The Nightowl Newswrap

By BG & YD

• This is a flubbed line in @marcorubio's VP audition. The right-wing Senator and tea-party favorite has paid an $8000 fine for "receiving prohibited, excessive, and other impermissible" donations, totalling over $210 thousand dollars during his successful 2010 Senate run. These were funds, the FEC found, that his campaign "did not refund, reattribute, or redesignate these contributions within the appropriate timeframes."  Or maybe the Rmoney campaign sees that willingness to play fast-and-loose with other people's money as a feature and not a bug?

• Leave the GOP already, Lisa. Lisa Murkowski was booed on Friday night when she went to the podium to introduce Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming at the state GOP convention. She used to get a little sympathy from the one of us who proudly and eagerly cast votes for Nancy Kassebaum on two separate occasions, but that well is now dry. She's become the abuse victim that won't leave the jerk, even though she could quite easily.

• Why isn't Katherine Harris in jail? In fact, we might even consider capital punishment appropriate for election tampering, especially election tampering on the Florida 2000 scale. You know, since a war that was ginned up by the president she stole the state for killed nearly 5000 Americans and led to the premature deaths of over a million Iraqis and doomed Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban once Bush took his eye off the ball there to invade Iraq.

• This doesn't exactly conform to their whole "Liberty! Freedom! Constitution!" schtick, does it?  Tennessee has officially outlawed all public displays of affection. Because forcing kids to hide even handholding isn't going to blow up in their faces or anything...

• There is no statute of limitations for right-wing faux-outrage. The EPA official who impertinently used the word "crucify" when asked about the treatment of egregious violators has been forced to resign -- two years after the incident took place.

• Add another one to the collection of sentences Steve Benen wrote that we wish we had written:It's also a reminder that when it comes to Mitt Romney's previous commitments, the president isn't inclined to let his rival shake the Etch A Sketch.

• Don't ask them why and don't expect a coherent answer if you do. Tea Party knuckleheads are absolutely convinced that ObamaCare is "Unconstitutional!" but they can't explain why, and can't tell you what article or amendment they are thoroughly convinced is violated, they just **know** that it is. It's a truthiness they just intuit. Or something. But they don't just hate the black guy. That's not it. Honest.

• Women notch a win in the war against them. A federal judge issued a stay against the state of Texas today, so for now the state can't ban Planned Parenthood from the state women's health program, finding sufficient evidence that the rule will be found unconstitutional.

• Make that two wins. In Oklahoma, a court has tossed the "personhood" amendment, finding it unconstitutional.

• This pointless idiocy got an Army captain from Kentucky killed last week, so we have no patience with it. "Fighting has broken out in Mali's capital, with troops who took part in last month's military coup and the guard of the newly installed president exchanging shots, witnesses said."

• We admire their principled stand, but the fledgling Burmese democracy is fragile enough as it it. "Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar's opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), says that a dispute over the wording of the country's parliamentary oath of office has been resolved."

• Very tricky, but we have deep faith in Secretary Clinton's ability to pull this one off. "The European Union has urged China to exercise "utmost restraint" in its handling of the blind dissident Chen Guangcheng, who escaped house arrest last week and is believed to be under US protection in Beijing."

And finally...

• Stick with the classics; we can wait forever for the script to "Dumb and Dumber" "Ben Hur and Casablanca are among the film scripts to be released as e-books for the first time by Warner Bros. Other movies in the Inside the Script series will include An American in Paris and North by Northwest. The e-books include items such as the shooting script, production notes, storyboards and on-set photographs. "Now we can give fans rarely seen details of how these stories came together," said Thomas Gewecke, Warner Bros president of digital distribution."

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/X2zcZ8Mb3sg/the-n
ightowl-newswrap

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

More on the Mitt Laden Smackdown

This paragraph from Jon Meacham's piece on the fight over the bin Laden ad captures quite a lot ...Republicans are -- forgive the cliché -- shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is "politicizing" an important national event. In this[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/xge3V0X_Hu0/more_on_the_mit
t_laden_smackdown.php

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Those Polls Up There

As you've probably noticed, at the end of last week the skybox links at the top of every TPM page were replaced by a curated selection of poll averages from PollTracker, TPM's proprietary poll aggregating and trending application. We did this for two[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/bjHv2faxI9k/those_polls_up_
there.php

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Suicides increasing in Greece as election nears

Following the stock market crash of 1929, there were plenty of rumors of bankers and the 1% of the time committing suicide by jumping out of windows on Wall Street. Never happened. Fast forward to the modern economic crisis and there are real stories of real people - regular people, not the 1% - who are committing suicide. In March, a Greek retiree shot and killed himself in a public square in Athens and now more reports of suicide are being reported, out of a country that is not known for suicide.And still no justice with the bankers? Why does everyone else have to pay the price for the crimes of the banks?

On Monday, a 38-year-old geology lecturer hanged himself from a lamp post in Athens and on the same day a 35-year-old priest jumped to his death off his balcony in northern Greece. On Wednesday, a 23-year-old student shot himself in the head.In a country that has had one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, a surge in the number of suicides in the wake of an economic crisis has shocked and gripped the Mediterranean nation - and its media - before a May 6 election.The especially grisly death of pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in the head on a central Athens square because of poverty brought on by the crisis that has put millions out of work, was by far the most dramatic.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Americablog/~3/mUUNypmQcmo/suicides-increasing-in-
greece-as.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Jonathans Chait And Weisman Dissect The Legendary
Paul Ryan... In Great Detail

The new Issue of New York features a "photo-illustration" of Wall Street's and the One Percent's favorite up-and-coming politician of Reaction, Paul Ryan, by Jesse Lenz... and it gets very close in style to Pierre et Gilles. I think Jesse knew exactly what he was doing. Parisians Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard produce highly stylized art pieces that have become part of popular culture. At Warners we used them to do album covers for Marc Almond, Erasure and, eventually, Madonna. Jesse may have actually been given Chait's manuscript for inspiration. What artistic heights could an opening like this inspire you to?

The implosion of the Newt Gingrich presidential campaign-- the first implosion, before the weird resurrection and inevitable second implosion-- came because he used four words: right-wing social engineering. He used the phrase, last May, to describe the Republican budget designed by GOP icon Paul Ryan. It was as if he had urinated on Ronald Reagan?s grave. Party leaders rounded on him. In Iowa, an angry voter cornered him and fumed, in a video captured by Fox News that quickly went viral, ?What you did to Paul Ryan was unforgivable ? You?re an embarrassment.? Gingrich quickly apologized to Ryan, pledged his fealty to the document, and then, lending his confession an extracted-at-NKVD-gunpoint flavor, announced, ?Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.? It was no use: Despite years of diligent service, his support among Republicans collapsed, his fellow partisans holding him in the low regard ordinarily reserved for liberals.

Ryan?s rise occurred so rapidly that an old hand like Gingrich hadn?t yet fully grasped the fact that he had become unassailable, though most (and, by now, virtually all) of his fellow Republicans had. Ryan?s prestige explains, among other things, the equanimity with which movement conservatives have reluctantly accepted the heresies of Mitt Romney. They may not have an ideal candidate, but they believe Romney could not challenge Ryan even if he so desired.

?Now, we are truly at an inflection point, between the Barack Obama and Paul Ryan approaches to government,? National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote recently, treating the elevation of the chairman of the House Budget Committee over the presidential nominee as his party?s standard-bearer as so obvious it requires no explanation. ?We don?t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget,? says anti-tax enforcer Grover Norquist. ?Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.? In any case, Romney has shown no inclination to challenge Ryan, praising him fulsomely and even promising him, according to the Weekly Standard?s Stephen Hayes, he?d enact Ryan?s plan in the first 100 days. Republicans envision an administration in which Romney has relegated himself to a kind of head-of-state role, at least domestically, with Ryan as the actual head of government.

Chait then veers off into an analysis about why the Village loves Ryan in a way it never embraced Newt or even Reagan in their heydays. And at the same time Chait had the Ryan phenomenon under his microscope, Jonathan Weisman was engaged in the same task over at the NY Times. Ryan listens to Rage Against the Machine on his iPod. But Ryan is the voice of the Machine... always has been, although it's only recently most people are listening. And Weisman reminds us "That is not bad for a man who was once just another minion on Capitol Hill, working for a research group, then for a member of Congress, and moonlighting as a waiter at the Hill hangout Tortilla Coast and as a personal trainer at a gym. Co-workers at the conservative policy group Empower America admonished him for hanging his workout clothes out to dry at work rather than laundering them." From that to undoing the New Deal.

Weisman is probably unaware that Dave Obey, Wisconsin's top-dog Democrat protected and even nurtured Ryan's political career and made sure he would never be seriously challenged for reelection even though he represents a swing district filled with Democrats, a district Obama won in 2008. Obey, who was forced into retirement from Congress after voting for the Stupak Amendment, has an obvious man crush on the much younger Ryan. Weisman uses Obey as an example of how "those who know him cannot seem to dislike him."

?I?m stunned by how oblivious he is to the pain his policies would cause people,? said David R. Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin who jousted often with his downstate colleague before retiring from the House at the end of 2010. ?What amazes me is that someone that nice personally has such a cold, almost academic view of what the impact of his policies would be on people.?

No one ever asks Obey about the notorious Obey Pact that protected all Wisconsin incumbents; convenient. Of course Obey isn't the only member of Washington's Conservative Consensus with a man crush on Paul Ryan's. Notorious GOP closet case, Aaron Schock from Peoria is completely smitten who gushes his homoerotic admiration for the older Ryan. Schock, who's ditched his pink belt and lavender shirts to blend in better with the straights, tells Weisman that Ryan is ?in kick-butt shape."

Paul Krugman has long decried Ryan as a fraud and a flimflam man and it's driven him to distraction that an even less serious Beltway media has conferred upon Ryan some kind of mantle of seriousness and wonkishness... and, worse yet, wisdom. Ryan's a Wall Street special interest hack, bought and paid for in the hopes of installing him one day in the White House, the way MCA and organized crime did with Reagan. Ryan's fame-- at least outside the Beltway-- rests in his plan, a redistribution of wealth plan (from bottom to top) masquerading as a deficit reduction plan. Chait puts it at the center of the Ryan legend:

The centrist political Establishment, heavily represented among business leaders and the political media, considers it almost self-evident that the budget deficit (and not, say, mass unemployment or climate change) represents the singular policy threat of our time, and that bipartisan cooperation offers the sole avenue to address it. By casting his program as a solution to the debt crisis, by frequently conceding that Republicans as well as Democrats had failed in the past, and by inveighing against ?demagoguery,? Ryan has presented himself as the acceptable Republican suitor the moderates had been longing for.

Whether Ryan?s plan even is a ?deficit-reduction plan? is highly debatable. Ryan promises to eliminate trillions of dollars? worth of tax deductions, but won?t identify which ones. He proposes to sharply reduce government spending that isn?t defense, Medicare (for the next decade, anyway), or Social Security, but much of that reduction is unspecified, and when Obama named some possible casualties, Ryan complained that those hypotheticals weren?t necessarily in his plan. Ryan is specific about two policies: massive cuts to income-tax rates, and very large cuts to government programs that aid the poor and medically vulnerable. You could call all this a ?deficit-reduction plan,? but it would be more accurate to call it ?a plan to cut tax rates and spending on the poor and sick.? Aside from a handful of exasperated commentators, like Paul Krugman, nobody does.

The persistent belief in the existence of an authentic, deficit hawk Ryan not only sweeps aside the ugly particulars of his agenda, it also ignores, well, pretty much everything he has done in his entire career, and pretty much everything he has said until about two years ago.

In 2005, Ryan spoke at a gathering of Ayn Rand enthusiasts, where he declared, ?The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.? Ryan has listed Rand?s manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, as one of his three most often reread books, and in 2003, he told the Weekly Standard he tries to make his interns read it. Rand is a useful touchstone to understand Ryan?s public philosophy. She centered libertarian philosophy around a defense of capitalism in general and, in particular, a conception of politics as a class war pitting virtuous producers against parasites who illegitimately use the power of the state to seize their wealth. Ludwig von Mises, whom Ryan has also cited as an influence, once summed up Rand?s philosophy in a letter to her: ?You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: You are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.?

Ryan now frequently casts his opposition to Obama in technocratic terms, but he hasn?t always done so. ?It is not enough to say that President Obama?s taxes are too big or the health-care plan doesn?t work for this or that policy reason,? Ryan said in 2009. ?It is the morality of what is occurring right now, and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack, and it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on.? Ryan?s philosophical opposition to a government that forces the ?makers? to subsidize the ?takers?-- terms he still employs-- is foundational; the policy details are secondary.

...In 2001, Ryan led a coterie of conservatives who complained that George W. Bush?s $1.2 trillion tax cut was too small, and too focused on the middle class. In 2003, he lobbied Republicans to pass Bush?s deficit-financed prescription-drug benefit, which bestowed huge profits on the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. In 2005, when Bush campaigned to introduce private accounts into Social Security, Ryan fervently crusaded for the concept. He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan?s plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as ?irresponsible.?

When Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 elections, they reimposed a budget rule requiring that any new spending or tax cuts be offset by new revenue or spending cuts. Ryan opposed it, preferring to let new spending or tax cuts go on the national credit card. Instead, he continued to endorse Bush?s line that tax cuts were leading us to a glorious new era of prosperity and budget balance. ?Higher revenues flowing into the Treasury, as a result of economic and job growth, have given us a real chance to balance the budget,? Ryan announced in 2007. ?The president?s budget achieves the important goal of balancing the budget in the near term-- without raising taxes,? he wrote in August 2008.

So Ryan's a fraud? Isn't that what we've been telling you for 6 years? Yes, he's a fraud. And in his own district that fraudulence has never been examined by voters. Is Rob Zerban up to the task? We think so. Blue America has endorsed him. We're raising money for him on a Stop Paul Ryan page which is what that thermometer leads to. And, we have an Independent Expenditure Committee we can use to really go after Ryan ourselves... if we can raise enough money. Right now we have a billboard up on the I-94 at the Ryan Road exit just south of the Milwaukee Airport. If you want to help, perhaps we can do a lot more than that between now and November.



Read The Full Article:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/04/jonathans-chait-and-weisman-dissect.h
tml

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

10,000 Americans Criticize Discovery
Channel’s ‘Frozen Planet’ CO2 Censorship

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

by Brad Johnson

When the Discovery Channel aired “On Thin Ice,” its Frozen Planet episode documenting changes in the Arctic, it conveniently left out human causes. The show?s producer told the New York Times she didn?t want people saying ?don?t watch this show because it has a slant on climate change? ? illustrating everything wrong with the conversation around climate change in America. This afternoon, I and other members of Forecast the Facts delivered a petition to the Discovery offices with 10,000 signatures demanding the organization correct this unscientific self-censorship:

We are deeply disappointed by your decision not to explain the science, and human causes, of global warming in the ?On Thin Ice? episode of the Frozen Planet series. As the world?s leader in environmental programming, your decision sends a dangerous message to media companies around the world ? that it is better to censor yourself than risk criticism by global warming deniers. We call on you to immediately acknowledge this error and to conduct a review of all Discovery programming decisions to ensure no such self-censorship happens again.

As I and other members of Forecast the Facts, scientists Steve Scolnick and Clarence Maloney, entered the Discovery headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, we were greeted by a security officer in the vestibule. Corporate Security Manager David Sterner told us that no-one in communications, production, or viewer relations was or would be available to accept the petition, nor were we welcome even into the main lobby. However, he did personally guarantee that the 10,000 signatures and the letter addressed to Discovery chairman John Hendricks would be delivered on our behalf.

It is an essential fact that burning fossil fuels is the cause of the melting poles. As Bill McKibben noted, “On Thin Ice” is no different than a documentary on the ravages of lung cancer that censored mention of cigarettes. The pursuit of profit is not a valid excuse for the censorship of science. Neither is the fear of reprisal from well funded polluters.

Faced with a gross failure of leadership on climate pollution by those in power, average citizens are mobilizing to demand honesty and action. But they’re not the only ones. Today also marks the start of the inaugural science policy conference of the American Geophysical Union, a response by the leading organization of earth scientists to the increasing disconnect between the facts of science and the decisions made by politicians and corporations. The central topic of today’s sessions? The rapidly changing Arctic.

Brad Johnson is campaign manager for Forecast the Facts.

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/01/474076/10000-americans-criticize-disc
overy-channels-frozen-planet-co2-censorship/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!