Chelsea's Wedding

First of all, we don't know how much it's all costing – every dollar amount quoted for every item so far has been a blind guess published by the media which wouldn't get much attention if it said something like "The cake came from Target and cost $150 and Chelsea made her own dress out of old curtains from her grandmother's windows." That just isn't news. Of course, the media is exaggerating.

So if a few million bucks are spent on a lavish wedding, that's a few million bucks pumped into the coughing economy. Waiters, florists, cooks, valets, manicurists, hairdressers, cleaning staff, the local Starbucks — all of these people and businesses benefit. How many extra ice coffees and bottles of water and ice cream were sold to the hounding press camped out in town?

Bill and Hillary should spend a whopping wad on this wedding. The country needs it. Now . . . if they are not also paying for all the extra Secret Service protection, well, that's a different story. And that WOULD BE a story.

Howling,
Brooklyn Beagle

The Mexico Situation

Over the past couple of years, I have been watching, with great interest and alarm, the increase in drug cartel related violence in Mexico. Most alarming is how brazen they are about it and how close to our border much of this is occurring. Killings of police and journalists are common, and gang members have resorted to barbaric tactics including decapitations and killing their enemies' relatives in hopes of intimidating opposition. They have armored vehicles, explosive devices and grenade launchers. Experts believe that the Gulf cartel and its former allies, the Zetas, are battling for trafficking routes in the northern border states and trying to get the military patrols out of the way.

 In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a border city located just across the river from El Paso, Texas, a drug cartel vowed to kill an officer every 48 hours until police chief Roberto Orduña Cruz, resigned. He initially refused to do so. On February 20, 2009, after the third murder of one of his officers, the chief resigned. The cartel also threatened to decapitate Ciudad Juárez' Mayor José Reyes Ferriz and his family unless he ended his efforts to clean up the corruption in the city's police department. The note told the mayor, who had homes in El Paso, Texas and Cuidad Juárez, that they were willing cross the border into the U.S. to kill them. Around the same time, gunmen shot at a car in Chihuahua Gov. José Reyes Baeza's motorcade, killing a bodyguard and wounding two agents. After these inccidents, the federal government took over the functions of police chief in Ciudad Juárez.


On July 1, 2010, there was a shootout between rival drug gangs on a deserted road between the villages of Tubutama and Saric, just 12 miles south of the U.S. (Arizona)-Mexican border, leaving 21 people dead and 6 wounded. Nearby Nogales, which is across the border from Nogales, Arizona, had 135 murders in 2009 and has had 131 murders so far this year.

In May 2009, a journalist from Torreón, in the state of Coahuila,which borders Texas was abducted and killed by kidnappers that investigators suspect were members of the Zetas drug gang. In January 2010, gunmen killed 10 young people in an attack in a bar Torreón.  In May 2010, eight young people were killed in an attack in another Torreón bar. Several of those who were killed were students and did not appear to have any links to drugs.  On Sunday, July 18, 2010, gunmen associated with a cartel burst into a birthday party and opened fire, killing at least 17 people.

On March 18 and 19, 2010, in Monterrey, Mexico, drug cartel members hijacked trucks and  buses, then used the vehicles to block four lane highways in an effort to disrupt army operations near the U.S.-Mexico border. Also in March 2010, gangs in the northeastern states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas used automatic weapons and erected blockades at checkpoints to prevent soldiers from coming to the aid of soldiers already under attack.  

More recently, a drug gang actually used a car bomb in a planned attack on law enforcement. On July 16, 2010 the gang dressed a bound, wounded man in a police uniform and called in a false report of an officer shot. When the police arrived, the gang exploded a car killing the decoy, a rescue worker and two police officers.

Then there was the March 13, 2010 attack on the U.S. Consulate employees as they headed home to El Paso after attending a birthday party in Cuidad Juárez. Jesús Ernesto Chávez, leader of the Barrio Azteca organization, a violent gang originating in Texas prisons with members on both sides of the border and which supplies contract killers to the Juarez drug cartel, was arrested for masterminding the killings of U.S. Consulate staffer Lesley Ann Enriquez and her husband. 

There are many other incidents involving mass executions, shootouts between rival gangs, shootouts between gangs and the police, discoveries of mass graves and reports of gangs entering weddings and parties to kill or kidnap people. Almost 25,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderón took office at the end of 2006. This violence could easily spill over into the U.S. and is a very dangerous threat to our national security. It appears that simply cracking down on drug cartels will not work, as much of this violence started when Mexico's president began doing just that. The U.S. has poured $1.6 billion into Mexico's efforts to stop the activity. The cartels have infiltrated every level of the Mexican government and there are allegations that the Ms. Enriquez, the U.S. Consulate staffer murdered in Cuidad Juárez, may have been compromised. We are sending 1200 National Guard troops to help patrol the border with the dual purpose of curbing illegal immigration and drug trafficking. But that is not enough. We need to do two additional things:


1. Use unmanned drone aircraft to patrol the borders. This will help the Border Patrol and National Guard locate the smugglers quickly.

2. Take the profit motive out of smuggling marijuana by legalizing it. Our experience during prohibition taught us that banning alcohol created a black market for the product and resulted in the growth of gangs and violence. The government can also then tax it and add to our revenue.

How shall we pay for this? As noted,the tax on marijuana sales will help pay for it, as will the restored revenue from the Bush tax cuts, which are scheduled to sunset soon. Using the restored revenue for this purpose is an investment in the security of our country and our way of life.

I Miss Ted Koppel

I do.  I miss Ted Koppel.  I loved the way he would stop the guest in the middle of a totally non-responsive answer, call attention to the fact that a guest was not answering his question and repeat the question several times until the guest answered.  He held their feet to the fire.  Since Ted retired, I have spent too much time heckling my t.v. set during news shows as the reporter or host allowed the guest to weasel around a question and instead use it as an opportunity to propagandize.  No one presses these people anymore.  Everyone is afraid of confrontation, afraid to call these people on their crap.   So, it gave me great pleasure to watch David Gregory do a Ted Koppel with NRCC chairman Pete Sessions on Sunday's Meet the Press.  Watch the video below.  Its fun.

WELL SAID !

Why GOP Is Not the Answer

Mitchell Bard said it well on his blog today over at Huffington Post:

"As the partisan cable networks breathlessly discuss what will happen in the midterm elections in November, there is much talk about how Americans are angry and, as a result, the Republicans are set for major gains in Congress. But the connection between these two assertions -- Americans' dissatisfaction and GOP success -- strikes me as incredibly lazy, both by the media and the voters. 

Nowhere is this disconnect more clear than in the financial regulation battle, which finally concluded with a bill passing the Senate yesterday.

Americans have every right to be angry. Oil has been spewing into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months (hopefully, it's finally been contained). Islamic extremists seek to kill Americans. We have such a muddy immigration situation, that, no matter which side of the ideological fence you sit on (pun intended), you can't be happy with the way things currently operate.

But the main point of anger is the economy. The official unemployment rate is hovering around 10 percent (with millions more not counted because they've given up on looking for a job). People are concerned about their ability to pay their bills and see an unfair system that rewards Wall Street's reckless risks while punishing middle class workers.

But if Americans want to assess blame for these woes, and if they want to choose who should help get us out of these messes, they have an obligation in a democracy to make an effort to really look at the issues before making a decision. And the media, likewise, has an obligation to sort through these complicated issues more carefully.

If the Republican campaign message for 2010 was something like, "Yes, we know that we caused all these problems in the Bush years, but we've learned our lesson, and now we are offering these new ideas to fix things in the future," I would understand (if not agree with) the equating of the problems with Republican gains. But that's not what the Republicans are offering. Rather, the GOP campaign message for 2010 is essentially the same message as the Bush years, only more militant (and more wacky, thanks to the Angle-Paul tea party influence). Their pitch is built around deregulation, lower taxes for the rich, and less government, the very things that got us into this mess in the first place.

The Republican congressional record for the Obama years consists of opposing any initiative the president offered (in an effort to make him look ineffectual), even if he proposed something the GOP itself had supported earlier, and to offer as solutions the same tired policies from the Bush years (tax cuts, even if they add to the deficit, as Sen. Jon Kyl suggested). That shouldn't be a winning election argument. But with incendiary rhetoric and right-wing-propaganda-machine-fueled lies taking center stage, the focus for the midterms hasn't been on the facts (how we got here and what the two parties have offered since). 

In fact, the Republicans have been at the heart of the causes of these problems, and they have offered little other than the same policies as solutions.

Which brings us back to financial regulation, an issue directly tied to the current economic problems. We did not magically morph from prosperity to recession. Rather, the current recession and massive job loss began with the near collapse of the financial system in 2008. Wall Street played a win-lose game (they won no matter what, but we all lost) with risky financial instruments. The housing market collapsed under the weight of subprime mortgages. So the deregulation trumpeted by Republicans caused this mess, and yet the party still touts deregulation. 

Certainly, Americans should be angry. And it would seem obvious that action was needed. Nevertheless, all but three Republicans in the Senate didn't think so. Given a choice of standing with the banks or the American people, the Republicans announced their allegiance loud and clear: It is the party of the financial institutions. 

So what is the Republican solution to our economic woes? Based on the actions of their leaders, it seems to be to blame the victims, cut taxes and protect the banks. Not only have Republicans opposed extending unemployment benefits, they have tried to blame the unemployed for their plight, particularly cruel since it was their policies that put them out of work in the first place. Arthur Delaney pointed out two examples in HuffPost last week: Sen. John Kyl said unemployment benefits provide a disincentive for the unemployed to seek work, and Sen. Judd Gregg claimed that unemployment insurance encourages the unemployed to stay out of work. (Again, Kyl won't support adding to the deficit for unemployment insurance, but he is fine with doing so for tax cuts for the wealthy.) 

Republicans have used increasing government debt as a pro-GOP argument. Generally, it is, of course, better for the government not to run large deficits. But the Republican argument ignores history and is overly simplistic. After all, Bill Clinton handed a surplus to George W. Bush, who proceeded to leave Obama with a gaping deficit. Republicans were happy to run up debt in the 2000s on tax cuts for the rich and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, none of which were paid for. But now that the tens of millions of Americans face unemployment, these same GOP leaders complain about the deficit and say we can't afford any programs to help. How is it that we could afford to spend when it was for tax cuts (and still can, according to Kyl), but not to help those hurt by the Republican-policy-induced recession? 

Two polls released on Tuesday showed that Americans care more about unemployment than the deficit. Which party is more concerned with each of those issues? So why should the anger translate to GOP votes? It shouldn't. 

In general, Republican policies precipitated the recession, and the party's solutions are to offer more of the same. And when it came to deciding who to stand up for, the Republicans attacked the unemployed and stood with the banks. Americans' anger is legitimate, but directing that anger by giving power back to the GOP is misplaced. The connection makes no sense. 

(You could run the same arguments for the oil disaster, immigration and terrorism, showing the Republican culpability and the lack of new solutions offered by the GOP to address the problems.)

I harbor no illusions that Obama and the Democratic Congress are above critique. But I'm saddened that there seems to be no recognition that most of the messes we find ourselves in were created, by and large, by the policies instituted by Bush and his Republican allies in Congress, and that the Republicans are offering those very same policies as the solution in the current campaign. It seems to me handing the reins back to the people who created the problems in the first place (and, more importantly, are only offering more of the same) is a horrible way to respond to the challenges. I'm further saddened that GOP strategy of obstructing and lying, putting rhetoric in front of facts, seems to be working.

You would think that with an oil disaster ravaging his state's already hurting economy, Sen. David Vitter would have better things to do than vote against financial reform and endorse bogus "birther" lawsuits against the president. But this is the essence of the Republican party in 2010."

Thank you, Mr. Bard.

Check out this article from DailyFinance

Check out this article from DailyFinance