President Obama was finally politically cornered, including by the unscripted remarks of Vice President Biden. Anyone who attributes courage to Obama in making this announcement is in a bemused state of mind. Obama’s calculation was electoral through and through. And the White House was definitely getting the news that major gay donors would not be signing checks until he “evolved” already. Also, millions of ordinary gay voters were finding it harder to suppress mounting moral revulsion at being played like extras in every election.

Some unknown but alarming number of ultra-rich Americans are now basically totally delusional and completely divorced from reality. This is now an inescapable fact, confirmed by multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Here’s a brief list of insane things that are apparently common knowledge among the billionaire class:

• That President Obama and the Democratic Party have treated wealthy finance industry titans maliciously and unfairly.
• That the fact that they are perversely wealthy and growing richer during a period of mass unemployment and staggering debt is a sign that the economy is functioning correctly.
• That poor people, and not the finance industry, are responsible for the financial crisis and subsequent recession.
• That the ultra-wealthy are wealthy because they are smarter and work harder than everybody else, and that they are resented for their success.
• That the ultra-wealthy in general, and finance industry executives in particular, are the victims of widespread prejudice akin to that faced by ethnic minorities.

There can be no reasoning with people this irrational.

Last month’s hearings on the constitutionality of health care reform didn’t help its popularity: Public support for Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislation has hit a new low in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, with criticism of the individual mandate as high as ever.
Half the public, moreover, thinks the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the legislation on the basis of the justices’ partisan political views rather than the law. Fewer, 40 percent, think impartial legal analysis will carry the day, with the rest unsure.
Fifty-three percent of Americans now oppose the law overall, while just 39 percent support it – the latter the lowest in more than a dozen ABC/Post polls since August 2009. “Strong” critics, at 40 percent, outnumber strong supporters by nearly a 2-1 margin in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates.
Two-thirds continue to say the high court should throw out either the entire law (38 percent) or at least the part that requires most individuals to obtain coverage (29 percent) or face a penalty; just a quarter want the court to uphold the law as is. Those numbers, like views on the law overall, are essentially unchanged from a month ago. 
There are political differences: Republicans, who are most likely to oppose the law, are less apt to think the justices will rule on the basis of politics; 41 percent say so, still a not-insubstantial number when it comes to a basic assessment of independent jurisprudence. More Democrats and independents, 55 and 52 percent, respectively, suspect the justices will go political.

The debate surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act illustrates the impoverishment of our political life. Here is a law that had its origin in the right-wing Heritage Foundation, was first put into practice in 2006 in Massachusetts by then-Gov. Mitt Romney and was solidified into federal law after corporate lobbyists wrote legislation with more than 2,000 pages. It is a law that forces American citizens to buy a deeply defective product from private insurance companies. It is a law that is the equivalent of the bank bailout bill—some $447 billion in subsidies for insurance interests alone—for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. It is a law that is unconstitutional. And it is a law by which President Barack Obama, and his corporate backers, extinguished the possibilities of both the public option and Medicare for all Americans. There is no substantial difference between Obamacare and Romneycare. There is no substantial difference between Obama and Romney. They are abject servants of the corporate state. And if you vote for one you vote for the other.

But you would never know this by listening to the Democratic Party and the advocacy groups that purport to support universal health care but seem more intent on re-electing Obama. It is the very sad legacy of the liberal class that it proves in election cycle after election cycle that it espouses moral and political positions it will not pay a price to defend.

The "Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act" (in addition to everything else, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market.

In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market.

The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard.

Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give "pre-prospectus" presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they'll still be held liable for what's in those. But it'll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the "pre-presentation."

The JOBS Act also loosens a whole range of other reporting requirements, and expands stock investment beyond "accredited investors," giving official sanction to the internet-based fundraising activity known as "crowdfunding."

But the big one, to me, is the bit about exempting firms from real independent tests of internal controls for five years.

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama. With Ron Paul out of it and warmongering hedge fund hustler Mitt Romney the likely Republican nominee, the GOP has defined itself indelibly as the party of moneyed greed and unfettered imperialism.

There is no Red America and there is no Blue America. Remember the first time you heard Barack Obama say that? I do. It was July, 2004, during the Democratic National Convention, when the young, skinny state senator from Illinois propelled himself into national politics.

The speech was a harbinger. Finding common ground was a recurring theme of Obama’s 2008 campaign and, arguably, of his first two years in office, although it rarely turned out as the new president hoped. Over and over again, he tried to compromise with Republicans—on the stimulus, on health care reform, and on deficit reduction—only to have Republicans walk away. (My colleague Noam Scheiber's book, The Escape Artists, has plenty more on that, if you haven't read it already.)

I thought about that 2004 speech twice this week, first when Obama criticized the Supreme Court and later when he criticized the proposed budget of Republican Congressman Paul Ryan. The swipe at the Court, during a press conference, was mild. The attack on Ryan’s budget, which presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has embraced, was not. Particularly with the comments about the Ryan budget, delivered as a speech to a convention of newspaper editors, it was if Obama had given up on the idea of political comity. Maybe the citizens of Red America and Blue America still have a lot in common, he seemed to be saying, but the officials they are electing do not.

In the middle of this week’s three-day health care oral argument marathon at the Supreme Court, the justices pondered how Congress would react if the court struck down the individual mandate and perhaps either part or all of the rest of the 2,700-page health care law. Justice Kennedy, recognizing that the current hyperpolarized Congress cannot get much done, asked if the court in thinking about congressional reaction to its ruling should consider “the real Congress or a hypothetical Congress.”
Justice Kennedy’s question introduced a dose of realism into the debate. Of course the current Congress won’t overcome its differences and do anything constructive if the court kills Obamacare. For the foreseeable future, the court’s word on the health care law will be final.
And if that word is a death knell to Obamacare, it would likely mark the end of any remaining illusions of a “hypothetical Supreme Court.” You know which court I’m talking about—the one where justices act as “umpires,” calling balls and strikes, discovering but not making law, acting with humility and judicial minimalism. The one which Chief Justice John Roberts promised the country at his 2005 confirmation hearing.  

Maybe it's a good thing we didn't ask them.

How can this be? I'm willing to consider the idea that the Obama administration would be willing to do deficit cutting to benefit the 1% or that they refused to jail corrupt bankers because they were protecting the elites. But tanking your own signature legislation (that happens to benefit insurance companies?) None of the people at the top of the heap in the Democratic Party will ever have to worry about money on a personal basis, certainly not the president himself. So you'd have to believe that he is some kind of 1% martyr to think he would destroy his own legacy simply in order to help out the ruling class.

No, I don't believe it. Sure, they may be corrupt whores for money for all I know, but that just isn't adequate to explain this one. They really were that naive. In fact, my current belief is that the administration's overriding problem is exactly what it seems to be --- they constantly overestimate their own abilities and underestimate the opposition's.

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. should be grateful to the Supreme Court for refusing to allow cameras in the courtroom, because his defense of Obamacare on Tuesday may go down as one of the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the court.

Stepping up to the podium, Verrilli stammered as he began his argument. He coughed, he cleared his throat, he took a drink of water. And that was before he even finished the first part of his argument. Sounding less like a world-class lawyer and more like a teenager giving an oral presentation for the first time, Verrilli delivered a rambling, apprehensive legal defense of liberalism's biggest domestic accomplishment since the 1960s—and one that may well have doubled as its eulogy.

Stephon stood just a few feet away from Barack Obama. The president, busy shaking hands, looked right at him. “It was like he was waiting for me to say something,” he said later.
So the 26-year-old Prince George’s Community College student took his cue and spoke to President Obama in his first language: American Sign Language. “I am proud of you,” Stephon signed. The president, almost involuntary, instinctively, immediately signed back.
“Thank you,” Obama replied.
This is one of those moments that humanize the office of the presidency:

Here we go again!

Another racist motif works its way into an Obama cartoon. It's not as bad as the one by Mike Lester, from a couple of weeks ago, which depicted Obama as a pimp, but still.

They traded thoughts about education, ruminated on the state of immigration and discussed the federal deficit.

But most intriguingly, they talked about the future. Over a long private lunch at the White House, President Obama posed a question to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: what are you interested in doing next?

Mr. Bloomberg’s precise response is unknown. But their meeting a few weeks ago, confirmed by aides to both leaders and previously undisclosed, was potentially significant for both men, as Mr. Obama seeks support for his presidential campaign and Mr. Bloomberg ponders his post-mayoral career.

Mr. Obama, facing a bruising re-election fight, is eager to attract the kind of centrist, independent voters drawn to Mr. Bloomberg’s brand of politics.

Mr. Bloomberg, confronting the end of his career in elected office, is grappling with how to exert the kind of influence over public discourse that he has had as mayor of the nation’s largest city.

The lunch invitation is striking because Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Obama are thought not to be particularly close — nor to have an especially warm relationship. But the White House seems intent on courting Mr. Bloomberg.

The cartoon pointed to by this Newsvine Live Poll depicts Obama as a vintage 1970s pimp, and by implication, Ms. Sandra Fluke as a prostitute.

This is the most disgusting political cartoon that I have ever seen and my reason for sharing it is to declare my contempt for the creator of this cartoon and anyone who finds it amusing.

It is ok to mock someone's intelligence. It is ok to mock their moral turpitude. It is NOT ok to mock their race. The reason for this is that we live in a society that is thoroughly tarnished and permanently damaged by racism.  We only managed to end slavery through a civil war, and it took at least another century to get Jim Crow laws off the books. And some people seem to want to get those laws back onto the books.

I condemn this cartoon. It is the journalistic equivalent of a hate crime.

There are others who defend this cartoon, both on the grounds that it is constitutionally protected speech and that it isn't even racist in nature.

So, I ask you, members of the Newsvine community:

Is this cartoon racist?

Is it an example of constitutionally protected speech?

You can see the cartoon here.

The cartoon pointed to by this Newsvine seed depicts Obama as a vintage 1970s pimp, and by implication, Ms. Sandra Fluke as a prostitute.

This is the most disgusting political cartoon that I have ever seen and my reason for sharing it is to declare my contempt for the creator of this cartoon and anyone who finds it amusing.

It is ok to mock someone's intelligence. It is ok to mock their moral turpitude. It is NOT ok to mock their race. The reason for this is that we live in a society that is thoroughly tarnished and permanently damaged by racism.  We only managed to end slavery through a civil war, and it took at least another century to get Jim Crow laws off the books. And some people seem to want to get those laws back onto the books.

I condemn this cartoon. It is the journalistic equivalent of a hate crime. 

One time in 1991, when Obama was serving as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he spoke affably of the first black tenured Harvard Law professor, Derrick Bell, while he was peacefully protesting the lack of diversity on Harvard’s faculty. And then Obama hugged him. He might as well have given Sauron a reach-around. 

This is the stupidest @!$%#ing story we’ve ever seen, maybe. Watch these amoral idiots trying to grapple with the fact that they’ve been scooped on releasing their much-hyped Scary Obama Radical College Years clip — part one of a new Breitbart.com thing called THE VETTING, defined in this context as a media campaign in which a half-literate band of googlers scotch tape together clunky race-baiting narratives about nothing.

 

When conservatives cry “freedom of religion” and insist they mean something more than “freedom of worship,” this is what they mean: religious freedom is not just the freedom to gather in a room and pray one morning a week. It is the freedom to impose one’s own religious values on others. Free expression of religion entails the right to reason from religious principles in the public square and — with sufficient electoral support — to enshrine those principles in law and social institutions. If Obama does not support this view, they argue, then he is hardly a true American.

In case you're not familiar with the details of said Hebrew scroll: The Megillah, commonly known as the Book of Esther, is the part of the Hebrew Bible that tells the story of how a hard-partying Persian king was convinced by an evil adviser that it'd be fun to decimate the Jewish minority population in his dominion. He declares a government holiday in the month of Adar during which his subjects are given carte blanche to murder Jews and steal their property. Long-story-short, the Jews do a fantastic job of defending themselves against the state-sponsored onslaught, and then proceed to commit a hugely successful counter-slaughter of the Persians. (This bit of Biblical spin has long since found a home in the annals of fascist and far-right propaganda.)

Flash forward a couple dozen centuries, and the Jews now have something of a home-plate advantage over Persian foes: They are the regional superpower. They have backing of the only global superpower. The track record of the Israeli military—and special ops forces—has achieved a Hollywood-level of renown. Oh, and one other thing: They have nuclear bombs.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Once, long ago, Evie looked after “Barry” Obama, the kid who would grow up to become the world’s most powerful man. Now, his transgender former nanny has given up her tight, flowery dresses, her brocade vest and her bras, and is living in fear on Indonesia’s streets.

Evie, who was born a man but believes she is really a woman, has endured a lifetime of taunts and beatings because of her identity. She describes how soldiers once shaved her long, black hair to the scalp and smashed out glowing cigarettes onto her hands and arms.

The turning point came when she found a transgender friend’s bloated body floating in a backed-up sewage canal two decades ago. She grabbed all her girlie clothes in her arms and stuffed them into two big boxes. Half-used lipstick, powder, eye makeup — she gave them all away.

“I knew in my heart I was a woman, but I didn’t want to die like that,” says Evie, now 66, her lips trembling slightly as the memories flood back. “So I decided to just accept it. ... I’ve been living like this, a man, ever since.”

Indonesia’s attitude toward transgenders is complex.

We can laugh all we want to about the Republicans being an insane party, but the truth of the matter is that the GOP is a force for moving the USA to the right while the Democrats won't even defend their own legacy or the base of their party. The Democrats gave up the ghost during the Clinton administration when they started courting the same exact corporate money as the Republicans. Before that, the Democrats were more dependent on people and organizations that did things like get out the vote: labor unions, community organizations, liberal activists. The Democrats have turned their backs on labor. They did nothing for Union Card Check, next to nothing for public workers in Wisconsin and other states where they are under siege, and Obama even signed a new law into the books making it harder for Railroad and Airline workers to unionize and easier to de-unionise them. Obama, the president we all know got his start as a community organizer, didn't bother to say a single kind word in defense of ACORN when it was defunded. Obama and the rest of the Democrats are afraid of their own shadows, lest they get called liberals. Job number one for this feckless bunch of losers is cutting the deficit during a recession and weak recovery. They are hardly a party that seeks power anymore. They are merely a place holder for when the public gets tired and fearful of the GOP.

You don't believe me? Read up on how likely it is that the Democrats will make any headway in congress come November 2012. Most likely, they will lose their thin majority in the Senate and lose additional seats in the House. If Obama gets to appoint anymore justices to the SCOTUS, he will be moving the court further to the right.

Sorry, my fellow liberals, progressives, and democratic socialists but the time for denial is over. We placed our faith in Obama, but he showed up just in time to bury rather than to praise liberalism -and with it - the Democratic party.

Nice looking family, though.

This is just current government expenditures divided by the GDP deflator, starting from 1982IV and 2009II; no attempt to separate out unemployment benefits, other transfers, etc.. Slightly weaker than the purchases-only comparison, mainly because unemployment benefits fell faster under Reagan, but the story remains the same:

At this point in the Reagan recovery government spending had risen 11.6 percent; this time around it’s actually down by 2.6 percent. So if we had followed the Reagan track, spending would be almost 15 percent higher.

Since government spending on goods and services is about $3 trillion a year, spending on the Reagan track would have meant more than $340 billion more in direct government demand, or more than 2 percent of GDP. Include the multiplier effect, and we would have expected real GDP to be something like 3 percent higher — and given Okun’s Law, the unemployment rate to be 1.5 percentage points lower, or something like 7 percent.

Poll reports that 51% of Americans believe that President Obama's political views are "too liberal," though 47% also say they agree with him on the issues they care about.

Gallup also said that "Americans' perceptions of Obama's ideology have changed significantly since he was elected."

Political commentator and comedian Bill Maher publicly donated $1 million to the super-PAC supporting President Obama's re-election on Thursday night.

According to reports, Maher brought an oversize check on stage with him during a performance in San Jose, Calif. that was also broadcast by Yahoo! online.

The Obama administration released a "framework" for corporate tax reform yesterday, proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and pay for that by closing various corporate tax loopholes.

The "framework" isn't really a corporate tax reform proposal. It is a message document, framed in a bitterly partisan election year when no reforms are about to take place. So what is the message?

The president wants to show that he's sensitive to business complaints about the complicated tax code with the highest nominal rates in the industrial world, outraged at the loopholes and scams built into the code, committed to providing incentives for businesses to create jobs here at home, and stout in opposing more corporate tax cuts unlike his Republican opponents.

But a brief look at the framework shows how truly limited and conservative our debate has become. The corporation lobby has won the fight before it has begun by defining the terms of the debate.

The president’s plan to cut the corporate tax rate sounds good for businesses and plays well on the campaign trail—but it won’t help our economy or create new revenue. Plus, the top 10 corporations that abuse the tax system most.

...

The Obama administration's announcement of a generous cut to the corporate statutory tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent (for manufacturing companies, to 25 percent) is an excellent political ploy. President Obama deftly wrapped a business-friendly tax cut in job-creation lingo, a slick maneuver sure to take some wind out of the GOP candidates’ sails. Which Republican is going to vote against a 20 percent corporate-tax-rate deduction?

“The president is wrong.” So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Those four words headline the website of the organization Progressives United, founded by former U.S. Sen., and now Obama campaign adviser, Russ Feingold. He is referring to Obama’s recent announcement that he will accept super PAC funds for his re-election campaign. Feingold writes: “The President is wrong to embrace the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United through the use of Super PACs—organizations that raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations and the richest individuals, sometimes in total secrecy. It’s not just bad policy; it’s also dumb strategy.” And, he says, it’s “dancing with the devil.”

...

As I interviewed Feingold, just hours after he was named one of the 35 Obama campaign co-chairs, I asked him if he was an odd choice for the position. Feingold responded: “How about a co-chair that’s proud of him for bringing us health care for the first time in 70 years? How about a co-chair who thinks that he has actually done a good thing with the economy and helped with the stimulus package, and we’ve had 22 months of positive job growth? How about a co-chair for a president that has the best reputation overseas of any president in memory, that has reversed the awful damage of the Bush administration, who in places like Cairo and in India and Indonesia has reached out to the rest of the world. Believe me, on balance, there’s no question. And finally, how about a co-chair of a president who I believe will help us appoint justices who will overturn Citizens United?”

Until then, as the Obama campaign “dances with the devil” of super PACs, perhaps campaign co-chair Russ Feingold will help us follow the money.

KRUGMAN: It really is catastrophic. If you include people who aren’t actively searching for a job and people who are working part-time even though they want full-time work, we’re up to about one in seven. That means the unemployment rate is 16 percent. I live in a fairly rarefied social class now and so probably hear a lot fewer personal horror stories. But I do hear them: people my age, 58-year-old guys who’ve lost jobs and see no chance of ever getting another one; young people out of college with good qualifications who can’t find anything, who can’t get their lives started. The human damage is enormous.

PLAYBOY: Some of that debate is irrelevant to the average person. All they know is they don’t have a job or they don’t have a job that pays enough.

KRUGMAN: The point is there’s a tremendous amount of suffering. A lot of America is much worse off than it was four years ago. I think the main reason you should be angry about it is that it’s gratuitous. This doesn’t have to be happening. We actually have the tools to make most of this go away. If we could throw aside the political prejudices and bad ideas that are crippling us, in 18 months we could be back to something that feels like a much better economy.

PLAYBOY: So people in America today are suffering when they don’t have to be because of policy makers who won’t do the right thing?

KRUGMAN: That’s right.

At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation—drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99%—electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they’re just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability.

If 2008 was the year of the small donor, when many political pundits (myself included) predicted that the fusion of grassroots organizing and cyber-activism would transform how campaigns were run, then 2012 is “the year of the big donor,” when a candidate is only as good as the amount of money in his super PAC. “In this campaign, every candidate needs his own billionaires,” wrote Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

A new New York Times/CBS News poll released Wednesday has found that a majority of Americans support some legal recognition for gay couples and also think an employer should cover contraception for women—even if her employer is a religious institution. Conservatives have gleefully used the Obama administrations’ requirement that health insurance plans cover birth control as a way to revive the culture wars. But they’re not winning, writes Andrew Sullivan.

On February 14, President Obama quietly signed into law the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, which will provide $63.6 billion for the agency’s programs between 2012-2015. The House had passed the bill on February 3, and three days later the Senate voted for the conference agreement. 157 House Democrats and 18 Senate Democrats opposed the bill, while Hill Republicans supported the bill only after forcing the adoption of controversial provisions that will make it more difficult for airline and railroad workers to form unions.

After 5 years of uncertainty and 23 short-term extensions, there’s no question that a long-term solution to FAA funding was overdue. There’s also no question that the unprecedented inclusion of the anti-union provisions in the legislation demonstrates the GOP’s determination to destroy unions. As its labor critics have stated, the bill is a compromise in name only, and the President should have vetoed it.

If the White House has its way, America could soon reduce its nuclear arsenal dramatically, possibly even to the point where it would possess fewer atomic bombs than congressmen. And though Republicans on the Hill are already complaining that the plans are "reckless lunacy," the administration appears to have plenty of military thinkers on its side.
What the truck? US big rigs loaded with nuclear bombs are secretly cruising the interstate near you. (See the maps!)

According to a report this week from the Associated Press, President Obama is considering three proposals by the Pentagon to cut the number of deployed nukes. The biggest proposal would reduce America's active stockpile to just 300 to 400 warheads—fewer than the US has had since the earliest days of the Cold War. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the US has reportedly built close to 70,000 atomic bombs. The recent New START treaty with Russia requires both countries to cut their deployed warheads to 1,550, so these new reduction plans would be dramatic, indeed.

On Tuesday President Obama signed a bill that will make it harder for workers to form a union.  This bill, the FAA Reauthorization Act, passed Congress last week despite an outcry from major unions.  Dozens of House Democrats voted for it, as did most Democratic senators.

Another reason why Obama sucks! Would rather shoot myself than vote for that A-hole again. No different than a rightwing reactionary Republican. (Not much difference anyway.) Dems & GOP just different factions of the same bought & paid-for crew  of muleteers  whose only job is hauling water for a corrupt cannibalistic yet ultimately cowardly Masterclass. They all must be replaced. ASAP! BAMN!

There's not much detail in this New York Times story, but it hints at the unspoken story of the contraception battle: the Catholic Church declared war first, months ago, seemingly (who'da thunk?) just in time for an election that's likely to turn on the electoral votes of large swing states with lots of old, culturally conservative Catholic voters. The church fathers were just looking for an excuse to start shooting:

WASHINGTON -- Unbowed by the dust-up from last week’s contraception debate, the Obama administration has jumped feet-first into the next round.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, in a statement to The Huffington Post, weighed in heavily against a toughly-worded measure being considered in the Senate that would greatly restrict women's access to critical health care services.

"Let's be clear about what's at stake," said Carney. "The proposal being considered in the Senate applies to all employers -- not just religious employers. And it isn't limited to contraception. Any employer could restrict access to any service they say they object to. That is dangerous and it is wrong. Decisions about medical care should be made by a woman and her doctor, not a woman and her boss.”

As Barack Obama contends for a second term in office, two conflicting narratives of his presidency have emerged. Is he a skillful political player and policy visionary—a chess master who always sees several moves ahead of his opponents (and of the punditocracy)? Or is he politically clumsy and out of his depth—a pawn overwhelmed by events, at the mercy of a second-rate staff and of the Republicans? Here, a longtime analyst of the presidency takes the measure of our 44th president, with a view to history.

The Obama team was beginning to learn what the Roosevelt team had learned sooner in their Great Depression. It turns out that bailouts for the top of the economic pyramid, which never trickle down, leave an economically depressed mass at the bottom. Governments that also try to pay for trickle-down policies by imposing "austerity programs" on the bottom only make matters worse. Sustained depression at the bottom eventually threatens the top: first economically and then also politically

....

The Obama team began in 2011 to supplement a wholly inadequate trickle-down approach with some limited trickle-up elements. The biggest of these have been the reductions in the social security deduction on paychecks. Another small step is this week's modest help for homeowners facing foreclosures. It will not help the majority of those in such danger – for example, the 50% of mortgages owned by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are ineligible. It will help the rest, but not much.

...

While the government's help to homeowners is far from adequate or just, it represents a partial and late recognition of trickle-down economics' inadequacy as policy. It further concedes the need for some trickle up. What happens next depends on the evolution of this crisis and of the political forces gathering strength.

I'm a simple man. I have a relatively moderate vocabulary and I rely heavily on spell check and online dictionaries to get through a typical day here on Newsvine.

But like most Newsviners, armed with my meager gifts, I make an earnest effort to get to the bottom of things. Sometimes this involves reading the actual articles in question. Sometimes it involves looking at the pictures. And once or twice, it's involved reading the Constitution.

The Constitution isn't a very long document, but it can surely be a confusing one. The Bill of Rights in particular drives me crazy. Whoever cobbled together this sentence:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

should have been shot.

What are we to make of it? Nanny-state-Liberals look at the phrase "well regulated militia" and want to keep gun ownership under control, Conservative-gun-nuts can only see the words "not be infringed." The lawyers slapping the constitution together probably saw that they were creating a lucrative profession called "Constitutional Lawyer."

Similarly, the first amendment reference to religious freedom:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

meant different things to people at the time of its signing.

The part saying that the "congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise thereof" is pretty straightforward. Of course, if a religion is premised on human sacrifice, murder will be prosecuted, and high-priests or not, the murderers will be convicted and punished. There is probably no specific law prohibiting any particular religion and its rituals, laws against murder are enough.The laws against murder are religion neutral -- they are not laws made "respecting an establishment of religion."

Fast forward to the present day, and we now are in the situation where religious institutions, and private persons who belong to religions, are employers of other persons. We have laws governing how employees are treated, and we find that religious institutions are demanding exemptions from these laws. Well, it strikes me as rather odd to carve out exceptions for religious institutions with regard to specific health insurance regulations. It strikes me, quite frankly, as making a law "respecting an establishment of religion."

The particular issue in question is birth control. Having a moral dilemma regarding birth control strikes me as a bit nutty, but if a person chooses to honor their religion by choosing not to use birth control, that is a matter of individual liberty. Simply don't use it and your conscience will be satisfied. The Catholic church, however, seems that it is not content to merely teach and preach the word of Christ. It also wants to run people's lives. It wants to limit their access to birth control and make their decisions for them. This is no longer a question of religious liberty; it is a question of religious tyranny.

That is my rant on this subject, and now I turn the reins over to you, my fellow Newsvine members. Please answer the poll question, "Does accommodating particular religious institutions, by giving them special exemptions to laws, violate the Constitution?"

I am greatly disappointed by the administration's rapid capitulation with regard to birth control being provided by health insurance plans provided by Catholic institutions to their employees. Yes, women will still have access to birth control, but they will have to arrange to get this from the insurance companies separately. And interestingly, employees of churches, themselves, will not have this option.

Why should we expect this to stop here? Perhaps some religious cults will demand that health insurance not provide vaccines or antibiotics. And while we are at it, why should health insurance plans pay for psychotherapy, but not exorcisms?

That is my question to you, members of the Newsvine community, "Do you think health insurance plans should be required to pay for exorcisms?"

Please be mindful of the CoH, and treat this article and poll question with the respect it deserves.

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year's presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party's super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires? The Republicans, enabled by decisions of a Supreme Court they still control, were the first out of the gate and are far more culpable in destroying our system of popular governance. But the Democrats, no less committed to winning at any cost to political principle, have now jumped in.

The generally reserved New York Times editorial page responded to the Obama campaign's decision to seek Super PAC funding with a scathing editorial headlined "Another Campaign for Sale." The Times reminded that Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech two years ago, called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits.

In a recent article in Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Professor Cornel West “went HAM” on Tulane University Professor Melissa Harris-Perry.

SEE ALSO: Black Farmer Wrests Billion-Dollar Settlement From U.S.

In what might be his strongest public comments yet, West referred to Harris-Perry as a “fake” and a “fraud” for allowing herself to be used by the liberal establishment to shoot down his critiques over our nation’s decision to overlook racial inequality and poverty.

I was quoted in the article, but only as a supporter of Dr. West. Anyone who evaluates Cornel West’s track record will see that he has consistently advocated for Black, Brown and poor people long before “hope” and “change” slogans were thrust on to our TV screens. In fact, Dr. West and Pastor Jeremiah Wright serve as our strongest modern-day embodiments of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Similar to King, both of these men must endure the public volatility that comes with not running in lockstep with any flashy political trend.

When I heard what Cornel said about Melissa, my neck snapped like Nene Leakes bumping into a bill collector at a night club. I was both impressed and shocked that West had been so strong in his position on Harris-Perry, and I was glad to see that even millionaires aren’t afraid to tell the truth.

WASHINGTON--The Obama administration is willing to work with Catholic universities, hospitals and other church-affiliated employers to implement a new policy that requires health insurers to offer birth control coverage, a top adviser to the president's re-election campaign said on Tuesday.

David Axelrod, a senior campaign adviser to President Barack Obama, said the administration had heard the Roman Catholic Church's concerns and never intended to "abridge anyone's religious freedom."

But he gave no sign that the administration would reverse course under intensifying pressure from church leaders and political heat from Republican presidential candidates.

Actor Clint Eastwood wants to clear up any confusion over the political intent of the Chrysler ad he narrated during the Super Bowl on Sunday.

“l am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama,” the actor told "O’Reilly Factor" producer Ron Mitchell according to Fox News. “It was meant to be a message ... just about job growth and the spirit of America. I think all politicians will agree with it.”

Eastwood reiterated that he’s “not supporting any politician at this time” and added that if "Obama or any other politician wants to run with the spirit of that ad, go for it.”

A second term for President Barack Obama would allow him to expand his replacement of Republican-appointed majorities with Democratic ones on the nation's appeals courts, the final stop for almost all challenged federal court rulings.

Despite his slow start in nominating judges and Republican delays in Senate confirmations, Obama has still managed to alter the balance of power on four of the nation's 13 circuit courts of appeals. Given a second term, Obama could have the chance to install Democratic majorities on several others.

Fourteen of the 25 appeals court judges nominated by Obama replaced Republican appointees.

The next president, whether it's Obama or a Republican, also has a reasonable shot at transforming the majority on the Supreme Court, because three justices representing the closely divided court's liberal and conservative wings, as well as its center, will turn 80 before the next presidential term ends.

The three justices are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the leader of the court's liberal wing, conservative Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy, who leans conservative but on some issues provides a decisive vote for the liberals.

The next high court opening would cause a titanic confirmation fight if it would allow a Republican president to cement conservative control of the court by replacing Ginsburg or if Obama could give Democratic appointees a working majority for the first time in decades by replacing Scalia or Kennedy.

The prospect of such dramatic change on the Supreme Court, along with the justices' strikingly high-profile election-year docket could heighten the judiciary's importance as an election issue, said Curt Levey, who heads the conservative Committee for Justice. The justices will hear arguments on Obama's health care overhaul in March and Arizona's immigration crackdown in April. The court also could soon decide whether to hear a Texas affirmative action case challenging the use of race as a factor in college admissions.

Even one new justice can produce dramatic change. Justice Samuel Alito replaced the more moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and shifted the outcome in cases on abortion, campaign finance and other key issues, even though both were appointed by Republicans.

Openings on the circuit courts of appeals get much less attention, but those courts have the last say in most legal disputes that are appealed in the federal system. Only about 80 cases make it to the Supreme Court every year.

There are still more Republicans than Democrats on the circuit appeals courts and on the entire federal bench. But if Obama merely filled existing vacancies, Democratic appointees would be the majority on the influential court of appeals in Washington, where four current Supreme Court justices once served, and the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans also maintain their edge on the 10th Circuit in Denver only because two judgeships are empty.

Two other appeals courts on which Republicans have comfortable majorities could shift over the next four years. The Chicago-based 7th Circuit has four judges in their 70s who were chosen by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit, Judge Emilio Garza, a Republican appointee, will take senior status in August, a move that will open a seat while Garza takes a smaller caseload. Two Reagan picks in their 70s remain on the court.

Twelve Reagan appointees now in their 70s remain on circuit appeals courts or, in the case of Scalia and Kennedy, the Supreme Court.

Republican presidents, in recent decades, have been more aggressive than Democrats in filling those seats with younger, more like-minded lawyers.

Many nominees of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were in their early 40s, some even in their 30s, and with reputations as bold conservatives. By contrast, Obama has frustrated some liberal interest groups mainly by favoring older nominees over younger ones who might be the Democratic equivalents of some of the Reagan and Bush picks. Obama's two youngest appeals court nominees, Goodwin Liu and Caitlin Halligan, were stymied by Republican filibusters in the Senate.

The average age of Obama-nominated appeals court judges is more than 55 years old, higher than any president's going back to Jimmy Carter, according to the liberal interest group Alliance for Justice. The age of these judges matters in an era when presidents regularly look to the circuit appeals courts as the pool for Supreme Court candidates. Younger judges have a chance to develop a record that presidents can examine, yet still be young enough to be considered for the high court.

Alito and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas all became appellate judges in their early 40s. Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee, and Justice Elena Kagan, a Democrat, would have been on the appeals court in Washington before their 40th birthdays had senators not blocked their confirmations. Roberts had to wait another decade before becoming an appeals court judge, while Kagan is the only justice who did not serve as an appellate judge.

Obama's picks have yet to surprise anyone with their decisions, said Levey, head of the conservative interest group. "So Obama's liberal critics can rest assured that if he's re-elected, his transformation of the appeals courts will make a big difference in the law."

Party labels do not always foretell a case's outcome. During recent challenges to the Obama administration's health care overhaul, Republican appeals court judges in Cincinnati and Washington cast deciding votes upholding the law, while a Democratic appointee in Atlanta voted to strike down the requirement that most people buy health insurance or pay a penalty.

Still, there is wide agreement that Obama picks have sharply altered the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had been dominated by conservative, Republican appointees.

The unsigned note claims to carry a message directly from the one-eyed militant to Barack Obama, urging the US president to release senior Taliban fighters from Guantánamo Bay as a first step towards peace talks in Afghanistan.

If the letter is confirmed to have come from the fugitive mullah it would be the strongest indication yet that the upper echelons of the Taliban movement are prepared to come to the negotiating table after ten years of insurgency.

Today marks the 2012 deadline for nominations for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, but as the prize committee meets this year to discuss what individual or group has "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace," they will be under heightened scrutiny to be sure their choice fulfills the original intent of its founder, Alfred Nobel.

The reason for the heightened pressure rests on an investigation by the Stockholm County Administrative Board of the committee's recent choices prompted by 'persistent complaints' by author and peace researcher, Fredrik Heffermehl, and roundly criticized choices by the committee in recent years -- most notably US President Barack Obama, a war commander governing over numerous military conflicts at the time he was awarded the auspicious "peace" prize in 2009.

There are several suspects in connection to the murder of card check–and all of them are guilty, to one degree or another.

The first group in the lineup is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and corporate lobbyists, and their massive, multimillion-dollar K Street smear campaign. The next group includes, of course, congressional Republicans.

But with Senate Democrats now holding a 60-seat “filibuster proof” majority, EFCA’s killers needed the collusion of “moderate” and conservative Democratic senators–including Dianne Feinstein of California and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the home state of anti-union behemoth Wal-Mart. Both reneged on earlier support for EFCA.
Behind this gang was a wider group of accessories–including other congressional Democrats and the White House, which failed to muster even a modest lobbying effort for EFCA.

Lastly, EFCA’s enemies needed a labor movement that pulled its punches to give Corporate America the political space it needed to finish off the pro-union legislation. Unfortunately, organized labor obliged.

How did things go so wrong?

President Barack Obama laid out a religious defense Thursday of the themes and economic policies, including tax increases on the wealthy, he’s advocating as part of his 2012 campaign platform.

President Barack Obama is applauded by First Lady Michelle Obama and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) after speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

“I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense,” Mr. Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. “But for me as a Christian it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.”

One by one Mr. Obama cited Biblical passages that drove his policy initiatives in a speech that at times seemed to directly challenge Mitt Romney, his potential opponent this November.

Mitt Romney is now being protected by the Secret Service. Unfortunately for him, they were not in a position to jump in front of his comments Wednesday morning. The day after his Florida triumph, Romney told CNN: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

This statement is striking for many reasons. Most are obvious—it is thoroughly ham-fisted for a politician to ever say he doesn’t care about part of the electorate, particularly the “very poor.” Everyone knows that much. But Romney’s gaffe signals something more about the general election to come. As it looks more likely that Obama and Romney will square off, we are faced with a new prospect: The 2012 presidential election may devolve into a battle between two aloof men trading charges about who is more out of touch.

So there was big news yesterday on the foreclosure settlement front. We still have to wait and see what the final deal looks like, but there are reports out that the long-awaited settlement is a far, far better deal for the public than expected. If these reports are true, it looks like New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and California AG Kamala Harris have scored an enormous victory in narrowing the scope of the settlement to the point where it really only covers robosigning abuses.

According to reports (like this one in the Huffington Post), the deal will not include:

1. Criminal liability.
2. Tax liability
3. Fair lending, fair housing, or any other civil rights claim.
4. Federal Housing Finance Agency or the GSEs [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac]
5. CFPB claims for the period after they came into existence in July 2011
6. SEC claims
7. National Credit Union Association Claims
8. FDIC claims
9. Federal Reserve Board claims
10. MERS claims

If that is true, and all of those things are out of the deal, and the banks are still exposed to liability not only for all of those things, but also for the broad range of offenses related to securitization, then $25 billion, dare I say it, might not even be a completely sucky number

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Those still wondering why the Obama administration surrendered so quickly on the drive for stimulus and joined the deficit reduction crusade, got the smoking gun in an article by the New Yorker's Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza. Lizza revealed a 57-page memo drafted by Larry Summers, the head of the National Economic Council, in the December of 2008, the month before President Obama was inaugurated.

When the polls closed in South Carolina on Saturday, I happened to be in a Charleston hotel lobby where elegantly dressed couples were filing past on their way to a black-tie event. A woman stopped and asked whether I had heard anything about the results.

“Newt’s winning big,” I said.

The woman’s face fell. “But if Newt wins,” she lamented, “then Obama wins.”

With the caveat that there are no guarantees, she has a point.

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

Beginning last year the average American family:  could not afford the average single family house... depended on their employer for health care insurance or went without... were in debt with no way out... didn't pursuing further education... saved nothing... slashed their food budget to the bone... and paid at least 30% of their gross wages in taxes.

Gender, age, religion, sexual preference and marital status are of no consequence to this financial analysis.  If you're human you can relate to these budget numbers.  

Any family earning today's average wage of $62,857 is very carefully spending every cent of their $49,067 take home pay and the details are disturbing.

The GOP is engaged in a wholesale effort to redefine the government help that Americans take for granted as an effort to create a radically new, statist society. Consider Romney’s claim in his Bedford speech: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing—the government.”

Obama believes no such thing. If he did, why are so many continuing to make bundles on Wall Street? As my colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Krugman have been insisting, Romney is saying things about the president that are flatly, grossly and shamefully untrue. But Romney’s sleight of hand is revealing: Republicans are increasingly inclined to argue that any redistribution (and Social Security, Medicare, student loans, veterans benefits and food stamps are all redistributive) is but a step down the road to some radically egalitarian dystopia.

Obama will thus be the conservative in 2012, in the truest sense of that word. He is the candidate defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal, and that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush dismantled. The rhetoric of the 2012 Republicans suggests they want to go far beyond where Reagan or Bush ever went. And here’s the irony: By raising the stakes of 2012 so high, Republicans will be playing into Obama’s hands. The GOP might well win a referendum on the state of the economy. But if this is instead a larger-scale referendum on whether government should be “inconsequential,” Republicans will find the consequences to be very disappointing.

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Eizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country.. . .Money rules.. . .The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

A former aide to Lyndon Johnson who knows politics from the inside, Moyers then delivered the coup de grace: “[Lease] should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats, then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.”

As it happens, Moyers’s remarks anticipated the trenchant question posed in an interview by another prominent liberal, Barbara Ehrenreich, just after billionaire Michael Bloomberg and mayors of other cities cleared public spaces of Occupy Wall Street protesters: “Where in all this was Obama? Why couldn’t he have picked up the phone and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: ‘Go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority.’ Would that have been so difficult?” Well, yes, particularly if your principal occupation is shaking down bankers and brokers for campaign donations on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Sanders is not alone in his fight. The activist organization Public Citizen and other progressive groups are organizing, circulating petitions for a constitutional amendment overturning the Citizens United decision. The target date, Jan. 21, will be the second anniversary of the high court’s ruling.

The Los Angeles City Council supports the constitutional amendment. Another supporter, progressive activist Mark Green, said Occupy Wall Street should join in. He wrote in The Huffington Post, “Nothing could enhance American democracy more than if Occupy Wall Street helped enact the 28th Constitutional Amendment to end the pretense that corporations are people who speak with money. The 99% can stop the privatization of government.”

On Thursday night, I attended a meeting of eight people who were planning a Jan. 21 march. The group, earnestly talking in the living room of Dr. Andrew Leavenworth, reflected the hope and frustration felt by progressives. Frustration with President Obama for not keeping his promises and with the money-dominated political system. Hope that their demonstration and others around the country will spark a reform movement. To attract attention in media-heavy L.A., they will march from a Bank of America branch to the nearby Federal Building, carrying a coffin containing Uncle Sam and a copy of the Constitution to show the harm done by the Citizens United decision.

Americans who want a cleaner politics should join in outrage with those working to scrub our political system. As Sanders said in his speech, “Make no mistake. The Citizens United ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy, further tilting the balance of power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when already the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good.”

In attempting to show himself as the man who would ensure Roosevelt's progressive legacy, Obama showed only the timidity of modern political discourse. Roosevelt's speech was a manifesto; most of his ideas eventually became part of American life. Obama's Osawatomie oration was a rear-guard action, defensive of a governing philosophy under fresh fire... it's a shame that Obama, in channeling T.R. from a long ago summer's evening, could not reach for anything more stirring in his proposals than a call for the approval of his consumer protection bureau appointee, and the continuance of tax cuts for wage-earners.

That's the danger of rhetoric for an incumbent -- we know what you've done. Or haven't done. As HuffPost's Dan Froomkin put it: "...the higher [Obama] soars with his populist rhetoric, the more he calls attention to the enormous gap between the promise of hope and change that he campaigned on in 2008 and the actions he has taken as president."

"We are concerned that Wyden-Ryan, like Congressman Ryan’s earlier proposal, would undermine, rather than strengthen, Medicare," said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. "The Wyden-Ryan scheme could, over time, cause the traditional Medicare program to “wither on the vine” because it would raise premiums, forcing many seniors to leave traditional Medicare and join private plans. And it would shift costs from the government to seniors. At the end of the day, this plan would end Medicare as we know it for millions of seniors. Wyden-Ryan is the wrong way to reform Medicare."

The statement makes valid policy points that other health care reform groups were expressing the day after the Wyden-Ryan model was laid out. That said, what the duo is attempting to do -- turn Medicare into a premium support system that also preserves the current model -- resembles some of the very reforms that President Obama instituted into the health care system at large (albiet without a public option-like choice for consumers, which traditional Medicare would be under Wyden-Ryan).

It is also clear, however, that the new bipartisan model has the potential to cause major political headaches for both parties -- particularly Democrats.

Mr. President, we heard what you said last week in Kansas – about the dangers to our economy and democracy of the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top.

We agree. And many of us are prepared to work our hearts to get you reelected – as long as you commit to doing what needs to be done in your second term:

I noted in February that John Kenneth Galbraith and Marriner Eccles explained 50 years ago that inequality causes crashes, and that many modern economists agree.

I just found a slighter older statement saying the same thing.

Specifically, the well-known Greek historian Plutarch – who died in 120 A.D. – said:

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Given that the level of inequality in America today is one of the greatest in history, it is not surprising that the republic is ailing so badly.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is introducing a new program on Monday designed to lower monthly mortgage payments for more troubled homeowners.

But a key new condition in the plan would shift the financial liability for refinanced loans from Wall Street banks to the American taxpayer. And by focusing on lower payments, the program does not confront what housing experts view as the core problem in the foreclosure crisis -- borrower debt that exceeds the value of one's home.

An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class—an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

Its members include Wall Street titans like Pete Peterson and Robert Rubin; deficit-hawk groups like the CRFB, the Concord Coalition, the Hamilton Project, the Committee for Economic Development, Third Way and the Bipartisan Policy Center; budget wonks like Peter Orszag, Alice Rivlin, David Walker and Douglas Holtz-Eakin; red state Democrats in Congress like Mark Warner and Kent Conrad, the bipartisan “Gang of Six” and what’s left of the Blue Dog Coalition; influential pundits like Tom Friedman and David Brooks of the New York Times, Niall Ferguson and the Washington Post editorial page; and a parade of blue ribbon commissions, most notably Bowles-Simpson, whose members formed the all-star team of the austerity class.

The austerity class testifies frequently before Congress, is quoted constantly in the media by sympathetic journalists and influences policy-makers and elites at the highest levels of power. They manufacture a center-right consensus by determining the parameters of acceptable debate and policy priorities, deciding who is and is not considered a respectable voice on fiscal matters. The “balanced” solutions they advocate are often wildly out of step with public opinion and reputable economic policy, yet their influence endures, thanks to an abundance of money, the ear of the media, the anti-Keynesian bias of supply-side economics and a political system consistently skewed to favor Wall Street over Main Street.

WASHINGTON — Americans consider President Obama to be the smartest and most honest presidential candidate against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, according to a new poll, but religious groups differ on their views of the candidates' attributes.

The Barna Group polled 1,010 adults on their perceptions of the candidates' honesty, intelligence, philosophy of government and leadership ability.

Obama scored highest on all attributes except leadership. Romney ranked the highest of the three on leadership ability, and outpolled Perry on all four attributes by small margins.

Among evangelicals, Perry scored the highest and Romney scored the lowest, though Romney tied with Obama on leadership skills. Skeptics, on the other hand, rated Obama the highest in all four categories. Catholics overwhelmingly ranked Obama higher than the other two candidates in all four categories.

(Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries.

The question for the left now, says Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future, is whether progressives can “establish independence and momentum” while also being able “to make a strategic voting choice.” The idea is not to pretend that Obama is as progressive as his core supporters want him to be, but to rally support to him nonetheless as the man standing between the country and the right wing.

Unemployment is high and wages stagnant, but that hasn’t stopped health insurance companies from hiking premiums by 9 percent this year, a new survey shows.

The poll by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found that the average family insurance plan purchased through an employer now costs over $15,000 per year. That's more than double the average price 10 years ago, the New York Times calculates. And Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman points out it's more than the cost of a new Chevy Aveo or Ford Fiesta.

Premiums soared in the decade's first half, but had grown more moderately in recent years.

The causes of this year's spike are debatable, but Obamacare is sure to take some of the blame.

By now, probably everyone reading this is already sick of America’s quadrennial political spectacle—the one in which politicians and media outlets ask us to believe that there remain vast differences between our two political parties. It’s like cheaply staged pornography on a red and blue set, with words like “polarization,” “socialist” and “extremist” comprising the breathless dialogue in a wholly unconvincing plot.

Some of this tripe can be momentarily compelling, of course. And as the 2012 election climax draws nearer, many Americans will no doubt submit to the fantasy. But before that happens, it’s worth looking a few levels beneath the orgiastic presidential campaign for a last necessary dose of nonfiction, if only to remind us that the parties are often two heads of the same political monster.

Barack Obama’s politically expedient decision to betray and abandon his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, exposed his cowardice and moral bankruptcy. In that moment, playing the part of Judas, he surrendered the last shreds of his integrity. He became nothing more than a pawn of power, or as Cornel West says, “a black mascot for Wall Street.” Obama, once the glitter of power fades, will have to grapple with the fact that he was a traitor not only to his pastor, the man who married him and Michelle, who baptized his children and who kept him spiritually and morally grounded, but to himself. Wright retains what is most precious in life and what Obama has squandered—his soul.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama will veto a comprehensive deficit reduction package if it includes cuts to entitlement program benefits but no tax hikes on the wealthy or well-to-do corporations, senior advisers said on Sunday.

It’s getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled “Dixie” while the banking system imploded. But it’s time for Democrats to admit that their guy bears considerable responsibility for not turning things around.

The problem for Obama, and the opportunity for Republicans, is the electoral college. Every political junkie knows that the presidential election isn't a truly national contest; it's a state-by-state fight, and each state is worth a number of electoral votes equal to the size of the state's congressional delegation. (The District of Columbia also gets three votes.) There are 538 electoral votes up for grabs; win 270, and you're the president.
Also read: The Koch brothers' secret war plan to take down Obama—plus a list of their million-dollar donors.

Here's the rub, though: Each state gets to determine how its electoral votes are allocated. Currently, 48 states and DC use a winner-take-all system in which the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of its electoral votes. Under the Republican plan—which has been endorsed by top Republicans in both houses of the state's legislature, as well as the governor, Tom Corbett—Pennsylvania would change from this system to one where each congressional district gets its own electoral vote. (Two electoral votes—one for each of the state's two senators—would go to the statewide winner.)

This could cost Obama dearly.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama White House is revising its initial unwillingness to negotiate on the president's job creation plan, saying now that if individual components of the bill came to the president's desk -- as opposed to the bill in its entirety -- he would sign them into law.

The new approach opens up the administration to charges that it no longer views the American Jobs Act as a take-it-or-leave-it bill. But in a briefing with reporters Tuesday, senior administration officials insisted President Obama wasn't backing off his position that he wants the entire bill passed through Congress.

For President Obama, August is indeed the cruelest month.

In 2009, the president ended his "honeymoon" period with the public, with the largest one-month drop in his job approval poll numbers he has ever experienced. In 2010, Obama hit an all-time low for monthly approval numbers. This would be followed, within the next two months, by his lowest daily approval average and his highest daily disapproval average.

This August, President Obama set new all-time lows in approval and all-time highs in disapproval, across the board.

August just isn't a very good month for Obama. There's simply no other way to state how dismal Obama's poll numbers were last month. A quick look at the new chart shows this plainly.

If you can think back all the way to January 2009, back when wars were ending, Guantanamo was closing, the Pentagon was getting oversight, employees were going to have free choice, the rich would start paying taxes, the air would be getting cleaner, and so forth, you’ll recall that the Obama transition team was acting super populist and high-tech.

They had questions from ordinary people for the President Elect submitted on their website and voted up or down. The top question at the end of the voting had come from Bob Fertik of Democrats.com and it was this:

“Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor – ideally Patrick Fitzgerald – to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?”
-Bob Fertik, New York City

Not only was the answer no, but it had to be inferred because President Change U. Wish refused to answer the question. I’ve always assumed I could guess why:

WASHINGTON -- After a vacuous back-and-forth over whether or not the president would be invited to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Sept. 7, or Thursday, Sept. 8, the White House buckled to GOP demands and chose the latter date.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney emailed a statement to the press Wednesday evening, emphasizing that the administration had consulted GOP leadership before it requested to speak on Wednesday. But, he added, the president was willing to move the date back to accommodate House Speaker John Boehner's concerns.

Alan is a fine choice as chief economic adviser. He’s done excellent work, he’s a really good guy, whom I know pretty well, since we keep getting each others’ mail.

Now the question is whether anyone in the administration listens to him …

All cloying appeals to the Obama administration to use stimulus money to build public works such as schools, libraries, roads, clinics, public transit and reclaiming dams, as well as to create jobs, are about as effective as writing heartfelt appeals in the era of the old Soviet Union to Uncle Joe Stalin. The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform, from campaign finance to environmental controls, that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state. The rot and corruption at the top levels of our financial and political systems, coupled with the increasing deprivation felt by tens of millions of Americans, are volatile tinder for revolt. And the trolls are prepared for this too. They have put in place draconian state controls, including widespread internal surveillance, to silence our anemic left. They know how to direct the rage of the right wing toward the last pockets of the cultural, social and political establishment that cling to traditional liberal values, as well as toward the most vulnerable among us including Muslims, undocumented workers and homosexuals. They will make sure we consume ourselves.

A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control.

President Obama has only one option as he ponders a world economy teetering on the edge: He needs to go big, go long and go global.

Obama should not be constrained by what the tea party might allow subservient Republican leaders in Congress to do. He should state plainly, eloquently and in detail what he thinks needs to happen. Neither history nor the voters will be kind to him if he lets caution and political calculation get in the way.

Perhaps it would have been inappropriate for the president to involve himself directly in a campaign against state officials. But whether he ought to have spoken out or not, there are still two profound lessons for him in this outcome.

The first lesson is that bipartisanship seems to be encouraged among Republicans these days only when they suspect that voters may be sick of their extremism. Just as Walker is now worried about his future, so is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has suddenly realized that he prefers cooperation to confrontation over collective bargaining—evidently because he fears the results of a potential repeal referendum on the issue in November.

The second lesson is that there is only one way to instill such fear among Republicans, in Wisconsin or Washington: By demonstrating the will to push back, as hard as necessary, on behalf of the principles Democrats have always promised to uphold.

The California Democrat, speaking at a raucous town hall in Detroit hosted by the CBC on Tuesday, said she doesn't want to attack the president from his base unless the base gives her the go-ahead.

"If we go after the president too hard, you're going after us," Waters said. "When you tell us it's all right and you unleash us and you're ready to have this conversation, we're ready to have the conversation."

Judging by the reaction of the audience, including someone yelling to Waters, "It's all right," the president will be hearing very soon from the congresswoman and her fellow caucus members.

Since Obama took office, he has resisted pressure from the CBC to create jobs programs specifically targeting blacks, saying that improving the entire economy will help all groups.

Waters said the Congressional Black Caucus "loves" the president, but it is frustrated.

It is unfathomable that yet another Texas blowhard governor has emerged as a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination. The persistent appeal of the mythology of Texas as a model for the nation defies the lessons of logic and experience, and yet here we are with Rick Perry, a George W. Bush look-alike, as a prime contender to once again run our nation into the ground.

To begin with,

Barack has always, ALWAYS, put his trust ultimately in the American people. He's trusted us, to step forward, to be vocal - LOUD EVEN - to push forward the change and prosperity we all seek.

Just like John Kerry did when he called to us to Filibuster Alito we rose to that call, flipping an impressive number of votes our way, and nearly shut down his nomination.

That's what we need to do again.  And we need to keep doing it.  In November 2012.  And in 2016.

We need to realize that Obama's vision of a United America,  one that sees it's goals ascommon and is willing to tackle them together, is more importantly to the long term health of the country than implementing any specific partisan progressive agenda item.  If we are to implement progressive goals without bringing the rest of the country into solidarity with those goals - they will fight tooth and nail to undermine and reverse those goals.

That is what we've seeing now with Dodd-Frank.  It's what we've seen with Health Care Reform.  Simply getting agenda items ticked off our "Honey Do" list isn't enough.

We need to stop squabbling, yes even amongst ourselves, and keep focused on continued improvements and progress.  Even if, sometimes, those improvements are small, sometimes they are insufficient.  In the end the policy changes aren't the goal - they're part of the process.  We have yet to reach the goal in almost any area, so we have to Keep Going.

It's not a matter of "Clapping Louder" - which implies a passive state of adoration.  We need to get out of our seats, put our frustrations and disappointments aside - or else use them as fuelto - put our shoulders to the wheel and PUSH HARDER.

And not for Obama.  Not for Nancy Pelosi.  Not for Harry Reid.  And not because we fear what Repubs might do in their place.

We have to do it for America.

 

I’m told White House political operatives are against a bold jobs plan. They believe the only jobs plan that could get through Congress would be so watered down as to have almost no impact by Election Day. They also worry the public wouldn’t understand how more government spending in the near term can be consistent with long-term deficit reduction. And they fear Republicans would use any such initiative to further bash Obama as a big spender.

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

At a town hall meeting in Decorah, Iowa, President Obama answered this question from a teacher:

Q Many unions, especially public sector unions, helped you get elected in 2008. Those public sector unions and their members gained their salaries and benefits through collective bargaining. Recently, those benefits have been under attack. And I realize that this is a state issue mostly, but what can you do to help support collective bargaining in the states and, most of all, support the public sector unions, the middle class, many of whom are union members? Thank you. (Applause.)

His answer was typical of the mixed bag he typically offers on labor issues. On the one hand, there was the strong general support for union rights:

And on the other hand he stuck the knife in a little deeper.

What a year. Rage in London, Egypt, Athens, Damascus. All real. Just a metaphor in the new “Planet of the Apes” film? No, much more. Warning: More rage is dead ahead. Across our planet a new generation is filled with rage. High unemployment. Raging inflation. Dreams lost. Hope gone. While the super -rich get richer and richer.

Listen to that hissing: The fuse is rapidly burning, warning us. Wake up before the rage explodes in your face. This firestorm is endangering America’s future. From forces outside, yes. But far more deadly, from deep within our collective psyche. We have lost our moral compass. We are self-destructing.

Crackpot warning? No. This warning comes from the elite International Monetary Fund. A recent IMF report looked at “the causes of the two major U.S. economic crises over the past 100 years, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007,” writes Rana Foroohar, an economics editor at Time magazine. 

“There are two remarkable similarities in the eras that preceded these crises. Both saw a sharp increase in income inequality and household-debt-to-income ratios.” And in each case, “as the poor and middle-class were squeezed, they tried to cope by borrowing to maintain their standard of living.”

But the rich “got richer, by lending, and looked for more places to invest, bidding up securities that eventually exploded in everyone’s face. In both eras, financial deregulation and loose monetary policies played roles in creating the bubble. But inequality itself — and the political pressure not to reverse it, but to hide it — was a crucial factor in the meltdown. The shrinking middle isn’t a symptom of the downturn. It’s the source of it.” Today the consequences of the meltdown still haunt us — there’s more to come.

The next bubble

There’s a new bubble blowing. No one can stop it ... soon it will explode.

Get it? There’s enormous “political pressure not to reverse” inequality till it “explodes in our faces.” We deny the inequality between rich and the other 99%. The rich are addicts. More is never enough. They thrive on greed, blind to the needs of others. Worse, they have no commitment to America as a nation. From Forbes billionaires and signers of “no new taxes” pledges, to Mitch McConnell’s un-American willingness to sabotage the economy to deliver on his main promise to make Obama a one-term president.

A front page story in Sunday's New York Times gave the country the bad news. President Obama is no longer paying attention to economists and economics in designing economic policy. Instead, he will do what his campaign people tell him will get him re-elected, presumably by getting lots of money from Wall Street.
The article said that President Obama intends to focus on reducing government spending and cutting programs like social security and Medicare. This is in spite of the fact that: "A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth."
In other words, President Obama intends to ignore the path for getting the economy back to full employment that most economists advocate. Instead, he is going to cut government spending – because his chief of staff and former JP Morgan vice president Bill Daley and his top campaign adviser David Plouffe both say this is a good idea.

There will be no magic potion, no instant formula for Democrats and progressives struggling to come back from their disastrous 2010 election losses.

They had hoped that Tuesday’s recall elections in Wisconsin would provide a narrative-changing breakthrough, proof-positive that the overreaching conservatives who now dominate the Republican Party had ignited a middle-of-the-road voter rebellion and inspired a legion of labor and liberal activists who would offer a definitive riposte to the tea party.

What happened instead was not without promise for Democrats, but it was also a sign of the resiliency of conservative activism—and the power of conservative money.

The whole thing is nuts. The economy is a shambles, saved from a free fall only by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented promise of free money for banks for at least two years. That’s how long a seven-member majority of the Fed’s Open Market Committee expects it to take for significant relief to take hold for the 25 million Americans who can’t find full-time employment.

The president who preserved a system rigged for the haves now faces their (confused) wrath

Obama is no progressive

The debt deal will make things clear. The President is not a progressive – he is not what Americans still call a “liberal.” He is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result.What Barack Obama got from the debt deal was exactly what his sponsors have wanted: a long-term lock-in of domestic spending cuts, and a path toward severe cuts in the core New Deal and Great Society insurance programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And, of course, no tax increases at all.

The article goes on to explain:

The Constitution of the United States flatly forbids default on debt or any other public obligation. The President could have simply asserted his duty and refused to negotiate.

Even more cleverly, he could under a quirk of existing law  have turned drama to farce by minting a large platinum coin  say for a trillion dollars  and using that to buy back public debt held by the Federal Reserve, so that the debt ceiling would never have been breached. (There would have been an uproar but no other economic effect.) 

These options were rejected or not considered at all. From which, one has to conclude that the President really did want a big budget-cutting deal. He just wanted like any politician the appearance of being bullied into it.

So now the die is cast. Practically nothing to address any real economic problem can now get done. Actual austerity will come slowly – the cuts are not abrupt and some may yet be blocked  but unless there is a radical change of events or mood it will come. Meanwhile as the economy stalls and despair deepens, the deficits and debt will continue to climb.

In "The Adjustment Bureau," Matt Damon was a Democratic candidate for Senate. Michael Moore wants him to take it to the next level -- in the real world.

Damon has a long history of speaking out on various political causes; once a major supporter of then-candidate Barack Obama, has been critical of the President on a number of fronts, including relations with Wall Street and, most recently, education.

Those comments have been music to Moore's ears, and during a panel discussion hosted by the blog FireDogLake, he gave a tentative endorsement to the star as a candidate.

President Obama is a strange man whose sincere desire to restore cooperation and civility to government is admirable, but for nearly three years has been unreciprocated. Despite that, he seems unwilling to be president. What a contrast he makes to George W. Bush, in his boots and with his swagger—the Decider who promised “to create chaos, to create a vacuum” in every corner of the world if that were necessary to save America from the mortal threat he saw everywhere, and ruthlessly started out keeping that promise. He left Obama with the wreckage.

The so-called analysts at Standard & Poor’s may not be the most reliable bunch, but there was one very good reason for them to downgrade U.S. debt: Republicans in Congress made a credible threat to force a default on our obligations.

This isn’t the rationale that S&P gave, but it’s the only one that makes sense. Like a lucky college student who partied the night before an exam, the ratings agency used flawed logic and faulty arithmetic to somehow come up with the right answer. No, life isn’t always fair.

On February 7, 1968, US forces demolished Ben Tre, a provincial capitol in South Vietnam.  An Army Major declared, 'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”  On August 2, 2011, President Obama signed the draconian law to raise the US debt limit and unravel our social safety net. He should have quipped, “It became necessary to destroy the economy to save it.”
Sifting through the ashes of this catastrophe, Liberals can glean five grim lessons.  First,

Of all the ways President Barack Obama tried to rationalize his surrender to the Republicans, none was more infuriating than when he said the deficit deal would lead to the “lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.”

Since Eisenhower was president? That was half a century ago—before the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and federal aid to education, including Head Start.

“These programs defined America as a decent, yes, a Great Society,” Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said Monday during the debate on the so-called compromise debt settlement. What President Obama supported, he said, was “tantamount to repeal of the Great Society.”

Barack Obama is a lot of things—eloquent, dissembling, conniving, intelligent and above all, calm. But one thing he is not is weak.

This basic truth is belied by the meager Obama criticism you occasionally hear from liberal pundits and activists. They usually stipulate that the president genuinely wants to enact the progressive agenda he campaigned on, but they gently reprimand him for failing to muster the necessary personal mettle to achieve that goal. In this mythology, he is “President Pushover,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently labeled him.

This storyline is a logical fallacy.

This article takes a bit of a turn that you might not fully expect from the above excerpt. David Sirota makes the case that Obama is not only far more conservative than many Progressives expected him to be, but that he has also been extremely effective in getting the outcomes he wants. The fact that Obama appears to be caving in to the Republicans at every turn is just political theater.

When Barack Obama began his quest for the presidency more than three years ago, admirers and many opponents alike conceded he was smart, tough and articulate. Well, we are left with one out of three.