GOP Teabaggers In Tampa...

...and they were so infantile.

http://dailykos.com/
Opponents shouted "Read the bill!" and held up signs as U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor attempted to address the crowd Thursday. There were reports of shoving and one man had his shirt ripped as a volunteer attempted to close a meeting room door. No one was arrested.
The Tampa chapter of the activist 9-12 Project says it encouraged members to show up and ask questions. The group was developed by Fox News Channel commentator Glenn Beck. The St. Petersburg Times reported the teabaggers not only said they were Beck disciples, but that the GOP had urged them to protest:Instead, hundreds of vocal critics turned out, many of them saying they had been spurred on through the Tampa 912 activist group promoted by conservative radio and television personality Glenn Beck. Others had received e-mails from the Hillsborough Republican Party that urged people to speak out against the plan and offered talking points.
So this is what the modern conservative movement has been reduced to: encouraging infantile behavior from teabaggers, practically begging them to drown out open discussion about health care reform.
What a bunch of pathetic cry-baby losers

Obama's Health Plan and ERISA...

...is not a very good mix for those of you who may be enrolled in an employer sponsered health plan. It would seem that the Obama administration is in the process of flat out trying to do away with ERISA altogether. This is not good for you.

The reality is that the House health bill, which the Administration praised to the rafters, will force drastic changes in almost all insurance coverage, including the employer plans that currently work best. About 177 million people—or 62% of those under age 65—get insurance today through their jobs, and while rising costs are a problem, according to every survey most employees are happy with the coverage. A major reason for this relative success is a 1974
federal law known by the acronym Erisa, or the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
Erisa allows employers that self-insure—that is, those large enough to build their own risk pools and pay benefits directly—to offer uniform plans across state lines. This lets thousands of businesses avoid, for the most part, the costly federal and state regulations on covered treatments, pricing, rate setting and so on. It also gives them flexibility to design insurance to recruit and retain workers in a competitive labor market. Roughly 75% of employer-based coverage is governed by Erisa’s “freedom of purchase” rules.

Iran's Past Democracy...

...and that would be the one which was alive in Iran back in the day before the United States took it away from the Iranian people, as Chris Hedges from truthdig.com points out. My links are still not working correctly so please bear with me.
Published on Monday, June 22, 2009 by TruthDig.com
Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away
by Chris Hedges

Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.

The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We have not brought freedom and democracy and enlightenment to the Muslim world. We have brought the opposite. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the region is submissive and cowed. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing ever greater portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one naively believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.

We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that “the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.” But our hypocrisy no longer fools anyone but ourselves. It will ensure our imperial and economic collapse.

The history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyranny. These tyrants were almost always propped up and funded by foreign powers. This suppression and distortion of legitimate democratic movements over the decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to power, unleashing another tragic cycle of Iranian resistance.

“The central story of Iran over the last 200 years has been national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers who have subjugated and looted the country,” Stephen Kinzer, the author of “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” told me. “For a long time the perpetrators were the British and Russians. Beginning in 1953, the United States began taking over that role. In that year, the American and British secret services overthrew an elected government, wiped away Iranian democracy, and set the country on the path to dictatorship.”

“Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, providing him with military equipment and intelligence that helped make it possible for his army to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians,” Kinzer said. “Given this history, the moral credibility of the U.S. to pose as a promoter of democracy in Iran is close to nil.

Especially ludicrous is the sight of people in Washington calling for intervention on behalf of democracy in Iran when just last year they were calling for the bombing of Iran. If they had had their way then, many of the brave protesters on the streets of Tehran today—the ones they hold up as heroes of democracy—would be dead now.”

Washington has never recovered from the loss of Iran—something our intelligence services never saw coming. The overthrow of the shah, the humiliation of the embassy hostages, the laborious piecing together of tiny shreds of paper from classified embassy documents to expose America’s venal role in thwarting democratic movements in Iran and the region, allowed the outside world to see the dark heart of the American empire. Washington has demonized Iran ever since, painting it as an irrational and barbaric country filled with primitive, religious zealots. But Iranians, as these street protests illustrate, have proved in recent years far more courageous in the defense of democracy than most Americans.

Where were we when our election was stolen from us in 2000 by Republican operatives and a Supreme Court that overturned all legal precedent to anoint George W. Bush president? Did tens of thousands of us fill the squares of our major cities and denounce the fraud? Did we mobilize day after day to restore transparency and accountability to our election process? Did we fight back with the same courage and tenacity as the citizens of Iran? Did Al Gore defy the power elite and, as opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has done, demand a recount at the risk of being killed?

President Obama retreated in his Cairo speech into our spectacular moral nihilism, suggesting that our crimes matched the crimes of Iran, that there is, in his words, "a tumultuous history between us." He went on: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians." It all, he seemed to say, balances out.

I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance and uses its power to deny popular will. But I do not remember Iran orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one of our passenger jets as did the USS Vincennes-caustically nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels-when in June 1988 it fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorism within the United States, as our intelligence services currently do in Iran. The attacks on Iranian soil include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and "targeted assassinations" of government officials, scientists and other Iranian leaders. What would we do if the situation was reversed? How would we react if Iran carried out these policies against us?

We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle East. The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the dictatorships that dot North Africa, is withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in their crude slogans of nationalist cant and violence. The louder the Israelis and their idiot allies in Washington call for the bombing of Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions, the happier are the bankrupt clerics who are ordering the beating and murder of demonstrators. We may laugh when crowds supporting Ahmadinejad call us "the Great Satan," but there is a very palpable reality that has informed the terrible algebra of their hatred.

Our intoxication with our military prowess blinds us to all possibilities of hope and mutual cooperation. It was Mohammed Khatami, the president of Iran from 1997 to 2005-perhaps the only honorable Middle East leader of our time-whose refusal to countenance violence by his own supporters led to the demise of his lofty "civil society" at the hands of more ruthless, less scrupulous opponents. It was Khatami who proclaimed that "the death of even one Jew is a crime." And we sputtered back to this great and civilized man the primitive slogans of all deformed militarists. We were captive, as all bigots are, to our demons, and could not hear any sound but our own shouting. It is time to banish these demons. It is time to stand not with the helmeted goons who beat protesters, not with those in the Pentagon who make endless wars, but with the unarmed demonstrators in Iran who daily show us what we must become.

The fight of the Iranian people is our fight. And, perhaps for the first time, we can match our actions to our ideals. We have no right under post-Nuremberg laws to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan. These occupations are defined by these statutes as criminal "wars of aggression." They are war crimes. We have no right to use force, including the state-sponsored terrorism we unleash on Iran, to turn the Middle East into a private gas station for our large oil companies. We have no right to empower Israel's continuing occupation of Palestine, a flagrant violation of international law. The resistance you see in Iran will not end until Iranians, and all those burdened with repression in the Middle East, free themselves from the tyranny that comes from within and without. Let us, for once, be on the side of those who share our democratic ideals.

© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.
Copyrighted 1997-2009
www.commondreams.org

Obama And The Federal Reserve

Published on Friday, June 19, 2009 by The Nation
Don't Cede More Economic Authority to Unaccountable Fed
by John Nichols

The reviews are in on Barack Obama's plan to address the crisis of Wall Street speculation and casino capitalism that has dramatically increased the gap between working Americans and the rich, created pressure for the deindustrialization of the United States and depression of wages and income for workers and farmers and created a nasty banking crisis.

Though even Obama acknowledges that this is the big one –- the issue that as much as anything led Americans to elect him last fall –- his "financial overhaul plan" did not merit above-the-fold coverage on the front page of The New York Times, the country's "newspaper of record." Two stories from Tehran and one on a poll about health care reform held the top spots. The overhaul merited only a feature suggesting –- correctly -- that there was "only a hint of Roosevelt" in Obama's plan.

In other words, for the great mass of Americans there will be no new "New Deal." To be sure, there's some good stuff here: creation of a new agency to help protect consumers of "financial products" and some stronger transparency requirements, a few more rules regarding banks and mortgage-backed securities. "But," as Times writer Joe Nocera notes, "it's what the plan doesn't do that is most notable." Nocera focuses, appropriately enough, on the failure of the administration to do much about the problem –- for taxpayers and for democracy –- of banks that are "too big to fail."

But the real concern ought not be focused on what this seemingly tepid plan fails to do.

The real concern is what it does.

The plan dramatically increases the authority and reach of the Federal Reserve, an already too powerful and unaccountable institution that will -- to the delight of the administration's "Fed men": Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and administration economic adviser Lawrence Summers -- become what the Wall Street Journal says will be "the nation's most powerful financial overseer."

"The proposal, if passed into law, would represent one of the biggest changes ever in the Fed's role," explains Journal writer Sudeep Reddy. "The central bank would win power to monitor risks across the financial system, and sweeping authority to examine any firm that could threaten financial stability, even if the Fed wouldn't normally supervise the institution. The nation's biggest and most interconnected firms would be subject to heightened oversight by the central bank."

In announcing the plan, President Obama claimed "that lines of responsibility and accountability are clear" with regard to the new authority being placed in the Fed's hands.

That is a ridiculous statement.

The Fed is famously unaccountable and resistant to transparency. Even Geithner acknowledged in his Thursday morning session with the Senate Banking Committee that there is a need to look at reforming the Fed's lax governance structure.

But don't expect Geithner of others in the administration to take a lead when it comes to fixing the Fed, an agency that zealously guards –- for logical reasons, as its track record is one of frequent missteps and failures on an epic scale. As Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd said after reviewing the central bank's significant flaws, "There's not a lot of confidence in the Fed at this point, and I'm stating the obvious."

What should be obvious to everyone is that Congress needs to get a grip on the Fed –- which is structured in a manner so that it faces little or no congressional oversight -- before it allows Obama's proposal to advance.

So says Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the dissident Democrat who responded to Obama's plan by declaring that: "Before Congress gives the Fed any new authority, we must thoroughly examine the Fed's response to our current economic crisis."

Noted Kucinich:

Since August 2007 the Fed has intervened in the economy in an extraordinary way, as a result ballooning their balance sheet from $847 billion to more than $2 trillion. Yet, we still don't know what the Fed has done or who got the money. That is why I introduced the bipartisan HR 2424, which would grant the GAO the authority to audit the Fed's response to our nation's economic crisis, a response that has dwarfed the $700 billion TARP program by more than 2 to 1.
Before we grant the Fed any new authority, we must demand greater transparency from the Fed; an earnest and open audit of the Federal Reserve's response to the economic crisis would be a significant step in the right direction. We can't continue to let the Fed operate within a black box.

Kucinich has proposed HR 2424, a piece of legislation that would amend United States Code "to authorize reviews by the Comptroller General of the United States of any credit facility established by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or any Federal reserve bank during the current financial crisis, and for other purposes."

Several progressive Democrats and old-right Republicans, including Texas Congressman Ron Paul, have cosponsored Kucinich's measure. Additionally, Paul has proposed H.R. 1207, which would amend the bill "to reform the manner in which the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is audited by the Comptroller General of the United States and the manner in which such audits are reported, and for other purposes."

A majority of House members –- 234, so far, ranging from the most progressive Democrats to the most conservative Republicans -- have signed on as cosponsors of this necessary legislation.

This is one of those issues that makes sense to any honest representative, no matter what the party or what the ideology. Our elected and reasonably accountable federal officials cannot cede more control over the U.S. economy to the unelected and unaccountable Fed without auditing, reviewing and reforming how the Federal Reserve System operates.

© 2009 The Nation
John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

© Copyrighted 1997-2009
www.commondreams.org

Presidential Tracking Poll

According to Friday's Rasmussen polling, President Obama has the approval of 34% of Americans who strongly approve of the way that Obama is performing his duties as President. On the other side of the fence, 33% of Americans strongly disapprove of the way in which Obama is running his show.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 34% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-three percent (33%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of +1. Only once (two weeks ago) has his rating been lower (see trends).

Seventy percent (70%) of Americans say they will not be impacted by the closure of GM and Chrysler dealerships. Only 9% are Very Likely to feel the pain.

Reverse Racist?

So once again, racist Rush Limbaugh is up to his old tricks, the typical conservative asswipe!
You've all heard about him calling judicial nominee Sonia Sotomayor a reverse racist because of her stance with the firefighters, in which, according to Rush, she sided against the white firefighters.
What I would like to know is, what the fuck is reverse racism? You are either a racist or you are not. Going by the theory of Mr. Limbaugh, if you are a racist against a white person of color, you are a reverse racist. If you are racist against people of other color, then you are just a racist. What is the fucking difference? There is no difference in the real world. A racist is a racist, period!

Employee Free Choice Act: Maine's Republican's Get It

With the EFCA finally starting to come to light in our government offices, it's so nice to see a few Republican's coming out in favor of this bill/law.
Two of those GOPers are from the state of Maine. They would be James J. Campbell Sr. and Penni Theriault. James Campbell serves on the Health and Human Services committee, while Penni Theriault is owner of Lots of Tots Child Care, and both of these persons favor the Employee Free Choice Act.

We write as a state legislator and a small business owner who share Mainers' deep concerns about the state of our economy.
Historically, no institution has been as effective at improving the quality of life for working families as membership in a union.

Union members earn better wages, have better health-care coverage and can count on a more secure retirement than non-union workers.

As current and former union members ourselves, we know that unions work.

Who brought us the weekend? Unions. Who rose with unions? The middle class. It just makes sense. Tens of millions of workers would join a union if they could. The problem is that if they try, and their employer resists, workers have only about a 20 percent chance of success.

This is because the current system for forming a union is unfairly tilted in the employer's favor.

That's just wrong. It's un-American and one more example of greed and power run amok.

Not all of the business owners in the United States are morally fucked up when it comes to their employees.

That is why we believe it is essential for Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which will help Maine's economy get back on its feet by removing barriers to union membership and allowing workers, not just CEOs, to share in the economic success they help create on the job.

The bill would enable workers to form a union when a majority of their co-workers sign cards indicating they want one. This puts the choice of how to form a union in the hands of workers, not corporations.

Just as importantly, the act ensures that workers can freely choose to form a union without intimidation or harassment from their employers.

The final word?

We are also both Republicans and some in our party oppose this bill. However, we do not view this issue through a partisan lens.

We believe enabling more workers to form unions is about justice and fairness – bedrock principles that have guided our nation since its birth.

For too long, big corporations have shunned these ideals and enriched themselves at the expense of America's working families. Today, the average CEO makes 344 times more than the average worker. So it is not surprising that CEOs and their Washington lobbyists oppose employee free choice.

On another note, my blogging software is still not working on my new system, as you can tell. Hopefully this will be corrected soon. Just in case the link for this doesn't show as it is supposed to: pressherald.mainetoday.com and you'll find the article.

Latest CNN Poll: Healthcare

Republicans have always been one to says that government shouldn't be involved with our nation's healthcare, but, the people of this country say otherwise.
According to CNN, 72% of those questioned:
Seventy-two percent of those questioned in recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey say they favor increasing the federal government's influence over the country's health care system in an attempt to lower costs and provide health care coverage to more Americans, with 27 percent opposing such a move. Other recent polls show six in 10 think the government should provide health insurance or take responsibility for providing health care to all Americans.
Sorry that I cannot provide a link to the poll, but since I am now having to go through blogger instead of my own software to post, I haven't figured out how to block-quote or link to the story. You can find the poll results at CNN.com.
Power outages and blown up computers can really fuck things up!

4 Of 5 Americans Approve Of Obama's Transition

and those are some pretty impressive numbers!

Eighty-two percent of those questioned in a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Wednesday morning approve of the way the Obama is handling his presidential transition. That's up 3 points from when we asked this question at the beginning of December. Fifteen percent of those surveyed disapprove of the way Obama's handling his transition, down 3 points from our last poll.

The 82 percent approval is higher than then President-elect George W. Bush 8 years ago, who had a 65 percent transition approval rating, and Bill Clinton, at 67 percent in 1992.

"Barack Obama is having a better honeymoon with the American public than any incoming president in the past three decades. He's putting up better numbers, usually by double digits, than Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, or either George Bush on every item traditionally measured in transition polls," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

The poll also suggests that the public approves of the President-elect's cabinet nominees, with 56 percent of those questioned saying Obama's appointments have been outstanding or above average, with 32 percent feeling the picks have been average, and 11 percent saying Obama's choices have been below average or poor.

A third say that their impression of Obama has gotten better since the election, with only 8 percent saying their opinion has gotten worse.

Presidents usually start to lose support once they assume office and start making the tough decisions. But with eight in ten currently approving of Obama, he can give away 20 or 30 points, estimates Holland, and still have a majority of the country on his side.

With the mess that Obama will be inheriting from the Bush fiasco, he will need all of the support that he can get.