The GrassCity Gazette

[wackdeafboy]

That's fucked up! He should be in jail for life AND totured for life. Fucking cops.
That should be a attempted murder.

[Dickie4:20]

Former SKorean president plunges to death | theage.com.au

[AK Infinity]

For GOP, A Southern Exposure

Republican strength in the South has both compensated for and masked the extent of the party's decline elsewhere.

Saturday, May 23, 2009
by Ronald Brownstein

Founded in the decade before the Civil War as the Northern voice of union, the Republican Party today is more electorally dependent on the South than at any point in its past.

In the House and Senate, nearly half of all Republicans were elected from that region, defined as the 11 states of the Confederacy, plus Kentucky and Oklahoma. In each chamber, Southerners are a larger share of the Republican caucus than ever before.

Similarly, beginning with the 1992 presidential election, the South has provided at least 59 percent of the Electoral College votes won by the GOP nominee, including by George W. Bush in his 2000 and 2004 victories. That percentage is nearly double the South's share of all Electoral College votes and by far the most that GOP presidential nominees have relied on the region over any sustained period.

Republican strength in the South has both compensated for and masked the extent of the GOP's decline elsewhere. By several key measures, the party is now weaker outside the South than at any time since the Depression; in some ways, it is weaker than ever before.

Today the GOP holds a smaller share of non-Southern seats in the House and Senate than at any other point in its history except the apex of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's popularity during the early days of the New Deal. What is perhaps even more dramatic is that Republicans in the past five presidential elections have won a smaller share of the Electoral College votes available outside of the South than in any other five-election sequence since the party's formation in 1854. Likewise, since 1992, Republican presidential nominees have won a smaller share of the cumulative popular vote outside of the South than in any other five-election sequence since the party's founding, including the five consecutive elections won by Roosevelt and Harry Truman (1932 to 1948).

The Republican domination of the South "looked great when we were holding on to our Northeastern and Midwestern seats and continuing to sweep the South," said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster who specializes in Southern races. "The challenge arises when the rest of the country says, 'I don't believe the same things,' or 'I don't admire the same candidates,' as the South does."

Since Bush's re-election in 2004, the GOP has lost ground electorally in the South and the rest of the nation. But the erosion has been much more severe outside the South. That dynamic has threatened Republicans with a spiral of concentration and contraction. Because the party has lost so much ground elsewhere, the South represents an increasing share of what remains -- both in Congress and in its electoral coalition. The party's increasing identification with staunch Southern economic and social conservatism, however, may be accelerating its decline in more-moderate-to-liberal areas of the country, including the Northeast and the West Coast. "Many of the things they have done to become the dominant party in the South have caused them to be less successful in other places," said veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, a South Carolina native.

These intertwined trends -- the Republican Party's growing reliance on the South and the erosion of its strength elsewhere, particularly along the coasts -- have prompted some unusually public soul-searching within the GOP about whether the party has grown too defined by the unflinchingly conservative priorities of its most loyal region. Although the GOP congressional leadership includes more non-Southerners than it did in the 1990s, much of the party's most militant opposition to President Obama has come from Southern leaders, such as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

The Texan even raised the possibility of secession in response to Obama's initiatives.

In the view of former Rep. Charles Bass, R-N.H., who was defeated in 2006, "The current crisis of the Republican Party is whether it wants to be a regional party or whether it can try to expand ideologically and appeal to other regions."

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman, argues that the election of Republican governors in New England, the Midwest, and California refutes the idea that the GOP is becoming excessively Southern. "If it wasn't for the governors, it would be more of a danger, more of an issue," Barbour said. "When I became a Republican in 1968, we were not a national party. We weren't competitive in a lot of the South. And you don't want to ever get as a party where you are not competitive in any area of the country."

Although not as severe, the regional challenges now confronting the GOP resemble those that Democrats faced in the first decades of the 20th century, when Republicans dominated Congress and the White House. From 1896 until Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, the Solid South, which still rejected Republicans as the perpetrators of "Northern aggression" in the Civil War, provided the sole regional base for the depleted Democrats. But throughout much of that period, the Democrats' pervasive identification with the South made it harder for them to loosen the Republicans' commanding grip on the rest of the country. In those years of Democratic decline, "the South was the majority faction in a minority party," notes Emory University political scientist Merle Black, co-author of the 2002 book The Rise of Southern Republicans. "And now it looks like the Southerners are becoming close to a majority faction in a minority Republican Party."

Presidential Balloting

For seven decades after the end of Reconstruction, Republicans were pariahs in Southern politics. From 1880 through 1948, Republican presidential nominees did not win a single state in the Old Confederacy, except Tennessee in 1920 and Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia in 1928, when Democrats nominated Northern Catholic Al Smith. Over that long period, the only other Southern states that Republicans carried were in the outer South: Kentucky in 1896, 1924, and 1928; Oklahoma in 1920 and 1928.

In terms of presidential politics, Republicans made their first inroads into the South from 1952 to 1964, when Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Barry Goldwater each won five to seven states there. After the Democratic-controlled Congress joined with Democratic President Johnson to end state-sponsored segregation by enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the traditional Southern Democratic coalition shattered. In 1968, Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey won only one Southern state, Texas; Nixon carried seven; and former Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, a segregationist running as an independent, carried the other five.



Since then, Republican presidential nominees have dominated the South. In the five elections from 1972 to 1988, Republicans won all of the South's electoral votes three times (1972, 1984, and 1988) and more than 90 percent of them in 1980. During that period, the only Democrat to win a majority of Southern Electoral College votes was former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter in 1976.

From 1972 to 1988, Republicans ran nearly as well outside the South as they did in the South. In three of that period's five presidential elections (1972, 1980, and 1984), the Republican nominee won at least 90 percent of the non-Southern Electoral College votes. Likewise, the party's nominee won almost three-fourths of them in 1988 and nearly three-fifths of them in 1976.

Beginning in 1992, the GOP's fortunes in the South and the non-South diverged. Since then, the GOP has remained strong in the South. Even as Arkansas's Bill Clinton was twice winning the White House for the Democrats, the GOP won about two-thirds of the region's Electoral College votes. In 2000 and 2004, Texan George Bush won all of the South's Electoral College votes, even though his first race was against a fellow Southerner, Al Gore of Tennessee. In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama made potentially significant inroads into the region by capturing Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia -- Southern states influenced by outside migration -- but Republican John McCain still won two-thirds of Southern Electoral College votes.

Elsewhere, though, the GOP's presidential performance has tumbled in recent election cycles. Democrats have won at least two-thirds of the Electoral College votes outside the South in each of the past five elections. Even Bush won only about 30 percent of the non-Southern Electoral College votes in 2000 and again in 2004.

In all, across these past five presidential elections, Republicans have won an average of only 21.1 percent of the Electoral College votes at stake outside the South. That's less than the 22.7 percent of the non-Southern Electoral College votes they captured in the five elections from 1932 through 1948. In fact, as noted above, from 1992 through 2008, the GOP won a smaller share of non-Southern Electoral College votes than it did during any other five-election sequence since the party picked John C. Fremont as its first presidential nominee in 1856.

As the Republican Party weakened elsewhere from 1992 to 2008, the 13 Southern states provided 59 to 69 percent of all the Electoral College votes won by its presidential nominees. Only once before had the region provided more than 36 percent of the party's Electoral College votes. The exception was in 1964, when five Southern states were the only places Barry Goldwater won outside of his native Arizona.

The story is similar with the presidential popular vote. For many decades after Reconstruction, the GOP was annihilated in the South: None of its nominees, for instance, exceeded 30.1 percent against FDR or Truman. But the party established a Southern beachhead from 1952 through 1964 (winning just under half of the region's votes) and raced past the Democrats after Wallace's insurgency.

In all 10 elections from 1972 through 2008, the GOP presidential nominee outpolled the Democratic nominee in the South, except in 1976 when native son Carter beat Gerald Ford in the region, according to calculations performed for National Journal by Polidata, a political data analysis firm. In seven of these 10 elections, the Republican nominee won an absolute majority of Southern votes -- four times reaching at least 57 percent. As he did in the Electoral College, Obama made inroads in last November's popular vote: He won 46 percent of Southern votes, more than any other Democrat since 1976 except for President Clinton in 1996. Even so, McCain drew a solid 53 percent of the region's votes.

From 1972 through 1988, the Republican nominee also carried the non-Southern popular vote each time, according to Polidata. In 1992, however, the South and non-South diverged once again. Starting that year, the Democratic nominee has outpolled his Republican rival in the non-Southern states each time. And the Republican nominee has exceeded 45 percent of the popular vote in the non-South only in 2004, when Bush won re-election while attracting almost 48 percent. In 2008, Obama crushed McCain outside the South, receiving 56 percent to his rival's 42 percent, Polidata found. That 14-point difference was the third-widest margin of victory ever for a Democrat over a Republican in the non-Southern states. Only Johnson in 1964 and Roosevelt in 1936 exceeded it.

Overall, Republicans won just 41.9 percent of the cumulative presidential popular vote outside of the South from 1992 through 2008, the Polidata calculations show. That was a stunning drop from their average of 53.3 percent in the non-South from 1972 through 1988. It was also less than the 45 percent of the popular vote that the GOP won in the non-Southern states during the five elections of the FDR-Truman era, a halcyon time for the Democratic Party.

Like the GOP's showing in the Electoral College, the Republican popular-vote tally outside of the South since 1992 is, in fact, the party's worst performance for any five-election sequence since its founding. The last time either party fared so poorly outside the South over five elections was 1916 through 1932, when the Democrats won only 40 percent of the non-Southern cumulative popular vote. The Republican total was low in 1992 and 1996 in part because independent candidate Ross Perot siphoned off votes from both major-party nominees. But third-party candidates split the vote in earlier periods, too. And even considering only the votes for major-party candidates, the Republican average in the non-Southern states from 1992 through 2008 is the party's worst showing ever over any five-election sequence.

A Similar Pattern On The Hill

Republicans were just as marginalized in Southern congressional contests as they were in the region's presidential races for many decades after Reconstruction. From 1900 through 1960, Republicans held more than 10 percent of the South's House seats in only three Congresses. In the Senate, between 1878 and 1960, the GOP only once -- in 1924 -- held more than two of the region's 26 seats. In the 20th century, Republicans did not elect a senator from the Old Confederacy until John Tower won the Texas seat that Lyndon Johnson vacated in 1961.

In both chambers, Southern Republicans started advancing in the early 1960s. Their gains accelerated over the next quarter-century, as a powerful constellation of issues -- including school busing and civil rights, abortion, gun control, gay rights, taxes, and national security -- drove legions of conservative white Southerners from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

The Republican share of Southern House seats doubled from 7.5 percent in 1960 to 15 percent in 1964, crossed 30 percent in Richard Nixon's 1972 landslide, and reached 36 percent when Ronald Reagan routed Jimmy Carter in 1980. Dixie Democrats largely held their ground for the next decade, but in 1994, the backlash against Clinton's chaotic first two years allowed Republicans to win a majority of Southern House seats for the first time since 1868.

The GOP's Southern progress in the Senate followed a similar track. The party grew from three seats in 1962 to 10 in 1972 and 12 during President Reagan's first term, before losing some ground later in the 1980s. The 1994 Republican surge then lifted the number to 16, giving the GOP its first majority of the South's Senate seats since 1872.

After the 1994 election, Republicans controlled a majority of House seats not only in the South but also in the non-South (about 53 percent in each case). Holding House majorities both inside and outside the South was another post-Reconstruction first for the party, Merle and Earl Black noted in The Rise of Southern Republicans. Following the 1994 election, Republicans also controlled most Southern Senate seats and exactly half of non-Southern seats.

In a pattern similar to the presidential balloting, the GOP's experiences in the South and the non-South diverged after 1994. The party has remained strong across the South. From 1996 through 2004, Republicans controlled at least 17 Southern Senate seats (peaking at 21 seats) and consistently won about three-fifths of Southern House seats.

In both chambers, Republicans have surrendered some Southern seats since 2006 because of the public's widespread disillusionment with Bush's performance. (Most notably, Democrats have gained 11 Southern House seats.) But, the GOP still holds 56 percent of the region's House seats and 19 of its 26 Senate seats. Outside the South, though, the GOP's position has sharply deteriorated. In the House, the party's non-Southern majority held for only two years, falling to 49 percent in 1996. Through 2004, the party retained control of nearly half of non-Southern House seats. The bottom fell out in 2006. Over the past two elections, the GOP share of non-Southern House seats has plunged to just 33.5 percent. Only twice in the party's history has it controlled a smaller share of House seats outside the South -- after the 1934 and 1936 elections at the height of FDR's popularity.

The GOP has followed a similar downward trajectory in the Senate. Republicans held exactly half of the chamber's 74 non-Southern seats from 1994 through 1998, but their share fell to around 45 percent during Bush's first term. After sharp losses in 2006 and 2008, the Republican share of non-Southern seats has dwindled to around 28 percent (counting Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter as a Democrat). That is the smallest percentage of non-Southern Senate seats controlled by Republicans, except after the 1936 FDR re-election landslide that reduced the GOP to its modern low point in Congress.

The Republicans' Southern advance has steadily tilted the balance of power in the congressional GOP toward the region. With only a single exception, the share of the House Republican Conference from the 13 Southern states has increased in every Congress since 1960. (Only the Congress elected in 1986 broke the pattern.) The progression hasn't been quite as linear in the Senate, but even there the South tripled its share of Republican seats from 9 percent in 1962 to 28 percent in 1992, before rising steadily to about one-third in 2000.

The party's losses in other regions during George W. Bush's second term shifted the balance even more sharply toward the South. In the House, the share of Southern members in the Republican caucus jumped from about 37 percent in 2000 to 45 percent now; in the Senate, the South's share spiked from 34 percent in 2000 to 48 percent now (19 of 40 members). In both chambers, the Republican conference is now considerably more concentrated in the South than ever before. These percentages far exceed the contribution of the 13 Southern states to Congress's overall makeup (about one-fourth of the Senate and one-third of the House). They also represent the biggest Southern tilt in either party since Dixie provided a comparable share of House and Senate Democrats in the mid-1950s.

Pulled To The Right

From Reconstruction through the modern civil-rights era, a consuming -- and often insurmountable -- challenge for Democratic leaders was reconciling the priorities of a solidly conservative South with the views of the party's supporters elsewhere.

Republicans today face a similar test. Over the past 50 years, with the decline of the party's moderate wing, the GOP's center of gravity has shifted to the right. But more often than not, the South still defines the party's right flank.

Southern House Republicans, for instance, have overwhelmingly opposed Obama, even on the handful of issues where he's made inroads among GOP legislators from other regions. Nearly one-third of House Republicans from outside of the South supported expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, but only one-tenth of Southern House Republicans did so. Likewise, just 5 percent of Southern House Republicans supported the bill expanding the national service program, compared with 22 percent of Republicans from other states. (In the Senate this year, there's no such gap between Southern and non-Southern Republicans. Few moderates from any region remain in the Republican Conference.)

Overall, the GOP's congressional leadership is more regionally diverse than it was in the 1990s, when it was dominated by Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Dick Armey of Texas, Trent Lott of Mississippi, and other Southerners. But in Congress and beyond, Southern Republicans have frequently led the resistance to Obama, heatedly denouncing his initiatives. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has described Obama as "the world's best salesman of socialism." Southern governors such as Sanford, Barbour, and Louisiana's Bobby Jindal headlined the Republican opposition to Obama's stimulus plan, condemning it as a federal intrusion into states' rights and even rejecting some funding. Texas Gov. Perry trumped them all for provocative positioning when he suggested in April that Obama's plans were so onerous they might prompt Texans to consider trying again to secede.

Perry no doubt was trying to consolidate conservative support heading into his gubernatorial primary next year, not launch a genuine secessionist movement. But his inflammatory language, which ignited an inevitable cable television and blog conflagration, dramatized the extent to which Southern voices now define a Republican Party explicitly formed in the North as a counterpoint to Southern political influence.

Carrick, like many other Democratic strategists, believes that these ideologically assertive Southern Republicans are hurting the GOP's appeal elsewhere, particularly because cable television has made each party's leaders more visible than a generation ago. "It makes them look... extreme and that they are engaged in partisan political fights that are irrelevant to achieving success," Carrick says. "It is definitely a losing spiral that... is reinforced every day by the 24/7 news cycle."

Like Barbour, South Carolina Gov. Sanford rejects the idea that the South is disproportionately influential within their party. In any case, he says, the arguments that he and other Southerners have raised against Obama offer the party its most promising path back to power. Republican recovery "is probably less about new bells and whistles and more about the core of what made the party great in the first place, which is the angle of limited government," Sanford said. "I believe our political destiny is more closely tied to our roots than in trying to add new features."

A broad range of Republicans supports a return to small-government arguments. Nevertheless, some GOP strategists are gingerly suggesting that staunchly conservative Southerners are putting too much of their own stamp on the party, especially on social issues. GOP consultant Mike DuHaime, political director of McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, said that "everybody in the party is concerned" about the GOP's decline along the coasts and in the Upper Midwest. "It's important that we always keep our base [in the South] as part of our party, but we need to have the ability to disagree on certain issues. That's the only way we are going to expand," he said. Republican pollster Ayres concurs. "The South is an incredibly important part of the Republican coalition, but it's not sufficient to win," he said. "You may very well have standards that are somewhat different for a Republican in the Philadelphia suburbs than you do for a Republican in Alabama."

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, appears to have taken that thinking to heart, pursuing moderates for 2010 Senate contests in several Democratic-leaning states, including Connecticut, Delaware, and Illinois, where Democratic troubles or departures have brightened GOP prospects.

Democrats are also giving Republicans openings in several high-profile gubernatorial races in blue states outside the South, including Illinois, New Jersey, and New York. Those opportunities create some optimism among Republicans that they may have hit bottom in the non-Southern states. Yet, given the extent of the party's decline there, it may be some time before Republicans recover enough strength outside the South to truly threaten the generation-long southward migration in the party's center of gravity.

Meanwhile, demographic trends could create new challenges for Republicans within their Southern stronghold. The Republican position in the Deep South is fortified by a racial paradox: In the states with the highest proportion of black voters (such as Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi), Democrats usually attract the smallest percentage of white voters, partly because African-Americans are seen as dominant in the Democratic Party.

But the growth of other nonwhite populations, such as Hispanics and even Asians, is strengthening Democrats across the region, especially in the outer South, and even in portions of the Deep South such as Georgia. These "new minority" voters functioned like a thumb on the scale last year for Obama in Virginia (where they reached 10 percent of the vote) and North Carolina (where they comprised 6 percent). They were also instrumental in tipping Florida to the Democratic presidential nominee. "When you add the Democratic vote among African-Americans with that of the new minorities, that means the share of the white vote a Democrat needs to win goes down," notes Merle Black.

Eventually, Hispanic population growth might even threaten the Republican hold on Texas, where whites last year constituted just 63 percent of the vote, the same as in California. Demography alone probably won't flip Texas: To capture it, Democrats will almost certainly need to improve their performance among whites there, too. (Obama won just one-fourth of them, compared with twice that in California.) But at the least, Black notes, the growing nonwhite vote is allowing Texas Democrats to become competitive again in the state that has functioned as the jewel in the crown for Southern Republicans.

Questions about the GOP's regional balance may come to a head when the party picks its next presidential nominee. The 2012 race could pit several strong contenders from the South -- including Sanford, Jindal, and Barbour -- against competitors from other regions, such as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Carrick predicts that a Southern Republican nominee in 2012 would "solidify all of the current trends" toward Democrats among young people and socially moderate white-collar suburbanites outside the South. Another Republican Southern nominee, Carrick maintains, "would say that it is a regional party but [also] that the prevailing ideology in the party is too far out to be competitive."

Barbour, not surprisingly, dismisses this analysis. He believes that the next GOP nominee's region is less important than the candidate's skills and whether the country has lost faith in Obama. "Could a guy from Alabama, Louisiana, or Texas get elected president as easily as one from Illinois under those circumstances?" Barbour asked. "I think the answer is yes."

As on so many other fronts, the debate over the party's 2012 nominee shows how the GOP's Southern drift is forcing Republicans to confront variations of the political dilemmas that long confounded the Democrats. From Truman in 1948 until Obama in 2008, the only Democrats who could hold enough of the South to build a majority national coalition and win the White House were Southerners: Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. Republicans now face the mirror-image challenge of recapturing enough territory beyond the South to assemble a winning national coalition. For decades, Democrats ardently debated whether they could elect a president who was not from the South.

Before long, Republicans may debate with equal passion whether they can elect another president who is.


Copyright ©2009 by National Journal Group Inc. The Watergate 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW Washington, DC 20037
202-739-8400 • fax 202-833-8069 NationalJournal.com is an Atlantic Media publication.

[Dickie4:20]

Sonia Sotomayor is Obama's Supreme Court nominee - Los Angeles Times

[AK Infinity]

msnbc.com Video Player

[MountyBounty]

China Is Now in Firm Control of U.S. Debt Markets

It is hilarious listening to the propagandists try to “spin” the events in bond and currency markets to make it sound like the U.S. government is still operating from a position of strength.
While there are many Western, corporate-media outlets spouting such drivel, I'll use the Financial Times as my example.“China stuck in dollar trap”, crows FT on May 24th. Then, later “...[Beijing] has little choice but to keep pouring the bulk of its growing reserves into the U.S. Treasury”.
What somehow escaped this “analysis” by FT is that China won't touch any U.S. dollar asset except Treasury bonds. The monthly flows of capital into (or out of) the U.S., which is known as the Treasury Department's “TIC” report, tell a clear story.
So far, in the three months of data which have been reported for this year (Jan., Feb., March), the net result was an outflow of capital from the U.S. totaling $211.4 billion.
Does this number suggest China is “trapped” into buying U.S. debt?
The March number is slightly more instructive. This marks the beginning of the newest propaganda-offensive from the U.S. corporate media in asserting (yet again) that the U.S. economy was starting to “recover”. This was epitomized by U.S. court-jester Ben Bernanke prancing around, braying about “green shoots”.
In March, the TIC inflow into the U.S. was a paltry $23.2 billion. However, net purchases of U.S. Treasuries totaled $47.9 billion – meaning the net results for all other categories of U.S. debt was yet another outflow of $24.7 billion.
About the only useful piece of information in the Financial Times' propaganda was to note that China was only purchasing short-term Treasuries. This is highly significant for two reasons.
First, the shorter-term Treasuries are the most-liquid form of U.S. debt. It's no surprise that China is choosing only these types of Treasuries, since it is currently on a commodities buying-spree – which it is financing with U.S. Treasuries. In other words, while China may be a net buyer of U.S. Treasuries in relation to its transactions with the U.S., on a global basis, China is spending its U.S. dollar holdings at least as fast as it is accumulating them. Does this look like China is “trapped”?
The second important point about China's focus on short-term Treasuries is that this does very little to help the U.S. fund its gigantic, out-of-control deficits. The focus by China (and most other foreign buyers) on short-term Treasuries means that not only is the U.S. being forced to dump the largest glut of new Treasuries in history on this already-saturated market, but it is also being forced to try to “roll-over” additional, huge amounts each month as the short-term Treasuries mature.
Does this support the ludicrous assertion by FT (and others) that China “is helping Washington fund its growing budget deficit”?
How exactly will the U.S. “fund” a deficit certain to exceed $2 TRILLION (just in the current fiscal-year) with an outflow of more than $200 billion so far this year?
The ultimate rebuttal to the nonsense of the propagandists is to simply note what is happening in markets. Since the U.S. bond-bubble hit its peak late last year, U.S. Treasuries have already plunged a sickening 30% (see “U.S. Bond Bubble Bursts – bye-bye Equities Rally”).
Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar just hit its lowest level of the year. A look at this horrific chart suggests that the plunge of the dollar is much closer to the beginning than the end.
It is not China which is “trapped”. It is the U.S. government. Trapped by years of lies and statistical “padding” of its declining economy. Trapped by years of grossly over-spending. Trapped by the self-destructive machinations of the U.S. financial crime syndicate, which runs the U.S. government in all but name.
When China runs out of things to buy with its U.S. Treasuries, it will stop accumulating them – period! Instead, it will channel its huge budget surpluses into infrastructure development and other internal uses: for a huge economy which is still in the infancy of its development.
This is the story which the Financial Times should have written.

Seeking Alpha

[Dickie4:20]

Think Progress » Rove: Attending top schools doesn’t mean that Sotomayor is smart, but it proves that Bush is.


Rove - “She is competent and will be confirmed….She has an interesting and compelling life story…”
Charlie - “She is very smart.”
Rove “Not necessarily.”
Charlie - “What do you mean? She went to Princeton where she graduating with honors and then went on to Yale Law School….”
Rove- “I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools.”

[MountyBounty]

IRS tax revenue falls along with taxpayers' income

Federal tax revenue plunged $138 billion, or 34%, in April vs. a year ago — the biggest April drop since 1981, a study released Tuesday by the American Institute for Economic Research says.

When the economy slumps, so does tax revenue, and this recession has been no different, says Kerry Lynch, senior fellow at the AIER and author of the study. "It illustrates how severe the recession has been."

For example, 6 million people lost jobs in the 12 months ended in April — and that means far fewer dollars from income taxes. Income tax revenue dropped 44% from a year ago.

"These are staggering numbers," Lynch says.

Big revenue losses mean that the U.S. budget deficit may be larger than predicted this year and in future years.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Baby Boomer | Moody's

"It's one of the drivers of the ongoing expansion of the federal budget deficit," says John Lonski, chief economist for Moody's Investors Service. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.7 trillion budget deficit for fiscal year 2009.

The other deficit driver is government spending, which, the AIER's report says, is the main culprit for the federal budget deficit.

The White House thinks that tax revenue will increase in 2011, thanks in part to the stimulus package, says the report from AIER, an independent economic research institute. But it warns, "Even if that does happen, the administration also projects that government spending will be so much higher each year that large deficits will continue, and the national debt held by the public will double over the next 10 years."

The government may have a hard time trimming spending to reduce the deficit when the recession ends. The 77 million Baby Boomers— those born in 1946 through 1964 — will start tapping their federal retirement benefits soon, which means increased government outlays for Social Security and Medicare.

"It will be doubly difficult for federal government to reduce expenditures and narrow the deficit as rapidly as they did following previous recessions," Lonski says. At the end of the last major recession, in 1981, Boomers were in their 30s. Their incomes were expanding, as was their appetite for goods and services.

The Boomers now are in their 50s and 60s and unlikely to keep increasing incomes for long, which means that revenue from income taxes could flatten in the next few years. Also, Lonski says, they are more likely to save for retirement than spend — and consumer spending is a big driver of the economy.

"The American consumer led us out of previous recessions with some semblance of gusto," Lonski says. "They're too old to do it now."

usatoday

[aaronman]

Obama's Democratic Authoritarianism

He’s not closing Guantanamo, he’s continuing the "preventive detention" policy of the Bush administration under a new rubric ("prolonged detention"), he’s on board with military commissions ("reformed," of course) and the denial of habeas corpus – and last, but certainly not least, his supporters in Congress have launched a campaign to give him and his cabinet officials the power to close down the Internet in the name of "national security."

I won’t go on at length about the brazen hypocrisy and general slipperiness exhibited by Obama and his fans when it comes to key civil liberties issues such as these. Jack Goldsmith, former head of George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Rachel Maddow, progressive commentator on MSNBC, have done a superlative job of that.

Goldsmith, of course, notes the president’s turn on a dime with obvious approval, arguing that the Bush approach was haphazard and lacked any substantive legal basis, while Maddow is horrified that, instead of abolishing these Bush-era assaults on the Constitution, her former hero is intent on formalizing and "legalizing" them. Go here to see her deliver the kind of stinging rebuke to Obama and his administration that Rush Limbaugh and his fellow radio ranters could never hope to match.

Maddow strikes a powerful blow against Cheneyism-without-Cheney by pointing out that the president’s preventive detention policy – which claims for the U.S. government the right to hold anyone, including American citizens, indefinitely, without trial, without formal charges, and without telling anyone – is worse than anything Bush ever attempted in one important sense. The Bushian effort was secretive and strictly ad hoc; the Obamaites, however, are quite openly constructing what Obama calls "a new legal regime" to preside over this wholesale assault on the Constitution.

At least the Bush crowd had enough remnants of a moral sense to sneak around and try [.pdf] to hide their crimes against liberty and the rule of law. Although they tried to rationalize their actions with after-the-fact legal arguments, the effort seems to me rather halfhearted: they weren’t really all that concerned with legalizing their power grab. They just went ahead and did it, and damn the torpedoes.

The Obamaites, on the other hand, have a different style – but the substance is essentially the same, with the addition of a few minor tweaks and rhetorical flourishes. They want to bureaucratize and institutionalize the horrors of the past eight years and make what used to be unthinkable routine.

This Memorial Day should be devoted to reviving and refreshing the failing memory of the American people, or, at least, those millions who voted for Obama in hopes of a better day. Remember the campaign promises, the soaring rhetoric about "the rule of law" and our "constitutional liberties"? Remember this: "Gitmo. That’s an easy one: close it"? Remember the promise of "change"?

As for this last, well, yes, the Obama administration is indeed carrying out a sea change in the realm of civil liberties, there’s no doubt about that. It’s a continuation of the transformation effected by Team Bush and made possible by the post-9/11 hysteria, in which the leaders of both parties were caught up – and which they continue to stoke for political gain.

Witness Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s assertion that the jailing of terrorist suspects in American prisons somehow represents a threat to this country’s security. Obama himself is not above this: in rationalizing his escalation of the Afghan war and occupation, he continually harks back to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as if they justified the decades-long occupation of Afghanistan and surrounding areas envisioned by his favored policy wonks.

The baddies, Obama avers, are "plotting to attack America" from their "safe havens" in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Which raises the question: So the f**k what? How much of a "safe haven" do they need to "plot," anyway? Answer: A space no bigger than an apartment in Hamburg, Germany, or a small town on Florida’s Atlantic coast, where the 9/11 attacks were plotted and carried out.

The 9/11 attacks provided the neoconservatives with the opportunity they had been waiting for: as the Twin Towers came down, so did the traditional safeguards against tyranny that had been erected over the past 200 years by the Founders and their successors. The neocons, in effect, pulled off a coup d’état: as Bob Woodward has pointed out, their method was to set up "a separate government," with Cheney at its head, that did an end-run around the institutional safeguards built into the system.

Bush usurped the constitutional lines of authority that acted as a rein on the unrestrained use of government power. Obama’s "reforms" will make that usurpation permanent.

Change? You bet.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

I just have one thing to say about the recent arrest of four losers who were plotting to bomb New York-area synagogues: while the FBI was busy carefully setting up these would-be terrorists-without-a-clue, luring them into an improbable scheme involving Stinger missiles and in effect setting up a government-subsidized terrorist cell, how many al-Qaeda sleeper cells were going about their business undetected?

[aaronman]

They May Not Want the Bomb
Fareed Zakaria

Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What's the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were "un-Islamic." The country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that "developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam." Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini's statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.

Following a civilian nuclear strategy has big benefits. The country would remain within international law, simply asserting its rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a position that has much support across the world. That would make comprehensive sanctions against Iran impossible. And if Tehran's aim is to expand its regional influence, it doesn't need a bomb to do so. Simply having a clear "breakout" capacity—the ability to weaponize within a few months—would allow it to operate with much greater latitude and impunity in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Iranians aren't suicidal. In an interview last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the Iranian regime as "a messianic, apocalyptic cult." In fact, Iran has tended to behave in a shrewd, calculating manner, advancing its interests when possible, retreating when necessary. The Iranians allied with the United States and against the Taliban in 2001, assisting in the creation of the Karzai government. They worked against the United States in Iraq, where they feared the creation of a pro-U.S. puppet on their border. Earlier this year, during the Gaza war, Israel warned Hizbullah not to launch rockets against it, and there is much evidence that Iran played a role in reining in their proxies. Iran's ruling elite is obsessed with gathering wealth and maintaining power. The argument made by those—including many Israelis for coercive sanctions against Iran is that many in the regime have been squirreling away money into bank accounts in Dubai and Switzerland for their children and grandchildren. These are not actions associated with people who believe that the world is going to end soon.

One of Netanyahu's advisers said of Iran, "Think Amalek." The Bible says that the Amalekites were dedicated enemies of the Jewish people. In 1 Samuel 15, God says, "Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." Now, were the president of Iran and his advisers to have cited a religious text that gave divine sanction for the annihilation of an entire race, they would be called, well, messianic.

Iran isn't a dictatorship. It is certainly not a democracy. The regime jails opponents, closes down magazines and tolerates few challenges to its authority. But neither is it a monolithic dictatorship. It might be best described as an oligarchy, with considerable debate and dissent within the elites. Even the so-called Supreme Leader has a constituency, the Assembly of Experts, who selected him and whom he has to keep happy. Ahmadinejad is widely seen as the "mad mullah" who runs the country, but he is not the unquestioned chief executive and is actually a thorn in the side of the clerical establishment. He is a layman with no family connections to major ayatollahs—which makes him a rare figure in the ruling class. He was not initially the favored candidate of the Supreme Leader in the 2005 election. Even now the mullahs clearly dislike him, and he, in turn, does things deliberately designed to undermine their authority. Iran might be ready to deal. We can't know if a deal is possible since we've never tried to negotiate one, not directly. While the regime appears united in its belief that Iran has the right to a civilian nuclear program—a position with broad popular support—some leaders seem sensitive to the costs of the current approach. It is conceivable that these "moderates" would appreciate the potential benefits of limiting their nuclear program, including trade, technology and recognition by the United States. The Iranians insist they must be able to enrich uranium on their own soil. One proposal is for this to take place in Iran but only under the control of an international consortium. It's not a perfect solution because the Iranians could—if they were very creative and dedicated—cheat. But neither is it perfect from the Iranian point of view because it would effectively mean a permanent inspections regime in their country. But both sides might get enough of what they consider crucial for it to work. Why not try this before launching the next Mideast war?

[aaronman]

Obama Wants a Super Embassy in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD — The U.S. is embarking on a $1 billion crash program to expand its diplomatic presence in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, another sign that the Obama administration is making a costly, long-term commitment to war-torn South Asia, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The White House has asked Congress for — and seems likely to receive — $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space in the Pakistani capital.

The scale of the projects rivals the giant U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which was completed last year after construction delays at a cost of $740 million.

Senior State Department officials said the expanded diplomatic presence is needed to replace overcrowded, dilapidated and unsafe facilities and to support a "surge" of civilian officials into Afghanistan and Pakistan ordered by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Other major projects are planned for Kabul, Afghanistan; and for the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Peshawar. In Peshawar, the U.S. government is negotiating the purchase of a five-star hotel that would house a new U.S. consulate.

Funds for the projects are included in a 2009 supplemental spending bill that the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed in slightly different forms.

Obama has repeatedly stated that stabilizing Pakistan and Afghanistan, the countries from which al Qaida and the Taliban operate, is vital to U.S. national security. He's ordered thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan and is proposing substantially increased aid to both countries.

In Pakistan, however, large parts of the population are hostile to the U.S. presence in the region — despite receiving billions of dollars in aid from Washington since 2001 — and anti-American groups and politicians are likely to seize on the expanded diplomatic presence in Islamabad as evidence of American "imperial designs."

"This is a replay of Baghdad," said Khurshid Ahmad, a member of Pakistan's upper house of parliament for Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the country's two main religious political parties. "This (Islamabad embassy) is more (space) than they should need. It's for the micro and macro management of Pakistan, and using Pakistan for pushing the American agenda in Central Asia."

In Baghdad and other dangerous locales, U.S. diplomats have sometimes found themselves cut off from the population in heavily fortified compounds surrounded by blast walls, concertina wire and armed guards.

"If you're going to have people live in a car bomb-prone place, your are driven to not have a light footprint," said Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. Neumann called the planned expansions "generally pretty justified."

In Islamabad, according to State Department budget documents, the plan calls for the rapid construction of a $111 million new office annex to accommodate 330 workers; $197 million to build 156 permanent and 80 temporary housing units; and a $405 million replacement of the main embassy building. The existing embassy, in the capital's leafy diplomatic enclave, was badly damaged in a 1979 assault by Pakistani students.

The U.S. government also plans to revamp its consular buildings in the eastern city of Lahore and in Peshawar, the regional capital of the militancy plagued North West Frontier Province. The consulate in the southern megacity of Karachi has just been relocated into a new purpose-built accommodation.

A senior State Department official confirmed that the U.S. plan for the consulate in Peshawar involves the purchase of the luxury Pearl Continental hotel. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

The Pearl Contintental is the city's only five-star hotel, set in its own expansive grounds, with a swimming pool. It's owned by Pakistani tycoon Sadruddin Hashwani.

Peshawar is an important station for gathering intelligence on the tribal area that surrounds the city on three sides and is a base for al Qaida and the Taliban. The area also will be a focus for expanded U.S. aid programs, and the American mission in Peshawar has already expanded from three U.S. diplomats to several dozen.

In all, the administration requested $806 million for diplomatic construction and security in Pakistan.

"For the strong commitment the U.S. is making in the country of Pakistan, we need the necessary platform to fulfill our diplomatic mission," said Jonathan Blyth of the State Department's Overseas Buildings Operations bureau. "The embassy is in need of upgrading and expansion to meet our future mission requirements."

A senior Pakistani official said the expansion has been under discussion for three years. "Pakistanis understand the need for having diplomatic missions expanding and the Americans always have had an enclave in Islamabad," said the official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter publicly. "Will some people exploit it? They will."

In Kabul, the U.S. government is negotiating an $87 million purchase of a 30- to 40-acre parcel of land to expand the embassy. The Senate version of the appropriations bill omits all but $10 million of those funds.

We may be "out of money", but there's always room for the military industrial complex!

[Dickie4:20]

Sestak: Pending Blessing From My Family, I Intend To Run | TPMDC

Go Joe!

[Deutschbag]

Is the Abortion Debate Changing?: Understanding the latest opinion poll results - Reason Magazine

Is the Abortion Debate Changing?

Understanding the latest opinion poll results

David Harsanyi | May 27, 2009

As an atheist and a secular kinda guy, I practice moral relativism regularly. Still, I always have struggled mightily with the ethics and politics of abortion. Apparently, I'm not alone.

A new Gallup Poll claims that for the first time since 1995—when the question was first asked by the organization—most Americans consider themselves to be "pro-life" rather than "pro-choice."

The straightforward question asked of participants was this: "With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?" Fifty-one percent responded that they were pro-life, and 42 percent said they were pro-choice. These percentages are the reverse of what was found in the same poll in 2006.

What happened? Is it possible that the nation has undergone a gigantic attitudinal shift on the fundamental issue of abortion in only three years' time? Logically, it seems that the entire framing of the debate has become antiquated and far too simplistic for the questions we face. Anecdotally, I would say it's possible. I know I've changed my views.

After a life of being pro-choice, I began to seriously ponder the question. I oppose the death penalty because of the slim chance innocent people will be executed and because I don't believe the state should have the authority to take a citizen's life. So don't I owe a nascent human life at least the same deference? Just in case?

Now, you may not consider a fetus a "human life" in early pregnancy, though it has its own DNA and medical science continues to find ways to keep the fetus viable outside the womb earlier and earlier. It's difficult to understand how those who harp on the importance of "science" in public policy can draw an arbitrary timeline in the pregnancy, defining when human life is worth saving and when it can be terminated.

The more I thought about it the creepier the issue got. Newsweek, for instance, recently reported that 90 percent of women whose fetuses test positive for Down syndrome choose to abort. Another survey showed that only a small percentage of mothers even use the test. So what happens when 90 percent of parents test their fetuses? Does it mean the end of the disorder, or are we stepping perilously close to eugenics?

What about future DNA tests that can detect any defects in a fetus? What happens when we can use abortion to weed out the blind, the mentally ill, the ugly, or any other "undesirable" human beings?

Recently, Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare ruled that women are permitted to abort their children based on the sex of the fetuses. In the United States, a woman can have an abortion for nearly any reason she chooses. In fact, a health exemption for the mother allows abortions to be performed virtually on demand.

If you oppose selective abortions but not abortion overall, I wonder why? How is terminating the fetus because it's the wrong sex any worse than terminating the fetus for convenience's sake? The fate of the fetus does not change; only the reasoning for its extinction does.

Now, I happen to believe (as civil libertarian and pro-life activist Nat Hentoff once noted) that the right to life and liberty is the foundation of a moral society. Then again, I also believe a government ban on abortion would only criminalize the procedure and do little to mitigate the number of abortions.

Obviously, these are a few of the complex and uncomfortable issues to ponder. Maybe this poll tells us that the dynamics of the abortion debate are about to change, that Americans are getting past the politics and into the morality of the issue.

Then again, it's entirely possible that I'm just projecting.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of Nanny State. Visit his Web site at www.DavidHarsanyi.com.

[Deutschbag]

Wrong Question - Real Clear Politics – TIME.com

Wrong Question
Posted by Tom Bevan | Email This | Permalink | Email Author

Andrew Cline misses the mark with his essay this morning by asking, What If Sotomayor Were White?

Take everything that is known about Sonia Sotomayor and change three factors -- her race, sex, and family's initial socioeconomic status -- and the points cited in praise of her selection would be diminished by more than 50 percent. The complimentary commentary would be reduced to: Mr. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and has had a breadth of experience over his lengthy legal career. That's it.

First, I'd argue that high marks from Princeton and Yale Law and a lengthy legal career would be enough to qualify her for the Supreme Court. But Kline also misses the fact that she has a compelling personal story which, like it or not, is part and parcel of the selling of a Supreme Court Justice in the modern era.
The dividing line here isn't race, and it isn't gender. It's partisanship. The better question is: what kind of treatment would Sotomayor receive if she were a Republican? It doesn't require too much imagination, since just a couple of years ago we saw the way the Democrats in the Senate treated a very well qualified Hispanic nominee with his own compelling up-from-the-bootstraps story.
Democrats went out of their way to block Miguel Estrada from being put on a track (the DC Circuit) to even have a future shot at the Supreme Court, with Dick Durbin going out of his way to mention Estrada's ethnicity in an email as a reason for the Democrats to stonewall his nomination.
The bottom line is that both sides play identity politics when they can. It's just that Democrats are a lot better at getting away with it than Republicans.

[Deutschbag]

Whoops! Browser Settings Incompatible

Robert Gibbs should apologise to the British press for his sneering rant

Posted By: Nile Gardiner at May 29, 2009 at 00:05:00 [General] Posted in: Foreign Correspondents , Politics
Tags:

ABU GHRAIB, Barack Obama, Robert Gibbs




Politico has an extraordinary report on Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, launching a furious broadside against the British press. Here are Gibbs' sneering and condescending remarks:
"I want to speak generally about some reports I've witnessed over the past few years in the British media," Gibbs said. "In some ways, I'm surprised it filtered down."
"Let's just say if I wanted to look up, if I wanted to read a write-up of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I'd might open up a British newspaper," he continued. "If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I'm not entirely sure it'd be the first pack of clips I'd pick up."
Gibbs' juvenile comments followed an article in The Daily Telegraph relating to the President's decision not to release new photos reportedly showing appalling prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib by a tiny minority of military personnel. The straightforward news piece, hotly disputed by the White House, is based upon an interview with Major General Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the inquiry into the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
For the record I firmly believe the President was right to refuse to release the photos in the face of pressure from the ACLU, which would only further inflame anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world. However I cannot recall an instance like this where the President's official spokesman has blasted the press of a key ally - in this case America's closest friend, Great Britain.
This kind of attack would normally be made against the likes of the North Korean or Iranian state media, but in the current climate of "engagement" with America's enemies the White House is far more likely to attack its own allies. Gibbs' remarks have echoes of a senior State Department official's anti-British statements to The Sunday Telegraph after the appalling handling of the Prime Minister's visit in March.
Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington. Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.
Robert Gibbs' completely unwarranted rant against the British press is an absolute disgrace, and the President should disown his views. An unreserved apology by Gibbs is also in order.
For all its talk of "raising America's standing" in the world after the Bush years, the Obama administration is doing a spectacularly bad job of reaching out to its allies. Unfortunately this is the new face of America's public diplomacy, which will only serve to alienate public opinion across the Atlantic. Congratulations Gibbs - you've just made an enemy out of the entire British media, quite an achievement for the man in charge of selling the President's message.