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.
The parallels are striking, both because Crist and Specter were among so few major Republicans to support the stimulus and because both are set to wage big-time Senate campaigns in which they face primary challengers.
There isn’t yet a chorus of anti-Crist voices in the Florida Republican Party - in fact, polling has him remaining very popular among his base - but Crist’s detractors say they can change that. And now they have their change instrument, in former state House Speaker Marco Rubio.
Rubio’s announcement Tuesday that he will run for retiring Sen. Mel Martinez’s (R-Fla.) seat ensures Crist won’t have a free ride in the GOP primary - and increasingly, it looks like it may not be an easy ride, either.
“We are seeing the same array of forces in this potential race that we saw last week with Specter and Toomey, and much of the same rhetoric being used,” said Atlanta-based GOP consultant David Johnson.
May 1st. The Kansas Supreme Court has issued its opinion in State v. Cott (No. 97,955) a case arising from a DUI prosecution. In a unanimous decision, written by Justice Eric Rosen, the Court ruled that DUI (which carries a the sentencing enhancement where a child under 14 is in the car) and the crime of aggravated endangerment of a child could both be charged in the same case. (more…)
“The choices are clear,” said Rep. Kevin Yoder, an Overland Park Republican who leads the House budget committee. He said too many lawmakers are hesitatant to make the hard decisions. “The easiest thing to be right now is a no vote.”
Finding consensus in the House is critical to solving the state’s budget crisis and ending the 2009 legislative session, one marked by declining state revenue and contentious budget battles.
The committee of petitioners trying to recall Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser turned in about 600 pages of petitions to the city clerk’s office this afternoon, which they estimated contain 9,000 to 10,000 signatures.
They also estimated that they have collected 3,000 additional signatures that are still out in the field and have not yet been turned in.
That still leaves the group needing probably 5,000 more signatures to meet the theshhold of nearly 17,000 signatures to qualify for a recall election.
Election authorities will likely take a few days to count the number of valid signatures and report back how many more are needed. The committee would then have 10 days after that to try to reach the required number.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States now has 642 cases of the new H1N1 flu, with two deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
CDC officials have said they expect the new swine flu to spread to all 50 states, to cause severe disease and some deaths, although most cases have been mild.
Mexico has confirmed 42 deaths and said it was impossible to get samples from about 70 more people who died of flu-like illness recently. Globally, more than 1,600 cases have been reported in 23 countries.
Chairman Rupert Murdoch, commenting on the most severe worldwide economic downturn in decades, said Wednesday that “it is increasingly clear that the worst is over.” Speaking to analysts on a conference call, Murdoch said: “There are emerging signs in some of our businesses that the days of precipitous declines are done and that revenues are beginning to look healthier.”
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–News Corporation (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) today reported third quarter net income of $2.7 billion ($1.04 per share) compared with net income of $2.7 billion ($0.91 per share) reported in the third quarter a year ago. During this third quarter, the Company recorded a net gain of $1.2 billion on the partial sale of its ownership stake in NDS Group plc (”NDS”) and a non-cash tax benefit of $1.2 billion from the resolution of various tax matters. The prior year’s third quarter net income included a $1.7 billion tax-free gain on the asset and stock exchange with Liberty Media Corporation. Operating income for the third fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2009 was $755 million, compared with $1.4 billion reported a year ago. (more…)
Unlike House Joint Resolution 1003, House Concurrent Resolution 1028 does not need the governor’s approval.
The House passed the measure 73-22. It now goes to the Senate.
“We’re going to get it done one way or the other,” said the resolutions’ author, Rep. Charles Key, R-Oklahoma City.
“I think our governor is out of step.”
House Democrats objected, saying the issue already had been taken up and had been vetoed, but House Speaker Pro Tempore Kris Steele, R-Shawnee, ruled the veto is not final action.
NYT: OBAMA UNDER ‘INCREASING PRESSURE TO ENGAGE’ ON GAY ISSUES
Wed May 06 2009 18:36:06 ET
President Obama was noticeably silent last month when the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
But the days when the president can keep quiet on an issue that gays view as central to their civil rights may soon be coming to an end, the NY TIMES is set to Page One on Thursday, newsroom sources tell DRUDGE.
“Just four weeks after the Iowa ruling, Obama — who opposes gay marriage but campaigned as a self-described ‘fierce advocate’ of gay rights — is under increasing pressure to engage on a variety of gay issues that are coming to the fore amid a dizzying pace of social, political and legislative change,’ reports the paper’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
History Repeats Itself With DHS Smear
April 23, 2009
“The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s,” so reads a recent DHS report, “when right-wing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.” (more…)
What do we make of President Obama’s first 100 days? The answer is that he falls within the norm. His favorability rating–which is certainly high, but not historic–puts him about where George W. Bush was at this time in 2001. In fact, his rating is similar to Jimmy Carter’s in April of 1977 and Richard Nixon’s in April of 1969. President Obama’s approval rating is typical of a “change” election President. The only “outlier” is Bill Clinton, and that is most likely due to his low vote share (43%) in the election. So forget the 100 day hype. Obama is where he should be.
A proud father has explained how watching video clips on YouTube helped him deliver his baby son.
Marc Stephens said he had to act quickly when his wife Jo went into labour three weeks early as she had a history of fast births with her previous three children.
The 28-year-old Royal Navy air engineer, from Redruth, Cornwall, searched “how to deliver a baby” on the internet and after viewing a few clips said he was ready to help deliver healthy baby Gabriel.
Although he didn’t seem eager to admit it, the latest appointment to the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission is the former executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party
Former Democratic leader Mark Simpson replaced Carol Zimmerman on the commission last week. Zimmerman was also a Democrat. House Minority Leader Paul Davis, D-Lawrence, made the appointment.
According to a report by the Kansas Meadowlark, Simpson introduced himself by saying, “I live in Lawrence … I’m an assistant district attorney in Douglas County. I’ve been there coming up on a year, and before that I worked in politics. I worked on some campaigns and things like that.”
