(And by the way, here and here are items from last night that bear repeating.)
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are ripping the Obama administration's economic policies on the one-year anniversary of the "Recovery Summer."I will admit that the whole “Recovery Summer” thing showed at least a partial tone-deafness (probably more) to the general plight of our economy by the Obama Administration (it’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs or don’t freaking bother, President Hopey Changey, and yes, it’s not his fault that businesses aren’t hiring, but he needs to do a hell of a lot better job with the “Bully pulpit” on this than he has to date).
"One year later, Obama's recovery remains a failure while economists are delivering a grim prognosis for the future," an email from the RNC reads. "Now the economy is threatened by a double dip as small businesses, manufacturing and the housing market run out of steam."
However, it is way beyond a joke for “so be it” Boehner and his playmates to poke fun at our chief executive while the Repug House “leadership” continues to play games with the debt ceiling; as noted here…
In the United States, the political problems include a fight over raising the legal ceiling on the nation's debt. A first-ever U.S. default would roil markets, and Fitch Ratings said even a "technical" default would jeopardize the country's AAA rating.And as noted here…
"I fully understand the desire to use the debt limit deadline to force some necessary and difficult fiscal policy adjustments, but the debt limit is the wrong tool for that important job," (Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke) said at the annual conference for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in D.C. on Tuesday.Oh, and by the way, another way to close the deficit is to raise revenue of course, since, as Think Progress tells us here about the latest nonsense from Moon Unit Bachmann, the top earners in this country now pay the lowest amount of taxes they’ve paid in a generation (and raising taxes on the “pay no price, bear no burden” bunch polls at about 72 percent in favor, as HuffPo tells us here).
Republicans have recently tried to tie a debt ceiling increase to spending cuts, as well as completely unrelated proposals.
But if the debt ceiling is not raised, Bernanke said, the United States would be forced to stop payments on some of its existing obligations, possibly including Social Security and military pay.
The creditworthiness of the United States would be called into question and the financial markets could be severely disrupted, Bernanke said.
"Failing to raise the debt ceiling in a timely way would be self-defeating if the objective is to chart a course toward a better fiscal situation for our nation," he said.
Even though, as I noted earlier, I’m definitely not satisfied with the Obama Administration on this issue, at least they represent a sure hand that has steered the metaphorical car of our economy back safely onto the highway. However, if Boehner and pals had their way, we would be aimed straight at the cliff all over again.
In an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.As noted here, probably the main reason our government has supported this entire stupid “war on drugs” game is because too many people make too much money in the bargain (to say nothing of the for-profit prison biz which incarcerates a larger proportion of this country’s population than any other industrialized nation).
The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.
These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”
These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.
Just chalk this up to yet another moment of our 39th president’s prescience in the face of all manner of right-wing bloviation that ridiculed him and, with the passage of time, has been proven to be utterly wrong once more.
The case involved a 13-year-old middle school student in Chapel Hill, N.C. The student, identified only by his initials in the court’s decision, confessed to two home break-ins after he was removed from class and questioned for more than half an hour in a school conference room by police officers and school administrators.Cue the obligatory right-wing umbrage…
People in police custody must be given the familiar warnings based on Miranda v. Arizona before questioning if their answers are to be used against them in court. The question in Thursday’s case, J.D.B. v. North Carolina, No. 09-11121, was how to determine if the student was indeed in custody.
Judges generally make that determination by asking whether a “reasonable person” in the circumstances would have felt free to leave. The North Carolina Supreme Court, refusing to suppress the student’s confession, ruled that consideration of a juvenile suspect’s age did not figure in that reasonable-person analysis.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority, said that a 13-year-old would surely feel less free to leave a school conference room “than, say, a parent volunteer on school grounds to chaperone an event, or an adult from the community on school grounds to attend a basketball game.”
“In short,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “officers and judges need no imaginative powers, knowledge of developmental psychology, training in cognitive science, or expertise in social and cultural anthropology to account for a child’s age. They simply need the common sense to know that a 7-year-old is not a 13-year-old and neither is an adult.”
“Personal characteristics of suspects have consistently been rejected or ignored as irrelevant under a one-size-fits-all reasonable-person standard,” Justice Alito wrote, adding, “There is no denying that, by incorporating age into its analysis, the court is embarking on a new expansion of the established custody standard.”It’s really hilarious to me to read “Scalito,” Hangin’ Judge JR and Silent Clarence portraying themselves as supposed defenders of Miranda when you consider the following from here; namely, that the Court ruled twice prior to last year and three times in 2010 that evidence obtained without Miranda warnings was admissible in court (including the same four justices noted earlier in this paragraph, along with former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Chief Justice William Rehnquist).
Justice Alito wrote that the majority had failed to explain how age is different from other personal characteristics that are ignored under the usual analysis, like intelligence and education. “Bit by bit,” he wrote of the majority’s approach, “Miranda will lose the clarity and ease of application that has long been viewed as one of its chief justifications.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent.
The Times also ran this editorial today on the matter (and just remember that, under – God help us – a McCain/Palin administration, a Repug justice would have ruled that the non-Mirandized admission from the child suspect would have been admissible, and the ruling surely would have gone 5-4 the other way).
And while we’re on the subject, let us never forget the “free speech” atrocity brought to you by the High Court of Hangin’ Judge JR, as noted here.
SenateCarper isn’t called “the Senator from (formerly) MBNA” for nothing (along with a certain now-Vice President who also voted for that fraud bankruptcy bill…and Chris Coons sure learns fast, doesn’t he?).
Debit-card fees. Voting 54-45, the Senate failed to garner 60 votes needed to shelve new rules that will sharply reduce the fees that large banks charge retailers for debit-card sales. Under Federal Reserve regulations soon to take effect, these "swipe fees" are to be sharply lowered from their present range of 1 to 3 percent of the transaction cost. Authorized by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, the rules are likely to cap fees at 12 cents or so per transaction.
Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and other large banks collected an estimated $20 billion last year in debit-card fees. The new limits on swipe fees will exempt banks with less than $10 billion in assets. This vote occurred during consideration of an Economic Development Administration reauthorization (S 782) that remained in debate.
A yes vote was to delay the new rules.
Voting yes: Thomas Carper (D., Del.), Chris Coons (D., Del.), and Pat Toomey (R., Pa.).
Voting no: Bob Casey (D., Pa.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.).
And as usual, “No Corporate Tax” Pat Toomey never met a government regulation he didn’t oppose.
Curbs on regulations. The Senate shelved legislation to impose sweeping curbs on federal regulations that affect small businesses. The tally of 53-46 fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the amendment to S 782 (above). In part, the measure would require agencies to cancel regulations that they have failed to review every 10 years; establish pro-business advisory panels at all agencies for reviewing new regulations; give small businesses expanded power to challenge regulations in court, and require agencies to take into account the indirect as well as direct economic costs of proposed regulations on small businesses.What’s interesting to me about this is that this amendment was proposed by President Snowe, but it failed to meet the “60 votes needed for passage” threshold usually reserved for Democratic legislation in the Senate (with anything under 60 triggering an automatic Repug filibuster).
A yes vote was to curb the regulation of small businesses.
Voting yes: Toomey.
Voting no: Carper, Casey, Coons, Lautenberg, and Menendez.
Gee, is it possible that the Dems have FINALLY learned this trick and are repaying in kind with filibusters of their own? Dare I dream?
Solicitor General Verrilli. Voting 72-16, the Senate confirmed Donald B. Verrilli Jr. as the 47th solicitor general of the United States, a position that entails representing the executive branch before the Supreme Court. Verrilli, 54, has served in the Obama administration as deputy counsel to the president and deputy attorney general and before that was a litigator in private practice.This week, the Senate resumed debate on a bill funding the Economic Development Administration, with votes possible on ending tax breaks for ethanol and repealing last year's Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law. The House schedule was to be announced.
A yes vote was to confirm Verrilli.
Voting yes: Carper, Casey, Coons, Lautenberg, Menendez, and Toomey.
Yes, this topic definitely hits me where I live, as it would for any parent who gets to the point where you will do anything a sane person would do (and probably some things a not-so-sane one would be tempted to do as well) to get your son or daughter to quit talking about all that stuff they’re saving up until the end of the day to delay the inevitable and tell them, at long last, that, though I indeed love you, you’d better button it so I can sit my raggedy butt down and watch Adult Swim while you journey to the Land of Nod or else you can forget about an allowance for roughly the entire decade (and don’t get me started on that damn X-Box either).
It’s really funny to me how conservatives whine at the drop of a hat about “political correctness,” but never seem to have a clue as to when they’re practicing it themselves (which I think Metaxas does a bit also here).
Well, with that in mind, this goes out to Metaxas (if “It’s Time For Sleep, My Love” works here, let me know, OK?).
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