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Photos by: joanneleon. September, 2013.
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The two most significant things that happened yesterday were Paul Ryan's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and Pres. Obama's press conference yesterday, where he took the helm at the daily White House pool presser. When you boil things down and strip away the shutdown/debt ceiling kabuki, they're both saying pretty much the same thing. But you aren't supposed to notice that. You're supposed to line up with the red team or blue team and pay attention to the clowns performing in the rings.
MSNBC is working the Grand Bargain this morning, though they do note that Obamacare has disappeared from the conversation.
The two main players on the red team, far as I can tell, are Paul Ryan and Pat Toomey. We already know the deal with the Ryan budget and Pat Toomey has ties to the Tea Party but he's not a Tea Party guy. He's a Wall Street / Chamber of Commerce guy. But he has influence over the extremists. He's dangerous. He also played a key role in repealing Glass-Steagall in the late 90's as part of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley / Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 team and I think he was part of other major legislation of the times.
When asked about the Paul Ryan op-ed, Toomey claims that he hasn't read it yet (almost certainly a big lie as he's a key player on the bicameral, bipartisan Grand Bargain team) but says that if Ryan wrote it, he's interested and anxious to read it. He also mentioned that the Republicans should consider some of the things in the president's own budget (Social Security cuts).
Toomey say the spending cuts aren't a drastic concession on the part of the Democrats -- they were signed into law by Democratic president. So they don't want to count the deep cuts from the sequester as the huge concession that Democrats have already made in this budget deal. This is another disastrous bit of blowback by the White House and their custom designed sequester. Remember, the sequester was designed to cause pain and was never intended to be permanent. The way out of the sequester was to get the Super Congress to agree on entitlement cuts and some revenue increases and they were given an express route (their bill would go straight to the floor, no amendments, faux debate, simple majority, which are extraordinary and perhaps unconstitutional provisions) to do it. But that failed and no smoother, easier way to weather the trillion dollars in cuts was found so the sequester kicked in and has been in effect for some period of time now, I can't remember the exact way it kicked in.
The sequester was designed to apply the cuts in harsh ways so that if the Super Congress failed, they'd come crawling back and beg for another chance to reconfigure the way the budget cuts were done. And as intended, Republicans are feeling the pain of the defense budget cuts because the Pentagon and the defense and intelligence contractors are applying pressure. The Democrats have been publicly lamenting the domestic program cuts that the sequester brought, every chance they get. Republicans want to restore the money to the defense budget and keep the domestic cuts. I think they might have done some of that already but I've lost track. But the sequester was so convoluted that I don't think most Americans even realize what happened, especially since the whole thing started in August of 2011 and the only thing people have concluded is that Democrats and Republicans have been bickering over budgets for five years and big crises keep happening and big battles keep happening and our lives keep getting worse and nobody in Washington seems to be representing us. The Congressional approval rating is about 11% right now and Obama's approval numbers are in the 40's. Judging by the response to the idea of bombing Syria, everybody's pretty damned fed up.
On MSNBC they're talking about "common sense entitlement reforms" as if it's a no brainer.
The MSNBC chiron today says the Senate rejects another Super Committee "gimmick" (which means they know it won't play well with the public, won't poll well and House Tea Party members might balk at the idea of a "Super Committee" or a "Grand Bargain" by those names. John Boehner told his caucus not to call it a "Super Committee" and Paul Ryan in his op-ed claims it's not a "Grand Bargain". All you have to do is look at the contents of the proposed deals to know that's bullshit. It also is an indicator of a weak spot, so the terms "Grand Bargain", "Super Committee", "Catfood Commission" should be applied to this early and often. They know that these terms will wake up activists and grassroots organizations (what's left of the ones that haven't been completely veal penned and who aren't being kept as busy as bees doing with shiny objects they've been assigned, ginning up outrage about the Tea Party, defending Obamacare, citing lists of national parks, and now using veterans and troops as political pawns).
There's so much to say about this whole thing but the key thing is that Costa signalled last night that the Ryan op-ed is the thing to pay attention to, and it signals the beginning of the R leadership's final moves (awkward but that's what he said). It's all about the entitlement cuts, major tax reform which Dems will sell as eliminating loopholes but the big deal about that is conservatives have been trying to lower and flatten taxes for decades and Obama wants to give them another major win but pretend he isn't. There's talk of doing the medical device tax cut repeal or delay too, which might bring some more Tea Party. What do the Dems get? Kinder, gentler sequester cuts, I guess and restoration of some funds to domestic programs. Funding the govt and raising the debt ceiling, maybe even some relief from future debt ceiling hijacks (but only if conservatives get all of their wet dreams, I assume). There has to be something else thrown in to make the Democratic base feel like it's a win, or a gut wrenching sacrifice for something they really want, and I'm guessing that will be the immigration bill.
In all of this clamor, Progressives are hardly even mentioned. Hardly even a factor. Everyone assumes that Obama and Pelosi will deliver the votes. And if they do, Republicans will start making their attack ads for 2014 the very next day about how Democrats voted to cut Social Security, Medicare, maybe Medicaid and the party will be wrecked. It won't matter who specifically voted for it or not, and Progressives might be given a pass to vote no but that won't matter. 80% of the country doesn't want Social Security to be cut and I assume the same or higher percent doesn't want Medicare cut, ages raised, etc. And Democrats have been elected to protect those. There is no changing that. The trade off for an immigration bill is not going to assuage that. It's hard to believe that Obama, Pelosi and Reid would do this to the party but it's clear as day they will try.
I think what's happening is as clear as day but a lot of smart progressives seem to disagree and they're buying the crazy men act. The latest thing in the "they're crazy!" act is all the Republicans saying that going over the debt ceiling cliff won't be that bad. Because the deal that's brewing is so big, maybe the kabuki will include passing the Oct. 17 deadline. The Treasure creates/estimates these deadlines anyway and it looks like they're trying really hard to convince us how crazy those Republicans are. Wall Street hasn't sent the markets on a roller coaster ride yet, so who knows?
Dems seem to be worrying about the polling numbers too.
Here's a quick comparison of Ryan's and Obama's statements yesterday and my thoughts on it from last night. There are links to Digby's piece and Ryan's op-ed in there too:
Karzai interview with BBC News. It's likely to be one of his last big interviews as his term in office comes to an end (~ 6 months).
Karzai when asked why the Americans call him an unreliable partner: "They want us to keep silent when civilians are killed. We will not. We cannot."
BBC News - Hamid Karzai speaks exclusively to the BBC's Yalda Hakim
Hamid Karzai has given one of his last major interviews before he steps down as Afghanistan's president to BBC Newsnight .
He spoke to Yalda Hakim, a presenter for BBC World News, about his relationship with the White House, plans to bring the Taliban into government, as well as corruption and women's rights.
After twelve years of war against an already devastated country, a power sharing deal with the Taliban, the terrorists? Karzai says this is the way to get peace and that he will do anything to bring peace which will make life better for all Afghans, including women, even if Taliban have some positions of control. He also says that if Afghan leaders and NATO can't come to an agreement, they can leave, part ways.
Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai says Nato caused 'great suffering'
"The return of the Taliban will not undermine progress. This country needs to have peace. I am willing to stand for anything that will bring peace to Afghanistan and through that to promote the cause of the Afghan women better," he said.
"I have no doubt that there will be more Afghan young girls and women studying and getting higher education and better job opportunities. There is no doubt about that; even if the Taliban come that will not end, that will not slow down," he added.
[...]
He said that in the years immediately following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan he had had good relations with the-then President George W Bush as in "those beginning years there was not much difference of opinion between us".
"The worsening of relations began in 2005 where we saw the first incidents of civilian casualties, where we saw that the war on terror was not conducted where it should have been."
Paul Ryan who has been quiet in public but a driving force in the backrooms, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. As usual, they're focused like a laser on "entitlements".
Paul Ryan: Here's How We Can End This Stalemate
Both Reagan and Clinton negotiated debt-ceiling deals with their opponents. We're ready to negotiate.
[...] We have an opportunity here to pay down the national debt and jump-start the economy, if we start talking, and talking specifics, now. To break the deadlock, both sides should agree to common-sense reforms of the country's entitlement programs and tax code.
[...]
[...] In 2011, Oregon's Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and I offered ideas to reform Medicare. We had different perspectives, but we also had mutual trust. [...]
[...] For my Democratic colleagues, the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act are a major concern. And the truth is, there's a better way to cut spending. We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs.
[...]
Meanwhile, mandatory spending—which mostly consists of funding for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—will grow by $1.6 trillion, or roughly 79%. The 2011 Budget Control Act largely ignored entitlement spending. But that is the nation's biggest challenge.
Tomgram: David Vine, The Pentagon's Italian Spending Spree
From Tom Dispatch Intro:
Which came first, the chicken or the terrorist? For many in this country, the Kenyan mall horror arrived out of the blue,[...] and suddenly, scores of FBI agents -- from what once upon a time was a U.S. domestic law enforcement agency -- on the ground in distant Nairobi checking out biometric data in the rubble, and you’re being told about a “direct threat” to “the homeland” from a scary Somali terror group called al-Shabab [...] seems unbelievable, though it is simple fact.
[...]
The idea that there was some history to all of this, that it involved Washington and the U.S. military, secret CIA prisons and covert drone strikes, the funding, supplying, and organizing of proxy African troops, and the thorough destabilizing of Somalia[...]
[...]
And don’t think that all of this is just so much seat-of-the-pants happenstance either. The planning for America’s militarized African presence has been going on for years, even if beyond the sight of most Americans, as this site has repeatedly reported. [...]
British intelligence and media is going after the Guardian, big time.
There's a "campaign blitz" this month with rallies and ads and "Oct. 28 business summit in Washington, D.C., that is expected to attract hundreds of business leaders from around the country." I still think this might get rolled into a grand bargain deal, officially or unofficially. The industries strongly pushing the immigration bill are technology, agriculture and manufacturing. I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention the defense industry since there are so many goodies in the bill for them too. It seems to me that there are more things in the most recently discussed immigration bill for big business than for immigrants themselves.
The article mentions that the business leaders will be focusing on some newly influential, very conservative Republican freshman and sophmore class House members. I wonder what the overlap is between this set of Republicans and the ones at the center of the Shutdown/Debt Ceiling kabuki.
Behind the scenes, business leaders press for immigration overhaul
The well-organized groups are led by some of the biggest names in business, such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. They’ve set their sights on GOP lawmakers from Southern states like North Carolina, Texas and Florida, and have recruited local business leaders and chambers of commerce to deliver a unified message that immigration legislation is crucial to the success of local economies.
They see a potential window of opportunity opening at the end of the month to reignite talks. They’ve been quietly laying the groundwork for months, holding backroom meetings and round table discussions with interest groups, and sending lobbyists to lawmakers’ offices armed with the latest studies showing the potential impacts on farmers and manufacturing if an immigration overhaul stalls.
The high-wattage names involved go beyond Bloomberg and Zuckerberg. Partnership for a New American Economy, led by Bloomberg, also includes Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., and Bill Marriott of Marriott hotels. Zuckerberg’s group, FWD.us., includes Napster co-founder Sean Parker and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
[...]
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who is also part of the Gang of Eight, encouraged House members to introduce a bill that would at least bring the House and Senate together in conference, where they could hash out a compromise.
[...]
He said there are “real fears” in the House that going to conference would lead to another fight over the path to citizenship. But Hudson added that the House leadership has assured members that, even if immigration legislation is passed, Boehner will not allow the measure to go to conference if a pathway to citizenship is on the table.
A renewal of the War on Terror? Obama-style. More like pulling back the curtain on the extensive preparations and operations we've been conducting in Africa.
‘Imperfect Intelligence’ Said to Hinder U.S. Raid on Militant in Somalia
Since American Special Forces were forced to retreat during a raid on a coastal Somali town on Saturday, the Shabab militant group has tried to use the clash as a morale jolt and propaganda tool, posting pictures of abandoned American equipment and boasting that its fighters beat back the same Navy SEALs featured in movies and video games — the same unit that got Osama bin Laden.
[...]
In recent years, the American strategy for fighting the Shabab has been largely to contain and outsource, supporting troops from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and elsewhere in the direct military operation against the group. That strategy was called into question after militants stormed the Westgate shopping mall, killing more than 60 people and reminding the world that East Africa is home to a significant cross-border terrorist threat. The Shabab claimed responsibility for the siege.
The raid on Saturday raised the question of whether the American military focus would now intensify. “If this is followed up with more military and covert actions against Shabab, it may signal a real shift in strategy,” said Ken Menkhaus, a professor of political science at Davidson College.
My father used to say, there's no such thing as a free lunch. I swear off the free apps and games but my kid has installed a few, including Angry Birds, which is probably swiping all my personal data. This kind of thing just sucks and it's such deceit. Nobody reads the terms of use nor do any terms of use say agreeing to this means the NSA can spy on you. But what's described in this article is a whole 'nother thing and it's part of the mega billions intelligence industrial complex. And the things they do, and what our government pays them to do, is seriously creepy. UGGGHHH! How do these people live with themselves? I can already see a black market voyeur industry, blackmail industry, PI industry, or other things, growing out of this.
The Data Hackers
Mining Your Information for Big Brother
We willingly hand over all of this information to the big data companies and in return they facilitate our communications and provide us with diversions. Take Google, which offers free email, data storage, and phone calls to many of us, or Verizon, which charges for smartphones and home phones. We can withdraw from them anytime, just as we believe that we can delete our day-to-day social activities from Facebook or Twitter.
[...]
What government agencies really want, however, is not just the ability to mine, but to refine those riches into the data equivalent of high-octane fuel for their investigations in very much the way we organize our own data to conduct meaningful relationships, find restaurants, or discover new music on our phones and computers.
These technologies -- variously called social network analysis or semantic analysis tools -- are now being packaged by the surveillance industry as ways to expose potential threats that could come from surging online communities of protesters or anti-government activists. Take Raytheon, a major U.S. military manufacturer, which makes Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, Maverick air-to-ground missiles, Patriot surface-to-air missiles, and Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missiles. Their latest product is a software package eerily named “Riot” that claims to be able to predict where individuals are likely to go next using technology that mines data from social networks like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.
Raytheon's Rapid Information Overlay Technology software -- yes, that’s how they got the acronym Riot -- extracts location data from photos and comments posted online by individuals and analyzes this information. The result is a variety of spider diagrams that purportedly will show where that individual is most likely to go next, what she likes to do, and whom she communicates with or is most likely to communicate with in the near future.
Some pretty good information about the NCTC in this article and that's something we all should know more about.
Spy agency insiders agree: shrinking the "intelligence community" will lead to better public safety outcomes
A newly published dissertation about how the National Counterterrorism Center works (or, rather, doesn’t work) undermines Clapper’s core claim about the relationship between the number of analysts at work and public safety outcomes. In fact, it suggests that the furlough might actually have the effect of making us safer.
After getting her foot in the door at the agency through a CIA graduate student fellowship, Bridget Rose Nolan, a sociology PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, worked at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) as a CIA analyst. Her dissertation, INFORMATION SHARING AND COLLABORATION IN THE UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF THE NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER, is a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the post-9/11 shake-up of the highly secretive, competitive shadow government known to insiders as the “intelligence community”. Her findings, based on extensive interviews with analysts from all of the major intelligence agencies, should send shock waves through congress.
Contra Clapper, the sociologist argues that there is too much information floating around, and that the size of the counterterrorism apparatus hinders its effectiveness. In fact, some analysts don't even know what they are supposed to be doing at work everyday. Nolan's thesis, then, paints a very different picture of the 'intelligence community' than the one we hear about from James "Not Wittingly" Clapper, and undermines his core claim about the relationship between the number of civilian analysts at work and public safety outcomes.
[...]
So there you have it. Many of the people who work at the CIA’s "domestic arm" for investigations think that the NCTC does more harm than good; compiles and shares too much information; and exists primarily because of bureaucratic self-interest and as a means to provide political cover for politicians. As a result, many of its own employees believe that the ‘intelligence community’ should be downsized.
I've excerpted the conclusion but it's well worth reading the beginning of the article too. What they don't take into consideration enough is alternative energy but what they're saying is that it doesn't matter if prices go higher or lower, there are still big problems ahead for the Middle East.
The price of oil: It's bad news for the Middle East
Higher oil production in the US coupled with conservation could spell trouble for petrodollar-dependent countries.
Which brings us to Saudi Arabia and Iran. There's been plenty of ink spilt on their regional rivalry and how it is playing out in multiple theatres from Afghanistan to the Levant. But as we consider Syria and the tragic rise of sectarian killing again in Iraq in the last few months, it is hard not to be drawn to the fact that for both countries ideological meddling in the conflicts of the region could have at least the serendipitous effect of raising the oil price - and easing the pressure at home.
The world has experienced two prolonged price crashes in recent history, in 1986 and 1998. Both times it was effective working agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia which brought oil producers relief in the form of capping production to hold the price up.
This time, the governments of both countries are caught by the fiscal break-even. Both need to produce as much oil as they can themselves while maintaining a high global price, which can best be ensured by someone else, somewhere else, producing less. Iran's case is complicated by US sanctions, its need for foreign investment to bring production up in ageing fields, and the politicisation of the industry under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
There are conspiracy theories upon conspiracy theories. Are Saudi money and Iranian intelligence facing each other down in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere because of the fragility of the oil markets? Or is Russia, whose fiscal break-even this year is $125? It seems unlikely. But you would have to be willfully naive to dismiss the fact that each regime is under stress to feed its patronage networks and each would benefit directly, and materially, from the failure of the other. Call it, then, an unconscious conspiracy of self-interest to promote conflict, in Syria, through Syria, and elsewhere.
The questions that Gallup asks in this poll are interesting. Pretty good, IMHO. Five countries with highest positive emotions:: Paraguay, Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, Columbia.
Five countries with lowest positive emotions: Syria, Iraq, Serbia, Montenegro, Yemen.
There are more listed in the article.
Syrians, Iraqis Least Positive Worldwide
Latin Americans still most positive
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- People in Syria and Iraq are the least likely in the world to report experiencing positive emotions, while those who live in Paraguay, Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Kuwait are among the most positive. Regionally, Latin Americans continue to report the highest positive emotions in the world and those in the Middle East report the lowest.
Action
Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
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