Never punch Rush in the belly

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Moe wants you all to know that she’s under the weather—a fractured elbow–and will be posting infrequently for a while; a Saint Patrick’s Day post is a strong possibility, however. Elvis bless her, and let’s hope she heals quickly.

Stay tuned…

Rich, and deserves every penny

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Game of drones

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British troops in Afghanistan are now using surveillance drones small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

The new Black Hornet Nano weighs approximately half an ounce and carries a camera for remote viewing. Used to find insurgents and view open areas before crossing, the Hornet offers “amazing capability to the guys on the ground,” according to Sgt. Christopher Petherbridge of Britain’s Brigade Reconnaissance Force.

The UK drones were developed as part of a $31 million contract for 160 units. Drones are becoming standard issue in the US, British, and other military forces of the world.

So the next time you feel the need to ease the pain of your glaucoma, or perhaps you and your partner get the urge to do something just a little odd in your bedroom, make sure the shades are shut tight–’cause it’s only a matter of time before our new little friends will be watching us, folks.

Mini Drones: Army Deploys Tiny Helicopters

Chomsky-ish

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Applying some of the ideas in last week’s Chomsky post

First, take a look at this map:

Now, consider this hypothetical scenario:

1. Iran invades and occupies both Canada and Mexico.
2. Iranian aircraft carriers and destroyers are patrolling the waters ten miles off the coast of Northern Virginia (as today American warships patrol the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz) to “protect Iranian interests.”
3. The President of the United States announces that, if attacked, America will defend itself.
4. Iran, before the UN, and using the President’s declaration as proof of US aggression and bellicosity, demands the international community enact economic sanctions and threatens military action “to contain the American threat.”

As an American, what would you think? What would you feel? What would you say?

Oxfam says world’s rich could end poverty

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From Al Jazeera:

The world’s 100 richest people earned enough money last year to end world extreme poverty four times over, according to a new report released by international rights group and charity Oxfam.

The $240 billion net income of the world’s 100 richest billionaires would have ended poverty four times over, according to the London-based group’s report released on Saturday.

The group has called on world leaders to commit to reducing inequality to the levels it was at in 1990, and to curb income extremes on both sides of the spectrum. […]

The group says that the world’s richest one percent have seen their income increase by 60 percent in the last 20 years, with the latest world financial crisis only serving to hasten, rather than hinder, the process.

Security guard forgets gun in school bathroom

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Hired to protect a Michigan school following the Sandy Hook shootings, the new security guard, a retired firearms instructor, walked out of the school bathroom leaving his gum behind:

Just days after calling its newly hired armed security guard “a tremendous asset to the safety of our students,” a Michigan school released a statement saying the retired firearms instructor had caused a “breach in security protocol” by leaving his handgun unattended in the school’s bathroom. […]

The school, which serves grades K through 8, insists that no students were in danger, and vowed to “continue to work on improving school security.”

But of course, we do want to arm our students, don’t we?

Security Officer Hired by School in Response to Sandy Hook Shooting Forgets to Take Handgun With Him When Exiting Student Restroom

7 brilliant insights from Noam Chomsky on American empire

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Reposted from AlterNet.  Note: I rearranged the entries in the article from shorter to longer.

by Laura Gottesdiener, AlterNet

Noam Chomsky is an expert on many matters — linguistics, how our economy functions and propaganda, among others. One area where his wisdom especially shines through is in articulating the structure and functioning of the American empire. Chomsky has been speaking and publishing on the topic since the ’60s. Below are seven powerful quotes on the evils, atrocities and ironies of the American empire taken from his personal site and from a fan-curated Web site dedicated to collecting Chomsky‘s observations.

1. “[The U.S. still names] military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.” — Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

2. “Suppose that, say, China established military bases in Colombia to carry out chemical warfare in Kentucky and North Carolina to destroy this lethal crop [tobacco] that is killing huge numbers of Chinese.” — Noam Chomsky on the irony of the drug war waged by the United States in Central and South America

3. “If something is right (or wrong) for us, it’s right (or wrong) for others. It follows that if it’s wrong for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and a long list of others to bomb Washington and New York, then it’s wrong for Rumsfeld to bomb Afghanistan (on much flimsier pretexts), and he should be brought before war crimes trials.” — “On Terrorism,”Noam Chomsky interviewed by John Bolender, Jump Arts Journal, January 2004

4. “Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.” — Profit over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order

The thing that wouldn’t die

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Paul Ryan is at it again; he’s agreed to cosponsor the Sanctity of Human Life Act yet one more time. The bill asserts that life begins with fertilization, and permits states to ban abortion outright, even in the case of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother.

And besides outlawing many forms of in vitro fertilization, the bill goes on: if a woman is raped in an abortion-banning state, then goes to an abortion-permitting state intending to have an abortion, her rapist can sue to stop the abortion, and win.

The prior version of this way-over-the-top bill died in Congress, and it’s expected this one will too. But Ryan’s ongoing attempt to repeal women’s reproductive rights exemplifies conservative entitlement; politicians like Ryan, along with conservative employers and landlords, sanctimoniously believe their morality outweighs the rights of those they govern and control.

As good as it gets

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California’s belt-tightening, tax increases, and subsequent projected budget surplus contrasts sharply with Gov. Chris Christie’s plan to cut New Jersey’s income tax, even though the state’s deficit grew again this year, as it has for almost a decade.

Christie believes that cutting taxes on the 1% will bring “job creators” into the state: according to Thinkprogress, “The tax cut plan that Christie unveiled in 2012 would have given 40 percent of its benefit to the richest 1 percent of New Jerseyans, while cutting taxes for middle-class families by just $80.”

Christie would cut state taxes even though it would dramatically lower revenue; meanwhile New Jersey desperately needs money to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy. And while Christie is smart, tough, personable, and appears to be one of the few non-crazies on the national Republicans scene,  he still clings to the market fundamentalism that brought the country to its present condition.

Libertarian comrades

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Via Corey Robin:

In the wake of the Newtown killings, writers on the right have suggested we should teach children to turn on their assailants, rushing them en masse. Here’s Megan McArdle writing in The Daily Beast:

I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.

McArdle is a libertarian. You know, the type who believes you can’t derive Rawlsian-style social justice from self-interested premises—that shit would never work—but that you can adduce from those very same premises a mass death instinct of the sort that powered the Red Army to victory against the Nazis. When it comes to public goods, libertarians think we’re all free riders; in the face of crazed killers, we’re all comrades.

Obama’s Christmas present to seniors

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America’s topple from the fiscal cliff will be triggered by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which was sparked by the debt ceiling debate of the same year. Now, as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations, President Obama has agreed to cut Social Security by switching to something called Chained CPI to figure the amount in your Social Security check.

I checked the Social Security website trying understand the impact of the switch, and pulled a few facts. Turns out the Bureau of Labor Statistics employs several different CPI measurements:

• Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)
• Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W)
• Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U)
• An experimental data series, the CPI-E, to measure the “inflation experience” of those aged 62 or older

This chart from the site shows how the different CPIs measure inflation over time. Chained CPI calculations result in a lower inflation rate number:

No calculation method is (or can be) completely accurate, but seniors are more likely to experience inflation patterns closer to the CPI-E, although the CPI-E may be less accurate because the population test bed is smaller. Inflation measured by the CPI-E is higher, due to seniors’ higher medical costs, which rise faster than other costs.

Inflation measured by the C-CPI-U is lower, due to the “substitution factor” caused by rising prices on some goods. For example, if the cost of chicken goes up, one would tend to substitute some lower priced meat like bologna.* (Some politicians have suggested that because of this, your Social Security check has really been too fat all these years.)

Cost of living adjustments (COLAs – the increase one sees in one’s SS check every few years) are currently based on the CPI-U and CPI-W.

Obama proposes switching to the C-CPI-U to calculate COLAs even though seniors need more than the CPI-U and CPI-W to keep up with inflation, not less. Why the switch? No other reason than C-CPI-U will pay less over time than the current method. Assertions that C-CPI-U is more “accurate”, or it’s just a “tweak” to the calculation, or “if enacted, nobody would notice the difference”, are ludicrous. Over a long retirement, Chained CPI would result in a month’s loss of benefits yearly, or about 8.3%. That’s a hefty cut.

*If the cost of bologna rises too much, I understand Kibbles ‘n Bits Bistro Meals have been found to be quite edible.

Pity the children

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The outpouring of grief over the Sandy Hook shootings continues. That one nation, if not the whole world, can express such pain and grief over the murders of these twenty children speaks to us of our innate human capacity for empathy and compassion.

Some pointed out the obvious almost as soon as it happened, but it didn’t seem right. After all, the horror of one act of brutality does not detract from the horror of another. To mourn the dreadful loss of one group of people takes nothing away from the suffering of another.

And yet the frenzy of national soul-searching continues unabated. So, amid the endless replays of interviews with sobbing parents, the minute cross-examination of media-sick residents, the near-nationwide outrage and demands that Something Must Be Done, can we pause to remember that hundreds of children have been murdered by US drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

And can we demand that here, too, Something Must Be Done?

Wall Street’s nightmare just got worse

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On Wednesday Senate Democrats confirmed Elizabeth Warren’s seat on the Senate Banking Committee. Considering Wall Street’s crucial role in President Obama’s failure to appoint her to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the humongous wads of cash the Street spent attempting to derail her Senate run, it will be interesting to see if Warren, named “Wall Street’s worst nightmare” by Forbes, will be able to effectively usher in the regulation the big banks so desperately need–and fear.

Stiff resistance by Republicans on the Committee is a given, but I’ll be most interested to see how Wall Street-beholden Democrats respond to her efforts. In any event, there is some irony in the fact that Warren will now be regulating the institutions that fought so hard and long to bring her down.

Boehner to America: drop dead

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House Speaker John Boehner held his weekly press conference today and demanded Democrats outline their plan for spending cuts “to avert the fiscal cliff and help get the economy moving again”:

“…the president has warned about the dangers of going over the fiscal cliff, but his actions have not matched his public statements…despite claims that the president supports a ‘balanced’ approach, the Democrats have yet to get serious about real spending cuts…Listen, this is not a game…And this is a moment for adult leadership…the White House has to get serious…we’ve put real concessions on the line by putting revenues on the table right up front…Republicans have taken action to avert the fiscal cliff by passing legislation to stop all the tax hikes, to replace the sequester, and pave the way for tax reform and entitlement reform….But without spending cuts and entitlement reform, it’s going to be impossible to address our country’s debt crisis, and get our economy going again, and to create jobs.”

Now it may sound rather ironic to hear Boehner calling for “adult leadership”, yet he says that the Republicans did in fact make concessions; they put “revenues on the table right up front.” Why would the Democrats refuse to compromise?

The White House has a notion. According to the Administration, it’s because even though they say they put revenues on the table, the Republican leadership won’t agree to raise tax rates on the top 2 percent. And the fact that the American people elected Obama on a platform that states the rich should pay more appears to be simply irrelevant to Boehner.

Parsing the rest of what Boehner is calling for–stopping tax hikes, paving the way for tax reform and entitlement reform–is just the same old Republican dogma, tax cuts and social spending cuts. And the bill to “replace the sequester” (designed by Paul Ryan and passed in the House with zero support from Democrats) replaced fiscal cliff Defense cuts with cuts to the Food Stamp program.

So Speaker Boehner is making clear the Republicans intent to change not one iota; they intend to dig in and hold fast to their program of serving the rich and the rest of the people be damned, even if we made clear our intent through the electoral process. So much for democracy.

Why we’ll miss Barney Frank

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Interviewer: You’ve long argued for the decriminalization of marijuana. Do you smoke weed?

Barney Frank: No.

Interviewer: Why not?

Barney Frank: Why do you ask a question, then act surprised when I give an answer? Do you think I lie to people?

Interviewer: I thought you might explain why you support decriminalizing it but don’t smoke it.

Barney Frank: Do you think I’ve ever had an abortion?

(Source)

Flash! Anderson Cooper not afraid of Rush Limbaugh

This is exquisite.

On Thursday, Mr. Limbaugh of Palm  Beach spoke ill of Anderson Cooper, who lightheartedly responded with gentle use of the one weapon that I think has power with the morbidly obese four-times married public moralizer- he mocked him. He as good as said the unsayable: the guy is too fat.

Did Rush lash back on Friday?

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Farewell, Newt

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Gingrich would have had the best chance of beating Obama in open debate…plus I particularly enjoyed watching him give the mainstream media the lambasting it so richly deserves.

What YOU Can Do on May Day

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May Day is an international day of celebration to honor the labor movement. This year the Occupy movement has made a call for mass action—the May First General Strike (#M1GS): a day without the 99%. Over 115 US cities have organized in solidarity with this call to action.

A general strike is a way to build and demonstrate the power of the people. It’s a way to show this is a system that only exists because we allow it to. If we can withdraw from the system for one day we can use that day to build community and mutual aid. We can find inspiration and faith—not in any leaders or bosses but in each other and in ourselves.

If you are inspired by the day of action but don’t live near any organized events you can still take part. If you can’t strike, take the first step. We can work to shift the balance of power back into the hands of the people little by little in our everyday lives.

Here are some examples to get you thinking:

1. Move Your Money: If you haven’t already, May Day is as good as any to move your money out of a national, corporate bank into a local bank or credit union. Support your local community and break up the “too big to fail” Wall Street banks that threaten our economic system. Learn more about moving your money here: www.moveyourmoneyproject.org
2. Have a Potluck: Share a meal with others and and talk about subsidized agriculture and factory farming or make a meal with friends to serve to local homeless people a la Food Not Bombs.
3. Start a Personal/Community Garden: On May Day, start or pledge to start a personal or community garden. Growing our own food means independence from corporate farms. This is one more way to take your self out of a system bent on keeping us complacent.
4. Have a Free Store/Fair: Get together and share your unwanted items with others. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. You could be helping someone who was about to go out and buy a (fill in your item here) anyway.
5. Ride your bike to work/carpool with friends: Ride your bike or arrange a carpool to work. When you do this you are lessening our country’s dependency on outdated, unclean energies.
6. Screen a Movie: Invite your friends or neighbors over to watch a documentary. After, have a discussion about how it relates to your values or the ideas of Occupy. You can watch political documentaries online at the following links for free:
   http://http://crimethinc.com/movies/
   http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/category/politics/
   http://www.documentarytube.com/category/political-documentarieshttp://freedocumentaries.org/
7. Have a Skill Share: Give a free class to share your skills and knowledge. This could be as simple as giving a knitting demonstration or as complex as teaching someone a new language.

We have the power in our hands to change the course of our day to day realities if we are willing to participate and reach out to our neighbors and communities. In the words of Steven Biko, ”the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Big business should not be in control of us, we are the many and they are the few.

(Source)

Don’t forget to look for actions in your area here or here.

May Day 2012: a real Labor Day

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Spring is in the air, and you know what that means–that’s right, Occupy Wall Street is back, bigger and better than ever! Although actions have been ongoing for several weeks, the first major action will be the worldwide General Strike called for May 1st. From OccupyWallSt.org:

May 1st, also known as International Workers’ Day, is the annual commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, when Chicago police fired on workers during a General Strike for the eight-hour workday. In many countries, May 1st is observed as a holiday. But in the United States, despite the eventual success of the eight-hour-workday campaign, the holiday is not officially recognized.

Now, in response to call-outs from Occupy Los Angeles, Occupy Chicago, Occupy Oakland, and other General Assemblies and affinity groups, the Occupy Movement is preparing to mobilize a General Strike this May 1st in solidarity with struggles already underway to defend the rights of workers, immigrants, and other communities who are resisting oppression. Dozens of Occupations in cities and towns throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia have already endorsed May Day.

To quote the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, who recently called for a national General Strike in Spain on March 29th to protest labor reforms:

For the CNT, the strike on March 29 must be only the beginning of a growing and sustained process of mobilization, one which includes the entire working class and the sectors that are most disadvantaged and affected by the capitalist crisis. This mobilization must put the brakes on the dynamic of constant assaults on our rights, while laying the bases for the recovery and conquest of new social rights with the goal of a deep social transformation.

I’ll be at the NYC action; hope to see you there! I’ll post links and updates as they become available.

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Corey Robin

Katha Pollitt writing in the Nation about the Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney fracas:

But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself.

…

So…

View original post 41 more words

America, land of opportunity

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Today under headline “As Occupy Wall Street Comes Out of Hibernation, Are Tasers, Mace or Weapon Detection Systems Good Investments?” smallcapnetwork.com spies gold in them thar hills:

As the weather warms up, Occupy Wall Street and various Occupy protesters should be coming out of hibernation to start protesting again but are stocks like TASER International (TASR), Mace Security International (MACE) and View Systems (VSYM) that make various protection devices or identification systems good bets for investors? … law enforcement authorities across the country are no doubt stocking up on tasers and mace in time for the spring and summer Occupy protest seasons. …are TASER, Mace and View Systems safe investments for those of us in the or who want to be in the 1% or should we give these stocks a pass?

A financial overview of the companies follows. There’s only one sour note: the summary states “Investors should be concerned about the potential number of wrongful death lawsuits that TASER International as well as Mace Security International could face”. But really, what’s the risk of a few dead protesters when compared with the opportunity to become a One Percenter?

Thief of Baghdad

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Several times a day what I read in the news makes me want to throw up, but this sentence on MSN took me way beyond the dry heaves to something I can only call brainpuke, the involuntary expulsion of ideas so vile that they and sanity cannot be retained by the mind simultaneously. Here we see the media in action, already manufacturing the “Iraq War” that will be inscribed in the history books:

President Barack Obama meets Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki Monday, marking America’s exit from a war launched in a aerial “shock and awe” assault that went on to deeply wound both nations.

The notion of some sort of equivalence or mutuality of suffering between Iraq and the United States–some kind of shared pain experienced by both sides in this war, or even that it can be called a “war”: it was an invasion and occupation, on a false pretext, and it laid waste to a nation that had done nothing to ours; almost 5000 US soldiers dead, compared to between 100,000 and a million Iraqis; millions of internal and external refugees, infrastructure ravaged, cities reduced to rubble, children playing in streets strewn with depleted uranium, civil society extinguished, civil war continuing to rage–should be beyond the conceivable and the civilized; yet it’s what we need to believe and so we do, safely ensconced in our sense of moral certitude.

Hail to the chief

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Despite the media hoopla and the Obama administration’s braggadocio surrounding the troop exit from Iraq, the US planned to maintain troops in the country indefinitely. The only reason for the withdrawal is that the Iraqi government refused to grant future immunity to US troops.

It was a slick move by Maliki, and demonstrates Obama’s lack of negotiating skills, even when he’s holding the big stick. He should have asked George W. Bush for advice.

In any event, only a neocon could be unhappy with the outcome: US troops out of Iraq.

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Match: certitude and others.   <!– function playIt(sUrl) { document.getElementById(‘sPron’).innerHTML=’http://’+sUrl+’‘; } // –> cer·ti·tude (sûr‘tĭ-tūd‘, -tyūd‘) n. The state of being certain; complete assurance; confidence. Sureness of occurrence or result; inevitability. Something that is assured or unfailing: “eager to swap the hazards of American freedom for the gray certitudes of Soviet life” (Time). See synonyms at certainty. [Middle English, from Late Latin certitūdō, from Latin certus, certain. See certain.] © Houghton Mifflin Company <!– Help  fbz 1114–> Copyright © 2011 Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of Use   Privacy Policy   IP Notices   Disclaimer

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Meet the new boss

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According to today’s BBC, “an Iraqi judicial committee has issued an arrest warrant for the mainly Shia Arab country’s Sunni Arab Vice-President, Tariq al-Hashemi. The warrant was issued under anti-terrorism laws…”

The main Sunni political party is now boycotting the cabinet and accuses Shia Prime Minister Nouri Maliki of “monopolizing power”.

Meanwhile Danny Schechter reports, “Maliki has dipped into Saddam’s playbook by deploying his own secret police and military to round up hundreds of former Baathist supporters…A US think-tank documenting his crackdown is saying that Maliki is primarily concerned with his own survival.” Sort of like, uh, Saddam Hussein. And, like Saddam, “he too uses his son, Ahmad, to evict US firms from the Green Zone in Baghdad and do his father’s forceful bidding. And human rights groups are criticizing him for running secret jails, imprisoning journalists and critics, and firing 100 professors from a university in Saddam’s old hometown of Tikrit.”

Schecter continues, “With Maliki now terrorizing his own enemies, often in the name of questionable “plots” to overthrow him, Iraq will remain volatile. Bear in mind that after all these years, the Iraqis are still suffering from a broken electricity system as well as serious food and medical shortages.”

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Match: certitude and others.   <!– function playIt(sUrl) { document.getElementById(‘sPron’).innerHTML=’http://’+sUrl+’‘; } // –> cer·ti·tude (sûr‘tĭ-tūd‘, -tyūd‘) n. The state of being certain; complete assurance; confidence. Sureness of occurrence or result; inevitability. Something that is assured or unfailing: “eager to swap the hazards of American freedom for the gray certitudes of Soviet life” (Time). See synonyms at certainty. [Middle English, from Late Latin certitūdō, from Latin certus, certain. See certain.] © Houghton Mifflin Company <!– Help  fbz 1114–> Copyright © 2011 Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of Use   Privacy Policy   IP Notices   Disclaimer

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A Lowe’s stunt to pull

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Jon Stewart nails it on the bizarre logic behind the Florida Family Association’s complaint against Lowe’s:
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Republicans on OWS: a preview

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This week Frank Luntz, Republican spinmeister extraordinaire, spoke to the Republican Governors Association about how to “frame” Occupy Wall Street to the public.

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Luntz. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Luntz is a master of using language to trigger subtle emotional responses favorable to the speaker, and for years has been directing Republicans in how to effectively spin their message.

Since Republican politicians obediently follow Luntz’s dictates in lockstep, you’ll be hearing these memes from conservatives of all stripes as they spin OWS in the coming days and weeks. The rules are quite instructive, especially since almost all public speech by the political class is generally finessed in the same way. And Luntz is the very best; the Democrats don’t have anybody in his league. In fact, President Obama would do well to ponder rule 6 carefully.

1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’
“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

2. Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Instead, tell them that the government ‘takes from the rich.’
“If you talk about raising taxes on the rich,” the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But “if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no. Taxing, the public will say yes.”

3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the ‘middle class.’ Call them ‘hardworking taxpayers.’
“They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the ‘middle class’ and the public will say, I’m not sure about that. But defending ‘hardworking taxpayers’ and Republicans have the advantage.”

Rosanne Cash – 500 Miles

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Lobbyist’s plan to undermine OWS

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By Jonathan Larsen and Ken Olshansky, MSNBC TV

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”

The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.

CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.

Zuccotti Park raided

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NYPD raided Zuccotti Park at 1 AM this morning and cleared it. They destroyed all property, including the library. There were 70+ arrests.

Cain on manhood

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In a wide-ranging GQ interview a thoughtful Herman Cain presents his views on the nature and expression of masculinity:

Chris Heath: What can you tell about a man by the type of pizza that he likes?

Herman Cain: [repeats the question aloud, then pauses for a long moment] The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is.

Chris Heath: Why is that?

Herman Cain: Because the more manly man is not afraid of abundance. [laughs]

Devin Gordon: Is that purely a meat question?

Herman Cain: A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.