Tom is down there visiting his daughters and trying to convince the city to open fire on Ft. Sumter again........
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Monday, November 28, 2011
Barney Frank not running for re-election
A little gift from heaven today.
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Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts does not intend to seek re-election in 2012, his office said Monday, closing out a career of more than three decades in Congress capped by last year's passage of legislation imposing new regulations on Wall Street.
Frank, 71 and a lifelong liberal, won a House seat in 1980 was one of the first lawmakers to announce that he is gay. He scheduled an early afternoon news conference in Newton, Mass., to make a formal announcement of his retirement plans.
Sixteen other Democrats have announced plans not to seek new House terms in 2012, compared with six Republicans.
Senators look to repatriate 1804 commandos of Tripoli
For years, the Navy has been reluctant to reclaim the remains of its first 13 commandos, who perished in a failed raid on Tripoli Harbor in Libya in 1804 — but pressure has been growing in Congress to force it to do just that.
A final showdown could happen this week in the Senate, where Sen. Dean Heller, Nevada Republican, has offered an amendment to compel the Navy to bring home the mangled bodies of the 13, who died while trying to destroy a pirate fleet during the Barbary Wars.
But the Navy is quietly resisting, telling senators that it would prefer to leave the bodies in the two different burial locations.
“These servicemen are currently buried in poorly kept mass graves far away from the country they served and died defending,” Mr. Heller said. “Bringing them home and giving these men a proper military burial will allow their families and other Americans an opportunity to better remember the sacrifices they made for our great nation.”
That repatriation is even a real option is a major turn of events, made possible by politics.
For much of the past few decades, the chances were stymied by the turbulent U.S. relationship with Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi, who alternately ran cold, then hot, then cold toward the idea, which was being pushed by descendants of the commandos.
But the Gadhafi regime now has been overthrown, and the repatriation effort has the support of the two national heavyweight veterans groups, the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
But the Navy stands in the way.
On this day 70 years ago, Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini officially meets with Adolf Hitler to discuss “the Jewish problem”
I've posted about it before, but this surfaced today.
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On this day 70 years ago, Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini officially meets with Adolf Hitler to discuss “the Jewish problem”
Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem was the “most prominent Arab” figure in Palestine during the Mandatory period
Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13 Billion
Roundabout via Matthew
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
The Future of the Obama Coalition
Via Tom
For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
It is instructive to trace the evolution of a political strategy based on securing this coalition in the writings and comments, over time, of such Democratic analysts as Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira. Both men were initially determined to win back the white working-class majority, but both currently advocate a revised Democratic alliance in which whites without college degrees are effectively replaced by well-educated socially liberal whites in alliance with the growing ranks of less affluent minority voters, especially Hispanics.
The 2012 approach treats white voters without college degrees as an unattainable cohort.
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