Fox's Sean Hannity Plays The Victim Card In Jennings Witch Hunt

Hannity Plays The Victim Card In Jennings Witch Hunt
Reported by Ellen at Hewshounds

After engaging in a relentless witch hunt against President Obama’s “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings, even after his accusations against Jennings have been debunked, Sean Hannity has not only refused to drop his attacks, he has declared himself the victim. While he was at it, Hannity added a new smear against Jennings, comparing him to disgraced Congressman Mark Foley. But there are at least two big differences between Jennings and Foley that negate the comparison. Nobody on the panel, not even supposed liberal Nina Easton, pointed out the dissimilarities. With video.

As I posted previously, Hannity’s original pretext for attacking Jennings was that he had supposedly encouraged the “statutory rape” of a gay high school sophomore, 20 years ago, when the student told Jennings about an affair with an older man. Instead of reporting the incident to authorities, Jennings said he hoped the student knew to use a condom. Since then, the then-student has come forward with a driver’s license showing that he was 16, the age of consent, at the time. Instead of dropping the attack, Hannity moved on to smear Jennings for saying he admired Harry Hay, a respected gay rights activist. Why? Because Hay had been supportive of NAMBLA. Hannity never pointed to any indication that Jennings supported NAMBLA nor did he ever offer any evidence of any improper conduct since Jennings joined the Obama administration.

But as Hannity continued to smear Jennings again last night (10/6/09), he painted himself as the victim.

During the “Great American Panel” segment, Hannity announced, “I’m being attacked… relentlessly by the left because I’m saying that I think Kevin Jennings… should be fired.” Hannity declared “I’m not convinced” that the student was really 16 at the time. “But that’s neither here or there. Jennings was the one who said the kid was 15.” Yeah, and Jennings has since said he made a mistake. This happened 20 years ago and has absolutely nothing to do with his job now.
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This is in no way a spam blog. Note that the blog is not monetized in anyway. I go through some trouble and expense for the graphics, whether they're Photoshop enhanced photo art, historical photos or illustrations. The news content is meant for educational purposes and an alternative to the mainstream media. I suspect the later is why someone is trying to censor this blog.

Wellpoint Sues Maine to Guarantee Their Profits

Wellpoint Sues Maine to Guarantee Their Profits
Now, WellPoint's affiliate, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is suing the state of Maine for refusing to guarantee it a profit margin in the midst of a painful recession.

Anthem Health Plans of Maine, a subsidiary of WellPoint, is suing the state because they want to increase premium rates by 18.5% on their 12,000 individual insurance policy holders, so they can guarantee themselves a 3% profit margin. This story shows how silly it would be to solely rely on regulation to rein in insurance industry practices.

Brave New Films has put together a video exposing the practices of Anthem and its parent company WellPoint. You can send your friends in Maine the news about this lawsuit, to highlight this practice. Maine Superior Court will consider this case on Wednesday.

Texas Lawmakers Who Voted Against The Recovery Act Now Beg For Stimulus Funds For NASA


Fox News tirelessly advanced false accusation that Jennings covered up "statutory rape"

Fox News and its websites Fox Nation and FoxNews.com repeatedly advanced the falsehood that Department of Education official Kevin Jennings, in the words of Fox News host Bill Hemmer, knew of a "statutory rape" and "never reported it."

Conservative Majority in Supreme Court Threatens Constitution and Most Basic Freedoms

Conservative Majority in Supreme Court Threatens Constitution and Most Basic Freedoms
October 5 marks the beginning of a new Supreme Court term, a session that will marked by high-profile cases that the Court's conservative majority could use to reshape the law. In its first full term together, the Roberts Court's conservative bloc immediately began cutting back on women's reproductive freedom, entrenching public school segregation, and undermining equal pay in the workforce, among other things, prompting retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to comment that she fears that some of her decisions "are being dismantled" by the current, more conservative-leaning court. "If you think you've been helpful, and then it's dismantled, you think, 'Oh, dear,'" she said. "But life goes on. It's not always positive." Yet while the conservative justices are perfectly willing to thumb their noses at precedent, they occasionally restrain themselves from politically-charged rulings likely to inspire a congressional backlash. Last term, for example, the Court pleasantly surprised the civil rights community by resisting the temptation to eviscerate two landmark prohibitions on race discrimination. This term, the Court has already agreed to hear more potentially-earthshaking cases than it has in years; the only question is how aggressive the Court will be in pushing its right-wing agenda.

PLAYING TO THE BASE: No one was more excited about President Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court than the right-wing "Justice Sunday" crowd, which crowed that by confirming Bush's judges, conservatives could "bring the rule and reign of the Cross to America and we can change America on our watch." This term, the conservative majority Bush built has plenty of opportunities to reward these supporters. The most famous case on the Court's docket is McDonald v. City of Chicago, which could overrule a 123 year-old rule holding that the states are free to regulate firearms. Conservatives, however, have far more than guns at stake this term. In United States v. Comstock, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will have their first opportunity to weigh in on the scope of Congress' power to enact laws that substantially affect interstate commerce. Should the Court roll back Congress' power, they would delight "tenthers" enraptured by the notion that every law conservatives disagree with somehow violates Congress' constitutional authority. Additionally, in a case called Salazar v. Buono, the Court could tear down the wall of separation between church and state. For years, O'Connor was the key fifth vote upholding the Constitution's ban on government endorsements of religion, and Alito is widely expected to provide the final vote to allow this ban to be whittled away into near non-existence.

A NEW BALANCE OF POWER: Two cases this term could also completely rework American election law, handing powerful conservative interests unprecedented power to manipulate elections. The first is Citizens United v. FEC, in which the conservative bloc appears poised to overrule a century-old rule permitting laws limiting the influence of corporate money in politics. Should the Court gut this rule, as it is widely expected to do, the health insurance industry will be free to spend billions to defeat lawmakers who support meaningful health reform; the tobacco industry will have free reign to spend limitless sums to elect politicians who will immunize them from accountability under the law; and Wal-Mart will be free to unleash its massive treasury to help elect a Congress which will strangle unions and freeze or eliminate the minimum wage. Also looming is the Court's decision in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which concerns the power of Congress to create "independent agencies" whose members cannot be fired at the whim of the president. Should the Court gut Congress' power to create such agencies, the next Karl Rove could pressure the FCC to fine the Rachel Maddow Show while ignoring the antics of Glenn Beck, and he could strongarm the FEC into manipulating elections to benefit a future president's party.

THE ILLUSION OF JUSTICE: Another unfortunate pattern in the Roberts Court's decisions is a belief that justice has been served if a rigid set of technical rules has been complied with. Thus, the conservative bloc held in its first full term together that an inmate who filed court documents two days late lost his right to appeal -- even though the untimely filing was caused by erroneous instructions from a federal district judge. Similarly, the Court held earlier this year that a potentially innocent man has no right to access DNA evidence that could exonerate him of a 1993 rape and kidnapping, even though he offered to pay for DNA testing himself. This term, several cases will show whether the justices still believe that unyielding rigidity is a substitute for justice. Among these are Wood v. Allen, which asks whether a capital defendant's right to an attorney was met when his life was placed in the hands of a brand new lawyer with little or no criminal experience, and Pottawattamie County v. Harrington, which asks whether a general rule protecting prosecutors from lawsuits also immunizes them from accountability when they willfully fabricate evidence against a defendant.

Is it True That Everything Bad That Happens is Obama's Fault

Republicans know whom to blame for the problems in the world -- no matter when they started

he list of Republican complaints against President Obama is, by now, fairly long. He's leading the country into socialism. He's doing too many things at once. He's not bipartisan enough. He's an enemy of humanity. And, of course, he bailed out Wall Street and the auto manufacturers late last year.

If that last item sounds a little odd, you may have been paying more attention to recent history than some GOP lawmakers have. Republicans have gotten so carried away lately with objecting to whatever the White House is up to that their rhetoric has sometimes seemed to be tinkering with the past. Though the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the Detroit bailout were both started by the Bush administration before Obama took office, the GOP is happy to lump those policies in with other gripes if it means voters grumble more. And policy problems Obama inherited when he took office are slowly, but surely, being transformed into his fault.

"We may be one more bailout away, one more so-called reform away, from losing our way as a nation of the people for the people and by the people," Senate GOP boss Mitch McConnell told like-minded conservatives at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit a couple of weeks ago. He hinted that he knew the real facts, but papered them over pretty quickly: "These worries have been building for a long time, even before last year's election, but they reached a new level in recent months."



Other Republicans have sought to roll back TARP and end the assistance to G.M. and Chrysler -- both policies that began under Bush. (Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby actually blamed Obama explicitly for TARP over the summer.) Speaking at the same conference as McConnell recently, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota started talking about some nefarious, if nebulous, concept known as "bailout nation." Citing the work of an (unnamed) economist from Arizona State University, Bachmann said Obama was up to no good. "Prior to the inception of bailout nation -- in other words, less than one year ago -- 100 percent of private business profits were private. But since the inception of bailout nation ... with all the government takeovers -- the current mentality that rules Washington, D.C. -- 30 percent of private business profits are now owned or controlled by the federal government."

Of course, the problem with that line of attack is that TARP passed almost exactly a year ago, at Bush's urging and with votes from Republicans and Democrats alike. But why let logic get in the way of a good talking point? The GOP appears to be playing on voters' confusion for political gain. As far as some voters are concerned, the Wall Street bailout and the Detroit aid from last fall are just part of the Obama spending spree Republicans are always talking up.

"There's no question that there's some confusion about where [the bailouts] really started," one Democratic pollster said. "When people talk about the spending, mostly what they're talking about is those kinds of bailouts; it's the first thing they go to ... There's a certain amount of confusion between that and the stimulus. For some number of people, the bailouts are part of the stimulus. All those get conflated to some extent in people's minds."

Which could add up to bad news for Democrats. Obama's job approval ratings seem to be recovering from the bruising he took in surveys during August's town hall furor, but anything the GOP can do to pile lingering Bush resentment on Obama doesn't help. "Obama's [poll numbers] would be higher were it not for this bad economy," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. "People don't blame him directly [for Bush's economic policies], but it can't help but seep into their overall assessment."

The attempt to blame Obama for the whole state of the world isn't limited to TARP, though that's the most glaring example. Republicans routinely talk about the number of jobs lost since the administration took office, as if the entire recession started at the stroke of noon on Jan. 20. "Americans are asking, 'Where are the jobs?'" House GOP leader John Boehner said Thursday. "But since the 'stimulus' was signed, we've lost roughly 3 million private sector jobs, and we're nearing 10 percent unemployment." True enough. But you rarely hear the GOP mentioning that unemployment was at 7.6 percent in January 2009, Bush's last month on the job. Or that White House economists believe that without the stimulus, another million jobs would have been lost this year so far. Some GOP strategists even seem to have forgotten who was responsible for the federal government in August 2005. "Here is the government that gave us the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the Post Office, and the effectiveness of Katrina, and now they want to take over our healthcare?" Republican message guru Frank Luntz told Fox News' Sean Hannity after Obama's healthcare reform speech last month. "Sean, use those three together and you have got a powerful message." And sure enough, at the Values Voter Summit, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins used the same line.

For Republicans, any confusion among voters who don't like the way things are going is, of course, just fine. The public is "putting that all into one bucket of 'Washington spun out of control,'" said GOP strategist Kevin Madden. "It allows us to realign ourselves with Main Street anxieties about Washington's inattention to spending ... independents are very aware of things like deficits, and they want to puke in their hats when they hear that the federal budget deficit this year alone is $1.4 trillion already."

But there could be another side to the blame game come November 2010, if the economy starts to recover and voters think the stimulus had an effect. A Democrat painted a picture of next fall: TARP funds being repaid, new jobs being created, the White House grabbing credit for all of it. "People are going to say, 'Well, I am seeing an impact, so it was a pretty good idea,'" the strategist said. If that all comes to pass, "the boil that is the bailout also gets lanced." Which basically means this particular political problem for Democrats, like most, could solve itself as the economy heals. Until then, though, don't expect Republicans to give up on revisionist history. After all, it's working so far.

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About those deficits that suddenly after eight years of Bush and Republicans spending like "drunken sailors", The 4 percent solution

Let me take as a starting point OMB’s Mid-session review, specifically its projections for 2019. To the extent that these projections are either too optimistic or too pessimistic, what follows would have to be adjusted; but OMB is, I believe, trying to be reasonable and intellectually honest, so it’s a useful jump-off point.

One measure of OMB’s honesty is that it doesn’t try to pretend that all will be well, even by 2019. As of 2019, according to the projection, we’ll have a federal deficit of 4% of GDP, and federal debt net of financial assets of about 70 percent of GDP.

Would this be sustainable? No, although it’s not too bad. A simple criterion for sustainability is that the government at least stabilize the debt-GDP ratio. Assume that the economy’s long-run growth rate is 2.5 percent, and that inflation is 2 percent. Then this implies nominal GDP growth of 4.5%. To stabilize debt at 70% of GDP would require a budget deficit of no more than 0.7 times 4.5 = 3.15 percent of GDP — call it 3 percent. So the terminal deficit in the OMB projections is too large.

If that were all there were to it, however, it wouldn’t look so bad. Finding 1 percent of GDP in higher taxes and/or spending cuts shouldn’t be that hard — and won’t be, if America has a sane political scene by 2019. (Let’s hope.)

But that isn’t the end of the story, of course. There are two factors that make longer-term budget projections look much, much worse: (1) an aging population (2) “excess cost growth” in health care — the tendency for health spending to grow faster than GDP.

We can do something about (2) — and in fact, we’d better, or there’s no hope for the budget. So let’s assume that by 2019 health reform has actually brought excess cost growth to zero. Oh, and also assume that we have a can opener. Whatever. Seriously, we basically have to solve the health cost problem, or nothing else matters.

But that still leaves (1). Now, by 2019 many but not all of the baby boomers will already have retired, so that there won’t be all that much demography still in the pipeline. But the demographic effect will still be substantial. SSA projects about a 25% rise in the ratio of retirees to workers between 2019 and 2050. This would imply, other things equal, a roughly 25% rise in the ratio of age-related social insurance spending to GDP. The mid-term review has Social Security and Medicare taking up 8.7% of GDP in 2019; add in some of Medicaid (nursing care, etc.) and we’re talking maybe 10%, rising over time to 12.5%. Hey, this is back-of-the-envelope; it’s supposed to be rough.

What I read from this is that between the slightly unsustainable deficit in 2019 and the demography to follow, we’ll eventually have to find 3.5% — call it 4 — in fiscal consolidation even if health reform ends excess cost growth.

That’s a big but not disastrous number. We could raise that much in taxes alone without inflicting huge economic damage. We could make up some of the number if health reform does more than end excess cost growth, and rolls spending as a percent of GDP part way back toward European levels. We could cut Social Security benefits — although if you look at the numbers, it would take draconian cuts to make a major dent that way.

The point, though, is that if we get real health care reform AND we get a sane political scene the long-term fiscal outlook is serious but not scary.

But will President Glenn Beck be willing to sign the necessary legislation?

CIA's 'Enhanced Interrogation' Techniques Were Counterproductive

CIA's 'Enhanced Interrogation' Techniques Were Counterproductive
The author of a new report suggests the belief that harsh interrogation and torture techniques are effective is a form of folk neuroscience that is not supported by scientific evidence, and does not fit with what we know about how the brain works.

The new paper was published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Professor Shane O'Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin. The paper reviewed previously secret scientific documents that were released in April, to determine the effect on memory and brain function of the severe interrogation techniques used by the CIA during the Bush administration.

Professor O'Mara found that so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques, such as prolonged sleep deprivation, exploiting phobias, being confined in stressful or painful positions, and waterboarding, result in the production of the stress hormones cortisol and the catecholamines.

The scientific evidence shows that areas of the brain most concerned with memory, the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, can be damaged by the stress hormones, and there can be tissue loss if the stress is continued. This makes it less likely for the subject to accurately recall information, and more likely for false memories to replace real ones. If the stress continues long enough the subject becomes unable to distinguish between the real and false memories.

Techniques of this nature are still defended by some intelligence officers, who consider them able to extract useful information from suspects. Other intelligence officers consider the practices counterproductive because victims supply the information they think the interrogators want to hear in order to make the torture stop.

The same phenomenon was also found in investigations of almost 250 police interrogations in which the accused was convicted and often pleaded guilty even though DNA evidence later proved they were innocent. In many cases the interrogated person had come to believe the police allegations and incorporated them into their own memories as if they were true.

Professor O'Mara's review of the literature on interrogation techniques reported that there is a wealth of literature showing that the extreme stress of severe interrogation and torture compromises brain function and memory. According to O'Mara these techniques are based on bad science, and they actually destroy memories they are supposed to reveal. There is no way to determine whether information revealed during the interrogation is true or not.

Capitalism is Great But America's Brand of it is Broken

The Forbes 400 Shows Why Our Nation Is Falling Apart
It's great to know that during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion. Well golly, that's only a 2 percent increase, much less than the double digit returns the wealthy had grown accustomed to. But a 2 percent increase is a whole lot more than losing 40 percent of your 401k. And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.

Collectively, those 400 have $1.57 trillion in wealth. It's hard to get your mind around a number like that. The way I do it is to imagine that we were still living during the great radical Eisenhower era of the 1950s when marginal income tax rates hit 91 percent. Taxes were high back in the 1950s because people understood that constraining wild extremes of wealth would make our country stronger and prevent another depression. (Well, what did those old fogies know?)

Had we kept those high progressive taxes in place, instead of removing them, especially during the Reagan era, the Forbes 400 might each be worth "only" $100 million instead of $3.9 billion each. So let's imagine that the rest of their wealth, about $1.53 trillion, were available for the public good.

What does $1.53 trillion buy?

It's more than enough to insure the uninsured for the next twenty years or more.

It's more than enough to create a Manhattan Project to solve global warming by developing renewable energy and a green, sustainable manufacturing sector.

And here's my favorite: It's more than enough to endow every public college and university in the country so that all of our children could gain access to higher education for free, forever!

Instead, we embarked on a grand experiment to see what would happen if we deregulated finance and changed the tax code so that millionaires could turn into billionaires. And even after that experiment failed in the most spectacular way, our system seems trapped into staying on the same deregulated path.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

Slide Show: The Far-Right Fringe

Republican S.C. Gov. Sanford doesn't want ethics report released

S.C. Gov. Sanford doesn't want ethics report released

Gov. Mark Sanford(R) has asked the South Carolina Supreme Court to block a state ethics panel investigating the governor from releasing its initial findings to lawmakers who could decide to remove him from office.

Sanford, who vowed to fight "tooth and nail" any effort to remove him from office, argues that releasing the report to lawmakers could be used for political purposes and could compromise his defense.

Sanford argues that only prosecutorial bodies can gain access to the State Ethics Commission's preliminary report, which is akin to an indictment and does not contain the governor's full defense.

The Ethics Commission maintains that the S.C. House would become a prosecutor, and therefore entitled to the report, if it opens impeachment proceedings against Sanford.

Sanford has been under scrutiny since returning from a secret five-day trip to Argentina in June and admitting to an extramarital affair with a woman who lives there.

Attorney General Henry McMaster asked the Ethics Commission to review Sanford's use of state and private planes, his purchase of business-class airfare and his use of campaign funds.

ACLU: FBI ‘manipulating’ debate on Patriot Act reform

The FBI is abusing the powers given to it under the Patriot Act in a way that is stifling the current debate about reforming that law, says the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The FBI continues to use the gag order provision of the Patriot Act’s national security letter (NSL) statute to suppress key information about the agency’s misuse of NSLs,” the group said in a statement released Wednesday.

National security letters (NSLs), created under the Patriot Act security bill that was passed in the aftermath of 9/11, allow the FBI to demand sensitive information about users of facilities like libraries and Internet service providers, and then bar those organizations from revealing that the order was ever given.

The ACLU’s claim comes weeks after Senate Democrats introduced the Justice Act, an omnibus security bill its authors, including Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), say is designed to protect civil rights threatened by the Patriot Act.