Bellwork  17 Jan  2011 

The 5 W Reading strategy

Who, When, Where, What, Why & Effect

I. Who: ( Who are the main characters, players, people etc) Level 1 Knowledge

 

II. When (When did the events take place when was it written )  Level 1 Knowledge

 

III. Where: Where did the events take place, location) Can pull out information from the text.                (Level 1 Knowledge Key Words: defines, describes, identifies, knows, labels, lists, matches, names, outlines, recalls, recognizes, reproduces, selects, states.)

 

IV. What: What is the article about- this is a brief summary of the article what did you just read about.         (Comprehension Level II: Key Words: comprehend, explains, extends, generalizes, paraphrases, predicts, rewrites, summarizes, translates)

 

V. Why: Why is it important, why I am reading this, why should I care, why will it affect me?

                (EvaluationVI: Make judgments about the value of ideas or materials)

 

VI. Effect: What effect will the events in the story have on the future( what are the likely repercussions) Make a prediction about the out comes of the events you have read. .

 

Go to the following Link and answer the questions above.

 Link for 17 Jan http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16598232

 

 

 

STOP HERE FOR  JAN 17

 

Reading for 19 Oct Ends Here

 

 

20 September 2011 Last updated at 10:39 ET

 

Once you get finished click on some of the links above and read the stories.

 

20 Sept  Stop Here 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading for 30 Aug 2011

Libya rebels give loyalist towns Saturday deadline

30 Aug 2011

Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- The head of Libya's interim council set a Saturday deadline for remaining loyalist towns to surrender or face fierce military battles.

Mustafa Abdul Jalil, head of the National Transitional Council, told reporters Tuesday that the rebels are in negotiations with tribal elders and hope that by the end of the Eid holidays, loyalists will surrender in places like Sirte, Moammar Gadhafi's hometown.

Jalil said the rebels hope to "avoid more bloodshed and to avoid more destruction and damage."

But in the end," he said, "it might have to be decided militarily. I hope this will not be the case."

As fighting continued for the last bastions of Gadhafi's grip, the strongman's whereabouts still were unknown. Members of his family, including Gadhafi's wife Safia, two sons -- Moahamed and Hannibal -- and daughter Aisha escaped to Algeria.

Mourad Benmehidi, Algeria's ambassador to the United Nations, said his nation allowed them to enter on "humanitarian grounds."

Unlike Libya's other neighbors, Algeria has not recognized the authority of the National Transitional Council and that nation's authoritarian government has much to fear with Arab revolutions so close to home.

Jalil said Tuesday that the rebels would ask Algeria to extradite members of the Gadhafi family back to Libya. He also said that once Libyan liberation was complete, the country would set up courts to hear people's complaints against the Gadhafi regime.

Rebel fighters forged ahead Tuesday toward Sirte, situated along the Mediterranean coast between the capital, Tripoli, and the opposition nerve center of Benghazi.

Tripoli residents feted the end of Ramadan with celebratory gunfire amid news that one of Gadhafi's most notorious sons, Khamis, died after a battle with rebel forces Sunday night in northwest Libya between Tarunah and Bani Walid.

Members of the 32nd Brigade or Khamis Brigade were known for human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch said Monday that the brigade executed detainees a week ago in a warehouse near Tripoli.

Forces led by Khamis also killed scores of captive civilians as they tried to retreat from Tripoli, according to Muneer Masoud Own, who said he survived the massacre. CNN could not independently verify the claim, though Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both documented the alleged incident.

A rebel commander said Khamis was taken to a hospital where he died from his injuries. The rebels buried him in the area.

In Tripoli, some shops started to reopen. Traffic has picked up and humanitarian aid is trickling in. France reopened its embassy Monday and Britain said its personnel are preparing to do the same.

Yet life was still far from normal -- no water and food in short supply.

Elsewhere, fighting raged, a reminder that the war in Libya was far from finished.

"There is still a need for the continuation of joint work in order to achieve the Libyan people's goals to get rid of the remnants of the Gadhafi regime," Qatar's news agency reported, citing foreign military leaders from several nations involved in the conflict who met in the Persian Gulf state Monday.

Another of Gadhafi's sons, businessman Saadi Gadhafi, has offered to negotiate an end to the war with the rebels, who he claimed cannot "build a new country without having us (at) the table." He has made previous offers, though this time he appeared ready to cut loose from his father and his brother Saif al-Islam, once assumed to be the heir apparent.

"If (the rebels) agree to cooperate to save the country together (without my father and Saif) then it will be easy and fast. I promise!" Saadi Gadhafi said in an e-mail to CNN's Nic Robertson.

CNN's Frederik Pleitgen, Arwa Damon, Kareem Khadder, Nic Robertson, and Dan Rivers in Libya; Jordana Ossad in New York; and Joe Sterling and Salma Abdelaziz in Atlanta contributed to this report. Remember this conflict has been going on for over 6 months!

 

Stop Here 30 Aug 2011

Two Stories Today

2 May 2011 Last updated at 13:11 ET

World 'safer' without Bin Laden, says Obama

US President Barack Obama has hailed the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden as a "good day for America," saying the world is now a safer and a better place.

Bin Laden was killed in a raid by US special forces on a compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

He is believed to have ordered the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, as well as a number of other deadly bombings.

He topped the US "most wanted" list.

But his details on the list have now been updated with a simple banner indicating his current status: "Deceased".

DNA tests carried out after the operation indicated with "99.9%" certainty that the man shot dead was Osama Bin Laden, US officials said.

He was buried at sea after a Muslim funeral on board an aircraft carrier in the north Arabian Sea, Pentagon officials said.

The US has put its embassies around the world on alert, warning Americans of the possibility of al-Qaeda reprisal attacks for Bin Laden's killing.

CIA director Leon Panetta said al-Qaeda would "almost certainly" try to avenge the death of Bin Laden.

Elusive

"Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can't do," President Obama said on Monday as news of Bin Laden's death was being digested around the world.

Bin Laden, 54, approved the 9/11 attacks in which nearly 3,000 people died.

He evaded the forces of the US and its allies for almost a decade, despite a $25m (£15m) bounty on his head.

On Sunday, US forces said to be from the elite Navy Seal Team Six undertook the operation in Abbottabad, 100km (62 miles) north-east of Islamabad.

US officials said Bin Laden was shot in the head after resisting.

The compound in Abbottabad is just a few hundred metres from the Pakistan Military Academy - the country's equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst.

The BBC's Aleem Maqbool in Abbottabad says it will undoubtedly be a huge embarrassment to Pakistan that Bin Laden was found not only in the country, but also on the doorstep of the military academy.

Pakistan was only notified of the operation once it was under way.

However, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said co-operation from Pakistan helped lead the Americans to Bin Laden.

His body was consigned to the sea after a burial service on the USS Carl Vinson.

"The deceased's body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker," a US defence official said.

"After the words were complete, the body was place on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body eased into the sea," the official said.

Photographs of Bin Laden's body have not been released.

Crowds gathered outside the White House in Washington DC, chanting "USA, USA" after the news broke.

Mrs Clinton said the operation sent a signal to the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"You cannot wait us out, you cannot defeat us, but you can make the choice to abandon al-Qaeda and participate in a peaceful political process," she said.

And she said there was "no better rebuke to al-Qaeda and its heinous ideology" than the peaceful uprisings across the Arab world against authoritarian governments.

Giving more details of the raid, one senior US official said a small US team conducted the attack in about 40 minutes.

Three other men - one of Bin Laden's sons and two couriers - were killed in the raid, the official said, adding that one woman was also killed when she was used as "a shield" and two other women were injured.

"This was a kill operation," one security official told Reuters, but added: "If he had waved a white flag of surrender, he would have been taken alive."

 

Reading II

 

Boehner: Deal is a 'first step' By: Jennifer Epstein April 11, 2011 08:53 AM EDT

Fresh off a deal with President Barack Obama to avert a government shutdown, House Speaker John Boehner is spoiling for a bigger fight to cut trillions of dollars in “autopilot spending” in fiscal 2012 and beyond. In an op-ed published in Monday’s USA Today, the Ohio Republican makes his case for “The Path to Prosperity,” the budget plan introduced last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). “Republicans control only one-half of one branch of the federal government, but we are committed to using our limited power to maximum effect in the effort to end the uncertainty facing job creators and put our economy back on a path to job creation and prosperity,” Boehner writes. Boehner has acknowledged that not raising the debt limit could bring about “financial disaster,” but he said he won’t agree to a “clean” up-or-down vote on the increase. Instead, he will use the vote that many economists consider essential as leverage for big spending cuts laid out in Ryan’s budget plan. The budget plan, Boehner argues in the op-ed, “is a powerful blueprint for economic growth and fiscal responsibility that will help our economy get back to creating jobs, stop Washington from spending money we don’t have, and lift the crushing burden of debt that threatens our children and grandchildren.” Citing his own experience in small business before he was elected to Congress, Boehner says that employers are reluctant to hire workers as long as “government engages in policies that rattle confidence or decrease predictability,” but that the GOP budget plan will “end much of that uncertainty.” Boehner also describes Obama’s proposed 2012 budget as “irresponsible,” raising taxes and adding trillions to the national debt. Boehner said he hopes the president will agree to a budget that makes big cuts but maintains important programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The president is set to lay out his budget plan in a speech on Wednesday. “More of the same spending, taxing and borrowing will not make our economy stronger or our future brighter,” Boehner writes. “This is why the spending cut agreement is important. While not nearly enough, these cuts represent a first step in taking our nation off the path to national bankruptcy, to giving employers the confidence they need to expand their businesses, and to sparing our children of lives indebted to foreign countries such as China.”

© 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC

 

 

 

Obama’s new approach to deficit reduction to include spending on entitlements

By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Sunday, April 10, 10:57 PM

President Obama this week will lay out a new approach to reducing the nation’s soaring debt, proposing reductions in spending on entitlements such as Medicare and Medicaid and renewing his call for tax increases on the rich.

In an effort to go on the offensive in the battle over government spending, Obama will look for cuts in “all corners of government,” senior adviser David Plouffe said on several Sunday talk shows.

Although Obama’s health-care law is projected to curtail Medicare spending over time, “we have to do more,” Plouffe said Sunday, marking the first time the administration has made an explicit commitment to changes in entitlement programs for the purpose of deficit reduction.

Contrasting the president’s approach with what Republican leaders have put forward, Plouffe said Obama will use a “scalpel” and not a “machete” as he seeks to preserve funding for education and other areas he considers crucial to the country’s long-term economic success.

Still, Plouffe said Obama is committed to doing more to slash the fast-rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid, to roll back George W. Bush-era tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 and to even discuss changes to Social Security.

For Obama, the political stakes are high. He will be trying to convince voters concerned about the growing debt that he is serious about cutting government spending and Democratic allies that he will protect key government programs, while also working to ensure spending is not cut so much that it impairs economic recovery.

In a speech scheduled for Wednesday, Obama will present his most extensive response to date in the debate over controlling federal spending. White House advisers have been discussing for months whether he should take the lead on deficit and debt reduction, concluding that his best approach for beating back Republican proposals for much deeper cuts would be to put forward his own vision.

The new approach is coming as the president seeks a way to defuse a potentially damaging battle over how much the federal government can borrow. The debt limit is set to be reached in mid-May, and the government will be able to meet all of its obligations only through early July at the latest. Many Republicans have said they will not vote to increase the limit without significant cuts in spending.

The question hanging over Obama’s speech is whether it will contain specific new ideas for reducing spending, be a broad but not detailed endorsement of deficit reduction or just offer principles for working with Congress. Simply by putting Medicare and Medicaid on the negotiating table, the president appears to be taking a more comprehensive approach to deficit reduction than he has before.

White House and Treasury Department officials have been working on a potential overhaul of corporate tax policy, but it is unclear whether that will be part of a deficit reduction plan.

Although Obama has long acknowledged the importance of deficit reduction — there was a fiscal summit at the White House in the first months after he took office, and he appointed a fiscal commission to address the issue last year — he has not embraced the most ambitious plans to roll back borrowing.

The president did not support the full report of his fiscal commission, which offered a plan in December to cut borrowing by nearly $4 trillion by 2020. Nor did he offer significant deficit reduction in the budget blueprint he released in February. That document contained a five-year freeze on domestic discretionary spending and proposed a slew of tax increases originally offered in his previous budgets, but it also proposed nearly doubling the debt over the next 10 years.

House Republicans upped the pressure on the president last week when they introduced a plan to slash government spending by $6 trillion more than the president’s plan over the next decade — largely by shrinking Medicare and Medicaid. The House may vote this week on a resolution supporting the budget — perhaps Wednesday, the day of the president’s speech.

On Sunday, Plouffe did not specify how much more the president wants to cut or whether his speech would propose a specific legislative agenda other than to say he will be looking for savings in both Medicare and Medicaid.

He said that though Obama does not think Social Security liabilities are a primary driver of the nation’s deficit and debt, the president would be open to discussing that, too.

Republicans responded to Obama’s plan to address deficit reduction with a mixture of skepticism and openness.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on “Fox News Sunday” that “we had to bring this president kicking and screaming to the table to cut spending” in last week’s 2011 budget negotiations. “It’s really hard to believe what this White House and the president is saying.”

But Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the architect of the House Republican plan to cut government spending, said that if the president “does choose to follow with serious proposals that address the drivers of our debt and the anchors holding back our economy, the door is open.”

Plouffe held open the possibility of compromise, saying that “the parties are going to have to come together to find common ground” and that the Republicans “should be credited” for advancing a plan with specific ideas to trim the deficit and debt. But, he warned, the plan was a boon for millionaires and had draconian cuts that would never be acceptable.

Obama’s decision to claim the mantle of deficit reduction comes after a White House debate on the political wisdom of doing so. White House aides have wanted to send the message to voters that Obama takes deficit reduction seriously and at the same time wants to protect programs supporting education and health care.

Some of the president’s advisers have been concerned that advancing a deficit-reduction plan would inject Obama into an unwinnable congressional fray and that his ideas would be immediately shot down.

Just in February, Obama said it was not his place to offer a plan.

“If you look at the history of how these deals get done, typically it’s not because there’s an Obama plan out there,” Obama said after releasing his 2012 budget. “It’s because Democrats and Republicans are both committed to tackling this issue in a serious way.”

Other advisers have argued that it is important that the president engage deficit reduction more publicly — at least by using the bully pulpit, if not promoting a specific plan. This would make it easier, they argued, not only to inoculate the president against criticism that he is not serious about the deficit and debt but also to protect his priorities.

In recent days, administration officials have expressed interest in the work of a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Six, who are meeting to develop a strategy for implementing the fiscal commission’s recommendations.

People familiar with those meetings said National Economic Council Director Gene B. Sperling spoke with members of the group last week to discuss the deliberations. The group is close to an agreement and may announce one as soon as next week.

“The White House is eager to attach themselves to this,” one source said.

goldfarbz@washpost.com

 

 

 

Stop here 11 April 2011

 

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12814748

 

Stop Here

 

 

 

 

Reading 2

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12809832

 

 

 

 

 

 

Go to the following link and read the article.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12378828

Apply the five w's and what if any impact will this have on the US.

Secondly find out who the Muslim Brotherhood are? Describe the history of the organization and what kind of country would Egypt become under their control. 

 

 

 

 

Stop here 8 Feb 2011

 

Reading for Bellwork.

 

The five W's

Stop Here

Tucson shooting reported globally as evidence of charged U.S. political climate

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 9, 2011; 5:40 PM

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) captivated many countries around the world, dominating the Sunday newspaper front pages and creating a buzz on social media sites, with commenters saying the attack confirmed their image of the United States as a deeply polarized nation brimming with angry rhetoric and gun nuts.

In Mexico, where vicious fighting among government forces and drug-trafficking organizations is a daily occurrence, news of the Arizona attack ran side-by-side with stories about a sensational slaughter in the resort city of Acapulco, where 15 decapitated bodies, with the heads scattered around them, were left at a shopping mall Saturday.

From Cuba, communist leader Fidel Castro in his latest "Reflections" column branded the attack "an atrocious act," and told his readers that Giffords "who was shot in the head, was in the sights of the ultraconservative movement Tea Party."

Castro noted that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (R) published an online map targeting members of Congress who supported President Obama's health-care legislation "marked with a gun sight."

In Britain, the Guardian noted "the rise of political extremism" in the United States, while attempting to put the shooting in the context of America's occasionally violent political past. "Attacks on American politicians can happen at any time, anywhere and seemingly for any reason" the paper said.

The shooting seemed to deepen views of the United States as a gun-loving, violence-plagued nation, with even the conservative Telegraph describing the incident as "exposing" America's troubling political divide. The Telegraph noted that leading tea party figures "drew criticism for flirting with violent imagery in their rhetoric," citing a quote from Palin: "Don't retreat - reload."

In Russia, a five-minute report on the shooting led the 8 p.m. broadcast on an all-news channel; it focused on the "miracle" of Giffords's survival, on the fact that her husband is an astronaut and on the "cross hairs" on Palin's Web site. But there has been little commentary in Moscow, which is at the end of a 10-day holiday that encompassed New Year's Day and Orthodox Christmas. Russia is no stranger to political violence. At least five members of parliament have been killed in the past 12 years, and one member of the upper house was sentenced to life in prison for murder last month.

Across the Middle East, the news from Arizona registered a distant second to all-day coverage of southern Sudan's historic independence vote, and debate about the regional economic implications should Africa's largest nation split in two.

But news reports of the shooting spurred hundreds of comments on Arabic media Web sites questioning why Americans were not calling the deadly rampage a "terrorist attack," and headlines from Lebanon to Iran cast it as politically motivated. "Blood infects American politics," read the online headline in Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News. "Proxy attack on the U.S. immigration law," declared TRT, the Turkish Radio-Television Corp.

Hundreds of comments in Arabic on Qatar-based al-Jazeera's Web site focused on a perceived double standard: If the shooter had been Muslim, most surmised, it would have been a "terrorist attack." Others cautioned that it would still be blamed on a Muslim.

"Thank god that the person who did the crime his name is not Mohammed or Muslim," wrote a person who identified himself as Amr Mohammed, in posting from Egypt. "But maybe Mama America will yet conclude that the person who stimulated him to this kind of act was a Muslim."

"If the killer was a Muslim or Arab, they would say this is a terrorist attack, but because this person is not, they will describe his act as 'devastating,'" wrote someone from Saudi Arabia using the pseudonym Abu Omar.

A reader from the United States, Adnan Almao, wrote in Arabic: "I'm really concerned that the attacker's name will be found to be Jared Loughner Bin Laden."

The state-run Fars News Agency in Iran posted a statement from the head of a group it identified as Families of Iranian Victims of Terrorism denouncing the shooting.

"No doubt, the terrorist move carried out in the United States displayed that the inauspicious phenomenon of terrorism has posed a serious threat to all people's security everywhere."

In Pakistan, a country still in shock from the religiously motivated assassination of a provincial governor last week, the attack in Arizona was barely noticed. Newspapers ran reprints Sunday of international wire stories on the attack, but there was no public debate or official comment.

Pakistan has been reeling from the Jan. 4 slaying of Punjab Gov. Salman Taseer, who was gunned down in apparent revenge for his outspoken stance on the need to reform the country's harsh blasphemy law.

The killing has unleashed a frenzy of emotion among rightist Muslim groups, who are hailing Taseer's assassin as a hero and demanding that the government drop all proposals to amend the law, which makes it a capital crime to insult the prophet Muhammad.

Staff writers Anthony Faiola, Pamela Constable, Aaron C. Davis and Will Englund contributed to this report.

 

 

Reading Two

 

The child who was killed in Sunday's shooting rampage at an Arizona shopping center had recently been elected to her school's student council.

 

 

 

 

Reading Three.

Arizona Massacre Prompts Political 'Cheap Shots'

By James Rosen

Published January 10, 2011 | FoxNews.com

When Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords collapsed outside the Safeway in Tucson Saturday morning, felled by a hail of bullets that killed six and wounded another 13 innocent people that had come to see her, some were quick to claim that the carnage was the product not merely of the tortured mind and trigger-happy fingers of the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner.

Rather, many on the American Left said the horror could be traced to the malign influence of American conservatives; members of the Tea Party; right-wing pundits Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck; former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin; and Fox News.

That was the narrative of culpability spun in the immediate aftermath of the shootings by some leading liberal commentators and Democratic politicians -- despite warnings from religious leaders, lawyers, academics, ethicists, reporters and historians that such a rush to judgment only further deepens the partisan divide in America, and further poisons its discourse.

Within minutes after the attempted assassination of Giffords -- indeed, at a point when it was still erroneously believed in many quarters that she was dead, and the identity of her shooter was not publicly known -- some commentators, absent any credible evidence, were already busily laying blame for the atrocity in political terms. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman blogged at 3:22 p.m. ET Saturday: "We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was."

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat, also found a political element in Saturday's bloodshed. Dupnik argued that the "vitriol" of the country's harshly polarized political climate was partly to blame, arguing that unbalanced individuals are uniquely "susceptible" to vitriol. Dupnik added, in an interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly: "We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country." 

Asked by Kelly if he had any evidence Loughner was in any way influenced by political "vitriol," Dupnik offered none. "That's my opinion, period," he said.

Krugman, in his blog post on the Times website, went on to mention Giffords' presence last year on Palin's "infamous crosshairs list." This was a map, disseminated by Palin's political action committee, SarahPAC, denoting the districts of 20 vulnerable House Democrats with images of crosshairs overlaid on each. The map was accompanied by a caption saying: IT'S TIME TO TAKE A STAND. Giffords herself, during her narrow campaign victory over a Tea Party-backed opponent last year, had complained about this choice of imagery, telling MSNBC: "The way that (Palin) has it depicted, the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district ...When people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences to that action."

Unnoted by Giffords then, or Krugman now, is the routine use of similar language and imagery by both parties in a culture obsessed with "battleground" states. Indeed, a nearly identical map, included in a Democratic Leadership Committee publication in 2004, featured nine bullseyes over regions where Republican candidates were considered vulnerable that year, and was accompanied by a caption reading: TARGETING STRATEGY. A smaller caption, beneath the bullseyes, read: BEHIND ENEMY LINES. The map illustrated an article on campaign strategy by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute.

Krugman's blog post on Saturday linked "the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc." to "the violence I fear we're going to see in the months and years ahead," and added: "Violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate." Yet in all of the grammatically hobbled writings and statements that Loughner posted on the Internet -- in which, ironically, one of his chief obsessions was others' poor grammar -- the failed student and awkward loner made not a single reference to talk-radio or the TV hosts Krugman cited, to the health care debate or the Tea Party, to Sarah Palin or Fox News.

Still, Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., found conservative lawmakers and Fox News at fault. The eight-term lawmaker told the Bergen Record Saturday: "There's an aura of hate, and elected politicians feed it; certain people on Fox News feed it."

Pascrell, for his part, has appeared as a guest on Fox News at least 159 times, dating from a January 2002 appearance on "The O’Reilly Factor" ("Honor to talk to you," Pascrell told host Bill O’Reilly, at the end of their segment) to an appearance last month on "Your World with Neil Cavuto" -- 38 days before the Tucson massacre. "The nation needs to be united right now," Pascrell told the hosts of "Fox & Friends" last Jan. 28, nearly a year before he blamed the network and GOP politicians for the attempted assassination of Giffords. "We don't do the nation any good by simply dividing amongst ourselves."

Without mentioning Palin by name, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the number-two Democrat in the Senate, alluded on Sunday to the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee in his discussion of the causes of the violence the day before. Durbin invoked "don't retreat, reload," a phrase from a well publicized Twitter message once sent by Palin, as the kind of "violent" sentiment that can provoke incidents like Saturday's. "These sorts of things, I think, invite the kind of toxic rhetoric that can lead unstable people to believe this is an acceptable response," Durbin said on CNN’s "State on the Union" program.

Some prominent commentators objected to these comments.

"To try to place blame before an investigation has occurred is in itself inciting hatred," countered Christian missionary Franklin Graham. Reached by Fox News minutes after returning to the United States from Haiti, where he had hosted Palin on a humanitarian mission last month, Graham offered prayers for the wounded and dead, and cautioned against ascribing a political motivation or origin to the violence. 

"Because we may disagree with a person from another political party, and something bad happens to that person, does that mean that we are responsible for what happens to that person? By no means. But If somebody calls for someone to go out and shoot someone in the head, then that person is just as responsible as the person who pulled the trigger."

Historian Douglas Brinkley agreed.

"We've got to be careful here that we don't use this as a censoring moment, or use this as a Democrats-beating-up-on-Republicans (moment), or using it as an opportunity to humiliate anybody who's affiliated with the Tea Party movement," Brinkley said. The author of numerous acclaimed biographies, Brinkley has edited the collected papers of the late Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and won the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast."

"There are definitely times when you have fallout from politics," Brinkley told Fox News in an interview from Austin, Texas, "but we don't want to lose the central point here: that this is a deranged person, that there's nobody serious in the Republican Party that would want to see such a heinous event happen at a Safeway. So we've got to be careful not to be braggadocio, not to use this, if you're a Democrat, as a weapon."

Reporter Pete Williams, who covers legal affairs and the Supreme Court for NBC News, steered his viewers away from a political explanation for the violent attack on a political figure. "The initial picture we're getting is that this is not what you would call, in the traditional sense, a politically motivated act," Williams said. "This seems to be the actions of a very disturbed individual."

That call was widely heard on Fox News.

"I don't know whether he's insane or not, but I do know that we need a reasonable discussion of what was going on with this man," said Peter Johnson, Jr., a Fox News legal analyst. "(Loughner's Internet) statements, taken together with the police conduct with regard to his known activities -- especially taken with the fact that he was rejected by the Army -- paints a disturbing picture of a mind that appears not to be intact. ... And we need to understand that the spinning wheel of recrimination at this point should be based on the facts, and not based on some rhetorical determination."

Juan Williams, the liberal Fox News analyst and historian of the civil rights movement, said Sheriff Dupnik "speaks for a lot of people" who would like to see the tenor of the American political debate dialed down a notch. "People realize that in the era of Obama, a lot of highly charged vilification of the president has been going on, particularly during the health-care debate," Williams said. "So people are alert for anything that could possibly be tied to the highly polarized political environment."

At the same time, Williams recalled the "bump" in public opinion polls President Clinton received when, in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, he attacked right-wing radio hosts. Williams urged Democrats to refrain from adopting a similar tactic today. 

"Some on the left are taking cheap shots," Williams said, "to try to keep Republicans on the defensive. In all honesty, I don't see any direct connection between any Republican group and this shooter ... who is a psycho nut-job."

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethic and Public Policy Center in Washington, called the comments by Krugman, Durbin, and other liberals "sickening."

"People were taking a terrible human tragedy and using it as a political club, and there wasn’t even a moratorium of 24 hours, or even 24 minutes," said Wehner.

A veteran of several Republican White Houses and the co-author of "City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era," Wehner said it would have been "legitimate" if the Tucson massacre had provoked a dialogue about gun control, because conservatives often seize on terrorist incidents to frame national security debates. But he also saw a double standard at work. "When (former Rep. Alan) Grayson called his opponent 'Taliban Dan' (during Grayson's losing re-election campaign last year against GOP challenger Daniel Webster)," Wehner said, "I didn’t notice the left being concerned about an atmosphere of violence."

Palin has issued a statement expressing her "sincere condolences" to those affected by Saturday’s shootings, but has not responded to suggestions that her statements, often studded with references to hunting and firearms, played some role in the Tucson massacre.

Fox News’ Jake Gibson contributed to this report.

 

 

 

 

 

What part of the constitution could you apply to this article.

 

This article talks about the enormous harm this could cause, do you agree or disagree, why? What would you do if you were president about the leaks?

WikiLeaks's unveiling of secret State Department cables exposes U.S. diplomacy

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 29, 2010; 12:07 AM

A vast treasure trove of secret State Department cables obtained by the Web site WikiLeaks has exposed the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy, as well as bluntly candid assessments by American diplomats, according to news organizations granted advance access to the more than 250,000 confidential documents.

The documents suggest U.S. diplomats were ordered to engage in low-level spying by obtaining foreign diplomats' personal information, such as frequent-flier and credit card numbers, presumably to better track their movements.

The cables also expose the sensitive diplomacy involved in winning sanctions against Iran; U.S. officials' attempts to remove highly enriched uranium from Pakistan; and new information on how North Korea is believed to have aided Tehran's weaponry program, giving it advanced missiles that could allow it to strike Moscow and major Western European cities.

Many of the insights gleaned from the documents are not surprising by themselves. Newspapers, for instance, have long reported that Arab nations are privately much more concerned about Iran's nuclear program than they admit publicly, and the cables document such concerns.

Still, such analysis rarely has the imprimatur of a U.S. government document, and the cables quote Arab officials by name expressing concerns they have not expressed in public.

One cable asserts that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly asked the United States to "cut off the head of the snake"- presumably meaning to attack Iran's nuclear program - while there was still time. Another quotes a senior Saudi official as warning that if Iran is not stopped, gulf Arab states would develop their own nuclear weapons.

Even when the documents merely confirm foreigners' suspicions, they could be embarrassing for the Obama administration. In cables drafted by U.S. diplomats, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is described as an "alpha-dog," Afghan President Hamid Karzai is "driven by paranoia," and German Chancellor Angela Merkel allegedly "avoids risk and is rarely creative."

Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi is accompanied everywhere by a "voluptuous blonde" Ukrainian nurse. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin" in Europe after receiving "lavish gifts" and lucrative energy contracts and the involvement of a "shadowy," Russian-speaking Italian intermediary.

The documents reveal how U.S. embassies have relied on foreign government officials for insight into policy. The German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg "tattled on his colleague," German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, "telling the U.S. ambassador that Westerwelle was the real barrier to the Americans' request for an increase in the number of German troops in Afghanistan."

WikiLeaks granted advance access to a number of news organizations, including Der Spiegel, the New York Times, the Guardian newspaper in Britain, El Pais in Spain and Le Monde in France. Those outlets began publishing reports on the cables on their Web sites Sunday afternoon.

While most of the cables appear to have been drafted over the past several years - including some as recently as February - others reach as far back as 1966.

Some of the cables, according to the Times, disclosed information long rumored but never confirmed: U.S. diplomats offered various countries incentives, such as a meeting with President Obama or even millions of dollars, in exchange for accepting detainees from the Guantanamo Bay prison. China's Politburo directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems in that country. U.S. and South Korean diplomats have discussed how to handle the potential collapse of North Korea.

U.S. reaction

The Obama administration had dispatched envoys around the world to warn foreign governments that the pending release of the information could be damaging to relations, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton personally calling a number of her counterparts.

Diplomats fear that the disclosure of the cables - many of which were not intended to be declassified for 20 years or more - will chill unvarnished conversations with foreign governments.

"By its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions."

"Nevertheless," he added, "these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world."

WikiLeaks posted a limited number of the cables on a Web site, cablegate.wikileaks.org. It said it planned to release more than a quarter-million documents in stages over the next few months. The files are classified at various levels, with 133,887 marked unclassified, 101,748 marked confidential and 15,652 marked secret, according to the site.

Although WikiLeaks has not disclosed the source of the materials, suspicion has centered on Pfc. Bradley Manning, 23, an Army intelligence analyst now in military custody.

The military arrested Manning this year, charging him with the downloading and transfer of classified material.

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by a former computer hacker, Julian Assange, and has released two other major tranches of secret U.S. documents - one about the war in Afghanistan, the other about the war in Iraq.

The organization has come under stress since then, with several members quitting after citing differences with Assange and the direction of the group. Additionally, Assange is facing allegations in Sweden of rape and sexual harassment, which he has denied, saying the charges are part of a U.S.-orchestrated smear campaign.

On Sunday, lawmakers from both parties condemned WikiLeaks's distribution of the cables. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, denounced what he called "a reckless action which jeopardizes lives by exposing raw, contemporaneous intelligence." He said that such information "should remain confidential to protect the ability of the government to conduct lawful business with the private candor that's vital to effective diplomacy."

'Enormous' harm

Jeffrey H. Smith, a former CIA general counsel, condemned WikiLeaks's dissemination of documents and echoed calls for Assange's prosecution.

"It just makes my blood boil," Smith said. "The harm it's going to do is just enormous. These are confidential discussions among some of our best allies."

He cited a discussion, contained in one of the cables, between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicates he will cover up the U.S. role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen. "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," Saleh tells Petraeus.

"What's that going to do to our ability to have him help us in Yemen?" Smith said.

Perhaps the most damaging revelation was the fact that diplomats had been ordered in recent years to expand their information collection from political reporting to include personal information on foreign dignitaries.

U.S. officials disputed suggestions that American diplomats were asked to spy under the instructions provided in the cables, which were signed - as all cables from headquarters are - by the secretary of state, in these cases either Condoleezza Rice or Clinton. The cables were sent to embassies in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America and the U.S. mission to the United Nations.

"Our diplomats are just that, diplomats. They represent our country around the world and engage openly and transparently with representatives of foreign governments and civil society," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. "Through this process, they collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years."

A senior U.S. intelligence officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified, said: "No one should think of American diplomats as spies. But our diplomats do, in fact, help add to our country's body of knowledge on a wide range of important issues. That's logical and entirely appropriate, and they do so in strict accord with American law."

Staff writer Ellen Nakashima and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

 

Now visit the web site and pick an embassy and find something that might be embarrassing.

http://wikileaks.org/

STOP HERE

 

 

Who, When, Where, What, Why

What part of the constitution could you apply to this article.

 

 

 

 

 

Go this link write down the Irish National Debt Ratio and find the US

http://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html

Read Also 22 Nov 2010

 

With bailout near, Irish PM's coalition cracks

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 22, 2010; 8:46 AM

DUBLIN - One day after Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen requested a financial bailout for his country from the International Monetary Fund and European Union, he faced a deepening political crisis as the junior partner in his ruling coalition called for a new general election in January.

Monday's move by the Green Party deepens the political turmoil that is unfolding in Ireland at the same time as Cowen's government is seeking a rescue package to prop up the country's banks and plug a massive hole in public finances.

Importantly, however, the Green Party said it would not withdraw its support immediately, but would remain a part of the governing coalition long enough to pass a new austerity budget that will dramatically slash government spending.

Passing the budget on Dec. 7 is considered vital to sealing the deal for an international rescue that could top $110 billion. The governing coalition led by Cowen's Fianna Fail party holds a majority in parliament of only three seats, making support by the six Green Party lawmakers essential.

"We have always said that our involvement in government would only continue as long as it was for the benefit of the Irish people," Green Party leader John Gormley told reporters in Dublin." Leaving the country without a government while these matters are unresolved would be very damaging and would breach our duty of care."

The Green Party's decision to leave the government at year's end virtually guarantees that Cowen, who was set to stay in office until 2012, will have no choice but to cut short his term and call new elections in January. It also will likely mean a fall from power for the Fianna Fail party, which has dominated Irish politics since the nation won independence from Britain in the first half of the 20th Century.

Opinion polls show the left-of-center Labor Party and center-right Fine Gael Party both leading Fianna Fail, whose public support has now eroded to 17 percent in some polls.

The International Monetary Fund and the European Union agreed Sunday to support the emergency bailout for Ireland after Cowen's near-bankrupt government--which for days had denied it needed help--abruptly requested a lifeline.

Ireland will become the second European nation in six months to require a multibillion-dollar rescue. The promise of aid comes as major nations in the region have been pressuring Ireland to accept a bailout, fearing its woes could spread to other troubled nations in the region, including Portugal and Spain, and potentially destabilize the euro.

But the currency advanced for a fourth day against the dollar and the yen on optimism that the rescue will prevent a spread across the region's debt markets.

On Monday, European markets declined for a second consecutive day, led by falling Irish bank stocks, and U.S. futures also sank lower as investors digested news of the bailout and tried to figure out what would happen next.

After a hastily arranged conference call from Dublin Sunday, in which Irish officials asked for help amid fears of a run on the banks, E.U. financial leaders and the IMF agreed in principle to come to Ireland's aid. But the key details of the package - including its size and the conditions attached to it - could take days or weeks to hash out between Irish officials and a team of negotiators from the IMF and the E.U.

As part of the deal, European officials said - and Cowen conceded - the government would need to impose a major restructuring on its failing financial system as well as further austerity on the already hard-hit Irish public.

"Irish banks will become significantly smaller than they have been in the past and gradually learn to stand on their own two feet once again," Cowen said. And "the government has to increase our taxes and reduce our spending to levels we can afford."

Zapping confidence

Ireland's troubles underscore how the reverberations of the global financial crisis are still festering worldwide two years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the United States. Although Greece, which received a $141 billion bailout in May, buckled under the weight of government overspending, mismanagement and corruption, Ireland's emergency stems from deeply troubled banks that are riddled with bad loans from a U.S.-style real estate bust.

The still-unknown extent of those losses is zapping confidence from investors and depositors, leaving Irish banks unable to borrow on global markets even as they have lost billions in deposits. At the same time, the government, which has already plowed $68 billion into the banks, is facing a huge budget gap from collapsed tax revenues and can no longer afford to prop up the banks itself.

Panicked investors have dumped Irish bonds in recent weeks, driving up the cost of borrowing for Ireland and a number of other European nations.

"The banks were too big a problem for the country," Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said Sunday on Irish radio. "The key issue all the time for the government is to ensure that we do not have a collapse of the banking sector."

After already forcing deep austerity on its citizens to help close the gap - cutting state salaries and slashing benefits to even widows and the blind - the Irish are facing the prospect of even more pain. The E.U. and the IMF will need to approve what is set to be a four-year plan to cut spending by $20 billion.

Newspapers in Dublin are bemoaning the national embarrassment of a country that in recent years became known as the "Celtic Tiger" but now is going hat in hand to Europe and the IMF. Dublin's Sunday Independent labeled the past seven days "the blackest week since the [Irish] Civil War," with many here lamenting a steady stream of young Irish who are emigrating from the country in numbers not seen in years. Small bands of protesters opposed to the bailout scuffled with police in Dublin late Sunday.

Although analysts have said Ireland might need $50 billion to $130 billion to recapitalize its banks and shore up the government's finances, Lenihan and Cowen declined to say how much the government would seek. Lenihan said the number will come in below 100 billion euros, or $137 billion.

But some E.U. officials suggested Sunday that the figure could rise as high as $120 billion. With Ireland unlikely win back the confidence of investors quickly, E.U. officials were preparing to offer Dublin a package of loans it could draw on for up to three years.

Ireland's request for aid will continue to test unity in the European Union, which will foot the bill for the bulk of the bailout from a $1 trillion rescue fund set up to aid financially ailing members after the bailout of Greece this spring. But the public in Germany, for instance, was enraged by the E.U. bailout of Greece, in which Germans made the single largest contribution. Chancellor Angela Merkel will now need to sell another unpopular bailout, arguing that aid for Ireland is essential to preventing a broader crisis that could destabilize the euro.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the Deutsche Welle German news agency on Sunday that the terms of the deal would be "tough." Nevertheless, he said it would need to be big enough to ensure that "it's not just a shot in the arm, but that it will also help to solve the problem."

British Prime Minister David Cameron has said London might take the extraordinary step of offering direct loans - reportedly up to $11.2 billion - to Ireland as part of an aid package, something that may not sit well with some in his Conservative Party.

Yet it remained unclear whether shoring up Ireland would be enough to avoid the need to bail out Portugal, another small nation whose weak economy and huge budget deficit have spooked investors. A greater test will be whether ailing Spain, the fourth-largest economy in the 16-nation euro zone, also needs help.

Calls for Cowen to resign

In for the roughest ride, however, is the Irish government itself.

Cowen is struggling to calm a furious opposition, as well as members of his own party and the Irish public, who are accusing him of mismanaging the crisis and misleading the nation about the need for an international bailout. He spent Sunday once again rejecting calls to resign.

All of last week, even as IMF negotiators were arriving in Dublin, Cowen continued to insist that Ireland could handle its problems. Later, he seemed to suggest that it was entering talks only to ensure stability of the euro. Privately, Irish officials have said he was staking out a negotiating position with the E.U. and the IMF.

"The political situation is very tense, and it could make it more complicated to resolve the crisis," said Constantin Gurdgiev, an economic lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. "Ireland's problems are not going to be solved just with a check from the IMF and the E.U."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

By FRANK RICH

IN the aftermath of the Great Democratic Shellacking of 2010, one election night subplot quickly receded into the footnotes: the drubbing received by very wealthy Americans, most of them Republican, who tried to buy Senate seats and governor’s mansions. Americans don’t hate rich people. They admire and often idolize success. But Californians took a hearty dislike to Meg Whitman, who sacrificed $143 million of her eBay fortune — not to mention her undocumented former housekeeper — to a gubernatorial race she lost by double digits. Connecticut voters K.O.’d the World Wrestling groin-kicker, Linda McMahon, and West Virginians did likewise to the limestone-and-steel magnate John Raese, the senatorial hopeful who told an interviewer without apparent irony, “I made my money the old-fashioned way — I inherited it.”

To my mind, these losers deserve a salute nonetheless. They all had run businesses that actually created jobs (Raese included). They all wanted to enter public service to give back to the country that allowed them to prosper. And by losing so decisively, they gave us a ray of hope in dark times. Their defeats reminded us that despite much recent evidence to the contrary the inmates don’t always end up running the asylum of American politics.

The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.

The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.

On last Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Obama was already wobbling toward another “compromise” in which he does most of the compromising. It’s a measure of how far he’s off his game now that a leader who once had the audacity to speak at length on the red-hot subject of race doesn’t even make the most forceful case for his own long-held position on an issue where most Americans still agree with him. (Only 40 percent of those in the Nov. 2 exit poll approved of an extension of all Bush tax cuts.) The president’s argument against extending the cuts for the wealthiest has now been reduced to the dry accounting of what the cost would add to the federal deficit. As he put it to CBS’s Steve Kroft, “the question is — can we afford to borrow $700 billion?”

That’s a good question, all right, but it’s not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich. That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970.

“How can hedge-fund managers who are pulling down billions sometimes pay a lower tax rate than do their secretaries?” ask the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker (of Yale) and Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley) in their deservedly lauded new book, “Winner-Take-All Politics.” If you want to cry real tears about the American dream — as opposed to the self-canonizing tears of John Boehner — read this book and weep. The authors’ answer to that question and others amounts to a devastating indictment of both parties.

Their ample empirical evidence, some of which I’m citing here, proves that America’s ever-widening income inequality was not an inevitable by-product of the modern megacorporation, or of globalization, or of the advent of the new tech-driven economy, or of a growing education gap. (Yes, the very rich often have fancy degrees, but so do those in many income levels below them.) Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election.

The book deflates much of the conventional wisdom. Hacker and Pierson date the dawn of the collusion between the political system and the superrich not to the Reagan revolution, but to the preceding Carter presidency and its Democratic Congress. They also write that contrary to the popular perception, America’s superhigh earners are not mostly “superstars and celebrities in the arts, entertainment and sports” or the stars of law, medicine and real estate. They are instead corporate executives and managers — increasingly (and less surprisingly) financial company executives and managers, including those who escaped with outrageous fortunes as their companies imploded during the housing bubble.

The G.O.P.’s arguments for extending the Bush tax cuts to this crowd, usually wrapped in laughably hypocritical whining about “class warfare,” are easily batted down. The most constant refrain is that small-business owners who file in this bracket would be hit so hard they could no longer hire new employees. But the Tax Policy Center found in 2008, when checking out similar campaign claims by “Joe the Plumber,” that only 2 percent of all Americans reporting small-business income, regardless of tax bracket, would see tax increases if Obama fulfilled his pledge to let the Bush tax cuts lapse for the top earners. The economist Dean Baker calculated that the yearly tax increase at the lower end of that bracket, for those with earnings between $200,000 and $500,000, would amount to $700 — which “isn’t enough to hire anyone.”

Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation? American companies seem intent on sitting on trillions in cash until the economy reboots. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ranks the extension of any Bush tax cuts, let alone those to the wealthiest Americans, as the least effective of 11 possible policy options for increasing employment.

Nor are the superrich helping to further the traditional American business culture that inspires and encourages those with big ideas and drive to believe they can climb to the top. Robert Frank, the writer who chronicled the superrich in the book “Richistan,” recently analyzed the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans for The Wall Street Journal and found a “hardening of the plutocracy” and scant mobility. Only 16 of the 400 were newcomers — as opposed to an average of 40 to 50 in recent years — and they tended to be in industries like coal, natural gas, chemicals and casinos rather than forward-looking businesses involving the Green Economy, tech or biotechnology. This is “not exactly the formula for America’s vaunted entrepreneurial wealth machine,” Frank wrote.

As “Winner-Take-All Politics” documents, America has been busy “building a bridge to the 19th century” — that is, to a new Gilded Age. To dislodge the country from this stagnant rut will require all kinds of effort from Americans in and out of politics. That includes some patriotic selflessness from those at the very top who still might emulate Warren Buffett and the few others in the Forbes 400 who dare say publicly that it’s not in America’s best interests to stack the tax and regulatory decks in their favor.

Many of the countless tasks that need to be addressed to start rebuilding an equitable America are formidable, but surely few, if any, are easier than eliminating a tax break that was destined to expire anyway and that most Americans want to see expire. Two years ago, Obama campaigned on this issue far more strenuously than he did on, say, reforming health care. Now he and what remains of his Congressional caucus are poised to retreat from even this clear-cut battle. You know things are grim when you start wishing that the president might summon his inner Linda McMahon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paladino defends comments, decries behavior at gay pride parade By the CNN Wire Staff STORY HIGHLIGHTS NEW:Paladino says the behavior at a gay pride parade is "a terrible thing" NEW: He said Sunday's remarks were referring to discrimination against gays NEW:Paladino denies being homophobic The gubernatorial candidate on Sunday said homosexuality isn't "equally valid" with heterosexuality New York (CNN) -- A day after saying homosexuality is not "an equally valid or successful option," New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino denied being anti-gay Monday but said it was "disgusting" that his opponent took his children to a gay pride parade. "Young children should not be exposed to that at a young age," Paladino told NBC's "Today." "They don't understand that. It's a very difficult thing, exposing them to homosexuality, especially at a gay pride parade. "I don't know if you've ever been to one but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other and it's just a terrible thing," Paladino said. Paladino drew fire for a remark he made to an Orthodox Jewish group on Sunday, in which he said he doesn't want children "to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option (compared to heterosexuality) ... it isn't." Andrew Cuomo, New York attorney general and Paladino's Democratic opponent, criticized his remarks Sunday, as did an advocate for gay and lesbians and an organization for gay and lesbian Republicans. Paladino defended that remark on Monday, telling both "Today" and ABC's "Good Morning America" that he was referring to the difficult path homosexuals face because of discrimination. "It's a very, very ugly experience for those who are discriminated against," he told "Today," adding that he has a nephew who is homosexual and also has homosexuals working for him. "It's terrible, and it shouldn't be. Society should be more accepting of it." "When I talk about issues such as this, I talk from my heart," he told NBC, "and I expect that the press will properly interpret my remarks. If they don't interpret my remarks correctly ... that's wrong." "My nephew is a wonderful boy and he's gay," he told "Good Morning America." "I see the difficulty he suffers with every day with discriminatory people." Paladino's nephew, Jeffrey Hannon, a member of his campaign staff, declined comment when contacted by CNN early Monday. Paladino told "Good Morning America" that he and his wife stumbled on a gay pride parade a few years ago in Toronto, Canada. "It wasn't pretty," he said. "It was a bunch of very extreme-type people in bikini-type outfits grinding at each other and doing these gyrations, and I certainly wouldn't let my young children see that." Asked whether he believes being homosexuality is a choice, Paladino said, "I've had difficulty with that. My nephew tells me he didn't have that choice, and I believe it's a very, very difficult life for a young person. I believe that young people should not necessarily be exposed to that without some really, really mature background first so they can learn to deal with it. It's a very difficult thing, and I sensitize with it totally." He said his Sunday remarks were taken out of context. A prepared version of his remarks, obtained by CNN from New York affiliate NY1, contained two lines that Paladino did not deliver. Those lines said, "There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual. That is not how God created us." Paladino emphasized in a statement on Sunday night that he did not include those lines when he delivered his remarks, and he told both programs on Monday he had crossed it out from his prepared remarks. "I wouldn't say that," he said. It was unclear, however, how the lines got into his prepared statements. Paladino at first suggested to "Today" that the lines were written by members of the Jewish group he was speaking to, although he later said he wasn't sure whether it originated with a group member or one of his staff. He told "Good Morning America" he had dictated in general terms his remarks to a staffer who put the lines in his remarks. "I refused to say it," he said, adding that does not represent his feelings regarding homosexuality. In the Sunday statement, Paladino said, "Apparently a few reporters relied upon suggested remarks distributed by my hosts at the synagogue in Williamsburg after my departure, not the actual statement I made." The written remarks given to reporters were identical to Paladino's spoken comments other than the two sentences in question. Paladino on Monday denied being homophobic. "My feelings on homosexuality are unequivocal," he told "Today." "I have absolutely no problem with it whatsoever. My only reservation is marriage. That's the only reservation I have." He told NBC he would recruit homosexuals to serve in key roles in his government if he is elected. Paladino's remarks came a day after New York police announced the arrest of an eighth suspect in a series of brutal, anti-gay hate crimes against four men. The incident last weekend involved three victims being held against their will by as many as nine assailants who beat them in a vacant apartment and sodomized two of them, police said. A fourth victim was beaten and robbed in connection with the attacks. "Don't misquote me as wanting to hurt homosexual people in any way," Paladino said Sunday. "That would be a dastardly lie -- my approach is live and let live." "I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family," he said. Asked on Monday whether the timing of his remark was poor, given the incident, Paladino said no. "I think my comments were directed at just the confusion that people have had over this issue," he said. Paladino also criticized Cuomo for marching in New York's gay pride parade in June. "That's not the example that we should be showing the children and certainly not in our schools," he said. Cuomo spokesman Josh Vlasto responded to Paladino's comments Sunday. "Mr. Paladino's statement displays a stunning homophobia and a glaring disregard for basic equality," Vlasto said in a statement. "These comments along with other views he has espoused make it clear that he is way out of the mainstream and is unfit to represent New York." Gay rights groups also criticized Paladino's remarks. "Carl Paladino's comments would matter if they were coming from a serious political figure. However, they are not," said Christopher Barron, chairman of the gay conservative group GOProud, in an email to CNN. "They are instead coming from the imploding campaign of a man with the personal baggage of John Edwards and all the electability of Alan Keyes." The Log Cabin Republicans of New York State also took issue with the candidate. "Carl Paladino's statements are unfortunate and show he lacks an understanding of what it means to be gay," said Gregory T. Angelo, chairman of the group. "I think gay men and women -- my neighbors and your neighbors -- would be much better off and much more successful if they were allowed equal rights and the option of getting married and raising a family. I don't want New Yorkers to be brainwashed into thinking that ignorance is an equally valid and successful option. It isn't." But Paladino's campaign manager, Michael Caputo, stood by the gubernatorial candidate's comments on homosexuality. "Carl Paladino's position on this is exactly equivalent to the Catholic Church," Caputo told CNN. "And if Andrew Cuomo has a problem with the Catholic Church's position on abortion and homosexuality, he needs to take it up with his parish priest." Paladino was seen on cell phone video by CNN affiliate YNN Albany last month seemingly threatening New York Post statehouse columnist Fred Dicker, after he was pressed to back up allegations he'd made that Cuomo had been unfaithful in his marriage. "You send another goon to my daughter's house and I'll take you out, buddy," Paladino said, apparently referring to the Post's coverage of a daughter the candidate had out of wedlock. Dicker shot back: "You gonna take me out?" "Yeah." "How you gonna do that?" "Watch," Paladino said before walking off. Paladino's campaign issued a statement the next day claiming that the Post sent a photographer to the Buffalo-area house where Paladino's 10-year-old daughter lives. On October 5, a statement on the candidate's website about his ideas for economic reform in the state said, "I'm a builder, not a career politician. I may not always say things in the most delicate or diplomatic way, but I will always tell you the truth and the truth is New York State is in a death spiral." CNN's Cheryl Robinson, Mark Preston and Jason Kessler contributed to this report.

Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/10/11/new.york.paladino.gays/index.html

Stop Here

 

 

 

 

9 Sept 2010

It sure sounded like President Obama endorsed his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel today for mayor of Chicago.

"I think he would be an excellent mayor," Obama said on ABC's Good Morning America. "He is an excellent chief of staff."

Emanuel hasn't said for sure he is running, but most White House officials expect him to do so -- though Obama says he wants Emanuel to maintain his day job in the meantime:

As long as he is in the White House, he is critically focused on making sure that we're creating jobs for families around the country and rebuilding our economy. And you know, the one thing I've always been impressed with about Rahm is that when he has a job to do, he focuses on the job in front of him. And so my expectation is, he'd make a decision after these midterm elections. He knows that we've got a lot of work to do. But I think he'd be a terrific mayor.

Obama, by the way, is in a position to directly influence the Chicago's mayor race -- he still votes there.

We should note that our Chicago friends tell us that while Emanuel would be a strong candidate, he is not a slam dunk. Many Chicago-based officials are expressing interest now that incumbent Richard Daley has announced he is not seeking re-election.

Check out this Chicago Tribune story from April, when speculation about Rahm-for-Mayor hit fever pitch.

Emanuel does have one advantage: Celebrity.

Even Julianna Margulies, Emmy-nominated start of the television drama The Good Wife, dropped Emanuel's name during last night's David Letterman show, making sport of his sometimes-foul language and reports that he cried during a commencement ceremony.

8 Sept

The signature act of the George W. Bush presidency is playing a major role in this year's congressional elections, and renewing an age-old political debate over tax cuts.

The reductions that Bush signed into law in 2001 and 2003 are due to expire at the end of this year, a deadline that has inspired a debate over whether letting them lapse is prudent fiscal policy or a job-killing tax hike.

When he speaks this afternoon in Cleveland, Obama will call for extending the tax cuts for most Americans, but ending them for families making more than $250,000 a year and individuals making more than $200,000.

"This economy is not hurting people that make $800,000 a year, it's hurting families that are making $40,000 a year," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, whose district includes Ohio, countered with a proposal for a two-year freeze on all current tax rates, while cutting back federal spending to 2008 levels. Boehner said this morning on ABC's Good Morning America that no one's taxes should be raised during such a tough economy.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., accused Obama of seeking "a massive tax hike on small businesses in the middle of a recession," and added that "it's no surprise that most Americans think the country is on the wrong track and that Democrat policies have failed to do anything to fix their top concern, the economy."

Gibbs and other White House aides said special tax breaks for the rich are one of the things that wrecked the economy in the first place, and led to high budget deficits. Letting the Bush cuts for high earners will not damage efforts at recovery, they said.

"The President's viewpoint is that we cannot afford to extend the tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year," Gibbs said. "I don't think the President believes that we are a $100,000 tax cut from a millionaire away from an economy that works for families that are making $40,000 a year."

 

 

 

Petraeus: 'Burn a Koran Day' Could Endanger U.S. Troops

Protests against the planned burning continue across the Islamic world.

by Ravi SomaiyaSeptember 07, 2010

On September 11, pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., will lead a ceremonial burning of Korans at his church. Amid protests in Kabul, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, says the planned desecration of Islam's holy book "could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort."

In a statement, Petraeus said, "Images of the burning of a Koran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan - and around the world - to inflame public opinion and incite violence," according to the Washington Post. "Such images could, in fact, be used as were the photos from [Abu Ghraib]. And this would, again, put our troopers and civilians in jeopardy and undermine our efforts to accomplish the critical mission here in Afghanistan."

ABC News reports that protests, in which effigies of Jones have been burned, are taking place in Kabul. Protesters also chanted "death to America," and set American flags alight. Comments Jones has made, such as "Islam is an evil religion," as well as the title of his book, Islam is of the Devil, are reportedly well-known to the protesters through the internet.

One of Petraeus' advisers, Gen. Jack Keane, told ABC that the planned burning was not just insulting to Muslims. "It's also insulting to our soldiers in terms of what they stand for and what their commitment is to this country and to the Muslims in this country," he said. A statement released by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul also condemns the upcoming action, calling it an "offensive initiative by this small group in Florida."

The fervor that news of the planned burning has stoked, said Petraeus, will likely spread. Jones's plan, and associated ripples of hatred, could cause problems "not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community."

Reports from Muslim countries give credence to Petraeus's comments. Iran's foreign ministry, reports Agence France-Presse, has issued a warning over Jones's plans. "We advise Western countries," said spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast, "to prevent the exploitation of freedom of expression to insult religious sanctities, otherwise the emotions of Muslim nations cannot be controlled." Late last month 100 or so Indonesian Muslims protested outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, and threatened holy war if the paradoxically-named Dove World Outreach Center were to go through with its plans. Indonesian Christians say they fear reprisals.

Jones has been informed of Petraeus' warning. But he remains unmoved. He and his 50 congregants still plan to gather Saturday he has said. "What we are doing," he told ABC, "is long overdue."

August 28, 2010

At Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth

By KATE ZERNIKE, CARL HULSE AND BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — An enormous and impassioned crowd rallied at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this weekend, summoned by Glenn Beck, a conservative broadcaster who called for a religious rebirth in America at the site where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech exactly 47 years earlier.

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck told the crowd, in what was part religious revival and part history lecture. “America today begins to turn back to God.”

The rally organized by Mr. Beck, a Fox News broadcaster who has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats, had been attacked as dishonoring the memory of Dr. King by being set on the anniversary of his speech. Despite Mr. Beck’s protestations, his event and a much smaller and mainly black counter-rally seemed to underscore the country’s racial and political fissures.

Critics have suggested that Mr. Beck was trying to energize conservatives for the midterm elections in November. Mainstream Republican leaders remain skittish about the group emerging on their right — and the influence it displayed in primary elections Tuesday — and had little to say about the Beck event.

But in an interview aired Sunday, Mr. Beck denied any political motivation — or political aspiration — and shrugged off conservatives’ suggestions that his ability to mobilize so large a crowd made him presidential material.

“There’s nothing we can do that will solve the problems that we have and keep the peace unless we solve it through God,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”

He also expressed regret for having asserted last year that Mr. Obama was a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people,” a comment that many critics felt undercut Mr. Beck’s assertion of racial tolerance.

“It was poorly said — I have a big fat mouth sometimes,” Mr. Beck said.

He said he had come to see Mr. Obama not as a racist but as an advocate of “liberation theology,” which he said pitted victims against oppressors. Liberation theology has generally been used in reference to a movement, begun in the Roman Catholic Church in poor parts of Latin America in reaction to social injustice, that some critics say has been taken over by leftists.

The overwhelmingly white and largely middle-aged crowd Saturday was a mix of groups that have come together under the Tea Party umbrella. While Tea Party groups have said they want to focus on fiscal conservatism, not religion or social issues, the rally was overtly religious.

Mr. Beck imbued his remarks with references to God, and he urged a religious revival. “For too long, this country has wandered in darkness,” Mr. Beck said. “This country has spent far too long worrying about scars and thinking about scars and concentrating on scars. Today, we are going to concentrate on the good things in America.”

Mr. Beck was followed on stage by Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and former Alaska governor. She said she was asked not to focus on politics but did say, in a veiled reference to Mr. Obama, “We must not fundamentally transform America as some would want; we must restore America and restore her honor.”

Many in the crowd said they had never been to a Tea Party rally, but they described themselves as avid Glenn Beck fans.

Even Mr. Beck’s critics acknowledge that he is one of the most powerful conservative voices. With a mix of moral lessons, frequent outrage and a dark view of the future, his programs draw millions of followers.

Chris Wallace, a veteran Washington journalist who interviewed Mr. Beck on Fox, told Mr. Beck that he had never seen a public figure quite like him.

Mr. Beck acknowledged that he was not cut from ordinary cloth. He is a largely self-educated man who took a single college class (at Yale University) before dropping out; a tough-talking critic who frequently breaks into tears; a man now wrapping himself in a religious mantle but whose religion (he is a Mormon) is not considered Christian by some of his ardent followers.

Yet, many of those at the event Saturday said they had been motivated to come by faith.

Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Florida, because, she said, “we believe in Jesus Christ,” and Jesus, she said, would not have agreed with the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare. “You cannot sit and expect someone to hand out to you,” she said. “You don’t spend your way out of debt.”

People in the crowd echoed Mr. Beck’s ideas that “progressives” were moving the United States toward socialism and that entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be ended.

“The federal government is only to offer us protection from our enemies and help us when we need it,” said Ron Sears, 65, of Corbin, Kentucky.

The event had the feeling of a large church picnic, with people, many from the South or Midwest, sitting on lawn chairs and blankets.

Washington officials do not make crowd estimates, but NBC News estimated the turnout at 300,000, while Mr. Beck offered a range of 300,000 to 650,000. By any measure it was a large turnout.

“People aren’t happy about things,” he told Fox. “A good number of people are not happy with the direction we’re going.”

Asked whether his ability to mobilize so large a crowd meant that he should be considered for a 2012 presidential ticket with Ms. Palin, Mr. Beck replied, “Not a chance.”

He said he had “zero desire” to be president, adding, “I don’t think that I would be electable.”

Across town, several hundred people, most of them black, packed a football field at Dunbar High School to commemorate Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“We come here because the dream has not been achieved,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist. “We’ve had a lot of progress. But we have a long way to go.”

Referring to Mr. Beck’s event, he added, “They want to disgrace this day.”

Raymond Hernandez contributed reporting.

 

 

 

 

 

Bell work 23 August 2010

More Candidates Hunting For Votes With Guns

by Linton Weeks