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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 (another slow week).HouseYou know this is a no-brainer when even Joe Pitts votes Yes (maybe trying to lay low after sponsoring that horrible amendment with Stupak - ???).
Extended jobless benefits. Voting 403-12, the House sent President Obama a bill (HR 3548) that would provide 20 more weeks of jobless checks for those whose allotments have expired or soon will expire and who live in states with at least 8.5 percent unemployment. The bill provides 14 additional weeks of benefits for the long-term jobless in all other states. The $2.4 billion cost would be offset by payroll-tax increases on employers. Jobless checks average $300 per week.
The bill also extends for five months an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers that is set to expire Nov. 30 and increases income limits for eligibility from $150,000 to $225,000 for couples and from $75,000 to $150,000 for individuals. The bill creates a $6,500 credit for some homebuyers who already own homes.
A yes vote was to pass the bill.
Voting yes: John Adler (D., N.J.), Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.), 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.), Joseph R. Pitts (R., Pa.), Allyson Y. Schwartz (D., Pa.), Joe Sestak (D., Pa.), and Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.).
Not voting: Robert A. Brady (D., Pa.) and Patrick Murphy (D., Pa.).
Credit-card rules. Voting 331-92, the House passed a bill (HR 3639) giving credit-card firms a tighter deadline for starting pro-consumer policies enacted by Congress in May. Under the bill, changes originally required to be in place by Feb. 22, 2010, would be advanced to Dec. 1. The rationale is that the sooner the rules take effect, the easier it will be for cardholders to cope with recession.I seriously hope the people working for Beau Biden are keeping track of some of these dumb votes by Castle (I smell a 30-second attack ad, people!).
A yes vote was to pass the bill.
Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Dent, Fattah, Holden LoBiondo, Schwartz, Sestak, and Smith.
Voting no: Castle and Pitts.
Not voting: Gerlach and Murphy.
Chemical-plant security. Voting 230-193, the House passed a bill (HR 2868) to permanently extend chemical-plant security requirements that otherwise would expire in October 2010.Based on this, I believe the Repugs had a problem with the whistleblower protection in the bill and the fact that states could implement their own security standards if they were stricter than the federal government (uh, and which is the “states rights” party again?).
A yes vote was to pass the bill.
Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Fattah, Holden, Schwartz, and Sestak.
Voting no: Castle, Dent, Gerlach, LoBiondo, Pitts, and Smith.
Not voting: Murphy.
SenateThe House is in recess this week (I believe), and the Senate debated the 2010 military-construction budget over the last few days.
Jobless benefits, tax breaks. Voting 98-0, the Senate sent the House a bill (HR 3548, above) that would provide at least 14 more weeks of jobless checks to the long-term unemployed in all states and 20 more weeks to people in states with unemployment rates of at least 8.5 percent.
A yes vote was to pass the bill.
Voting yes: Thomas Carper (D., Del.), Bob Casey (D., Pa.), Ted Kaufman (D., Del.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), and Arlen Specter (D., Pa.).
Justice Department budget. Voting 71-28, the Senate sent to conference with the House a bill (HR 2847) appropriating $64.4 billion for the fiscal 2010 budgets of the Justice and Commerce Departments, NASA, and several other agencies. The bill represents a 12 percent spending increase over 2009.
A yes vote was to pass the bill.
Voting yes: Carper, Casey, Kaufman, Lautenberg, Menendez, and Specter.
In an interview with CNBC in January, the president promised the stimulus bill would keep unemployment at 8 percent and new jobs would be created. Yet since the passage of the $787 billion stimulus in February, America hasn’t reduced unemployment. In fact, we have lost 3.2 million jobs.As Media Matters tells us here, the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that job losses that began in 2007 are slowing, albeit very gradually (necessitating the need for some kind of stimulus for job creation IMHO, but that’s a bit off-topic for here). So as usual, Gingrich is misreading the data here.
President Obama argues that although jobs have been lost, the stimulus has “saved or created” one million jobs. But what is going to happen when the stimulus money dries up? Those jobs will be lost. In effect, the stimulus bill will have lost over four million jobs. This is inexcusable.
Republicans are still going to have to do root-and-branch renovation if they hope to provide compelling answers to issues like middle-class economic anxiety. But in the meantime, people like Thune offer Republicans a way to connect fiscal discipline with traditional small-town values, a way to tap into rising populism in a manner that is optimistic, uplifting and nice.Oh, I’m sure it was “optimistic, uplifting and nice” of Thune to tell us here that “government jobs don’t stimulate the economy,” although CBO director Douglas Elmendorf begged to differ there.
…other Republican politicians have profited when they exposed received wisdom about them as false. In 1980, Democrats portrayed Ronald Reagan as a dim-witted ideologue bent on starting a nuclear war.Uh, I don’t think so, though I’ll admit anything is possible, given that the country will be trying to recover from the damage inflicted upon it by another Republican president who was nothing but a pretender for years to come (and I don’t want to say anything about Palin, since any publicity, good or bad, will be spun by our media in her favor anyway).
Then Reagan debated President Jimmy Carter. The public watched as a conservative pragmatist with a puckish wit unmanned a self-important, humorless liberal. Suddenly, Reagan was no longer the "dangerous" choice. He won handily.
Could Ms. Palin follow Reagan's example?
MONDALE: … Now, Mr. President, you said: ''There you go again.'' Right. Remember the last time you said that?(I'll never forget how befuddled Reagan looked at that moment; didn't happen often though, I'll admit, until Iran-Contra, that is.)
REAGAN: Um hmm.
MONDALE: You said it when President Carter said that you were going (to) cut Medicare. And you said: ''Oh, no, there you go again, Mr. President.'' And what did you do right after the election? You went out and tried to cut $20 billion out of Medicare. And so when you say, ''There you go again,'' people remember this, you know. And people will remember that you signed the biggest tax increase in the history of California, and the biggest tax increase in the history of the United States. And what are you going to do? You've got (a) $260 billion deficit. You can't wash it away. You won't slow defense spending; you refuse to do that.
For many middle- and low-income families, this tax increase (from the Social Security Reform Act of 1983) more than undid any gains from Mr. Reagan's income tax cuts. In 1980, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, middle-income families with children paid 8.2 percent of their income in income taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. By 1988 the income tax share was down to 6.6 percent — but the payroll tax share was up to 11.8 percent, and the combined burden was up, not down.Given all of this, I’ll trade an amiable dunce with a “puckish wit” for a “humorless liberal” any day of the week.
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DALLAS — Nearly 10 months after leaving office, former President George W. Bush plans to emerge from self-imposed political hibernation on Thursday as he starts a new public policy institute to promote some of the domestic and international priorities of his presidency.The “results” never achieved by his nightmare of a presidency, of course, on “education, global health (last I checked, the U.S. was “global”), human freedom and economic growth.”
In a speech at Southern Methodist University, home of his future library and museum, the former president will kick off the new George W. Bush Institute as a forum for study and advocacy in four main areas: education, global health, human freedom and economic growth. Advisers said he hoped his institute would be more focused on producing results than many research organizations are.
“The president has been working with these ideas for a long time now,” said James K. Glassman, a former top State Department official now serving as the institute’s founding executive director. “He wanted to do something very different from other former presidents, and that is to create a research institute that’s independent, nonpartisan and scholarly and that will have an impact on the real world.”Oh, I’m sure it will be “very different from other former presidents” all right (and by the way, to get an idea of how brainless Glassman is, click here and read the hilarious comments to his book predicting that the Dow would hit 36,000).
A few blocks from where the Wall stood is the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, which commemorates the more than 1,000 people who died trying to cross the deadly East German border. A group of important Berliners gathered over the weekend to inaugurate a new exhibit on the Gipper and his famous efforts to end the division of Berlin.And as we know, when Ronnie said something “had to go,” like reasonable tax rates for his rich pals at our expense, any notion of sane environmental stewardship under the odious James Watt, economic fairness due to the “trickle down” madness of Budget Director David Stockman, and compliance with Congressional laws in the Iran-Contra fiasco…well, gosh darn it, it “went,” didn’t it?
The collection tells a fascinating story of just how focused Ronald Reagan was on tearing down the Wall. He first visited Berlin in November 1978, and spent many minutes surveying the wall's "death strip" from the penthouse offices of the conservative Axel Springer publishing house that stood right on the border between the two cities. "You could tell from the set of his jaw and his look," recalls former aide Peter Hannaford, "that he was very, very determined that this was something that had to go."
…the growing consensus among historians is that Reagan’s contributions, while positive, weren’t the definitive factor that America-centric commentators make them out to be. Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, has insisted that attributing the end of the Cold War to Ronald Reagan is like attributing the sunrise to the rooster’s cackle.Ooooh – snap!
Time after time, public murder sprees occur in "gun-free zones" - public places where citizens are not legally able to carry guns. The list is long, including massacres at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School along with many less deadly attacks. Last week's slaughter at Fort Hood Army base in Texas was no different - except that one man bears responsibility for the ugly reality that the men and women charged with defending America were deliberately left defenseless when a terrorist opened fire.Um, let’s see, war zones – as I recall when Clinton was president, we had limited conflicts in Haiti, Somalia, (cue the reflex right-wing umbrage over the “Black Hawk Down” incident – not a great moment, I’ll admit, but at least the episode was resolved under Clinton, albeit unsatisfactorily, unlike what would happen under Number 43 where conflicts still blazed when he left office) and Bosnia (still a tense stalemate there also). So there was no “high demand for MPs in war zones,” as I recall. And this of course meant that there were no shortages of MPs for our bases.
Among President Clinton's first acts upon taking office in 1993 was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases. In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations forbidding military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection. For the most part, only military police regularly carry firearms on base, and their presence is stretched thin by high demand for MPs in war zones.
Sources tell ABC News that in August 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan walked into the Guns Galore gun store in Killeen, Texas, and legally purchased the FN Herstal tactical pistol that authorities believe was used to massacre soldiers at Fort Hood.So basically, instead of arming everybody to the teeth, we should concentrate on better information-sharing between our intelligence services instead. And here is the first question I would ask of “Guns Galore”; how come you didn’t think it was a problem that a member of the Fort Hood base bought a weapon that was prohibited for use at that base (again, some information-sharing and reporting would have done a lot more to save lives than giving everyone assault weapons to shoot the “bad guys”).
An FBI background check under the National Instant Background Check System was done when Hasan purchased the pistol -- but that information was never shared with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington, which was aware that Hasan had repeatedly contacted a radical imam suspected of having ties to al Qaeda.
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force ran down intelligence leads relating to Hasan late last year but closed the inquiry sometime in early 2009.
Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island was to meet Thursday with Thomas J. Tobin, the Roman Catholic bishop of Providence, and perhaps start healing a bitter rift over whether health care legislation now before Congress should restrict abortion coverage.(Count to ten and breathe, Doomsy…)
Instead, they postponed the meeting, and Bishop Tobin stepped up his public rebuke of Mr. Kennedy, accusing him Wednesday of “false advertising” for describing himself as a Catholic and saying he should not receive holy communion because he supports using taxpayer money for abortions.
“If you freely choose to be a Catholic, it means you believe certain things, you do certain things,” Bishop Tobin said on WPRO, a Providence radio station. “If you cannot do all that in conscience, then you should perhaps feel free to go somewhere else.”
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(Part One is over here.)Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.Given, though, that we’re talking about the High Court of Hangin’ Judge JR, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope for that either (and this tells us how the Second Circuit upheld a ruling in 2006 dismissing a claim against Saudi Arabia, a Saudi charity, four princes and a Saudi banker of providing material support to al Qaeda before the September 11 attacks).
In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured.
Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that none of that entitled Mr. Arar to a day in court.
…
Written by (Jacobs), the 59-page majority opinion held that no civil damages remedy exists for the horrors visited on Mr. Arar. To “decide how to implement extraordinary rendition,” he wrote, is “for the elected members of Congress — and not for us as judges.” Allowing suits against policy makers for rendition and torture would “affect diplomacy, foreign policy and the security of the nation,” Judge Jacobs said.
…
One of the dissenters, Judge Guido Calabresi, said that “when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.”
The damage to Mr. Arar, America’s reputation and the rule of law is already quite plain. The Supreme Court should reverse this ruling.
A new CNN/Opinion Research Poll of 1,018 adult Americans finds those who are very or somewhat confident about the Democrat administration's plans waning, while those lacking confidence are increasing in numbers.Nice one, Malcolm, you scumbag (the "ic" always matters).
…steady delays in manufacturing the (H1N1) vaccine and the federal government's distribution have continued. Deliveries of millions of doses have gone way beyond the original schedule. So late are deliveries that some medical experts say an epidemic will be well underway or over before all the doses become available in late December.I must tell you that I’ve just about had it with Ron Paul.
GOP Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, never a fan of big new government programs, has called this year's H1N1 swine flu preparations a "total failure." His belief seems to be spreading like a virus as well, with several polls showing a majority of Americans now have no intention of getting the doses, even if and when they become available.
Now, the new CNN Poll, taken Oct. 30-Nov. 1 with a margin of error of +/-3 points, finds those Americans who are very confident that the Obama White House can prevent a pandemic has fallen from a meager 15% around Labor Day to a worse 11% now. Those feeling "somewhat confident" has dropped from 44% to 40%.
Meanwhile, the percentage of those lacking any confidence has jumped from 40% to 49%.
At a time of heightened national anxieties following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and other targets, US authorities raised the spectre of biological attack using the smallpox virus (though there was no evidence that such an attack was imminent, or even feasible). Bush announced a programme to vaccinate 10 million ‘frontline’ public service workers, including police and health staff, with the smallpox vaccine (which had not been used since smallpox had been declared extinct 30 years earlier). But few believed that smallpox was a real threat and, though the politicians succeeded in bullying the public health authorities into endorsing the programme, fewer than 40,000 of the eligible staff came forward to have the vaccine and within a year the whole campaign sputtered out.So if people are hesitant about getting their vaccinations (and there’s no reason for that, by the way; some school districts mandate up-to-date vaccinations), we can thank the husband of Malcolm’s benefactor for inflicting some unnecessary panic.
According to journalist Arthur Allen in his authoritative study of vaccination and anti-vaccination campaigns in the US, in the smallpox scare ‘the Bush administration had seemingly distorted the truth and manipulated public fears to achieve its goals’ (4). As an advocate of the benefits of immunisation, Allen regretted the effect of the smallpox bioterrorism vaccine programme in undermining public trust for health authorities and in damaging the reputation of vaccination. He noted that this episode contributed to a shift in popular attitudes towards immunisation from the prevailing enthusiasm of the postwar years (resulting from the success of vaccination against polio, smallpox and other diseases) to the more ambivalent climate that now prevails (as a result of the vaccine/autism and other scares).
…the police say, as many as two dozen Abington (Pa) youths armed with baseball bats piled into cars, drove into the Fox Chase neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia and confronted a group of teen-agers who ran off.And as noted here in a post about police and emergency personnel acting with the haste and pre-emption that, tragically, were missing in the Polec case, “(The Polec story) pained a family, neighborhood, city and nation in 1994. It prompted an overhaul of the Philadelphia 911 system – including removing civilian dispatchers and replacing them with trained officers.”
The Abington youths then cornered (Polec) in front of the church where he had once been an altar boy. He fell or was knocked to the pavement. Then, while some of the attackers pulled him to his feet, others clubbed him to death with a bat, fracturing his skull seven times.
The Philadelphia police arrested three suspects on Tuesday, and said they expected to make at least two more arrests soon. Thomas Crook, 18, Bou Khathavong, 17, and Nicholas Pinero, 17, were charged with murder and are being held without bail.
The police said the attack appeared to have been provoked by an accusation by a young woman from Abington who said she had argued with some teen-agers at a McDonald's in Fox Chase and was then raped. The police said that the young woman had not been raped, but the young men from Abington nonetheless planned revenge for days before they drove to the same McDonald's the night of Nov. 11.
Mr. Polec, whom the police said was not involved in the earlier incident, was standing in the parking lot with some friends when the Abington teen-agers pulled up and chased them to the front of St. Cecilia's Roman Catholic Church. Several of Mr. Polec's friends were injured in the melee.
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Michael Sokolove wrote the following profile of Dick Armey in the New York Times magazine on Sunday, in which we learned the following…The (Washington) march on Sept. 12 was largely organized by FreedomWorks (the non-profit “Astroturf” group of which Armey is co-chairman) which secured the permits and opened the podium to a range of speakers — including those from the like-minded but separate Tea Party movement.Eric Boehlert of Media Matters had a good response to that and other excerpts here (and as noted here, I’m sure the statement from Sokolove that Armey’s group is somehow separate from the “teabaggers” is news to Joe Conason, among others - Wikipedia does tell us that the "Tea Party Patriots" are officially separate from Freedom Works, however).
Armey told me that he had doubts from the beginning about the Iraq war and now regards it as a mistake.That’s interesting, because while in Congress, Armey voted for the Authorization to Use Military Force (noted here, though to be fair, a lot of other members of Congress on both sides of the aisle did also).
To Armey, the Constitution is not a “living document” — a phrase he mocks at rallies, to laughs and great applause — and is in fact so straightforward and speaks so directly to this era that it’s reasonable to wonder why we need the nine justices of the Supreme Court to interpret it.I can’t think of a word to describe my disgust over the fact that Armey actually served in Congress at any point whatsoever if he actually felt such disregard for the constitutional separation of powers.
In 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a reporter asked him what he would do if he were in President Bill Clinton's position. He replied "If I were in the President's place I would not have gotten a chance to resign. I would be lying in a pool of my own blood, hearing Mrs. Armey standing over me saying, 'How do I reload this damn thing?'"[5] Several of his former female economics students went public with stories of his sexually harassing them — harassment allegedly so severe that at least one student transferred to another school. He would later divorce his wife and marry one of his students.[6]And finally, I give you this from Sokolove’s article…
If Armey’s views seem disconnected from how many Americans experience health care, one reason could be that Armey himself has very little recent personal exposure to the system. Like many American men, he avoids doctors and said he has not seen one in many years. “I’ve been very fortunate, very healthy,” he said, “so why change up what I’ve been doing?” He equates medical care with unpleasantness. “What happens to old folks, and I’m 69, is they get prodded and poked and picked on. They run a camera up your behind. If these things are medically necessary, I will adhere to them. But don’t make me go through them for your comfort. Medicine is supposed to be for my safety, not yours.”If Armey chooses to put off colorectal screenings to prevent detection of cancer, that’s his right, even though he’s a damn fool when it comes to his health (to say nothing of his politics either, of course) since he’s in a higher-risk age group. However, this story tells us that colorectal cancer rates have ticked upward for groups beneath the age of 50, generally considered the cutoff for procedures to detect colorectal cancer.
(And I also posted here.)A preliminary review of the computer of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the accused shooter in Thursday's rampage at Fort Hood in which 13 people were killed, has revealed no evidence of any connection to terror groups or conspirators, according to law enforcement officials.I know decency towards those with whom they disagree is way too much to ask of Horowitz, O’Reilly, Hannity and the rest of that crowd. Apparently, though, respectful silence to commemorate the dead prior to another round of bloviation is too much to ask also.
