Politics - what I see and what I do not understand

“Where Are The Women?”: A National Assault On Women’s Health, Reproductive Rights…And Birth Control

2012-02-17T21:40:00.000-05:00

Feb 17,2012

From presidential politics to the halls of Congress to state legislatures across the nation, scores of lawmakers and politicians have made the curious decision to launch an assault on women’s rights.

Despite an incumbent president vulnerable thanks to persistent economic worries and states faced with ills ranging from budget deficits to foreclosure crises, America’s current crop of political leaders are litigating contraception and “fetal personhood” in the year 2012. Women in the United States arguably have not faced the construction of such legislative barriers since the suffrage movement.

Seizing the most headlines this month has been the public spat between the Catholic Church and the federal government over birth control, which has developed into a one-sided national discussion; the Church and conservative lawmakers seeking to place restrictions on contraception against the overwhelming majority of the country (including 98 percent of Catholics) that heartily approves of the general theory and use of birth control.

The Obama administration’s ruling that religious organizations employing and serving a significant number of people outside of their own religion must include access to contraception as part of employer-provided health insurance ignited a firestorm among religious leaders. The U.S. Catholic Church — the group most likely to be affected by the law thanks to its number of public hospitals, schools and other institutions — launched an immediate protest.

The government eventually relented, offering a compromise ridiculed by experts and progressive as a dangerous risk to women’s health and rights. Catholic bishops still refused to acquiesce, claiming “moral concerns” about the idea of including any kind of birth control coverage in employer-provided insurance since church doctrines preach against the use of contraceptives.

U.S. Catholic Church leaders said they will fight President Barack Obama’s controversial birth-control insurance coverage policy despite his compromise that religious employers would not have to offer free contraceptives for workers, shifting the responsibility to insurers.

In an abrupt policy shift aimed at trying to end a growing election-year firestorm, Obama on Friday announced the compromise.

But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said its concerns were not addressed and cited “serious moral concerns.”

In a statement issued Friday evening, the bishops said Obama’s proposal “continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions.”

“We will therefore continue – with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency – our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government,” the bishops said in urging Congress to take action to overturn the rule.

Not only has the issue of contraception been up for debate within the church establishment itself but, as noted above, virtually all U.S. Catholics defy their own church’s teachings and accept birth control as a basic staple of modern life. Observers say that the Catholic Church has blundered and seems out of touch in forcing an extreme debate over women’s health considering its own recent past is littered with highly public failings.

Religious sensitivities aside, the question of birth control on a constitutional level was answered by the U.S. Supreme Court nearly half a century ago in the famous “Griswold v. Connecticut” decision. The present day brouhaha is literally an anachronism from the 1960′s.

Nonetheless, contraception has suddenly become a hot button — if not one-sided — issue for the current campaign season. “The pill” has become a political football, which is how American taxpayers ended up paying for a congressional hearing on Thursday that delved into the question of contraception and its role in American society.

Chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) the House hearing was devoted to the Obama administration’s mandate and the religious community’s opposition to it, with the Republican majority accusing the government of launching an attack on religious freedoms.

But in the officially sanctioned debate over birth control — a decidedly ”female” decision — not a single woman was called upon as a witness. Such an oversight caused quite a stir with the female lawmakers sitting in on the conversation.

A Capitol Hill hearing that was supposed to be about religious freedom and a mandate that health insurers cover contraception in the United States began as an argument about whether Democrats could add a woman to the all-male panel.

“Where are the women?” the minority Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked early in the hearing.

She criticized the Republican committee chairman, Rep. Darrel Issa, for wanting to “roll back the fundamental rights of women to a time when the government thought what happens in the bedroom is their business.”

“We will not be forced back to that primitive era,” she said.

The unexpected referendum on birth control has led to an eye-opening reveal of the lack of enlightenment, as some may call it, among certain individuals on an issue that can unquestionably be described as settled and wholly uncontroversial.

To ask Foster Friess, a conservative multi-millionaire currently bankrolling a super-PAC supporting Republican presidential frontrunner Rick Santorum, American women would be better off to forgo the “costly” modern methods and simply put a “Bayer aspirin…between their knees.”

Foster Friess, the mega donor behind the pro-Rick Santorum Super PAC, dismissed questions about his patron’s controversial views on women in combat, contraception and gay marriage.

……………

He went on: “On this contraceptive thing, my Gosh it’s such [sic] inexpensive,” he added. “You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”

While birth control has suddenly become a topic for debate on the national scene, only a select few are actually seeking legislation that would ban the use of contraceptives. This is not the case with the reproductive rights, another issue crucial to women’s health and constitutional integrity.

New fronts in the war on a woman’s right to choose have developed across the United States. In Texas, where last year lawmakers passed one of the strictest laws regarding abortion tights at the time, a federal court has blocked a challenge to the state law mandating sonograms before any abortion procedure. Women’s health advocates complain that the ruling has “violated” the First Amendment rights of Texas women.

This week alone, two states have approved unprecedented restrictions on abortion rights that could have far-reaching legal and health consequences.

In Virginia on Tuesday, the radical conservative legislature passed a pair of bills that instantly give the the commonwealth some of the most extreme laws barring a women’s right to choose in the nation. Lawmakers passed legislation that would require ultrasounds before any abortion procedure and a so-called “personhood bill,” a law considered the last step before an outright ban on abortion that bestows the rights of ”personhood” on “unborn children” almost from the moment on conception.

Virginia’s “personhood” law is a virtual copy of a referendum that failed in Mississippi last year. Contraception is also under attack with this law, because its language bars the use and access to certain form of birth control. Critics argue the legislation could be used to place an outright ban on birth control in the future.

The Tuesday passage in Virginia of two of the strictest anti-abortion bills in the country has sparked fierce debate over abortion rights the battleground state, with Democrats decrying the acts as an unprecedented encroachment on women’s rights as Republicans push to move the legislation forward.

One bill, Republican Del. Bob Marshall’s House bill 1, would define personhood at conception and “provides that unborn children at every stage of development enjoy all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of the Commonwealth.” The second bill requires that women be required to undergo an ultrasound procedure prior to having an abortion.

The personhood bill, which passed by 66-32 in the Virginia state House, does not ban abortions, the legality of which are protected under the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. It would, however, make illegal certain types of contraceptive measures, including emergency contraception. Women’s health advocates say it could also open the door to banning birth control pills and intrauterine devices (IUD).

Besides outrage from pro-choice groups and women’s rights advocates, doctors in Virginia have expressed deep concern with the language of the personhood bill and the potential ramifications it could hold. Doctors say they could be charged with manslaughter in cases of contraception or abortive procedures used to save the life of a patient.

Going even further than Virginia, lawmakers in Oklahoma approved legislation this week that would create a similar “personhood law.” More extreme than any law currently in effect, Oklahoma has moved to the brink of a challenge to Roe v. Wade by virtually outlawing abortion.

The Oklahoma state Senate passed a “Personhood Act” that would give all human embryos individual rights from the instant of conception, effectively banning abortions and most forms of contraception. Most significantly, there is no exception for cases of rape, incest, or instances where a mother’s life could be saved. The state Senate President said he is “proud” to “stand up” for the “right to life.”

Oklahoma lawmakers edged closer toward trying to outlaw abortion on Wednesday by approving “personhood” legislation that gives individual rights to an embryo from the moment of conception.

The Republican-controlled state Senate voted 34-8 to pass the “Personhood Act” which defines the word person under state law to include unborn children from the moment of conception.

The measure now goes to the state House where pro-life Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than a 2-1 margin.

Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Mary Fallin, who signed every anti-abortion bill sent to her last year, did not issue a reaction to the latest right-to-life measure.

“Oklahoma is a conservative pro-life state-we are proud to stand up for what we know is right,” Senate Pro Tempore President Brian Bingman, a Republican, said.

“This bill is one of many Senate Republicans have advanced which affirms the right to life and I am proud to support it,” he added.

…………

But Martha Skeeters, president of the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice, said that a state law declaring that life begins at conception could have “dire consequences.”

The bill offers no exceptions in the case of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest and could mean some forms of contraception such as the “morning after pill” would be unavailable, she said.

State Senator's Comeback to Mandatory Ultrasound Bill:

2012-02-17T21:23:00.004-05:00

Mandatory Rectal Exams for Men Seeking Viagra

—By Maya Dusenbery

| Tue Jan. 31, 2012 11:30 AM PST

Virginia state Sen. Janet Howell said her amendment was just about "basic fairness." Janet Howell

In a tongue-in-check effort to add "some gender equity" to a mandatory ultrasound bill proposed in Virginia, state Sen. Janet Howell proposed an amendment requiring men to undergo a rectal exam and cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
Well, apparently not in this case. Legislators rejected Howell's amendment Monday by a rather slim 21 to 19 margin. The original bill, which is expected to pass the full Senate on Tuesday, requires women to have an ultrasound and be offered an opportunity to view the image—despite the fact that a routine ultrasound is not considered medically necessary for a first-trimester abortion (PDF). Explaining her amendment on the Senate floor, Howell said, "It’s only fair, that if we’re going to subject women to unnecessary procedures, and we’re going to subject doctors to having to do things that they don’t think is medically advisory, well, Mr. President, I think we should just have a little gender equity here."
Many states have such so-called "informed consent" laws (PDF), which, as MoJo's Kate Sheppard has pointed out, are based on the premise that "women don't know what's in their uterus." While abortion foes argue that ultrasounds are necessary to ensure that women fully grasp the consequences of their decision to abort, there's no evidence to suggest that women don't understand that abortion ends a pregnancy. Indeed, the Texas Tribune/New York Times recently reported on the effect of Texas' similar new law, which was allowed to go into effect earlier this month even though its constitutionality is being challenged in court. The law has resulted in a "bureaucratic nightmare" but, according to both clinic directors and abortion opponents, it hasn't caused a single woman to change her mind about getting an abortion.

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Virginia Legislature Votes to Slash Abortion Funding for Low-Income Women

2012-02-17T21:06:00.003-05:00

—By Maddie Oatman

| Thu Feb. 16, 2012 4:02 PM PST

In Virginia, a low-income pregnant woman who wishes to abort because her fetus has a totally incapacitating deformity or mental disability may no longer be eligible for the aid she needs to do so. On Thursday the Virginia Senate Committee on Education and Health approved House Bill 62, which would repeal the section of the state code that authorizes the Board of Health to fund abortions for pregnancies with certain complications.

The bill puts no restrictions on women who can afford to abort these types of pregnancies. That's why the Pro-Choice Coalition of Virginia (which includes NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia and the ACLU) has deemed the legislation discriminatory. "When a woman receives a catastrophic prenatal diagnosis, she should have the same options her wealthier counterparts enjoy to end the pregnancy safely and with dignity," the Coalition said in a press release sent out Thursday morning.

It's worth mentioning that the state shells over almost nothing for these types of abortions each year—in 2011, funding was approved for 10 abortions, costing the state a grand total of $2,784. Which makes the bill's passage that much more of a social, rather than a financial, issue.

HB 62 comes on the heels of two other Virginia bills aiming to limit abortions in the state. Just this week, the state's House passed a different bill redefining a "person" to include a zygote, which, as my colleague Kate Sheppard points out, could potentially make abortion and some forms of oral contraception illegal. And another Virginia bill would require all women to get an ultrasound before getting an abortion and be offered a chance to see the imaging, for apparently no other reason than the belief that women don't understand what's happening inside their bodies during pregnancies.

Inside Virginia's Abortion Crackdown

If draconian new building rules take effect, the 3,900 patients of the Falls Church Planned Parenthood clinic could be SOL.

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Sep. 21, 2011 2:00 AM PDT

badlyricpolice/Flickr

It's 10 a.m., about an hour after the Falls Church, Virginia, office of Planned Parenthood opens for the day. As I enter, a young couple is waiting for the nurse practitioner. There's a small television in the corner showing morning talk shows, with a large basket of condoms balanced atop. Brochures on STI testing, emergency contraception, breast self-exams, and HPV are about in abundance. It's not that much different from any other doctor's office you've ever visited, with dated copies of People and fluorescent lighting.
Last year, 3,900 patients visited the Falls Church office. Eight hundred and seventy-five of them were tested for HIV, 633 took a pregnancy test, and 743 had a pap smear. More than 600 women came in for the morning-after pill. The office dispensed 1,699 prescriptions for the birth control pill, and another 917 prescriptions for contraceptive rings. The vast majority of the women and men who come to the Falls Church clinic come for health screenings and family planning services, but another 900 visited for abortion services—a fact that has put the clinic's future in peril.
New regulations that require abortion providers to comply with building codes designed for hospitals could force this Planned Parenthood health center to shut its doors as soon as next year. Unveiled in August and approved by the Virginia Board of Health last week, the rules would likely be impossible to meet within the space that Planned Parenthood currently rents on the third floor of a nondescript, brown-brick office building about 10 miles from downtown Washington, DC.
To comply with the regulations, the Falls Church office would have to nearly double the width of its hallways, to five feet wide. Its pre-op rooms would have to measure at least 80 square feet, and operating rooms 250 square feet. The new rules dictate the type of HVAC system the office needs to have, the number of parking spaces, and where the bathrooms should be located.
All of the state's 23 clinics that provide abortion services may fall short of at least some of the new requirements, but the Falls Church office is almost certain to fail, says Laura Meyers, president of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, at least in its current set-up. The office is small, at just 3,300 square feet, and Planned Parenthood rents it from the building owner, which would make a major overhaul difficult, to say the least.
Meyers and I sat in the recovery room on the morning we talked, on the green and pink padded vinyl chairs where women usually wait for a half an hour after their procedure, before they head home or back to work, whatever may lay ahead of them that day. On each chair was a white blanket and a heating pad with a floral-patterned cover. A basket of saltines and graham crackers sat beside the chairs.
"First trimester surgical abortion is among the safest procedures one can undergo in one's lifetime," Meyers said, "with far fewer complications than other common in-office procedures." But the new rules single abortion providers out from all other outpatient medical services, like vasectomies or colonoscopies, many of which actually have much higher risks.
"My neighborhood in northwest DC now has a walk-in Botox clinic," the clinic's nurse practitioner points out in passing, noting that it's offered by a "cosmetic consultant" rather than an actual licensed medical doctor. "Like I'm going to let him put a nerve poison in my wrinkles."
Of course, it's the abortions that take place here that the state is targeting with its new law, but closing the clinic would also jettison all the low- to no-cost pregnancy tests, cancer screenings, birth control, and STI tests that are the reason most people find themselves in the office. And if it is forced to close, Meyers said, "the ancillary effect of this is that people will not have access to health care."
"Who is going to absorb all those people?" she asked.
Abortion is already more restricted in Virginia than in many other states. Most facilities only provide the procedure in the first trimester—up to 14 weeks after conception. Most counties in the state have no abortion providers at all. Virginia law also mandates a 24-hour waiting period before a woman can undergo the procedure.
Even clinics that expect to meet the new building codes will likely need to make significant changes to their buildings. The Richmond Planned Parenthood built an entirely new facility northwest of downtown in 2009, constructing it under the same standards as an outpatient surgical center out of concern that the state would issue regulations like those released last month (the Legislature had made numerous previous attempts). Even with this new facility, the architectural changes mandated under the new rules are expected to cost the clinic between $200,000 and $900,000, said Paulette McElwain, the CEO of Richmond's Planned Parenthood. She noted that the new rules will force them to relocate one of their bathrooms—which their architect expects will cost Planned Parenthood $90,000.
More worrisome for the Richmond office, though, is that the new regulations may force other private clinics in the region to close. There are only two other clinics in the state capitol, and the three clinics combined perform 5,500 abortions in the average year. Trying to provide all the abortion services for the region would certainly strain their resources, says McElwain. That would put limit Planned Parenthood's ability to care for the 12,000 patients who come to their office each year for health screenings and routine gynecological exams, she said.
The rules were issued in response to a law that the Legislature passed back in February that reclassified abortion clinics and called for regulations tailored to clinics. For years, anti-choice lawmakers in Virginia have been trying to pass similar bills, also known as "targeted regulation of abortion providers" or TRAP laws. (Their counterparts in Indiana, Kansas, South Carolina, and Utah succeeded.) But this year, they were newly empowered with stronger majorities in both chambers of the Legislature. They've also got the help of staunchly anti-abortion Gov. Bob McDonnell and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in the statehouse. The state Board of Health approved draft rules at a September 15 meeting, sending them to McDonnell for approval—which he's expected to give, given his staunch anti-abortion record. The board will then have to draft the permanent regulations, a process expected to take 12 to 18 months.
Meyers said Planned Parenthood is currently evaluating its options to determine if it's at all feasible to make changes to the current Falls Church office, or if it will need to search for a new office entirely. "Obviously, in its present form, it will not meet those regulations," she said.
"Last time I looked, abortion was legal in this county," Meyers said. But finding a way to make it more difficult to perform seems to be the point of this type of regulation, she added. "It's a way to make abortion so difficult to obtain," Meyers said, "that in all practicality, women do not have access to abortion."

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Virginia Is for Zygote Personhood?

2012-02-17T21:00:00.005-05:00

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Feb. 14, 2012 2:47 PM PST

biblicone/Flickr

Virginia lawmakers want to grant fertilized eggs the same rights as adults.

We've covered the litany of so-called "personhood" measures—conferring legal rights on fertilzed eggs—that have popped up around the country since Mississippi voters defeated just that sort of effort last November. Now Virginia could become the first state in the country to actually pass personhood legislation.
On Tuesday, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill introduced by Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Prince William) by a 66-32 vote. The bill, like other "personhood" measures, would amend the definition of the word "person" under state law to include zygotes, thereby granting them legal rights. The summary reads:

Provides that unborn children at every stage of development enjoy all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of the Commonwealth, subject only to the laws and constitutions of Virginia and the United States, precedents of the United States Supreme Court, and provisions to the contrary in the statutes of the Commonwealth.

It will be interesting to see what happens from here. The bill now must be cleared by the state senate to move forward. But earlier this month, a panel in the state senate rejected a bill that would have limited abortions to the first 20 weeks after conception. This latest bill would be far more restrictive, potentially prohibiting all abortions and likely some common types of oral contraception. Virginia's House of Delegates also recently passed a new law forcing women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion.
Passage of this latest bill in the House of Delegates makes Virginia "dangerously close to making Virginia the first state in the country to grant personhood rights to fertilized eggs," says Tarina Keene, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia. She noted that the state code mentions the word "person" 25,000 times, which would give this redefinition a broad reach into many aspects of the law. The measure now faces a vote.

jmtaylor70002/14/2012 05:12 PMin reply to h8koolaid

Hard to believe Virginia produced Jefferson, Madison, the first Bill for Religious Freedom the world had ever known. It's an interesting contradiction that the Baptist were one of the biggest proponents of the Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom, but then at that time they were the persecuted minority, and now that they have become a religious majority, they clearly lust to destroy the barrier that had it never been, emboldened by its defeat their existence would have surely ended then or be cramped into some tiny enclave.

Now that they have tasted civil political power, they have exchanged their humble beginnings for "pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution". (James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrances Against Religious Assessments)

“...During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. Enquire of the Teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those of every sect, point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy.” [Ibid]

"Because the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” [Ibid]

Once the honeymoon period is over that has united all the Sects in their cause to establish Christianity as the national religion, if successful, the sect holding the majority will use its numbers to flood the government with its disciples and then turn it upon those that were once their allies.

bjwalls02/15/2012 12:22 PM

Hmmm. Zygotes are persons entitled to "equal
protection" under the law, even though the Fourteenth Amendment
specifically says “All person born”. So now, if a life exists at this
early stage, how are we going to know if it is still there or was there?
Will VA require all women each month to submit the remains of their menses to
the state to try and determine if a "life" oops I mean
"person" every existed. Currently, it is estimated that 1
out of 3 pregnancies are spontaneously aborted (common term miscarriage),
often before a woman even knows she was pregnant. And to go one step
further, as this law would require, once it was determined by an examination of
the menses, that a person existed, a cause of death, and possible charges
against the perpetrator of the death of the person must be considered. On
the positive side, this law will open up a plethora of business
opportunities for resourceful individuals to make millions, for they'll
need to produce special collection boxes for the menses, hundreds of businesses
will need to be started to gather the remains, to examine the evidence,
some sort of specialized “doctor” to fill out a "person form" when
evidence that a person had existed, as opposed to a 'birth certificate",
then a new kind of "death certificate" for these special
"persons" will be needed , as the current system of “death
certificates” are based upon a will not apply. Hey, this law might create
enough jobs in VA that the recession will end there! Maybe that is what
the Republicans meant after all! Brilliant!

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EXCLUSIVE: Woman silenced at birth control hearing on 'Ed Show' tonight

2012-02-17T20:23:00.001-05:00

By Steve Frank

Thu Feb 16, 2012 4:08 PM EST

. She will be tonight's edition of "The Ed Show" at 8pET on MSNBC.
House Republicans today held a hearing today about whether the Obama administration was violating basic rights to religious freedom with its policies for requiring that employees of religion-affiliated institutions have access to birth control coverage.
But Democrats angrily cried foul when they were denied to the ability to present witnesses who might support the government stance or speak for the rights of women to reproductive health coverage.
Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has "refused to allow a minority witness to testify about the interests of women who want safe and affordable coverage for basic preventive healthcare, including contraception," said the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland.
Indeed, five men but no women were allowed to testify (in the first round), including Sandra Fluke, a third-year student at Georgetown Law School (click here to read what Fluke was planning to say to the committee).
Sandra Fluke will be our exclusive guest on The Ed Show tonight at 8pET on MSNBC.
Who is Sandra Fluke?

She is past president of the school's Students for Reproductive Justice group. She has lobbied the administration at Georgetown (a private, Jesuit, research university) for three years to include birth control in its student health plans.
The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff caught up with Fluke outside the hearing room.
“My testimony would have been about women who have been affected by their policy, who have medical needs and have suffered dire consequences," Fluke said.
By the way, three Democrats walked out of the (House Oversight and Government Reform) hearing in protest when Fluke was not allowed to testify.
Here is what Fluke was planning to say to Congress if she'd been allowed to testify:

Members of Congress, good morning, and thank you for allowing me to testify. My name is Sandra Fluke, and I’m a third year student at Georgetown Law, a Jesuit school. I’m also a past president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice or LSRJ. I’d like to acknowledge my fellow LSRJ members and allies and thank them for being here today.
Georgetown LSRJ is here today because we’re so grateful that this regulation implements the nonpartisan, medical advice of the Institute of Medicine. I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraception coverage in student health plans. Just as we students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously affiliated hospitals and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens. We are all grateful for the new regulation that will meet the critical health care needs of so many women. Simultaneously, the recently announced adjustment addresses any potential conflict with the religious identity of Catholic and Jesuit institutions.
As I have watched national media coverage of this debate, it has been heartbreaking to see women’s health treated as a political football. When I turn off the TV and look around my campus, I instead see the faces of the women affected, and I have heard more and more of their stories. You see, Georgetown does not cover contraceptives in its student insurance, although it does cover contraceptives for faculty and staff. On a daily basis, I hear from yet another woman who has suffered financial, emotional, and medical burdens because of this lack of contraceptive coverage. And so, I am here to share their voices and ask that you hear them.
Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. Forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy. One told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn’t covered, and had to walk away because she couldn’t afford it. Students like her have no choice but to go without contraception. Just on Tuesday, a married female student told me she had to stop using contraception because she couldn’t afford it any longer.
You might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Women’s health clinics provide vital medical services, but as the Guttmacher Institute has documented, clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing and women are being forced to go without. How can Congress consider allowing even more employers and institutions to refuse contraceptive coverage and then respond that the non-profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis, particularly when so many legislators are attempting to defund those very same clinics?
These denials of contraceptive coverage impact real people. In the worst cases, women who need this medication for other medical reasons suffer dire consequences. A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome and has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown insurance because it’s not intended to prevent pregnancy. At many schools, it wouldn’t be, and under Senator Blunt’s amendment, Senator Rubio’s bill, or Representative Fortenberry’s bill, there’s no requirement that an exception be made for such medical needs. When they do exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are good enough and whose aren’t, a woman’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.
In sixty-five percent of cases, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they need these prescriptions and whether they’re lying about their symptoms. For my friend, and 20% of women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription, despite verification of her illness from her doctor. Her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay, so clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy. After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore and had to stop taking it. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of her final exam period she’d been in the emergency room all night in excruciating pain. She wrote, “It was so painful, I woke up thinking I’d been shot.” Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary. She’s not here this morning. She’s in a doctor’s office right now. Since last year’s surgery, she’s been experiencing night sweats, weight gain, and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She’s 32 years old. As she put it: “If my body is indeed in early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no chance at giving my mother her desperately desired grandbabies, simply because the insurance policy that I paid for totally unsubsidized by my school wouldn’t cover my prescription for birth control when I needed it.” Now, in addition to facing the health complications that come with having menopause at an early age-- increased risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, she may never be able to be a mom.
Perhaps you think my friend’s tragic story is rare. It’s not. One student told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but it can’t be proven without surgery, so the insurance hasn’t been willing to cover her medication. Last week, a friend of mine told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome. She’s struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified to not have access to it. Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown’s policy, she hasn’t been reimbursed for her medication since last August. I sincerely pray that we don’t have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously.
This is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends. A woman’s reproductive healthcare isn’t a necessity, isn’t a priority. One student told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered, and she assumed that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handled all of women’s sexual healthcare, so when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health. As one student put it, “this policy communicates to female students that our school doesn’t understand our needs.” These are not feelings that male fellow students experience. And they’re not burdens that male students must shoulder.
In the media lately, conservative Catholic organizations have been asking: what did we expect when we enrolled at a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success. We expected that our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of cura personalis, to care for the whole person, by meeting all of our medical needs. We expected that when we told our universities of the problems this policy created for students, they would help us. We expected that when 94% of students opposed the policy, the university would respect our choices regarding insurance students pay for completely unsubsidized by the university, especially when the university already provides contraceptive coverage to faculty and staff. We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that if we wanted comprehensive insurance that met our needs, not just those of men, we should have gone to school elsewhere, even if that meant a less prestigious university. We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health, and we resent that, in the 21^st century, anyone thinks it’s acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women.
Many of the students whose stories I’ve shared are Catholic women, so ours is not a war against the church. It is a struggle for access to the healthcare we need. The President of the Association of Jesuit Colleges has shared that Jesuit colleges and universities appreciate the modification to the rule announced last week. Religious concerns are addressed and women get the healthcare they need. That is something we can all agree on. Thank you.

Issa to keep contraception fight going

2012-02-17T20:10:00.001-05:00

"I look at this panel, and I don't see one single individual representing the tens of millions of women across the country who want and need insurance coverage for basic preventative health care services, including family planning," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) before walking out of the hearing. "Where are the women?"

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) also walked out in protest.

By Steve Benen

Thu Feb 16, 2012 10:16 AM EST

Associated Press

Chairman Issa isn't exactly fair and balanced.

Republican efforts to combat contraception access have failed rather spectacularly. After a pointless culture-war fight, the American mainstream -- including Roman Catholics and self-identified Republican voters -- agrees that the GOP is wrong and the Obama administration is right.
The smart move for congressional Republicans would be to simply move on to other issues, since the GOP probably can't force a legislative change anyway. As Sarah Posner reported, that's not, however, what's happening on Capitol Hill today.

Republican Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will convene a hearing [Thursday], "Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?"
The lead witness is the Most Rev. William E. Lori, Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., and chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty. Judging from Lori and the rest of the witness list, it's obvious that Issa has posed what he considers to be a rhetorical question and lined up nine like-minded rhetoricians to answer it anyway.

The ostensible point of a congressional hearing is to provide lawmakers with information they need to shape public policy. In this case, Issa has invited nine "expert" witnesses to discuss contraception coverage -- and all nine are men who represent religious institutions.
How many of the witnesses will offer testimony in support of the administration's position? According to Democrats, zero. How many can speak to issues regarding contraception and/or preventive health care? Again, zero. Issa invited nine people to testify, and each of them will tell Issa exactly what he wants to hear.
Dems were initially offered a chance to have one witness testify, but when they selected a female law student at Georgetown, Republican committee staffers rejected the choice, arguing that she would only be able to speak to issues regarding contraception access -- and this was a hearing about religious liberty.

The video summarizes the testimony Chairman Issa rejected at today's hearing: Sandra Fluke, who would have been the Minority's witness and the only female voice on behalf of millions of women who seek safe and affordable coverage for preventive health care

Remember, there are no church-state lines being crossed with the White House policy. Churches and other houses of worship are exempt, and a compromise measure ensures that religiously-affiliated employers won't have to pay for contraception coverage, either.
But don't expect to hear these details at today's committee hearing.
Update: In the 11th hour, Republicans changed the witness list and included two women who were not originally going to be part of the hearing. They were, however, part of the second panel -- the original, five-person panel were all men -- and of the 10 GOP witnesses who participated today, none were health care or contraception advocates.

'A Terri Schiavo moment'

2012-02-17T20:10:00.000-05:00

By Steve Benen

Fri Feb 17, 2012 8:01 AM EST

Seven years ago, there was an unexpected political hullabaloo surrounding Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who'd been in a vegetative state for 15 years. When there was a disagreement among family members about her fate, it touched off a national controversy and unprecedented intervention from Washington.
Indeed, Congress took steps to prolong Schiavo's life -- passing legislation related to literally just this one person -- and President Bush even cut short a vacation to address the issue. At the time, an internal memo was distributed by a Republican senator's office characterizing the controversy as "a great political issue" that could pay dividends for the Republican Party with Christian conservatives.
Putting aside the callousness of exploiting a family's pain for partisan advantage, the GOP's political instincts served them poorly-- much of the American mainstream was repulsed by Washington policymakers' role in the Schiavo matter, and the intervention became a political fiasco for Republicans.
A new report (pdf) from Democracy Corps believes we may be witnessing a similar set of circumstances now, as GOP officials fight to restrict women's access to contraceptives. Greg Sargent reported yesterday:

The firm's poll finds that one of the most important factors powering Obama's gains against likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney has been the President's improving numbers among unmarried women, a key pillar of the present and future Democratic coalition.
Among this group, Obama now leads Romney by 65-30 -- and there's been a net 18-point swing towards the President among them. [...]
Concludes the memo: "We may yet look back on this debate and wonder whether this was a Terri Schiavo moment."

The report was put together before yesterday's hearing in which Republicans invited a series of conservative men to talk about blocking access to contraception and before Foster Friess' aspirin-between-the-knees comments, which certainly won't help.
Remember, when the Schiavo affair first began to unfold, Republicans were certain this would be political gold, and encouraged GOP officials to embrace the controversy with enthusiasm. Likewise, there are probably ample memos circulating in Republican offices about the value in attacking contraception this election year, gender gap be damned.
The party got the Schiavo matter wrong. All available polling evidence suggests they're making the same mistake on birth control.

Maloney asks, 'Where are the women?'

2012-02-17T19:52:00.000-05:00

By Steve Benen

Thu Feb 16, 2012 11:36 AM EST

Following up on an earlier item, here was the witness table at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, as discussion about contraception access and health care got underway.

You'll notice, of course, that all of the witnesses are men. What you can't tell from the photo is that the second panel will feature four more men, and the combined total of the nine witnesses will include no women, no experts on contraception, no experts on health care, and no experts who might say something Republicans disagree with.

As ThinkProgress noted, this proved to be a bit too much for some of the Democratic woman on the committee. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) asked a sensible question under the circumstances: "Where are the women? When I look at this panel, I don't see one, single woman representing the tens of millions of women across the country who want and need coverage for basic preventive health care services."
As the farce hearing progressed, nearly all of the Democratic women on the committee left the room in protest.

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There is one Republican woman on the committee, Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-N.Y.), who has not expressed concerns about the one-sided nature of the hearing.
Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who rejected the one witness Democrats asked to participate, claimed this morning that the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a progressive voice, had been invited to participate, and would have provided balance to the hearing (balance, in this case, would mean nine conservatives and one liberal).
In reality, committee Dems had considered Lynn as a possible witness, but instead invited a young female law student at Georgetown.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rev. Lynn [disclosure: Lynn is a long-time friend of mine] explained in a statement, "I was open to testify at today's hearing, but I understand and support the minority's decision to ask a woman to take part because this issue would affect women's access to contraceptives and the right to conscience. I appreciate that I was given the opportunity to provide written testimony. I am disappointed, however, by the imbalance on the panel and the lack of women's voices on an issue that has terrific impact on them. When the claim of 'conscience' by large religions collides with that of an individual woman, her right to make her own moral decision must be saved."

Information about cabinet department and agency budgets.

2012-02-17T15:42:00.000-05:00

The White House has released its FY2013 Budget proposal. Pres. Obama made the initial announcement and the OMB and other Administration Budget Executives briefed on the budget details. Information about cabinet department and agency budgets.

The President's Proposed FY2013 Budget

If you would like to see the proposed Budgets for each of the 18 Departments of the Government, you can go and check them out here.

Obama reiterates call for farm subsidy cuts

2012-02-17T14:43:00.001-05:00

A staff assistant holds a copy of President Obama's FY2013 budget upon its arrival at the Senate Budget Committee room on Capitol Hill in Washington February 13, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

WASHINGTON | Mon Feb 13, 2012 1:58pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama proposed slashing subsidies to the booming agriculture sector by $32 billion over the next decade, just as Congress begins the lengthy process of overhauling the expiring U.S. farm law.For the third year running, Obama proposed sweeping cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in his annual budget. Congress, however, has yet to come to an agreement on how to reform the massive subsidies to the sector.
Obama's plan includes eliminating the $5 billion a year in direct payment to farmers that is disbursed regardless of need, an idea that has some support among U.S. lawmakers.
"In a period of severe fiscal restraint, the payments are no longer defensible," said the administration, referring to the direct payments.
The plan to cut some $32 billion over 10 years for farm support is far larger than the $23 billion agreed by Agriculture Committee leaders in Congress last fall during deficit-reduction talks.
Last year, Obama made a similar call for cuts, saying payments to the wealthiest farmers should be eliminated along with reductions in direct payments.
Budget cuts have squeezed the Agriculture Department's reporting of crop production over the past couple of years but the White House proposed steady funding, $109 million, for its forecasting arm in the coming fiscal year.
Obama said USDA should cut some 2 million acres from the long-term Conservation Reserve, which holds farmland out of production. Crop insurance subsidies would be cut by $7.6 billion through 2022. A disaster-relief fund, scheduled to expire this year, would remain.
Farm groups are divided on the shape of the new farm law. The Senate Agriculture Committee opens the farm bill process with a hearing on Wednesday. Analysts say there is a 50-50 chance, at best, that Congress will enact a farm law this year, given election-year and deficit-reduction pressures.
The White House won little support among farm groups and lawmakers when it proposed a similar package of cuts last fall. Two farm lobbyists said the new package would be ignored too. Agriculture Committee leaders seem set on $23 billion in farm subsidy cuts.
There is broad agreement the direct payment will not be renewed. It is paid to landowners based on historical production of grain, cotton and soybeans. Farm income hit a record high in 2011, making the payments harder to justify.
While the White House suggested a cap of 30 million acres for the Conservation Reserve, some proposals call for a ceiling of 25 million or 26 million acres.
(Reporting by Charles Abbott; editing by Jim Marshall and Dale Hudson)

$27B Energy Budget Pushed by Sec. Chu

2012-02-17T14:10:00.000-05:00

Feb 16, 2012
Senate Committee Energy and Natural Resources

Washington, DC
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Energy Secretary Steven Chu testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the President’s 2013 budget request. The $3.8 trillion package includes $27.2 billion for the Energy Department which is just over a three percent increase from 2012.
Despite a bigger budget, Secretary Chu says cuts were made to certain programs based on multiple factors with one being economic feasibility. He added the request reflects the administration’s priorities and commitment to clean energy technology, research and development and national security.

The best Superbowl Commercials of 2012

2012-02-17T12:55:00.000-05:00

The Making Of: The Dog Strikes Back Commercial

Uploaded by Volkswagen on Feb 2, 2012

Take a behind the scenes look at the making of The Dog Strikes Back, Volkswagen's 2012 Big Game commercial. Watch our 2012 Game Day commercial here: http://vwoa.us/dogstrikesback

Clint Eastwood Super Bowl Commercial 2012 Chrysler It's Halftime in America

Uploaded by bestsuperbowlads on Feb 6, 2012

The great Clint Eastwood stars for Chrysler in this inspirational 2012 Super Bowl commercial about "Halftime in America" and Detroit's comeback.

Doritos - Man's Best Friend Super Bowl Commercial 2012

Uploaded by FunnySBCommercials on Jan 23, 2012

http://funnysuperbowlcommercials.com
Best part about the Super Bowl is obviously the Super Bowl Commercials and here is the Funny Doritos - Man's Best Friend Ad. Enjoy this ad and other commercials from the super bowl right here.

Pepsi MAX Love Hurts Super Bowl Commercial 2011

Uploaded by FunnySBCommercials on Jan 20, 2012

http://funnysuperbowlcommercials.com
Best part about the Super Bowl is obviously the Super Bowl Commercials and here is the Pepsi MAX Love Hurts Ad. Enjoy this ad and other commercials from the super bowl right here.

Best Super Bowl Commercials Ads 2012

Uploaded by bestsuperbowlads on Feb 6, 2012

Your collection of the most talked about 2012 Super Bowl Commercials in one easy to watch place from BestSuperBowlAds. Please share the link to this video for the enjoyment of your friends and as a way of supporting the companies who produced and aired these.

Nigerian underwear bomber gets life sentence

2012-02-16T21:08:00.003-05:00

hours

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Umar Abdumutallab, the man who tried to blow up an airplane on Christmas day two years ago, has been sentenced in a federal courtroom in Detroit. NBC's Pete Williams reports.

By msnbc.com staff and news services

DETROIT -- Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound international flight with and underwear bomb on Christmas Day 2009 on behalf of al-Qaida, was sentenced to life in prison without parole Thursday.
The hearing before federal Judge Nancy Edmunds was an open platform for Abdulmutallab and passengers and crew of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 who wanted to speak.

Abdulmutallab, 25, the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, pleaded guilty in October and admitted he was on a suicide mission for al-Qaida when he tried to detonate explosive chemicals hidden in his underwear minutes before the plane landed at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabterrorists

In his court statement Thursday, according to NBC station WDIV of Detroit, Abdulmutallab praised Allah and ranted that his life and the life of Muslims has changed. He said al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and other

the government says were killed are alive.

He called his sentencing hearing a day of victory and claimed U.S. attorneys on his case intentionally misquoted him and mishandled his case "to achieve their Hebrew goals." He said the Jews need to be "ripped out of Palestine … the capital of the Muslim world."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Cathleen Corken played an FBI video to demonstrate the destructive force of explosives similar to those Abdulmutallab carried. A brief but intense flame was seen in slow motion when the explosives were detonated in an outdoor field on a sheet of aluminum sitting on two wooden sawhorses.

RAW VIDEO: The Justice Department has released video of FBI tests showing the potential explosive force equivalent to the underwear bomb device Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009.

Edmunds, in sentencing Abdulmutallab to multiple life sentences, said, “The defendant has never expressed doubt or regret or remorse about his mission,” The Detroit Free Press reported. “To the contrary, he sees that mission as divinely inspired and a continuing mission.”
As Edmunds said the sentence was "just punishment" for what he had done, Abdulmutallab sat quietly with his hands folded under his chin and did not show any reaction.
Inside the courtroom: Updates from NBC station WDIV
The government said Abdulmutallab first performed a ritual in the airplane lavatory — brushing his teeth and perfuming himself — and returned to his seat. The device didn't work as planned, but still produced flame, smoke and panic in the cabin.
In a defiant speech as he pleaded guilty in October, Abdulmutallab said he was carrying a "blessed weapon" to avenge Muslims who have been killed or poorly treated around the world. He admitted he was inspired by Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born cleric and leading al-Qaida figure in Yemen who was killed by a U.S. drone strike last fall.
"The Quran obliges every able Muslim to participate in jihad and fight in the way of Allah those who fight you, and kill them wherever you find them ... an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," Abdulmutallab said.
Anthony Chambers, an attorney appointed to assist Abdulmutallab, had urged Edmunds to declare that a mandatory life sentence is unconstitutional, claiming it is a cruel punishment in a case where no one but Abdulmutallab was physically hurt. His groin was badly burned.
The government said that is not the threshold.
"Unsuccessful terrorist attacks still engender fear in the broader public, which, after all, is one of their main objectives," prosecutors said in a court filing Wednesday. "In addition, the enormous cost of the augmented security measures adopted as a direct result of defendant's unsuccessful terrorist attack are borne by the American public at large in both increased cost, inconvenience and wasted time at airports."
Among four passengers and a crew member who testified, WDIV reported, was Kurt Haskell, a lawyer who was traveling with his wife, Lori. Haskell, reiterating charges in his blog, said the government conspired with Abdulmutallab to carry a defective bomb onto the plane to give the government a reason to install full-body scanners at airports.
The Associated Press reported that passenger Shama Chopra, 56, of Montreal, also plans to speak in court. She ran unsuccessfully for the Canadian Parliament in 2011, a race she couldn't have imagined joining years ago.
"I don't have to feel weak," Chopra said Wednesday. "I don't have to be scared of anything. God has given me a second chance to live."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

ABC News via Getty Images

This handout government image provided by ABC news shows the underwear with the explosive worn by alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in his failed attempt to down a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Dec. 28, 2009.

Why the GOP looks to federal workers to pay

2012-02-16T20:53:00.005-05:00

hours

ago

By Tom Curry, msnbc.com National Affairs Writer

Updated 3:35 pm ET
When congressional Republicans try to figure out how to avert cuts in defense spending, or offset the cost of an extension of unemployment insurance, it is often federal workers they look to for the money.
A dispute over making federal employees pay a bigger share of their pensions was one snarl that delayed the bipartisan accord announced Wednesday night on a bill to extend the payroll tax cut, continue unemployment benefits for long-term jobless people, and avert a 27 percent cut in payments to doctors serving Medicare patients.

Pete Marovich / Getty Images

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., proposed to come up with the money to fend off cuts to the defense department by hiring only two workers for every three who leave federal employment.

For months, Republicans have been pushing bills to reduce the federal workforce through attrition. Republicans point out that since 2007 the federal workforce has grown by 14 percent, even as the recession decimated private sector jobs.

Earlier this month when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and a phalanx of other pro-military Republican senators warned of automatic spending cuts looming at the end of the year, they proposed to come up with the money to fend off those cuts by hiring only two workers for every three who leave federal employment.

Related: House speaker says payroll tax bill won't add jobs

McCain and his allies also wanted to maintain the freeze on cost-of-living wage increases for federal employees until mid-2014. The House voted last month to keep the cost-of-living pay freeze for this year and next year. Even with the freeze, federal workers still do get pay increases based on performance and length of service.
Why do Republicans look to federal workers as the money source?
One obvious reason is Republicans’ aversion to tax increases – and their knowledge that the real struggle over taxes will begin only after Election Day, when a lame-duck Congress and President Obama will get down to haggling over the income tax rates and tax credits that expire on Dec. 31.
But Republicans also turn to federal workers for the money because they point out that they’re better compensated than workers with comparable skills and experience in the private sector, according to an analysis released last month by the Congressional Budget Office.
The CBO said that overall, the federal government paid 16 percent more in total compensation than it would have if compensation had been comparable with that in private sector firms.
The biggest difference is not in pay, but in benefits: “On average for workers at all levels of education, the cost of hourly benefits was 48 percent higher for federal civilian employees than for private-sector employees with certain similar observable characteristics,” the CBO said.
And the thing that federal workers have that most private-sector workers do not -- the defined-benefit pension plan – was a bone of contention in the bargaining over the payroll tax package.
In the end, instead of increasing the amount all federal workers must pay for their pension benefit, the accord makes only new federal employees pay more.
With Maryland having 137,000 executive branch workers, House Budget Committee ranking member Rep. Chris Van Hollen and Senate Finance Committee member Sen. Ben Cardin, both of Maryland, fought hard to limit the damage to those workers in the deal that was announced Wednesday night.
Cardin said Wednesday before the agreement was clinched, that those putting together the deal “are asking… that a large part of the offsets that help working families that are out of work be paid for by other middle-income working families” -- by federal employees. “To me that’s not fair,” Cardin said.
In a joint statement Thursday, Cardin and Van Hollen said that altough they were happy the final deal didn't affect current federal workers, "we still strongly oppose the provision that raises $15 billion to help offset the cost of this package from future workers."
They argued that it was "inherently unfair" that the money to offset the cost of extending unemployment insurance came from "additional sacrifice from other middle-class families rather than the very wealthiest Americans who can afford to pay more but continue to pay less."
The battle over federal workers here on Capitol Hill is another front in the long-running GOP struggle against public-sector unions that played out in Wisconsin last year where Republican Gov. Scott Walker fought to have public-sector workers pay more of their pension and health insurance costs and signed a law curbing their right to collective bargaining.

Obama touts manufacturing at Wisconsin plant

2012-02-16T20:42:00.000-05:00

day

ago

Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images

President Barack Obama speaks with employee Eric Hammerer as he tours the manufacturing facility at Master Lock, maker of security locks, prior to speaking on the economy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, February 15, 2012.

By The Associated PressPresident Barack Obama called Wednesday for tax cuts for American manufacturers and higher taxes for companies that move overseas, pressing what he hopes will be a winning campaign issue.
Appearing at a Milwaukee padlock plant, Obama said the U.S. must do everything it can to make it more attractive for American businesses to stay put and grow here home, "and the place to start is our tax code."
The president visited Master Lock, a manufacturer that has brought jobs back to the United States. Reprising ideas from his State of the Union address, he asked Congress to approve tax system changes right away, including a minimum tax on multinational companies, so that American firms can't skirt taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. He also pushed for tax breaks for businesses that move into communities that have been hurt by factories leaving town.
"Don't wait. Do it now. Get it done," Obama shouted, his jacket removed and shirtsleeves rolled up, as he stood in front of a pile of stacked orange metal boxes, including one stamped "Made in the USA."

Recommended: How much support would Romney have given to automakers?

Obama, who is en route to a three-day West Coast fundraising swing, said he decided to visit Master Lock "because this company has been making the most of a huge opportunity that exists right now to bring jobs and manufacturing back to America." And he called on other businesses to follow its lead and take advantage of rising costs overseas and growing productivity at home.
Master Lock brought back 100 jobs to the U.S. from China in response to higher labor and logistical costs in Asia.
Pointing to a rebound in manufacturing and pushing U.S. businesses to extend it, the president said: "Ask what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed."
The president made his economic pitch as Congress was poised to advance a key component of the jobs agenda he unveiled last September. Lawmakers from both parties were praising an emerging deal Wednesday on extending a payroll tax cut through the end of the year and renewing jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed. They hoped to send the measure to Obama within days.
The extension would be a win for Obama, who has said the cut in the Social Security payroll tax — amounting to about $40 per paycheck for the average worker — is vital to keeping the economy on the right path.
"I'm glad to see that Congress is making progress," Obama said. "It will make a real difference in the lives of millions of people and as soon as Congress sends an extension of this tax cut and unemployment insurance to my desk, I will sign it right away."
Obama has repeatedly talked up the nation's manufacturing base as an engine of growth and a sign of a recovering economy. He has urged companies to promote "insourcing," promising new tax incentives for businesses that bring jobs to the U.S. instead of shipping them overseas and eliminating tax breaks for companies that outsource jobs.
The manufacturing sector was hard-hit for more than a decade. Manufacturers shed 5.8 million jobs from 1999 to 2009 as many companies shifted jobs overseas to take advantage of lower costs and many plants were modernized and automated, allowing firms to do more with fewer workers.
But the sector has shown more vitality in recent months, bolstering Obama's case. Manufacturers added 50,000 jobs in January, the most in a year, and added 237,000 jobs in 2011, the largest annual boost since 1997. Of the 3.2 million jobs added by the economy since February 2010, about 400,000 are in manufacturing.
Obama carried Wisconsin by 14 points in 2008 but is expected to face a more difficult challenge this year after Republicans captured nearly every statewide office two years ago and the president's standing declined in parts of the Midwest. Obama's visit coincided with the one-year anniversary of the first widespread protests against proposals from Republican Gov. Scott Walker to effectively end collective bargaining rights for most public workers.
Walker, who greeted Obama at the airport, had been scheduled to join him for the event at Master Lock but decided at the last minute not to attend. Walker's spokesman, Cullen Werwie, said the governor was recovering from the flu and had to cancel his plans to go to the event.
The governor has been targeted for a recall election that could come in the spring or summer and has sought to define the outcome as a bellwether of how Obama will fare in Wisconsin next fall. Walker has said a win would deliver a "devastating blow" to Obama's re-election campaign.
But despite the political undertones Obama got a friendly tarmac welcome Wednesday from Walker, who presented him with a Milwaukee Brewers' jersey that bore the number 1 and Obama's name.
The two smiled and shook hands and Walker took a diplomatic tone in comments to a pool reporter at the airport: "Today's the president's day. I'm appreciative he's in Wisconsin, appreciative he's focused on manufacturing. We'll leave politics for another day."
The scene stood in stark contrast to Obama's tarmac moment with Arizona's Republican governor, Jan. Brewer, last month.
Most of Obama's trip will be devoted to fundraising. The president is holding eight fundraisers for his re-election campaign in the Los Angeles area, San Francisco and Seattle.
After departing Milwaukee, Obama was to attend two fundraisers in Los Angeles. The first is an outdoor fundraising reception at the home of soap opera producer Bradley Bell and his wife, Colleen, featuring a performance by the rock band the Foo Fighters. The campaign expects 1,000 supporters to attend, with tickets starting at $250.
Obama is also attending a dinner at Bell's home co-hosted by actor Will Ferrell and his wife, Viveca Paulin. Eighty people are expected to attend the dinner, with tickets costing $35,800. The fundraising will benefit the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee for Obama's campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Why Are Men Dominating the Debate About Birth Control for Women?

2012-02-16T20:35:00.001-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

By Jen Doll | The Atlantic Wire – 2 hrs 36 mins ago

Republican politicians are treading into murky (read: sexist) waters in the contraception debate. Earlier today, in protest of House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa's refusal to allow women onto a panel of witnesses at the hearing on the White House mandate to require employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage, Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) walked out, garnering a significant amount of media attention and setting off an ensuing furor among women and men. Why no women? Issa said, “the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience."

Currently under the Obama plan, in cases where religious groups are involved contraception coverage will be offered to women by their employers’ insurance companies directly, so that religious employers who oppose contraception don't have to be involved with that nasty business. What Issa means is that the hearing is about whether requiring insurers to cover birth control violates the religious freedom of people who don't believe that birth control should, essentially, exist. The people on his panel, then, were men. Religious men. (Two women appeared on a second panel at the hearing. Both spoke against contraception.)

But back to Issa's statement: How do you take "reproductive rights and contraception" out of a conversation about birth control? You can't. You might try to ignore those parts of the conversation because you want to get a specific answer, for a specific purpose. And allowing women on a panel to talk about how and why they need birth control -- and how and why they need insurers to pay for it -- detracts from that mission.

In tackier, more sensational headlines, Rick Santorum pal Foster Friess announced on MSNBC today that back in the old days the "gals" used to just put some Bayer Aspirin between their knees as a handy (and cheap!) contraception method. In addition to winning "most moronic statement of the day," Friess went on to further belittle the issue of birth control, insinuating that all this focus on stupid lady crap when there are more important issues at stake (like wars), is the marking of a randy, sex-obsessed culture:

Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex. I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are.

Rush Limbaugh comes down on this side, with a bit more of a conspiracy angle, saying Democrats "ginned up" the contraception debate to divide the GOP and distract from the real issues.

RELATED: Even Republicans Want Employers to Cover Birth Control

But what are the real issues? Sex, and everything related to it -- you could argue that very little is not related to sex in some way -- surely, is one of them. Surely Friess knows that. (We dare say his words have the confessional mark of "methinks the man doth protest too much.")

Friess, Limbaugh, and Issa, each in different ways, are trying to desexualize and downplay the importance of an issue that is, at its core, about not only sex but also men and women, power, religion, socioeconomics, relationships, healthcare, equal rights, and, not to speak too broadly, but pretty much our entire global future. We'll throw Issa a bone: Fine, this particular hearing is also about freedom of religion and conscience -- things that women have opinions on just as much as men do, just like men should care about birth control just as much as women do. But, two facts: Men don't actually get pregnant, and we have nothing to gain from a one-sided conversation about an issue that impacts us all. It's doubly insulting when women, who have been dealing with birth control on their own for years, are left out of the conversation or added as an afterthought. Come on, politicians. We're all grown ups here. If you feel the need to giggle behind your hand when someone mentions sex, you should excuse yourself from the table. Didn't we all take health class back in high school? (As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said today, “What else do you need to know about the subject? I may, I may at some point be moved to explain biology to my colleagues.”)

The simple answer of why men are dominating the conversation on birth control is that, regardless of strides made, men continue to largely dominate the conversation in politics. The more complicated answer is that the men who are dominating the conversation on birth control -- and you can count Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio among those who've come out against the White House contraception plan -- are deeply afraid of losing the conservative vote, and, it seems, conservatives continue to be deeply afraid of women having free and equal control over their own bodies and all that follows from that. Like having sex. Creating fewer unwanted children. And women taking care of themselves. What a sin.

Image via Shutterstock by Mathom.

House speaker says payroll tax bill won't add jobs

2012-02-16T20:30:00.000-05:00

hours

ago

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, discusses the payroll tax deal saying she is unhappy with the current compromise and is unsure whether or not she will support it.

By The Associated Press

A compromise bill extending a payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed should be enacted, but it's not going to help the economy very much, House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday.
Boehner, R-Ohio, made the remarks hours after bipartisan congressional bargainers announced agreement on legislation extending those provisions through 2012 and heading off a steep cut in reimbursements for physicians who treat Medicare patients. The bill would assure a continued tax cut for 160 million workers and jobless benefits for several million others, delivering top election-year priorities to President Barack Obama and edging a white-hot political battle a big step closer to resolution.
Boehner told reporters the accord is "a fair agreement and one that I support."
Bargainers completed the bill's final details Thursday afternoon, resolving technical questions about savings the bill would pluck from federal workers' pensions and government sales of portions of the broadcast spectrum.
One top negotiator, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said leaders were anticipating pushing the legislation through Congress on Friday.
In a jab at Obama, Boehner minimized the impact the measure would have. Last fall, Obama proposed extending the payroll tax cut and added jobless benefits through this year as major pillars of his program for creating jobs.
"Let's be honest, this is an economic relief package, not a bill that is going to grow the economy and create jobs," Boehner said.
Boehner's comment underscored the GOP's desire to limit Obama's ability to declare victory over the legislation. The fight over the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits has been waged since late last year and has taken a political toll on Republicans.
Both proposals initially ran into GOP resistance, some of which lingers. But Republicans have largely concluded it would be damaging to oppose the package, particularly in this presidential and congressional election year.
That contrasted with their attitude in December, when House Republicans refused to back a bipartisan Senate bill providing a two-month extension of the tax cuts and jobless benefits while bargainers completed a yearlong deal. Within days, they retreated under barrages of criticism from Republicans and conservatives around the country.
Illustrating their reluctance to be seen as blocking a middle-class tax cut, House Republicans removed the major hurdle to the legislation earlier this week when they agreed that the payroll tax cut — comprising about two-thirds of the measure's cost — would not have to be paid for with spending cuts.
The House's top Democrat, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, said Democrats are mostly satisfied with the compromise and said it should be pushed through Congress quickly.
"I don't think the American people can wait another day," Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters.
Pelosi said that while Democrats were hoping parts of the roughly $150 billion measure could be paid for with savings from winding down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, "I don't see a scenario where our members would vote against it."
The two lead negotiators, Rep. David Camp, R-Mich., and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said shortly after midnight that they had reached agreement and that only technical issues and the drafting of legislative language remained.
The bargainers spent Wednesday trying to extinguish last-minute brushfires.
Chief among the late disputes was a proposal to save around $15 billion — about half the $30 billion cost of the bill's extended jobless benefits — by requiring federal workers to contribute an additional 1.5 percent of their pay to their pensions.
Democrats, including Sen. Ben Cardin and others from Maryland, home to many government employees, resisted that plan, holding up a final handshake among congressional bargainers. The provision was ultimately changed to target the boost only at newly hired federal workers, requiring them to contribute 2.3 percent of their salaries toward defined benefit pensions.
There was little controversy over the main thrust of the bill.
A 2-percentage-point cut in the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax, which is deducted from workers' paychecks, would run through 2012. For a family earning $50,000 a year, the cut saves $1,000 annually.
Extra unemployment benefits for people out of work the longest would be extended for the same period, and a 27 percent slash in federal reimbursements for physicians who treat Medicare patients would be averted.
Unless Congress acts, the tax cut and added jobless benefits would expire, and doctors' Medicare payments would be reduced, all on March 1.
In a GOP win, the bill would phase down the current maximum 99 weeks of jobless coverage to 73 weeks in the hardest-hit states by autumn, though in most states, people would get no more than 63 weeks.
Besides increasing new federal workers' pension contributions, more savings were supposed to come from government sales of parts of the broadcast spectrum to wireless companies. The spectrum auction was supposed to raise about $15 billion — even after $7 billion would be spent for a new communications network for emergency workers.
The government's main welfare program would be continued through this year. Republicans won a provision barring welfare recipients from using their electronic cards to withdraw cash from teller machines in liquor stores, strip clubs and casinos.
The $20 billion price tag for preventing the cut in doctors' Medicare reimbursements would be covered partly by trimming a fund Obama's health care overhaul created to help prevent obesity and smoking. There would also be reductions in Medicaid payments to hospitals that treat high numbers of uninsured patients.
Dropped from the final compromise were proposals to renew expiring business tax cuts; a GOP plan to require unemployment recipients to work toward high school equivalency diplomas; and another Republican provision, aimed at illegal immigrants, requiring low-income people to have Social Security numbers before they can get checks from the Internal Revenue Service for the children's tax credit.

Obama sends export agency reform bill to Congress

2012-02-16T18:41:00.000-05:00

Reuters – 3 hrs ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama urged lawmakers on Thursday to grant him the power to reform and consolidate federal agencies, sending a bill to Congress that would help him fend off election-year charges by Republicans that he favors big government.

The law would reinstate a power last wielded by President Ronald Reagan, a hero to the Republican Party, as Obama campaigns for re-election in the November 6 election.

The White House said last month it would start by using the authority, if granted, to close the Commerce Department and shift a number of export-focused agencies, including the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, into a new agency.

"We cannot allow redundant bureaucracy and unnecessary red tape to stand in the way of creating good jobs here at home," Obama said in a statement to announce that the Consolidating and Reforming Government Act of 2012 had been sent to Capitol Hill.

Republicans, campaigning to deny him a second White House term, portray the president as a tax-and-spend liberal responsible for a bloated government. But they said they were ready to work with him on this issue, if he would do their legislative proposals the same courtesy.

"We're happy to take a look at it, just as we hope the president will take a look at the nearly 30 jobs bills the House has already passed," said Brendan Buck, spokesman for House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress.

(Reporting By Alister Bull; Editing by Peter Cooney)

The State Department Holds FY2013 Budget Briefing

2012-02-16T15:21:00.000-05:00

State Dept. Budget Briefing

Washington, DC
Monday, February 13, 2012
State Department officials brief reporters on their department goals as spelled out in President Obama's proposed FY2013 budget.
Following the release of the President's proposed FY2013 budget, State Department officials held a briefing on aspects of the department's budget. Thomas Nides, the Deputy Secretary of State, and Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator, spoke. Deputy Secretary of State Nides serves as Chief Operating Officer of the Department and assistant to Secretary of State Clinton. USAID Administrator Shah is the 16th Administrator of the USAID and leads the efforts of more than 8,000 professionals in 80 missions around the world.

Updated: Wednesday at 7:47am (ET)

DoD Holds Briefings on FY2013 Budget Proposal

2012-02-16T15:15:00.000-05:00

Washington, DC
Monday, February 13, 2012
Coinciding with President Obama's release of next fiscal year's budget, the Defense Department is set to hold four press briefings Monday afternoon addressing different aspects of their slice of the budget.
At 2pm ET, Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Robert Hale and Lt. Gen. Larry O. Spencer will brief press from the Pentagon. The Defense Department plans to cut $487 billion from the budget over the next 10 years. Hale will discuss the overall budget and how cuts will affect military readiness.
Then, at 3:15pm ET, Army Budget Director Maj Gen. Phillip McGee and Deputy Director Barbara Bonessa will hold their press briefing. Officials will lay out specifics on trimming the budget and programs that will be cut. The Army is expected to cut about 80,000 soldiers and reduce the number of combat brigades from 45 to as few as 32 as part of wide-ranging changes to the army’s force structure to cut costs.
Navy Deputy Assistant Secretary for Budget Rear Adm. Joseph Mulloy holds a briefing at 4pm ET. He will discuss specific programs that will be cut to help trim the Defense Department budget.
And at 4:45pm ET, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Budget Maj. Gen. Edward Bolton and Deputy Marilyn Thomas hold the day's final Defense Department briefing. They will talk about the Defense Department’s new FY 2013 budget request, its affect on the Air Force and how it will maintain readiness and capabilities with budget reductions. The U.S. Air Force is proposing to cut 123 fighters and 133 airlifters to help cut costs.
The President's 2012 Fiscal Year budget proposal requested $670.9 billion for the Defense Department, which was about $37.3 billion less than the previous year's request.

Video Playlist

Treasury Department's 2013 Budget Request(House)

2012-02-16T15:13:00.000-05:00

Feb 16,2012

House Committee Budget

Secretary Geithner testified on the Treasury Department's fiscal year 2013 budget request.

Treasury Department's 2013 Budget Request(Senate)

2012-02-16T15:11:00.000-05:00

Feb 14, 2012

Senate Committee Finance

Secretary Geithner testified on the Treasury Department's fiscal year 2013 budget request. He said President Obama's $3.8 trillion package will reduce deficits significantly over time and put the nation back on a sustainable budget path.The proposal includes raising revenues, one of which is a tax hike on the top two percent of wage earners. Republican committee members argued the increase will only hurt small businesses who are the main job creators.

Health and Human Services 2013 budget.(Senate)

2012-02-16T15:09:00.001-05:00

Feb 15, 2012

Senate Committee Finance

Secretary Sebelius testified about the fiscal year 2013 Health and Human Services budget.

President Obama's 2013 Budget Request (Senate)

2012-02-16T14:34:00.000-05:00

Senate Committee Budget
Feb 14, 2012

Jeffrey Zients testified on President Obama's fiscal year 2013 budget proposal.

Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Request

2012-02-16T14:33:00.001-05:00

Feb 13, 2012

Office of Management and Budget

Obama administration officials spoke to reporters about the fiscal year 2013 budget proposal. Live coverage of this program was interrupted for a pro forma House session.

President Obama's 2013 Budget Request (House)

2012-02-16T14:33:00.000-05:00

Feb 15, 2012

House Committee Budget

Jeffrey Zients testified on President Obama's fiscal year 2013 budget proposal.

New defense cuts threaten bases, shipyards

2012-02-16T14:23:00.000-05:00

1
day

ago

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, right, accompanied by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, testifies on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

By Tom Curry, msnbc.com National Affairs Writer

At a time when President Barack Obama is proposing more than $120 billion in new and enhanced tax incentives for companies to manufacture in America, not overseas, one part of the nation’s industrial base -- a sector where foreigners aren't allowed to fully compete -- is under siege.
Smaller defense budgets proposed by Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will cancel some made-in-America ships, airplanes and unmanned aerial vehicles and slow down the purchase of others.
The Obama budget also threatens to shut manufacturing and repair facilities, such as the 212-year old Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which sits on an island between Maine and New Hampshire.
Obama’s budget blueprint calls for defense outlays to drop by 5 percent over the next two years, and fall from 19 percent of federal spending this year to 13 percent by 2022.
In a four-hour hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday, Panetta defended his call for fewer ships, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other hardware.

And he made the case for his proposal for two more rounds of the base realignment and closure (BRAC) process that would close bases and shipyards across America.
But he faced concerns and criticism from both Republicans and Democrats on the committee -- about the threat to blue-collar manufacturing and repair jobs as well to national security.
Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., told Panetta that “perhaps most disturbing of all” was the fact that at a time when U.S. strategy is increasingly focusing on East Asia and the Pacific, “this budget would reduce shipbuilding by 28 percent.”
Sen. Roger Wicker, R- Miss., whose state is home to the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, pointed to the 8.3 percent unemployment rate and noted that Obama’s budget proposal has various job creation ideas -- such as transportation infrastructure -- in it.

The Grio's Perry Bacon, Former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, and the Huffington Post's Jon Ward discuss the latest political news, including the GOP candidates' public comments about the President's budget.

“It makes no sense to me -- at a time when there is an effort to create more jobs with other spending -- to cut defense spending, which gives us the ‘two-fer’ of protecting the country and protecting the industrial base, which is a whole lot of Americans working to provide us with the infrastructure we need,” Wicker said. “It is a fact, is it not, that this budget will have an adverse effect on our industrial base?”

Panetta replied, “We’ve taken a lot of steps to try to protect against that happening, because we absolutely have to protect our industrial base and those industries that support the defense budget. We can’t afford to lose any more and, for that reason, we design an approach that will keep them in business …”

But keep them in business with fewer manufacturing jobs, Wicker noted.

“There will be, I understand that, and that does have some impact,” Panetta admitted.

Later in the hearing, pressed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Panetta said he would make sure that “we keep our industrial base busy, serving our needs.”

“Once that industrial base is gone, you never get it back and once those trained workers go into other fields you’ve lost them forever,” Collins told Panetta. “And that would greatly weaken our capabilities.”

Armed Services Committee members such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, I –Conn., are also opposing delays in building the Virginia-class submarine, which is built in Connecticut and repaired in New Hampshire.

As for closing excess bases and shipyards, Panetta said, “I don’t know of any other way” to cut infrastructure and get the savings needed “without going through that kind of process.”
When Panetta served as a House member from California in 1991, he saw BRAC first hand when the BRAC commission closed Ft. Ord near Monterey, costing more than 16,000 jobs.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

President Barack Obama's newly-proposed 2013 budget, has been criticized by Republicans as a political document in an election year – calling it "dead on arrival." Economist Greg Ip takes a closer look at Obama's plan

“I’ve been through the process; frankly I don’t wish the process on anybody,” he told Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D- N.H., who was defending the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
“Twenty five percent of my local economy was hit by virtue of a BRAC closure,” Panetta told her. But he said the community did use the closing as an opportunity to develop a college campus.
“I see very little support for the president’s proposal on BRAC,” Collins said, in an interview during a break in the hearing.
“If you look at the GAO reports on the last BRAC round, it has turned out to cost the government money, rather than saving money -- at least for the first five years. So I think there’s a great deal of skepticism both about the savings that would be produced and also whether there really is excess capacity.”
She said she did not think Congress would vote to launch another BRAC round. Portsmouth was on the hit list in 2005, but the BRAC commission overrode the Pentagon recommendation that it be closed. “Tony Principi, the BRAC chairman at the time, described Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as ‘the gold standard in naval yards.’”
The economic impact of closing the shipyard would huge in southern Maine, Collins said: “It’s a major employer in York County and beyond York County. Half the workers are from New Hampshire -- it affects both states”
In bipartisan accord was her Democratic neighbor, Shaheen who said after hearing, “The number one priority is national security. The Portsmouth Naval shipyard was created … because of national security – but there are a lot of good jobs there. To look at the equation without factoring that in, along with costs, would be shortsighted.”

One dissenter on the committee was Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., who said he did not consider defense manufacturing as “a job creator for America.” He also said he does think it’s necessary to consider another BRAC round -- “as hard as that is for my colleagues.”

Tompom

Defense is over half of the discretionary spending in the budget. I understand big ships are pretty vulnerable to anyone with a motorboat and a missile, or an airplane etc. They are handy to get large numbers of troops to foreign countries - but there are probably other viable options options that are at least as quick and cheaper.
Building expensive, outdated behemoths just to create jobs doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. If we sink our economy to produce expensive toys today, we won't have any power tomorrow.

95 votes

#1 - Tue Feb 14, 2012 4:54 PM EST

Greg-621390

All these politicians care about is making it look like they give a hoot about the people who put them in office. Most of them own stocks in the companies that are pillaging the government at every turn. Everyone knows that the whole acquisition system for DOD is a complete disaster and ends up costing tax payers more and more each year. Notice of course that all but one of the negative comments come from republicans that have facilities on the chopping block. This is all part of the pork barrel spending that everyone complains about yet, when it comes to something like this, the President is an a$$. Perhaps if Congress gave the President line item veto authority, there could be a more direct approach at killing these BS pork barrel projects that every member of Congress wants in the budget. Just as many posts have stated: it seems that the 97% has been forced to make cuts over the past couple years in order to live within their means and just to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. But, this isn't the case with the government. So, we can do one of two things make budget cuts or raise taxes, otherwise the deficit will continue to rise. So, as most of the American public has been forced to cut out about every enjoyment in life that they had in order to survive it's time for others that have been making huge profits to pick up their fair share of the burden. Congress needs to overhaul taxes and place more of a burden on the top 3%, who have been living high on the hog at the expense of the other 97%. Then, they need to look at tax reform for businesses. If they choose to build there products overseas and then bring them to the US I say put a tariff on them. This includes tariffs on all the call center jobs that companies like AT&T have shifted overseas. If businesses aren't going to choose to bring jobs back to America, then make it less lucrative for them and better for the rest of us. 50% of this nation lives in poverty and the lowest economic class, there is no reason why those who live in their million dollar homes and go out and spend $500 on a meal at a restaurant, shouldn't have to pull their weight. I believe in the security of our nation otherwise, I wouldn't have spent 21 years in uniform but, perhaps instead of playing police for the world and having bases all over the place that cost billions of dollars a year to run with foreign workers maybe we need to bring our troops back to the US, place them all around the nation providing better security within our borders and let the government spend money running bases that employ Americans, who will pay US taxes. Hell, we still don't have a budget for the fiscal year that began October 1st, does anyone really think that the current Congress can come to any compromise? I say vote them all out and let's look at a fresh start.

william whittemore-3007421

Yeah, Tompon is out of touch a little bit and has no idea what he is talking about. All you have to do is do a little past history research to find out that after every war the government cut back on the military and defense spending. Guess what happened when we got caught up in another war? We were caught with our pants down and lacking the resources to fight the modern battlefield. The Navy has to be stronger than the other services. It cost a lot of money to send troops and equipment from point A to point B. Also, our adversaries aren't waiting for us to catch up with them in the technology department. The Navy punches a hell of a lot of firepower whether you know it or not. Especially the submarines.

15 votes

#1.16 - Tue Feb 14, 2012 6:09 PM EST

2013 Transportation Department budget request.

2012-02-16T14:05:00.002-05:00

Feb 15, 2012
Senate Committee Budget

Secretary Ray LaHood testified on the 2013 Transportation Department budget request.

Department of Energy Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Proposal

2012-02-16T14:02:00.002-05:00

Feb. 13, 2012

Department of Energy

Energy Department officials spoke to reporters about the fiscal year 2013 budget proposal for the Department of Energy.

Semper Fi: Always Faithful

2012-02-15T21:32:00.000-05:00

On February 24, 2012 at 10Pm Lawrence O'Donnell will be doing a special on Semper Fi. If you are interested or one of the many Marines stationed at Camp LeJune, North Carolina from 1957 - 1987. This may pretain to you.

Semper Fi: Always Faithful Trailer from Rachel Libert on Vimeo.

Inspiration for Semper Fi: Always Faithful

Originally published in the Huffington Post.
Serendipity is often the starting point for documentary films and this was certainly the case with my film Semper Fi: Always Faithful. Nearly four years ago, my Co-Director Tony Hardmon and I were researching a documentary film about an innovative public health program when we met the sister of a man named Jerry Ensminger. She told us that her brother was in the process of exposing water contamination at a Marine Corps Base and she was looking for filmmakers to document it. We were skeptical but she laid out this incredible story of intrigue, heartbreak and betrayal. It piqued our interest enough that we showed up in Washington, DC two weeks later and met a gruff retired Marine on the mission of his life.
Master Sgt. Jerry Ensminger was a devoted Marine for nearly 25 years. As a drill instructor he lived and breathed the "Corps" and was responsible for indoctrinating thousands of new recruits. Jerry moved to North Carolina's Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in 1975 when his wife was pregnant with their second child Janey. When Janey was six years old she was diagnosed with a rare type of leukemia. Despite countless excruciating medical procedures and a tireless desire to live, Janey succumbed to her disease when she was only nine years old. Jerry's world collapsed and he was left with the nagging question "why?" He began a relentless search for answers in 1997 upon hearing a local news story on the issue, which led to the discovery of one of the largest water contamination incidents in U.S. history.
The drinking water at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune had been highly contaminated by carcinogenic chemicals for nearly thirty years. It's estimated that nearly a million Marines and their families drank, bathed and cooked with this water between 1957 and 1987.
Semper Fi: Always Faithful follows Jerry as he fights for justice on behalf of the Marines and their families exposed to these deadly toxins. In the process, we also witness this dutiful soldier transform himself into the activist he never imagined he'd become. We felt that this was a unique opportunity to tell the story of an environmental disaster from a very personal perspective.
When we first learned about the situation at Camp Lejeune, we were surprised that the water was contaminated for such a long period of time and that the Marine Corps hadn't notified former residents of their exposure to carcinogenic toxins until 2008. When we dug deeper and learned that the United States Department of Defense is our nation's largest polluter, we knew that this was an important story with far-reaching repercussions.
This issue does not just affect military personnel and their families. At the same time that we were documenting Jerry's efforts to raise awareness about Camp Lejeune, the Department of Defense was fighting for exemptions from environmental laws and battling with regulators over the safe standards for some of the most common contaminants found in this country. There are over 130 military sites on the EPA's National Priorities List for clean-up. At some of these sites, toxins have spread from the military base into neighboring civilian communities.
While making the film, I began to see that the Department of Defense is behaving the way that most polluters behave. They often bury their head in the sand and hope that no harm comes from what they've done. I think the difference here is that we expect more from our government than from private industry.
In many ways, the story of Semper Fi: Always Faithful is a classic David and Goliath tale and it was this conflict and heroism that initially attracted us. When we began making the film we were somewhat cynical about how much one man could achieve when fighting the U.S. government. Jerry and his team have dispelled any doubts that we had. We hope the film illustrates that social change is possible especially when undertaken by relentless and determined individuals.

Semper Fi: Always Faithful premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on Thursday April 21, 2011 and will screen three additional times during the festival.

Contamination at Camp Lejune

WHAT HAPPENED
Between 1957 – 1987 an estimated 750,000 to 1,000,000 people may have drank and bathed in tap water containing extremely high concentrations of toxic chemicals at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina. It is believed to be one of the largest water contamination incident s in US history.
Leaking underground storage tanks, industrial area spills, waste disposal sites and waste from an off-base dry cleaning business were identified as the sources of the contamination. Over 70 chemicals were found in the water, including benzene, vinyl chloride and trichloroethylene (TCE), three known human carcinogens, in addition perchloroethylene (PCE), a probable carcinogen.

Caring for Camp Lejeune Veterans Act of 2011

by Levi Newman on October 10, 2011

One of the most toxic contaminations in the country began in 1957 and continued through 1987 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Marines and their family members consumed or used contaminated water containing various volatile compounds for years. According to the St. Petersburg Times, a regulation on the books of Camp Lejeune shows the Corps knew the danger organic solvents posed as early as 1974. The paper reported that the news went public in1984.
The Caring for Camp Lejeune Veterans Act of 2011 was proposed as a way to provide hospital care, medical services, and nursing home care for any illness acquired by veterans and family members who suffered effects from contamination. In June of 2011, the bill passed out of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs with bipartisan support. However, since September, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) has faced stiff opposition from military and veterans groups, Department of Defense and the Veterans Affairs regarding his method to fund the bill.
To pay for the bill, Burr included a provision that would remove the appropriations that help cover the cost of the Defense Commissary System and would fold the commissaries in with the military exchange system. This would effectively eliminate the discounted grocery benefits many service-members and their families rely upon.
Currently, the bill is on the Senate editorial calendar, awaiting debate on the Senate floor. A major push for the legislation has been provided by an upcoming documentary, Rachel Libert and Tony Hardmon’s Semper Fi: Always Faithful.
While legislation rests in the hands of Congress, we should rely on each other more than ever to keep the faith and help one another. Semper Fidelis.

Link to the timeline, courtesy of St. Petersberg Times.

The Last Of CPAC

2012-02-15T21:15:00.000-05:00

These are the lasst videos i will post. There are more and you can see them on YouTube at CPAC

CPAC 2012: Reince Priebus

Uploaded by townhall on Feb 14, 2012

CPAC 2012: Reince Priebus

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CPAC 2012 - February 9-11, 2012 - - Video is a preview trailer for CPAC 2012. Join the American Conservative Union in Washington, DC for their 38th Conservative Political Action Conference - the largest annual gathering and agenda-setting event for conservative activists and leaders from across the country. The theme is - "We STILL Hold These Truths" - an ode to our country's founding "First Principles," including: 1.) Constitutionally Limited Government; 2.) Individual Liberty; 3.) Free Markets; 4.) Strong National Defense; and 5.) Preserving Traditional Values. Learn more at

CPAC 2012: Kirk Cameron Interview at CPAC

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Kirk Cameron interviewed by Townhall

Heaviest 2013 defense budget cuts would fall on troops

2012-02-15T21:05:00.005-05:00

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/02/13/138781/heaviest-2013-defense-budget-cuts.html#storylink=cpy

By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — As the Pentagon sought to show Monday that it had made tough spending decisions in its fiscal 2013 budget proposal, the brunt of the reductions would fall on U.S. ground troops, which face job losses, modest pay raises and increased health care costs while serving in a smaller force.
Even with those cuts, however, the Pentagon's base budget, which excludes most war spending, would decrease only slightly next year — from the current $531 billion to $525 billion — before rising to $534 billion in 2014.
The proposed budget shifts some long-term war costs into the base budget and includes greater spending on operations and maintenance, a driver of the growth. By the 2017 fiscal year, the base budget is projected to reach $567 billion.
The Pentagon has said it's responding to the economic downturn by saving $259.4 billion, but that reflects only cuts in the projected growth of spending through the 2017 fiscal year.
"Despite the president's good intentions to improve the balance between military and non-military security spending, the budget leaves it essentially unchanged through 2016," Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank, said in a statement.
The budget is intended to reflect the Obama administration's new defense strategy, which calls for a leaner, more agile force that's prepared for any kind of threat, while focusing on Asia and the Middle East. The strategy, which officials introduced last month, said the military must be ready to conduct several operations at the same time.
Under the new budget plan, which Congress must approve, Pentagon officials said that some troops — although it didn't specify how many — would be forced to leave the military as the department shrank the size of the services. By 2017, the Army is projected to shrink by 72,000 soldiers to 490,000, the Marines will shrink by 20,000 to 182,000, the Navy will shrink by 6,200 to 319,500 and the Air Force will shrink by 4,200 to 328,600.
Robert Hale, the Pentagon's comptroller, said the military would be "humane" in its cuts, and that they'd still leave a larger force than before the wars started. In 2001, there were 480,000 soldiers and 180,000 Marines.
The Pentagon called for retiring some planes that transport troops, including 27 C-5As and 65 C-130s. It said it planned to reduce pay raises to below private-sector levels, with troops receiving 1.7 percent raises for the next two years, followed by 0.5 percent increases in 2015 and 1 percent hikes in 2016.
The budget also would delay the purchase of several weapons systems — notably 179 of the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the most expensive weapons system in U.S. military history. Hale said the delay was to give the developer, Lockheed Martin, time to correct problems with the system, but critics have charged that delaying the purchases while not canceling them outright kicked the decision down the road and potentially raises the cost per system in the future.
Service members also will face increased health care fees, deductibles and co-payments phased in over several years, although the Pentagon didn't offer specifics. Military-age retirees who make more than $45,179 annually — a pension usually reserved for officers — will see their health care costs nearly quadruple, from $600 annually in fiscal year 2013 to $2,048 in 2017.

The United States withdrew forces from Iraq in December, but the Pentagon asked for $2.9 billion to spend there, largely to pay for the removal of equipment still in the country, Hale said. Another $88.5 billion in contingency funding will pay for operations in Afghanistan in the new fiscal year.
Some of the figures don't appear to reflect the Pentagon's stated goals. The Defense Department has called training Afghan security forces a key to its strategy to exit Afghanistan, yet the budget proposal cuts spending on that training mission by half, from $11.2 billion this fiscal year to $5.7 billion in 2013.
Hale said military officials thought that start-up costs for the mission of training some 352,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers_ such as spending on infrastructure for new Afghan bases and supplying the Afghans with uniforms and weapons — had passed.
"Don't take that reduction as any sign of a reduction in our commitment" to Afghan forces, Hale said. "We are fully committed to them."
Even the reduced spending on Afghan security forces, however, is more than the Army would spend on schools, day care centers and commissaries for its soldiers' families. The Army asked for $8.5 billion for military family support.
Hale said the department also would ask Congress to start two rounds of base realignments and closures — the always-controversial proceedings known as BRAC — in 2013 and 2015, which he said would lead to $5 billion in savings. Those savings aren't yet included in the budget proposal, Hale said.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/02/13/138781/heaviest-2013-defense-budget-cuts.html#storylink=cpy

President Obama's Budget Interactive

2012-02-15T20:58:00.000-05:00

UPDATED February 12, 2012

Four Ways to Slice Obama’s 2013 Budget Proposal

Explore every nook and cranny of President Obama's federal budget proposal.

All Spending

Types of Spending

Changes

Department Totals

Senate GOP tries to restore Keystone pipeline

2012-02-15T20:57:00.000-05:00

Obama administration rejects Keystone XL pipeline

On Jan. 18, President Obama rejected a Canadian firm’s application for a permit to build and operate the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, a massive project that would have stretched from Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Texas. Here’s a look at some of the key players in the pipeline plan and the protests against it.

WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 7, 2011. Crowds against the Keystone XL Pipeline gather outside the Reagan Building in Washington, DC on October 7, 2011. There were many others supporting different causes that came to the event. (Photo by Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post)??

By Juliet Eilperin, Published: February 13

Senate Republicans introduced an amendment Monday to a federal transportation bill that would speed the construction and operation of a controversial oil pipeline between Canada and the United States.

The move sparked a backlash from environmentalists, who generated hundreds of thousands of e-mails against the amendment within hours.

It remains unclear how quickly the Senate will vote on the amendment, which has the backing of 44 Republicans and one Democrat. Senate Democratic leaders oppose it and the chamber is embroiled in a separate fight over President Obama’s contraception coverage policy.

The amendment indicates the debate over TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline — which would transport heavy crude from Canada’s oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries — will continue to help define the two parties this election. Proponents say it will create jobs and provide the United States with a reliable energy supply. Opponents argue that the energy-intensive extraction of crude in Canada will accelerate climate change, and they worry that a spill could jeopardize sensitive habitat.

President Obama denied the TransCanada permit application last month, saying a congressionally mandated deadline did not allow his aides enough time to evaluate the project once Nebraska completed a rerouting of the pipeline around the sensitive Sand Hills habitat. The firm has indicated it will reapply for a federal permit.

The measure sponsored by GOP Sens. John Hoeven (N.D.), Richard G. Lugar (Ind.) and David Vitter (La.) would eliminate the need for TransCanada to obtain a federal permit to cross the U.S.-Canada border, while allowing Nebraska unlimited time to develop an alternative route through its territory.

Hoeven said that the measure “not only acknowledges the vital national interest this project represents on many levels, but also works in a bipartisan way to begin construction.”

More than 30 environmental and liberal groups began a noon drive to muster at least half a million messages to Congress within 24 hours in opposition to the project. They reached that goal just before 7 p.m. They planned to deliver those and later messages Tuesday to the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“Anyone who thought environmentalists were graying into irrelevance was wrong,” said climate activist Bill McKibben, who co-founded the group 350.org and had helped lead protests against the pipeline.

But Lugar spokesman Neil Brown said that Republicans would continue pressing for approval of the project. “We are committed to succeed where President Obama failed on Keystone XL, so we’ll try every avenue to get a vote and keep coming back on KXL until we get a vote for jobs,” he said.

800,000 Americans Tell Senate: Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline

2012-02-15T19:02:00.000-05:00

More than 800,000 messages urging rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline are delivered to the U.S. Senate, February 14, 2012 (Photo by 350.org)

WASHINGTON, DC, February 14, 2012 (ENS) - Over the last 24 hours, environmental and progressive groups flooded the Senate with more than 800,000 messages opposing TransCanada's Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The 1,700-mile-long proposed pipeline would carry heavy bitumen oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and on the Texas Gulf Coast.

The surge in activism came as Senate Republicans tried to add an amendment giving Congress authority to approve the pipeline to a bill intended to reauthorize transportation funding for the next six years.

Because the pipeline would cross an international border, a Presidential Permit is required stating that the project is in the national interest.

The Senate's amendment to the transportation bill would reverse President Barack Obama's January 18 decision to block the controversial project because it is not in the national interest.

In December, Congress passed and the President signed a bill to extend the payroll tax cut. Attached was an amendment requiring Obama to decide whether or not to approve the pipeline within 60 days. Saying more time was needed for a new route through Nebraska to be determined, Obama met the 60 day deadline by rejecting the pipeline.

More than 800,000 messages urging rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline are delivered to the U.S. Senate, February 14, 2012 (Photo by 350.org)

Today, representatives from the coalition delivered the 800,000 messages directly to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.

The petition drive was organized by a group of over 30 organizations and businesses with the goal of sending the Senate half a million messages in under 24 hours.

The online drive quickly went viral, powered in part by blogs and online advertising, tweets from celebrities, including the founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, and attention from Stephen Colbert, who interviewed 350.org founder and petition organizer Bill McKibben on his Comedy Central TV show Monday night.

The online push inspired offline action as well, organizers said.

In Kentucky, over 2,000 people gathered at a rally opposing mountaintop removal mining picked up their cell phones and called Senator McConnell, urging him to stop pushing the pipeline.

In New York City, dozens of people visited Senator Charles Schumer's office and got him on the record opposing the pipeline.

Petition deliveries also took place in Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, New Mexico, and elsewhere.

Fifteen of the nation's top climate scientists also added their names to the effort by sending a personal letter to the Senate and the House of Representatives, urging the leadership of both parties to abandon the tar sands pipeline because of its potential damaging impact on the environment and climate.

"We are researchers at work on the science of climate change and allied fields," the scientists wrote. "Last summer, we called on President Obama to block the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada's tar sands. We were gratified to see that he did so, and since some in Congress are seeking to revive this plan, we wanted to restate the case against it."

"The tar sands are a huge pool of carbon, one that it does not make sense to exploit. It takes a lot of energy and water to extract and refine this resource into useable fuel, and the mining is environmentally destructive," the scientists explained. "Adding this on top of conventional fossil fuels will leave our children and grandchildren a climate system with consequences that are out of their control. It makes no sense to build a pipeline that would dramatically increase exploitation of this resource."

"When other huge oil fields or coal mines were opened in the past, we knew much less about the damage that the carbon they contained would do to the earth's climate and its oceans. Now that we do know," the scientists urged, "it's imperative that we move quickly to alternate forms of energy - and that we leave the tar sands in the ground."

"We can say categorically that this pipeline is not in the nation's, or the planet's best interest," wrote the group, which includes Dr. James Hansen of NASA, Dr. Michael Mann at Penn State, and Dr. Ralph Keeling at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

Many of the groups involved in the effort to collect signatures are pledging to keep up the fight against Keystone XL as long as Republicans continue to try and bring measures designed to resurrect the project.

CREDO Mobile phone company President Michael Kieschnick said, "The Senate should consider this one day of action as a warning. The American people are watching very closely whether the Senate represents Big Oil or the public health. If the Keystone XL pipeline is forced through, we will do much, much more until it is permanently blocked."

Participating groups included: 350.org, Alliance for Climate Education, Avaaz, BOLD Nebraska, Brighter Planet, Center for Biological Diversity, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Climate Reality Project, Climate Solutions, CREDO, Democracy for America, Environmental Action, Energy Action Coalition, Environmental Defense, Frack Action/Water Defense, Friends of the Earth, FUSE, Global Exchange, Green America, Green for All, Indigenous Environmental Network, League of Conservation Voters, Labor Network for Sustainability, MoveOn.org Political Action, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oil Change International, Other 98%, Public Citizen, Patagonia, The North Face, Rainforest Action Network, Rebuild the Dream, Sierra Club, Solar Mosaic, Sojourners, Sungevity, Tar Sands Campaign, US Climate Action Network and Vote Solar.

Many of the groups involved in the effort to collect signatures are pledging to keep up the fight against Keystone XL as long as Republicans continue to try and bring measures designed to resurrect the project.

The Great Divorce

2012-02-15T18:53:00.002-05:00

January 30, 2012

By DAVID BROOKS

I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricey, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today.

More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage. The rates were similar, upper class and lower class.

Since then, America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

The upper tribe is now segregated from the lower tribe. In 1963, rich people who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan lived close to members of the middle class. Most adult Manhattanites who lived south of 96th Street back then hadn’t even completed high school. Today, almost all of Manhattan south of 96th Street is an upper-tribe enclave.

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

Apple admits it has a human rights problem

2012-02-15T18:44:00.000-05:00

After years of complaints and workers' suicides in China the technology giant faces up to the human cost of its gadgets

Stephen Foley New York
Tuesday 14 February 2012

Thousands of Chinese factory workers will be given the chance to detail the punishing conditions on assembly lines producing Apple iPads and iPhones, after the US company bowed to criticism and agreed to allow independent inspections of its supply chain.

Facing a growing scandal over the working conditions of those making its best-selling gadgets, Apple has called in assessors from the same organisation that was set up to stamp out sweatshops in the clothing industry more than a decade ago. The move is an admission that Apple's own system of monitoring suppliers has failed to stamp out abuses, and that the negative publicity surrounding its Chinese operations threatens to cause a consumer backlash against its products.

But campaigners for Chinese workers immediately criticised the company for conducting a public relations exercise instead of actually alleviating the long hours, harsh management and safety problems which have driven some workers to suicide and led to fatal accidents at a number of plants.

Inspectors from the Fair Labour Association started work yesterday at the Foxconn factory near the booming southern city of Shenzhen, where iPads are made. In 2010, a spate of 13 suicides or attempted suicides at that factory, known as Foxconn City, first turned a spotlight on the companies Apple uses to build its devices. Another Foxconn factory in Chengdu will also be inspected, Apple said, with the first findings to be published by the FLA next month. Apple said all of its suppliers had agreed to co-operate with the FLA and to let their workers speak freely.

Apple has come under fire for building a consumer electronics powerhouse on the backs of exploited workers, many of whom earn as little as 30p an hour. Employees of some suppliers complain of 10-hour shifts with only one permitted break, and of being forced to stand for so long that their legs swell. Last year, there were two fatal explosions at plants producing Apple goods, including one caused by the ignition of dust released by the polishing of new iPads.

The FLA will ask employees about working and living conditions, including health and safety, pay and hours. Its team will inspect manufacturing areas, dormitories and other facilities.

"We believe workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we have asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers," said Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook. "The inspections now under way are unprecedented in the electronics industry."

Apple's decision to call in the FLA comes after a new round of exposés of conditions at its suppliers. Last week, the campaign group China Labour Watch wrote an open letter to Mr Cook demanding that Apple accept lower profits so suppliers can raise wages, employ more staff and invest in improving safety.

Yesterday, the organisation dismissed Apple's commitment to independent inspections as a publicity stunt. "We already know what the conditions are like in the factories," said Fan Yuan, a China Labour Watch activist. "What Apple needs to do right now is take action to solve the problems. This move is not really about solving the problems, but rather about Apple getting publicity and rebuilding its positive image."

The FLA was set up in 1998 to monitor a code of practice introduced by clothing manufacturers that aimed to stamp out sweatshop conditions among their suppliers, following a similar public outcry and the success of consumer boycotts of offending companies.

Its work comes in addition to the audits conducted every year by Apple itself, which introduced a code of practice limiting the length of workers' shifts and demanded proper overtime pay. The company's spot-checks, though, reveal scores of violations at most suppliers.

Mr Cook, who took over the leadership of Apple last year from the late Steve Jobs, is fêted as the architect of its lean and flexible supply chain, which has been central to its ability to turn devices from concept to mass production in a matter of months. He has also focused on getting products produced at the lowest possible costs, which is one of the reasons that Apple's profits are among the fattest in the technology industry.

Yesterday, Apple's share price passed $500 for the first time in its history, just seven months after it first topped $400. The company is now the most valuable in the world, at $460bn.

Apple in China: The allegations

In July 2009, a Foxconn employee fell from an apartment building after losing an iPhone prototype. Over the next two years, at least 18 more of the company's workers have attempted suicide or have fallen from buildings in ways that suggested suicide.

In 2010, 137 workers at the Suzhou facility owned by Apple suppliers Wintek were injured after being ordered to use a poisonous chemical, n-hexane, to clean iPhone screens because it dried faster. Although Apple claims to have contacted all the employees affected, many say they have heard nothing.

In May 2011, four employees were killed and 18 were injured in a dust explosion at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu, which produces iPad parts. Chinese campaigners claim they warned Apple of hazardous conditions at the plant.

In December 2011, another 61 workers were injured in a gas explosion at the Riteng Computer Accessory Co factory in Shanghai, which was trialling aluminium iPad 2 back panels.

Employees allege that many of Foxconn's dormitories, where 70,000 workers live, are overcrowded, with reports of 20 workers being housed in a three-room apartment.

Jenny Stevens

Corporate income tax cut nears approval in Florida

2012-02-15T18:12:00.000-05:00

Lawmakers moved closer to approving a tax plan that would double the corporate income tax exemption, from $25,000 to $50,000, meaning 3,770 companies would be exempt from paying any income taxes.

Posted on Tuesday, 02.14.12

The Miami Herald
2012 FLORIDA LEGISLATURE

By Toluse Olorunnipa

TALLAHASSEE -- After a partisan spectacle of procedural gamesmanship, House lawmakers moved closer to passing a massive package of business tax cuts.

The two-hour debate over the tax cuts was bitter at times, bouncing around to many of the hot-button political issues of the day — organized labor, contraception, Cuba, domestic partnerships, immigration and inequality. During the lengthy bout of political posturing, both Republicans and Democrats used procedural maneuvers to steer the debate towards politically divisive issues.

The tax plan, a priority of Gov. Rick Scott, would double the corporate income tax exemption, from $25,000 to $50,000, meaning 3,770 companies would be exempt from paying any income taxes.

Scott has said he would like to completely phase out the state’s corporate income tax, in order to make Florida more business-friendly. Companies paid nearly $2 billion in state income tax last year, about 8 percent of all revenue collected by Florida.

Several other parts of the tax package would cut costs for thousands of businesses and reduce revenue in the state. The measures would slash taxes on oil drilled in Florida (by $3.3 million), manufacturing equipment ($56.4 million), private plane repair ($12.3 million) and electricity at produce packing houses ($1.1 million).

Taken together, the cuts mean about $108 million in less revenue annually for the state, and about $13.2 million less for local governments.

The debate — which degenerated into a parliamentary scene of procedural maneuvers, highlighted the tension between Democrats and the Republicans, who hold a significant majority.

Democrats in the House used the opportunity to pepper high-ranking Republicans with a flurry of questions on a wide-range of political issues.

Democrats offered 15 amendments to the corporate tax cut, attempting to deny the benefit to companies that ship jobs offshore, deny health insurance for domestic partners, deny coverage for contraceptives, work with countries that sponsor terrorism, or discriminate against veterans.

In an attempt to call the Republicans’ bluff on immigration, Rep. Scott Randolph, D-Orlando, offered an amendment that would provide the corporate tax cut only to companies that used an E-Verify system to prevent the hiring of undocumented immigrants. Several Republicans, including Gov. Rick Scott, campaigned on the issue, but have generally avoided the politically-dangerous topic this year.

Rep. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, R-Miami, countered each of the amendments with an amendment of his own, stating that companies that hire unionized labor would not be eligible for a tax cut.

Each time, state Representatives voted to change the Democrat-led amendments into the anti-union amendment, effectively blocking a vote on the Democrat’s issues.

“There’s nothing in the rules that says that I can’t do this,” Lopez-Cantera told protesting Democrats. “I’m just doing what the rules afford me the right to do in this Chamber.”

The tax package faces a full vote in the House on Wednesday. The House also moved forward on other tax measures, including this year’s back-to-school sales tax holiday and a property tax exemption for surviving spouses of veterans and first responders killed in the line of duty.

charleo1

Corporations don't want to pay a living wage. Done.
They don't want to provide retirement. Done.
They don't want to provide healthcare benefits. Done.
They want publicly financed debt. Done.
They want subsidies to off set business expense. Done
They want public school money. Done.
They want regulations removed holding them responsible for faulty products, dishonest financial
deals, and pollution clean ups. Done.
They want to pay no taxes on profits from all of the above.
And, they won't to do business in a state where they couldn't use taxpayer money to buy every
politician in it.

A Like Reply Yesterday 08:19 PM

KLC557

Collapse Expand It's about time to vote out all Republicans, they are only for big business and themselves. You Christians better wake-up and see they are devils in sheep's clothing. Remember the Republicans are the ones that opened up free trading that allowed Corporations to out source our jobs to other countries and not pay Taxes. If a Company wants to do business here in the states they need to pay taxes period. Then we come to the Presidential Candidates if they don't keep their money in the States and pay taxes on it they shouldn't be allowed to run. It's illegal for us as tax payers to do it so why do they get to. It shows how much they love their Country, if they are keeping their money elsewhere. Sounds to me they are UN-American and shouldn't be so GREEDY.

A Like Reply

BOOM: David Brooks, Charles Murray, and the Reign of Mammon

2012-02-15T18:05:00.000-05:00

by LaVonne Neff 02-15-2012
8:56am

Der Mammon und sein Sklave. Holzstich, 1896 via Wiki Commons, http://bit.ly/zom5Df

Tuesday's New York Times carried a thought-provoking op-ed by David Brooks called "The Materialist Fallacy." I recommend that you read it: it's only 764 words long. Brooks argues that "in the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated." This is not just because of job loss (the liberal explanation) or government intrusiveness (the libertarian explanation) or "the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms" (the neo-conservative explanation).

It has more to do with declining social context and social capital, says Brooks, who never met a financial capitalist he didn't like. He really likes Charles Murray's new book, however: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. (If you're not up for the 416-page book, you might want to read Brooks's January 30 column in praise of it.) Both authors worry about nefarious social forces that are driving a wedge between rich and poor, productive and non-productive, law-abiding and outlaws.

Brooks is partly right, and so are his critics. Yes, there's a rip in our social fabric. Yes, it is caused or made worse by job loss, ill-advised government programs, and shifting (or abandoned) values. Yes, it diminishes social capital and impoverishes social context. But also, Mr Brooks, and perhaps fundamentally, our decaying social fabric is the direct result of our enthusiastic worship of Mammon--the love of money that is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10).

I don't need to remind anybody about rapacious financiers, bloated CEOs, unscrupulous lobbyists, and corrupt politicians. But there were plenty of those in the 1890s and the 1920s, and, as Brooks points out, the social fabric still stayed more or less intact back then. Even two World Wars and a Great Depression didn't unravel it. People still finished school, still got jobs, and still got married before having children, if not always before getting pregnant. Why did things start to break down in the 60s?

It's all the Boomers' fault, right? I mean, the first Boomers were getting their driver's licenses in 1962, the very year Brooks chooses as the beginning of the end. And once we had wheels, and cars with back seats, and, hey, the Pill!--it was all downhill from there.

Nope. Brooks doesn't think it's that simple. But I don't see him fretting about the sea change in the cult of Mammon that took place in the 1950s when we older Boomers were children. For the first time, kids — millions of us — became a market segment. With a brand-new television set planted in nearly every living room in America, we were sitting ducks for anyone who had a product to sell and money to buy air time. We were as plankton to whales, as baby seals to sharks.

The marketers told us we were fantastic, and we believed them. They told us we deserved whatever we wanted, and we agreed. They warned us, sometimes not so subtly ("often a bridesmaid, never a bride"), that if we didn't buy their product, we might face some diminution of our social capital, and we trembled. And they encouraged us to buy their product right now, whether or not we had cash on hand.

Believing them, we stopped thinking about tomorrow. Sha la la-la-la-la, live for today — never mind that what we did today might get us in debt, or destroy our brains, or produce babies. We were the "Now" generation, and proud of it.

But what do you get when people start wanting everything now, so much so that they stop making and carrying out long-range plans, that they defer commitment indefinitely, that they heedlessly risk future solvency in favor of present satisfaction? Well, at the front end, you get a great economy based on thriving businesses with ever-expanding sales volumes. Then, when the rush subsides, you get fatherless children, inadequate education, declining health, a hazardous environment, crumbling roads, and joblessness. You get a social fabric shot full of holes.

So whom shall we blame for the present sad state of so many Americans? Government? Big business? Mysterious social forces? Our own lack of moral fiber? Sure, why not. We've all sold out to Mammon. Our society's organizing principle is the love of money.

Alas, until we as individuals and as a nation stop worshiping at Mammon's altar, all attempts to fix the social fabric--be they Republican, Democratic, socialist, anarchist, moralist, religious, or academic--will be about as effective as sewing "a piece of new cloth on an old garment" (Mark 16:21). Still, a patched garment, if no new fabric exists, is better than no garment at all.

LaVonne Neff is an amateur theologian and cook; lover of language and travel; wife, mother, grandmother, godmother, dogmother; perpetual student, constant reader, and Christian contrarian. She blogs at Lively Dust and at The Neff Review.

The Materialist Fallacy

2012-02-15T18:03:00.001-05:00

February 13, 2012

By DAVID BROOKS

The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion. Marriage rates were high. Community groups connected people across class.

In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.

As early as the 1970s, three large theories had emerged to explain the weakening of the social fabric. Liberals congregated around an economically determinist theory. The loss of good working-class jobs undermined communities and led to the social deterioration.

Libertarians congregated around a government-centric theory. Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying.

Neo-conservatives had a more culturally deterministic theory. Many of them had been poor during the Depression. Economic stress had not undermined the family then. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. They argued that the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption, especially for those in fragile circumstances.

Over the past 25 years, though, a new body of research has emerged, which should lead to new theories. This research tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next.

Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values.

Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.

The recent research details how disruption breeds disruption. This research includes the thousands of studies on attachment theory, which show that children who can’t form secure attachments by 18 months face a much worse set of chances for the rest of their lives because they find it harder to build stable relationships.

It includes the diverse work on self-control by Walter Mischel, Angela Duckworth, Roy Baumeister and others, which shows, among other things, that people raised in disrupted circumstances find it harder to control their impulses throughout their lives.

It includes the work of Annette Lareau, whose classic book, “Unequal Childhoods,” was just updated last year. She shows that different social classes have radically different child-rearing techniques, producing different outcomes.

Over the past two weeks, Charles Murray’s book, “Coming Apart,” has restarted the social disruption debate. But, judging by the firestorm, you would have no idea that the sociological and psychological research of the past 25 years even existed.

Murray neglects this research in his book. Meanwhile, his left-wing critics in the blogosphere have reverted to crude 1970s economic determinism: It’s all the fault of lost jobs. People who talk about behavior are blaming the victim. Anybody who talks about social norms is really saying that the poor are lazy.

Liberal economists haven’t silenced conservatives, but they have completely eclipsed liberal sociologists and liberal psychologists. Even noneconomist commentators reduce the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.

I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school. The influences that lead so many to do so are much deeper and more complicated than anything that can be grasped in an economic model or populist slogan.

This economic determinism would be bad enough if it was just making public debate dumber. But the amputation of sociologic, psychological and cognitive considerations makes good policy impossible.

The American social fabric is now so depleted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them. It’s not enough just to have economic growth policies. The country also needs to rebuild orderly communities.

This requires bourgeois paternalism: Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.

Social repair requires sociological thinking. The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975.

Is Glenn Beck A Hypocrite?

2012-02-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

I found this and decided to post this article. Cenk (The young turks) had Andrew on his show tonight and they were politely discussing this and his venture at CPAC this past weekend.
Here is the video.....

Andrew Breitbart: It’s OK to smear Occupy, because tea party has been unfairly portrayed

“I tand by precisely what I said,” Breitbart says.
Cenk talks to Andrew Breitbart about a video that captures him yelling, “Stop raping people!” at Occupy protesters outside the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
what I’m trying to understand is if you’re doing it on purpose, like, you know you’re being unfair, or do you think you’re being eminently fair?” Cenk asks.
Do you really think you can smear the whole movement?” Breitbart answers, “I’m being too fair. Fair is playing by the same rules that you and NBC and The Huffington Post played against smearing the tea party.”

Written by Steven Rosenblum in politics, TV, VIP on 26 May 2011

It is important that I start by saying I don’t personally know Andrew Breitbart or Glenn Beck. I met Breitbart once, for about 60 seconds, at CPAC 2010. I also interviewed him by phone on May 21^st, with my co-host Daria DiGiovanni, on Conservative Republican Forum. I have never met or spoken to Glenn Beck. I admire what both of these men have accomplished.

Glenn Beck versus Andrew Breitbart

*Updated (see below).

On the evening of May 24^th I became aware of a feud between Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck, two conservative media heavyweights, that apparently has been brewing for the better part of a year. The dispute goes back to the story of Shirley Sherrod, the USDA employee, who was forced to resign in July of 2009 after a video of her speaking at a local NAACP chapter meeting was shown on Breitbart’s BigGovernment website.
In the video Mrs. Sherrod- who is black- talks about an experience she had with a white farmer who came to her for help saving his farm. She tells the audience among other things that, “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land — so I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”

This video became public at a time when the NAACP and much of the liberal media were attempting to portray the Tea Party movement as racist. Not surprisingly conservative media outlets: including FoxNews and others ran with the story. This led to Mrs. Sherrod, the USDA’s Georgia Director of Rural Development, being forced to resign by Secretary Tom Vilsack to avoid embarrassing the Department and the Obama Administration.
Unfortunately the video on BigGoverment’s website was not the full video of the event. It was however “the entirety of the speech [Breitbart] had in his possession”, according to blogger Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com. Mrs. Sherrod goes on to explain the error of her initial impression, this fact was later confirmed by the farmer himself and his wife. In fact the wife calls Sherrod a “friend” who “helped us save our farm”.
Andrew Breitbart has said that the point of the video was not Mrs. Sherrod’s statement, but rather the way that the audience laughed and seemed to approve of her not giving the white farmer “the full force of what” she could do. Again, the NAACP was accusing the Tea Party of racism and Breitbart had a tape of people at a NAACP chapter meeting embracing her story of black on white racism.
The dispute between Beck and Breitbart stems from some of the claims Beck made about how he covered the story, including: “We didn’t rush to condemn her”, “We defended her and said her side of the story demanded to be heard- because– context matters.”

It is true that on his Fox News Channel show Beck did not condemn Shirley Sherrod. But what was not revealed to his TV audience, and was largely ignored in the media, was that earlier that morning on his nationally syndicated radio program (before all the exculpatory information became known and put her comments in context) Beck did attack Sherrod in 3 segments, totaling about 9 minutes.
Click below to hear the segments from 7/20/2010:
Glenn Beck Radio Audio Segment 4
Glenn Beck Radio Audio Segment 11
Glenn Beck Radio Audio Segment 12
If Beck had simply said he didn’t have all the facts when his radio show aired and had framed his future coverage of the story that way, there would have been no problem. But instead he told this cable audience, “I have a story I want to share with you that I haven’t shared yet. Do you know why I didn’t do the Shirley Sherrod story? Did anyone think that story was uncommon for the people that we have in the White House? That there might be some prejudice that is happening? No. I stood in my office with my entire team, and I said, “Something’s wrong, don’t do this story.” That’s what saved me: the Sword of the Spirit.”
Clearly, this is not the case. He attacked Mrs. Sherrod on his radio show based on the information he had in his possession at that time. He also ignored the context of the article that accompanied the audio he was using to attack her. Then when the full story became clear Mr. Beck didn’t simply admit it, he made himself the victim and started to blame others.
Click below to see Glenn later the same day on his Fox News show:
Beck- Context Matters Part 1
Beck- Context Matters Part 2
Beck- Context Matters Part 3
Beck- Context Matters Part 4
On his Twitter feed Breitbart says he’s “been trying since July 2010 to get him [Beck] to set [the] record straight”. He says he “sucked it up for most of a year & went to Beck’s office last month. Talked to [a] top exec. Expected results. Got none”.
Breitbart goes on to ask “Beck fans” 5 questions:

“Is it cool your guru goes behind my back to hire away my editors, take bloggers/contributors & while bad mouthing me?”
“Why’d he take so much Big content w/out attribution during even our high times? Is partial attribution the ‘truth’ standard?”
“When he was throwing me under [the] Sherrod bus, why’d he double down & lie to O’Reilly’s face that he didn’t do [the] story?”
“Why has he avoided a year of me trying to settle this privately through Kerry, LibertyChick & others?”
“Why’d you go after O’Keefe & me (though I had nothing to do w/NPR)? @mmfa [Media Matters for America] sure liked that d*ck move!”

I have been to GlennBeck.com and TheBlaze.com to see if Mr. Beck has addressed Mr. Breitbart’s charges. I could find no evidence that he has. On his cable show Beck tells his viewers a few things that have always made me respect him: “Don’t take my word for anything I say on this show”, “do your own research”, “truth has no agenda” and “QUESTION WITH BOLDNESS”.
I don’t have a dog in this hunt. Both Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck are titans of conservative media that have inspired many of us to write, broadcast, investigate and question. If I had never heard of the two of them I might not be writing for this publication and likely would not be hosting my own radio show.
Andrew Breitbart vs. Glenn Beck, to me, is the equivalent of the old Japanese monster movie ‘King Kong vs. Godzilla’ (I’m not sure who is who). It is a colossal battle and just as the result of those two monsters fighting led to the destruction of Tokyo, a battle between Breitbart and Beck could lead to damage to the conservative movement and media. The only winners in this dispute are left-wing media organizations like Media Matters for America, the DailyKos, MSNBC and the New York Times.
And yet it seems the difficult question that must be asked, because “the truth has no agenda”, is: “Is Glenn Beck a hypocrite?” Has he failed to live by the standards he espouses to his audience? His listeners, viewers and all the people that buy his books and have traveled vast distances to attend his rallies, not to mention all the people that follow his 9 principles and 12 values (912) deserve to know the truth of what really happened.
Andrew Breitbart has made his side of the story extraordinarily clear and very public. He has brought the issue of Glenn Beck’s ethics and integrity to the court of public opinion, because he says Beck refused to deal with it privately for almost a year. To put it simply Beck’s principles and values have been challenged, this time by a conservative peer not some left-winger. Shouldn’t Glenn address this? His silence is deafening.
Updated 12:30pm 5/26/11:
It appears that Glenn Beck’s producers did go on to defend Mrs. Sherrod in the 4th hour of the show which is available only to SUBSCRIBERS OF HIS INSIDER EXTREME service. They play audio of a CNN interview with Mrs. Sherrod, where she defends herself and tries to explain why she did not fight when the USDA and White House demanded her resignation. You can judge for yourself the veracity of her claims and how much the Beck producers actually defend Sherrod.

Senator McConnell Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-14T22:22:00.002-05:00

Feb. 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell talked about Republican Party strategy against President Obama in the 2012 presidential election. He talked about the economy, the deficit, and the the Obama administration ruling on a provision of the 2010 health care law that requires church-affiliated employers to cover contraceptives and other preventive services in their health insurance plans.

Must-Read Transcript Breitbart at CPAC:This Is Not Your Mother's Democratic Party

2012-02-14T20:56:00.000-05:00

This is not word for word, but pretty close. He knows exactly how to incite the audience.

Doug Ross @ Journal: --
Saturday, February 11, 2012, 3:55:00 PM

Transcript by Biff Spackle, Junior Cub Reporter:

Right now, my Twitter feed is already calling me a big fat homosexual. Hello, children at home. No, your Dad's not gay. That's how the Left rolls.

Everybody asks me: why do you retweet? Why do you do that? ...In fact, there's probably no one in the world I respect more than Professor Hugh Hewitt and the other day he took me aside. He said, "I don't think you should do that, Andrew." Well, Professor Hewitt, on this issue I disagree.

Because they've held over our heads -- with contempt -- the false narrative of their innate tolerance. The least tolerant people you'll ever meet in your entire lives -- I know it, I live it every day. And I retweet it to remind them that I know exactly who they are.

...This is my war cry for 2012. You need to join me in my war against the institutional left.

This is not your mother's Democratic Party... duh! John Podesta and George Soros? This is not your mother's Democratic Party You know whose party it is? ...I have a thesis about who we're fighting against on the hard left... [In college] I had no idea these [left-wing academics] people were actually serious about the malarkey they were teaching. The post-structuralist, politically correct garbage.

Unfortunately in 2004, the radical Left [executed] a coup d'etat of the Democratic Party. And basically kicked a person -- that four years was called 'the standard-bearer of decency in the Democratic Party'. And that person was Joe Lieberman.

That was the end of the Democratic Party. And in 2010, the DLC went under.

There's no such thing as a moderate Democrat. And so what do we get now, in Barack Obama?

In this election we're going to vet him

I've got videos, by the way, and in this election we're going to vet him. I've got videos. This election we're going to vet him. From his college days, to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what 'hope and change' was sold in 2008.

The videos are going to come out. The narrative is going to come out: that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver pony-tails [left wing academics] back in the 1980s, like Bill [Ayers] and Bernadine Dohrn who said "one day, we're going to have the presidency.'

And the rest of us slept while they plotted and they plotted and they plotted. And they oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in the Annenberg Challenge, from real capitalists, who gave it to their children and their children's children [who] then became communists. We've got to work on that...

Barack Obama is a radical and we should not be afraid to say it. And Barack Obama was launched from Bill and Bernadine's salon... it became self-evident to me that [Obama enjoyed] many a meal there... And don't tell me, ABC, CBS and NBC that I can't posit that theory, because it is a self-evident truth. Just like it was a self-evident truth that he was with Jeremiah Wright. And just as it was a self-evident truth that when he was at Harvard, he was advocating for the worst of the worst to join the faculty. Radicals. Radicals at "Beirut on the Charles".

And that who's in the White House. And that's who's outside right now [the Occupy movement] telling you that you don't have a right to be here. They would squelch your free speech just as easily as they do at Harvard, Vassar, Yale, Wesleyan - they're a bunch of totalitarian freaks.

The media can no longer be called objective journalists

And they pal around with our friends in the mainstream media. I always thought the media leaned to the left... but when they act like a Provost at a politically correct university and tell people to shut up, [then] no longer can they be called objective journalists. They're playing for the other side.

They've been part of demonizing good and decent people. They tried to defeat the Tea Party and when they failed, just like when they tried to create a [leftist] Rush Limbaugh and they failed with Air America, they want what they can't have. They wanted what they could not have and what did they create?

They created the "Occupy Movement". What is the Occupy Movement, you may ask? It's a natural, organic group of people -- you've never seen before in your life. Wait a sec-- these exact people protested against you at the GOP Welcoming Committee in 2008-- and two of them were arrested for planting Molotov cocktails. [These] are radicals against the police, radicals against you, exactly like Occupy, the same exact people, the same people who organized "Camp Casey" in Crawford, these are the same exact people who went down the highway at the end of the summer when Katrina happened, created Occupy New Orleans.

It's the same radicals, they've been in your life since 'Senator Obama' became part of your vocabulary. They are at war with you. They attack you. They throw eggs at you. And -- guess what? -- the media looks the other way. You're domestic terrorists, you know. Janet Napolitano warned me about that.

Yet when this group emerged, what happened? ...This is my thesis: the anti-war movement was never about anti-war. It was a Saul Alinsky community-organizing tool to get Barack Obama and the Left elected. It went away immediately.

The Occupy Movement is the Definition of Un-American

And the mainstream media created a narrative... Time Magazine's "Person of the Year... this is the anti-war movement! How do I know this? Because if I told this to ABC, CBS and NBC, they'd tell me it's a conspiracy theory -- that it's just a bunch of organic people. There's no organization going on, even though we have the emails to prove it. Or the undercover videos of Natasha Leonard of The New York Times organizing with the radicals. No, that didn't mean anything!

Bernadine Dohrn pointed out to me when I was snarkily asking 'What ever happened to the anti-war movement?', she let loose an affirmation of everything I know to be true. She said, "Well, that's not true... it's more or less what Occupy Wall Street is." And the mainstream media refuses to tell you that these are the same shock troops that have been ... instigating [against] us, instigating riots against the police, these people are the definition of un-American.

I don't care who our candidate is

You want a unity speech? I'll give you a unity speech. I don't care who our candidate is.

I haven't since the beginning of this... ask not what the candidate can do for you, ask what you can do for the candidate!

And that's what the Tea Party is.

We are there to confront [the radical left] on behalf of our candidate!

I will march behind who ever our candidate is. Because if we don't, we lose.

There are two paths! There are two paths! One is America, the other is Occupy! One is America, the other is Occupy! And I don't care, and along the way... I've realized over the last three years that the Republican Party and the conservative movement is not what ABC, CBS and NBC put on the screen.

They try to portray you in the worst possible light... and when I travel around the United States meeting people in the Tea Party who care -- black, white, gay, straight -- anyone that's willing to stand next to me to fight the progressive left, I will be in that bunker, and if you're not in that bunker 'cause you're not satisfied with this candidate, more than shame on you. You're on the other side.

Erick Erickson -- you listening?

Breitbart: Support Republican Nominee, Whomever It Is, in “War Against the Institutional Left.”

2012-02-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

Andrew Breitbart’s Video Of CPAC Speech

Breitbart tells CPAC: I have videos of Obama in college and they’ll come out during the election

posted at 7:53 pm on February 10, 2012 by AllahpunditVia Mediaite, the key bit comes at 5:15 but don’t skip. Watch the whole thing, as this is easily the most entertaining speech you’ll see at CPAC. Naturally he’s coy about what he’s got, but it sounds like it has to do with O as a student radical. I wonder if big media, having heard this, will scramble to try to uncover the footage and put it out ASAP so that it’s old news by the time of the general election. Can’t wait to hear their explanations for why they couldn’t be bothered to do that last cycle.

Note well what he says at 10:30 about Bernadine Dohrn’s take on the anti-war movement. It’s a comfort to know that some of its leaders are now willing to admit what a fraud it was.

Posted on February 11, 2012

This is a speech about unity, mind you. I thought he was never gonna make it, but man was I wrong! This speech I bet changed a lot of minds about the back-and-forth of our candidates and the threats of sitting it out if it’s not who they picked for President.

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Bill Hobbs

Long-time Tea Party supporter Andrew Breitbart, the conservative new-media star and publisher of Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv, gave a colorful last speech of the day at CPAC today in which he bashed the liberal media and the Occupy movement, calling the radical Left “a bunch of totalitarian freaks.”

“I’m looking for you Occupy Freaks, bring on the glitter bomb,” Brietbart said at the start of his talk, as he paced the CPAC stage, peering into the crowd.

According to Brietbart, the Occupy movement houses the same radicals from the anti-war movement – but the media chooses to ignore their violent acts and instead paint them as “peaceful protesters.”

Brietbart said the Occupy protesters are “the definition of un-American,” and urges attendees to act and react to these “shock troops” by supporting the Republican presidential nominee – whomever it is.

Ask not what candidate can do for you, but what you can do for the candidate,” Brietbart said, drawing applause, and called on the crowd to “join me in the war against the institutional left.”

Senator Rand Paul Remarks to Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-14T20:16:00.005-05:00

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Senator Rand Paul criticized President Obama's call for a minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Senator Paul warned of a looming national debt crisis, saying even his party was late to address the issue.

Herman Cain Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-14T20:15:00.000-05:00

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Herman Cain used his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference(CPAC) to endorse Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher for Senate in Ohio. Speaking in Washington, Mr. Cain also said he dropped out of the presidential race because of "gutter politics and for family."

Conservative Issues

2012-02-14T16:55:00.000-05:00

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Republican Representatives Steve King (IA), Michele Bachmann (MN), and Jim Jordan (OH) spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Among the Issues they addressed were federal regulations, President Obama's foreign policy agenda, and the state of the conservative movement.

Conservative Political Action Conference Panel Discussion

2012-02-14T16:53:00.001-05:00

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Conservative commentators talked about the state of the conservative movement, the 2012 presidential election campaign, the economy, and Republican views of social issues.

Speaker Boehner Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-14T16:52:00.000-05:00

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

House Speaker John Boehner spoke about the House under his leadership. He also talked about Republican efforts to ban earmarks and the Obama administration ruling on a provision of the 2010 health care law that requires church-affiliated employers to cover contraceptives and other preventive services in their health insurance plans.

Rick Perry Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-14T16:50:00.000-05:00

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Texas Governor Rick Perry talked about the relationship between Wall Street and the federal government

Federal Budget and Employment Priorities

2012-02-13T22:51:00.001-05:00

Feb 10, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) and Representative Connie Mack (R-FL) talked about federal budget priorities. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) spoke about global climate change and the military budget. Carly Fiorina closed the panel, focusing on research and technology, the economy, and the federal government.

Mike Huckabee Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-13T22:49:00.000-05:00

Feb 10, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Republican 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made opening remarks in the opening morning session of the Conservative Political Action Conference. Mr. Huckabee in his comments spoke about an Obama administration ruling on a provision of the 2010 health care law that requires church-affiliated employers to cover contraceptives and other preventive services in their health insurance plans. Afterward, panelists talked about Planned Parenthood, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

Conservative Political Action Conference, Day 2, Evening Session,

2012-02-13T22:46:00.000-05:00

Feb 10, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Governor Scott Walker (R-MI) gave the keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Newt Gingrich Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-13T22:37:00.001-05:00

Feb 10, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Republican 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He was followed by Andrew Breitbart who focused his remarks on television news networks and the Occupy movement.

Mitt Romney Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-13T22:35:00.000-05:00

Feb 10, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Republican 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In his remarks he said that President Obama was a failure and the poster child for government arrogance. He also defended his record as governor, and said he would overturn every Obama administration regulation that threatened life.

Rick Santorum Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-13T22:33:00.000-05:00

Feb 10, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference

Republican 2012 presidential candidate Rick Santorum spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In his remarks he said that he was the only true conservative running for president and was the candidate with the boldest contrast against President Obama

Conference Straw Poll

2012-02-13T22:23:00.000-05:00

Feb 11, 2012
American Conservative Union
Conservative Political Action Conference

Attendees at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) participated in a presidential straw poll. Mitt Romney won with 38%, followed by Rick Santorum with 31%, Newt Gingrich 15%, and Ron Paul 12%

John Cornyn Remarks(CPAC)

2012-02-13T22:20:00.001-05:00

Feb 11, 2012
American Conservative Union
Conservative Political Action Conference

John Cornyn (R-TX) spoke to conservative activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He accused U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder of "playing politics" with national security by releasing confidential memos concerning CIA interrogation techniques.

Grover Norquist Remarks

2012-02-13T22:18:00.000-05:00

Feb 11, 2012
American Conservative Union
Conservative Political Action Conference

Grover Norquist spoke to conservative activists about the importance of controlling Congress, state legislatures and the White House. He also offered a plan for promoting conservatism.

Bobby Jindal Remarks(CPAC)

2012-02-13T22:16:00.000-05:00

Feb 11, 2012
American Conservative Union
Conservative Political Action Conference

Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) spoke about some of the lessons the federal government could learn from states in addressing entitlement programs, education and other issues. He also talked about his experience working with President Obama and other federal officials during the 2010 Gulf oil spill.

Rick Scott Remarks(CPAC)

2012-02-13T22:13:00.000-05:00

Feb 11, 2012
American Conservative Union
Conservative Political Action Conference

Governor Rick Scott (R-FL) spoke about some of his accomplishments as governor and why he made accountability a major theme of his administration. He criticized the Obama administration for government bailouts and failing to create jobs. He also talked about the role of government to help "level the playing field" and not to "pick the winners and losers."

Sarah Palin Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

2012-02-13T22:11:00.000-05:00

Feb 11, 2012
American Conservative Union
Conservative Political Action Conference

Former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sara Palin spoke to conservatives attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. She criticized the Obama administration's policies which she said were not "winning the future" but "losing the country."

Opinions on Occupy Movement (CPAC)

2012-02-13T22:07:00.001-05:00

Feb 11, 2012
American Conservative Union
Conservative Political Action Conference

Panelists spoke to conservative activists and talked about the role and impact of both the tea party movement and the occupy wall street movement. Their characterizations of the occupy movement were often tongue-in-cheek or disparaging. They responded to questions from the audience.

Obama budget sees recovery gaining speed

2012-02-13T21:35:00.002-05:00

4
hours
ago

By John W. Schoen, Senior Producer

President Barack Obama is feeling upbeat about the economic recovery, maybe too upbeat.

As part of his $3.8 trillion spending plan for 2013, the president included an economic forecast that shows the nation’s gross domestic product moving ahead by 3.6 percent this year and 4.4 percent in 2013. Obama and his advisors also see the unemployment rate falling to 7.5 percent next year, with an inflation rate holding steady at about 2 percent through the rest of the decade.

The administration also predicts the recovery will produce strong growth in 2014 before the pace of growth begins slowing in 2015.

While typical of the rosy scenarios outlined by White House budgets in an election year, the president added a note of caution to his economic outlook.

"We are seeing signs that our economy is on the mend," Obama said in his budget message to Congress. “But we are not out of the woods yet.”

The president’s numbers are higher than forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office and the Blue Chip survey of about 50 private business economists. One reason for the discrepancy, according to the White House, is that its forecast assumes the president’s budget proposal will be enacted as written.

The odds of that happening in an election year are slim to none.

“I don't think that anyone is satisfied with this budget,” said Roger Altman, founder of Evercore Partners and a senior Treasury official in the Clinton administration. “It confirms the dire debt and deficit outlook. And, of course, no major tax and spending changes, whether they come from the president or they're proposed by Congressional leaders, are going to be enacted before the election. “

The White House budget proposal calls for some $4 trillion in deficit cuts over the next ten years. Under Obama's plan, the deficit would fall to $901 billion in 2013 and continue to shrink to $575 billion in 2018. In the short term, though, the administration wants to raise spending on some programs that it argues will help the recovery continue to gain momentum.

“We must transform our budget from one focused on speculating, spending and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating and building," the administration said.

According to the administration, that means spending an additional $476 billion on transportation projects, including inner-city rail services; another $30 billion to modernize 35,000 schools; and $30 billion more to help cash-strapped states hire more teachers, police, rescue workers and firefighters. The White House said Monday that the president will also ask Congress to approve an $8 billion fund to support a joint effort between business and community colleges to train workers in high-growth industries.

Congressional Republicans wasted no time attacking the plan, saying increased spending was exactly what the economic recovery doesn’t need.

“There's a number of reasons why we're looking at the slowest, weakest recovery since the Great Depression, but frankly, this debt is a huge drag on our economy,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) who was co-chair of the “super committee” on deficit reduction. “We got to quit spending money we don't have.”

Some Democrats argue that, with the recovery just beginning to take hold, many voters are more concerned about their own household budgets than whether the government begins to take meaningful steps to manage its own.

“For most people, according to what they tell pollsters, what they really care about is jobs and growth: deficit is actually is ranked pretty low,” said Jared Bernstein, former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden. “There’s going to be a lot of discussion today about the deficit issue. But from the perspective of the economy that's still climbing out of recession, I think at this point adding to the deficit in the interests of short term economic boost actually makes a lot of sense.”

The administration is hoping that the latest improvement in the job market may deflect some criticism of its failure to forge a bipartisan solution to shrink the federal deficit. On the job front, the White House forecast was only slightly more optimistic than either the CBO or Blue Chip forecasts. Although all three see job growth as remaining weaker than normal for the next several years, the White House is a bit more optimistic in projecting a jobless rate of less than 6 percent by the end of 2017. (The administration’s current thinking may be even more upbeat: because the projections were made in November, they don’t factor in the much better-than-expected jobs numbers for the last two months of 2011.)

Notably absent are any broad proposals to revise the tax code. The plan includes some changes, including the so-called “Buffet rule” that would close a tax break for investment income that lets billionaires like Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet pay a lower percentage of income than his secretary. But the budget sidesteps the much thornier issue of comprehensive reform of the complex, bloated tax code that has been widely criticized by members of both political parties.

“Fundamental tax reform has been agreed upon across the spectrum from the left to the right as something that is necessary,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former CBO director and chief economist in the George W. Bush administration. ”The president has never put forward a single serious proposal on fundamental tax reform despite saying he wants it. If he wants it, put it in your budget.”

The White House may yet get a chance to oversee one of the biggest changes in the tax code in nearly a decade. With Bush-era tax cuts set to expire at the end of this year, the White House has a chance to raise taxes by doing nothing, or issuing a veto on any bill to extend them.

That gives Obama leverage in the debate over how much taxes should be raised to balance the budget.

“I think it's a golden opportunity to start fixing the deficit problem,” said Altman. “You have $3.6 trillion of revenue over ten years to work with.”

Are the Obama administration's projections too rosy? Share your thoughts on Facebook.

Wash. governor signs gay marriage bill into law

2012-02-13T21:31:00.002-05:00

4
hours
ago

Elaine Thompson / AP

Wash. Gov. Christine Gregoire, seated, raises her arms as legislators and supporters cheer behind her after she signed into law a measure that legalizes same-sex marriage Monday, Feb. 13, 2012, in Olympia, Wash.

By The Associated Press and msnbc.com staff

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- Gov. Chris Gregoire has signed into law a bill that legalizes gay marriage in Washington state, making it the nation's seventh to allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.

It's a historic moment, but same-sex couples can't walk down the aisle just yet.

The law takes effect June 7, but opponents are already mounting challenges on multiple fronts.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Opponents planned to file a challenge Monday that could put the law on hold pending the outcome of a November vote.

Separately, an initiative was filed at the beginning of the session that opponents of gay marriage say could lead to the new law being overturned.

advertisementGregoire signed the bill Monday morning. It passed the House on Wednesday, a week after Senate approval.

"We are thrilled," said Lisa M. Stone, executive director of Legal Voice, a nonprofit that advocates for gay and lesbian rights. "After amazing support from both the Senate and the House earlier this month, signing the marriage equality bill late this morning was the next step toward providing equal treatment for all loving and committed families."

The group is girding for further battle, however, anticipating that opponents to same sex marriage will launch a petition to get the issue on the November ballot.

In fact, opponents had that effort under way in anticipation of Gregoire's signing Monday.

"We ARE going to exercise our right to referendum and reject this law!" said the Family Policy Institute of Washington on its Web site, in an urgent appeal launched Sunday.

"Don’t forget to continue to pray that the citizens of Washington State will be fearless in their support and defense of traditional marriage between one man and one woman. Send out requests across the state, nation and world for other faithful to join us in prayer to move hearts here in Washington to unify, organize a successful referendum campaign and to vote for traditional marriage."

The Seattle Times article on the bill being signed into law elicited mostly positive reaction in its comments section.

"Hooray!" wrote Sounder_Beav. "This has no business going to a state-wide referendum. However, if it does, I'm confident a strong majority of WA voters will uphold and confirm equal rights for same sex marriage."

"Glad this is finally over and we’ve joined the 21st Century at last," wrote Alphonso Arrivaderci.

But there were exceptions.

"So sad," wrote idcoug from Boise, without elaborating.

And then there was a contingent impatient with the issue.

"Good. Can we move on now?" commented 2times.

"Let’s focus 100 percent on balancing and passing the state budget now," urged Taxmaad.

In New Jersey on Monday, the state Senate passed a bill that would allow nuptials for same-sex couples. Gov. Chris Christie has said he will veto such legislation.

The Senate's vote sends the bill to the Assembly, which is expected to pass it Thursday.
It means the world isn't changing, it means the world has already changed," said Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, the state's largest gay rights organization. "So wake up and smell the equality."

Len Deo, president of New Jersey Family Policy Council, which opposes gay marriage, called the vote "an exercise in futility."

The governor has said he does not believe marriage laws should be changed, but he does support New Jersey's civil union law, which grants gay couples the legal protections of marriage.

Christie said he wants to put a change in the definition of marriage to a public vote.

But gay rights groups oppose a referendum. They see gay marriage as a civil rights matter and argue that it should not be up to the masses to protect the rights of a minority group.

Five years ago, New Jersey's state Supreme Court ruled that gay couples should have the same rights as married heterosexual couples. In response, the Legislature created civil unions.

Gay rights advocates say that because the civil union designation is hard to understand and still treats committed gays differently from married couples, the courts should eliminate civil unions and recognize gay marriage. A lawsuit seeking to do that is in the state court system.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Conservative Political Action Conference Feb 9 - 11 2012

2012-02-13T21:04:00.000-05:00

Rand Paul Asks CPAC Crowd: Who Will Be America’s New Hero?

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, said the election of 2012 will and must center around the return to the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the American Dream. Read more »

All-Star Panel: Liberty at Stake in 2012 Election

A CPAC All-Star Panel today proclaimed the most important issue facing Americans in the 2012 election is liberty – preserving it or losing it. Read more »

Panel Calls for End to Obama EPA’s Assault on Economy

Even if Washington D.C. politicians manage to balance the budget and resolve the current fiscal crisis, the economy is not likely to recover within the current regulatory environment, Myron Ebell, the president of Freedom Action told listeners at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Read more »

Cain: Like the Colonists in 1776, “The American People are Fed Up Once Again.”

Herman Cain called for a new revolution in America, telling the crowd gathered for the Conservative Political Action Conference 2012, “Our nation today has become a nation of crises, an economic crisis, an energy crisis, a fuzzy foreign policy crisis, and a deficiency of leadership crisis.” Read more »

Panel: Too Soon to Tell Impact of Arab Spring on America – But Obama Lacks Coherent Policy for Middle East

Is the Arab Spring good for America? Too soon to tell was the consensus of a panel of experts at CPAC 2012 today. Read more »

Jindal: “When You Put Conservative Ideas Into Action, They Yield Great Results.”

Conservatism works. That was the message of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to the CPAC audience early Saturday morning. “When you put conservative ideas into action,” Jindal said “they yield great results.” Read more »

Gov. Walker Reflects on Collective Bargaining Battle During Reagan Banquet Address

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin invoked the memory of Ronald Reagan as he challenged “big government union bosses” who use their political muscle to block reforms set up to empower taxpayers. Walker was the featured speaker a dinner banquet named in honor of the former president at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Read more »

Breitbart: Support Republican Nominee, Whomever It Is, in “War Against the Institutional Left.”

Long-time Tea Party supporter Andrew Breitbart, the conservative new-media star and publisher of Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv, gave a colorful last speech of the day at CPAC today in which he bashed the liberal media and the Occupy movement, calling the radical Left “a bunch of totalitarian freaks.” Read more »

Gingrich Calls on CPAC Crowd To Choose Path to “World the Works”

The conservative movement wins decisively “when it offers bold solutions to the American people,” former House Speaker and current presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told a packed house at CPAC 2012 today. Read more »

President Obama versus the Constitution

President Obama has defiantly set about to implement his agenda with or without congressional consent, former Sen. George Allen of Virginia warned audience members during a panel discussion at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC). Allen is running to reclaim the seat he previously held this coming November. Read more »

Palin Closes Out CPAC Slamming Obama Economics: “His Plan Isn’t winning the Future, It’s Losing the Country”

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin unloaded on President Barack Obama and the Washington D.C. establishment during an address that closed out the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Read more »

Sen. Cornyn: “Voter ID Laws Necessary to Safeguard Integrity of the Ballot”

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) addressed the CPAC audience Saturday on the failures of President Obama and Attorney General Eric holder and the need to revamp voter identification laws. Read more »

Norquist Predicts Conservative Majority House Will Drive Agenda in Future

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, addressed the CPAC audience on the importance of not increasing taxes and electing a strong conservative majority in the House and Senate to cut taxes. Norquist predicted a conservative majority in the House will drive the agenda for the next 20 years.

Romney Wins CPAC Straw Poll

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won the CPAC Straw Poll, sponsored by the Washington Times and conducted by pollster Tony Fabrizio, who announced the results Saturday afternoon along with the results of a parallel national poll of conservative voters. Read more »

E-Fairness Panelists Discuss Ways to Make Online Sales Taxes Fair

A CPAC panel Saturday discussed the issue of taxation on items sold online by various Internet businesses including Amazon.com, with panelists unanimously agreeing the tax system for Internet vendors should be overhauled. Read more »

President’s 2013 Budget Hits Planetary Science Hard

2012-02-13T21:02:00.000-05:00

By Adam Mann
February 13, 2012

3:46 pm

Artist's concept of MAVEN, one of the last Mars missions that NASA currently has planned, which will study the Martian atmosphere. Image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

The president’s 2013 budget, released today, asks for modest increases for some federal science agencies but trims funding to NASA. The request takes a deep bite out of Mars and outer-planet science exploration in particular.

NASA’s funding would fall to the lowest level in four years, with a total budget of $17.71 billion. The president’s request projects a flat budget through 2017, with no growth to even account for inflation.

“We are having to make tough decisions because these are tough economic times,” said NASA administrator Charles Bolden during a press conference Feb. 13.

As expected, planetary science — in particular Mars exploration and outer-planets missions — is the biggest loser, getting a $309 million decrease compared to last year. This means NASA will not be able to maintain previous commitments to the European Space Agency for dual Mars missions in 2016 and 2018, Bolden confirmed at the conference.

The hit to outer-planet exploration means a lack of funding for any new mission to study the moons of Jupiter or a Uranus orbiter, two projects that received high priority in last year’s planetary science decadal survey. The reduction might also affect ongoing missions such as the Cassini spacecraft that is currently exploring Saturn and its moons, though this will depend on the outcome of NASA’s senior reviews later this year.

The budget does include some winners. Manned exploration would get a boost of $200 million. This includes $2.8 billion for a new heavy-lift rocket system, which continues much of the work from the canceled Bush-era Constellation program that would take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit.

The long-delayed and over-budget James Webb Space Telescope would get $627.6 million, which is a more than $100 million increase over last year. This mission will require continued funding until its launch date, currently pegged at October 2018.

Other scientific agencies are also getting modest increases. The National Science Foundation would be given a 5 percent increase, receiving $7.4 million. While Obama promised to double the NSF’s budget back in 2009, the difficult fiscal environment doesn’t seem to make this possible. The U.S. Geological Survey could also be getting a $34.5 million boost compared to last year, bringing its funding to $1.1 billion.

The president’s budget request is just a taste of what may come. Congress has to agree on what the actual federal budget looks like, and legislators and the White House don’t see eye to eye on many issues.

One major area of contention is the requested $830 million for private spaceflight companies. Many Congress members, particularly those whose districts include traditional spaceflight companies such as Boeing, have scoffed at previous private spaceflight requests, eventually providing around half of the requested amount.

But the new private companies are looking to prove their worth. SpaceX will launch its Dragon capsule to dock with the International Space Station this year.

The budget request also makes no mention of the failure of last year’s bipartisan congressional subcommittee that was meant to find $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions. Members of this committee were unable to compromise, triggering an across-the-board cut to all government agencies. Congress will have to figure out what to do with this legislative requirement before starting deliberations on the final 2013 budget.

FISCAL YEAR 2013 BUDGET

2012-02-13T20:57:00.002-05:00

FISCAL YEAR 2013 BUDGET OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

Office of Management and Budget

2012-02-13T20:37:00.000-05:00

Budget Overview

Past BudgetsWe now face a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those trying to reach it. After decades of eroding middle-class security as those at the very top saw their incomes rise as never before and after a historic recession that plunged our economy into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover, it is time to construct an economy that is built to last. The President’s 2013 Budget is built around the idea that our country does best when everyone gets a fair shot, does their fair share, and plays by the same rules. We must transform our economy from one focused on speculating, spending, and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating, and building. That begins with putting the Nation on a path to live within our means – by cutting wasteful spending, asking all Americans to shoulder their fair share, and making tough choices on some things we cannot afford, while keeping the investments we need to grow the economy and create jobs. The Budget targets scarce federal resources to the areas critical to growing the economy and restoring middle-class security: education and skills for American workers, innovation and manufacturing, clean energy, and infrastructure. The Budget is a blueprint for how we can rebuild an economy where hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded.

KEY BUDGET FACTS

•In the Budget Control Act, both parties in Congress and the President agreed to tight spending caps that reduce discretionary spending by $1 trillion over 10 years. This budget reflects that decision. Thus, for all the priority areas we are investing in, difficult trade-offs had to be made to meet these very tight caps.

◦Discretionary spending is reduced from 8.7 percent of GDP in 2011 to 5.0 percent in 2022.

•Including the $1 trillion in discretionary cuts, the Budget includes more than

$4 trillion in balanced, deficit reduction so that, by 2018, we cut the deficit to less than 3 percent of GDP, stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio, and achieve primary balance.

•For every $1 in new revenue from those making more than $250,000 per year and from closing corporate loopholes, the Budget has $2.50 in spending cuts including the deficit reduction enacted over the last year.

•2012 Projected Deficit: $1.33 trillion, 8.5 percent of GDP; 2013 Projected Deficit: $901 billion, 5.5 percent of GDP; 2018 Projected Deficit: $575 billion, 2.7 percent of GDP; 2022 Projected Deficit: $704 billion, 2.8 percent of GDP.

JUMPSTART JOB CREATION

•More than $350 billion in short-term measures for job growth starting in 2012, including many planks of the American Jobs Act that we continue to call on Congress to enact plus some new job creation initiatives. They include:

◦Extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance benefits for rest of 2012.

◦An upfront investment of $50 billion from the surface transportation reauthorization bill for roads, rails, and runways to create thousands of quality jobs in the short term.

◦Continuing to allow businesses to write-off the full amount of new investments.

◦$30 billion to modernize at least 35,000 schools and $30 billion to help states and localities retain and hire teachers and first responders.

◦Project Rebuild, a series of policies to help connect Americans looking for work in distressed communities with the work needed to re-purpose residential and commercial properties, creating jobs and stabilizing neighborhoods.

◦A new tax credit for this year focused on small businesses and that gives businesses that add jobs and wages a tax cut equal to 10 percent of wages added up to $500,000.

EDUCATION AND SKILLS FOR AMERICAN WORKERS

•$850 million for Race to the Top, which implements systemic education reforms in five critical areas, including early learning and care. The Budget also provides $300 million in new resources to improve child care quality and prepare children for success in school.

•A new $5 billion competitive program that will challenge states and districts to work with their teachers and unions to attract, prepare, and reward great teachers to help students learn.

•Make college more affordable and help achieve the President’s goal of the U.S. leading the world in college graduates by 2020:

◦Sustains the maximum Pell Grant award through the 2014-2015 award year.

◦A one-year measure to prevent student loan interest rates from doubling this summer and doubles the number of work-study jobs.

◦New reforms to help address rising costs by shifting some Federal aid away from colleges that fail to keep net tuition down and by providing incentives for States and colleges to keep costs under control.

◦Makes permanent the American Opportunity Tax Credit (AOTC) -- a partially refundable tax credit worth up to $10,000 per student over four years of college. AOTC helps more than 9 million students and their families afford the cost of college.

•Supports State and community college partnerships with businesses to build the skills of American workers, and creates a Pathways Back to Work Fund, which will support summer and year-round jobs for low-income youth, and will help connect the long-term unemployed and low-income adults to subsidized employment and work-based training opportunities.

AMERICAN INNOVATION AND MANUFACTURING

• $140.8 billion for R&D overall; increase the level of investment in non-defense R&D by 5 percent from the 2012 level, even as overall budgets decline; maintains the President’s commitment to double the budgets of three key basic research agencies (National Science Foundation, Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and National Institute of Standards and Technology Laboratories); expands and makes permanent the R&D tax credit.

•$2.2 billion for advanced manufacturing R&D, a 19 percent increase over 2012.

•Provides tax incentives for manufacturers who create jobs here at home and doubles the deduction for advanced manufacturing; ends tax deductions for shipping jobs overseas; and establishes a Manufacturing Communities Tax Credit to encourage investment in communities affected by job loss.

•Level funding for biomedical research at NIH ($30.7 billion); and to get more out of the money, proposes new grant management policies to increase the number of new research grants by 7 percent.

•Supports the goals of: putting one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015; doubling share of electricity from clean energy sources by 2035; and reducing buildings’ energy use by 20 percent by 2020.

◦Elimination of 12 tax breaks to oil, gas, and coal companies will raise $41 billion over 10 years.

BUILD AMERICA: A 21ST CENTURY INFRASTRUCTURE

•A six-year, $476 billion surface transportation reauthorization bill – expanded to included inter-city passenger rail – to create thousands of new jobs and modernize a critical foundation of our economic growth.

◦Fully paid for through current user-financed mechanisms and part of the savings from ending the war in Iraq and winding down operations in Afghanistan.

◦Get the most out of taxpayer dollars through: a “fix-it first” policy, consolidation of 55 duplicative highway programs into five, and using a Race to the Top-style competition to bring about reform.

•National Infrastructure Bank to fund projects of national importance.

• Builds a next-generation, wireless broadband network for public safety users.

◦Plan is fully paid for, and the sale of spectrum provides nearly $21 billion for deficit reduction.

AMERICAN VALUES: EVERYONE PAYS THEIR FAIR SHARE

•Calls for individual tax reform that: cuts the deficit by $1.5 trillion, including the expiration of the high-income 2001 and 2003 tax cuts; simplifies the tax code, lowers tax rates, and protects progressivity; eliminates inefficient and unfair tax breaks for millionaires while making all tax breaks at least as good for the middle class as for the wealthy; and observes the Buffett Rule that no household making more than $1 million a year pays less than 30 percent of their income in taxes.

•Scores of cuts and consolidations including more than $7.5 billion in administrative savings.

•Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee on largest financial institutions to fully compensate taxpayers for their extraordinary support. Raises $61 billion over 10 years and is intended to offset cost of TARP and the President’s mortgage refinancing program.

• More than $360 billion in savings to Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs over 10 years to make these programs more effective and efficient and move our health system to one that rewards high-quality medicine.

•$278 billion in non-health mandatory savings through reforms in areas such as: agriculture subsidies and direct payments, federal civilian worker retirement, and the PBGC.

• Implements the new defense strategy to spend $487 billion less in the Department of Defense’s base budget than was planned in last year’s Budget. Overall defense budget, including overseas contingency operations, is 5 percent below last year’s enacted level.

Obama sends 2013 budget to Congress, GOP pounces

2012-02-13T19:39:00.000-05:00

By Chris Moody
The Ticket – 6 hrs ago

Copies of the White House budget are delivered to the House Monday. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

On Monday morning, President Obama sent to Congress his federal budget for fiscal year 2013, a non-binding blue print of the White House's spending priorities that calls for raising taxes on the wealthy, cutting spending in certain areas of government and increasing the budgets of infrastructure projects and job training programs.

If implemented, the White House says that the plan would decrease the federal deficit by $4 trillion within the next decade, although it leaves the federal government with a budget shortfall of $901 billion by the end of fiscal year 2013. Obama introduced his budget in a speech at the Northern Virginia Community College near Washington, D.C.

"The main idea in the budget is this: At a time when our economy is growing and creating jobs at a faster clip, we've got to do everything in our power to keep this recovery on track," Obama said. "Part of our job is to bring down our deficit, and if Congress adopts this budget, then along with the cuts that we' already made, we'll be able to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion by 2022."

"The last thing we need is for Washington to stand in the way of America's comeback," he went on to say, calling on Congress to extend a payroll tax cut, which expires at the end of this month, "without drama, without delay."

The Budget Control Act, passed by Congress last August to end the damaging stand-off over the debt ceiling, cut discretionary spending by $900 billion over the next decade. That all but forced the White House to make major cuts to discretionary spending across the board -- including agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration -- in today's budget proposal.

The plan unveiled Monday also includes $360 billion in cuts to federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Most of those cuts come from reduced payments to providers, including drug companies. By contrast, a plan put forward last year by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), and embraced by much of his party, calls for a broader restructuring of Medicare; many analysts say cuts in the Ryan plan would fall more heavily on future beneficiaries.

Congressional Republicans criticized the budget, citing the tax increases and calling the level of deficit reduction in the plan inadequate.

"This budget does nothing to prevent the bankruptcy of critical programs, threatening the health and retirement security of current and future seniors," said Ryan in a statement.

The GOP also knocked Obama for submitting a budget that does not cut the federal deficit in half by the end of the president's first term, a promise Obama made in February 2009.

In the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) vowed to introduce the President's budget as a bill--largely a symbolic gesture intended to embarrass the White House--in the upper chamber. The last time the Democrat-controlled Senate voted on the president's budget in 2011, it was unanimously defeated.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney panned the budget for not addressing entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and vowed to overhaul the way the government spends on the programs.

"The President has failed to offer a single serious idea to save Social Security and is the only president in modern history to cut Medicare benefits for seniors," Romney said in a statement in which his campaign also referred to the budget as "an insult to the American taxpayer."

"I believe we can save Social Security and Medicare with a few commonsense reforms, and," Romney added, "unlike President Obama — I'm not afraid to put them on the table."

One of Romney's rivals for the GOP nomination, Rep. Ron Paul, also slammed the plan.

"When President Obama talks about spending 'cuts' it's always some plan that will supposedly unfold over a decade and that the next president or Congress can change at whim," Paul's campaign said in a statement on its website. "In other words, cuts never happen. But budget deficits, as evidenced above, happen every year. And they will continue to happen every year. President Paul would offer $1 trillion cuts in the first year."

And Grover Norquist, the influential small-government conservative who runs Americans for Tax Reform, was even more dismissive. "Obama's 'new' budget: higher taxes, higher spending, higher debt. Who is surprised?," he tweeted.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington-based group that advocates deficit reduction, was more measured. "It's a step in the right direction from past budgets put out by the president," Jason Peuquet, the group's research director, told Yahoo News, praising the plan's specificity on spending cuts. "But we need to be doing much more on the deficit and debt front, to put the debt on a downward trajectory. And it doesn't look like it'll be able to achieve that goal."

Both Republicans and Democrats have press conferences planned Monday afternoon to address the details outlined in Obama's plan.

Zachary Roth contributed reporting.

At CPAC, Jindal revives attack on Obama administration over oil spill recovery

2012-02-12T22:48:00.000-05:00

J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana addresses activists from America's political right at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Saturday.

By NBC's Jamie Novogrod

WASHINGTON – Speaking before an audience of Republican activists Saturday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal blasted the Obama administration over its response to the 2010 BP oil spill in the gulf, saying Obama officials “wasted precious time while that oil was coming in to our coast.”

The remarks came at the conclusion of his speech at CPAC, the annual gathering of Republican activists held here in Washington.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“They wasted precious time while that oil was coming in to our coast,” Jindal said. “They refused to listen to the people who lived along the coast that knew better than all the experts.”

Jindal – whose state was hit hardest by the spill – was a central figure in the recovery effort. His criticism, first expressed in his book, "Leadership and Crisis," represents a stinging rebuke of a Democratic administration with which he was partnered throughout the recovery effort.

“You’ve had a lot of speakers come up here and talk to you about the importance of this year’s election,” Jindal said, before adding that he wanted to offer “one more reason” why the election is important.

“What I saw and what I heard were people that were maybe very, very book smart, but had never run anything in the private sector,” Jindal continued.

“During our regular meetings and calls, the president would talk regularly about his “Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary.’ I’d begin to think that was part of his title,” Jindal said, refering to Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “I didn’t understand what that had to do with stopping the oil from coming to our coast.”

(Chu won a Nobel Prize in 1997, for physics; Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.)

Jindal’s attack represents another expression of a complaint about an elite or out-of-touch White House that has marked many of the CPAC speeches throughout the three days here.

Much of Jindal’s speech prior to the remarks concerned privatizing and reforming public education in Louisiana, an effort which he said would involve expanding charter schools and scholarships, and cracking down on underperforming teachers.

“For the ineffective teachers that refuse to get better, maybe they should look into another profession. Maybe they don’t belong in the classroom anyway,” Jindal said.

Bin Laden told children 'live in peace in the West'

2012-02-12T22:03:00.000-05:00

Do as I say, Not as I do! Or is this total hypocrasy? I only post and comment once in a while, especially when I can type. If this is true...and I do not know if it is or not....maybe he was letting his children and grand children know that peace is the only way to live together without fighting. Or maybe it has a deeper meaning, and there is where the hypocrasy comes in....

A screen grab of Osama bin Laden, taken from Qatar's al-Jazira TV in 1999. The slain Al-Qaeda chief urged his children to go live peacefully in the West and get a university education, his brother-in-law said in an interview

AFP – 9 hrs ago

.

Slain Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden urged his children to go live peacefully in the West and get a university education, his brother-in-law said in an interview published Sunday.

Zakaria al-Sadah, the brother of bin Laden's Yemeni fifth wife Amal, told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that the Saudi-born extremist believed his children "should not follow him down the road to jihad."

"He told his own children and grandchildren, 'Go to Europe and America and get a good education,'" al-Sadah told the Sunday Times.

Al-Sadah said bin Laden told them: "You have to study, live in peace and don't do what I am doing or what I have done."

Bin Laden was killed in a commando raid in May 2011 by US Navy SEALS at a house in the garrison town of Abbottabad, northwest Pakistan, where he had been living for several years.

Al-Sadah said that in November he had seen his sister for the first time since she was shot in the knee during the raid, and had since been allowed to have a number of meetings with her in the presence of guards.

He said the three wives and nine children who were in the compound -- some are bin Laden's children and others are his grandchildren -- have been held for months in a three-room flat in Islamabad.

They are guarded by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, he said.

The Sunday Times published what it said was the first photograph to show some of the young children from the compound: two sons and a daughter, and two grandsons and a granddaughter.

The children were still traumatised after seeing the raid in which bin Laden died, al-Sadah said.

"These children have seen their father killed and they need a caring environment, not a prison -- whatever you think of their father and what he has done," he said.

A Pakistani commission investigating the raid said in October that it had lifted travel restrictions on Bin Laden's family and al-Sadah flew to Islamabad in November to take Amal and her children home.

But he said Pakistani officials had refused to let him take them.

There was no immediate response to the claims from Pakistani officials..

US Marines posed with Nazi symbol in Afghanistan

2012-02-12T21:31:00.000-05:00

By JULIE WATSON
Associated Press – Fri, Feb 10, 2012.....

.knightarmco.com - This Sept. 2010 photo posted recently on the Titiusville, Fla.- based arms manufacturer Knight's Armament's Internet blog, shows members of Charlie Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, out …more of Camp Pendleton, Calif. in Sangin, Helmand province, Afghanistan. The Marine Corps confirmed Thursday Feb. 8, 2012 that one of its scout sniper teams in Afghanistan posed for a photograph in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS. (AP Photo/knightarmco.com)

..SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Marine Corps on Thursday once again did damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS — a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others.

The Corps said in a statement that using the symbol was not acceptable, but the Marines in the photograph taken in September 2010 will not be disciplined because investigators determined it was a naïve mistake.

The Marines believed the SS symbol was meant to represent sniper scouts and never intended to be associated with a racist organization, said Maj. Gabrielle Chapin, a spokeswoman at Camp Pendleton, where the Marines were based.

"I don't believe that the Marines involved would have ever used any type of symbol associated the Nazi Germany military criminal organization that committed mass atrocities in WWII," Chapin said. "It's not within who we are as Marines."

The Corps has used the incident as a training tool to talk to troops about what symbols are acceptable after it became aware of the photograph last November, Chapin said.

The image has since surfaced on an Internet blog, sparking widespread outrage and calls for a full investigation and punishment, including bringing those in the photograph and anyone who condoned it to court martial.

"This is a complete and total outrage," said Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, headquartered in Albuquerque, N.M.

His organization sent a letter to the head of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Amos, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday, demanding punishment for those involved.

It was the second time this year the Marine Corps has had to do damage control for actions of its troops. It's also investigating a separate group of Marines recorded on video urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban fighters..

"First we have Marines peeing on dead bodies and now this," Weinstein said.

The Marines in the photograph are no longer with the unit. Chapin said she did not know if they are still in the Corps.

In the photo taken in the Afghanistan town of Sangin, the Marine Corps unit is posing with guns in front of an American flag and a large, dark blue flag with what appear to be the letters "SS" in the shape of white jagged lightning bolts.

Camp Pendleton spokesman, Master Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva, said he did not know where the flag came from but it was likely the property of one of the Marines in the photograph.

The photograph appeared on the blog for a military weapons company called Knight's Armament in Titusville, Fla. The company did not respond to emails or phone messages left by The Associated Press.

The SS, or Schutzstaffel, was the police and military force of the Nazi Party, which was distinct from the general army. Members pledged an oath of loyalty to Adolph Hitler.

SS units were held responsible for many war crimes and played an integral role in the extermination of millions of Jews along with gypsies and other people who were deemed undesirable. The SS was declared to be a criminal organization at the Nuremberg war crime trials.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, said he does not buy the explanation that posing with the flag was an innocent mistake and insisted the American public has a right to know what happened.

"If you look at any book on the Nazi period, this is the dreaded symbol of the SS, and to have a Marine Corps unit adopt it and put it beside the American flag when 200,000 Americans died to free the world of that dreaded symbol is just beyond the pale," he said.

President Obama’s State of the Union: Ten Skirted Issues

2012-02-12T21:29:00.000-05:00

Nomi Prins
Infowars.com

January 25, 2012

I confess; I expected to be bored out of my mind listening to President Obama’s campaign – I mean, State of the Union – I mean campaign, speech. I kept hoping some truly earth shattering story would sneak in there beforehand, like say some discovery that Mitt Romney had been having an affair with Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife while he was creating jobs at Bain capital, and we could all focus on that instead.

It turned out that my pre-determination proved accurate. I wonder if the members of Congress felt the same sense of same déjà vu that I did, as they were bopping up and down and applauding.

Obama’s speech was a compilation of highlights from his past ones. One part optimism, two parts repetition equals one total uninspiring. Maybe it’s so boring, because it matters so little at this point. Taking away popularity polls, our national threshold for belief in hope or change has been trampled, not just because of Obama or Romney, but of the whole political apparatus that thrives on deflection of reality and posturing. We don’t have the same energy to expend listening to politicians, the endless spin that renders fact obsolete, responsibility absent, and true accomplishment, unnecessary.

We saw Optimistic Obama in his first address to Congress in 2009: “While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

We got Presumptuous Obama in 2010: “As we stabilized the financial system, we also took steps to get our economy growing again, save as many jobs as possible, and help Americans who had become unemployed.”

We watched Philosophical Obama in 2011: “We are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea -– the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny. That’s why centuries of pioneers and immigrants have risked everything to come here… The future is ours to win.”

Now, we had Campaigning on Fairness Obama. He returned to the roots of his pre-Presidential words, having accomplished little to attain the goal that his words implied. Here are ten things that President Obama skirted:

1) The cost of healthcare insurance. Obama tried to play both sides, slapping a populace spin on an insurance industry gift. “That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.” He claimed he won’t “go back” on things like health insurance companies being able to cancel policies. He didn’t say that insurance premiums have already risen 22% in the past two years. Republicans hate Obama’s ‘signature’ healthcare reform bill because it unconstitutionally forces people to purchase insurance. Democrats support the bill because Obama passed it. The reality is – by the time it takes effect in 2014, premium costs may have doubled. Frame it however you want, that means health insurance could cost twice as much when this bill takes effect as it did before it was passed. Meanwhile, there are more people without insurance (because they can’t afford it) even though insurance companies can’t cancel policies or deny insurance for pre-existing conditions. This bill merely offers insurance companies a wider pool of customers, with a few restrictions on how much they can pillage them.

2) Student Loan Defaults. Obama claimed he wants to cap interest rates on student loans – which would be great, but can only work in this particularly low rate environment. He urged colleges to keep costs down – again, something that’s worked out really well when he’s mentioned it before. This year, student loan debt surpassed credit card debt, breaching the $1 trillion mark, at an average of more than $25,000 per student (and up 47% over a decade ago, not all under Obama, but a bi-administration problem is still a problem). Not surprisingly, student loan defaults rates have risen alongside this debt increase. Nearly 9% of loans defaulted in 2010, of those that began repayment in 2009, vs. 7% that began in 2008.) Obama didn’t mention this growing problem.

3) Youth unemployment. Obama took credit for the creation of 3 million jobs (I’m not going to debate that here). Regardless, youth unemployment is at its highest rate since 1948. The unemployment rate for those under age 25 is 18.1%, (31% for blacks) havin risen sharply since 2008. Do the math. High student loan debt + diminishing job prospects = bad ending. Work-study programs have to be intense to really alter that.

4) Big banks. The largest firms continue to grow their asset bases and fee extrapolation strategies from their captive customer base (If you’re say, a JPM Chase customer, it costs you $5 to extract your own money from a Bank of America ATM – both banks get a cut). It was Obama that re-confirmed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke for another fourteen years (and yes, a bi-partisan Congress agreed), and who still keeps Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner around. Both men were gung-ho about the merger mania that dotted Wall Street in the fall of 2008 and making the ‘too-big-to-fail” banks bigger, as they now are.

5) Small banks. President Obama didn’t address the smaller bank closings occurring because the big banks got disproportionate subsides;, 389 smaller banks (with $297 billion in assets) failed from 2009 to 2011. Like during the early years of the Great Depression, this means less choice for individuals, less loans for local businesses, and consolidation of influence and market share for the big banks – which comprise Obama’s largest bundling base.

6) Borrowers. Despite a few tepid programs to help homeowners, the sheer number of foreclosures is higher today than it was in 2008. There were a record number of foreclosure filings: 2.9 million in 2010 and 2.7 million in 2011. These are predicted to rise in 2012 amidst default surges and more lender notices than in 2011.

Why? Because Obama’s program (that was supposed to help 5 million borrowers, and helped half a million) had to be approved by the banks. Banks don’t like citizen aid programs, even if they screwed them to begin with by fueling a $14 trillion toxic asset pyramid repackaging risky (for people), high interest-bearing (for them). Obama said, “The banks will repay a deficit of trust”? What?! When?! Where?!

7) Recent regulator incompetence. Regulators looked the other way, Obama said, pre-crisis. But he mentioned nothing about the regulators giving a pass since; the SEC bestows banks settlements for fraudulent mortgage asset products, without extracting any admission of wrongdoing. He missed saying anything about the lack of related DOJ criminal indictments. The top five banks agreed to pay $1.149 billion to the SEC to settle subprime-mortgage related fraud charges, with no admission of guilt or criminal indictments. (The SEC settlement of $285 million with Citigroup was rejected by Judge Rakoff in November, 2011 and is being re-negotiated.) And Obama wants to create a Financial Crimes Unit? What’s the SEC supposed to be doing? or the DOJ? or the FBI?

8 ) MF Global and customer money. On the same topic – the deficit of trust thing: Obama avoided any talk about his buddy, Jon Corzine or MF Global, the nation’s eight largest bankruptcy. He didn’t point out how diabolical it was to use and ‘lose’ customer funds that were supposed to have been kept separate from bad bets. He didn’t suggest having a solid separation between customer money and financial firm money – as in – don’t have it at the same firm. He claimed to ‘we will not bailout you out again” and yet, we still are.

9) Banks hoarding. Obama neglected to mention the $1.6 trillion that banks are stashing at the Fed in the form of excess (and interest-bearing) reserves, which do nothing for the Main Street economy. Meanwhile, small business loans are at a 12-year low, having shrunk continuously since 2008.

10) Obama conveyed that we dodged a bullet with getting the banking system under control. He didn’t note the rising risk in the banking system: the largest four US banks (JPM Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs) control nearly 95% of the US derivatives market, which has grown by 20% since just last year, to $235 trillion JPM Chase holds 11% of the world’s derivative exposure, Citibank, Bank of America, and Goldman comprise about 7% each. Goldman has 537 times as many (from 440 times last year) derivatives as assets and it’s still considered a bank holding company (as per Bernanke) that gets federal backing.

In all, the President’s speech was reminiscent of George Clooney’s in Ides of March. We’ve heard it all before, maybe with slightly different words: America lost 4 million jobs before I got here, and another 4 million before our policies went into effect, but in the last 12 months, we added 3 million job. We must reduce tax loopholes, and provide tax incentives to businesses that hire in America. We must reform taxes for the wealthy (though he signed an extension of Bush’s tax cuts.) We must train people for an apparent abundance of expert jobs. We need more clean energy initiatives. We created regulations (big sigh of relief he didn’t use the word ‘sweeping’) to avoid fraudulent financial practices. We will help homeowners. Wall Street must ‘make up a trust deficit.” Like Jamie Dimon cares.

In other words, Obama gave Wall Street a pass, while waxing populace. Don’t get me wrong. I expected nothing different. I will continue to expect nothing different, when he gets a second term, given the lame duo the GOP favors his key contenders to be.

Nomi Prins’ article first appeared on her blog.

Iran to announce 'very major' nuclear advance

2012-02-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

Revolutionary Guard commander threatens to his Israel, US bases with thousands of missiles if country is attacked

TEHRAN — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Saturday that the Islamic Republic would soon announce "very major" advances in its nuclear program.

updated 1 hour 57 minutes ago 2012-02-11T12:35:41
A Revolutionary Guard commander also said Iran would respond to military action by sending thousands of missiles at Israel and U.S. bases.
Ahmadinejad was speaking on the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed Shah. Tens of thousands of Iranians joined state-organized rallies to mark the occasion.
"In the coming days, the world will witness Iran's announcement of its very important and very major nuclear achievements," Ahmadinejad told a crowd at Tehran's Azadi (Freedom) Square in a speech relayed live on state television.
Demonstrators carrying Iranian flags and pictures of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei chanted "Death to Israel" and "Death to America."

Report: Saudi Arabia eyes nukes if Iran tests A-bomb

Ismail Haniya, who heads the Islamist Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, also attended the ceremony.
Ahmadinejad gave no details of how Iran's nuclear work, which Tehran says has only peaceful purposes, has progressed.

Israel uses terror group to kill Iran nuke scientists

The United States and Israel, a country which Iran does not recognize, have not ruled out military action if sanctions fail.
Iran has warned of a "painful" answer, saying it would hit Israel and U.S. bases in the Gulf as well as block the vital Gulf oil shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz.

Report: Iran says it could hit US forces anywhere
"If attacked by the Zionist regime (Israel), we will turn it to dust," said a Revolutionary Guards commander, Mohammad Shirdel, semi-official Fars news agency reported Saturday.
"Thousands of our missiles will target Israel and the 40 bases of America in the region," he added.
West tightens sanctions
The nuclear dispute has fuelled tension as the West tightens sanctions. The European Union has agreed to ban Iranian oil imports by July and to freeze the assets of Iran's central bank.
Its measures reinforce those imposed by the United States as the West tries to force Tehran to return to talks before it produces enough nuclear material for an atomic bomb.

Video: Assassination wielded as ‘a weapon’ (on this page)

Neither side has shown much appetite for compromise. Iran says it will fight EU sanctions with counter-measures and its parliament plans legislation to ban oil exports to the EU.
Iranian officials brush off the impact of sanctions, while also proclaiming that Iranians will endure any hardship in support of their country's right to nuclear technology.
"I am saying openly that if you (the West) continue to use the language of force and threat, our nation will never succumb to your pressure," Ahmadinejad said.

Israel has long used assassination against its enemies, “hoping that by taking out individuals, they can alter, change the course of history,” says Ronen Bergman, an Israeli commentator and author of “Israel’s Secret War with Iran” and an upcoming book tentatively titled “Mossad and the Art of Assassination.”

Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, describes what Iranian leaders believe is a close relationship between Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.