Budget Conference Committee Back to Work Today

After being unable to wrap-up their bi-chamber budget talks Friday night, House and Senate[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://kansasjackass.blogspot.com/2009/02/budget-conference-committee-back-to.htm
l

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

Burma, Myanmar, Thailand, UNHCR: US, 'must stop
it and shut up'

Rohingya news is everyday. Some lunatic peopel are loudly shouting at Burma and Thailand.I respect the human rights, but the news is too much.Who can stop these boats?Who created it and changed it into international problem?We need to find out the root[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.ashinmettacara.org/2009/02/burma-myanmar-thailand-unhcr-us-must.html

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

Prop 8 goes to court

The California Supreme Court has announced that on March 5th it would hear arguments about the constitutionality of Prop 8.

Many have petitioned the court asking that Prop 8 be overturned:

The court has been inundated with friend-of-the-court arguments in the case.

Forty-three groups representing civil rights activists, legal scholars, labor unions, bar associations, state legislators and religious organizations have filed written arguments asking that Proposition 8 be overturned.

The task for opponents of Prop 8 is to formulate a legal argument which would overturn Prop 8 and restore to gays and lesbians the right to marry in California.

Gay rights lawyers and the city of San Francisco contend that the ballot measure was an illegal revision of the state Constitution. It is a novel argument that required the attorneys to try to distinguish Proposition 8 from other cases in which the court rejected revision challenges.

California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown also asked the court to overturn the proposition, but on other grounds. He argued that "inalienable rights" cannot be eliminated without compelling reasons, an argument that, if accepted by the court, would make major new law in California.

In an attempt to put a human face on the arguments for the restoration of equality, The Courage Campaign has created the following video.



"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.


If the video moved you (and I honestly don't know how it couldn't have) please think about signing the petition The Courage Campaign has put together to support gay rights in California.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.themodernleft.com/2009/02/prop-8-goes-to-court.html

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

No "Reagan Day," Say Some Guvs

Great piece in the Capital Times (Madison, WI) on the refusal of Gov. Jim Doyle (D-WI) and others to proclaim Feb. 6 (last Friday) as "Ronald Reagan Day."

Reagan was a fool whose utter lack of comprehension of the polices enacted were on display each time Reagan held a press conference.

Compare that with what we will see tonight as Pres. Obama holds his first prime-time news conference expected to be dominated by questions on the economy as today's news reveals that the "International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the world's advanced economies -- the U.S., Western Europe and Japan -- are 'already in depression.'"

The best that can be said of Reagan is that he was not George W. Bush, but he tried.

Some highlights from the lightweight's two terms as president:

- Huge expansion of the deficit and debt
- Declaring the country of Nicaragua such a threat to the United States' national security that Reagan proclaimed a state of "national emergency"
- Iran-Contra Gate

One can go on.

Reagan commissar Grover Norquist is quoted in the piece. Norquist is the intense Reagan cheerleader who wants more statutes, buildings, holidays and pictures of Reagan installed throughout the U.S. than Stalin ever had in the Soviet Union.

From the Capital Times' feel-good piece on Doyle's refusal to budge on Reagan:

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle was one of only a handful of governors to deny recognition of the late president, according to the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project based in Washington, D.C.

'By refusing to honor President Reagan, Gov. Jim Doyle has put pusillanimous petty partisanship above patriotism,' said Grover Norquist, chairman of the group, in a press release. 'Ronald Reagan was a man loved by the American people and citizens abroad. Ignoring his legacy of leadership ignores the strength and value of freedom and democracy. Gov. Jim Doyle should be ashamed.'

Fifteen governors (14 Democrats and one Republican) refused to issue a proclamation. Five did not respond to the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project's request.

Thank you Gov. Doyle! Always said that you were a good man.

Read The Full Article:
http://malcontends.blogspot.com/2009/02/no-reagan-day-say-some-guvs.html

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

The Israeli Center: Players and Program

If all one means by center is a vague desire to contain Palestinian terrorism yet distance oneself from settlers' excesses--to do the former without alienating Washington, and the latter without splitting the Jewish people--then a stable majority has been centrist since 1967. But this is a free-floating desire, not the basis of a political identity. You can see how much good vague desire is when others create facts.  

ISRAELIS ANGUISH OVER five issues, actually. First, there is the question of whether to rely primarily on military power when dealing with the troubled Middle East. Second, there is the collateral but more ideologically charged question of whether to withdraw from occupied territory, historic Eretz Yisrael, in order to advance to a "two-state solution" with Palestinians. Third, there is the question we have examined thus far, whether a democracy can accord exclusive privileges to legally defined Jews--a question linked to the first two, but not limited by them. Next there is the question, tucked into the last one, of whether to privilege orthodox religious practice. Finally, there is the question of economic privilege, even class: who wins and who loses in a global market economy?

One cannot easily find a center in the permutations these questions produce, which is why as many as twenty political parties typically compete in Israeli elections. But when pundits speak about a center now, they mean leaders who--though they'll want to have things both ways on many of these issues--have tipped in certain directions: immediate toughness over eventual diplomacy; "painful concessions" in the territories over "Zionist" devotion; some civil reform yet Jewish privilege over scrupulous attention to Arab rights; the religious Status Quo over secular discomfort; and global markets over working-class discomfort.
Some of these choices are short-sighted, no doubt, but the ambivalence is promising. Centrists will often advance contradictory positions: shows of social compassion for the poor wedded to reassurances to venture capitalists; civil marriage, yet jobs for Rabbis. 
To add to the complexity, Israel's elections bring out five more or less permanent tribes to debate these issues: groups of electors defined by primordial ethnic or religious loyalties. Each comprises about 20 percent of the electorate, or something around a million and a half people. The tribes have had immigrant experiences at very different times, and so tend to think of Israel in different ways. They sometimes melt into each other and more often chafe against one another. For some time now, Israeli coalition politics has been a game of temporarily patching them together.
THE FIRST TRIBE--call it Tribe One--is dominated by veteran Ashkenazim (of European origin), most of them "Sabras." They were born in the country, are now well-educated and cosmopolitan, secular and (if anything) observant of Judaism in the emancipated sense, live-and-let-live by instinct--and living very well indeed in fashionable neighborhoods like North Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem's Bak'a or Haifa's Carmel. These are the Israelis Americans usually run into, members of the educational and professional élite, often drawn by opportunities abroad: a visiting appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, a stint at A.T. Kearney. Their old-timers tell harrowing, personal tales of ideological non-conformism and political prescience, of immigrant courage and pioneering struggle during the Mandate. Successful entrepreneurs will yet justify their businesses in the rhetoric of the old pioneering communitarianism. Tribe One are Israel's WASPs. Clearly, they are crucial to an understanding what the Israeli center is and can yet be. Think Kadima and Labor.
Tribe Two, in contrast, are the residual core of the rather larger North African immigration of Mizrahi Jews, who came to Israel in the 1950s and 60s en masse. They were as shocked as the Arabs by Tribe One's ideological and sexual avant garde. Most had been petit-bourgeois, small merchants and tradesmen back in Casablanca, Tunis, Tripoli, etc. Their most educated or affluent leaders often went to Paris or Montreal. Back in the Maghreb, men ruled and plotted family survival. Women were generally illiterate. The collapse of colonialism, and the birth of Israel, left Mizrahi Jews exposed to unexpected retaliations in their countries of origin; businesses and friends were left behind in heartbreaking haste.
Once in Israel, however, the Mizrahim found themselves in an underclass, much less well-educated than the Eastern European Labor Zionists who ran the place. They were pressured to work for, and become like, the socialist bosses who presided over the kibbutzim, union-owned factories, and government agencies. Their old culture heroes were the French bourgeoisie.
On average, Tribe Two still actually earns a third less than Tribe One. Pride in Tribe Two is pride in the family, not in tales of some old commune or movement. But it is a pride that tips easily into social anger, for they see the state as a kind of great family that ought to take care of its own. Many have now made it in retail businesses, or car repair shops, or real estate. Their children have become lawyers, police officers, and contractors. Yet most of Tribe Two remain hungry for status, and tens of thousands still struggle with unemployment in inner-cities and neglected development towns. Think Likud.
Unlike Tribe One, Tribe Two follow Halakha naturally, if not quite piously. They still feel they have a score to settle with "the Arabs," the Muslims, who drove them out, mainly after the Sinai War. They still cannot believe how they could have been so marginalized by the old Labor aristocracy. Think Shas.
As with the Boston Irish, their social resentment gets passed on from generation to generation and gets channeled into cultural politics: over-zealous devotion at soccer matches, or overt nepotism in the smaller city councils, where Tribe Two politicians tend to dominate.
TRIBE THREE, THE newest tribe, have their origins in about 900,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most of whom came in the 1990s. They include people from the Ukraine, the Baltic states, etc., but are generally known as "the Russians." Hyper-educated, hyper-secular (about 25 percent were never "real" Jews back home in Moscow or Kiev), the Russians were beneficiaries of both a rigorous Soviet education and a vital anti-Soviet "refusenik" underground. Fo them, Jews are victims of perpetual hatred, and their national retaliation defines them. They are repelled by the orthodox and are gluttons for high culture and, horrors, non-kosher food: symphonic music, experimental theater, cosmopolitan styles, mathematical science.
In the 1990s, when Israeli high tech was taking off, about a third of the research programmers, materials scientists, etc., were from Tribe Three. But they are also hyper-nationalist, certain of their purchase on Europe's grim history, scornful of Muslim fanaticism and backwardness (their Vietnam was Afghanistan, after all), and dismayed by the squishy liberal intellectuals of Tribe One who allegedly pander to the Muslim world. They came to Israel to join the "West" and to save it from itself. They are searching for an Israeli Putin. Think Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu.
Haaretz's Lily Galili, who has followed this community for years, told me that a majority of the Russians are feeling chronically embattled, "a combination of seeing impending catastrophe and a certainty that toughness will bring progress." They are quick, she says, to see Nazis in Palestinians, and yet they are certain about Israel's ability "to exercise a kind of omnipotence" on a world stage:
"This is very Russian, the idea that 'liberalism' is holy and yet something for Jewish suckers, which is why they have such common language with American neo-conservatives. Natan Sharansky is in many ways their hero--the chess player, the intellectual, the world prophet. He appealed to international liberal conscience while he was in prison, but after coming to Israel, he seems to have found that he could both lecture to the world about democracy and lecture Israelis that the Jewish claim to Jerusalem was a 'higher value' than liberalism--that the Arabs had better learn to accept it--that Israel, being a better 'democracy' than its neighbors, should be immune from Western criticism."
These first three tribes intermarry at a high rate, and their edges are getting blurry. Some vote their class interests, some their security fears--none of the three is monolithic. The melding of Ashkenazim and Sephardim is especially great in the twenty-something generation. More educated Mizrahim and more cosmopolitan Russians tend to vote Labor and embrace liberal ideas. Nevertheless, "identity politics" play out among these tribes in unpredictable ways, depending on who leads or what buttons get pushed--say, whether security concerns or economic issues dominate the headlines.
On the whole, economic issues pull people leftward, that is, toward concessions to the Palestinians, while security issues pull rightward. Though a majority in each tribe has tended to hold to certain directions--Tribe One to Labor, Two to Likud, Three to rightist splinter parties, claiming Russian loyalties--it is in Tribes Two and Three where virtually all of Israel's swing voters live today.
IN THE FRAUGHT election of 2001, which brought Sharon to power, the affluent mainly Ashkenazi suburb of Kfar Shmaryahu voted 78 percent for Labor, while 81 percent of the comparatively poor Mizrahi town of Beit Shemesh voted Likud. In 1999, some 65 percent of the Russians voted for Barak in 2001, about 70 percent voted for Sharon. All of which brings us to Tribes Four and Five, more familiar by now--also more monolithic and predictable.
Four is made up of Israel's ultra-nationalist, theocratic groups, bronzed West Bank settlers wedded politically, if not temperamentally, to pale Haredi Yeshiva students. Tribe Four are devotees of the Land of Israel. Yet they tend to be economically socialist--"national socialist," one settler told me with a kind of creepy pride--for many of the orthodox live off the state, either in state schools or embattled settlements. Tribe Four disdains Israeliness as an effort to decouple the national life of the state from the Jewish world of Torah and commandments. It refuses the distinction between the covenantal people and the Israeli nation.
Its bane is Tribe Five, Israeli Arabs, living in towns segregated by both archaic land policies and the discrimination of Zionist institutions. Poor but up-and-coming, willing if not eager to enter Israeli democracy, Israeli Arabs are enraged by the existing version of the Jewish state.  Five is counting on, if anything, Israeliness.
ORDINARILY, THEN, TRIBE Three hates Four, condescends to Two, and doubts One; Two hates One, resents Three and (for different reasons) Four; One is afraid of Two, patronizes Three and hates Four; Four hates One, proselytizes Two, and is afraid of Three. All four are afraid of Five.
So imagine how, if at all, any winner of tomorrow's election will be able to form a government, and how long any such government will last. The real question is whether a government will form that will be able to respond to an American initiative, which is the only hope.
(Many of these observations are taken fromThe Hebrew Republic.)



Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tpmcafe-main/~3/Q1ciTeWBdw0/

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

Obama returns to campaign mode to again defeat
the Republicans who destroyed the U.S. economy

A welcome change in tone started to emerge from the President last week as he realized that the Republicans were still playing the same old games and pushing the same old failed policies. The American people dumped the GOP last November. And, Obama had to dump that painful rhetoric about bipartisanship, which only works if both sides are willing. Reuters provided an analysis:

President Barack Obama showed he is willing to cast aside talk of bipartisanship and flex Democratic muscle to push opposition Republicans out of the way in the battle over a U.S. economic stimulus.

Obama began his presidency declaring a desire to work with both sides of the divided aisle. Two weeks later, he found himself caught in the middle of a congressional debate over the size and direction of a behemoth stimulus package.

To the chagrin of some of his own Democrats, Obama welcomed a Republican push to make changes in a $819 billion package that emerged from the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives without a single Republican vote.

Senate Republicans had some good ideas, he told NBC last Sunday, "and I want to make sure those ideas are incorporated."

But by Thursday, the legislation began to get bogged down in partisan battles and polls showed American support for it dropping in the face of Republican charges the plan was stuffed with wasteful Democratic spending items.

Obama abruptly changed his tune, reverting to some of the rhetoric he used on the campaign trail to win the White House.

Americans "did not vote for the false theories of the past, and they didn't vote for phony arguments and petty politics. They didn't vote for the status quo -- they sent us here to bring change," he told House Democrats on Thursday at a retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia.

You can't be nice to Republicans, at least to the right wing nut jobs that run that party now. Nice doesn't work with them. They must be crushed. Flex more muscle.

Here's a clip from that speech to the House Democrats in Williamsburg last week. More of the Obama, please:

video details and more



Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Americablog/~3/NUR_fA5svyc/obama-returns-to-campai
gn-mode-to-again.html

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

McCain: Stimulus Plan is "Generational Theft".

video details and more



It's simply extraordinary to listen to McCain - of all bloody people - talk of "generational theft".

This is the man who backed both the Iraq war and Bush's tax cuts whilst running to be president, what is that if not "generational theft?" Bush inherited a massive surplus and left office with an enormous deficit which was caused by two things; his tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars which Republicans were keen to support but not, apparently, keen to pay for.

The cost of that they passed down the line to be paid for by their children and the grandchildren. So it's a bit bloody rich to listen to McCain complain here about "generational theft". The hypocrisy that he is indulging in here is quite breathtaking.

Tags: Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer, John McCain, Stimulus Bill, generational theft

Read The Full Article:
http://the-osterley-times.blogspot.com/2009/02/mccain-stimulus-plan-is-generation
al.html

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

"My Kingdom for a Horse....."

The current stimulus package making it's torturous way through both houses of Congress is like the saying..... what do you get when you ask a committee to put together a horse? A camel.

Nothing wrong with a camel, but the country needs a horse to start pulling us out of the economic ditch.

Paul Krugman's asks today in "The Destructive Center" (WaPo) .... "What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

"A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished."

The centrists in the Senate just created a camel, and President Obama seems unable, or unwilling, to fix it.

Krugman opines, "One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

"The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care ? cut. Food stamps ? cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

"On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the 'flip your house to your brother' provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

"All in all, the centrists? insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering."

It was Obama who lifted the flap so the "lower taxes" camel could poke it's nose into his change-we-can-believe-in tent. We are in this economic mess because the GOP rich-get-richer trickle-up policies cost trillions and didn't work.... and according Pulitzer-winning economist Krugman and many others, this camel of a bill isn't the economic horse we need now.

MSNBC's Chuck Todd puts a fine point on this today in his "First Read" posting.... many ask just "how the Obama White House and the Democratic committees allowed themselves to get worked over by the Republicans.... how did a Republican Party that had turned a budget surplus into a projected trillion-dollar deficit get away with becoming paragons of fiscal responsibility? "

Krugman points out, "After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy?s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.
Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts.

"Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate."

There's a lesson for Obama here. His high-minded attempt to build a bipartisanship tent ran into the "loyal" opposition's ideological take-no-prisoners stone wall.

Has Obama learned this lesson?

Evidently not. This weekend he was busy trying to saddle this unwieldy stimulus camel.... "Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands, the scale and scope of this plan is right,? he declared on Saturday.

As Krugman laments.... "No, they didn?t, and no, it isn?t."


Read The Full Article:
http://whathappenedtomycountry.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-kingdom-for-horse.html

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

Secretary Sebelius in the Future

My inbox was flooded this weekend with article after article all saying exactly the same thing: [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://kansasjackass.blogspot.com/2009/02/secretary-sebelius-in-future.html

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

Salon: Army's Fatal Neglect

Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna have the first in a series this week on the failure of the U.S. Army to care for returning troops.

See Death in the USA: The Army's fatal neglect
Returning U.S. combat soldiers are committing suicide and murder in alarming numbers. In a special series, Salon uncovers the habitual mistreatment behind the preventable deaths


Read The Full Article:
http://malcontends.blogspot.com/2009/02/salon-armys-fatal-neglect.html

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