Tea Party Turmoil: Internal Conflict Plagues Movement Following Convention

The Tea Party war -- the internal one -- continues.

Following the weekend convention sponsored by Tea Party Nation, a social networking site for tea partiers, a rival site, Tea Party Patriots, sent out an email message to its members complaining about the "media frenzy" around the convention and advising them to be wary of anyone trying to hijack the movement.

Daniel Cluchey: Conservatives' Network Moment

There is a special circle of hell reserved for self-hating intellectuals, bright minds who have opted to poison the well of political discourse in this country rather than engage in the sort of vigorous national debate that would in a better world serve as the awesome engine of American democracy. Say what you will about the Democratic party, but where liberals have in large part chosen to fight the more difficult -- and often unsuccessful -- battle of 'let's put my idea on the table alongside your idea and let the country decide which is better,' the Republican party's preferred strategy of late has been to light the table on fire and hope that the Democrats' idea isn't shiny enough to be found amongst the ashes.

There are good and honorable conservative thinkers, many of whom I am proud to call my friends, and this complaint is not addressed to them. The sad truth is that their party has been commandeered by those who would rather dumb their fellow citizens down than take part in an honest discussion about what policies best serve the American people. In their desperate race toward the lowest common denominator, these pundits and politicos have distorted, distracted, and lied to Americans who trust them, and the results are not good -- not just for the GOP, but for the entire country and the very idea of (small 'd') democratic integrity. Last week, Daily Kos/Research 2000 polled 2,003 self-identified Republicans nationwide. To borrow a line from Nabokov, "look at this tangle of thorns."

Do you, dear reader, "believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people?" If you answered 'yes' or 'not sure,' then you would fit right in among the 64 percent of Republicans who feel the same way. You would also fit right in in David Duke's living room. I wonder what it is that President Obama has done to make a supermajority of Republicans feel this way. I wonder if it has nothing to do with the President at all, and everything to do with Glenn Beck announcing to millions of television viewers that Obama has "a deep seated hatred for white people" on Fox & Friends last July. As has been well-documented by the rational world at large, Beck is the poster child -- and I do mean child -- for those who would rather torpedo the most important debates facing our nation than join in them.

Perhaps hating white people is the high crime or misdemeanor you might cite if you are one of the 68 percent of respondents who answered 'yes' or 'not sure' to the question "Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?" If impeachment doesn't work out, no matter -- since only 42 percent of Republicans are sure that the President was born in the United States, the other 58 percent are presumably already prepared to declare the Obama administration null and void. 79 percent answered 'yes' or 'not sure' to the question "Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?" while 57 percent answered likewise when asked "Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?" Read that again. 57 percent of Republicans either think that, or aren't sure if, President Obama wants the terrorists to win. What in the world makes ordinary Americans so suspicious of the President of the United States that they honestly believe that he's rooting for the bad guys in the case of America v. the Terrorists? The answer is sad and simple: every single day and every single night, someone who knows better looks into the camera and lies to them.

I am led to believe that the people who propagate these claims hate their country, that they truly loathe Americans. To go on television and question the President's ideas is a noble and worthwhile endeavor; to go on television and question the President's citizenship or attitude toward America is the act of an irredeemable coward. For the Sean Hannitys and Glenn Becks of the world, there are short-term gains -- it makes for great television, and every time you convince another American to become outraged, you hinder the administration's agenda a little bit more. But in the longer term there is a catastrophe coming. What the poll shows is that these demonstrably false beliefs have wormed their way into the Republican mainstream, where they are being left to ferment into a dangerous paranoia. The most shocking statistic of all? Only 58 percent of Republicans answered 'no' when asked if they believe that their state should secede from the Union. Is secession a Republican value? Of course not -- but it is what happens when smart conservatives spend all of their time and energy convincing their fellow Americans to hate liberals rather than convincing them of the merits of conservative principles. Every little insinuation, every cry of 'socialism' from a politician who knows it isn't true, every invocation of taxes that in reality haven't gone up, every little bit raises the temperature that much more, and pretty soon their blood is boiling.

This past Thursday, Beck, who likes to think of himself as a sort of latter-day Howard Beale, went on his radio show and said this of the President: "He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America -- you don't take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion." Unbelievably racist? Of course it is. But the problem isn't that Glenn Beck is a racist -- it's that he wants to make you one. He wants you to talk about first names and middle names so that you're not talking about the best plan to create more jobs for Americans. He wants you to trade in your reasonable conservative notions for panic and a pitchfork.

How can we hope to succeed as a country when this is the voice whispering into the ears of much of the Republican Party? Where are the adults? Who will fight for true conservative values once half of our citizens have been taught to hate first and ask questions later? Democracy requires unpolluted discourse the way circulation requires unclogged arteries, and unless those actors who control the national political diet stop feeding us a steady stream of gristle we are headed for certain cardiac arrest. The time has come for smart conservatives to stand up to the peddlers of ignorance and say, "I'm rational as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Obama's Health Care Summit: Merely Political Theater?

WASHINGTON — Could this turn into something more than political theater? President Barack Obama's televised dialogue with Republican lawmakers on health care, promised for later this month, has the makings of an entertaining exchange. But the differences between the basic Democratic and GOP ideas are stark – and the two sides have increasingly hardened their positions in this election year.

Yet, in a story with more twists than a soap opera, Obama's invitation to congressional leaders of both parties to attend a Feb. 25 meeting can't be dismissed as a mere diversion. Although many Americans have doubts about the Democrats' sweeping plans to cover the uninsured, Republicans can't afford to be perceived as oblivious to the health care insecurities of middle-class families.

"My expectations? Probably below 50 percent, but not zero," said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., a moderate who serves as president of the Democratic freshman class. "At some point, the public is going to demand that Republicans participate like mature adults, and not just say 'no' to everything."

It's the Democrats' big-government approach – not Republicans – that's the problem, insisted Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., author of the House GOP bill. "The president has got to show that he has heard what the American people are saying. He's got to make clear we are not going to start off with the current bill."

But where to start?

_ Democrats want an upfront commitment to cover most of the nearly 50 million uninsured Americans. Republicans prefer first taking steps to cut costs, then revisiting the issue of full coverage over time.

_ Democrats would raise taxes to provide government subsidies for people who can't afford to buy health insurance. Republicans say now is not the time to increase taxes.

_ Both sides want to bar insurance companies from turning down people with health problems, but only Democrats propose requiring most people to get coverage – a necessary first step, according to most experts.

To illustrate the gap, the House GOP bill would cover 3 million uninsured people, the House Democratic version 36 million.

"That's quite a gulf," said Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the No. 2 Democrat in the House. "And if that's where Republicans want to stay, I don't think it's going to be perceived as much progress by the 33 million who would be left out."

After months of seeing Obama try to muscle legislation through with only Democratic votes, Republicans are wary of his new overture. The election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts changed the balance of power in the Senate, forcing the president to recalibrate.

"This has the feel of a campaign event," said economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a top adviser to 2008 GOP presidential candidate John McCain. "The time to sit down with Republicans was a year ago."

The House and Senate are partisan institutions by design, Holtz-Eakin said. Divided into majority and minority, they sharpen differences. Only Obama could have guaranteed a bipartisan health care bill. "You needed the White House to spend political capital telling the liberal base in the House they weren't going to get everything they wanted," he said. "They weren't able to do that."

The way the health care summit was announced struck some Republicans as suspect. Democrats say the idea came from the White House, and was first broached last Thursday when Obama met Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Hoyer, to discuss the 2010 legislative agenda.

Republicans say they were notified by the White House on Sunday, a couple of hours before a CBS News interview in which Obama floated the proposal. Usually, White House schedulers call congressional leaders well in advance of major meetings.

Democrats say they want to resolve remaining differences between the House and Senate versions of their own legislation in advance of the meeting. That may mean Obama wants to emphasize contrasts with Republicans, not probe for common ground.

The meeting is expected to be held at Blair House, the presidential guest house across from the White House, but the administration has not released any details about the format. "I don't agree this is going to be political theater," said spokesman Reid Cherlin. "This is going to be a substantive discussion about how best to achieve the goals the president laid out."

Starting from scratch is not an option, Democrats say. But Republicans say they can't see the House and Senate Democratic bills as a beginning. For one thing, both would raise taxes.

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio wrote White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on Monday saying Republicans would "rightly be reluctant to participate" if the starting point is the Democratic legislation. Previously, Boehner welcomed Obama's offer. Asked if Boehner is now setting conditions, an aide would not elaborate.

Still, there are a couple of issues on which Obama could try to nudge both sides.

He could officially bury the government insurance plan sought by liberals. A major obstacle for Republicans, the public option never had the votes to pass in the Senate. Yet Obama has hesitated to declare it dead.

The president could also follow through with curbs on medical malpractice litigation. Although he agrees with Republicans that fear of lawsuits leads doctors to practice defensive medicine and drives up costs, Obama has not insisted that limits on litigation be in the bill.

Any step toward limits – fiercely opposed by the nation's trial lawyers – is certain to draw solid Democratic resistance in a midtern election year. It's unclear how much such a gesture by Obama would help at this point.

"Right now, it is hard to get people to move off positions that they have taken," said Gail Wilensky, who ran Medicare for former President George H.W. Bush. "It's not like there was a bipartisan effort that went to the 11th hour and then fell apart. It was a Democratic package."

___

Associated Press writer Erica Werner contributed to this report.

Lanae Erickson: Grandma Knows Best

An elderly woman sits with her grandson. She begins to tell the story of her family and her Catholic faith. She talks about her core values and says, "Marriage to me is a great institution. It works, and it's what I want for my children, too."

The camera angle widens to reveal the woman's son and his male partner sitting next to her and her grandchild. It is only then that you realize this is an ad asking you to vote no on a ballot initiative which would repeal marriage equality in Maine. (You can see the ad HERE.) The commercial said a lot. But it's what it did not say that was worth hearing. The ad didn't say a word about rights or benefits. It spoke of responsibilities and commitment.

Third Way recently partnered with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research to conduct two statewide polls after the 2009 election: in Washington, where voters upheld an expanded domestic partnership law, and in Maine, where voters overturned marriage. By analyzing the poll results, we've come up with some insights about what we think is the best way forward to achieve relationship recognition and marriage in the future, and they sound an awful lot like that ad from Maine.

Our research found that there are people who don't yet support marriage but who are fundamentally easier to reach than other marriage opponents. For these folks, who we call "the middle," the equality argument (which to date has been the primary focus of marriage advocates) isn't connecting. Our work revealed that in order to reach folks in the middle, marriage advocates must make clear that gay and lesbian couples are seeking to join in the true spirit of marriage, the way the middle sees it. Our poll found that people in the middle view marriage as an ideal, not a legal construct, and they are not yet persuaded that gay couples fit into this ideal. To them, the ideal is about lifetime commitment, responsibility, and obligation--not rights and benefits, or even legal protections.

Instead of leading with talk about equality, our polls suggest that marriage advocates should concentrate on making plain that gay couples fit into this ideal and demonstrating that gay couples want to undertake the sacrifices that it entails. When advocates speak about marriage in this way, they can address the middle's concern that allowing gay couples to marry will threaten or change the tradition of marriage, or that it will alter the way children perceive or value that tradition.

If advocates can show and convince Americans that gay couples want to join the true spirit of marriage as the middle sees it--to be there for each other for better or for worse--they will help move the country more quickly towards support for marriage. Who knows? They might even make Grandma proud.

To read more of Third Way's insights and analysis, CLICK HERE. To see the polls, click HERE and HERE.

Rachel Laser is the Culture Program Director at Third Way and Lanae Erickson is Policy Counsel at Third Way.

Rick Ayers: Constructing the Achievement Gap

The problem of the "achievement gap" in public education is the most vexing problem on the agenda today. Many people look at this gap -- in grades and test scores between people of different races and family incomes -- as a mysterious and intractable problem with no discernable solution. I disagree. In reality, the gap is something that is constructed and reproduced year after year -- by the conscious and unconscious actions of many people. We can talk about the actions of politicians, administrators, teachers, and the students themselves. For now, I'd like to focus on the actions of some parents, mostly white, mostly high income.

I know that school districts are desperate to get parent involvement. And I believe that the best educational projects involve a close collaboration between parents, students, and teachers. Indeed, I understand that it is the natural and normal response for parents to be watching out for their own kids, to try their damndest to support them getting a decent education and having a positive process of development.

But we all know the powerful and fierce pressure some parents exert to create tracks and to get their kids on the high track, whether it is in various forms of so-called gifted classes (a subject in itself to explore another time), selective enrollment schools, magnet, and choice schools. Even students who are struggling mightily with academic work will, if they come from the right families, find a way to get a place in these schools.

Let me recount a recent struggle at Berkeley High School to illuminate how this parental action works. Local and even national media has been reporting the recent flap over the "elimination of science labs" for students at Berkeley High -- another silly series of breathless media accounts and an unsatisfying non-conclusion. The facts fade away, leaving a fog of untruths. For this one, let's get the core lie out of the way. The proposal of Principal Jim Slemp and the Shared Governance Committee was to incorporate science labs into the science classes in the normal six period day -- the way it is done at almost all California high schools -- instead of the extra classes that had been created and paid for by parcel tax money that Berkeley taxes itself. The proposal was to redirect some of this money towards projects designed to narrow the achievement gap -- for student engagement, academic and social support, etc. It would also help to more equitably distribute the parcel tax money -- since the extra labs were consuming a huge portion of the funds for a sector of the student population that already has great advantages.

One of the interesting things about Berkeley High School is that it is a diverse school -- containing an ethnic and socio-economic diversity that is unusual in America's increasingly segregated schools. But this can also be a frustrating factor when one is forced to witness the inequities of the US, the different opportunities and different outcomes, contained within a single school. And as the distance persists, as the achievement gap seems impervious to endless well-meaning gestures, it makes one wonder if it can ever be overcome - it suggests some mysterious, ominous force greater than the efforts of mere mortals, which cannot be changed.

But a closer look at Berkeley High reveals something more sinister -- that the gap persists because of groups of people, conscious active people, who move aggressively to thwart any effort to even make a little progress in developing equity between students. Generally, we are advised to keep silent, to not name this partnership of a handful of elitist teachers and privileged parents, in the interest of the normal administrative belief in a collaborative process which might find us able to agree, some day. This is the kind of "managing change" paradigm advocated by Michael Fullan and supposes that conflicts should be minimized, common ground should be sought, usually with lots of butcher paper on the wall. But sometimes in social change there is conflict. An example is the Civil Rights Movement. We did not just seek common ground. There were clear, entrenched forces that had to be countered, even when they wielded political power.

Since I am a former teacher at Berkeley High, I look back and realize that all of these years of sitting in meetings to try to persuade the opposition has led to an embarrassingly paltry amount of positive movement towards equity. I think it's time to call it what it is -- a stranglehold on any progress at the school which is enforced by what is informally known as the Parents of Power, or sometimes the Parents of Privilege (PoP). I'm certainly in favor of having us all just get along. But the truth is, just as with Obama's overtures to the Republicans, the opposition to equity never lets up, never wavers in its determination to block change.

I taught at Berkeley High for 11 years and had some fantastic experiences with the student newspaper, with the small school Communication Arts and Sciences, and with hundreds of students and some fantastic colleagues. I know, because I've seen it time and again, that African American and Chicano Latino students who are given respect, agency, and opportunities, who are taught with culturally relevant and meaningful curriculum, who are engaged in a community, defy the system's negative expectations and do fantastic work. But in the end I became convinced that we would always be half-stepping, we would never get a chance to develop the kind of powerful, engaging, equitable educational project that Berkeley could be capable of.

Again, I honor the many parents involved in public education and the contributions they make to the schools. Indeed, many of the best friends that Ilene and I have today are BHS and small school parents, with whom we have become close. But the Parents of Privilege are another category altogether -- wielding their social capital and political connections to get their way, even if it is against the interest of all students, even if it is against the interests of their own kids, which I'll speak to below.

Where to start? We seem to be in a state at Berkeley High where there is one constructed crisis after another -- each orchestrated by the PoP and duly picked up by the media. The "end of the science lab" story was not only run in the SF Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, and East Bay Express but it was a topic on KQED Forum as well as a feature in the Los Angeles Times. It was a juicy story, filled with dire unspoken fears and code language -- about the danger of "dumbing down" the curriculum, the undermining of "choice," and the dangers of PC policies that help those who are too lazy to help themselves. Since the labs were not disappearing, this story seemed to follow the pattern of Sarah Palin's death panel charges concerning health care legislation -- and it similarly appealed to the idea that we are losing something because of those dang poor people again. One of the side claims of the PoP was that BHS graduates are fantastic in science ("My older daughter, she became a doctor!" exclaimed one. And of course that never would have happened without the extra science lab). BHS Advanced Placement scores -- for the group of privileged kids who take them -- on chemistry and physics tests are quite high. Of course, they don't mention that these AP test scores are compared with those at schools across the state which have much lower income families. And they leave out the fact that an estimated 70 to 80 per cent of Berkeley High students in AP science classes are receiving private tutoring, sometimes at $50 to70 per hour.

The science lab story has been preceded by other false alarm panic stories, again designed to forestall any progress towards equity. Some of these stories were:
• Small school "cheating" by giving students extra time or alternative science options if they were failing in college prep classes (this was only a few months ago).
• Small schools inflating grades and throwing pixie dust in the eyes of college admissions officers
• The problem of the creation of advisory classes to support students in planning and committing to their education -- something that might take some minutes from academic classes.
• The danger of block scheduling (same concern as above).
• The threat of small school options being created for all BHS students, taking away the number of AP options students might have.

All of these threats to the traditional, factory-model, impersonal, transmission style education have been ferreted out by the PoP and stopped in their tracks. They can breathe a sigh of relief. Nothing has changed, not one attempt to address the achievement gap. But they know they have to be vigilant. The principal and staff, they imagine, in some misguided attempt to support the "difficult" kids (that's code language), will probably come up with a new proposal. And the PoP will sniff it out early, ready to bash it down. The handful of committed, integrated small schools within Berkeley High represents one reform that has gotten a small foothold and thus becomes a target, being perceived as a threat to privilege.

Many people are surprised at the avalanche of false or misleading data the PoP present to the school board when they are launching one of their attacks. The claim about BHS AP test scores is one example. The recent charge that small schools don't teach as well, as shown by test scores, is another. Anyone familiar with education issues knows that standardized test scores are highly correlated with family income and social capital, not academic attainment. The only thing the low test scores show is that the lottery and the fear generated among middle class white parents has resulted in a higher per cent of low income, low skilled students coming into the small schools in the 9th grade. Many of the Parents of Privilege are UC faculty -- and it's always humorous to see these professors of a Tier I research university twisting data and invoking sloppy "back of the envelope" calculations.

And one of the teachers favoring the maintenance of elite privilege, in the science department no less, recently demonstrated the same penchant for proposing conclusions based on similarly irresponsible, unscientific, specious reasoning. His suggestion was that "The birth of an achievement gap at BHS coincides with the creation of small schools." In the real world, the achievement gap goes all the way back to the beginning of Berkeley schools. As soon as computer programs allowed the disaggregation of data, around 1994, the gap which we all knew was there became apparent and quantified. But this claim somehow invokes a "good old days" when there was no gap. Are you kidding?

In spite of all the protestations of liberal concern for the poor, for the "others" who they feel sorry for, the PoP maintain a primary focus on policing the school, to make sure the curriculum is "challenging" for their kids and that their children are kept away from the "disruptive" students, the troublemakers, what one Academic Choice parent called the "slack-jawed" children. Interestingly, some of these parents are so adept at working the college admissions game that they keep their kids in private school through middle school, then drop them into Berkeley High so they can claim on their applications to come from an urban, diverse school. God forbid, however, that they should actually encounter that diversity.

While the small schools were implemented in the interest of finally integrating the school, of bringing a diverse group of students through a whole four year program, the large school "programs" have reverted to the old Berkeley High tradition, segregation within. Walk down the hallways of Berkeley High. You will see mostly black and mostly white classes in these programs, but they manage to claim that their overall program is integrated.

Another part of the full court press the PoP put on is to harass, pressure, complain, and generally brow-beat administration figures to do their bidding. The new superintendent is currently getting his baptism in PoP treatment, facing a line of parents who complain that their voice is not strong enough in the shared governance process. They are, get ready for this, marginalized and powerless in the school! Of course, the opposite is true. The low income families, and most African American and Chicano Latino families, are desperately underrepresented in school functions and school decision making. A meeting held last year at St. Joseph the Worker Church for Latino families, to discuss advisories, was stacked with the PoP who took up all the space in the big discussions and in the small groups. The previous superintendent experienced the same boxing out by these parents and Jim Slemp, the current principal who has had proposal after proposal shot down, must surely be wondering if it is all worth the hassle.

An interesting aspect of the breathless protestations of the Parents of Privilege is the way they evoke the term "choice." They should have a choice of which teacher they have, a choice of the curriculum, a choice of the way city parcel tax money is spent, a choice of how the schedule is set up. So much freedom! But really "choice" here has a similar ring as the "state's rights" calls of the southern whites who were resisting integration. Indeed, integration and a move towards equity was going to deny them some choice about the kind of school they had and who sat next to their kids. And if the states wanted to enforce inequity, the movement, and the federal courts, took that choice away from them.

Yes, racism comes dressed up in many covers and Berkeley has its own liberal version of it. We don't so much have an achievement gap as an educational debt, a debt we owe to low income students, to many African American and Chicano Latino students, who continue to be crushed by the Berkeley school system, who continue to head off to the streets or the prisons. The failure continues and what do we have in response to it? Some patronizing hand-wringing, some head shaking, wondering what's wrong with those kids, maybe we should get them a few tutors, some after school back-up. But we have to ask: what are they doing right from 3:15 to 5:00 PM that they could not be doing from 8:15 to 3:00?

The failure of these students, or rather our failure of them, is not some mysterious or impenetrable problem. It is constructed, it is created, by our schools -- which very efficiently reproduce the class and racial fissures of our society. It is kept in place by conscious actions, by real people, who head off any efforts to make the school work for everyone. If our community cared about this problem, each of the proposals enumerated above, and many more, would be embraced in an affirmative effort to solve the problem. Any effort that is made in the Berkeley schools, however, is met with a chorus of protests by selfish and mean-spirited citizens of Berkeley who want to keep all the marbles for themselves.

The sad thing is that many, many powerful efforts have been mounted in Berkeley, precisely because it could be a showcase of progress and equity. We had the Diversity Project, a six year process of research, assessment, and recommendations led by Pedro Noguera and involving graduate researchers, teachers, parents and students; we had the concerted efforts of the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools; we had the Parents of Children of African Descent, the Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action, and the United in Action; we have had endless hours put in by teachers committed to equity and diversity, the demands of the students over and over, and the series of proposals that Principal Jim Slemp has initiated. Each initiative has gained some life, made some progress, and been beaten back by the PoP.

What we lack is a strong, coherent voice of the communities, the teachers and parents and students who know what would make Berkeley High work. Too often, the struggle is a one-sided shouting match. We don't need to sit with the principal and hash out a two year "decision making" process only to have it crash and burn at the board level. We need to put our efforts into building a strong, consistent, militant community movement that demands change, deep change, and nothing less.

Ultimately, we have to take a deep look at what we think education is for. Why do we have schools? What are they about? In the broadest sense, they are to develop the adults who will lead our society in the next generation. They are about supporting young minds in imagining a just and fulfilling world -- and then going out and creating it. Schools should not be dismissing the knowledge, withholding the instruction, and crushing the hopes of students who are not the right race or income level. These students, the ones our schools marginalize, show again and again the greatness they can achieve if just given a few chances.

And the blocking efforts of the PoP don't only harm students who have been pushed aside by our schools; they harm their own kids. I don't think a consequence of by-product our children should be to exacerbate the gap between rich and poor, to create a world of gated communities on the one hand and blighted neighborhoods on the other. In the interest of bumper sticker pride, so they can display an Ivy League school their children attend, some of these parents push their kids to take 3 or 4 AP classes, extracurricular activities, endless lessons, and some obligatory charity work.

I've had the experience of encountering some of upper track students in the hallways, being restrained by security as they went through a panic attack brought on by overloads of AP classes and extracurriculars. I've seen so many of them robbed of the joy of learning, figuring out how to do a book report from Cliff's Notes, scheming how to get by -- through cheating or through putting up the minimum needed for the "lazy A." I've known college professors who are so discouraged to get these students, to find them so uninspired about learning, so cynical about the world and their possibilities. They have developed the habit of narrow survival, learned to play the game, and never gained passion for anything. How sad is that?

It's interesting to listen to many of the students themselves on the upper track at Berkeley High. One in the Shared Governance committee argued that high-achieving students of Berkeley High were ready to lose the privileges of additional classes if all students were given greater opportunities for success so that the achievement gap could be narrowed. He added that he "had too many AP classes anyway." When the school board was considering the dire danger of the extra lab class being cut, another student shocked them by declaring that nothing much happened in that class, many teachers did not take attendance. It was padding on the schedule, not a rigorous lab. One is left to wonder: was the frantic response of the PoP based on a knee-jerk reaction that feared some privilege of their kids might be infringed upon? Or were they worried that the elevation of the educational opportunities of the low income students would make their kids' transcripts not look as good in comparison?

Somehow, these parents declare how proud they are that they are sticking with public school, that they "got involved" in the school. They beat back any attempts at meaningful reform. They pushed the rigor and the rigor mortis of the curriculum. I guess they can say they won.

I know we're all supposed to get along but I can't believe that these parents don't, in the private moments at home, feel some shame at what they've wrought. I know I'm not supposed to blast all this complaint out. It is a bitter note I have written many times -- and heard other teachers, administrators, parents, and students voice often - but, having gotten it off my chest, I usually decide to hit the delete button. Perhaps this time I will hit send. I have no doubt that this group will continue to dominate the board and the direction of the school. But at least someone should name them, because these are the active agents of the achievement gap. They need to own it. And we need to understand them.

We need to make this struggle openly and deeply, so that some day we will be able to take an honest look at the problems and take common sense measures to address them.

Remembering The 'Murthquake': When John Murtha Took On The Iraq War

The passing of Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) on Monday from gall bladder surgery complications brought to an end one of the most dynamic careers of the political generation that emerged from the Vietnam War.

The 77-year-old lawmaker and warrior, who remained an officer in the Marine Reserves for the first eight of his 18 terms in office, was a classic blue-collar Democrat. He was a consistent and effective advocate of local working-class issues, as well as a supporter of gun rights and an opponent of abortion rights. His extraordinary talent for bringing home the pork made him legendary among insiders -- and landed him in ethical hot water.

But the Johnstown native forever cemented his legacy during a mid-November afternoon in 2005 when he went public with his skepticism about the course of the Iraq War.

"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," he declared in a speech. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We can not continue on the present course."

It is rare that a political figure can literally re-chart the course of his political party. But in coming out for an immediate troop withdrawal, Murtha gave his Democratic colleagues the cover they needed to express their own reservations about the war. Those who worked closely with the congressman at the time -- both on and off the Hill -- credit him with elevating Iraq on the Democratic platform and in turn putting the party in a position to benefit from the wave of anti-war sentiment that swept the 2006 elections.

"At the time, the debate was largely framed by George W. Bush's 'stay the course' mentality and Cindy Sheehan's protests down in Crawford," said Brian Katulis, a leading foreign policy expert at the Center for American Progress. "That summer, there was a sense of growing unease with some opinion leaders in the party. [Sens.] Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold and Carl Levin were out there, they all kind of came out in favor of a timely withdrawal. But when Murtha did it, just by virtue of who he was, the credibility he had; that did more than what the others could."

Looking back now, it's difficult to recall the shock that the congressman gave to the political system at the time. That may be due to the fact that, five years on, Murtha's vision is still unachieved: U.S. troops remain engaged in a now winding-down Iraq war.

But the "Murthquake," as Katulis labeled the time period, was more than just a speech. For his party, it was an invitation to cast off the post-Vietnam national security deficit disorder that compelled them to demur whenever the political conversation switched to matters of war and peace. Unaccustomed to being in the national spotlight, Murtha neither had nor wanted the customary filter when responding to his critics. And he was better off for its absence.

When Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex) thanked God that Murtha's sort of thinking had not prevailed "after the bloodbaths of Normandy and in the Pacific or we would be here speaking Japanese or German," the congressman threw the daggers right back.

"Were you there?" Murtha barked from the floor of the House, a stare of disgust clear on his face. "Were you in Vietnam? Were you in Iraq?" Gohmert had no response.

When Karl Rove, George W. Bush's senior political adviser and hatchet man, delivered a speech accusing the congressman of wanting to cut and run from Iraq, Murtha responded with a withering comeback: "He's making a political speech," Murtha said on "Meet the Press". "He's sitting in his air-conditioned office with his big, fat backside, saying, 'Stay the course.' That's not a plan. I mean, this guy -- I don't know what his military experience is, but that's a political statement."

And when then-Vice President Dick Cheney accused Democrats of "self-defeating pessimism," it was Murtha who took to the pages of the Washington Post, penning a column sarcastically titled "Confessions of a 'Defeatocrat'".

"It's all baseless name-calling, and it's all wrong," he said of Cheney. "Unless, of course, being a Defeatocrat means taking a good hard look at the administration's Iraq policy and determining that it's a failure. In that case, count me in. Because Democrats recognize that we're headed for a far greater disaster in Iraq if we don't change course -- and soon. This is not defeatism. This is realism."

And yet, for all the conviction he brought to the cause, going public was not an easy decision. Katulis recalled working with the congressman closely on matters of troop deployments and watching as his evolving knowledge of the situation in Iraq and his talks with generals on the ground, caused him to sour on the entire enterprise. John Isaacs, executive director of the anti-war group Council for a Livable World, recalled the more intimate arm-twisting that compelled Murtha to come forward.

"I remember the days during the early anti-war activities among House Democrats and people like Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) got involved and he would say, 'I think we might get Jack Murtha against the war,'" said Isaacs. "And when he did, it was quite significant."

Even after the November 2005 speech, there were road bumps. The congressman's rising stock within the party only went so far. Despite the close relationship he enjoyed with then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) -- having bet, early on, that she could (and would) be the first female speaker -- he came up well short in his own bid for Majority Leader in 2006. When George W. Bush's surge wielded incremental security benefits, Murtha struggled to defend his call for a full-bore troop pullout and took even more heat when admitting that, in a limited sense, the surge had worked.

By the time the Obama administration rolled into Washington -- when the congressman should have been a leading foreign policy voice within the Democratic ranks -- Murtha was, instead, an odd man out. His propensity for securing gratuitous appropriations that often benefited his home district was unseemly. His ties to a defense-lobbying firm that had secured millions in government contracts landed him atop a list of most corrupt pols in Washington and even spurred the intervention of the FBI.

On foreign policy, the Pennsylvania Democrat remained at odds with the White House -- resolute in his belief that more war did not mean better security. Now, however, it was his own party's leadership he opposed.

"I'm not sure there's a threat to our national security," he said of President Obama's Afghanistan surge, in a statement that did not command the television time or national attention that his speech against the Iraq war had five years earlier. "I do not see an achievable goal at this point."

John Hickenlooper Leads Scott McInnis In February Rasmussen Poll

In a round of polling conducted February 4, Rasmussen Reports found Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper with a 4-point advantage over his Republican rival, former congressman Scott McInnis. The poll, which has a 4% margin for error, showed Hicknlooper with a 49%-45% lead over McInnis with 6% undecided and 1% preferring a different candidate.

Hickenlooper was viewed favorably by 35% of those surveyed, while only 13% viewed McInnis favorably. The two-term Denver mayor also enjoyed greater name recognition than McInnis.

Last week, Chairman of the Colorado Republican Party Dick Wadhams, told a group of Arapahoe County Republicans "if this election has to be about whether voters like John Hickenlooper, we will lose."

Hickenlooper announced in Jaunuary that he would run for Governor after current Democratic Governor Bill Ritter shockingly dropped his reelection campaign.

Polling by Rasmussen in December showed Ritter losing to McInnis by a 48%-40% margin. In the wake of Ritter's surprising exit from the race, Rasmussen preformed a round of polling that compared several speculative Democratic candidates head-to-head with McInnis. That round of polling showed McInnis with a 45%-42% lead over Hickenlooper.

Pro-Choice License Plate Advocated In Virginia: Supporters Threaten Lawsuit

RICHMOND, Va. -- Abortion-rights advocates have been unable to halt the "Choose Life" license plate variations in nearly two-dozen states, so now they're working to balance the bumper debate.

Activists are pushing a "Trust Women/Respect Choice" license plate in Virginia, which would become only the fourth state to offer a pro-choice plate and the first to require legislative approval for it. Supporters have threatened to sue if lawmakers don't give drivers the option.

"We really don't feel like a license plate is the place to be promoting a political agenda," said Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia. "However, the pro-choice community feels like they're being taken on by the anti-choice side with this license plate, and we feel like we need to get involved."

Opponents, including the state's attorney general and governor, say they oppose diverting money from plate fees to Planned Parenthood offices -- not necessarily the plates themselves.

A state Senate committee heard testimony on the bill Thursday and could vote on it this week. The full legislature's approval and the governor's signature are needed for the plates to be sold.

Last year, Virginia became the 23rd state to approve the "Choose Life" plate. The plates should be on the roads in Massachusetts, Delaware and North Dakota by the end of March, and efforts are under way in a dozen other states to get them approved, said Russ Amerling, a coordinator for the Florida-based Choose Life, Inc., which promotes the plates.

Nationwide, more than 520,000 of the plates have been sold since 2000, raising more than $11 million for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, adoption services and maternity homes.

Those on the other side of the debate have yet to mount a coordinated response. Even in states where the plate is offered, it hasn't sold well, though at least 400 people have signed up to buy the pro-choice plates in Virginia.

Hawaii was first with a "Respect Choice" decal for plates in 2003, but lack of interest is threatening to halt its availability. A "Pro-family, Pro-choice" plate is available in Montana, and Pennsylvania has a Planned Parenthood labeled plate. However, only 22 of those are active.

Those states don't require the legislature to sign off -- the plates are handled administratively and can be sold as long as they meet certain requirements.

Virginia's proposed plate would generate money for the state's eight Planned Parenthood health centers, which provide free pregnancy tests, contraception, gynecological exams, cancer screenings and other services for about 30,000 people each year.

That is likely to be a source of contention for Republicans, who control the House and in recent years have stripped the organization of state funding other than Medicaid reimbursements because Planned Parenthood provides abortions. The organization says the money from any license plate sales -- $15 per plate after the first 1,000 are sold -- would not be used for abortions.

"I expect that's the hurdle," said Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who led the fight against the organization as a legislator. "It isn't the plate, it's where the money goes."

However, supporters say Virginia has no choice but to allow a pro-choice plate after it offered up a "Choose Life" plate -- because doing otherwise would be unconstitutional.

The Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has twice ruled the government cannot unreasonably censor or favor one viewpoint on specialty plates because they are a public forum.

"The General Assembly has stepped into a legal morass now," said Sen. Janet Howell, who is sponsoring one of two bills to establish the plate. "You can't have just one point of view represented on license plates. You have to have both."

Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said the organization likely will sue if the state blocks the pro-choice plate, calling it a First Amendment issue.

"If the opposite were occurring -- a pro-choice plate having passed and an anti-choice plate being considered -- we would make the same legal argument in favor of the anti-choice plate," he said.

Cuccinelli said he was prepared to defend the state if lawmakers strike down the plate. Both he and Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell said lawmakers could avoid a clash by ensuring the bill doesn't allocate any money from plate sales to Planned Parenthood.

Virginia has more than 200 specialty license plates celebrating everything from sports teams to Jimmy Buffett fans. About 30 of those divert funds to nonprofit groups, and each costs $25 apiece.

Supporters say it's only fair that money from the plates goes to Planned Parenthood, since funds from the "Choose Life" plates in Virginia and numerous other states go to opposing groups.

The ACLU said Virginia and other states could avoid the problem by handing over approval of the plates to the Department of Motor Vehicles or some other administrative agency, as 21 have.

"This is one time lawmakers need to set aside their views on reproductive rights and let the First Amendment be their guide," Willis said. "If they can do that, the pro-choice license plate will be easily approved. If not, we're undoubtedly headed to court."

(This version CORRECTS that license plate says 'Respect Choice.')

Stephen Mo Hanan: Colin Powell Changes His Tune

As a member of the Harvard Class of 1968, I approached my 25th Reunion in 1993 with some misgivings over the honoring of Colin Powell. Echoes of distaste for the Shah of Iran's presence at my own Commencement reinforced my current views on militarism in general, and Pentagon homophobia in particular. Little did I anticipate the twin opportunities of speaking personally with the General at the Class Marshal's Luncheon and taking a literally central position in demonstrating an aspect of what Erik Erikson dubbed Gandhi's Truth.

Though fully aware since puberty of my orientation, I kept it hidden throughout my undergraduate career with a zeal not even Sam Nunn could have faulted. Fear of rejection by my friends should they learn the truth was the mechanism that held my self-oppression in place; it took the advent of gay liberation some years later to show me that friendship based on the pretense of a false self was a contradiction in terms. Whether the courage needed to confront disapproval and even violence for the sake of telling the truth and removing an unjust stigma is as "incompatible with military service" as the Joint Chiefs wished to assert was a question my own experience made me address with urgent passion.

Consequently I rejoiced in the presence of several firebrand classmates, of various persuasions, determined to stand publicly not against Colin Powell but against the policy he had endorsed. A manifesto, circulated throughout Reunion week and signed by many, affirmed not only opposition to the gay ban but "support, respect and love" for lesbians and gays in the Class, at Harvard, and throughout the world. Clearly, some of those whose intolerance I feared a quarter century earlier had grown less worthy of my dark projections, and evolved into true allies, even though unknown.

Thus I found myself on Commencement morning sporting not only the top hat, striped pants and cutaway coat of a Marshal's Aid, but the pink triangle buttons of a politically committed one. The Lift the Ban sticker in the middle of my white tie didn't escape General Powell's notice when I approached him over pre-Luncheon cocktails, congratulated him, and said, "I hope we both live to see the day when this issue no longer divides us." "So do I," he replied, "and I hope it's soon." He went on to say, "I have no brief against any group of Americans, but I represent an institution that changes very slowly and with great reluctance. I'm doing my best to make it change as fast as I think it effectively can." Speaking briefly at the end of lunch, he was even more conciliatory, assuring the audience that the claims of gays and lesbians to serve would be honored as fully as those of blacks and women had been. It was an olive branch that became him more than his rows of medals; Seventeen years later, it has finally bloomed.

At the Afternoon Exercises I was seated a few rows behind and just slightly to the left of the podium, and as the moment of Powell's address approached, I realized how exposed I would be as the sole top-hatted male standing in protest. Rendering me even more conspicuous was the large pink triangle blooming on the front of my top hat, lending me the air of a gay Jerry Garcia. Noting the four Secret Service guns at the edge of the stage, I took one fearful precaution: having been sucking on lozenges all day (my throat was dry and I was scheduled to sing that night at the Class Cabaret), I gathered a few into my left hand rather than risk the ignominy of being shot down as I reached into my cutaway for a pastille. Superior weaponry can induce caution even in the bold.

My earlier encounter with the General enabled me to stand throughout his speech with a calmness verging on Quakerism. I realized I had no animosity towards him whatsoever, but rather was moved to applaud more than a few times, for instance at his prediction that nuclear stockpiles would before long be reduced to zero (a prediction calculated more to please his audience than to come true). Two women stood near me among the Aids, and many more classmates standing in mufti at the far sides of the stage bolstered our resolve. The angry cries of "Sit down" that greeted us at first were obviously more disruptive than our silence and soon subsided.

As Powell continued, I began to experience a state of blissful surrender: my decision had already been made, and I would remain standing as long as he spoke; the duration of my protest thus depended on him. I wondered what Martin Luther King, slated to have been the 1968 Class Day speaker, would have said to this black warrior had he survived into the era of the gay rights struggle. Finally I contacted the inherent power of non-violence to dissolve Otherness, and thus overcome the demonizing of the adversary on which militarism depends (an unlikely response to the remarks of a four-star general, but so be it). And then I marveled that simply by affirming with pride an aspect of my nature that formerly, in sight of these very elms, had seemed a burden of shame, I had once more opened myself to the healing power of Veritas. Coming out is coming home.

Frances Moore Lappe: Justice Thomas' Reasoning -- Dangerous for Democracy

The normally closed Supreme Court opened a crack last week, as Clarence Thomas defended the 5-4 decision clearing away limits on corporate spending to influence elections.

"If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group," he said, "you'd say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association." And "if all of you formed a partnership," it would be the same.

Then he asks rhetorically, "But what if you put yourself in corporate form?" He implies the answer would not change. "It's wrong," he argues, to make any distinction. The "ultimate precedent is the Constitution."

But, Justice Thomas, democracy itself depends on our making distinctions about who can influence political decisions, as the Court has done for many decades. (What about the 1933 Hatch Act curtailing political activity by government employees?)

And the most critical distinctions?

If I speak out as a citizen, or join with others and decide "to speak, just as a group," I am choosing to further democratic decision making by adding my voice. Democracy's foundation is the belief that citizens are able to deliberate and choose what is best for society as a whole. And indeed studies show most Americans vote with this goal --vote their values, not their narrow self-interest.

But if I form a corporation, or own shares in one, my purpose is utterly different. Partly, I seek to shield myself against personal financial liability and to enjoy other legal advantages for financial gain. These very different purposes and protections are among the reasons a corporation is not a citizen, nor is it a group of citizens; and why it cannot vote or sit on a jury, for example.

How can democracy permit an entity that cannot itself vote to have the power to sway voters and power over what a candidate might dare to say without risking a billion-dollar backlash?

You argue the Constitution is the "ultimate precedent." But the Constitution doesn't mention corporations, at the time they didn't exist as independent entities. Within a few decades many founders, including Thomas Jefferson began to see how corporate power could subvert democracy. "I hope [that] we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations," Jefferson said, "which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and [to] bid defiance to the laws of our country." It seems inconceivable that founders would approve the corporate influence in elections that you have just approved.

You suggest that the Supreme Court majority is expanding freedom and core democratic values.

No.

The Court's decision threatens my freedom to know that my purchases and investments don't fund a corporation's political speech to defeat my values. But this is the least of my freedoms lost.

The decision undermines my choice to be part of a democracy in which each of us can be heard, a voice not overwhelmed by entities whose resources rival those of whole nations, and whose interests lie not in a healthy democracy but in enhancing their markets. The Court's decision also helps to deprive me of the freedom to choose among a range of political candidates far wider those favored by our society's vast concentrations of wealth. In a word, it deprives me of the very essence of democracy itself--effective voice and choice.

Citizens stunned by this assault on democracy are devising a range of response. Listening to them, Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA), for example, is pursuing legislation to require broad consent by shareholders before a corporation can engage in political spending

Many Americans feel powerless in the face of such loss. We are not. One immediate step we can take right now step is to ensure passage of the bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act--S.752, H.R.1826. It establishes a workable system of small donations combined with voluntary public financing for congressional races. It builds on an approach that's already proven itself in three states. (Watch this inspiring example of its impact.) The Fair Elections approach has not been blocked by the Supreme Court. While it can't avert all the threats embodied in the Count's decision, it enables a candidate to run for office without becoming beholden to corporate money.

That is huge.

So let's not allow the Justices' dangerous logic to undermine democratic decision making America needs now more than ever. We can commit to choosing elected leaders who grasp what we've lost and would seat justices eager to reclaim the long precedent shielding us from this travesty. Right now, we can press our representatives to support the Fair Elections Now Act. We can back the excellent work, for example, of Change Congress Now, YouStreet, and Publiccampaign.org.

Obama's Approval Rating Hits A New Low: POLL

President Obama's approval rating continues to slump, according to a new Marist University poll out on Monday.

The poll showed that 44 percent of registered voters approve of the job Obama is doing as president, while 47 percent disapprove.

According to the polling Web site, Pollster.com, that is the president's worst showing since he took office last year.

The Hill notes that "the most noted shift may be among independents, of whom 57 percent said they disapprove of Obama's job performance and 29 percent say they approve. Those numbers are virtually the inverse of independents' view of the president in Marist's April 8, 2009 poll, which found independents approving of Obama, 53-28."

"If attracting Independents and bipartisanship are the aim, then the president clearly has a lot of ground to cover in year two," Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said in a statement.

Hotline's On Call blog has more details from the Marist poll:

Voters are disappointed in what they got with Obama's first year. The poll shows 47% believe Obama has failed to meet their expectations -- including a quarter of Dems, 65% of GOPers and 53% of indie voters -- while just 42% say he has met their expectations. 38% say Obama's policies are moving the country in the wrong direction, while 37% say they're making the country better.

Meanwhile, members of Congress should brace for a difficult election year. 42% of registered voters said they would back their current member of Congress, while 44% said they would support someone else -- a drop of 9 points in support of the incumbent in just 2 months.

The poll of 910 registered voters was conducted Feb. 1-3 and has a 3.2 percent margin of error.

Miles Mogulescu: Congress: The Banks Own the Place. Do They Own Obama Too?

"The banks--hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created--are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."

That's what Democratic Senate whip Dick Durbin said last May when the Senate failed to pass a bankruptcy reform bill that would give bankruptcy judges the power to reduce the principal of homeowners' underwater mortgages, the same power bankruptcy judges have to reduce the principal on commercial mortgages like those held by Donald Trump that get in trouble. Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh, one of the banks' favorite Senators said at the time,

The putative Democrat Bayh appeared to have few regrets that 40 Senators could block any action that would help homeowners keep banks from foreclosing on their homes. And President Obama did nothing to confront or embarrass those Senators, mostly Republicans but including several Democrats, from siding with the banks against the people.

Now The New York Times is reporting that as a result of massive bank lobbying, it's becoming increasingly likely that the Senate will reject another pro-consumer reform that would end government subsidies of private banks making student loans, would save $80 billion over the next 10 years and enable more middle class and poor students to afford college.

President Obama called the proposal a "no brainer". But that was before the banks launched a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign in Congress to kill the proposal and keep their corporate welfare. Sallie Mae, the national largest private student lender, doubled its lobbying expenditures to $8 million in 2009 and other private lenders spent millions more, according to an analysis prepared for The Times by the Center for Responsive Politics. Political action committees for the lenders made $2.1 million in political contributions in 2009, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In typical Washington revolving door fashion, one of the banks' top lobbyists fighting the reform is Democrat Jamie Gorelick who was the number two person in President Clinton's Justice Department before Clinton appointed her Vice Chairman of the scandal plagued Fannie Mae where she earned $24,466,834 in 5 years including $779,625 as a result of Fannie Mae fraudulently manipulating its books. Now, with the help of lobbyists like Gorelick, passage of the student loan reform, too, appears in doubt.

The question is, if relatively simple "no brainer" reforms like bankruptcy reform and student loan reform, which would save the government tens of billions of dollars and make the lives of middle class Americans better, can't make it through a Democratic controlled Congress, how will more fundamental reforms of the financial system fare?

Reports are surfacing that proposals like a consumer financial protection agency, and the so-called "Volker rules" to prevent commercial banks from gambling federally insured consumer deposits in the global financial casinos, won't even make it out of the Senate Banking Committee chaired by long-time bank friend Chris Dodd who is retiring this year under the cloud of financial scandal. It's looking increasingly likely that if any financial "reform" emerges intact from the Senate, it will be so watered down that it will do little to reign in Wall Street's most egregious practices, prevent the next bubble from developing, or mitigate the need for the federal government to again bailout the financial system when the next bubble bursts.

And just to be sure, major Wall Street banks, who have given campaign dollars to Democrats, are threatening to shift their contributions to Republicans, according to reports in Monday's New York Times. By helping electing Barack Obama--the first African American President who appeared to be an advocate of the people against the special interests--Wall Street banks may have successfully headed off a full-scale political rebellion when they were bailed out with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money and asked for next to nothing in return. Now that there is talk of serious reform to prevent the next financial bubble and the next taxpayer-funded bailout, they'll do everything they can to elect a Republican Congress, and threaten remaining Democrats, to be sure those reforms never happen. And the Supreme Court has just handed them a nuclear weapon to carry out their plans. They can give unlimited amounts of money to any Congressperson who will support them and threaten defeat to any Congressperson who opposes them. In fact, they don't even have to spend the money. All they have to do is have their lobbyists tell enough Senators who might otherwise support financial reform that they're prepared to spend unlimited funds to defeat him or her and the Congressperson is likely to bend to their will.

By reforming the financial system, FDR may have saved capitalism and the banking system from itself, even over the organized opposition and greed of the big banks. Among other things, FDR and a Democratic Congress instituted a bank holiday, created Federal Deposit Insurance to rekindle confidence in the banking system, formed the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the public investment system, and passed the Glass-Steagall Act to separate federally insured commercial banks from investment banks and hedge funds. The regulatory regime created under the New Deal helped protect the American and global capitalist financial system from meltdown for over 75 years until memories faded and it was slowly eroded under the Presidencies of Ronald Reagan, two President Bushes, and Bill Clinton.

The question is, does Barack Obama have the courage and political will to follow in the footsteps of FDR and again act to protect our financial system from the next bubble which will be the inevitable result of Wall Street's unregulated greed? To do so, he will have to stop acting like he's the Senate Majority Leader looking to cut a bogus bipartisan deal that can only produce what columnist Tom Friedman has called "suboptimal solutions", and go over the heads of Congress to speak directly to the American people. Or is Obama also too bought off by Wall Street banks who helped finance his Presidential campaign and whose existence was saved by the largesse of the taxpayers?

If Obama fails to lead, may God save these United State of America. The bankers and their paid concubines in Congress sure as hell won't.

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To sign a petition sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future asking your Senator to end $80 billion dollars in bank subsidies for student loans, click here.

What's Next For Murtha's Congressional Seat?

After the death of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) on Monday, what happens to Pennsylvania's 12th district congressional seat?

Murtha died Monday at the age of 77 after complications from earlier gall bladder surgery. Just last week he became the longest-serving member of Congress in Pennsylvania history.

Now voters in Pennsylvania will most likely go to the polls to elect a replacement for the late congressman on May 18, according to the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza:

According to state law, the governor has ten days once the vacancy is officially declared to decide on the date for the special election, which can come no sooner than 60 days following that proclamation.

That likely means the special election will be held on May 18, which is the date already set for federal primaries around the state.

RealClearPolitics looks at the voting patterns of the 12th district, and at the results of previous election cycles:

Democrats have won every special election in this Congress, including one pick-up from the GOP in New York 23. Another is set in the Florida 19th on April 13, with yet another seat opening soon when Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) steps down to run for governor.

The Washington Examiner's Michael Barone has more details on political makeup of the area Murtha represented:

Bush Billboard Looms Over Highway (PHOTO)

George W. Bush is back...in billboard form. Hovering over I-35 near Wyoming, Minn., is an ominous/how'd-anyone-take-him-seriously pic of the former president with the question, "Miss Me Yet?"

There have been no reports as to who is behind the billboard. For all we know Bush put it up after finding a picture of himself as he was about to catch a hamburger at a barbecue. (via NPR)

Tom Matzzie: John Murtha Showed Us How to Be Strong

I hope that we will remember John Murtha for his strengths. It is a good way to encourage others in Congress to show strength. Murtha did something very important on Iraq--he showed leadership when there was a lack of it. He took a risk when others were hiding. And he admitted a mistake (his vote for the Iraq war) but then more importantly he worked to try to figure out how to correct for it rather than fade into the background after a soundbite.

I got to know Congressman Murtha briefly back when he spoke out on the war in November of 2005. At the time I was leading MoveOn.org's campaign to end the war in Iraq. What struck me the most about John Murtha was that he really knew how to throw a punch and fight for what he cared about. He would give speeches, travel, go on TV, record videos and sign his name to anything important that advanced his cause. He was tireless.

Even though he wasn't from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Murtha had no fear of working with progressives on the Left--he enjoyed it. He called me once and said, "Tommy, they're saying I shouldn't work with you anti-war folks. Too Left. But I just told them, I like these guys and look what working with pro-war Republicans got us into." He later would talk about how his position wasn't liberal or conservative--it was just the right thing to do.

Despite John Murtha's actually bipartisan nature, Republicans in Congress and around the country were mean and vicious to him. They would cut into him and he would just roar back at them in a way that showed people he wasn't afraid--it often humbled critics (see video below). What he showed us all is the importance and power of strength and outrage in our political system--not in a personal or vitriolic way, but when fact-based.

Most important John Murtha showed Democrats in Congress how to be strong. We need more Murthas on other issues like health care, the economy and climate change. Democrats need to be a party that projects strength not through the belligerence of our policies but through the strength of our advocacy.

Murtha was flawed like all of us and he was surely a conservative Democrat (somebody once jokingly reminded me that Murtha probably would've kept us in Vietnam). But I think progressives could learn a lot from John Murtha....if only how to fight for what we care about. I will miss him.

VIDEO: Sample of Republican attacks on John Murtha and how he responded.

VIDEO: John Murtha on joking about Iraq.

Tina Dupuy: Privatized Bureaucracy is Still Bureaucracy

The knee-jerk "government is bad" argument against health care reform, the jobs bill or banking regulations is always "it creates more bureaucracy." This is mainly from Republicans who want to be called lawmakers. Yes, there are people working in the government - gladly cashing their government paychecks - whose default is always that the government is incompetent. And admitting government can't do anything right actually, sometimes, gets them elected.

Which is like hiring a mechanic who prefers not do anything that requires wearing overalls, using power tools or knowing what a car looks like - but he knows a guy...

Bureaucracy is always bad, you see. It's slow, deliberate and full of well - bureaucrats. People who thrive on rules and checks and balances. A bunch of hall monitors. Form filling bed-wetters.

The alternative to bureaucracy? Privatization. Yes, the private sector is the cure-all for all the cumbersome, slow-witted, pencil pushers in the government. The sexy private sector is full of innovators we're told - entrepreneurs. People who are moving and shaking and forward thinking. The private sector is shaping our future.

So the next time you have to call AT&T about a mistake on your bill, or your Internet going out or why your cell phone works perfectly on the Inca Trail but not in your living room, think of how much better the private sector works. Yes, after you've been transferred to the fifth person who also isn't accountable, knowledgeable or responsible for how poorly the mega-corporation is performing think of how horrible it would be to have more bureaucracy. And when they tell you the call is being recorded for quality assurance because after an hour of being transferred to three continents you still need assurance, smile inside that this is a preferred alternative to your tax dollars being wasted.

And to anyone who's ever been harassed for years by a billing department mix-up only to have the charge show up as unpaid on your credit report take heed, at least it's not the anal-retentive IRS with all that red tape. And when Capitol One just arbitrarily decides your APR should be north of 33%, feel pride that at least there's not a government bureaucrat between you and your banker. And the next time Bank of America charges you unlimited overdraft fees and you're left with absolutely no recourse look up at that shiny red, white and blue sign and feel the glow of patriotism because it's not the dreaded government interfering in your life.

From a consumer vantage point - privatized bureaucracy seems an awful lot like regular bureaucracy.

Waiting in line at the court house to clear up a parking ticket is the same hour spent in line at your cable company to switch out your defective DVR. All tedious, de-humanizing, time-sucking authoritative bodies are the same to their victims. The only difference is politics. No wonder people are afraid of the government taking over Medicare (psst it's a government program). It's one giant soulless entity being confused with another giant soulless entity. The right would have us believe it's the government that's the problem and the left would have us believe it's the unregulated corporations. A privatized world is no utopia - not anymore than a government run one is. It would be nice to have a healthy pool of both, however.

The difference between the government and the private sector is you don't have people pulling a paycheck in the private sector championing for more money and power to go into the government.

The only reason the government is preferable is because it doesn't turn a profit. Its motives are not to make money and it is at least successful at that. Plus in the government you and I are the shareholders. We have ownership of our government, ideally. We have a say. It's for the people, by the people. If bureaucracy is an inevitable evil, a symptom of civilization, between the private sector and government, between the DMV or Etna, I'll choose indifference over monetization.

Ed Kilgore: Palin's Saturday Night Live

If you didn't watch Sarah Palin's speech at the National Tea Party Convention on Saturday night, you should definitely give it a gander. It was in some respects an unprecedented opportunity for her: a prepared text (obviously her best format), but not one scripted by a campaign (unlike her 2008 Republican Convention address), and guaranteed major media attention. As a private citizen, she was in a position to say pretty much whatever she wanted. Yes, the venue was a bit tricky, because of the widespread criticism of the Tea Party Convention itself, but not remotely as perilous as her resignation speech as governor of Alaska.

She used her own Saturday Night Live opportunity to perform four tasks: general cheerleading for the Tea Party Movement (while making it clear the immediate venue and the controversial for-profit organization that sponsored it was a small piece of that Movement); a quick tour d'horizon of global hot spots to begin addressing one of her most glaring weaknesses, a lack of foreign policy chops; an assortment of crowd-pleasing snarky attacks on the Obama administration, not very original but pretty well-delivered; and an extremely conventional recitation of time-honored conservative themes, punctuated by ritual invocations of the Holy Name of Ronald Reagan.

Anyone who thinks the Tea Party Movement is vastly at odds with the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party should observe that this speech could have been delivered at a Lincoln Day dinner pretty much anywhere in the country, and would have received the same rapturous audience reaction.

Indeed, the speech is a good illustration of why Palin creates such dramatically different perceptions among different groups of politically active people. To most progressives, every other line in the speech was something of a howler, thanks to the exceptionally unselfconscious way in which she glides over self-contradictions. She genuflected at the altar of constitutional supremacy even as she mocked the president as a law professor. She called for a radical attack on budget deficits while she demanded more tax cuts, often in the same sentence. She repeatedly assaulted the lack of transparency in Democratic policy formulation, but failed to offer any policy prescriptions other than minor (and frankly, stupid) conservative pet rocks like interstate health insurance sales or her own well-rehearsed pet rock of expanding fossil-fuel exploration. She redundantly assailed Wall Street bailouts that she endorsed when they were actually happening. And with every breath, she posed as just another citizen-activist fighting against political elites and media persecution, even though she was a professional politician lifted from obscurity by Washington-based Republican political professionals and then made a national celebrity by constant media attention.

But to conservative ideologues, Palin is simply expounding Revealed Truth, in the uncomplicated manner attributed to the sainted Reagan, and her red meat attacks on Democrats, her allusions to persecution by "elites," and her pose of independence from the GOP establishment, are all projections of their own feelings, cultivated over many years.

And that's why having watched Palin's act in Nashville, I disagree more strongly than ever with those who assert she can't possibly launch a viable campaign for the presidency in 2012. No, I don't think she will be elected president, but yes, I think it's possible she could win the Republican nomination.

To assess this question, you have to appreciate the psychology of movement conservatives at this particular moment of political history. Most of them have believed all along that there is a "hidden majority" of conservatives in America that can only be crystallized by the most rigorous conservative candidates and messages. After 1964, at least, conservatives have attributed every single Republican presidential defeat to a combination of RINO machinations, "moderate" policy prescriptions, and an unwillingness to exploit the opposition's vulnerability by any means necessary--all mistakes imposed by Republican "elites" who contemptuously betray conservative interest groups and causes. These are the kind of people who started showing up at McCain rallies in the autumn of 2008 to upbraid their candidate for failing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and ACORN, and who empathized viscerally with Palin's public frustration about the campaign's unwillingness to "take the gloves off" (a frustration she alluded to in her Nashville speech).

I don't think most progressives fully appreciate how vindicated conservative activists feel right now. Since the 2008 elections, their party has executed the most remarkable turn away from the political center any losing party has probably ever undertaken. RINOs have been intimidated and silenced; Republican Members of Congress have been whipped into highly disciplined submission; policy positions on issues ranging from health care to climate change to foreign policy that were highly respectable in GOP circles just a few years ago are now "socialist" anathema. And in consolidation of earlier conservative victories within the GOP, legalized abortion is now almost universally considered murder; "moral relativism," including homosexuality, is regarded as an abomination inflicted on a suffering "real American" population by decadent elites in Sodom and Gomorrah enclaves on the coasts; and any suggestion that Islamic jihadism is less than an Cold War-level existential threat is treated as "hate-America" semi-treason.

And lo and behold, even as Republicans finally take hard-core conservative advice, their electoral prospects are blossoming. A Tea Party ally has won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat! Even liberal media villains expect a big Republican victory in 2010! With every day, more American are beginning to blame Obama and the Democrats for the economic crisis, and Republican discipline in the Senate ensures he can't do much about it. And moreover, the most vibrant popular political movement in the country, the Tea Party Movement, is pushing Republicans (and perhaps the country) even further to the right, aiding materially not only in the savaging of Obama, but in the ongoing purge of RINOs and "moderate" squishes.

This is the context within which any assessment of Sarah Palin's immediate political future needs to be conducted. It's a context in which vast and largely sympathetic media coverage is devoted to an amateurish, financially-questionable convention in Nashville where people like Tom Tancredo and Roy Moore really don't stand out. It's a context where Sarah Palin is firmly in the mainstream.

So why wouldn't this sudden mega-celebrity, who believes her career is the object of divine favor, and who is surrounded constantly with adulation made even more intense by any mockery of her misteps, run for president? Why not take a chance on completely eclipsing Mike Huckabee and utterly destroying Tim Pawlenty in the Right-to-Life dominated caucuses in Iowa, a state where a new Des Moines Register poll shows one-third of all voters supporting the Tea Party Movement?

That's all a long way off, and a lot could change. 2010 may not after all represent the great gittin' up morning that conservatives expect. At some point, conservative activists may finally get tired of Palin's maddening lack of specificity, or tumble to the fact that Democratic horror of Palin does not actually represent fear of her general-election appeal. Maybe she really doesn't want anything other than her current level of fame or her very manageable political work-load. And perhaps her fans will find a new, or old, champion (her Fox colleague Glenn Beck, for example, seems to think Rick Santorum is The Bomb).

But it's far past time to stop pretending that Palin is just a joke. If her performance in Nashville was taken seriously by the kind of people who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process--and it was--then she's got a political future that she can only enhance by continuing to pose as the personification of grassroots conservative activism, "you betchas" and all.

This item is crossposted from The Democratic Strategist.

Cabinet did not need to hear legal doubts over Iraq invasion, says Straw – The Guardian

Cabinet did not need to hear legal doubts over Iraq invasion, says Straw
The Guardian
"A big problem with the US was from the neocons," he said, referring in particular to the American defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. …

and more »

More: continued here

Nick Robinson (BBC News)

Voting reform proposal to be considered by MPs

More: continued here

NATO aware of Taliban buildup – Zimbabwe Star

Zimbabwe Star NATO aware of Taliban buildup
Zimbabwe Star
Over two years of murders and War Crimes! And many of the Murders are Documented! Signed! Approved! by Donald Rumsfeld! Fifty different Documented Attacks …

and more »

More: continued here

Abdulmutallab Interrogation Critics Now Insist They Deserve A Pass For Their Ignorance

On yesterday's edition of "Meet The Press", John Brennan took the opportunity to blast his GOP critics for politicizing the war on terror. A worthy cause, considering how consistently wrong and foolish they've been on all matters related to the failed Christmas bomb attack.

On the show, this part stood out:

None of those individuals raised any concerns with me, at that point. They didn't say, "Is he going into military custody? Is he going to be Mirandized?" They were very appreciative of the information. We told them we'd keep them informed. And that's what we did. So, there's been quite a bit of an outcry after the fact. Where again, I'm just very concerned on behalf of the counterterrorism professionals throughout our government that politicians continue to make this a political football. And are using it for whatever political or partisan purposes.

Yesterday, I gave myself a pat on the back for correctly intuiting that the process went something like this:

2. GOP lawmakers are informed.

3. Some time passes. It looks like nothing bad has happened, so this can be politicized.

4. A plan is hatched to politicize this. It does not make any fucking sense, but whatever. People remember being scared, they can be made to be scared of a sad and lonely loser who pasted flammable goop on his balls for the glory of his Sky-God.

5. Al Qaeda is like: "Wow. Thanks for taking an incident that would normally make us embarrassed to be in the terrorist business, and turning it into a super-successful field op! We will definitely associate ourselves with this sad loser."

6. We are honestly asked to entertain the possibility that it would have been better to have tortured this sad loser, so that we could have some false intelligence, presumably on this network of sad losers who paste gunk to their taint and set them afire.

7. The media aids and abets the cynical opportunists who populate the political landscape, and they should all die in the snow but they won't.

Now you can add the eighth part of the process: the part where the same GOP lawmakers, weeks after the fact, now think they deserve a pass because HOW SHOULD THEY KNOW HOW THE F.B.I. works, anyway? Via Spencer Ackerman, at the Washington Independent:

I think that Hoekstra's inclusion is worth noting, because no one is faster to grandstand on national security issues than Hoekstra. Maybe if, in the end, he's so ignorant in the basics of law enforcement procedures, he should just calm down, shut up, stop twittering, and of course maybe rein in his instinct to turn everything he knows nothing about into an opportunity for personal enrichment.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Jared Bernstein: Where We Are and Where We Were

Along with a massive snowstorm, Friday brought a blizzard of new info on the job market. From the perspective of our work at the White House, two points stand out, one about where we are and the other about where we've been.

First, while there are encouraging signs regarding jobs, they are early signs and must be viewed with care. The job market is clearly doing better than it was but the level of unemployment is miles north of where it needs to be. Unemployment fell significantly last month, which is good, but a) it's a one-month data point and not yet a new trend, and b) it fell from 10% to 9.7%, and that's still an unacceptably high rate of joblessness.

Second, today's data release has new, revised information on just how bad this recession has been in the job market. The chart below is worth a lot of words.

The chart plots the course of payroll employment over the last four recessions, including this one. In each case, we index jobs at the start of the recession to 100%, and the x-axis shows the number of months from when the recession began.

By setting it up this way, you get a lot of useful, comparative information across different downturns. For example, you see how much longer it took to regain the lost jobs in the 1990 and 2001 recession compared to the 1981 version.

But the main point is how severe this recession has been on job loss. There are two lines in the graph for the current recession because last week's data provided a revision based on more complete data. We knew it was bad, but it turned out to be even worse. We thought we were losing an unprecedented 690,000 jobs per month in the first quarter of last year. It turned out to be 750,000. In the four months between December 2008 and March 2009, we lost more jobs than during the last two recessions combined.

That's where we were. Where we are, as noted, is better but not good enough. Last month, we lost 20,000 jobs and that's not an outlier -- it's another data point in an improving trend moving towards net job gains, which we expect to be seeing in a few months. But the job market won't be in recovery until those small negatives turn into big positives.

Here's what comes out of all this: our policies, most notably the Recovery Act, have helped move us from a situation where we were losing a nightmarish 750,000 jobs per month to one in which we've pulled back from the economic abyss and are moving a lot closer to adding jobs, on net, on a regular basis. But we can't kick back and wait for that moment. There's too much pain out there, too many families struggling with a job market that's simply not providing the opportunities they need to get back on their feet.

So we have to hasten the arrival of more robust job growth with a set of initiatives targeted at the factors holding back job creation. The House passed a targeted jobs bill in December that included some of these priorities, including upgrading transportation and infrastructure, and aid to states to keep teachers, cops, and firefighters on the job. The Senate's actively working on proposals with some of those same components.

Last week the President announced an initiative to help credit flow more freely to small businesses that want to expand their operations and payrolls but can't access the capital. Both the President and Congress have been working on a new hiring tax credit targeted at the business owner who is considering adding workers but needs a nudge (and you can see employers dipping their toes in the labor pool -- temp work has increased in each of the past four months).

Another idea in the mix right now is investment in infrastructure to help offset the continuing job losses in construction, a sector that took another big hit last month. And another is help to state and local governments facing tight budget squeezes and the resultant layoffs in folks like teachers, down 10,500 last month at the local level.

GDP is growing and growing pretty solidly. The employment data show employers cutting a lot less but not yet adding a lot more. Unemployment moved in the right direction last month, and we need to build on that positive movement.

But as the figure above shows so clearly, we've got a huge hole to fill. That hole wasn't dug overnight, and it's going to take some time and some smart, targeted policies, to fill it up. Now there's a shovel-ready project worth taking on.

Originally published at WhiteHouse.gov.

Jared Bernstein is Chief Economist to Vice President Biden, and Executive Director of the Middle Class Task Force.

William K. Barth: President Obama Should Stop Home Foreclosures

"We haven't yet found a way of dealing with this..." - Assistant Treasury Secretary Herbert M. Allison Jr. on home mortgage-loan modifications.

Early in his term of office, President Obama set the standard by which voters should judge his administration, saying it would be tested by how successful it proves to be in ending the nation's economic downturn.

Republican victories in New Jersey, Virginia and, more recently, Massachusetts, as well as the failure of congressional Democrats to pass health care reform legislation, all go to illustrate that voters are dissatisfied with the Democrats, whom they perceive as ineffective. The most stunning example of Democratic failure since President's Obama inauguration last year has been their inability to stop home foreclosures, which are projected to affect 19 million homeowners by the end of 2010.

In his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama made clear how he intends to resolve the home mortgage foreclosure crisis -- namely, by ignoring it. He offered no options for distressed homeowners, aside from their securing conventional mortgage loan refinancing at lower interest rates. However, because of the depressed housing market, millions of homeowners hold mortgage debts greater than the value of their homes; they are, as industry analysts describe it, underwater. Deutsche Bank had projected that 25 million, or 48 percent, of all homeowners will be 'underwater' in their mortgages next year. Furthermore, diminished home values make conventional bank refinancing impossible, because, sadly, the Federal government's TARP bank-rescue program was never intended to assist homeowners to modify their mortgage terms.

Otherwise, it is difficult to understand how the Obama administration expects the economy to recover, since high mortgage payments, when combined with declining home values, have further depressed the housing market that triggered the economic recession in the first place. Underwater homeowners are faced with a devil's dilemma, because they cannot afford their inflated mortgage payments, nor sell their homes at prices that will permit them to satisfy those homes' mortgage debts. This leaves homeowners with effectively two options: namely, resorting to so-called short-sales (i.e. convincing the lender to accept a loss when the home is sold for less than the mortgage owed), or, worse, foreclosure, which is a process that affects an owner's credit worthiness, similarly to legal bankruptcy. The result of all this is that millions of homeowners will not only suffer eviction from their homes, but also ruin their credit, which curtails their consumer spending and further damages the prospect of general economic recovery. Moreover, the economic ripple effects of foreclosures cause neighborhood home values to plummet while at the same time diminishing municipal tax bases.

So far, President Obama's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) has assisted only 31,000 homeowners to modify their mortgages, whilst millions more remain on the brink of foreclosure. The President's meager housing efforts are faulty in their conception, since homeowners living in high-priced housing markets in states like California, Massachusetts and New York are ineligible for the HAMP program, since, according to the means test, they hold mortgages priced above the program's upper limit. President Obama's beleaguered housing strategy is perplexing, given that previous Democratic Presidents created successful housing programs. For example, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman assisted millions of working-class families in achieving home ownership by creating the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program, as well as the FHA-VA program, which helped build military housing and assisted millions of returning war veterans to buy new homes. Although the homeownership rate fell last year to 67.3 percent, homeownership is still close to its all time high of 68.1 percent in 2001.

During the Great Depression era, only four in ten American households owned homes, and America was a nation of renters. In the 1940s, mortgage loan terms were limited to 50 percent of the property's market value, with a repayment schedule spread over three to five years and ending with a balloon payment, making mortgage terms difficult for most homebuyers to meet. The FHA encouraged lenders to create affordable 30-year mortgages, by insuring lenders against mortgages lost to default. The FHA has insured over 34 million properties since its inception in 1934. Furthermore, the FHA was also good politics, as working-class families who became homeowners remained loyal to the Democrats thereafter.

This lesson is not lost on all politicians. For example, Hilary Clinton, during her presidential nomination campaign, appeared to offer a bolder, macro-economic approach for solving the foreclosure crisis. Clinton supported the idea of placing a moratorium on all home foreclosures, to stabilize the decline of home values whilst encouraging lenders to modify mortgage terms to homeowners. Even Republican candidates such as John McCain got in on the act, promising to re-set mortgages to the lowered market-value of homes in order to assist underwater homeowners.

Inexplicably, the Obama administration has not fully utilized the FHA, and other programs like it, despite the fact that these programs have been used frequently over the decades to assist both homeowners and lenders overcome difficult housing-market challenges. Creative financing ideas abound about how to assist lenders to modify home mortgages, such as 'equity give-backs', which permit lenders to share in a home's appreciation when it is resold. Alternatively, there is the idea of having the FHA serve as the insurer of last resort (its current role), so as to protect lenders against losses that result from their modifying the terms of a homeowner's mortgage. In short, existing Federal programs work in partnership with lenders to assist homeowners escape mortgages they can no longer afford by transitioning them into a new housing situation, without having to resort to obnoxious public policy solutions such as default, foreclosure, or bankruptcy, all of which can only further imperil the recovery.

Sadly, the Obama administration has left distressed homeowners with few alternatives. This will make it difficult to solve our current economic downturn, because, as in the last Great Depression, housing construction jobs have disappeared in the depressed housing markets. It is bad enough that President Obama and a Democratic Congress failed to pass even a weakened version of health care reform. If the home foreclosure crisis continues unattended, it will transform the stream of Republican state-wide victories into a tsunami of voter discontent headed directly towards the incumbents in Washington DC, namely, President Obama and congressional Democrats.

William K. Barth is a California attorney who holds a doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford. Dr Barth worked for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1994 to 2002. He writes a blog on the Huffington Post.

John Murtha Dead: Congressman Died At Age 77

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Rep. John Murtha, a retired Marine Corps officer who became the first Vietnam War combat veteran elected to Congress and later an outspoken and influential critic of the Iraq War, died Monday. He was 77.

The Pennsylvania Democrat had been suffering complications from gallbladder surgery. He died at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va., spokesman Matthew Mazonkey said.

Murtha was an officer in the Marine Reserves when he was elected in 1974. Ethical questions often shadowed his congressional service, but he was best known for being among Congress' most hawkish Democrats. He wielded considerable clout for two decades as the ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees Pentagon spending.

Murtha voted in 2002 to authorize President George W. Bush to use military force in Iraq, but his growing frustration over the administration's handling of the war prompted him in November 2005 to call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion," he said.

Murtha's opposition to the Iraq war rattled Washington, where the tall, gruff-mannered congressman enjoyed bipartisan respect for his work on military issues. On Capitol Hill, Murtha was seen as speaking for those in uniform when it came to military matters.

William Russell, Murtha's GOP opponent in the 2008 election, who was planning to challenge him again in November, asked in a statement Monday that people pray for the Murtha family and said his campaign would suspend activity for a few days.

"Regardless of your political position, you always knew Jack had an immense love and loyalty to his family and the residents of the 12th Congressional District," Russell said.

Born June 17, 1932, John Patrick Murtha delivered newspapers and worked at a gas station before graduating from Ramsay High School in Mount Pleasant, Pa.

Military service was in Murtha's blood. He said his great-grandfather served in the Civil War, his father and three uncles in World War II, and his brothers in the Marine Corps.

He left Washington and Jefferson College in 1952 to join the Marines, where he rose through the ranks to become a drill instructor at Parris Island, S.C., and later served in the 2nd Marine Division.

Murtha moved back to Johnstown and remained with the Marine Reserves until he volunteered to go to Vietnam. He served as an intelligence officer there from 1966 to 1967 and received a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

After his discharge from the Marines, Murtha ran a small business in Johnstown. He went to the University of Pittsburgh on the GI Bill of rights, graduating in 1962 with a degree in economics.

He served in the Pennsylvania House in Harrisburg from 1969 until he was elected to Congress in a special election in 1974. In 1990, he retired from the Marine Reserves as a colonel.

"Ever since I was a young boy, I had two goals in life – I wanted to be a colonel in the Marine Corps and a member of Congress," Murtha wrote in his 2004 book, "From Vietnam to 9/11."

Murtha's criticism of the Iraq war intensified in 2006, when he accused Marines of murdering Iraqi civilians "in cold blood" at Haditha, Iraq, after one Marine died and two were wounded by a roadside bomb.

Critics said Murtha unfairly held the Marines responsible before an investigation was concluded and fueled enemy retaliation. He said that the war couldn't be won militarily and that such incidents dimmed the prospect for a political solution.

"This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," Murtha said. "And we're set back every time something like this happens."

In 2008, the Republican Party used Murtha's words against him in TV ads aired less than a month before the election. The ads cited his criticism of the Haditha incident, as well as his comment about "racist" voting tendencies of many western Pennsylvania residents. Still, Murtha handily won his 18th full term.

Murtha was a perennial target of critics of so-called pay-to-play politics. He routinely drew the attention of ethical watchdogs with off-the-floor activities, from his entanglement in the Abscam corruption probe three decades ago to the more recent scrutiny of the connection between special-interest spending known as earmarks and the raising of cash for campaigns.

Murtha defended the practice of earmarking. The money, he said, benefited his constituents.

Murtha became chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee in 1989. The same year Paul Magliocchetti, a former subcommittee staffer, left Capitol Hill to found the now-defunct PMA Group. The lobbying firm, which specialized in obtaining earmarks for defense contractors, was one Murtha's biggest sources of campaign cash.

In 2007 and 2008, Murtha and two fellow Democrats on the subcommittee directed $137 million to defense contractors who were paying PMA to get them government business. Between 1989 and 2009, Murtha collected more than $2.3 million in campaign contributions from PMA's lobbyists and corporate clients, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political money.

Shortly after the 2008 election, the FBI raided PMA's offices as part of a criminal investigation. In a separate development in January 2009, FBI agents raided the offices of a defense contractor from Murtha's district – Windber-based Kuchera Defense Systems Inc. – that had received millions of dollars in earmarks sponsored by Murtha while contributing tens of thousands to his campaigns.

A year later, Kuchera was suspended from bidding on government contracts because of allegations that it paid more than $200,000 in kickbacks to another defense contractor.

Around the same time, the House ethics committee was investigating the link between PMA-related campaign contributions and earmarks, but it had not named a subcommittee to look into possible violations by individual lawmakers.

Murtha's critics recall the Abscam corruption probe, in which the FBI caught him on videotape in a 1980 sting operation turning down a $50,000 bribe offer while holding out the possibility that he might take money in the future.

"We do business for a while, maybe I'll be interested and maybe I won't," Murtha said on the tape.

Six congressmen and one senator were convicted in that case. Murtha was not charged, but the government named him as an unindicted co-conspirator and he testified against two other congressmen.

Murtha's district encompasses all or part of nine counties in southwestern Pennsylvania and embodies the region's stereotypes of coal mines, steel mills and blue-collar values.

Constituents credited Murtha with bringing jobs and health care to the region, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars for local industry, hospitals and tourism. Critics derisively nicknamed Murtha the "king of pork" and said he used his position on the defense subcommittee to win favors.

Murtha often delivered Democratic votes to Republican leaders in exchange for the funding of pet projects. He wasn't shy about such deals, once saying that "dealmaking is what Congress is all about."

In 2006, when the Democrats captured control of the House for the first time in 12 years, Rep. Nancy Pelosi endorsed Murtha to become majority leader. Pelosi, D-Calif., went on to be elected as the first female House speaker, but caucus members picked Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., as their leader.

David Segal: States Can Pick Up the Stimulus Slack

The recession has surely proved a windfall for Chicago's psychotherapists: As even some prominent Friedman disciples break from the ranks of free market absolutists, couples' therapy must be at a particular premium, with the need to sort out so many newly strained relationships among former partners in the doctrinaire. We're (nearly) all Keynesians now. At least in theory.

But as happens with tragic frequency in the field of economics, what looks good on paper isn't manifesting itself in the real world. It's not that the ideas are wrong this time -- Washington just can't manage to put them to work. Many state governments, however, ought to be able to pick up the slack.

We've spent $700 billion bailing out Wall Street. We've seen the enactment of a $787 billion stimulus bill -- nearly $300 billion of which comprised tax cuts. Much of it went to worthy programs, like health care and public education, but only about $80 billion of was designated directly for much-needed infrastructure improvements.

We're doing deficit spending, but the federal government has proved anemic at creating the sort of jobs-spurring, capacity-building, growth-inducing, public works stimulus that once won us civic monuments, highways, and city streets and sidewalks, and helped millions of Americans survive the Great Depression. On a per capita basis, Roosevelt's stimulus saw us spending nearly seven times more on infrastructure projects than has Obama's. (This is the incremental stimulus spending -- there's admittedly a higher baseline of government spending now than there was in the 1930s.)

Leaning on Okun's Law, which relates unemployment to changes in GDP, many economists have argued convincingly that the government should have passed a stimulus twice as large as last winter's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

There are countless reasons for the Federal logjam -- some tactical, some structural. But where the Federal government has failed, the states can make up part of the difference. With the exception of Vermont, state constitutions and laws prohibit traditional deficit spending -- states can't pass budgets in which spending exceeds revenues in a given fiscal cycle. But they can do precisely what we need most: put bond measures on ballots that would create capacity-building, capital projects and put people to work. That means grants and low-interest loans in support of roads, bridges, and public transit, easier credit for small businesses, funds for businesses and residents to undertake renewable energy, energy efficiency, and weatherization projects.

The endeavor might require a few crash courses in economics. State leaders are not used to creating their own stimulus packages; recessions create pressure on states to take measures that actually risk exacerbating economic contractions. Nobody wants to raise taxes in a downturn, but states can't engage in traditional deficit spending. So when revenues collapse, programs that employ people and help keep money moving through the economy -- frequently social services and aid to cities and towns -- get gutted. State leaders are used to stitching together scraps to save whatever they can, trying to hold the line on taxes, and calling it a day.

So we need a well-orchestrated national effort to encourage states not just to avoid Shock Doctrine-style cuts, but also to adopt such infrastructure-intensive local stimuli. They'd by no means pass everywhere, but with legislators looking to do whatever they can to promote recovery in this election year, they're probably feasible in at least some number of states. Success would certainly be much more likely in blue states than in red (and provide an interesting case study in employment results), with the 16 states with Democratic control of both the legislature and the governorship being the obvious places to start. The initiatives would energize coalitions of municipalities, small businesses, environmentalists, and the construction industry's contractors and trades workers unions -- which have been utterly decimated by the recession. In states where the initiatives are popular, they'd provide voters an exciting reason to go out and vote for Democrats this fall.

A successful effort could inject another $20 billion or more into the economy and help propel the recovery as we move into 2011 and 2012. More than any other factor, the economy is motivating voters decisions, and their anger will be felt from city halls to state capitols to Congress, but elected officials who best respond to those concerns may yet be spared the coming wrath of November.

David Segal is a Rhode Island State Representative. Austin King is a former president of the Madison, WI Board of Alders.

White House Press Corps Is Once Again In Need Of Your Pity

It's hard for me to muster up even a whit of sympathy for the forever-beleaguered White House Press Corps. Yet they persist, in a self-made glass case of emotion, to periodically bitch about how difficult their jobs are and how they feel frozen out by President Obama. Last week, it was the New York Times's Peter Baker singing the eloquent complaint-aria:

Baker goes on to note that, after a year Obama has succeeded in doing "what every modern president may have wanted to do but never did: effectively shut out the reporters who work just a few feet from the Oval Office." If Peter Baker hadn't told you this, you wouldn't have noticed.

And you probably didn't notice, even then! Why? Because Baker's complaint came during a week of pretty peak public interaction by the president. (Read the above paragraph again... I think Baker noticed this!) But since it obviously didn't occur to anyone in America to be concerned about the White House press corps, Howard Kurtz takes up the matter in an astonishing attempt to make all of this out to be some sort of problem:

"It's a source of great frustration here," says Chip Reid, CBS's White House correspondent. "It's important for us to hold the president's feet to the fire."

What can I say? The White House Press Room is the finest and most ornate Kabuki theater in the Western Hemisphere. Questions asked by members of the corps are Kabuki. Their complaints about the answers are Kabuki. THIS VERY HOWARD KURTZ ARTICLE IS PART OF THE KABUKI. Meanwhile, America tunes all this right the frack out. In fact, the people seem to prefer watching the House GOP Caucus do the whole "feet to the fire" job! Can you remember the last time Chip Reid asked the president a question and 15,000 people joined a Facebook group, demanding more?

The hilarious thing to me is that the White House Press Corps seems to largely spend its time not digging up scoops of national import, but alternating between their two great ur-complaints of this White House. This month, he's not accessible enough. When that gets corrected, the press corps will bitch about how the president is "overexposed." This actually comes up in the Kurtz column:

Gibbs responded to Reid by saying that the last time the subject came up, "you all, to a person, reminded me of our dramatic overexposure."

If you cast your mind back to early August of 2009, Howard Kurtz was busy like a bee, facilitating that complaint, hither and yon.

But if you want to gauge the essential lack of value of the White House Press Corps, this pull from Kurtz's column today says it all:

But the July 22 session underscored how the administration can lose control of the story line. During a news conference devoted almost entirely to health-care reform, Obama answered a final question about the arrest of his friend Henry Louis Gates -- he said the Cambridge police acted "stupidly" -- and the resulting flap dominated the news for a week.

See, Kurtz is making it sound like the White House went undercover because the brave press corps pinned it down with some groundbreaking journalism. My read is that, after five press conferences the White House noticed that the press corps was putting the most effort behind blowing the Henry Louis Gates incident out of proportion. It was, on substance, one of the least essential things that has ever been uttered at a presidential press conference. BUT HE LOST CONTROL OF THE STORYLINE!

Finally, a win for the White House press room! But when you really look at it, it's not much. It's sort of like winning a reality-show challenge, in that it took a lot of hard work to do and yet didn't change the lives of anyone watching at home.

I mean, the end result of that whole incident was that it forced the president to drink a beer. Trust me, Ron Howard is not going to make a movie about this journalism.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Cindy Handler: Bipartisanship and Other Urban Legends

The Obama administration has pursued bipartisanship for so long without success that I'm ready to find the concept debunked on Snopes.com. Could it be any more obvious that the GOP leadership's current strategy is to deny the president a legislative victory -- of any kind, even if it means doing a 180 on what they've claimed to support in the past? They don't even try to keep it a secret; Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) recently admitted as much to a CNBC interviewer. When Democrats say "bipartisanship," the minority party hears "more years in the wilderness."

And the plan is working for them. If voters reject the Dems in November, it won't be because they legislated too far to the left or right: It will be because they were outflanked by their opposition, and didn't get to legislate at all. Americans hate weak leaders even more than ones who are wrong-headed, but steadfast: Witness the reelection of George W. Bush. Voters want the candidates they support to appear sure about what they're doing, because if they wanted to find someone who didn't know how to fix the country's problems, they could look in a mirror.

This isn't such a bad thing. The only ones surprised that people expect results from DC are legislators who ran to win job security. So while the GOP's ideas, or lack of them, aren't worth over-examining, their methods are. Whether they're setting the agenda or opposing it, here's what they do that the majority party needs to do, too:

• They get out in front of an issue and frame the debate. The Dems need their own Frank Luntz, someone who's equally good at concocting pithy phrases in a language lab. Faster than you can say "obstructionism," Republicans respond to thoughtful legislation like healthcare with wrongheaded but emotion-churning phrases like "death panels." This puts the Democrats, with their carefully-reasoned arguments, on the defensive. Then the President has to go out and deliver an impassioned, soaring speech to clarify his intentions. He inevitably impresses, but by then the waters have already been muddied. Berkeley professor of linguistics George Lakoff has made a career of this type of term-crafting, and should be Googled for inspiration. Whatever terms party leaders agree on, they should be repeated often, with the same iron discipline Republicans show -- minus the distortions and fabrications.

• They won't be shamed into cooperating. From what I can tell, a goal of the upcoming jobs legislation is, besides putting unemployed Americans back to work, to embarrass the inevitably naysaying Republicans into explaining why they hate jobs. But if history is a predictor, they're most likely going to frame their refusal in some kind of "It'll increase the deficit" or "I'm not going to advance a socialist agenda" nonsense. Then the Democrats will lapse into the default mode of going on the defensive, arguing amongst themselves and dropping the ball. The current GOP understands one thing, and that's, in the immortal words of Mr. Karl Rove, "Never apologize, never explain." That's why the Dems need to avail themselves of every procedural move at their disposal, because:

• Republicans wouldn't hesitate to do anything and everything they can to pass legislation they favor. To be fair, they believe that what they're doing is what the constituents who elected them want them to do. And for the same reason, Dems need to be just as ruthless. First, they should eliminate or seriously revise the procedural filibuster, which basically rewrites the Constitution to require 60 Senate votes for a bill's passage. Tom Harkin of Iowa says he intends to introduce legislation to reform this bill-killer, but he needs the support of his peers, not to mention voters' pressure on them. The Democrats should also use reconciliation, the procedure that requires 51 votes for passage of a bill, whenever possible. As David Plouffe recently editorialized in the Washington Post, nothing will bring American voters onboard the majority bandwagon like passing good legislation, even if it takes creative thinking to do it. For example, Minnesota's Al Franken has proposed some creative solutions to the Healthcare debate that involve reconciliation first, and continued fixes second.

The usual suspects would whine and stamp their feet, but they've proven that they intend to do that no matter what the Democrats do. So what do they have to lose?

Tony Blair’s Great Game: Toying With the Chilcot Investigation – Huffington Post (blog)

Daily Mail Tony Blair's Great Game: Toying With the Chilcot Investigation
Huffington Post (blog)
… being indicted for war crimes." George Bush and Tony Blair take heed: The world is watching, and we are not forgetting. Your age of impunity is over. …
<i>Gwynne Dyer:</i> Ignorance Blair's worst war crimeNew Zealand Herald

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Andrew Rubin: Healthcare Is Officially On The Back Burner

I received a disturbing phone call on my radio show this week (Healthcare Connect - Sirius 114/XM 119) from of a concerned listener in Iowa. She called to tell me how upset she was by a recent conversation she had with a staff member from Iowa Senator Charles Grassley's office. The caller, currently working, has a pre-existing condition, COBRA from her previous employer that is running out next month, and in spite of her underlying condition is currently healthy. Her current employer does not offer health insurance. (COBRA is federal legislation that mandates larger employers to continue to offer their health insurance plans to employees who no longer work for the company. The catch is the former employee must pay 100 percent of the premium). The caller was very nervous, as no insurer was willing to provide her coverage she could afford, nor would they cover her pre existing condition.

She decided to follow my advice and call Senator Grassley's office (and Senator Tom Harkin) to make sure they knew about her dire healthcare care situation and encourage them to pass some form of healthcare reform right away. She was scared of being without insurance and was rightfully looking for help from her elected officials. This is not someone who wanted to become dependent on her state for basic survival. She just wanted health insurance in case she got sick. Shockingly, the staff member from Senator's Grassley's office told her "healthcare is currently on the back burner." The Senator's office continued to suggest that if she was unable to find health insurance, she could always stop working and go on disability. Then after 2 years, she would be eligible for Medicare. This is a true story. It was disturbing to hear. Senator Grassley, who is a very intelligent man, was basically telling his constituents -- tough luck. He was not going to be working on a fix for the broken healthcare system right now. I will never understand how our nation can tolerate the current system.

Healthcare reform does not belong in any political party. It should be a national priority for all of us to work together to find solutions to our growing national tragedy. This week alone, thousands more lost their healthcare coverage. The numbers continue to grow each week. Further, as healthcare costs rise many more will lose their coverage as well. We cannot allow this to happen. Democrats must find a way to work with Republicans and Republicans must find a way to work with Democrats. Since we all know that is not working right now, we need to find a better way to send a message to our elected officials to stop the nonsense. Simply waiting for the election cycle to finish is not going to be sufficient. Just because the balance of power shifts back and forth in Washington does not mean we would be able to structurally solve the problems plaguing our healthcare system today.

Healthcare reform requires the voice of the country to demand we get something done. I believe the only way to make that happen is to start educating this country on what is really happening to so many Americans each and every day. We seem to be suffering from a "thank goodness it's not me syndrome." We feel terrible when we hear stories of people going bankrupt over healthcare bills or people going without basic medical care because they cannot afford the costs. Yet when it comes to fixing the problems, we turn a blind eye. What people need to understand is that so many of us are at risk. We live in a country where if we lose our jobs or do not make enough money, we lose our health insurance. Whether you are a factory worker or in a management position at a large company, we are all at the mercy of our employer. Even more unfortunate are those who have to navigate the health insurance markets on their own, as they do not have employer provided insurance.

The news media does not cover what is happening to so many. They report on the process in Washington. While that may be best for their ratings, who is responsible for educating the public? In the absence of good information, the conservative movement has scared many into believing government involvement in the healthcare system will cause great harm. If you are like my caller from earlier this week, you already know how bad the current system is. How can doing something be worse than doing nothing? It is an absurd argument.

As a healthcare executive working in one of the larger and more successful medical centers in this country, I can assure you that we can reform this system without destroying the best aspects of our healthcare system. We are always going to lead the world in medical discovery, innovation, and advancement. We will always train the best physicians and scientists. And, we will always be at the forefront of new medical technologies. These principles do not collide with removing waste from the system, ensuring everyone has health insurance, and has access to affordable quality healthcare. Demand your politicians get back to work and solve the healthcare crisis.

Do not let Senator Grassley tell us "it's on the back burner." We ALL deserve more than that - Republicans, Democrats, Independents, AMERICANS. No political party has the right to deny anyone access to affordable and quality healthcare. There are solutions. I will keep writing about them each week until the day no longer exists when I have to answer calls like I did this past week.

Ron Paul: Newest Tea Party Target

His son Rand's campaign for Senate in Kentucky is going better than anyone could have expected -- every Kentuckian I met at the National Tea Party Convention backed him -- but Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is drawing three primary opponents for his own re-election bid. Ironically, all three are from the Tea Party movement, which, as reporter Tom Benning points out, would be hard to imagine without the energy stirred up by Paul's 2008 presidential bid.

Tea Party associations aside, many of the challengers' criticisms echo concerns of Paul's past opponents: that he is too focused on his national ambitions; that his views are too extreme; that he doesn't support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that he votes "no" on everything, including federal aid for his district after Hurricane Ike.

Motorola Wins Mobile Ad Super Bowl - MediaPost Publications

Motorola Wins Mobile Ad Super Bowl
MediaPost Publications
... a mother bangs vainly on the door of her teen son's bedroom, a wife slaps her husband, a gay couple slap each other, and a guy fixing a gutter falls of ...

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Janet Murguía: New Report on the Latino Vote Should Be Bedside Reading for Any Politician

Despite the snow storm that closed down Washington, DC and the federal government today, our friends at America's Voice, an advocacy group working with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) to fight for realistic and comprehensive immigration reform, released a new report on the Latino vote in 2010. The report, The Power of the Latino Vote in the 2010 Elections (They Tipped Elections in 2008; Where Will They Be in 2010?) , shows among other things that in nearly 20% of U.S. House districts, Latinos make up more than 25% of the voters, and we are growing as a force throughout the country that every politician must respect if they are to win office. In addition to Frank Sharry, Executive Director and Founder of America's Voice, I was joined in a telephonic press conference this morning by Eliseo Medina, International Vice President of the nation's largest and fastest-growing labor union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who said that the new report should be bedside reading for any politicians seeking office this year.

Below is an excerpt of my opening statement at today's press conference:

America is a country of mutts, a lovable breed without a pure pedigree that has put together the best country there is. And Latinos have been a part of that story from day one, an integral part of America's past, present, and future.

Latinos are a national community and our vote matters. Although many think of Latinos only when they think of California, New York, or Texas, we are a growing part of the electorate everywhere. We are the fastest-growing population, and we are the youngest population.

We are not firmly Democratic, and we have not been definitively pushed away by Republicans yet. Our 18-year-olds are registering to vote, our immigrants are becoming new Americans, our citizens are turning out on Election Day, and the NCLR and its network of community-based organizations are working to ensure that that process continues and grows. What matters to us ought to matter to any wise politician seeking office.

Between 2004 and 2008 alone, Latino voting grew by 30%, adding more than two million voters to the American electorate (a change from 7.5 to 9.7 million). Just look at Senator Hagan's victory in North Carolina or Senator McCain's victory in the Florida GOP primary in 2008 and you can see that the Latino vote is a decisive factor in American politics.

As it is for all Americans, the economy is the biggest concern for Latinos. We want hard-hit communities to get the help they need, jobs that let us provide for our families with pride, and the ability to keep the home we worked so hard to achieve. We want health care that doesn't break the family bank, schools that work, and safe streets.

And there is something else we deeply care about: Respect. That is why immigration reform--and how it is debated and too often maligned--is so important to us.

Like all Americans, we are concerned about an immigration system in chaos that politicians continue to talk about but do painfully little to fix, actively thwarting or ignoring real solutions. We want a legal system with smart enforcement and laws that people follow, one that upholds our national values of family unity and hard work. A system where employers cannot undercut American jobs and wages. A system that once and for all rejects the notion that we can massively detain and deport a population about the size of Pennsylvania, and instead gets them on the books and paying taxes. Policy-wise, reform could not be more urgent.

And we also want a stop to the use of this issue to reject the everyday contributions of Latinos across the board and deny our place as brothers and sisters in the American family. These affronts have energized Latinos toward citizenship, toward the voting booth, and away from those who are demonizing this community.

That is why the hope for immigration reform has been a powerful force behind the Latino vote. Like all Americans voters, Latinos believe it's time for politicians to stop playing politics with a problem we could have solved a long time ago. And as all voters, we will hold accountable those in either party who engage in obstruction or avoidance.

Rep. Alan Grayson: The Story That No One Will Tell

The story that everyone wants to tell is that the Democratic Party is disheartened and disintegrating. Teabagger Republicans are juiced up and on top. Or so the media says, over and over again.

But the House candidate who raised the most money in the entire country during the last FEC reporting period -- $860,000 in three months -- is not a teabagger. He is not boosted relentlessly by Fox News. He's not even a Republican. He doesn't think that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, that President Obama was born in Kenya, or that global warming is a hoax.

This House candidate also, remarkably, had the largest number of contributors. Over 15,000 individuals contributed, many of whom have given time after time, whatever they could. The House candidate who raised the most money did so without French-kissing lobbyists, without flattering the idle rich, and without reaching into his own pocket.

The House candidate who raised the most money, from the most people, is an outspoken populist, who tells it like it is, on the war, on jobs, and on health care. His website is called CongressmanWithGuts.com. In the 100,000 e-mails that he has received this year, the most common refrain is, "You are saying what I've been thinking."

I know who he is. Because he's me.

But no one has reported that the House candidate who raised the most money, from the most people, is a proud Democratic populist. No one.

There are something like ten thousand political reporters in this country, maybe more. The information above is readily available. Anyone could have visited an official government website, www.fec.gov, any time this past week, and seen it for themselves. We did our part -- we sent out two news releases, both local and nationwide. But in lieu of any actual reporting in the media, there is instead what Simon & Garfunkel vividly described as the "Sounds of Silence":

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

The political reporters camped out in D.C. often act like a giant Xerox machine for the fib factory known as the national Republican Party. Recently, they saw fit to report (and repeat, and repeat) the Republican Party's crackpot claim that we are withholding a secret poll with bad news in it for us. (We aren't; there is no such poll, but the Republican Party is soooo good at manufacturing plausible lies.) Not one word from those reporters, though, about what would seem to be an irresistible "feel good" story -- that thanks to People Power, that brash, plain-spoken Democratic Congressman from Orlando is the Number One fundraiser in the country. Nothing about that.

The fact that an unapologetic progressive Democrat could amass such support, not by trading favors for money, but by striking a chord with so many ordinary people, refutes the pervasive meme of Democrats divided and despondent. Particularly when it's a Democrat who says that "you can't beat a Republican by being one." Particularly a Democrat who quotes Harry Truman and Howard Dean: "If you run a fake Republican against a real Republican, the real Republican will win every time."

Freshman Democrat Alan Grayson, number one in the country. The story that no one will tell. It doesn't fit their preconceptions. So you're just not going to hear about it.

Unless you happen to read the Huffington Post.

Tony Blair dismisses Iraq Inquiry as part of Britain’s ‘obsession with … – Daily Mail

Daily Mail Tony Blair dismisses Iraq Inquiry as part of Britain's 'obsession with …
Daily Mail
Speaking on Fox News he said critics of the war were obsessed with conspiracy theories, and refused to accept that his motives were 'genuine'. …

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Obama Admin Demands Answers From Anthem Blue Cross After Private Insurer Raises Rates 39%

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is asking the largest for-profit health insurer in California to "provide a detailed justification" for expected rate increases that could hike its consumers' premiums as much as 39 percent.

In a letter to Leslie Margolin, president of Anthem Blue Cross, Sebelius struck a harsh tone about the expected rate hike, which was reported this past weekend by the California press. Calling the expected 39-percent rate increases "extraordinary" and noting that they were "up to 15 times faster than inflation," the HHS Secretary asked for a detailed synopsis of how much of that money would go to medical care versus administrative costs.

"Your company's strong financial position makes these rate increases even more difficult to understand. As you know, your parent company, WellPoint Incorporated, has seen its profits soar, earning $2.7 billion in the last quarter of 2009 alone," Sebelius wrote.

"I believe Anthem Blue Cross has a responsibility to provide a detailed justification for these rate increases to the public," she added. "Policy holders in the individual market deserve to know if their premium increases would be invested in better medical care or insurance company overhead costs like salaries, profits, and advertising."

An official with HHS said that, as of early Monday afternoon, no response has yet been received. Sebelius did mention the reported rate hike during a speech before the Health Affair's National Health Policy Conference on Monday.

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that many of Anthem's "approximately 800,000 customers who buy individual coverage" could see the price of their plans go up starting on March 1 -- some by as much as 39 percent. People with group coverage aren't affected.

This isn't the first case of a health insurer jacking up rates to meet profit expectations. Back in December, the Huffington Post reported that Aetna was planning to force up to 650,000 clients to drop their coverage next year as it raised premiums starting in 2010.

Here is Sebelius's letter in full:

Leslie Margolin
President, Anthem Blue Cross
Delivered Via Fax

Dear Ms. Margolin,

One of the biggest pressures facing families, businesses and governments at every level are skyrocketing health insurance costs. With so many families already affected by rising costs, I was very disturbed to learn through media accounts that Anthem Blue Cross plans to raise premiums for its California customers by as much as 39 percent. These extraordinary increases are up to 15 times faster than inflation and threaten to make health care unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of Californians, many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet in a difficult economy.

Your company's strong financial position makes these rate increases even more difficult to understand. As you know, your parent company, WellPoint Incorporated, has seen its profits soar, earning $2.7 billion in the last quarter of 2009 alone.

I believe Anthem Blue Cross has a responsibility to provide a detailed justification for these rate increases to the public. Additionally, you should make public information on the percent of your individual market premiums that is used for medical care versus the percent that is used for administrative costs. Policy holders in the individual market deserve to know if their premium increases would be invested in better medical care or insurance company overhead costs like salaries, profits, and advertising. I am aware that the State of California is investigating this matter, and urge Anthem Blue Cross to cooperate fully. In the meantime, I will be closely monitoring the situation.

At a time when health care costs are a critical threat to families as well as the nation's economy, I hope you appreciate the urgent nature of this request. I look forward to your prompt reply.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Sebelius
Secretary of Health and Human Services