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How to Love Vegetables More in Just a Few Weeks

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Nick Anderson:

. . . lies not with Republicans, nor with the right wing, nor with the Tea Party, nor with the mean old media, but with our very own selves. Rather than whine and wring our hands that CNN gave Michele Bachmann time to rebut both the SOTU and the Republicans’ answer, we should have been beating down their doors to give real progressives, real populists, real We the People folks, the same amount of time they gave her.

As Bob Somerby keeps asking: If we’re so smart, how come we keep getting snookered by these supposedly dumb people? Can’t we let down the walls of our silos for just a few minutes every now and then to work together on getting our message out to a more general audience?

So far, the answer has been only long enough to freeze out half the party to nominate and elect a conservative as a Democratic president. A man who has completely destroyed the unity we had when fighting the Bush regime. We are that smart.

Brent Budowsky:

Michele Bachmann’s Brilliant Move

Michele Bachmann’s idea of giving a second Republican reply to the State of the Union was politically brilliant. Democrats, progressives and real populists would be well-advised to understand why.

By standards of Democratic presidents, the president has positioned himself as a center-to-right Democrat, reaching out to big business and Republicans. Being charitable, Tuesday night’s debate was between a Democratic centrist, Barack Obama, a conservative Republican, Paul Ryan, and a more conservative Tea Party Republican, Michele Bachmann.

There were two missing chairs [Tuesday] night. The first was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’. The second was any voice for a progressive or populist viewpoint, which was not a part of last night’s discussion, one more step in a debate that is moving very far to the right, and by doing so, taking the political center even further to the right…

The question progressives and populists should ask is not how Bachmann could dare give her speech, but why their voice was virtually silenced as the nation considered the state of the union.

. . . the incredible hypocrisy.

Think Progress:

Boehner Attacks Obama For Supposedly Ignoring American Exceptionalism In State Of The Union

The wicked irony, of course, is that Boehner and his colleagues are doing everything they can to destroy what made America great—its strong middle class.

Mark Thoma, CBS MoneyWatch:

New Claims for Unemployment Insurance Increase Sharply and Unexpectedly

The data on new claims for unemployment insurance brought a surprise. Claims are up sharply over last week. The Department of Labor reports:

In the week ending Jan. 22, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 454,000, an increase of 51,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 403,000. The 4-week moving average was 428,750, an increase of 15,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 413,000.

Here’s a graph showing the four week moving average of new claims (via Calculated Risk…):

The other piece of news today was the fall in new orders for durable goods. Orders fell by 2.5% last month, an unexpected decline, and this is the fourth decline in the last five months, This is yet another signal that the economy is not yet on firm footing.

We appear to have turned the corner, but we still have a long way to go to get back to full employment even under the best of conditions. Today’s data does nothing to improve that outlook, if anything the expected recovery time is now longer.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

CREW: HOUSE VOTES TO GIVE BIG DONORS MORE INFLUENCE OVER ELECTIONS

[Wednesday], the House of Representatives voted to eliminate the public financing of campaigns. In response to the vote, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) Executive Director Melanie Sloan issued the following statement:

“Instead of spending its precious legislative time on dismantling the presidential financing system, the House should be working on legislation that would undo the disastrous Citizens United case. More than four billion dollars was spent on the 2010 election, much of it to elect the very members of the 112th Congress who cast this vote. As a result, I am disappointed – but not surprised – that they would choose to put even more special interest money into our elections. We need real campaign finance reform that allows elections to be won by the candidate with the best ideas, not the biggest donors.”

. . . make women go crazy.

Healthday News:

Abortion Typically Doesn’t Harm Mental Health: Study

Of course it doesn’t, but this zombie lie, just like all the rest of them, will continue to surface and surface, over and over again, even by the same people who’ve been told it’s a lie.

See how much things haven’t changed.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  George Bush wants to give MY retirement money to Bill Gates.
Editorial,  New York Times:

Interpreting Mr. Greenspan

Alan Greenspan’s endorsement of tax cuts in his Congressional testimony yesterday all but puts to rest the question of whether Congress will enact such cuts in the coming months. But President Bush ought to avoid the temptation to misread the Federal Reserve chairman’s testimony to be an endorsement of his extreme 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax cut proposal. Tax cuts may be inevitable, but their scope remains very much a subject for debate. Indeed, on this score Mr. Greenspan offered some cautionary words that need to be heeded. He also countered the administration’s specious argument that fiscal policy is the best means of jump-starting a slowing economy.

Congress therefore ought to proceed, but with caution. Democratic leaders have already indicated that they would back some tax cuts, and President Bush would be wise to work with them to fashion a compromise that can command broad bipartisan support. That is the fiscally prudent course, and, as a political matter, it would get his presidency off to an auspicious beginning. If the president instead opts to misinterpret the chairman’s testimony as a license to hold out, at any cost, for a proposal that even Republicans on Capitol Hill were slow to embrace, he will have wasted an invaluable opportunity. He will also have invaded the surplus so deeply as to thwart prudent spending.

Mr. Greenspan scoffed at the notion that tax cuts are needed to stimulate the slowing economy. Monetary policy remains the best weapon for the near term — as Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill all but conceded in his confirmation hearings.

Political Fix, Salon.com:

Was the West Wing trashed or not?

Some recent press reports suggest Bill Clinton and crew left behind a different sort of legacy at the White House when they departed Saturday. Weekend reports of Clinton aides gamely popping the “W” off of computer keyboards quickly turned to murmurs of vandalism, with Matt Drudge reporting that the damage bordered on the criminal, with phone lines slashed, obscenities scrawled on walls, something called “porn bombs” and obscene messages left on the voice mail system, among other transgressions. Drudge also reported that the incoming Bush administration is conducting a full investigation of these actions.

But by Thursday afternoon, the buzz had died somewhat after White House press secretary Ari Fleischer denied in his afternoon briefing that any “investigation” was going on, though he did say Bush and company were busy cataloging any damage that they had found in the White House…

Jake Siewert, the press secretary under Clinton, claims that there’s not much for Bush to forgive, at least not in the West Wing. “The place was really spic and span,” said Siewart, who says he was among the last to exit the building Saturday.

Harold Meyerson, LA Weekly:

The Pretender

The Restoration is upon us. The dynasty’s dullard son now rules, to a general, still largely unspoken sense of incredulity. The thought that will not go away, even among Republicans for whom W.’s legitimacy is not at issue, is: What is he doing there?..

Since that December evening when the Supreme Court made him the president, a number of Bush’s efforts to reassure a nervous nation have had, perversely, the opposite effect. He’s exhibited a humility at being president that I can only presume is calculated to contrast with what Republicans see as Bill Clinton’s arrogance…  Bush calls to mind Churchill’s line, when told that a certain person he didn’t like was nonetheless a modest man, that “he has much to be modest about.” [Emphasis added.]…

For Clinton, the presidency was the supreme object of his desire; for Bush, it seems more like a chore he’s been unable to duck. Thirty years after he got out of going to Vietnam, the draft has finally caught up with him.

Rob Richie, Center for Voting and Democracy:

MEDDLING WITH REFORM

Let’s call it “Floridamok” – the protracted partisan battle that yielded Electoral College victory for George W. Bush despite Al Gore’s half-million ballot lead in the national popular vote. The resulting furor has spurred a national reexamination of the quirky Electoral College system by which we elect our presidents.

But reformers, beware! Partisans from both major camps can see opportunity in the outrage inspired by Bush vs. Gore – the chance to hijack the reform impulse and manipulate it to their own advantage…

The simplest, most powerful change for electing our president would be direct election combined with instant runoff voting to ensure that the winner represents as many Americans as possible. Instant runoff voting for now can be pursued state by state. Proportional allocation of electoral votes is worth serious consideration if done all at once across the nation, but that would require Constitutional change. Allocating electoral votes by congressional district is the most problematic reform. It shares the downsides of proportional allocation, but has the significant additional problem of perverting fair results due to partisan gerrymandering.

So, when partisans like Grover Norquist suddenly take interest in this “fair” method or electoral reform, watch out. The spirit of Floridamok has not subsided, and it may distort the reforms demanded by the voting public.

MSNBC.com:

Multiple voting hurt Gore in Florida (link no longer valid)

A REVIEW OF computerized records for 2.7 million votes in eight of Florida’s largest counties offers new details of how voters erred. It reveals that, while both Vice President Gore and George W. Bush each may have lost votes that were intended for them, Democratic voters were significantly more likely to have invalidated their ballots than Republican voters.

According to the Post’s analysis, the biggest problem for Gore was in “overvotes,” ballots invalidated because voters indicated multiple choices for president. Although the number of ballots thrown out for that reason was known shortly after the Nov. 7 election, The Post analysis for the first time shows the voting patterns contained in those ballots. Gore was by far most likely to be selected on invalid overvoted ballots, with his name punched as one of the choices on 46,000 of them. Bush, by comparison, was punched on 17,000.

Democratic votes also appear to have been disproportionately affected because of Palm Beach County’s infamous “butterfly ballot.” The study found that the 8,000 voters whose ballots were thrown out because they chose Gore and one of the two other presidential candidates listed near him voted more than 10 to 1 Democratic in the U.S. Senate race.

105 Million in U.S. Have Diabetes or Prediabetes, CDC Says

Diabetics, spouses may feel stress

Eating Poorly Can Make You Blue

Biochemical Basis for Broccoli’s Cancer-Fighting Ability

Plus lots more.

Scott Stantis:

Robert Scheer:

Hogwash, Mr. President

What is the state of the union? You certainly couldn’t tell from that platitudinous hogwash that the president dished out Tuesday evening…

The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole. Instead the president conveyed the insular optimism of his fat-cat associates: “We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.”

How convenient to ignore the fact that this bubble of prosperity, which has failed the tens of millions losing their homes and jobs, was floated by enormous government indebtedness now forcing deep cuts in social services including state financial aid for those better-educated students the president claims to be so concerned about.

Rabbi Michael Lerner:

The State of the Spirit, 2011

The bad news is that global warming will soon be irreversible and, by the end of the twenty-first century, large parts of the earth will be under water…

All this is likely to happen gradually, as American power slips away and, with it, the particular opportunities that the citizens of this partial democracy fought to win in the past…

Meanwhile, most liberals and progressives will likely spend the next twenty years either supporting political parties that don’t even begin to address these issues in a holistic way…

The good news is that we have a good ten to twenty years to reverse this process, and, as an old Jewish joke would have it, ten more years to learn how to live under water.

The looter. The demander. The hypocrite.

Michael Ford, Founding Director of Xavier University’s Center for the Study of the American Dream:

[Ayn] Rand, famously a believer in rugged individualism and personal responsibility, was a strong defender of self-interest. She was a staunch opponent of government programs from the New Deal and Social Security to the Great Society and Medicare…

[I]n the recent “Oral History of Ayn Rand” by Scott McConnell (founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute) that … Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand’s law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand’s behalf she secured Rand’s Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O’Connor (husband Frank O’Connor)…

Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn “despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently… She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”

But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so. Apart from the strong implication that those who take the help are morally weak, it is also a philosophic point that such help dulls the will to work, to save and government assistance is said to dull the entrepreneurial spirit.

In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.

Patia Stephens, via Susie:

Rand herself called altruism a “basic evil” and referred to those who perpetuate the system of taxation and redistribution as “looters” and “moochers.” She wrote in her book “The Virtue of Selfishness” that accepting any government controls is “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.” In a 1972 edition of her newsletter, she said:

Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next.

Rand may have rationalized that since she had paid into Social Security and Medicare, she was entitled to receive benefits. In a 1966 article for The Objectivist newsletter, she wrote about the morality of accepting Social Security, unemployment insurance or similar payments:

It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

Rand often spoke of moral absolutism, saying “There can be no compromise on basic principles,” but the realities of aging and illness seem to have softened her stance. Social Security, and perhaps Medicare, allowed Rand and her husband to maintain their quality of life, remain in their apartment and live out their final years with dignity.

Would that her followers would stop trying to deny that dignity to the rest of us.

AlterNet:

Planned Parenthood Busts Conservative “Sting” Attempt Reminiscent of ACORN Smear Campaign

In what is perhaps one of the most craven actions of a deeply craven movement, anti-choice scam artists apparently affiliated with Live Action Films and Lila Rose of undercover “gotcha film-fame” appear to have attempted an ”ACORN-like” hoax on Planned Parenthood Federation of America by sending people into Planned Parenthood health centers in six states posing as sex traffickers seeking health care for young girls who were “part” of their supposed sex trafficking rings.

In response, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder describing the visits and asking for an investigation…

PPFA reports that men, sometimes accompanied by a woman, “visited at least 11 Planned Parenthood health centers in six states within a one-week time frame.”…

The goal, according to Rose, is to “unnerve Planned Parenthood employees and eventually put them out of business.”

See how much things haven’t changed.

Ruth Conniff, The Progressive:

Denial in DC

As the Republicans cheered the President’s speech, the distant sound of boos and chanting, along with police sirens and whirring helicopters, intruded. Police clashed with protesters and cracked heads in nearby Freedom Square during the pious invocations from the podium on the Capitol steps…

The guest of honor at one Hotel Washington corporate hospitality suite overlooking the parade was Katherine Harris, Florida’s Secretary of State, who helped push for an end to a recount many thought would have turned the election the other way. Harris was greeted like a celebrity by the lobbyists, lawyers, and Republican politicians. With her steely smile and willful disregard of the maelstrom of public condemnation whirling around her, she is a posterchild for the spirit of the new regime: Onward Christian soldiers. Democracy be damned.

David Corn, AlterNet:

Dubya’s True Colors

“Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment.”

You cannot say the Bush II years will not have entertainment value. The above quote about….well, about who-knows-what comes from a pre-inauguration interview George W. granted to The New York Times. Usually, when the Prince of Midland mugs the English language you can suss out what he meant to say. But this remark was a humdinger. Many more are to come.

It will be as if Norm Crosby, the Friars-generation comedian whose stock-in-trade was malapropisms, has moved into the Circle-Like-Thing Office. Sure, environmental protection will suffer, the labor unions will be under assault, abortion rights will be threatened, health and safety regulations will be undermined, corporate money will continue to flood the political system, the Pentagon will throw tens of billions of dollars down the national-missile-defense rathole, affirmative action programs will be targeted, plans to turn Social Security over to Wall Street will be hatched, and tax-cuts-for-the-rich will remain the holy grail. But Bush will keep us in stitches.

Yeah, stitches.
Jacob Weisberg, Slate

Ballot Box: My Right Foot

First came John Ashcroft, Gale Norton, and Linda Chavez, three Cabinet appointments designed to warm the cockles of conservative hearts. Then, even before the inauguration, George W. Bush suggested that he might rescind Bill Clinton’s last-minute executive orders protecting public lands.

On Bush’s first full day as president, his chief of staff affirmed that he would press the Food and Drug Administration to reconsider whether the abortion pill RU-486 is “safe.” On his second day, he reinstated a pre-Clinton executive order banning family-planning groups that receive federal money from encouraging or providing abortions.

He’s expected to move soon to outlaw so-called partial-birth abortions and prohibit scientific research using fetal tissue.

Obama Defends Health Care Law, Offers Fixes

Positive emotions may buffer stress, aging

Smoking, Obesity Slowing U.S. Life Expectancy Gains: Report

New U.S. analysis backs annual breast screening

Plus lots more.

R.J. Matson:

Brent Budowsky:

Left Behind: the State of the Union that Will Be Silent Tonight

In America tonight there will be many who are not given much voice in the state of the union discussion. They are the hungry and the homeless, the pained and the suffering, the victims of a society that can truly be called our two Americas. They will not be given much voice in the President’s speech, the Republican response, or the Tea Party address by the gentlelady from Minnesota…

I come today on behalf of those who are  hurting, because the state of their union will suffer in silence tonight.