The media won’t cover it (is the media biased?) but today is the March for Life in Washington. And tomorrow is the March for Life in San Francisco. The crowd in Washington will rival that of the inauguration earlier in the week. Probably the longest annual civil rights march in world history.

Did anyone see the Mass for Life at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in D.C. last night? It was a love-fest, how beautiful, and packed. The U.S. Cardinals were all there at the altar, what great men. They are such different personalities.

And the March itself will be a love-fest, and by love I mean real love, not a counterfeit.

It has been two days and the western media, neither NPR, CNN or even Drudge, have covered the murder of  21-year-old Lubna Hanash who was shot in the face by Israeli soldiers outside the Al-Arroub College near the West Bank.   No coverage for this palestinian girl.

The western media is filled with nonsense news. The monthly story du jour (school shootings, hurricane Sandy, etc.), lipsinking Byonse, sports, and vacuous political banter.  The only foreign news in the US is consistently biased and propagandized.

Dear Members of Congress,

You seem to have forgotten that your
approval rating hovers at or around 15%. I simply can’t believe
that each of you is not on C-SPAN, MSNBC, FOX news, CNN, NPR, etc.
everyday apologizing to the American public for your collective
incompetence. Your recent “change” to the Filibuster Rules is nothing more
than further manipulation by both

sides to continue the stranglehold your
partisanship has had on the American public, our economy, and our
futures.

Many of you complain that there isn’t
enough “certainty” in this or that program of the other party or the
President. You all collectively are the root cause of that uncertainty. How
else can we view a three month extension to the debt limit which is
necessary to pay the bills for programs you have already “approved”? How
else can we view a two year limit on the

“New” and “Improved” Filibuster
rules? We finally have an instance where using a “Nuclear Option” would not
harm anyone and would actually help the country and it isn’t deployed.
Behavior like that certainly doesn’t lower our “uncertainty” level any. Your
unwillingness to to work together for the common good, to engage in actual,
intelligent, substantive debates is a complete dereliction of your duty and an insult
to hundreds of millions of hardworking Americans.

Some of you like to imagine that the
President has committed some sort of impeachable offense. With an approval
rating of 15% I’d have to say that over 400 of you deserve to be facing
impeachment hearings yourselves. I double-dog dare you to enact recall legislation!
“We, the People…”, would decimate your ranks!

I’m Fed Up!,

Charles A. Bowsher
 

This week, union membership as a percentage of all employment is at the same level as it was in 1936 (before unions got power and while people were being shot dead in the streets and called “communists” among other things for that power). 

Nice going baby-boomers–thanks for losing most of what the Greatest Generation fought for.   

The Republicans at Hillary’s hearings demonstrated once again that their first, indeed, their only priority is to gain and keep political power. All the questions they asked were about fixing blame, in an attempt to damage a potential Hillary candidacy in 2016.

This is always the party that responds to snafus of their own making (9/11…Iraq…Katrina response…etc.) by insisting that “America doesn’t want to play the blame game”.

Then, when something bad happens during a Democratic administration, they only have time for the blame.

What’s more, they seem to employ their most despicable attacks against minorities and women. Especially minority women. Then they wonder why their numbers with those voters are horrendous.

Excellent Krugman column. I agree 100%. He notes that The President ignored the big bad deficit in his inaugural address, and continues:

“Why have the deficit scolds lost their grip? I’d suggest four interrelated reasons.

First, they have cried wolf too many times. They’ve spent three years warning of imminent crisis — if we don’t slash the deficit now now now, we’ll turn into Greece, Greece, I tell you. It is, for example, almost two years since Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles declared that we should expect a fiscal crisis within, um, two years.

But that crisis keeps not happening. The still-depressed economy has kept interest rates at near-record lows despite large government borrowing, just as Keynesian economists predicted all along. So the credibility of the scolds has taken an understandable, and well-deserved, hit.

Second, both deficits and public spending as a share of G.D.P. have started to decline — again, just as those who never bought into the deficit hysteria predicted all along.

The truth is that the budget deficits of the past four years were mainly a temporary consequence of the financial crisis, which sent the economy into a tailspin — and which, therefore, led both to low tax receipts and to a rise in unemployment benefits and other government expenses. It should have been obvious that the deficit would come down as the economy recovered. But this point was hard to get across until deficit reduction started appearing in the data.

Now it has — and reasonable forecasts, like those of Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs, suggest that the federal deficit will be below 3 percent of G.D.P., a not very scary number, by 2015.

And it was, in fact, a good thing that the deficit was allowed to rise as the economy slumped. With private spending plunging as the housing bubble popped and cash-strapped families cut back, the willingness of the government to keep spending was one of the main reasons we didn’t experience a full replay of the Great Depression. Which brings me to the third reason the deficit scolds have lost influence: the contrary doctrine, the claim that we need to practice fiscal austerity even in a depressed economy, has failed decisively in practice.

Consider, in particular, the case of Britain. In 2010, when the new government of Prime Minister David Cameron turned to austerity policies, it received fulsome praise from many people on this side of the Atlantic. For example, the late David Broder urged President Obama to “do a Cameron”; he particularly commended Mr. Cameron for “brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain’s economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession.”

Sure enough, the sudden, severe medicine cut short Britain’s economic recovery, and threw the nation back into recession.

At this point, then, it’s clear that the deficit-scold movement was based on bad economic analysis. But that’s not all: there was also clearly a lot of bad faith involved, as the scolds tried to exploit an economic (not fiscal) crisis on behalf of a political agenda that had nothing to do with deficits. And the growing transparency of that agenda is the fourth reason the deficit scolds have lost their clout.

What was it that finally pulled back the curtain here? Was it the way the election campaign revealed Representative Paul Ryan, who received a “fiscal responsibility” award from three leading deficit-scold organizations, as the con man he always was? Was it the decision of David Walker, alleged crusader for sound budgets, to endorse Mitt Romney and his budget-busting tax cuts for the rich? Or was it the brazenness of groups like Fix the Debt — basically corporate C.E.O.’s declaring that you should be forced to delay your retirement while they get to pay lower taxes?”

Rethuglicon/right-wing jackassery of the week…

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50139497n

McCain jokes about “waterboarding” Kerry at confirmation hearing

 [[ “We look forward to interrogating him at his hearing next week, mercilessly…”

“We will bring back, for the only time, waterboarding to get the truth out of him.” ]]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/21/powell-republican-leaders-should-stop-idiot-presentations-from-palin-and-birthers/

Powell: Republican leaders should stop ‘idiot presentations’ from Palin and birthers

[[ “The Republicans have to stop buying into things that demonize the president,” he explained. “I mean, why aren’t Republican leaders shouting out about all this birther nonsense and all these other things? They’re silent. We should speak out.” ]]

http://mediamatters.org/video/2013/01/22/foxs-ablow-obama-favors-disempowering-the-indiv/192353

Fox’s Ablow: Obama Favors “Disempowering The Individual” With Government Solutions Because He Was “Abandoned” As A Child

Hillary asks, “What difference does it make?”  From a security standpoint, I think it makes a whole lot of difference.  If it’s a protest, well that’s something you could prepare for and even anticipate, especially on sensitive dates like 9/11.  If it was random, well, you might be  able to take  another course of action.

Obama Unchained!

Who was there to Grill Colin Powell over his lies to the UN? Compared to that this is a very small lie.

Will this whole issue now make the release of information going forward even more limited, since “official” information will now need to be vetted even longer?

WOW! The caller is really working the “rape” angle.  It’s a little creepy.

Tom,

1)Beyonce took out her ear piece in the middle of her solo and continued singing, because it was interfering with her singing. She was not lip synching.

3)There is a long concept of women warriors and warrior queens in history, e.g. the Amazons in Homer and Athena the warrior goddess, also, in Nubia which had basis. In fact. in the ancient Silk Road areas female burials were found with weapons.

2)Watching a PBS Aviation program on warplanes last night demonstrated that government and industry can cooperate to accomplish great things when necessary. Even competing corporations worked together.

better to be able to defend self-country then wait passively to be raped dor to die

I’ve been hearing a bit this week about some GOP attempts to change how electoral votes are allocated.   Here are some visuals that show how the proposed changes would have affected the 2012 election:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/republican-vote-rigging-electoral-college_n_2546010.html

Thoughts?

This isn’t what women, or we, need.
For real equality, women need to be required to register for the Selective Service at the age of 18, just like men. That women are not now so required is held against them, a disparity no amount of combat corrects. This is a silent cheat. Serving in combat without it plays into the gun culture.
Still, it is right that makes might, not guns, not combat.

Will somebody do me a favor and tell me how much of a nut Jonah Goldberg is while ignoring his very valid points… please.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/sns-201301241430–tms–jgoldbrgctnjg-a20130125-20130125,0,7777260.column

NPR’s Michele Kelemen, 22 March 2011: “Women in Spotlight as US Debates Libya Policy”. New Republic (“Obama’s Female Hawks”) and National Interest (“America’s Foreign Policy Valkyries”) published similar profiles in courage contemporaneously.
MUCH celebration of the Clinton-Rice-Power triumvirate occurred nationally in the spring of 2011 as the Obama Administration responded to the Arab Spring.
Compare the commensurate LACK OF INTEREST attending the collapse of US Libyan (or more broadly North African) policy as 2012 drew to a close, with no one of our intrepid journalists or MSM outlets pointing out that the failures leading to the death of a US ambassador were a consequence of policies initiated by the Three Weird Sisters themselves, the Clinton-Rice-Power Cabal of Valkyries. Granted, the Valkyries were not responsible for policy implementation all down the line. But the only consequence of the Administration’s failures in this episode has been the failure of Susan Rice to succeed Hillary Clinton at the State Department (are Rice’s protests of innocence in mischaracterizing the Benghazi episode consistent with her own contributions to the formulation of US Libyan policy? No one has told us, no one is telling us). Clinton has famously claimed that she has taken responsibility for the tactical failures surrounding the Benghazi attack, but with the responsibility she has taken she has incurred no penalty whatsoever (her concussion hardly counts). Samantha Power’s candor has not even been consulted since 11 Sep 2012, to hear our intrepid journalists not tell the story.
At every opportunity over the past four months, NPR for one has gone out of its way to ignore the story outright or bury it at a depth likely to keep it out of sight. Heralded as a triumph of feminine expertise and resolve at its outset, the Obama Administration’s conduct in Libya has unwound enough so that effects are now being felt further afield in Mali and Algeria. A very curious lack of curiosity remains on full display concerning these events, just as a relative lack of accountability has ensued in the wake of the more manifest failures.      

Gregg–I can’t even backtrack to the beginning of a discussion of economists on this week’s thread, but I won’t argue with your characterization of Friedman as a towering figure, deserving of his Nobel.  I had the good fortune to study under a few of his disciples in graduate school–really sharp people.

His monetarist ideas just didn’t translate into public policy; that he spent his entire career at Chicago speaks to his shortcoming, which was his rigid adherence to philosophy.  For the most part, other economists–such as Reich, Krugman, Stiglitz, even Bernanke–acknowledge and admire Milton’s work.  But economic theory is nearly pointless if it can’t be translated into action–that’s why Keynes and Galbraith, etc., get the appointments.  It’s a “scientific art.”

Friedman was cursed by the phenomenon that has come to be known as Newt’s problem:  He’s a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.