Wednesday PM Stuff

post from The Liberal Doomsayer on 23 February 2011 11:55:00 PM. © The Liberal Doomsayer

Here is a link to both clips of Hosni Mubarak Walker getting punked by the "Buffalo Beast" phone caller (nice when our side does this stuff for a change...of course, Fix Noise is harrumphing all over the place - screw 'em).

However, I thought it more appropriate to take a break from all of this for a minute and instead express my admiration to Robert Cowie, who speaks in the clip below (more info is here, and I extend my sympathies for his loss - it happened in Florida, but it could happen anywhere)...

...and this might be some good advice for Walker the next time he thinks about saying something stupid (five, four, three...).

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http://liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com/2011/02/wednesday-pm-stuff.html

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House GOP: Mother F#@ckers

post from The Zaftig Redhead on 23 February 2011 11:35:00 PM. © The Zaftig Redhead

Brilliant piece from Jon Stewart and The Daily Show about how the House GOP's slash and burn continuing resolution to complete the budget for FY11 lands squarely on the backs of women.

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Daily Show: Mother F#@kers Stork BucksKristen Schaal wants to cut funding for any organization that has anything to do with abortions, including firefighters, the FAA and NASA.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cMother F#@kers - Stork Bucks www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Copyright 2010 (text only). The Zaftig Redhead. All Rights Reserved.

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheZaftigRedhead/~3/WBiv4qXfIXs/house-gop-mother-f
ckers.html

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Open thread for night owls: McKibben - Chamber of
Commerce darkens the skies

post from Daily Kos on 23 February 2011 11:30:02 PM. © Daily Kos

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. At Tom Dispatch, he writes The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Darkens the Skies:

In Beijing, they celebrate when they have a ?blue sky day,? when, that is, the haze clears long enough so that you can actually see the sun. Many days, you can?t even make out the next block.
Washington, by contrast, looks pretty clean: white marble monuments, broad, tree-lined avenues, the beautiful, green spread of the Mall. But its inhabitants -- at least those who vote in Congress -- can?t see any more clearly than the smoke-shrouded residents of Beijing.
Their view, however, is obscured by a different kind of smog. Call it money pollution. The torrents of cash now pouring unchecked into our political system cloud judgment and obscure science. Money pollution matters as much as or more than the other kind of dirt. That money is the single biggest reason that, as the planet swelters through the warmest years in the history of civilization, we have yet to take any real action as a nation on global warming.
And if you had to pick a single ?power plant? whose stack was spewing out the most smoke? No question about it, that would be the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose headquarters are conveniently located directly across the street from the White House. On its webpage, the chamber brags that it?s the biggest lobby in Washington, ?consistently leading the pack in lobbying expenditures.?
The group spent as much as $33 million trying to influence the midterm 2010 elections, and has announced that it will beat that in 2012. That, of course, is its right, especially now that the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United ruling, opened the floodgates for corporate speech (as in ?money talks?).
But the chamber does what it does with a twist. It claims to represent ?three million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.? The organization, that is, seems to speak for a country full of barbers and florists, car dealers, restaurant owners, and insurance salesmen, not to mention the small entrepreneurs who make up local and state chambers of commerce across the country.
At least when it comes to energy and climate, though, that claim is, politely put, a fib. The Chamber of Commerce doesn?t have to say where it gets its money, but last year a group called U.S. ChamberWatch used one of the last disclosure laws still in existence to uncover a single pertinent fact. They went to the headquarters of the chamber and asked to see its IRS 990 form. It showed that 55% of its funding came from just 16 companies, each of which gave more than a million dollars. It doesn?t have to say which companies, but by their deeds shall you know them. ...

? ? ? ? ?

At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:

So what have we learned the last 24 hours?
Terrorism is such a horrific danger to the very existence of our republic that we must torture prisoners, suspend all manners of constitutional rights, wage war against countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, spy illegally on US citizens, and refrain from criticizing King George lest we give "aid and comfort" to the enemy.
But, business concerns take precedence above all.
As Bush said:
This deal wouldn't go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America.
It doesn't happen every day, but the guy finally made sense.

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http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/GrJtNLhYitE/-Open-thread-for-night
-owls:-McKibbenChamber-of-Commercedarkens-the-skies

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Did you ever have one of those days

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 23 February 2011 11:06:30 PM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

Yeah. Us too.

Long story short, my netbook is in the computer hospital and Yellow Dog is waiting on a service tech.

The roundup will resume tomorrow.

Y'all who come here to read the roundup could leave interesting things you saw around the web today in comments. Just a thought.

Or I could give you a topic to discuss amongst yourselves...The underground railroad was neither underground nor a railroad. Discuss.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have a clawfoot tub and a king size bed, and I ain't afraid to use 'em. In that order.

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ou-ever-have-one-of-those-days

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State budget gaps, the housing bubble and
negative equity

post from Daily Kos on 23 February 2011 11:05:03 PM. © Daily Kos

Ah, thank you David Brooks, for pushing the latest anti-union, economic meme: "States with public sector unions tend to run into fiscal crises." As Matt Yglesias says, "This is true because 'states with public sector unions' are a sub-set of 'states' and in the United States of America 'states tend to run into fiscal crises.'"

But Mike Konczal does the best debunking.

Amidst all the public debate about how states are being bled dry by militant public unions, you wouldn?t know that we just had a major housing bubble across the country followed by a financial system near-collapse and the most prolonged downturn since the Great Depression.

Riffing off of a couple of graphs at The Monkey Cage showing the correlation between union membership and state and local debt, especially this one:

Mike charts the relationship between state budget shortfalls and negative equity&151;the percentage of mortages in the state that are have negative and near negative equity.

Negative equity is correlated with all kinds of other bad things like unemployment, but from my point of view it?s a good first approximation for how devastating the housing bubble was to a community. The more the bubble popped, the more people that were hit by falling house prices, the more negative equity grows as a percent of mortgages....
Significant (t-stat of 3.53), and it is significant with or without that outlier in the upper-right corner (Nevada). The mechanisms for how this contributes is important ? is it the unemployment? Is it that state governments with a larger housing bubble got more confident and spent as if all those property taxes were on their way? Are there other important, casual mechanisms? These are all good and crucial questions for us to answer, ones we should take up when we finish scapegoating teachers.

I'd suspect it's all of the above, but especially high unemployment and plummeting income and property tax revenues from the double whammy of a burst housing bubble and high unemployment. In fact, in some areas of extremely high unemployment, public employees are probably the largest sector of employed people keeping local economies afloat.

So, hey, how about some replacement revenue? There are certainly those whose share of the sacrifice could be a hell of a lot larger, and they'd hardly notice it.

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e-housing-bubble-and-negative-equity

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Late Night: The Rational Wingnut and DOMA Doom

post from Firedoglake on 23 February 2011 11:01:35 PM. © Firedoglake

It seems pretty clear that when the Attorney General observes that "classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny," what he means is that "DOMA is a load of bigoted shit and continuing to defend[...]

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C&L's Late Night Music Club with Hall & Oates

post from Crooks and Liars on 23 February 2011 11:00:21 PM. © Crooks and Liars

Genre: SoulTitle: She's GoneArtist: Hall & Oates

This song, a blue-eyed soul slow jam, was released as the single off of Hall & Oates third lp, Abandoned Luncheonette in 1974 to little success...But after Tavares had at #1 hit with it on the soul charts in the same year (Lou Rawls also recorded it in '74), and the success of Hall & Oates Sara Smile in 1975, Atlantic Records re-released She's Gone in '76, seeing it hit #7 on the pop charts.

I'm not a big fan of Blondie & The 'Stache's pop-ier, chart-topping hits of the '80s, but this earlier work...Well, it keeps me from begrudging them the success they had later.

Abandoned Luncheonette

Artist: Hall & Oates Price: $2.63 (As of 02/23/11 12:53 pm details)

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http://crooksandliars.com/andy-k/cls-late-night-music-club-hall-oates

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Israel & Palestine on Same Page at UN Condemning
Libya Violence

This is a guest note by Mark Leon Goldberg, Managing Editor of UN Dispatch, where this piece originally ran.

Leave it to Muammar Qaddafi to bring together the Israelis and Palestinians at the United Nations.

I have just obtained the copy of a draft resolution from the Human Rights Council that strongly condemns the violence in Libya. The resolution is as strongly worded as they come. But what is more significant than the substance of the resolution is the broad support that it has attracted by a diverse set of members.

Check this out (full pdf):

You'll also note that Qatar and Tunisia co-signed.

As it happens, Libya is on the Human Rights Council right now. But given the broad support for this resolution, I can't imagine that they will last much longer. (A two-thirds vote of the General Assembly is required to boot a member from the Human Rights Council.)

Very interesting times. And a situation like this demonstrates the value of the Human Rights Council -- it can be used to show the cruel Libyan regime just how united the world is against it.

"We've joined many concerned members of the Human Rights Council in supporting this session," Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Suzanne Nossel tells me over email, "It is significant that the international community will speak with one voice in condemning the violence."

-- Mark Leon Goldberg

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http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2011/02/israel_palestin/

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GOP to increase Defense Dept. budget

When is enough enough? If the GOP was serious - and we know that they're not - they would cut into the DoD budget which is already the most bloated of them all. Let's not squeeze the poor with stripping heating subsidies or cutting school lunch programs and then let the fattest of the fat cat get even larger. CNNMoney:

As a practical matter, though, the impact of the proposals is easiest to grasp when compared with 2010 funding levels, which are in effect until March 4.

By that measure, defense would not be hit by the $60 billion in spending cuts passed by the House before dawn on Saturday.

In fact, the defense budget would increase to $533 billion, up from $526 billion currently.

That doesn't count the money that will be spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the money spent on defense-related activities through other agencies, said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, who served as assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.