Who Would've Thought, It Figures from Daily Kos

excerpt from http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/12/6/44527/5802/211/669986

So here is a footnote to the Enrons and the Washington Mutuals of 2008; to all the companies that grew temporarily fat on the illusory con-game of the Bush "ownership society."  A particularly ironic footnote.  Let BearingPoint be the point man and standard-bearer of this message: Deregulation and Friedmanite proposals are not arguments to be rebutted, but scams to be revealed.  No one in power who asserts them, means them seriously.  Those underneath who take the rhetoric at face value, who vote for "conservative principles," are not so much wrong as suckers.  But this poetic moment of justice for BearingPoint is also a reminder.  As bad as things are here, they go far worse for the people in countries where we forcibly export this deregulatory sham; where the citizens never voted nor asked nor fell for it, at all.

Your Weekly Address from the President-Elect

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGpIT2bVZDw

Obama: Lobbyist docs go online from Raw Story Breaking News

Special interest meetings will see full disclosure on Web, says President-elect.

entire article http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/06/obama-to-open-interest-group-talks/

President-elect Barack Obama's transition team will publicize any official meetings that staffers have with outside interest groups and will post online any policy documents the groups present during those meetings, according to rules put in place Friday.

"Every day, we meet with organizations who present ideas for the transition and the administration, both orally and in writing. We want to ensure that we give the American people a seat at the table and that we receive the benefit of their feedback," transition chief John Podesta wrote in a memo to his staff, obtained by The Washington Times.

The rules apply to "official meetings," which Mr. Podesta defined as those in which at least three of the participants are from outside organizations. Any written document those in attendance present to the transition team also will be posted on the Web site www.Change .gov.

Mr. Podesta said the transition staff should consider the rules "a floor, not a ceiling," and consider posting documents even from meetings that don't meet the standard of at least three outside participants.

Mr. Obama has vowed to run an open transition process and to allow more sunlight on the way his administration operates once he takes office. During the Democratic primaries he contrasted that with the way Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his then-rival and now his nominee to be secretary of state, ran her health care task force when her husband was president.

Obama: Biggest public works investment since Eisenhower planned from Daily Kos

via http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/12/6/9452/77027/278/669927

In this morning's weekly address, President-Elect Obama promised to roll out the biggest investment in public infrastructure since the federal highway system of the 1950's was undertaken. In addition to roads and bridges, the new administration will upgrade public schools, build out broadband, make public buildings energy efficient and modernize medical record-keeping.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGpIT2bVZDw

Good morning.

Yesterday, we received another painful reminder of the serious economic challenge our country is facing when we learned that 533,000 jobs were lost in November alone, the single worst month of job loss in over three decades. That puts the total number of jobs lost in this recession at nearly 2 million.

But this isn't about numbers. It's about each of the families those numbers represent. It's about the rising unease and frustration that so many of you are feeling during this holiday season. Will you be able to put your kids through college? Will you be able to afford health care? Will you be able to retire with dignity and security? Will your job or your husband's job or your daughter's job be the next one cut?

These are the questions that keep so many Americans awake at night. But it is not the first time these questions have been asked. We have faced difficult times before, times when our economic destiny seemed to be slipping out of our hands. And at each moment, we have risen to meet the challenge, as one people united by a sense of common purpose. And I know that Americans can rise to the moment once again.

But we need action – and action now. That is why I have asked my economic team to develop an economic recovery plan for both Wall Street and Main Street that will help save or create at least two and a half million jobs, while rebuilding our infrastructure, improving our schools, reducing our dependence on oil, and saving billions of dollars.

We won't do it the old Washington way. We won't just throw money at the problem. We'll measure progress by the reforms we make and the results we achieve – by the jobs we create, by the energy we save, by whether America is more competitive in the world.

Today, I am announcing a few key parts of my plan. First, we will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that. We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won't just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work.

Second, we will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s. We'll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we'll set a simple rule – use it or lose it. If a state doesn't act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they'll lose the money.

Third, my economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen.  We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.

As we renew our schools and highways, we'll also renew our information superhighway. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I'm President – because that's how we'll strengthen America's competitiveness in the world.

In addition to connecting our libraries and schools to the internet, we must also ensure that our hospitals are connected to each other through the internet. That is why the economic recovery plan I'm proposing will help modernize our health care system – and that won't just save jobs, it will save lives. We will make sure that every doctor's office and hospital in this country is using cutting edge technology and electronic medical records so that we can cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help save billions of dollars each year.

These are a few parts of the economic recovery plan that I will be rolling out in the coming weeks. When Congress reconvenes in January, I look forward to working with them to pass a plan immediately. We need to act with the urgency this moment demands to save or create at least two and a half million jobs so that the nearly two million Americans who've lost them know that they have a future. And that's exactly what I intend to do as President of the United States.

Thanks for listening.

Aside from the commitment to what sounds like a great progressive stimulus plan, one sentence struck me: Will your job or your husband's job or your daughter's job be the next one cut?. Read that closely. In a speech about universal fears and hardship, he is addressing his primary listeners as women. Never have I heard sentence construction like that from a president -- women addressed directly in a non-"women's issues" setting as legitimate, fully fledged and very concerned and invested breadwinners. The effect is stunning.

Supreme Court Silent on Obama Birth Certificate Lawsuit from Chicagoist

The Supreme Court made no announcement today whether or not it will hear Donofrio v. Wells, the lawsuit challenging the election based on Barack Obama's release - or alleged lack thereof - of his official birth certificate and his citizenship status. (The court did decide to hear two cases, one of which is the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, an Al Qaeda combatant seized on American soil.) Of course, there's no guarantee the Court will ever actually issue any statement on the Obama case since it was simply petitioned to the court and, along with hundreds of other cases, could be dismissed without any comment at all. But as Frank James, over at The Swamp, says, "the lack of an announcement doesn't mean the court definitely won't hear Donofrio." So either we will or we won't. Hmm.

rest http://chicagoist.com/2008/12/05/no_word_from_supreme_court_on_obama.php

Exclusive video: Tiny crowd prays Supreme Court will invalidate Obama presidency from Raw Story Breaking News

A small but determined band of conservative protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court Friday morning to pray the justices would invalidate Barack Obama's election.

The court was deciding whether it would hear oral arguments in Donofrio v. Wells, which argues that Obama's placement on the New Jersey presidential election ballot was invalid because he is not a natural born citizen. The justices are expected to dismiss the case.

Discussions with several of the 18 demonstrators who gathered despite freezing temperatures revealed disjointed, confusing and increasingly conspiratorial reasons for their presence. Several alleged varying degrees of a coverup to hide the circumstances surrounding Obama's birth; none were willing to accept the much simpler explanation that Obama was in fact a natural-born citizen eligible to be president.


rest http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Demonstrators_pray_Supreme_Court_will_invalidate_1205.html

The movement to sue Obama out of office for not being a citizen is analyzed here in this article from crooks and liars

entire article at http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/obamas-citizenship-wingnuts-desperat

It seems the outer fringes of wingnuttia are still clinging to a last little acorn of a conspiracy theory as their last hope for stopping Barack Obama from becoming president. It comes down to this:

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama's election.

The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer's supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation's highest court.

The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.

Legal experts say the appeal has little chance of succeeding, despite appearing on the court's schedule. Legal records show it is only the tip of an iceberg of nationwide efforts seeking to derail Obama's election over accusations that he either wasn't born a U.S. citizen or that he later renounced his citizenship in Indonesia.

David Weigel at Slate has a rundown on how widespread this has gotten, from the Donofrio case now before the court, to 9/11 troofer Philip Berg's lawsuit, to WorldNetDaily's ongoing fundraiser, to the peculiar case of one Bob Schulz:

That's the same argument made by Bob Schultz, the founder of the paleoconservative We the People Foundation for Constitutional Education. On Monday and Wednesday, Schultz gave the Obama conspiracy its biggest burst of attention—at least since Rush Limbaugh speculated that this was the real reason Obama visited his dying grandmother—by purchasing full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune. In the "open letters" to Obama, Schultz asserts that Obama's certificate of live birth is "forged," that his "grandmother is record[ed] on tape saying she attended your birth in Kenya," and that Obama would have lost his citizenship anyway when Ann Dunham married her second, Indonesian husband, Lolo Soetoro. (Lou Dobbs would be delighted to discover that the 14th Amendment can be nullified so easily.)

Schultz has asked Obama to allow forensic investigators to inspect Obama's files in Hawaii's Department of State. "Have one guy go in and do his thing," explains Schultz. "Have another guy go in, do his thing, put the certificate back in the envelope. These are scientists. They should all come to the same conclusion."

Eric Ward observes that the Schulz campaign is being touted heavily by the white-nationalist crowd. That's unsurprising: Schulz has been selling far-right tax theories to gullible suckers for awhile now, and as Ward observes, this is a crowd that has been a major seedbed for far-right organizing for a considerable time.

Schulz has been running an outfit called We the People Foundation for a number of years that sells these schemes. He has been featured on Fox News a couple of times -- Brit Hume interviewed him once propounding a tax scheme that is built upon a hash of groundless conspiracy theories that have their origins in the far-right Posse Comitatus and other extremist tax protest schemes. It was, in fact, also remarkably similar to the Montana Freemen's theories. And for the duration of the interviews, Hume listened intently and evidenced no skepticism whatsoever about the fantastic claims regarding federal taxes Schulz was making.

This wasn't the only time Fox interviewed Schulz. When he staged a "hunger strike" (there's no evidence he actually went without food) later that year, Fox's Hannity and Colmes interviewed him and were only a little less credulous than Hume.

Obama thanks Illinois donors personally at reception from Daily Kos

via http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/12/4/21394/1172/733/669488

John McCormick of the Chicago Tribune just filed a pool report--complete with a touching speech by Barack Obama--on a reception that the president-elect for his early supporters in Chicago and members of his finance committee. Reading this, you get a sudden stunning sense of just how far the man has come and what a journey it has been.

After leaving his transition office in Chicago's Loop at 5:55 p.m., the PEOTUS and his motorcade traveled approximately two blocks to The Standard Club.

The private club, located at 320 South Plymouth Court, played host to a thank you reception for many of Barack Obama's fundraisers, mostly from Illinois. Obama entered the building at 5:56 p.m. and the pool was held in the van.

After holding at the base of a stairway inside, we were ushered into the room about 7:17 p.m. There were about 100 people in the small room and they all stood as he spoke.

In the back were the standard buffet tables and a bar (cheese, bread and crackers were some of the offerings).

Obama had spoken privately with people before we entered and also posed for photos. Michelle Obama was in the room as well, but did not speak as part of the brief program that we saw.

The president elect spoke for about seven minutes (a few quick quotes are below). He was introduced by John Rogers and James Crown, key members of his Illinois finance committee.

Penny Pritzker, the chairwoman of his national finance committee, was also in the room, although did not speak while we were there. Aides said the crowd was a mixture of Illinois finance committee members and national finance committee members.

"I could not have asked for better leadership," Obama said of his finance committee leaders.

Obama said he wanted to do the small event because of the long friendships in the room.

"This is a gathering of friends, and we wanted to do it precisely because all of you are friends. You know in politics, often times you say folks are friends, when what you really mean is they supported you and sometimes only after it became apparent you were winning. In this case, it's absolutely true."

Obama looked out onto the crowd and said he saw classmates, friends, co-workers, past bosses and some of his earliest political supporters, including Bettylu Saltzman.

"I'm almost speechless here, which I don't usually get, because this is really a tapestry of our lives. You know, we workout out at the East Bank Club. We worked on education stuff together. We've rabble-roused together. We've played basketball together. We have golfed, not so well, together. We've sat on foundation boards together. And we've seen frustrations, but also seen some dreams come true together. And so, I just want you to know that all of you had more to do with us being successful than just raising money. You helped shape Michelle and myself. Many of you have been part of our children's lives. Many of you have helped to support us, through thick and through thin. And so, I'm just very grateful to all of you. Now, we've got a lot of work to do, and I don't want to sugar-coat the amount of work there is to be done."

"We didn't just win, but we ran and won in the right way," Obama said.

rest at http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/12/4/21394/1172/733/669488

GQ Names Chicago "City of the Year" from Chicagoist

GQ Magazine has named Chicago its 2008 City of the Year, concentrating on four different categories: Film (Batman, check); Literature (Aleksandar Hemon, check); Architecture (Spire, um...); and Politics (Mayor Daley? Seriously). Okay, so maybe we have a few issues with some of the things they picked. Hizzonah is not exactly high on our happy-with list right now. Still, what with Obama's election and the Olympic bid, we guess we understand the focus on our fair city right now. At least it's better than that New York Times story.

REST http://chicagoist.com/2008/12/04/gq_names_chicago_city_of_the_year.php

Bush, Paulson, and their T.A.R.P. of S.N.A.F.U. | BuzzFlash.org

via http://buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/252

Let's just consider it their parting gift of wanton incompetence, the final bow of squalid mismanagement, the last tip 'o the hat to operatic farce and unaccountability.

As the Washington Post reports, while revealing no shock or even dismay: "The Bush administration has failed to adequately oversee its $700 billion bailout program."

Failure, inadequacy, lack of oversight -- three commonly referenced subjects in any story on the Bush regime, which parachute into the same inclusive sentence with almost perfunctory regularity and, after eight years, have devolved to the reportorial level of a yawning S.N.A.F.U.

What the Post takes note of, you see, is that the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has found there is no "guarantee that banks are complying with the plan's limits on conflicts of interest and lavish executive compensation."

What's more, the GAO's recently released investigative report "said the Treasury Department has yet to impose necessary safeguards or decide how to determine whether the program is achieving its goals."

The "evolving nature of the program," said the GAO, has "hampered efforts to put a comprehensive system of internal control in place." And "until such a system is fully developed and implemented, there is heightened risk that the interests of the government and taxpayers may not be adequately protected and that the program objectives may not be achieved in an efficient and effective manner."

Oh, stop. Please stop. You're killing me. What cards, those accountants at the GAO, what with their boundless sense of humor and playful bent for naked irony. To arms! To arms! The Bush Babies with machine guns lack "internal control"; they've put taxpayers at risk; they've thrown "adequate protections" overboard; they -- brace yourself -- don't seem all that "efficient and effective."

Hmmm. What a fine but familiar kettle of fish. Can you say, "Katrina"? Or, "fiscal responsibility"? Or, "Iraq"? Or "Afghanistan" or "Geneva Conventions" or "regulatory oversight" or "independent Justice Department"? If not, just say "S.N.A.F.U."

The proverbial roots of the many problems -- generally defined, simply, as wasteful impotence -- of the $700 billion bailout program, however, would seem to be wedged in the GAO and Post's terminology of "its goals" and "evolving nature."

You will recall the bailout's acronym: T.A.R.P., a tidy, self-explanatory little term that indicated a "relief program" would be established to -- what else? -- relieve banks of their "troubled assets."

Here, for instance, from ABC News, was concise reporting during the week of the bailout bill's Congressional passage: At "the heart of the bill" is the "plan to provide the Treasury with $700 billion to buy troubled assets from financial institutions -- an effort that proponents say will help ease the credit crunch by allowing banks to clear their balance sheets and lend money."

Good enough. That made sense. Banks weren't loaning to one another -- hence to you, or me, or anyone else -- because of their prodigiously valid concern that the institutional loan recipient might be as poisoned by lethally problematic assets as, let's say, Lehman Brothers was.

Consequently, or rather synonymously, credit markets were frozen. But hellfire, if Hank Paulson just relieved those institutions of their mortgage-related doubts, through complex but, we were told, ultimately workable reverse auctions, then the financial sewers would clear and the confidence skies would part and the reciprocal rivers would once again run green.

But in midcourse planning (to use a charitable term), Mr. Paulson instead began heaving mountains of cash on banks that hadn't even asked for the money. Just take it, he insisted -- no bad securities bought, but on the other hand no questions asked and no answers or guarantees demanded.

So they took it. And then, stunned by their good fortune, they kept it.

Meanwhile, those financial sewers still clogged with dubious mortgage-related securities are still running red, extending the period of no confidence in this wreck of an economy created largely by the Bush administration's wholesale absence of oversight and surfeit of farcical incompetence.

What a perfectly fitting, parting gift to the nation.

Obama has postponed the repeal of the Bush tax cuts, and now he's backed off his plan for a windfall profits tax

Ben Smith's Blog: Another tax, cut - Politico.com: "Obama has postponed the repeal of the Bush tax cuts, and now he's backed off his plan for a windfall profits tax -- on the grounds, evidently, that low gas prices may mean the oil companies aren't making windfall profits.

Depending on how you see it, the change is either a welcome adjustment to a changed reality, or another mark that he feels free to dismiss commitments made amid the 'heated campaign rhetoric' he's been deploring lately. (David Sirota, from whom got this news, takes the latter tack.)

Reported the Chronicle: rest http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1208/Another_tax_cut.html

Virginia GOP Chairman Defends Comparison To Bin Laden from Daily Kos

Remember Jeff Frederick, the Virginia GOP chairman who told McCain canvassers to compare Barack Obama to Osama Bin Laden? Well Mr. Frederick is sticking to his guns. Although he concedes his remark was dumb, he's defending it as 'true.'

Va. GOP chief: Obama remark was stupid but true

Virginia's Republican chairman said Tuesday that his remark tying Democrat Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden during the presidential campaign was stupid, but he refused to apologize...

...Frederick was asked about the remark Tuesday during a discussion of the 2008 Virginia presidential campaign with a group of newspaper editors. Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia in 44 years.

"It was a stupid joke I gave to somebody in a small crowd of people and that's what happens," Frederick said. "But you know, it's really unfortunate. We live in a 'gotcha' society."

rest http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/12/3/03020/5669/433/668747

Reuters: Obama Backs Off Promise to Pass Windfall Profits Tax on Big Oil from Open Left - Front Page

Off the Reuters wire:

CHICAGO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama is not planning to implement a windfall profit tax on oil companies because prices have dropped below $80 a barrel, an aide said on Tuesday...

Obama, who signaled early in his campaign for the White House that he would take an active approach to oil markets as president, had planned to use the revenue from a windfall profits tax to fund a tax rebate for low- and middle-income families struggling with high energy prices.

Between this move and the move to wait to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it seems like the Obama team is buying into the right-wing frame that raising any taxes - even those on the richest citizens and wealthiest corporations - is bad for the economy. Of course, that frame is debunked by history. And while sure, it's OK to rack up deficits so as to spend our way out of the economic crisis, it's sorta silly to ignore the tax moves that could be implemented to limit those deficits where possible. 

rest http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=10252

Chambliss Defeats Martin; Dems Lose Chance at 60-Vote 'Super Majority' from TPR: The Public Record

Sen. Saxby Chambliss won a runoff election in Georgia Tuesday against Democrat Jim Martin ending Democrats' chances of controlling a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the House.

With 95 percent of the precincts reporting, state election officials said Chambliss won 58 percent while Martin won 42 percent of the vote. Election officials reported that about 2 million people voted in the runoff compared with 3.7 million who voted on Election Day.

The runoff was held because neither Chambliss nor Martin captured 50 percent of the votes cast on Election Day to be declared the winner of the race as required by Georgia law.

rest http://www.pubrecord.org/politics/534-chambliss-defeats-martin-dems-lose-chance-at-60-vote-super-majority.html

VA GOP chair refuses to apologize for comparing Obama to bin Laden. from Think Progress

In October, Virginia GOP Chairman Jeff Frederick compared Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden, telling an audience that they "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon."

rest http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/02/va-gop-chair-refuses-to-apologize-for-comparing-obama-to-bin-laden/