kpete
kpete's Journal"like, totally awesome"
Point Of Order: If We’re Going To Declare The War In Iraq Over, Shouldn’t We Declare War On Iraq First?
Or, If We Were Going To Have The Last Person To Leave Iraq Turn Out The Lights, Shouldn’t We Have Turned On The Electricity At Some Point?
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/12/18/iraq-an-ending-of-sorts/
House GOP to REJECT payroll tax cut...Admits because it will help Obama!!
"The rank-and-file members are extremely opposed to it," said the GOP source, adding that most members were concerned with the uncertainty caused by just a two-month extension, as well as the political benefit the White House could gain in the national dialogue over taxes.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/18/1046746/-House-GOP-to-REJECT-payroll-tax-cutAdmits-because-it-will-help-Obama!!?via=siderec
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/18/politics/congress-payroll-tax-cut-2/index.html
via:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/18/1046746/-House-GOP-to-REJECT-payroll-tax-cutAdmits-because-it-will-help-Obama!!?via=siderec
COVER OF TIME Magazine's "Person of the Year" vs. Original Photograph. Note the Glaring Difference?
The image on TIME's cover – in which the 99% is unmistakably absent – is based on a photo of Sarah Mason, a 25-year-old Occupy L.A. activist (and art gallery worker) who was photographed by LA Weekly's Ted Soqui as she stood in a line, arms linked, during a November 17 protest at Bank of America Plaza.
The original image, with a vinegar-soaked 99% bandana masking Mason's face, her eyes focused and determined as she protests corporate greed, has unmistakable intensity and meaning. However, on TIME's cover, she is reduced to a generic, hybrid graphic that fails to invoke passions precisely because it lacks the specificity of place, the specificity of time, the specificity of motivation, of a cause.
In short, it lacks the 99 percent.
the rest:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/18/1046730/-Cover-for-TIME-Magazines-Person-of-the-Year-vs-Original-Photograph-Note-the-Glaring-Difference?via=siderec
Bolt down your Christmas trees everyone. And for all the Muslims out there, get an alarm system.
If Gingrich gets the nomination, the media is going to make a huge deal of the egghead vs. egghead presidential race. That is silly. Gingrich's intellectualism is the intellectualism of a precocious 16 year old who just read the Fountainhead -- shallow, capricious and grandiose. Next year he/she will have gone goth, or something else. So it is with Gingrich, although though he probably won't go goth. I think people overstate Barack Obama's intelligence too. He is smart but not brilliant. Rather what seems him look so smart is his 'cognitive complexity,' as I wrote about in one of my first posts here, and is so rare in politicians these days. He can see multiple sides of an argument. But be warned -- this will be the narrative if he wins the nomination.
But his 'intellectualism' is not why Gingrich is so popular today. I think Gingrich is picking up the votes of the real Tea Party people -- those who resent what they imagine to be enormous sums of their tax dollars going to finance what they imagine to be the profligate lifestyles of those on Aid to Families of Dependent Children or Medicaid or both. We call this 'economic conservatism' but it is not a belief in the free market. It is a belief that we owe nothing to anyone else. In political psychology we know it has a strong association with a particular personality trait -- disagreeableness. In short, Tea Parties are meanies before they are anything else.
Social conservatives score much higher on other personality traits like conscientiousness. They are not nearly so uncaring. They might deny family planning services to unwed mothers, but this is because they think they are doing the right thing by not putting ideas into impressionable girls heads -- that it is OK to have sex. Of course this makes them likelier to get pregnant and have abortions. But it comes from a genuinely good if misguided intention. They are mean by accident, indirectly.
Newt's rise has to be attributed to his performance in debates, since, as was the case with Cain, there is nothing else to explain it -- no money, no organization, and only negative name recognition. What has he done at these debates? He has no gimmick, no 9/9/9 plan. He flips around all the time. But every time he shows up on camera, we see the same thing -- contempt, scorn, meanness. For everything. Newt is tapping into how nasty these nasty people feel. To others, and at previous times, this would have seemed unpresidential. But these are the times we live in. Newt Gingrich is an asshole, and many Republicans love him for it.
the rest:
http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2011/12/gingrinch.html
Even Fredo Thinks Gingrich Is Nuts
Former Bush Attorneys General Slam Gingrich’s ‘Ridiculous,’ ‘Irresponsible,’ ‘Outrageous,’ and ‘Dangerous’ Courts Plan
KELLY: He wants to see the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals entirely abolished, your thoughts on that?
MUKASEY: Ridiculous. . . . to say that you’re going to undo and entire court simply because you don’t like some of their decisions, when there are thousands of cases before that court, is totally irresponsible. It’s outrageous because it essentially does away with the notion that when courts decide cases the proper way to have them reviewed is to go to a higher court. It’s dangerous because, even from the standpoint of the people who put it forward, you have no guarantee that you’ll have a permanent majority. . . . It would end with having a Democratic majority that then decides to abolish the Fourth Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit. And you go on and on and on. And I guess they could then reconstitute another court. It would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle.
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had a similar reaction:
GONZALES: The notion or the specter of bringing judges before the Congress, like a schoolchild being brought before the principal is, to me, a little bit troubling . . . . I cannot support and I would not support efforts that appear to be intimidation or retaliation against judges.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/12/16/391189/former-bush-attorneys-general-slam-gingrichs-ridiculous-irresponsible-outrageous-and-dangerous-courts-plan/
Occupy: Just Do It!
More Than 50 Occupy Wall Street Protesters Arrested In Manhattan
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"Jesus came into the world. There was not room for him in the inn. So once again, today there is no room for people who are struggling for the poor, as we say for the 99 percent,” said Father Paul Mayer, who was arrested during yesterday’s protest.
“I think that in order to be able to exercise our first amendment freedom of assembly, we have to actually do it. And if that means that we can't obtain the permits necessary to do so, then we need to just do it anyway,” said Jessie LeGreca, a protester.
Trinity Church has allowed protestors to use its meeting rooms and offices but has so far refused to let them take over the lot.
http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/152735/more-than-50-occupy-wall-street-protesters-arrested-in-manhattan
Self-Adoration Reaches Newt Heights
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Self-Adoration Reaches Newt Heights
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: December 17, 2011
................ You have to take another politician’s ego, double it, and add cheese and a side of fries to get to Gingrich. An especially heaping, unhealthy diet of self-regard slogs through his veins.
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Gingrich isn’t the answer: he’s hot-headed and truculent. And while Obama sees himself (with justification) as historic, Gingrich sees himself as epic. If Obama is The One, Gingrich is The Plus-Size One.
Lately he has been on less bloated behavior, and by lately I mean the few weeks since he emerged as the Republican frontrunner du jour. If you watched the debate Thursday, you could sense, from the clench of his jaw, that he wasn’t merely biting his tongue but making an unhappy meal of it.
Still, Gingrich the Grandiloquent sneaked through. Asked about his stated resolve to rein in federal courts, he said that “just like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and F.D.R., I would be prepared to take on the judiciary.” The company he keeps!
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/bruni-newt-gingrichs-self-adoration.html?_r=1
How the GOP stole America
SUN DEC 18, 2011 AT 06:00 AM PST
How the GOP stole America
byMark Sumner
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If you listen to the news, you might think went on a we spending spree. You might think we shoved fresh billions into social programs, or gave fat pay raises to government workers, or that there's been some huge expansion of the government bureaucracy. That's not quite what happened.
President Bush said Saturday that the most important number in the budget he sends to Congress next week is the $5.6 trillion surplus it projects over the next 10 years.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/02/24/national/main274334.shtml
That's not some alternate universe. It's not ancient history. That's the United States just a decade ago. So what happened? Well, we didn't hand out huge new benefits, or fix all our crumbling roads and bridges, or address the failing National Parks. Emptying the national pocketbook was a lot easier than that. We gave it away.
We gave away $1.5 trillion in income tax cuts, and here's the fun part. Over one trillion of that went to the top 5%. Less than 2% of Americans pocketed more than all the rest put together. Another bit of fun: the extensions that have already been made to the cuts will double the cost, with the payout being just as lopsided.
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It's easy to scream about a Balanced Budget Amendment, but a decade ago we had a balanced budget. Heck, we had a surplus, one that was produced by small but real increases in the top tax rate. It's not the Constitution that changed since then. Nobody slipped in an amendment that forced the government into the red. Given the opportunity, the Republicans did everything they could to make sure that the United States not only doesn't have a balanced budget, but can't attain one because the one tool that can make it all work is the one they will not allow. Again, not a secret. What part of "government is the problem" did you not understand?
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the rest:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/18/1046522/-How-the-GOP-stole-America?via=blog_1
Photo: NYPD knees, takes down credentialed photojournalist for multiple wire services and papers
Reached by phone, Kelly said that at the time, he was scurrying over to the site of an arrest when the beefier of two officers blindsided him with a knee to the ribs. The picture was taken in the moments immediately thereafter.
"What did you do that for? I'm press," Kelly recalled saying.
"Sorry. I didn't realize you were press," he said the officer replied. As you can see in the picture, he was carrying two cameras and was wearing his credentials over his coat around his neck.
Kelly said he has encountered some general obstruction while on assignment since: "The thing that annoys me the most is, you say, 'Hey look, I'm press!' And it doesn't seem to matter at all."
more:
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2011/12/4660939/photo-dramatizes-conflict-between-photojournalists-and-nypd
via:
http://www.americablog.com/2011/12/photo-nypd-knees-takes-down.html
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