If he had been alive today, he would have added “and Republican’s complete lack of foresight.” The Iraq War, for instance, was going to be over in weeks. OOOPS. Holding the debt ceiling hostage would make them look strong. OOOPS. Scott Walker was going to dominate Wisconsin. OOOOPS. The Tea Party was going to be their personal conservative army. OOOPS. Sarah Palin would rally the GOP. OOOPS. Impeaching a sitting president would work out swell. OOOOOPS.

In today’s Piggie of the Week, AP Ticker considers how the Citizens United decision backfired on the Republicans.

This is the first “Piggie of the Week” I did all myself, from the writing to the one-the-street interviews, to the capturing and rough cuts, to the final edits. Big props and tons of gratitude to Brodzilla and Sean for the editorial guidance and advice, teaching me how to edit video and audio, including chromakeying, into the final package you see here.

I think it’s pretty ok for a first-timer, and regardless of any skips and jumps, I learned a LOT over the course of the project. I sure hope I get to do more of these.

Letters: Christine Flowers needs a dose of compassion for the homeless

Philadelphia Daily News
RE CHRISTINE Flowers’ op-ed about homelessness:

I am a chaplain at a psychiatric hospital in South Jersey and am also a retired military veteran. I also serve as a chaplain in Camden at the Trauma Hospital.

I see homelessness and mental illness up close and personal every day. She sees them as an “annoyance,” and I see them as God’s lost children.

One out of every four homeless adult males are military vets, and most homeless people suffer from some form of mental illness, drug addiction or traumatic stress syndrome.

I thank God every day that my tours in Somalia and Desert Storm didn’t leave me so traumatized that I couldn’t work.

I have an autoimmune disease (sarcoidosis) as a result of being in Desert Storm, I am blind in one eye, and I have severe rheumatoid arthritis. It is only the grace of God and a supportive wife that keeps me from being one of those lost souls who lives on the street or in a mental institution.

Ms. Flowers, when you wake up in your warm bed in the morning, try thanking your Creator that you have a sound mind, a roof over your head and food to eat – because it could easily have been you. Then again, like most hard-core conservatives, you talk about patriotism but never served in the military because you could afford to go to college.

Mark H. Stevens

Browns Mills, N.J.

That’s in response the most recent claptrap from the Daily News’ resident liar Christine Flowers, who writes of the homeless:

What if you live or work here, or simply want to visit without having to wade through sidewalks filled with people who can be a threat to our well-being? Does compassion mean we need to sacrifice the needs of the many to the demands of the toxic few?

I’m sure Sister Mary will think I wasn’t paying attention in religion class at Merion Mercy all those years ago, the one that taught me about loving my neighbor and doing unto others. But maybe, just maybe, I learned another important lesson.

God helps those who help themselves. And if they don’t want it? Call the police, and then let them do their job.

There’s no way Flowers learned that “God helps those who help themselves” in religion class, because it’s not in the Bible, it’s a Ben Franklin quote. And for that matter, Franklin was a Deist, and would have no patience for a birdbrain like Flowers.

Who, by the way, has a blog. it’s an excellent look inside her diseased mind, and filled with all the gems you’ve come to expect: idiotic snide remarks about the French (who she REALLY REALLY REALLY hates, it’s practically her pejorative of choice!), lies about Democrats and liberals, and of course her ongoing obsession with Lindsay Lohan.

You’re probably wondering, as a friend (a real honest-to-god writer) asked, “she gets paid for this?”

She does. And quite handsomely too, I expect. And that’s why I always close these treatises on Christine Flowers by saying that Michael Schefer and Sandra Shea, the editors of the Daily News op-ed page, should be ASHAMED of themselves for giving Flowers even one column inch.

While Rogers was once dubbed the “Prince of Pork” and McConnell has hauled so much pork he’s at risk for trichinosis, they are now converts to Sen. Paul’s anti-government gospel. McConnell says President Obama’s new budget is “unserious” and “irresponsible” because it merely cuts projected deficits by $1.1 trillion. “The people who voted for a new direction in November have a five-word response,” McConnell said, “We don’t have the money.”

Fair enough. So here’s my two-word response: Defund Kentucky. Cut it off the federal dole. Kentucky is a welfare state to begin with. The conservative Tax Foundation says the Bluegrass State received $1.51 back from Washington for every dollar it paid in federal taxes in 2005 (the most recent data I could find on the Tax Foundation’s website.) We need to listen to the people of Kentucky. They don’t want any more federal spending in their state—and they certainly must be appalled by the notion that they’re a bunch of welfare queens, living off the taxes paid by blue states like California (which only gets 81 cents back on the dollar), Connecticut (69 cents), Illinois (75 cents) and New York (79 cents).

And boy-oh-boy do those deadbeats in Kentucky take a LOT:

80 percent of Kentucky’s Medicaid bill is paid by Washington and more than one in five Kentuckians receives a monthly check from the Social Security System, totaling $8.5 billion a year. Washington also spends over $2 billion a year on flood insurance for Kentuckians, $667 million in crop insurance, and $877 million in mortgage insurance. Plus the Bluegrass State is home to federal facilities ranging from Ft. Knox to the Department of Energy’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah.

Begala identifies at least $10 billion in savings if we cut Kentucky off from the federal spending and welfare they say they hate. I say, “That’s a good start, but doesn’t go far enough.”

I think that the President and his budget team need to go through the budget line-by-line, and cut any spending for any congressional district that’s represented by a Republican. By doing it by Congressional district, rather than by Senate representation, you wield a scalpel instead of an ax. So, for example, Philadelphia wouldn’t see any change in its stream of federal money, but Delaware County, represented by right-winger and noted deficit hawk Jim Gerlach, would get cuts. when the citizens of Delco complain, the President could tell them, honestly, “Congressman Gerlach insisted that he didn’t want any spending, while Congressmen Fattah and Brady requested federal funds. These are different districts with different needs, and who am I to oppose the will of the people in any given district?”

Let’s face it: if the elderly voters in Elk County Pennsylvania want the government out of their Medicare, by all means give them what they want. If morons in Johnstown PA are opposed to federal flood insurance spending, give them what they want. They haven’t produced squat for decades, and no one would miss Johnstown if it was flooded again.

One question would be “how do we deal with the national highways that pass through these states”. Easy: we set up a toll system, one at each end and one at every single on-ramp. An express lane would segregate through-travelers from local residents, and perhaps levy a smaller toll.

Take the idiots at their word, give them what they think they want. Within a year, they’ll be crawling back for help, which I think they should receive, provided they pay a substantial security deposit.

I think the potential for savings will be incredible, not only allowing us to substantially close the deficit the GOP left us, but perhaps even allowing increases in federal funding for those congressional districts that AREN’T by idiots.

Have you heard that in the email dump were all sorts of plans to go after labor unions and progressive groups with smear campaigns:

the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents. In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to “generate communications” with Change to Win.

have you heard that the scheme targeted specific That blogger had plenty to say this morning:

The leaked report suggested numerous ways to destroy WikiLeaks, some of them likely illegal — including planting fake documents with the group and then attacking them when published; “creat[ing] concern over the security” of the site; “cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters”; and a “media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities.” Many of those proposals were also featured prongs of a secret 2008 Pentagon plan to destroy WikiLeaks.
[...]
As creepy and odious as this is, there’s nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous’ hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it’s being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely.

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I’ve written many times about this issue — the full-scale merger between public and private spheres — because it’s easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It’s not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it’s worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

That’s what this anti-WikiLeaks campaign is generally: it’s a concerted, unified effort between government and the most powerful entities in the private sector (Bank of America is the largest bank in the nation). The firms the Bank has hired (such as Booz Allen) are suffused with the highest level former defense and intelligence officials, while these other outside firms (including Hunton & Williams and Palantir) are extremely well-connected to the U.S. Government.

If you haven’t heard, you’re probably not using the Internet, because it’s not available in the New York Times, NPR, or any other “mainstream” media outlet, including print, tv, and radio.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s a BIG story when a group targeted by the US government and Bank of America, one of the biggest corporations in the entire world, manages to bring down one of their henchmen, David-and-Goliath style. And I encourage you, strongly, to read Greenwald on the matter, as well as this backgrounder by Techherald.

God bless Anonymous and Wikileaks.

I wonder why the New York Times doesn’t think this is a story. I wa-wa-wa-wonder…

Dear Senator Casey,

I am aghast and disgusted that you voted for this destructive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. With a net worth of more half a million dollars in 2008, you will clearly benefit personally from this cut. At the same time, you have caused taxes to RISE for low-income Pennsylvanians, including my brother (who i have cc-ed, so he knows what his senator is up to).

You have now helped open the door to social security cuts, raised the taxes of very low-income people like my brother, and given a massive gift to the wealthiest among us at a time when millions of Pennsylvanians are out of work. Your phone staff tell me that’s because you believe that the wealthy create jobs: ,a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101196.html”>this is simply not true, and all one needs to do to see the proof is look at George W. Bush’s record.

I will quote it for you:

“There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 — and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.”

And surprise, surprise: that growth ended when Bush passed tax cuts for the wealthiest. The rich don’t spend their money the way middle class and working class people do: in fact they tend to invest in in multinational corporations that send good American jobs to China. So unless you want staff to amend your statement to “the senator believes that the cut will produce jobs for people in other countries that are not the US”, I suggest you start coming up with a better excuse for this travesty of a vote.

Economists agree that this cut will not create jobs.

Tax cuts, as has been argued by almost every reputable economist, are the worst form of economic stimulus. You can read more here.

Senator Casey, I am asking myself why I bothered to vote at all. If all the Democrats stand for is tax cuts for the wealthy, they’re not really the party of working people. If the Democrats won’t protect Social Security, why should working people vote for them?

I am extremely angry with you today. I will not be supporting you when you run again. We already have a Senator who is hostile to the working class, bends over backwards to accommodate the wealthy, and who opposes reproductive rights. That Senator’s name is Pat Toomey, and I didn’t vote for him either.

I have copied this email to many of my friends and colleagues, and I encourage them to share it with their circle of friends as well. People should know what kind of representation they’re getting in DC (or in the case of Pennsylvania’s working class, middle class, and unemployed families, NOT getting).

This was a bad deal, and I suspect that you know it. Rest assured, working people will not forget this vote, especially when the economy fails to recover in 2011 and 2012. At that point, I expect someone with an actual economic vision for the state and the nation will primary you.

Sincerely,

Brendan Skwire

I didn’t contribute any money toward this ad, because it won’t accomplish anything. We all know what’s going to happen: the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest will be extended, because the President has less fight in him than an opossum.

Although I’m happy to run it, just for the sake of rubbing it in.

The Bush administration insisted that “enhanced interrogation techniques” — torture — were necessary to extract information from prisoners and keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks. Never mind that it was immoral, did huge damage to this country’s global standing and produced little important intelligence. Now, as we had feared, it is also making it much harder to try and convict accused terrorists.

Because federal judges cannot trust the confessions of prisoners obtained by intense coercion, they are regularly throwing out the government’s cases against Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

A new report prepared jointly by ProPublica and the National Law Journal showed that the government has lost more than half the cases where Guantánamo prisoners have challenged their detention because they were forcibly interrogated. In some cases the physical coercion was applied by foreign agents working at the behest of the United States; in other cases it was by United States agents.

By the time you get done reading the whole thing, your desk will have a six-inch deep imprint of your forehead. And here’s one last paragraph to gt you started:

Even in cases where the government later went back and tried to obtain confessions using “clean,” non-coercive methods, judges are saying those confessions too are tainted by the earlier forcible methods. In most cases, the prisoners have not actually walked free because the government is appealing the decisions. But the trend suggests that the government will continue to have a hard time proving its case even against those prisoners who should be detained.

The Bush Administration fucked it all up, the whole ball of wax. Bin Laden’s still alive, we lost in Iraq, we’re going to lose in Afghanistan, and now we have one more reminder of what happens when you put an incompentent C+ legacy student and his CIA father’s corrupt chums in charge of the government: when you try to skirt the law and due process, you end up losing. The bit on Binyam Mohamed’s torture is classic: they got the guy to name another prisoner as a terrorist… after they’d cut up his dick, stuck him in a cat carrier (or hung him by his thumbs from the ceiling, that’s what they mean by “stress position”), and kpt him awake for days and days under music blasting from loudspeakers. Gee, I wonder why the judge didn’t trust the evidence? I wonder how ashamed the Obama DOJ lawyers feel pushing cases this obviously flawed and weak? Personally, I’d recuse myself out of embarrassment and disrespect for my employer.

All of this was, of course, predicted by the rational people. Not that it matters.

So my remaining question is, when do we hang Jay Bybee and John Yoo on national TV from RFK Stadium?

And I mean that seriously: someone should be swinging, at the state’s expense, for a fuck up this big, this predictable, and this easily avidable. How much have we spent on this fucking war now? Trillions? Kajillions? Let’s just call it a mega-shit-ton of money and lives, and with absolutely NO FUCKING BENEFIT AT ALL.

The credit scores of millions more Americans are sinking to new lows.

Figures provided by FICO Inc. show that 25.5 percent of consumers — nearly 43.4 million people — now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. It’s unlikely they will be able to get credit cards, auto loans or mortgages under the tighter lending standards banks now use.

Because consumers relied so heavily on debt to fuel their spending in recent years, their restricted access to credit is one reason for the slow economic recovery.

“I don’t get paid for loan applications, I get paid for closings,” said Ritch Workman, a Melbourne, Fla., mortgage broker. “I have plenty of business, but I’m struggling to stay open.”

So let’s review. In 2005, Congress reformed the bankruptcy laws, making it much more difficult for people to obtain bankruptcy protection from credit card debt. Individual bankruptcies from credit cards are nowhere near the dollar amount of say, corporate bankruptcies, but that wasn’t really taken into consideration. At the time I predicted no good would come of this, and I was right: first, Washington Mutual and Wachovia admitted that their obsession with credit card debt destroyed their mortgage divisions, because the debt people hold on credit cards pales in comparison to the debt on mortgages, which, for the first time ever, people were walking away from. OOOPS.

I’ve further predicted (i don’t know where it is in the blog, but it’s somewhere) that eventually the credit card and credit reporting companies are going to have to refigure what “good credit” looks like, especially during this period of extending unemployment for a growing percentage of the country. back to the original article:

More are likely to join their ranks. It can take several months before payment missteps actually drive down a credit score. The Labor Department says about 26 million people are out of work or underemployed, and millions more face foreclosure, which alone can chop 150 points off an individual’s score. Once the damage is done, it could be years before this group can restore their scores, even if they had strong credit histories in the past.

I never use my credit card if I can help it, and in fact used almost all of my tax refund to pay off my cards (and in doing so did not stimulate the economy one iota). Right now 25% of Americans have shitty credit. Soon that will be 30%, then 40%, and (as Susie Madrak points out) soon 50%. The percentage of creditworthy borrowers is shrinking every day as our economy continues to contract (it ain’t a recovery with no jobs). Eventually, that pool will be so small that it’s going to hit the profit margin as people decide they’re not going to use credit anymore.

Toldya so.

Right wingers are fucking idiots. With Erick Erickson, doubly-so:

This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.

First of all, the census doesn’t ask you how often you flush your toilet or how often you go to work. That’s just standard winger paranoia.

But this notion that the government doesn’t “have the legal right” to make you fill out the census is just 100% WRONG:

The U.S. Constitution empowers the Congress to carry out the census in “such manner as they shall by Law direct” (Article I, Section 2). The Founders of our fledgling nation had a bold and ambitious plan to empower the people over their new government. The plan was to count every person living in the newly created United States of America, and to use that count to determine representation in the Congress.

For someone who seems to always be bringing up the Constitution, he sure is fucking ignorant of what’s actually IN the document.

So like the bunch of morons they are, the right wing has been telling their flock not to participate, warning of internment camps for conservatives, and other nonsense. And apparently, it’s working: in Wingnutistan Texas, participation rates are incredibly low. Northern Michigan, home to a substantial wingnut population, also has low rates. And so on.

Then, the right-wingers realized something (as usual, too late): because the census counts PEOPLE, it has ramifications for your POLITICAL REPRESENTATION, including redistricting. So a mad scramble to get right-wingers to participate ensued: Karl Rove, of all people, was trotted out to plead for conservative participation.

So now, having pretty much squandering their opportunity to participate in the census, the conservatives NOW say the census is deliberately skipping republican neighborhoods.

These people are nuts.