Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) began Wednesday’s commerce subcommittee hearing on “the Future of Journalism” by welcoming media executives, Senate colleagues and audience members to a “brave new world.”
The hearing opened just 12 hours after staffers at Kerry’s home-town paper, the Boston Globe, agreed to an 8.3 percent pay cut for staffers just to keep the doors open.
Newspapers, Kerry said, “look like an endangered species.”
“Most of us in this room probably begin our day with a newspaper-maybe two or three,” Kerry said in his remarks. “Newspapers have been a part of our daily lives since we were old enough to read, and since our first paper routes, for me delivering the now defunct Washington Star. We learned about our neighborhood, our country, our world from newspapers - they entertained us; they enraged us; but always, they have informed us.”
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh Wednesday that if former Secretary of State Colin Powell is going to keep criticizing the GOP, he may as well leave the party and become a Democrat-adding that Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama was “purely and solely based on race.”
“He’s just mad at me because I’m the one person in the country that had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama,” Limbaugh said on his radio show. “There can be no other explanation for it.”
As the clock ticks on a self-imposed deadline, Rep. Henry Waxman is facing fire from all sides over his landmark measure to curb carbon emissions.
After months of haggling, he still doesn’t have a deal that moderates will support. On Wednesday, he had to back offhis threat from a day earlier to skip a key subcommittee vote after members raised a ruckus. And, to top it all off, the president and others are breathing down his neck to wrap up work on climate change so that Waxman can turn his focus to the blockbuster fight of the summer over health care reform.
“Henry has some decisions to make,” said Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), a key moderate voice in the negotiations. “Everyone has been very clear about where they need to be to get to ‘yes.’ … The chairman has a very good read of the committee.”
A year ago today, with returns rolling in from the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, the late Tim Russert so famously declared, “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be, and nobody is going to dispute it.”
Russert was right, but Hillary Clinton, nevertheless, kept campaigning for several more weeks, fueled by her supporters’ convictions that her proposals were better than Obama’s.
After barely 100 days in office, it now appears Obama agrees: Since taking office, he has dropped virtually every position that distinguished him from Clinton.
Granted, there were not many policy differences between Obama and Clinton during the campaign. But those that existed were sharply debated and helped Obama define himself as the pragmatic change agent that many voters now believe him to be.
Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans say 17-year-olds should be required to consult a parent before taking the so-called “morning after” pill to prevent pregnancy.
Thirty percent (30%) do not think it is necessary for 17-year-olds to discuss the pill with a parent first, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Men and women have virtually identical views on this question.
Not surprisingly, 82% of pro-life adults say 17-year-olds should consult a parent first. However, pro-choice Americans are evenly divided on the need for parental consultation.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made it legal for 17-year-olds to take the morning-after poll in a decision two weeks ago, but 66% of all adults also think they should be required to talk to a doctor beforehand. Twenty-seven percent (27%) disagree.
Now it appears that Harry Reid was unable to keep his promise to award Specter his seniority. According to CNN, a resolution today prevented Specter from retaining his seniority. This is a double blow for Specter. First, he can no longer argue to Pennsylvanians that his seniority is a benefit to the state. This makes problem one and two above harder to overcome, as he loses one of the major arguments for his candidacy. Second, Specter does not strike me as a man with a small ego, yet he has dropped from being the twelfth most senior senator to coming in right below Kirsten Gillibrand, who was in diapers when Specter was starting his political career. I would imagine that isn’t easy to take. To make matters worse, there isn’t much he can do about it; what can he do, switch parties back?
So far, Specter’s best day as a Democrat was his first day.
According to a new study released by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, some of our most liberal states rank at the bottom in a measure of personal freedom. “Freedom in the 50 States, an index of personal and economic freedom,” finds the most free states to be first New Hampshire, then Colorado, followed by S. Dakota, Idaho, Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona, Virginia and N. Dakota.The bottom ten least free states in the U.S. are (in descending order) Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Washington, Hawaii, Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and bringing up the bottom is New York.
It is striking that some of the most Republican states are the most free and all the least free are Democrat states, isn’t it? (2008 Election Map)
Mourning the death of one of its own is perhaps the entertainment industry’s most time-honored traditions. In one cherished tribal ritual, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter-those old-school bibles of trade news and gossip-reap a financial windfall as movie studios, TV networks and top showbiz suits rush to place full-page memorials to the departed. There were no such memorials last week, however, as one of entertainment industry’s most influential organizing principles was laid quietly to rest. After an agonizing and prolonged decline, the long-suffering Vertically Integrated Media Conglomerate (1989-2009) passed away. (more…)
Some days you have to ask yourself, my God, what if these people were Republicans?
Democrats took back Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 in no small part because of their ability to bang their spoons on their high chairs about what they called the Republican “culture of corruption.” Their choreographed outrage was coordinated with the precision of a North Korean missile launch pageant. And, to be fair, they had a point. The GOP did have its legitimate embarrassments. California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and lobbyist Jack Abramoff were fair game, and so was Rep. Mark Foley, the twisted Florida congressman who allegedly wanted male congressional pages cleaned and perfumed and brought to his tent, as it were.
Of course, it wasn’t as if Democrats were without sin. Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson was indicted on fraud, bribery and corruption charges in 2007, after an investigation unearthed, among other things, $90,000 in his freezer. Then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was busted in a prostitution scandal.
- First, do not confuse war with common criminality. The detainees held at Guantanamo are not common criminals, but warriors the vast majority of whom are fundamentally committed to the destruction of our way of life. The appropriate legal foundation upon which detainee policy should be built is the law of war, along with procedures adapted from our military justice system.
- Second, military commissions remain the appropriate trial venue for these individuals. We would strenuously oppose any effort to try enemy combatants in our civilian courts. By an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which set forth procedures for trying enemy combatants for war crimes.
I’ve been following the travails of Michael Steele for a few months now, and I’d say the latest news is pretty gosh darned huge. From the Washington Times:
Capitulating to critics on the Republican National Committee, embattled Republican Party Chairman Michael S. Steele has signed a secret pact agreeing to controls and restraints on how he spends hundreds of millions of dollars in party funds and contracts, The Washington Times has learned.The “good governance” agreement revives checks and balances Mr. Steele resisted implementing for RNC contracts, fees for legal work and other expenditures that were not renewed after the 2008 presidential nominating contest.
The agreement, proposed by several current and former RNC officials, goes further, making 33-year RNC veteran Jay Banning, who was fired by Mr. Steele along with his deputy last month, an on-call adviser to the RNC treasurer. Mr. Banning was seen as a trusted liaison to RNC members critical of Mr. Steele’s tenure and financial management.
From the looks of it, the outlines of the agreement restore some old rules that had expired at the end of last year. Moreoever, Steele’s opponents have also managed to put Jay Banning (the RNC’s chief financial officer until he was fired by Steele) in a watchdog position over Steele. This is an agreement that Steele initially opposed.
RCP: “These comments from federal judge Sonia Sotomayor are in the news because she is a possible nominee for the Supreme Court. In 2005 at Duke University she said that policy is made in the courts.”
The video goes through 16 Republicans competing to win “the heart and soul of the GOP.” The ad includes Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Mark Sanford, Jeb Bush, John McCain, Bobby Jindal, John Cornyn, Mike Huckabee, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Michael Steele, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.
Senator Arlen Specter has been called many things by his former fellow Republicans over the years, but “classy” has never been a term they used for the man. His announcement today that after nearly 30 years in the Senate as a Republican he will cross the line to join the Democratic majority is the capstone on a career built not on ideological purpose or seeking after the right course for the country, but on service to the worst kind of personal interest, a lust for manipulative control of every situation, and the crass pursuit of power for power’s sake.
It’s positively quaint to listen to Republicans murmur optimistically about their “dominance” on Twitter. #polc09, #tcot, #p2
The very first time I saw one, it reminded me immediately of comments I had seen and heard before. They were the openly dismissive comments directed by complacent and cocky Republicans at the Democrats efforts online.
I specifically remember more than a few people, myself included, who watched the rise of the online left with initial derision. As late as 2004 and 2005, I heard things like, “The Democrats and their blogs. How’s that working out for them? All that effort and how many wins has it resulted in?”
Beginning with Conrad Burns and George Allen, we began to quickly see the results of “those blogs”. It’s a lesson we failed to heed early on, and it contributed greatly to our demise.
Specter is revealing more of his unprincipled nature with each passing day. These comments are mind-blowingly candid. From Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:
Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) reversed himself from comments he made in an interview in which he said he wanted Norm Coleman (R) to prevail in the disputed Minnesota Senate race against Al Franken (D), CQ Politics reports.
Said Specter: “In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates. I’m ordinarily pretty correct in what I say. I’ve made a career of being precise. I conclusively misspoke.”
Asked who he’s backing now in elections, Specter said, “I’m looking for more Democratic members. Nothing personal.”
Last Friday, the day after Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, I drove past the company’s headquarters on Interstate 75 in Auburn Hills, Mich.
As I glanced at the pentagram logo I felt myself tearing up a little bit. Anyone who grew up in the Detroit area, as I did, can’t help but be sad to see a once great company fail.
But my sadness turned to anger later when I heard what bankruptcy lawyer Tom Lauria said on a WJR talk show that morning. “One of my clients,” Lauria told host Frank Beckmann, “was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.”
Lauria represented one of the bondholder firms, Perella Weinberg, which initially rejected the Obama deal that would give the bondholders about 33 cents on the dollar for their secured debts while giving the United Auto Workers retirees about 50 cents on the dollar for their unsecured debts.
For a politician who sometimes got accused of playing class warfare, candidate Barack Obama sure made a lot of well-to-do friends during the 2008 campaign.
The big question now is whether President Barack Obama can keep them.
One striking, if little-noted, trend of the past presidential election was that Obama won the affluent vote - those making more than $200,000 annually - with 52 percent. Moving down the income scale a bit, he and John McCain essentially tied among those making between $100,000 and $200,000.
In 2008, exit polls showed the percentage of voters earning more than $100,000 had jumped to a historic high of 26 percent, compared with just 9 percent in 1996. Obama’s strong showing among this bloc reversed a decades-old pattern in which the more money someone made, the more likely he or she was to vote Republican.
