Morning Must Reads: Duck

Now we have the answer to who had day 365 off according to Napolitano’s calendar, It was Director of National Intelligence Director James Clapper who when asked about the arrests in London looked as if the question was asked in a foreign language.
.
But I guess it is hard to be aware of actual terrorists when Homeland Security is more worried about Global Warming.

Yesterday the Obama administration’s top anti-terrorism officials–Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano–gave an interview to ABC’s Diane Sawyer on the current state of the terrorist threat. The interview has aired, or will air, today; you can watch it here.
The questions and answers are unremarkable, except that there is a surreal moment near the end of the interview, when it becomes apparent that DNI Clapper was unaware that twelve would-be terrorists were arrested in Great Britain yesterday. Brennan jumped in to help him out, but Sawyer came back to the question later, and Clapper admitted that he hadn’t heard about the arrests.

“Desision Points: How I Managed to Go Eight Years without Making One Good Decision.”
.
Imagine if George Bush had misspelled a word the field day CBS would have had. Missing from their statement? Any acknowledgment that maybe they are to use a fact checker. Why let that get in the way.
.
When a series of book covers flashed by on-screen, former President George W. Bush’s recent memoir was no longer titled “Decision Points,” but instead carried this title and subtitle: “Desision Points: How I Managed to Go Eight Years without Making One Good Decision.”
The cover, of course, was a fake – a computer-altered version that had appeared earlier on The Drudge Report, though its exact origin couldn’t be learned Tuesday.
CBS News Tuesday blamed the gaffe on a production mistake made under deadline pressures. A spokesman noted that in researching book covers for the story, this particular cover was unintentionally pulled down from the Web and then clipped into Erin Moriarty’s report – at a particularly inopportune moment, in fact, when she was saying “a good cover tells you what kind of book it is without giving too much away.”
In a statement, CBS said, “It’s a mistake no one could see because you’d have to freeze the frame to notice it,” adding that this was “another cautionary tale about the risks of the Internet age. Clearly, we have to be more careful when downloading material.”
.

It’s not a new position for the president. but it’s pretzel-like nature remains undeniable.

The Senate may move on to the health bill for 9/11 first responders after START.

Then again, maybe not.

And why is that?

grape_crush: Thanks so much for the follow-up. Some starkly clear proof that the Repubs are quite willing to throw these heroes under the bus if that’s what their corporate masters demand. This is truly sickening.

Cap-and-trade was a resounding success.

“The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released data Monday that, the agency says, shows cap-and-trade has been extremely successful in cutting pollution.

The data concerns a 20-year-old, GOP-backed cap-and-trade program that has helped cut power plant emissions that cause acid rain. It is separate from cap-and-trade proposals to cut greenhouse emissions, which are now politically radioactive.

The cap-and-trade program targeting acid rain was meant to reduce power companies’ sulfur dioxide emissions. It was a key part of 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which then-President George H.W. Bush proposed and Congress overwhelmingly approved.

‘Since its inception in 1995 as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, EPA’s Acid Rain Program has earned widespread acclaim due to dramatic sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX) emission reductions that are saving American lives and ecosystems,’ the EPA said as it released its latest report Monday on the effects of the acid rain initiative.

‘An analysis estimates annual public health benefits of the program in 2010 alone at more than $120 billion, about 40 times the estimated cost,’ EPA said, summarizing the report.”

From before today, but I bet no one has really highlighted it. We’re over leveraging our young: Student Loan Debt exceeds all U.S. Credit Card Debt

“Believing that waste, fraud, and abuse are enough to eliminate the deficit is a nice fantasy, but it’s still a fantasy.”

“So here comes Tom Coburn to try to make budget-cutting more palatable. On Monday, the Oklahoma Senator released his ‘Wastebook 2010,’ which reveals $11.5 billion in purportedly frivolous government programs. $615,000 to archive the Grateful Dead’s back-catalog! $1 million for poetry at zoos! And, Coburn suggests, that’s just what a cursory examination turned up—in all, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money might be getting flushed down the drain.Not surprisingly, the report garnered adoring press attention. Stories of ‘gold-plated potties’ in Arkansas feed into stereotypes about unaccountable government bureaucrats. Plus, there’s a comforting moral here: Surely, the report suggests, we can balance the budget without wincing—all we need to do is rid ourselves of waste, fraud, and abuse. Lower taxes and better government. What’s not to love?

Trouble is, a closer look at Coburn’s ‘Wastebook’ (which, mind you, was also footed by taxpayers) suggests there’s less here than advertised. The report does offer up a broad—and useful—taxonomy of waste, fraud, and abuse in the public sector. But, as it turns out, rooting this stuff out isn’t always so simple—and doing so would do less to close the gaping budget deficit than Coburn would like us to believe. What’s more, in many cases, Coburn’s report overlooks even more egregious abuses.”

Total student loan debt exceeds total credit card debt in this country, with $850 billion outstanding, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com, websites that provide information about student aid and scholarships.
·
Consumers owe about $828 billion in revolving credit, including credit card debt, according to seasonally adjusted numbers in a report on July credit from the Federal Reserve.
·
Finaid.org says it first happened in June.
·, some students don’t even know how much they owe — or to whom.

·
Average monthly payments for new graduates (which must start after 6 months of not attending school full time, if your lender didn’t sell your loan to another company), can be as much as 600 a month for schools which costed 15,000 – 20,000 a year.
·
To give you an idea. The price of my college when I entered was (after “scholarship”) $23,000. By the time I graduated it was over $35,000. In 4 years I had acquired $100,000 worth of debt. For someone who enters college today at a similar, its much more likely to be a higher number.
·
My monthly payment is close to $900 a month. Just under roughly 40% of my take home pay.
·
Think about those numbers, and now consider how horrible the economy is right now and how hard it is for a graduate to obtain a job. I think it was roughly 1 in 10 managed to land one upon graduating in my year.
·
And since those people hadn’t been laid off, they didn’t add to the “unemployed” numbers.
·
Now tell me that the educational system in America isn’t broken. Go for it.

$615,000 to archive the Dead’s catalog? Not nearly enough! LOL!

GOP – low hanging fruit. Just ignore the elephant in the room destroying the good china. If we save a million by ‘eliminating fraud and waste’ but ignore the billions of dollars lost elsewhere it’s a win win situation for the TPer crowd who don’t deal with anything other than whatever ‘sounds right’.

“Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried. Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”

“Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny.

One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, ‘The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.’

But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase.

‘I find it shocking’, said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. ‘We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.’

As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time.”

It’s simple:
CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
More CO2 means higher temperatures.
.
I’d like to see where the politics is in that…

Rabid O’Donnell, in typical liberal fashion offers nothing to back his gasbag rhetoric. He as with every liberal is always most generous with Other People’s Money.

“COULTER: As has been demonstrated time and time again. Liberals are the least charitable with their money. Conservatives and especially Christians the most charitable”
.
O’DONNELL: So Ann, I’m not going to fight with you about who is more charitable. I’m going to allow the astonishing kindness and generosity of my audience to serve as the response to your statement,”
.

So which gasbag did you choose?

That is true, Coulter is very charitable with her hatred. A good role model if you want spite.

Appearently, freeinpa can’t sort the sexes properly, either…

I owe 53k on mine and I’m upside down in my house to the tune of -44% equity.
.
This is not good, precarious as hell, actually…

Ann Coulter shocked to disover that rich people give away more money than poor people. Details at eleven!

Nowadays, Coulter could always give large charitable contributions to Gingrich’s “Little Conservative”* programs.
.
*Yes. About 10 years ago, in the office of my health care clinic, I actually saw a childs’ book with that title. Thumbing through it made me feel so, so, soviet…

When she looks at herself in the mirror, does she self-revulse?

When she looks at herself in the mirror, does she self-revulse?
.
You’re assuming that there’s a reflection.

“Ann Coulter shocked to disover that rich people give away more money than poor people. Details at eleven”
.
So by your “brilliant analysis all rich people are conservative and all poor people are liberals? First, that is just plain idiotic. Second, on an absolute basis I don’t think you need Congressional hearings to find out that more dollars are given by those who have more dollars.
.
But the point that you obtusely or stupidly ignored was that conservatives of all income levels gave more of their own money. It can also be found that liberals of all income levels give away more of other people’s money.

The same points the 3 stooges (grape, hippo and IQ5) ignored. But then it is hard to argue with reality so they do the typical denigrate the source. Bankrupt minds all.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/21/lanny-davis-laurent-gbagbo_n_799706.html
.
One of those guys (also see Harold Ford) that the traditional media thinks is a spokesperson for liberals, Lanny Davis:
.

Over in the Ivory Coast, things are not going well. Last month, incumbent president-slash-strongman Laurent Gbagbo lost an election to Alassane Ouattara that was deemed fair and square by international observers. Since then, however, Gbagbo has refused to step down, and has instead stepped up the violent suppression of his political opponents. Gbagbo is currently in a standoff with U.N. peacekeeping forces, who have refused his order to decamp from the country because “more than 50 people have been killed in recent days in Ivory Coast” and there are “hundreds of reports of people being abducted from their homes at night by armed assailants in military uniforms.” And now, he’s earned sanctions from the United States State Department as well.
.
Naturally, Gbagbo has retained the services of homunculoid flack Lanny Davis. We go live now, to Justin Elliot in the Salon War Room, who notes that “even for Davis, taking on Ivory Coast leader and flagrant human rights violator Laurent Gbagbo as a client, as he did this week, seems to cross some kind of line”

The Senate passed the 9/11 responders bill this afternoon:
.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/deal-for-911-health-bill-reached-in-senate/?hp
.
Apparently there were further concessions to the Repubs…unfortunately not covered in this link.

I became disabled while in college, so I was able to have most of my loans cancelled–I thought they all were, but 10 years later, I find out I still owe the college $1,700 for a $500 loan.
.
I’ve wanted to go back to school, but since I’d end up being responsible to pay back the $30,000 that was forgiven, why would I return? I’ve now got a job I love, though it will take me longer to advance within the mental health treatment system without the degree. I’ve got nothing but time and employment for these kinds of nonprofits don’t pay enough to take on the debt I’d incur. The CEO of the place I work doesn’t even pull in $100,000.

“The data concerns a 20-year-old, GOP-backed cap-and-trade program that has helped cut power plant emissions that cause acid rain.”
.
Thanks so much for bringing that important one line up.
.
Back in 1990 I was in college and took what was then called “the conservative position” on cap and trade.
.
The alternative was just to have the government assign a maximum with no exceptions for any reason whatsoever.
.
Along came very bright and open minded conservatives back by – unimaginable today – PhD Economists with “cap and trade”.
.
In the next 20 years the country has gone so far to the right that this once conservative POV is called “communist”.
.
Hell, by 1990s standards I was considered on the line between moderate and liberal.
.
By 1960s and 1970s standards I guess I would have been considered a Republican.
.
(I’m starting to feel sick after writing that last sentence.)

“Along came very bright and open minded conservatives back by – unimaginable today – PhD Economists with “cap and trade”
.
Amazing how they were bright and open minded when they agree with you. And yet he was a PhD and you a dropout!

“GOP – low hanging fruit. Just ignore the elephant in the room destroying the good china.”
.
And the Democrats and Obamas plan? Gut defense, raise taxes and spend more money(sorry invest). The elephant in the room is entitlements which the left wants to grow!

“The cap-and-trade program targeting acid rain was meant to reduce power companies’ sulfur dioxide emissions. It was a key part of 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which then-President George H.W. Bush proposed and Congress overwhelmingly approved”
.
How can this be? According to liberal fact Republicans hate the environment and want to destroy the world.
.
Wow if you can’t believe liberal facts there is no hope!

“Amazing how they were bright and open minded when they agree with you.”
.
I considered them bright and open minded because they listened to scientists about climate change, not the oil companies.
.
Just like when there is a criminal trial and the defendant loses, bright and open minded people listen to the jury’s decision while moronic partisans listen only to the defendant swearing that he’s not guilty and that he was holding the murder weapon by accident.
.
“According to liberal fact Republicans hate the environment and want to destroy the world.”
.
No, Freak, those aren’t liberals talking. Like the Marxists and wealth redistributers you think are hiding under your bed at night with illegal immigrants trying to steal your job (which is hard to steal your job since you don’t have one) they are just a figment of your delusional mind.
.
20 years ago the same views I have now were called “moderate” not “progressive” or “liberal”. But, 20 years ago you would have been in asylum.
.
The early 1990s were a good time, weren’t they?

“And the Democrats and Obamas plan? Gut defense, raise taxes and spend more money(sorry invest). The elephant in the room is entitlements which the left wants to grow!”
.
“Gut defense…”
.
Well Star Wars, about as practical as shooting a bullet in mid air has been a nearly 30 year failure devouring billions of dollars.
.
Tanks specializing in warfare against other tanks when every single country which has a significant number of tanks are at peace with us also has nuclear weapons and would be incredibly unwise to go to war with would be a place to cut.
.
Battleships designed to engage other navies rather than troop support when all of the countries with significant navies are, as above at peace with us and have nuclear weapons is another good place to cut.
.
Some of the 700 foreign bases we had for the cold war could be shut down since there is no communist threat outside of the imaginary wealth distributers Freak sees under his bed at night exists.
.
Submarines carrying nuclear missiles are not particularly practical right now.
.
Also, we could – against the policy of the Bush administration – save money by not invading a random country during the re-election of Obama in 2012 the way Bush invaded Iraq to secure his 2% margin of victory over Kerry in 2004.
.
Lots of room for cuts.
.
“… spend more money(sorry invest)..” Well the highways which run through PA are an example of investment. This way people can drive past you at 75 MPH and not have to deal with you and your insanity. That’s a good use of a billion dollars. High speed rails would, also, work well since they use a small fraction of the amount of the fuel per mile as trucks buses and a tiny fraction of the amount of fuel used by cars is a good investment.
.
Better yet, those investment both pay off long term and get people working. When people start working, they start spending. When they start spending private for profit businesses start earning money and, better than that, hiring people who keep the process of economic growth going.
.
As for entitlements, they are all the safety net which every developed country in the world has (but usually far more than us) to make sure that the poor don’t become actual Marxists as they were in the 1930 and go Bonnie and Clyde on your ass.
.
You know, if it were just you we were protecting from the poor going Bonnie on Clyde on…. maybe we shouldn’t bother with entitlements in Bucks County where your sorry ass is.

“It’s true that religion is the essential reason conservatives give more, and religious liberals are as generous as religious conservatives. Among the stingiest of the stingy are secular conservatives.

According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do….
.
…In any case, if conservative donations often end up building extravagant churches, liberal donations frequently sustain art museums, symphonies, schools and universities that cater to the well-off. ”
.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html
.
Sorry, Freak, foiled by facts again.
.
Conservatives who do not attend church give the very least and liberals who do attend church donate the very most.
.
Fact proven (to no surprise) that Churches are excellent formats for pitching for charities.

“And the Democrats and Obamas plan? Gut defense, raise taxes and spend more money(sorry invest). The elephant in the room is entitlements which the left wants to grow!”
.
Just ignore the many things I’ve said about Obama and the continued tax cuts. That way you can pretend that Im attacking GOP and being a hypocrite about the dems.
.
On the other hand I’d like to hear more about the same from you; the usual liberals are insane scum and GOP increasing the deficite through tax cuts isn’t increasing the deficite because if you split hair only increasing spending increases deficite. Tax cuts on borrowed money is magic.
.
Get real; low hanging fruit – ignore everything that completely kills our economy but attack some millions here and there. Or better. B1tch about pork and than ignore all the pork from the right hand side.
.
So no – I don’t like it when dems spend money we don’t have but it doesn’t hurt me one bit when taxes goes up as long as it pays down our deficite.