VIDEO: Fireworks over Chicago, kind of

Chicago's Grant Park fireworks display was canceled this year, due to budgetary concerns, but that didn't stop a lot of other people from firing off stuff anyway. It's not clear from this time lapse video if we're seeing various suburbs holding fireworks shows, or whether these are just people shooting stuff in the area.

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Obama proposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare

Unfortunately, I doubt anyone is going to be surprised by this development. Deeply disappointed, yes. Amazing frustrated, yes. Beyond annoyed, yes. And, wondering what the hell they're thinking at the White House, definitely.

Maybe the President has been negotiating with himself for so long that he's lost all perspective. In exchange for what might possibly be some minor tax revenue increases, the President is giving GOPers what they couldn't get from George Bush, a GOP-controlled House and a GOP-led Senate. Yes, from Obama, Republicans are getting what they've always wanted. Lori Montgomery at the Washington Post broke the story:

President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.

At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.

As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.

“Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don’t believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance,” said a Democratic official familiar with the administration’s thinking. “These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by.”

That "hunger to do something of some significance" is fed by the GOPers and the DC pundits. The White House bought it. They're selling out on core Democratic priniciples. For what?

And, if GOPers don't agree on tax increases, hard to see how Obama takes Social Security and Medicare off the table -- after he put them there. Read the rest of this post...

Boehner just again said the stimulus didn’t create jobs - which is a lie - where is the administration response?

HuffPost Hill reports that the Republicans, with John Boehner taking the lead, tried to spam the President's Twitter Townhall held today:

Republicans tried to swamp the #AskObama hashtag with politically embarrassing questions. "With 9.1% unemployment & 'shovel ready' jobs a bust, will you admit the 'stimulus' was a mistake? http://bit.ly/oTK17f #askobama," Boehner tweeted. "We're excited the President is taking questions on jobs and the economy," Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck told Jen Bendery. "He's got a lot of questions to answer -- starting with, 'Where are the jobs?'"

Where are the jobs? They're in Olympia Snowe's purse. You might recall she demanded that $100 billion be cut from the stimulus. That was a good chunk of jobs gone thanks to Senator Snowe. As for the rest of the jobs, they disappeared in the form of GOP tax cuts that the President included in the stimulus, to the tune of 35% of the plan, to woo GOP votes. Had we not given away 35% of the stimulus to near-worthless GOP tax cuts, perhaps we'd have stimulated a few more jobs.

We know for a fact that the stimulus created millions of jobs and significantly improved GDP. That's a fact. Did the stimulus create ENOUGH jobs, no. Partly because the GOP was against any stimulus at all, so it wasn't big enough, and partly because the President didn't ask for a bigger one (God knows why).

But to suggest that the stimulus was a bust is an outright lie. It's a lie that's caught hold in much of the country - hell, it caught hold a long time ago, what with only 6% of the American people I believe thinking the stimulus created any jobs, in one poll from a year or so ago. And guess why the public is so hell bent on deficit reduction right about now?  Probably because they think we "wasted" a trillion dollars in a stimulus that "was a bust."  It's all tied together.

The White House needs to hit back hard when the GOP Speaker of the House outright lies about one of the most important initiatives of Obama first term.  So where is the push back?  And I mean REAL push back.  The kind that tells you "don't ever try this again." Read the rest of this post...

Roubini sees economic "perfect storm" in 2013 for global economic downturn

There's no shortage of kicking the can down the road both in Europe and the US. In the US, we can no longer afford the war machine but nobody wants to say it. We couldn't afford it when we had the mirage of an economy and we certainly can't afford it now. In Europe, there's a lack of reality when it comes to certain countries who really can't afford to stay in the eurozone. As for China, time is not on its side. CNBC:

Known for his generally dour outlook that helped him see the financial crisis before it hit in 2008, Roubini said the US, European nations and others have become adept enough at forestalling their problems that a true crisis won't hit until 2013.

But when it does, the effects are likely to be painful.

"My prediction for the perfect storm is not this year or next year but 2013, because everybody is kicking the can down the road," he said in a live interview. "We now have a problem in the US after the election if we don't resolve our fiscal problems. China is overheating...eventually it's going to have a hard landing."

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Weekly oil and gas spills in North Sea

Maybe Big Oil can dismiss this as they did with the Yellowstone River spill. The Guardian:

Serious spills of oil and gas from North Sea platforms are occurring at the rate of one a week, undermining oil companies' claims to be doing everything possible to improve the safety of rigs.

Shell has emerged as one of the top offenders despite promising to clean up its act five years ago after a large accident in which two oil workers died.

Documents obtained by the Guardian record leaks voluntarily declared by the oil companies to the safety regulator, the Health and Safety Executive(HSE), in a database set up after the Piper Alpha disaster of 6 July 1988 which killed 167 workers. They reveal for the first time the names of companies that have caused more than 100 potentially lethal and largely unpublicised oil and gas spills in the North Sea in 2009 and 2010.

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Banks selling your private shopping data to retailers

This CNNMoney story makes it sound great, almost as if the banking industry wrote the story. The spin is that it's like Groupon, only better because they help by automatically tailoring your discount coupons to where you shop. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I'd rather not have my bank shopping around my private details in any way, shape or form.

Unless someone specifically signs up for something like this, it should be considered theft. Let the banks make money some other way because profiteering from private data is simply wrong. But don't count on the gutless Congress to lift a finger on this one. They have campaign contributions to raise, after all.

Many of the nation's leading banks and card issuers, including Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), Citi (C, Fortune 500), USAA, Sovereign Bank and Discover (DFS, Fortune 500), are selling information about consumers' shopping habits -- how much they spend, where they shop and what they buy -- to retailers, which are using the data to offer targeted discounts via text, email and online bank statements. Each time a consumer cashes in on one of those deals, the retailer pays the bank a nice commission.

At a time when government regulation is forcing banks to hike fees and eliminate consumers perks, selling consumers' shopping data is an easy way to not only generate a decent chunk of revenue but also to drum up some much-needed customer loyalty.

Aite Group, an independent Boston-based research firm specializing in financial services, forecasts that these merchant-funded incentives will drive $1.7 billion in annual revenue for card issuers by 2015.

Maybe the journalist who wrote this can ask why the regulations are there instead of apologizing to the industry. This smells like a banking industry planted story. Read the rest of this post...

Court rules that DADT can't be enforced, anywhere, starting now

Big breaking news on the Don't Ask, Don't Tell front. Read the rest of this post...

Frank Rich on BofA: "What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up"

One part of Frank Rich's latest sand-blasting of Obama's Wall Street problem caught my eye as potentially explosive. It involves the attempt by the Iowa Attorney General to create a national settlement with Bank of America in the multi-pronged mortgage scandal.

Rich says near the middle of his piece (my emphasis throughout):

Even now, on the heels of Bank of America’s reluctant $8.5 billion settlement with investors who held its mortgage-backed securities, the Obama administration may be handing it and its peers new get-out-of-jail-free cards. With the Department of Justice’s blessing, the Iowa attorney general, Tom Miller, is pushing the 49 other states to sign on to a national financial settlement ending their investigations of the biggest mortgage lenders. What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up. Time reported in April that the lawyer negotiating with Miller for Moynihan’s Bank of America just happened to be a contributor to his 2010 Iowa reelection campaign. If the deal is struck, any truly aggressive state attorneys general, like Eric Schneiderman of New York, will be shut down before they can dig into the full and still mostly uninvestigated daisy chain of get-rich-quick rackets practiced by banks as they repackaged junk mortgages into junk securities.

Here's a little of the Time article linked above:

Bank of America Lawyer, Consultant Gave Foreclosure Probe Chief $15,000

Iowa’s Democratic Attorney General Tom Miller is known for taking on big business. ... Most recently, Miller took the lead on the investigation by all 50 state attorneys general into the “robo-signing” foreclosure scandal, where several big banks allegedly approved taking away people’s homes without adequately verifying the facts in court, as required by law in some states.

Last fall, just after he made the announcement that he would look into the foreclosure mess, contributions to Miller’s campaign coffers for November’s election soared, thanks in large part to out-of-state lawyers who make a living representing big banks, a new report from the National Institute for Money in State Politics finds. “Nearly half of the money Miller raised in 2010,” NIMSP reports, “was donated after the October 13 announcement that he would be coordinating the 50-state attorneys general investigation.”

There's more in that piece.

Two thoughts: Miller looks like a guy with eyes on a bigger prize. And if chunks like the $15,000 mentioned in the headline are the bait, fish like Miller are way too easily caught. Me, I'd start the bidding closer to twenty.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Documents point to slower than reported oil leak response by Exxon

Surprise, surprise. Exxon distorted information, again. It's clear that the White House doesn't like to ruffle any feathers other than the left who helped elect the president but maybe it's time to call out Exxon. During the BP disaster, the White House couldn't move quickly enough to help paper over the mess. One of these days someone in Washington is going to have to stand up for the rest of the country instead of the richest of the rich.

Federal documents show it took Exxon Mobil nearly twice as long as it publicly disclosed to fully seal a pipeline that spilled roughly 1,000 barrels of crude oil into the Yellowstone River.

Details about the company's response to the Montana pipeline burst emerged late Tuesday as the Department of Transportation ordered the company bury the duct deeper beneath the riverbed, where it is buried 5 to 8 feet underground to deliver 40,000 barrels of oil a day to a refinery in Billings.

The federal agency's records indicate the pipeline was not fully shut down for 56 minutes after the break occurred Friday near Laurel. That's longer than the 30 minutes that company officials claimed Tuesday in a briefing with federal officials and Gov. Brian Schweitzer.

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David Frum: "The president’s own weakness" has the perverse effect of exaggerating Republican concessions and diminishing his own

David Frum, of all people, gets this right (h/t Digby):

To the uninstructed eye, however, it looks like Obama has set up yet another lopsided bargaining table: He needs the Republicans to give him something, anything, that he can claim as a victory. ... [But] if they give him something, anything, it will be represented as a defeat. The president’s own weakness has had this perverse effect on his political opponents: it has reduced the value of his own concessions (no matter how big) and hugely exaggerated the significance of any offset he achieves (no matter how small).

Digby ominously (and also correctly) adds:

I've written before that I think Boehner wants to let his Tea Partiers run free, so I suspect everyone will play this out until the very end and then Obama will get his symbolic face saving concession. The majority that votes through these massive, painful spending cuts in the House will likely be composed of far more Democrats than Republicans. It may take all of them. Isn't that special? [Emphasis hers]

Obama's need to concede is much discussed. Frank Rich chalks it up to this: "He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys." I'm not so sure. Ken Silverstein has Obama's number in 2006, long before "hope and change," in an article called Barack Obama, Inc. Maybe he's just doing it because he wants to.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Greg Sargent on debt limit debate and "how much Democrats appear to be on the verge of trading away"

I have to agree with Greg Sargent's take on the politics surrounding the debt limit talks:

Obama and Dems appear to be trying to box Boehner in: If he agrees to real revenue increases, Dems will agree to Medicare cuts as a way to allow Boehner to ease the weight of the political problem Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan has created for Republicans. But Boehner has repeatedly insisted he won’t support new revenues, and if he walks away after having been offered substantial Medicare concessions by Dems, the GOP risks looking as if they’re hostage to anti-tax fanaticism, unconcerned about the fate of the country, and are “not fit to govern,” as David Brooks put it yesterday.

But even if the GOP is in a difficult spot, it also needs to be pointed out yet again how much Democrats appear to be on the verge of trading away. If the GOP has dug itself a political hole, Dems appear to be on the verge of cheerfully supplying the dirt Republicans need to fill it.

As it is the debate is unfolding almost entirely on GOP turf, in a place where Republicans are getting far more than anyone thought possible in exchange for a debt ceiling hike that they themselves already agreed months ago was inevitable. Any concessions Dems win from Republicans on new revenues will be dwarfed by what Dems are giving up. And we don’t even know yet precisely what sort of Medicare cuts Dems are offering. If they agree to benefits cuts it could deprive them of some of the political advantage they have carefully built up on the issue in recent months. But it’s looking increasingly like the White House and Dems are willing to trade that advantage away in exchange for a deal and an opportunity for Obama to reap the anticipated political advantages that come with having presided over one.

Voters are not going to reward Democrats for being magnanimous, despite what the political geniuses at the White House may think. Americans have been looking for leadership, for someone who will fight for them. Still are.

I'm hoping the President seizes the moment, starting at the meeting with Hill leaders tomorrow. I'm hoping that the "something big" isn't another cave to the GOP, but rather, is the President showing leadership by fighting the GOP hostage-takers. Read the rest of this post...

Obama summons Hill leaders to talk debt limit, wants "to do something big"

Tomorrow, the President will meet with the top leaders from both parties to talk about the debt limit. Expected at the meeting are Senators Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Mitch McConnell and John Kyl along with House leaders Boehner, Eric Cantor, Nancy Pelos and Steny Hoyer. And, the President wants "something big":

President Obama on Tuesday rejected calls for a short-term increase in the legal limit on government borrowing and summoned congressional leaders to the White House to restart negotiations over a long-term plan to restrain the deepening national debt.

With an Aug. 2 deadline closing in, Obama urged lawmakers in both parties to break the stalemate that halted talks nearly two weeks ago and seize what he called “a unique opportunity to do something big” to rebalance the nation’s finances.

“There may be some in Congress who want to do just enough to make sure that America avoids defaulting on our debt in the short term but then want to kick the can down the road when it comes to solving the larger problem of our deficit. I don’t share that view,” Obama told reporters during a late-afternoon appearance at the White House.

With the surprise announcement, Obama sought to take charge of a situation that was rapidly devolving into a dangerous game of chicken: Republicans have refused to discuss any debt-reduction deal that includes higher taxes, while Democrats have rejected any deal based solely on spending cuts.

And, my worry is that the White House will offer "something big" and the GOPers won't.

Those Republican leaders want Obama's presidency to fail. They're willing to tank the economy and the nation's credit rating to do that. The GOP's policies got us into this mess. They haven't lifted a finger to fix it. They only make it worse.

Republicans expect Obama to cave. Be great to see what they would do when he doesn't. Read the rest of this post...

Report: Rupert Murdoch's UK paper hacked into London 7/7 bombing victim's phones

What a disgusting bunch of absolute creeps. Would anyone really be surprised if his organization in the US had done this?

The phone-hacking crisis enveloping the News of the World intensified on Tuesday night after it emerged that Scotland Yard has started to contact the relatives of victims of the 7 July 2005 attacks to warn them they were targeted by the paper.

The revelation that bereaved family members may have had their mobile phone messages intercepted by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the paper, in the days following the 2005 London bombings will heap further pressure on the title's owner, News International, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

Graham Foulkes, whose son David was killed in the attack at Edgware Road tube station, confirmed that he had been contacted by officers from Operation Weeting, the Met's investigation into phone hacking. He said they had told him his mobile phone number, ex-directory landline number and address had been found in records made by Mulcaire that were recovered from the investigator's office in south London.

Ford has now suspended advertisements with the publication. Read the rest of this post...

Amnesty has documented crimes against humanity in Syria

The UN appears to be a bit slow with this process so thanks to Amnesty, they can get a jump start on the process. When there's no oil profits to be had, the process can take a bit longer, apparently. Al Jazeera:

The Syrian government's violent suppression of the revolt against its rule could amount to a systematic campaign of crimes against humanity, a human rights group has said.

London-based Amnesty International says it has gathered proof of such crimes by the government in the northern town of Tell Kalakh.

The organisation called for the UN Security Council to refer the Syrian government's massive repression, which has come in response to continuing protests against President Bashar al-Assad's rule, to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, in a report released on Wednesday morning.

"The willingness of the international community to take action on Libya in the name of human rights has highlighted its double standards on Syria," Philip Luther, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa deputy director, said.

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Is Portugal going to be the next Greece?

Portugal of course has already been bailed out, but so was Greece. Now Portugal's debt is being labeled "junk" by one of the ratings agencies. As worthless as the ratings agencies services proved to be during the economic crisis, they still mean something when borrowing money.

For the euro, Greece, Portugal and even Ireland are all small countries so as a percentage of the European Union they are not critical. Added together it becomes more of a problem. If they tip the balance and push one of the weaker links such as Spain or Italy over, then there's a problem. We're not there yet but that is the direction. The first round of bailouts simply kicked the can down the road as did the second Greek bailout. BBC News:

The credit ratings agency Moody's Investors Service has downgraded Portugal's debt to junk status.

The agency said there was a growing risk the country would need a second bail-out before it was ready to borrow money from financial markets again.

Moody's was concerned that if there was a second bail-out, private lenders might have to contribute.

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