Ciao from the Florida Keys! How about that Supermoon this weekend? In case you missed it, here's some photos from around the world. I'll be here all week, so let's get to gettin.

Eclecta Blog: 5 Reasons We Can Never Let Mitt Romney Become President of the United States

American Prospect: A Sad Day for Democracy

Southern Poverty Law Center: How Many 'Ex-Gays' Does it Take to Justify a Conference? Apparently More Than They Could Draw.

Torrent Freak: The Lengthening Arm of Uncle Sam's 'Pirate' Justice

Round up by Swimgirl.(tweeter @miamiswimmer) Send tips to mbru AT crooksandliars.com.

via videographer Mimi Schiffman.

In a small school a little north and a little west of downtown Durham, N.C., a group of eleven-, twelve- and thirteen-year-olds has been busy organizing a field-trip.

Watch as a middle school's gay-straight alliance, GLOW, for Gay Lesbian or Whatever, embarks on an adventure in civic engagement with real consequences for many of the club's members.

"They don’t really see kids as having an idea of how they want their future to be like," said Sarah, a GLOW member, "but when we actually voice our opinion it really does make a difference.

Open Thread below....

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This is the world we live in now, folks. One where conservatives think students borrowing money from the government is an "entitlement." Back in the days when people were sane, we used to believe paying for our young people to be educated was an obligation of a healthy democracy. Now, it's all up to kids who are expected not only to pay for their college educations, but to bury themselves deep in debt to do it. Listen to George Will's arrogant pronouncement:

TAPPER: And, George, you and I were talking about this earlier. You think that we're witnessing the birth of a new entitlement, with the president's push on -- on student loans.

WILL: Well, look what happened. It's a slow-motion, almost absentminded creation of a new entitlement, exactly at the moment when the entitlement state is buckling under the weight of its already existing commitments. Five years ago, Congress says, well, let's cut in half the interest rate on certain student loans, from 6.8 to 3.4.

Wow, no brownie points to Jake Tapper for just repeating that nonsense without so much as a raised eyebrow. Entitlement? Really?

From the time our kids are in kindergarten, parents, teachers and society alike hammer home the value of their education. By the time they're freshmen in high school, they're expected to know what they want their career to be and forge a pathway to college. If they want to get into something other than a community college, they're told to stress out for the next four years, take all the AP or IB classes they can, volunteer in their communities, participate in extracurricular activities, work a part-time job, and make sure they maintain their straight As in the process.

Those who actually manage to do these things are then rewarded with acceptances to the colleges of their choice and immediately presented with a bill for anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 per year. If they're really lucky, they might win one of the few scholarships available to shave some of the pain off that bottom line, but there are no guarantees.

If they're not, they're told they can borrow around $5,000 per year from the government, and if their parents qualify, mom and dad can borrow about $25,000 from the government to send them to that school. Here's what happens: Those kids who we pushed to achieve and qualify for those public and sometimes private university educations land in community college for a couple of years while they try to save enough money to go to a 4-year university and not go broke in the process.

If they choose the 4-year university/tuition loan route, they leave school with debt, hazy job prospects, and the sense that everything they just worked toward was a farce. Which it will be, if Will has his way.

TAPPER: 6.8 to 3.4, yeah.

WILL: We'll do it, they said, temporarily. Well, now we're coming up against the expiration of that, and they're saying, well, let's temporarily move it on yet again.

TAPPER: But Romney supports that, as well.

WILL: I understand that. And that's why this is a bipartisan example of how entitlements -- because once you do this, once you extend it again, you'll never go back to 3.4 percent.

SMILEY: But when -- but when -- but when student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt, and we want to label that an entitlement, we don't call corporate welfare an entitlement. I just -- I don't see...

WILL: Of the two-thirds of the people who graduate from college with debt, the average debt is something under $30,000 total. That is just about the one-year difference in earnings between a college graduate and a high school graduate. We're talking about a pittance a month (ph).

(CROSSTALK)

SMILEY: But, George -- but if we give interest-free loans to bankers, why not interest-free loans to students, George?

WILL: Let's not give interest-free loans to anyone.

At last! Something I agree with George Will about. Truly, let's not give interest-free loans to the banks, and let's not make students and their struggling middle class parents break under the weight of student loans. Instead, let's recognize that this country has always believed that educating our children is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy, and start paying for it again the way we have in the past.

The reason Will and his ilk argue against student loan interest rate breaks is simple: They want to control which students have access to a college education. Their preferred flavor of student is a conservative one. They truly believe educating those librul ingrates who show up at Occupy protests or dare to question the status quo are unworthy of an education. If conservatives could choose which students got a college education, they'd be the very compliant sons and daughters of fine, upstanding, churchgoing types. The ones who qualify for Koch scholarships.

The ones like people in my family who protested the Vietnam war, went to college in the days when the University of California was tuition-free, and then dedicated themselves to public service for their entire career? They need not apply if their voter registration says "Democrat."

I'm completely serious about the need to return to the values that made this country great, and those values include assuming the costs for educating our young people and making sure they have the finest education possible in order to innovate, create, and shape a new, better, more equal world. Enough of the philosophy of educating only caretakers for the oligarchs.

Not only should there be no interest charged on student loans, there should be no student loans. It's as simple as that.

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While discussing the fact that the United States has been slow to recover from the recession, David Gregory parroted the Republicans' talking point that you can't claim the stimulus plan worked because it failed to keep unemployment below 8 percent as the administration claimed it would.

Gregory also ignores the record amount of obstruction the Democrats have had to deal with ever since President Obama took office with either blocking or watering down the stimulus package they did manage to get passed. As many have pointed out, one of the biggest drags on the economy right now has been the number of government jobs that have been lost, as opposed to the private sector which has been recovering more quickly.

As Vice President Biden pointed out, the economy was in a lot worse shape than they realized when that statement was made and no one can argue that putting more teachers and firefighters back to work is not going to improve the unemployment numbers. He also pointed out that Mitt Romney's record on job creation is not the best one either as a businessman or during his term as governor.

Transcript of their exchange below the fold.

Continue reading »

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This Week with George Stephanopoulos marks the deaths of five service members in Afghanistan:

US Marines MSgt Scott E Pruitt, 38, Gautier, MS
US Army PFC Christian R Sannicolas, 20, Anaheim, CA
US Army Sgt Nicholas M Dickhut, 23, Rochester, MN
US Army CPT Bruce K Clark, 43, Spencerport, NY
US Army SSG Zachary H Hargrove, 32, Wichita, KS

According to iCasualties, the total number of allied servicemembers killed in Afghanistan is now 2,992. While contemporaneous reporting is difficult to find, an estimated 12,800 Afghan civilians have been killed since the initial invasion.

In addition, the following notable names lost their lives: Professional poker player Amarillo Slim, Israeli academic and activist Benzion Netanyahu, Olympian Alexander Dale Oen, musician Charles 'Skip' Pitts, football player Junior Seau, musician Adam Yauch, comedian Rich Ramirez, supercentenarian Charlotte Hawkins Flowers, and character actor George Lindsey.

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The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday refused to deny that she was planning a run for Senate in Wyoming.

Politico noted last week that Liz Cheney had been setting the stage for a possible Senate run by increasing her visibility and speaking at six events in Wyoming this year alone.

"This is planting seeds of thought in people’s minds," Shawn Whitman, a former chief of staff for two Wyoming senators, told Politico. “There’s nobody I know that goes to those events unless they have a position in the party or they’re trying to run for office.”

Liz Cheney declined to speak to Politico, but she couldn't avoid the question from Chris Wallace on Sunday while appearing on Fox News.

"I love Wyoming," she explained. "Wyoming is my home. And what I have been hearing from people all across Wyoming is how important it is that we defeat Barack Obama in 2012. And they're very afraid about -- you ask people in Wyoming, 'Are you better off now than you were $5 trillion ago?' They'll say, absolutely not."

"There was a report yesterday that you're traveling around the state, and that you're thinking of running for Senate from Wyoming in 2014," Wallace pressed.

"Look, I have been honored to have been asked to help support the Republican Party in Wyoming," Cheney replied. "As I said, it's my home. It's a very special place, but I'm really focused on defeating Barack Obama. We don't have the luxury, frankly, of looking beyond this election because this election is so important."

"And let me tell you, folks: to be continued," Wallace concluded.

Charles Mahtesian, Politico’s national politics editor, pointed out that "[f]or a nation forged by revolution against a hereditary monarchy, America has always had an unusual tolerance for -- or even embrace of -- political dynasty."

"At the moment, there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 members of Congress whose parents also served in Congress, or have a sibling or cousin in Congress, or who succeeded to their husband's seat," Mahtesian wrote. "And there's more waiting in the wings: Seven sons of congressmen are currently seeking election to the House."

This is why we can't have nice things. Former Bain Capital executive Edward Conard--showing that the .01 percent have their finger on the pulse of America--wrote a book declaring that massive income inequality is actually a good thing.

Conard understands that many believe that the U.S. economy currently serves the rich at the expense of everyone else. He contends that this is largely because most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”

This is the usual defense of the 1 percent. Conard, however, has laid out a tightly argued case for just how much consumers actually benefit from the wealthy. Take computers, for example. A small number of innovators and investors may have earned disproportionate billions as the I.T. industry grew, but they got that money by competing to constantly improve their products and simultaneously lower prices. Their work has helped everyone get a lot more value. Cheap, improved computing helps us do our jobs more effectively and, often, earn more money. Countless other industries (travel, telecom, entertainment) use that computing power to lower their prices and enhance their products. This generally makes life more efficient and helps the economy grow.

The idea that society benefits when investors compete successfully is pretty widely accepted. Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.

Let's hear it for the Chicago School of Economics claptrap. For thirty plus years we've been hearing this and it yet the economy gets worse and worse for not only the 99 percent, but for the country as well. We went to the biggest creditor nation to the biggest debtor nation. The economy isn't driven by innovation and risk, you selfish ass. Let's stop perpetuating this meme once and for all.

The economy is driven by demand. Period. Full stop. All the innovation and risk in the world means nothing if people can't afford to purchase the products.

As Thom Hartmann puts it:

The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "conservative" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.

I am sick and tired of these wealthy, selfish elites getting a platform to rationalize their avarice when we have demonstrable proof that all this "job creators" and "innovators" driving the economy is nothing but bovine excrement. Where are the damn jobs? Why are wages stagnating? Why is it that in the wealthiest nation in the world 1 in 5 children are going to bed hungry or malnourished?

Tell me, Mr. Conard, what innovation did you provide to the country when you acquired and broke up companies? Yes, some products have reduced in price due to innovation (it's lovely if you can afford a big screen plasma TV for under a grand, or get a laptop for under $500...but the number of American families who can afford that are falling dramatically) but other costs have gone up dramatically, like health care and education. But those facts are inconvenient to Conard:

More to the point, Conard doesn't seem to understand the negative consequences of income inequality, certainly not in any form beyond an abstract red line on a graph. Viewing the economy simply as risk and reward divides the population into rich and not-rich, rather than increasingly wealthy and vastly expanding poor. It collapses the lower and middle classes into a monolith of moral distinction; they're simply "not innovators," a label that occludes everything awful about poverty, from quality of life to its cyclical and self-reinforcing nature. Conard's model also assumes lower prices are a financial salve in and of themselves. But simply because food is cheaper does not mean that someone living below the poverty line can afford enough of it, especially as median incomes decline along with prices. And Timothy Noah points out that while the prices of goods have declined in the past few decades, the prices of other, more important services, like higher education and health care, have gotten drastically more expensive. How a shrinking middle class, having to work longer hours to keep itself healthy and increasingly unable to afford education, creates a greater amount of innovators is something Conard doesn't address. Not only do innovators suffer when an enervated society can't afford to purchase their products, but innovators themselves have to come from somewhere. The income inequality that Conard endorses as the reward for innovators is the very same process that prevents future innovators from coming up. Conard waves many of these concerns away. He came from a solidly middle class family and built up a massive personal fortune, and suffers from the biographical delusions of many self-made men, roughly: I did it, therefore everybody else can, too.

Too bad that Conard's self-serving rationalizations actively prevent that from happening.

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Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday endorsed equal rights for married gay men and lesbians -- and President Barack Obama's top aide said that the president had "precisely" the same position.

"The good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition," Biden told NBC's David Gregory. "Who do you love? Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out what all marriages at their root are about, whether they're marriages of gay men or lesbians or heterosexuals."

"The president sets the policy," he acknowledged, but "I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that."

Biden added that he didn't know if President Barack Obama would support full same sex marriage rights in his second term.

"I don't know the answer to that," the vice president admitted. "People fear that which is different and now they're beginning to understand."

Obama campaign senior adviser David Axelrod quickly took to Twitter to say that his boss had the exact same position on marriage equality.

"What VP said-that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights-is precisely POTUS's position," Axelrod tweeted.

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A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. - Mark Twain.

If there was ever any doubt that the right-wing media machine thinks as one, it was confirmed this morning when, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the ever-pompous, exceedingly unctuous George Will was hectoring President Obama for making "incontinent" speeches. "That's how you end up with empty seats," he said, his eyes bugging through his coke-bottle glasses and his chicken head bobbing righteously.

George Will has always been a hypocrite (Mr. Old-Time Family Values was famously thrown out of the house when his then-wife found out about his affair with his now-wife and threw all his belongings onto the lawn), but he lies, too.
(Sometimes it's just lies by convenient omission. For instance, I don't remember him disclosing this year that Wife No. 2 was the communications director for the Rick Perry campaign. Oops!)

For Will, this was typical. Loose with the facts, pronounced as though he brought down the tablets from the mountaintop from his personal meeting with God.

Look, self-absorption is part of the occupational hazard of politics and then it's also part of the job description of being president. All that said, try to imagine Dwight Eisenhower talking about D-Day, saying, "I did this, I decided this, I did this and then I did that." It's inconceivable. If you struck from Barack Obama's vocabulary the first person singular pronoun, he would fall silent, which would be a mercy to us and service to him, actually, because he has been so incontinent in his speechmaking for the last three years that you wind up with, as you said in Ohio State University, empty seats.

It's simply bull. And of course Breitbart and Drudge pitch in to sell the snake oil:

The truth is that President Obama drew 14,000+ in an 18,000 seat arena. It wasn’t a sellout, but it was about 13,500 more people than Romney’s largest crowd in Ohio. As the Washington Post pointed out Romney has drawn crowds of several thousand during the campaign, what they didn’t mention is that most of his thousands were bused in Mormon college students, but Obama’s crowd today was exponentially bigger than anything Mitt Romney has drawn this year.

The right wing media was trying to level the playing field. They want to erase the memory of Mitt Romney giving his big economic address to 80,000 empty seats at Ford Field in Detroit. The problem they have is that even though right wing media does, the photographs don’t lie.The arena for the Obama event wasn’t empty. This was just another attempt by the right to plant a lie in the media, with the hope that it takes root and sprouts, but visual evidence and common sense are the pesticides needed to make sure that this weed never grows in our 2012 garden.

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Sunday suggested that Democrats invented the contraception debate and the Republican Party was "more tolerant" on diverse opinions about a woman's right to choose.

Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Mitt Romney's possible vice presidential running mate if the Republican Party would "take this country back when it comes to gay rights, when it comes to birth control, when it comes to abortion?"

"On the issue of life, yes,'" Rubio agreed. "Although there is diversity in the Republican Party on the life issue. In essence, there are such a thing as pro-choice Republicans, there are very few pro-life Democrats that are certainly tolerated within the mainstream of the Democratic Party. I think that's important to point out. On that issue, I think there's actually more tolerance in the Republican Party."

While Rubio is right that there are pro-choice Republicans, there are more Democrats in Congress that are against abortion rights than there are Republicans who support them.

For example, ten Democrats voted with the Republican majority last year to strip Planned Parenthood of funding, while only seven Republicans voted against the measure.

The senator from Florida also said Republican opposition to mandating that all insurance plans cover contraception for women wasn't really about birth control.

"I don't know anything about a contraception debate," he insisted. "I do know about a religious liberties debate that we had in this country about whether the federal government should have the power to force a religious institution -- in this case, the Catholic Church -- to have to pay for something that the church teaches against. That's what that issue was about."

"I understand the president turned it into a contraception issue because it ties back to this strategy of this administration. He doesn't want to run on his record. So instead, they are constantly in search of some issue that they can divide the American people on."

Rubio added: "The president we have today is a typical Washington politician that's prone to hyperbole and divisiveness and false outrage. And I think it's very sad."