So where were we?

Oh yes. Recently (May 8th to be exact) I did a post on potty-mouthed golf caddy George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina who, for some reason, took offense when Sandra Fluke went on Twitter and voiced her support for a bill that would protect the rights of working women when they get pregnant.

Let’s relive The Magic That Is George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina When He Talks To The Ladies, shall we? :

And here is Sandra Fluke’s response to George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina’s aforementioned Magic with George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina ‘s return volley of More Magic:

I know… Nice, right?

Misunderstanding how the Twitter works, George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina seemed to think he was using his “inside voice” when speaking (twatting) to Ms. Fluke on Twitter only to find out, in a very round-about way, that she elected to retweet to her 36,000 followers what George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina had to say to her and she only did this because she is obviously racist against douchebags who like to shout stuff at ladies on the internet because, as we like to say: virtual manhood is better than no manhood at all. [cont'd.]

Anyway, that is where I came in when I screen-capped the whole exchange and made a post out of it, which brings us to last week when George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina decided to google himself on the internet and OH HOLY SHIT! he is now kind of semi-famous for Doing Internet Swears At Ladies and now that all that money he spent on eHarmony is just fucking wasted because ladies will not want to go on a date with him ever ever again besides the fact that all he ever wants to talk about is golf which is like the third gayest sport ever. Besides, also: boring.

So eight days after I shared The Magic of George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina he wrote an email to my patron d’art, as follows:

Whoever runs this site needs to take my damn comments off of it. I did not give you permission, nor did you ask me for it. It shows up on google and I will see a lawyer if this doesnt disappear. Ask me before posting bullshit about me. You fuckers had no right.

Sincerely,

George Tierney Jr

Adorable, right?

Jane responded:

Dear Mr. Tierney,

It is site policy to establish that you are actually George Tierney, and not someone claiming to be him, in order to engage you on this matter further. Please have your lawyer confirm that you are in fact the George Tierney referred to in the post and I will be happy to discuss the matter with him. My contact information is below.

Annnnnd ….. Mr. Tierney responded:

You dont get to make the rules. I am the george tierney that made the comments to sandra fluke, not to you..take it off google. If it goes to a lawyer, it will be settled in court, with me getting paid.

Sincerely,

George Tierney Jr

Yes. This is true. We are NOT The Boss Of George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina and we DO NOT Make The Rules in much the same way that George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina does not make up THE MAGIC LAWS OF THE INTERNET that say that you cannot

• point at and make fun of

• be sad about

• heh, indeed

…something that someone says in a public forum.

Having said, that, and because we are all about trying to help people be better people, we are willing to update the offending post if George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina makes a public apology to Sandra Fluke, and not one of those bullshit, ” I apologize if you were offended because I called you a under-rock-dwelling dick sucking cunt” kind of apologies. No, that would not do.

Also, too, stop doing this.

Additionally he could make a substantial but not ostentatious contribution to Planned Parenthood in Sandra Fluke’s name.

Yes, that would be nice. For that we would totally consider updating the Google for him.

Good Morning and welcome to our live coverage of the NATO Summit in Chicago, today looks to be action packed with a full agenda for attendees and activists. So far we have seen the full force of the police state with preemptive arrest, terrorism charges and vicious police brutality.

Today is sure to bring more of the same with the largest march of the weekend kicking off the days events. CANG8 will start the day off breaking out into contingents holding rallies in Grant Park and converging on the sight of the summit the McCormick Convention Center. Among the days speakers and performers are Tom Morrello, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Madea Benjamin and Mumia Abu Jamal. We look forward to giving up to the minute coverage of the days events.

If you are looking to follow what’s going on on twitter follow the Hash Tags #CANG8 #nonato #M20 #nato

9:34am – Occupy Chicago gathering at Jackson and LaSalle in preparation for march to Grant Park to join the massive #CANG8 March

10:00am – @OccupyChicago Reports that the 6 occupiers arrested yesterday, including SM member @PhilipDeVon1, have been released & are back on the streets! #noNATO #M20

11:00am- www.ustream.tv/channel/boyboy142 Check it Out Live Stream from Chicago protesters en route to Grant Park

11:20am- www.ustream.tv/occupiedair is now streaming protesters going over horror stories of yesterdays events preparing for CANG8 March starting soon.

11:41 am- www.livestream.com/chicagoindymedia is now broadcasting a press briefing with Reverend Jesse Jackson and others who will be speaking at todays #CANG8  March and Rally [cont'd.]

For reasons only he and his producers can fathom, NBC’s Meet the Press host, David Gregory, thought it would be edifying to feature a debate about the economy and budget issues between two men who don’t have a clue about how to help the economy and who differ only in degree about how much Congress should pass measures that will hurt growth, put more people out of work, leave more people uninsured, and reduce more people’s wages and retirement incomes.

The so-called “debate” featured the GOP’s ultimate flim-flam con artist, Representative Paul Ryan. Ryan champions cutting programs to protect the poor and middle class, and non-military government programs in general, while slashing taxes for the rich, effectively transferring trillions from the losing group to the rich winners, and making America’s scandalous inequality even more obscene. You can only do that and claim to reduce the long-run debt by effectively cancelling most of the federal government’s non-military programs. Of course, that’s the point.

In a first segment, Ryan claims illogically that unless we extend the Bush Tax Cuts, we face a debt crisis, which would be Obama’s fault. So, if taxes go up, we have a debt crisis? Huh? But it went right over Gregory’s head.

And to make sure no one draws the obviously logical conclusion about the failure of European austerity, Ryan and fellow deficit hysterics have been insisting that we should follow Europe’s austerity policies, even though it’s now clear we’d wind up with the same predictable failed outcomes of declining growth and higher unemployment that Europe now faces from following Ryan’s prescriptions. When you hear logic so completely turned up-side-down, it’s time again to head for the sock drawer for things to throw at your tv.

So to have a decent debate with this kind of nonsense, one need only oppose Mr. Ryan with any decent human being, someone who actually cares about the effects of government policies on ordinary Americans and who can follow the news from Europe’s austerity catastrophe and draw logical conclusions. But instead, Mr. Gregory chose Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, just another representative afflicted with the same hysteria who can’t follow simple logic. Durbin left the principles of the Democratic Party years ago but neglected to tell anyone, and Gregory apparently doesn’t know the difference.

Durbin chides Ryan for not supporting the Bowles/Simpson proposals, which he fronts as a reasonable compromise approach. Well, if the choice is between destroying government and only crippling it somewhat, I suppose Bowles-Simpson is a “compromise.”

To review the B-S plan, after misdiagnosing the causes of long-run deficits — private health care costs (not public “entitlements”) — B-S prescribes unhelpful remedies, including significant but unspecified cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (and lots of other stuff) and unspecified revenue increases. B-S assumes there is a looming debt crisis, but that issue is the one most doubtful. Rather than fundamentally improve America’s scandalous, deliberately enforced inequality in the allocation of income and wealth, B-S would make it worse. The B-S proposal consists of essentially long-standing GOP remedies, now no longer fashionable with the GOP, with a predictable drag on the economy, while proposing nothing to alter ongoing looting by America’s financial elites. So the “compromise” is between what the GOP used to believe and what they now claim to believe. Notice anything missing?

And the winner of this faux debate between dumb/duplicitous and dumber/clueless is . . . America’s financial elites, some part of which will now sponsor this show. You lose.

Earlier this week, I lectured at two public high school classes in the San Fernando Valley. While I prefer to attempt to have discussions or conversations with these classes, I use the term "lecture" on purpose. Each of the classes I met with had over 40 students packed somewhat like sardines into a portable classroom on the edge of the school grounds. And while the drastic underfunding of our public education system isn't the focal point here, I got treated firsthand to the consequences of the drastic budget cuts facing our state: in each case, our one hour of government class had expired long before every student who desired to was able to ask a question, much less engage in any substantial in-depth discussion about any particular issue.

Right-wingers are alarmed and desperate about the political ramifications of the reports that non-Hispanics whites now account for fewer than half of all births in the United States. If the groups of high-schoolers I talked to were indicative, their concern is rightly founded. The group of students I talked to in both classes were mostly of Latino or Asian descent. Most of them were not politically motivated in a significant way, but when it came time to actually discuss where each party stood on the issues, there was very little love in those classrooms for the positions of the Republican Party.

If anyone was wondering about how President Obama's announcement supporting marriage equality would impact things beyond the extra money and enthusiasm he may draw from a more motivated base, they need look no further than our nation's high schools. Whenever I started off asking what the main differences were between the Democrats and Republicans, marriage equality was always the first issue discussed: Democrats and President Obama supported it, they said—accompanied by spontaneous applause from a handful of the students—while Republicans and Mitt Romney oppose it. It goes without saying that one day of lecturing in a suburban high school in Los Angeles constitutes anecdotal evidence from an infinitesimal sample, but it still constitutes an interesting lesson: would these same students have claimed that the Democratic Party supported marriage equality even the previous week, before President Obama had made his historic announcement? Therein lies a key consequence: for better or for worse, depending on the region and demographic, Obama's stance has put the entire Democratic Party on record, and formed a definitive contrast between the parties, instead of uncertainty and half-measures.

The second most popular issue? Immigration reform. If the high school students I observed were in any way indicative of the population at large, the Republican Party needs to seriously rethink its approach to immigration if it wants to have a chance at earning any support from the ever-increasing Latino population in this country. These students were not only aware of what was happening across the nation in terms of new immigration enforcement policies, but were also aware of which political party was leading the drive to enact them. In my drive to avoid proselytizing and simply present the facts as best as I could, I concurred; I explained that it was the consensus opinion among Democrats to support a path toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants, while Republicans generally opposed it. In a moment of repartee that was at the same time shocking but not surprising, one of the students responded to my explanation of the Republican position by muttering only somewhat under her breath, "because they're racists." That's a message to Joe Arpaio, the authors of SB1070, and anti-immigrant legislators everywhere: when that young lady is old enough to vote, she and millions like her will simply never vote for your team. Ever. Congratulations.

In the end, it didn't matter what issues we discussed: whether it was access to contraceptives and abortion, the cost of education, marijuana legalization, or ending foreign occupations, these students were much more likely to take the progressive point of view. But here, there lies a valuable lesson for the Democratic Party: these students understood that the Republicans were against all of these things they cared about. But they did not feel that Democrats were necessarily for them. When these students become voters, they may never choose to align with Republicans; but whether they choose to align with Democrats as anything more than out of opposition to Republicanism could depend on how good a job we do on taking a definitive stand on some of these issues and educating people about those positions.

But by far the highlight of my experience? The precocious youngster who responded to my question about the differences between Democrats and Republicans by claiming that Republicans wanted to impose austerity as an economic policy, which isn't the correct response in a recession. It was all the proof I needed that even in the darkest of times, there is still hope in the world.

William Galston is a noted scholar (formerly the Saul Stern Professor and Dean at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland) and experienced political hand (Bill Clinton's Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy in the '90s) who is currently the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

This past week, Dr. Galston released a white paper, titled "Six Months to Go: Where the Presidential Contest Stands as the General Election Begins." It caught my attention since that's a topic of great interest to us, and I was pleased to see some familiar themes (see Things that matter in the presidential election, and things that don't) covered in the paper.

Six topics in particular were the focus:

• An examination of polling results and public attitudes toward both candidates and important issues of the day.

It remains to be seen whether the negative perceptions of Romney that resulted from the nominating contest will endure. For the time being, at least, Obama enjoys a sizeable advantage on a host of personal qualities. He has a narrow edge in most of the key swing states. And his path to 270 electoral votes is easier than Romney’s. In short, he begins the general election contest with a modest advantage, which adverse developments at home or abroad could eliminate or even reverse. The 2012 election will be hotly contested, and the victor’s margin is unlikely to approach Obama’s seven-point edge in 2008.

Reflecting diminished confidence in government and public life, younger Americans are more likely to view the American dream as resulting from personal achievement. They are also less likely to give priority to ensuring opportunity for all members of society. Because they cannot rely on government for financial security, they experience increased pressure to provide for themselves and their families. But they are not confident that they will be able to do so if current trends continue.

Every survey finds that economic issues dominate public concerns. The most recent survey of the Pew Research Center asked respondents to rank eighteen issues on a four-point scale from “very” to “not at all” important. Eighty-six percent said that the economy was very important, with jobs a close second at 84 percent. By contrast, four hot-button social issues—immigration (42 percent), abortion (39 percent), birth control (34 percent), and gay marriage (28 percent)—came in at the bottom.

The election of 2012 takes place against the backdrop of a political system that is more polarized along partisan and ideological lines than it has been for many decades—indeed, if standard political science measures are correct, since the 1890s. This fact has already reshaped the campaigns of both the president and his challenger.

It appears that 2012 will be more like 2004—a classic mobilization election—than either 1992 or 1996. Like George W. Bush, Barack Obama has turned out to be a polarizing president who has induced many voters to choose sides very early in the process. So the enthusiasm of core supporters—their motivation to translate their preferences into actual votes—will make a big difference.

The focus of this paper thus far has been on the national electorate. But of course we do not have national elections. As the 2000 election painfully reminded us, the structural difference between the national popular vote and state-by-state results can sometimes be consequential.

But it is important to keep 2000 in perspective. The Electoral College comes into play only when the popular vote is narrowly divided. If a candidate wins the popular vote by as little as 2 percent, it is very unlikely that the loser can win a majority of the electoral votes.

(Continued below the fold)

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of Security

Welcome to the Firedoglake Book Salon. For the next two hours, we’ll be talking to Kip Hawley. Hawley was the TSA administrator from mid 2005 to early 2009. He has a new book, Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American Security, that chronicles his time at the TSA. For most of us, the TSA is our only contact with the “war on terror,” and I’m sure we’ll have a lot of talk about that.

I’m Bruce Schneier, and I’ll be your host. I’m a security technologist and author who has written extensively about airline security, terrorism, and security in general. Hawley and I have debated several times in the past, most notably in this Q&A from 2007 and in The Economist earlier this year. Hawley reviewed my latest book, Liars and Outliers, on his blog earlier this week.

I have just finished reading Permanent Emergency, and I learned a lot about the TSA and their approach to airport security — stuff I had never seen before. I can’t even begin to summarize it here; perhaps the best thing you can read to get up to speed on Hawley’s thinking is his op ed for The Wall Street Journal from last month. My commentary on it is here.

Please ask away. Probing is good. Challenging is good. We’re not the mainstream media and we’re not going to limit this to softball questions, but I’d like the conversation to remain civil. I have some questions prepared to get things started but we’re counting on you.

Okay, go!

(photo: MCS@flickr/flickr)

In a blogpost discussing the push by many groups to get a financial transactions tax the Post told readers:

The White House believes it would be easy to evade, could hamper economic growth, and might make markets more volatile, not less so. Instead, Obama has proposed a new “financial crisis responsibility fee” on big banks, which would raise about $61 billion.

While it is not clear how the Post knows what the White House really believes, what we know is that financial transactions taxes are apparently not that easy to evade. The tax in the UK, which applies only to stocks (not derivative instruments like credit default swaps, options, and futures) raises between 0.2 and 0.3 percent of GDP annually. This would be between $30-$45 billion a year in the United States. Unless we assume that the Obama administration thinks our tax collectors are much less competent than those in the UK, then they presumably do not really “believe” that the tax will be easy to evade.

The reference to economic growth refers to outdated research by the European Commission (EC). The most recent study by the EC (sorry, no link) shows that a tax would lead to somewhat more rapid growth if the money was used either to reduce other taxes or finance public investment.

If the White House has any evidence that the tax would increase volatility they are keeping it secret from the world. The tax would simply raise transactions costs back to where they were 10-15 years ago. Financial markets were not obviously more volatile in 1995 than they are today.

Finally, the “financial crisis responsibility fee” proposed by the Obama administration would raise an order of magnitude less tax revenue than the financial transactions taxes of the size generally being proposed. The Obama administration surely understands that they are pushing a tax that will have much less impact on the financial sector and will raise much less revenue than a financial transactions taxes.

The Post does not know what the White House “believes” about financial transactions taxes. It knows what it says about financial transactions taxes. While what it says may reflect what it believes, it may also reflect the fact that the administration is hoping to raise money for its re-election campaign from Wall Street. Also, many officials in the administration may hope to work on Wall Street after leaving the administration. These are the facts that we know.

###

Economist Dean Baker is co-founder of Center for Economic Policy and Research and writes regularly on CEPR’s Beat the Press blog, where this post first appeared.

What welcome news; and it clarifies and underscores that the social justice movement will not be divided by NOM, race-baiters, and anti-equality activists that try to conflate church and state and court communities of color in a divide and conquer strategy. At a Miami meeting of civil rights organization’s board of directors, the NAACP voted to support marriage equality. Its statement:

“The mission of the NAACP has always been to ensure political, social and economic equality of all people,” said Roslyn M. Brock, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP. “We have and will oppose efforts to codify discrimination into law.”

“Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP. “The well-funded right wing organizations who are attempting to split our communities are no friend to civil rights, and they will not succeed.”

The NAACP has addressed civil rights with regard to marriage since Loving v. Virginia declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in 1967. In recent years, the NAACP has taken public positions against state and federal efforts to ban the rights and privileges for LGBT citizens, including strong opposition to Proposition 8 in California, the Defense of Marriage Act, and most recently, North Carolina’s Amendment 1, which changed the state constitution’s to prohibit same sex marriage.0

Below is the text of the resolution passed by the NAACP board of directors:

The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the “political, education, social and economic equality” of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment.

Some reactions…

Rea Carey, Executive Director, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force: [cont'd.]

“This is truly a historic moment as the NAACP — the nation’s oldest civil rights organization — takes an official and unequivocal stand for marriage equality. As the country’s oldest national LGBT rights group, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force could not be more thrilled.

“We are also not surprised by the leadership exhibited once again by the NAACP. Just a few months ago, NAACP President Ben Jealous stood before 3,000 LGBT rights activists at our Creating Change Conference and spoke powerfully and poignantly about the ties of conscience and courage that bind us. ‘The NAACP and the LGBT movement have fought together for social justice since Bayard Rustin planned the March on Washington in 1963,’ he told the crowd. ‘He was a black gay hero who wrote the textbook on mobilizing the masses for jobs and freedom.’

“We are proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the NAACP working together on the many issues that affect all of our lives. Whether it be fair access to education and jobs, an end to voter suppression and racial profiling, the right to love and be who we are free of discrimination — these issues affect all of us, our families and our country. Today the NAACP did what it does so well — inspires and affirms our common humanity.”

GLAAD:

“For more than 103 years, the NAACP has been a leading advocate and a voice for members of marginalized communities. Today’s announcement represents their continued stance against the discrimination that LGBT families face. We applaud President Ben Jealous and the NAACP Board of Directors for their leadership on this issue,” said GLAAD President Herndon Graddick. “Across races, faith traditions, and political persuasions, a majority of our culture recognizes that denying gay couples the chance at happiness that comes with being married is unfair and un-American.”

The NAACP’s recent statement affirming same-sex couples reflects the latest data polling data that shows a significant increase in support for marriage equality among African Americans.

-This week, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that since President Obama declared his support of marriage equality, “54 percent express a favorable view of his position on the issue,” compared to “just 41 percent of African-Americans supported gay marriage in ABC/Post polls in mid-2011 and early 2012.”

-A Public Policy Polling survey found “a noticeable shift in the attitudes of African Americans in North Carolina toward rights for gay couples in the wake of President Obama’s announcement. -A NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released in March 2012 showed support for marriage equality among African Americans at 50 percent.

-A Field Poll of California voters released in February 2012 found that 53 percent of Latino and 50 percent of African-American respondents approved of allowing same-sex couples to marry.

Last week, GLAAD joined “NoWedge 2012: A Memo to Black America,” a movement among Black civil rights and faith leaders in response to anti-LGBT tactics to “drive a wedge between gays and Blacks” as first reported by the Human Rights Campaign. Launching at Covenant Baptist Church in Washington, DC, the Black community and faith leaders issued a national declaration regarding the need for an organized, unified response to combat attempts steered at creating tensions with Black and LGBT communities.

HRC:

“We could not be more pleased with the NAACP’s history-making vote today – which is yet another example of the traction marriage equality continues to gain in every community,” said HRC President Joe Solmonese. “It’s time the shameful myth that the African-American community is somehow out of lockstep with the rest of the country on marriage equality is retired – once and for all. The facts and clear momentum toward marriage speak for themselves.”

Evan Wolfson, Founder and President, Freedom to Marry:

“The NAACP has long been the nation’s conscience and champion for an America where all share equally in the promise of liberty and justice for all. Today the NAACP resoundingly affirmed that the freedom to marry is a civil right and family value that belongs to all of us, and that discriminatory barriers to marriage must fall. The toxic tactics of anti-gay groups like NOM to ‘drive a wedge between blacks and gays’ will be washed away in the wave of righteous affirmation.”

Marylanders for Marriage Equality’s Josh Levin:

We could not be more pleased with the NAACP board decision to support marriage equality. It is yet again reflective of the growing momentum within the African-American community –like all communities – to support stronger families and protect children.
The NAACP- Baltimore Branch has been part of our coalition from the beginning, as has Chairman Emeritus of the NAACP, Dr. Julian Bond. Churches and African-American pastors have spoken out in favor of civil marriage. And anecdotally through our field work, President Obama’s historic endorsement of marriage equality is changing people’s minds.

The signs are clear: A majority of all Marylanders – people of all backgrounds – support making families stronger and protecting all children equally under the law.

Family Equality Council:

“The NAACP’s vote today in favor of marriage equality is clearly also a vote in support of our families,” said Family Equality Council Executive Director Jennifer Chrisler. “LGBT couples raising children in our country are more likely to be people of color and today they can take comfort knowing they are part of two strong communities who share a common goal of fairness and freedom for all American families.”

The National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC):

“As a Life Member of the NAACP, I am happy to see the organization join the President of the United States in ‘evolving’ and follow the powerful example of civil rights icons and Black voices like Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery, Julian Bond, Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and others who have said committed LGBT couples and families deserve the same protections as everyone else,” says Sharon Lettman-Hicks, NBJC Executive Director and CEO. “Family is the epicenter of Black life, community and culture. For Black LGBT people, its importance is just as great.”

Studies show that Black lesbian partners parent at almost the same rate as Black heterosexual couples. In comparison to their white counterparts, both Black gay and lesbian couples are more likely to be raising children. Robbed of the 1,138 federal protections and benefits available to married couples, including Social Security survivors benefits, Medicaid spend-down protections, and workers’ compensation, Black same-sex families are disproportionately put in harm’s way. Despite these challenges, Black gay men and lesbians continue to care for children in need of a loving and supportive home. According to the LGBT Families of Color: Facts at a Glance Report,same-sex partners who become foster parents are more likely to be families of color than among heterosexual married couples. Yet 40 states plus the District of Columbia are silent on fostering by LGBT parents, while 2 states restrict it. Same-sex couples also face uncertainty about joint adoption in 28 states and are prohibited entirely in 5 other states.

“Outdated anti-gay laws and mindsets disproportionately undermine Black families,” adds Lettman-Hicks. “When you deny loving and committed same-sex couples equal protection under the law, you’re inflicting an even greater blow on LGBT families of color whose challenges are compounded by both race and orientation.

As a voice of Black leadership, the NAACP can help the country understand that the fight for equality isn’t about ‘Black vs. gay,’ but that there are loving couples and families at the intersection who are a part of the Black/African American narrative.”

• Greece will go to the polls again June 17 to elect a government that will either continue austerity or default and start fresh. Expect bankers to push the meme in the global media that if Greece does not destroy its own people, Western Civilization will collapse.
  
• President Obama lifted sanctions on Burma or Myanmar, whichever you prefer. Quite frankly, the entire Myanmar policy amounts to a major diplomatic coup for the president and Secretary Clinton.
  
• More signs that President Obama's sactions regime against Iran is taking its toll:
  

  Inflation is now officially running at about 20 per cent, although economists say prices of the goods most Iranians worry about are rising at a much faster rate.

  "This budget will deflate the economy. To have what is almost zero growth with a growing population like Iran's, in real terms the country is going to contract severely. It is a truly bad situation," added Emadi.

• North Korea appears to be up to its old habits:
  

  Ten thousand rolls of tobacco, 12 bottles of sake and a handful of second-hand Mercedes-Benz cars are among the latest reported breaches of a UN ban on luxury goods sales to North Korea, according to a confidential draft UN report.

  Guess who that stuff is for.
  
• Syria remains unstable. President Obama calls for political change, but stops short of military involvement.
• It is a good time to go to London if you can manage it. Soon, the Oylmpic Games will begin.

• Greece will go to the polls again June 17 to elect a government that will either continue austerity or default and start fresh. Expect bankers to push the meme in the global media that if Greece does not destroy its own people, Western Civilization will collapse.
  
• President Obama lifted sanctions on Burma or Myanmar, whichever you prefer. Quite frankly, the entire Myanmar policy amounts to a major diplomatic coup for the president and Secretary Clinton.
  
• More signs that President Obama's sactions regime against Iran is taking its toll:
  

  Inflation is now officially running at about 20 per cent, although economists say prices of the goods most Iranians worry about are rising at a much faster rate.

  "This budget will deflate the economy. To have what is almost zero growth with a growing population like Iran's, in real terms the country is going to contract severely. It is a truly bad situation," added Emadi.

• North Korea appears to be up to its old habits:
  

  Ten thousand rolls of tobacco, 12 bottles of sake and a handful of second-hand Mercedes-Benz cars are among the latest reported breaches of a UN ban on luxury goods sales to North Korea, according to a confidential draft UN report.

  Guess who that stuff is for.
  
• Syria remains unstable. President Obama calls for political change, but stops short of military involvement.
• It is a good time to go to London if you can manage it. Soon, the Oylmpic Games will begin.

I’ll get to the Rachel Maddow clip in a bit.

Here is how you make America dumber, one Sunday at a time. First you show a clip of some politician making a speech. You then have a CNN (or ABC, CBS, NBC) panelist critique a segment of the speech, but do it in a misleading “balanced” way to avoid appearing to take sides between the politician that just lied and the other party. Someone says, “tsk tsk,” and then you move on.

On Candy Crowley’s CNN show this a.m., the politician was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio is shown complaining that the Obama Administration was trying to divide Americans, rich against poor, men against women. It’s a standard GOP attack line. But the facile Senator gets excited, adding this may be the most divisive Administration in history.

Heavens! Enter Dana Bash, who calmly explained that while politicians may indeed try to divide the electorate, it was an exaggeration to claim this was the most divisive in history, because sometime in our history, left undefined, someone must have been worse. Tsk, tsk. End of discussion. They move on as Candy Crowley nods approvingly at the balanced wisdom displayed.

So what did we just learn? First, while Marco Rubio may have stretched the point a bit, because there must have been some pretty awful dividers, unnamed, it’s still true that the Democrats and Obama Administration are trying to divide the rich from the poor and men from women.

Now let’s bring in the facts that did not penetrate this morning’s discussion.

First, the main reason Republican politicians, especially Romney VP wannabes, are making the men versus women argument is because the polls tell them that Barack Obama has a significant edge over Mitt Romney among women voters. It seems women may believe the Republican Party is conducting a war on women’s reproductive (and employment) rights. So the counter-strategy is both to deny the GOP is waging such a war and to insist the whole issue is a fabrication meant to divide America.

Second, the likely reason many women are coming to this conclusion about the GOP is because it’s true. As Maddow has shown us night after night, in state after state, GOP legislators and Governors have proposed and often enacted restrictions on women’s reproductive rights. There have been hundreds of such bills, with new ones almost every week. Meanwhile, Catholic Bishops, who are actively working to suppress the moral views and actions of women Catholics, are claiming that any efforts to advance women’s reproductive rights are an attack on religious freedom. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum et ilk fully endorsed the Bishop’s male-domination views. In other words, women aren’t stupid, and they know when their rights, lives, and dignity are under attack.

What about dividing rich from poor? Again, the GOP worries that so-called “populist” views might work, but all the President has said is that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes as we cut Medicare and Social Security, and that it’s not fair if very wealthy people pay less than their secretaries. He hasn’t said the rich are evil or immoral nor encouraged Americans to burn down Mitt Romney’s mansions. If anything, he’s been oversolicitous to the rich — it’s okay to be rich, we don’t begrudge them, etc. — and depressingly timid in efforts to protect the unemployed or address inequality.

In the meantime, study after study shows that a hugely disproportionate share of America’s increased income and wealth over the last two decades has gone to the top 1% or 0.1%, while the middle class stagnated or fell behind. Inequality is now as bad as before the Great Depression and ranks the US embarrassingly low world wide. And yet the GOP position is adamantly opposed to any efforts to ask more of the rich and address the poverty and suffering on the other side.

Senator Rubio’s point is that pointing out these facts is meant to divide Americans, pitting the rich against the poor. In other words, telling the truth about things that are hurting the country is divisive per se. Uh, no, denying these realities on all sides by the media is what’s hurting the country.

And remember, Marco Rubio is the guy who is so embarrassed by his own Party’s attacks on immigrants that he tried, unsuccessfully, to convince his colleagues to pass a watered down version of the DREAM Act, hoping to get the GOP to stop alienating the fastest growing minority in the US.

There are clear efforts to divide Americans and to do so by lies and evasions, but to see who’s doing that, Mr. Rubio needs to borrow the GOP mirror. The fact is, Marco Rubio just told several outrageous lies in that short segment about who is dividing the country and why.

But all of that completely escaped Candy Crowley and her top analyst Dana Bash, who told us that Mr. Rubio was just exaggerating a bit, tsk, tsk, but his fundamental claim that Obama/Dems are trying to divide Americans is true.

That section was follow by a commercial from America’s coal industry, in which the sponsors tell us, amidst pretty pictures, that “clean coal” could supply America for hundreds of years. Of course, they don’t point out that “clean” and “coal” do not belong in the same sentence — preposterous lie #1 — and the only way coal can regain its status in America’s electric power industry is if the coal boys convince the EPA to impose on the gas boys the same types of emission restrictions for public health and safety that the coal industry has managed to escape while insisting regulations, and not the unregulated gas boys, are cleaning their clocks.

It’s possible there are more lies told on Sunday’s Talking Head shows than any day of the week, but I’ve lost count.

Death and the Miser by Jan Provoost

The housing crisis provides a good example. The problem is that people owe mortgages they can’t afford, either because the interest rates are too high or because they lost their jobs and have substantially less income. At the same time, housing prices have plunged, putting many homeowners underwater. That makes people feel like debt slaves, with all their income going to pay off something that will never be worth what they paid. For many people, that sense of misery is reinforced by the feeling that they are powerless to protect their families and themselves from predatory banking practices.

There are direct solutions. The government could give homeowners the right to cram down the mortgages in Chapter 13 cases, giving them equivalent rights to those enjoyed by their Corporate Person peers. There are a number of solutions even more forceful. But no. The President backed down from his campaign promises on cramdown, and the Democrats in Congress refused to consider any solutions that would require lenders to share in the losses they helped to create. Homeowners were left powerless to negotiate with lenders. We got HAMP and HARP and the foreclosure fraud settlement, all designed to encourage predator lenders to solve the problems they created. Pushing on a string doesn’t work.

The collapse of demand in the consumer economy could be solved with direct action. President Obama’s economic advisers pushed for big tax cuts, which, they said, would be spent in the consumer economy and provide a demand bump. That didn’t happen. People wisely chose to devote all their discretionary money towards debt reduction, including paying for underwater mortgages. Or they saved the money, rightly concerned that their retirement portfolios were damaged and that they would need even more money as both parties claimed that we couldn’t afford to pay for Social Security and Medicare. Giving people a tiny bit of extra money was pushing on a string. It didn’t work.

The money directly spent by government to create demand for labor worked exactly as predicted, and gave a push towards recovery. But conservatives in both parties hate that idea, because it shows that government is valuable. There won’t be more direct spending.

With fiscal policy sidelined by a two-party consensus, the Federal Reserve Board tried quantitative easing, flooding the economy with cash, buying financial assets at a ferocious pace. The idea is that banks will lend all that money to corporations which will spend money and hire more people. More string pushing. We got a staggering increase in the amount of money sloshing around in banks and in the stock market. Gillian Tett reports in the Financial Times:

At a meeting of corporate treasurers Thursday, those wails were echoed again: US groups are now stuffed with cash (more than $2tn at last count), but are finding it harder than ever to find anywhere to invest it.

She reports hearing that Brazilian investors are buying US Treasuries for safety, at negative real interest rates, even though Brazil needs infrastructure investments that would provide much higher long-term returns. In his introduction to our Book Salon with Paul Krugman, George Grantham gave us this chart:

Banks are required to maintain a certain amount of money as reserves. In normal times, they can buy safe investments, treasuries, for example, to hold that money and make a small profit. Now, however, they store the money at the Fed, where it earns a minimal interest rate. That $1.6 trillion at the Fed includes $126 billion in excess of required reserves at those banks. That’s $126 billion more dollars that isn’t in the economy in the form of loans. Banks can’t lend it out, because there isn’t any demand for loans, and why would there be when corporations have $2 trillion in loose money?

Bloomberg reports:

Total deposits at institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. rose to about $10.2 trillion at the end of last year from $8.2 trillion in the third quarter of 2007. In the same period, total loans fell to $7.5 trillion from $7.7 trillion. Securities in bank portfolios rose to $2.9 trillion from $2 trillion, according to FDIC data.

So JPMorgan takes in $360 billion in deposits it can’t lend, and tries to invest it. They have to provide a return higher than treasuries, which means increasing their risk of loss. They have to do something to protect against loss, which means hedging. They are already a huge part of the hedging world, and it was easy to trap them in a bad hedge. The net result was a transfer of money from JPMorgan’s shareholders to the investors in a bunch of hedge funds. It didn’t help the economy, it didn’t solve the demand problem. It just rearranged the holdings of all that money.

The idea behind quantitative easing, and indeed, behind the entire program of salvaging the banks, was that they are this wonderful engine of allocating capital to its highest and best uses. So we flood them with money, and they’ll lend it out and the economy will get going. Pushing on a string. It doesn’t work..

The stupid idea that we can provide incentives to rich people to act in the interests of society has failed and has made things a lot worse.

We need direct government action: direct spending, and direct rejection of economic policies that have never worked anywhere at any time.

It is well understood that Democrats do not like Mitt Romney's policies. In fact, our leading politicians will go out of their way, as we Democrats are wont to do, to praise Mitt Romney's character. We practice the rather high minded view that our disagreement with him and his party is not personal, but purely a matter of phiolosophical and political differences. We think it is impolite to call Mitt Romney "weird." That it is unseemly to ask questions about his church or the things taught from its pulpits. We cannot attack the character of his family or his associates. We think ourselves better than this sort of thing, content in being able to look at ourselves in the morning for not having gone done the road Republicans often do not hesitate to travel. Speaking for myself, however, my perception of Mitt Romney has almost nothing to do with his policies, most of which are standard nutcase Republican fare. There are plenty of other Republicans who parrot the same talking points as Mitt Romney, but they don't get up to the top of my thermometer. I even find Limbaugh a mere bufoon. But there is so much about Mitt Romney that makes me detest him more than any public figure I've known in my life. In my mind he's the worst kind of person that should be involved in politics. It basically comes down to this: Mitt Romney has spent his entire life preying on the weak and defenseless, always from a position of complete safety for himself. In other words, he's a coward.

His propensity for lying is well known. His lack of any central convictions about anything other than his own ambitions well documented. As he's run for the highest office in the land, we are now getting enough stories about his life that allow us to examine it as a whole. Consider his willingness in his youth to engage in violent hazing with a gang of similary privliged ruffians against a defenseless outsider. Consider his callous mistreatment of his own household pets. Think back about the episode when Romney talked about how illegal immigrants ended up maintaining his lawn and his open hostility toward them today. Consider how harshly he has treated his own employees when money was at stake. Look at how he has treated his fellow competitors for the Republican nomination. In every case, Romney has always attacked the weak with particular viciousness. In every case, Romney has kept his distance, doing it all from the comfort of an office tower or lordly estate. Do you think Mitt Romney would personally deliver a pink slip to a steelworker? Would he personally walk up to a gardner and fire him to his face? Would he attack a gay person without a pack of toughs behind him? He offers $10,000 bets to people who don't have $10,000 to bet. He braggs about the joy he takes in firing people. Worse thing about it is, he does it in a way that makes it appear that he truly believes that he's doing you a favor. "Pranks and hijinks," he says. "Politics aren't bean bags," he says. An overbearing gorilla calls a woman a slut over the airwaves and his response is "not the sort of words I'd have chosen." The man is a coward. He won't confront the strong and forces himself on the weak. His entire life, that's all he's done. You can't find one instance where Mitt Romney actually stood up and fought for someone other than himself. Find a case where Mitt Romney put himself at risk on someone else's behalf. Look and see if you can find a single case where Mitt Romney sacrificed something for someone else's benefit. You can't because he doesn't.

No, Mitt Romney is not a patriot. No, Mitt Romney is not a great guy. No, Mitt Romney isn't a wonderful guy in private. Mitt Romney is an self-indulgent, egomaniacal, sociopathic coward.

There are plenty of reasons to vote against Mitt Romney even if he agreed with us on policy. He isn't the kind of person who should be in public life, except perhaps as a "heel" character on pro wrestling. People like him should peak in high school and then go learn their life lessons through hard knocks in obscurity. Had it not been for Romney's wealth and pedigree, that is exactly what would have happened. Perhaps it is rather low brow to want a public leader who actually has a heart and a moral compass that aims true. Who laughs without ulterior motive. Who doesn't think legal entities are the same thing as human beings. But if there are voters who vote against Mitt Romney because they just can't stand him, that's fine with me. I'm right there with them.

The story, upside down. (photo: garryknight/flickr)

Republicans have spent decades branding Democrats as anti-capitalist collectivists bent on the destruction of private property and free enterprise. In the Right’s propa-melodrama, the leftist locomotive flattens virtuous Little Nells of capitalism after tying them to the railroad tracks of taxes with the ropes of regulation.

The character inversion is pure genius. In the classic American melodrama it’s usually a sinister Snidely whacking Little Nell so he can take her land. In other words, it’s the evil capitalist that threatens the sanctity of private property and the freedom and integrity of the individual.

As I’ve noted before, melodrama is such a pervasive narrative form in our politics and popular culture that we might well say we live in a melodramocracy. The form is inherently conservative as it always imagines a return to the past, to a safe and secure status quo that existed (at least in the imagination) before the trouble started.

In the form there are clearly identified heroes, villains, victims, hero’s helpers, etc. Causation is always simple and direct. The bad guy is to blame. The victim is blameless. The hero ultimately causes the villain’s failure. The form’s so wired in our brains that storytellers can simply supply a context and, say, a villain, and we supply the rest (usually ourselves as the potential victims and the narrator or protagonist as the hero).

Americans heard a complete melodramatic story when Ronald Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” The melodramatic-shaped filter in our brains helped us identify as victims when we heard the words “our problem.” The teller, Reagan, was the hero who correctly identified the villain, “government.” The End.

It is just such narrative patterning that has turned regulations and taxation into villain’s tools of oppression. Americans and the unconscious media that’s passed the story along are so accustomed to the form and roles that what was once clearly melodramatic fiction is now taken for truth. Yesterday’s Snidely, the greedy crook taking what was rightfully Little Nell’s, is today’s Dudley Do-Right. Dudley is a socialist.

More dramatically, Americans are still swallowing the story even though in the real world today Little Nell is actually getting run over by a train. Whence the gullibility? Well, today’s Right-wing storytellers have added a Darwinian gothic end to the story. In their version, Little Nell must die because that is the price of our freedom.

For the record, I’m a law-and-order, open market advocate. I want cops to stop the robbers on the street. I want the white-collar cops to stop the Wall Street’s sociopaths from stealing the wealth of an entire nation while hiding behind free-market masks.

Because of decades of Republican propa-melodrama, I’m at a disadvantage on the public stage. When I advocate for new regulations to stop sociopathic predators from destroying whole economies, I’m recommending a tool (regulation) many Americans already believe is a rope that ties their virtuous, would-be-victim selves to the tracks. They have that story in their heads and the villains and victims sort themselves out accordingly, and usually not to my advantage.

Narratives are a kind of frame, and as brain science teaches us we cannot erase frames. We can, however, wire around them by creating new ones. We have to tell a different story. It’s one reason I used the phrase “law-and-order, open-market advocate” and made the analogy between financial crime and street crime. I could have said “free market” instead of “open market,” but by this late date the frame seems too fitted to the Right’s melodrama. Too much of their story might spill into mine.

There may be better frames and simpler ways to tell a story about the need for a community of equals to stand against the bullies who steal us blind. Democracy was born a long time ago in such cooperative, egalitarian efforts. You can read about that in “The Promise of Popular Democracy.” It’s difficult to escape the melodramatic mold, but we should try, because as noted the form itself is conservative in the sense that it always a bought a return to the past. In such a form change can seem dangerous. But when we need change, we must tell a story that makes it welcome.

Under cover of the night around twelve police cars stopped five journalists when they were heading back to where they are staying in Chicago during the NATO summit. All five have been covering protests against the NATO summit for the past few days.

The five journalists included Luke Rudkowksi, who streams as @Lukewearechange, Tim Pool, who streams as @Timcast, Jeoff Shively (@Giraffa), Dustin & Jess. They are known for their work livestreaming and tweeting out regular coverage of Occupy protests.

Rudkowski of We Are Change managed to record the Chicago police approaching the journalists in the car. The police have their guns drawn. They shout, “Hands! Hands! Get your hands up!” And then, “Fuckin’ hands!” Then Pool’s voice can be heard saying, “We’re being raided. For folks who are watching, we are being raided by the CPD right now as we speak.”

There is some trouble with the door. The door is locked and the police are knocking on the windows of the car. The door is opened. A police officer can be heard telling one of the journalists, “Put your coffee down so you don’t burn your crotch.”

Police officers ask a journalist, who I presume is Rudkowski, if he has anything on him. He then is told to leave the camera on the seat of the car.

The video cuts and then we see Shively and Rudkowski recounting what happened. They say police are following them. They add the police would not explain why they were stopped, they were pulled over by unmarked police cars and Rudkowski and Dustin were cuffed together. [cont'd.]

During the stop, search and interrogation, Chicago PD took the journalists’ hard drives and slammed them against “running boards four or five times.” They took Pool’s alternate batteries and slammed them too. Content recorded by the journalists was deleted from Ustream.

The stop happened about midnight or just after. And, according to Pool’s Twitter stream, the police were still following them on the police scanner around 2 am. They allegedly wanted the targeted journalists to announce where they were staying for the night so they could raid where the journalists were staying.

Pool released a YouTube clip that included audio of the stop.

The stop was another episode of preemptive policing. No person was told why they were being searched. They were put in cuffs and interrogated because police wanted to stop them and put them in cuffs and interrogate them. They know that these people are involved in reporting and livestreaming protests and that made them susceptible to targeting. They know that these journalists also, unlike many of the establishment press, have an interest in calling out the police when they engage in repression or commit violence against protesters.

On May 19, there were reports in the daytime of an alarm going off where these journalists have been staying. The National Lawyers Guild was called. That seemed like a raid. It was widely reported on Twitter. It was not a raid, although the location where these journalists are staying in Chicago was still swarmed.

This surveillance by police has led Pool and Rudkowksi to not want to announce where they are sleeping at night.

The episode was not an isolated incident. @Ghostpickles and @Korgasm who have both been covering Occupy since the early days, reported being interrogated by CPD with others in the middle of the night.

“Ghostpickles” and “Korgasm” (and another person) were sitting by a fence on the side of the road. They were waiting for a ride when a police SUV crept up.

Earlier in the day, something similar but much worse happened. According to “Ghostpickles,” the police “jumped” them. When they went to park their car, they got out and two SUVs full of cops jumped out. The police pushed the group against the vehicles. The police would not identify themselves. They would not explain why they were being cuffed or detained. Their vehicle, including all the property inside, was impounded by the cops.

There appears to have been a conscious targeting of bloggers and livestreamers. The Chicago police, possibly with help from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI or other federal agencies, appear to be working off a list of “suspected” people or spaces where they must go “check in” on what is happening simply to ensure all is safe. Of course, this is illegal. Without a warrant or probable cause, rights are being clearly violated.

In each of these instances, the police did not inform those detained why they were being detained. The police stopped them to find criminal activity that they could then use against the journalists to make arrests. And so far they have not been able to find any justification for arresting any of these people, but they have been able to briefly frighten and infuriate these journalists and also to impound a vehicle.