Saturday Stuff

By the way, let's not forget that this weekend marks the 70th anniversary of acclaimed contralto Marian Anderson's performance at the Lincoln Memorial (more here)...



...and again, haven't done the birthday thing for a little while, but Joss Stone hit 22 today, so...

Friday AM Stuff

As you endure watching this, please keep this Obama approval number in mind (about 59-60 percent according to Gallup - more here)...



..and yep, you just go "full-steam ahead" with your little "teabag" party, wingnuts (as kos points out, at least you won't be shooting anybody)...



...oh, and Karl? Before you call Biden a "liar" and a "blowhard" here, maybe you ought to pay attention to Chuck Todd first (more here - thanks to The Daily Kos for the first three videos - and by the way, I never did get an answer to this question)...



...and Mrs. Doomsy thinks these guys sound like Coldplay, but I think they're OK (I hope they don't get sued now that I've said that).

Where The Rubber Meets The Road (4/9/09)

As reported in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, here is how Philadelphia-area members of Congress were recorded on major roll-call votes last week (and I thought I'd provide extra reading material for the long weekend, seeing as how posting will be highly questionable from tomorrow into early next week - just that kind of a guy).

House

Tobacco regulation. Voting 298-112, the House on Thursday sent the Senate a bill (HR 1256) to begin federal regulation of tobacco products. The bill empowers the Food and Drug Administration to regulate cigarette content, require disclosure of product ingredients, ban cigarette marketing to children, and require more prominent health warnings. The bill would preempt state tobacco laws.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: John Adler (D., N.J.), Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.), Robert A. Brady (D., Pa.), Michael N. Castle (R., Del.), Charles W. Dent (R., Pa.) Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), Tim Holden (D., Pa.), Frank A. LoBiondo (R., N.J.), Patrick Murphy (D., Pa.), Allyson Y. Schwartz (D., Pa.), Joe Sestak (D., Pa.), and Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.).

Voting no: Joseph R. Pitts (R., Pa.).

So, in addition to the other constituencies he supports and opposes, Joe Pitts is pro-carcinogen, pro-Joe Camel, anti-kids and anti-disclosure of cancer-causing cigarette additives. Peachy.

Executive compensation. Voting 247-171, the House on Wednesday sent the Senate a bill (HR 1664) limiting executive compensation at firms receiving the largest bailouts under the Troubled Assets Relief Program. The bill would repeal authority for AIG bonuses that Democrats put into this year's stimulus law.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Fattah, Holden, Murphy, and Schwartz.

Voting no: Castle, Dent, Gerlach, LoBiondo, Sestak, Smith, and Pitts.

Kind of odd to see Democratic-sponsored legislation aimed at undoing the work of other Democrats (inasmuch as Geithner and Summers are “Democrats,” that is). And Admiral Joe ends up keeping rather unusual company on this one.

AmeriCorps expansion. Voting 275-149, the House on Tuesday sent President Obama a bill (HR 1388) that would more than triple the ranks of AmeriCorps, Volunteers in Service to America, and National Civilian Community Corps - to 225,000 participants by 2014 - while expanding their missions.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Castle, Fattah, Holden, LoBiondo, Murphy, Schwartz, Sestak, and Smith.

Voting no: Dent, Gerlach, and Pitts.

This recent Murdoch Street Journal editorial tells us that AmeriCorps has received support from Senators Ted Kennedy (no surprise) and Orrin Hatch (yes surprise), as well as that noted “liberal” John McCain, all of whom have been instrumental in their support (of course, the Journal writer points out with pride that the latest reauthorization means that AmeriCorps volunteers won’t be able to engage in voter registration or union organizing activities - heaven forbid that one of Rupert The Pirate’s publications fails to point that out).

Still, despite the Repug “transfusion,” if you will, that does not leave AmeriCorps free from wingnut derision, as noted in the very last sentence here.

Federal budget. Voting 233-196, the House on Thursday approved a five-year Democratic budget (H Con Res 85) that for 2010 projects $3.55 trillion in spending, a $1.2 trillion deficit, $284 billion in interest payments on the national debt, and $130 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Over five years, it embraces President Obama's major initiatives in areas such as health care, renewable energy, and education, and extends his middle-class tax cuts if means are found to pay for them. The budget allows Bush-era tax cuts for high-income payers to expire after 2010.

The budget sets "reconciliation" procedures under which Senate Democrats would need 51 rather than 60 votes to pass administration proposals such as overhauling health care and education programs. The Senate (below) excluded reconciliation from its budget plan.

A yes vote was to adopt the Democrats' budget.

Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Fattah, Holden, Murphy, Schwartz, and Sestak.

Voting no: Castle, Dent, Gerlach, LoBiondo, Pitts, and Smith.

Just typical Repug obstruction, nothing else to see here…let’s move along (and I’ll have something to say about one of our Senators on this shortly).

GOP budget alternative. Voting 137-293, the House on Thursday defeated a Republican alternative to the Democratic budget plan (HJ Res 85, above) that differed, in part, by permanently extending the full range of Bush-era tax cuts, freezing most non-defense discretionary spending for five years, and repealing the stimulus bill except for its jobless benefits.

A yes vote backed the Republican budget.

Voting yes: Dent and Pitts.

Voting no: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Castle, Fattah, Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Murphy, Schwartz, Sestak, and Smith.

Pretty funny when most of the Repugs don’t even vote for their own crock of a budget “alternative” – ha, ha, ha…

Senate

Federal budget. Voting 55-43, the Senate on Friday approved a five-year Democratic budget (S Con Res 13) that, for 2010, projects $3.5 trillion in spending and a $1.2 trillion deficit. In a key difference with the House Democrats' plan (above), it rules out the use of "reconciliation" for advancing key administration proposals.

Voting yes: Thomas Carper (D., Del.), Bob Casey (D., Pa.), Ted Kaufman (D., Del.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.).

Voting no: Arlen Specter (R., Pa.).

As always, screw you, Arlen (maybe you’ll overcome this primary lead by Pat Toomey, and maybe you won’t – we’ll see).

By the way, speaking of our state’s Repug U.S. senator, this column from Specter appeared today in Philadelphia’s newspaper conservative house organ of record, and in it he offers the “(creation of) a National Criminal Justice Commission to undertake a comprehensive 18-month review of the criminal justice system” as a cosponsor to a bill sponsored by Dem Senator Jim Webb of Virginia (curious for Specter to pursue a “moderate” course like this, particularly given his 14-point deficit to Toomey).

I doubt if Specter has read this fine recent article in The New Yorker about solitary confinement (maybe Webb has) by correspondent Atul Gawande, but I think it is food for thought since we’re talking about the Webb/Specter bill here; extended excerpts follow…

Prolonged isolation was used sparingly, if at all, by most American prisons for almost a century. Our first supermax—our first institution specifically designed for mass solitary confinement—was not established until 1983, in Marion, Illinois. In 1995, a federal court reviewing California’s first supermax admitted that the conditions “hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable for those with normal resilience.” But it did not rule them to be unconstitutionally cruel or unusual, except in cases of mental illness. The prison’s supermax conditions, the court stated, did not pose “a sufficiently high risk to all inmates of incurring a serious mental illness.” In other words, there could be no legal objection to its routine use, given that the isolation didn’t make everyone crazy. The ruling seemed to fit the public mood. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, some sixty supermax institutions had opened across the country. And new solitary-confinement units were established within nearly all of our ordinary maximum-security prisons.

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.

…

Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach.

Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

If nothing else, I hope Gawande’s article serves as a starting point for a serious discussion on the merits of solitary confinement and whether or not it serves any rehabilitative purpose whatsoever.

Reconciliation ban. The Senate on Wednesday voted, 67-31, to prohibit the use of "reconciliation" in S Con Res 13 (above) to advance Obama's cap-and-trade proposal for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Republicans said reconciliation would deny them a chance to filibuster a proposal they see as a crippling tax on key industries.

A yes vote backed the amendment.

Voting yes: Casey and Specter.

Voting no: Carper, Kaufman, Lautenberg and Menendez.

As Ezra Klein tells us here…

The reconciliation process…limits debate to 20 hours and bypasses the filibuster altogether (only 50 votes are needed for bill passage, whereas 60 are needed to break the filibuster). It was instituted to ensure that minority obstruction couldn't block important business like passing a budget or reducing the deficit. But it was misused. At least, Robert Byrd thought so. He saw all manner of "extraneous" amendments and legislation sneaking beneath the radar of the reconciliation process.

…

…the reconciliation process has been used for plenty that did not reduce deficits. Both of President Bush's tax-cut plans traveled through the process. And the very senators who speak reverentially of the filibuster now, voted for reconciliation then. Judd Gregg, in fact, voted for reconciliation every time it was used in the Bush era.

And even if reconciliation had only ever been used to cut the deficit, an observer might wonder what renders deficit reduction so much more pressing than, say, ending the punishing human cost of the health-care crisis, or saving the planet from catastrophic climate change. Why should cutting programs be exempt from the Senate rules but not saving lives?

So (echoing Klein a bit), by voting against “reconciliation” here as an option, Specter and Bob Casey are saying that it’s more important to observe the sometimes-absurdly-arcane rules of Senate governance than it is to do something about the fact that our planet is melting due to global warming.

And gee, Bob, if you’re going to oppose reconciliation on the climate crisis today, what’s to prevent you from opposing it again tomorrow on the Employee Free Choice Act or the Obama/Sebelius health care initiative?

At this moment, I really can’t find the words to communicate my disgust with Bob Casey. He has become every bit the centrist/corporatist/DLC-Third Way/accommodationist flunky I feared he would be when he defeated Chuck Pennacchio in the Democratic Senatorial primary three years ago.

Note: As of last Sunday, Congress is in recess until the week of April 20.

Wednesday Stuff

"Best Persons" with K.O., including Ebert's open letter to Bill Orally (here it is, but sorry Roger, nothing "admirable" about Krauthammer - stay well, dude, and the person telling Coleman to give up at long last was Ramesh Ponnuru, by the way)...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and I don't know about you, but I'm diggin' this new tune from Incubus (thanks to YouTuber Christi0v for the way cool vid).

Five Ultra-Quick Wednesday Hits

Don’t blink…

Thumbs Up here to Dem U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan for his spot-on prediction of our economic meltdown over credit default swaps way back in 1994 (here) as well as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley fiasco (here – I just posted about Dodd I know, but maybe Dorgan should be Finance Committee chairman instead)

Thumbs Down to Our Man Arlen Specter for saying the following about Flush Limbore: “I like him” here

Thumbs Up to Patrick Murphy for taking the House congressional lead in trying to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” here (h/t Atrios – can’t wait for the howls of outrage from the Bucks County Courier Times over this one)

Update 4/11/09: Nice work for Patrick to take the lead in legislation creating the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail - a 685-mile path crossing eight states from Newport, R.I., to Yorktown, Va., as noted here (President Obama recently signed the bill into law).

Thumbs Down to pretend Bush Dog Democrat (redundant?) Dan Boren of Oklahoma for accusing Obama of “being weak on defense” here (hey brainiac, the defense budget was prepared by Robert Gates, the Republican Secretary of Defense, OK? - I'm not unsympathetic to the possible loss of DoD jobs here, but it's time to be realistic)

Thumbs Up to President Obama for being the first president to attend a White House Seder (here)

And by the way, Happy Passover to everyone observing the holiday.

In Defense Of Chris Dodd

(And I also posted over here.)

I have to say that, like many of you I’m sure, I’ve been watching the deterioration of Chris Dodd’s political fortunes with more than a bit of alarm. And I’ve been reluctant to say anything, that is, until I read this post from Megan McArdle of The Atlantic.

I’m sure McArdle is a pretty bright individual, but I really have to wonder why she would write a post sourcing an editorial in the Augusta (GA) Chronicle attacking Dodd over the bonuses paid to executives of AIG (the editorial is fundamentally wrong for reasons I will note shortly). Another clue as to the partisan nature of the Chronicle editorial is the fact that it praises South Carolina Repug Gov. Mark Sanford for “(doing) his best to wean his state off the cocaine of federal money. He knows it's corrupting. He knows it will mask the state's needs rather than fill them. He knows we are stealing from our children.”

Gosh, what noble rhetoric from the Chronicle. Would that I and others had heard it while Dubya and his “ship of fools,” otherwise known as the 108th and 109th Congresses, were busy passing and signing budgets into law that left us awash in red ink (and no, I’m not going to go off on another rant defending the stimulus; at this point, if people still don’t get the concept, they never will).

And I guess what has me a little ticked off is the decidedly lukewarm response to the news of Dodd’s current electoral trouble from progressives generally, helped also by Dodd himself, I realize; I wish he’d written an Op-Ed months ago explaining this Countrywide mortgage deal once and for all in response to the caterwauling from the right-wing echo chamber, chiefly the Murdoch Street Journal – I posted about this awhile ago here; it all appears to be nothing but a tempest in the proverbial teapot.

Something else in McArdle’s post today that I took issue with is the following claim…

…the more damning case (against Dodd) is that the Senate Banking Committee was basically non-functional in the early part of the crisis, because Dodd was running for president. Even if early action could have saved us money and pain later--and that's a big if--I recently heard a plausible case made that such action was made impossible by his presidential campaign. But somehow, no one finds that offensive, or even notable.

Well, Dodd ended his presidential campaign in January 2008 after he was shut out in the Iowa caucuses (making his purchase of property there all the more mystifying to your humble narrator), but the collapse of Lehman Brothers (the moment that our economic slide really started to accelerate) didn’t take place until September of that year, and the first TARP funds weren’t released until the following month. Besides, with Dubya still on board and fellow Repug Richard Shelby at Dodd’s side on the Senate Finance Committee, I’m not sure what else Dodd could have been expected to accomplish.

However, we know the real reason why Dodd is in trouble, and that’s because the “kick me” sign, as it were, has been pinned on his back for the AIG bonuses paid out with TARP funds.

Yeah, well, therein hangs a tale; as noted here by My Left Nutmeg (excerpting Glenn Greenwald)…

It was Dodd who did everything possible -- including writing and advocating for an amendment -- which would have applied the limitations on executive compensation to all bailout-receiving firms, including AIG, and applied it to all future bonus payments without regard to when those payments were promised. But it was Tim Geithner and Larry Summers who openly criticized Dodd's proposal at the time and insisted that those limitations should apply only to future compensation contracts, not ones that already existed. The exemption for already existing compensation agreements -- the exact provision that is now protecting the AIG bonus payments -- was inserted at the White House's insistence and over Dodd's objections. [...]

The point was -- and is -- that Dodd was pressured to put that carve-out in at the insistence of Treasury officials (whose opposition meant that Dodd's choices were the limited compensation restriction favored by Geithner/Summers or no limits at all), and Dodd did so only after arguing in public against it. To blame Dodd for provisions that the White House demanded is dishonest in the extreme...

So what has been the effect of this Dodd sellout by Geithner and Summers? Basically, according to this Quinnipiac poll, Dodd would lose big in a head-to-head matchup with presumptive Repug Senate candidate Rob Simmons (with pollster Douglas Schwartz telling us that “a 33 percent job approval rating is unheard of for a 30-year incumbent”).

Well, to me, this spells trouble, even though the election is due to take place a year and a half from now (basically, Dodd is losing to “anybody not named Chris Dodd” at this point). And it would be nice if some lefty political sites such as this one would be a little less inclined to pump up silly “scandals” involving Dodd in a cheap attempt to drive up their hit count (that is, unless they want to contribute to the “drip, drip, drip” of negative commentary that could ultimately drown him in November 2010).

After all, let’s not forget that Dodd tried to fix the fatally flawed FISA bill that was signed into law last year here (and speaking of FISA, I would call this a decidedly alarming development, and a little beyond "trying to sweep something under the rug" – nice try by Obama’s people to pull this off while press coverage is focused on the POTUS overseas).

Also, as noted here, Dodd mixed it up with Billo the Clown over The Daily Kos, and he also signed on here as a cosponsor to an amendment sponsored by fellow Dem Russ Feingold in 2007 to redeploy our troops out of Iraq in 90 days (we know what happened to that one, of course).

So basically, Dodd is a friend of progressives as far as I’m concerned. And I was always taught that you try to help out a friend when that person is in trouble.

And a lukewarm blog post by anyone with unjustified innuendo of wrongdoing doesn’t even come close to doing that.

Tuesday Stuff

Good for Joe here (go howl at the moon...Dick)...



...yep, this is good news, but I have a feeling the biggest battles have yet to come (EFCA, trying to overcome that traitor Blanche Lincoln and her Senate Repug buddies, along with health care - we'll see; hat tips for these two videos to The Daily Kos)...



...and you're very welcome, K.O. (referring to this video, which I inexplicably missed last night - anyway, here's "Worst Persons," with Sean Inanity chastising Obama for the latter's entirely correct pronouncement that we're engaged in a struggle against radical Islam, not Muslims in general...duh; and what a charming T-shirt some apparently single-brain-celled life forms in Kentucky concocted, no doubt hoping to goose-step their way to fame and fortune; and I don't know about you, but I just hope and pray that, the next time something terrible happens in this country - and I hate to sound like I'm giving comfort to a thought like that, but it's just about statistically inevitable given the amount of guns in this country, the level of hate and the economy - the person who does it doesn't stand up and shout "I LOVE GLENN BECK" before he blows his brains out, hopefully taking no one else with him...if that happens, at the very least, it will be time to retire this talking point cipher and gutter snipe one and for all, to a place where a camera and/or microphone can nary be found, or even a computer)...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and I thought this was interesting about the jazz sax player Bud Shank who just left us, and that is the fact that perhaps his most memorable contribution to music (at least in terms of hearing it on the radio) was this solo on an instrument he didn't play as much as the sax (the flute) in a musical idiom aside from jazz where he was most famous (namely, '60s-era pop...video by YouTuber UMG with the last note cut off) - crazy world.

On The Economy, Our Pain Is J.D.’s Gain

(Also, I posted over here.)

I have to admit that the two most recent columns by Bucks County’s big mouth pundit J.D. Mullane (last Sunday and today) have been absolutely startling, definitely “Exhibits A and B” for not having to pay online if you’re a non-subscriber to the paper (actually, for reasons I will note shortly, I think the paper should pay us if we happen to ingest any of Mullane’s drivel).

He told us the following on Sunday (here)…

Unemployment has bolted to 8.5 percent, the highest in 25 years. From January through March, 2 million jobs have been lost. It’s grim.

So why did I have to wait 45 minutes for a table at a restaurant the other night?

The eatery’s parking lot was packed. So was the bar, where people crowded two deep to pay $6 a drink.

A couple easily drops $100 on dinner at a chain restaurant like that, which made me wonder: Where’s the recession?

If millions are unemployed and the president says it is the worst economy since the Great Depression, where is it?

…

…(Last week), I conducted a search for the worst economy since the Great Depression — let’s call it the “Great Recession.” I figured it would be evident in places where middle class people are most likely to spend discretionary cash, since that kind of spending stops in tough times.

I did not find soup lines, suffering or struggle.

Not at Dunkin’ Donuts, where a steady line of cars clogged the drive-thru for $2 coffees.

Not at a Wal-Mart, where a woman was waiting to purchase a $54 Sunbeam bread-making machine with “12 baking functions.”

J.D. goes on to tell us that he conducted further “research” at Game Stop in the Oxford Valley Mall and Best Buys, presumably on Commerce Drive in Fairless Hills, PA. And as a result, here is his “analysis”…

We go to Dunkin’ Donuts rather than Starbucks. We eat at a chain restaurant, rather than a chic place downtown. We buy off-brand water, not name-brand.

Hard times. They ain’t what they used to be.

And in response today to those who wonder what universe Mullane inhabits that somehow renders him unable to see the reality faced by an ever-growing number of people in this country, he tells us this…

Oh, there's "suffering" - especially for those who spent the good years maxing out their credit cards, tapping the equity in their house to buy unneeded goodies, and trading in perfectly good cars to buy new ones because, well, because.

I really don’t know what else there is to say in response to such appalling literary smegma except to provide this excerpt from some actual reporting on Sunday from business writer Jane M. Von Bergen of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who tells us the following (from here)…

Seventy-two truck drivers and warehouse workers at the USF Holland truck terminal in the city's Tacony section are losing their jobs. The terminal closed Friday.

In Blue Bell, a Montgomery County suburb where homes cost upwards of $800,000, three out of 10 neighbors in adjoining culs-de-sac are laid off.

In West Philadelphia's 5700 block of Spruce Street, in one of the city's zip codes hardest hit by unemployment, the block captain worries about prospects for the young men on his street - bleak, when unemployment among African American male teenagers stands at nearly 40 percent.

"I can't offer nothing to these kids," said Thommie Hampton. "You can't get a job."

In Cheltenham Township, a business-process manager laid off in January for the second time in two years struggles to reinvent himself - again - as his middle-class lifestyle slips away.

In Mount Ephraim, a young woman who graduated from Rutgers University in Camden last year is still looking for a librarian or government-research job this year. "It's pretty disheartening to apply for so many positions and get rejected," said Stephanie Kurek, 26. Older workers, willing to take pay cuts to stay employed, are competing with her for entry-level positions, she said.

If there is anything that these tales tell us, it is that misery is everywhere in the Delaware Valley. It crosses all geographic lines, all economic lines, all gender lines, all race lines, all age lines.

All these people, the unemployed executives in Blue Bell, the unemployed teenagers in West Philadelphia, the lawyers, the doctors, the truck drivers, and the managers have their own difficult and individual stories.

But collectively, their loss is our loss.

Every now and then the Inky reverts to its past form, as it does so admirably here (and God, does philly.com have some hideous trolls).

And I know J.D. wouldn’t get caught dead reading that bad liburuul paper The New York Times, but they told us the following also on Sunday (here)…

On Friday (4/3), reality bit back with the news that the unemployment rate spiked in March, to 8.5 percent, a 25-year high. The government’s report also showed that employers had shed 663,000 more jobs in March. Nearly two million jobs have vanished this year — 5.1 million since the recession began in December 2007. The ranks of the unemployed now stand at 13.2 million.

There is no longer any doubt that the current recession will be the longest yet in America since World War II. The previous record-holders — the contractions of the early 1970s and the early 1980s — each lasted for 16 months. As of now, the economy already has been in decline for 16 straight months.

The questions now are how much longer the recession will be and how much worse it will get. Measured by the labor market, the answer to both questions is “a lot.” That is because employers will continue to cut jobs as long as the economy is weakening and will resume hiring only once they are sure a recovery is under way. In this recession, the traditional paths to recovery are especially blocked. Economic rebounds — especially from steep declines — are generally led by recovery in the housing market. This time, housing is unlikely to provide the spark. By prudent estimates, housing sales and prices will not begin to turn up appreciably until 2010 at the earliest.

And I’ll go Mullane even better than that – if he wanted to find a clue, all he had to do was read the same Sunday issue of the very paper in which his column appeared; his fellow writer Jo Ciavaglia tells us this (here)…

To get perspective into how bad the U.S economic crisis is, ask someone who works in mental health.

Suicide call volume has doubled, according to one local emergency hot line. Bucks County's largest short-term psychiatric unit is seeing a significant upswing in involuntary mental health commitments - eight since Wednesday alone.

A New Jersey behavior health center is seeing notably large increases in first-time psychiatric hospitalizations, particularly among nontraditional patients.

Demand for outpatient mental health treatment also is increasing, but so are requests for copay waivers and other financial assistance, local providers say.

The growing demand for mental health services also is outpacing the limited resources of providers. Most Bucks County mental health agencies the county contracts with are in danger of running out of money for uninsured patients before the fiscal year ends, a county official said.

"We can feel the tempo. People are incredibly nervous, anxious and upset. We get calls about rents, mortgages and even food," said Lenore Sherman, executive director of Contact Greater Philadelphia, a crisis hot line. "People are obviously in chaotic shape, so worried over the situation."

I have to admit that citing this stuff really isn’t that difficult – there is plentiful evidence to support the fact that Mullane doesn’t know what he’s talking about; shooting his arguments full of holes is about as satisfying as kicking the crutch out from underneath the arm of Tiny Tim (and by the way, I conducted a bit of “research” myself at Dick’s Sporting Goods in Fairless Hills, PA on Sunday, and except for a couple of other families, it basically was a ghost town).

So I attempted to find out how food banks and social service agencies in Bucks County are being affected by the economic conditions, calling some numbers from this list (I am currently awaiting “call backs” from the Penndel Food Pantry and the Emergency Relief Association in Levittown; I will call again if I don’t hear from anyone – part of the issue with tracking these people down is that these agencies are usually based in a church or community center during “off hours” in the evening when the need for their services is the greatest).

I have to admit that I was unsuccessful for the most part, though I did speak to a lady named Stephanie Sides of the Family Service Association of Bucks County. She told me that, in addition to running a food pantry, the association partners with the Bucks County Opportunity Council to help lower-income residents of the county achieve self-sufficiency. She said that the demand for food seems to “ebb and flow” more centered on the holidays, though the number of people seeking food has increased in recent months (she was careful not to draw a direct link to the economic conditions).

In addition, she mentioned that the association runs a teen center near One Oxford Valley (the office building next to the mall, for local-area folk) on Thursday and Friday evenings; the center is located near the FedEX and UPS mail stops. The center allows the teens (14-21) to socialize with one another and seek counseling, and it’s difficult to keep up with the demand for food (always a need for microwaveable dishes such as Raman noodles, turkey dishes, etc., as well as snacks such as crackers and chips).

As I say, I have some calls outstanding on this in an attempt to gauge the impact of the recession, for which you can blame solely those who made bad purchasing choices, according to Mullane. If I find out anything else, I’ll let you know.

Monday Stuff

Touching tribute on "Countdown" tonight to Keith's mom, by the way - our sympathies...

And it sounds like the wingnuts were in winning form again with their little "tea party" (kind of scary when a bunch of terminal adolescents get together for no good reason, I suppose)...



...and oh yes, didn't I tell you that, on the side, I'm a "reprogrammer" for the Obamabot "reeducation" facility in Bucks County, PA? Uh huh (nice touch on the black helicopter)...



...something else to consider when you hear about how charging an online fee to non-subscribers is the answer to problems in the media industry...



...I thought this had kind of a nice ring to it (not much happening in the video - kind of morose like the weather in these parts at the moment).

My Tribute To The AP

(And I also posted here.)

So the AP tells us from here that it and “its member newspapers will take legal action against Web sites that use their articles without legal permission,” huh?

Wow, you mean that the AP would actually seek to punish individuals such as your humble narrator who tries to access some of that service’s glorious content....

…from Ron Fournier (here)

…from (former correspondent) John Solomon (here)

…from Jennifer Loven and Fournier again (here)

…from David Espo (here)

…from Sam Hananel (here, with clarification by Media Matters here)

…from Hope Yen (here)

…from Amy Lorentzen (here)

…from Andrew Taylor (here)

…from Phillip Elliott (here)

…from Liz Sidoti (here)

….from Elliott, Calvin Woodward and (wait for it…) Nedra Pickler (here)

….and from (drum roll, please) the one and only Charles Babington (here)

The AP really “wants a piece o’ me,” as it were?

Well, considering that the news service has produced such sterling content as that which I have cited above, I have only this to say in response:

Bring it on, meat!

Update 4/16/09: I forgot about this choice item from Ben Feller.

Sunday Stuff

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart and John Oliver have some fun concerning the media fawning over the Obamas' recent visit to the Queen...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
The Poisonous Queen
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

...and boy, that Repug PA State Senator Mike Folmer is a real "rocket scientist," isn't he? With the EFCA, both "card check" and the secret ballot would still be legal, but the employee would call the shots, not the employer (h/t Michael Morrill at Keystone Progress)...



...actually, though, Cantor and the House Repug "leadership" did offer this, which is way beyond a bad joke (more on Cantor here)...



Update 4/7/09: Oh yeah, Cantor and the Repugs sure will overtake Obama and the Dems with stuff like this.

...and oh yeah, time to rock harder.

Saturday Stuff

Two from Rachel Maddow that I couldn't quite get to last night: first has to do with the two women journalists detained in North Korea (here, and what a wonderful Bushco legacy, being lectured on human rights by one of the most oppressive regimes on earth)...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and Repug North Carolina Senator Richard Burr's cowardly "hold" on the nomination of Tammy Duckworth for assistant secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs (more here - I thought "the world's greatest deliberative body" got rid of this stuff, but apparently not...and somewhere, I'm sure Evan Bayh is trying to work out a "compromise").

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A Saturday Sports Note

From here (class)...

PHILADELPHIA — Pat Burrell wondered how Phillies fans would observe his return to Citizens Bank Park Friday.

...

With a little help from the Phils, who warmed up the crowd with a striking and at times emotional video tribute, Burrell turned the page on nine years with the Phillies he vowed never to forget.

Burrell went 1-for-3 with an RBI single, a walk, a stolen base and two tips of the cap in his new role as designated hitter to spot the Tampa Bay Rays the lead in the otherwise meaningless exhibition game.

The Phils rallied for two runs in the ninth inning to claim a 3-2 victory, minor league prospect Jason Donald plating Eric Bruntlett with a bases-loaded single with nobody out. Drama always seems to mark this rivalry although you pretty much can predict the result.

That said, the night belonged to Burrell.

The Phils dispensed letter-sized prints of Burrell slugging the seventh-inning double high off the wall to spark a rally against the Rays in Game 5 of the World Series.

After the video, an emotional Burrell popped out of the dugout to wave his cap to the Phillies’ faithful, who gave him a standing ovation.

And just for the record, the Phillies play Tampa Bay again for real in June, but it's for three road games.

Now, I would ask that you compare and contrast with this from March 2008 (no class)...

The 76ers are talkin' about Allen Iverson once more.

Here he comes, 15 months after he was kicked out of Philadelphia over irreconcilable differences, A.I., The Answer, the MVP, the hip-hop hoops icon -- call him what you want -- is back in the city he once owned like few others ever have in its deep, rich sports history (with his then-new team, the Denver Nuggets).

...

The Sixers will not honor Iverson with a video tribute or plan to acknowledge his return in any form other than the standard announcing of his name when starting lineups are introduced.

"There will be plenty of time for accolades for Allen Iverson when he retires," (Sixers owner Ed "Freedom's Watch") Snider said.

To be fair, Snider was complimentary towards Iverson in the article, but it was still crappy not to even go to the trouble of giving Iverson a tribute the way the Phillies did with Burrell (would the Phillies have done this for Burrell had they not won the World Series? A fair question, and I don't know the answer.)

And speaking of the Sixers, the record this year of the fired Maurice Cheeks was 9-14 (122-137 overall). Replacement coach Tony DiLeo's record is 31-21, which is OK. And the team locked up a playoff berth today, so good for them.

Are they good enough to get out of the Eastern Conference of the NBA (as opposed to the Phillies, who of course won it all last year)? Next question...

Friday Stuff

Yeah, to be sure, Brown is sucking up to Obama, but here's the deal; he's VERY unpopular "across the pond," and he's trying to revive his political hopes by latching onto our Number 44 - and even though I'm sure Sanchez will find a way to sneak in a plug for Flush Limbore in the not-too-distant future, kudos to him for now (h/t The Daily Kos)...



...and here's a little number to take us on outta here - maybe more stuff over the weekend, but we'll see.

Where The Rubber Meets The Road (4/3/09)

As reported in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, here is how Philadelphia-area members of Congress were recorded on major roll-call votes last week (not a lot going on).

House

Public lands conservation. Voting 285-140, the House sent President Obama a bill (HR 146) that would conserve tens of millions of acres of public land, mostly in the West. The bill would protect 2.1 million acres in California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia as wilderness; add 26 million acres to the National Landscape Conservation System; preserve 2,800 miles of federal trails and add three units to the National Park System.

A yes vote was to send the bill to Obama.

Voting yes: John Adler (D., N.J.), Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.), Robert A. Brady (D., Pa.), Michael N. Castle (R., Del.), Charles W. Dent (R., Pa.) Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), Tim Holden (D., Pa.), Frank A. LoBiondo (R., N.J.), Patrick Murphy (D., Pa.), Allyson Y. Schwartz (D., Pa.), Joe Sestak (D., Pa.), and Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.).

Voting no: Joseph R. Pitts (R., Pa.).

This week’s particularly stupid No vote by Joe Pitts, ladies and gentlemen.

Fighting wildfires. Voting 412-3, the House passed a bill (HR 1404) that would establish a dedicated fund within the normal appropriations process for paying the costs of fighting catastrophic wildfires. The bill awaits Senate action.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Castle, Dent, Fattah, Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Murphy, Pitts, Schwartz, Sestak and Smith.

Federal-state contracts. Voting 148-272, the House refused give the U.S. Forest Service permanent authority to sign contracts with states to prevent forest fires. Backers said the amendment to HR 1404 (above) would reduce the risk of catastrophic fires, while opponents said such contracts would undermine federal workers' rights and U.S. policies in areas such as timbering and environmental protection.

A yes vote backed the amendment.

Voting yes: Dent and Pitts.

Voting no: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Castle, Fattah, Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Murphy, Schwartz, Sestak and Smith.

For what it’s worth, this was introduced by Repug Bob Goodlatte of Virginia (nice try, Charlie and Joe, you asshats).

Senate

Americorps expansion. Voting 79-19, the Senate passed a bill (HR 1388) that would more than triple the ranks of AmeriCorps, Volunteers in Service to America, and the National Civilian Community Corps - to 225,000 participants by 2014 - while expanding their missions to areas such as health care and clean energy.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: Thomas Carper (D., Del.), Bob Casey Jr. (D., Pa.), Ted Kaufman (D., Del.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), and Arlen Specter (R., Pa.).

Acorn dispute. Voting 53-43, the Senate tabled (killed) an amendment to prohibit funding under HR 1388 (above) for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). A nongovernmental organization, ACORN works mainly in poor communities on issues such as foreclosures, Gulf Coast recovery, immigration, voter registration, and raising the minimum wage. Critics accuse ACORN of fraudulent voter-registration activity.

A yes vote was to kill the amendment.

Voting yes: Carper, Casey, Kaufman, Lautenberg and Menendez.

Voting no: Specter.

This amendment was sponsored by Diaper Dave Vitter (who, as noted here, despises all things ACORN). Thus, our Repug senator further attempts to burnish his right-wing “cred” against the challenge of wingnut Pat Toomey, as he did here on the Employee Free Choice Act.

As always, screw you, Arlen.

This week, the House and Senate took up Obama's budget, along with their own budget blueprints for fiscal 2010 and later years. Congress began a two-week Easter-Passover recess at week's end.

Trying To Avoid A Census Crisis

This CNN story tells us the following (and I also posted here)…

WASHINGTON (CNN) - A report that the Obama administration will name an advocate of statistical sampling as the next census director has set off a fusillade of Republican criticism even though that choice has not been formally announced.

The Associated Press reported Thursday afternoon that the White House intends to nominate University of Michigan Prof. Robert M. Groves as the census director. Groves worked for the Census Bureau during the last census in 1990, and recommended at that time that the national head count be statistically adjusted to compensate for a possible undercount of millions of Americans.

By the way, the two House Repugs caterwauling the loudest over this are Darrell Issa (apparently having grown bored with insisting on more transparency from Michelle Obama, as noted here) and Patrick McHenry (taking a break from endangering and harassing our military serving in Iraq, as noted here).

And call me just another filthy, unkempt liberal blogger, but let’s see now…if Groves ran the census for 1990, then the work for that would have taken place in the prior decade of the ‘80s, and I don’t recall any Democratic presidential administrations during that time.

Actually, I think the Repugs are concerned because the census (which I’m sure will be managed correctly now that Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History and his bunch are no longer in charge) is likely to reveal, and thus enshrine, information such as the following from this 2007 New York Times editorial, written before the Lehman failure last year, the moment the recession kicked in for good…

Sputtering under the weight of the credit crisis and the associated drop in the housing market, the economic expansion that started in 2001 looks like it might enter history books with the dubious distinction of being the only sustained expansion on record in which the incomes of typical American households never reached the peak of the previous cycle. It seems that ordinary working families are going to have to wait — at the very minimum — until the next cycle to make up the losses they suffered in this one. There’s no guarantee they will.

The gains against poverty last year were remarkably narrow. The poverty rate declined among the elderly, but it remained unchanged for people under 65. Analyzed by race, only Hispanics saw poverty decline on average while other groups experienced no gains.

The fortunes of middle-class, working Americans also appear less upbeat on closer consideration of the data. Indeed, earnings of men and women working full time actually fell more than 1 percent last year.

This suggests that when household incomes rose, it was because more members of the household went to work, not because anybody got a bigger paycheck. The median income of working-age households, those headed by somebody younger than 65, remained more than 2 percent lower than in 2001, the year of the recession.

Over all, the new data on incomes and poverty mesh consistently with the pattern of the last five years, in which the spoils of the nation’s economic growth have flowed almost exclusively to the wealthy and the extremely wealthy, leaving little for everybody else.

Also, I thought this post from a man named Morley Winograd, who was hired by then-VP Al Gore to oversee the 2000 census, made some interesting points; the Repugs favored a “straight enumeration” (which included tricks such as double-counting families with two homes or college students with two residences, who trended Republican) versus a “sample supplemented census” (noted in the CNN story, which used survey sampling techniques to validate not just the overall count but the individual demographic sub-groups that the census’s enumeration process would identify).

And as you may have guessed, the Repugs don’t like “sampling” because it might ensure a more accurate account of minorities who would tend to vote Democratic. In fact, they disliked it so much that…

Republicans sued the Census Bureau in federal court, demanding that only the actual count of residents as provided in the Constitution be used for any congressional redistricting by the states. The Federal Appeals court dismissed the Republican lawsuit as none of the Court’s business. Foreshadowing the outcome of Gore v. Bush in 2000, the Supreme Court surprisingly took up the case and overturned the Appeals court ruling. As a result, all subsequent redistricting efforts have used only the enumeration count from the 2000 census. On the other hand, formulas used to allocate federal funds based on population characteristics were unaffected by the ruling and could have used the sampling process, had it not met an untimely and unnecessary death.

As soon as George W. Bush was elected and the incredibly professional Director of the Census Bureau, Ken Prewitt, was removed from office, the Commerce Department’s new partisan Secretary, Donald Evans, determined that the sample that had been prepared over the strong objections of congressional Republicans was not usable.

Also…

When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, he decided, in his own paranoid way, that Bill Clinton and the Democrats would use their executive authority to produce a biased census whose over-count of minorities would shift, in his opinion, 24 House seats from the Republicans to the Democrats after the 2000 census. Of course, it was ludicrous to think such an outcome would occur, since legislative boundaries are drawn by the party in power in each state. Whatever numbers the census produces in our decennial exercise can be manipulated to produce any outcome each state’s ruling party desires, as U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican cronies proved a few years ago. Nevertheless, Gingrich was determined to use the Congressional appropriations process to undercut any attempt by the Democrats to overstate minority populations in the several states.

So as you can see, the census has been and will remain a big political football, thus generating much umbrage primarily from the party out of power for years to come (and by the way, here’s a clarification about Judd Gregg that gets snuck into the end of the CNN story – no end to the tricks of our dear corporate media cousins).

Update 4/5/09: I thought this was interesting.

Wednesday Stuff

Another questionable posting day tomorrow, by the way...

Yep, I would say this is the treatment that Glenn Beck deserves, the self-appointed spokesperson for every right-wing crybaby in this country (along with Joe The Plumber, Rick Santorum, Christine Flowers, Kevin Ferris, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, assorted letter and Guest Opinion writers to the Bucks County Courier Times, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, etc., etc.)...

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The 10/31 Project
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

...and I wish this were an April Fools joke, but alas...



Update 4/3/09: Kudos to MoveOn for this (h/t The Daily Kos).

...and to his great credit, filmmaker Robert Greenwald makes a hell of a lot of sense on Afghanistan (more here)...



...and here's a song for the day by "The King" (I'll get back to the alternative/indie rock stuff, I promise).

A “Filibuster Fable” from The Old Gray Lady

I came across this intriguing little story in the New York Times today concerning the nomination hearings for some Obama Administration appointees, including David F. Hamilton, Obama’s first selection for a federal appeals court seat, and Dawn Johnsen, nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.

What got my attention in particular was this item concerning (you guessed it) methods of Repug obstruction…

But so far, facing a solid Democratic majority in the Senate, they have been able to do little beyond briefly delaying confirmation. Now they are weighing whether to use the filibuster — a threat of extended debate, the tool many Republican senators regularly denounced when it was used by Democrats to block some Republican nominees. These are certainly different times.

I would like Times writer Neil A. Lewis to click here and take a really good look at the chart. He will learn that Republican filibusters (or the threat thereof) skyrocketed in the 110th Congress (hence the importance of achieving “the magical number of 60” in passing legislation, with that being the vote total that would bar a filibuster, a fact very well known by Senate Repugs including John Cornyn of Texas). So basically, the Repugs haven’t been “weighing” whether to use the filibuster or not; they’ve actually been using it!

And speaking of “Big Bad John” (please), he had the following to say about Johnsen, as the story tells us…

(Cornyn) said Ms. Johnsen lacked the “requisite seriousness” to head the Office of Legal Counsel.

A committee Democrat, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, said he was astonished by the attacks. After the “long, dark days of degradation” of the office, Mr. Whitehouse said, it is hypocritical of Republicans who were then silent to complain now about partisanship.

“Now suddenly they come forward with concerns,” he said. “Where were you when those incompetent, ideological opinions were being issued?”

I don’t know a lot about Whitehouse, but I like what I’ve seen on him concerning abuses in the Bushco Justice Department in particular.

And how funny is it to hear Cornyn talk about “requisite seriousness” when he has promised to wage “World War IIII” to keep Al Franken out of the Senate, as noted here?

Here’s why the Repugs are so upset with Johnsen (and I’d like to watch her kick the crap out of any Repug who calls her a “liberal ideologue” – I’ll bet she could do it)…

Ms. Johnsen, a law professor at Indiana University, was an unsparing critic of memorandums, written by lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, that said the president could largely ignore international treaties and Congress in fighting terrorists and that critics have portrayed as allowing torture in interrogation.

The broad reading of presidential authority was “outlandish,” and the constitutional arguments were “shockingly flawed,” Ms. Johnsen has written. While her language was harsh, the memos have largely been withdrawn, and among lawyers a consensus agreeing with her views has emerged.

And Johnsen also earned the scorn of right-wing bloviators for…

…a footnote in a brief she filed 20 years ago when she was a lawyer with the National Abortion Rights Action League. The footnote said forcing a woman to bear a child when she had no desire to do so was “disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude.”

Conservative blogs asserted that she had equated pregnancy with slavery, and the argument was taken up by Republicans at her confirmation hearing on Feb. 25. Mr. Specter suggested that she had said abortion rights should be protected by the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. Ms. Johnsen replied that the footnote had made a suggestion of an analogy and that it had mentioned the amendment, but that she had never “believed the 13th Amendment had any role” in the abortion issue.

This post from HuffPo’s David Latt provides a more detailed analysis of Johnsen’s thorough criticisms; Senate Democrats would be well advised to do all they can to confirm her without any further delay.

Obama Thwarts MacDonald - Spotted Owl Won't "Buy The Farm"

(Get it, MacDonald’s Farm…heh, and I also posted stuff here that may or may not be of interest, though the new “Hit And Run” ad is pretty good.)

This tells us that the Department of the Interior of the Obama Administration…

...has told a federal court that it will not defend the Bush administration's decision to cut back protections for the northern spotted owl.

The action could affect logging in western Oregon.

…

Interior Department lawyers said in the motion that the decision was based on an inspector general's report finding there was political interference in owl protections by a former deputy assistant interior secretary.

And who exactly would that former deputy assistant interior secretary be? Why, it would be Julie MacDonald. As noted here…

...MacDonald used her political power to rig countless life or death decisions for imperiled American wildlife under the Endangered Species Act. Species like the Preble's meadow jumping mouse, California red-legged frog, and the Canada lynx are all likely a little closer to extinction as a result of MacDonald's decisions while at the Interior Department. While at the Interior Department MacDonald regularly decided in favor of large landowners, development interests, and corporate polluters at the expense of America's wildlife.

…

Julie MacDonald resigned in May (2007) after a scathing report from the Interior Department's Inspector General revealed that she had ridden roughshod over numerous decisions by agency scientists concerning endangered species protections. The report found she had violated ethics rules, edited scientific decisions on endangered species issues and passed internal agency documents to outside parties hostile to wildlife protection. Of particular concern is her involvement with a 2003 decision to remove the Sacramento split-tail from the endangered species list, a fish found on property she and her husband own in California.

As noted here concerning the split-tail decision…

MacDonald’s financial disclosure statement shows that she earns as much as $1 million per year from her ownership of the 80-acre active farm. Federal law bars federal employees from participating in decisions on matters in which they have a personal financial interest.

The Sacramento Splittail, a small fish found only in California’s Central Valley, depends on floodplain habitat and has been described by the Fish and Wildlife Service as facing “potential threats from habitat loss.”

Today, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, wrote to Interior Secretary Kempthorne requesting a full accounting of MacDonald’s role in the Sacramento Splittail decision, an explanation of her apparent conflict of interest, and a thorough review of the science underlying the decision to remove the Sacramento Splittail from the threatened species list.

“It looks like another Bush Administration official was protecting her own bottom line instead of protecting the public interest,” said Miller, a senior member and former chairman of the Natural Resources Committee and a long-time proponent of the Endangered Species Act and Bay-Delta fish and wildlife issues. “We are going to fully investigate this matter and determine whether public policy was improperly altered because of personal conflicts of interest.

And this tells us of MacDonald’s attempt to scuttle the Northwest Forest Plan, which was instituted in 1993 by President Clinton to “(settle) a lawsuit over the northern spotted owl by setting aside habitat for the owl. But it did not protect all of the remaining old-growth trees and it did not protect anything permanently. It was an administrative solution, vulnerable to the kind of underhanded, undermining tactics so typical of the Bush administration.”

Indeed – as the Alternet story tells us…

Once the DC oversight committee (consisting of high-ranking officials from the departments of Agriculture and Interior, including MacDonald) got involved in the spotted owl plan, scientific principles became a lost cause. The first thing that happened, according to (Dominick DellaSala, a scientist with the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy), was an instruction to "flip and switch" the presentation of threats to the spotted owl. Instead of emphasizing the need to protect the owl's habitat, the recovery plan was to emphasize the threat of competition from an invasive species, the barred owl.

The barred owl is a recent transplant from the East Coast that is out-competing spotted owls in some areas. These interlopers are clearly a threat to spotted owls; the solution is not to reduce the protected habitat, but rather to increase it. Doug Heiken of the conservation group Oregon Wild put it this way: "If the in-laws move in with you, you don't make the house smaller; you make it bigger."

As DellaSala describes it, the process went from bad to worse with repeated memos coming down from DC, instructing the recovery committee to produce an alternative "less focused on habitat preservation," and above all, to sever all connections between the new recovery plan and the current recovery plan in place, which is the Northwest Forest Plan.

And as today’s NPR story tells us…

Withdrawal of the Bush administration measures on the spotted owl measures would make it difficult for the federal Bureau of Land Management to go ahead with plans to boost logging in western Oregon.

And by the way, I haven’t heard anything yet from Obama Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar on this, but if you wish to contact him and encourage stronger protections for the spotted owl and old-growth forests, click here.

Tuesday Stuff

As noted here, this is what you're paying for when you advertise on "The Orally Factor"...



...oh, but if we all clap real hard and maybe spread some pixie dust, then numbers will magically appear tomorrow!!!...



..."Still Bushed" (another miserable failure in Afghanistan/Pakistan of course, giving millions while the Taliban and al Qaeda were becoming even better "buds," with Obama a change that they notice after only two months; Dubya's EEOC violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by denying overtime to its employees and providing time off instead - oh goody; and this is a real capper - "President" Hamid Karzai of Pakistan institutes a law observing Shia doctrine that basically legalizes married rape, making divorce easier for men than for women and gives men preferential inheritance rights...heckuva job, Hamid, you sick beast)...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...and as a "tribute" to Karzai for that last item, I came oh so close to embedding "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails, which I think captures what he and the Taliban must be all about, but I just couldn't do it, so this is my substitute, proving once more that cartoon monkeys endowed with the ability of human speech are superior to Afghan terrorists.