Union intransigence and unrealistic expectations at Hostess Brands have forced the bakery to shut its doors permanently and throw 18,500 people out of work. So much for Big Labor caring about the little guy.And some of the unions types are cheering huzzahs at how big labor "stood up" for workers.
A down economy and two restructurings in three years left Hostess, maker of Twinkies and Sno Balls, in dire fiscal straits. The company warned its workers, union and nonunion, to make concessions or everyone would go down in a liquidation.
Instead, one union, the AFL-CIO-affiliated Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International (BCTGM), imagined the company was bluffing and went on strike.
The decision contrasted with the majority of the workers who didn't delude themselves. The Teamsters, hardly pushovers, issued this statement:
"Teamster Hostess members and all Hostess employees should know this is not an empty threat or a negotiating tactic, but the certain outcome if members of the BCTGM continue to strike. This is based on conversations with our financial experts, who, because the Teamsters were involved in the legal process, had access to financial information about the company."
That didn't matter to the striking union, whose 5,000 members pull in as much as $22 an hour plus medical benefits, get nine weeks of paid leave and a company pension. It ignored the warning and Nov. 15 deadline and now will take 100% losses on salaries and benefits instead of the 8% requested by management. Some union brotherhood — the bakers' action took their fellow workers down with them.
Obama has staked out a very dogmatic and inflexible position on class-warfare tax hikes and he obviously wants all of us to think only the “rich” will be impacted.Read it all at the link.
I think it’s foolish to penalize investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners and other upper-income taxpayers. What nation, after all, has ever prospered by placing obstacles in front of those who create jobs? France? Don’t make me laugh.
But I’m also amazed that anyone believes Obama isn’t going to screw the middle class as well. The simple reality is that there aren’t enough rich people to finance big government.
There are some honest folks on the left who admit that they want ordinary people on the chopping block.
* The New York Times endorsed higher taxes on the middle class in 2010.
* The then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer also gave a green light that year to higher taxes on the middle class.
* Earlier this year, MIT professor and former IMF official Simon Johnson argued that the middle class should pay more tax.
* The Washington Post also called for higher taxes on the middle class this year, as did Vice President Joe Biden’s former economist.
*I A New York Times columnist also called for broad-based tax hikes on the middle class this year.
I want to own up to and explain that earlier today I sent out two tweets about saying prayers for the people in Palestine and Israel and after hearing from my followers, I decided to take down the tweets because I realized that some people were offended and hurt by what I said, and for that I apologize. I should have pointed out my intentions behind these tweets when I posted them. The fact is that regardless of religion and political beliefs, there are countless innocent people involved who didnt choose this, and I pray for all of them and also for a resolution. I also pray for all the other people around the world who are caught in similar crossfires.That didn't satisfy the left's Nazis:
@kimkardashian kiss my ass and go to hell with Israel
— ENG.Mohammed Thwab (@thwab) November 16, 2012
Officials divulge that Obama was told it was armed extremists, not a spontaneous mob, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens.More at the link (via Jennifer Rubin).
U.S. intelligence told President Barack Obama and senior administration officials within 72 hours of the Benghazi tragedy that the attack was likely carried out by local militia and other armed extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida in the region, officials directly familiar with the information told the Washington Guardian on Friday.
Based on electronic intercepts and human intelligence on the ground, the early briefings after the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya identified possible organizers and participants. Most were believed to be from a local Libyan militia group called Ansar al-Sharia that is sympathetic to al-Qaida, the official said, while a handful of others was linked to a direct al-Qaida affiliate in North Africa known as AQIM.
The details from the CIA and Pentagon assessments of the killing of Ambassador Chris Stephens were far more specific, more detailed and more current than the unclassified talking points that UN Ambassador Susan Rice and other officials used five days after the attack to suggest to Americans that an unruly mob angry over an anti-Islamic video was to blame, officials said.
Most of the details affirming al-Qaida links were edited or excluded from the unclassified talking points used by Rice in appearances on news programs the weekend after the attack, officials confirmed Friday. Multiple agencies were involved in excising information, doing so because it revealed sources and methods, dealt with classified intercepts or involved information that was not yet fully confirmed, the officials said.
"There were multiple agencies involved, not for political reasons, but because of intelligence concerns," one official explained.
Rice's performance on the Sunday talk shows has become a source of controversy between Congress and the White House. Lawmakers, particularly Republicans, have questioned whether the administration was trying to mislead the country by suggesting the Benghazi attack was like the spontaneous protests that had occurred elsewhere on Sept. 11, in places like Egypt.
Obama has defended Rice, and he and his top aides have insisted politics was not involved. They argue the administration's shifting story was the result of changing intelligence.
U.S. intelligence officials said Friday, however, the assessment that the tragedy was an attack by extremists with al-Qaida links was well defined within 48 to 72 hours.
"We knew this was an attack by extremists, a terror attack, and that this was more violent than the embassy protests we saw that day," one official said. "But it also had an element of spontaneous opportunity and disorganization."
The Washington Guardian was first to report just 48 hours after the attack that U.S. officials believed the attack was linked to al-Qaida sympathizers and may have evolved from spontaneous early attacks to a more organized mortar shelling.
Among the early evidence cited in the briefings to the preisdent and other senior officials were intercepts showing some of the participants were known members or supporters of Ansar al-Sharia -- the al-Qaida-sympathizing militia in Libya --and the AQIM, which is a direct affiliate of al-Qaida in northern Africa, the officials said.
The use of rocket propelled grenades and mortars also indicated the players were engaged in more than a spontaneous uprising, though ground reports also showed some of the attackers were somewhat disorganized during the early waves of attacks, the officials said.
House Women Defend Rice Over Libya Comments (by 'defend' they mean 'infantalize') claiming she is being 'battered' hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie…
— kirsten powers (@kirstenpowers10) November 16, 2012
Hostess's owners have decided to liquidate rather than ride out a nationwide strike by one of the largest of its dozen unions, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. The Texas-based company owned by the private-equity shop Ripplewood Holdings and other hedge funds essentially gave up. On Friday it shut down its 33 bakeries and 565 distribution centers and prepared to fire nearly 18,500 employees en masse and auction off its brand and recipe portfolio.PREVIOUSLY: "Hostess Goes Down: Daily Kos Blames Corporate Greed and Mitt Romney-Style Liquidation."
Hostess posted sales of $2.5 billion in 2011 but lost $341 million and lacked the cash flow to hold out through the bakers union work stoppage that had only lost a few days of production so far. One reason is a labor-rule burden that by comparison makes Detroit look like Hong Kong.
The snack giant endured $52 million in workers' comp claims in 2011, according to its bankruptcy filing this January. Hostess's 372 collective-bargaining agreements required the company to maintain 80 different health and benefit plans, 40 pension plans and mandated a $31 million increase in wages and health care and other benefits for 2012.
Union work rules usually required cake and bread products to be delivered to a single retail location using two separate trucks. Drivers weren't allowed to load their own vehicles, and the workers who loaded bread weren't allowed to load cake. On most delivery routes, another "pull up" employee moved products from back rooms to shelves.
This year management negotiated concessions from some of the unions, including the Teamsters, but the bakers rejected a last and best offer in September. Then the courts gave Hostess unilateral authority to modify collective-bargaining contracts, prompting the strike. So now it will liquidate, instead of attempting to emerge from Chapter 11 intact.
The 18,500 layoffs are equal to about 11% of the net new jobs the entire U.S. economy created in October. The unions are blaming private equity, or Bain Capital, or capitalism, but the election is over. And so is Hostess.
At Yale University, you can be prevented from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on your T-shirt. At Tufts, you can be censured for quoting certain passages from the Quran. Welcome to the most authoritarian institution in America: the modern university—"a bizarre, parallel dimension," as Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, calls it.Continue reading.
Mr. Lukianoff, a 38-year-old Stanford Law grad, has spent the past decade fighting free-speech battles on college campuses. The latest was last week at Fordham University, where President Joseph McShane scolded College Republicans for the sin of inviting Ann Coulter to speak.
"To say that I am disappointed with the judgment and maturity of the College Republicans . . . would be a tremendous understatement," Mr. McShane said in a Nov. 9 statement condemning the club's invitation to the caustic conservative pundit. He vowed to "hold out great contempt for anyone who would intentionally inflict pain on another human being because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed."
To be clear, Mr. McShane didn't block Ms. Coulter's speech, but he said that her presence would serve as a "test" for Fordham. A day later, the students disinvited Ms. Coulter. Mr. McShane then praised them for having taken "responsibility for their decisions" and expressing "their regrets sincerely and eloquently."
Mr. Lukianoff says that the Fordham-Coulter affair took campus censorship to a new level: "This was the longest, strongest condemnation of a speaker that I've ever seen in which a university president also tried to claim that he was defending freedom of speech."
I caught up with Mr. Lukianoff at New York University in downtown Manhattan, where he was once targeted by the same speech restrictions that he has built a career exposing. Six years ago, a student group at the university invited him to participate in a panel discussion about the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that had sparked violent rioting by Muslims across the world.
When Muslim students protested the event, NYU threatened to close the panel to the public if the offending cartoons were displayed. The discussion went on—without the cartoons. Instead, the student hosts displayed a blank easel, registering their own protest.
"The people who believe that colleges and universities are places where we want less freedom of speech have won," Mr. Lukianoff says. "If anything, there should be even greater freedom of speech on college campuses. But now things have been turned around to give campus communities the expectation that if someone's feelings are hurt by something that is said, the university will protect that person. As soon as you allow something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings, anything and everything can be punished."...
In his new book, "Unlearning Liberty," Mr. Lukianoff notes that baby-boom Americans who remember the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest places on earth. But that idealized university no longer exists. It was wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors committed to political agendas.
"What's disappointing and rightfully scorned," Mr. Lukianoff says, "is that in some cases the very professors who were benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to advocate speech codes and speech zones in the 1980s and '90s."
Hamas and its acolytes are committing crimes against humanity twice over. They are deliberately targeting Israeli civilians with their rockets and missiles, trying to kill as many of them as possible including women and children. They are also using their own people as human shields, having deliberately hidden their rocket launchers among Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, thus deliberately exposing ordinary Gazans to the severe risk of being killed. In addition, the Hamas are committed not just to the destruction of Israel but also, by their own religious authority, to the genocide of the Jews, and indoctrinate their children accordingly into deranged, Nazi-style Jew-hatred.RTWT.
Yet despite these Palestinian crimes against humanity and genocidal incitement British journalists have been outdoing themselves to blame Israel for what has happened...
Meanwhile, the Palestinians appear to be up to their old tricks in staging patently absurd theatrics to dupe credulous and lazy broadcasters into thinking they are transmitting pictures of Palestinians injured or killed by the wicked Israelis. They did it years ago with the infamous hoax over Mohammed al Dura -- the iconic Palestinian boy whose televised supposed killing in a barrage of Israeli gunfire incited terrorist atrocities across the world, but who not only miraculously showed no sign of injury whatever but after he was pronounced dead was filmed peeping through his fingers.
Now the BBC have fallen for a similar example of ‘Pallywood’. Honest Reporting captures here the relevant footage. At 2:11 minutes in, a Palestinian in a beige jacket and black T-shirt, presumably injured in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike, is picked up and taken away. Yet at 2:44 minutes, the same Palestinian has staged a remarkable recovery and walks insouciantly away.
This is a Mitt Romney-style deal. Throughout the campaign, we read about Romney's past deals that went very much like what's happening to Hostess. Now we're watching it in real time—and seeing how when workers fight back, they're targeted for blame.The socialists will always blame capital, but as WSJ reports, the overall business climate had turned against the company, and big labor's hammering the nails in the coffin. Geoffrey Norman has more at the Weekly Standard, "Taking Ourselves Hostage":
Hostess is the maker of, among other things, Twinkies, a snack food that consists of doughy yellow cake wrapped around some sort of gooey filling. The sort of thing, in other words, to give nutritionists heart attacks when they merely think about it. The Twinkie, though, had its followers. Now, they have lost their small, sinful pleasure and some 18,500 employees of the company will be out of work. The whole thing recalls the scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff takes a hostage – himself – whom he threatens to kill unless his demands are met.IMAGE CREDIT: iOWNTHEWORLD.
Something like what is going on in Washington, where the people who created the "fiscal cliff" are now threatening to take the country over the edge.
TEL AVIV—Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with planes and artillery for a second straight day and began mobilizing tens of thousands of troops, while Palestinian militants mounted their deepest-ever missile strikes into the heart of Israel.Continue reading.
The exchanges, which have killed 19 Palestinians and three Israelis, broadened a conflict that had erupted into the open the day before. Israel responded to escalating missile strikes from Gaza militants by launching a blitz of airstrikes Wednesday that killed the top military commander of Hamas, the Islamist militant group and political movement that runs Gaza.
It was unclear whether Thursday's troop movements were designed to intimidate Israel's foes or to lay the groundwork for an invasion. Israel's leaders have said they are ready to launch a ground assault if rocket fire continues.
"The situation has all the elements and dynamics that could lead us down the road to a place we haven't been before," said Steve Cook, a Mideast specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's a very dangerous situation, and it's difficult to say what the Israelis should do."
The conflict's course from here on out rests largely with Israel and its neighbor, Egypt—the two nations that form the cornerstone of U.S. policy in the region, but which have seen ties fray in the months since an Islamist government came to power in Egypt.
U.S. efforts to calm the situation depend largely on Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, analysts said. Before becoming president earlier this year, he was a top leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, which has close ideological links to Hamas. With his election, he inherited oversight of billions of dollars in annual U.S. military support and a U.S.-brokered Israeli-Egyptian peace deal that has defined regional security for three decades.
On Thursday, Mr. Morsi ordered Egypt's prime minister to lead a delegation into Gaza on Friday, Egyptian state television reported. The visit would pose an unprecedented challenge to Israel, perhaps forcing it to scale back its military operations while the delegation is there. Mr. Morsi's activist response to Israeli-Palestinian violence marks a stark reversal from the more hands-off policies of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.
President Barack Obama and administration officials have been in contact with leaders of Israel and Egypt—staunchly supporting Israel's operation while pressing the Egyptians to rein in Hamas, officials said.
"I'm not going to speculate on where this might go, beyond saying that we all want to see a de-escalation of the violence and that the onus rests squarely on Hamas," said State Department spokesman Mark Toner. "It needs to stop its rocket attacks."
'You know, the math tends not to work," declared President Obama at his Wednesday press conference, as part of his explanation for why closing tax loopholes for the wealthy wouldn't provide enough revenue for a budget deal. Ergo, he says, tax rates must go up immediately for those making more than $250,000 a year, even if this means sending the economy over the January 2013 tax cliff.Well, it's revenge, of course.
The President must be getting bad advice because his math is mistaken in two ways. He's wrong on the revenue arithmetic of limiting deductions, and he's also wrong in claiming that raising tax rates as he proposes would do much better.
Regarding deductions, we refer readers to an October 17 study, in which even the liberal economists at the Tax Policy Center report that capping all itemized deductions at $50,000 a year for each tax filer under current policy would yield $749 billion in extra revenue from 2013-2022.
Reducing the annual deduction cap to $25,000 would raise an additional $1.286 trillion over 10 years. Lower the cap still further to $17,000, as Mitt Romney once suggested during the campaign, and the revenue increase soars to $1.747 trillion by 2022. Our preference is that Republicans hold out to use this revenue to finance a reduction in tax rates as part of a larger tax reform, but similar math applies in any case.
It's important to note that these revenue estimates are based on static analysis, a Tax Policy Center specialty that doesn't consider changes in behavior. But then that's the same kind of static analysis that Mr. Obama is insisting on. It's important to note as well that these estimates apply to capping the itemized deductions of all taxpayers, not merely those who make more than $250,000.
But the liberal class warriors at the Tax Policy Center also did the math for the distribution tables for this deduction cap when they were trying to defeat Mr. Romney. And, lo, they found that the top quintile of income earners would pay 96.2% of the higher taxes if deductions were capped at $50,000. The top 1% of earners would pay 79.9% of the higher tax revenue from capping deductions, and the top 0.1% would pay no less than 48.4%.
In other words, the rich would still be soaked and the middle class would largely be spared. Is that enough tax fairness for you, Mr. President?
As for Mr. Obama's implication that higher tax rates will bring a revenue windfall, he is simply being disingenuous. The Joint Tax Committee's budget score of Mr. Obama's proposal to raise taxes on capital gains, dividends, and income above $200,000 while reinstating the PEP and Pease deduction phase-outs yields merely $823 billion over 10 years.
That's barely more than the $749 billion from capping deductions at $50,000 a year. And at an annual average of $82 billion a year in revenue, it's merely 7.5% of last year's $1.1 trillion federal budget deficit. And that's assuming no negative impact on revenues from slower economic growth due to higher tax rates on savings and investment. To borrow a phrase, "the math tends not to work."
All of which makes us wonder why Mr. Obama is so insistent on raising tax rates now, even if he can get nearly the same amount of revenue from reducing deductions. Here's one guess: He really doesn't care if there's a budget deal this year that avoids the tax cliff.
By the way, if you’re looking for the latest episode of “Real Housewives of CENTCOM,” here you go. Two sources tell Fox News that the e-mails between Gen. Allen and Jill Kelley were in fact a bit more than flirtatious and amounted to the e-mail equivalent of phone sex. I confess, as I was reading the story, I completely lost the plot for a moment as to why it’s newsworthy and how we arrived at the point where we’re all interested in it. It matters, I guess, because Allen has been nominated to be the U.S. commander in Europe and this reflects on his judgment. Or because maybe, depending upon how many e-mails there are, it shows he’s been spending way too much time dallying with Kelley instead of attending to his duties in Afghanistan. I’m not sure how the FBI stumbled onto their e-mail correspondence in the first place, though, or even whether it was the FBI at all or some Pentagon agent vetting Allen for the Europe promotion. (See Marc Ambinder’s list of questions about FBI behavior in this case.) Did Kelley invite the FBI to read her e-mail initially in order to track down Broadwell, and then they inadvertently intercepted e-mails to her from Allen? If that was a risk, why would Kelley invite them to read her e-mail in the first place? Or maybe there’s more here than meets the eye.Actually, there's no need for all that speculation, especially if folks are keeping up with the investigations at Fox News. Here's Jennifer Griffin on last night's O'Reilly Factor, which clears up some of the points raised by Allah:
If newly re-elected President Obama was hoping to float into his second term on a cloud of renewed national optimism and bipartisan goodwill, he's likely to be disappointed.And see The TaxProf Blog, "President Obama Calls for $1.6 Trillion Tax Increase."
The latest IBD/TIPP Poll shows that, at least as far as economic optimism is concerned, America very much remains a house divided.
The bellwether Economic Optimism Index for November plunged 10%, from 54 in October to 48.6 in November, as a major part of the electorate took stock of the vote's outcome and didn't like what it saw for the economy.
The partisan breakdown for optimism is telling. Not surprisingly, sentiment among Democrats improved — 4.2%, from 70.8 in October to 73.8 in November.
But Republican poll respondents, who for months were below the break-even level of 50 for optimism , expressed an even gloomier outlook over the economy's future.
The optimism index for this group plunged 41.1%, from an already-low 42.1 in October to 24.8 in November — the lowest reading ever for Republicans.
Independents, who mostly voted for GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney, likewise saw a slump in optimism, but not nearly as much as Republicans. They fell 8.1%, from 47.9 in the October reading before the election to 44.0 in November.
TAMPA, Fla. — Jill and Scott Kelley moved here about a decade ago, taking up residence in a huge redbrick home with a spectacular view of the water on Bayshore Boulevard, the city’s most fashionable street. They quickly established themselves as social hosts to the powerful four-star officers who run two of the nation’s most important military commands.It's interesting. In the end though, it's what the scandal reveals about Benghazi that matters. Petraeus' downfall is tragic, but the administration covered-up the deaths of the Ambassador and his rescuers. And Americans need to know the truth about that.
The Kelleys were known for their lavish parties, with extravagant buffets, flowing Champagne, valet parking and cigars for guests from nearby MacDill Air Force Base, including David H. Petraeus and Gen. John R. Allen, who now commands troops in Afghanistan. “Tampa is the kind of community where, if you’re new to the community, you can carve out your own niche,” said Pam Iorio, the city’s former mayor, who recalls mingling with Mr. Petraeus and his wife, Holly, at the Kelleys’ home. “They decided to carve out a niche with the military.”
Now the social link between Tampa’s military and civilian elite is at the center of an unfolding Washington scandal that has already cost Mr. Petraeus his job as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and has ensnared General Allen, who was Mr. Petraeus’s deputy when he was here from 2008 to 2010.
At the heart of the investigation is the Tampa woman who prompted it: Ms. Kelley, 37, who received threatening anonymous e-mails that set off an F.B.I. investigation revealing that Mr. Petraeus had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. On Tuesday, General Allen was caught up in the scandal, when the Pentagon said that it was investigating whether he had engaged in “inappropriate communication” with Ms. Kelley; associates of the general say the messages were innocent, and President Obama voiced support for him.
Records show that Ms. Kelley and her husband, a doctor, have been subject to a string of lawsuits over debts, according to a report in The Tampa Bay Times, which said the Kelleys owed a bank nearly $2.2 million, including attorney fees, on a building they own. They also ran a cancer charity, which appears to be defunct. A 2007 tax filing, the latest available, shows the charity raised $157,284 that year, but spent just $58,417 on program services, described as conducting research to improve the lives of terminally ill adult cancer patients.
Their parties, though, were the talk of the town. In February 2010, a gossip column in The Tampa Bay Times reported that Mr. Petraeus and his wife arrived escorted by 28 police officers on motorcycles to a pirate-themed party at the Kelleys’ home, to mark Tampa’s Gasparilla Pirate Fest, an annual event. Guests dined on lamb chops and crab cakes, beside hot dog and funnel cake carts, the paper said.
Army bombs multiple terror targets in the Gaza Strip, killing up to six, as Operation Pillar of Defense commences against Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets; Hamas’s armed wing warns assassination of top activist has ‘opened the gates of hell’.
Despite their weak candidate, Republicans increased their share of the presidential vote among many major demographic groups. Compared with 2008, they made significant gains among men (four percentage points), whites (four points), younger voters (six points), white Catholics (seven points) and Jews (nine points). Mr. Romney also carried the independent vote 50% to 45%. Four years ago, independents voted for Mr. Obama 52% to 44%.There's still a lot of work to do, but I think digging down into the data will help Republicans (if not conservatives) grapple with their loss last week. That said, I think spirits are still pretty depressed on the right, so it's going to take a lot more than a few poll analyses for a lot of folks to snap out of it. Of course, this Petraeus scandal is dramatically weakening the credibility of Obama's reelection, so there's promise not only in congressional investigations, but in the invigoration of the grassroots against the historically corrupt administration. People gotta start taking this country back. It can be done and it will be done.
Republicans can take some solace from these gains. In addition, only 43% of voters this year said they wanted an activist government (compared with 52% in 2008), and 49% continued to disapprove of Mr. Obama's health-care law (compared with 44% approving).
In short, the current American electorate is hardly stacked against the Republican Party. But Republicans should recognize that, on balance, Americans remain moderate—holding a mix of liberal and conservative views. They generally believe that small government is better and that ObamaCare is bad. But the exit poll shows that 59% believe abortion should be legal, 65% support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and a surprising plurality support legalizing same-sex marriage in their states.
Threading the ideological needle with this electorate is vital for the Republicans in the future—and for the Democrats, too.
“This is all Staten Island is to them – a starting line and a dump,” Chris Rich, a Staten Island firefighter tells us as he cleans up debris and mud from his gutted house. Throughout his neighborhood today, New York City marathon runners prance through decimated streets, leaping over piles of donations yet to be distributed, bringing severe congestion to a community just beginning to regain its senses after the catastrophe. To place it in even sharper relief, according to Rich, it was only that very morning that authorities had gotten around to removing three bodies floating in Bay Street Marina. One was tied to a pier to avoid it washing down shore. The person who reported the bodies was told that they would be left for the time being as efforts were to be exclusively “rescue” oriented, eschewing “recovery.” While the Staten Islanders were, and are, still counting their dead, they felt as if they were expected to indulge catastrophe tourism.An amazing post, a classic of citizen's journalism.
Last week House Speaker John Boehner offered to increase tax revenues as part of a tax and spending deal, but AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has said that isn't good enough. The President must settle for nothing less than raising taxes by letting the Bush tax rates expire.
As for spending, well, Mr. Trumka said that Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats must oppose "any cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits." His comrade, Max Richtman of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, explained that what should be "on the table" for "deficit reduction" are "tax cuts for the wealthy." Variations of this theme were expressed by MoveOn.org Director Justin Ruben to Afscme chief Lee Saunders.
Yet as President Obama knows, all the higher tax revenue he is asking for would only raise $82 billion a year under the most optimistic circumstances. The deficit last fiscal year was $1.1 trillion, and that's before ObamaCare kicks in and the baby boom cohort keeps retiring. Everyone talks about Republicans and taxes as an obstacle to bipartisanship, but the liberal delusion that entitlements can be financed by taxes alone is something Mr. Obama needs to address if he wants a successful second term.
In an effort to cover a trail of messages between him and his mistress, former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus reportedly used a tactic favored by terrorists and teenagers -- communicating via draft e-mail.That sounds so freaky in the context of Petraeus. But then again, all of this is freaky in the context of Petraeus. But RTWT.
Since the 9/11 attack on the U.S consulate in Benghazi, we've been told an anti-Islam YouTube video was to blame. We know the consulate was attacked multiple times throughout 2012 and U.S Ambassador Chris Stevens had received multiple threats from al Qaeda before being killed on 9/11 with three other Americans. From the beginning the story never added up and the YouTube video excuse has been proven a complete lie, but the recent revelations of an affair between General David Petraeus and biographer Paula Broadwell may have given us the missing link to this whole thing. It isn't the affair itself that gives us more information, but the affair bringing attention to words spoken by Broadwell in Denver on October 26. She said the CIA was holding prisoners at the annex in Benghazi and Fox News has confirmed with another source this was the case.Here's the report referenced there, at Fox News: "EXCLUSIVE: Petraeus mistress may have revealed classified information at Denver speech on real reason for Libya attack."
This explains two things. The U.S. consulate in Benghazi was being repeatedly attacked because prisoners were being held and because President Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning secret CIA prisons, they had to find an alternative story to cover-up what really happened, hence the YouTube video.
I think it’s important to situate “California is ungovernable”–which has *never* been true in any recognizable sense–in the broader political discussion about American political life. For all its issues and faults, California is the closest thing that the U.S. has to European-style social democracy. It has strong state-provided social services, such as a very robust state OSHA program, relatively pro-worker wage-and-hour laws, and a massively successful (if declining) public university system–which provides far more to state public life than in other states with premier universities, such as Massachusetts, where such are privatized. It has politically active unions like the CTA and CNA on the winning side. It has strong environmental protections and lots of public lands and public trusts. It has a broadly politically empowered populus in its major cities; and so forth.This state's bankrupt, but for these idiot commies, it's like heaven on earth.
This isn’t to say that California is perfect, by any means. But it is to say that reiterating the discourses without situating them in those broader conversations often tends to legitimize a discourse that implies that social democracy is “ungovernable” and neoliberalism is a neutral, invisibile, natural state of affairs.
In a sluggish economy
Inflation,recession
Hits the land of the free
Standing in unemployment lines
Blame the government for hard time
We just get by
However we can
We all gotta duck
When the shit hits the fan
10 kids in a cadillac
Stand in lines for welfare checks
Let's all leach off the state
Gee!the money's really great!
Soup lines
Free loaves of bread
5lb blocks of cheese
Bags of groceries
Social security
Has run out on you and me
We do whatever we can
Gotta duck when the shit hits the fan...
WASHINGTON—The White House plans an aggressive public campaign to build support for its approach to reduce the deficit through tax increases and spending cuts, a sharp contrast to its private talks with Republicans that faltered last year.Continue reading comrades!
President Barack Obama will meet with labor leaders Tuesday and a number of chief executives on Wednesday, in an effort to solidify backing for his proposals.
Both groups carry sway with different segments of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Mr. Obama also plans to travel outside of Washington to try and broaden national support for his proposal that includes tax increases on the wealthy—which White House officials believe won public backing in last week's election.
His meetings with labor and business leaders come before he meets with congressional leaders Friday, evidence the White House believes Mr. Obama can use momentum from his re-election to marshal outside support and heighten pressure on Republicans to agree to tax increases on upper-income earners.
The strategy comes as many Republicans appear to have softened their antitax rhetoric in the wake of the election, with many openly acknowledging that higher taxes will likely be part of any plan to reduce the deficit.
Mr. Obama has planned the meetings as policy makers start work to craft a package of deficit-reduction measures that could come in place of the so-called fiscal cliff, the mandatory spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to begin in January.
Several Republicans, including House Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.), have said in recent days higher tax revenue could be part of a deal. They have refused to consider higher tax rates, saying that new revenue should come instead from new limits on deductions and other tax breaks, suggesting one potential approach to a deal.
Republicans also say significant changes to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid would have to be part of any package.
Stirred by a decade of astronomical growth, economic heartache and the rising political influence of Latinos, the Inland Empire proved treacherous territory last week for a Republican Party that just a decade ago considered it the new GOP frontier.The new normal.
Voters in Riverside and San Bernardino counties on Tuesday elected three Democrats to Congress — two Latinos and a gay Asian American — after having sent only two Democrats to Washington in the last four decades.
Before the election, Republicans represented the city of Riverside in Congress, the state Senate and the Assembly. On Tuesday, Democrats took all three seats.
The rumblings of an impending seismic shift in Inland Empire politics have been heard for years, with pressure slowly building as the GOP's share of voters declined. California's new political boundaries, crafted last year, allowed pent-up Democratic power to push to the surface and reshape a political landscape that's now more evenly divided. Contests will be much harder to predict.
"The Inland Empire was the third bastion for the GOP after Orange County and San Diego," said Shaun Bowler, a political scientist from UC Riverside. "That's not true anymore, which is a worry for the Republican Party. They've got to work harder than they have in the past."
BOSTON—Mitt Romney is one of the wealthiest men ever to run for president. And yet the lack of money earlier this year stalled his campaign, and he never really recovered.Keep in mind, while Romney was struggling, the Democrats were simultaneously running ads in those very swing states, hammering the GOP nominee as a greedy, rapacious capitalist downsizing jobs and destroying middle class prosperity. Places like Ohio were inundated with these attacks. The progressives lied ruthlessly. It was unrelenting, merciless, and literally evil in its single-minded focus on character assassination. Romney wasn't ready for it. I wrote about some of Romney's problems in September, but I had no idea about the money deficits.
The GOP nominee emerged late last spring from a long and bruising Republican primary season more damaged than commonly realized. His image with voters had eroded as he endured heavy attacks from Republicans over his business record. He also felt compelled to take a hard line on immigration—one that was the subject of debate among his advisers—that hurt his standing with Hispanic voters.
More than that, Mr. Romney had spent so much money winning the nomination that he was low on cash; aides, seeing the problem taking shape, had once considered accepting federal financing for the campaign rather than rely on private donations.
The campaign's fate led on Wednesday to second-guessing and recriminations among Republicans chagrined that a seemingly winnable race slipped away. Some Republicans wondered whether the Romney campaign had misjudged the power of President Barack Obama's coalition, while others were questioning Mr. Romney's and the party's approach to immigration.
Back in spring, the Romney campaign's biggest worry was money. So the campaign's finance chair, Spencer Zwick, huddled with political director Rich Beeson to craft a complex schedule that took Mr. Romney to the cities that were prime real estate for fundraising.
It meant visits to places like California, Texas and New York—none of which were important political battlegrounds—while only allowing for quick side trips to swing states that Mr. Romney would need to win to become president.
On one level the strategy worked: Mr. Romney ultimately garnered some $800 million or more, putting him in close competition with Mr. Obama's robust fundraising effort.
But Mr. Romney paid a deep political price. The fundraising marathon reduced his ability to deliver his own message to voters just as the Obama campaign was stepping in to define the Republican candidate on its terms. Mr. Romney's heavy wooing of conservative donors limited his ability to move his campaign positions to the center, to appeal to moderate and independent donors.
The search for cash led him to a Florida mansion for a private fundraiser where Mr. Romney would make the deeply damaging, secretly recorded remarks where he disparaged and dismissed the 47% of Americans who don't pay taxes.
In the end, Mr. Romney lost nearly every swing state. Other factors contributed to his defeat, of course, including difficulty making voters warm to him and a dearth of support among Hispanics.
But in the eyes of top aides in both campaigns, that early summer period when Mr. Romney was busy fundraising was perhaps the biggest single reason he lost the election.
The Obama campaign spent heavily while Mr. Romney couldn't, launched a range of effective attacks on the Republican nominee and drove up voters' negative perceptions of Mr. Romney.
The problem: Mr. Romney had burned through much of his money raised for the primaries, and by law, he couldn't begin spending his general-election funds until he accepted the GOP nomination late in the summer.
The money crunch didn't totally take the Romney camp by surprise. Long before Mr. Romney secured the nomination, his closest advisers began plotting what it would cost to wage an effective campaign against Mr. Obama in the general election. Mr. Zwick, his finance chief, assumed the best way to handle cash needs would be to raise money from private donors, rather than accept the public financing the government offers presidential candidates, advisers said.
Mr. Zwick looked at fundraising markets in every state and sketched out a schedule for Mr. Romney, his wife Ann, and his yet-to-be-named running mate. He decided the payoff from fundraising was worth the investment of the candidate's time. Analytical decisions like that one were the campaign's mantra. In interviews, staffers called it the "Bain way."
In August, when Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan was announced as Mr. Romney's vice presidential pick, Mr. Ryan's fundraising schedule was released the same day: 10 events by the end of the month.
Mr. Romney's finance team was vigilant in its efforts to ensure fundraising jaunts would be worth his time. Every other month the campaign's state finance chairmen met for a roughly four-hour meeting with Romney staffers. During the meeting, fundraisers had to stand in front of their peers and report whether they had hit their fundraising target.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein said Sunday she intends to investigate who knew what and when about l'affaire David Petraeus, and rightly so. The facts that are dribbling out suggest that all sorts of people knew about the CIA director's personal predicament—except the President for whom he worked.Still more, "FBI Agent in Petraeus Case Under Scrutiny."
If the leaks are correct, the FBI was investigating Mr. Petraeus for months. The unidentified sources claim that the bureau stumbled across the affair when his paramour, Paula Broadwell, sent a threatening email to another woman. The G-men then pursued the matter out of concern for a national security breach, which they say they never found.
Let's hope so, although it's hardly reassuring that the CIA chief was communicating with Ms. Broadwell via a Gmail account. Our operating assumption is that every Gmail account can be ransacked by hackers from China and elsewhere, no matter Google's GOOG +0.43% best efforts at security. For America's chief spook to leave himself vulnerable in this way is an astonishing lack of judgment for such a disciplined and experienced man.
It's also passing strange, not to say politically convenient, that these sources say the FBI alerted the White House for the first time at 5 p.m. on Election Day. The leakers say the bureau told Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who then advised Mr. Petraeus he would have to resign.
But why wait weeks to tell the White House if a CIA chief is compromised in a way that might force his resignation? A report of this kind had to have gone up the chain of command to FBI Director Robert Mueller, and probably to Attorney General Eric Holder. Did they not tell anybody at the White House, not even the general counsel? This is odd, if not a dereliction, and the information chain needs to be understood.
All the more so because House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has confirmed a news report that he was told by a whistleblower in late October about the Petraeus affair, and he then had his staff alert the office of FBI Director Mueller. Mr. Cantor deserves credit for showing discretion and good judgment in the middle of an election campaign.
But the same credit should not go to Administration officials if they kept this problem bottled up until President Obama was safely re-elected. No one wants to see Mr. Petraeus or his family further humiliated, but there are security implications that need to be explained.
The Obama re-election dooms the country. It ensures that his philosophy will be imposed for another four years. His election ensures the continuing shift away from the Rule of Law, property rights, free men, and free markets. Obama's vision of how the world works ensures a dire economy until an economic collapse resets everything. The rest of the world, apparently bigger Obama supporters than U.S. voters, will not be immune from the consequences.
SACRAMENTO — The election wasn't even over Tuesday when state Treasurer Bill Lockyer's phone started ringing. Activists of all stripes had the same message for him: With voters apparently poised to approve billions of dollars in tax hikes, it was time to spend more money.Make them permanent?
"They had to be reminded the money has already been spent," Lockyer said.
As California tries to shake its national reputation as a financial bungler, policymakers in Sacramento will be managing an estimated $6 billion in annual revenue from Gov. Jerry Brown's newly approved tax plan, Proposition 30. The money is already included in the budget the governor signed last summer.
The bloodletting that has become a ritual part of assembling the state budget is expected to fade. But some of the issues that have made California's financial problems so persistent remain and could still create a budget gap if things don't go as planned.
In essence, analysts say, voters have stabilized the patient, but surgery may still be required.
Brown has long acknowledged that fixing the state's fiscal problems will require more work. He told reporters last week that "there are no cure-alls" and pledged to hold the line against new spending. As the former seminary student often does, he used a biblical allusion to make his point.
"We need the prudence of Joseph," he said.
The governor's plan will increase the state sales tax by a quarter-cent for four years and raise levies on high earners by one to three percentage points for seven years. Passage of Proposition 30 prevents billions of dollars in education cuts and gives the state an opportunity to end the fiscal year without a deficit for the first time in five years.
But California still has the lowest credit rating of any state. Its tax system is unstable. Borrowing costs remain high, and there are signs that the Brown administration's current $91.3-billion budget may be fraying at the seams as savings fail to meet expectations.
"By no means is California out of the woods yet," said Kil Huh, a director at the Pew Center on the States in Washington. "They've built up a set of challenges that are daunting for any state."
For starters, swings in the stock market can have an outsize effect on California's budget because the state relies so heavily on income taxes paid by the wealthy. In 2010, the richest 1% of Californians earned 21.3% of the income in the state and paid 40.9% of the state income taxes, according to the most recent government data available.
Gabriel Petek, an analyst at Standard & Poor's, noted that California has, over time, decreased more reliable sources of revenue, such as fees on motor vehicle registrations, while increasing less dependable ones, such as income taxes.
Revamping the tax base is politically treacherous. Voters approved strict limits on property taxes in 1978 with Proposition 13, which has since been considered the third rail in California politics.
"If I was dictator of the state, I would look at it," said Kim Rueben at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington. "I'm not sure it will ever be looked at."
The responsibility for handling state finances now is expected to fall completely to Democrats, who are poised to gain a supermajority in each house of the Legislature. Republicans would no longer be able to block tax increases, which require a two-thirds vote.
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said in an interview Friday that changes in the tax system can bring "political peril" and are not high on his agenda.
California could also face budget gaps when Proposition 30's tax hikes expire. Administration officials are banking on improvements in the economy to make up for the loss of extra tax revenue then.
Some Republicans fear Democrats will increase spending so much that they'll try to make the tax hikes permanent.
On Tuesday night, with a minute to go until the polls closed in the battleground state of Virginia, the MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews received word through their earpieces that the state was too close to call, according to the election analysts at MSNBC’s parent, NBC News.More at the link.
“I think that’s pretty significant,” Mr. Matthews said, optimistically, as a commercial break wrapped up. Virginia, a state that had voted to elect a Democratic presidential candidate only once in 40 years — Barack Obama in 2008 — was not leaning toward Mitt Romney as some Republicans had predicted it would.
Inside the NBC “Sunday Night Football” studio that MSNBC was borrowing for the night, the stage manager loudly called out, “Here we go.” Ms. Maddow softly repeated, “Here we go,” and reported the news to three million viewers.
When President Obama won Virginia and most of the other battleground states on Tuesday night, ensuring himself a second term as president, some at MSNBC felt as if they had won as well.
During Mr. Obama’s first term, MSNBC underwent a metamorphosis from a CNN also-ran to the anti-Fox, and handily beat CNN in the ratings along the way. Now that it is known, at least to those who cannot get enough politics, as the nation’s liberal television network, the challenge in the next four years will be to capitalize on that identity.
MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC.
But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.
“We’re closer to Fox than we’ve ever been,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, who has been trying to overtake Fox for years. “All of this is great for 2013, 2014 to keep building.”
In some ways MSNBC, which until 2005 was partly owned by Microsoft, is where Fox was a decade ago — in the early stages of profiting from its popularity. The channel receives a per-subscriber fee of 30 cents a month from cable operators; CNN receives twice that, and Fox News at least three times as much.
“When Microsoft was involved with MSNBC, it was viewed as kind of lacking in direction; I don’t think the channel had much leverage raising rates,” said Derek Baine, a senior analyst for SNL Kagan. “Maybe they will have some more leverage on this postelection.”
If Fox sees itself as the voice of the opposition to the president, MSNBC sees itself as the voice of Mr. Obama’s America. Its story resembles that of so many other cable channels. It hit on a winning strategy (antiwar liberalism led by Keith Olbermann at 8 p.m.), added similar shows (like Ms. Maddow’s at 9 p.m., which became the channel’s tent pole when Mr. Olbermann left in 2011) and then sold its audience as something more: a community of passionate, like-minded people.
Many progressives (and conservatives) now view the channel as a megaphone for liberal politicians, ideas and attacks against those who disagree. Such a megaphone — clearly marked, always on — has never existed before on television.
