Republican congressman and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan demonstrated what kind of vice president (and, gawd forbid, president) he might be when he saw an opportunity and took it with total disregard for how his actions might cause real injury to caring people and the least of our citizens.

Connie Schultz writes:

Last weekend, Ryan and his family were on their way to the airport, when he decided to barge into a dining hall run by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. The patrons already had eaten and departed. The volunteers had cleared the hall and cleaned most of the dishes. Nevertheless, Ryan, his wife and three young children donned aprons. Moments later, photographers and television cameras captured Ryan standing at the sink, his head bent low as he scrubbed a pot.

When the charity’s president, Brian J. Antal, found out about Ryan’s stunt, he was furious. Ryan and his campaign had “ramrodded” their way into the kitchen, Antal told The Washington Post on Monday.

“We’re a faith-based organization,” he said. “We are apolitical because the majority of our funding is from private donations. It’s strictly in our bylaws not to do it. They showed up there, and they did not have permission. They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors. … The photo op they did wasn’t even accurate. He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.”

Public reaction was ferocious — and much of it has targeted Antal.

When I talked to Antal on Tuesday afternoon, he said he was starting to worry “a little bit” for the safety of his family. A young child wailed in the background as he described the barrage of angry calls he’d been fielding ever since the story broke.

“They keep accusing me of being partisan,” he said. “They say they’re donors who will never give again because of what I said.” None of them would give a name.

Ryan owes an apology, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Via What’s Up:

WHO: Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch
WHAT: The Struggle for Justice in Latin America and in the Roman Catholic Church
WHEN: Tonight at 7:30
WHERE: Community of St Peter 7100 Euclid Avenue

About Roy Bourgeois

Reverend Roy Bourgeois, MM, earned a B.S. in Geology from the University of Louisiana. He served as a Naval Officer and was awarded the Purple Heart. Following military service he entered the Maryknoll Missionary Order and was ordained in 1972.

He worked in Bolivia, where his defense of the poor resulted in his arrest and eventual deportation. He has become an outspoken critic of US foreign policy and has spent over four years in federal prisons for non-violent protest against the training of Latin American soldiers at the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

In recent years he has taken on a prophetic role in challenging the Catholic hierarchy concerning the role of women in the church and the issue of women’s Continue Reading »

Roldo Bartimole writes:

You have probably read about the scandalous spending of $6.4 million for a kitchen (restaurant) in the Justice Center (jail). For jailbirds!

What you never read about, nor heard a single complaint about in the daily cover-up was the $7.5 million spent on what I called “Two lavish, upscale restaurants at Gateway…”

It just matters who is getting fed. That determines whether the Plain Dealer, its reporters, editors and columnists make a fuss about it.

If you are spending it for multi-millionaires there is no need for complaint.

If you are doing it for jailbirds, get the spotlights out. Red alert!

The Terrace Club, built into the baseball stadium, cost $5,155,893, seating some 900; Sammy’s at the arena cost $2,370,134. And they don’t ever have to pay any property taxes.

Don’t mind me, I’m prejudiced. I hate giving public money to people who don’t need it. How about you?

[Update @ 1304: Supreme Court won’t block early voting in Ohio.]

In his piece written for Slate, Richard Hansen writes that:

Ohio’s cutback of early voting could have a negative effect at the polls and was done for no good reason. Indeed, the Ohio legislature probably eliminated the last weekend of early voting for purely partisan reasons.

Two Federal Courts agreed (without saying as much) but all that could, in a pre-emptive, Bush v. Goresgque strike by the Roberts’ court, be rendered null and void.

Hansen concludes:

As a matter of constitutional law, however, Judge White’s reasoning is the biggest stretch of all. The Obama campaign’s case was originally based on the disparate treatment of classes of voters. Now it has morphed into a kind of general constitutional right not to dismantle a (relatively) well-run election system. As much as I wish our Constitution provided such a guarantee, I’m skeptical that a majority of the Supreme Court will find one lurking there now.

If I were making the case before the Supreme Court of the United States, my central argument would be this: in any conflict that affects the rights and freedoms of our citizens, the weight of justic must always go on the side of the scale that favors expansion.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Roldo Bartimole writes:

I think I’ve concluded. The Plain Dealer front page Sunday convinced me.

I’ve been thinking how bad it would be that the city didn’t have a daily newspaper.

Reality finally hit.

No it wouldn’t.

Why?

The paper provides too much untrue propaganda.

The paper ignores too much reality.

It avoids what needs to be told. It toots horns for too many bullshit charlatans.

It makes heroes of Jimmy Haslam just as it did Art Modell. Until it can’t avoid the obvious. These guys are for themselves. All the way.

More space on Monday’s front page for Mrs. Haslam, Dee that is. She’s so smart. She’s so generous. She’s so vivacious. She’s so passionate. She loves dogs. Even her employees. And they all love her.

Meanwhile, what’s happening to the real people of Cleveland…? Who cares? Not on the agenda.

Finally on the PD: Presidential endorsement. It’s coming.

I wrote previously that the PD would endorse Sen. Sherrod Brown (who the paper didn’t endorse six years ago) but questioned Continue Reading »

Once again, comedians are the ones telling the truth.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Matt Taibbi writes:

Well, it’s over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face. But it’s not so much the result that matters – it’s the quiet.

What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.

Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

0428: A River Runs Through

OK, I could live with my hometown newspaper endorsing Willard Mitt Romney. The editorial board would be wrong, but I wouldn’t invoke the crazy factor. Endorsing Josh Mandel however?

The role of U.S. senators is to represent their constituents’ best interests in Washington. Josh Mandel, who has served Ohioans in the Marine Corps, the General Assembly and now as state treasurer, will do that when Buckeye State voters elect him to the Senate.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who is running for re-election against Mandel, views service to his party and its leaders as his top priority. That has meant Brown often votes against the best interests of Ohioans.

I have to wonder if the editorial board of the Marietta Times actually spoke with Mandel, politician so ovre the edge that a Republican radio show host hung up on him.

No, I haven’t started watching political ads, but this critique by David Dayen (via Glenn Greenwald) is important because it highlights yet another reason that, while I’ll agree that four more years of Barack Hussein Obama in the White House would be better than four years of Willard Mitt Romney, the difference between the two just isn’t one that truly makes a difference.

There’s only one thing that sticks out to me about this ad, though the casual viewer probably won’t notice it. Let’s look at that litany of Wall Street “criminals” and “gluttons of greed,” which later get juxtaposed with Big Bird. You have Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski. So two CEOs prosecuted and convicted by George W. Bush’s Justice Department, and Madoff, whose son turned him in before Obama took office, in December 2008, and who pleaded guilty.

So the Obama campaign could not fill a list of three Wall Street criminals that the Obama Justice Department actually sent to jail. Heck, they couldn’t fill a list of one!

This is despite Eric Holder telling students at Columbia University in February of this year that his Justice Department’s record of success on fighting financial fraud crimes “has been nothing less than historic.” But not historic enough that his boss could point to, well, one Wall Street criminal behind bars as a result of DoJ’s actions.

That’s painfully telling. Nobody from Bank of America or Wells Fargo or Citigroup or JPMorgan Chase or Goldman Sachs or Bear Stearns or Morgan Stanley or Merrill Lynch or even Countrywide or Ameriquest was available to stand in as a “glutton of greed” in this advertisement. Literally no major figure responsible for the financial crisis has gone to jail. So the campaign has to use two CEOs from a decade-old accounting scandal, and a garden-variety Ponzi schemer. The financial crisis plays no role in this advertisement trying to juxtapose cuts to PBS with the financial crisis!

The subtext here is far more revealing than the text.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Charles P. Pierce writes:

One of the little miracles of this election season is that Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, an unrepentant and unreconstructed liberal, is on his way to winning re-election easily despite having had been carpet-bombed by Karl Rove and the rest of the corporate flying monkeys. This has a lot to do with Brown’s natural abilities as a politician. It also has a lot to do with the fact that his opponent, state treasurer Josh Mandel, is about eight bulbs short of an intellectual chandelier. If he’s not instigating hooleys in elevators, he’s astonishing newspaper editorial boards with the sheer magnitude of his obvious incompetence…

Joshua Aaron Mandel is a shanda fur die goy. (Look it up…)

When I logged on to the Internet Thursday morning, I was immediately struck by a general lovefest for joint press conference host Martha Raddatz and her questioning of Congressman Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden. I think some people have very low thresholds for love. Glenn Greenwald was not so smitten.

He writes:

Exactly the same is true of Raddatz’s statements and questions about America’s entitlement programs. Here is the “question” she asked to launch the discussion:

“Let’s talk about Medicare and entitlements. Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process.

“Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive?”

That social security is “going broke” – a core premise of her question – is, to put it as generously as possible, a claim that is dubious in the extreme. “Factually false” is more apt. This claim lies at the heart of the right-wing and neo-liberal quest to slash entitlement benefits for ordinary Americans – Ryan predictably responded by saying: “Absolutely. Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.” – but the claim is baseless.

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times economics reporter David Cay Johnston has repeatedly explained, this is the primary demonstrable myth being used by the DC class – which largely does not need entitlements – to deceive ordinary Americans into believing that they must “sacrifice” the pittances on which they are now living:

“Which federal program took in more than it spent last year, added $95 billion to its surplus and lifted 20 million Americans of all ages out of poverty?

“Why, social security, of course, which ended 2011 with a $2.7 trillion surplus.

“That surplus is almost twice the $1.4 trillion collected in personal and corporate income taxes last year. And it is projected to go on growing until 2021, the year the youngest Baby Boomers turn 67 and qualify for full old-age benefits.

“So why all the talk about social security ‘going broke?’ … The reason is that the people who want to kill social security have for years worked hard to persuade the young that the social security taxes they pay to support today’s gray hairs will do nothing for them when their own hair turns gray.

“That narrative has become the conventional wisdom because it is easily reduced to a headline or sound bite. The facts, which require more nuance and detail, show that, with a few fixes, Social Security can be safe for as long as we want.”

That Medicare is “going broke” is as dubious and controversial a claim as the one about social security. Numerous economists and fact-checking journalists have documented quite clearly why this claim is misleading in the extreme.

My gut reaction here is that Raddatz, like Jim Leher, and perhaps the next two moderators, are in on the theater that is our election process.

Mano Singham writes:

The city passed the law over the rabbis’ objections and it was due to go into effect on October 21. Now the Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA and Canada, Agudath Israel of America, International Bris Association and three rabbis have gone to court to stop implementation of the law.

Why? Religious freedom of course! Which is interpreted by them as being allowed to do just as they please as long as it is part of their tradition, the health and safety of the baby be damned.

These religious ‘leaders’ can only survive by keeping people ignorant. It will be interesting to see how the courts rule. It seems to me to be an easy decision but one never knows.

This repugnant practice is not common by any stretch of the imagination, but the very idea that the Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA and Canada, Agudath Israel of America, International Bris Association would join three rabbis for the right to continue this dangerous practice under the guise of religious freedom is wrong on so many levels I don’t know where to begin.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

For establishment journalists like Raddatz, “objectivity” is the holy grail. In their minds, it is what distinguishes “real reporters” from mere “opinionists” and, worse, partisans. As they tell it, this objectivity means they traffic only in straight facts, unvarnished by ideology or agenda. This journalistic code obligates them to speak only from what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, citing the philosopher Thomas Nagel, derides as “the View from Nowhere”, a term Rosen explains this way:

Three things. In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position ‘impartial’. Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.

Leave aside whether that is even a desirable mindset. The reality is that, as desperately as they try, virtually no journalists are driven by this type of objectivity. They are, instead, awash in countless highly ideological assumptions that are anything but objective.

I’ve argued this for decades: there is no such person as an objective journalist. We can be up front about our preconceptions and prejudices. We can make sure that our readers, listeners and viewers are aware of that which makes us who we are, and we can certainly wrestle with our demons and angels and strive for some personal standard of fairness, but we cannot stop being who we are.

Faux objectivity, for that surely is the only way to describe the fantasy, is a disingenuous invisibility cloak that renders us naked.

Mano Singham writes:

But really, should we be surprised? When Bush was president and waging wars and torturing with abandon, at least some Democrats were up in arms, warning of the grave violations to the constitution and human rights that those actions represented. As soon as Barack Obama took office, he halted torture practices such as waterboarding but did not take any actions whatsoever against those who had committed those and other war crimes, essentially condoning such acts by pardoning the perpetrators.

Many of those voices who had expressed horror at torture were silent about his complicity, and remained silent as he raised the stakes and asserted his right to actually murder people just because he, and he alone, felt that they deserved it. Of course, the Republicans were not going to voice any protest since Obama was only doing what they would have loved to do anyway and were probably delighted that Obama’s actions paved the way for the next Republican president to expand on the program of presidential murder.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Paul Krugman writes:

Meanwhile, the household survey produces estimates of both the number of Americans employed and the number unemployed, defined as people who are seeking work but don’t currently have a job. The eye-popping number from Friday’s report was a sudden drop in the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, but as I said, you shouldn’t put too much emphasis on one month’s number. The more important point is that unemployment has been on a sustained downward trend.

But isn’t that just because people have given up looking for work, and hence no longer count as unemployed? Actually, no. It’s true that the employment-population ratio — the percentage of adults with jobs — has been more or less flat for the past year. But remember those aging baby boomers: the fraction of American adults who are in their prime working years is falling fast. Once you take the effects of an aging population into account, the numbers show a substantial improvement in the employment picture since the summer of 2011.

None of this should be taken to imply that the situation is good, or to deny that we should be doing better — a shortfall largely due to the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans, who have blocked any and all efforts to accelerate the pace of recovery. (If the American Jobs Act, proposed by the Obama administration last year, had been passed, the unemployment rate would probably be below 7 percent.) The U.S. economy is still far short of where it should be, and the job market has a long way to go before it makes up the ground lost in the Great Recession. But the employment data do suggest an economy that is slowly healing, an economy in which declining consumer debt burdens and a housing revival have finally put us on the road back to full employment.

Krugman concludes:

It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Be sure to click through for the setup…