White House orders 5% spending cuts on top of
discretionary spending freeze

post from Open Left - Front Page on 08 June 2010 09:02:20 AM. © Open Left - Front Page

In response to a dismal jobs report released on Friday, the White House is ordering spending[...]

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Marchant Polygraph Test 'Inconclusive' On Haley
Affair Claim

post from TPMMuckraker on 08 June 2010 09:01:35 AM. © TPMMuckraker

In the latest in a continuing string of last-minute stunts in the South Carolina gubernatorial race, lobbyist Larry Marchant has taken a lie detector test about his claim of a one-night stand with front-runner Nikki Haley back in 2008.

The results of the test, which was sponsored by the local FOX affiliate? Inconclusive.

WACH Fox in Columbia reports:

WACH Fox hired two separate independent polygraph examiners to conduct the test, and a WACH Fox News representative was present Monday afternoon to observe.
Marchant officially tested "inconclusive." However; independent polygraph examiner John Davis said the the test results show no indication that Marchant was being untruthful in his answers. ...
Davis said it's common for initial polygraph exams to come back inconclusive and it can require as many as three exams to obtain results from a subject who is telling the truth.

Just yesterday, Marchant's former boss, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, released the results of a polygraph he says he took on the question of whether he was pushing the affair story to the media. Bauer claims the results prove he did nothing of the sort.

Haley, meanwhile, is enjoying a wide lead in the polls and quipped last night, "Sen. [Jake] Knotts could go take a polygraph and say he's a choir boy and I could care less," referencing the Republican lawmaker who called her a "raghead" last week.

South Carolina - Nikki Haley - Social Sciences - Psychology - Forensics and Law

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Going Mainstream

post from Talking Points Memo on 08 June 2010 09:01:15 AM. © Talking Points Memo

Birther queen Orly Taitz was the "special guest" of the Republican Jewish Coalition at a weekend event in California that also featured luminaries like Karl Rove, former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), and Senate candidates Chuck[...]

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U.S. Stocks Offer Important Signals for Currency
Investors

post from Jutia Group on 08 June 2010 09:00:57 AM. © Jutia Group

Currencies represent the truest reflection of economic fundamentals and market sentiment. Therefore, they continue to be an important segment of the financial markets to watch.Since the “flash crash” in the U.S. stock market on May 6, most market pundits and financial media have had their eyes glued to the euro for explanations on stock market activity.Take a look at these headlines to see what I mean …• Reuters: “Stocks Slide, Euro Falls After Spain Downgrade”• Associated Press: “Stocks Slide After Euro Falls to New 4-year Low”• Press TV: “Euro Concerns Pull Down Global Stocks”So perhaps there’s never been a more important time to keep abreast…

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President Obama: "I want to know whose ass to
kick"

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 June 2010 09:00:28 AM. © Crooks and Liars

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From an interview to air ~~tomorrow~~ this morning with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today Show.

"I was down there a month ago, before most of these talkin' heads were even paying attention to the gulf. A month ago...I was meeting with fishermen down there, standin' in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be. And I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar, we talk to these folks because they potentially...have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick".

And here is the complete video, up now at the MSNBC site. This part, with Lauer's lead in, begins at about the 4:30 mark.

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NYT Editorial Calls for Investigations on Illegal
Torture Experiments

post from Firedoglake on 08 June 2010 09:00:28 AM. © Firedoglake

The New York Times' editorial board has called for the White House and Congress to investigate charges of illegal human experimentation by the CIA and possibly other agencies. Such illegal research is a war crime, and insofar as undertaken by medical[...]

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Nanny State

post from Kmareka.com on 08 June 2010 09:00:25 AM. © Kmareka.com

The Libertarian argument that it’s an assault on freedom for a state to ban smoking in restaurants caught my attention. Rand Paul says that sensible people can just choose to avoid smoky restaurants and bars.

It’s fresh in my memory that people used to smoke in all restaurants, and double in bars. For that matter, when I worked in factories people smoked on the assembly bench right next to me.

I actually tend for some reason to like people who smoke, and would sometimes hang out with the ‘smoker’s support group’ just for the conversation. But that was when I worked in a hospital, and the smokers gathered outside, and I truly had a choice to join them or not. It’s a shame the habit is so bad for you, when there’s so much stress and so few ways to feel good. But that’s another topic.

John Aravosis at Americablog has a good post on this…

This is the problem with Libertarians, but also conservatives (well, any political philosophy, really). The philosophy sounds nice in principle, but in practice it often doesn’t work. As a non-smoker, with allergies, and now asthma because of my allergies, my “choice” was always between joining my group of friends at a particular bar or restaurant, or staying home alone. I wasn’t about to tell 20 people, many of whom I barely knew, that instead of going to a bar tonight (since every single bar was smokey back in the day), maybe we could stay home and play Parcheesi instead. That’s not much of a choice.

This is the heart of the matter. Rigid thinking– whether it’s Catholic dogma or a fundamentalist literalism in the reading of law, or neat philosophical arguments about high principles, does not serve well in real life.

Many of us encountered the smoking/non-smoking situations. (A local restaurant actually built a lucite booth to confine the non-smokers, but that didn’t last long.) We worked it out and now you can eat and breathe and smoke outside if you must.

Fewer of us have encountered the situation of being in a happy group out for fun and realizing that one of us was the wrong race to be admitted to a restaurant or club.

This kind of thing happened, and not just in the South, and not very long ago. Why would anyone would want to bring that back? A neat philosophical argument that of course reasonable people would never patronize such businesses is refuted by recent history.

A business easily makes the calculation that it is better to turn away one customer than risk losing ten. The luxury of being in the majority is that you never even have to notice this, it’s not your problem. The pain of being in the minority is hearing from majority friends that it’s no big deal, one more slight, one more small cut— are you supposed to get used to it?

Reality is messy, isn’t it? Martin Luther King’s life experience was far different from Rand Paul’s. It would be good if white people learned to listen. It would be good if we would stop invoking Dr.King unless to recall his work for civil rights. It would be good if we would listen to Holocaust survivors, and learn that nothing in our current situation compares to what they went through.

The truth is that people are often not high-minded and logical. We will always need some social control against greed, bullying and scapegoating of minorities. It might seem like the jackboot of oppression to have to take your cig outside, but the guy next to you has a right to breathe.

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U.S. Is A More Peaceful Place Than Angola And
Bangladesh... Barely

Today's the day we can send a message to Washington that we want jobs, not war
First off, today being the day of the California primary-- which features one race pitting a rabid warmonger, Jane Harman, against a pro-peace progressive, Marcy Winograd (CA-36)-- let's start this discussion with a one minute video Brave New Films released yesterday:

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OK, and now let's think globally. This morning the Institute for Economics & Peace released the 2010 Global Peace Index, which, I'm assuming, will be available online later today. I'm working from a summary of an advance .pdf file they provided me with last night. "The results," it begins, "... suggest that the world has become slightly less peaceful in the past year. The GPI, which gauges ongoing domestic and international conflict, safety and security in society and militarization in 149 countries, registered overall increases in several indicators, including the likelihood of violent demonstrations and perceptions of criminality."

They trace some of this increase to the global economic turndown-- something we follow here at DWT and view as the successful class warfare conducted by the very wealthy parasites against society in general across the entire world. New Zealand, Iceland and Japan are ranked as the most at peace countries in the world, although if only Japan had a Second Amendment and a well-armed population I'm sure they would be as peaceful as the U.S. Oops... the U.S. ranked #85, just below totalitarian China and civil war plagued Bolivia, Macedonia and Nepal. But our bastion of "We're #1-ness" did come out ahead of Iran, Mexico, Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Algeria, Thailand, Turkey, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq... you know, the countries that have been in the news lately regarding difficulties.

Will our country ever be more at peace within itself and more of a force for peace in the rest of the world? Well... ever is a very long time but the Change Obama seems to have been talking about when he ran for president didn't include either the intention or the will to change much of the Bush-Cheney policies encompassed in brutal class war at home and aggressive international superpower arrogance abroad. Here's some of the latter, which I especially hope our friends in CA-36 will think about when they go vote today:

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When Did Ben Bernanke Stop Being Wrong About the
Economy

This is the question that should routinely be raised when Ben Bernanke makes pronouncements about the state of the economy or recommendations on economic policy, as he did when he insisted on the need for deficit reduction yesterday. Bernanke of course completely missed the housing bubble, the collapse of which gave us the worst downturn in 70 years and also led to the huge jump in the deficit that has prompted so much panic in people like him.

In his capacity as a member of the Board of Governors since the summer of 2002 Bernanke routinely insisted that there was no housing bubble. Furthermore, he argued that even if there was a bubble, it posed no real problem for the economy.

It would be difficult to imagine how a person could be more wrong about the economy. Most people who fail in their jobs so completely would be fired in an instant. Remarkably, Mr. Bernanke still holds his job -- even as millions remain unemployed due to his mistakes -- and collects a salary of close to $200,000 a year.

Clearly Bernanke's economic advice was completely wrong before the collapse of the bubble. If his advice is worth anything today then he must have stopped being wrong about the economy. So, the question millions are asking is: "when did Ben Bernanke stop being wrong about the economy?"

Ben Bernanke - United States - Economy - Economic - Economic policy

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Last one out get the lights, the (tea) party's
over

I never took the tea party chuckleheads seriously. They struck me at first blush as know-nothing morons at best and unrepentant, unreconstructred racists at worst, and told people who were concerned by their "nascent power" to chill out, as soon as people who don't follow politics and feel the earth move with every poll fluctuation got to know them, they would demand their share of the hate for the right-wing lunatics that we had been hoarding for ourselves.

I was right. A new poll out this morning in the Washington Post shows that over half the population has a negative impression of the loud, noisy white-trash rabble that comprise the so-called movement. All they had to do was get to know them just the tiniest little bit.

This tidbit comes along on the heels of Mainers backing away from a radical platform that tea party activists managed to replace the "pro forma" document with at their convention last month. A platform that calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, declared climate change a myth and healthcare a service, not a right.

People who know history, and I mean really, truly know history - or at least people who took Western Civ II from a competent instructor when they were in college - know that the so-called tea party is a reprise of a movement that happened in the mid-fifties. And do you know what makes it all the more delicious?

It happened in France!

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