Visual source: Newseum

Michael Crowley at TIME looks at the Marco Rubio chatter:

Now that Mitt Romney has, in an important psychological sense, clinched the Republican nomination, the conversation is turning to the question of his running mate. And everyone seems to agree that Florida Senator Marco Rubio is a compelling option: young, telegenic, Hispanic and from a critical swing state. There’s just one problem–Rubio insists he doesn’t want to be vice president.

It’s true that, at times, he has offered something less than a completely airtight, LBJ-style “will not accept” statement. But in October he called the prospect “off the table” and said yes when asked if he was “ruling that out.” Just yesterday, he declared, “I’m not going to be Vice President.” To my ears this is a solid notch more negative than the typical coyness of someone who covets the number-two slot but doesn’t want to appear overeager. By contrast, Ohio Senator Rob Portman, another likely veep candidate, declined a similar chance to rule out the prospect to Politico recently, although he too downplayed his interest.

Eugene Robinson also looks at potential Mitt Romney running mates and starts off with the Rubio possibility as well:
Playing second fiddle to Mitt Romney won’t be easy, but somebody has to be his running mate. Let’s handicap the field:

●Florida Sen. Marco Rubio: The choice who offers the biggest potential reward — for the biggest risk.The telegenic young Cuban American could potentially shore up three of the Romney campaign’s weaknesses: He is an unambiguous conservative, elected with Tea Party backing, who would temper Romney’s “Massachusetts moderate” image among the disgruntled GOP base. Rubio’s groundbreaking candidacy could lure back some of the Hispanic voters driven away by Republican policies. And he happens to come from a huge swing state that Romney has to win to have a chance at the White House.

But Rubio would be a roll of the dice. How would he perform under the microscopic scrutiny that any candidate for national office must endure? Pitted against Vice President Biden in a debate, would he seem callow and uninformed? Rubio could brighten Romney’s prospects, but there’s also a chance he could dim them considerably.

Paul Krugman writes in The New York Times about conservative attacks against the Fed:
A few days ago, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, spoke out in defense of his successor. Attacks on Ben Bernanke by Republicans, he told The Financial Times, are “wholly inappropriate and destructive.” He’s right about that — which makes this one of the very few things the ex-maestro has gotten right in the past few years. [...]

the real reason the attacks on Mr. Bernanke from the right are so destructive is that they’re an effort to bully the Fed into doing exactly the wrong thing. The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing. [..]

True, Mr. Bernanke likes to insist that he and his colleagues aren’t affected by politics. But that claim is hard to square with the Fed’s actions, or rather lack of action. As many observers have noted, the Fed’s own forecasts indicate that while things have been looking up a bit lately, it still expects low inflation and high unemployment for years to come. Given that prospect, more of the “quantitative easing” that is now the main tool of Fed policy should be a no-brainer. Yet the recently released minutes from a March 13 meeting show a Fed inclined to do nothing unless things take a turn for the worse.

At The Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibben writes about fossil fuel subsidies:
Start this way: You subsidize something you want to encourage, something that might not happen if you didn't support it financially. Take education. We build schools, pay teachers and give government loans and grants to college kids. Families too have embraced education subsidies, with tuition often being the last big subsidy we give the children we've raised. The theory is: Young people don't know enough yet. We need to give them a hand and a chance when it comes to further learning, so they'll be a help to society in the future. From that analogy, here are five rules that should be applied to the fossil-fuel industry.

Don't subsidize those who already have plenty of cash on hand.

No one would propose a government program of low-interest loans to send the richest kids in the country to college. We assume that the wealthy will pay full freight. Similarly, we should assume that the fossil-fuel business, the most profitable industry on Earth, should pay its way. What possible reason is there for giving, say, Exxon a tax break? Year after year the company sets records for money-making. Last year it managed to rake in a mere $41 billion in profit, just failing to break its own 2008 all-time mark of $45 billion.

The Courier-Journal looks at ALEC and the wave of Republican legislation it's helped to enact across the country:
Pressure has been brought to bear on a number of large corporations that help fund ALEC’s work, which allegedly promotes “pro-business” legislation in state legislatures across the nation. The ALEC staff drafts model bills that conservative, mostly Republican, lawmakers push in the individual states. Two of these companies, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, have resigned in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case.

The work of ALEC goes far beyond “pro-business” legislation like right-to-work laws and efforts to break public employees’ unions. Other model legislation that the group has advanced include bills targeting illegal immigrants and those that would limit voter participation by requiring photo identification cards.

A report on National Public Radio yesterday noted that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was once a proud ALEC member. In remarks to the organization in 2009, he said: “Not only does [ALEC] bring like-minded legislators together, but the private sector engagement and partnership in ALEC is really what I think makes it the organization that it is.”

Those who remember the right-wing demonization of ACORN, the citizen’s action group with which President Obama had ties in Chicago, may find it interesting that the goals of that group included much of what ALEC crusades against. ACORN advocated for low- and moderate-income families by focusing on neighborhood safety, affordable health care, increased democratic participation through voter registration, affordable housing and other issues.

Gina Barecca at The Hartford Courant has some advice for those of you attending family gatherings this weekend:
One thing to remember when it comes to celebrating the holidays together: Heaven makes you family, but a new generation of selective serotonin reintake inhibitors, known as SSRIs, can make you friends.

I'd like to offer five suggestions for ways to make time with your extended family easier to manage:

1. Keep your mouth full at all times. That's right. Stuff your cheeks like a chipmunk. The more food you shovel into your craw, the less possibility there is of saying something inflammatory.  [...]

5. Remember that you will never change anybody's mind about the following topics: politics, contraception, foreign vs. domestic automobiles, country music, global warming, cats vs. dogs, boxing, evolution, high-protein diets, texting, unions, Julia Roberts, religion, Jay Leno vs. Conan O'Brien vs. David Letterman, jeggings, public education, ghosts and primogeniture.

The best parts of any holiday are the serendipitous moments of laughter and connection not caught on video but recorded, indestructible, in our hearts.

If that's not working, there's usually cake; remember suggestion No. 1.

enlargeCredit: MAD Magazine

h/t Batocchio, Who said it, Romney or Mister Burns from The Simpsons? (click image for larger)

Open Thread below...

digby writes:
Brad DeLong has a question for Ezra Klein about Grand Bargains:

As a Clinton administration staffer, a question for Ezra. Suppose we do a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal over the next two years. Why don't you think that the next time the Republican Party gets back into power afterwards they won't do what they did the last time they had working majorities everywhere in 2001-3, and indeed the time before that they had working majorities in 1981-2: large tax cuts for the rich that destabilize America's public finances.

It's hard for any veteran of the Clinton Administration to reach any conclusion other than that fixing America's long-run fiscal dilemmas requires first the complete destruction of today's Republican Party, and those of us who care about America's fiscal future need to turn all of our energies to that end. Can you give me reasons not to believe that?

This is a really good question. It's not as if the Democrats haven't done a ton of Grand Bargaining over the past couple of decades—and the result is always that the Republicans demand more. I recall having an argument back in 2000 with a long time Democratic operative who insisted that the Republicans could never demagogue them again because Clinton balanced the budget and left a surplus. Surely the people now understood that the Democrats were fiscally responsible. How'd that work out for us?

Or, for that matter, how did it work out for us on foreign policy and national security and women's rights and affirmative action or anything else? At every turn the GOP has moved further right and the Democrats have felt compelled to scurry after them, all the while insisting that the country would see them as the more "reasonable" and "responsible" for having done so.

The bottom line is that Grand Bargains are a huge part of our problem. [...]

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:

Iraq remains a lethal place for US soldiers and marines; we lost 38 Americans in March.  Last week Muqtada al-Sadr made it clear that any decrease if fighting in Iraq (that's not due to the already completed population transfers in mixed-sectarian parts of the country like Baghdad) remains tenuous and largely out the control of U.S. forces.  US forces were mostly bystanders during the fighting between Shiite factions, but if our soldiers and marines are asked to engage Iraqi forces casualties could quickly go back to the levels we saw in 2006 and early 2007.  [...]

The only big differences between two years ago and today is that a lot more soldiers are on their third deployment to Iraq, the Taliban are even more powerful in Afghanistan, more sergeants and captains have left the military, and more of the men and women we're putting in to that war zone are suffering from the strain and shouldn't be standing in Iraq, with a gun, suffering from anxiety, fatigue and PTSD, hoping they don't get blown up.

Tweet of the Day:

If anyone sees Newt Gingrich, would you please ask, "Hey, genius, how's the think tank?"
— @LOLGOP via TweetDeck

High Impact Posts. Top Comments. Overnight News Digest.

Title: Atheists Don't Have No SongsArtist: Steve Martin and The Steep Canyon Rangers

Happy Holy Weekend to our atheist friends, and G-d bless. :D

Rare Bird Alert Artist: Steve Martin Price: $13.23 (As of 04/05/12 08:00 pm details)

This was the second time in 11 days they've had this kind of leak, so you might get the impression that the plant isn't all that stable. This sort of thing might also explain why the seaweed on the West Coast is testing so much higher for radiation lately.

But the question I have is, in a place where the radiation is so high that it's not safe for robots, why the hell would they use plastic pipes?

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said as much as 12 tons of radioactive water leaked from a pipe at its crippled Fukushima nuclear station, the second such incident in 11 days at the same pipeline, raising further doubts about the stability of the plant.

Part of the water may have poured into the sea through a drainage ditch, Osamu Yokokura, a spokesman for the utility, said by phone. The company known as Tepco stopped the leak from a pipe connecting a desalination unit and a tank today, he said.

“There will be similar leaks until Tepco improves equipment,” said Kazuhiko Kudo, a research professor of nuclear engineering at Kyushu University, who visited the plant twice last year as a member of a panel under the Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency. “The site had plastic pipes to transfer radioactive water, which Tepco officials said are durable and for industrial use, but it’s not something normally used at nuclear plants,” he said. “Tepco must replace it with metal equipment, such as steel.”

Tepco has about 100,000 tons of highly radioactive water accumulated in basements at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station nearly 13 months after the March 11 quake and tsunami caused meltdowns and the worst radiation leaks since Chernobyl. The tsunami knocked out all power at the station, causing cooling systems for reactors to fail. The utility was forced to set up makeshift pumps to get cooling water to the reactors, with most of it then draining into basements.

Tepco has been criticized before over its handling of the radioactive water following several leaks into the sea, including the one reported on March 26.

Last year, the environment group Greenpeace International said it found seaweed and fish contaminated to more than 50 times the 2,000 becquerel per kilogram legal limit for radioactive iodine-131 off the coast of Fukushima during a survey between May 3 and 9.

The latest leak contains about 16.7 becquerels per cubic centimeter of radioactive cesium 134 and 137 combined, Tepco said in a statement today. It’s still investigating how much strontium and other types of radioactive particles are contained in the water, Yokokura said.

Strontium can be absorbed in the body through eating tainted seaweed or fish. It then accumulates in bone and can cause cancer, said Tetsuo Ito, the head of Kinki University’s Atomic Energy Research Institute, in a December interview.

On March 26, about 120 tons of radioactive water may have leaked from a pipeline connected to the desalination unit, Yokokura said. Of the leaked water, Tepco believes about 80 liters poured into the sea, he said.

(Clips of Tom Delay and John Cornyn quoted below start after the 1:00 mark.)

On Monday, President Obama unsurprisingly expressed confidence that the Supreme Court would uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even less remarkable, Obama rightly reminded Americans that "conservative commentators" have for years said "the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law." Nevertheless, Republicans quickly accused the President of "unprecedented" effort to "intimidate the Supreme Court."

Of course, this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black (to put it mildly). After all, denouncing "judicial activism" has been a GOP talking point for years. Not content to rest there, the party's members of Congress and presidential candidates have pushed to limit the federal judiciary's jurisdiction on a range of issues, abortion not least among them. And as their incendiary rhetoric during the Terri Schiavo saga and other episodes reveals, Republican leaders didn't hesitate to issue none-too-thinly veiled threats of violence against the nation's judges.

Following the President's statement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell led the GOP charge:

"This president's attempt to intimidate the Supreme Court falls well beyond distasteful politics. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for our system of checks and balances."

While Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove all called the President a "thug," McConnell doubled-down on Thursday, insisting Obama should "back off" because "the independence of the court must be defended."

Of course, back in 2005, McConnell played a pivotal role in the GOP effort to disregard the 19 rulings by Florida and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, in the case of Terri Schiavo. As he explained to an incredulous Brit Hume of Fox News:

What we simply did was grant to the courts an opportunity to review the case, something they do in habeas corpus petitions in death penalty cases all the time. It's not unusual for a death decision. And in effect, that's what's happening here.

A decision to let Ms. Schiavo die would be reviewed in the courts. That's all Congress did. The courts took a look at it, decided not to review it. And this tragic matter obviously is soon going to come to an end.

Not if Texas Senator John Cornyn had his way. Cornyn, himself a former chief judge of the Texas Supreme Court and author in 2010 of an attack on Obama nominee Elena Kagan titled, "I Sense a Judicial Activist," took the Republican assault on the judiciary to a new and frightening level. Cornyn was one of the GOP standard bearers in the conservative fight against so-called "judicial activism" in the wake of the Republicans' disastrous intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair. On April 4th, Cornyn took to the Senate floor to issue a dark warning to judges opposing his reactionary agenda. Just days after the murders of judge in Atlanta and another's family members in Chicago, Cornyn offered his endorsement of judicial intimidation:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country...And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

Facing criticism for his remarks seemingly endorsing right-wing retribution against judges, Cornyn held his ground. "I didn't make the link," he said on Fox News Sunday, adding with a note of sarcasm:

"It was taken out of context. I regret it was taken out of context and misinterpreted."

As it turns out, Cornyn was merely echoing the words of the soon-to-be indicted House Majority Leader Tom Delay. On March 31st, Delay issued a statement regarding the consistent rulings in favor of Michael Schiavo by all federal and state court judges involved:

"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today."

As the New York Times reported:

Saying that the courts ''thumbed their nose at Congress and the president,'' Mr. DeLay, of Texas, suggested Congress was exploring responses and declined to rule out the possibility of Congressional impeachment of the judges involved.

The impact of tacit conservative endorsement of violence against judges cannot be dismissed. After all, it extends to members of the Supreme Court of the United States. In March 2006, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed that she and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor were the targets of death threats. On February 28th, 2005, the marshal of the Court informed O'Connor and Ginsburg of an Internet posting citing their references to international law in Court decisions (a frequent whipping boy of the right) as requiring their assassination:

"This is a huge threat to our Republic and Constitutional freedom...If you are what you say you are, and NOT armchair patriots, then those two justices will not live another week."

Neither O'Connor nor Ginsburg were shy about making the connection between Republican rhetoric of judicial intimidation and the upswing in threats and actual violence against judges. While Ginsburg noted that they "fuel the irrational fringe," O'Connor blamed Cornyn and his fellow travelers for "creating a culture" in which violence towards judges is merely another political tactic:

"It gets worse. It doesn't help when a high-profile senator suggests a 'cause-and-effect connection' [between controversial rulings and subsequent acts of violence]."

Of course, O'Connor and Ginsburg weren't the only targets of right-wing retribution, serious or otherwise. After sentencing Scooter Libby to 30 months in prison in 2007, Judge Reggie Walton reported receiving death threats. That episode followed a January 2006 joke by best-selling conservative author and media personality Ann Coulter, who mused in January 2006, "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee." (When Justice David Souter announced his resignation from the Court in 2009, Red State editor and CNN regular Erick Erickson responded by tweeting, "The nation loses the only goat f--king child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court in David Souter's retirement.")

Apparently, Coulter's judicial rat poison would have been just fine with Montana Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg. Just weeks after the Tucson slaughter that claimed the life of circuit judge John Roll, Rehberg responded to a recent ruling by declaring he wanted to "put some of these judicial activists on the Endangered Species list":

"Environmental obstructionists found a federal judge in Missoula that was willing to ignore the scientific evidence as well as the expert opinions of on-the-ground wildlife managers here in Montana. And he ruled last August that the grey wolf had to remain on the Endangered Species List.

When I first heard his decision, like many of you I wanted to take action immediately. I asked: how can we put some of these judicial activists on the Endangered Species List? I am still working on that!"

And so it goes.

Of course, the Republican criticism of President Obama's own critique of judicial activism started long before this week's comical accusation (shockingly echoed by a GOP appointee on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals) that Obama doesn't believe in the concept of judicial review. This week, Senator McConnell resurrected the GOP's bogus charge that Obama "browbeat the Court during the State of the Union."

As you'll recall, Republican leaders feigned outrage over President Obama's criticism of the Court's Citizens United decision during his 2010 State of the Union. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called it "rude," adding "It's one thing to say that he differed with the court but another thing to demagogue the issue while the court is sitting there out of respect for his position." As usual, Texan John Cornyn took it a step further, calling Obama's strong disagreement with the Court "hysterical" and insisting:

"I don't think the president should have done what he did in trying to call out the Supreme Court for doing its job. They are the final word on the meaning of the United States Constitution, even when we don't like the outcome."

Unless, that is, a Republican is in the White House.

After all, George W. Bush's Supreme politicking during his State of the Union speeches was a regular fixture of his presidency. For three straight years (2004, 2005 and 2006), President Bush denounced "activist judges" and insisted "for the good of families, children and society, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage." On the very day Samuel Alito joined the Roberts Court, Bush used his 2006 SOTU for a victory lap:

"The Supreme Court now has two superb new members -- new members on its bench: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito. I thank the Senate for confirming both of them. I will continue to nominate men and women who understand that judges must be servants of the law and not legislate from the bench."

Of course, Bush had his own unique view of the constitutional separation of powers. As he put it in 2000:

"The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law."

So much for the nine robed people who sit in the Supreme Court. Which is just fine with the GOP, just as long as one of their own is seated in the Oval Office.

(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

Click here to view this media

The chairman of the Republican National Committee is denying that his party is waging a war on women, saying it's as fictional as the "war on caterpillars."

In a interview that will air on Saturday, Bloomberg TV's Al Hunt asked RNC Chairman Reince Priebus how big of a problem it was for Republicans that recent polls showed President Barack Obama with a 2-1 lead among female voters in battleground states.

"If Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that the Republicans have a war on caterpillars then we would have problems with caterpillars," Priebus explained. "The fact of the matter is that it's a fiction."

"This started as a war against the Vatican that this president pursued," the RNC chairman said, referring to the Obama administration's mandate that health care insurance provided by religious institutions cover contraception for women. "He still hasn't answered Archbishop Dolan's issues with Obama-world and Obamacare."

"How do we combat it? We make the case to women and everyone in this country -- no matter what you background -- that, number one, this president hasn't fulfilled his promises. Number two, we can do better in this country in regards to jobs and the economy."

Probable Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney earlier this week declared that he would "take our message to the women of America" to make up lost ground.

"We have work, we have work to do, to make sure we take our message to the women of America, so they understand how we’re going to get good jobs and we’re going to have a bright economic future for them and for their kids," the candidate told supporters in Middleton, Wisconsin. "And make sure that these distortions that the Democrats throw in are clarified and the truth is heard."

Click here to view this media

President George W. Bush's former senior advisor on Tuesday said that President Barack Obama was "some kind of political thug" because he suggested that it would be "unprecedented" for the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the health care reform law.

During his show on Tuesday, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs asked Karl Rove how Obama was handling the possibility that the court might overturn all or part of the Affordable Care Act.

"Not too well," Rove insisted. "This is a bad way to start off, looking like you are some kind of political thug at the White House threatening the Supreme Court and basically telegraphing to them, 'You better uphold my law or there's going to be political damage created and I'll help do some of the creating.'"

"I thought it was very unpresidential and probably shows the mindset of what the president might do if it's declared unconstitutional," he added.

As Bush's former top political adviser, Rove was also accused of strong-arm tactics like improperly firing U.S. Attorneys for their political beliefs and engineering laws against LGBT rights to turn out conservative voters.

(H/T: Media Matters)

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit today has overturned a previous grant of summary judgment in YouTube's favor, and revived a billion-dollar lawsuit alleging intentional copyright infringement back during YouTube's early days (the mid-Aughts), which was brought against it by a broad coalition of plaintiffs, including Viacom, Paramount, the Premier League and others. (Seriously, there's a six-page listing of all the lawyers involved.)

The decision is here. Basically, while the Court generally agreed with YouTube about how broad the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA were, it disagreed with YouTube (and the district court below) as to whether YouTube qualified for such protections. The Court ruled that there was sufficient evidence that a reasonable jury could determine that YouTube had actual knowledge or awareness of facts that indicated specific and identifiable instances of infringement and failed to stop it. As such, this case goes back to the trial court to determine what YouTube knew, when it knew it, and when it decided to stop the problem. What kind of evidence?  Follow me below the magic gnocchi:

I wrote a book that came out in early 2009 called, “The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be,” that talked about the history of the American political debate. One of my fundamental arguments was that conservatives are using the same arguments against modern day progress that their ideological ancestors used against the progress we made throughout history. What I underestimated, though, is how fiercely and broadly the modern conservative movement is trying not only to block advances in progress, but to actually roll back the gains of our history. Things that had seemed long settled only a few years back when I wrote that book are now being fought over anew, and not by trivial people on the fringes of our politics but by most of the leaders in the Republican Party.

Over the last couple of years, we have seen the Supreme Court overturn 100 years of precedent in dramatically expanding corporate political power, and have seen Supreme Court Justices imply in oral arguments that Medicaid might be unconstitutional; we have seen leading Republican presidential candidates openly calling for the repeal of child labor laws, argue for letting the states ban contraception, and say that Social Security is unconstitutional and a Ponzi scheme; there was a Republican governor and presidential candidate, Rick Perry, who opened the door to his state seceding from the union; there is a Republican senator who called for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (although he later pulled back from that under intense pressure); and the Paul Ryan budget, passed twice by the Republican House and unreservedly endorsed by their presumptive, ends Medicare and Medicaid as we know them, and calls for a 95-percent cut in domestic spending over the next four decades.

This was the stuff of the extremist fringe -- the John Birch Society, the militia types, the neo-Confederacy fan boys in the South, the Ayn Rand apostles, the Christian Dominionists -- until fairly recently. But this group of outside-the-mainstream ghouls has become the twisted heart and soul of the 2012 Republican Party.

President Obama’s speech this week went after the extremists who control the Republican Party hard, and he nailed it. As a history buff, and someone who wrote at length about the original Social Darwinists in my book, I was glad to see him explicitly tie Ryan and Romney to their Social Darwinist ancestors:

This congressional Republican budget is something different altogether. It is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last -- education and training, research and development, our infrastructure -- it is a prescription for decline.

Just to give you a flavor of the original Social Darwinists, their intellectual founder was British writer Herbert Spencer, who happily applauded the divine right of Kings and “anyone who can get uppermost”. He attacked democratic forms of government, as well as trial by jury, where “12 people of average ignorance” would dare to sit in judgment of great corporations or wealthy people. In the US, the leading Social Darwinist was a Yale professor named William Graham Sumner, who said that every society had a choice between only two alternatives: “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest” or “un-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.”

It is ironic that the modern Republican Party is a place where most of its adherents reject Charles Darwin ideas on science yet have embraced them fully on economics. Here’s the problem, though: Darwin was a scientist, not an economist. His ideas have been accepted, and have thoroughly stood the test of time, in the realm of science. But when applied to economic policy in the USA in the 1880-90s, the 1920s, and the Bush era at the turn of this century, they have caused economic depressions and the massive destruction of the middle class every time.

President Obama’s messaging on this is right where it needs to be. This paragraph is beautiful:

In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class. That’s how a generation who went to college on the G.I. Bill, including my grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has ever known. That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so they could buy the cars that they made. That’s why research has shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

This is an election where it is very clear that people are going into the voting booth unhappy with the economy and with both parties. For the most part, they aren’t going to have faith in anyone on the ballot, and they aren’t going to be feeling optimistic about winning the future. They are going to need to see a clear contrast. On the one hand, they need to understand just what the Republicans are offering: a Social Darwinist, Ayn Randish future where all the benefits go to the wealthiest, who got that way because they are the “fittest” -- where only the wealthy “job producers” get any benefits at all from government. On the other, they need to see Democratic candidates from the Presidential level on down who they believe will fight without pause or fear for the middle class and those trying to climb the ladder up into it. From the looks of the President’s speech Tuesday, that is exactly what we will get.

Hal Uhrig A new lawyer for George Zimmerman says his current role is defending his client's reputation while everyone awaits the decision of the special prosecutor in the Trayvon Martin slaying.  Zimmerman has hired media savvy Hal Uhrig, former police officer, former Florida assistant attorney general and commentator on local Fox News stations to handle his defense if he is charged in the shooting. At the same time, Joe Oliver, the guy who unconvincingly said he was Zimmerman's friend in several media interviews, has been jettisoned as "media consultant." Uhrig said in an interview with WPTV that the shooting had nothing to do with the unarmed 17-year-old's being black:
"It's because that 6-foot-3 young man made a terrible decision and a bad judgment when he decided to smack somebody in the face and break their nose, jump on them and smack their head into the ground, and in doing that, put him in reasonable fear for his safety," Uhrig said. "He was absolutely entitled to defend himself and that's why Trayvon Martin is dead, not because of racial profiling." In a subsequent interview conducted by NBC's Kerry Sanders and posted at the website of NBC-affiliated theGrio, Uhrig expanded on his views. Once the facts become known, he said, his client's behavior in the shooting will be seen as reasonable:
[Sanders:] In addition to the broken nose and the lacerations that you suggest, if the police followed protocol, and you are a former police officer, in the 7 hour[s 50 minutes] investigation they did, they would have [found] blood splatter[ed] on his shirt.

[Uhrig:] Not necessarily.

[Sanders:] Could be microscopic depending on proximity, so the question is how close was George Zimmerman to...

[Uhrig:] You're going to find, the two of them were closely engaged. It was a basic point blank shot, but there's going to be evidence that the police have, and they don't do their investigation by sharing it with you and I and having a crowd vote on what they think about it as it goes along. They'll do an entire investigation. Now the Florida Department of Law Enforcement -- [a] very well resourced, credible law enforcement agency -- has taken over a lot of the responsibility for that. The special prosecutor is investigating as though it's a brand new start from the beginning. It's going to be very, very thoroughly vetted and investigated and at that point in time a very well respected prosecutor is going to make a determination as to what they take to the grand jury. And whatever comes out is whatever is going to come out. [...]

[Sanders:] And that evidence, the trace evidence, the forensic evidence you believe it covers...

[Uhrig:] I believe everything that you're going to find that comes out from a forensic standpoint or a witness standpoint is going to be consistent with the explanation given by George Zimmerman and the way the law is written in Florida and about 23 other states, if you are in fear for imminent injury, and when you're getting your head slammed in the ground after your nose has been broken that's a pretty good reason to have fear of imminent injury -- then you are entitled to use force including deadly force to protect yourself.

[Sanders:] And you are suggesting that's exactly what happened here?

[Uhrig:] That's exactly what happened. [...]

[Sanders:] I'm listening to what you're saying and I hear you without saying it—that you are prepared because you have an indication that there are going to be charges.

[Uhrig:] I'm not saying any such thing. I'm not confident, but I am very hopeful there will not be any charges. I'm never confident one way or the other. The grand jury is going to do what the grand jury is going to do. If there are charges, we will successfully defend them. If there are not, then justice will be done a little earlier.

Meanwhile, Final Call has an interview with Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father:
FCN: There is now an onslaught of articles circulating online attempting to smear the character of Trayvon. What was your son really like? Do you think this is a tactic to detour people from focusing on the real issues related to this case?

TM: I love my son and he was a wonderful gift just like any child is a gift to any other father. We know in this world you have those who play checkerboard tactics to pit the good versus the bad. But I as a father will not standby and allow them to smear his character. I will stand tall on his name.

What is the significance of them attempting to smear my son’s image? They want to accuse him of doing certain things when the focus should be on the fact that my son was murdered by Zimmerman. These are political games but our son’s death is serious. What many in the press choose to deal with in terms of that smear campaign is irrelevant to the crime committed by Zimmerman. My question to them is out of all of the accusations they are making against Trayvon’s character was he doing any of that the night he was killed? Was he doing anything wrong the night that Zimmerman murdered him? And the answer is no. We will not be detoured from the fight for justice regardless of what some in the media may say. We’re standing up for Trayvon.

Circumstantial evidence is pointing to the strong possibility that charges will be filed against Zimmerman in the coming days. That includes the fact that the family is getting a legal team together and a website has been set up for a defense fund.  

Stories of Interest:

• Zimmerman's evolving story (theGrio)

• A look at what happened the night Trayvon Martin died (Tampa Bay Times)

• Problems for Zimmerman's defense team (MSNBC—Larry O'Donnell)

• Trayvon Martin Cartoonist: Texas Students Petition To Reinstate Stephanie Eisner At Campus Newspaper (The Huffington Post)

• Terry Jones, Quran-burning pastor, reportedly headed to Sanford in support of Zimmerman (theGrio)

• Zimmerman's family says he protested police coddling of white suspect (Orlando Sentinel)

• Sen. Durbin to Hold Hearing on Racial Profiling in America (ACLU Blog)

Trust me, they aren't wearing heels
because they want to appeal to women
  The Atlantic's Molly Ball said somebody had to do it, so she did.

In the wake of GOP Chairman Reince Priebus's claim that the Republican War on Women is as fictional as the Republican War on Caterpillars, Ball exposed the truth about the GOP's war on that fuzzy little insect—and it turns out it's not a fiction after all:

Under the guise of aiding the agriculture industry, Republicans and their allies in Washington have been waging a long-running campaign to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting bug-killing pesticides. Ball's conclusion?
Republicans may claim that they have no anti-caterpillar agenda -- that they're just trying to protect people and plants from being bitten, that they're merely the victims of a liberal media that sympathizes with the radical bugs'-rights lobby. But the truth is clear, and it's nothing new: Republicans just don't care about caterpillars.

Need any more proof? Tom DeLay, the onetime leader of the GOP House majority, began his career as an exterminator.

And with that, The Hammer has dropped.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (Jason Reed/Reuters) The House Republicans are mulling the idea of tackling the expiring Bush tax cuts during the regular legislative session, and before the elections instead of waiting until the post-election lame duck session, when any number of budget-type deals are expected to be made. For some reason, Republicans seem to think that showing repeatedly that they will fight to the end to protect the tax cuts of millionaires is a good thing for them politically.

Senate Democrats apparently agree, at least that there should be voting on at least one tax proposal, and lots of it.

Senate Democrats are teeing up a vote on the “Buffett Rule” legislation on the eve of Tax Day, and are pledging to push the issue all year as a defining contrast between the parties ahead of the election. [...]

“We’re going to continue pushing this issue all year long. It’s an emerging contrast with Republicans,” said No. 3 Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY) on a conference call with reporters Thursday. He said Dems intend to hammer the fact that Republicans want to give even bigger tax cuts to high earners while forcing the middle class to hold the bag.

The Buffett Rule, you'll remember, would require anyone making over $1 million annually to pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes.

Greg Sargent was also on the call and noted that Schumer made sure to point out that "Mitt Romney personally benefits from the current tax code that the Buffett rule would undo—and that this would make it politically harder for GOPers to maintain opposition." Republicans have thus far had no trouble maintaining opposition to a more equitable tax code, but it could indeed get harder for them with Mitt "Moneybags" as their standard-bearer.

Democrats could have a trifecta on income inequality this election: 1) Mitt Romney as the nominee; 2) repeated Republican filibusters of the Buffett Rule; and 3) the Republican budget, which gives the wealthy the most lenient tax rate since the Hoover administration. It's a fight they can win, so let's hope Schumer means it when he says it'll be the fight the make.

Working America connects with Occupy D.C.

For the second post in our series taking a closer look at the state of the U.S. labor movement, we have an exclusive interview with the executive director of Working America, Karen Nussbaum.

Karen Nussbaum says Working America has had a lot of success in the last nine years, by listening to working families and talking to them on a one-on-one basis. She said that Working America started with the theory that union members view the world differently than many other people — they're more progressive, they vote differently, they have a different view on government. And if non-union people living in the same neighborhoods were given the same information and the same sense of empowerment that they could make a difference in government, they would think and act similarly to union members.

So they went door-to-door talking to non-union households, often an environment where Rush Limbaugh and Fox News played in the background. Working America found that in one-on-one conversations, people were sympathetic to union issues and viewpoints. And they were stunned to find that two out of three people that they got the chance to talk to agreed with them on the issues and were willing to become members. If you have the conversation about who benefits from a particular piece of legislation, people get it. They realize that much of what is being passed now won't benefit them and they become much more questioning of what they're being told and start to look for other options.

Working America has continued to organize and canvass on the local level and they've found that their approach is very effective, even around electoral campaigns. They've found that while the majority of their members are moderates on the ideological spectrum, they vote for Working America-endorsed candidates 65-70 percent of the time. Even in households where Working America members were also National Rifle Association membgers, they were more likely than not to vote for the organization's endorsed candidate.

Nussbaum said their results show the effect you can have if you simply start a conversation with people. She said that working class families, regardless of their ideological background, recognize many of the same issues that movements like Occupy Wall Street have brought attention to. They've been dying to have these conversations, but they just didn't know where to go.

The organization, which is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, is designed to do community outreach on issues that are important to working families. Founded in 2003, Working America is focused on organizing working class voters — union members or not — so that they have a voice in the political conversation. In addition to talking to workers and recruiting them to participate in the political process, they also work on issue campaigns, particularly fighting against some of the worse-case scenarios that have recently popped up in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Minnesota and elsewhere. In particular, they fight against policies like "right-to-work" (for less), the loosening of child labor laws, and education cuts frequently found in conservative state budgets. They also pursue positive campaigns like attempts to increase minimum wages and pass measures to institute earned sick days at the city and county level.

Working America isn't limited to traditional labor issues, either, as they have also stood up against bad laws like a recent attempt to ban gay marriage in Minnesota. The organization listens to its members, surveying them frequently, and fights for the issues that are important to the membership. And their membership is quite diverse, with more than half of members being women, more than 20 percent being people of color, many members are under 35, and nearly half a million are unemployed. A diversity of voices in the organization give them a broader picture of the issues working families face than many other organizations see.

Nussbaum is excited about what she's seeing in the broader labor movement. She said that the recent examples of activism in places like Wisconsin and Ohio are some of the most exciting things she's seen in some time. When conservatives pushed too far, threatening to weaken or eliminate unions altogether, not only did unions respond, but the broader community did as well. She said the labor movement passed several important litmus tests of their organizational capacity. The successful petition drive to recall Scott Walker — whether he is recalled or not — was an unbelievable achievement in her opinion and the electoral success in Ohio showed that this wasn't simply about Walker and his overreach, but it's about the people rejecting an extreme right-wing agenda and fighting back against harmful policies. She said it showed that Americans hold closely to the belief that workers need to have power and a voice, which is the foundation for the existence of unions. And it showed that there is strength in numbers and that working families and their allies have numbers they can mobilize to make positive change.

The biggest challenge working families face, Nussbaum said, are the well-funded, well-organized legislative attacks across the country pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council. But she said ALEC is just the vehicle for this agenda, not the source. The real concern is the unchecked corporate power we see in every part of our lives now, seen in things like Citizens United and the growth of massive personal debt because of necessities like education, health care and housing.

Things have gotten so out of whack, she said, because there hasn't been a strong countervaling force to fight on behalf of the 99 percent. She said the only thing that can stop the steady move towards corporate control of government is the organized power of the people, particularly of workers. It is necessary to rebuild the belief in collective power in the mind of the average American and it has to be done on a one-by-one basis. People need to see concrete evidence of how their activism can change things and that the larger progressive movement needs to adapt to find more ways for people to exercise their power.

Nussbaum said its hard to guess where the corporate interests will attack next and its hard to see if they have any limits on how far they will go in attacking working families and the American way of life. We have to be vigilant everywhere and on any front, because its difficult to know where the next assault on our rights will take place or what issue it will focus on. She pointed to ALEC's pursuit of "Stand Your Ground" laws as an unlikely avenue for corporate interests to pursue, yet they did it anyway.

She said if we work hard, though, we'll be able to reverse part of what's happening in the states. Particularly now that there is total political gridlock at the national level, people need to know that they can still have an impact locally. Nussbaum said she thinks progressives and unions should go on the offensive next year, focus on positive changes and new policies that benefit working families. The goal should be to try to return to a time when all workers had basic rights — she remembers a time when minimum wage workers had sick days; now half of all private sector workers have no sick days. She said you can't run a country like this. If we continue to eviscerate working and living standards, the one percent will have to have armed guards and armored cars because the direction we're headed in isn't sustainable and people will only take so much of it before they will resort to more drastic measures. Our job, she said, is to make sure things never get that bad.

Working America is trying to increase the use of social media among its members, despite the fact that half of their members are hardly ever, or never, online. Nussbaum points out that 77 percent of their younger members are on the web all the time. The organization has to use multiple avenues to reach their members, but she notes that eventually everyone will be online, so she said they have a robust online campaign. They recently revamped their website, they have an active blog, they now recruit members directly onto iPads and they have a lot of fun with creative, and award-winning, online campaigns like Not Your ATM, the My Bad Boss competition, and the current Simple Questions campaign, which she said has gotten a huge response. The point is to find the best way to integrate people into the information stream so they can become better voters, better advocates and better activists.

Nussbaum said that people sympathetic to the causes that Working America fights for, can join the organization, which makes them an associate member of the AFL-CIO, even if their workplace isn't unionized. Working America also spends a lot of time reaching out to groups with similar values, noting, in particular, recent efforts to support the Occupy movement. She said that people really connect with the 99 percent message, even if they aren't the type to grab a sleeping bag and camp out. Working America members wrote thousands of letters in suppport of Occupy (see video above) and wrote letters to the editor of various newspapers in support of Occupy and the 99 percent.

Working closely with allies around shared concerns is really the future of the movement. It isn't enough, Nussbaum said, to just win elections, we also need to govern. And that governing needs to be done with the support of the working class. Without that support, you see a backlash against the progressive agenda. That agenda has to be as broad as possible, she said, and has to find ways to bring people together over common ground. Environmental issues, for instance, are also economic issues and people concerned about one should be working with people concerned about the other so we can advance on both fronts.

Nussbaum is hopeful. She said we've been through a lot in the history of the labor movement in the U.S., including times that were darker than the present. At one point, the American labor movement was more militant than anywhere else in the world. And if people can find their own way to exercise their power in the system, they can help check unbridled corporate power. She said that the ways that we respond to issues have to adapt to the current realities. Forms of organization are going to mature over the next decade and we'll see a much different landscape for the power of working Americans. That has to happen, she said, because the damage being done now is unsustainable.

More entries in the State of the Labor Movement series

Big news, as Mitt Romney boldly backs up President Obama's stance that women should be allowed to join the Augusta National Golf Club:

Romney: "If I were a member and if I could run Augusta, which isn't likely to happen, but of course I'd have women in Augusta."
— @SarahH_CBSNJ via HootSuite See there? Republicans aren't anti-women at all! Mitt thinks that if it were up to him, he'd probably let women in the super-secret club for menfolk, but it's not gonna be up to him, but hey, he's thinking about you in spirit, ladies!

This all started because of this:

The issue of the membership of the club that hosts most prestigious golf tournament is being scrutinized because the top executive at IBM, Ginni Rometty, is a woman.

IBM's sponsorship of the Masters tournament guarantees club membership for its officers, but the club does not allow women to join.

... which pits the Republican love of people with craploads of money and corporate power against the Republican love for old white fogies to be treated better than anyone else and to keep the womenfolks in their place. So you can see the challenge.

Will Mitt get in trouble with his base for this? Will he follow it up with, "Well, if I was in charge of these things, I would be totally fine with women getting to make medical decisions for themselves, but like hell that'll ever happen." Will the Augusta National Club reach a compromise, in which women are allowed to join, but must wear burkas at all times so as to not angry up the blood of the menfolks?

My God, it's 2012, and the entire presidential campaign is threatening to turn into a referendum on whether or not women should be allowed to use birth control if their employers don't like it, and just how many states are going to institute requirements that women undergo mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds because the menfolk want to do a little more slut-shaming, and whether or not the religious sensibilities of tired old supposedly-celibate coots should hold more sway over American women than the clear opinions and established rights of women themselves, but hey, here's a little light at the end of the tunnel, Mitt Romney says women ought to be able to join a men-only golf club! You, know, if it was up to him! Which it's not!

Yeah, cherish this moment, women of America. He's meeting you halfway here.

by Cora Currier

Some homeowners are getting stuck with relatively high interest rates even after they participate in the government's program to help them refinance their mortgages. The biggest banks are not lowering rates as much as they could be — and homeowners have few options to go elsewhere.

Analysts say that the big banks are set to make major profits off of the Home Affordable Refinancing Program, also known as HARP, which allows homeowners with loans backed by government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance if they owe more than their home is worth.

The program, launched in 2009, is designed to let struggling borrowers take advantage of lower market interest rates. So far, about 1.1 million people have refinanced under the program, which was expanded last fall to make it more attractive for banks and to let more homeowners participate.

Since then, the government says there has been "tremendous borrower interest" and estimates that another 1 million could qualify over the next two years. But while the expansion may let more people refinance, it may not be at the lowest rate possible because the incentives don't favor competition, according to a new report by an investment group Amherst Securities.

The report says the big banks are able to make a considerable profit from refinancing their existing customers under HARP, and that there is little incentive for them to go outside their own customer base and seek out more HARP business on mortgages that originated with other lenders.

Few other companies have stepped in to offer HARP refinancing for people who'd like to leave their current lender, partly because it is still risky for them to take on the underwater loans, even with the HARP incentives.

The result is that homeowners in many cases are stuck with what they've got, Amherst says, and the big banks can charge them more.

Guy Cecala, who runs the publication Inside Mortgage Finance, said that there is "virtually no competition" for the big banks. "It's normal business practice for mortgage lenders — when you can, you charge a higher interest rate."

Here's how this situation came about.

For Banks, Built-In Incentives

Last fall's expansion of HARP tries to make it more appealing to mortgage lenders, since the initial response to the program fell short of expectations.

New rules removed the cap on how much a borrower could be underwater and still qualify. It also eased appraisal requirements and — critically for banks — removed some of the liability for bad loans that banks had when selling their mortgages to Fannie and Freddie.

The Amherst report points out that the biggest lenders — JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — are responsible for more than 60 percent of HARP refinancing applications. The report also says the cost of refinancing an existing customer under HARP is minimal.

The big banks already have plenty of demand in-house. As such, it's easier and more profitable to stick with the loans they already service than to compete for new business, which could result in lower rates for homeowners.

The report says that the extra steps required under HARP to refinance a loan from another lender make the process onerous and risky. A spokeswoman for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which is in charge of HARP, disputed the notion that it's difficult to sign up new borrowers. "The additional information collected is minimal and appropriate, given that these lenders have no experience with or information on these (new) borrowers," she said.

JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America all confirmed to ProPublica that they have seen an increase in the volume of applications for HARP refinancing since the new rules came into effect. Last month, American Banker reported that banks were scrambling to bolster their mortgage-servicing units to deal with the influx of applications from HARP.

The program is voluntary for banks, and they can place their own restrictions over and above those set by the government.

JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America say they are only doing HARP refinancing for existing customers — not seeking out new business on loans originated by other lenders. Wells Fargo is accepting refinance applications from borrowers at other servicers, but it is putting a cap on the amount that the loan can be underwater.

In January, according to the FHFA, roughly 50,000 people refinanced under the new HARP rules, and HARP's share of all refinancing increased. Some smaller lenders, especially in states with the worst housing markets, are hoping to jump in and offer lower rates to people looking to leave their current bank, even with the greater risk.

Click here to view this media

As Rachel Maddow reported this Wednesday, despite the Bush administration's best efforts to destroy every copy of internal memo from former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, one copy survived and has been obtained by Wired Magazine and the national security archive at George Washington University, three years after filing a FIOA request.

Rachel delved into the politics on this, noting the hard move to the right by the Republican Party even since their nomination of John McCain who spoke out against torture during the last presidential election.

MADDOW: And, if the Republican Party were still the party of John McCain, this would open up a whole new can of political worms, because the Obama administration, remember, looked into Bush administration ordered torture and they decided not to prosecute any of it. They decided effectively that the Bush administration was operating on good faith when they ordered torture? They thought it was legal? Probably not. Actually, it turns out they had good reason to know it was not legal, so that means it was a crime. It was probably a war crime, not to put too fine a point on it.

And that is something that we are legally obligated to prosecute in this country. This reopens the whole question of the legal liability for torture that was administered by the previous administration. The Democratic Party will be split by this because the White House politically doesn't want to deal with it, even if it's wrong and even if they know it's wrong.

And the Republican Party still has to figure out who it is. Is the Republican Party still the party of John McCain, which has now the opportunity to out flank the President on a matter of principle here, where the White House knows what the right thing to do is, but they don't want to do it. Or, are the Republicans still the party of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, who think torture is okay? Gut check time.

Given the fact that it appears they're well on their way to nominating Mitt Romney and hell will be warming over before we see anyone in the GOP pushing for prosecutions of the Bush administration, I think we've already got our answer. And given the fact that the Obama administration and the DOJ have not already pushed for prosecutions on this matter, I'm not holding my breath for them to do the right thing either.

Here's Spenser Ackerman's article over at Wired on the newly released memo -- CIA Committed ‘War Crimes,’ Bush Official Says:

A top adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Bush administration that its use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques like waterboarding were “a felony war crime.”

What’s more, newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.”

Zelikow argued that the Geneva conventions applied to al-Qaida — a position neither the Justice Department nor the White House shared at the time. That made waterboarding and the like a violation of the War Crimes statute and a “felony,” Zelikow tells Danger Room. Asked explicitly if he believed the use of those interrogation techniques were a war crime, Zelikow replied, “Yes.”

Zelikow first revealed the existence of his secret memo, dated Feb. 15, 2006, in an April 2009 blog post, shortly after the Obama administration disclosed many of its predecessor’s legal opinions blessing torture. He briefly described it (.pdf) in a contentious Senate hearing shortly thereafter, revealing then that “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed.”

At least one copy survived in the files of the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The State Department has now disclosed it to Danger Room, mostly without redactions — three years after this reporter filed an official request for it. You can read the memo for yourself, below.

You can read the memo and the rest of their report at the link above.

You have to read this to believe it.
Frustrated by a lack of political power and fed up with blindly donating to politicians who consistently vote against the industry's interests, a handful of leaders are determined to shake things up.

They have formed the industry's first SuperPAC — dubbed Friends of Traditional Banking — that is designed to target the industry's enemies and support its friends in Congress. [...]

"Congress isn't afraid of bankers," adds Roger Beverage, the president and CEO of the Oklahoma Bankers Association. "They don't think we'll do anything to kick them out of office. We are trying to change that perception."

Pity the poor banksters, unable to spend enough to buy some clout on Capitol Hill.
What they really want is just to have totally unfettered, unaccountable spending so they can do more of this:
But, seriously, the persecution complex the banksters have is just epic. One would really like to see a handful of them living the life of an unemployed single mom for a month or two, just to see if they are capable of learning.

• Today's comic is Abraca-Tax-Cuts by Mark Fiore:
  
• George McGovern has been hospitalized:
  Former South Dakota senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern has been hospitalized in Florida, his daughter said Wednesday. [...]

  Hospital officials said the elder McGovern is in stable condition.

• Good:
  The Connecticut Senate on Thursday voted to repeal the death penalty, setting the stage for Connecticut to join several states that have recently abolished capital punishment.
• Ladies, in case you were wondering, the pope still doesn't like you:
  Pope Benedict on Thursday re-stated the Roman Catholic Church's ban on women priests and warned that he would not tolerate disobedience by clerics on fundamental teachings.

  Benedict, who for decades before his 2005 election was the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer, delivered an unusually direct denunciation of disobedient priests in a sermon at a morning Mass on Holy Thursday, the day the Church commemorates the day Christ instituted the priesthood. [...]

  The Catholic Church teaches that it has no authority to allow women to become priests because Jesus Christ willingly chose only men as his apostles when he instituted the priesthood at the Last Supper.

  And, no, he didn't mention his intolerance for naughty priests who rape children. Because apparently, Jesus was cool with that.
• Texts from Hillary. It's a thing. And it's awesome.
• Sky News says sure, it hacked some emails, but it was in "the public interest."
• How sweet: Saudi Arabia says no, women can't compete in the Olympics, but they can "compete on their own outside the official delegation."
• Start hoarding vanilla:
  [T]he cost of a scoop of vanilla ice cream could go up 10 percent this summer amid a shortage of vanilla pods, Mintec analysts say.

  A poor harvest in vanilla-producing countries, Mexico and India, has caused more users to buy beans from Madagascar.  Production of the beans fell 90 percent in Mexico and Indonesia last year.  The monopoly in Madagascar has resulted in an increase of wholesale prices from $25 per kilogram to $35 to $40 in two months.

• Man punches shark.
• Smells like teen middle-aged spirit:
  Dear Everybody: Kurt Cobain offed himself 18 yrs ago today. Yep, you're really that old. http://t.co/...
  — @phillipanderson via Twitter for Mac
• AMERICAblog Gay would like folks to please email Landmark Theatres at Q1Landmark@gmail.com to urge them to show a (gay) marriage equality documentary at their cinemas nationwide. Make sure you include where you're from. You can read more about it here.