Here's Who Is Really to Blame for Sequestration

By Molly Ball

Don't look at Obama or Republicans in Congress. The failure of the bipartisan "supercommittee" 15 months ago created the current mess.

Reuters

Patty Murray. Jon Kyl. Max Baucus. Rob Portman. John Kerry. Pat Toomey.

These six senators from both parties, along with six members of the House of Representatives, are the people to blame for the sequestration cuts scheduled to hit the federal budget beginning Friday. And yet in the energetic round of finger-pointing that has consumed Washington in recent days, their names have hardly been mentioned.

They are the former members of the so-called "supercommittee" -- the bipartisan crew that, back in 2011, was given four months to propose $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. It was their failure to come together that created the current mess. Today, Republicans are focused on pinning sequestration on President Obama, who came up with the idea, while Obama has pointed the finger at Congress, which voted for it on an overwhelming, bipartisan basis. But that's silly. Nobody who "agreed" to sequestration actually wanted it to happen. In classic Washington fashion, they thought they could assign the hard work to somebody else and get them to do it. They were wrong.

The supercommittee was supposed to forge the deal that Obama and House Speaker John Boehner could not in their July 2011 debt-ceiling talks. It was this hypothetical future deficit reduction that got Republicans, grudgingly, to agree to raise the debt limit.

Sequestration -- automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending -- was to be the punishment if the supercommittee could not come up with a plan. The cuts were designed to be as clumsy and inflexible as possible, in order to motivate lawmakers to come up with a better approach. That's why agency heads have very little discretion on which programs are hit by the cuts: They were designed to inflict maximum suffering on both parties' priorities, with little wiggle room to mitigate the pain. Republicans would be motivated to compromise to keep defense spending from being axed, while Democrats would come to the table to protect domestic programs.

That was the stick, but there was also a carrot: The supercommittee had enormous power. Whatever deal it produced would go directly to the floor of the House and Senate, ineligible for filibuster or amendment.

And so, in September 2011, the supercommittee held its first and only formal meeting. (It would also hold four public hearings, but most of its business was conducted behind the scenes.) The six senators (two of whom, Kyl and Kerry, have since left the Senate) and six representatives (Xavier Becerra, Jeb Hensarling, Jim Clyburn, Fred Upton, Chris Van Hollen, and Dave Camp) had been chosen by the Republican and Democratic leaders of their respective houses of Congress.

At first, there were glimmers of hope. As recounted in Politico's excellent supercommittee postmortem, there were private, bipartisan meetings between Baucus and Camp, who chair the Senate and House tax committees, respectively; Kerry and Portman went on bike rides and tried till the bitter end to work out a compromise.

But it didn't take long for the two sides to realize there was little middle ground between their irreconcilable positions. Republicans wouldn't raise taxes, and Democrats wouldn't cut entitlements. Each side offered what it saw as concessions -- Republicans proposing modest revenue increases from tax reform, Democrats offering trims to Medicare and Medicaid. But each side saw the other's idea of "compromise" as laughably insufficient.

By about a week before the November 23 deadline, it was clear that there was no deal to be had. Members left town for Thanksgiving, and their staffs spent the final days, pathetically enough, discussing "how the panel should publicly admit that lawmakers could not meet their mandate of shaving $1.2 trillion from the federal debt." Even on that, naturally, they couldn't agree: The Republicans wanted to release a printed statement from the committee's co-chairs, Murray and Hensarling, while Democrats wanted them to give the statement in person.

Why did the supercommittee fail so miserably, and what lessons can we draw from it for the current stalemate, which is really the same stalemate 15 months later?

First and foremost, the supercommittee seems to prove that romantic notions of legislative dealmaking are misplaced, and Obama's deficiencies as a horse-trader, significant as they may be, aren't principally to blame for the ongoing standoff. There's been a welter of punditry of late pining for the days of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill, or even Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich - swashbuckling pols who were willing to take political risks to make big things happen. If only Obama had that ability and willingness to drive a bargain and bend the other side to his will, this line of thinking goes, things might be different.

But the supercommittee was made up of some of Congress's biggest dealmakers. As the Washington Post's Paul Kane noted:

There are at least a half dozen folks on this panel that either have a history of working on big deals, or they sorta grew into that role in this process. Max Baucus, Rob Portman, Dave Camp, John Kerry, Chris Van Hollen -- that was a core group of folks that are serious about legislating. Or, in Kerry's case, have clearly grown into the role during these talks, despite this not being his area of expertise (that being foreign affairs). There was a core here that should have been able to get this done.

In a priceless scene from the Politico tick-tock, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and former Senator Chris Dodd made a pilgrimage to the burial plot of Ted Kennedy, where "Dodd poured some whiskey on Kennedy's grave while Reid recited a prayer." But even this shamanistic conjuring of the spirit of deals past couldn't make the supercommittee magic happen.

In the end, nobody could agree, and nobody took the deadline very seriously anyway. Sound familiar?

Hannity Stops Interview After A Brutal Ass Kicking By Keith Ellison

Rep. Keith Ellison hammers Sean Hannity: You’re a shill for the Republican Party

By Eric W. Dolan
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 22:44 EST

 

 

Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota ripped into Fox News host Sean Hannity during a tense interview on Tuesday night.

Hannity began his segment by claiming President Barack Obama was to blame for looming across-the-budget cuts known as the sequester. The conservative Fox News host insisted the President was “fear-mongering” about the consequences of the cuts and played an irreverent mash-up of Obama’s recent speeches.

“You’re the worst excuse for a journalist I’ve ever seen,” Ellison said after being introduced.

Hannity asked for Ellison to repeat himself, claiming he couldn’t hear him. Instead, Ellison continued to blast Hannity, saying his mash-up was deceptive “yellow journalism” and a “breach of every journalistic ethic I know of.” Ellison told Hannity he was a “shill for the Republican Party,” but Hannity repeatedly insisted he was a “registered conservative.”

“Keep going, keep ranting,” Hannity said.

Ellision said it was wrong for Hannity to blame Obama for the sequester. The across-the-board
spending cuts were part of a political deal to raise the federal debt ceiling in 2011. The sequester was intended to be so painful that it would force Republicans and Democrats to compromise on a plan to reduce the federal deficit. Ellison noted a so-called “super committee” that was supposed to hash out a deal had failed and blamed the failure on Republicans’ stubborn opposition to raising taxes.

The two men continued to exchange barbs. Eventually, Hannity asked Ellison about the “immoral” debt.

“You’re immoral,” Ellison replied. “You say things that aren’t true.”

 

Watch video, courtesy of Fox News, below:

The Sequester – How Obama Outfoxed The Entire GOP Leadership

By Nathaniel Downes

The hot buzz word in DC today is “Sequester.” From the lunchroom to the floor of the Senate, everybody is talking about it. And the pressure is on to resolve it.

Obama has nothing to lose in the sequester negotiations. He gave the GOP everything they asked for, and have been asking for in their rhetoric for years. You ask an average Republican voter, they demand to slash government spending. The Sequester is just what they’ve been asking for, and now they are fighting it tooth and nail.

What happened? Simple, Obama, along with the Democrats, stopped being the enablers. Without the Democratic Party being responsible adults, the Republican policies would result in a complete federal government shutdown. So, the Democratic Party, lead by Obama, simply decided on giving the GOP exactly what they wanted, and stepped back to let them deal with the mess.

Confused as to how the Democrats were enablers? Lawrence O’Donnell explains how this setup works here:

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The Republicans have been given everything they have ever wanted. They now have the across the board budget slashing that they have campaigned on since Newt Gingrich took power in 1994.

They expect the Democrats to bail them out again after running up the nation’s credit card. And now Obama and the Democrats say “No deal.” This is putting an incredible amount of pressure on the Republican party, more than they’ve ever faced before. That Obama already got the tax increases he demanded. Obama knows, if the Republicans don’t cave, they will suffer from the public backlash.

The sequester was their idea, now they are panicking because it is looming. They assumed they could get their way, that the Democratic Party would save their hide while they go back to their tired old talking points and strategies. Now they are being forced to actually participate in politics, that being the party of “NO” means that they are the ones who are wearing the emperors new clothes.

Obama is letting the pressure of the sequester settle in, and force the existing divisions within the Republican party to the surface. Already the GOP’s civil war is forcing serious divides to settle in and become wedges. The division is exposing how fragile the GOP’s coalition truly is. Being built not on responsible governance, but on radical ideology, it could not stand on its own, only in opposition to some outside force. For decades, that outside force had been the Democrats, who predictably enabled the GOP radicalism by being the responsible party. Obama simply took away that opposition, and gave them the very thing they have been demanding, and now tells them to solve the mess they made.

Obama is the adult in the room, dealing with a Republican congress who are now, for the first time since Newt Gingrich reshaped them in the 1990′s, being forced to pay the piper. Governing is hard, it requires compromise, and responsibility. The Republican Party has been given a free pass from responsibility for too long.

And the piper is standing there, holding out his hand for the promised payment.

---

Nathaniel Downes is the son of a former state representative of New Hampshire, now living in Seattle Washington. Feel free to follow Nathaniel Downes on Facebook.

Land Grab Cheats North Dakota Tribes Out of $1 Billion

Fort Berthold in North Dakota

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica

Native Americans on an oil-rich North Dakota reservation have been cheated out of more than $1 billion by schemes to buy drilling rights for lowball prices, a flurry of recent lawsuits assert. And, the suits claim, the federal government facilitated the alleged swindle by failing in its legal obligation to ensure the tribes got a fair deal.

This is a story as old as America itself, given a new twist by fracking and the boom that technology has sparked in North Dakota oil country. Since the late 1800's, the U.S. government has appropriated much of the original tribal lands associated with the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota for railroads and white homesteaders. A devastating blow was delivered when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1953, flooding more than 150,000 acres at the heart of the remaining reservation. Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes — the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara — were forced out of the fertile valley and up into the arid and barren surrounding hills, where they live now.

But that last-resort land turns out to hold a wealth of oil, because it sits on the Bakken Shale, widely believed to be one of the world's largest deposits of crude. Until recently, that oil was difficult to extract, but hydraulic fracturing, combined with the ability to drill a well sideways underground, can tap it. The result, according to several senior tribal members and lawsuits filed last November and early this year in federal and state courts, has been a land grab involving everyone from tribal leaders accused of enriching themselves at the expense of their people, to oil speculators, to a New York hedge fund, to the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The rush to get access to oil on tribal lands is part of the oil industry's larger push to secure drilling rights across the United States. Recent estimates show that the U.S. contains vast quantities of oil and gas. As fracking has opened new fields to drilling, and the U.S. has striven to get more of its energy from within its borders, leases from Louisiana to Pennsylvania have been gobbled up. Now the pressure is increasing on one of the last sizeable holdouts — lands owned by Native Americans.

A review of tribal and federal records as well as lawsuit documents reveals a dizzying array of lowball, non-competitive deals brokered by numerous companies, often entwined with the tribal council and with individual landholders on the reservation. But at heart the alleged practices are simple: Tribal leaders and outsiders set up companies to buy drilling rights cheap and flip them later for spectacular profits — in one case earning as much as a 200-fold return in just four years.
"Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost," said Tex Hall, the current chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, in an interview. "It's just a huge loss and we'll never get it back."

At the center of that particular alleged scheme, according to one of the suits, was Spencer Wilkinson, Jr., longtime manager of 4 Bears Casino, a time-worn warehouse of slot machines, swirling cigarette smoke and stained carpets that serves as the reservation's entertainment nexus and its financial hub. Wilkinson also sat on the board of the tribe's development corporation, where he was charged with finding new opportunities to enhance the economy of the reservation.

According to interviews with tribal members, former employees of the Three Affiliated Tribes, and a class action lawsuit filed in federal district court in Bismarck, ND against Wilkinson and others, Wilkinson used his access to casino funds — and to the development corporation — to gain influence and craft an oil deal that would leave him one of the richest men on the reservation.

In 2006 he became an owner of a company, Dakota-3, with Richard Woodward, a white consultant who, records show, was receiving more than $20,000 a month from tribal funds for his work at the development corporation. Together, the suit and other legal filings allege, Wilkinson and Woodward planned to raise money and buy up rights to much of the remaining land not yet slated for drilling, all the while maintaining their work with the tribes and employing Wilkinson's relationship with the council to help get the oil leases approved.

Leases for oil rights generally work like this: A company purchases the right to drill for oil underneath an acre of land by paying a one-time upfront payment, called a bonus, and a percentage of the profits earned on the well, known as a royalty. On Indian lands additional laws also apply, dictating who can negotiate for whom and how the government has to oversee the agreements.

Wilkinson declined to comment and Woodward could not be reached. Wilkinson has filed a motion to dismiss the case. The suit alleges that Wilkinson and others aided and abetted the U.S. government in failing to fulfill its fiduciary responsibility to the tribes; Wilkinson's motion argues, among other things, that the government had no such responsibility. Woodward has not yet filed a response to the suit in court.

Many details of Dakota-3's deals remain murky. There is limited transparency into tribal government affairs, no public access to documents, no annual reporting on accounts, and limited communication about what tribal council members discuss in their meetings.

But, according to separate lawsuits and records filed with the North Dakota Secretary of State, Dakota-3 partnered with an Oklahoma-based oil speculator named Robert Zinke and his company Zenergy to buy leases and form additional joint venture companies. Documents from two law suits mention the involvement of the New York based hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management Group but do not specify the firm's role. The hedge fund is publicly traded and, according to its web site, has more than $33 billion under management.

A spokesman for Och-Ziff declined to comment, and Zinke did not return a telephone message.
The interlinked companies, the documents show, purchased drilling rights to some 42,500 acres of lands owned by individuals and families through dozens of separate small deals. Those rights were ultimately controlled by Dakota-3, which also purchased from the tribal council drilling rights to another 44,000 acres of lands managed by the council. Altogether, Dakota-3 accumulated rights to about a fifth of the 420,000-odd acres of leasable land on the reservation, having bought much of those rights for as little as $50 per acre and royalties of around 18 percent. At about the same time, records and interviews show, other companies were purchasing drilling rights to land on and near the reservation for $300 to $1,000 per acre plus royalties as high as 22.5 percent.

One of the lawsuits alleges that the difference in the one-time bonus payments, plus the difference in royalty payments, "could mean billions of dollars" over the life of the oil field.

In late 2010, an Oklahoma-based oil production company, Williams, bought Dakota-3 for $925 million. At the time of the purchase, Dakota-3 was pumping a small amount of oil, but the bulk of its assets were the drilling rights. Two lawsuits allege that by buying Dakota-3, Williams effectively paid more than $10,000 per acre for those rights — as much as 200 times what Dakota-3 had paid for the leases.

At issue is not just the question of how Dakota-3 managed to win the tribal council's approval for the deal, but whether the federal government should have stepped in to ensure that the tribes were paid higher rates.

Reservation lands are still held in trust by the U.S. government. As a trustee, the Department of the Interior has responsibility for overseeing the development of oil and gas on tribal lands, and for ensuring that any leases or sales of that land are made in "the best interest" of the Native Americans.

When it comes to leases to drill for oil — even those negotiated directly between the tribal council and the oil industry — the Bureau of Indian Affairs is required to make sure the leases meet this standard.

The bureau did not respond to a list of written questions, but according to interviews and documents obtained by ProPublica, the bureau approved the leases even though some Interior Department staffers expressed misgivings. Other documents show that tribal members appealed to high-level Interior Department officials and others to reject the leases and step in on their behalf.

"Mr. Secretary, this company, Dakota-3, like the other companies in the oil business will turn around and sell the lease," wrote Russell Mason Sr., a tribal elder, to the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in a December, 2007 letter. "We are making a plea to you that you exercise your trust responsibilities."

"The United States has uniformly failed in its duties to the Indian landowners," states one lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. that was brought by tribal landowners seeking restitution for the Dakota-3 leases sold to Williams.

The Dakota-3 deals are not the only controversial ones. For example, a company called Black Rock Resources purchased drilling rights to about 12,800 acres of land for $35 per acre and a 16.7 percent royalty. It later sold those rights to Marathon Oil for about $42 million, according to financial documents that describe the deal.

Messages left for multiple Black Rock Resources officials were not returned, and Marathon Oil did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs approved the Black Rock deal, and documents obtained by ProPublica reveal the sometimes-contradictory advice the Bureau of Indian Affairs received from its own staff and other federal officials.

When Black Rock first offered to buy up reservation leases for $35 per acre beginning in 2005, some bureau staff justified the rates saying the cumbersome regulations and past problems with leasing on the reservation had driven down demand. "Unfortunately," wrote one staffer in a department letter, $35 per acre "is what the market will bear."

But in a review dated November, 2005, an expert at the Bureau of Land Management wrote that the offered price "appears to look low compared to those offered recently at both BLM and North Dakota State competitive oil and gas lease sales in the area." He cited other sales that same month for as much as $370 an acre. An Interior Department lawyer in Washington sent a letter to North Dakota BIA officials expressing similar concerns.

Even at the time, the tribe received higher offers. Jerry Nagel is a tribe member, businessman and former program analyst for the tribe who has been outspoken against leases he thought were being sold for too little. In an interview, he said that he financed a venture in 2006 that offered the tribe $140 per acre plus a royalty rate more than twice as high as the tribal council was offered for the big leases it ultimately signed. It's unclear why the tribal council didn't take that offer, but Nagel claims it's evidence that the council gave preferential treatment to certain suitors.

The tribal council's office did not immediately respond to questions about why the council passed over Nagel's offer.

Kyle Baker is a tribe member, geologist and former environment official for minerals and energy for the tribe. He said that his family struck deals to lease its acreage on and near the reservation for as much as $700 per acre around the same time as the Black Rock deal.

"Companies will come and find your weaknesses and then drive themselves in," Baker said on a recent wintery morning in his living room overlooking Lake Sakakawea. "Our laws, our setup wasn't ready for it."

Companies and the U.S. government have long known that the Ft. Berthold reservation lay in the heart of the oil-rich Williston Basin, a reserve thought by some to contain as much as 20 billion barrels of oil. But previous efforts to lease and drill on the Indian lands stalled in the 1970s, and again in the late 1990s, thwarted by a dense bureaucracy and a tangle of laws governing leasing on reservations.

Only after the advent of modern fracking — and after Congress passed a handful of laws to ease corporate access to the Ft Berthold reservation — did companies begin to invest seriously in drilling there.

Today it's estimated that the three tribes and individual Native American landholders are receiving some $50 to $80 million a year from the drilling leases and royalties, compared with revenues of about $5 million a year before the boom began in about 2006.

But that money has brought allegations of sweetheart arrangements that have left a few tribal members with disproportionate profits from oil development.

In 2011 a team of elders audited the tribal council's activities. They found widespread financial inconsistencies that they said indicated systemic misconduct. "We saw millions of dollars going out and hardly anything coming back" to the Three Affiliated Tribes, said Tony Foote a forensic auditor who chaired the team. "We're not just talking about cash. It's rooms, food, travel, donations, and there's only a handful of people that can get all this stuff."

Hall, the tribes' current chairman, had previously held that post from 1998 until 2006. He didn't deny that there had been corruption, but he said that since he came back into office in 2010 he has focused on reform and on making sure that the oil revenues benefit the broader tribal community. He said he has formed tribal entities to directly control a pipeline and refinery project, set up a $100 million trust fund for the tribes, and begun to sign lease agreements that are more favorable to the Native Americans on the reservation. He also demoted Wilkinson, who is now an administrative officer at the casino, not its CEO.

"I was called back because people were concerned about sweetheart deals, so we have totally changed the dynamic," he said.

Medicare fraud

Republicans will tell you that we need to raise the minimum age for Medicare eligibility. Which would put hundreds of thousands of seniors at risk of being uninsured. What we should be looking at is the rampant fraud. Ed Schultz has the numbers and the latest investigation into the well-known Scooter Store.

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Louisiana Parish Files Suit Against BP For Unpaid Damages From The Deepwater Horizon Disaster

By Rika Christensen

A Louisiana parish that was among the most severely affected by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010 is suing British Petroleum (BP) for not paying on even one of its claims. Plaquemines Parish was the “epicenter” of the spill and its consequences, as well as the cleanup effort. According to Courthouse News, their complaint states, in part:

“The parish has suffered and will continue to suffer economic damages in the form of past and future lost revenues, lost business opportunities, diminution in asset values, loss and damage to wetlands, costs of coastal monitoring, increased costs of coastal projects due to delay and damage to wetlands, increased administrative medical and psychiatric costs, administrative costs for BP’s use of parish facilities, administrative costs of PPG in response to the disaster, wear and tear on parish infrastructure, costs to implement marking (sic) campaign to reverse stigma damages and investigative costs in preparing the presentment to BP and all other damages set forth and categorized in PPG’s October 30, 2012 presentment to BP.”

The damage from such an oil spill is far more than monetary, and it’s difficult to put a financial estimate on the actual damage caused. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), ecological damage and necessary cleanup will continue for decades. Just as a comparison, as of 2010, Prince William Sound still had not fully recovered from the Exxon-Valdez oil spill that occurred 21 years before. Oil could still be seen on rocks in shallow waters. The fishing industry up there still hasn’t recovered. Beach sands still contain enough oil to be toxic.

And Exxon still has $92 million for cleanup that, as of one year ago, it still hadn’t paid.

BP goes to court on Monday on charges of gross negligence in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

According to a Nov. 15, 2012 article in The New York Times, BP plans to plead guilty to the charges and agree to $4.5 billion in fines and penalties, however, depending on how the case goes, they could end up paying more than $20 billion. BP initially tried to hide the seriousness of the spill, especially how much oil was gushing from the damaged well.

However, BP has managed to get the Justice Department to eliminate monetary penalties for the barrels of oil it managed to recapture from the Gulf. Depending on how much oil was actually spilled, and how much they actually managed to clean up, that could reduce the fines they owe anywhere from $900 million to a whopping $3.5 billion, according to The Washington Post.

BP’s lawyer, Rupert Bondy also believes that the company’s willingness to pay valid claims for damage early on will help to convince the judge hearing the case to reduce the final penalties.
That will be of no comfort to those who’ve suffered the ongoing consequences of the spill.

Plaquemines Parish and other communities are likely to see their businesses and their tourism suffer for decades, just like the communities along Prince William Sound have suffered for more than two decades.

Furthermore, despite Plaquemines Parish’s suit, BP has said in a statement that it’s already paid out $9 billion to the government, and to individuals and businesses affected by the spill. If the history of the Exxon-Valdez disaster is any indicator, it will be many decades before things finally do return to normal along the Gulf Coast.

The U.S. government continues to sell leases off the east and west coasts and around the Arctic to companies for exploration and drilling, and makes promises about how much oversight there will be, how low the risk of an actual spill is, how quickly any spills will be contained and cleaned up, and more. Given that these are promises the government has made before, and the fact that Exxon-Valdez and Deepwater Horizon happened anyway, these promises ring very hollow.

Plaquemines Parish would be well advised to continue as best it can with its own lawsuit against BP, and, if it can afford to, avoid settling out of court. Oil spills have such far-reaching and devastating effects that those caused by negligence demand extremely harsh punishment. Out-of-court settlements often result in much lower financial penalties for companies, and don’t give them much incentive to change their ways.

National Review Writer Asks Women To Give Up The Right To Vote

By Wendi Petit

Michael Walsh doesn’t think that your mother, grandmother, sister or wife should be able to vote. You read that right. In a recent post on the National Review’s site, The Corner titled simply The 19th Amendment he suggests that women should lose the right to vote. He makes light of it. It’s all funny. After all, wasn’t it funny when actors wore blackface in those black and white films? Well, no, but he tries to make it that way.

And women’s suffrage . . . well, let’s just observe that without it Barack Obama could never have become president. Time for the ladies to take one for the team.

The truth is, he understands that the 19th Amendment could never be repealed. He’s so full of himself, and thinks himself so amusing that women should just give it up. His attitude is ‘sorry ladies, but if you can’t vote the way I think you should, you don’t deserve the right’. Of course we should not take him seriously. He’s doing it to get attention.

Just who is Michael Walsh? Well, for one, he’s a former music critic, but most recently he’s a fiction writer who uses conservative punditry to sell his books. The book that has brought him to the fore is Rules for Radical Conservatives. It’s written under the fictional name, David Kahane. The fictional character is portrayed as a pompous know-it-all, not too far off from Michael himself. ‘David’ spills the beans by telling all the secrets that liberals supposedly hide. There’s nothing to hide. In fact, it’s really just a self-portrayal. He uses lots of adjectives peppered in his many run-on sentences. To the right, he sounds intelligent and funny. To the rest of us (you know, the truly intelligent ones), he just sounds like the class bully who just happened to be smart. He smiles at the teacher, and then when the teacher goes back to writing the day’s assignment on the chalkboard, he pulls the pig tails of the little girl behind him.

As part of this character, he writes two columns in the National Review, both of which supposedly became viral. The first was titled I Hate You Sarah Palin, and the follow-up was named I Still Hate You Sarah Palin. In an interview with The Hill, he likens the humor he portrays in David Kahane to Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Bill Maher. He may get a few laughs when he speaks to core conservatives, but he’s no Colbert. There’s a reason why those guys have a huge following and Michael Walsh does not. They’re funny, and Michael Walsh is not.

Knowing all of that, I can understand why you still might feel a bit outraged. However, if we remember that he’s doing this to get attention, then we should act accordingly. We should ignore his childish behavior. After all, why does a bully feel the need to bully in the first place? It’s because they feel insecure about themselves. Case in point.

While Walsh didn’t really love the choice of Mitt Romney for president in the 2012 election, he backed him just because he was not Barack Obama. If he really had courage, he would say that he wouldn’t vote for anyone. At least he’d be showing that he acts on his convictions of principles over party. But the horror comes when you find out about his idealization of Nixon.  He mourned him as a great conservative who never got the chance because of some pesky journalists named Woodward and Bernstein. Yes, he’s one of those.

So yes, we should feel sorry for Mr. Walsh. He’s all about sticking to the brand even when the brand has failed miserably.  He’s in the same class as ‘say it ain’t so’ Karl Rove. Never accept defeat, but instead continue to dig your own grave. Oh, well. Maybe if he calls up Sarah Palin and asks for an apology, she’ll agree to do a two-bit road show with him. Now that would be funny.

The Affordable Health Care Act lands a big win

The Affordable Health Care Act lands a big win when the poster boy for the opposition, Florida Governor Rick Scott, reverses himself and decides to participate in the Medicare expansion. The Huffington Post's Howard Fineman joins Ed Schultz to talk about this major development.

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Boehner caught red-handed on sequester lie

House Speaker John Boehner likes to pretend the sequester is President Obama's idea. But a new discovery shows how much Boehner was promoting the sequester back in 2011.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., MSNBC's Karen Finney and Maddow Blog's Steve Benen join Ed Schultz to explain the sequester hypocrisy.

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Senator John McCain Needs To STFU

By Richard Riis
Hey, John McCain!


 Senator John McCain got himself worked up into a righteous lather on Sunday’s "Meet the Press" over what he continues to insist was a “massive cover-up” on the part of the White House about the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the United States consulate in Benghazi .

"There are so many answers we don't know," McCain told host David Gregory. "We've had two movies about getting bin Laden and we don't even know who the people were who were evacuated from the consulate the day after the attack. So there are many, many questions. So we've had a massive cover-up on the part of the administration."

Pressed by Gregory on what he meant by “a massive cover-up”, McCain could only sputter, “I'm asking you, do you care whether four Americans died? And shouldn't people be held accountable for the fact that four Americans died?"

"Well, what you said was the cover-up -- a cover-up of what?" Gregory pressed on.

"Of the information concerning the deaths of four brave Americans," McCain replied. "The information has not been forthcoming. You obviously believe that it has. I know that it hasn't. And I'll be glad to send you a list of the questions that have not been answered, including 'What did the president do and who did he talk to the night of the attack on Benghazi?'"

McCain’s phony and self-perpetuated outrage over the attack in Benghazi is not only disingenuous but monumentally hypocritical. It’s nothing more than a disgraceful attempt to squeeze political capital out of tragedy.

Contrary to what the McCain and his fellow Republicans in Congress would have you believe, American embassies and consulates are attacked quite frequently, or at least they have been over the last few decades. During the Bush administration, for instance, American diplomatic missions were attacked, by my count, 14 times. Scores of people, including Americans, were killed and wounded in those attacks. Did any of the people who continue to clamor for a formal investigation into what happened in Benghazi raise any questions about President George W. Bush’s role or whereabouts in the wake of any of these attacks? Is the papacy a lifetime job?

Were the Republicans this aggressive in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in which 2,996 people were murdered right here on American soil? In that case we actually have solid evidence demonstrating that President Bush disregarded warnings of an imminent attack on American soil. What else would you call a CIA national security brief dated August 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US”? But it’s the Benghazi attack that has Republican knickers in a twist. Surely I’m not the only one that finds that not only odd but infuriating.

Where was all that concern for our men and women serving in embassies and consulates across the globe when these other attacks and killings occurred?

June 14, 2002, Karachi, Pakistan - A truck with a fertilizer bomb driven by a suicide bomber was detonated outside the United States consulate. Twelve people were killed and 51 injured, all Pakistanis.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

February 20, 2003, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – A truck bomb detonated in front of an international diplomatic compound kills 20, seven of them Americans.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

February 28, 2003, Karachi, Pakistan – Motorcycle-riding gunmen killed two police officers and wounded five other officers and a civilian in front of the U.S. consulate.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

March 15, 2004, Karachi, Pakistan – Pakistani police discovered and disarmed a van filled with nearly 200 gallons of liquid explosives hooked up to a timer and two detonators parked in front of the U.S. consulate.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

July 30, 2004, Tashkent, Uzbekistan - Suicide bombers struck at the entrances of the U.S. and Israeli embassies. Two Uzbek security guards were killed in each bombing.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

December 6, 2004, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – Armed militants stormed the American Consulate, breaching the compound's outer wall. A Yemeni, a Sudanese, a Filipino, a Pakistani and a Sri Lankan—all employees of the consulate—were killed by gunfire, and about ten others were wounded.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

March 2, 2006, Karachi, Pakistan - A suicide car bomb killed four people and injured thirty outside the Marriott Hotel, 20 yards from the U.S. Consulate. Among the dead was David Foy, an American diplomat and three Pakistanis. It appears that Foy was the direct target of the bomber, who detonated his vehicle in the car park behind the consulate as Foy arrived.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

September 12, 2006, Damascus, Syria - Gunmen tossed grenades over the perimeter walls of the U.S. Embassy before opening fire with automatic weapons. A car bomb was detonated outside the embassy, although a truck bomb filled with pipe bombs and gas cylinders failed to explode. A Syrian security guard was killed, and thirteen people were wounded, including two security guards and a Chinese diplomat.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

January 12, 2007, Athens, Greece - A rocket-propelled grenade was fired into the U.S. Embassy. There were no injuries.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

October 1, 2007, Vienna, Austria – A man was prevented from entering the U.S. Embassy with a backpack full of explosives.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

February 17, 2008, Belgrade, Serbia - A mob of 2,000 protesters vandalized the Slovenian Embassy and burned portions of the United States and Croatian Embassies.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

March 18, 2008, Sana’a, Yemen – Three mortar rounds were fired at the U.S. embassy but missed, landing outside a nearby girls’ school. Three policemen and 13 students were wounded.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

July 9, 2008, Istanbul, Turkey – Gunmen attacked the United States consulate killing three Turkish police officers.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

September 17, 2008, Sana'a, Yemen – The American Embassy is attacked by assailants armed with rocket-propelled grenades, automatic rifles, grenades and car bombs. A 20-minute battle results in 13 deaths and 16 injuries. Six members of the Yemeni security forces and seven civilians, including one American, were killed in the attack, and sixteen people were wounded.

Calls for congressional investigation: none.

Quotes I could readily find from John McCain pertaining to any of these 15 incidents: zero. And I spent the better part of a day combing through the newspaper archives.

Frankly, I would not have called for a congressional investigation of any of these attacks either. The United States has 275 embassies and consulates around the world, and it’s patently absurd to expect the president - any president - to be personally involved in the security arrangements for each one of them, even those that might be perceived as being at greater risk than others. The United States it at war. We have enemies everywhere. The world is too full of terrorists, militants and just plain fanatics to even pretend we can guarantee the complete safety of any American mission or diplomatic employee. We do the best we can with what we have, and, all things considered, we're doing pretty well.

Of course, it would easier if some of the most willful enemies of national security were not right here at home. House Republicans, out of purely partisan spite, cut the Obama administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in 2011, and $331 million in 2012. It takes some mighty big cojones to cut funding for diplomatic security and then try to exploit a tragedy resulting from weakened security at a diplomatic post.

So, let it go, Senator McCain. Perpetuating this hypocritical and baseless witch hunt is not only disrespectful to all those who lost their lives defending our diplomatic missions abroad, but an embarrassment to yourself, your party and your country.

Mississippi abolishes slavery thanks to ‘Lincoln’

After watching the movie "Lincoln," a Mississippian asks a question and another does some research that leads to the state finally ratifying the 13th Amendment, 147 years after slavery was abolished.

In an exclusive interview, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell speaks to Dr. Ranjan Batra and Ken Sullivan, the two men who got Mississippi to move to the right side of history.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

How The GOP Shows That They Still Do Not Understand America

By Winning Progressive

In the wake of the GOP’s electoral drubbing last November, many conservatives and their enablers in the media have been pretending that Republicans have learned their lesson and are presenting a new, more inclusive, and, to paraphrase Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), less stupid party. Perhaps the leading focus of this effort is rapidly raising the profile of Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a young Latino first term Senator who Time Magazine recently labelled “The Republican Savior.” Last week, the GOP tried to raise Senator Rubio’s profile even higher by picking him to give the party’s nationally televised response to President Obama’s State of the Union address.

While Senator Rubio certainly presented a younger and more diverse image of a Republican than most Americans are used to seeing, his actual speech showed us once again that the GOP has not really changed. Instead, Senator Rubio’s speech was marked by virtually the same set of reactionary policy ideas, flip-flopping, and out-of-touch attitude that the GOP’s most recent failed Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, subjected us to for the past year-and-a-half. Here are some examples:

Out of Touch

Romney, of course, showed how out of touch he was with average Americans when he told students trying to pay for college to just borrow money from their parents and complained to his wealthy donors about how 47% of Americans are supposedly freeloaders.

Rubio did the same thing when he said in his speech “I still live in the same working class neighborhood I grew up in.” In reality, Rubio recently put his 2,700 square foot, four bedroom, four bathroom house on the market for $675,000. Only in the mind of a politician who is doing the bidding of the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us could a $675,000 house be considered working class.

Talking Out of Both Sides of His Mouth

Perhaps the defining characteristic of Romney during the Presidential campaign was that he was willing to say anything he thought would win him a few votes, even if it directly contradicted something Romney had said even a few hours beforehand.

Rubio demonstrated a similar propensity last week, as he talked out of both sides of his mouth in his speech. For example, Rubio spent much of his speech attacking government as a bad that needs to be shrunk, stating:

And the idea that more taxes and more government spending is the best way to help hardworking middle class taxpayers – that’s an old idea that’s failed every time it’s been tried.

More government isn’t going to help you get ahead. It’s going to hold you back.

More government isn’t going to create more opportunities. It’s going to limit them.

And more government isn’t going to inspire new ideas, new businesses and new private sector jobs. It’s going to create uncertainty.

Yet then the Senator tried to inoculate himself against claims that he is anti-government by claiming that:

I believe in federal financial aid. I couldn’t have gone to college without it.

One of these programs, Medicare, is especially important to me. It provided my father the care he needed to battle cancer and ultimately die with dignity. And it pays for the care my mother receives now.

Romney tried this bait-and-switch of being everything to everyone in last year’s Presidential election, and now Rubio is trying the same thing.

Ending Medicare as we Know It

Even as Rubio explained the importance of Medicare to his own parents, he signed onto the GOP’s “detailed and credible plan that helps save Medicare without hurting today’s retirees.” That plan to “save” Medicare is, of course, the one developed by Paul Ryan and adopted by Mitt Romney that would end Medicare as a guaranteed universal program and replace it with inadequate vouchers for seniors to try to buy private insurance on their own. The plan is so politically unpopular that Republicans were unwilling to propose that it apply to anyone over the age of 55, yet last week Rubio was offering his support for that exact same plan.

Climate Denial

Consistent with the orthodoxy that has overtaken the GOP, Romney last year disavowed his previous belief in climate change by echoing climate deniers’ false claim that “we don’t know what is causing climate change.”

Senator Rubio offered similar head-in-the-sand sentiments when he claimed that “When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather– he accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air.” Such dismissal of climate change as simply “weather” is a common tactic of climate deniers to downplay climate change.” and to cause people to question the scientific fact of climate change whenever the weather gets cold.

Mouthing Conservative Hobby Horses

Throughout the 2012 Presidential election, Romney – who many erroneously thought was a moderate at heart – showed an uncanny willingness to mouth virtually every false conservative talking point that came down the pike. Rubio’s speech was a tour de force of attempting to revive those same zombie lies.

For example, Rubio argued that the 2008 economic downturn was caused not by deregulation, but by “a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.” This statement was a nod towards the conservative theory that the mortgage crisis was caused by government policies, implemented by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of pushing bad loans, but that theory is factually unsupported and was rejected by the definitive report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Rubio echoed conservative attacks on the 2009 stimulus bill by false claiming that “every dollar our government borrows is money that isn’t being invested to create jobs.” In fact, government spending, especially at a time of economic recession, undeniably creates job, with the 2009 stimulus alone having been estimated to create between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs by the Congressional Budget Office.

Rubio dragged out the conservative hobby horse of claiming that “uncertainty created by the debt is one reason why many businesses aren’t hiring.” In fact, economists and numerous business surveys show that a lack of demand caused by continuing high unemployment and stagnant wages, not uncertainty over taxes or fiscal matters, is what is causing the lack of corporate investment.

Rubio revived conservatives’ baseless attacks over federal clean energy development loans that went to Solyndra, stating that “Instead of wasting more taxpayer money on so-called “clean energy” companies like Solyndra, let’s open up more federal lands for safe and responsible exploration.”

While conservatives have convinced themselves that the Solyndra loans somehow demonstrate corruption or at least a waste of money, numerous fact checkers have found otherwise, and it appears that the GOP’s attacks are motivated primarily by a desire to hobble the clean energy industry, not by a scandal or problem with the loan guarantee program.

If people tuned in to last week’s State of the Union rebuttal by Senator Rubio hoping to experience a new and improved GOP, they would have been sorely disappointed. Unfortunately, all Senator Rubio offered was a warmed over version of the exact same things that Mitt Romney spent eighteen months running on in a failed attempt to become President. Apparently, the GOP still hasn’t learned the lessons from that defeat.

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Facebook Will Pay No Taxes, but Will Be Getting a Tax Refund of $429 Million

By Thom Hartmann, The Thom Hartmann Program

In today's On the News segment: Facebook made over $1 billion in US profits in 2012, but it won't be paying a single penny in federal or state income taxes; forty Republican Senators filibustered Chuck Hagel's Secretary of State nomination yesterday; Obama appointed two of the nation's top election lawyers to a new presidential commission, charged with finding ways to streamline the election process; and more.

TRANSCRIPT:

Thom Hartmann here – on the news...

You need to know this. Forty Republican Senators filibustered a Secretary of State nomination for the first time in history yesterday, by refusing to let Chuck Hagel's confirmation come to a vote. Only four Republicans, Sens. Thad Cochran (R-MS), Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Mike Johanns (R-NE), voted to break the filibuster, and the final vote was 58 to 40. Republicans held up the nomination saying they want more information about the attack in Benghazi – an event that Chuck Hagel had nothing to do with. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "Make no mistake: Republicans are trying to defeat Senator Hagel's nomination by filibustering, while submitting extraneous requests that will never be satisfied." This is exactly why many democrats were angry over Reid's weak agreement on filibuster reform – instead of pursuing a rule change to stop GOP obstruction. Blocking a vote on a cabinet member is unheard of, and it's appalling that Republicans would play games with our Defense Department, considering we have thousands of service men and women fighting in Afghanistan. Supposedly, the Senate will take an up-or-down vote on Hagel's confirmation in 10 days, after returning from a President's Day recess. Yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham said he expects the vote to move forward then, "unless there's some bombshell that he likes blood sucking vampires." Other Republicans also said they expect the confirmation to move forward at that time, which makes their filibuster of Chuck Hagel seem even more absurd. After days like yesterday, it's not hard to see why Congress has it's lowest approval rating in history.

In screwed news... Not only is Facebook stealing your privacy, but they're getting your tax dollars too. The company made over $1 billion in U.S. profits in 2012, but they won't be paying a single penny in federal or state income taxes. In fact, Facebook will be getting a refund of $429 million. Citizens for Tax Justice uncovered the social network's use of a single tax loophole, which reduced their income taxes by about $1 billion just in 2012 – and even got them an additional $451 million in refunds from earlier years. When the company was preparing to go public last year, democratic Sen. Carl Levin predicted this outcome, saying "When profitable corporations can use the stock option tax deduction to pay zero corporate income taxes for years on end, average taxpayers are forced to pick up the tax burden." And Facebook isn't alone. Between 2008 and 2011, 26 large corporations paid no federal corporate income tax, despite their combined $205 billion in profits. These corporations get the benefit of using our commons, and they make huge profits off of hard-working Americans like you and me. They need to be paying for those privileges. Call Congress and tell them to make Facebook pay up. Tell them to pass the Sanders-Schakowsky Corporate Tax Fairness Act now!

In the best of the rest of the news...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren didn't waste any time going after the banksters. Yesterday, Warren challenged financial regulators to explain the lack of accountability for Wall Street's role in the financial meltdown. She said, "tell me a little bit about the last few times you've taken the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street all the way to a trial." And after regulators weren't able to provide a specific answer, she didn't mince words about her feelings on the matter, saying, "I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial.'" Despite causing our nation to teeter on the brink of economic collapse, and swindling thousands of Americans out of their homes, banksters have avoided public testimony by settling alleged crimes out of court. As the Think Progress Blog points out, prosecution of financial fraud hit a 20-year low in 2011, even as many of the biggest banks were found guilty of fraud. It may be a few years late, but thanks to Sen. Warren, banksters may finally have to answer for their crimes.

President Obama isn't waiting for Congress to take on election reform. Yesterday, he appointed two of the nation's top election lawyers to a new presidential commission, charged with finding ways to streamline the election process, and reduce the long lines that kept thousands from voting last November. The New York Times is reporting that Robert Bauer and Ben Ginsberg, who have had opposing views on issues like voter registration, early voting laws, and presidential debates, will now be working side-by-side to fix our broken election system. Senior adviser to the President, Dan Pfeiffer, said, "There is a whole set of ideological partisan issues around voting, but on the very specific questions of the administration of elections, that is something that you would hope and believe Republicans and Democrats would want to solve." With an upcoming challenge to the Voting Rights Act in the Supreme Court, and the far-reaching Republican effort to rig the electoral college, we'll have to fight harder than ever to preserve our democratic process. We have the power to control our democracy, but to do it we need to move to a national popular vote. Let's get it done. Go to NationalPopularVote.com.

And finally... Is The Onion a better news source than Fox News? One professor at West Liberty University thinks so. Professor Stephanie Wolfe provided students with a syllabus, which listed two sources the students couldn't use while researching for assignments – The Onion and Fox News.

Professor Wolfe explained that The Onion is a parody source, but had a more interesting reason for banning the use of Fox so-called News. She wrote, "DO NOT use Fox News – The tagline 'Fox News' makes me cringe. Please do not subject me to this biased news station. I would almost rather you print off an article from the Onion." Unfortunately, University officials informed the professor she couldn't ban students from using Fox so-called News. For the sake of Professor Wolfe's sanity, we hope that students decide to use stories from The Onion instead.

And that's the way it is today – Friday, February 15th, 2013. I'm Thom Hartmann – on the news.

This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of publication.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award winning author and host of a nationally syndicated progressive radio talk show. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at his website and find out what stations broadcast his radio program. He also now has a daily independent television program, The Big Picture,  syndicated by FreeSpeech TV, RT TV, and 2oo community TV stations.  You can also listen or watch Thom over the Internet.

Sewage Cruise Reveals Cruise Industry’s Dirty Secret

By Wendi Petit

Even before the passengers of the ill-fated cruise ship Triumph finally set foot on land, stories about the horrific conditions on board began to come to light. When the 4,000 plus passengers set sail just eight days before, they had no idea that their luxury cruise would turn into a nightmare, complete with raw sewage sloshing around on the floors and streaming down the walls. It exposes the dirty secret of these huge vessels – all of that excess has its consequences. The result is that very little of the refuse that’s created is dealt with in an environmentally responsible way.

First clues of the impending disaster came on Sunday after smoke was seen billowing from the ship’s huge smoke stacks. The ship’s four engines were knocked offline after fire made all of them inoperable. The trip began in Galveston, Texas last week Thursday with about 3,100 passengers. It made its way to its destination port of Progreso, Mexico, which is on the Yucatan Peninsula. Once it had completed its docking in Progreso, it picked up additional passengers, and then began its trip back to Texas. The fire broke out when the ship was 150 miles out at sea. Only now are the stories, videos and pictures coming out.


The photo above shows the sleeping conditions for some who chose to sleep on deck. Those who chose the outdoor accommodations did so due to lack of air conditioning, and the stench of human waste that was wafting from lower decks where sewage was said to be floating on the floor and streaming down the walls. A video of the sewage in one elevator can be seen below.

 

What most people don’t know is that the toilets not working was only part of the problem. The real problem is that even if the toilets were working, the ship was unable to do anything with it once the toilets flushed. Once the toilets stopped working, passengers were asked to use red plastic bags for their solid waste. While it is contained, most have no idea where those bags go. Unlike large RVs which must carry the human waste until it’s able to properly hook it up to a septic system, cruise ships are allowed to dump the waste into the ocean. Some ships partially treat the sewage, but others do not. It depends upon where the ships are located, but many allow the dumping to take place a few miles out from public areas. They are also dump solid garbage overboard. While most no longer do this, some still disregard good stewardship to the environment.

Back in August 2012 residents of Nahant, Massachusetts found evidence of probable illegal cruise ship dumping. Photos of the debris include some pretty disturbing evidence, but the presence of a cruise liner tag amongst the debris points to the probable culprit. The President of Safe Waters of Massachusetts describes the scene.

Packages of human excrement, rubber gloves, flip flops, water bottles..I’m sure it’s from the ship. It makes perfect sense to me, because the little tag is right in there with the rest of the stuff.

According to the Coast Guard, ships need to be at least nine miles off the Massachusetts coast. The fact is, it may have well been within that nine mile requirement. A strong current in the right direction could easily have washed the debris ashore. Even if it was illegal, it’s hard to prove unless there was a witness.

 

The large ships are required to partially treat their sewage, leaving liquid waste and solid waste. Regulations are more strict on the West Coast. A report by the State of Washington Department of Ecology, state that ships are required to be 12 nautical miles off the coast before they are allowed to dump what is called black water. (Black water is simply waste water from toilets where the liquids are extracted, leaving solid waste, which is then partially treated.) Cruise ships are further restricted if there is a shellfish bed nearby, but they can still dump as long as it is no closer than one half a mile.

 

What exactly does get dumped by these ships? According to a report by Friends of the Earth, using information gathered from the EPA, a cruise ship with 3,000 passengers generates a 210,000 gallons of sewage in a week. To understand how much that is, that’s equal to 10 backyard swimming pools. That partially treated waste contains viruses, bacteria, and even heavy metals. All of that gets swallowed and absorbed by all the aquatic life that is within range.

 

The sewage that the passengers did see is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s lots more waste that’s dumped into our oceans. An internet search for the words ‘five gyres’ shows the much larger problem. There are literally miles and miles of plastic bottles, tooth brushes, and other plastic garbage that makes its way into our oceans. While the ocean is large, it is fast becoming a vast dumping ground.

 

Most of us think nothing of where our trash goes when we sit back and soak up the sun, cruising along and taking in the scenery. If you are planning a cruise, but want to know how cruise lines compare, you can check out this report card by the Friends of the Earth. If I were you, I wouldn’t choose Carnival Cruise Lines. They received a D+.  After this past week, I bet quite a few passengers from the Triumph would agree with that assessment.

Elizabeth Warren Embarrasses Hapless Bank Regulators At First Hearing

Warren questioned top regulators from the alphabet soup that is the nation's financial regulatory structure: the FDIC, SEC, OCC, CFPB, CFTC, Fed and Treasury.

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts had a straightforward question for them: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? It was a harder question than it seemed.



"We do not have to bring people to trial," Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, assured Warren, declaring that his agency had secured a large number of "consent orders," or settlements.

"I appreciate that you say you don't have to bring them to trial. My question is, when did you bring them to trial?" she responded.

"We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals," Curry offered.

Warner turned to Elisse Walter, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who said that the agency weighs how much it can extract from a bank without taking it to court against the cost of going to trial.

"I appreciate that. That's what everybody does," said Warren, a former Harvard law professor. "Can you identify the last time when you took the Wall Street banks to trial?"

"I will have to get back to you with specific information," Walter said as the audience tittered.

"There are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it. I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial,'" Warren said.

A Warren constituent, open-Internet activist Aaron Swartz, recently committed suicide after being hounded by federal prosecutors who reportedly said they wanted to "make an example" of him. Warren had met and said she admired Swartz and, after he died, expressed her concern by attending his memorial in Washington.

The financial regulators can blame, at least in part, Wall Street lobbyists (along with outgoing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Senate Republicans) for their embarrassing turn at the hearing. Warren would have been on the panel herself representing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, instead of a sitting senator, if her nomination to head the agency hadn't been thwarted in 2011.

It's America, not Marco Rubio, that should be sweating

Lehigh University’s Dr. James Peterson and Jared Bernstein, former economic advisor to the vice president, explain why it’s America, not Marco Rubio, that should be sweating over his austerity ideas, which mirror the ones now driving Europe into an economic hole.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Every Time Cheney Laughs, An Angel Gets Stabbed in the Dick

By Heather

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart gave former Vice President and chicken hawk Dick Cheney some of the lack of respect that he deserves, after he was out there going after President Obama for his national security nominees at a speech he gave in Wyoming over the weekend and his subsequent interview with the entirely useless Charlie Rose on CBS this Tuesday.



Here's more on that from our friends at Raw Story:

“You know,” said Stewart, “Cheney’s really confident in his opinions and analysis, probably forgetting that he sucked at this.”

He added, “Like, he was a shitty vice [president], but even if Obama wanted to take our standing in the world down a peg he couldn’t ’cause the Bush-Cheney Administration left him with no peg room. I guess Obama could’ve created lower peg space, maybe invest in deep sea peg-hole drilling technology, but unfortunately he can’t afford to because the previous administration left us in a bit of a cash crunch.”

“And by ‘previous Administration, I mean these motherfuckers,” Stewart added. “Where does he get the balls?” Steward wondered, admonishing his audience, “Please don’t say ‘cadavers.’”

“This guy was wrong every time,” Stewart continued, after showing clips of a few of Cheney’s less-than-accurate statements about Iraq that led the country into war. “Every time he analyzed it, he was wrong. You try that at work, see if you get to keep your job and be wrong every fucking time.”

As Stewart correctly pointed out here, there is no penalty in our corporate media for always being wrong. They should be ashamed of themselves for giving the likes of Cheney air time in the first place, but I've given up on the notion a long time ago that we're ever going to see that come to a stop any time soon. Once again, we're left with the fake "news" show making a mockery of one that actually considers themselves a news outlet --and rightfully so.

Former GOP Rep. Joe Walsh Plans To Sue The Chicago Sun-Times For Deadbeat Dad Piece

By Rika Christensen

Ex-U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh now plans to sue the Chicago Sun-Times for its Feb. 11 piece about his requesting the courts to end his child support obligation because he’s out of a job.  

Talking Points Memo contacted Walsh about the imminent suit and was told that he plans to file this week, and that the article is nothing but defamation of his character, which is evidenced by the fact that the Sun-Times made no attempt to contact him and changed their headline three times.

A statement on his website, walshfreedom.com, says:

“Late this afternoon, the Chicago Sun-Times posted a story on-line that claimed that I wanted to stop making child support payments. That claim is an absolute lie, and I will no longer stand for it.

Here are the facts: My three kids are 25, 22, and 18-years-old. My youngest son will be emancipated in May of this year when he graduates from high school. Two weeks ago, I did what every other father who is paying child support is supposed to do — by law — when their employment situation changes — I modified my support agreement. With my Congressional term ending on January 3, and with my ex-wife having been paid in full through my term in Congress, by law, I filed a modification of my support payments for my remaining unemancipated child for these next four months. This modification called for me to pay my ex-wife 20% of my net income during these four months, which is my responsibility by law. […]

Earlier this afternoon, Natasha Korecki of the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote a story about me and my child support arrangement, without bothering to speak to me or to my attorney. The story stated and implied that I did not want to make child support payments and was behind on payments. Both statements are false. [...]“

He goes on to claim that “the Sun Times has had a vendetta against me since I was first elected. I will no longer take it. I have had to live with the ‘deadbeat dad’ label, even though the original case against me was dropped one year ago, and my ex-wife acknowledged that I have always been a loving and supportive father.”

He has screenshots of both the original Sun-Times headline and a revision from five hours later, and insults the author, Natasha Korecki, more than once. He also posted a screenshot of an email she sent to his attorney, ostensibly at the same time she filed her story. In the email, she says that she tried to contact Walsh directly but his voicemail was full, and she was looking for comment.

Walsh claims that his voicemail being full is an outright lie, however there is no way to verify one way or the other, and it’s Korecki’s words against his that his voicemail was full.

The full statement can be read here.

Talking Points Memo also spoke to the Sun-Times regarding the story, and reached editor Jim Kirk, who said, “Just that we stand by our story. Nothing further.” It’s true that Walsh currently has very little in the way of assets, and the motion to dismiss his remaining child support payments was, in fact, filed because he was out of a job and without income. He currently plans to start a super-PAC to fight Karl Rove’s new super-PAC, which may become his new source of income.

Rika Christensen is an experienced writer and loves debating politics. Engage with her and see more of her work by following her on Facebook and Twitter.