Many many stories about the debt limit crisis, but since the story changes every day there's no point in obsessing over the detail.....but the scum in Congress and our cave-in President have to solve it......so depressing......
1/ Following the debt limit crisis? Too much BS for you?
Can't blame you....but here's a brief primer, a Times Editorial.......
EDITORIAL
The Republican Wreckage
Published: July 25, 2011
House Republicans have lost sight of the country’s welfare. It’s hard to conclude anything else from their latest actions, including the House speaker’s dismissal of President Obama’s plea for compromise Monday night. They have largely succeeded in their campaign to ransom America’s economy for the biggest spending cuts in a generation. They have warped an exercise in paying off current debt into an argument about future spending. Yet, when they win another concession, they walk away.
Related
Showdown Nears on Debt as Obama Warns of ‘Crisis’ (July 26, 2011)
News Analysis: A ‘Unique Opportunity’ on the Debt Ceiling, Lost (July 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Federal Debt Limit (Debt Ceiling) & Deficit Talks
Related in Opinion
David Brooks: Congress In the Lead (July 26, 2011)
Readers’ Comments
"We need more passion in defense of reasoned discourse, and more compassion for those who are suffering from an economic and financial crisis."Barnabas D. Johnson, Peaks Island, Maine
This increasingly reckless game has pushed the nation to the brink of ruinous default. The Republicans have dimmed the futures of millions of jobless Americans, whose hopes for work grow more out of reach as government job programs are cut and interest rates begin to rise. They have made the federal government a laughingstock around the globe.
In a scathing prime-time television address Monday night, President Obama stepped off the sidelines to tell Americans the House Republicans were threatening a “deep economic crisis” that could send interest rates skyrocketing and hold up Social Security and veterans’ checks. By insisting on a single-minded approach and refusing to negotiate, he said, Republicans were violating the country’s founding principle of compromise.
“How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries?” he said, invoking Ronald Reagan’s effort to make everyone pay a fair share and pointing out that his immediate predecessors had to ask for debt-ceiling increases under rules invented by Congress. He urged viewers to demand compromise. “The entire world is watching,” he said.
Mr. Obama denounced House Speaker John Boehner’s proposal to make cuts only, now, and raise the debt ceiling briefly, but he embraced the proposal made over the weekend by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, which gave Republicans virtually everything they said they wanted when they ignited this artificial crisis: $2.7 trillion from government spending over the next decade, with no revenue increases. It is, in fact, an awful plan, which cuts spending far too deeply at a time when the government should be summoning all its resources to solve the real economic problem of unemployment. It asks for absolutely no sacrifice from those who have prospered immensely as economic inequality has grown.
Mr. Reid’s proposal does at least protect Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And about half of its savings comes from the winding down of two wars, which naturally has drawn Republican opposition. (Though Republicans counted the same savings in their budgets.)
Mr. Boehner will not accept this as the last-ditch surrender that it is. The speaker, who followed Mr. Obama on TV with about five minutes of hoary talking points clearly written before the president spoke, is insisting on a planthat raises the debt ceiling until early next year and demands another vote on a balanced-budget amendment, rejected by the Senate last week. The result would be to stage this same debate over again in an election year. Never mind that this would almost certainly result in an immediate downgrade of the government’s credit.
We agreed strongly when Mr. Obama said Americans should be “offended” by this display and that they “may have voted for divided government but they didn’t vote for a dysfunctional government.” It’s hard not to conclude now that dysfunction is the Republicans’ goal — even if the cost is unthinkable.
2/ Still think this is a fair society? Then have a look at this story on how rich kids are going to summer camp in daddy's private jet.....
To Reach Simple Life of Summer Camp, Lining Up for Private Jets
Andy Molloy for The New York Times
Ana Sosa, 13, at the airport in Augusta, Me., on Saturday. She took a private jet from Miami with her parents to attend camp.
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: July 24, 2011
Gov. Paul LePage of Maine happened to be waiting for his flight at Augusta State Airport on a recent Saturday when the weekend crush began.
Andy Molloy for The New York Times
The tarmac at Augusta State Airport in Maine on Saturday, when traffic was well above average.
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
A turboprop Pilatus PC-12 carrying Melissa Thomas, her daughter, her daughter’s friend and a pile of lacrosse equipment took off for their home in Connecticut, following the girls’ three-week stay at Camp All-Star in nearby Kents Hill, Me. Shortly after, a Cessna Citation Excel arrived, and a mother, a father and their 13-year-old daughter emerged carrying a pink sleeping bag and two large duffel bags, all headed to Camp Vega in Fayette.
“Love it, love it, love it,” Mr. LePage said of the private-plane traffic generated by summer camps. “I wish they’d stay a week while they’re here. This is a big business.”
For decades, parents in the Northeast who sent their children to summer camp faced the same arduous logistics of traveling long distances to remote towns in Maine, New Hampshire and upstate New York to pick up their children or to attend parents’ visiting day.
Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation’s wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps. One private jet broker, Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets, said his summer-camp business had jumped 30 percent over the last year.
3/ Most interesting story about one of the possible futures for education - online tutorials that challenge the kids to learn....
Someone forward this to our idiot Governor......
Excellent article........
“This,” says Matthew Carpenter, “is my favorite exercise.” I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It’s an inverse trigonometric function: cos-1(1) = ?
Carpenter, a serious-faced 10-year-old wearing a gray T-shirt and an impressive black digital watch, pauses for a second, fidgets, then clicks on “0 degrees.” Presto: The computer tells him that he’s correct. The software then generates another problem, followed by another, and yet another, until he’s nailed 10 in a row in just a few minutes. All told, he’s done an insane 642 inverse trig problems. “It took a while for me to get it,” he admits sheepishly.
Carpenter, who attends Santa Rita Elementary, a public school in Los Altos, California, shouldn’t be doing work anywhere near this advanced. In fact, when I visited his class this spring—in a sun-drenched room festooned with a papercraft X-wing fighter and student paintings of trees—the kids were supposed to be learning basic fractions, decimals, and percentages. As his teacher, Kami Thordarson, explains, students don’t normally tackle inverse trig until high school, and sometimes not even then.
But last November, Thordarson began using Khan Academy in her class. Khan Academy is an educational website that, as its tagline puts it, aims to let anyone “learn almost anything—for free.”
4/ So - is this you? Are you in denial about the value of your home? Read on, McDuff......
Homeowners in Denial About Value of Properties
By ANN CARRNSHomeowners, especially those who bought their houses after the real-estate bubble burst, are still having trouble accepting just how much the values of their properties may have fallen, says a new report from the real-estate site Zillow.
Current sellers who bought their homes in 2007 or later, an analysis of the site’s home listings shows, are overpricing their properties by an average of 14 percent.
5/ Excellent commentary and background on the debt ceiling fight, and it's consequences on real people who are just collateral damage to the oligarchy and their minions in government.....
This article from the New Yorker is more thoughtful than most.......
In the midst of the debt crisis in Washington, D.C., Danny Hartzell backed a Budget rental truck up to a no-frills apartment building that is on a strip of motels and pawnshops in Tampa, Florida. He had been laid off by a packaging plant during the financial crisis of 2008, had run through his unemployment benefits, and had then taken a part-time job stocking shelves at Target in the middle of the night, for $8.50 an hour. His daughter had developed bone cancer, and he was desperate to make money, but his hours soon dwindled to four or five a week. In April, Hartzell was terminated. His last biweekly paycheck was for a hundred and forty dollars, after taxes. “It’s kind of like I’ve fallen into that non-climbable-out-of rut,” he said. “If you can’t climb out, why not move?”
On the afternoon of July 1st, Hartzell was loading the family’s possessions into the rental truck—and brushing off the roaches that had infested the apartment, so that the bugs wouldn’t make the move, too—when a letter arrived from the State of Florida. Four days earlier, Governor Rick Scott, a Republican backed by the Tea Party, had signed a law making it harder for Floridians to collect jobless benefits, and the letter informed Hartzell that he was ineligible for new benefits after losing his job at Target. “I guess it’s just all water under the bridge at this point anyway, being that we’re going to stake a new claim,” Hartzell told his fifteen-year-old son. “Right, Brent?” Then the Hartzells drove ten hours north, to rural Georgia, where no job or house awaited them—only an old friend Hartzell had reconnected with on Facebook, and the hope of a fresh start.
On the day the family moved, there were officially 14.1 million unemployed Americans, or 9.2 per cent of the workforce. Hartzell himself probably isn’t counted in these statistics. In recent years, he has fallen into the more nebulous categories of the part-time employed, the long-term unemployed, and the “marginally attached”—the no-longer-looking unemployed. Economists report that the broader, and more accurate, unemployment rate is 16.2 per cent. Three years after the economic meltdown, nearly one in six Americans are out of work.
6/ A very good 8 minute Jon Stewart.......his take on the President's address Monday -
"Did He Just Quit?"
As the Aug. 2 deadline for raising the nation's debt ceiling approaches, Jon Stewart continues to take note of the ridiculous back-and-forth between President Obama and the Republicans in Congress. On Tuesday night's "Daily Show," Stewart focused on Obama's Monday night address and how it's starting to seem like the President is giving up.
First, Obama warned in his speech about potentially serious damage to our economy if the debt ceiling is not raised, but Stewart felt the message was undercut slightly by the "golden-chaired red carpet" room (or the "I killed bin Laden room" as it's known) in which he was giving the speech:
7/ This just popped into my head the other day and it stuck there, repeating itself over and over and over.....so I dare you - open it and listen it for 90 seconds.....
Another stray thought - she was a candidate for the United States Senate, the choice of the Republican Party, and came close to being the first witch elected to public office.....
Go on.....open it up, listen.....
8/ The title of this article says it all....a story about our crumbling infrastructure......
Why Are Our Bridges Made in China?
JUL 21 2011, 9:25 AM ET71Rebuilding our infrastructure right here in America, instead of outsourcing projects overseas, could put us on a track toward economic recovery
In my first piece for The Atlantic, I talked about the breakdown of our infrastructure based on my experience with the Washington DC Metro: the broken escalators, the slow Orange line, the unscheduled stops in the middle of tunnels. Today I'd like to add my complaints about the Maryland Area Regional Commuter line, MARC, where delays are not uncommon, and Amtrak's Acela, which sustained a speed of 0 mph for two straight hours in New York's Penn Station during one of my recent trips.
I choose the quiet car, because I don't want to hear the curses that greet one delay after another. But then I think, Is passivity really the American way? Aren't we supposed to take action, do something, get the job done? Americans solve problems. What's going on when I read that China is launching a new line of fast trains and we aren't even able to get our slow trains going?
So I took it personally when Congressman John Mica, a Florida Republican and head of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee -- rather than embracing the idea of an infrastructure bank that had the backing of John Kerry (Democrat) and Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Republican), the Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO -- proposed to decrease infrastructure funding even beyond what Paul Ryan had proposed. Mica wants a 40 percent cut, to outdo the Tea Party's cut of 30 percent.
The Republicans say they want to create jobs. But making it difficult to get to work is not the right path. And it's tough get a job when you can't get to an interview on time. On the delayed Acela, one of my fellow passengers complained (despite being in the quiet car) that he was going to miss his meeting with a potential client. As we sat in the station, unmoving, he became increasingly agitated and depressed. "In this bad economy, I really can't afford not to meet him," he said.
In my first piece for The Atlantic, I talked about the breakdown of our infrastructure based on my experience with the Washington DC Metro: the broken escalators, the slow Orange line, the unscheduled stops in the middle of tunnels. Today I'd like to add my complaints about the Maryland Area Regional Commuter line, MARC, where delays are not uncommon, and Amtrak's Acela, which sustained a speed of 0 mph for two straight hours in New York's Penn Station during one of my recent trips.
I choose the quiet car, because I don't want to hear the curses that greet one delay after another. But then I think, Is passivity really the American way? Aren't we supposed to take action, do something, get the job done? Americans solve problems. What's going on when I read that China is launching a new line of fast trains and we aren't even able to get our slow trains going?
So I took it personally when Congressman John Mica, a Florida Republican and head of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee -- rather than embracing the idea of an infrastructure bank that had the backing of John Kerry (Democrat) and Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Republican), the Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO -- proposed to decrease infrastructure funding even beyond what Paul Ryan had proposed. Mica wants a 40 percent cut, to outdo the Tea Party's cut of 30 percent.
The Republicans say they want to create jobs. But making it difficult to get to work is not the right path. And it's tough get a job when you can't get to an interview on time. On the delayed Acela, one of my fellow passengers complained (despite being in the quiet car) that he was going to miss his meeting with a potential client. As we sat in the station, unmoving, he became increasingly agitated and depressed. "In this bad economy, I really can't afford not to meet him," he said.
9/ Eight minute video on how Fox News distorts and ridicules "Global Warming", and how dangerous it is because it paralyses our political leadership......
10/ We try for some good video clips on DDD, but this is one of the best this year.....four minutes of dead-on impressions of celebrities.....what a talent!!!
Florida - 4 stories......
11/ By the time you read this Lake County Commissioners will probably have voted to overturn the long term plan for growth in the County to give developers a free hand.....excellent Lauren Ritchie column.....
Forget rural. Who needs rural anyway?
County commissioners are poised to vote Tuesday to settle rather than fight six formal objections to the county's growth plan. They're caving in to whining developers who are setting themselves up to profit at the expense of the people who live here today and are paying the bills.
County commissioners are poised to vote Tuesday to settle rather than fight six formal objections to the county's growth plan. They're caving in to whining developers who are setting themselves up to profit at the expense of the people who live here today and are paying the bills.
So much for representing the people.
The six settlements — none of the objections were turned down, of course — will allow an oversized anchor store in rural Sorrento that dwarfs every other business; small housing developments in Lady Lake and the Thrill Hill area east of Eustis; a big subdivision that has been turned down numerous times on 700 acres called Clonts Grove in south Lake; a second subdivision in the old Jahna mine site east of Clermont and south of State Road 50 on 540 acres; and paved runways on rural property in the Lake Jem community.
The six settlements — none of the objections were turned down, of course — will allow an oversized anchor store in rural Sorrento that dwarfs every other business; small housing developments in Lady Lake and the Thrill Hill area east of Eustis; a big subdivision that has been turned down numerous times on 700 acres called Clonts Grove in south Lake; a second subdivision in the old Jahna mine site east of Clermont and south of State Road 50 on 540 acres; and paved runways on rural property in the Lake Jem community.
12/ Privatising prisons is a bad idea on all kinds of levels, but the most disturbing thing is that it's driven by corruption......the private prison companies pay bribes to politicians, and lobby for harsher sentences because the more people sent to prison, the more money they make......
Have that in the back of your mind the next time you get jury duty.....
Florida is seeking bids from private companies to take over management of 30 state prisons in an 18-country area in South Florida. The “fastest privatization venture ever undertaken by the state of Florida” is an effort by Gov. Rick Scott (R) to save the state money byoutsourcing prison oversight to the lowest bidder:
In an effort to cut costs, Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature set a Jan. 1, 2012, deadline to privatize 30 state prisons, road camps and work release centers. [...].......................................................... And the private prison industry isn’t just lobbying to take over state prisons; it’s also “working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.” According to a report by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI), private prisons spend millions on lobbying to put more people in jail, which translates to more profits for them. Last year, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group made over $2.9 billion in revenue.
13/ Good Scott Maxwell column on Perky Pam Bondi, and redistricting......
Floridians are fired up!
In the past few weeks, I've received hundreds of calls and emails from readers who want to fight back against politicians who waste their money, fight their votes and coddle the special interests.
In the past few weeks, I've received hundreds of calls and emails from readers who want to fight back against politicians who waste their money, fight their votes and coddle the special interests.
Well, amen, brothers and sisters. That's why today's column preaches the gospel of empowerment.
Whether you're worked up about shady dealings at the attorney general's office or legislators trying to monkey with your votes, I've got plenty of ways to speak up — including one today right here in Orlando.
Troubling oustings
We start with Attorney General Pam Bondi, who made jaws drop when it was revealed that her office ousted two of its top investigators.
In case you missed the story, assistant attorneys general Theresa Edwards and June Clarkson were making national news uncovering foreclosure fraud when Bondi's office forced them out.
At first, Bondi's office refused to say why. But after public outcry intensified, Bondi's deputies claimed Clarkson and Edwards were guilty of "poor performance."
It was an interesting claim for two people who had recently helped net a $2 million settlement. Also for two people with stellar job reviews.
Whether you're worked up about shady dealings at the attorney general's office or legislators trying to monkey with your votes, I've got plenty of ways to speak up — including one today right here in Orlando.
Troubling oustings
We start with Attorney General Pam Bondi, who made jaws drop when it was revealed that her office ousted two of its top investigators.
In case you missed the story, assistant attorneys general Theresa Edwards and June Clarkson were making national news uncovering foreclosure fraud when Bondi's office forced them out.
At first, Bondi's office refused to say why. But after public outcry intensified, Bondi's deputies claimed Clarkson and Edwards were guilty of "poor performance."
It was an interesting claim for two people who had recently helped net a $2 million settlement. Also for two people with stellar job reviews.
14/ South Florida real estate is having a revival - having reached [what they think is] the bottom, vulture investors and South American money are coming back into the market.....
Affluent Buyers Reviving Market for Miami Homes
By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: July 26, 2011
MIAMI — South Florida is the default capital of the country. Here in Miami-Dade County, one out of five households with mortgages is in foreclosure. Nearby Broward and Palm Beach counties are not far behind. Nearly 200,000 South Florida families are stuck in the mire of default.
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