Watch as Ed Schultz of MSNBC's The Ed Show assails the do-nothing Republicans in Congress for refusing to allow unemployment benefits to be extended to the 4 million people about to be without any source of income.H/t to Darryl.
Andy Griffith promotes U.S. President Barack Obama's health care law to senior citizens in a new commercial paid for by Medicare.Howie P.S.: My father and brother did some writing work for "The Andy Griffith Show" and I have always thought he was a good guy.
"This year, like always, we'll have our guaranteed benefits and with the new health care law, more good things are coming," the 84-year-old actor says in the ad, petting a yellow labrador retriever. "I think you're going to like it." MORE...
One of the neat things about being Paris is walking. I have to admit that I was never much of a walker until I got my puppy earlier this year. And once I dropped 7 pounds as a result of our twice a day romps around the neighborhood, little Sasha had me hooked on the value of a good stroll around the block.Howie P.S.: This made me feel like being an expat all over again, just like I did in 1974. What a perfect impression of Paris Aravosis has delivered. Reader Advisory: You won't believe this but there is an ad for Joe Fitzgibbon on the bottom of this post! I must admit, that guy is hip.
But walking in Paris is something entirely different than walking in Washington, DC. To wit, my walk home last night from the Marais, an old neighborhood in the center of Paris. It was around 10pm and I was about to hit the metro, but figured, why am I heading home? I had nothing to do, but still, it's early and it's Paris. So I walked. MORE...
Joe Bageant is featured in a documentary film now in production, titled "The Kingdom of Survival", scheduled for release in November. Others in the film are Noam Chomsky, Mark Mirabello, Ramsey Kanaan, Sasha Lilley, Mike Oehler, Bob Meisenbach, and Will "The Bull" Taylor.Writer and filmmaker M. A. Littler describes his film as a search for visions that challenge the status quo. "This is an interdisciplanary documentary combining speculative travelogue and investigative journalism in order to trace possible links between survivalism, spirituality, art, radical politics, outlaw culture, alternative media and fringe philosophy," he said.
"Contrary to the popular approach of trying to summon arguments that legitimize a pre-conceived point of view, I sought out contrary opinions ranging from the far left to the far right of the political spectrum, from the spiritual to the strictly secular and from the profound to the profane," Littler said.
"The Kingdom of Survival" circles through themes of utopianism, globalized capitalism, anarchism, intellectual and spiritual self-defense, religion and art in an investigation of physical and psychological survival strategies practiced by groups and individuals in a conflict-ridden and confused post-modern world. The film is a production of Slowboat Films .
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Today on MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews tried to debate Salon’s Joan Walsh and former Gov. Howard Dean that Andrew Breitbart’s version of the controversial Shirley Sherrod speech was completely unedited. Considering there were about 35 minutes missing from that tape, this was wrong for obvious reasons. But if you caught the 7PM rerun, you wouldn’t have seen that, because Hardball retaped the segment, this time with Matthews admitting the Breitbart version was incomplete. MORE..with the video in question.
SLOG:JOE FITZGIBBON JOE FITZGIBBON JOE FITZGIBBON: Tonight presents another opportunity to toast the dreamy 34th District challenger (he's even hotter with whiskey breath). Go see him, maybe even listen to what he's saying, but definitely see him. (Moe Bar, 925 E Pike Street, (Thursday) 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., 21+)Friday:
Spend a quiet evening at home recovering from this, IF YOU CAN:
And here's The Stranger's wonkier version:Two words about this election: Joe Fitzgibbon.AND their MOST wonkier version:Joe Fitzgibbon is running for 34th District Representative. So if you live in his West Seattle district, vote for him. If you don't live in his district, move there, vote for him, and join the Stranger Election Control Board (SECB) in stalking him.
Swoon.
State Representative, Position 2Joe FitzgibbonHowie P.S.: I'm voting for Marcee Stone. Check out her endorsements on the "About Marcee" button. My pal Kirk Prindle likes Mike Heavey (cool website). Go figure. If Joe wins, The Stranger/SLOG gets another notch on their political gunbelt. Oh, and PubliCola endorsed Joe, 2.There is no hotter race in Seattle this summer than the race to be the next state representative from West Seattle, and there is no hotter candidate in that race than Joe Fitzgibbon. That's right, we're not ashamed to say it. Because it is, inarguably, a TRUE FACT. Just look at his action shots. (What's the difference between acne and a Catholic priest? Acne comes on a boy's face after he turns 12.)
MORE...
BP is starting over. It just named a new American president and its finances are looking up. BP’s second-quarter report showed surprisingly strong revenues of $75.9 billion, beating Wall Street’s estimates. (This includes a $32.2 billion writedown along with the $20 billion liability fund that the Obama Administration wanted.) The company has started to sell $30 billion of its assets to ensure it has all the money it needs to pay any liability claims. No wonder several Wall Street analysts are suggesting BP stock as a terrific buy.Howie P.S.: If Nate Silver is right, it might become even more difficult for Congress to pass laws that get "corporations to act differently."
It doesn’t seem to matter BP was responsible for the worst environmental disaster in American history. Consumers worldwide – including Americans – continue to slurp up its oil.
But wait a minute. If BP emerges from this debacle fatter and happier than anyone imagined a few months ago, whatever happened to the idea of corporate accountability? Does this mean any giant corporation can wreak havoc and then get back to business as usual? MORE...
Former Governor Howard Dean drew a characteristic rebuke from Fox News’ Michael Clemente when he accused the network of “absolutely racist” coverage of the Shirley Sherrod story. Clemente called Dean a “failed candidate” who “blame(s) Fox for almost anything.”
Speaking to Dylan Ratigan fill-in and Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, Dean stood by his comments, and dismissed Clemente’s criticism, while Cenk noted the long roster of “failed candidates” who populate Fox’s air. (h/t Aaron Wysocki)I also thought it was interesting that a network with Sarah Palin as a contributor would describe an opponent as a “failed candidate,” especially when you consider that Dean was the architect of the 50 state strategy that helped to defeat Palin’s vice-presidential bid. Also, Dean did finish his full term as governor. Actually, he finished five full terms.
I don’t think the fact that Shirley Sherrod resigned before Fox News ever aired the story factors into Dean’s criticism, which was of the way Fox personalities like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity covered the story. As Steve Krakauer pointed out, CNN reported on the edited tape Monday night, too, but none with the gusto of Fox’s opinion shows.Dean’s argument doesn’t rest on the Shirley Sherrod story alone, either. Whether or not you agree with Dean that there’s a pattern of racism, it is upon this foundation that Dean’s argument rests, and not simply whether Fox had a hand in Sherrod’s resignation.
Today, Rep. Jim McDermott issued the following statement outlining his reasons for voting against the supplemental appropriations bill:
“It doesn’t matter if we commit 30,000 or 300,000 additional troops, I do not believe the U.S. military alone can bring about the change necessary to stabilize Afghanistan. American troops have now been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade and have been doing a magnificent job of what’s being asked of them. But U.S. and NATO forces are not equipped to solve the kinds of problems facing the nation. I believe that if we really want to help the Afghan people form a functioning government that serves its people and respects human rights, we must do it with additional aid and support—not with more troops.
“After spending nearly $350 billion on this war, I have not seen nearly enough progress and will not support simply intensifying an approach that has produced few results. The responsibility for building a stable Afghanistan ultimately lies with the Afghan people, and we must pursue a much broader and more comprehensive strategy to support them. While this appropriations bill contained funding for several programs that I steadfastly support, I cannot in good conscience vote to send soldier after soldier into a battle I do not believe we can ever win.”
We spend the hour with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, talking about the biggest leak in U.S. history: the release of more than 91,000 classified military records on the war in Afghanistan. As the Pentagon announces it is launching a criminal probe into who leaked the documents, Assange asks what about investigating the "war crimes" revealed in the leaked military records? He also talks about the media, why he isn’t coming to the U.S. anytime soon and what gives him hope. "What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change," Assange says. "They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way."
James Surowiecki spoke with Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School and the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), about the importance of transparency in consumer financing, the future of the regulatory system, and what’s good about capitalism. They met in Washington, D.C., on November 5th, (2009).
Raul Grijalva's Diary on Kos:Once again, war is being paid for with a credit card while investments in our children’s future are tossed aside. These investments – $10 billion for teacher jobs, $1 billion for summer youth employment, $5 billion for Pell grants, $701 million for border security – were cut from the war funding bill coming to the House floor despite being fully paid for and not adding to the budget deficit. They have been jettisoned in favor of further borrowed war spending. Today’s bill doesn’t include anything to maintain first responder, police or firefighter positions despite the dramatic need for those jobs in every community in America. We believe this is fiscal insanity and a moral tragedy. MORE...Howie P.S.: Here's more bad news:
Only 102 Democrats joined a dozen Republicans and the war money passed, 308-114.
Pete Seeger may be 91 years old, but the iconic folk singer still has plenty to protest. On Friday night at New York's City Winery, Seeger debuted a new song he wrote about the disastrous BP oil spill as part of a fundraising concert for the Gulf Restoration Network and Global Green USA . "It's a strange, strange song," said Seeger about the new tune, which featured a simple finger-picked chord progression and gravelly ominous lyrics like, "When the drill baby drill turns to spill baby spill/God's counting on me/God's counting on you." Check out video of "God's Counting on Me, God's Counting on You" above. MORE...Howie P.S.: H/t to Linda Lax Jacobs. Before the blogosphere, there was the folk music protest "movement" and Pete Seeger was its Godfather.
U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) released the following statement Tuesday after Senate Republicans mounted a filibuster against the DISCLOSE Act, which would blunt the worst impacts from the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision earlier this year:
"The vote was disappointing but not unexpected. There was huge pressure on every Republican to vote the other way. I think a good number of them, in their hearts, knew we were right. The message we have is, this is the first battle, but not the end of the war. This issue is so important and the public is so strongly on our side that we dare not give up. We will keep fighting and fighting and fighting until this passes - until we get that one courageous Republican to say, 'I am going to put what's good for the nation first,' and not play politics.
"The elections this fall, if this doesn't change, will be so different than elections we've had in the past. We feel there is almost a moral imperative to pass this legislation. It is constitutional and it is within the ambit of what the Court not only allowed, but endorsed. We can't delay a day. I fear for the future of our democracy because if this decision is allowed to continue, the average citizen will feel more and more removed from government. We're going to keep at it, keep at it, and keep at it, and I believe we will win."
Barack Obama supporters, from left, Antjelina Newman, 17, Yuku Huang, 19, and Jessica Peterson show support with chalk while in line outside of Key Arena to see the Democratic candidate speak in Seattle on Friday (February 8, 2008).President Obama will visit the Puget Sound area next month to talk about the economy and headline a fundraiser for Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., an administration ally locked in what she describes as a close reelection race.
A White House spokesman would not give a date, but Murray campaign spokeswoman Julie Edwards indicated the visit will be August 17. MORE...
KUOW with audio:Three candidates are vying for the 34th District State House seat, which includes West Seattle, White Center and Burien. We'll meet the candidates.
Guest(s)
Marcee Stone is a legal secretary and campaign finance activist.
Joe Fitzgibbon is chair of the Burien Planning Commission.
Mike Heavey is an aide to King County Councilmember Jan Drago.
One of the country's largest and most powerful union groups is formally opposing new campaign finance laws being pushed in the Senate, calling the bill noble in spirit but "onerous" and overbearing in its requirements. MORE...
Over the weekend, Sen. Al Franken (D.-Minn.) made the corporate takeover of our media, and the government's acquiescence to these corporations, frighteningly clear.Howie P.S.: More video of Franken's remarks here (scroll down) @ Crooks and Liars from MOXNEWS. Lawrence Lewis pulls the camera back for The Big Picture:Franken told more than 2,000 bloggers and organizers attending the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas that our media system is at risk everywhere we turn - from our free speech online to the growing power of companies who own a massive number of media outlets. MORE...
Your government is owned, and unless you're a wealthy corporate person, it's not owned by you.
The site of a suicide bomb which was followed by civilian deaths as US marines escaped. Photograph: Noorullah/EPABrevity is the hallmark of military reporting, but even by those standards the description of one disastrous event is remarkably short: "The patrol returned to base."Howie P.S.: H/t to Glenn Greenwald who comments:It started with a suicide bomb. On 4 March 2007 a convoy of US marines, who arrived in Afghanistan three weeks earlier, were hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the city of Jalalabad.
The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded. MORE...
These are the kinds of stories the WikiLeaks documents enable - decide for yourself if they're worthwhile.
The top five tweeted quotes from the first day of Netroots Nation 2010 - Mathew Hoh, Van Jones, Pam Karlan, Tim Wise.
It’s one of the biggest leaks in US military history. More than 90,000 internal records of US military actions in Afghanistan over the past six years have been published by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The documents provide a devastating portrait of the war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, how a secret black ops special forces unit hunts down targets for assassination or detention without trial, how Taliban attacks have soared and how Pakistan is fueling the insurgency. We host a roundtable discussion with independent British journalist Stephen Grey, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, former State Department official in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh, independent journalist Rick Rowley and investigative historian Gareth Porter.
The annual Netroots Network summit of progressives should be an occasion for celebrating Obama’s achievements. Matthew Yglesias on why the left is slumping—and how to lift its spirits.
David Lightman (McClatchy):The netroots, the liberal Democrats who've been instrumental in making the Internet an important political tool, are disappointed in President Barack Obama.
While the left is hardly abandoning a man they helped elect, the 2,000 Democratic bloggers, activists and organizers who wrapped up four days of Netroots Nation meetings at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino Sunday are sending him a message: It could be harder to generate the kind of passion in this November’s congressional elections that was so crucial to his 2008 victory.
"A lot of people woke up every day in 2008 and asked, 'What can I do to get Obama elected?' " said Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "We want him to succeed, but unfortunately what we've seen so far is an unwillingness to truly fight the powerful interests. MORE...
The Obama White House is too white.Howie P.S.: As I have written elsewhere (more politely) Rahm (for example) is the ultimate cocky white-guy. In almost six years of posting on this site, I have never linked to Ms. Dowd before.
It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.
But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.
The first black president should expand beyond his campaign security blanket, the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him — a long political tradition underscored by Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 when she complained about the “smart-ass white boys” from Walter Mondale’s campaign who tried to boss her around. MORE...
Glenn Greenwald:The most consequential news item of the week will obviously be -- or at least should be -- the massive new leak by WikiLeaks of 90,000 pages of classified material chronicling the truth about the war in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009. Those documents provide what The New York Times calls "an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal." The Guardian describes the documents as "a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency." MORE...
Many progressives helped to elect Democratic majorities in Congress in 2006 and 2008 and helped Obama win the presidency. But with the Democrats in power, the feeling now among many grassroots activists is that most Democratic lawmakers have not acted on behalf of their progressive constituencies. We speak with two progressive activists: Ilyse Hogue of MoveOn.Org, and Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. [includes rush transcript]
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean took direct aim at Fox News for it's involvement in the Shirley Sherrod racism flap, calling their coverage "absolutely racist."Howie P.S.: Certainly not a startling revelation, but I can't help having admiration for Howard's "direct aim." Rest assured that if I ever locate this video, it will appear here.
Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, offered his candid assessment in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday" in which he criticized the cable network for being complicit in the controversy.
"Fox News did something that was absolutely racist," Dean said. "They had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and this Sotomayor and all this other stuff." MORE...
A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.Howie P.S.: Would you be surprised to learn that this article appeared on December 16, 2007? The cost estimate above is well below our expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan. We'll have to wait and see if that Return On Investment pencils out, but I have already reached my own conclusion.
- A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
- Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
- A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
- But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.
—The Editors
Scene of the crime: A neighbour returns to the house where he found the still-smoking body of 14-year-old Abeer, along with those of her parents and younger sister. Photograph: AP Photo/Ali al-MahmouriIn March 2006, four US soldiers, strung out after months in the deadly battleground south of Baghdad, hatched a plan: to carry out one of the worst war crimes ever committed in Iraq. MORE...Howie P.S.: According to the Google, a search of the soldiers' names mentioned in this story reveals not that one word of this particular incident has seen the light of day in the USA, to date.
“I wish things were as bad for progressives as progressives think they are.”
That was one epiphany for Phillip Klein, a conservative writer for the American Spectator, after palling around with liberal bloggers for several days at the fifth annual Netroots Nation in Las Vegas this weekend. Klein was marveling at the melancholy suffusing the conference, given the Obama administration’s undeniable legislative accomplishments to date. The health care bill “alone,” he said, “is more than any liberal has passed since LBJ.”
Now Klein could just be, in web parlance, concern-trolling for his political opponents. But his view coincides neatly with several of the political heavyweights who spoke at keynote sessions of the conference, when most of the 2,100 attendees gathered in a cavernous Vegas ballroom flanked by dark curtains studded with glow-in-the-dark stars. The flashy digs hosted Democratic Congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and liberal heavyweights like Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Van Jones, Richard Trumka, Majora Carter and Markos Moulitsas, who founded the blog that first spawned the conference. MORE...
David Fox, an Army veteran, at home in Montana. He uses medical marijuana to help quiet the pain from neuropathyThe Democratic Party has a motivation problem.Howie P.S.: Meanwhile, a dash of good news from the NY Times: "V.A. Easing Rules for Users of Medical Marijuana." (see photo above)
Party officials acknowledged low morale within their left wing and urged liberal bloggers and activists Friday to keep faith with President Barack Obama in an election year as Democrats brace for losses in Congress.
"We need to find a way to get our voters really engaged in this election," Democratic National Committee executive director Jennifer O'Malley Dillon said at the annual Netroots Nation convention. "It's more important, every single day, to know what's at stake
Jon Vogel, executive director of the Democratic House campaign organization, predicted Democratic voters would get energized when they focus on what Republican gains would mean for the Democratic agenda.
"You start to educate folks as to differences in candidates, the enthusiasm gap certainly will close," Vogel said.
Liberals who helped put Obama in the White House in 2008 are disillusioned over the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, slow movement on gay rights and the failure to create a government-run insurance option in the health care overhaul.
The racially tinged furor surrounding the ouster of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod, who was forced to resign but later received a personal apology and job offer from Obama, left many feeling the White House was manipulated by the conservative media.
"People are in a down mood," said Michael Lux, who heads Progressive Strategies, a Washington-based consulting firm. MORE...
Las Vegas -- Former White House green jobs "czar" Van Jones told progressive activists and bloggers today that, rather than bash President Obama for not changing the country as fast as they'd thought, they should maintain hope and help him with his agenda."I can't stand it. President Obama volunteered to be the captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg," Jones said at Netroots Nation while being interviewed by journalist Ari Melber of The Nation. (Follow our live coverage here.) MORE...
How an unknown government official regained control of a runaway narrative, and forced apologies from Bill O’Reilly and Barack Obama, by telling the truth.
Ari Melber:The fifth annual Netroots Nation kicked off in Las Vegas on Thursday, as liberal bloggers and activists gathered to organize and assess an Obama administration that continues to disappoint key planks of the Left. One of the first panels, scheduled months ago, could have been ripped from today’s headlines about Shirley Sherrod: “Fighting the Right Wing with Racial Justice.”James Rucker, the cofounder of a netroots civil rights organization, told attendees that media personalities like Glenn Beck had to be “undressed” and combated in a platform that they don’t actually control. Rucker lamented that racial provocateurs like Andrew Breitbart, who does submit to interviews with traditional journalists, manage to get free press while escaping factual accountability.
An early, unscientific sampling of liberal conference attendees suggested a sour mood for the politics of the day. Across the hallways of The Rio, a bright, off-strip hotel that is budget but clean, people seemed pretty fed up with the entire Sherrod imbroglio. While the administration’s mistreatment of Sherrod does not meet the scale of foreign policy or financial reform, of course, the rushed, reflexive capitulation to disingenuous opponents dovetails with a caricature of Obama’s governing playbook, at least among some progressives.
Back in the racial justice panel, several speakers cast the Sherrod attack as politics as usual in the Obama age.
Rich Benjamin, who traveled through some of the most concentrated Caucasian neighborhoods in America for his book “Whitopia,” proposed that racial tension lurked behind many of the domestic policy debates of the Obama era. “The health care debate was explicitly about race,” he said, stressing how Joe Willson’s “You Lie” outburst focused on tapping anger towards the false fear that the government would fund health care for minority immigrants. (Benjamin is a friend of mine, by the way.)
And all the panelists agreed that there is scant space for a genuine “national conversation” on race right now.
“White liberals are afraid to death,” Rucker contended, to have frank conversations about resilient racial divisions in America.
Another panelist echoed Eric Holder’s supposedly controversial observation that America shies away from racial dialogue. Tammy Johnson, a community organizer with the Applied Research Center, declared that today’s leaders, and Obama by implication, do not have the guts to address race head-on.
One conference attendee pushed back on those sentiments, however, during the question and answer session.
Davey D, a disc jockey for Hard Knock Radio, stressed that many people and potential leaders talk about race in substantive ways -- they simply do not garner mainstream media coverage. And the whole point of building a new media structure, he reminded fellow activists, was to cover and amplify new voices, not to lament the status quo.
If everyone had already forgotten that, he stressed, then “it’s time to have a conversation with yourself.”
Netroots Nation:If you can't make it to Netroots Nation this year, there are a number of ways you can follow along at home.
Each year Netroots Nation has a strong presence on Twitter. Last year the #NN09 hashtag was a trending topic for three days. Many sessions are taking live feedback from the Twitter stream; speakers often post presentations and video there; and you can generally stay up to date on all the action. Follow Netroots Nation on Twitter and check out the #NN10 hashtag.You can also gain some great insights on the event and get behind-the-scenes information from Netroots Nation staff. Follow @ravenb @nolan @merickles @etinkc @navi_ganancial @karenkolber and staff photographers @macaby @sterno.
STREAMING
We're streaming all of our keynote sessions and six of our panel rooms live each day of the convention. You'll find these streams on both Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. You can also watch on ustream.tv directly or get the embed codes and host the streams on your own blog.
- View our keynote sessions live on ustream.tv here. You can see a schedule of all our keynote sessions here.
- View all sessions in the Miranda 1-2 room live on ustream.tv here. You can see a schedule of all sessions in this room here.
- View all sessions in the Miranda 3-4 room live on ustream.tv here. You can see a schedule of all sessions in this room here.
- View all sessions in the Brasilia 1 room live on ustream.tv here. You can see a schedule of all sessions in this room here.
- View all sessions in the Brasilia 2 room live on ustream.tv here. You can see a schedule of all sessions in this room here.
- View all sessions in the Brasilia 4 room live on ustream.tv here. You can see a schedule of all sessions in this room here.
- View all sessions in the Brasilia 6 room live on ustream.tv here. You can see a schedule of all sessions in this room here.
* Is "race" the problem? The emerging media consensus this morning on the Shirley Sherrod mess is that it proves race remains a "stumbling block" for Obama. Few, however, seem willing to explain why this is the case, or who it is that's trying to ensure that race continues to trip up the president.Shirley Sherrod: 'I Can't Say That the President Is Fully Behind Me' (George Stephanopoulos):But Eugene Robinson cuts through the B.S. and spells out what's really going on here, arguing that the Sherrod tale "has fully exposed the right-wing campaign to use racial fear to destroy Obama's presidency."
"A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites," Robinson writes.
(SNIP)
* Is "partisan media" the problem? Also: You'll be hearing a lot of people blaming "partisan" media on both sides for the current state of affairs. Here, for instance, is Politico's Jim VandeHei:
"It speaks to a much broader problem in the media-activist industrial complex, if you will, and I think it's a problem that's going to get worse: There's been this proliferation of partisan media -- whether it's MSNBC and Fox at night, or it's Breitbart on the right or Huffington Post on the left -- there's just a huge incentive for people to engage in real tough combat, and to overreact."
This strikes me as a false equivalence. I think it's fair to ask folks wringing their hands about "partisan media" to take a stand on whether MSNBC and HuffPo are even remotely comparable to Breitbart and Fox in their willingness to cook the facts and engage in full blown political crusades. The problem is not "partisan media." It's Breitbart and Fox. Period. MORE...
In my interview coming up on "GMA," Shirley Sherrod says that she’s not ready to accept Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s job offer. She wants to hear more from the Secretary and his boss – President Obama."Scaring white people for fun and profit" (MaddowBlog, with video-12:15):
“I can’t say that the President is fully behind me,” Sherrod told me. “I would hope that he is…I would love to talk to him.”
Sherrod wants to be convinced that the President and his whole team are fully committed to fighting discrimination against African American farmers.
Fox News has run with a few different stories this year that they really pushed all on their own. They weren't mainstream news stories -- they weren't even news, really. They were Fox agenda items, all following a very, very similar narrative. There was the Van Jones controversy, with Fox morphing the president's renewable-energy policy expert into an ex-con who served time after the Rodney King race riots -- not true. The other great Fox News crusade of the past year was against ACORN, an almost all-minority community organizing group which Fox characterized as stealing taxpayer money and an election. More recently, Fox News has crusaded against the New Black Panther Party, after video surfaced of two wackjob blacks at a polling station during the 2008 election. The Bush Justice Department investigated and found that the wackjobs hadn't intimidated voters that day, and Fox News has continued running the same footage over and over and over again.
The message? They're coming for you, white people. They're coming for you. Black people are coming for you, to take what's yours. MORE...
“It's always been a bit of a conundrum reconciling Obama the campaigner and Obama the president,” said liberal blogger John Aravosis. “The former was a maverick, the latter tries far too hard not to rock the boat.”Howie P.S.: JMart has now updated this posting with quotes from Ari Melber, Markos and Peter Daou
“The administration has enabled the Republicans, and all their political opponents, including conservative Democrats. far too often. They didn't pass a big enough stimulus because the Republicans objected. They didn't push for the public option because the Republicans, and conservative Democrats, objected. They didn't go for a full repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell because Republican appointee Secretary [Robert] Gates objected.”
Added Aravosis: “In politics, yes, sometimes you have to cut your losses and dismiss employees who get involved in too-high-profile a scandal, regardless of the merits. But far too often, President Obama seems to cut his losses, on personnel and policy, whenever the Republicans say boo. I have no idea why he doesn't show more backbone, but a lot of Obama supporters, myself included, wish he would.” MORE...
Just amazing. The NAACP, in its statement just now, says it has reviewed the full tape and admits that they were "snookered" by Breitbart and Fox News into believing that Sherrod had withheld help from the white farmer for racial reasons. MORE...Howie P.S.: Full video and commentary from TPMMuckraker of Sherrod talking to the Coffee County NAACP here.
Britain, unlike the U.S., is currently in the process of Looking Backward, Not Forward, as they investigate both the events that led them to the attack on Iraq as well as their involvement in America's torture regime.>
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British Muslims became "radicalized" and "swamped" that country with Terrorist plots only after watching the Government attack two separate Muslim nations. Add to that things like lawless detentions, Guantanamo, a torture regime, attacks in places like Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and others -- all on top of two occupations in the Muslim world that will extend for a full decade at least -- and only the densest among us (or those who actively desire high levels of Terrorism threats for their own interests) will fail to see how the very policies justified in the name of fighting Terrorism are the ones most exacerbating that problem. MORE...
Booman:Here are the ten most progressive members of the House of Representatives (as measured by lifetime Progressive Punch scores on crucial votes):
1. Grijalva, Raul D AZ-7
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2. Schakowsky, Jan D IL-9
3. Baldwin, Tammy D WI-2
4. Edwards, Donna D MD-4
5. Sánchez, Linda D CA-39
6. Olver, John D MA-1
7. Conyers, John D MI-14
8. Lee, Barbara D CA-9
9. Payne, Donald D NJ-10
10. McDermott, Jim D WA-7
The attacks on Social Security have steadily intensified in the past few months. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer recently called for a higher retirement age and House Minority leader John Boehner suggested raising the retirement age to 70. Meanwhile, President Obama’s bipartisan 18-member commission dealing with the nation’s public debt is due to come out with a report in November that is expected to recommend cuts to Social Security. We speak with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The concern with the latest BP attempt to stop the massive leak has been that the pressure of shutting well down could force the sea floor to rupture and create an even larger problem. Observers had been closely following the valve pressure which would indicate whether or not there was a leak elsewhere. It now sounds as though US officials were not seeing enough pressure in the valve which suggests a leak somewhere else. If the well starts leaking elsewhere that could become a substantial problem. Opening new leaks beyond the well will be difficult to shut down. After the painful start to this disaster by the US government, it is good to see them paying more attention and finally, giving orders. BBC:BP had hoped the cap could stay in place until relief wells stop the leak for good.
But with pressure readings from within the well lower than expected, scientists had raised concerns that oil could leaking into the surrounding undersea bedrock.
And in a letter to BP chief managing director Bob Dudley, Admiral Allen said: "Given the current observations... including the detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head, monitoring of the seabed is of paramount importance...
"I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed."
As reported on HuffPost last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has expressed opposition to the possible nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a source with knowledge of Geithner's views.Howie P.S.: Who is John R. Talbott?One can assume that Geithner, being very close to the nation's biggest banks, is concerned that Warren, if chosen, will exercise her new policing and enforcement powers to restrict those abusive practices at our commercial banks that have been harmful to consumers and depositors.
(SNIP)But this is not the only reason that Geithner is opposed to Warren's nomination. I believe Geithner sees the appointment of Elizabeth Warren as a threat to the very scheme he has utilized to date to hide bank losses, thus keeping the banks solvent and out of bankruptcy court and their existing management teams employed and well-paid. MORE...
Congress has labored mightily to produce a mountain of legislation that can be called financial reform, but it has produced a molehill relative to the wreckage Wall Street wreaked upon the nation.
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The consequences of there not being a real Afghan government are probably dire. Our desire for there to be a real Afghan government is strong and rational. But us just wanting it to be so does not mean that we are capable of making it so. To me, it seems likely that nothing we can do -- nothing within our power as the United States of America -- will result in there being a real Afghan government. Our presence there may in fact make that outcome less likely.Howie P.S.: Our Congressman appears to agree: "McDermott Breaks with Dems, Obama on War. Again" (Publicola).
What government can grow to full strength and legitimacy with a foreign military on its soil?
What hope is there for the government to supersede the warlords and drug lords and powerbrokers it competes with if the billions of dollars a month our military presence drags behind it like cans off newlyweds' car bumpers get funneled to those same thugs the government's competing with?
What better way for us to recruit for and romanticize the Taliban cause than to give them 10 years of armor-clad infidel foreigners on their land, to inveigh against and to attack? A real Afghan government is the outcome we want for us and for the Afghan people. It is practically inarguable as a desired outcome. But whether or not that outcome is achieved is not really up to us. MORE...
Every day, the story changes. Sarah Palin's the leader of the Republican party--except that she can't raise money. Eliot Spitzer is a disgrace (but has a TV show), and David Vitter can run for reelection on a "family values" platform. The NAACP wants the Tea Party movement to declare itself not racist, and suddenly the NAACP is racist. And we can't even get started on the BP disaster--mostly because BP won't let reporters near the scene of the crime.Howie P.S.: Here's Hertzberg's latest New Yorker oeuvre: "Tea Party Poop." Hertzberg and I hung out a little bit, on and off, back in the 20th Century.
Who can make any sense out of all this? Thankfully, we have expert political observers Rebecca Traister of Salon.com and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker join us in studio to try.
Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit over selling a mortgage investment that was established to fail. While the SEC hailed the $550 million settlement as the largest in Wall Street history, many outside analysts questioned why the government didn’t demand more. Investors responded favorably as Goldman Sachs shares jumped by 5 percent in late trading, adding far more to the firm’s market value than the amount it will have to pay in the settlement. We speak to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.
Which brings us to the real problem for Obama among all Americans, not just his base, which is his neo-liberal economic policy and the often dry New Democrat political rhetoric that enables it. It does not surprise me much because he signaled early on in the campaign that he was going to govern like a cautious centrist and immediately upon taking office started chattering about "Grand Bargains" on social security and medicare. I took a lot of criticism for pointing that out at the time, from people who felt I wasn't giving him a chance (and who oddly believed the right had been completely vanquished...) But I don't think there was ever much of a mystery about whether or not he was a technocratic "pragmatist" who believed that this recession was simply a market correction that would turn itself around with a few tweaks here and there to make it more "efficient." Everything the administration did signaled they believed they were forced to intervene by political rather than economic necessity. Their eyes were on an "Obama Goes to China" legacy on so-called entitlement reform. The tepid stimulus and continued insistence on coddling Republicans all flowed from that.Howie P.S.: H/t to Glenn Greenwald.
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--- creating a Goldilocks meme among the media that says because Obama is criticized by both the immature bloggers and the radical tea party, he must be juuust riiiight. That won't do the Democrats any good in the short run, but it sounds like a 2012 strategy in the making.MORE...
Public skepticism about government's efficacy in the face of our economic doldrums has made the public receptive to the Republican case that Dems are overreaching and overspending, with nothing to show for it. Dems may sustain large losses in the midterms, and perhaps their travails will continue beyond then.Greg Sargent:
But more broadly, it's fair to imagine that that the more accomplishments Dems rack up -- energy reform is next, though its prospects are in doubt -- the easier it will be for them to tell the larger story they're trying to tell. The picture of Dems succeeding at what they've set out to do will make it easier for Dems to argue: We're getting things done, and none of the worst case scenarios foreseen by critics are coming to pass.
I'm no blog triumphalist, and some of the debate about Weigel was overblown, but the claim about blogospheric indifference to the midterms is just laughably false. The liberal blogs I read have spent months now engaged in deep debate about the midterm elections, the best ways to limit losses, and what the consequence for the progressive agenda will be if Dems don't figure out how to pull themselves out of their doldrums.
Indeed, amusingly enough, the very argument VandeHarris are criticizing liberal blogs for making -- that the White House has remained captive to a Beltway culture that fetishizes bipartisanship and has failed to seize this historical moment's potential to dramatically expand the boundaries of what's politically possible -- has been central to the liberal bloggers' debate about this fall's elections. MORE...
The Alaskan Way Viaduct is buffered by trees in this photo taken Tuesday. An effort is under way to preserve the trees when the structure is torn down and replaced by a tunnel.
If the Alaskan Way Viaduct is torn down and replaced by a tunnel, at least one public official thinks the trees alongside the viaduct ought to be left standing near the central waterfront.
The city has a policy of trying to preserve its steadily disappearing canopy of trees and City Councilman Nick Licata thinks the viaduct trees shouldn't be any exception, even if they're around construction work. He's exploring the possibility with the city's forestry commission, a recent entity created to consider how to preserve the city's disappearing tree canopy.
"I don't see why not," he said of his idea. "If you put in a new viaduct you probably couldn't save them but if you're tearing one down (as planned), I don't see a problem," Licata said. MORE...
