Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20120620163840/http://www.squarestate.net:80/
Last month, after Rep. Mike Coffman said he didn't know whether President Obama was an American "in his heart," KNUS morning show host Steve Kelley wanted to talk to Coffman.
He told his listeners May 25 that, maybe, Coffman's comments weren't "worthy of a major apology," and he wanted to talk to the Congressman about it.
But Coffman, who'd been on Kelley's show "many, many times," wasn't returning phone calls, and Kelley was getting increasingly pissed.
So Kelley, a conservative talk-radio host who's been amping up his attacks on Obama in recent months, took a stand that you wouldn't expect to hear on rightie radio.
Kelley said on air that he'd give Coffman four more days to call back. After that, since Coffman was refusing to return calls during a tough time, Kelley wouldn't accept Coffman's requests, as he had in the past, to come on the radio show and promote himself and his agenda.
Kelley: When Mr. Coffman's people call and say look, he's got an initiative, he's got this, he'd like to come on the air--
Kelley's Co-host: A ribbon cutting ceremony.
Kelley: Yes. The answer is no. Thank you very much. You weren't willing to come in during a heated time. You're not coming on to tout and pump yourself up. I don't care what party you are. I don't care if I happen to agree with your politics. You're not going to - you know, that's not how you manipulate and use the media, at least, you're not going to here.
The Senate overwhelmingly rejected a bid to preserve some $4.5 billion in food stamps funding, as part of the massive farm bill, on Tuesday.
The amendment to keep that spending in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, offered by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), failed 33 to 66. Sixty votes were needed to pass.
Gillibrand had hoped to prevent food aid cuts in the $969 billion bill by trimming the guaranteed profit for crop insurance companies from 14 to 12 percent and by lowering payments for crop insurers from $1.3 billion to $825 million.
A growing number of Senate Democrats are signaling they are not prepared to raise taxes on anyone in the weak economy unless Congress approves a grand bargain to reduce the deficit.
A grand bargain that will slash Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security - all so we can keep low taxes on the the highest earners and most profitable corporations. Quite grand.
At least seven Democratic senators have declined to rule out supporting a temporary extension of the Bush-era income tax rates, breaking with party leaders who have called for letting the rates expire for people earning more than $1 million per year.
Those making $1 million+ will complain, no doubt. This will give cover for Dems to do nothing. The article says Democrat Joe Manchin sounded the same theme:
"I'm totally for the Bowles-Simpson [plan] and will continue to work for Bowles-Simpson. We need to revamp the system and I think Bowles-Simpson is the pragmatic way to do it."
Bowles and former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) are scheduled to brief a bipartisan group of senators this week on the need for a broad deficit-reduction package.
Bennet and Udall (willing to lose his job, bravely) will be there in the front row, hands folded, nodding grimly, salivating at the thought of that Grand Bargain Vote they will be so proud of.
But many lawmakers are skeptical that a multitrillion-dollar entitlement and tax reform package can be passed during the compressed lame-duck session between Election Day and New Year's.
If they do pass this POS in a rush, their intent and its result will be clear: Democrats will have betrayed the Middle Class one last time, at the behest of Republicans, for the benefit of the rich and powerful, while repeating lie after lie in order to obfuscate their actions. Oh, and the only reason it's a rush job is the historic intransigence of congressional Republicans executing their primary goal of making Barack Obama a failure as President.
Congress' push to cut food stamps could cause collateral damage in the military, hitting everyone from active-duty members to retirees, who together have used more than $100 million in federal food aid on military bases over the past year, a Huffington Post review of the data found.
Decrying the surge in food stamp costs since the start of the recession, politicians increasingly have been calling for a crackdown on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The program has expanded from covering 26 million Americans in 2007 to more than 44 million in 2011.
Suggesting that growth is evidence of fraud and abuse, House Republicans passed a budget resolution for 2013 that would cut the program by $134 billion over 10 years. In its version of the farm bill, the House Agriculture Committee has proposed $33 billion in cuts.
Maybe these ones are "phony" soldiers, or just slackers who are intent on raising a generation of slothful kids:
"We know from our sources in the military that they're seeing a hell of a lot more families in the low pay grades than they used to, and that's where they're seeing a lot of stress issues," said Ben Geyerhahn of BeneStream. "We know that for military families, the top two stressors are, No. 1, the death of a family member, but No. 2 is financial."
The base pay of most recent enlistees -- from corporals on down -- is at or below the $23,050 poverty rate for a family of four. The military, which counts housing allowances, tax advantages and bonuses in its own accounting of pay, estimates the average junior enlisted member earns about $43,000.
HuffPost looked at data provided by the Defense Commissary Agency -- which serves a wide range of military members, including retirees -- and concluded that commissary customers have redeemed $101 million worth of food stamps since June 2011. According to a recent Stars and Stripes analysis, that figure was $31 million in 2008.
It's crystal clear to me, but almost congenitally impossible for establishment Democrats - and that applies to most of them in beautiful Colorado - to understand:
There is something about Democrats, and many liberals in general, that makes them desperate to be seen as reasonable to the exclusion of everything else, even winning.
If I thought there was some great benefit to this, I might agree, but there is ample evidence that nobody ever sees them as "reasonable" and that they get nothing for their attempts.
Barack Obama didn't win big because of his "reasonable" platform. He was widely seen as either a liberal change agent or someone who could make the other side agree with him by sheer force of his personality -- or both. Now, that never made a lot of sense, but it hugely appealed to a large number of people. They didn't love him for being "reasonable", they loved him for being powerful. That was a rare race and he was a rare candidate.
As it turned out, he too wanted more than anything to be seen as the grown-up in the room, splitting the differences, making Grand Bargains, mediating between the two extremes and most of all, "changing the tone" which was a fool's errand, but it didn't stop him from trying.
Republican obstructionism, hypocrisy, and plain old hate have taught Democrats nothing these past 3 years. There are some signs of life in the Obama campaign, but no evidence of a permanent change learned by the fire of his enemies' hatred.
[The Colorado Springs] Gazette's John Schroyer interviewed Doug Lamborn, who faces a GOP primary challenge from businessman Robert Blaha. Lamborn was asked if he felt he had been a worthy successor to Hefley, a fellow Republican.
"I feel like I've gone beyond his legacy," Lamborn told Gazette TV.
You can just image Hefley's snort when told what Lamborn said.
"My first reaction was, 'How can you be so stupid?'" Hefley told the Gazette. "It showed me that Doug is either ignorant or he's dishonest."
Rep. Mike Coffman "apology" for saying President Obama isn't an American "in his heart" has turned into a multi-part series, with dark overtones, disappearances, repeat episodes, and passion.
It's been so gripping that it's worth a quick review, especially because a new installment will almost certainly play out on your TV screen soon.
You recall that when 9News first aired "Coffman's Birther Moment," with Coffman's insult of Obama, Coffman said he misspoke, and he apologized, but not fully. Coffman stated:
COFFMAN: "I don't believe the president shares my belief in American Exceptionalism. His policies reflect a philosophy that America is but one nation among many equals," the statement read. "As a Marine, I believe America is unique and based on a core set of principles that make it superior to other nations."
A defensive apology!
Written as if to send a wink to the birthers out there who might have been offended by Coffman's remorseful correction about Obama's heart.
This is just the kind of undercurrent that you'll find this summer in the trashy novels you'll be reading on your front porch.
The complete rejection of common-sense Keynesian economic measures is almost here. Republicans have hijacked any reasonable conversation regarding how to fairly tax the enormous wealth of our most successful citizens and corporations. Wealth, by the way, they would not have without the infrastructure and laws and workers they so despise.
Most Democrats have shown the backbone of a jellyfish these last few decades, and with our current Towers of Pudding in the U.S. Senate being joined by Economic Austerians Polis, Lamborn, Coffman, Gardner, and whomever else, the Great, Exceptional, World-Leading United State of America is preparing to cement into place the last of the austerity measures required to kill the Middle Class and suspend our Great Egalitarian experiment via the mechanisms of the unelected and unaccountable Simpson-Bowles debt commission:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke in front of the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday, and he gave what amounts to an endorsement of the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan.
Addressing the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday afternoon, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that the debate about the path to fiscal responsibility "really began with Bowles-Simpson and that's where it's going to end."
He added that while the president's Fiscal Year 2013 budget "differs in slight-in small respects from that basic framework, [it] is very close to that basic design. That's the neighborhood in which we've planned to govern."
The Administration's budget for FY2013 indeed includes a $4 trillion deficit reduction package, and the major complaint that President Obama has had for Bowles-Simpson is that it cuts defense spending too harshly. In February, Geithner echoed that criticism, but did add that the cuts to Social Security were not preferable to him.
The lame duck session has so many fiscal issues expiring at the same time that many view it as an opportunity to put together the long-sought "grand bargain" on deficit reduction. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson have recently come out of their shells and resumed a high-profile media tour in an effort to get their framework into the discussion for the lame duck session. The Bowles-Simpson plan does include tax increases of hundreds of billions above the Bush tax cut rates, albeit lower than what would occur if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to completely expire.
Because of this, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi have embraced Bowles-Simpson to tease Republicans for their opposition to higher tax rates. But that also puts Democrats on the hook for embracing cuts to the social safety net, including Medicare and Social Security. And on Wednesday, Geithner said that Bowles-Simpson is "the only path to resolution politically [and] growing essentially economically, and I think that's where it's going to end up." He didn't make the caveats on Social Security or other entitlements.
I usually laugh at the "both sides do it" formula whereby people can blame both Democrats and Republicans for any particular problem, but this truly is a bipartisan blow that will take decades for the Middle Class to recover from.
All the while, our leaders on both sides, the rich, the corporations will be feasting on caviar and champagne and laughing at the dupes who let this happen.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) made the decision to blockade nominations official Wednesday when he informed his colleagues that he would invoke the "Thurmond Rule" - named after the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) - from now until after the elections.
As if there's a word or agreement we can believe that comes from any Republican currently in the United States Congress.
The state of global polar sea ice area in early June 2012 has once again fallen below climatologically normal conditions (1979-2009). Arctic sea ice loss is primarily responsible for this change in condition since just last month. Arctic sea ice melted quickly in May because it was thinner than usual; Antarctic sea ice has refrozen at a near normal rate during the late austral autumn. Polar sea ice recovered from an extensive deficit of -2 million sq. km. area three months ago to a +750,000 sq. km. anomaly one to two months ago before falling back to a -1 million sq. km. deficit. After starting the year at a deficit last year, sea ice area spent an unprecedented length of time near the -2 million sq. km. deficit in the modern era in 2011. Generally poor environmental conditions established and maintained this condition, predominantly across the Arctic last year. The last time global sea ice area remained near 19 million sq. km. through May was in 2007, when the Arctic extent hit its modern day record minimum.
"The Democrats and union interests love to say 'We're looking out for the little guy. This is not about the little guy. ... This is about people who retire in their mid 50s for the rest of their lives on the state's dime.'"
WHOA there, Mr. Treasurer. That might have been a good time to explain to Fox viewers that when Republican Gov. Bill Owens was in office and Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate the legislature passed a bill making it easy for employees to buy years of service and retire at an obscenely young age.
It's no secret that pension funds across the country are in trouble, that private-sector employees - many crushed by the recession that began in 2008 - are fed up with the idea of working for years and years before they can quit while government employees can retire earlier and have a more stable pension paycheck to look forward to.
(Lynn could have saidhere that many of those state employees toiled in thankless jobs, many of them very dangerous like policing and firefighting, for less pay, and with much scrutiny for the tradeoff of that early retirement date. - Z)
But Colorado's Republican state treasurer would boost his credibility if he ever publicly mentioned that his own party, in control of the legislature for nearly 40 straight years, played a role alongside the Democrats and unions in creating the current crisis.
Less than 1% of PERA Retirees receive an annual benefit payment in the six figures. We at the Colorado Coalition for Retirement Security realize that the average PERA retiree receives less than $32,000 a year and those dollars go directly back into our economy here in Colorado - $3.03 billion annually into our economy.
Here's what a few more national Republicans think about this issue:
And if anyone thinks this is only about State of Colorado workers and their pensions, call me cuz I have some watches for sale.......
Large version here.......is it true that this message it too radical for our purple state? I know it's too radical for the kind of Democrats we have elected to office lately - none seem to have the guts, or the political savvy, or the populist sense that Elizabeth Warren does.
Conservative talk radio hosts don't have too many kind words for Metropolitan State College these days, after Metro's decision last week to offer a reduced tuition rate to undocumented students.
Everyone knows this issue potentially alienates Hispanic voters in a swing state where Hispanics could decide the election.
Still, the conservatives on the radio, many of whom define themselves as partisan Republicans, are attacking Metro with abandon.
For example, KNUS Steve Kelley, who denounced Metro, had Rep. Cory Gardner on his morning show Friday, and he put the question to him. Gardner replied:
Gardner: I read that in the paper this morning, and of course I oppose in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. I think it's the wrong policy. It sends the wrong kind of message to people who are in the country illegally. And I think we got to work on border security before anything else. And I think Metro State has it backwards.
KNUS' Kelley was open-minded about the issue compared to Devon Lentz on KFKA's "AM Colorado" June 5.
Lentz is a KFKA host and the temporary chair of the Larimer County Republican Party.
LENTZ: Are their parents being kicked out of this country yet? And besides the fact that my taxpayer dollars are educating them in the public schools, that their parents are not paying into the school system. Not okay with this one. Oh, so many levels...
I think I'm missing something here. Why are we continuing to reward illegals in America? Why? That's what we are doing. We are continuing to reward them. So, yeah, I get the whole 'they're innocents, they're minors', they got their education. I don't care if they've been here for 3 years and graduated from high school, or if they've been here 10 years. They're on my dime in the school system. Their parents are not paying in. I'm not looking to backhand minors that didn't have a choice in this country, but at what point does even the schools system learn that this 6th grader coming in and their parents are here illegally. Why are they being allowed in the school system to begin with?
Both Kelley and Lentz were mixed up on the facts related to this issue, and I'll get to the fact-checking in a future post, but clearly the conservative talk radio world isn't holding back.
You have to wonder whether Rep. Mike Coffman admires their passion.
(I know this will sound like an obscure thing. But elections are at the heart of our democracy. We need citizen watchdogs, to keep the lawmakers and clerk's office honest. - promoted by KathrynCWallace)
Yesterday the Gov. overlooked at least 150 citizen comments and more formal veto requests from representatives of the Ute Mtn. Ute Tribe, Common Cause, ACLU, Colorado Ethics Watch, Colorado Union of Taxpayers, Denver Post, Boulder Daily Camera, Grand Junction Sentinel, Center Post Dispatch, Coloradans For Voting Integrity, Colorado Voter Group, Citizen Center, and more. Our Governor gathered friendly legislators and county clerks at the Capitol yesterday and ceremoniously signed HB 1036- the wrapper for what was Senate Bill 155- a bill to blackout access to ballots when it matters and hide any clerks' creation and possession of traceable ballots from public oversight as if it were ok.
Mary Eberle of Coloradans For Voting Integrity was there but not by invitation. She decided to investigate the Capitol after we heard a rumor that the bill would be signed. She and other citizen election integrity activists with years of experience participated in a massive but fruitless effort to obtain a veto.
We feel used as tokens of evidence of good legislative process that was anything but. We were invited to the Capitol twice in December and January to join with clerks in designing what could have be a constructive and agreeable bill. That was welcome and unprecedented openness. But we have not been invited back since the January 13th meeting when we learned that the bill was going to harm the Colorado Open Records Act instead of improving the anonymity of tabulated ballots. We have been fighting for a foot in the door of almost inaccessible legislative process ever since.
We'll be talking about Tuesday's Wisconsin recall election for a long time to come.
The results were a historic setback for organized labor, which failed to oust Gov. Scott Walker in a citadel of modern progressivism. And how it must have stung that 38% of union households voted for Mr. Walker, up a point from 2010 when he was first elected.
This could be a self-reinforcing cycle, bought and paid for by Republican funders, perpetuated by those who continually vote against their own best interests.
Walmart's outsourcing of jobs is driving down wages at American factories, according to a report from the National Employment Law Project.
Instead of employing its own factory employees, Walmart subcontracts many of the jobs to outside companies that have histories of low wages and labor violations, the report said.
"These outsourced workers laboring on Walmart's behalf toil at the bottom of a complex hierarchy of intermediaries and in alternative employment schemes that leave them vulnerable to significant worker rights abuses and unsure where to seek redress," said the report, which also noted that workers at multiple Walmart-contracted facilities have sued their employers for violating minimum wage laws and cheating them out of pay.
And I never did believe that buying cheap crap cheaply made up for the titanic pressures on manufacturing and wages that Walmart can wield.
The right-leaning Colorado Observer reported last week that Jessica Peck was "outraged, stunned--and strangely flattered" when her organization was named in a recent Colorado Ethics Watch complaint to the IRS.
The Observer piece didn't explain why Peck was "outraged and stunned," but it did say that Peck was flattered because her organization is considered important and powerful enough to be taken seriously by Colorado Ethics Watch.
If I'm a reporter, and someone tells me they're flattered to be accused of violating IRS rules, I'd present an itsy bitsy bit of detail about the alleged violations.
For a sense of what not to do, meanwhile, check out the website of The Denver Post. The Post's coverage area has recently seen what might be called a "birther lite" controversy, sparked when incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Coffman said this to supporters: "I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don't know that. But I do know this, that in his heart, he's not an American. He's just not an American." [...]
[The Denver Post's] credibility took a further hit thanks to the paper's decision to publish on Thursday a column by Mike Rosen, an AM radio host at Denver's KOA, under the headline "Mike Coffman was right about Obama in the first place."
Much of the column is devoted to agreeing with Coffman's statement that Obama is not an American "in his heart," and to pillorying the president with a barrage of culture-war epithets: "leftist academic ideologues, blame-America-firsters and would-be revolutionaries," etc., etc.
To my eye, it's poor writing and poor political argument, but if the Post wants to make sure the Fox & Friends niche is represented in its opinion pages, that's the paper's choice.
Unfortunately, the Post is probably driven by that very need. I have a feeling the editors still can't shake the assumption that the halfway point between Democrats and Republicans is where the common sense center lives. Republicans pushed us off that cliff years ago.
Did we need printed proof of Mike Rosen's proud ignorance by way of the Post? Isn't 15 hours per week enough? I'm glad he did the deed - the smackdown has been universal. And the fact that Mike Coffman - and Mike Rosen - are both birthers is on the record and beyond doubt.
Poor Mike Rosen just can't help himself. And he can't help but inflame his high-motivation, low-information voter/listeners. Rosen says today that Mike Coffman was correct in his slander and lies about Barack Obama. Since these guys are going after so many aspects of Obama's presidency, and COPols has proven Rosen is by definition a "birther", let's just look at another Obama criticism: the hyperbolic and completely irrational charge that Barack Obama (and all his constituents and supporters - that's you and me, folks) are European Socialists with a hidden Hatred of America.
Of course, no amount of evidence, no rational discussions, no comparisons of policies across the world will convince Rosen and his listeners otherwise. Nothing will stop the irrational hatred of a man who is implementing many fairly conservative (note: dictionary definition) policies, many of which were supported by Republicans in their own form or as policies before Obama also endorsed them.
Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Don't confuse this definition with the definition of "government" or "society" in general. If we have no rules, no common reference for acceptable behavior, we have anarchy -- which no one here advocates.
