FBI investigating hacking of celebrities, including Scarlett Johansson

I find it intriguing that this comes out at the same time Rupert Murdoch's media empire is alleged to have hacked famous people in the UK.  Possibly no connection - there's no mention of who the suspect might be - but it is an interesting coincidence. Read the rest of this post...

Is the GOP getting ready to steal the presidential election? Looks like it.

Mother Jones:

Here's the rub, though: Each state gets to determine how its electoral votes are allocated. Currently, 48 states and DC use a winner-take-all system in which the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of its electoral votes. Under the Republican plan—which has been endorsed by top Republicans in both houses of the state's legislature, as well as the governor, Tom Corbett—Pennsylvania would change from this system to one where each congressional district gets its own electoral vote. (Two electoral votes—one for each of the state's two senators—would go to the statewide winner.)

This could cost Obama dearly. The GOP controls both houses of the state legislature plus the governor's mansion—the so-called "redistricting trifecta"—in Pennsylvania. Congressional district maps are adjusted after every census, and the last one just finished up. That means Pennsylvania Republicans get to draw the boundaries of the state's congressional districts without any input from Democrats. Some of the early maps have leaked to the press, and Democrats expect that the Pennsylvania congressional map for the 2012 elections will have 12 safe GOP seats compared to just 6 safe Democratic seats.

Under the Republican plan, if the GOP presidential nominee carries the GOP-leaning districts but Obama carries the state, the GOP nominee would get 12 electoral votes out of Pennsylvania, but Obama would only get eight—six for winning the blue districts, and two (representing the state's two senators) for winning the state. Since Obama would lose 12 electoral votes relative to the winner-take-all baseline, this would have an effect equivalent to flipping a medium-sized winner-take-all state—say, Washington, which has 12 electoral votes—from blue to red.* And Republicans wouldn't even have to do any extra campaigning or spend any extra advertising dollars to do it.

If the Democrats tried this, the Republicans would be rioting in the street. They're quite literally trying to steal the presidential election. How will the Democrats respond? The word feckless comes to mind. Read the rest of this post...

Has GOP been given an opening to gut Medicare and Medicaid?

NYT:

The president made clear his intentions in his speech to a joint session of Congress last week when, setting forth a plan to create jobs and revive the economy, he said he disagreed with members of his party “who don’t think we should make any changes at all to Medicare and Medicaid.”

Few Democrats fit that description. But many say that if, as expected, Mr. Obama next week proposes $300 billion to $500 billion of savings over 10 years in entitlement programs, he will provide political cover for a new bipartisan Congressional committee to cut just as much or more.

And, they say, such proposals from the White House will hamstring Democrats who had been hoping to employ Medicare as a potent issue against Republicans in 2012 campaigns after many Congressional Republicans backed a budget that would have substantially altered Medicare by providing future beneficiaries with a subsidy to enroll in private health care plans.

The story goes on to note that Medicare and Medicaid comprise 23% of federal spending, and in 2021 they'll comprise 28%. That's bad. And it's one of the reasons the President should have pushed for a public option during health care reform, that the groups should have pushed much harder for reform across the board (I didn't see any Harry & Louise quality ads on our side), and the President should have been beating the drum about the GOP (and conservative Dems) short-circuiting health care form from the time they did until now. You don't just drop the argument and then a few years later say "gosh, health care is expensive, let's cut Medicare!"

All of this is tied together into one large political web. Every misstep feeds another. We said at the time that the President's capitulation on health care was going to have ramifications later on, and it is. It is absurd that the President doesn't own this issue. Instead, the GOP does, to a degree. They talk every day about "Obamacare." How often do you hear the President talking about health care?

Can you name two things that the President's health care reform package does? Here's what I know: Something with pre-existing conditions (not quite sure what), and something with something called exchanges (zero idea there). Oh yeah, and it lets kids up to 26 stay on their parents' plans. Otherwise, I haven't a clue. And most people I know don't either.  Of course, part of the problem is that some brainiac thought it wise to not implement the major provisions of the plan until 2014 - thus ensuring the public would see little to no benefit before then and thus neither understand the plan nor feel any loyalty to it. Which hands the issue over to the GOP, and makes it ripe for repeal if the President loses re-election and we lose the Senate. Read the rest of this post...

James Fallows on the "Passionless Presidency"

At some parts, Fallows describes President Obama to a T.  Except that this was written in 1979 about Jimmy Carter.  This is just a small excerpt of a quite long article.  Some of this sounds awfully familiar:

But if he has the gift of virtue, there are other gifts he lacks.

One is sophistication. It soon became clear, in ways I shall explain, that Carter and those closest to him to him took office in profound ignorance of their jobs. They were ignorant of the possibilities and the most likely pitfalls. They fell prey to predictable dangers and squandered precious time.

The second is the ability to explain his goals and thereby to offer an object for loyalty larger than himself.

The third, and most important, is the passion to convert himself from a good man into an effective one, to learn how to do the job. Carter often seemed more concerned with taking the correct position than with learning how to turn that position into results. He seethed with frustration when plans were rejected, but felt no compulsion to do better next time. He did not devour history for its lessons, surround himself with people who could do what he could not, or learn from others that fire was painful before he plunged his hand into the flame.

If he persists in walling himself off from challenge and disorder, Jimmy Carter will ensure that great potential is all he'll ever have. Teaching himself by trial and error, refusing to look ahead, Carter stumbles toward achievements that might match his abilities and asks us to respect him because his intentions be been good. I grant him that respect, but know the root of my disappointment. I thought we were getting a finished work, not a handsome block of marble that the chisel never touched.

The first clue to the solution of these questions was Carter's cast of mind: his view of problems as technical, not historical, his lack of curiosity about how the story turned out before. He wanted to analyze the "correct" answer, not to understand the intangible irrational forces that had skewed all previous answers. When he spoke of cleaning up the bureaucracy, he spoke like a Peace Corps volunteer explaining hygiene in Malaysia, imagining that such scientific insights had never occurred to the listeners before. When he said that, this time, tax reform was going to happen, it was not because he had carefully studied the tales of past failures and learned how to surmount them, but because he had ignored them so totally as to thinks his approach had never been tried. In two years the only historical allusions I heard Carter use with frequency were Harry Truman's rise from the depths of the polls and the effect of Roosevelt's New Deal on the southern farm. The rest of Roosevelt's record, especially his style of educating the public and getting the most out of his employees, was uncharted territory to the leaders of the Administration.

At the start of the Administration, as in the general election campaign, Carter and his captains felt omniscient; they had done what no one else had know how to do. Why should they take pains to listen to those who had designed the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society? The town was theirs for the taking; it would have required nothing more than allowing the old warriors a chance to help. But Powell and Jordan and Carter let these people know that they could go to hell. Where had they been, with all their sage advice, when the campaign was out of money and no one knew who Jimmy Carter was? What were they doing when Carter was drawing crowds of ten and twenty in tiny Iowa towns? Spite is an expensive luxury in government, but Carter thought he could afford it, not realizing then how badly his operating account would soon be overdrawn.

Those who are close enough to Carter to speak to him frankly—Powell, Jordan, Rafshoon, perhaps Moore—either believe so totally in the rightness of his style, or are so convinced that it will never change, that they never bother to suggest that he spend his time differently, deal with people differently, think of his job in a different way. Even that handful speaks to him in tones more sincerely deferential than those the underlings use. No one outside this handful ever has an opportunity to shoot the breeze with Carter, to talk with no specific purpose and no firm limit on time.

If he persists in walling himself off from challenge and disorder, Jimmy Carter will ensure that great potential is all he'll ever have. Teaching himself by trial and error, refusing to look ahead, Carter stumbles toward achievements that might match his abilities and asks us to respect him because his intentions be been good. I grant him that respect, but know the root of my disappointment. I thought we were getting a finished work, not a handsome block of marble that the chisel never touched.

Read the rest of this post...

New evidence suggests more problems and deception by BP in Gulf disaster

You don't say?

Meanwhile, interviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press show a BP scientist identified a previously unreported deposit of flammable gas that could have played a role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but the oil giant failed to divulge the finding to government investigators for as long as a year.

While engineering experts differ on the extent to which the two-foot-wide swath of gas-bearing sands helped cause the disaster, the finding raises the specter of further legal and financial troubles for BP.

It also could raise the stakes in the multibillion-dollar court battle between the companies involved.

Read the rest of this post...

1% of Americans work for the Defense Department

Though when you look at the numbers, it's not surprising. Still. From the Economist, via Jonathan Turley:

The Economist magazine shows that the Defense Department employed 3.2 million people, including 700,000 civilians.

We beat out the Chinese Army and even more frightening Wal-Mart (which comes in third after the Red Army). McDonald’s follows in fourth. The remainder in order are the China Petroleum Corporation, the State Grid Corporation of China, National Health Service of England, Indian Railways, China Post Group, and Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Company.

Read the rest of this post...

Devastating unaired Kay Bailey Hutchison ad on Perry and HPV vaccination

Matt Ortega at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right's Field flags this hard-hitting, yet unaired ad by Kay Bailey Hutchinson attacking Rick Perry over the HPV vaccination. I would expect Michele Bachmann to continue to attack Perry along a similar line, though it's hard to imagine a more brutal ad than this. Read the rest of this post...

Pol: 2/3 say creating jobs more important than cutting deficit

CNN:

Two-thirds believe that creating jobs should take precedence over the federal budget deficit and only 29 percent say reducing the deficit should be more important that reducing unemployment.

And the public is fine with providing disaster assistance not funded by additional cuts.

In the wake of recent natural disasters, Americans also prioritize disaster relief over the deficit. Six in 10 want federal aid to the victims of recent hurricanes and wildfires even if that amount of money is not cut from other government programs.

The problem is that we've had the polls on our side before, but the Democrats still chicken out. At some point the Democrats, and that includes the President, need to call the bluff of the GOP and force them to do something bad like kill the new stimulus. The GOP only has to do it once for the public to get the message and exact retribution. Then, no more hostages. By giving in to GOP demands from the beginning of the Obama term, Democrats have created, and enabled, a GOP monster. And that monster is now crippling our economy even further, in addition to potentially costing the President his job, and us control of the Senate. Read the rest of this post...

CBO head: Stimulate economy now, cut deficit later when economy back to normal

An interesting point buried in the CBO director's quote is that you shouldn't implement long-term cuts until the economy is nearly back to its full potential. No one thinks the economy is going to be nearly back to its full potential in a little over a year when all the Obama/GOP debt ceiling aftermath cuts go into effect. From the Washington Post:

“Credible policy changes that would substantially reduce deficits late in the coming decade and over the long term, without immediate cuts in spending or increases in taxes, would support the economic expansion in the next few years and strengthen the economy over the longer term,” Elmendorf said at the hearing. “There is no inherent contradiction between using fiscal policy to support the economy today, while the unemployment rate is high ... and imposing fiscal restraint several years from now, when output and employment will probably be close to their potential.”

But the problem we have is that the President already endorsed immediate cuts to the budget.

But now that the worst of the recession is over, we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable. Every day, families sacrifice to live within their means. They deserve a government that does the same.

So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. (Applause.) Now, this would reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, and will bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was President.

No, the public deserves a government that understands basic economics enough to know that you don't cut spending when the current economic forecast is malaise for years and years to come.  This is a problem of the President's own doing.  He wanted to embrace the Republicans and their ideology, again, in order to make himself look like a centrist to the public, even if it meant telling the public something that was flat our wrong.  And now he, and we, are locked into a political climate that is going to worsen the economy and possibly lose us the presidency and the Senate. Read the rest of this post...

Geithner blames global crisis on "political dysfunction," doesn’t mention Republicans

If he means this in the "Washington and the Fed should never have bailed out the bankers in a way that maintained their cushy lifestyle" then it's hard to argue with his remark. But unfortunately, that's not what he meant. The political class remains clueless about the negative impact of propping up people who should have been brought down to reality. Kicking the problem down the road wasn't a solution which is why the problem won't go away. Now remind me again who the Federal Reserve director was in New York who worked with Hank Paulson and George Bush to deliver that sweetheart deal? CNBC:

Speaking during the "Delivering Alpha" conference—organized by CNBC and Institutional Investor—Geithner said the US recovery is slower than many would like and that's not being helped by chaos in Washington.

"You have this terribly damaging political dysfunction here and in Europe that leaves the world wondering whether the political system has the capacity to do the right thing," he said. "That is very damaging to confidence."

NOTE FROM JOHN: Nice of Geithner to forget to mention that it's one political party, the Republicans, causing all the dysfunction. Hell, the way he phrased it, he might as well have been telling voters to oust his own boss, Barack Obama. After all, if we have a damaging political dysfunction, then let's get rid of the politicians. Yesterday's vote in NY made clear that the voters are not interpreting this as "let's only get rid of the Republicans." Read the rest of this post...

Fox News/NY Post slam Obama for using a paper clip. Way to slander an American-made product.

As Media Matters, points out, this is beyond mindlessly petty. The New York Post 'story':

President Obama's plan to reverse the nation's staggering jobless rate is held together with a paper clip!

"Here it is," Obama said, waving a copy of his jobs plan during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden yesterday, an enormous paper clip binding the pages together.

Faux News broadcast the same story so this is clearly on the list of GOP talking points of the day.

Of course had the jobs bill been presented in a leather bound volume Faux News would have run a story about waste in the Federal government and suggested that the White House use inexpensive binder clips instead.

NOTE FROM JOHN: It's fascinating the Republicans have chosen to slander a product that, you might be surprised to find out, is almost exclusively Made in the US of A.  Americans buy 11 billion paper clips a year, and almost all of them are made in America.  From the WSJ:

Though the U.S. long ago ceded manufacturing of such items as cellphones and computers to lower-cost producers, it still prevails in paper clips. Most of the estimated 11 billion sold each year in the U.S. are made domestically.

ACCO, the No. 1 U.S. clip maker, once known as American Clip Co., traces its history to 1903, when Fred J. Kline began making paper clips on Long Island, N.Y. ACCO now makes far more money from other products, including staplers and binding equipment, and says clips account for less than 1% of annual sales.

If I were the President, I'd wait for the first Republican to open his mouth about this, then get before the cameras and have a talk about how petty the Republicans have become, that they've actually reverted to criticizing paper clips. Americans are unemployed and the GOP is worrying about paper clips. Then I'd crow about how the paper clip is a made in America product and how even though the GOP may mock it, Obama is proud to support an American success story as ordinary as the simple paper clip (and people will chuckle and think the President is the adult in the room). Read the rest of this post...