The GrassCity Gazette

[AK Infinity]

"GOP is Specter of its old self"
By: John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei
April 28, 2009 04:15 PM EST

Arlen Specter’s break from Republicans is the latest in a trip-hammer series of reversals that leaves the GOP more beaten and less popular than either major party has been in decades.

Amid gloating among Democrats and recriminations among Republicans, the Specter divorce is both symptom and cause of the GOP collapse — leaving the opposition party on the brink of irrelevance in Barack Obama’s Washington and facing few obvious paths back to power.

The Pennsylvania Republican’s about-face, combined with the all-but-certain ascension of Minnesota Democrat Al Franken to the Senate, should soon leave Democrats with a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.

The last time either party had such a wide Senate margin was during the first two years of Jimmy Carter’s term in 1977-1978, when Democrats under then-Majority Leader Robert Byrd held 61 seats.

But Specter’s abandonment didn’t happen in isolation. No matter whether his move was motivated by principle, fear, or opportunism — or some combination of the three — it comes in the same month as a traditionally GOP-leaning district in upstate New York tipped for the Democrats. In the nine states of the Northeast, including Pennsylvania, there are only 15 GOP House members out of 83 seats, and now just three Republicans out of 18 senators.

Nationally, Republicans are at or near record levels for unpopularity. In January, Gallup showed Democrats with their greatest advantage in party identification since the organization began polling the question. Democrats have an eight-point advantage, 36 percent to 28 percent. That 28 percent tied the figure for the lowest Republican support ever recorded by Gallup.

The most recent precedent for Tuesday’s news was when another Northeasterner, then-Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont, left Republicans to become an independent and switched control of the chamber to Democrats.

But this is far worse for Republicans. In 2001, Republicans still had the House and the White House. Now they have neither. Instead, they have a Republican National Committee chairman who is drawing weak reviews for gaffes, they have House and Senate leaders — Rep. John Boehner of Ohio and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — who are more tacticians than public messengers. And there is little prospect of a national GOP spokesman emerging for another three years, until the 2012 election.

While many Republicans were jeering Specter as he headed for the exits, few were denying that the move was a setback, both in public perceptions and legislative arithmetic.

“It’s a huge blow to the Republicans’ ability to moderate any of Obama’s very liberal positions,” said former Sen. Rick Santorum, who once served with Specter as a GOP senator from Pennsylvania.

Tim Griffin, a former top strategist to the Bush-Cheney campaigns, echoed the widely held view of Specter among conservatives: “While I am disappointed to lose a Republican senator, he has long acted like a Democrat and belonged with them. He is finally going home.”

But other Republicans said that conservatives have left the Republican party with an exclusionary message. On the national level, said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), “you certainly haven’t heard warm encouraging words of how they view moderates. Either you are with us or against us.”

What’s notable about the Republican collapse is not simply its depth but its velocity. It was just a few years ago, in the wake of George W. Bush’s reelection, that books were being written on whether Republicans had acquired a virtually unbreakable hold on the levers of political power. After 2004, Republicans held a ten-vote advantage in the Senate.

The last time a political party suffered such grievous losses in the Senate during a compressed period was from 1976-1980, when the Democrats went from a post-Watergate high of 61 seats after Carter’s first election, to 45 seats as Ronald Reagan came in. The numbers are almost perfectly reversed: in the last four years, the Democrats have gone from a 45-55 deficit in the Senate after Bush’s reelection to 60 seats (or 59 with an asterisk) today.

In the category of silver linings, the fluidity of these numbers illustrates that politics can change quickly. Republicans hope that Obama, who is sharpening the lines of debate with big plans on spending, energy, and health care, might himself be an engine of GOP revival.

But Republicans will need to squint hard to see good news in the latest numbers. Current polling shows a tight generic ballot contest in the 2010 campaign for the House of Representatives: Pollster.com has Democrats outpacing Republicans by a slim margin of 39.9 percent to 38.6 percent. That’s down from a double-digit advantage before the 2008 elections. But even if those numbers hold up, it won’t be enough to bring the GOP even close to parity in the House: in order to close the 78-seat gap between the parties, they’d need to run well ahead of the Democrats in generic polling.

Alexander Burns contributed to this report.
© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

[MountyBounty]

Never Taser a man in a shooting range parking lot

killed 2 police officers

"When that Taser released after five seconds, he came up shooting..."

In November, when authorities arrested Cartwright for domestic battery, they listed his employer as the US Army Reserves. But Spooner said Cartwright was a member of a Florida National Guard unit based in Crestview. He said Cartwright also was interested in militia groups and weapons training.

An offense report filed against Cartwright the day he died outlines an angry husband who threatened his wife, kept guns and knives on hand, was "severely disturbed" that Barack Obama had been elected president, and believed the U.S. government was conspiring against him.

[wackdeafboy]

Possible Swine Flu Quarantines

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has sent a memo to some health care providers noting procedures to be followed if the swine flu outbreak eventually makes quarantines necessary.

DHS Assistant Secretary Bridger McGaw circulated the swine flu memo, which was obtained by CBSNews.com, on Monday night. It says: "The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines."

McGaw appears to have been referring to the section of federal law that allows the Surgeon General to detain and quarantine Americans "reasonably believed to be infected" with a communicable disease. A Centers for Disease Control official said on Tuesday that swine flu deaths in the U.S. are likely.

Federal quarantine authority is limited to diseases listed in presidential executive orders; President Bush added "novel" forms of influenza with the potential to create pandemics in Executive Order 13375. Anyone violating a quarantine order can be punished by a $250,000 fine and a one-year prison term.

A Homeland Security spokesman on Tuesday did not have an immediate response to followup questions about the memo, which said "DHS is consulting closely with the CDC to determine appropriate public health measures."

The memo from McGaw, who is DHS' acting assistant secretary for the private sector, also said: "U.S. Customs and Coast Guard Officers assist in the enforcement of quarantine orders. Other DOJ law enforcement agencies including the U.S. Marshals, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives may also enforce quarantines. Military personnel are not authorized to engage in enforcement."

Quarantines are hardly new: their history stretches at least as far back as the Bible, which describes a seven-day period of isolation that priests must impose when an infection is apparent. The word literally means a period of 40 days, which cities along the Mediterranean shipping routes imposed during the plague of the 15th century, a legal authority reflected in English law and echoed in U.S. law.

Congress enacted the first federal quarantine law in 1796, which handed federal officials the authority to assist states in combating the yellow fever epidemic. In response to the 1918 influenza epidemic, states levied quarantines and imposed mask laws – with the District of Columbia restricting residents to their homes and San Francisco adopting the slogan "Wear a Mask and Save Your Life! A Mask is 99% Proof Against Influenza." Public health authorities quarantined the entire campus of Syracuse University for two-and-a-half weeks in October of that year.

Until recently, the last involuntary quarantine in the United States was in 1963. Then, in 2007, Andrew Speaker, an Atlanta lawyer, was quarantined inside a hospital in Denver on suspicion of having extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis. It turned out that the CDC was incorrect and Speaker had a milder form of the disease.

The CDC's error is one example of how quarantines can raise civil liberties issues. If a suspected swine flu patient is confined to a hospital isolation ward for a week or two, who pays for the bills? What if private businesses find their buildings requisitioned in an emergency? Or if hospital employees charged with enforcing the quarantine fail to show up for work?

McGaw's memo on Monday also said that the federal plan to respond to pandemic influenza was "in effect."

The Bush administration released the National Strategy For Pandemic Influenza in November 2005; it envisioned closer coordination among federal agencies, the stockpiling and distribution of vaccines and anti-viral drugs, and, if necessary, government-imposed "quarantines" and "limitations on gatherings."

A Defense Department planning document summarizing the military's contingency plan says the Pentagon is prepared to assist in "quarantining groups of people in order to minimize the spread of disease during an influenza pandemic" and aiding in "efforts to restore and maintain order."

[AK Infinity]

YouTube - President Obama On Swine Flu & Arlen...

[aaronman]

The War On Drugs: What's Race Got to Do with it?

Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg argues that there is something "unlibertarian" about pointing out the racially disproportionate impact of the war on drugs:

The classical liberal is supposed to see people as autonomous and sovereign moral actors, not identity politics groups. I'm hard pressed to think of another area where libertarians are so willing to talk about racial or ethnic groups as a class....

Unlike other government policies that discriminate...on the basis of race, the drug war's much lamented racism is more of a byproduct than anything else....The drug war—despite the many authentic tragedies it produces—doesn't set out to punish blacks because they are black. It sets out to punish people who sell (and to a lesser extent buy) drugs and use violence to protect their trade. That blacks are disproportionately in this line of work is certainly lamentable.

It's important to remember the racist roots of drug prohibition, not least because this history shows how easy it is to demonize intoxicants associated with unpopular groups. But I agree that contemporary drug warriors generally are not motivated by racism. The fact that blacks are disproportionately arrested and punished for drug offenses is nevertheless legitimate cause for concern from a classical liberal perspective. Such uneven treatment undermines the rule of law and creates a perception that blacks are being targeted either out of racial animus (which usually is not true) or because busting street dealers in poor neighborhoods is practically and politically easier than going after less conspicuous white dealers catering to the middle and upper classes (which is more often the case).

Goldberg assumes that blacks are disproportionately arrested for selling drugs because they are "disproportionately in this line of work." That is not at all clear. Considerable research, including studies by the National Institute of Justice, indicates that drug users tend to buy from people of the same racial or ethnic group. (This report [PDF] includes a quick summary of the research.) Given this pattern, since whites are about as likely as blacks to use illegal drugs, they should be about as likely to sell them. Yet blacks, who represent 13 percent of the general population, account for about 40 percent of drug offenders in federal prison and 45 percent of drug offenders in state prison (PDF).

Further evidence that blacks' disproportionate share of drug arrests cannot be explained by disproportionate involvement with drugs comes from New York City's little-noticed crackdown on pot smokers under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Survey data indicate that among 18-to-25-year-olds, the age group where these pot busts are concentrated, whites are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to smoke marijuana. Yet a 2008 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that in the Big Apple blacks and Hispanics are, respectively, five and three times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.

These are cases where simple possession is the most serious charge, and the arrests typically occur after police trick the defendant into producing concealed cannabis, thereby placing it "in public view" (which converts what would otherwise be a citable offense into a misdemeanor). The NYCLU report suggests these low-risk pot busts are motivated not by racism but by a desire to pad arrest figures and generate overtime pay. If blacks and Hispanics suffer disproportionately, it's probably because they are easier targets. Yet that in itself is disturbing. Police seem to be targeting poor black and Hispanic men for treatment that would not be tolerated if it were aimed at affluent whites.

Here is one more example of how a racially disproportionate outcome can be troubling even if it's not deliberate: Federal sentences for crack cocaine are much harsher than sentences for equivalent amounts of cocaine powder, even though these are simply two different forms (smokable and snortable) of the same drug. The mandatory minimum sentences established by Congress in the 1980s treat crack as if it were 100 worse than cocaine powder—i.e., it takes 100 times as much powder to trigger the same sentence as a given amount of crack. Since the supporters of these sentences included black politicians who believed the crack trade was destroying the communities they represented, it would be hard to argue that the policy was intentionally racist. But because the defendants in federal crack cases were overwhelmingly black, the upshot was that blacks were punished much more severely than whites for morally (and chemically) equivalent offenses. Troubled by this outcome, and gradually coming to realize that the arguments for treating crack and cocaine powder differently did not hold water, many of the people who originally supported this sentencing scheme, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, turned against it.

From a libertarian perspective, the war on drugs would be unjust even if its victims were a statistically precise cross-section of the American population. But the fact that it disproportionately harms members of a racial minority that was long subject to official discrimination in this country is additional cause for concern, especially since the laws it enforces grew out of explicitly racist anxieties.

[aaronman]

Congress Looks to Bolster Iran Sanctions

Congress is taking up a bipartisan proposal which would give the Obama administration more leverage over Iran by toughening economic sanctions on foreign oil and shipping firms that aid Tehran.

A group of Democrats and Republicans introduced legislation Tuesday that would give the president expanded authority to crack down on companies that export gasoline and other refined petroleum products to Iran.

The Senate bill, which is expected to be mirrored by a similar House bill, is expected to pass because it has broad support from both Republicans and Democrats and is not opposed by the White House.

Administration officials have signaled they would not block the proposal despite recent U.S. overtures to Iran. President Barack Obama and senior U.S. diplomats have directly appealed for Iran to cooperate in talks over the country's nuclear buildup, but Tehran has veered between interest and rejection.

Despite its own large oil reserves, Iran now imports as much as 40 percent of its gasoline because it has limited capacity to refine crude oil.

Under the Senate proposal, the foreign companies could be barred from doing business in the United States unless Iran complies with international demands to halt its suspect nuclear program. The bill would also allow the administration to freeze the assets of those companies under U.S. jurisdiction.

The measure could apply to several major firms and their subsidiaries — among them oil giants Shell, BP, Reliance and Vitol. The bill would also target shipping firms that deliver refined fuel to Iran and even insurers for the ships.

"We need to give them a choice: you can do business with Iran's $250 billion economy or our $13 trillion economy, but not both," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who is a lead sponsor of the bill along with Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind. and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. There are 25 co-sponsors.

Lieberman said he had raised the matter with Dennis Ross, the U.S. special envoy who deals with Iran policy, and Ross had not objected. Ross is currently visiting Gulf nations to discuss the administration's overtures with Iran's neighbors and could not be reached for comment.

The State Department would not discuss the specifics of the bill but said it was generally supportive of any move that would help press Iran to address concerns it is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran has repeatedly denied it is seeking to build a nuclear weapon and is only engaged in a civilian atomic energy program.

"We want to do whatever we can to put additional pressure on the (Iranian) government," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

Bayh and other proponents of the legislation said the expanded sanctions authority would fit in well with Obama's plan to engage Iran by providing him an additional "stick" in the existing "carrot-and-stick" approach on the Iranian nuclear program.

"The purpose of this legislation is to give President Obama a new tool in his diplomatic arsenal to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons," said Bayh.

Experts believe that Iran is three to four years away, some think sooner, from having the capability to make nuclear weapons. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — as well as Germany have offered the country incentives to stop reprocessing uranium that could fuel a nuclear bomb.

Iran has thus far ignored the offer and continues to amass enriched uranium, sparking grave fears in Israel, which has not ruled out military strikes to deal with the threat, the broader Middle East and elsewhere.

Bayh and others said their bill would provide the "best opportunity" to stop Iran from getting the bomb "without a resort to military force."

[kokopelli]

If anyone used to listen to Glenn Beck on his old radio show, there were NWO conspiracy theorists that used to call in all the time. This was years ago too. Perhaps now there are too many things coming together to discount the fact that there is something going on. Even at its most benign, the current level of corruption in the government needs to stop and more people need to be aware of the dangers of the chemicals such as MSG and Aspartame in our food supply and how we are raping 3rd world countries for resources.

[Dickie4:20]

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Bank savings interest rates are lower than a conservative's belly


You would think that with the banks unable to lend much money because of liquidity problems that they would want to attract deposits. For every dollar a bank has on deposit the Federal Reserve will print up ten dollars to lend the bank at interest rate that is today about zero. Instead the banks are paying as little as .05% on savings accounts; effectively a zero return.

This should have the Obama Adm. concerned. One of the reasons we got into this mess was that people couldn’t get a decent return on savings and went looking for other things to invest in. Things that turned out to just be a series of big bubbles that inflated the economy. This hid the fact that we didn’t make anything anymore. This also gave the Chinese the illusion that we could somehow pay for all the stuff we were buying from them.

Of course we are still buying a whole lot of stuff from China and we still have no way to pay for it. Maybe Obama thinks another bubble would be OK or maybe he has a plan or maybe he is too busy with other things. Did that pig just sneeze?

[aaronman]

TOTUS Mutiny

YouTube - "Move It Up" Obama Loses Track of...

[aaronman]

Jane Harman-Nancy Pelosi-PowerRangers-AIPAC spy ring

Your Government Not at Work - Jane Harman Scandal...

[AK Infinity]

YouTube - Condi Rice Pulls a Nixon: If the...

[aaronman]

Know your history!

The Link between Obama & John Law

Obama's 100th day is upon us and the new president is ramping up an expansion of government that will place him alongside some of the most notorious dictators in history. CNN's senior political analyst Bill Schneider may believe Obama's personal qualities make him "the superpresident," but first and foremost, Obama with his $3.5 trillion budget sees himself as the new FDR, armed with a new New Deal.

But the New Deal wasn't new when FDR did it. The charismatic Roosevelt was more than 200 years behind John Law's Mississippi Bubble, described as "the first New Deal of the capitalist order," by John T. Flynn in his amazing book Men of Wealth.

In a chapter devoted to the money magician, Flynn cleverly calls Law the "evangelist of abundance." And conditions in France could not have been riper for Law's fiscal chicanery in 1715. France was completely ruined by Louis XIV, a ruler whom history has been much too kind to, according to Flynn. He ravaged the country he ruled, while being a "shallow, egotistical, pretentious coxcomb."

Louis spent vast millions on his palaces and engaged poets and writers to write of his virtues, long before the days of CNN. As Flynn explains, industry had not come to France, thus the king stole his wealth from small farmers and city-dwelling artisans through oppressive taxation.
John Law (1671–1729)


Those who managed to amass wealth in France did so by knowing "how to tap this stream of public money on its way to the government." There were no entrepreneurial fortunes being made, only parasitic ones.

While the typical French family lived as paupers, going barefoot and sleeping on straw, there were vast fortunes made by those granted government monopolies. Louis died in the fall of 1715 with his country hopelessly bankrupt. The treasury was empty and the army unpaid. It was proposed that the nation formally declare bankruptcy.

"France had come to the end of the road, as America did in 1933," Flynn writes, "save that she was impoverished in substance as well as in the collapse of her economic mechanisms."

But the regent did not want the public humiliation of bankruptcy, so "instead, he sought to accomplish the same end by a less frank device," and John Law's monetary theories finally had a taker.

When news reached John Law, who had been gambling his way across Europe, he quickly packed his bags and headed for Paris. Law, like Obama and FDR, was charming and eloquent. "He was handsome, tall, well-made, and full of dexterity and grace," writes Adolphe Thiers in The Mississippi Bubble: A Memoir of John Law. In addition to his physical attributes, Law "was a facile talker and a superb salesman," according to Flynn.

And just like Obama's and FDR's "deals," Law's prescription for what ailed France required no sacrifice. Instead, Law's plan called "for a pleasant journey along the glory road to riches."

Like all modern Keynesians, Law saw the economic problem as being one of not enough money. While on the lam from the law for killing Beau Wilson in a duel over Elizabeth Villiers's affections, Law spent time in Amsterdam and studied the workings of the Bank of Amsterdam. The world-famous bank had attracted debauched coinage from all over Europe since its founding in 1609. In the beginning, the bank held 100 percent reserves with the bank weighing and assaying coinage from around Europe and giving the depositor credit for an honest value in guilders.

But what sparked the imagination of Law was the Bank of Amsterdam's violating its charter by surreptitiously making the East India Company a loan from its vast pool of deposits. As Flynn points out, the foundation of modern finance and fractionalized banking was born. "Law perceived with clarity that this bank, in its secret violation of its charter, had actually invented a method of creating money."

And create money Law did. Although he started small with his privately owned Banque Générale, within a year all royal revenues were to be paid in the Banque's notes and these notes were to be cashed on sight at government offices, making these offices essentially branches of Law's bank.

After devaluing the livre, the French government became, as described by Flynn, "drastic in the extreme." Any person making a profit from state contracts or out-of-state offices during the preceding 27 years was to make an honest accounting with rewards offered to informants. "Wealth became a crime," Flynn explains. "People of wealth were in a panic," hiding their money and attempting to flee.

Two years into Law's system, the livre was devalued again, by 40 percent. Despite the devaluations, Law's reputation continued to rise and by the end of 1718, the state took over Law's bank, which became the Banque Royale. A nomadic gambler just three years before, Law suddenly had immense power, controlling the monopoly on coining money, the collection of tax revenues, as well as tobacco and salt revenues. His Mississippi Company (Compagnie du Mississippi) would buy up the debt of the French government, a proposal Flynn compares to Roosevelt's plan to extinguish America's debt by having the Social Security Board purchase it.

Law inflated the money supply through the Banque Royale, he created jobs through public-works projects; he attempted to release the hoarded savings back into business with the promotion of Mississippi Company shares; he exploited France's colonial empire, relieved the debt-ridden government of its debts, and was making money for himself and his patrons. Law even renounced his Protestant faith and was accepted into the Catholic Church after he made generous gifts to the St. Roch parish.

Law's system unraveled a mere four years after it began. People fled Law's paper for the safety of gold and silver, despite Law's attempts to demonetize and confiscate specie. Ultimately, Law's system would only serve to forestall France's bankruptcy, not solve it. Law himself would die near poverty a decade later.


"As a New Dealer [Law] was not greatly different in one respect from the apostles of the mercantilist schools — the Colberts, the Roosevelts, the Daladiers, the Hitlers and Mussolinis, and, indeed, the Pericles — who sought to create income and work by state-fostered public works and who labored to check the flow of gold away from their borders," writes Flynn who goes on to point out that Law's use of a bank to create money out of nowhere to pay for government programs was imitated by Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini.

"Law is the precursor of the inflationist redeemers," Flynn explains. "Like all the inflationist salvations, his career was short."

We can now throw Obama in with the other inflationist New Dealers, and with a compliant Treasury and Federal Reserve and their expanding monetary tools at the ready, he can do more damage than even John Law. We can only hope that his career will be short and that the Fed's days are numbered.

[Dickie4:20]

Texas, Run by Secessionist Guv, Has Received More Federal Disaster Relief Than Any State | Mother Jones

[AK Infinity]

msnbc.com Video Player

"I don't want to run auto companies, and I don't want to run banks, I've got two wars I've got to run already--I've got more than enough to do."

~Barack Obama~

[Dickie4:20]

Churchgoers more likely to back torture, survey finds - The CNN Wire - CNN.com Blogs