Number of poor children continues to rise in US

While the thugs at the NYPD and other local police forces are bashing heads to protect the interests of the 1%, the number of poor children in America grows. This should be a national disgrace, but no, too many in Congress are much more worried about protecting their friends on Wall Street, Big Pharma, the insurance industry, defense contractors and insisting on more giveaways for the rich.

Why are the poor and middle class so ignored by Washington?

The number of children in the United States considered poor rose by 1 million in 2010, the U.S. Census said on Thursday, with nearly one in three of the youngest Americans now living in poverty.

"Children who live in poverty, especially young children, are more likely than their peers to have cognitive and behavioral difficulties, to complete fewer years of education, and, as they grow up, to experience more years of unemployment," the Census said.

In 2010, when the Census survey was conducted, 32.3 percent of children across the country were poor, compared to 30.8 percent in 2009.

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Fox Nation falsely claims would-be Obama assassin "linked" to OWS - not true

Anyone out there who watches Fox and doesn't understand why people say they're nothing more than an arm of the Republican party, please read this story, look at what Fox claims, and then click through to the original story that Fox is basing this allegation on - Fox lied.  This is why so many people have a problem with Fox.  Not that they get stories wrong and everyone gets stories wrong.  It's that they blatantly lie in order to help Republicans and hurt Democrats, and this story is a perfect example.

And if that wasn't enough, here's a second story from Fox in which they try to mislead their audience.  They claim that Obama's evil regulations will make your car cost $2000 more.  They don't tell you that the same regulations will be saving you around $5000 to $6000 in fuel over the lifetime in the car, so actually the new regulations will save the average consumer $3000 to $4000.  Kind of relevant to the story, you think? Read the rest of this post...

Thank OWS for defeating the GOP super-committee

Everyone seems to be thinking that the Super-Committee is headed for failure. From where I sit it looks like it succeeded magnificently, just not in the way that the GOP hoped.

The principal goal of the super-committee was to kick the GOP deficit histrionics down the road a few more months and avoid a government shutdown. Obama clearly hoped that a bipartisan deal would allow him to neutralize the 'deficit' issue as an electoral concern in 2012. The GOP hoped to get the chance to steal at least some of our pensions to pay for the tax cuts they have already given to the 1%. All it would take for the White House to get their bipartisan deal was a handful of blue dogs and a minimal level of pragmatism from the GOP.

Then OWS came along and suddenly the 'deficit' narrative of 'shared sacrifice' was collapsed as they pointed out the simple fact that what the GOP has been proposing all along is to take the sacrifices of the 99% and give them to the undeserving 1%.

The Democratic Party establishment is not particularly scared of a few thousand people camping out in a park but what petrifies them is the idea that OWS might copy the tactics of the Tea Party and put up their own candidates against blue dogs in the primaries.

So instead the committee will 'fail' and the starting point for the 2012 (and future) budget negotiations is one in which the Bush tax cuts expire completely and the bloated military budget is cut. The US is still one of the richest countries on earth with one of the stingiest welfare states in the developed world. The structural deficit is entirely due to the fact that the US spends more on its militarism than the rest of the planet combined and the rich don't want to pay for it.

There are cuts that hurt progressive priorities in the automatic cuts as well. But those worry me rather less. The automatic cuts represent the starting point for negotiations, not the final result. Restoring cuts in entitlements is join to be much easier than increasing the military budget after the end of two wars. Read the rest of this post...

Neutrinos may travel (very slightly) faster than light after all

There is still a small possibility of an error in the measurement of the distance between the start and the end point due to some GPS effect. But the news from CERN is that they have repeated OPERA the neutrino experiment and the faster than light effect is still there. The new experiment rules out one of the potential sources of systematic error.

The difference is so slight that it is quite possible that the ultimate culprit will turn out to be some weird systematic error in our measurement of light speed that turns out to be the issue. The speed

Contrary to widespread speculation, this does not contradict Einstein's theory of relativity any more than Einstein contradicted Newton. Newton was well aware that there would be significant implications if the speed of light was less than instantaneous. Einstein was aware that his theory of relativity could not be reconciled with the then emerging theory of quantum mechanics.

The theory of relativity does not predict that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Instead, one consequence of the theory is that if something is moving slower than the speed of light it cannot be accelerated to move faster and that if something is moving faster than the speed of light it cannot be decelerated to move slower. Read the rest of this post...

Tea Party / OWS rapprochement?

AP:

Occupy Memphis member Mallory Pope had just finished telling a group of about 75 tea party followers Thursday night that politicians should not allow themselves to be influenced by lobbyists and unions when she received an unexpected invitation.

"It sounds to me that y'all ought to be joining us," said Jerry Rains, a 64-year-old computer programmer and tea party member. "You have a lot of the same goals we have, which is to take our country back."

I'm not sure how I see the two groups truly cooperating.  I suspect a good chunk of Tea Party members are Fox News devotees who simply do not have any clear idea of what's going on in this country - they listen to Fox, believe the lies that they hear, and of course they think Obama is a socialist on the very of turning us over to the Soviet Union.  How do you work together with someone who doesn't have the same grasp on what the reality is?  It's like negotiating with someone in a foreign language that you don't speak.

Second, I think another chunk of Tea Party members are Republicans who legitimately think government isn't working, our representatives in Washington stink, etc.  But again, I worry that underneath it all they're conservative  Republicans.  Their solutions are going to be Paul Ryan's solutions.  Things that don't bear much resemblance to the actual problem at hand.  They rail against the stimulus because they've been sold a lie, that stimulus plans don't work, when they do, and it did.

Having said all of that, one thing I learned in politics a long time ago, is that some days you're my enemy, some days you're my friend.  Just because someone is, oh I don't know, the former head of the Republican party, doesn't mean that with some cultivation you can't turn them into a million dollar gay rights activists.  You'd be surprised at some of the wooing I've seen that has worked in politics in the past.  So, I don't think people should write off discussions with the Tea Party.  I simply worry as to how much of the Tea Party isn't a front for Dick Armey and Fox News, and I think it's not much. Read the rest of this post...

Gingrich health care group supports individual mandate

Mother Jones made the discovery:

Much more from David Corn at Mother Jones. Read the rest of this post...

Maddow on Mario Savio—"One thousand people sitting down can stop any machine, including this machine"

A couple of posts ago I talked about Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, in the context of Occupy.

Here's why — Rachel Maddow on the connection between Mario Savio and Occupy, a brilliant presentation and a necessary lesson in the history of resistance. (Click to open in a new tab.)

Be sure to watch at 4:26 in the clip as the modern cops attack the modern Occupy movement in Berkeley (November 9, this year).

There's an especially vicious sucker-club to the gut by a "peace officer" against the only woman in the front row of protesters. Vicious, sadistic.


I can't wait for the Mario Savio Free Speech Zone, sponsored by Miller Lite, Official Home of the Definition of Manliness. (You know they're right cause you saw it on TV. You know you're manly cause you bought it.)

Critical mass, folks. Now is the time.

My current thoughts on Occupy and what's next are in this post. Some thoughts on Occupy as a constitutional revolution are here (skip to the end).

GP Read the rest of this post...

Occupy Thanksgiving

Just a thought — why not Occupy Thanksgiving?

Every movement needs to be fed, and Thanksgiving would be a splendid time to say Thanks! to the Occupy Movement. After what they've been through, they deserve it and then some.

Occupy Thanksgiving. One or two determined organizers in every Occupy city could make this happen. That's what — 10 or 15 self-appointed people? They wouldn't even need a committee, just a phone and time on their hands.

Even pizza would work. (Do they make Turkey Pizza?)

Regardless, here's my early Thanks to the Occupy Movement. You've given so much.

May you Occupy Thanksgiving. We certainly thank you.

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Nevada AG files criminal indictments on robosigners

Earlier this week Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto indicted two mid-level employees of Lender Processing Services (LPS) for 606 counts of robosigning, specifically "directing fraudulent notarization and filing of foreclosure documents." LPS is a major company hired by banks to process foreclosure documents and has been at the center of the robosigning scandal. LPS would allegedly help banks forge documents that were used to foreclose on homeowners in situations where the banks didn't have any of the required documentation to prove that they had a right to foreclose.

The two employees under indictment are mid-level people, not CEOs and not people who in themselves represent an indictment of the entire industry response to the failure to properly track mortgage documentation during the securitization process. 600 counts likely represents at most a day of work for two robosigners and this is a crisis that has been going on fore years. At Naked Capitalism, Matt Stoller notes that, "These would be the only charges served involving the housing crisis and its link with the structurally corrupt securitization chain so far." So even if nothing else comes from these indictments and Masto isn't able to roll them up on their bosses, this is still an important moment for the rule of law as it relates to private property and the housing crisis. Stoller goes on:

At this point, Masto has gone further than any other official in terms of restoring some sort of social contract. And that’s saying something. Leadership can come from anywhere, especially when the corruption seems to be everywhere. And with California AG Kamala Harris putting immense pressure on Fannie/Freddie on foreclosures, it suggests the tide is turning on this issue somewhat.

Our essential economic problem is that our economy allocates resources through a mediating system of banks that are broken and/or corrupt. If you look at a chart of the recession, and then the recovery, you’ll notice that business investment perked up, but residential investment did not. The Fed lowered rates, bought Treasury bonds, and bought mortgage backed securities to lower rates for homeowners. But it’s not really working, because the monetary channel is corrupt. This indictment gets to that problem, it alleges tens of thousands of forged documents (or as a friend told me sarcastically, an afternoon’s worth of work for LPS). These documents represent foreclosures, economic loss, and clouded title. The indictments handed down, and the ones to come, show that corrupting our property laws and the basis of our economy is a crime.

This is incredibly important, since there just hasn't been the sort of criminal investigation into robosigning and the way it has corroded the entire system of property ownership. With 11 million foreclosures already and quite possibly as many to come in the next few years, the impacts of robosigning are devastating. When a bank can't prove they have a right to a particular property and hire a company like LPS to forge documents saying they do, and they are allowed to take someone's home this way without punishment, there can be no functional expectation that any individual's property is safe from theft. When the improperly foreclosed home is then eventually sold, that new owner will be taking over a property with unquestionably cloudy title.

Plenty of people have been saying robosigning is a criminal act for a long time now. Nevada AG Masto has now validated those people and confirmed that criminal behavior in connection to the housing crisis will not be tolerated, at least not in Nevada. There's no reason why Attorneys General in every other state cannot do the same, nor is there a reason why the Department of Justice can't hold people criminally responsible for illegal behavior during the housing crisis and continuing today. Read the rest of this post...

GOP campaign gaffes of the day

The latest crop of GOP campaign gaffes remind me of the scene in Towering Inferno when some of the panicked people trapped on the top floor rush the "breeches buoy" to save their skins [didn't go so well].

In no particular order:

Cain (21%) responding to his Libya gaffe has declared that 'we need a leader not a reader'. [Because leaders are the sort of people who engage in trash talk that only exposes their own ignorance then suggest that what is needed is a 'leader'.]

Cain also spent time discussing plans for his Presidential Library and post-Presidential speaking career. [Umm, why not just skip the actual presidency part and jump straight on-board the gravy train? For Cain, the country, its a win-win.]

Bachmann (3%) refuses to be waterboarded on the grounds that she is already President and they don't do that sort of thing.

Gingrich (12%) voted the candidate most trusted with nuclear weapons in a Fox News Poll. The same poll puts him in the lead over Romney. [Good for Newt, but what does that say about his rivals?]

Santorum (Too low to measure) has joined Occupy Wall Street.

Romney (Never more than 21%) appeared to have dropped off the face of the earth until this morning's Globe story that he and his staff had deleted emails before he left the Massachusetts governor's office to campaign for President in breach of a State law requiring records to be preserved.

Perry (11%) has challenged Nancy Pelosi to debate. [If Pelosi's office bothers to reply expect it to be in the form of a copy of the US constitution with 'What part of co-equal branch of government don't you get? scrawled across the top with a Sharpie. Oh wait, she did reply.]

Perry has also opined that Obama, 'Never Had To Work For Anything'. [Because we all know that single mothers living off of food stamps are so 1%]

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Mormons launch $6m ad campaign to make people like them

The Mormons are reportedly spending $6 million on an "I'm a Mormon" ad campaign to convince Americans that they're really nice people.

The thing is, really nice people don't try to steal the souls of dead Holocaust victims, and then lie about it, for years, after they get caught.

Nor do they secretly baptize President Obama's deceased mother into their faith, right before the election, without his knowledge or permission, and then not to tell him.

You know another thing nice people don't do?  They don't use their billions to politically gay-bash year after year after year.

The Mormons are quite possibly the biggest funder of anti-gay bigotry in America today. The group running the campaign to pass Prop 8 in California, which successfully ripped away the right to wed from gay couples in that state, reports that half of their total donations came from Mormons, and 80% to 90% of their early volunteers were Mormons.  From Wikipedia:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,[52][53][54] whose members are commonly known as Mormons, also publicly supported the proposition. The First Presidency of the church announced its support for Proposition 8 in a letter intended to be read in every congregation in California. In this letter, church members were encouraged to "do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time."[52] Local church leaders set organizational and monetary goals for their membership—sometimes quite specific—to fulfill this call.[55][56] The response of church members to their leadership's appeals to donate money and volunteer time was very supportive,[57] such that Latter-day Saints provided a significant source for financial donations in support of the proposition, both inside and outside the State of California.[58] About 45% of out-of-state contributions to ProtectMarriage.com came from Utah, over three times more than any other state.[59] ProtectMarriage, the official proponents of Proposition 8, estimate that about half the donations they received came from Mormon sources, and that "eighty to ninety percent" of the early volunteers going door-to-door were LDS.[60] The The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints produced and broadcast to its congregations a program describing the support of the Proposition, and describing the timeline it proposes for what it describes as grassroots efforts to support the Proposition.[61]

The Mormons were responsible for the passage of Prop 8. Don't believe me, believe the NYT in an article entitled "Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage."

In the end, Protect Marriage estimates, as much as half of the nearly $40 million raised on behalf of the measure was contributed by Mormons.

$20 million buys a lot of hate.

More about just how involved the Mormons were in passing Prop 8:

On September 17 and 18, Rosemary Winters of the Salt Lake Tribune called attention to www.Mormonsfor8.com, a website dedicated to tracking Mormon contributions to the pro-Prop 8 website www.ProtectMarriage.com — listed on the LDS Church’s website to facilitate its members’ participation.

“If we could identify every Mormon, I think that probably 85 to 90 percent of the donors would be Mormon,” said website proprietor Nadine Hansen, a 61-year-old, semi-retired lawyer (and non-practicing Mormon) from Cedar City, Utah. (In a subsequent story, Hansen told the AP’s Eric Gorski that she had used campaign records, “tips from site visitors and church members,” and search engines to track down LDS donors.)

On September 20, Mark Schoofs of the Wall Street Journal reported that, in an August conference call, church leaders solicited $25,000 donations from 40 to 60 California Mormons, an amount likely based on their tithing receipts. LDS officials maintained a separate post-office box to handle members’ donations, which were tallied and sent to the campaign.

Of course, this wasn't the Mormons' first time at the gay-bashing ball. They've been doing it for a few decades now, that we know. They reportedly spent over a million dollars fighting the civil rights of gays in Alaska and Hawaii during the 1990s. They also fought our civil rights in Nebraska and Nevada.  And Prop 8 wasn't their first foray into California gay-bashing either.

"I'm a Mormon."

Yeah, and I'm a Mormon victim.

Someone ought to run that ad.  Oh wait, they already did:

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Berlusconi to release album of love songs

Please make it stop.

When Silvio Berlusconi refused to step down at the height of Italy’s economic crisis, he was compared to the Emperor Nero, who is said to have watched Rome burn to the ground while playing a stringed instrument.

It now looks like somebody else was playing the guitar for Berlusconi; he was just writing the lyrics.

On Nov. 22, while Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Monti, and his government are trying to save Italy from economic meltdown, Berlusconi will release “True Love,” his latest CD of love songs.

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Myanmar showing small signs of change

We've been here before, so let's see how long it lasts. The good news is that the political party of Aung San Suu Kyi is going to join politics again and labor unions have been granted the right to strike. Small steps, but at least it's moving in the right direction for the moment.

After more than two decades of rule that has been by turns obstinate, cruel and surreal, the generals are showing tentative signs of reform.

Labour unions have been granted the right to strike. Some political prisoners have been released. An unpopular dam project on the Irrawaddy was suspended, the authorities preferring to annoy their Chinese paymasters rather than furious locals.

But is Burma about to undergo a proper thaw after years of frosty diplomacy – or is it just a play by the generals to improve international relations at a time when they are short of cash and intimidated by the rise of their mighty northern neighbour?

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Should employers be allowed to raise insurance rates for smokers or obese?

Unless the plans include a lot of help for people to quit smoking or lose weight, this doesn't sound fair. The thought of charging someone a high premium because of their cholesterol also sounds unfair. I know people who have high cholesterol but are very fit. Once again, companies and the insurance industry do this because they can. New York Times:

But some benefits specialists and health experts say programs billed as incentives for wellness, by offering discounted health insurance, can become punitive for people who suffer from health problems that are not completely under their control. Nicotine addiction, for example, may impede smokers from quitting, and severe obesity may not be easily overcome.

Earlier this year, the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association were among groups that warned federal officials about giving companies too much latitude. They argued in a letter sent in March that the leeway afforded employers could provide “a back door” to policies that discriminate against unhealthy workers.

Kristin M. Madison, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, said, “People are definitely worried that programs will be used to drive away employees or potential employees who are unhealthy.”

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