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GOP Aide Regrets That Attack on Obama Daughters Overshadowed Insults About Their Parents |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 01 December 2014 15:34 |
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Borowitz writes: "Republican congressional aide Elizabeth Lauten said on Sunday morning that she “deeply regretted” her attack on Sasha and Malia Obama because it 'completely overshadowed the vicious insults I hurled at their parents.'"
President Obama and his daughters. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
GOP Aide Regrets That Attack on Obama Daughters Overshadowed Insults About Their Parents
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
01 December 14
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 epublican congressional aide Elizabeth Lauten said on Sunday morning that she “deeply regretted” her attack on Sasha and Malia Obama because it “completely overshadowed the vicious insults I hurled at their parents.”
Appearing on Fox News, Lauten said, “If I had to do it over again, I’d leave the girls out of it so that the horrible things I said about their parents would have had a chance to shine through. I’m kicking myself about that.”
Saying that she had “learned my lesson” from the incident, she added, “I put a lot of work into crafting malicious insults about Barack and Michelle Obama, and those insults have largely been ignored. That’s the real tragedy here.”
Visibly emotional, Lauten said that having her attacks on the First Couple be overlooked “has been a source of great personal suffering for me,” but added, “I refuse to call myself a victim.”
“If what I’ve gone through helps others to do a better job of vilifying the President and the First Lady, it will all have been worth it,” she said.
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President Walker? Five Things You Should Know About Scott |
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Monday, 01 December 2014 15:33 |
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Bottari writes: "Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is walking and talking a lot like he is running for President of the United States. The Wisconsin governor who famously told his cabinet that he was inspired by Ronald Reagan to kill Wisconsin unions is throwing his hat into the ring, and Walker is garnering kudos from good friends like government-slayer Grover Norquist."
Scott Walker. (photo: AP)
President Walker? Five Things You Should Know About Scott
By Mary Bottari, PR Watch
01 December 14
 isconsin Governor Scott Walker is walking and talking a lot like he is running for President of the United States. The Wisconsin governor who famously told his cabinet that he was inspired by Ronald Reagan to kill Wisconsin unions is throwing his hat into the ring, and Walker is garnering kudos from good friends like government-slayer Grover Norquist.
Grover is banging the drum for a Walker presidency, writing rapturously about how Walker is much like Calvin Coolidge, who busted the police unions as governor of Massachusetts. He fails to note that Calvin’s minimalist approach to his presidency between 1923 and 1929 helped bring about the Great Depression.
Here are a few things that you need to know about the cheddarhead with Coolidge-like ambitions.
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Walker Failed to Expand His Base: Walker won in 2010 with 52% of the vote. After $100 million spent by his campaign and outside interests to burnish his image, Walker won reelection in 2014 during a GOP wave with 52% of the vote. As John Nichols points out in The Nation, former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson won his first race with 52%, his second with 58% and his third with 67%. People can still name programs that Thompson started. What is Scott Walker’s signature achievement? Did he launch an impressive new initiative that sparked a job surge? Did he improve health care options for thousands of Wisconsinites? Have test scores in the state doubled? Not at all. Walker’s signature achievement was stripping public teachers, nurses and other state employees of their right to organize. To the public, he said the state was "broke" and local communities needed the "tools" to pay public workers less. To creepy billionaire donor Diane Hendricks eagerly asking him how Wisconsin could become "a completely red state," he explained the strategy to make Wisconsin a Republican stronghold is to divide and conquer:" first go after the public-sector unions, then go after private sector ones. Walker would later call his presidential campaign book "Unintimidated," a real "howler" of a title says Milwaukee historian John Gurda. "Walker threw the first punch, and the second, and the fifth; everyone else simply reacted." Bullies do not make attractive presidential candidates.
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Walker Failed to Fix State Budget Problems: After demonizing state workers, slashing education and social welfare funding, dividing the state and sparking mass protests in the name of balancing the budget, Walker has failed to do so. In 2010 the state had a $2.3 billion dollar budget shortfall. Today, the state has a – wait for it – $2.2 billion dollar project budget shortfall. Wisconsin is still deep in the hole. Why? Because Walker was not actually serious about getting Wisconsin's fiscal house in order. If he was, he would not have given away over $760 million in tax breaks and other special interest perks to corporations and wealthy individuals, worsening the state's budget woes. The state now may be forced to pass another "budget repair bill" and implement more painful cuts in state programs. These cuts have real consequences for real people. According to a new report out of Georgetown, approximately 61,000 kids in Wisconsin were uninsured in 2013.
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Walker's Job Rate Falls Far Behind National Average: After the 2008 financial crisis, Wisconsin lost 168,000 jobs. Walker was elected to office in 2010 as a friend of the working man. He carried his lunch in a brown bag and promised to create 250,000 jobs in four years. He fell 150,000 short. Walker likes to tout Wisconsin’s low overall unemployment rate which is 5.6%, but the facts are that the state’s economy is stagnating. During Walker's tenure federal statistics have regularly ranked Wisconsin among the worst in the nation and the upper midwest in new job creation, putting Wisconsin at 33 in September. Forbes ranks Wisconsin a dismal 32 for business climate. Walker’s privatized, flagship economic development agency the Wisconsin Economic Development Authority (WEDC) has been plagued by law breaking and incompetence. While the authority has been touting big numbers in its official reports (60,00 jobs "impacted" in FYs 2012, 2013), CMD’s analysis of the same period found only 5,840 actual jobs reported by companies receiving state aid. WEDC is so full of incompetence and bad news, its two top officials Reed Hall and Ryan Murray recently announced their departures, the second shake up in as many years. No doubt, Walker is trying to clean house before the national press corps gets a hard look at WEDC. Serious reporters, like NBC's Chuck Todd, point out that if Wisconsin had only kept up with the national average in wages and job growth it would be doing much better.
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Walker is at the Center of a Long Running Criminal Investigation: Walker is at the center of a long running criminal investigation of illegal campaign coordination with outside independent expenditure groups. During the recall elections that followed Walker's bill to knock off public sector unions, millions of dollars flooded the state from outside groups with little disclosure. Wisconsin's nonpartisan elections board, which is run by a group of retired judges appointed by the governor, joined with a bipartisan group of five district attorneys to launch an investigation of potentially illegal campaign coordination during the recalls. Long standing law at the state and federal level, upheld by state courts and U.S. Supreme Court, holds that issues ads and independent expenditures must be in fact independent and not coordinated with campaigns. If the expenditures are coordinated, they would constitute a campaign contribution that needed to be disclosed. In Wisconsin, Walker raised millions for Wisconsin Club for Growth run by his top campaign aide RJ Johnson and ally Eric O'Keefe. CMD was the first to disclose that Wisconsin Club for Growth funneled that money to dozens of groups who cut ads for Walker and others up for recall. Wisconsin Club for Growth has challenged every aspect of the investigation in court before finding a friendly federal judge (the only Wisconsin judge to regularly attend Koch-junkets) to take the unusual step of intervening in a state criminal case. This year, the case will end up before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. If the Club's theory is allowed to prevail, unlimited, undisclosed money will flow into Wisconsin elections -- fully coordinated with campaigns -- completely destroying Wisconsin's post-Watergate clean elections laws.
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Walker Succeeded in Becoming Completely Beholden to Out-of-State Special Interests: Scott Walker is an alumni of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) where he first encountered an array of deep pocketed special interests. Walker was an ALEC member in his early days in the state legislature, pushing ALEC’s "Truth in Sentencing" and other punitive measures. After becoming Governor, Walker signed 19 ALEC bills into law including anti-consumer "tort reform" bills, voter ID, castle doctrine, charter schools, virtual schools, concealed carry and more. That kind of agenda wins you some pretty important far-right friends on the national scene. Since becoming governor, Scott Walker has taken more money from out-of-state donors than any other politician in Wisconsin history. The Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity group spent some $10 million in the 2012 recall race, according to its leader Tim Phillips, double what was spent by Walker's Democratic challenger Tom Barrett. In 2014, AFP told the public it was spending another $900,000 in support of Walker, but the Koch total might be higher. Other big donors include a who's who of the far right including: school privatizer Dick DeVos, Texas builder Bob Perry, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. If elected, Walker may not be the first friend of David Koch’s in the oval office, but he would be America’s first ALEC president.
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The Revolution Will Be Live-Tweeted: Why #BlackLivesMatter Is the New Model for Civil Rights |
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Monday, 01 December 2014 15:29 |
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Muhammad writes: "The events of the past few months, now simply referred to as Ferguson, have touched off nationwide protests of a scale not seen in a half-century. From billboards to T-shirts, protest banners and news headlines – all emblazoned with the words #BlackLivesMatter – we are witnessing the makings of a social movement of the 21st century kind."
(photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA)
The Revolution Will Be Live-Tweeted: Why #BlackLivesMatter Is the New Model for Civil Rights
By Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Guardian UK
01 December 14
Black Power may have devolved into a fight to exist, but what if that’s a good thing? Ferguson’s young protesters are moving forward in all the right ways
 he events of the past few months, now simply referred to as Ferguson, have touched off nationwide protests of a scale not seen in a half-century. From billboards to T-shirts, protest banners and news headlines – all emblazoned with the words #BlackLivesMatter – we are witnessing the makings of a social movement of the 21st century kind. The revolution that Gil Scot Heron famously said, “would not be televised”, is today, in fact, recorded and tweeted.
The Godfather of Rap and soulful Black Power poet and musician could never have imagined that a hashtag would be the rallying cry of a new generation’s quest for racial justice in the United States of America.
What a remarkable development in the midst of the 50th anniversary of the black freedom movement. What should be the eve of commemorating the final chapter in the century-long battle for citizenship rights by African Americans with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, now marks the prologue to a new human rights drama.
Black Power has given way to #BlackLivesMatter, the devolution of a movement for resources and recognition to a fight to exist, free of state-sanctioned violence. This is the “rearest of rear-guard positions one can imagine,” historian Andy Seal writes at his blog, “petitioning for the right not to die prematurely, a mark of retreat from the larger hopes and assertive agendas” of the 1960s and 1970s.
Or could it be that this is the wrong way to look at it? What if this moment is also a return to first principles: the necessary assertion of the humanity of black life by the democratic crowd beyond the legal fictions of equality?
The fierce critic, essayist and novelist James Baldwin was on to something when he marked the Emancipation Proclamation centennial in 1963. In a message to his nephew in the opening essay of The Fire Next Time, he foretold the flames of Ferguson. Much of the civil rights establishment at the time had their sights on a massive rally on the mall to be held that summer and led by A Phillip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. But Baldwin was less concerned about legislation while the Kennedy administration dithered about the passage of a civil rights bill. Baldwin wanted his nephew and all Harlem youth to build their immunity against the malignancy of self-doubt, by externalizing what the psychologist Kenneth Clark of Brown v Board of Education fame described as the “daily experience” of being disrespected and devalued.
“They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know and do not want to know it,” Baldwin wrote. “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.”
Saving black youth meant going beyond ending the legal infrastructure of Jim Crow. It meant inverting the narrative of black pathology embedded in what Darren Wilson calls “high crime areas” or what former mayor Rudolph Giuliani and police commissioner Ray Kelly call “black-on-black crime” today. Baldwin crafted a new narrative and structural analysis of white responsibility for black suffering and premature death, even at the hands of one’s own neighbors and schoolmates.
Like Baldwin, #BlackLivesMatters categorically refuses to trade on respectability, to determine who deserves to die prematurely when the “authors of devastation” control the apparatus of justice. Black people cannot establish different standards of justice, from policing to prison, outside of white decision makers and a predominately white electorate. When Giuliani claimed that crime was black people’s problem for them to fix on their own, he was making a 21st century segregationist claim. Contrary to popular myth, the former New York City mayor’s Italian-American forebears did not save themselves from their own white-on-white crime. Welfarist policies, machine politicians, union jobs and white philanthropists aided them over much of the 20th century.
These reforms were pro-social, life affirming, non-lethal interventions, amounting to a repudiation of criminal justice as the blunt instrument of social order. The lie of segregation has always been that blacks are unfit or undeserving of equality. The logic is that they are either monstrous or childlike, not fully human.
The Black Power movement defied this logic and tried to put into practice the spirit of what Baldwin had said in prose. As a mode of empowerment and self-determination, Black Power was one of many long-running modes of engagement with American racism. Then, as a slogan and a new political imperative it went viral in 1966 – the same year the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California – and soon spread nationally. More youth rallied to Black Power and its many organizational manifestations and theoretical orientations than any other ideological concept. And the Panthers made criminal justice a core focus of their work. “We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people,” they listed on their Ten-Point Program.
The Panthers never achieved their goal as they faced insurmountable violence by local, state and federal officials by the end of late 1969. Clandestine attacks and agents provocateurs were the seeds of their undoing. And yet their unfinished work is reinvigorated today in #BlackLivesMatters. Young people again are shaping a movement in their own image. Although, this time it is far more democratic, transparent and inclusive. This time the racial justice movement is about human rights and civil rights. This time change is in the cities and in the suburbs. And this time “the revolution will be live” on Twitter. Stay following.
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Florida, Nation Cannot Ignore Climate Change |
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Monday, 01 December 2014 14:40 |
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Excerpt: "No one needs to be a scientist to grasp the dire implications that a warming Earth poses to everyday life. That's the message from the latest in a yearlong series of reports from the world's leading science body, which finds that climate change is 'clear and growing' and an immediate risk to people and ecosystems."
Climate change. (photo: Florida Center for Environmental Studies)
Florida, Nation Cannot Ignore Climate Change
Tampa Bay Times | Editorial
01 December 14
 o one needs to be a scientist to grasp the dire implications that a warming Earth poses to everyday life. That's the message from the latest in a yearlong series of reports from the world's leading science body, which finds that climate change is "clear and growing" and an immediate risk to people and ecosystems. The report should be wakeup call to industrial nations and coastal states such as Florida to start seriously addressing climate change before the impacts pose even greater threats to security, population centers and the food and water supply.
The report released last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an agency formed by the United Nations that brings 195-member states together with the world's leading scientists, found that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases were the highest in history, that warming is unequivocally happening and that the changes since the 1950s have been the greatest in thousands of years. Each of the last three decades was successively hotter than any preceding decade since 1850. And the last 30-year period was the warmest in the Northern Hemisphere in 1,400 years. The issue is not whether the climate is warming but what the world will do to curb the "irreversible" impacts to human life.
The industrialized states need to lead by cutting their reliance on fossil fuels, investing in the clean energy sector and becoming more serious about conservation and more efficient urban design. The developing world will not curb its growth by holding back on fossil fuels if the richer nations don't set an example that clean energy can propel the economy. This report lays a foundation for the international community to agree on action at the next U.N. climate conference this month in Peru.
The midterm elections were a setback, as Republicans skeptical about climate change increased their hold on Congress and as Gov. Rick Scott won re-election. President Barack Obama should continue to press clean energy initiatives that can keep moving the nation away from dirtier fuels. Scott, who has said he is not convinced of man-made climate change and met with climate scientists only late in his re-election campaign, needs to address the reality that more extreme weather, rising sea levels, heat waves and drought poses to this coastal state.
The panel's report frames the risks of climate change in the most compelling language the global panel has ever used. It shuts down the nonsense that global warming is a theory and a problem for some future generation to confront. And it raises the urgency of the conversation by framing the risks of climate change in terms of national security. Rising sea levels, drought, and the impacts that extreme weather will bring to farmland and fisheries will threaten the world's food and water supply — creating more instability in the most volatile parts of the world. The United States and the world have a responsibility to those future generations to address climate change before the costs only continue to grow.
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