He’s running on the Bad Hair Party ticket
Well, Jim Trafficant has been certified as a candidate for Congress.
He got enough signatures.
He is running as an independent.
Beam me up Scotty.*
It should make for an interesting campaign in 17th district this year.
*Please, JFGI.
This actually improves the chances of the Democratic candidate, Sitka Mayor Scott McAdams, from “snowballs chance in hell” to long shot candidate.
So, after Alan Simpson has repeatedly shown an implacable hostility to Social Security spanning decades, and referred to every person in the us as freeloaders sucking at the tits of society, the Obama administration has decided to double down on this biased nutjob:
But at the White House, Jennifer Psaki, the deputy communications director, said, “Alan Simpson has apologized and while we regret and do not condone his comments, we accept his apology and he will continue to serve.”
The only reason to appoint him in the first place, and the only reason to keep him on after this incident is because Barack Obama wants, and, based on his behavior, what he wants is to gut Social Security.
Well, how about a lobbying group brazenly using its ability to bribe members of Congress in an attempt to get an industry to target its own customers with onerous positions:
The Recording Industry Association of America said on Monday that current U.S. copyright law is so broken that it “isn’t working” for content creators any longer.
RIAA President Cary Sherman said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains loopholes that allow broadband providers and Web companies to turn a blind eye to customers’ unlawful activities without suffering any legal consequences.
…………
This seems like innocuous whine, the sort that we have heard from the RIAA, the MPAA, the BSA for years, but it’s the threat that caught my eye:
In response to a question from CNET, Sherman said it may be necessary for the U.S. Congress to enact a new law formalizing agreements with intermediaries such as broadband providers, Web hosts, payment processors, and search engines.
The RIAA would strongly prefer informal agreements inked with intermediaries, Sherman said: “We’re working on [discussions with broadband providers], and we’d like to extend that kind of relationship–not just to ISPs, but [also to] search engines, payment processors, advertisers.”
But, Sherman said, “if legislation is an appropriate way to facilitate that kind of cooperation, fine.”
The basic attitude here is that they can ask Congress to jump, and the only response will be the query, “how high?”
It is a revolting state of affairs.
It should be noted that RIAA chief Cary Sherman later “clarified”, saying that, “A broader law enacted without their cooperation isn’t what the RIAA wants,” which really more a restatement of the the threat than anything else.
I hope that attitudes toward IP, and IP absolutism, are changing slowly. It seems to me that they are, largely as a result of the Blackberry case, when a patent troll nearly shut down the Blackberries in the US, in fact RIM’s inability to separate commercial users from government users is in large part why the troll finally settled, they realized that judges deprived of their “Crackberries” can get stroppy.
Case in point, House Minority leader John Boehner calling for Tim Geithner to be fired:
U.S. House Republican leader John Boehner called on President Barack Obama to fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the other remaining members of the president’s economic team.
In a speech today to the City Club of Cleveland, Boehner said Obama’s stimulus policies are failing to create jobs.
It would make me wonder about whether I was being too tough on Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, but I am reassured by the words of this guy:
[MSNBC Commentator Jim] Cramer during Tuesday’s Stop Trading! took issue with comments from a key House Republican, who called on President Obama to fire his economic team.
Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said during a speech in Cleveland that the president should get rid of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House economic adviser Larry Summers for starters. But Cramer stepped in to defend Geithner.
Boehner’s comments were “outrageous,” the “Mad Money” host said. “Geithner’s done a remarkable job.”
While I am troubled that I agree with John Boehner on this, I am reassured that I am still on the other side of the issue from Jim Cramer.
Jon Stewart showed just what Cramer’s opinions are worth.
I love Alan Grayson.*
*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.
Texas’s (where else) own Louie Gohmert.
Play him off, Jon Stewart:
He just made the obvious point that the current H1B program does not serve the needs of the American people:
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that the H-1B program has created “multinational temp agencies” that undercut U.S. wages and discourage students from entering tech fields.
Schumer said the H-1B program has morphed into program used to hire foreign tech workers “willing to accept less pay than their American counterparts.” He spoke on the Senate floor in advance of its approval Thursday of $600 million for border security that includes an H-1B visa fee increase.
He’s right, of course. The program is not about finding people who cannot be found in the US, it’s about importing cheap labor.
The rise in the H-1B fees is perhaps the best part of the law, thought, of course, the foreign body shops are apoplectic about this, claiming that “The US is giving a very strong signal foreigners are not welcome.”
My heart bleeds borscht for them, but they should consider themselves lucky: I would set a soft cap of something like 50K a year visas, and raise the rates when the number of applications exceed this.
As an alternative, you could go with a bidding system, with something like quarterly auctions, which would raise the cost from a $2,500 fee
The new law added $2000 for firms that have more than 50% non citizen/green card workforces, which is still too low.
But only because Howard Dean gets that honor today.
Once again, it’s Chris Dodd, who continues to audition for his 7-figure lobbying gig, because after sending out signals that she was a great candidate, but not confirmable, there has been a groundswell of support that appears to be dragging the Obama administration kicking and screaming into nominating her. (I still don’t think that they will)
So now Dodd has taking a new tack, saying that he is unsure if she is qualified:
“If the president wants to name her and it goes through the hearing process, then fine, she’ll have my support,” Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) told the Hartford Courant editorial board. “But she has to tell me more than just she’s a good consumer advocate or that’s she’s got a great campaign.
“It isn’t just a question of being a consumer advocate. I want to see that she can manage something, too.”
Dude, you ran for President of the United States, and you never managed anything bigger than a a Senator’s office.
<Facepalm>
The headline, of course is that he is calling for the gradual elimination of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:
“I think they should be abolished,” Frank said. “The only question is what do you put in their place. This is a situation where given the importance they had come to play in housing, you can’t tear down the old jail until you build a new one. And that’s a process that we’ve started.”
This is legitimately a big news story, but the rest of his proposal is far more revolutionary. He is a calling for an end to government subsidies to home buyers:
Frank went on: “I have been very critical for a long time that not everybody should be a homeowner. There are people in this society who for economic and frankly social reasons can’t and shouldn’t be homeowners. I do want some government help to build affordable rental housing.”
It’s this 2nd point that is a big deal. While the GSEs (Government Sponsored Entities) were a vanishingly small part of the housing bubble, as house prices exploded, their share of the market fell precipitously, what was a huge part of the market was the enormous subsidies made available to both home buyers, sellers, builders, and agents.
This distorted the market in some very profound ways, and it is very likely that if these measures had not been in place, we would have seen neither the bubble nor the crash.
We sacrificed our economy on the alter of home ownership.
Once again, the Obama administration has gone for a maximalist position on IP, and they are looking at making radio stations start paying license fees to performers, aka a “public performance right”:
The recording industry scored a significant victory today with news that the Obama administration will provide its “strong support” for the Performance Rights Act. The bill would force over-the-air radio stations to start coughing up cash for the music they play; right now, the stations pay songwriters, but not the actual recording artists.
I will say that this is a basically fair, since web broadcasters, satellite radio have to pay these fees, and the status of Radio is a historical artifact dating back something like 70 years.
The record distributors love this, and the radio stations (rather unsurprisingly) hate this law.
This, in and of itself, is neither surprising, nor particularly interesting to me.
What is interesting is that the RIAA is trying to cut a Verizon/Google type deal on this:
Music labels and radio broadcasters can’t agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.
The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. “The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,” thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is “not in our national interest.”
This is really pretty absurd. If you have an MP3 player, you can play the song that you want, and not tune into the repetitive crap that comes out of the increasingly conglomerate dominated commercial FM airwaves, though I could see listening to a sporting event.
On a deeper level though, this is profoundly disturbing, because it shows how blatant the incumbents in various segments of our society have become in divvying up the spoils through as privileged participants in the legislative process.
If people really want to change the tenor of Washington, they should start by taking on this sort of corruption head on, and get to Republicans and Democrats calling each other names later.
He’s called for the Lower Manhattan Islamic center to move:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has now spoken out on the Muslim community center in New York — saying that while the organizers are free to construct the project, it should be moved somewhere else.
“The First Amendment protects freedom of religion. Senator Reid respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built some place else,” said a statement from Reid spokesman Jim Manley. “If the Republicans are being sincere, they would help us pass this long overdue bill to help the first responders whose health and livelihoods have been devastated because of their bravery on 911, rather than continuing to block this much-needed legislation.”
If he weren’t running against Sharron Angle, I’d be rooting for the Republican.
Of course, he is running against Sharron Angle, so I am merely ambivalent.
Of course, it’s so transparently craven that it probably hurt him more, but cowardice when it is both self-destructive and stupid appears to be a basic Democratic Party value.
The DSCC is looking at cutting off Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, because with less than 3 months to go, she is down about 20 points in the polls.
These were her number before our current and former presidents went balls to the wall for her in the primary, and got a lot of money sent her way.
I don’t know why Barack Obama had decided on an unprecedented level of White House interference in primaries, I understand why Bill Clinton did, Lincoln is a protege of his, but the net results seem to be primary losses, weak candidates in the general, and a dispirited base.
Unfortunately, we just got money manager, and Corproatocrat Michael Bennet won the primary for Colorado Senate.
He’s bad on policy, and he was a money man who as superintendent, allowed the Denver School District in invest in disastrous interest rate swaps, when he should have known better, and that will be a real vulnerability.
In Connecticut, crotch kicker, and co-conspirator in steroid distribution, Linda McMahon won the GOP Senatorial primary, should make for a fun election.
Also, in the CT Governor’s race, Ned Lamont lost the primary to Dan Malloy, which makes me mildly disappointed, I still appreciate Lamont saving the Democratic Party in 2006 by showing that running against the Iraq war was a winner, but I really have not followed this race too closely.
In Minnesota, Keith Ellison, the only Moslem in the Congress, resoundingly wins renomination, good for the people of Minnesota.
Additionally, Bachmann ran unopposed, so we will have plenty we w the crazy from her as she continues to campaign.
It would have been better if the Senate hadn’t dithered and watered this down, but this should keep a few thousand cops and teachers employed:
The US House of Representatives has passed an aid package that will provide cash-strapped states with $26bn (£16.4) for healthcare and education.
The bill, which cleared the Senate last week, is now set to be signed by President Barack Obama, three months before the mid-term elections.
The president had appealed for the passage of the legislation, while Republicans condemned it.
The House had been called back for an emergency session for the vote.
The House voted 247 to 161 in favour of the bill, which supporters say will help to save the jobs of 100,000 teachers.
The package also includes $16.1bn to extend funding for the Medicaid healthcare programme for low-income Americans.
This has been a very busy August news wise.
So Barack Obama gets his 2nd Supreme Court Justice through the Senate.
I think that she’ll be depressingly conservative, but I’m a fan of Kagan’s old mentor, Thurgood Marshall as a good place to put the ideological center of the court.
I hope that her lack of judicial record will mean that she is a pleasant surprise, but I would take 2:1 odds against it.
They got both Senators from Maine to vote against a filibuster, and so it goes to the House, where Nancy Pelosi has promised to hold a special session to pass the bill.
It’s 26.1 billion in aid to the states for education and Medicaid, and it’s needed.
Michigan, Missouri, and Kansas, with the updated results here.
The only remotely close race was the MI governor’s race. The rest of the races, congressional and gubernatorial, were not even remotely close on the Dem side.
As to the ‘Phants, I really don’t care, but you can click on their tool too.
As a part of Congressional ethics reform, the Office of Congressional Ethics was established in 2008.
It’s co-chair is Porter Goss, whose aides both in Congress and while he was at the CIA, were convicted of corruption, which (unsurprisingly, it involved Republicans) and whose number 2 at the CIA was sleeping with a woman who was sleeping with a Russian spy at the time of he hired him. (My archive of my posts on him are here)
He was also the guy when asked about an investigation of the invasion or Iraq, he quipped that he would wait for a blue dress.
This is like putting Keith Richards in charge of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
This may explain why the only two Congressmen brought up on charges so far are Black Democrats, and, just heard on Olbermann, that there have been 8 investigations, and all 8 of them were of Black Democrats.
Jeebus! I understand that this needs to be a bipartisan commission, but you should not be putting rat f%$#ers on the commission so that they can attempt to gain partisan advantage.
The Republicans are now looking at repealing the 14th amendment, in effect repealing the Dredd Scott decision, which in addition to making slavery eternal, also declared that freed slaves were not US citizens.
<Facepalm>