Tweet
Today is the final day of Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as Speaker of the House. Couldn’t you just feel it in the air? Links…
• The same Republicans bellyaching for the past few years about not being allowed to offer amendments to legislation won’t allow amendments on the health care repeal bill. It’s a two-page bill that basically says “repeal what we did before,” and you can’t really win these hypocrisy arguments, but I would hope that Democrats at least pick up on a Republican gambit from the recent past and put a motion to recommit together. Although I do have to admit that Boehner’s office was at least amusingly pugnacious about the repeal bill.
• Eric Cantor wants to offer a bill a week to show a commitment to cutting spending, but if they’re all as lame as a 5% cut to lawmaker staff budgets, which would save a whopping $35 million out of a budget measured in trillions, then I don’t think many people will give a damn.
• How can you call this a major reshuffling of the White House staff when you acknowledge in the article that “nearly all of [the open positions] are likely to go to officials already at work in the West Wing or to former campaign loyalists”?
• The war on public employees continues, with legislation at the state level to curb the influence of unions. That’s what this is all about, using public unions as a model to silence the organizing hopes of the private sector unions, with the actual culprits of the crisis – Wall Street and their allies – getting off scot-free. Marshall Auerback has more.
• Roger Hickey couldn’t get this op-ed on Obama and Social Security printed in the Washington Post, probably because it criticized two of their op-ed stalwarts. WaPo probably won’t print the correct take on the retirement age, either.
• Actually, we do need a manufacturing policy coordinator in the White House, and Ron Bloom is about as good a choice as can be expected for that position.
• A new round of diplomacy in North Korea, as the mood softens there.
• Texas was held up as a miracle of low taxes and low regulation, but their huge budget deficit – a consequence of last year being an out-year of a two-year budget cycle – shows that they’re just like everyone else in this Great Recession.
• Hilda Solis has a long climb on mining safety.
• Any peace deal in Afghanistan should be seen as good news, but I fear that extremism is growing and not weakening in that part of the world.
• Revolving door watch: Kit Bond moves to K Street, Patrick Murphy at least avoids that but joins a Philly-area law firm to defend white-collar clients “with key interests in regulatory changes.”
• Judy Miller tries desperately to spin her way out of her criticism of Julian Assange. I’m surprised she didn’t close with “We were proved fucking right.”
• Marvin Ammori on Wikileaks is provocative, not always correct in my view, but worth a read.
• This profile of Mitch McConnell should be entered as exhibit A on why we need to change the Senate rules. McConnell has basically turned the Senate into a large exhibition for watching paint dry.
• Is Goldman Sachs avoiding regulatory oversight on their Facebook special purpose vehicle?
• I’m no Michael Gerson fan but he’s dead on about Michael Vick, criminal justice and second chances, IMO.
• Antonin Scalia cannot stand individual rights, that’s the real point here.
• I thought we already knew that the toppling of the Saddam statue in Iraq was a massive psyop, but this week’s New Yorker cements that.
• Turns out the microfinance industry in India has started to lead to mass suicides, as people cannot pay back the loans given out by a new breed of profit-maximizing microlenders. This is the most horrifying story you’ll read all day.
• I heard a plausible explanation for all those blackbirds dying in Arkansas – New Year’s fireworks leading to some negative consequences – but how, then, to explain the 500 more dead birds a few hundred miles away in Louisiana?
• Speaking of birds, Saudi Arabia accused one of being an Israeli Mossad agent.
• I still use RSS almost exclusively, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere in the face of Twitter. As someone says in the comments, Twitter is like the radio, RSS is the backstop that nothing can get through.
• Millions of dollars in homeland security strategy reduced to rubble in fifteen seconds. “Build the danged fence,” indeed.
• Bye Bye RichRod. Whatever else happens, today is a great day. Take Denard with you, by the way.
15 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL News Desk
From the January-February issue of The Atlantic:
The Rise of the New Global Elite LINK.
Punjab Governor Salman Taseer assassinated in Islamabad LINK.
Regarding Afghanistan, from The Guardian:
Here’s the problem: The Taliban are never going to turn on each other. And the tribe’s commitment to oppose the Taliban who are their blood-relatives is weak. Other than that this is wonderful progress.
This is a reminder that the region has a long history of extreme political violence. Certainly it does not motivate the Pakistani army to expend more effort along the border.
Can someone explain what’s new about the New Yorker article about the Saddam statue?
Boy, that article, which seems admiring, about McConnell was truly depressing. It’s a portrait of a man who does not believe in democracy, who’s deluding himself about what voters/citizens want (the Obama admin went for “a hard left agenda”) but all too effective at accumulating and wielding power. Not a man who’s good for the U.S.
The piece on coal companies’ resistance was mixed – it showed, actually, more will and action in O’s MSHA to change the status quo than in most of the Admin, but of course, also how well Big Coal and especially, Massey/Blankenship, have manipulated the government and regulators to get their way, and keep people working in lethally dangerous conditions.
And reading that one, with quotes from the mine operators on how “they couldn’t make a profit” if safety was enforced, I kept hearing echoes of that letter to all the industry lobbyists last month, asking how the R’s could change regulations to make things easier for them. Sigh. That’s depressing.
Bye-bye, Rich Rod? You a disgruntled Mich alumn, or from a competitor (Ohio State, MSU?)
It’s even better than the title–the booing was from a ballet audience! Theater Audience Boos Tea Party Billionaire David Koch LINK.
Coming soon to a sky over you? Miami-Dade police buy drones LINK.
Couldn’t be from (The)Ohio State (University), he’s not offering autographs for tats.
Regulators Want $2.5 Billion From Bank Execs
“The [FDIC] website will be updated monthly with a running tally of the amount of lawsuits authorized and how much the agency is seeking to recover. So far, however, the FDIC has only filed suits against directors and officers from two banks.”
LINK.
because when i think of radio, i immediately think of backstops.
what?
“I don’t even have to read the briefs, for Pete’s sake.”
Ignorance and arrogance succinctly professed.
Not since he’s already decided that the Constitution was intended as an authoritarian edict, every Madisonian limitation actually a misinterpretation, and everyone except him is something less than a human being. This sociopath has done everything he can to destroy the integrity of the US Supreme Court, he is one of the dangerous fascist thugs the right has positioned to poison the courts and the laws of the land, he is a traitor, a vehement enemy to the very ideas of self-governance, human dignity and rights.
As if community banks haven’t suffered enough, now the FDIC wants to do this. Sheila Bair is awful.
When you reshuffle a deck, you still have the same cards, just in different positions.