Morning Must Reads: Holiday

“–The Alaska Supreme Court has squashed Joe Miller’s election challenge. Certification for a newly emboldened Lisa Murkowski appears imminent.”
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What a shame. It isn’t “Miller Time”.

Caption for the 1st photo:
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M. C. Escher must be laughing.

Good catch by Greg Sargent regarding the media’s one-sided, shallow coverage of Social Security and so-called reform efforts:
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http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/12/22/930777/-CJR-blasts-traditional-media-attacks-on-Social-Security
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The story discusses a Columbia Journalism Review article on the subject:
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http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/social_security_under_attack.php?page=2

I rather like my Congressman.
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“The U.S. House’s first Muslim congressman is totally fine with Rep. Peter King’s planned hearings on radicalization — as long as they doesn’t focus on Muslims alone.
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“It is legitimate to want to know what converts a [peaceful] citizen to somebody who would want to kill their fellow Americans,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) told TPM in a phone interview Wednesday. “I think that’s a fair question, and I don’t think we know enough about it.”
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http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/keith_ellison_sure_have_hearings_on_radicalization.php?ref=fpb

“It is legitimate to want to know what converts a [peaceful] citizen to somebody who would want to kill their fellow Americans,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) told TPM in a phone interview Wednesday.
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It is a fair question. After all, how many of us didn’t want to choke the sh!t out of our elected representatives this past year? It’s only fair that they should have the same questions about us.

sacred-While I take, and don’t disagree with, your sentiment it is a curious thing that makes people’s trigger switch from anger/frustration to violence.
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Although I’m not sure Congress has the expertise to address that question, that it moves the conversation from scapegoating to something serious-even by a little bit-is encouraging.

Sacredh: Just for the Escher reference (I thought the same thing when I saw the pic):

http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/gallery.htm

Enjoy!

I agree. I’m not a violent person myself. I’m more inclined to just throw up my hands and shake my head. I think it’s almost futile to try to dissect other individual’s motives because I believe that most of us don’t even fully understand our own motivations completely all the time. Who hasn’t done something and then wondered why they did it?
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People’s fuses are getting shorter and shorter. We’re a society in flux. I think much of it has to do with the pace of change. The good old days (that often weren’t actually so good) are gone and they aren’t going to return. There isn’t the comfort level that there used to be. We’re in a strange new world that puzzles and frightens us. The days are gone where we could take solace in the fact that oceans separate us from “them”.
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We can yearn for the way things used to be all we want to. It just isn’t going to happen. We can either go with the flow or be swept away by it.

During this joyous season, I’m joyful all those little Romneys can’t vote.

The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com

I’ve always liked Escher. I have several coffee table books of his drawings and quite a few large framed prints. The problem is that we have so many that we have to rotate them because there isn’t room to display them all and we have a large home.

We will do for you what we did to the Big 3!
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a) Two of the three firms we’ve organized have already gone bankrupt!
b) In the process they lost almost 34,000 jobs!
c) “The UAW was first to the table to make concessions and sacrifices that have helped Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group to emerge from the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, [King] said. Those concessions equate to between $7,000 and $30,000 per worker.”
d) “The UAW now represents about 120,000 hourly workers at the Detroit 3, down several fold from even a decade ago because of plant closings and buyouts.”
e) Unionize and the Obama administration will be on your side.
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http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/kausfiles/2010/12/22/uaw-ready-for-fresh-triumphs.html

UAW President Bob King said the union intends to launch a campaign in January to organize the U.S. manufacturing plants of Asian and German automakers …　
King said the UAW has a better story to tell transplant workers today than it had over several decades of failed efforts to organize those workers.

Green jobs take a hit. And the reason cold winter in Europe. Hmmm…..

So much for green jobs being the wave of the future, as promised by President Obama. Taxpayer-subsidized solar cell maker Spectra-Watt has announced it is shuttering its plant. The Poughkeepsie Journal reports:
In a stunning reversal, the frequently lauded and taxpayer-funded SpectraWatt Inc. has told the state it will close its solar cell plant starting in March and lay off 117 workers.

The announcement was startling because in the past two months, the company, which had been promised about $8 million in tax dollars, planned to train more workers and changed its work shifts to enable a 24-hour operation.

The company blames the unusually cold winter in Europe

AND THE BIGGEST LOSER OF 2010- OBAMA

so says the German newspaper Spiegel. Seems the honeymoon is over everywhere.

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“he did not pass any decent laws despite his majority in Congress and he was aloof, elitist and indecisive.”
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A view of reality that the US MSM and the left miss, ignore or deny

“Barack Obama was the biggest loser of 2010. He allowed the angry Tea Party movement to grow powerful, he did not pass any decent laws despite his majority in Congress and he was aloof, elitist and indecisive. He had to accept a formidable, yet entirely understandable, defeat in the midterm elections as a result. No one expected much from Obama, at least not during the rest of this year.”
“Now, just days before Christmas, Congress has ratified the New START disarmament treaty with Russia. … Will Obama build on this victory? Is it Obama’s breakthrough as a president? Will it mark his comeback as a reformer? … Is a new era of cooperation beginning?”
“The opposite is much more probable, namely that the disarmament treaty will be Obama’s last significant achievement for a long time. In January, the new Congress will convene. The new representatives who won in the midterm elections will come to Washington, including those Tea Party activists who have little interest in making compromises with Obama. With them, Congress will move to the right …. Possibly the only reason why so many Republicans voted for Obama’s law was because they themselves fear the new era and see few chances of passing sensible, bipartisan laws in the new Congress.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,736320,00.html

A “1000 Words” would be nice for the Holiday weekend.

Sacredh:

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to you and yours also freeinpa. Tomorrow night is the one year anniversary of me totaling my wife’s car (deer) on the way to work. I’m going to be driving my truck. She told me that if I wrecked her new car this Christmas Eve I’d better be calling from the hospital or else she’s put me there herself. I know she loves me, but it is a nice car.

Wow, that is pretty Cherry picked, freeinpa.

After months of stalling, the US Senate has finally approved the New START disarmament treaty with Russia. The ratification is a major triumph for US President Barack Obama, but German commentators warn that it may be the last such success for a long time.

US President Barack Obama came to power promising a new era of bipartisan cooperation. But there has been precious little of that since he took office. Indeed, Republican opposition to Obama’s initiatives has been markedly vociferous.

Now, in a rare victory for the president, the US Congress has ratified the New START disarmament treaty, with Republican support. On Wednesday, the Senate approved the treaty, which had been stalled for months, by 71 votes to 26. At least 13 Republicans voted with the Democrats after being won over by Obama. The ratification is an important foreign policy triumph for Obama, who suffered a crushing defeat in November’s midterm elections.

The treaty, which Obama signed with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April 2010, involves Russia and the US cutting their stock of nuclear warheads by 30 percent and will also introduce a new mutual inspection regime. “This is the most significant arms control agreement in nearly two decades,” Obama said. It replaces the START treaty, which was signed in 1991 and expired in December 2009.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel congratulated Obama on the ratification. In a statement issued on Wednesday evening in Berlin, the chancellor said the treaty was an “important milestone in the development of a real partnership” with Russia. She also expressed her hope that further disarmament steps would follow the ratification of New START.

The two houses of the Russian parliament still need to ratify the treaty. The lower house, the Duma, might do so as early as Friday, the Duma’s speaker said Thursday.

On Thursday, German media commentators take a look at what the ratification means for Obama’s presidency.

SPIEGEL’s Washington correspondent Marc Hujer writes on SPIEGEL ONLINE:

“Barack Obama was the biggest loser of 2010. He allowed the angry Tea Party movement to grow powerful, he did not pass any decent laws despite his majority in Congress and he was aloof, elitist and indecisive. He had to accept a formidable, yet entirely understandable, defeat in the midterm elections as a result. No one expected much from Obama, at least not during the rest of this year.”

“Now, just days before Christmas, Congress has ratified the New START disarmament treaty with Russia. … Will Obama build on this victory? Is it Obama’s breakthrough as a president? Will it mark his comeback as a reformer? … Is a new era of cooperation beginning?”

“The opposite is much more probable, namely that the disarmament treaty will be Obama’s last significant achievement for a long time. In January, the new Congress will convene. The new representatives who won in the midterm elections will come to Washington, including those Tea Party activists who have little interest in making compromises with Obama. With them, Congress will move to the right …. Possibly the only reason why so many Republicans voted for Obama’s law was because they themselves fear the new era and see few chances of passing sensible, bipartisan laws in the new Congress.”

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

“All previous treaties between Washington and Moscow regarding strategic nuclear weapons are associated with names of a Republican presidents, such as Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. Nevertheless, this time around, representatives of the Republican Party left no stone unturned in their bid to prevent the new disarmament treaty being passed by the Senate. Even though some of them may have had entirely legitimate concerns about the treaty on principle, or regarding its details, it was clear that the Republicans wanted to deprive Obama of one of his few demonstrable foreign policy successes. Half a dozen former Republican secretaries of state testified that the ratification of the New START treaty was in the national interest of the United States. But many senators were willing to put the supposed interests of the party over those of the country. How shameful!”

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

“The ratification of the New START treaty is extremely important. The treaty guarantees that the number of nuclear weapons continues to fall, by an equal number on both sides, so that a dangerous imbalance does not arise. … It also refutes the accusation that the nuclear powers always demand that non-nuclear states do without atomic weapons, without disarming themselves. Even with the treaty, the idea of a world free of nuclear weapons remains just a hope. But a small step is better than nothing.”

“Barack Obama, who negotiated the treaty with Moscow, is justified in celebrating a major personal victory. Despite his serious defeat in the midterm elections, the US president invested a lot of political capital in order to get the treaty through the Senate. US voters are unlikely to thank him for it — they have other worries. But they should, at least for one day, feel a little proud of their president.”

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,736320,00.html

Seriously, freeinpa that clip you post was just one view from a Washington corespondent. It did not come from the German media but was rather a biased American from Washington who wrote a small piece for a larger one for a German News paper.

And even in that negative piece notice the word “did not”. “Did not” is not “has not”

“he did not pass any decent laws despite his majority in Congress”

the piece then goes on to speak of Obama’s victories regarding legislation passed in the lame duck congress.

So often people just want to hear what they want to hear. You selective understanding is proof of it.

The link was there. You have to keep the reading short since the left has a short attention span especially when they don’t like the news.

Same could be said of you!

“…I think it’s almost futile to try to dissect other individual’s motives because I believe that most of us don’t even fully understand our own motivations completely all the time…”
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In a completely apolitical way, there has been a huge amount of study about what makes people make decisions. NPR’s Radio Lab (which is apolitical BTW) does some great shows about that type of thing.
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“People’s fuses are getting shorter and shorter….”
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I would agree with one thing to add: shorter and shorter than they had been since the 1960s. I know of the 1960s (not born until ’71) and, by contrast this is a mellow time compared to then.
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All in all, I look back to history and think of times gone by and think that this is just a time when people chose to be rude in political discussions more than any time in many years. (When responding to some barbs by our resident wingnuts, I plead guilty to that myself.)
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“I think much of it has to do with the pace of change..”
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By some people’s standards, HCR and gays in the military have been floating around for 17 years now and it seems like change is happening riding on the back of a snail with arthritis.

“Seriously, freeinpa that clip you post was just one view from a Washington corespondent. It did not come from the German media but was rather a biased American from Washington who wrote a small piece for a larger one for a German News paper.”
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As typical of many here when the news is bad or contradicts beliefs: the source is a liar, biased, mentally inferior or crazy.

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Now what was that you were saying about selective understanding?

Here is hoping you have better luck although the venison would make a mighty fine Christmas meal.

“You have to keep the reading short since the left has a short attention span especially when they don’t like the news.”
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This is coming from you, Freak?
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You have shown an unusual inability to accurately read the posts of anybody you disagree with and have convinced yourself with no evidence that posters here, the mainstream (Lamestream for right wingers who have the maturity of 12 year olds) media are against rather than vigorously support companies making profits by making products which are harmless at worst and treat their workers with fairness and respect.

sacredh: You can always make me laugh. Have a fun Christmas.

When it comes to your selective understanding, as I posted at 10.2, one could write a small novel about.

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12 Gays of Christmas!
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Happy holidays.

“As typical of many here when the news is bad or contradicts beliefs: the source is a liar, biased, mentally inferior or crazy.

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Now what was that you were saying about selective understanding?”

No, freeinpa, the facts were put before you. You were selective in your posting of an article and then you misrepresented what it said.

Even in that one negative piece notice the word “did not”. “Did not” is not “has not”

“he did not pass any decent laws despite his majority in Congress”

the piece then goes on to speak of Obama’s victories regarding legislation passed in the lame duck congress. re: New START treaty which was a huge victory and worthy and decent law. However, the writer of that piece also points out it might be one of his last victories because of the 63 seat won by hard core conservatives who very likely will not want to find any common ground with Obama in the next two years. I did not selectively not hear that. All democrats are aware of it. However, what you need to understand is that many democrats are serious about wanting to reduce deceit spending and simplify the tax code. If the new congress is serious, then common ground will be found. The hard core left might not like some of the things cut from governmental spending, but Obama is not hard core left and that holds true for most the country.
I might be deluding myself, but I think Obama will play ball and get things passed in the next two years that will be “over all” good for our country.