Schmidt hasn't had any impact at all in Congress and is widely considered an embarrassment and one of the least influential members of the House. The only other thing she's known for is her dogged opposition to the legitimate aspirations of the Amenian-American community. Schmidt, a dim bulb, isn't exactly someone would expect to even know anything about Armenia or Armenians. But she has been taking bribes from shady Turkish sources and helps run their anti-Armenian efforts. Friday the House Ethics Committee issued their report on her corruption, but decided not to recommend expulsion or arrest, claiming, in effect, that she was too dumb to know she had violated House rules. You have to be pretty dumb to not know taking bribes is against the rules... and the law.

Labels: hack journalism, House Republicans, spin, That Woman Is An Idiot

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day

S&P, which covered itself in a substance other than glory during the mortgage crisis, may have a poor record and strange methodology when it comes to sovereign ratings. France, which has a far higher debt per capita ratio than the U.S., still enjoys a AAA rating. And a downgrade, alone, doesn't mean U.S. interest rates will spike -- on Monday or at any time in the future. Japan's credit rating was downgraded several years ago, when the interest rates its government paid on bonds was already extremely low, and they've generally trended lower in the years since.

Market conditions, the trajectory of economic growth and relative value can play as big -- if not a bigger -- of a role in determining interest rates than a rating.

But that doesn't mean we should ignore S&P's Friday evening shot across the bow. In downgrading the U.S.'s credit rating, S&P points out what has long been obvious: Washington's inability to come to an agreement on how to close the large fiscal gaps that have emerged since the recession began is troubling. Recent events have sapped the agency's confidence that the government can and will do what is necessary to align revenues with spending commitments. And it's difficult to escape the conclusion that America's credit rating was intentionally sabotaged by Congressional Republicans.

It has long been obvious to all observers -- to economists, to politicians, to anti-deficit groups, to the ratings agencies -- that closing fiscal gaps will require tax increases, or the closure of big tax loopholes, or significant tax reform that will raise significantly larger sums of tax revenue than the system does now. Today, taxes as a percentage of GDP are at historic lows. Marginal rates on income and investments are at historic lows. Corporate tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are at historic lows. Perhaps taxes don't need to rise this year or next, but they do need to go up in the future.

Otherwise, the math of deficit reduction simply doesn't work. And that's how the deficit reduction deals signed off on by Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush came about.

Yet the action in Washington in the past year has all gone in the opposite direction. President Obama deserves some of the blame. Several months ago, he struck a deal with Congress to make the fiscal situation worse -- extending the Bush tax cuts for two more years and enacting a temporary cut in the payroll tax.

But Congressional Republicans deserve much more of the blame. For this calamity was entirely man-made -- even intentional. The contemporary Republican Party is fixated on taxes. It possesses an iron-clad belief that the existing tax rates should never go up, that loopholes shouldn't be closed unless they're offset by other tax reductions, that the fact that hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than school teachers makes complete sense, that a reversion to the tax rates of the prosperous 1990's or 1980's would be unacceptable.

In the past two years, this attitude has combined with a general hostility to playing ball with Democrats on large legislative issues, a near-blanket refusal to conduct business with President Obama, and, since the arrival of the raucous Tea Party freshman, a cavalier attitude toward the nation's obligations. It was common to hear duly elected legislators argue that it wouldn't be a big deal if the government were to pierce the debt ceiling and default on its debts.

Labels: economic death watch, right-wing economic terrorism

More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey's forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.
And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country's £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.

Ravaged by the loss of their jobs and their homes, the residents of Tent City struggle to get by without day-to-day luxuries that we take for granted such as food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Ex-minister Steve Brigham, 50, runs Tent City, which consists of a dirt road running through a two-acre encampment which has flowerpots laid out front of proud tents and homes.
Functioning as near to a normal town as possible, Tent City is governed by democratic rules agreed by all the residents.

They all must agree to no fighting, to clean the camp, to volunteer their time when they have it, and to most importantly keep the noise down after 10pm

Labels: america R.I.P., homelessness, Teabag America, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class

In the deadliest day for American forces in the nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan, insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter on Saturday, killing 31 Americans and 7 Afghan commandos on board, American and Afghan officials said. American officials said later Saturday that 22 of the dead were members of a Navy SEAL unit, along with other American servicemembers and the Afghan unit. The helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in the Tangi Valley of Wardak Province to the west of Kabul, one coalition official said, though others said the exact weapon remained in question.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which punctuated a surge of violence across the country, even as American and NATO forces begin a modest drawdown of troops. It occurred after a night raid, a tool that has been praised by American commanders as one of the most effective in the recent military offensive, though the raids have been heavily criticized by Afghan officials and civilians.

The Associated Press has learned that more than 20 Navy SEALs from the unit that killed Osama bin Laden were among the 31 U.S. soldiers lost in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

The operators from SEAL Team Six were flown by a crew of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. That's according to one current and one former U.S. official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because families are still being notified of the loss of their loved ones. One source says the team was thought to include 22 SEALs, three Air Force air controllers, seven Afghan Army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew.

Labels: Afghanistan, futility, the so-called war on terror

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day

Labels: Chris Christie, credit where credit is due

Labels: Broadway, pop culture, religion, snark

Labels: hack journalism, nepotism, political hackery

It is not farfetched to believe that Barack Obama has spent pretty much his entire 50 years trying to make people who find him fearful comfortable. Even his white grandmother admitted to being nervous if an African American male approached her, an attitude that could not help but affect him in his impressionable years. Add to that someone who appears constitutionally conflict-averse (his pre-politician career as a community organizer was to get people to work together, not fight it out), and you have the makings of a person ill-suited for the divisive environment of Washington and the full-contact political battles that have to be fought.

And we've seen that tendency manifest itself as a politician who is always willing to bend over backwards to those who will not trust him, whether from their own innate racism or from their own personal agenda. There's no question that racism plays a much greater role than liberal white America may have wanted to acknowledge, although our minority friends and colleagues would probably say "duh!". One little moment of expressed irritation will give rise to literally hundreds of thousands of reports in the media and right wing blogs/publications/foundations of the angry black man. So rather than play to those disposed to give him the benefit of the doubt, Obama rather tries to win over those who will never do so.

Labels: Barack Obama, bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day

Labels: economic death watch, Greedy Republican Bastards, Medicare, social Darwinism, Social Security, We Are So Screwed

Labels: 2012 election, Better Democrats, hope, hopelessness

President Obama is a fine man, but he just got rolled by Republicans again.

He wanted a grand bargain, and they said no. He wanted a balance of spending and tax changes, and they said no again. And now, with 14 million Americans out of work, he’s about to sign an agreement full of job-killing spending cuts. This, he tells us, is good for the country.

You get the feeling that if they kidnapped his dog, he would pay them money to return it. And say thank you.

The solution here is obvious: Obama needs a blood transfusion from someone meaner, someone who doesn’t shy away from a fight, someone who is willing to take his case to the people and force change.

He needs a dose of Gov. Chris Christie.

What Obama's missing:
The guts of our governor

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck on Sunday night — amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama — Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning.

All day Monday, the blogosphere and the talk shows mused about which party would come out ahead politically. Honestly, who cares? What ought to matter is not how these spending cuts will affect our politicians, but how they’ll affect the country. And I’m not even talking about the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class. I am talking about their effect on America’s still-ailing economy.

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Labels: closing the barn door after the horse escapes, economic death watch, icepick meet forehead, irrelevant has-been pundits, We Are So Screwed, wussy-ass Democrats

So the debt deal has finally been reached. As expected, the agreement arrives in a form that right-thinking people everywhere can feel terrible about with great confidence.

The general consensus is that for the second time in three years, a gang of financial terrorists has successfully extorted the congress and the White House, threatening to blow up the planet if they didn't get what they wanted.

Back in 2008, the congress and George Bush rewarded Hank Paulson and Wall Street for pulling the Cleavon-Little-"the-next-man-makes-a-move-the-n---er-gets-it" routine by tossing trillions of bailout dollars at the same people who had wrecked the economy.

Now, Barack Obama has surrendered control of the budget to the Tea Party, whose operatives in congress used the same suicide-bomber tactic, threatening a catastrophic default unless the Democrats committed to a regime of steep spending cuts without any tax increases on the wealthy.

Labels: American Oligarchy, bloggers, truth, wussy-ass Democrats

Labels: assholes, hack journalism, media whores