Bark Bark Woof Woof: October 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011

A Little Night Music

Something gentle for Hallowe'en...

Happy Hallowe'en

It's pouring rain here in South Florida this morning, so I hope that by the time the local costumed critters come out tonight it will have dried up a little. That way I can give out all those Snickers minis that I bought and not eat them all myself.

At least it's not snowing.

Via my friend Doug, here's a photo that made me laugh. Not exactly a Hallowe'en picture, but it is funny.

Have a safe and fun Hallowe'en.

Arming the Keynesians

As any Republican will tell you, government spending doesn't create jobs. Unless, as Paul Krugman points out, it's military spending. Then it does.

Thus Representative Buck McKeon, Republican of California, once attacked the Obama stimulus plan because “more spending is not what California or this country needs.” But two weeks ago, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McKeon — now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee — warned that the defense cuts that are scheduled to take place if the supercommittee fails to agree would eliminate jobs and raise the unemployment rate.

Oh, the hypocrisy! But what makes this particular form of hypocrisy so enduring?

First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.

So there's bad government spending -- schools and bridges -- and good government spending -- F22's.

It puts the lie to the fact that any spending -- government or not -- can create jobs and boost the economy, and the Republicans would rather not admit that. There is one small problem: we end up with a lot of jobs building things that are designed to kill a lot of people, and to quote Maj. Margaret Houlihan, "this war can't last forever."

Don't Shoot

They have some interesting priorities in the state capitol in Wisconsin.

A new plan crafted by Gov. Scott Walker (R) would allow guns in most of Wisconsin’s state Capitol, while most photos would still be banned.

Under the new policy, the public would be allowed to carry concealed weapons in the Assembly viewing galleries, but existing rules barring the use of still and videos camera would not be changed, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Because you never know what might happen if someone goes berserk and starts taking pictures of lawmakers. Oh, the humanity.

The Cain Scrutiny

As it has to be, the more a candidate gets noticed, the more people start to look into their background. It's happened to everyone in recent memory (Gennifer Flowers, Jeremiah Wright, etc. all came out of the woodwork), and now it's happening to Herman Cain.

Poiltico went up Sunday with a blockbuster story of Cain’s time as president of the National Restaurant Association, the industry trade group that was Cain’s first foray into the Washington political scene.

Politico reports “at least two” women working at the NRA when Cain ran it “complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior” by the man who is now the national frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

So now the media and the blogosphere have something to talk about this week, and the cycle -- the breathless revelation, a non-denial denial, an attempt to distract, backlash against the accusers, and accusations of hypocrisy from the candidate's defenders directed to the appropriate side of the political fence -- will go through its motions. You could play Bingo on the number of predictable memes you'll hear coming from the Cain people and the other campaigns.

Also, these news stories don't happen in a vacuum. Someone in another campaign has been doing their opposition research and leaked this story to Politico. Whether or not they're doing it because they are having trouble with his jump in the polls or if they're just tossing it out there as part of the overall campaign to bring him down on anything that sticks remains to be seen.

Short Takes

The U.S. is seeking Pakistan's help in brokering a peace agreement in Afghanistan.

Iran is trying to extort the U.S. over the charges it was behind an assassination plot.

Qantas Airlines is cleared to fly again after the fleet was grounded over a labor dispute.

Three million are still without power in the Northeast after Saturday's snowstorm.

South Florida had floods and tornadoes last night.

The Dolphins' winless streak continues.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

A Little Night Comedy

Classic comedy from Shelley Berman.

By the way, he's still in the business.

Sunday Reading

Eating Their Own -- George F. Will lights into Mitt Romney for being the pretzel candidate.

The Republican presidential dynamic — various candidates rise and recede; Mitt Romney remains at about 25 percent support — is peculiar because conservatives correctly believe that it is important to defeat Barack Obama but unimportant that Romney be president. This is not cognitive dissonance.

Obama, a floundering naif who thinks ATMs aggravate unemployment, is bewildered by a national tragedy of shattered dreams, decaying workforce skills and forgone wealth creation. Romney cannot enunciate a defensible, or even decipherable, ethanol policy.

[...]

Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate. Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the Tea Party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.

Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from “data” (although there is precious little to support Romney’s idea that in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants is a powerful magnet for such immigrants) and who believes elections should be about (in Dukakis’s words) “competence,” not “ideology.” But what would President Romney competently do when not pondering ethanol subsidies that he forthrightly says should stop sometime before “forever”? Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?

Mr. Will is at his Brahman best when he gets all stuffy like this, and it's a joy to read such indignant diatribes ("Floundering Naif" would be a great name for a deep-sea charter boat), but especially when it's directed at one of his own kind. After all, Mr. Romney is the perfect GOP establishment candidate; he's the 21st century Thomas E. Dewey, but without his charm or conviction.

What's missing from this lovely piece of fratricidal vitriol against Mr. Romney is Mr. Will's promotion of an alternative choice for the nomination. Unfortunately, all of his druthers have left the party, so to speak, or have no chance of getting the nomination, and he appears to be way over his brief crush on Michele Bachmann that he elaborated on in October 2009. So, who's left? Will he go for Herman Cain, who can't articulate a position on abortion but stands up for the smokers? What about Newt Gingrich, who is getting another look now that the rest of the field is falling apart? After all, Mr. Gingrich once predicted that after all the other candidates have been found wanting, they would turn to him.

This is what happens when you make the campaign solely about beating the other guy. That may be the way to win the nomination or even an election, but at some point the voters want to know what you stand for, not against.

(Photo: Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya)

More below the fold.

Defining "Exile" -- Myriam Marquez of the Miami Herald comes somewhat to Sen. Marco Rubio's defense about his fudging of his family's arrival from Cuba by saying that being an exile is a state of mind rather than a legal status.

Because they arrived in 1956 and sought a green card, technically they were not exiles. But exile is based on more than a date of departure. It’s a mindset, an ache in the heart, a pride in one’s principles to not return until a tyrant leaves.

In that sense, Rubio’s parents were undeniably exiles, while others who left Cuba post 1959 and now travel to and from the island may not see themselves through that same lens. Ask many of the new arrivals from Cuba if politics was their motivation for leaving. It’s not always the case. They want a job and “jama,” Cuban street slang for food.

It’s complicated.

I don’t agree with Rubio’s ultra-conservative politics, but to turn this slip of a date into a “gotcha” visa-gate insults most Cuban Americans.

In discussing Cuba with Cubans, I've often heard that "it's complicated" and "you're not Cuban, so you can't understand." That may easily be. I'm not Cuban nor did my immediate ancestors leave their native land to come here, although some of them did it under similar circumstances from countries like England and Wales (and perhaps France and Holland; we're not really sure). But since that was over two hundred years ago, my family has pretty much gotten over it. The thing that is problematic is that some Cubans (not all) make it sound as if they are the only people who have fled their native land under political or economic pressure or threat of persecution. That's clearly not the case; just ask some folks in the Jewish population.

It's risky to draw parallels, but if a Jewish candidate for office presented himself as the son of Holocaust survivors and a fine example of what the American Dream offers for people like him only to find out that his parents actually came to the United States from Germany in 1933 instead of a DP camp in 1946, his career would be finished, even if he claimed he didn't know when they landed on Ellis Island. Whether or not Mr. Rubio honestly can claim "exile" status and it's all a mindset, the plain fact is that he allowed both his campaign and himself to present misleading information, and it wasn't until he was caught on it that he corrected it. There's a name for that kind of mindset, too.

DIY 1965 Mustang -- For those of you who have the skills and wherewithal, you can build your own classic 1965 with factory-authorized sheet metal.

Ford Motor Co. will soon sell brand-new 1965 Ford Mustangs for just $15,000 each. The only hitch: There's some assembly required.

As part of its Ford Reproduction business, Ford revealed today it had approved a new stamping of the steel bodies for first-generation Mustang that buyers could then build into their own 1964 1/2 through 1966 Mustang, using whatever engine, axles, interior and other parts they can find on their own.

The first-generation Mustangs rank as America's most-restored vehicle, and the cottage industry of reproduction parts has grown to where it's possible to build a Mustang just as it would have appeared on the showroom floor in the mid-1960s, down to the pushbutton AM/FM radio.

Ford says the new body shell built by California-based Dynacorn has been improved only slightly with modern welding techniques and rustproofing, and comes out of the crate nearly ready for paint and assembly. The company already offers metal bodies for Mustangs from 1967 through 1970, and has been in talks with Ford to remake the original body of the Ford Bronco. There's still life in those old horses yet.

You can also buy a very nicely restored 1965 Mustang for about the same amount of money. But hey, if you want to build it yourself, go for it.

[HT to Reader Jerry.]

Doonesbury -- Fox hunting.

Short Takes

A suicide bomber in Kabul hit an armored bus, killing at least 12 Americans.

The U.S. is planning a troop build-up in the Persian Gulf after leaving Iraq.

2.5 million are without power in the Northeast after the snowstorm.

Cops go after OWS protestors in Denver and Nashville.

Florida is cracking down on assisted-living facilities that are in bad shape.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

A Little Night Music

One of Allen's many gifts was introducing me to off-beat singing groups, like The Roches.

Previews of Coming Attractions

We're still more than a year away from the election and already the ad wars are taking off. For example, the senate race in Massachusetts between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren.

The first shot comes from the Brown campaign with their scare ad about Ms. Warren's support for OWS, dubbing her the "Matriarch of Mayhem" (what a great name for a heavy metal band):

The Warren campaign has fired back, naming him the "Tea Party Patriarch":

I'm really glad to see the Democrats fighting back, but with a year to go, I'm also really glad there's TiVo.

A Big Nuffin

A few weeks ago the wingnuts got frothy over the story that the Department of Justice had paid $16 per muffin for a breakfast at a conference in 2009. Typical waste and fraud on the part of the guvamint, and typical of the Obama administration to screw over the taxpayer for some fancy-schmancy tofu-granola whole grain bird food.

Yeah, except it's not true.

The office of the Justice Department inspector general on Friday retracted its much publicized claim that the agency had spent $16 per breakfast muffin at a conference. And it expressed regret for the “significant negative publicity” for the department and for the hotel that hosted the meeting that resulted from the erroneous finding in a report last month.

The supposed “$16 muffins,” at a conference for immigration lawyers in August 2009, had been a highlight of the report, which blasted the Justice Department for “extravagant and potentially wasteful” spending on food at conferences at the end of the Bush administration and early in President Obama’s term.

The figure was cited in news accounts, including in The New York Times, and was much repeated on political shows.

But the department and the hotel, the Capital Hilton, said the cost of the breakfast had included not only muffins but also fruit, coffee, juice, taxes and a gratuity for the servers. It was also part of a package with the hotel that included “free” use of a ballroom and a dozen meeting rooms during the five-day conference.

In a new introduction to a revised report issued on Friday, the Office of the Inspector General said it had reviewed additional paperwork and now agreed that its conclusions “were incorrect and that the Department did not pay $16 per muffin.”

I'm posting this because you won't read about it on Fox News or the front pages of the librul media. Spread the news and pass the butter.

The Week in Review

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Short Takes

The Cardinals won the World Series in seven games.

Bangkok is almost under water.

One of Qaddafi's sons is seeking a hearing in The Hague.

The European debt crisis isn't over; it's just delayed.

The Northeast is in for a lot of snow this weekend.

The U.S. is scaling back its northern border security checks.

Bank of America may back off on some of its plan to charge for debit card use.

Friday, October 28, 2011

A Little Night Music

Too Late To Turn Back Now

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is now in support of the the Occupy Oakland goals. Great. But it comes after the police riot that seriously injured Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen and turned the demonstrations into confrontations.

So far, the eruptions of tension and arrests in the Occupy demonstrations seem to have come from overreaction on the part of some members of the law enforcement community. Yes, they have a tough job, but they're also professionals, and part of keeping the peace is not by using excessive force to do it.

As the demonstrations continue to grow, the officials need to realize that it's gone beyond just a bunch of hippies playing bongos after curfew. It's bigger than that, and the more they try to control it with threats of force, the harder it will be to keep it from spreading.

"I Don't Want To Play In Your Yard"

Rick Perry doesn't do well in debates, so he's not going to do them anymore.

After a series of poor debate performances in the early months of his presidential campaign, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is backing off the upcoming GOP debate schedule, committing to just one of the next three events between now and Nov. 15.

Perry has struggled in the five debates he has attended since he joined the race in mid-August. At one, he fumbled an attempt to cast rival Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper. At another, bickering between Romney and Perry drew criticism that the candidates were acting juvenile.

Perry hinted at his frustration with the debates earlier this week when he told Fox News that participating in them was a “mistake.”

“These debates are set up for nothing more than to tear down the candidates,” Perry said. “…All they’re interested in is stirring it up between the candidates.”

Well, who in the world ever thought they were going to be Socratic dialogues or the TV version of Lincoln-Douglas? They're phony, they're shallow, but then again, so are the people who participate in them. Mr. Perry threw himself into this circus, and now that he doesn't like how he's doing, he's taking his ball and going home.

For all this tough-guy talk we got about executin' and shootin' coyotes, he's remarkably thin-skinned.

In Case You Missed It

Jon Stewart ribs the librul media for ignoring some important news last week.

The Daily Show
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Then Stay There

Bernie Madoff likes being in prison.

Financial swindler Bernard Madoff said that he is happier in prison than he was on the outside because he no longer lives in fear of being arrested and knows he will die in prison, Barbara Walters said on Thursday.

Walters, who spent two hours at the prison with Madoff on October 14, also told "Good Morning America" that Madoff said that while he had contemplated suicide during his early days behind bars but lacked the courage, he never thinks about killing himself now.

If life is so great in the joint, maybe he should encourage his fellow swindlers to join him.

Department of Redundancy Department - Ctd.

The Miami Herald website editors are at it again:

Teen dies after taking fatal plunge

Short Takes

Rescuers are still finding people alive in the rubble from the earthquake in Turkey.

The UN ends its mandate for the NATO operations in Libya.

Greece's prime minister praises the debt deal that could rescue his country's economy.

The economy is showing signs of picking up the pace.

The Dow moved up sharply yesterday, ending above 12,000 for the first time in August 1

Miami lifts its hiring freeze to hire more cops.

Tropical Update -- Rina is now a tropical storm swirling off the coast of Mexico.

World Series -- The Cardinals beat the Rangers, forcing a Game 7.

Friday Catblogging Classic

Car show time!

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Car Show Time

It's time for the South Florida International Auto Show, and the car club is participating, as we have done for many years, in creating the Memory Lane exhibit of top-class antiques from our club members. That's what I'll be doing today; helping get the show set up and getting ready for opening night tomorrow.

1959 Oldsmobile and 1959 Dodge

The picture is from the 2010 show. I'll be out there on Saturday morning, so if you're so inclined, stop by and say hi.

Simple For Most Of Us

Rick Perry made some news when he came out with his plan to simplify the tax code and get away from all the complicated rules and regulations.

I guess Mr. Perry has never heard of the 1040-EZ. As Bryan notes, all it requires is your W-2 and your basic information. It works for about 99% of the taxpayers who don't have a bunch of loopholes and Schedule C's and D's and whatever. For the rest of us who don't need a tax lawyer and an accountant, you can file electronically either over the phone or via the internet. There's also commercial software like Turbo Tax; the only problem with that is that you have to spend most of the time dodging sales pitches from Intuit.

So the only people for whom the tax code is complicated are the ones who are doing their best to avoid paying taxes in the first place.

This Is A Test...

I know I've pretty much ignored Glenn Beck for, well, pretty much forever, but this is just plain funny: he's freaked out about a national test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

You remember EBS; they are the annoying tones that radio and TV stations play, usually in the middle of a song or at the climax of a TV drama, to make sure they can get the word out about a tornado, a hurricane, or another emergency. It's usually done on a local level, but on November 9 the FCC and FEMA are planning a national test. Well this has set Glenn off. He thinks it's the precursor to a takeover of the national networks by the government, followed by jack-booted thugs in black helicopters coming into every city and town and forcing people into same-sex marriage and other abominations.

I think the FCC and FEMA are doing this to just mess with him. It's like playing throw the invisible ball with a dog; they always fall for it.

HT to Steve M.

Deregulation

Another myth bites the dust.

Republican lawmakers have been raking President Obama over the coals due to what they call a “tsunami” of new government regulations. “Business owners are reluctant to create jobs today if they’re going to need to pay more tomorrow to comply with onerous new regulations,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). Obama’s “excessive regulations that unnecessarily increase costs” just “make it harder for our economy to create jobs,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

As with most GOP talking points, the facts tell a different story. A Bloomberg analysis of regulations reveals that Obama has approved fewer regulations than President George W. Bush “at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush’s father.” Indeed, the record for the most expensive regulations still belongs to the GOP.

Of course, the Republicans' idea of perfection is no regulation at all on anyone... well, except women and their uteri and those icky gays who want to get married.

It's Not Just a Number

The Economist blog notes that a study by the CBO verifies the claim by OWS that the there's truth to the 99%. It's hard to argue with the numbers.

A report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) points out that income inequality in America has not risen dramatically over the past 20 years—when the top 1% of earners are excluded. With them, the picture is quite different. The causes of the good fortune of those at the top are disputed, but the CBO provides some useful detail on that too. The biggest component of the increase in after-tax income for the top one percent is "business income" as opposed to income from labour or investments (though admittedly these things are hard to untangle). Whatever the cause, the data are powerful because they tend to support two prejudices. First, that a system that works well for the very richest has delivered returns on labour that are disappointing for everyone else. Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill. Of course it is a little more complicated than that. But this downturn ought to test the normally warm feelings in America of the 99% towards the 1%.

(Click to embiggen.)
Okay, you know that this message is getting through when Joe Scarborough is agreeing with the point of the 99%'ers.

HT to CLW.

Tropical Update -- Hurricane Rina

It looks like Hurricane Rina will turn back on itself.

Short Takes

European banks have come up with a basic plan to rescue the euro.

The Supercommittee is making its first proposals public.

Cities are learning how to deal with the long-term Occupy demonstrations... some better than others.

President Obama announced his student loan revisions to a crowd at the University of Colorado-Denver.

Rajat Gupta, a former Goldman-Sachs executive, surrendered on charges of insider-trading.

Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL) will enter the Senate race against Bill Nelson.

A grand jury is looking into Miami's troubled assisted-living facilities.

World Series -- The game was postponed by weather.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

A Little Night Music

What's for supper?

Tropical Update -- Hurricane Rina

Well, if the five-day forecast is accurate, we'll dodge whatever's left of Rina here in South Florida.

Light Up the Sky

TPM has a slideshow of the aurora borealis that lit up the sky as far south as northern Georgia on Monday night.

Very cool.

Sliding Down the Poll

If you think President Obama is in trouble with the American people because of the economy and unemployment -- he's got a 46% approval rating -- he's in great shape compared to the Republicans and Congress, and a huge number of people agree with a lot of the points of Occupy Wall Street. At least that's what I'm seeing in this poll from The New York Times and CBS.

With nearly all Americans remaining fearful that the economy is stagnating or deteriorating further, two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly in the country. Seven in 10 Americans think the policies of Congressional Republicans favor the rich. Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and a similar number prefer increasing income taxes on millionaires.

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released a new study concluding that income distribution had become much more uneven in the last three decades, a report that could figure prominently in the battle over how to revive the economy and rein in the federal debt.

The Republicans are, to put it delicately, in deep shit when it comes to their candidates; none of them are generating any kind of enthusiasm, and the Republican-led Congress's ratings stand at 9% favorable. That's not a typo. Nine percent is the kind of favorable rating that Lady Gaga gets at a Focus on the Family convention.

The public is pretty much opposed to the entire GOP agenda. They don't want to repeal the healthcare law, they want to raise taxes on the rich, they want to spend money on schools, teachers, and police, and they want to rebuild the infrastructure. So when John Boehner and Mitch McConnell say the American people are supporting them, they're obviously talking only about each other.

A year from now we will be in the last stages of the election. It boggles the mind to think what it will be like then in terms of campaign craziness; if you think that what we've seen so far is juvenile and over the top, we haven't even left the station. President Obama won't coast to re-election; a recent poll showed him running neck-and-neck with a "generic" Republican. The problem with that is that there is no "generic" Republican running this year. The chances of the economy heating up and unemployment going down to 6% are unlikely, especially with the GOP doing everything they can to undermine it. But the more the Republicans keep Herman Cain in the lead and Congress spends all its energy passing bills to preserve the life of every sperm and demonize gay marriage, they're making it a lot easier for him.

Overreaction in Oakland

Via Think Progress:

Late [Monday] night, Oakland police, under orders from the city, began surrounding the Occupy Oakland encampment in preparation to oust the protesters from Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Approximately an hour ago, hundreds of Oakland police officers raided the camp. Dressed in riot gear, the police used rubber bullets, flash grenades, and gas canisters to forcibly evict and/or arrest the demonstrators who remained in the plaza.

There's videos and twitter-feeds from the site detailing the events.

I understand that the police want to maintain law and order, but rubber bullets, flash grenades, and tear gas is the kind of stuff you use against an armed mob of rioters, not a bunch of people camped out in a park carrying signs and singing Pete Seeger songs.

Update: I heard a news report this morning that some of the demonstrators threw rocks and bottles at the cops. C'mon; give peace a chance.

Quote of the Day

Pat Robertson on the GOP field:

I believe it was Lyndon Johnson that said, ‘Don’t these people realize if they push me over to an extreme position I’ll lose the election?’ Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election…They’ve got to stop this! It’s just so counterproductive!

When you're warned about being too extreme by Pat Robertson -- the man who thinks gay marriage causes hurricanes -- you know that you have reached that magical land of WTF.

Rubio's Story

The St. Petersburg Times -- via the Miami Herald -- looks at the discrepancies in Sen. Marco Rubio's story of how his family came to the United States. It seems he's changed it somewhat since he was profiled on NPR while running for his current job.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has come under fire for incorrectly linking his parents to the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro beginning in 1959. He insists they are exiles nonetheless, and angrily denounced the suggestion he misled for political gain.

“My upbringing taught me that America was special and different from the rest of the world, and also a real sense that you can lose your country,” Rubio said in an interview.

But the visa documents cast clearer divisions between his parents, who came for economic reasons, and the Cubans who scrambled to leave their homeland but thought they could soon return. And they come to light amid new discrepancies since Rubio’s timeline came under scrutiny last week.

In a 2009 interview with NPR, then-Senate candidate Rubio explained his mother returned to Cuba in 1961 to care for her father, injured in an accident. He said the family wanted to go home to Miami but were blocked by Castro’s government for nine months, and that influenced their thinking about leaving for good.

In a widely read piece in POLITICO on Friday, Rubio did not mention the accident and said his family was making preparations to move to Cuba but “after just a few weeks, it became clear that the change happening in Cuba was not for the better. It was communism.”

The difference between "exile" and "immigrant" is not a big deal to anyone outside of Little Havana, and the GOP establishment that sees Mr. Rubio as their next great hope -- he's handsome, he's straight, he's Tea Party-ish -- could care less when his family came over. (It goes without saying that if Mr. Rubio was a Democrat, he'd be hounded from Calle Ocho as if he was wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt.) Even if they can't sell him as an escapee from communism -- red-baiting is so 1960's anyway -- they probably figure that the average GOP voter doesn't know a Cuban from a Mexican, anyway.

If they can keep the birthers quiet, they'll be able to push him as their defense against the claim that the GOP is just a bunch of cranky middle-aged white guys: "Hey, we're backing a Latino! Who says we're racist?"

Short Takes

The death toll from the earthquake in Turkey has reached at least 360.

The remains of Muammar Qaddafi were buried somewhere in the Libyan desert.

The White House will offer relief on student loans.

Go figure; oil prices are up because of greater supplies.

Digging It -- Miami's port tunnel starts to produce a lot of dirt.

Two Miami charter schools lose funding.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

A Little Night Music

How could I resist?

Tropical Update -- Hurricane Rina

It looks like Hurricane Rina is heading for the Florida Straits by this weekend.

Perry's Tax Plan -- Run Flat

Rick Perry has put out his plan for fixing the tax system. Kevin Drum takes a look.

...Perry is going to lower the corporate tax rate, move to a territorial tax system, pass a Balanced Budget Amendment, ban earmarks, freeze federal hiring and salaries through 2020, halt all pending federal regulations, repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, repeal section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley, and add private accounts to Social Security (presumably without paying for them, per normal Republican doctrine)

I'm disappointed. Perry only wants to repeal section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley? Why not the whole enchilada? What a sellout.

What can you even say about this? It sounds less like a tax plan than a big ol' stew pot of right-wing applause lines, all the way up to the inane insistence that eliminating the estate tax has nothing to do with rich people and is only designed to provide "needed certainty to American family farms and small businesses." Should we laugh or cry? Perry has actually managed to combine two separate conservative memes (the estate tax is all about family farms, uncertainty is hobbling the economy) into one single sentence that makes even less sense than either of them separately. It's hard not to be impressed.

The result will be a massive tax cut for the rich and a huge loss of revenue for the federal government, which is a Republican's dream: America in the age of William McKinley.

Last night on one of the cable shows (probably Hardball), I heard some Republican praising the idea of Perry's plan and the flat tax, comparing it favorably to how they did it in Eastern Europe. Really? A Republican praising a foreign country's tax system? Aside from the fact that most countries that use a flat tax rate have a large number of social programs like universal healthcare and all sorts of safety nets, most of those Eastern European countries have a population equal to a small state or large metropolitan area here in the U.S. And what works on a small scale may not work on a large one. That's the right-wing argument about Romney's healthcare reform in Massachusetts vs. Obamacare.

But hey, if the GOP wants to emulate European socialism in order to fix the system, let's give it a try. Just be aware that a lot of those countries wish they had our system of loopholes, dodges, and credits that give us about the lowest tax rate in the industrialized world.

Raising Cain

Rachel Maddow looks at the seemingly magical rise of Herman Cain through the polls and across the country as the GOP frontrunner. How is he doing it?

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Aside from the Koch brothers connection, there's another element behind Mr. Cain's surge: the electorate's fascination with someone who is so out there as to amuse and mystify. He's not much different than Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, or George Wallace, and they will always find a core of voters who will be willing to indulge them. They're not unlike the comic relief clowns in Shakespeare's tragedies, except when they speak truth to power, it's just plain whacked. (Their backers say that candidates like Nader and Perot got more than 10% of the popular vote when they ran. Yes, that's roughly equal to the percentage of voters who believe the world is flat.)

The thing I can't figure out is why the Koch brothers are backing him. With all their money, they buy any candidate they want, yet they go with Herman Cain, who heretofore has shown all the political acumen of Typhoid Mary. (He's produced a commercial with a spokesman who makes a point of smoking a cigarette on screen. Think of the children.) I guess that's what happens when you inherit your fortune rather than earn it all yourself: the brains don't get passed along with the trust fund.

That, or they're just messing with the Republicans, which is always a good source of amusement.

Now Hear This

This sounds like a real breakthrough for the hearing-impaired.

After he lost much of his hearing last year at age 57, the composer Richard Einhorn despaired of ever really enjoying a concert or musical again. Even using special headsets supplied by the Metropolitan Opera and Broadway theaters, he found himself frustrated by the sound quality, static and interference.

Then, in June, he went to the Kennedy Center in Washington, where his “Voices of Light” oratorio had once been performed with the National Symphony Orchestra, for a performance of the musical “Wicked.”

There were no special headphones. This time, the words and music were transmitted to a wireless receiver in Mr. Einhorn’s hearing aid using a technology that is just starting to make its way into public places in America: a hearing loop.

“There I was at ‘Wicked’ weeping uncontrollably — and I don’t even like musicals,” he said. “For the first time since I lost most of my hearing, live music was perfectly clear, perfectly clean and incredibly rich.”

His reaction is a common one. The technology, which has been widely adopted in Northern Europe, has the potential to transform the lives of tens of millions of Americans, according to national advocacy groups. As loops are installed in stores, banks, museums, subway stations and other public spaces, people who have felt excluded are suddenly back in the conversation.

A hearing loop, typically installed on the floor around the periphery of a room, is a thin strand of copper wire radiating electromagnetic signals that can be picked up by a tiny receiver already built into most hearing aids and cochlear implants. When the receiver is turned on, the hearing aid receives only the sounds coming directly from a microphone, not the background cacophony.

“It’s the equivalent of a wheelchair ramp for people who used to be socially isolated because of their hearing loss,” said David G. Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., who is hard of hearing. “I used to detest my hearing aids, but now that they serve this second purpose, I love the way they’ve enriched my life.”

I can think of at least one of my closest friends who could really appreciate this new and simple technology.

Holy DFH's

It looks like even The Vatican is behind OWS.

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.

“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.

What do you expect from a group that was founded by a bunch of non-violent hippies that preached love, peace, and care for the poor? And if memory serves, they've had their own problems dealing with high finance. They know something about how Wall Street works.

*
In other OWS news, authorities in Portland, Maine, are looking into who tossed a chemical bomb into an Occupy Maine encampment on Sunday.

Portland police Sgt. Glen McGary said the bomb was thrown into the camp’s kitchen, a tarped area where food is cooked and served. Protest organizers said the explosion lifted a large table about a foot off the ground.

"There was no fire... We had a good 20 feet of thick smoke rolling out from under the table," Wilburn said. They could see the "G" on the 24-ounce bottle and its orange cap, as well as bits of silver metal, she said.

She and a friend who ran over to look at it breathed in fumes that smelled like ammonia, she said.

Witnesses said a silver car had been circling before the attack, its occupants shouting things like "Get a job" and "You communist." They believe someone from that car threw the device, according to a statement from Occupy Maine.

This was obviously in retaliation for all the times those murderous hippies attacked the Tea Party rallies with their rapier-like wit.

HT to ABL.

New and Improved

The cruel world of the free market strikes again.

Reed Hastings was soaking in a hot tub with a friend last month when he shared a secret: his company, Netflix, was about to announce a plan to divide its movie rental service into two — one offering streaming movies over the Internet, the other offering old-fashioned DVDs in the mail.

“That is awful,” the friend, who was also a Netflix subscriber, told him under a starry sky in the Bay Area, according to Mr. Hastings. “I don’t want to deal with two accounts.”

Mr. Hastings ignored the warning, believing that chief executives should generally discount what their friends say.

He has since regretted it. Subscribers revolted and many dropped the service. The plan further tarnished a once widely respected Internet service that had already been wounded by an unpopular price increase in the summer. Mr. Hastings was forced to reverse the planned split — but not the price increase — three weeks later and apologized.

On Monday, the company revealed the damage that had been done. It told investors that it ended the third quarter of the year with 800,000 fewer subscribers in the United States than in the previous quarter, its first decline in years. The stock plummeted more than 25 percent in after-hours trading.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people get run over by trying to "improve" something that doesn't need it. Just ask the folks in Atlanta how "new" Coke went over.

Caught Another One -- Ctd

Yet another conservative Republican has been caught hiring a guy for gay sex.

A Republican mayor in New Jersey denies that he agreed to pay a California man for sex through the website Rentboy.com, and says he doesn’t even know if the pictures posted of him in bright blue underwear are real.

Medford City Councilman and Mayor Chris Myers, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2008 against Democrat John Adler, is accused of paying the man $500 for sex during a trip to California in October 2010.

Danielle Camilli of the Burlington County Times reports that a man sent the paper a series of e-mails alleging that Myers agreed to pay him for sex, and promised him a car and a recording studio after the encounter at the Fairmount Hotel in Newport Beach, CA. The man said that Myers said he was a mayor from New Jersey, and showed him identification.

Yeah, well, we could have done without the "bright blue underwear" detail.

These guys need to get their own website -- is Horny Hypocrites.com taken?

Tropical Update -- Hurricane Rina

It looks like Hurricane Rina may turn east towards Cuba after hitting Mexico.

We'll be watching this one.

Short Takes

Tunisia's first-ever election results are coming in, showing a moderate Islamic party in the lead.

Libya's interim government is under pressure to explain the circumstances of Qaddafi's death.

Survivors of the earthquake in Turkey are looking for shelter.

President Obama offers some hope for mortgage holders under water.

Florida's drug-testing program for welfare recipients has been put on hold by a federal judge.

Florida power customers will pay more to pay for nuclear power.

World Series -- The Cardinals lost 4-2; they return to St. Louis down 3-2.

Monday, October 24, 2011

A Little Night Music

It's not too late to take piano lessons, is it?

Tropical Update -- Hurricane Rina

I'm not liking the looks of this one.

It was six years ago today that we here in South Florida were in the throes of Hurricane Wilma. That was the one and only time that I turned the blog over to someone else (Brian, posting from Albuquerque), and two days later, I got the power back.

I'd rather not go through that again, please.

Whose Idea Was It To Get Out of Iraq Now?

Mitt Romney and Republicans such as Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) were all over President Obama for announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year. Mr. Romney, apparently without being ironic, pronounced it an "astonishing failure," and Mr. Graham said it was all about campaign politics, as if that was something the Republicans would never do with foreign policy. No sirree!

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a cogent reply:

They should have raised those issues when President Bush agreed to the agreement to withdraw troops by the end of this year.

Not to mention the fact that the Iraqis want us out. Not that that matters or anything.

It's About Time He Caught Up

Rick Perry goes birther.

No surprise there; it just makes you wonder why it took him so long to get on that particular wagon.

For Those Who Still Don't Get OWS

Here are a couple of simple yet powerful explanations of what Occupy Wall Street is about.

Here's a helpful tip: if you are a political pundit and you still don't know what Occupy Wall Street stands for, you are an idiot. If you purport to make your living analyzing the political landscape, or from parsing the effectiveness of various political messages, or if you write columns explaining what the American people want based on your deep, intimate knowledge of what the American people want, but you still, after a month, cannot quite grasp what these uncouth people in the streets are going on about, then you are categorically bad at your job. If you find yourself tuttering and tsking over how the protestors are merely a group of fringe figures, and you do not notice or care to notice the polls expressing wide support for the message, you are a fraud.

It really is that simple, at this point. No supposed "pundit" should be able to say with a straight face that they cannot possibly understand what message the protestors have. Here, I will give it to you in a mere few words: the Occupy Wall Street movement is a protest against rampant income inequality, against corporate excesses, and against a government rigged to protect and worsen both.

Or, if you need a visual:

Any questions?

HT to Rook, Bryan, and CLW.

Short Takes

More than 200 people have been killed in a 7.2 earthquake in eastern Turkey.

Libya -- Islamic law will be the "basic source" of legislation, according to the new leaders.

The Economy -- President Obama will announce actions on student loans and housing that don't require Congressional approval.

Gas prices are up about 5 cents a gallon in the past two weeks.

Lawsuit -- "U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants must pay out-of-state tuition in Florida. A lawsuit has been filed to overturn the policy."

Tropical Update -- Tropical Storm Rina is in the Caribbean heading for Central America. Meanwhile, another disturbance is headed for the southern Caribbean.

The Miami Dolphins find a way to blow a 15-point lead.

World Series -- The series is tied at 2 each after the Rangers shut out the Cardinals.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

A Little Night Music

I love her voice. Song ain't bad, either.

By The Numbers

Now that we're finally bringing our troops home from Iraq, here's a summation of the numbers.

8 years, 260 days since Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program

8 years, 215 days since the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

0 weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

And it was all based on a lie. You can't put a price on the cost of that.

Sunday Reading

Compare and Contrast -- Kate Zernike of the New York Times looks at the similarities and the differences between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

It is a culture war, young versus old, left versus right, communal food tables versus “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.

In fact, the two movements do share key traits. They emerged out of nowhere but quickly became potent political forces, driven by anxiety about the economy, a belief that big institutions favor the reckless over the hard-working, grievances that are inchoate and even contradictory, and an insistence that they are “leaderless.” “End the Fed” signs — and even some of those yellow Gadsden flags — have found a place at Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests alike.

Where they differ is in where they place the blame. While Occupy forces find fault in the banks and super-rich, the Tea Party movement blames the government for the economic calamity brought on by the mortgage crisis, and sees the wealthy as job creators who will lift the country out of its economic malaise. To them, the solution is less regulation of banks, not more.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey declared Monday, “If you told the Occupy Wall Street people and the Tea Party people that they are the same, they would hit you.”

Not quite. But Tea Party activists are indeed fighting the comparisons.

“They seem to be more in favor of anarchy than they are in favor of working out problems through the Constitution,” Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, said about the Occupy forces.

“We have worked very hard to be respectful of the laws,” she said in an interview. “We protest and complain, but we’re also trying to work within the system. It’s frustrating to watch people who have an utter lack of respect for our form of government.”

[...]

Lin Wefel, an Occupy supporter at Zuccotti Park, where the protests began, said she had attended a Tea Party event in Pennsylvania and thought the missions of the two movements coincided “80 percent.”

“They want jobs, fair wages, get the money out of the system — the same things we want,” she said.

Kate Linker, another protester, said that while the two movements agreed that the system was not working, they disagreed on how it should work. She, for instance, was soliciting signatures for petitions to renew the New York State millionaires tax and establish one federally — not a cause most Tea Party activists are likely to support.

Still, she said, Occupy does aspire to have as strong an impact on the national discussion as the Tea Party has had.

So far, most Americans do not align with either movement. In a USA Today/Gallup poll taken last weekend, 26 percent of those polled said they were supporters of the Occupy movement, while 19 percent identified as opponents, and 52 percent said they neither supported nor opposed it. Meanwhile, 22 percent said they were supporters of the Tea Party, 27 percent said they were opponents, and 47 percent said they were neither.

The one thing missing from the comparison is that OWS does not have the astroturf backing of the likes of the Koch Brothers and organizers like Dick Armey and his "spontaneous" Freedom Works; nor is there the 24/7 coverage granted to the Tea Party by a major media outlet like Fox News.

Oh, and one more thing. While the OWS people may not appeal to the sensibilities of the Tea Party folk, it goes way beyond any form of human decency to compare them to the accused shooter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, as Gary Bauer did. Mr. Bauer, you'll remember, is the vile little toad who pops up out of the swamp every so often to remind us of just how stench-laden some right-wingers can be.

More below the fold.

The War Candidate -- Jill Lawrence of The Atlantic looks at how President Obama's foreign policy might influence his re-election.

The Republicans aiming for the White House might be well-advised to pack it in on foreign policy for a while and cede the field to President Obama. While they've got a case to make against his economic stewardship, their national security critiques are increasingly at odds with the facts on the ground.

The narrative from Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and other candidates is that Obama is a weakling who continually apologizes for America, doesn't believe we're exceptional, cedes leadership to other nations, mistreats Israel, and is overseeing our march toward lesser-power status. The problem with those narratives is that they are, for the most part, false -- and obviously so.

Obama has brought his party close to parity with the Republican Party when it comes to which one voters trust more to keep the nation safe. In a world ever more complicated, dangerous and economically fragile, he can make a strong argument that he deserves re-election based his record as commander in chief. That may not be enough to offset the pain of the recession and voters' desire for change, but Republicans are bolstering his case in at least two ways: One, some are making unforced errors on foreign policy and two, as they court conservative primary voters, the GOP candidates may be misreading the type of foreign policy most Americans want.

[...]

When it comes to Obama's economic record, the GOP candidates are determined to make sure Americans judge him by the cold, hard realities of unemployment, foreclosures and falling income. But in looking at him as commander in chief and leader of the free world, they would prefer that people ignore what's been going on in the real world. It brings to mind the old Marx Brothers joke: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

Bet On It -- Casino gambling will be coming to downtown Miami.

TALLAHASSEE -- It is a lazy, rainy day in Tallahassee and Colin Au, the president of Genting Americas, has arrived in town on a mission — to meet with every one of the state’s 180 legislators to explain why Miami needs a “destination resort” with one of the world’s biggest casinos.

As the top U.S. executive for one of the globe’s largest casino developers, Au is prepared to lobby “24-7 for 100 days," he said — or as long as it takes for a legislative vote on a bill to bring resort casinos to Miami-Dade and Broward. “I’m stationed here," he said Tuesday, in between meetings.

A bill is expected to be filed Monday by Miami Rep. Erik Fresen and Fort Lauderdale Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff. It asks legislators to do what decades of lawmakers have rejected: bring three Las Vegas-style casinos to Florida.

The proposal appeals heavily to the jobs-first strategy of Gov. Rick Scott and legislators, but skepticism is widespread. Doubters question what impact more gambling, more tourism and more congestion will have on families, communities and the state.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Herald/Times last week, Au responded to concerns, pointedly countered rumors that his company is anti-Semitic and associated with the Chinese mob, and offered a window into the company’s legislative strategy.

“My message is very simple," Au said. Florida faces “huge unemployment, budget deficits and gaming is already here.” Florida’s choice, he said, is to decide whether it wants to keep gaming the way it is “or transform it.”

He spelled out the preliminary results of an economic impact study, in which Genting consultants project annual casino tax revenue of $400 million to $600 million and the creation of 100,000 permanent jobs.

He's got enough money to buy up all the land -- including the property where the Miami-Dade County School Board lives -- and he's got enough money to buy Tallahassee, too.

Doonesbury -- Gimme the dough.

Short Takes

Tunisians vote in the first post-Arab Spring election.

Speaking of elections, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was re-elected.

Stalemate -- Banks in Europe don't have a deal yet for the Greek bailout.

Another dead satellite -- this time, a German one -- crashed to earth, but no one knows where.

Environmentalists rally in Miami.

Tropical Update -- There are two areas of tropical weather -- here and here -- to keep our eyes on.

World Series -- The Cardinals -- specifically Albert Pujols -- walloped the Rangers in Texas 16-7 for to win Game 3.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

A Little Night Music

See you...

Fudge Factor

The kerfuffle over the Washington Post's investigation of Sen. Marco Rubio's story of his family's arrival in the United States from Cuba has gotten a bit of attention here in Miami. It includes a debate over the definition of the term "exile," and just how much outrage can deflect from the fact that Mr. Rubio's story that his parents emigrated to Miami after Castro's takeover in 1959 isn't exactly true.

Mr. Rubio's response in Politico follows the usual track of a politician being caught in an embarrassment: self-righteous outrage, a hair-splitting explanation, and, of course, blaming the media that caught him.

That is an outrageous allegation that is not only incorrect, but an insult to the sacrifices my parents made to provide a better life for their children. They claim I did this because “being connected to the post-revolution exile community gives a politician cachet that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group sometimes viewed with suspicion.”

If The Washington Post wants to criticize me for getting a few dates wrong, I accept that. But to call into question the central and defining event of my parents’ young lives – the fact that a brutal communist dictator took control of their homeland and they were never able to return – is something I will not tolerate.

Every politician, regardless of party, invokes the fudge factor when they're telling their family history, usually doing it to make them sound like they're part of the great American narrative of hard work and coming up from humble beginnings to achieve greatness. (Even the rich guys like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush try to make it sound like they're the hero of a Horatio Alger story.) It usually doesn't matter; no one really cares if you played Little League or if your dad worked two jobs to get you into college. But in Mr. Rubio's case, that includes the shared experience with the Cuban community of exile and overcoming terrible conditions to reach the beach of freedom. I don't know what his family dynamic with his parents was, but usually when your parents make a rather momentous decision to leave their homeland and emigrate, the circumstances -- including the date -- would be a part of the story. Whether or not you're connected to the Cuban community here in Miami, it strains credulity that Mr. Rubio got "a few dates wrong." And in the narrative of the Cuban revolution, the difference between 1956 and 1959 is very important.

Mr. Rubio has now made an attempt to correct the record by updating his website to remove references to when his family came to Miami. That's a tacit admission that yes, the dates do matter. Allowing the story that your parents arrived after the revolution to be told without correction makes him complicit in creating the false impression that his family's experience is shared with those who actually did flee the country as the rebels arrived in Havana.

The question becomes whether or not Mr. Rubio's rise in the Republican party, both nationally and in Florida, would be any different if he had been upfront from the beginning about his family history. He certainly has the political instincts and charm to do well in a campaign, and he has done a fine job of cultivating the right connections to be elected to the state legislature and then on to the United States Senate. But if he had not embellished his narrative with the story of fleeing communist Cuba, would he be the right-wing rock star that he is now? I don't know the answer to that. Neither, apparently, does Mr. Rubio, but he isn't willing to take a chance on the answer.

Short Takes

Iraq -- President Obama announced that all troops will be out of the country by the end of the year.

Libyans debate where and when to bury Qaddafi.

Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz, 85, the Saudi heir to the throne, has died.

Human rights lawyers have filed torture charges against former President Bush.

Unemployment has dropped to its lowest level in two years in South Florida.

Tropical Update -- There are a couple of small disturbances in the North Atlantic.

Friday, October 21, 2011

A Little Night Comedy

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Cain's Choice Words

Herman Cain says he's "100% pro-life. End of story." This tweet was in response to the reaction to his interview on Piers Morgan's CNN show where he said, "I believe that life begins at conception. And abortion under no circumstances" ... until he was asked about what his reaction would be if he had a daughter or granddaughter who became pregnant by rape. His response was interesting:

CAIN: [I]t comes down to it's not the government's role or anybody else's role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you're not talking about that big a number. So what I'm saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn't have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.

Steve Benen noted, "there's a category for candidates who may be personally opposed to abortion, but who wouldn't use the power of the state to impose their opinion on the nation. They're called 'pro-choice' candidates." Or, at the least, candidates who are in touch with reality.

Mr. Cain's libertarian view that government has no business telling women what to do with their bodies is not part of the right-wing dogma: government is a horrible burden, it's perniciously intrusive, and it has no business telling us how to live our lives...unless it's doing it to people they don't like.

"End of story"? If Mr. Cain means his ride atop the GOP polls, he's probably right.

Quote of the Day

Andrew Sullivan:

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.

Havana Daydreaming

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) likes to portray himself as a child of Cuban refugees who made it out of Havana just as the Castro brothers were seizing the capital. It's a classic tale that evokes images of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, sure to evoke a tear from the audience. But, according to this story in the Washington Post, it's mostly bullshit.

During his rise to political prominence, Sen. Marco Rubio frequently repeated a compelling version of his family’s history that had special resonance in South Florida. He was the “son of exiles,” he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after “a thug,” Fidel Castro, took power.

But a review of documents — including naturalization papers and other official records — reveals that the Florida Republican’s account embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than 2 1/2 years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.

[...]

The real story of his parents’ migration appears to be a more conventional immigrant narrative, a couple who came to the United States seeking a better life. In the year they arrived in Florida, the future Marxist dictator was in Mexico plotting a quixotic return to Cuba.

Rubio’s office confirmed Thursday that his parents arrived in the United States in 1956 but noted that “while they were prepared to live here permanently, they always held out the hope and the option of returning to Cuba if things improved.” They returned to Cuba several times after Castro came to power to “assess the situation with the hope of eventually moving back,” the office said in a statement.

In other words, instead of floating to Key West in a raft made out of a '52 Chevy truck and sofa cushions, his parents came to the U.S. the same way most people came in from Cuba the mid-fifties: on Pan Am. The only sad part of the story is that they probably flew coach instead of business class.

What’s known of their lives in the United States comes primarily from Marco Rubio’s speeches and writings. He talks and writes lovingly of his father, telling of the family’s regular Sunday trips to the International House of Pancakes and how his father managed equipment for his Pop Warner football team. His father was a bartender and school crossing guard; his mother worked as a hotel maid and stocking shelves at Kmart. The family was itinerant, according to the senator, living at various times in New York and Los Angeles and spending several years in Las Vegas. But it appears that most of their time was spent in the Miami area, where a 1958 city directory shows a Mario Rubio employed at the luxurious Roney Plaza Hotel.

In one 2010 interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Marco Rubio seemed uncertain about the date of his parents’ arrival, saying, “My parents and grandparents came here from Cuba in ’58, ’59.” None of the public statements reviewed by The Washington Post gave 1956 as their arrival date.

I wonder how this news will go over in the Cuban community here in Miami, especially among those who really did come here one step ahead of Fidel and his revolutionaries. After all, Mr. Rubio has built his meteoric career in Florida and the GOP by milking the Cuban refugee schtick for all its worth. Now we find out he's like the guy who inflates his military record by saying he "served in Vietnam" when in reality he was a clerk in the quartermaster corps in Bayonne in 1967.

To quote another famous Cuban immigrant, he's got some 'splaining to do.

More GOP-Minority Outreach, Ctd.

A Florida state senator is in hot water for demanding that Hispanic voters prove their citizenship in order to vote.

Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, rekindled the divisive debate over illegal immigration when he told the Senate committee reviewing a series of congressional redistricting plans that “before we design a district anywhere in the state of Florida for Hispanic voters, we need to ascertain that they are citizens of the United States.

"We all know there are many Hispanic-speaking people in Florida that are not legal,” he said. “And I just don’t think it’s right that we try to draw a district that encompasses people that really have no business voting anyhow,” he said.

“He is calling on a witch hunt before a Hispanic district can be realistically considered,” said Rep. Janet Cruz, D-Tampa.

Florida will receive two additional congressional seats because of its population growth in the last 10 years that, according the U.S. Census data, was largely fueled by the surge in the state’s Hispanic population. Hays made the comments in response to a proposal being considered by the Senate Reapportionment Committee that would create a Hispanic-majority district in Central Florida, where the Puerto Rican population has exploded.

Cruz pointed out that Puerto Ricans are American citizens at birth.

Maybe they should have an IQ test for people before they run for office. A lot of white Republican bigots would be disqualified. (PS: Nobody speaks "Hispanic.")

Senate Showtime

As expected, Senate Republicans and three sorta Democrats filibustered the Obama jobs bill that would have funded teachers and firefighters.

The final tally on the late Thursday vote was 50-50, with Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AR), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and Ben Nelson (D-NE) voting with the entire Republican caucus to support the filibuster. The GOP continues to oppose all economic stimulus proposals that involve spending money on jobs, and take even greater exception to Obama's jobs bills, which pays for that spending with a small surtax on millionaires.

Democrats expected the legislation to fail, but plan to use routine GOP obstruction to strengthen the narrative that the Republican party is unwilling to help improve the economy, or to raise taxes on wealthy people to pay for any of the country's needs.

To wit, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) issued an official statement after the vote denouncing Republicans for "unanimously block[ing] a bill that would have kept 400,000 teachers in the classroom and first responders on the job because they refuse to ask millionaires to pay their fair share."

The Republicans are shocked, shocked, I tell you, that the Democrats would use a vote in the Senate to exploit the craven GOP toadyism to their corporate millionaire overlords.

Of course, no one expected the bill to pass either in the Senate or the House, even in its watered-down version. The GOP would rather do the Macarena with Hugo Chavez than anything that would make the president look good, even if it means that unemployment stays high and public schools have to lay off teachers.

But what about the children, you ask? The hell with them; they don't vote.

Short Takes

Libya rejoices.

Qaddafi's last few moments were not peaceful.

Greece is going through major strikes and violent protests over austerity measures.

Unemployment claims were down last week.

The Senate rejected President Obama's revised jobs bill.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez says he's cancer-free.

Yep, still here; the Rapture didn't happen yesterday.

World Series -- The Rangers came back to win, and the series is tied at 1-1.

Friday Catblogging

"Who needs potassium?"

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