Occupation of the United States Capitol on January 17, 2012 will Highlight Corruption in America’s
Political System

Harnessing the considerable power of the Occupy Wall Street movement, protestors from all over the country are being called to participate in "Occupy Congress" next week. It is the next stage in the widespread public protest that began last September in New York.

On January 17th, an Occupy "Call to Action" urges protestors to convene beginning at 9 a.m. EST on the West Front Lawn at Capitol Hill in an effort to bring the movement's message to the doorstep of Congressional lawmakers.

Rallying against corporate greed and corruption, the "99 percent" will arrive on Martin Luther King's birthday weekend to participate in a day of organized protests. According to the Occupy Congress website, the day's activities will include Teach-ins, an Open Mic, a Multi-Occupation General Assembly, Idea Sharing Sessions, and a DC Voting Rights Vigil. The day will end with an "OCCUParty."

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The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union launched a fun interactive game Monday test people's knowledge of the anti-worker sentiments of the top Republican presidential contenders. The game is a great use of low-level technology to make a clear point about the candidates. Using only YouTube clips with embedded links, they achieved a technological feat that in the past would've required much higher level tech skills and programming. This is a tool that has a lot of potential use for campaigns and interest groups in the future.

The description of the game:

We've seen all the outrageous comments, one-liners and sniping between candidates. Now let's see where the candidates stand on issues like public employee unions, child labor and Social Security! Play the game, then sign up below to receive email updates and text alerts.

The game tests viewers' knowledge of recent comments by Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum, making it obvious that none of the candidates has the interests of workers in mind.

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Pat Buchanan on Tuesday blamed "militant gay rights groups" and former Obama administration official Van Jones for a campaign to oust him from his commentator gig at MSNBC.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin suggested last week that the former Republican presidential candidate had been indefinitely suspended from MSNBC after the publication of his book "Suicide of a Superpower," which contains chapters titled "The End of White America" and "The Death of Christian America."

"The reports of my suspension are highly overrated," Buchanan chuckled to Sean Hannity Tuesday. "In November, I had a medical condition, shakes, fever, chills, and I was in the hospital for 11 days, and pretty big hit. ... There's been no formal notification of anything like that."

"Look, for a long period of time, the hard left, militant gay rights groups, militant -- they call themselves civil rights groups, but I'm not sure they're concerned about civil rights -- people of color, Van Jones, these folks and others have been out to get Pat Buchanan off TV and deny him speeches, get his column canceled," Buchanan noted, speaking about himself in the third person.

"This has been done for years and years and years. And it's the usual suspects doing the same thing again. But my view is you write what you believe to be the truth."

In an email to supporters on Tuesday, Color of Change, an organization co-founded by Jones, credited the more than 275,000 members who signed a petition demanding MSNBC fire Buchanan.

"This is a huge victory for everyone who cares about keeping hateful, racially divisive rhetoric and misinformation out of the mainstream media," the group wrote.

(H/T: The Huffington Post, Think Progress)

Republicans have a wide variety of conservative white males vying to be their nominee. No really. Bear with me:

They have former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich summing up the worst of the ‘90s GOP. Not only did he shut down the government during his tenure, he attempted to oust a president for doing what Gingrich was doing at that very moment. The Speaker investigated Bill Clinton for hanky panky with an intern (a paid one – FYI – oh the ‘90s were a golden age) while Gingrich was messing around with a Capitol staffer; soon to be his third and current wife, Callista.

I’ve stopped using the word “hypocrite” for people like Gingrich. It’s a 75-cent word no one cares about. A better term is “fraud.”

Gingrich enjoys going after people for the things he’s guilty of; like when he said we should lock up Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. Gingrich described them as “the politicians who profited from the environment and the politicians who put this country in trouble.” This was before it was disclosed Gingrich was paid $1.6 million by Freddie Mac for what any reasonable person would call lobbying. (He maintains it was anything from being a celebrity to being a historian that “earned” such a paycheck.)

He’s now attacking Mitt Romney for “making people unemployed” at the leverage buyout firm Bain Capital, while not mentioning Gingrich was on the advisory board at a competing leverage buyout firm Forstmann Little after his stint as Speaker.

Fraud.

But don’t worry, Republicans also have a sample of the worst of their party from ‘00s: Rick Santorum. Now Santorum believes your uterus doesn’t have a right to privacy. If Santorum has his way, women’s private parts are up for public scrutiny and federal regulation. He’s also bravely stood up for states being able to ban birth control and not wanting to make black/blah people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.

But Santorum ranks among the worst of the Bush Era because of a blah spot on the Grand Old Party called: The Terri Schiavo case. In 2005, Schiavo was in a decades-long vegetative state; her husband wanted to abide by her wishes and not keep her alive by artificial means. Her parents disagreed. They went to court. Then Congress got involved. Then the President of the United States at his home in Crawford boarded Air Force One on Easter to fly to Washington to sign legislation to “save Terri.”

Santorum was at the bedside of Terri Schiavo (uninvited) to make a national spectacle of himself. How’d he get there? Walmart corporate jet. Why was this Pennsylvania senator in Florida? Outback Steakhouse fundraiser. So an industry toady uses his corporate favors to publically moralize our most intimate issues? He’s pro-life, with the caveat of being pro-er-big-big-business.

A few months later in that same year, nearly 2,000 Americans died in Hurricane Katrina without a special session from Congress or a visit from Santorum. It’s hard to embrace the sanctity of life while corpses float along the streets of an American city. Santorum lost his seat by 17 points the next fall.

So worst of the ‘90s, worst of the ‘00s and just to add diversity - the cartoon of an absurd GOP future: Rick Perry.

All that really needs to be said about Perry is he was finally able to list all three agencies he’d cut while president and got a nearly standing ovation from an otherwise subdued New Hampshire crowd last Saturday at ABC’s debate. As they say in Texas, Perry is all hat and no…

“Uh … I can’t … sorry … oops.”

Which leads us back to the 1 percent (tipper) representing, Mitt Romney. Because all the other candidates remind us of bygone ethics violations, shameful hysterias, China or Ron Paul, the GOP looks like they’re stuck with Romney. But they do not love him.

His campaign has been like the rehearsal dinner for an arranged marriage: kind of sad, kind of inevitable – fun to watch from another party.

Cross posted at tinadupuy.com

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Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters continues to sound the alarm on our extreme weather patterns. Maybe someone in a position to do something about manmade climate change policies should, you know, do something about it?

Flowers are sprouting in January in New Hampshire, the Sierra Mountains in California are nearly snow-free, and lakes in much of Michigan still have not frozen. It's 2012, and the new year is ringing in another ridiculously wacky winter for the U.S. In Fargo, North Dakota yesterday, the mercury soared to 55°F, breaking a 1908 record for warmest January day in recorded history. More than 99% of North Dakota had no snow on the ground this morning, and over 95% of the country that normally has snow at this time of year had below-average snow cover. High temperatures in Nebraska yesterday were in the 60s, more than 30° above average. Storm activity has been almost nil over the past week over the entire U.S., with the jet stream bottled up far to the north in Canada. It has been remarkable to look at the radar display day after day and see virtually no echoes, and it is very likely that this has been the driest first week of January in U.S. recorded history.

Portions of northern New England, the Upper Midwest, and the mountains of the Western U.S. that are normally under a foot of more of snow by now have no snow, or just a dusting of less than an inch. Approximately half of the U.S. had temperatures at least 5°F above average during the month of December, with portions of North Dakota and Minnesota seeing temperatures 9°F above average. The strangely warm and dry start to winter is not limited to the U.S--all of continental Europe experienced well above-average temperatures during December.

The cause of this warm first half of winter is the most extreme configuration of the jet stream ever recorded, as measured by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The Arctic Oscillation (AO), and its close cousin, the North Atlantic Oscillation (which can be thought of as the North Atlantic's portion of the larger-scale AO), are climate patterns in the Northern Hemisphere defined by fluctuations in the difference of sea-level pressure in the North Atlantic between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. The AO and NAO have significant impacts on winter weather in North America and Europe--the AO and NAO affect the path, intensity, and shape of the jet stream, influencing where storms track and how strong these storms become.

During December 2011, the NAO index was +2.52, which was the most extreme difference in pressure between Iceland and the Azores ever observed in December (records of the NAO go back to 1865.) The AO during December 2011 had its second most extreme December value on record, behind the equally unusual December of 2006. These positive AO/NAO conditions caused the Icelandic Low to draw a strong south-westerly flow of air over eastern North America, preventing Arctic air from plunging southward over the U.S. and Europe.

[...] We will (finally!) get the first major storm of 2012 in the U.S. early next week, when a low pressure system will develop over Texas and spread heavy rains of 1 - 3" along a swath from Eastern Texas to New England during the week. This storm will pull in a shot of cold air behind it late in the week, giving near-normal January temperatures to much of the country, and some snow to northern New England. Beyond that, it is difficult to tell what the rest of winter may hold, since the AO is difficult to predict more than a week or two in advance. The latest predictions from the GFS model show the current strongly positive AO pattern continuing for at least the next two weeks, resulting in very little snow and warmer-than-average temperatures. If we don't get significant snows during the latter part of winter, the odds of a damaging drought during the summer in the Midwest will rise. The soils will dry out much earlier than usual without a deep snow pack to protect them, resulting in a much earlier onset of summer-like soil dryness. Water availability may also be a problem in some regions of the west due to the lack of snow melt. Fortunately, most Western U.S. reservoirs are above average in water supply, due to the record-breaking snows of the previous winter.

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Mitt Romney gave a fiery speech after his expected win in the New Hampshire GOP primary race this Tuesday evening which was full of red meat for the base and full of lies and ad hominem attacks on President Obama and a lot of projection to boot.

It started out with a lot of the standard fare we've heard from him on the campaign trail, claiming that our current President who has, to a fault in my opinion, bent over backwards to try to get Republicans to work with him only to be met with unprecedented obstruction every step of the way is the one dividing America.

ROMNEY: We remember when Barack Obama came to New Hampshire four years ago.

He promised to bring people together.

He promised to change the broken system in Washington.

He promised to improve our nation.

Those were the days of lofty promises made by a hopeful candidate. Today, we are faced with the disappointing record of a failed President. The last three years have held a lot of change, but they haven’t offered much hope.

Then from a member of the party that's been trying to sabotage the economy on purpose for political gain, Romney went on to attack President Obama for failing to turn the economy around quickly enough, as though he's the only one that's got any control over that, or that Mitt Romney has any credibility on the issue of job creation.

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The Obama White House continues to push for a settlement that would let bankers avoid being punished - or even investigated - for a wave of mortgage-related crimes that includes perjury, tax evasion, and several types of fraud.[1]

Despite the President's new-found populism - rhetorically, anyway - officials in his Administration continue to push an unfair deal designed to conceal the financial Crime of the Century.

The Financial Times reported on new details of the proposed settlement, whose stated purpose is to punish banks and reduce the amount of money owed by underwater homeowners. But it's increasingly clear that the deal wouldn't help homeowners very much and wouldn't punish bankers at all.

Banks could lower those loan balances by reducing the amount owed on mortgages owned by investors and not by the bank itself. That's what Bank of America is accused of doing as part of an $8 billion settlement it reached in 2008. This deal would set the stage for a repeat performance.

This proposed deal is still unfair, unjust, and very unbalanced. And it has the Administration's fingerprints all over it.

Unfair

Banks deceived investors into buying bundled mortgages (mortgage-backed securities) that they knew were worth far less than they were paying. Now, as part of this settlement deal, they could shaft those investors again. Many of the investors are from the 99 percent, not the one percent. As the head of the Association of Mortgage Investors told the Financial Times, "It would be a pyrrhic victory to settle the mortgage crisis with the money of public institutions, pension funds and seniors."

The proposed deal would force banks to meet a certain dollar limit for reducing mortgage principal. But it's designed to let them use other people's money - mortgage investors' money - to reach that limit. They would have to reduce principals by a larger amount if they were using someone else's money.

Taking $1.00 off their own books might get them $1.00 closer to their goal, while using investors' money money only "earn" them fifty cents. Is that really supposed to encourage them to do the right thing?

Ask yourself: What if you were given a choice between spending a thousand dollars of your own money to pay a fine - or two thousand dollars of someone else's? (And remember: You're a banker, so don't let conscience influence your decision.) What would you do?

The money should come out of the banks' balance sheets, not those of mortgage investors that in many cases they've already defrauded. Even that isn't entirely fair: Many pension funds and other institutional investors hold bank stock, too, as do unwary private investors. They've also been defrauded by bank executives. But someone has to pay the price for trusting these bankers and tolerating their continued presence in the executive suite.

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We Are Respectable Negroes: Uncomfortable Worshipfulness Towards a Killer: Fox News Interview With Chris Kyle

Mad Mikes America: Newt Gingrich's Patriotic Adultery

Juanita Jean's: The "I Love Yew Newt" Daily Newt

Jay Allbritton: Republicans Doing Ted Kennedy's Material

Roundup by Suzette (twitter @miamiswimmer) Send tips to MBRU at Crooks and Liars dot com

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Reuters says so. Open thread below....

Here's a little sunshine.

Eternity's Children
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