* for the first time in six months, more people approve of the job the president is doing than disapprove …

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the comparison does NOT favor any of the performers in the Republic clown show

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Roger Simon writes in Politico (1/27/12) …

• The American people, after being treated to hour upon hour of Republican candidates being allowed to say pretty much whatever they want, are slowly discovering something: Barack Obama doesn’t look that bad any more.
• An NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll released Wednesday said that “for the first time in six months, more people approve of the job the president is doing than disapprove.”
• Newt, I note, said, “This is a big choice election.”
• But he didn’t say the choice was standing on the stage.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72064_Page2.html

* UPDATED 1/25/12 … Prosecutors say Philly archdiocese is ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in clergy sex abuse case … LMW: If this case succeeds, the rest of the Catholic hierarchy will be at immediate risk … that’s the only way to get them to change

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Cardinal Bevilacqua ... he is the one who should be held to account ... he is the "enabler" who allowed his priests to ruin the lives of countless children

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UPDATE 1/25/12

• City prosecutors want to include accusations against dozens of priests when Monsignor William Lynn stand trial on child endangerment and conspiracy charges in March. Most of the cases stem from a 2005 grand jury report that blasted church officials for keeping 63 problem priests on the job — but yielded no criminal charges.
• Now, prosecutors are pushing to include about 30 of those cases in Lynn’s trial. Lynn served as secretary of clergy for the archdiocese from 1992 to 2004.
• Prosecutors say the 61-year-old Lynn kept priests in ministry and around children despite explosive allegations in secret church files. Those files are now in prosecutors’ hands — and some of them are being aired in court.

Defense lawyers argued Tuesday that Lynn took orders

from Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua and several bishops

above him in the church hierarchy. 

• They said prosecutors should have indicted the archdiocese and others if they wanted to attempt a broad conspiracy case.

read the entire article at … http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/24/philly-judge-weighs-church-sex-abuse-evidence/

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LMW COMMENT …

I couldn’t agree more with the defense attorneys. Indict the whole rotten bunch of them, starting with the Cardinal and including every single person in the hierarchy who kept transferring priests and giving them access to new victims.

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the Associated Press reports (1/23/12) …

• Prosecutors on Monday accused the Archdiocese of Philadelphia of being an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a clergy sex abuse case and said the Roman Catholic Church fed predators a steady supply of children.
• The comments came in a key hearing before the March trial of a high-ranking church official, a priest and a former priest.
• Monsignor William Lynn, 61, is charged with conspiring with priests and church officials to keep priests accused of sex abuse in ministry and parishioners in the dark.
• Assistant District Attorney Mark Cipolletti compared the accused priests to live bombs that Lynn left in a room without defusing.
• “You’re (still) on the hook” if the bomb later explodes, Cipolletti argued.
• Lynn faces up to 28 years in prison if convicted. The archdiocese is paying his legal fees.

read the entire article at … http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/prosecutors-philly-archdiocese-is-unindicted-co-conspirator-in-clergy-sex-abuse-case/2012/01/23/gIQAbqvRLQ_story.html

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LMW COMMENT …

• This is the most important case in the entire Catholic Church sexual abuse matter.
• It is the only case that goes after the managers of the church – the monsignors, bishops and cardinals – who are the truly guilty as enablers of sexual attacks on children and in covering up the horrible acts of the priests within their jurisdiction.
• If this case succeeds, the rest of the Catholic hierarchy will be at immediate risk.
• If prosecutors have the courage to put the bishops and cardinals in jail, and this problem will be well on its way to being solved.

* religious fundamentalists of all faiths … why can’t they define their relationships to their Gods without insisting that others share their views and practices?

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DOV LINZER writes in the NYT (1/19/12) …

• Last month, an innocent, modestly dressed 8-year-old girl, Naama Margolese, living in Beit Shemesh, described being spat on and vilified by religious extremists — all men — who believed that she did not dress modestly enough while walking past them to the religious school she attends.
• What is behind these deeply disturbing events? We are told that they arise from a religious concern about modesty, that women must be covered and sequestered so that men do not have improper sexual thoughts.
• This is not a problem unique to Judaism. But the Talmud, the basis for Jewish law, offers a perhaps surprising answer: It places the responsibility for controlling men’s licentious thoughts about women squarely on the men.

Put more plainly, the Talmud says: It’s your problem, sir; not hers.

• It is forbidden for a man to gaze sexually at a woman, whether beautiful or ugly, married or unmarried, says the Talmud.
• The Talmud tells the religious man, in effect: If you have a problem, you deal with it. It is the male gaze — the way men look at women — that needs to be desexualized, not women in public. The power to make sure men don’t see women as objects of sexual gratification lies within men’s — and only men’s — control.

read the entire article at … http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/opinion/ultra-orthodox-jews-and-the-modesty-fight.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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LMW COMMENT …

• As disgusting as is the behavior of the Jewish men described above, it is but part of a larger issue.
• Too many religious people of all faiths seem to believe that they have the right to tell other people, who do not share their beliefs, how they should run their lives.
• This arrogance is shared by members of Jewish, Catholic, Muslim and other religions, including the right wing religious fundamentalists of the United States who seem to control so much of the Republican party in America.
• To me, it seems that these people are apparently incapable of defining their own relationship with their God without compelling others to do exactly as they do.
• This attitude has led to many if not most of the world’s wars and to countless examples of persecution and execution of religious minorities.
• It has also led to the well deserved contempt that many people have for religious fundamentalists of all persuasions.
• Instead of inspiring others with their religious feeling and fervor, they create the exact opposite effect.

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* Bill Clinton has responsibility for setting the stage for our recent financial disaster (lower capital gains tax and repeal of Glass-Steagall) … He needs to admit he was wrong and apologize to the American people … If he does not, Clinton’s value as a campaigner for Obama will be severely compromised

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 Paul Krugman writes …

• Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan — yes, Ronald Reagan — signed a tax reform equalizing top rates on earned income and capital gains at 28 percent. The rate rose further, to more than 29 percent, during Bill Clinton’s first term.
• Low capital gains taxes date only from 1997, when Mr. Clinton struck a deal with Republicans in Congress in which he cut taxes on the rich in return for creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/opinion/krugman-taxes-at-the-top.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

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President Clinton has more to apologize for …

• The repeal of provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999 effectively removed the separation that previously existed between investment banking which issued securities and commercial banks which accepted deposits.
• The deregulation also removed conflict of interest prohibitions between investment bankers serving as officers of commercial banks.

This repeal directly contributed to the severity

of the financial crisis of 2007-2011 

by allowing Wall Street investment banking firms to gamble

with their depositors’ money that was held in the commercial banks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act

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• When Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which then allowed investment banks to merge with commercial banks, the final piece of the puzzle was in place as normally conservative investing banks could then invest heavily in over the counter derivatives markets, much of which was in the form of speculative credit derivatives closely tied to real estate.
• Much of that real estate had been financed with sub-prime financing with borrowers who could barely buy a doughnut, let alone a house.

http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_169166.asp

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 LMW COMMENT …

Bill Clinton has responsibility for setting the stage for our recent financial disaster.  He needs to admit he was wrong and apologize to the American people. If he does not, Clinton’s value as a campaigner for Obama will be severely compromised.

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* a well intentioned but over-reaching attack on the freedom of the internet … it behooves all of us to become informed on this issue … there must be a way to control internet piracy without strangling the benefits of free exchange which are the very hallmark of the internet

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VICTORY !!!

• Some lawmakers are rethinking their support of controversial anti-piracy bills that led to some websites shutting down in protest.
• The protest was in response to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill, a piece of proposed legislation that is working its way through Congress.
• The protest seemed to change the minds of lawmakers, including those that had strongly backed the bills in the past.
• “We can find a solution that will protect lawful content. But this bill is flawed & that’s why I’m withdrawing my support. #SOPA #PIPA,” Republican Sen. Roy Blunt wrote on his official Twitter page.
• Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who was an initial co-sponsor of PIPA, reversed his position.

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• Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in May, 2011 in the Senate, which would give the Justice Department the power to take down copyright-infringing websites.
• Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) followed with SOPA on Oct. 26, 2011 for the House, also introducing sweeping anti-piracy legislation intended to empower the U.S. Department of Justice—-and copyright holders-—to fully crack down on websites that are suspected of hosting their copyrighted material.

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Julian Sanchez wrote in the New York Post (12/21/11) …

• The goal of SOPA (and its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT-IP Act) is legitimate enough: To fight copyright violators and counterfeiters who run sites beyond the reach of US courts. The trouble is the method. These bills empower the attorney general to seek orders compelling thousands of Internet service providers to block purported ”rogue sites,” forcing search engines to redact their results and requiring ad networks and payment processors to sever ties.
• As Uncle Sam’s own cybersecurity experts at Sandia National Labs have noted, the measure is “unlikely to be effective.” Anyone with a tiny bit of technical know-how can easily bypass the proposed blocks in any number of simple ways.
• But SOPA wouldn’t just be costly and futile: It would deter innovation, interfere with legal speech protected by the First Amendment and (as the geeks at Sandia put it) “negatively impact US and global cybersecurity and Internet functionality.”
• Perhaps even more troubling, SOPA would lead to the creation of a sophisticated legal and technological architecture for censorship — a single Internet blacklist implemented across the entire country.

Once that machinery is in place, it would be easy, and all too tempting,

for future administrations to turn that blacklist to other purposes.

Citizens would have to trust the government

to only block truly criminal sites.

• These are high costs to pay for a law that would, at best, amount to an impotent symbolic gesture against piracy. Lawmakers should be wary of meddling with technology they admit they don’t understand, and instead focus on measures aimed at shutting off the flow of money to criminals, without starting down the dark road of Internet blacklists and government firewalls.

http://www.socraticnews.com/ArticleDetails2.aspx?article=7409

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Wikipedia … 

• Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time.
• these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet.
• Detailed information about these bills can be found in the
  • Stop Online Piracy Act
  • and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia
• GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The EFF has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

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Google …

• “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” Google said in its statement opposing the legislation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-to-state-anti-sopa-stance-on-home-page/2012/01/17/gIQANeD05P_print.html

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Politico …

• What’s happening now on the Web, the bills’ backers say, is nothing short of rampant unpoliced theft of American goods. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, so-called “rogue” sites draw hundreds of millions of clicks a year — at a huge toll to the American economy.
• The business lobby cites research by brand protection firm MarkMonitor estimating that illegal sites cost legitimate businesses more than $130 billion in revenue annually.
• Google and First Amendment scholars like Harvard’s Laurence Tribe argue that SOPA would squelch free speech by giving private parties power to effectively cripple sites that allegedly — but not conclusively — steal copyrighted content.
• The simple filing of a complaint, they say, would exert huge pressure on the Internet ecosystem to blacklist an accused site. They also say it would give the feds dangerous new powers to go after sites for political reasons.
• The biggest backers of the antipiracy bills are the industries hardest hit by online piracy: the makers of music and movies.
• The Internet, and the explosion of illegal copying and sharing of music and movie files that came with it, has been economically devastating for Hollywood and recording studios, and they’ve been pushing lawmakers for years to hold Internet platforms more accountable for the illegal content that flows through their servers.
• The bills are also backed by makers of pharmaceuticals and luxury goods that want to strangle the market for knockoff goods.
• All told, hundreds of businesses led by the chamber are pushing hard for the bills.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71567.html

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LMW COMMENT …

It behooves all of us to become informed on this issue … there must be a way to control internet piracy without strangling the benefits of free exchange which are the very hallmark of the internet … who is behind this Congressional initiative?

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* A World in Denial of What It Knows … Is it because there are legitimate differences of opinion, and the truth really wasn’t quite so obvious? … Or is it because people who choose not to know have an agenda which is served by not knowing?

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what we chose not to know about Iraq

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Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in the NYT (12/31/11) …

• Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to “unknow.”
• Unknown knowns were everywhere, from Wall Street to Brussels, from the Pentagon to Penn State.
  • What kind of willful obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea? An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who obviously can never repay it.
  • Or recall how we were taken into the Iraq war. Those of us who opposed the war may be asked to this day whether we knew what weaponry Iraq possessed, to which the answer is that of course we didn’t. But that was the wrong question. It should have been not “what weaponry does Saddam Hussein possess?” but “Is Saddam Hussein’s weaponry, whatever it may be, the real reason for the war, or is it a pretext confected after a decision for war had already been taken?” The answer to that was obvious and could have been known to all, but too many people chose to unknow it. Then there was another unknown known: the likely consequences of an invasion. President Jacques Chirac of France said it was foolish to think of creating a modern democracy in an artificial country with a divided society like Iraq.
  • For years, Bernard L. Madoff’s investors gratefully and unquestioningly accepted returns that were strictly incredible. Loud warning voices sounded. Harry Markopolos spent nearly nine years repeatedly trying to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that these figures were not merely incredible but mathematically impossible. And still the S.E.C. chose to unknow it.
  • In a very different kind of scandal, not everyone at Penn State, and certainly not every fan, knew what had happened in the showers. But quite enough was known by people who could have acted. They chose instead to unknow.
  • And so to another classic unknown known, the euro. If truth be told (but it so rarely is!), the euro cannot work and could never have worked. That is, a single currency embracing countries as diverse in social culture, productivity, work practices and taxation as Germany and Greece, or the Netherlands and Portugal, is economically impossible without much closer fiscal and financial union — which is politically impossible. Anyone could have known that at the time the euro was introduced, but for the rulers of the European Union it was their very own unknown known.

read the entire article at … http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/unknown-knowns-avoiding-the-truth.html?scp=1&sq=a%20world%20in%20denial&st=cse

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LMW COMMENT …

• So we consistently choose to deny what is the obvious truth. The real question is why?
• Is it because there are legitimate differences of opinion, and the truth really wasn’t quite so obvious?
• Or is it because people who choose not to know have an agenda which is served by not knowing?

 

* Robert K. Lifton sees no reason to be optimistic about any Israeli/Palestinian solution in the foreseeable future

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Israel showing Gaza & the West Bank

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Robert K. Lifton writes in the Huff Post (12/30/11) …

• After more than a year of stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, it is clear that for the foreseeable future there will be no deal resolving their differences and establishing a Palestinian state.
• It is fruitless to blame one side or the other.
• the leaders of both sides face obstacles to deal making that make it very difficult for each of them even if they so desired.
• for the Palestinians, it is giving up the right of millions of Diaspora Palestinians to return to their former homes in Israel.
• For Israel, it is the ability to remove thousands of settlers from their homes in areas that would be included in the Palestinian state in a two state solution.
• neither leader seems to desire a deal enough to make any meaningful compromise.
• The government of Israel, led by Mr. Netanyahu and his coalition, has shown no willingness to compromise in order to make a deal and continues to expand settlements despite international pressure to stop.
• And the Fatah government of Mr. Abbas, by embracing Hamas, has given Israel a legitimate reason to argue that it can’t countenance any deal with an entity committed to its destruction.

read the entire article at … http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-k-lifton/israel-palestine-future-_b_1177107.html

 

* Michael Thomas writes … it’s time to make the Wall Street bastards pay for the grief and woe they have caused … LMW: I suspect that the party which shows the courage to take on Wall Street will sweep the board in 2012

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it's time to take on the Wall Street "bull"

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Michael Thomas writes in The Daily Beast (12/26/11) …

• As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved.
• Bank balance sheets still reek.
• Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole.
• The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault.
• This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work.
• This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head—and about time, too.
• This time, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions will be exacted.
• Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling
• OWS has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands.
• A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.
• Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. 

it’s time to make the bastards pay, properly,

for the grief and woe they have caused

read the entire article at … http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/25/wall-street-has-destroyed-the-wonder-that-was-america.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet

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LMW COMMENT …

• I hope Michael Thomas is correct, and that Wall Street gets its long-deserved comeuppance.
• There is a valid and necessary role for Wall Street in providing capital to businesses that actually make things and provide services. 
• There is NO ROLE, in my opinion, for making huge piles of money by trading invented papers that no one understands. Those sorts of transactions should be made illegal.
• What remains to be seen in this election cycle is whether either party will take on the challenge Thomas has outlined. 
• Are any of the politicians who actually have power willing to take on one of the main financial cows which provides campaign funding? 
• I suspect that the party which does show the courage will sweep the board in 2012. 
• I hope it’s Obama and the Democrats.

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* Speaker Boehner Caves to the President’s will … is this the beginning of a new Obama?

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a victory for the President ... and for the American people ... a huge defeat for the Tea Party "know nothings"

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CARRIE BROWN and JONATHAN ALLEN report in Politico (12/23/11) …

• Boehner delivered the news that he had struck a deal on a Thursday afternoon conference call with House Republicans, the technology was in place to prevent rank-and-file lawmakers from voicing the kind of angry dissent that scuttled a Senate-passed payroll bill on Saturday.
• The five day drama that exposed both the political naivete of the freshman-heavy Republican Conference and the sharp limits of Boehner’s power over them ended in silence.
• Boehner knew the year-end fight to renew the payroll tax would be bad — but he couldn’t possibly have anticipated how bad it would get. Obama always knew the fight would be good for him — but not this good.
• It got the president not only the tax cut he wanted but provided a jolt for Democrats anxious about 2012 who felt Obama had been played by House Republicans in earlier negotiations.
• For the first time since they lost the House in 2010, Democrats see a president who likes to play hardball.
• And for the first time since they won election, freshman Republicans know what it feels like to be on the losing end of a Washington deal, literally silenced by their leaders.
• “A core part of a president’s leadership is his ability to show he’s in charge and that he’s leading, rather than being led,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the White House. “One problem for him in the first two years is that he had to run with Congress because it was controlled by Democrats, and too often it seemed that they were pulling him rather than he was leading them.
• “Now, he has stared down the House GOP and they have capitulated, showing that he’s in charge.”

read the entire article at … http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70803.html

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LMW COMMENT …

Let’s hope Obama likes the taste of victory and will now show more spine in future battles. You may remember that I said weeks ago that Obama had put the Republicans in a “no win” situation. The White House won’t gloat about that, but I believe it was a purposeful trap, designed to achieve something needed by 160 million taxpayers and also show the Republicans for the anti-middle class group they are.

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* why did President Obama sign the Levin/McCain detention bill?

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Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon (12/15/11) …

• President Obama – after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill – yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law 
• The ACLU said that the bill contains “harmful provisions … that some legislators have said could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world” 
• while the powers this bill enshrines are indeed radical and dangerous, most of them already exist.
• That’s because first the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have aggressively argued that the original 2001 AUMF already empowers them to imprison people without charges, use force against even U.S. citizens without due process (Anwar Awlaki), and target not only members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban (as the law states) but also anyone who “substantially supports” those groups and/or “associated forces” (whatever those terms mean).
• Obama’s objections to this bill had nothing to do with civil liberties, due process or the Constitution.
• It had everything to do with Executive power. 
• The White House’s complaint was that Congress had no business tying the hands of the President when deciding who should go into military detention, who should be denied a trial, which agencies should interrogate suspects
• Totally prior to and independent of anything Congress did, President Obama fully embraced indefinite detention as his own policy.
• Obama is a proponent — not an opponent — of indefinite detention.

read the entire article at … http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/obama_to_sign_indefinite_detention_bill_into_law/singleton/

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LMW COMMENT …

• I have not seen any rationale from the White House related to the comments above. 
• If any of you have seen such justifications, please let me know.

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