Bush Defends Internet Spying

To solve the debt crisis, Americans--who are already suffering in these tough economic times--will have to make even more sacrifices, Rep. Mike Coffman told his House colleagues last year. So, leaning on his military service, the 58-year-old Colorado Republican argued that members of Congress should take the first step and abolish their congressional pensions. "If there's one thing I learned in both the United States Army and the Marine Corps about leadership, it was leading by example," Coffman lectured them, pointing to his chest at a committee hearing. "Never ask anyone to do anything that you yourself would not be willing to do."

What Coffman left unsaid that day in a speech about his bill's "symbolic" importance was that he was collecting a $55,547 state-government pension in addition to his congressional paycheck. Having spent two decades as an elected official in Colorado, he has received retirement benefits since 2009, the year he arrived in Congress.

"We did not want to double-dip on the taxpayers in a time of fiscal challenge."--Rep. Chris Gibson, R-N.Y., who declines his pensionCoffman is not alone. About 90 members from both chambers collected a government pension atop their taxpayer-financed $174,000 salary in 2012, National Journal found in an examination of recent financial records. Including a dozen newly elected freshmen who reported government pensions last year, the number now stands above 100. That's nearly one-fifth of Congress. One lawmaker, freshman Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, received $253,323 from her government pension last year--a sum that, combined with her congressional salary, will make her better paid than President Obama this year.

Although, if you've EARNED a pension, I don't think you should be penalized.  But it seems that if someone takes another job, then their pension payments should be delayed.

THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans' phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration's claims that these "modest encroachments on privacy" were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to "meh."

I so wish this weren't true.  What's wrong with people?

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) signed a contentious two-year budget bill into law on Sunday evening. The governor vetoed 22 amendments to HB 59 before approving it, but he left intact several provisions that will severely limit women's reproductive access.

The new budget, which takes effect on Monday, includes at least five new anti-abortion provisions. HB 59 will defund Planned Parenthood clinics, reallocate family planning funding to right-wing "crisis pregnancy centers," strip funding from rape crisis centers that give their clients any information about abortion services, impose harsh restrictions on abortion clinics that will force many of them to shut down, and require doctors to give women seeking abortion information about the presence of a "fetal heartbeat."

Taken together, the budget amendments ensure that Ohio now has some of the most stringent abortion laws in the nation.

And, as if that isn't bad enough, consider what's happening in Iowa:

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R) has approved a measure to expand his state's Medicaid program under Obamacare, which will extend health coverage to tens of thousands of his poor residents. But there's a catch buried in the Medicaid expansion legislation that the governor signed last week. Now, when low-income women on Medicaid seek insurance coverage for medically-necessary abortions, they'll have to get approval from Branstad himself.

[snip]

But now Iowa is going a step further. If a woman who gets her health care through Medicaid has an abortion that falls under one of the exceptions in the state's abortion coverage ban -- if she has been a victim of rape or incest, if her fetus has fatal abnormalities that won't allow it to survive outside the womb, or if her life will be put in danger unless she ends the pregnancy -- she'll need to have her case approved by the governor's office. Presumably, Branstad will choose whether to approve or deny each woman's request for insurance coverage for her abortion. It's the first law of its kind in any state.

I wonder when he will have office hours...will he get to examine the patients, too?  What are Branstad's medical qualifications for making these decisions?  

From Esquire:

The film descends into the lives and cases of a few public defenders, focusing mainly on a small core of lawyers in Georgia and Mississippi - all of whom juggle more than a hundred cases at a time - and the umbrella organization which supports them called the Southern Public Defender Training Center, whose founder, Jon Rapping, spends most of his time desperately exhorting his members not to quit for the much easier and more lucrative life of private practice. There are two young lawyers in particular whose stories deliver exceptional power to the film: Travis Williams of Hall County, Georgia, a young man who basically raised himself (he hardly knew his father, and his surname comes from one of his mother's aliases) and whose office wall is covered in framed copies of his clients' acquittals, and who tattoos the names of his clients whose cases he loses on his back; and Brandy Alexander of Clayton County, Georgia, whose absolutely ingenious defense of a client packs an emotional wallop at the film's end, and who is so broke that she has to scrounge change from her purse to put a few dollars worth of gas in her car until payday. That's the thing: Our criminal justice system is so skewed toward prosecution that we almost defy young and talented lawyers to enter into this kind of practice, and every lawyer depicted in the film carries significant student loan debt, and each lives paycheck to paycheck. That, combined with the crushing caseload, makes their job both almost impossible and incredibly heroic. As Jon Rapping says to a discouraged Brandy Alexander, "If you're trying to rescue people from hell, you have to go to hell yourself."

The Texas lieutenant governor's recent threat that statehouse reporters could potentially be arrested and jailed if their behavior is deemed "not respectful" of the legislature is being called "worrisome" and "absurd" by Texas journalists.

Several editors and reporters who have been covering the contentious abortion debate in the state Senate, which drew national interest last week during an 11-hour filibuster that derailed the legislation, said Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's threats of potential arrest during an interview Friday raised concerns.

But hey, no biggie. We all know that when journalists don't keep proper "decorum" (which includes genuflecting to the bigfoot journalists who identify with the power structure) well, they are no longer allowed the privileges of a free press. That's how we keep the babies safe. digby

MOSCOW -- Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked U.S. security secrets and is now a fugitive, met Monday morning with Russian diplomatic officials and handed them an appeal to 15 countries for political asylum, a Russian Foreign Ministry official told The Times.
[...snip...]
The official didn't disclose the countries that were on the list. The meeting took place at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport...

Having taken the town in the first day's fighting, over the following two days the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia would continuously attack without result the line of hills south of Gettysburg held by the Union Army of the Potomac, all of which culminated in Gen. Robert E. Lee's rashest decision -- and biggest blunder -- of the entire war.

In an effort to break the bloody stalemate, and as commanding Union Gen. George Meade had correctly surmised during a council of war with his corps commanders the previous evening, Lee would order all his available reserves -- some 15,000 men in total -- to assault the reinforced federal center at the presciently named Cemetery Ridge, a vainglorious but doomed undertaking that's known today simply as "Pickett's Charge."

Because Meade had greatly reinforced his center in anticipation of Lee's move, the rebel attack was literally blown straight to hell, which left Lee's forces in a severely depleted state, with over one-third of the 76,000-strong Confederate army listed as casualties. Nevertheless, Lee would keep his troops in place on July 4, attempting to lure Meade into replicating his own grievous error, but Meade refused to rise to the bait.

In fairness to Meade, his own command was nearly as badly mauled by the three-day battle, but he had managed to hold his lines under considerable duress, which compelled the Confederates to retreat back to Virginia the following day, and left Meade and the Union Army of the Potomac in sole possession of the field.

Bill said that if Obama listened to what 80% of the American people want - which is to NOT intervene, he would wind up looking like a "total fool" if things went badly. He said that Americans like to have their presidents "win". (Whatever "winning" would entail was, as usual, left undefined.)

Let's assume that intervention by the US would be a good thing - which after experiencing our track record in these things I do not - there must be a way to convince us that it is a good thing. I mean by reasoned discussion - not the usual scare tactics and misrepresentations so endemic since 2001.

The contempt that Bill shows for the war-weary people of this country along with his fellowship with John (100-years-of-war-is-okey-dokey) McCain is infuriating imo.