AARP under fire for siding with Social Security cuts

Maybe AARP wants to see if they can anger the public more than the GOP. Whatever the reason, this is not going to go down well.

AARP, the powerful lobby for older Americans, was hammered Friday by fellow activists for refusing to oppose any and all cuts to Social Security benefits, a position the group says it has long held as a way to extend the life of the massive retirement and disability program.

The group, which has 37 million Americans as members, adamantly opposes cutting Social Security benefits to help reduce the federal budget deficit, said David Certner, the organization's director of legislative policy. But for years AARP has acknowledged that cuts to future benefits may be necessary to improve the program's finances, he said.

"Our policy for decades has always been that we basically support a package that would include revenue enhancements and benefit adjustments to get Social Security to long-term solvency," Certner said. "That has been our policy stated over and over again for, I mean, literally it has to be two decades, now."

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FLASHBACK What was Rep. Weiner working on before he was "gated"? (Hint: Clarence Thomas’s conflicts of interest)

[Correction: The author of the AngryBlackLady post mentioned below is Allan Brauer. My error and apologies – GP]

I'm following up two chunks of information this morning, both acquired over the weekend.

The first is bits and pieces regarding the "gating" of Rep. Weiner (as in "Weiner-gate," or "Mighty-tighty-whiteys–gate," or the "Breitbarting of Weiner's ..." something ... gate).

The second involves a big chunk of info about Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan from Howie Klein at DownWithTyranny via a long interchange with Digby on a recent Virtually Speaking.

Let's focus on the NY congressman. I'm not much interested in Weiner's ... something ... but I am interested in Clarence Thomas, whom I've written about on several occasions.

Thanks to AngryBlackLady (h/t MG1 via email), one of the things the big bright spotlight didn't cover on Weiner-Friday was Clarence Thomas's re-amendment of his amendment of his financial disclosure forms.

All of a sudden, the news that Clarence Thomas was being forced to correct the lie that corrected the other lie (sorry, "impossible-to-believe double oversight") was overshadowed by the news that someone may have tweeted Anthony Weiner's ... something. Or somebody's something. (Think that was Breitbart's subaltern in those shorts?)

What's the connection? Weiner is the reason that Thomas had to make that double correction.

A timeline:

■ In January 2011, Common Cause reveals that Clarence Thomas has repeatedly failed to report his wife's Movement Conservative income (from the Heritage Foundation) on his financial disclosure forms. He checked the box marked "Not one dime" when he should have checked the one labeled "Between $1 and $686,589" in each of five years running.

■ In February, Anthony Weiner gets 74 congresspeople to send a letter to Clarence Thomas asking him to explain himself, then launches a Conflicted Clarence Thomas campaign, attempting to shame him into a recusal on any health care case. From Weiner's petition (feel free to click and sign):

The Thomas household has profited from opposition to health care reform. His wife has already taken nearly $700,000 from health care opponents and now openly advertises herself as a crack lobbyist with the “experience and connections” to overturn the law of the land.

Use the form on the right to stand with Anthony Weiner and his House colleagues, co-signing their letter and calling on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from any cases regarding the constitutionality of the health care reform law immediately in the interest of maintaining impartiality in nation's highest court.

Note that the "nearly $700,000" number will turn out to be wrong, significantly low.

■ Liberty Central is forced, presumably by Weiner's constant tweaking, to release its own IRS forms showing $150,000 in payments to Ginni Thomas, President and CEO, in 2010 (jump to page 12 using the pop-up toolbar at the bottom).

Liberty Central is on record as opposing Obama's Affordable Care Act, perhaps the reason this income didn't make it to Clarence Thomas's first round of income-correction. The ACA may well come before the Court on which Thomas sits.

■ On May 27 (a Friday), Thomas announces he will release his amended disclosures later that day, and starting at 9:14 am there's a lot of Twitter traffic from @RepWeiner about it, eleven straight tweets at one point, including this one.

Note that the "nearly $700,000" number is now $800,000 (that we know about).

■ Later that evening, Weiner tweets that his Facebook account has been hacked and the chicken-in-the-pants pic goes out (no link; this is why god made google, folks).

Here I part company with AngryBlackLady, by the way. She sees a connection, based in part on the fact that the intended recipient of the pants-pic is black (something I was not aware of) and Clarence Thomas's original sin, which was sexual harassment of a black woman (Anita Hill):

But notice now what you may not have noticed before. How allegations that Anthony Weiner sexually harassed a young African American woman just appeared out of the blue at the very moment when Weiner’s campaign to discredit Clarence Thomas was peaking. Think some more about what you’ve learned that you may not know, or have forgotten, about the history of the players in this drama and their nexus with the story of the man whose name came to be synonymous with sexual harassment in the American culture 20 years ago. Think about how distracted the media have been from the story of Clarence Thomas, in spite of the efforts of Anthony Weiner to keep a spotlight on Thomas.

Perhaps, and I mean that sincerely. But for what it's worth, I am thinking coincidence (or happy accident), though I do believe that God is an ironist. There's a ton of information in this Daily Kos diary that fingers two Breitbart acolytes–types, James O'Keefe wannabes, as the likely tighty-whitey pic perps.

As I wrote to MG1 (who sent me the original AngryBlackLady article), I think it's unlikely that someone at the low level occupied by those two would be coordinating with someone operating at a high enough level to be managing Clarence Thomas's disinformation and misdirection campaign.

But still, why waste a crisis? Like AngryBlackLady, I'd like to take the big bright beam now focused on Weiner's imagined flashlight, and shine it on Clarence Thomas's ongoing problem with the truth, his inner angry giant, and our ongoing problem with him.

So for that, my thanks! Clarence, this one's for you. According to ProtectOurElections.org, there's a lot more where this came from. And Rep. Weiner, along with myself, your humble servant, will be all over it. Stay tuned.

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Layoffs expected on Wall Street

It's never good to see anyone lose their job but really, Wall Street needs to feel a lot more of the pain that they caused the rest of the country. It's unrealistic for Wall Street to expected pre-crisis profits and really, the rest of the country should not even tolerate seeing those profits. We all know they were false so more of the same is not what we need. NY Times:

Wall Street plans to get smaller this summer. Faced with weak markets and uncertainty over regulations, many of the biggest firms are preparing for deep cuts in jobs and other costs.

The cutback plans are emerging even as Wall Street firms have mostly recovered from the financial crisis and are reporting substantial profits again. But those profits are not as big as they were before the crisis, and it is expected that in the coming months it will be even more difficult for firms to make money. Worries about debt in Europe and the shape that the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul rules will ultimately take, combined with the usual summer doldrums, are prompting banks to act.

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Karzai admits US in negotiations with Taliban

Whatever it takes to leave, fine. Just get it over with.

The US and other foreign powers are engaged in preliminary talks with the Taliban about a possible settlement to the war in Afghanistan, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has said. It is the first official confirmation of US involvement in such negotiations.

Diplomats have already said there have been months of preliminary talks between the two sides, and Karzai, who is a strong advocate of peace talks, has long said that Afghans are in contact with insurgent groups.

"Peace talks are going on with the Taliban. The foreign military and especially the United States itself is going ahead with these negotiations," Karzai told a news conference in the Afghan capital on Saturday. The US embassy in Kabul declined to comment on Karzai's statement.

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The Pogues - Navigator

Just as I was ready to head outside, the rain returned. It's great for the garden and we need it, but it would be nice if the rain could just work during the normal work week and not the weekend. Read the rest of this post...