaces. An NPR report outlined how CCA aims to translate the anti-immigrant rhetoric and political void into a long-lasting cash drive-believing that immigrants will provide a fresh influx of ‘guests’ in their less then onerous ‘hotel’ cells. Even worse, CCA founder Tomas Beasly once called his scheme ‘more profitable’ than selling burgers or cars-a clear indication that any sense of justice in the prison industry will be forever trumped by cash flows and profit margins.
It is clear that for CCA, along with the GEO Group and Management and Training, immigrants are a product-one that is for sale to the highest vendor. They view locked-up immigrants as the next big share jump, stock option, bonus incentive, or any other motive that tickles their multi-billion dollar fancy. They have no shame admitting so-every year the private prison industry gets together for a major convention to essentially design strategies that will fill the more then 150,000 bed spaces they currently own.
Recall For AZ Russell Pearce Gains Momentum: 18K Signatures – Twice What Is Needed
We’ve been tracking the recall campaign against Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, author of SB1070, because he insisted on playing his nativist fiddle in the Senate while Arizona’s economy burned to the ground. It probably hasn’t helped that he’s become belligerent whenever anyone brings up his role in the Fiesta Bowl scandal, either.
Of course, Greta Van Susteren knew better than to ask Pearce any such tough questions last night on her Fox show. She mostly lobbed out the news of the day – the fact that the people leading the recall had filed more than twice what they needed, some 18,000 signatures – and let him swing away.
But Pearce looked scared, and he should be:
In a celebratory display of unprecedented organization, a bipartisan group of activists poured into the Arizona secretary of state’s office yesterday with more than 18,300 signatures to demand the recall of State Senate president Russell Pearce. The filing of the petitions marked the culmination of a campaign that has defied expectations, and a watershed moment for the beleaguered state. Once the state and Maricopa County recorders verify the legal requirement of 7,756 signatures from the traditionally conservative and Mormon-founded Mesa district, Pearce, who is considered by many as the de facto governor and motivating force behind the state’s notorious blitz of extremist policies on education, health, guns and immigration, will become the first State Senate president in American history to be recalled.
h/t Crooks & Liars
Jun 05 2011
Rant of the Week: Jon Stewart
Donald Trump disrespects New Yorkers by taking Sarah Palin to a pizza chain and eating his stacked slices with a fork.
Jun 05 2011
On This Day In History June 5
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
Click on image to enlarge
June 5 is the 156th day of the year (157th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 209 days remaining until the end of the year
1933, the United States went off the gold standard, a monetary system in which currency is backed by gold, when Congress enacted a joint resolution nullifying the right of creditors to demand payment in gold. The United States had been on a gold standard since 1879, except for an embargo on gold exports during World War I, but bank failures during the Great Depression of the 1930s frightened the public into hoarding gold, making the policy untenable.
Soon after taking office in March 1933, Roosevelt declared a nationwide bank moratorium in order to prevent a run on the banks by consumers lacking confidence in the economy. He also forbade banks to pay out gold or to export it. According to Keynesian economic theory, one of the best ways to fight off an economic downturn is to inflate the money supply. And increasing the amount of gold held by the Federal Reserve would in turn increase its power to inflate the money supply. Facing similar pressures, Britain had dropped the gold standard in 1931, and Roosevelt had taken note.
Prolongation of the Great Depression
Some economic historians, such as American professor Barry Eichengreen, blame the gold standard of the 1920s for prolonging the Great Depression. Others including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman lay the blame at the feet of the Federal Reserve. The gold standard limited the flexibility of central banks’ monetary policy by limiting their ability to expand the money supply, and thus their ability to lower interest rates. In the US, the Federal Reserve was required by law to have 40% gold backing of its Federal Reserve demand notes, and thus, could not expand the money supply beyond what was allowed by the gold reserves held in their vaults.
In the early 1930s, the Federal Reserve defended the fixed price of dollars in respect to the gold standard by raising interest rates, trying to increase the demand for dollars. Its commitment and adherence to the gold standard explain why the U.S. did not engage in expansionary monetary policy. To compete in the international economy, the U.S. maintained high interest rates. This helped attract international investors who bought foreign assets with gold. Higher interest rates intensified the deflationary pressure on the dollar and reduced investment in U.S. banks. Commercial banks also converted Federal Reserve Notes to gold in 1931, reducing the Federal Reserve’s gold reserves, and forcing a corresponding reduction in the amount of Federal Reserve Notes in circulation. This speculative attack on the dollar created a panic in the U.S. banking system. Fearing imminent devaluation of the dollar, many foreign and domestic depositors withdrew funds from U.S. banks to convert them into gold or other assets.
The forced contraction of the money supply caused by people removing funds from the banking system during the bank panics resulted in deflation; and even as nominal interest rates dropped, inflation-adjusted real interest rates remained high, rewarding those that held onto money instead of spending it, causing a further slowdown in the economy. Recovery in the United States was slower than in Britain, in part due to Congressional reluctance to abandon the gold standard and float the U.S. currency as Britain had done.
Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act on 30 January 1934; the measure nationalized all gold by ordering the Federal Reserve banks to turn over their supply to the U.S. Treasury. In return the banks received gold certificates to be used as reserves against deposits and Federal Reserve notes. The act also authorized the president to devalue the gold dollar so that it would have no more than 60 percent of its existing weight. Under this authority the president, on 31 January 1934, fixed the value of the gold dollar at 59.06 cents.
Jun 05 2011
Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition
“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”.
The Sunday Talking Heads:
This Week with Christiane Amanpour: Ms. Amanpour has an exclusive interview with the president’s top adviser on the economy, Austan Goolsbee.
To discuss the never ending stand-off on the economy and how it should be managed is 2008 Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman of The New York Times, chief economist of the Chamber of Commerce Martin Regalia and Chrystia Freeland of Thomson Reuters.
The “This Week” roundtable takes on all the week’s politics with Republican political adviser Mark McKinnon, ABC News’ senior political correspondent, Jonathan Karl, former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers and the Republican presidential candidate rising in the polls, Herman Cain.
Except for Krugman, that you can catch later on-line, weeding the garden would be more interesting.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Joining Mr. Schieffer is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour.
The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests Bob Woodward, The Washington Post Associate Editor, Helene Cooper, The New York Times White House Correspondent, Alex Wagner, Politics Daily White House Correspondent and John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent will discuss these questions:
He won the White House as the insurgent, so how will Barack Obama win again as the incumbent?
Can Republicans run for president while running from interviews?
Meet the Press with David Gregory: We get a break from Lurch this week for live coverage of the Men’s Final of the French Open at Stade Roland Garros in Paris between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. This is what I’ll be watching with a café au lait and a croissant.
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests: Chief economist on President Obama’s Economic Advisory Board, Austan Goolsbee, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Alice Rivlin, and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, presidential candidate Ron Paul, former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman and Counselor to President Bush.
Tennis, sleep or weeding the garden, your many options
Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Mr. Zakaria’s guests will be two top economists, Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University and Kenneth Rogoff from Harvard and an interview with a top leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Essam El Erian
The Washington Post Editors work in a city and live in a nation in which huge numbers of poor and minority residents are consigned to cages for petty and trivial transgressions of the criminal law — typically involving drugs — and pursuant to processes that are extremely tilted toward the State. Post Editors virtually never speak out against that, if they ever have. But that all changes — that indifference disappears — when political elites are targeted for prosecution, even for serious crimes . . .
In some of these cases (Libby, Mubarak), the Post couches its defense of political elites in terms of concerns about the process while claiming they’re receptive to the possibility of punishment. In others (Edwards), the concerns they raise are not invalid. But whatever else is true, Post Editors are deeply and almost invariably disturbed when political elites are subjected to criminal accountability for their wrongful acts, but wholly indifferent — if not supportive — when ordinary Americans are mercilessly prosecuted for far less serious wrongdoing.
And it’s not just Post Editors, but their stable of Op-Ed columnists, who reflexively defend political elites when they break the law. The late Dean of the Washington Press Corps, David Broder, was one of the first and most vocal advocates of one of the earliest expressions of elite immunity: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, and Broder repeated that defense in 2006 upon Ford’s death (“I thought and wrote at the time that he was well justified to spare the country further struggling with the Nixon legacy”). The Post‘s Broder also vigorously defended President Obama’s decision to oppose prosecution of Bush officials: “he was just as right to declare that there should be no prosecution of those who carried out what had been the policy of the United States government. And he was right when he sent out his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to declare that the same amnesty should apply to the lawyers and bureaucrats who devised and justified the Bush administration practices.”
Maureen Dowd: An Archbishop Burns While Rome Fiddles
The archbishop of Dublin was beginning to sniffle.
He could not get through a story about “a really nasty man” – an Irish priest who sexually abused, physically tortured and emotionally threatened vulnerable boys – without pulling out his handkerchief and wiping his nose.
“He built a swimming pool in his own garden, to which only boys of a certain age, of a certain appearance were allowed into it,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told me recently. “There were eight other priests in that parish, and not one of them seemed to think there was something strange about it.”
Two years after learning the extent of the depraved and Dickensian treatment of children in the care of the Irish Catholic Church – a fifth circle of hell hidden for decades by church and police officials – the Irish are still angry and appalled.
César Chelala: UN Sharply Critical of US on Women’s Rights
The United Nations Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, has issued a very critical report of the U.S. on its policies on women’s rights. The report is based on a trip of the Special Rapporteur to the US from 24 January to 7 February 2011. During that trip, Ms. Rashida Manjoo broadly examined issues of violence against women in different settings. Her recommendations should provide fruitful material for the U.S. to improve its policies towards women.
As indicated in the report, “Violence against women occurs along a continuum in which the various forms of violence are often both causes and consequences of violence.” Domestic violence or Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is one of the most critical expressions of violence. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) 552,000 violent crimes by an intimate partner were committed against women in the U.S. in 2008.
Their husbands or intimate acquaintances are responsible for the majority of crimes against women. The Violence Policy Center states that the number of women shot and killed by their husbands or intimate acquaintances was four times higher than the total number of women murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined, according to an analysis of 2008 data.
James Hansen: Silence Is Deadly: I’m Speaking Out Against Canada-U.S. Tar Sands Pipeline
The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline, known as Keystone XL to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised. The scientific community needs to get involved in this fray now. If this project gains approval, it will become exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands monster. The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities. Although there are multiple objections to tar sands development and the pipeline, including destruction of the environment in Canada, and the likelihood of spills along the pipeline’s pathway, such objections, by themselves, are very unlikely to stop the project.
An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts. The tar sands are estimated (e.g., see IPCC Fourth Assessment Report) to contain at least 400 GtC (equivalent to about 200 ppm CO2). Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth. However, if emissions from coal are phased out over the next few decades and if unconventional fossil fuels including tar sands are left in the ground, it is conceivable to stabilize earth’s climate.
Jun 05 2011
Mangled History: Palin’s Version Of Revere’s Midnight Ride
No bells, no whistles and no shots fired but some Tea Party revisionists will take the former Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin on her word. Maybe if she would have had a clue if had checked Wikipedia, read the poem or even YouTube:
One If By Misstatement, Two If By Ignorant: Palin Gets an “F” in American History
It is tiresome to pick on Palin. She has taken more than her share of hits on matters of geography, newspaper reading, American allies and favorite founders. Even conservatives ridicule her — it was Glenn Beck who pressed her on the favorite founder issue.
There is little point to piling on after Beck has taken his shot.
Palin is not going to run for president because (as the polling makes abundantly clear) Republicans do not want her to be their candidate, because (as the polling makes even more abundantly clear) Americans would never elect her and because she is not about to give up her lucrative book, broadcasting and speaking fees to go back into public service.
It has ever been the case that Palin’s patriotism extends only so far as it benefits her own self-interest.
What is now equally evident, however, is that her historical bumbling is not a misstep here, a misstatement there. It is a pattern, a pattern of disconnection with and disinterest in the American story. Like so many politicians, she uses American history as a prop, not as inspiration, and certainly not as instruction.
It is astonishing that the ignorance of this woman and her counter part, Michelle Bachmann, garner this much attention from the MSM. Frankly, they are both embarrassing representations of women.
Jun 05 2011
The Abbreviated Evening Edition
Our Chief News Editor ek hornbeck has the day off and left me in charge. 🙂
Well, I’ve had a busy day with maintenance and shopping, nice buy a new sandals. So tonight’s Evening edition is going to be ABBREVIATED.
Britain deploys top diplomat, helicopters to Libya
by Jean-Pierre Campagne – 2 hrs 36 mins ago
BENGHAZI, Libya (AFP) – British Foreign Minister William Hague on Saturday met leaders of rebels fighting to oust Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi after NATO deployed attack helicopters for the first time.
Russia’s top diplomat, meanwhile, warned that the NATO military operation in Libya was “sliding towards” a land campaign as warplanes again blasted the capital Tripoli.
“We are here today for one principal reason — to show our support for the Libyan people and for the National Transitional Council, the legitimate representative of the Libyan people,” Hague said in a statement.
Hague, accompanied by international development minister Andrew Mitchell, held talks with chief of the rebel National Transitional Council Mustafa al-Jalil.
3 dead in Syria clashes as burials draw 100,000
DAMASCUS (AFP) – Security forces on Saturday killed three demonstrators in northwestern Syria, after more than 100,000 mourners turned out in Hama for the funerals of protesters, rights groups said.
In Jisrash Shughur, “security forces opened fire to scatter more than 1,000 demonstrators protesting after the funeral of a civilian killed on Friday” in protests at the nearby village http://www.thestarshollowgazet… Has in northwestern Idlib province, an activist said on condition of anonymity.
Jun 04 2011
Health and Fitness News
Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.
You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.
A few years ago, we began to hear a lot about flaxseeds. Rich in omega-3 fatty acids, these seeds also are loaded with vitamin E, B vitamins and certain important minerals (manganese, potassium, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc and selenium). . . . .
Flaxseeds are harder than sesame seeds, so it’s a good idea to grind them – coarse or fine, depending on the recipe. That way, too, all the nutrition in flaxseeds is more readily available to the body. Keep what you don’t use in the refrigerator or freezer, as the oils in flaxseeds, like those in most nuts and seeds, will oxidize if not kept cold.
Besides using them in this week’s recipes, you can add ground toasted flaxseeds to yogurt, smoothies, granola and baked goods. You can sprinkle them on salads or mix them into salad dressings, or even stir them into mustard, mayonnaise or other sandwich spreads.
This substantial smoothie is perfect following a high-energy workout.
These crisp fillets are a great way to work flaxseeds, toasted or not, into a main dish.
Use toasted flaxseeds for this nutty, not-too-sweet granola.
Inspired by a recipe from “Good to the Grain,” by Kim Boyce, and not too sweet.
When you bake raspberries in this crumble, the flavors deepen.
Jun 04 2011
Punting the Pundits
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”.
Paul Krugman: From American Conservatives, Voodoo Economics
So Representative Paul D. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, recently gave a big speech defending his budget plan – and demonstrated, in case you were wondering, that there’s no “there” there (and there never was).
Remember how everyone declared that Mr. Ryan was a serious person, truly willing to face up to the United States’ deficit problem? Well, now he’s out there denouncing the way “the budget debate has degenerated into a game of green-eyeshade arithmetic” – in other words, enough with all these numbers.
And his answer to the deficit now is that we have to grow our way out.
There’s a name for that: voodoo economics.
New York Times Editorial: When States Punish Women
The Obama administration has rightly decided to reject a mean-spirited and dangerous Indiana law banning the use of Medicaid funds at Planned Parenthood clinics, which provide vital health services to low-income women.
The law, signed by Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana in May, is just one effort by Republican-led state legislatures around the country to end public financing for Planned Parenthood – a goal the House Republicans failed to achieve in the budget deal in April. The organization is a favorite target because a small percentage of its work involves providing abortion care even though no government money is used for that purpose.Governor Daniels and Republican lawmakers, by depriving Planned Parenthood of about $3 million in government funds, would punish thousands of low-income women on Medicaid, who stand to lose access to affordable contraception, life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing and treatment for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. Making it harder for women to obtain birth control is certainly a poor strategy for reducing the number of abortions.
The unemployment rate edged up again in May, reaching 9.1 percent, as the rate of private-sector job growth slowed to just 83,000. There were also downward revisions to the prior two months data, which lowered the average for the last three months to 160,000, approximately 70,000 more than what is needed to keep pace with the growth of the labor force. Some of the weakness in May probably stemmed from quirks that exaggerated April job growth. For example, the retail sector reportedly added 64,000 jobs in April. It lost 8,500 in May. Health added 36,700 jobs in April, compared with an increase of just 17,400 in May. Food manufacturing added 6,300 jobs in April, it lost 7,000 in May. These are most likely quirks of seasonal adjustments, not sharp shifts in the economy itself.
Taking a longer, three-month snapshot, there is not much that is very encouraging. A loss of 5,000 jobs in manufacturing brings the average gain over the last three months to 13,000. Construction added 2,000 jobs in May, bringing its average gain to 4,000. Job growth in retail has averaged 16,700 over the last three months. Health care has added an average of 28,000 jobs since February. The rate in restaurants has been 23,000.
Johann Hari: It’s Not Just Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The IMF Itself Should Be On Trial
Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but with starving her, and her family, to death
Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.
So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.
To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honorable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured the money and resources of the planet were forever hoovered towards them. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: No Need to Demagogue the Ryan Plan
It always gets back to health care.
That’s why 2009 and 2010 were so consumed by President Barack Obama’s push for health care reform, and why Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals are at the center of politics in 2011. Our long-term budget problem is primarily about two things: a shortage of revenue and rising health care costs.
The revenue and health cost issues are intertwined. The whole debate comes down to whether we want government to absorb a significant part of the risk of insuring us against illness, which means we’ll have to pay somewhat higher taxes, or whether we want to throw more and more of that risk onto individuals.
So let’s welcome Ryan’s call for considering his proposals on their merits. Yes, Republicans who invented “death panels” out of whole cloth and insisted, falsely, that Obama’s health proposal was nothing but a “government takeover” have a lot of nerve complaining about the “demagoguery” against Ryan.
David Sirota: Cutting Kids’ Health Care Will Make Deficits Bigger
In the name of curtailing deficits, politicians across the country are hacking away at programs that aim to make children healthier. In Congress, for example, House Republicans are spearheading a budget that eviscerates funding for food assistance and effectively defunds the wildly successful Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Similarly, from Texas to California, state lawmakers are chopping children’s health programs in the face of budget shortfalls. In all these initiatives, the rhetorical leitmotif is “fiscal responsibility.”
Like clockwork, this has set off the now-standard ideological debate over values, with liberals arguing that it’s immoral to deny health care to today’s kids and conservatives countering that it’s even more immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. But as highlighted by a new National Bureau of Economic Research report, both sides are ignoring the most important non-ideological fact: Any so-called “deficit reduction” plan that cuts child health programs is almost certain to increase deficits.
Medea Benjamin: Come Dance with Me (and Thomas Jefferson)
Dancing can be dangerous. In Ceausescu’s Romania I was arrested for dancing without a partner. In newly independent Guinea Bissau, my dancing partner was thrown in jail for boogying before the President and his wife had the first dance. In Cuba I was awoken at 4am to bail out a friend who had been locked up for “lesbian dancing.” And in Afghanistan I narrowly escaped arrest for dancing on a “men-only” dance floor. On each occasion I was shocked by the misuse of government power and disrespect for personal freedom.
So I naturally felt the same sense of outrage when I heard about the case of Mary Brooke Oberwetter, who was arrested for dancing quietly (with a headset on) at the Jefferson Memorial back in 2008. She sued the Park Police, lost and then appealed. On May 17, 2011 the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against her, saying that that dancing at memorials is forbidden “because it stands out as a type of performance, creating its own center of attention and distracting from the atmosphere of solemn commemoration.” Never mind that Oberwetter was arrested at midnight, when there was nobody but her and her friends around. Never mind that tourists at these memorials are always talking loudly, posing for photos and making all kinds of “distractions.” Never mind that dance can be a way to express joy at the freedoms espoused by our founding fathers.
To protest this absurd ruling, some folks put out a call on Facebook to gather on Saturday, May 28, to dance at the Memorial. I heard about it from my friend Adam Kokesh, an Iraq war vet and producer of the show Adam vs. the Man on the network Russia Today. A committed libertarian, Adam decided to help spread the word and join the protest.
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