Via Paul Krugman, Bruce Bartlett explains his journey from right-leaning to student to Republican functionary to political (and social) pariah.
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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In the News
Just days before Obama embarked on a high profile trip to Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, which was intended to symbolise this "pivot", Israel assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the head of Hamas' military wing. The eight-day conflict that followed not only pushed Obama's three-day Asia tour off the US' front pages, it sent ripples of exasperation through the administration's foreign policy establishment.
Former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer has been claiming for months that state party members engineered a new law to suppress voter turnout, falsely touting voter fraud concerns to advance their mission. Now, other former Republicans and consultants are backing Greer up, The Palm Beach Post reports.
Greer, who is under indictment and accused of funneling campaign funds from the Republican Party, has been claiming that state Republicans supported a law (HB 1355)—which, in part, curtailed early voting—simply as a means to stymie the Democratic vote.
Staff and consultants "never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue," Greer told the newspaper. "It's all a marketing ploy."
Former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, GOP consultant Wayne Bertsch and one unnamed consultant now tell the newspaper that state Republicans and consultants were actively seeking ways to suppress Democratic turnout following the 2008 election.
"I know that the cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of their targets only because that's a big day when the black churches organize themselves," the anonymous longtime GOP consultant told the newspaper.
.............
Rachel Rose Hartman, Yahoo!news, yesterday.
Just when you thought you had heard it all, life in the homeland, from an overseas source, BBC.
A Florida man choked to death in October after eating dozens of live cockroaches in a contest to win a python, an autopsy has found.
The body of Edward Archbold, 32, tested negative for drugs and Broward County medical examiner ruled the death was an accident caused by "asphyxia"....
Does Florida, or any state, or country need cockroach eating contests? How about the winning prize: a python? Is somebody dumb enough to eat roaches, responsible enough to possess a dangerous snake? We need not answer that in this case.
By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Washington Post, Nov. 26, 2012
The White House warned Monday that the average family will pay $2,200 more in taxes next year if Congress does not freeze tax rates for the middle class, publishing a new report as part of President Obama’s campaign to extend tax cuts for most Americans while allowing taxes on the wealthiest to rise.
The White House report says Americans could dramatically pull back on spending in the crucial holiday season if they expect sharp tax hikes next year, which would cut deeply into take-home pay. A tepid shopping season would interrupt a string of positive data in recent weeks that suggest Americans are increasingly opening their pocketbooks after years of post-recession caution.
The report is part of a strategy to pressure Congress to pass legislation that would immediately extend the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000 a year.
The Democratic-controlled Senate has signed off on the legislation. Now it is up to the Republican-controlled House to decide whether it will follow [....]
Also see:
White House Sees Stunted Growth if Tax Cuts Expire
By Peter Baker, Debt Reckoning @ nytimes.com, Nov. 26, 2012
Americans could spend nearly $200 billion less next year than they would otherwise if automatic tax increases take effect, the White House warned in a new report.
Reuters, Nov 26, 2012
Jerusalem: A new Israeli air shield against rockets more powerful than those intercepted by Iron Dome in the Gaza conflict passed its first field test last week after being rushed through development, officials said on Sunday.
They said that David's Sling, billed as Israel's answer to the longer-range missiles of Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas and Syria, shot down a target rocket in a secret November 20 desert trial that coincided with fierce shelling exchanges between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Worried about deteriorating security on the fronts with Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and the international showdown over the disputed nuclear programme of arch-foe Iran, Israel has been accelerating work on its multi-tier missile shield, with extensive help from the United States [....]
Associated Press, Nov. 25, 2012
Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan --A Taliban bombing killed at least six people and wounded 90 others at a Shiite religious procession in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday, police said, as the minority Muslim sect observes the annual Ashura holiday.
Since Wednesday, at least 31 people have been killed in bombings aimed at Pakistani Shiites and claimed by the Taliban, which espouses an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam. More than 100 were wounded in the attacks during the run-up to the holiday, which commemorates the seventh-century death of Prophet Muhammad's grandson. The schism between Sunnis and Shiites dates back to that time.
Sunday's explosion went off as hundreds of Shiites were passing through the main intersection of the city of Dera Ismail Khan, police said, where food and water stalls were set up to serve the crowd [....]
By Steven Morris, Leo Hickman and Matthew Weaver, guardian.co.uk, 25 Nov 2012
More than 800 homes and business premises were contending with flooding on Sunday night after more rain caused havoc across a swath of Britain, forcing the government to defend the work it has done to protect at-risk areas.
David Cameron promised to help communities in the south-west of England and the Midlands that have been devastated after more than a month's worth of rain fell within four days. [....]
But the government and the Environment Agency said most new defences, many introduced since the great floods of 2007, were working well and had protected more than 24,000 homes across England and Wales.
They will be tested again in the coming days. More rain is expected for [....]
Also see:
In pictures: storms and floods across the UK
And:
Flooding: 'Quiz night on Tuesday is cancelled' Leo Hickman reports from Polperro on the aftermath of the torrential storms that swept through Cornwall
By Soni Daniel, Kingsley Omonobi, Emman Ovuakporie & Luka Binniyat, Vanguard, 26 Nov 2012
Kaduna — Over 11 persons were feared dead, yesterday and several others seriously injured when a suicide bomber rammed into the Saint Andrews Protestant Church, inside the Army Cantonment, Jaji, in Kaduna.
A military spokesman told the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC that two vehicles were driven into the barracks in Jaji in what he described as "surprising and an embarrassment" [....]
The attacker, it was learnt, had aimed at killing most of the worshippers as they were coming out of the church. [....]
Sources told Vanguard that the vehicles were driven into the Jaji cantonment through the bush, thereby escaping all the military checkpoints mounted at the entry and exit points into the cantonment.
Military sources disclosed that the suicide bombers, who died in the blast, came through the Maraban-Jos axis, and thereby escaped being detected at the Abuja-Minna-Kaduna axis.
The source said: "It is true that a suicide bomber attempted to enter the St. Andrews Protestant Church inside the Cantonment but he was stopped from gaining access to the main building. But he detonated his bomb and killed himself and some other persons [....]
Corroborating Michael Maeillo's take-down of Tom Friedman last week, a NYT journalist dismisses the notorious "skills gap":
The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.
By Michael Weiss, ForeignPolicy.com, Nov. 23, 2012
Britain's Conservatives are rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin's wealthy oligarchs.
[....] British elites, elected or otherwise, have grown highly susceptible to the unscrutinized rubles that continue to pour into the boom-or-boom London real estate market and a luxury-service industry catering to wealthy Russians who are as bodyguarded as they are jet-set. This phenomenon has not only imported some of the worst practices of a mafia state across the English Channel, but it has had a deleterious impact on Britain's domestic politics. And some of the most powerful and well-connected figures of British public life, from the Rothschilds to former prime ministers, have been taken in by it. Most surprising, though, is how the heirs to Margaret Thatcher's fierce opposition to the Soviets have often been the ones most easily seduced by the Kremlin's entreaties.
On Aug. 21, a new lobby group called Conservative Friends of Russia (CFoR) was launched at the London home of Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to Britain. The launch was attended by some 250 guests, including parliamentarians, Conservative Party members, businessmen, lobbyists, NGO representatives, and even princes [....]
By Scott Shane, New York Times, Nov 24, 2012
WASHINGTON — Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.
The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.
Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.
Though publicly the administration presents a united front on the use of drones, behind the scenes there is longstanding tension [....]
The [U.S. Department of Energy] said it would help bring to market a small, modular nuclear-power reactor from Babcock & Wilcox Co., under a program in which the Obama administration wants to spend up to $452 million over five years on the technology.[...]The small reactor could provide about 180 megawatts of power, about one-fifth the size of a typical nuclear reactor but still enough for tens of thousands of homes. It has an underground radiation-containment structure, meant to be safer and less expensive than those at larger plants.The small reactors are modular, meaning manufacturers hope to build them at a central location before shipping them and installing them, potentially reducing the costs of constructing a nuclear plant. The reactor is about 83 feet tall and 13 feet in diameter, allowing it to be shipped by rail as opposed to being assembled on site. The cost of building a conventional nuclear-power plant today tends to make it
By Phillip Inman and Josephine Moulds, The Guardian, 22 Nov. 2012
Strong manufacturing figures from China and the US fuelled speculation that a long slowdown in global output is rapidly coming to an end. Commodity prices jumped and stock markets lifted after China's manufacturing sector expanded for the first time in 13 months in November.
The Chinese data, which has shocked analysts over the last year as each month revealed that output tightened further, closely followed a report that showed US manufacturing grew this month at its quickest pace since June.
News that the world's largest economies are expanding, albeit at historically low levels, was enough to overcome weak figures from Britain and the eurozone where industrial output contracted and the outlook remains increasingly gloomy [....]
Guess he's just earned some political capital and he ain't putting it in the bank!
By Chris Stephen in Tripoli, guardian.co.uk, 21 November 2012
The Libyan security chief who led an anti-militia crackdown in the wake of the killing of the country's US ambassador has been assassinated in Benghazi, raising questions about the government's ability to impose the rule of law.
Colonel Farag al-Dersi, Benghazi's chief of security, was shot dead by three gunmen in the eastern Libyan city where ambassador Chris Stevens and three fellow diplomats died after the US consulate was overrun on 11 September. The colonel had been instrumental in seeking to curb the power of extremist militias in Benghazi, banning some and trying to bring others under control of government-appointed officers.
His death is the latest in a string of killings and car bombings in the city, most of them targeting officials who had high-profile roles in the former administration of Muammar Gaddafi. To date none of the assassins have been put on trial [....]
Will you be shopping at Walmart this weekend?
The company brags about its low prices. But many shoppers probably don't think much about how Wal-Mart makes this slogan a reality, which may start happening given the publicity the strike is getting. The average Wal-Mart associate earns about $8.81 an hour, or a yearly wage of about $15,500, meaning that hundreds of thousands of the company's workers live below the poverty line, according to unions.
The union-backed OurWalmart is seeking wages of $13 per hour, and is calling on the company to make full-time jobs available for employees who want them. The company disputes these characterizations and says on its website that it offers "competitive wages, good benefits and the chance to grow and build a career."
States worried about the growing costs of Medicaid have pressued Wal-Mart for years to improve worker benefits. In response, the company offered some benefits to those working less than 24 hours per week, only to reverse course last year and decree that new part-time employees would no longer get benefits and that people working 24 hours to 33 hours a week can no longer include their spouses in their coverage, though children are allowed.
Data from unions indicates that Wal-Mart employees are the largest recipients of government assistance among those that are employed in a huge number of states. That means that taxpayers are on the hook for these benefits to the tune of more than $1 billion.
Though it's unlikely the strike will put a dent in Wal-Mart's profits, some customers may start to wonder whether the company's low prices are worth the costs born by its employees.
Note:
Walmart CEO Michael Duke has a total compensation of $18.1 million, and is the second highest paid executive in the Fortune 500. According to CNN Money, it would take more than 700 employees’ salaries to match his total compensation package.
Making Change at Walmart, the group leading Black Friday’s protest, is asking for a minimum wage of $13 an hour, more full time positions and affordable health care. Currently, the typical employee is paid $22,100 a year, slightly below the federal poverty line for a family of four (which is at $23,050 in 2012). Walmart earned $15 billion last year.
The situation is far more complex than it is often made out to be. Hamas is the Gazan offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is now in charge of Egypt. Over the past few days of fighting in Gaza, no more than 900 Palestinians per day--about the average apparently--have been allowed to enter Egypt. No flotillas, no boycotts, just crickets. Interesting place, the Middle East.
No more trips to Europe on the taxpayers wallet for Republican Governor Nikki Haley.
The state (South Carolina-first in rebellion) announced late last month that an international hacker had stolen 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers....
The data leak, one of the largest in history against a sate agency, was discovered by those useless federal people from the Obama guvment. The Secret Service in this case. I guess if South Carolina seceded, no one would yet know what happened in Charleston. Business owners are already reporting hacking into their bank accounts. The costs of the fiasco will cost South Carolina millions.
The state's Republican Governor, Nikki Haley, might want to consider to emulate the guy she replaced, Sanford, and go for an extended walk on the Appalachian Trail. Until the thing blows over. Unfortunately, that may take years. South Carolina, a small government Republican bastion, is getting exactly what they voted for and deserve, rule by the incompetent blowhards of the GOP.
Here's teh newest cool thing to do if you're a state lawmaker: give a tax exemption to a fetus.
The new legislation would change that, allowing parents to claim a fetus as a dependent if a physician determines the fetus is at least 12 weeks old as of the end of a tax year.
A representative of the Michigan Family Forum, which supports the bill, said it could translate to a $160 savings that could be used for prenatal care or other purposes.
But critics called the measure divisive and said it appeared to be a move to lay the groundwork to fight against abortions.
"In our view these bills are an attempt to give some legal recognition to the unborn in tax law, which would then be used as a reason to give legal recognition to the unborn in other contexts such as in criminal law or in health law," said Mary Pollock of the National Organization of Women's Michigan chapter. "And so they are a not so subtle reason to establish personhood for a fetus at 12 weeks gestation so that abortion could be banned or punished thereafter."
Good gawd in heaven above...Lansing, MI has become the looney bin of state governments. This bill should die in the lame duck session but until then, Teh Crazy Rulz!
Bay Karin Laub, Associated Press, Nov. 20, 2012, (WITH GRAPHIC PHOTOS)
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Masked gunmen publicly shot dead six suspected collaborators with Israel in a large Gaza City intersection Tuesday, witnesses said. An Associated Press reporter saw a mob surrounding five of the bloodied corpses shortly after the killing.
Some in the crowd stomped and spit on the bodies. A sixth corpse was tied to a motorcycle and dragged through the streets as people screamed, "Spy! Spy!"
The Hamas military wing, Izzedine al-Qassam, claimed responsibility in a large handwritten note attached to a nearby electricity pole. Hamas said the six were killed because they gave Israel information about fighters and rocket launching sites [....]
One body was then tied by a cable to the back of a motorcycle and dragged through the streets. A number of gunmen on motorcycles rode along as the body was pulled past a house of mourning for victims of an Israeli airstrike. [....]
By Nicole Perlroth, Bits @ nytimes.com, Nov. 20, 2012
Article explains that Anonymous's campaign has been unsuccessful at anything other than being a slight nuisance, but that
[....] Attacks from Iran and Gaza are another matter.
In July, security researchers at Kaspersky Lab and Seculert, two computer security firms, discovered that a strain of malware had infected Israeli companies. Many of those companies handle critical infrastructure, like the country’s energy and water supplies, computer and telecom networks. The malware, which the researchers named “Mahdi” after a command in its code, appears to have originated in Iran. Elements of the code were written in Farsi [....]
More recently, Israel was forced to take its police department offline two weeks ago after security experts discovered that many of the department’s computers had been infected with a remote-access tool, or RAT, which gives attackers realtime control of victims’ machines. The RAT appeared to be an off-the-shelf variation that can be bought on public sites for as little as $50.
After some investigation, researchers at Norman, a computer security firm in Fairfax, Va., noted that the attacks originated from command-and-control centers in Gaza and that the same servers had been spying for over a year, first on computers in Palestine and then in Israel. [....]
By Robert J. Lopez, LA Now @ latimes.com, Nov. 19, 2012
Four men with ties to Southern California have been charged with plotting to join Al Qaeda and the Taliban to commit "violent jihad" and target Americans, the FBI said Monday night.
One of the men, Sohiel Omar Kabir, 34, allegedly traveled in July to Afghanistan, where he arranged for terrorist training to be conducted with Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, according to a complaint unsealed Monday in U.S. District Court in Riverside.
Kabir, who lived in Pomona, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, federal authorities said. In 2010, Kabir allegedly introduced Ontario resident Ralph Deleon, 23, and Upland resident Miguel Alejandro Santana, 21, to "radical and violent Islamic doctrine," according to the complaint [....]
By David Smith in Johannesburg and Blase Wetemwami in Goma, guardian.co.uk, 19 Nov. 2012
Photo caption: People run as fighting erupts between M23 rebels and Congolese army troops near the airport in Goma. Photograph: AP
Rebels with the alleged backing of Rwanda threaten to invade the biggest city in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo yesterday/on Monday, with UN peacekeepers appearing powerless to stop them.
After several days of heavy fighting, the M23 militia group, which the UN accuses of human rights abuses and recruiting child solders, appeared to be on the brink of taking Goma after resistance from the Congolese army crumbled.
With regional tensions growing, neighbouring Rwanda accused Congolese soldiers of firing heavy weapons into its territory, wounding three civilians. Rwanda reported that one of the three civilians hit had died in hospital. Brigadier general Joseph Nzabamwita, a Rwandan army spokesman, said the Congolese army "has deliberately this evening bombed Rwanda, using T55 tank and mortar bombs" as well as 37.5mm anti-aircraft fire [....]
By Tania Branigan in Beijing, guardian.co.uk, Nov. 19, 2012
Five homeless children have been found dead in a rubbish bin where they probably suffocated while sheltering from the cold, authorities in south-west China have said. The boys, aged around 10, were found by an elderly rag picker on Friday morning, Beijing News reported. An initial investigation suggested they died of carbon monoxide poisoning, possibly due to burning charcoal inside the bin, [....] Residents said the boys had been living in a nearby shelter they built from a tarpaulin, cement blocks and plywood [....]
According to the ministry of civil affairs, there were an estimated one to one and a half million children living without parental care, mostly on the streets of towns and cities, in 2008. That did not include children working on the streets with migrant parents.
Last year the government ordered officials to place a higher priority on helping street children without parental care and to seek them out to provide help.[....]