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From here (class)...PHILADELPHIA — Pat Burrell wondered how Phillies fans would observe his return to Citizens Bank Park Friday.And just for the record, the Phillies play Tampa Bay again for real in June, but it's for three road games.
...
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.
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.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.)
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.
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).HouseThis week’s particularly stupid No vote by Joe Pitts, ladies and gentlemen.
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.).
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.For what it’s worth, this was introduced by Repug Bob Goodlatte of Virginia (nice try, Charlie and Joe, you asshats).
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.
SenateThis 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.
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 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.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).
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.
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.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).
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.
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.Also…
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.
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).
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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.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!
(Cornyn) said Ms. Johnsen lacked the “requisite seriousness” to head the Office of Legal Counsel.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.
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?”
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.And Johnsen also earned the scorn of right-wing bloviators for…
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.
…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.”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.
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.
(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.)...has told a federal court that it will not defend the Bush administration's decision to cut back protections for the northern spotted owl.And who exactly would that former deputy assistant interior secretary be? Why, it would be Julie MacDonald. As noted here…
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.
...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.As noted here concerning the split-tail decision…
…
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.
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.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.”
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.
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.And as today’s NPR story tells us…
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.
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.
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…their lucrative pension perk known as DROP.I am the last person who will claim that Philadelphia City Council is a model of moral or civic rectitude, and I have to admit that this was a good “rock” to turn over for the Inky, if you will, but until and unless CEO Brian Tierney and the rest of his merry management cohorts at Philadelphia Newspapers figure out how they’re going to give back the six-figure bonuses they received as noted here (h/t Atrios) while the Inquirer and Daily News face bankruptcy, then I don’t think they have the right to criticize anyone for financial transactions that don’t pass the “smell test.”
"I'm entitled to it," Council President Anna Verna said of the nearly $600,000 check she's in line to receive through the DROP program. That's on top of Verna's annual pension of about $130,000.
Councilwoman Marian Tasco also argued that her DROP payment of almost $500,000 is her money. She says Council members are being unfairly maligned for taking what is owed to them.
Here's where Verna, Tasco, and others on Council are not only wrong, but also extremely tone-deaf.
For starters, the DROP program was intended for city employees - not elected officials. Voters are supposed to decide when to "retire" an elected official, so there's no need for them to have the pension incentive.
Second, the DROP payment is supposed to come after you retire. But Councilwoman Joan Krajewski exploited a loophole that must be fixed before other elected officials slither through. After winning reelection last November, Krajewski retired for one day, collected her roughly $275,000 DROP check, and then was sworn in for another four-year term. This sleazy move in no way passes the smell test - even though former City Solicitor Romulo L. Diaz Jr. blessed the maneuver.
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is dealing with the beleaguered auto industry more sternly than he has with bailed-out banks and insurers as he takes the nation another step into uncharted government regulation of industry.I’ll admit that I don’t have a crystal ball, and neither does Babington. As I noted briefly yesterday, I don’t know how much more the UAW is supposed to give back, and judging from the early prognostications of former GM CEO Rick Wagoner’s replacement here, I also don’t know at this moment how GM is going to avoid bankruptcy (Chrysler certainly faces that if it doesn’t agree to the Fiat takeover…thank you, Bob Nardelli). But from what I read, I don’t know of any other way around what Obama is proposing.
The decision could leave a lasting mark on his presidency, for good or for bad, in ways reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's battle with air traffic controllers or Harry Truman's showdown with striking steelworkers.
“The White House Misfires on Limbaugh” was The Wall Street Journal’s headline over a column by the former Bush “guru” Karl Rove, who is now enjoying the delights of being on the kicking rather than the receiving team. After the new press secretary, Robert Gibbs, took the opportunity to change the subject of economic distress by zapping a controversy-loving media critic, Rove wrote in defense of the conservative commentator: “Presidents throughout history have kept lists of political foes. But the Obama White House is the first I am aware of to pick targets based on polls. Even Richard Nixon didn’t focus-group his enemies list.” The Journal’s embedded subhead punched up the column’s message: “Aren’t there more important things to do than create an enemies list?”And of course, Rove’s claim and the rather bald-face insinuation that the Obama White House compiles an “enemies list” went thoroughly unchallenged by Safire.
(And I also posted over here.)There are plenty of people in Congress for whom the CBO report (that projected $9.3 trillion added to the debt) was no surprise, and some of them have proposed a solution that would confront this reality. Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Judd Gregg, its ranking Republican, have offered a bill to create a bipartisan commission to examine every aspect of the budget -- taxes, defense and domestic spending, and, especially, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Congress would be required to vote promptly, up or down, on its recommendations, or come up with an alternative that would achieve at least as much in savings.Oh, please; the following came from this Think Progress post, which noted that Former President Reality Avoidance claimed “the push for Social Security privatization” as his biggest domestic achievement – words fail me on occasions like this, I must admit (and that's quite a trick for somebody like me)…
In the House, Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Republican Frank Wolf of Virginia have been pressing a similar proposal but have been regularly thwarted.
The roadblock in chief is Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House. She has made it clear that her main goal is to protect Social Security and Medicare from any significant reforms. Pelosi has not forgotten how Democrats benefited from the 2005-06 fight against Bush's effort to change Social Security. Her party, which had lost elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004, found its voice and its rallying cry to "Save Social Security," and Pelosi is not about to allow any bipartisan commission to take that issue away from her control.
It seems odd that Bush cited an unsuccessful effort as his biggest domestic policy achievement, but understandable given that he doesn’t have much else to consider. But not only was Bush’s drive to privatize Social Security an utter failure, the concept is also widely unpopular with the American public and if enacted, it would have had disastrous consequences for Americans’ retirement funds.I would tend to agree with Sen. Kent Conrad who claimed that the projected deficit in President Obama’s budget is “unsustainable.” However, let’s get this done it in whatever form it takes (after Congress hammers it out, passes it and sends it to Obama’s desk) to help rebuild our economy first, OK? And then, after we turn things around economically (God willing), we can start looking for ways to rework the numbers.
A recent Center for American Progress Action Fund report found that if a worker had retired on October 1, 2008 after 35 years of contributions to private retirement accounts, that retiree would have lost nearly $30,000 in retirement funds because of the downturn in the stock market over the last two years.
Part of the reason Bush’s push failed was that very few people actually believed he was trying to reform Social Security and instead thought he was trying to dismantle it. Even back in 2005, despite a lack of support for privatization, the Bush administration was insisting that their efforts were a “great success.”
Indeed, a recent CNN poll found that 62 percent of Americans oppose privatizing any part their Social Security taxes.
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In a June 6, 2002, address, Bush called (Abu) Zubaida al Qaeda's "chief of operations" and said that "[f]rom him and from hundreds of others, we are learning more about how the terrorists plan and operate, information crucial in anticipating and preventing future attacks.""You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?"
At a Republican fundraiser on October 14, 2002, Bush called Zubaida "one of the top three leaders in the organization."
But according to Suskind, even as Bush was publicly proclaiming Zubaida's malevolence, he was privately being briefed about doubts within the intelligence community regarding Zubaida's significance -- and mental stability. Suskind quotes the following exchange between Bush and then-CIA director George Tenet:
"'I said he was important,' Bush said to Tenet at one of their daily meetings. 'You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?'
"'No Sir, Mr. President.'"
And on the Guardian Web site today, Brent Mickum, an attorney who represents Zubaida, writes: "For many years, Abu Zubaydah's name has been synonymous with the war on terror because of repeated false statements made by the Bush administration, the majority of which were known to be false when uttered....Oh, and one more thing – it should be noted that the Authorization to Use Military Force against Iraq (basically, Congress’s signoff on Dubya’s Mesopotamian Disaster) passed on October 16th, two days after the Republican fundraiser.
"[T]he man described by President Bush and others within his administration as a 'top operative', the 'number three person' in al-Qaida, and al-Qaida's 'chief of operations' was never even a member of al-Qaida, much less an individual who was among its 'inner circle'."
Notice that directly lying does not cause a loss of face. For example, if a flight is cancelled by an airline, then they may lie that it is merely delayed. Inability to arrange the trip would cause a loss of face, while lying that it is delayed would help to save face. So-called "polite lies" are acceptable.So, maybe if he’d admitted that his so-called “case for war” in Iraq was a house of cards and thus put a halt to it (realizing Hans Blix was right after all), he’d thought he would “lose face,” as opposed to constantly changing his rationale for the war (9/11, fighting them there so we don’t fight them here, bringing them democracy, etc., etc., etc.), which could have been a version of a “polite lie.”
