Month: July 2011

It’s On Bitch

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And by Bitch, I mean Ohio Governor John Kasich, who passed an even wider ranging assault on union rights, because the referendum to repeal the bill is on the ballot:

Ohio residents will be voting this fall on whether to allow a controversial collective bargaining law to go into effect, officials said Thursday.

Backers of the effort to repeal the law have successfully collected almost four times as many signatures needed to put the issue on the statewide ballot.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said opponents of the newly passed law collected 915,456 valid petition signatures. A total of 231,147 were needed.

“We Are Ohio has collected and validated more signatures than any other campaign in Ohio history,” said Melissa Fazekas, a spokeswoman for the group collecting the signatures. She expects voters will repeal the new law in November.

According to Maddow it’s gotten so bad that Kasich is polling behind Rick Scott of Florida. He’s down to 35% approval, which means that not only is he less popular than a case of hemorrhoids, he’s probably less popular than Dick Cheney pole dancing.

I expect that a lot of this vote will be about Kasich in addition to the union busting law.

I just hope that the Koch suckers and their corporate money don’t turn this around.

We Need to Primary Him Now!!!

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I’m beginning to think that the Republicans, the ½ sane ones anyway, may have been right in their criticisms in 2008 when they tried to portray him as a self-absorbed narcissist.

I am increasingly convinced that he obsessed with his own legacy such a degree that he just does not care about right and wrong.

He thinks that he is so damn awesome that he can somehow create a post partisan partisan paradise, with sparkle ponies!

To be fair, it could be that he’s just enamored by the idea that government should be private companies run by his Harvard buddies, but the effect is the same.

The latest episode in this is that he is trying to cut a deal with Republicans on the debt ceiling which is all cuts, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid:

President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner rushed Thursday to strike agreement on a far-reaching plan to reduce the national debt but faced a revolt from Democrats furious that the accord appeared to include no immediate provision to raise taxes.

With 12 days left until the Treasury begins to run short of cash, Obama and Boehner (R-Ohio) were still pursuing the most ambitious plan to restrain the national debt in at least 20 years. Talks focused on sharp cuts in agency spending and politically painful changes to cherished health and retirement programs aimed at saving roughly $3 trillion over the next decade.

More savings would be generated through an overhaul of the tax code that would lower personal and corporate income tax rates while eliminating or reducing an array of popular tax breaks, such as the deduction for home mortgage interest. But the talks envisioned no specific tax increases as part of legislation to lift the debt limit, and the tax rewrite would be postponed until next year.

Democrats reacted with outrage as word filtered to Capitol Hill, saying the emerging agreement appeared to violate their pledge not to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits as well as Obama’s promise not to make deep cuts in programs for the poor without extracting some tax concessions from the rich.

………

After a lunchtime meeting between Lew and Senate Democrats, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) made no attempt to hide his anger, telling reporters that his caucus would oppose the “potential agreement” because it appeared to include no clear guarantee of increased revenue.

“The president always talked about balance, that there had to be some fairness in this, that this can’t be all cuts. There has to be a balance. There has to be some revenue and cuts. My caucus agrees with that,” Reid said. “I hope that the president sticks with that. I’m confident that he will.”

Congressional and administration officials said the White House informed Democratic leaders about the talks after Obama met privately with Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) late Wednesday. Congressional aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail private discussions, said the White House acknowledged that the emerging agreement is “to the right of the Gang of Six” — a bipartisan Senate debt-reduction framework unveiled this week — and far removed from what Democrats have said would be acceptable.

Obama summoned top Democratic leaders in both the House and the Senate back to the White House later Thursday for further discussions.

Barack Obama is the Manchurian Democrat.

To be fair, sources within the Obama administration are denying this, but as John Aravosis notes, in terms identical to when they killed the public option in secret:

Obama White House’s Dan Pfeiffer on rumors that they sold out the public option:

A rumor is making the rounds that the White House and Senator Reid are pursuing different strategies on the public option. Those rumors are absolutely false.

In his September 9th address to Congress, President Obama made clear that he supports the public option because it has the potential to play an essential role in holding insurance companies accountable through choice and competition. That continues to be the President’s position.

We all know how that went.

Obama White House on the rumors that the President has sold out on the budget deal:

A White House spokesman called the claims from aides “not credible” — the result of having a “3rd hand version of the facts.”

And here’s more on the record from – wait for it – Dan Pfeiffer:

pfeiffer44 Dan Pfeiffer
Anyone reporting a $3 trillion deal without revenues is incorrect. POTUS believes we need a balanced approach that includes revenues.

Barack Obama is going to f%$# the American people, and he’s going to f%$# the Democratic party, and while he does not understand it, he’s going to make Sarah Palin President, because the American people hate the idea of cutting entitlements, and like taxing the rich, and he’s decided that we are all idiots, so he’s setting it up so that Republicans will be completely insulated from the consequences of gutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

I Think that Jimmy Murdoch is Going to Jail…

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Of course, if the Parliamentary inquiry committee had sworn him in, it would have been even more likely.

You see, according to tow of James Murdoch’s staffers, he was specifically made aware of the phone hacking when he signed off on settlements with litigants:

James Murdoch has been accused of misleading the parliamentary select committee this week in relation to phone hacking, igniting yet another fire for the embattled News International boss to extinguish.

In a highly damaging broadside, two former News of the World senior executives claimed the evidence Murdoch gave to the committee on Tuesday in relation to an out-of-court settlement to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, was “mistaken”.

The statement came as something of a bombshell to the culture, sport and media select committee, which immediately announced it would be asking Murdoch to explain the contradiction.

Colin Myler, editor of the paper until it was shut down two weeks ago, and Tom Crone, the paper’s former head of legal affairs, said they had expressly told Murdoch of an email that would have blown a hole in its defence that only one “rogue reporter” was involved in the phone-hacking scandal.

This contradicts what Murdoch told the committee when questioned on Tuesday.

As an aside on the media, if you want to follow this, I recommend two sources, the Guardian, which really went out on a limb in following this for years, and Keith Olbermann who has been on this like white on rice.

Wanker of the Day

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NY Times Reporter and columnist Frank Bruni, who admits that he has written opinion pieces about things that he has no knowledge or opinion, because he wanted to look cool:

I’m glad Bruni feels comfortable admitting that he’s a poseur. This admission confirms the suspicions I had about Bruni as a political reporter and as a food critic.

It’s good to know upfront that your op/ed columnist is so insecure that he’ll generate spurious opinions rather than admit that he’s not well-informed or even interested in the topic at hand.

Everyone fronts from time to time, but it’s disconcerting to realize that Bruni thinks this bad habit is something to brag about.

As an opinion columnist, they have every right to their opinion, but the idea that they would fake having an opinion just boggles the minds.

You can read the rest of Lindsay Beyerstein’s post on this, it’s short, and well worth the read.

I Said that the Ivins AnthraxEvidence was Tenuous………

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Lawyers at the Department of Justice have concluded that, notwithstanding the FBI’s claims to the contrary, there is absolutely no evidence that accused anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins had any access to equipment that would have had to be used to weapoonize the disease:

The Justice Department has called into question a key pillar of the FBI’s case against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized Congress a decade ago.

………

Now, however, Justice Department lawyers have acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins’ lab — the so-called hot suite — didn’t contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001.

The government said it continued to believe that Ivins was “more likely than not” the killer. But the filing in a Florida court didn’t explain where or how Ivins could have made the powder, saying only that his secure lab “did not have the specialized equipment . . . that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.”

The government’s statements deepen the questions about the case against Ivins, who killed himself before he was charged with a crime. Searches of his car and home in 2007 found no anthrax spores, and the FBI’s eight-year, $100 million investigation never provided direct evidence that he mailed the letters or identified another location where he might have secretly dried the anthrax into an easily inhaled powder.

Earlier this year, a report by the National Academy of Sciences questioned the genetic analysis that had linked a flask of anthrax stored in Ivins’ office to the anthrax in the letters.

I’ve always felt that the FBI was more interested in finding some guy than they were interested in finding the guy, and from that perspective.

In fact I think that Ivins’ suicide was an implicit goal of their tactics, which appears to have been a desired outcome for the FBI (they went out of their way to, for example, alienate and terrify his therapist), because dead men don’t defend themselves.

It makes it easier to close the case.

Background here.

This Joint Kills Fascists

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This is your brain


This is your brain on drugs … Any Questions

About 5 years ago, a couple of young twins (about 14) achieved some notoriety as the singing group called “Prussian Blue.”

It was a white white supremacist group.

Well, these days, the girls have renounced racism, and they credit marijuana for their change of heart:

Lamb and Lynx Gaede, whose band Prussian Blue was popular back in 2005 among those inclined to like such things, ascribed their unsavory past to having been “home schooled country bumpkins” heavily influenced by their domineering white supremacist mother, reports Neurobonkers.

The twins back when they were little 13-year-old Nazis about six years ago
​Since then the twins, who turned 19 on June 30, have moved to Montana to attend high school, where in her first year Lynx was diagnosed with both cancer (which led to removal of a tumor) and cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS). Lamb developed scoloiosis and back pain, “as well as lack of appetite and intense emotional stress.”

Both of the girls, who sort of became the white supremacist equivalent of the Olsen Twins, began using marijuana after Lynx had a bad reaction to the harsh pharmaceutical narcotics Oxycontin and morphine, which a doctor had prescribed to treat her pain.

“I have to say, marijuana saved my life,” Lynx said. “I would probably be dead if I didn’t have it.”

Lynx became one of the first five minors in Montana to get a medical marijuana card, and Lamb now has one, too. One can only wonder what will become of the girls now that Montana’s conservative Republican-controlled Legislature has all but repealed the state’s compassionate medical marijuana law, approved by 62 percent voters in 2004.

Apparently, the marijuana didn’t just ease the physical pain, but also quelled the psychological hatred that had been inculcated in the girls by their racist upbringing.

No, this is not The Onion.

How is Barack Obama Different from George W. Bush?

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No this is not a lead in for a joke it’s a real question because Barack “I’m Shutting Down the CIA Black Sites” Obama has set up a new CIA black site:

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.

The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there are as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working with the Somali NSA do not conduct operations; rather, they advise and train Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us, but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he adds. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities changing.”

Bullsh%@.

This is not an existing state security apparatus who is doing us a favor, this the CIA, and possibly the NSA running another black site.

The “official government” in Somolia controls, “Somali government forces control roughly thirty square miles of territory in Mogadishu thanks in large part to the US-funded and -armed 9,000-member AMISOM force.”

This government controls about half the land area of Liechtenstein and that only by dint of massive foreign aid.

Seriously, what Barack Obama has done by way of the rule of law and civil rights is worse than what George W. Bush did, because he has normalized behavior, both by refusing to investigate criminality, and by aping the policies of Bush/Cheney.

…and it’s not getting any coverage by the MSM.

Here’s a Bit of Etiquette for All You Pie Flingers

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If you are going to fling a pie at some rich pig as a way of publicly taking them down a peg, the preferred, and traditional, pie is a cream pie, but you should include both a crust and a filling, even if the latter is just whipped cream (kind of lame).

That being said, I do not approve of the actions of comedian and political activist Jonathan “Jonnie Marbles” May-Bowles, who flung a pie tin full of shaving cream at Rupert Murdoch when he was testifying before Parliament. (His wife deflected the projectile, that’s love … and good reflexes)

Mr. May-Bowles, if you are to fling a pie at Rupert Murdoch, make it a real pie.

I’m Going Long On Republican Crazy

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First, we have Allen West, who just unleashed a truly unhinged tirade against Debbie Wasserman-Schultz:

A Republican congressman from Florida turned to email on Tuesday to call a Democratic colleague from the state “vile, despicable and cowardly” after she called into question his stance on Medicare during the debate over a spending cap and balanced budget bill before the House.

Rep. Allen West, a first-term Republican from south Florida, wasn’t shy about his online outburst. He sent his peppery email to numerous lawmakers as well as his target, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

The subject line of the email: “Unprofessional and Inappropriate Sophomoric Behavior from Wasserman Schultz.”

The e-mail said: “Look, Debbie, I understand that after I departed the House floor you directed your floor speech comments directly towards me. Let me make myself perfectly clear, you want a personal fight, I am happy to oblige. You are the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the US House of Representatives. If you have something to say to me, stop being a coward and say it to my face, otherwise, shut the heck up.”

Is it me, or did he just challenge her to a fight?

It certainly sounds like Zell Miller challenging someone to a duel. The only difference is that it was email, which means that it’s less likely to end up on Stewart.

And then there is Michelle Bachmann’s staff, who in response to a reporter asking about the reports that she is taking a veritable pharmacy of drugs for her stress related migraines, which regularly incapacitate her for days at a time, roughed up the reporter, and not just any reporter, but ABC’s Brian Ross:

Bachmann said 30 million Americans suffer from migraines and that “nearly 1 in 4 American households” have a migraine sufferer. “While I appreciate the concern for myself and for my health,” she added, looking to climb back down to safer ground, “the greater concern should be the debate that is occurring today in Washington, D.C., over whether or not we will increase our debt spending and taxes.” Bachmann reiterated that she would not vote to raise the debt ceiling. And with that, she departed without taking questions.

That’s when things got interesting. Ross dashed after Bachmann, repeatedly asking whether she had ever missed a House vote due to a migraine. She ignored him. Ross pursued her into a parking area behind the stage. Her aides grew alarmed. When Ross made a beeline for the white SUV waiting to carry Bachmann away, two Bachmann men pounced on him, grabbing and pushing him multiple times with what looked to me like unusual force. In fact, I have never seen a reporter treated so roughly at a campaign event, especially not a presidential one. Ross was finally able to break away and lob his question at Bachmann one more time, but she continued to ignore him.

Afterward, I asked Ross — a hard-nosed pro who nevertheless seemed slightly shaken — whether he had ever been treated so roughly. “A few times,” he told me. “Mostly by Mafia people.”

(emphasis mine)

Does anyone know if someone out there has a futures market where I can invest in Republican crazy?

Something like the Iowa Electronic Markets, only one that would allow bigger bets.

I’d make out like a raped ape.

Wanker of the Day

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No surprise, it’s a rat f%$# who works at the Heritage Foundation, who is claiming that because poor people can get 5-year old video game systems at the Goodwill for under 20 bucks.

So, the idea that there are no poor, because, “In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave,” little more than a substitute for screaming out the N-word at a Klan rally.

Full disclosure:  I harbor a lot of personal malice against the Heritage Foundation.  They fired a friend of mine for having cancer.

Lucy Will Hold The Football This Time … Really

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The “Gang of Six” in the Senate, it’s back:

The once moribund Senate “Gang of Six” gained new life Tuesday after Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn unexpectedly rejoined the group and President Barack Obama praised a new effort to cut the debt by as much as $3.7 trillion over the next decade.

Speaking at the White House Tuesday afternoon, Obama gave the Gang of Six a big boost, saying its proposals were “roughly” in line with his negotiations during the stalled debt-ceiling talks. But he said there would need to be broader buy-in to the proposal and he said Congress needed to have “fail-safe” plan, being drafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to avert a default.

“I think we’re now seeing a potential for a bipartisan consensus,” Obama told reporters.

And Obama is not just positive about this development, he is a “ferocious advocate” of capitulation masquerading as bipartisanship:

President Obama heaped praise on a deficit-reduction proposal produced by bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Six,” calling it a “significant step” and arguing that members on both side of the aisle are beginning to coalesce around a balanced approach involving cuts to entitlements and tax increases.

“We’re in the same playing field and my hope is that we start gathering everybody in the next couple of days” on an agreement, Obama told reporters in a brief appearance in the White House briefing room Tuesday.

This is just pathetic.

In response to Republicans taking “a shellacking” because of their attempts to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid, Obama has signed on to a plan that calls for cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

Yesterday’s quote of the day shines a bit more light on this problem.

Barack Obama’s fetish regarding “Responsibility without conviction,” is more than “weak”.  It is in fact profoundly irresponsible.

Speaking as a parent, and someone who plays an adult on the internet, sometimes adults actually have to deal with children, and, “I’ll give you another ice cream if you stop ……… Well OK, you did not stop, but here is your ice cream anyway,” is not responsible anything.

I think the idea that Barack Obama is the responsible adult in the room is a delusion, and one that is most firmly held by one one Barack Hussein Obama.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!? Rudy Giuliani Seizes the Moral High Ground?!?!

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No, this is not a joke. Rudolph Giuliani really said the right thing, and there will very likely be a not inconsiderable political cost, because the right thing has very little intersection with the Republican party:

Rudy Giuliani, always a critic of his party’s social agenda, urged Republicans to “move on” from social issues after New York State’s recent approval of gay marriage.

“I think that marriage should be between a man and woman, but I think that the Republican Party would be well advised to get the heck out of people’s bedrooms and let these things get decided by states,” said the former New York mayor, who’s considering another bid for the Republican presidential nomination, in an interview aired Sunday.

Giuliani said that he thinks the New York vote was “wrong,” but “there are other things that I think are wrong that get decided by democratic vote.”

The libertarian streak of the Republican party, he added, should want to avoid “getting involved in people’s sexual lives.”

We live in strange times.

Quote of the Day

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Courtesy of George Packer:

Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.

Word.

I Think That He Needs to Get a Younger Girlfriend………*

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Baltimore is a strange place

So, I was driving home from shopping with my family, and come up on a motorcyclist who has a decidedly atypical companion on the back of the bike:  a skeleton, complete with wig and helmet.

I asked Sharon† to snap some pictures of this, and here they are.

As you can see, he saw our interest, and my wife snapping pictures, and posed a bit for us.

It added a bit of the surreal to this day.

*I cannot claim credit for this bon mot. It was coined by my daughter, Natalie.
†Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Can We Please Primary the Bastard Now?

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So it appears that Barack Obama is removing Elizabeth Warren as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

President Barack Obama has chosen a candidate other than Elizabeth Warren as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a person briefed on the matter.

The president’s choice is a person who already works at the consumer agency, the person said yesterday. Obama may make the nomination as soon as next week, another person briefed on the administration’s plans said.

The people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process isn’t public, didn’t name Obama’s choice.

Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, was appointed last fall by Obama to set up the consumer bureau until a director was named. Warren previously was head of the congressional watchdog panel overseeing the bank bailout.

And here is the kicker:

Raj Date, a top deputy to Warren at the consumer bureau, was on a short list of candidates to become director ………

………He was senior vice president for corporate strategy and development at Capital One and a managing director in the financial institutions group at Deutsche Bank. During the debate over Dodd-Frank, Date headed the Cambridge Winter Center for Financial Institutions Policy, a research group he founded.

So he’s replacing Elizabeth Warren with a f%$#ing banker.

But in classic fashion, he’s floating out a payoff for her to keep her mouth shut until after the 2012 election, the Democratic nomination for Senate, where she would run against Scott Brown:

Elizabeth Warren’s calendar sure looks like the schedule of a woman considering a Senate bid, or at least someone being courted by power players in Massachusetts and the Senate Democrats’ campaign operation in Washington.

In recent weeks, Warren has met in person or spoke on the phone with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, David Axelrod, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Massachusetts Democratic Reps. Barney Frank, Stephen Lynch and John Tierney. The phone call with Murray took place in early June, Roll Call has learned. Warren attended a community banking event with Tierney in the Bay State and dined with Schumer, a former DSCC chairman and an aggressive recruiter who remains involved in DSCC activities.

Warren’s May calendar, the most recently available public schedule, shows the Schumer dinner along with the other meetings and discussions.

Given that Warren is leading the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB business could, of course, have been the lone agenda item during these meetings. But for a woman some national Democrats and liberal activists are hoping will take on Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R) — a prime target in 2012 — her calendar alludes that she has at least been examining the possibility of a run.

So he’s putting her up to run against Scott Brown, which is a win-win for Obama.

Basically, she’s about the only person who appears to have a possibility to beat him right now, though it’s a tough row to hoe, because Brown is the consummate politician, and she isn’t.

If she wins, it’s easier to hold onto the Senate, and she gets buried as a low seniority Senator, where the old boys’ network keeps her far away from any meaningful banking regulation

If she loses, then no one could have won, and he keeps her inconvenient truths out of the press until his reelection.

With the Space Shuttle Program Ending

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Let me be contrarian, and say good riddance to bad rubbish.

I worked on the HRS (Radiator for the International Space Station) and among its specifications was a minimum stowed size which was large enough to rule out any other launcher.

It was one of the many lame ass attempts by NASA to create a need for the most expensive, least reliable, and least safe launcher that they ever created.

It was flayed in concept, it was flawed in execution, and it was flawed in basic architecture.

He’s Proposing Means Testing Medicare? Is He Nuts?

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One of the reason that Social Security and Medicare are popular are because they both apply to everyone.

When you start trying to exclude people for being too rich, you remove a powerful constituency that supports the programs, and save next to no money, and set the stage for a lower level, until finally the programs are just for the poor, and they are easier to kill.

Well, at his press conference, this is what Barack Obama proposed:

“The fall back position, the third option, and what I consider the least attractive option, is one in which we raise the debt ceiling without making any significant progress on reducing the deficit,” he said.

Obama specifically highlighted the possibility of additional means-testing for Medicare as a way to achieve savings, noting that his proposal would not affect current beneficiaries.

“You can envision a situation where for somebody in my position — me having to pay a little bit more — would be appropriate…and that could make a difference,” Obama said during a Friday press conference.

Will someone please primary the bastard before he destroys the last vestige of the New Deal? Please?

His narcissistic interest in accomplishing big things, even when they are bad big things, is profoundly troubling.