Morning Must Reads: Hats

Peering into the looking glass at America’s future.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11579979
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The 19% average cuts to departmental budgets were less severe than the 25% expected – thanks to an extra £7bn in savings from the welfare budget, the chancellor told MPs.

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While in other news, they are still…………STILL rioting in France. When will all of this come to America you ask?
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http://www.france24.com/en/20101020-france-violent-protests-unions-retirement-sarkozy-pension-hortefeux-petrol
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Soon.

“69% of voters are saying their vote is a signal to the president, compared with 59% who said so in 2006 about then-President George W. Bush, the year Democrats took control of Congress.
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The numbers of voters in 2006 who said they were motivated by feelings for or against Mr. Bush “are dwarfed by how Obama impacts the political stage,” Mr. McInturff said.
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Voters this year are evenly divided between showing their support for, or opposition to, the president, while voters in 2006 were more likely to be signaling their opposition to Mr. Bush—with 37% saying they wanted to register opposition, and 22% signaling support.”

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303550904575562493014465942.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEADNewsCollection

Why won’t Ginned-up Thomas (or her useless husband) tell us who’s paying her salary? And wouldn’t it be a COI for him if it turns out foreign interests are funding her “non-profit”?

COI = conflict of interest

Hey Sheriffs – why’s the blog all funny-looking?

The “Mad Hatter” and hats.
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gLx36Kv1P93AbF39waIL-MJ-SwtA?docId=CNG.eedb0f66e03b42c4cacdaf19b591ff66.f1
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“US President Barack Obama has cancelled a visit to a Sikh temple in India, sources said Wednesday, over apparent concerns that photos of him with his head covered would revive claims he is a Muslim.”

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Revive? A better word may be CONFIRM. LOL
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The Commander-in-Chief of all things Muslim or other than the status quo in America. Of course our dear leader continues to omit “Creator” out of the Declaration of Independence when he makes reference to this grand document of our historical past.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/obama-continues-to-omit-creator-from-declaration-of-independence/
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Now why would a so-called “Constitutional Scholar” like Barack Obama omit such a very important part of our Declaration of Independence again?

You realize what you quoted pretty much says people disliked bush overall more, and that more people stand behind Obama than did Bush?

Democrats describing their re-election prospects….
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“In deep-blue New York, Republicans have a shot at as many as nine Democrats. “It’s thermonuclear,” said two-term Rep. Michael Arcuri, in describing the campaign against him to The New York Times.”

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Thermonuclear is a good word to use I do believe. That or the average voter going to the polls on November 2nd will be nothing short of a swarm of “Killer Bees” descending upon the carcasses of soon to be dead Democrat politicians. Especially those who have supported ObamaCare or all of Nancy Pelosi’s progressive policies.
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How do you say it with conviction? Bub-Bye Nancy!!
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/43814.html#ixzz12uMUMADL

Inside a Secret DOD Prison in Afghanistan
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The Horowitz report collects and corroborates earlier media accounts concerning the Tor Jail, and it helps establish that the Obama Administration brought change to the formal, public detentions policy while continuing the abusive secret operations of JSOC and the DIA.

You realize what you quoted pretty much says people disliked bush overall more, and that more people stand behind Obama than did Bush?

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I know full well what I quoted. Are you trying to say that these numbers in someway show that Obama is more or less SLIGHTLY better than Bush was in 2006? Do you think that is something you should shout out from the mountain tops today?
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In all States where Obama’s approval ratings are below 50%, the Democrat no matter what race is behind in the polls. Behind so much that even the likes of Barney Frank are running scared of losing this election.
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With the exception of California, New York and Delaware, most all the rest of the States are recording voter disgust at Democrats and their policies over the past 2 years in particular. The head honcho of Democrats is Barack Obama. The ONLY other person who polls lower than Obama is Nancy Pelosi.

Yeah, the only thing it would confirm is that wing-nutters are culturally illiterate paranoids who would literally take anything as evidence supporting their dislike of Obama. A man having to cover his head when he enters the temple is no different than a woman having to cover her head when she enters a Catholic church. The difference here? It’s not a Christian tradition so it’s automatically scary and threatening to xenophobic, racist wingnuts.

What did I miss?

“‘We would not be manufacturing in the United States if it wasn’t for the stimulus money,’ said Lisa Hardwick, Delphi’s plant manager, during a tour of the facility.”

“…here in Kokomo, the Recovery Act and Obama’s auto bailout have jolted Kokomo back to life — keeping big industry from fleeing and attracting newcomers as well.

‘We wouldn’t be standing here,’ said Brian Harlow, a 32-year Chrysler veteran who grew up in Kokomo and now is based at the company’s headquarters outside Detroit. “It would have been a ghost town.’

Chrysler, which had idled 3,500 hourly workers in Kokomo a year and a half ago, recently announced $350 million in new investments that will make the city the hub of North American manufacturing for its next-generation transmissions. All those people have been put back to work, and 700 others have been hired.

Auto parts manufacturer Delphi will use an $89 million stimulus grant to retain 100 manufacturing jobs and make 100 additional hires at a facility building parts for hybrid vehicles.

And a Colorado solar company plans to use $300 million in stimulus funds to hire as many as 900 workers at an old Daimler auto plant south of town that will make products to export to Europe.

Even the downtown looks better. The mayor leveraged $800,000 in stimulus funds to help with a revitalization project that has netted 11 new stores since the start of the year.”

Mister Crowley | What went on in your head?

“Describing the importance of the ad, DNC spokesperson Brad Woodhouse said, ‘The debate over the secret money Republican-aligned groups are spending to win the election and the economy is inextricably linked — because if Republicans win — they are going to reward this special interest backing by returning to the economic policies of the Bush era that cost eight million Americans their jobs.’

Pundit criticism notwithstanding, I continue to think this message has merit. For one thing, ads like these make the connection between secretly-financed attack ads and the issue foremost on voters’ minds: economic policy.”

To reiterate: Yes, voters care about this.
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/10/yes_voters_do_care_about.html
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Also, too: There appears to be a ‘there’ there.
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http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/13/chamber-foreign-funded-media/
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Burden of proof now lies on the Chamber of Commerce.

Early voting brings allegations of voter intimidation.

“Harris County, the biggest county in the state, is where a Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots launched an anti-voter fraud initiative called ‘True the Vote,’ which recruited poll watchers and amped up fears over groups like the community organizing group ACORN.

Chad Dunn, a lawyer who is representing the Texas Democratic Party, told TPMMuckraker a number of witnesses have been interviewed by Civil Rights Division lawyers already. ‘We’ve gotten a number of reports — quite a few out of the Houston area — that poll watchers, King Street Patriot training poll watchers, are following a voter after they’ve checked them out and stand right behind them,’ Dunn said. There’s at least a dozen reports that they could confirm with witnesses, he said. ‘Interestingly, it’s all in the polling places in Hispanic and African-American areas,’ he added.

Terry O’Rourke, the first assistant in the Harris County Attorney’s office, told TPMMuckraker that there have been allegations of poll watchers talking to voters, which they are not allowed to do, as well as hovering over voters as they are waiting to vote. He said the complaints came from Kashmere Gardens, Moody Park, Sunnyside and other predominantly minority neighborhoods of the county.”

A while back, Michelle Malkin went after Rachel Ray for wearing something that vaguely resembled something middle-eastern in a Dunkin Donuts ad. Boycotts were threatened, protests, the works.
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Most right wingers act like puppies do when there’s thunder. They’re reactionary, ignorant, and scared witless. No surprise they see boogeymen under every bed. The rest of the right-wing fans the flames of these fears to get the rest to vote agianst their own interests.
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So, of course, they’d go apoplectic if Obama did anything vaguely Muslim, Rusty’s lickin his lips at just the thought of it. Its what he lives for.

Followup on the right-wing “Don’t Vote” campaign aimed at latinos.

“Univision, which heads the non-partisan Latino civic participation campaign, Ya Es Hora, has decided to do the right thing and not broadcast the ads. A Univision spokesperson told ThinkProgress:

Univision will not be running any spots from Latinos for Reform related to voting. It is also important to clarify that while Mr. Robert de Posada has on occasion provided political commentary on Univision, representing one of various points of views, he is not in any way affiliated with Univision. Univision prides itself on promoting civic engagement and our extensive national campaigns encourage Hispanics to vote.

[...]ThinkProgress did some digging into de Posada’s group, and here’s what we found.

To begin with, the group’s 8872 form lists the same P.O. Box number as the one belonging to the Admiral Roy F. Hoffmann Foundation, an organization founded by the chairman of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), Roy F. Hoffmann. For those who don’t recall, SBVT was another 527 group formed during the 2004 elections aimed at opposing Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) presidential bid by distorting and misrepresenting his war record. [...]

The connection doesn’t stop at a P.O. Box. Latinos for Reform, the Hoffmann Foundation, and SBVT have all employed the services of the same consulting firm, Political Compliance Services. Susan Arceneaux, a ‘long time aide of Dick Armey’ heads the company. “

Enthusiasm gap.

(or, Desperately Seeking O’Donnell Supporters)

“The George Washington University chapter of the College Republicans seem to be having a bit of trouble rallying volunteers to campaign for Christine O’Donnell”:

“We are still DESPERATELY looking for people to sign up for the campaign trip to Delaware this weekend. Please attend! Our candidates in Delaware desperately need help! A gift of 50 dollars, free food, transportation, and lodging at a beautiful hotel in Delaware will be provided to ANYONE who comes on this trip. YOU WILL GET PAID FOR GOING! THIS WILL BE THE EXPERIENCE OF YOUR YEAR HERE AT GW! Additionally, the campaigns will give our College Republicans chapter 2,000 dollars for future programming if we get 30 people to go. Please go!”

“I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike”.

“As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.

There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia’s SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.”

GOP candidate Allen West decides it is ‘Miller Time’

It will be interesting to see who the punditocracy sides with on this one.

(’cause they sure didn’t stick up for the common folk)

“Pacific Investment Management Co., BlackRock Inc. and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York are seeking to force Bank of America Corp. to repurchase soured mortgages packaged into $47 billion of bonds by its Countrywide Financial Corp. unit, people familiar with the matter said.

A group of bondholders wrote a letter to Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon Corp., the debt’s trustee, citing alleged failures by Countrywide to service loans properly, their lawyer said yesterday in a statement that didn’t name the firms. The New York Fed acquired mortgage debt through its 2008 rescues of Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc.

Investors are stepping up efforts to recoup losses on mortgage bonds, which plummeted in value amid the worst slump in home prices since the 1930s. Last month, BNY Mellon declined to investigate mortgage files in response to a demand from the bondholder group, which has since expanded. Countrywide’s servicing failures, including insufficient record keeping, may open the door for investors to seek repurchases by bypassing the trustee…”

Peering into the looking glass at America’s future.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/world/europe/21britain.html?_r=1&hp
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More money for a National Health Service, a reduction in defense spending, and assorted spending cuts and tax increases? We should only hope that’s in our future.
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…STILL rioting in France. When will all of this come to America you ask? Soon.
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It’s overdue here in the States, actually. Just not for the reasons you think, FreeDumbLog.

TARP made money for the US Taxpayers…
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-20/bailout-of-wall-street-returns-8-2-profit-to-taxpayers-beating-treasuries.html

I’m guessing that you knowingly left out the fact that the U.K. is also cutting its defense budget.
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http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/World/Story/STIStory_592987.html
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Note how they are making the case that they would still be spending 2% of their GDP on defense as required by NATO. Compare this to the 23% spent by the U.S. last year.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2007.png
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If only the U.S. will reduce its defense spending by half, it would still be 6 times what the British spend as a percentage of GDP, and it would most likely solve ALL the deficit and sundry problems that the U.S. is facing.
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Any great conservatives for such a bold move? … I’m sure the nation can count on you to do the right, and obviously reasonable thing.

“We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.”

“The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.”

(Observation: In that we’re all sensing that something is going very, very wrong with our country, there’s not much space between us commoners whether right, left, or somewhere in-between. We diverge from that ‘common sense’ when we ask why things are going wrong and begin looking for someone to blame…There’s a substantial amount of anger that has been misdirected as a result of ideologically- and greed-driven misinformation campaigns.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/19/AR2010101906085.html?wpisrc=nl_politics
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The article goes on to list the plutocrats that are scamming the tea party true believers.

I have trouble copying and pasting the body of articles. Don’t know why.

New O’Donnell crazy. She wants to close the borders entirely. Couple that with Miller wanting a Berlin wall, we may find ourselves not able to leave and no one allowed in. Good plan.
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/10/odonnell-close-the-borders-ent.html?wprss=44

Another Rep. Constitutional scholar:
Joe Runyan, former pro-football player, running for House of Rep in NJ.
Asked to name a recent SCOTUS decision he disagreed with, he name the Dred Scott decision (1857). When asked for something a little more recent, he couldn’t think of any.
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http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/goper-runyan-lists-dred-scott-as-recent-scotus-decision-he-disagreed-with-video.php?ref=fpb

Joe Miller’s ex-boss happy to see him go.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/joe-millers-ex-boss-we-were-not-eager-to-have-him-stay.php?ref=fpb

And in Orange County, California, county workers are using a $10,000 stimulus grant to install “swingable” grates over street storm sewer openings to catch trash and garbage before it can be flushed out to the ocean. This will save tens of thousands of dollars in ocean-outlet cleanup costs, and stop some trash from migrating to the mid-Pacific floating garbage pile.

Want to see a picture of a President in a hat?

http://deadpresidents.tumblr.com/post/539101615/how-can-they-tell

Here’s the inspiration for this generation’s Republicans’ philosophy of governance:

During the 1924 campaign in which Coolidge won a Presidential term of his own, he answered questions for reporters who had been pleading for a question-and-answer session. One reporter asked, “Have you any statement on the campaign?”. “No,” said Coolidge. “Can you tell us something about the world situation?”, asked another reporter. “No,” said Coolidge. “Any information about Prohibition?”, asked yet another reporter. “No,” said Coolidge once again. Knowing that they weren’t going to get anything new from the President, the reporters began to disperse as Coolidge quickly said, “Now, remember — don’t quote me.”

Sound familiar?

Oh, by the way, he did announce his economic policy: “The business of America is business.”, then refused to run again in 1928. In 1929, the business of America became Depression.

new,
Do you want to respond to “I’m guessing that you knowingly left out the fact that the U.K. is also cutting its defense budget.” from walkingfunny?

Do you want to comment on the data he cites?

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I didn’t think so. You may resume your snarkalogical commentary at your convenience.