Conservative activist Victoria Jackson makes Rick Santorum look smart

Mike Signorile was able to interview the former SNL star, and current far-right activist, at the recent conservative CPAC conference:

"I’m here to save America from communism,” the former "Saturday Night Live" cast member and Tea Party activist Victoria Jackson said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend in Washington. As she walked the corridors she was treated like a rock star by CPAC attendees who raised their fists to her, shook her hand and thanked her for her far-Right political activism.

"The people of California voted that they did not believe that gay marriage -- no gay marriage," she explained to HuffPost Gay Voices. "They voted that. A judge, probably gay, activist judge, overturned that. That’s what I’m talking about -- communism."

She explained further that it could lead to living in pods. "Do you know what the housing is going to be like when we all live in a pod?" she asked. "And we all take public transit? It's going to be Russia. It's going to be Cuba."

As CPAC attendees who passed by expressed their gratitude to her for, as one described it, "speaking the truth," Jackson offered her thoughts on Barack Obama: "This president was raised marxist. His parents, his grandparents, his college professors, his whole life, he’s been immersed in marxism, even his church. Jeremiah Right did not preach Christianity. He preached black liberation theology, which is marxism disguised as religion."

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UAW profit-sharing bonuses to boost economy

Yeah, Mitt, that Big Auto bailout sure was a bad idea. Now even the little people have some money to spend. The end of the world must be near for the Romney's of the world who can't understand the importance of the middle class having work and having some money to spend. Bloomberg:

Mike Green says he already knows how he’s going to use a $7,000 profit-sharing check from General Motors Co. (GM): He’ll help his son buy a new car, throw him a graduation party and sock some money away in the bank.

“A lot of people are going to catch up on stuff,” said Green, president of UAW Local 652 in Lansing, Michigan, where GM builds Cadillacs. “People haven’t really had a raise since 2005. It’s kind of nice we get to reap some of the rewards now.”

The rebound in carmaker profits is putting money into the pockets of U.S. workers after years of belt-tightening. GM yesterday reported a record $9.19 billion in net income for 2011, which will mean profit-sharing bonuses of as much as $7,000 for 47,500 eligible UAW members. That’s an all-time high for GM, and up from an average of $4,300 for the company’s U.S. union workers last year.

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The GOP 2012 platform in brief

A shorter version of the GOP platform:

On Women: All of your uterus are belong to us.
On Social Security: All of your pensions are belong to us and will be handed to Mitt Romney in Tax cuts.
On Medicare: Phase out, first we will take it from the under 50s and once its gone for them it will be easy to cut it for seniors.
On Health Care: We have a health care plan - you die.
On Foreign Policy: Bomb, Bomb Iran
On the Economy: Its tax cuts all the way down but only for the 1%
On the Environment: Drill baby, drill.
On Social Issues: Hate baby, hate.

Did I miss anything? Read the rest of this post...

Gay marriage passes MD House of Delegates

Which pretty much means it will be signed into law. Only problem, the legislation delays the implementation until after the religious right hopes to put it up to a vote in November on the ballot.

Oh, and Maryland delegate Sam Arora, who ran on a platform of supporting marriage equality, voted against us.  There's a call taking place tonight among senior Democratic party operatives to determine the best way to ensure that Arora never works in Democratic politics again.  The Democratic party is a lonely place for a known homophobe who has turned his back on all of his friends. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Puppy is upset toy is trying to steal its food

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Vatican facing nearly $1 billion per year tax bill

And this is only touching a small fraction of their wealth, so consider it pocket change for the church. Their property holdings are substantial so why shouldn't they be taxed like everyone else? The Independent:

After several years of scandal in which the Catholic Church has faced allegations of financial impropriety, paedophile priests and rumours of plots to kill the Pope, the Vatican is now facing a new €600m-a-year tax bill as Rome seeks to head off European Commission censure over controversial property tax breaks enjoyed by the Church.

As the EC heads closer to officially condemning the fiscal perks enjoyed by the Catholic Church and introduced by the Berlusconi administration, Prime Minister Mario Monti has written to the Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, saying that the Vatican will resume property tax, or Ici, payments.

Mr Almunia said in 2010 that the exemption amounted to state aid that might breach EU competition law. A parliamentary proposal by the Italian Radicals party last August to repeal the exemption, with a successful petition on Facebook, upped the pressure. A spokesman for Mr Almunia appeared to give the thumbs-up yesterday: "It is a proposal that constitutes a significant progress on the issue and I hope will be implemented," he said.

As much as the church gets involved in politics in the US, it's unclear why they don't get taxed here as well. If they want to keep their tax free status they really need to shut up and get back to focusing on issues like helping the poor instead of amassing wealth and power. Read the rest of this post...

FBI arrests would-be suicide bomber near US Capitol building

Wow.  Good job, FBI.  But creepy.

CNN:

U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI on Friday arrested a Moroccan man who was planning a suicide attack on the Capitol, police and a federal law enforcement official said.

Authorities identified the man as Amine Khalifi.

He received what he thought was a vest with explosives, but the materials in the vest had been rendered inoperable by law enforcement, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said.

The man was arrested as soon as he accepted the vest from undercover officers, according to the federal law enforcement source.

More from the Wash Post:

Amine el-Khalifi, 29, was picked up while carrying an inoperable gun and a fake suicide vest provided to him by undercover FBI agents posing as al-Qaeda associates, U.S. officials said. They said he entered the United States when he was 16 and was living as an illegal immigrant in Arlington, Va., having reportedly overstayed his visitor’s visa for years.

The Associated Press, quoting a law enforcement official, said Khalifi changed his mind about his intended target several times but ultimately decided on the Capitol. He is not believed to be associated with al-Qaeda, AP said.

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How Target knows you're pregnant before your family does

Smart as hell, and creeeeeeepy.  Forbes:

Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant — and loyal — buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole — before Target freaked out and cut off all communications — about the clues to a customer’s impending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past.

From the NYT:

[Pole] ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.

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US taxpayers saved the Salt Lake Olympics, not Mitt

When the taxpayers fork out $1.3 billion, don't they deserve some credit? It's interesting to see how Romney used to brag about government funding for his projects (the Olympics and Bain) but now that he's busy trying to win over the Republican primary voters, he's completely against those same handouts. Funny how that works. Read the rest of this post...

Is Dick Cheney lobbying for gay marriage in MD?

The world was so much easier when the good guys wore white were Democrats. Read the rest of this post...

How everyone wins in the birth control flap

Yesterday we had the sight of five men lecturing congress on the reasons why their religious consciences would be offended should women get access to birth control.

After years of GOP culture war antics it is natural to assume that the current birth control flap is yet another Republican party wedge issue. Only this time it is not, it was the administration that decided to pick this particular fight right now.

The birth control flap has energized the most lunatic factions of the GOP base, and this in turn pays Obama multiple dividends. In order to keep in with their base the GOP takes positions that are drastically unpopular with the public at large, making them more fringe and Obama mainstream. Even though Romney is still the favorite to win the nomination, Santorum is now a real contender. The fight looks set to continue for many months yet, and the longer the two GOP front runners are fighting each other, the worse the prospects for the Republican party in November. Read the rest of this post...

Drone Industry wrote the legislation governing domestic drone use

More Tales of Our Bought Congress. But this time it's not just bought congress people; it's a whole Bought Law.

For a mere $280,000, spread across an unknown number of eager congressmen, the Drone Industry has bought a law allowing anyone in the United States, including cops, to buy and use ... drones.

As a result of this law, already signed, new drone sales are expected to reach 30,000 additional units in the next few years. (So, let's say a new drone costs $1 million; that means ... carry the three ... gosh, a whole lot of money.)

I'm going to name this the Drone Manufacturers CEO Bonus Act of 2012. (Reasons stated below; for the rubes, they're calling it an amendment in the FAA Reauthorization Act, but we know better.)

The Drone Industry has been caught bragging that it co-authored the amendment. Says a leaked industry slide presentation: "Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word."

Here's Lee Fong at the Republic Report, who is doing magnificent work on this continuing story. Fong reports (my emphasis and paragraphing):

[A] lobby group — which maintains an official partnership in Congress with Reps. Buck McKeon (R-CA), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), and dozens of other lawmakers — was the driving force behind the domestic drone decision passed last week.

Fong offers selections from the lobbying group's presentation, eerily titled "Connecting the Unmanned Systems Community Across the Globe":

■ Page 6: The drone lobbyists take full credit for authoring the expansion of domestic drone use codified in the FAA authorization bill passed last week, noting “the only changes made to the UAS section of the House FAA bill were made at the request of AUVSI. Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word.”

■ Pages 10-12: The drone industry eagerly anticipates that civil drone use, including use of drones for “suspect tracking” by law enforcement, will soon eclipse military use of drones.

Under a section called “Challenges facing UAS,” the lobbyists listed “Civil Liberties.”

I'm kind of a page 5 fan myself:

Globally, the unmanned systems market was estimated to be between $5.5 billion and $6 billion dollars in 2010[.]

And "factors that will influence market growth"? Well:

1. Access to Airspace
2. Expansion of civil/commercial UAS operations
3. Global Conflict–particularly U.S. and allied nation involvement in future conflicts

Oh good; global conflict.

This is not to shock you (I hope it doesn't). This is to impress you that Drone Industry CEOs have hired competent help.

After all, what better way to stuff your pockets than to use corporate money to buy a chump-change Congress ($280,000 is nothing compared to the profit on 30,000 military-style aircraft). Remember, the ROI on defense bribes is upwards of 100:1. And these lobbyists are pros; they deliver.

In case you haven't figured it out, here's the whole process from start to finish:

    ▪ CEO gives corporation's cash to lobbyist
    ▪ Lobbyist takes a nice cut, passes cash to Congress
    ▪ Congress pockets cash and passes law (in this case, to open the entire U.S. domestic market to lobbyist's product)
    ▪ Democratic president signs law
    ▪ Corporation books profits
    ▪ CEO loots corporation via compensation, stock, bonuses
    ▪ CEO & sixth wife buy seventh house in Tahiti
    ▪ Lobbyist & eighth wife join them for nine holes of golf

It's the old, old story.

And what do you get? You get to worry about everyone in the country watching your every move. Then you get to hear from the Democratic president how bad the Republicans are. Then, on April 15, you get to pay for the privilege of sending your tax dollars to Tahiti — since there's no conscience exemption for bribe-hating you.

If you're interested, the whole presentation is below (don't miss page 13, on regulation):



Did you also catch page 11, "Non-Military Applications"? I see all kinds of "pipe/power line surveillance" possibilities (insert Keystone-"terrorist" wisecrack here).

And this is kind of cute (page 8): Define "small unmanned aircraft as weighing less than 55 pounds". Can you imagine the market for Apple iDrones? Those Chinese children will be ever so pleased.

There's much more on the pesky civil liberties "challenge" from Digby, who tipped me to this story.

(Money-plane image via Shutterstock.)

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AutoNation CEO rips Romney over Big Auto bailout attacks

Interestingly enough, AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson believes that Romney would have done the same thing as Bush and Obama with rescuing the auto industry had he been in charge when the business was collapsing. The noise today is all about Romney stirring up the Republican voters and trying to get them to forget about Romney's moderate past. Had Detroit been allowed to fail, Jackson believes the results would have been catastrophic both for Big Auto as well as the overall unemployment rate in the US. CNBC:

LL: You were in numerous discussions during the crisis with the Auto Czar. We all know we were on the edge of a cliff and the cliff was crumbling. If Romney was President during that time and let the autos fail where would the US economy be right now? MJ: My belief is that if he was the President at that moment, he would have lead and acted as Bush and Obama did. However, if he had let GM and Chrysler liquidate—which would have dominoed and crushed the entire supplier system—we would have had a systemic shutdown of the entire US auto industry, millions of jobs lost, a depression and 20% unemployment.

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Goldman, JPMorgan Chase & Morgan Stanley eyed for credit rating cut

Had it not been for the taxpayer bailout of those banks, none of them would have survived. The Fed has helped them juice their numbers (and will probably do it again) with quantitative easing but without the widespread gambling that fed the housing market, their numbers could never last. They pay out obscene amounts of money internally for high stakes gambling but those returns won't come back until the next generation of politicians forget about this current mess. The banks will still make money - they almost always do - but the question now is whether they will be able to still rake in the big money and not crash themselves. Moody's is suggesting that the sector has trouble ahead. Will Greece or Europe in general bring them down? Bloomberg:

UBS AG, Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and Morgan Stanley’s credit ratings may be cut by as many as three levels by Moody’s Investors Service, which is reviewing 17 banks and securities firms with global capital markets operations. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Citigroup Inc. (C) are among companies that may be downgraded by two levels, Moody’s said in a statement, adding that the “guidance is indicative only.” Moody’s today cut some European insurers’ ratings based on risks stemming from the region’s sovereign debt crisis. The potential downgrades, which may raise borrowing costs and force banks to increase collateral, put the ratings company at odds with bond investors, who are sticking with bets that new capital rules and trading limits will make the financial firms safer in the long run. Funding costs have climbed for banks worldwide as Greece’s debt woes roil markets.

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Hillary and Summers leading candidates for World Bank opening

Unless the mission of the World Bank is to trash the economy the way Summers did during his Clinton years and then with Obama, Hillary is the only sensible option. Who honestly thinks a pompous, sexist jerk like Summers deserves another shot at screwing things up? Bloomberg:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers are two leading candidates to succeed World Bank President Robert Zoellick when he leaves at the end of June, according to two people familiar with Obama administration discussions. While Summers has expressed interest in the position and has supporters inside the administration, the position would be Clinton’s if she sought it, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity about the private conversations. Clinton, who said previously she doesn’t plan to remain in her post if President Barack Obama wins a second term, repeatedly has denied having an interest in the World Bank job. State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland repeated those denials today.

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