DOWNLOADS: (14)

PLAYS: (179)

Embed

A Fox News legal analyst asserted on Thursday that President Barack Obama became a "vigilante" by making recess appointments this week.

The White House announced on Wednesday that the president would be appointing former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three others to the National Labor Relations Board.

Many conservatives have argued that the since the Senate was not technically in recess, the move was illegal.

"In my view, this is a vigilante act of an imperial presidency," Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. opined Thursday.

The White House, however, has said that the appointments are perfectly legal because Senate Republicans were using a "gimmick" to prevent the president from fully staffing the government.

"The Senate has effectively been in recess for weeks, and is expected to remain in recess for weeks," White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer wrote for The White House Blog. "In an overt attempt to prevent the President from exercising his authority during this period, Republican Senators insisted on using a gimmick called 'pro forma' sessions, which are sessions during which no Senate business is conducted and instead one or two Senators simply gavel in and out of session in a matter of seconds."

"But gimmicks do not override the President’s constitutional authority to make appointments to keep the government running. Legal experts agree. In fact, the lawyers who advised President Bush on recess appointments wrote that the Senate cannot use sham 'pro forma' sessions to prevent the President from exercising a constitutional power," he added.

But all of that was not good enough for Johnson, who says Republicans should sue the White House.

"The issue is do they have the political will and the nerve to move forward against this?" Johnson wondered. "Essentially, the president had nullified a power of Congress, has acted in a way that's in violation of the Constitution."

(H/T: The Political Carnival)

For months, likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has made Barack Obama's supposed "failure of leadership" a centerpiece of his campaign. But like his ill-advised comparison of President Obama to Marie Antoinette, Romney's sound bite could well boomerang. After all, when Multiple Choice Mitt isn't comically reversing his stands, he's too afraid to take any at all.

That cowardice starts with his tax returns. While John Kerry and John McCain at least presented a summary of their (and their well-to-do wives') payments to Uncle Sam, the $250 million Mitt has so far refused to do so. Despite his famous demand in the 1994 Senate race that Ted Kennedy release his tax returns to show he has "nothing to hide," Romney reiterated his own paperwork would not be forthcoming. "We don't have any current plans to release tax returns, but never say never," Romney said, adding:

"I can tell you we follow the tax laws, and if there's an opportunity to save taxes, we like anybody else in this country will follow that opportunity."

Or as he put it to CNN's Wolf Blitzer last week (at around the 6:40 mark):

"I don't put out which tooth paste I use either. It's not that I have something to hide."

That's one interpretation. Another is that Mitt Romney is desperate to avoid the horrible political optics his tax returns would inevitably produce. After all, because Romney's continuing millions in annual income from Bain Capital (a company the Los Angeles Times recently explained "often maximized profits in part by firing workers") are taxed at the 15 percent capital gains rate, Mitt already pays a much lower share to Uncle Sam than most middle class families.

Romney's pusillanimity extends to his own tax proposals as well. Unlike virtually all of his GOP rivals, Romney has held back on endorsing either a flat-tax or the complete elimination of the capital gains tax. As he seemed to suggest to the Wall Street Journal, discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to telling voters about the massive windfall the Romneys would reap under the tax policies that dare not speak their name:

What about his reform principles? Mr. Romney talks only in general terms. "Moving to a consumption-based system is something which is very attractive to me philosophically, but I've not been able to sufficiently model it out to jump on board a consumption-based tax. A flat tax, a true flat tax is also attractive to me. What I like--I mean, I like the simplification of a flat tax. I also like removing the distortion in our tax code for certain classes of investment. And the advantage of a flat tax is getting rid of some of those distortions"...

Amid such generalities, it's hard not to conclude that the candidate is trying to avoid offering any details that might become a political target. And he all but admits as much. "I happen to also recognize," he says, "that if you go out with a tax proposal which conforms to your philosophy but it hasn't been thoroughly analyzed, vetted, put through models and calculated in detail, that you're gonna get hit by the demagogues in the general election."

Mitt Romney's fear of getting hit was also on display during the debt ceiling debate this summer. As the GOP's brinksmanship over defaulting on the U.S. debt reached its climax in late July, Romney turned his tail and fled. As MSNBC reported at the time:

NBC's Garrett Haake reported that Mitt Romney told reporters in Ohio yesterday that he would not comment on the debt negotiations in Washington. And so far, he has refused to either endorse Boehner's legislation (as Huntsman has done) or oppose it (as Pawlenty and Bachman have done). Our question: How does someone who wants to be the leader of the Republican Party not have a position on one of the biggest issues facing Washington, especially after the dueling primetime speeches by Obama and Boehner? It's actually quite surprising; this isn't just another Washington fight. Is the lack of a position proof of how fragile Team Romney believes its front-runner status is right now?

(Ultimately, Romney used Facebook to announce his support of the Boehner bill, but only after it passed the GOP House.)

As it turns out, Ohio was the scene of another of Mitt Romney's moments in cowardice.

Continue reading »

A few days ago, GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum put his foot in his mouth by saying “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

Santorum allegedly made the controversial comments when discussing welfare in an interview Wednesday night with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, but he maintained that people misheard the word "black" when he stumbled on a word.

“I looked at that, and I didn't say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of - blah - came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn't," Santorum said while smiling away.

“And I can tell you, I don't use - I don't - first off, I don't use the term ‘black’ very often. I use the term ‘African-American’ more than I use ‘black' ... I think sometimes you want to give someone the benefit of the doubt if it's a little bit of a blurred word."

I'm not certain even O'Reilly believed him by the time that he was finished babbling.

DOWNLOADS: (52)

PLAYS: (976)

Embed

Rick Santorum's late come-from-behind finish (You know, there's no way to talk about his campaign without double entendres) in Iowa was generally attributed by the media powers-that-be as being due to his lack of vetting before the vote. Naturally, no one thought him a credible candidate until all the others showed themselves to be the clowns that they are. So by default, little Ricky climbed up the ranks to Number Two (See? It just writes itself). But you can be sure that Santorum's days of little scrutiny are over.

We at C&L would like to assist the media in their new endeavor by reminding everyone of just how incredibly stupid Rick Santorum is in matters of national security. Back in 2006, Amato caught this little exchange on Hannity, where Santorum actually waves in front of the camera allegedly classified documents:

Greg Sargent picked up my original assertion the other night that Rick might have violated federal laws by holding up a classified document to the camera on H&C: I wrote

"If that is the document that's classified, isn't little Ricky breaking about a gazillion different federal laws by exposing them? I've taken the precaution of blackening it a bit. Of course, I'm no attorney, but I believe this is the law.

But even better than that little bit of flagrant law-breaking is the subject for which Santorum and cohort Pete Hoekstra wanted to stake their national security bona fides: finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Which, as you may remember, was frequently promised to us, but never actualized. While Hannity kept trumping up what an amazing discovery this was, it took only Fox News' own Jim Angle making the call to the DOD that Santorum never bothered to do to soundly debunk the whole dang thing.

And this is the guy Republicans think should have the nuclear codes?

How can it be that a runaway teenager is deported to Colombia without even a cross-check of her identity? Here's how it happened, via WFAA.com:

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl's fingerprints, but somehow didn't confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

"She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was," Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

There's really no excuse for this. I don't care how much of a priority it is to enforce immigration laws. They should be enforced with accuracy, not expediency. And to require her to pay for the ticket home? Ridiculous.

Now she is pregnant, being held in a detention facility in Bogotá. God knows what has happened to that child after she was deported and now, but whatever it is, it shouldn't ever have happened. ICE likes to brag about their numbers and say they're deporting criminals and repeat offenders, but it seems that they're a bit sloppy about how they're doing it. They fingerprinted this child, for heavens' sake! How hard would it have been to compare her fingerprints to those of the person whose name she used before sending her out of the country? I wonder if they ever thought the absence of a Columbian accent would have been a clue? Evidently not.

Even if the Houston police screwed up, and I believe they did, the responsibility and ultimate screwup sits firmly with this administration's immigration authorities. An apology and restitution is the least they should do.

Step up, DHS. Get this girl home. Now.

Update: CNN just ran this report at 9 AM this morning. Note how the entire story is being twisted now to blame the victim. It's HER fault she's in Colombia. Somehow she plotted to use someone's name who was never in the ICE system? According to CNN, she jacked the whole system to get from Texas to Colombia. They can't imagine why, of course, but it's clearly this 14-year old (now 15) African-American teenager's fault that she is being held in the system in Colombia after being deported from this country.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (97)

PLAYS: (1446)

Embed

Chris Hedges appeared last Sunday on C-SPAN's Book TV series, In Depth for a three hour interview which you can watch all of at their archives. Here's a portion from the beginning of the last hour where Hedges weighed in on Ron Paul and Libertarianism, the battle between the working class and the elites for democracy and on Oprah Winfrey and her role in the cultural and religious pursuit of personal wealth in America.

On Ron Paul and Libertarianism:

HEDGES: Ron Paul for me is sort of a funny guy. I mean, he says a lot of good stuff, but for me Libertarianism is sort of a preindustrial ideology. The idea that government should be so diminished... well, I mean, the problem is that government is anemic in the face of corporations like Exxon Mobil, City Bank and Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. And we need to find leverage by which these monopolies can be broken up and the power of these corporations can be curbed.

And so I think Ron Paul is pretty good in terms of empire, in terms of fiscal responsibility, in terms of Constitutional rights, but the core of his message, which is essentially to gut government is one that I think isn't going to do anything to diminish the power of the corporate state.

Continue reading »

Wednesday in New Hampshire, John McCain endorsed Willard at a town hall event. After the love fest, they opened it up to questions -- which was a big mistake.

The fist question was by an Occupier, and he really let Willard have it.

“It seems that the U.S. is a great place to be a corporation,’’ the man said, “but increasingly a desperate place to live and work.’’

“Where do you think corporations’ profits go?’’ Romney asked.

“It goes to the 1 percent of Americans who own the 90 percent of stocks,’’ the man responded and continued to press him.

That's how it's done, ladies and gentlemen. Willard then pathetically replied,

“You’ve had your turn,’’ Romney said. “Now it’s my turn. . . . Corporations are made up of people and the money goes to people either to hire people or to pay shareholders. They’re made up of people. So somehow thinking that there’s something else out there that we could grab money from and get taxes from and everything would be better . . . why, they’re still people.’’

Here's hoping Willard keeps up this "corporations are people" stuff all throughout 2012. Winning message.

Later, a woman tells Willard that she doesn't think much of Reaganomics.

“After 20 years of Reagan economics, trickle down theory, it didn’t help me,’’ she said. “My tin can is still empty.’’

“Let me ask you a question: Can you tell me where it’s better to live, where the income per person is better than in America?’’ Romney responded.

In other words, "Suck it up, lady -- or go back to China." Super classy.

I think Willard laid out a couple good campaign bumper stickers there. "Romney 2012: Corporations Are People" or "Romney 2012: Be Grateful You're Not Living in a Third World Country."

Add yours in comments.

DOWNLOADS: (52)

PLAYS: (739)

Embed

While discussing the current crop of GOP candidates that are still standing after the Iowa caucuses and why Republican voters can't stand Mitt Romney and settled on Rick Santorum instead, David Brooks offered up this bit of infinite wisdom on The Charlie Rose Show on Santorum and who the Republican Party represents.

ROSE: But the great columnist at The New York Times David Brooks said the following. America does not want to see Harvard Law vs Harvard Law in the general election. So square that.

BROOKS: Yeah, well I think that's the key to Rick Santorum's perpetuation. He rose because he's a social conservative, but he's not only a social conservative. He's also a genuine working class kid. His grandfather was a coal miner as he says. His dad came over, was an immigrant and got an education through the G.I. Bill and he represented west Pennsylvania, the dying steel towns there.

And so he genuinely has these working class roots and what he said last night after his victory, or pseudo victory speech about the dignity of labor, that's marrying sort of social conservative values to the economy. And he talks about we can't have a growing economy without strong families, without strong communities.

And he lived that basically in the Senate. And so this country has had a lot of pseudo populists, coming up rising, but only getting so far... people from Mike Huckabee... ugh... even Dick Gephardt on the Democratic side. And if he can marry the social conservatives message with a really, an economic conservative, a really more populist working class message, and just sent off a working class vibe, he could do well because the Republican Party is the party of the working class.

Oh yeah... since when? You know, one can argue legitimately about what's left of the Democratic Party that still represents the working class, but there is still a large progressive base in the Democratic Party and in the Congress that does still represent the working class. The Republican Party has been a wholly owned subsidiary of big money, the wealthy elites and the richest among us entirely for some time now.

And if anyone wants an example of what's wrong with a great deal of our politics, our media and how they frame issues and how Republicans vote, it's exactly what Brooks was describing here where maybe a “pseudo populist” like Santorum can fool enough rubes into voting for him because they think he shares their “values."

The subtext of that which doesn't get discussed of course if that those "values" actually mean telling women what they can do with their bodies and whether they can use birth control, or telling people who they can have sex with, or demonizing the poor by playing off of racial divisions.

Continue reading »

In an important move for the rights of American workers, President Barack Obama used recess appointments to seat three new members on the National Labor Relations Board, overcoming Republican obstruction to make sure the Board can continue to operate. Without the appointments, the Board would've fallen below the minimum number of members necessary to maintain a quorum and would've been unable to take any action. Senate Republicans refused to approve any new members to the Board in an attempt to prevent it from doing anything to protect American workers. The new appointees are Department of Labor Attorney Sharon Block, labor lawyer Richard Griffin, and NLRB counsel Terence Flynn.

Like the CFPB, Republicans have spent the past year blocking nominations to the NLRB in an effort to keep the agency from functioning. Those efforts would have paid off soon, since after Craig Becker’s term on the board expired this week, the NLRB would have been reduced to two members, which is the number it had for more than two years from 2008 to 2010. This effectively shuts down the board, since the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that two members does not constitute a legal quorum, and thus, a two-member board can’t make binding rulings.

All 47 Senate Republicans have warned Obama of a “constitutional conflict” should he choose to use his recess appointment powers — authority he is well within his right to use, as ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser noted yesterday — but it was Chief Justice John Roberts, a noted conservative, who suggested the president should make recess appointments to keep the NLRB functioning, as ThinkProgress reported in 2010.

Obama’s appointment of Block, Flynn, and Griffin is important, too, because it boosts the board’s membership to five, protecting its quorum even if member Brian Hayes follows through on his threats to quit. Preserving its right to quorum ensures that its rulings will not be thrown out on legal challenges, as more than 600 cases were by the Roberts Court in 2010.

The Board is vital in protecting the rights of American workers:

Having a functioning body, able to enforce laws protecting workers, isn’t just about workers in unions. It matters to all workers. The right to bargain, and the NLRB that protects it, have been frequent targets of congressional Republicans. Through the use of the filibuster, the minority of Republicans in the Senate—without passing any new laws—could essentially have demolished labor law and made collective bargaining in this country nearly impossible.

Gee, I wonder how this will end? I mean, who could have anticipated that leaving so many people unemployed and without support services would result in a housing crisis? I'm trying to think if there were any other recent examples of anything like that. Let me think, I know it'll come to me...

Nearly seven million Britons are risking a "spiral of debt" through using credit cards, overdrafts and payday loans to pay off their rent or mortgage, a major housing charity has warned.

Of those almost one million have taken out high interest payday loans to meet housing costs, in what Shelter has deemed a “totally unsustainable” situation.

Roger Harding, head of policy and research at Shelter said that as households continue to feel the squeeze, there’s "no reason to expect that it won’t get worse”.

Shelter, in its report published Wednesday, also warned it wasn't just low income families at risk: "We're in a situation now when anyone can lose their home because it only takes unemployment or an unexpected illness to start tipping you into that spiral,” Harding told the Huffington Post UK.

"The council of mortgage lenders are predicting a 20% increase in the number of repossessions this year, and that's with interest rates at a 200-year-low. Private rents are going up.

“We are really starting to see increasing numbers of people who are just squeezed into this situation, whose situation hasn't changed but all the costs around them have.”

Harding predicted government cuts to housing benefits, which came in this month, will lead to more people “turning to credit to pay their rent”.