Supreme Court's Defense of the Powerful

E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- The United States Supreme Court now sees its central task as comforting the already comfortable and afflicting those already afflicted. If you are a large corporation or a political candidate backed by lots of private money, be assured that the court's conservative majority will be there for you, solicitous of your needs and ready to swat away those pesky little people who dare to contest your power.This court has created rules that will have the effect of declaring some corporations too big to be challenged through class actions, as AT&T consumers and female employees...

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/06/30/defending_the_supremely_powerful_110411.html

George Soros Aung San Suu Kyi Queen Elizabeth II King Abdullah Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Bad Teacher, Worse Students

I haven't seen Bad Teacher--I haven't seen anything, me and the 21st century have so much catching up to do--but I find it peculiar-odd for film critics to use phrases such as "assholery" and "unrepentant shittiness" and "treading water in a sea of crap"to complain about a comedy's coarse vulgarity. Once your own prose becomes as crude as what you're deploring, you've punted away any tactical advantage.

It is my growing conviction that movie reviewers would become much better writers if they simply stopped going to all these damned movies. Get out of this racket while you still can!

Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/06/bad-teacher-worse-students.html

Dennis Kucinich Nelson Mandela Paul Martin John McCain Evo Morales

Labour joins Conservative attack on EU's ?1tn budget proposal

Ed Balls condemns European commission's plan as 'out of touch' amid EU-wide spending cuts

Britain's political class closed ranks to condemn the European commission's proposal for the first ?1tn EU budget.

In a rare display of unity, Labour echoed No 10's claim that the EU budget for the seven years from 2014 was inappropriate during a period of austerity. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor who played a key role in thwarting Tony Blair's attempts to join the euro, called for a rethink.

Balls said: "When countries across the EU are having to make tough decisions to get their deficits down after the global financial crisis, these proposals are ill-judged, out of touch and cannot be supported. The European commission should go back to the drawing board."

Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, said: "At a time when Britain and other countries have to make some tough decisions on public spending this significant rise proposed by the EU commission will strike people as inappropriate and misguided. The European commission should be focused on finding savings and targeting spending on the most crucial areas."

The Labour leadership criticised the proposed EU budget after the commission called for a new tax on bank transactions. Jos� Manuel Barroso, the commission president, wants a larger share of its spending to be supplied by "own resources" ? taxes paid to Brussels.

The commission also wants an overall budget of ?971.5bn (�872bn) in payments and ?1.025bn in commitments for 2014-20, but denies British claims that this amounts to a 10% increase. The Treasury says the commission is wrong because it uses commitments, rather than actual spending, as the baseline.

Stephen Booth, research director of Open Europe, said: "Although it has proposed some minor improvements, such as a reduction in farm subsidies and a new fund to promote energy and infrastructure connections, the European commission has again opted for an above-inflation increase without the radical reform needed to make the EU budget more rational and on target.

"The European commission has also chosen to employ some creative accounting by moving some spending items off its main balance sheet, to hide the true rise in overall expenditure. This type of spin will not win the trust of taxpayers and citizens across Europe."

The comments came as Nick Clegg was pressed by senior Liberal Democrats to join the Lords rebellion against the government's European Union bill aimed at halting any further integration of Britain into the EU by triggering referendums on any transfers of powers to Brussels.

A letter to the deputy prime minister from Andrew Duff, the leading Lib Dem MEP who believes that passage of the bill could ultimately lead to Britain leaving the EU, argues that the use of referendums destabilises Europe, that the EU is "slithering towards a fiscal union" which will have a big impact on the UK while leaving it marginalised, and that the bill reduces parliament to an onlooker in EU policy-making.

The letter to Clegg has been sent to all Lib Dem MPs, peers, and MEPs in an attempt to block or delay the Tory-led campaign to insulate Britain from forfeiting more sovereign powers to Brussels.

The bill was the Cameron government's response to Gordon Brown's refusal to stage a referendum on the EU's Lisbon Treaty.

Earlier this month senior Thatcher-era Tories such as Michael Heseltine and Leon Brittan as well as and veteran Lib Dems led by Lady Williams rebelled in the Lords against the EU bill, larding it with amendments before sending it back to the Commons where the government is expected to overrule the upper house.

The Duff letter, of which the Guardian has a copy, will enrage the eurosceptic Tory backbenches. "I urge you to argue in Cabinet for acceptance of the Lords' amendments," Duff told Clegg.

The bill is tantamount to a "unilateral renegotiation of Britain's terms of EU membership. A wise government would avoid doing such irreparable damage to the national and European interest."

The effect of the bill is to treat the EU uniquely in British politics, singling out EU matters "for a popular vote and the relegation of the Westminster parliament to the role of onlooker", Duff contends.

The rest of the 27 countries of the EU, he adds, take a dim view of the Cameron government's move and will simply bypass Britain on key policy-making decisions.

"Everyone else in the EU knows that, and rightly concludes that the UK's credibility as a negotiating partner is dramatically lowered ... the UK will be excluded from key sectors of integration.

"I cannot see how the UK will have either the moral or political clout to block the constitutional evolution of the EU desired by its partners. Relegation to a new class of second-class membership would be the only available step. Such marginalisation would delight many Conservatives and Europhobes. It is a prospect which must appal us."

• European Union
• Europe
• Ed Balls
• Labour
• Conservatives

Nicholas Watt

Ian Traynor

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/30/labour-eu-trillion-euro-budget

John McCain Evo Morales William Mountbatten-Windsor Prince William Charles Mountbatten-Windsor

This July 4th, Uncertainty Abounds

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review
For the last 235 years, on the Fourth of July, Americans have celebrated the birth of the United States, and the founding ideas that have made it the most powerful, wealthiest and freest nation in the history of civilization.But as another Fourth of July approaches, there has never been more uncertainty about the future of America -- and the anxiety transcends even the dismal economy and three foreign wars. President Obama prompted such introspection in April 2009, when he suggested that the United States, as one of many nations, was not necessarily any more exceptional than others. Recently,...

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/06/30/an_exceptional_fourth_of_july_110418.html

Queen Elizabeth II Wu Yi Viktor Yushchenko Nancy Pelosi Speaker Pelosi

Heart surgeon: the system for children wrecks confidence - it must change

Concentrating resources on fewer centres would make complex operations safer, Leslie Hamilton says

A leading heart surgeon has spoken of the intense pressures and responsibilities that drove him to quit operating on babies and children because he no longer had the confidence to perform the complex, life-saving operations.

"I'd be sitting in meetings and I'd suddenly get an anxiety attack," Leslie Hamilton said of the stresses. Since 2007, he has operated only on adults.

"At home the phone would go and you'd get a tachycardia [a racing heartbeat]. You'd be woken in the night and wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. It built up. It was just beginning to affect my health."

Hamilton is a key supporter of proposals to amalgamate children's heart surgery into fewer, bigger units, which experts say will help surgeons become more experienced, operate more safely and support each other better.

A range of options for reducing the 11 NHS units to six or seven are undergoing public consultation and have caused controversy in areas where a hospital is under threat. Hamilton sits on the steering group of the NHS Safe and Sustainable committee which made the proposals, although he was not one of the decision-makers.

Hamilton, who led children's heart surgery at the Freeman hospital in Newcastle from 1991, believes all children's heart surgeons suffer high levels of stress. "But you are not allowed to admit that. People don't like to admit weakness."

After 18 months working on his own in Newcastle, Hamilton was joined by a second children's heart surgeon, Asif Hasan. With two surgeons sharing a relatively small volume of cases, "there would be times when you hadn't done things for a while and you were just that little bit more nervous about it. I found that pressure began to tell over the years.

"Then you have a case that maybe doesn't go so well and it knocks your confidence. And it's quite difficult to get that back again. I think that's what happened to me and it was time to stop."

That happened at the end of 2006. "It wasn't a particularly difficult operation, but there were issues just getting started. I was having real problems with something I had done thousands of times ? putting the tubes in for the bypass machine."

There is always fear that a baby will die, Hamilton said. "I suspect all children's heart surgeons will admit to waking up in the middle of the night going over the operation in their head they are about to do the next day, because it might well be different from the last one you did."

The death rate in children's heart surgery is about 4%. "Every surgeon has deaths from time to time and that's difficult to cope with. Even though you do the technical job well, how children respond, how their body copes with the stress of the operation, will vary."

The operations are longer ? children's surgery can last for eight hours, compared with two to three for an adult ? and afterwards the surgeon is far more involved with intensive care. "To my mind," said Hamilton, who had finished an adult heart transplant operation at 4am that morning after a full day at work, "children's heart surgery is the most demanding and stressful."

Hamilton spoke out as a number of hospitals stepped up their campaigns to keep their own children's heart surgery units, ahead of Friday's deadline for the public consultation.

The Royal Brompton in London, which under the proposals would lose its surgery to Great Ormond Street and the Evelina children's hospital, has launched a judicial review, saying the consultation was flawed.

One Royal Brompton patient, 12-year-old Greg Shipley, from Wandsworth, south-west London, has written to David Cameron. Shipley, who suffers from a complex heart problem wrote: "One of the reasons I got sent to Royal Brompton is that my condition in children is very rare and needs treatment by adult facilities as well as children's. Most children's hospitals will not have the right equipment or staff to treat me."

MPs from Leeds, who are arguing to keep the children's heart unit at the general infirmary, last week debated the matter in the Commons.

Greg Mulholland, the Lib Dem MP for Leeds North West has written to Cameron with concerns about the "impartiality, the accuracy and the consistency" of the consultation process. He wrote that there were no representatives from Yorkshire on the panel that decided which units would be closed.

Hamilton says nobody ? from surgeons to medical royal colleges to patient organisations ? disputes the need for fewer, larger centres. They just don't want their own unit to close.

Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, agrees that even London needs fewer centres. "Because England needs only six to seven centres to guarantee safe cardiac surgery for children, London needs two not three surgical centres.

"Expertise does not reside in bricks and mortar; the expertise resides in the very talented doctors, nurses and other clinicians. London has a unique opportunity to pool its clinical expertise and provide even better results for children in the future.

"The ideal model is where you have fewer but highly specialised larger centres delivering the really complex and difficult operations," he said.

Since the Kennedy inquiry, published a decade ago, into the Bristol babies disaster ? the unnecessary deaths of babies with congenital heart defects at the hands of surgeons who were not good enough at the procedures they were carrying out ? it has been accepted that bigger centres are safer.

"Looking back over Bristol, I don't know how the guys managed," Hamilton said. "They must have been having nightmares and yet the atmosphere of the time was you had to cope and you weren't allowed not to cope. An argument for having bigger centres is you are working as a team and you can support each other a lot more and take the pressures off for a time. Had I been in a bigger centre with more colleagues and they could have shared the workload a bit more maybe it would have been easier."

Hamilton said the reorganisation of children's heart surgery was being closely watched all over the world, adding that while it was always hard to close any medical centre, reconfiguration was vital if the the NHS was to meet the changing health needs.

Last time there was a review, submitted by Professor James Monro and submitted in 2003, the then health minister Stephen Ladyman said there was no evidence for closures, which most thought meant it was just too politically sensitive.

This time, technically, it will be doctors rather than politicians making the decision ? unless, that is, the potato once more becomes too hot for ministers to handle.

• NHS
• Health policy
• Health

Sarah Boseley

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/30/heart-surgeon-system-children-change

Al Gore Chuck Hagel Stephen Harper Dennis Hastert Vaclav Havel

Senate cancels July 4 recess to work on debt limit (AP)

WASHINGTON ? The Senate canceled its planned July Fourth recess on Thursday, but partisan divisions remained razor sharp as the clock ticked on efforts to strike a deal to avoid a government default and trim huge federal deficits.

A day after President Barack Obama accused congressional leaders of procrastinating over the impasse, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced that the chamber would meet beginning next Tuesday. The Republican-run House is not in session this week but had already been scheduled to be at work next week.

Despite the Senate's schedule change, there was no indication the two sides had progressed in resolving their chief disagreement. Democrats insist that a deficit-cutting package of deep spending cuts also include higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans and fewer tax breaks for oil companies. Republicans say any such agreement would be defeated in Congress, a point Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., made anew when he invited Obama to meet with GOP lawmakers at the Capitol on Thursday afternoon.

"That way he can hear directly from Republicans why what he's proposing won't pass," McConnell said on the Senate floor. "And we can start talking about what's actually possible."

McConnell's invitation seemed almost like a taunt, since well before McConnell spoke the White House had announced that Obama was heading to Philadelphia to attend Democratic fundraising events.

White House spokesman Jay Carney defended Obama's decision to attend the fundraisers, saying, "We can walk and chew gum at the same time." He also said McConnell had merely "invited the president to hear what would not pass. That's not a conversation worth having."

The Obama administration has warned that if the government's $14.3 trillion borrowing limit is not raised by Aug. 2, the U.S. will face its first default ever, potentially throwing world financial markets into turmoil, raising interest rates and threatening the economic recovery. Many congressional Republicans indicate they're unconvinced that such scenarios would occur, and some administration officials worry that it could take a financial calamity before Congress acts.

One Democratic official familiar with the debt talks said the real deadline for reaching an bipartisan agreement on the debt and deficit reduction is mid-July, in order to give congressional leaders time to win votes and put final details of a deal into shape. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal details of private negotiations.

Obama has said that in talks, Republican and Democratic negotiators have found more than $1 trillion in potential spending cuts over the coming decade, including reductions favored by both sides.

The Democratic official said Thursday that of those cuts, roughly $200 billion would come mainly from savings from Medicaid and Medicare, the federal health insurance programs for the poor and elderly.

Another $200 billion would come from cuts in other automatically paid benefit programs, including farm subsidies. Another large chunk would come from cuts in discretionary spending that Congress approves every year ? presumably over $1 trillion, which is more than the White House but less than Republicans have proposed.

Both sides would then also count whatever interest savings they achieve through those deficit cuts.

The White House is also proposing about $400 billion in higher tax revenues. Republicans want no tax increases and deeper spending cuts than Democrats have proposed.

The overall goal would be to cut at least $2 trillion over 10 years.

Increasing the current borrowing limit by about $2.4 trillion would carry the government until the end of 2012 ? thereby avoiding another congressional vote on the issue until after the next presidential and congressional elections. Republicans have insisted on coupling any extension with at least an equal amount of budget savings.

For next week, Reid laid plans for the Senate to debate legislation authorizing U.S. involvement in Libya. He told reporters that Democratic senators would also discuss the deficit standoff with Obama next Wednesday at the Capitol or the White House, meet with administration economic advisers and learn about a deficit-cutting plan crafted by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

"What we have to do is too important to not be here," Reid said.

But GOP senators belittled the plans, saying little would be achieved.

"Talk about Libya? How does that answer the concerns expressed by the president" about the debt limit, said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.

A confrontational tone dominated the day, with each side accusing the other of lacking seriousness about finding a way to extend the debt ceiling.

"Where is the president? Campaigning," said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., one of a parade of GOP senators who took to the Senate floor to accuse Obama of not tackling the deficit standoff. "We're here, Mr. President."

Democrats focused on the GOP refusal to consider tax increases, including loophole closers Democrats have proposed on companies that ship jobs abroad and on wealthy owners of yachts, race horses and aircraft.

"Protecting them is not protecting America," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Senate Democratic leader.

The stakes of the debate were underscored when a Standard & Poor's executive said the credit-rating agency would give the government its lowest rating should lawmakers fail to agree on raising the borrowing limit and cause a federal default.

Should that occur, S&P would drop the U.S. rating of AAA to D, John Chambers, managing director of sovereign ratings for the company, said on Bloomberg Television.

The United States pays an average of about 3 percent on its existing debt, according to the Treasury Department. In 2010, that added up to $197 billion in interest payments.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects interest paid will rise from $463 billion by 2015. That's under the assumption that the U.S. keeps its AAA credit rating. A D rating from Standard & Poor's would force the government to pay sharply higher interest rates.

Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP, noted that one of the biggest challenges if the U.S. defaults would be finding enough investors who could buy junk-rated bonds. Pension funds and other institutional investors who buy a large number of Treasurys aren't generally allowed to buy securities with such low credit ratings.

___

Associated Press writers Ben Feller and Christopher S. Rugaber contributed to this report.

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110701/ap_on_bi_ge/us_debt_showdown

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How accurate are Ken Clarke's figures on legal aid? | Owen Bowcott

Labour justice spokesman and Bar Council challenge statistics quoted by ministry of justice to justify legal aid proposals

Ken Clarke's fervent admiration for the supposedly utopian state of legal practices down under is being subjected to a cold shower of scepticism.

Economy, reason and fairness, the justice secretary repeatedly implies, are the hallmarks of New Zealand's judicial system as exemplified by the fact that the country spends a mere �8 a year per head on legal aid.

In profligate, lawyer-ridden Britain, Clarke told the Commons again this week, the downtrodden citizenry fork out a world record �39 each to keep the onerous wheels of justice turning.

It is a powerful contrast but one now challenged by Labour's justice spokesman, Andy Slaughter, as well as the Bar Council who both dispute the accuracy of the Kiwi figures.

New Zealand, researchers have ascertained, spent NZ$172 million on legal aid in the year 2009/10. (That figure appears on a number of government press releases). According to the World Bank the country's population is 4.3 million residents.

Elementary long division results in 40 NZ dollars per head of population; translated into sterling it amounts to around �20 per person ? significantly larger than Clarke's oft-repeated �8.

The Ministry of Justice points to a 2009 report it published, written by two University of York academics entitled "International comparison of publicly funded legal services and justice systems," as the source of its comparative figures ? even though the document cautions that it did not "set out to be a full-scale comparative study".

The report draws its evidence of legal aid costs from a significantly earlier period (between 2003 and 2007) and notes that spending per capita on "legal aid related services" in New Zealand amounts to US$21.86; at today's rate that would convert into �13.65.

Clarke might take comfort from the fact that the justice minister in Wellington has expressed alarm at a 55% rise in legal aid costs over three years and branded the scheme "unaffordable". The 2009 comparative MoJ study also found that on "almost all of the components of the (legal aid) expenditure" more was spent in England and Wales than the other countries surveyed.

But Andy Slaughter said:

"The government is making policy on the basis of false figures. To justify destroying legal aid and our civil justice system they have seriously misrepresented the facts time and time again, including to the House of Commons and to the public.

In fact the cost of our justice system compares well with other jurisdictions. We completely reject the cuts to social welfare legal aid. Millions will suffer as a result of this poor analysis by a Department in chaos."

The Bar Council, representing barristers, similarly questions the ministry of justice's sums. "The government has continued to peddle the myth about the cost of our legal aid system," a spokesman said.

"Misleading statistics cannot be used as a cover to introduce DIY justice in place of access to justice by withdrawing whole areas of legal aid from scope.

"On a like-for-like basis, as the justice select committee found, our expenditure is average across Europe. These cuts will put us below average. The government relies on 2004 figures for New Zealand and compares them with our figures in 2009. The real cost in New Zealand is over double what the government suggests."

Labour claims the coalition has form in the conjuring of statistics and even alludes to "dodgy dossiers". Lord McNally, it notes, sent out a letter in March correcting figures given out about the cost of lawyers' fees to the NHS in 2008/9.

The Liberal Democrat peer apologised that "the �456m I quoted as the spend on lawyers' fees is in fact the NHS's total spend on clinical negligence claims comprising �312m in damages, �104m in claimants' legal costs and �40m in their own legal costs".

The ministry of justice retaliated by challenging Labour to identify where it would make savings of �64 million to compensate for the cuts to social welfare and housing advice which the party said it would never have contemplated.

The Access to Justice Action Group (AJAG) has, furthermore, come up with fresh analysis based on recently published parliamentary answers to contest the government's claims that the NHS will save �50 million through planned changes to "no win, no fee" agreements.

"In fact," the group maintains, "the impact will be to cost the NHS an extra �105.55million, comprising legal fees, additional compensation and loss of income from recovered treatment charges from insurers.

Andrew Dismore, AJAG's coordinator, said:

"Even if we are only half right, the cost to the NHS of these ill thought out and hast measures is truly shocking. The government is determined to press ahead, despite all the evidence pointing to them heading for a legal services train wreck.

"Our figures do not even take into account the long term cost of caring for injured accident victims who will now no longer claim, so the cost of their care falls on hard pressed local councils and the NHS, rather than the insurance companies."

Opposition to the bill is intensifying. The Spinal Injuries Association, supported by the brain injury charity Headway and Action Against Medical Accidents, has announced that it has lodged an application for judicial review of Clarke's plans to alter "no win, no fee" agreements.

(Under the governments' proposals, claimants' lawyers will have to take their success fees out of any compensation awarded rather than from the defendant. The switch, it is alleged, will render many claims financially unattractive to pursue.)

"Ministers have failed to consider properly the devastating impact its proposals could have on disabled people," Dan Burden of the Spinal Injuries Association, said.

"For a great many people whose lives have been devastated through a catastrophic event such as a spinal cord injury, the "no win, no fee" system has opened up the opportunity, irrespective of means, to submit a legitimate claim.

A newly injured person who is facing up to a life of permanent disability and paralysis should be entitled to obtain good quality legal advice which is independent, without financial pressures impacting their decision to progress a claim."

• Legal aid
• Kenneth Clarke

Owen Bowcott

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/butterworth-and-bowcott-on-law/2011/jun/30/legal-aid-new-zealand-accuracy-figures

Dick Cheney Noam Chomsky Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton Tom DeLay

Empty promises? The Sky News requirements imposed on News Corp

The extra undertakings demanded by culture secretary Jeremy Hunt ? subject to a consultation exercise ending on 8 July

Requirement News Corporation has been told that in order to take full control of BSkyB, Sky News must be spun off into an independent, publicly listed company to allay plurality fears. News Corporation will hold a 39% stake in Sky News but is not allowed to control more than 50% of voting shares. Existing Sky shareholders will take stakes in the same proportions as their investment in the satellite broadcaster.

Verdict The deal is designed to ensure Sky News has "editorial, governance, commercial and financial" independence, but critics argue that with a 39% stake, News Corporation will still have effective control over the new entity as it currently does BSkyB.

Requirement The majority of directors of Sky News must be independent.

Verdict The addition of the requirement for a non-Murdoch chairman ? which News Corporation initially opposed ? and beefing up editorial expertise at board level is designed to block News Corporation's perceived ability to sidestep legal agreements to secure independence, as occurred following the acquisition of the Times and the Wall Street Journal. Should help safeguard Sky News's independence.

Requirement The Sky News brand will be licensed for 14 years, with an option for three further years, and the channel will be guaranteed a slot on the electronic programme guide "no worse" than its current position. In addition Hunt will sign off on a 10-year TV carriage agreement and a 15-year land-lease agreement on Sky News's current location. BSkyB will also use its TV ad sales muscle to sell advertising and sponsorship for Sky News for "up to" three years.

Verdict Attempt to ensure that Sky News continues to be supported by BSkyB and might be seen by potential investors as having an economically viable future. Unclear, though, if Sky News is an independently viable business.

Requirement A monitoring trustee will report every four weeks to ensure NewsCorp abides by the undertakings.

Verdict Modest concession, depends on character of trustee.

• News Corporation
• Media business
• BSkyB
• BSkyB
• Television industry
• Jeremy Hunt

Rupert Morris

Mark Sweney

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/30/requirements-imposed-on-news-corp

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Omar al-Bashir Gloria Arroyo Joe Biden Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud

Bachmann: The View From Brooklyn

John Cassidy, The New Yorker
Three men sitting in a bar off Atlantic Avenue. The Lanigan, sporting a new beard, which gives him a vaguely Falstaffian aspect, gets all red-faced and serious-eyed. “Did you see the piece by Nate Silver on the Republican primary field?” he huffs. “He had Michele Bachmann as one of the first-tier candidates. How can he get away with that stuff?”One of his fellow drinkers doesn’t respond. The other one, a lean bird with crooked teeth, sets down his Pils and offers that he hasn’t seen the Silver post, but he’s not a bit...

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2011/06/30/bachmann_the_view_from_brooklyn_258427.html

Than Shwe Aung San Suu Kyi Yulia Tymoshenko Elizabeth Windsor Queen Elizabeth II

Labour joins Conservative attack on EU's ?1tn budget proposal

Ed Balls condemns European commission's plan as 'out of touch' amid EU-wide spending cuts

Britain's political class closed ranks to condemn the European commission's proposal for the first ?1tn EU budget.

In a rare display of unity, Labour echoed No 10's claim that the EU budget for the seven years from 2014 was inappropriate during a period of austerity. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor who played a key role in thwarting Tony Blair's attempts to join the euro, called for a rethink.

Balls said: "When countries across the EU are having to make tough decisions to get their deficits down after the global financial crisis, these proposals are ill-judged, out of touch and cannot be supported. The European commission should go back to the drawing board."

Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, said: "At a time when Britain and other countries have to make some tough decisions on public spending this significant rise proposed by the EU commission will strike people as inappropriate and misguided. The European commission should be focused on finding savings and targeting spending on the most crucial areas."

The Labour leadership criticised the proposed EU budget after the commission called for a new tax on bank transactions. Jos� Manuel Barroso, the commission president, wants a larger share of its spending to be supplied by "own resources" ? taxes paid to Brussels.

The commission also wants an overall budget of ?971.5bn (�872bn) in payments and ?1.025bn in commitments for 2014-20, but denies British claims that this amounts to a 10% increase. The Treasury says the commission is wrong because it uses commitments, rather than actual spending, as the baseline.

Stephen Booth, research director of Open Europe, said: "Although it has proposed some minor improvements, such as a reduction in farm subsidies and a new fund to promote energy and infrastructure connections, the European commission has again opted for an above-inflation increase without the radical reform needed to make the EU budget more rational and on target.

"The European commission has also chosen to employ some creative accounting by moving some spending items off its main balance sheet, to hide the true rise in overall expenditure. This type of spin will not win the trust of taxpayers and citizens across Europe."

The comments came as Nick Clegg was pressed by senior Liberal Democrats to join the Lords rebellion against the government's European Union bill aimed at halting any further integration of Britain into the EU by triggering referendums on any transfers of powers to Brussels.

A letter to the deputy prime minister from Andrew Duff, the leading Lib Dem MEP who believes that passage of the bill could ultimately lead to Britain leaving the EU, argues that the use of referendums destabilises Europe, that the EU is "slithering towards a fiscal union" which will have a big impact on the UK while leaving it marginalised, and that the bill reduces parliament to an onlooker in EU policy-making.

The letter to Clegg has been sent to all Lib Dem MPs, peers, and MEPs in an attempt to block or delay the Tory-led campaign to insulate Britain from forfeiting more sovereign powers to Brussels.

The bill was the Cameron government's response to Gordon Brown's refusal to stage a referendum on the EU's Lisbon Treaty.

Earlier this month senior Thatcher-era Tories such as Michael Heseltine and Leon Brittan as well as and veteran Lib Dems led by Lady Williams rebelled in the Lords against the EU bill, larding it with amendments before sending it back to the Commons where the government is expected to overrule the upper house.

The Duff letter, of which the Guardian has a copy, will enrage the eurosceptic Tory backbenches. "I urge you to argue in Cabinet for acceptance of the Lords' amendments," Duff told Clegg.

The bill is tantamount to a "unilateral renegotiation of Britain's terms of EU membership. A wise government would avoid doing such irreparable damage to the national and European interest."

The effect of the bill is to treat the EU uniquely in British politics, singling out EU matters "for a popular vote and the relegation of the Westminster parliament to the role of onlooker", Duff contends.

The rest of the 27 countries of the EU, he adds, take a dim view of the Cameron government's move and will simply bypass Britain on key policy-making decisions.

"Everyone else in the EU knows that, and rightly concludes that the UK's credibility as a negotiating partner is dramatically lowered ... the UK will be excluded from key sectors of integration.

"I cannot see how the UK will have either the moral or political clout to block the constitutional evolution of the EU desired by its partners. Relegation to a new class of second-class membership would be the only available step. Such marginalisation would delight many Conservatives and Europhobes. It is a prospect which must appal us."

• European Union
• Europe
• Ed Balls
• Labour
• Conservatives

Nicholas Watt

Ian Traynor

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/30/labour-eu-trillion-euro-budget

Henry Kissinger Dennis Kucinich Nelson Mandela Paul Martin John McCain

Missile Defense Malpractice

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2011/06/30/missile_defense_malpractice_258456.html

Laura Bush George W. Bush George H. W. Bush Jimmy Carter Fidel Castro

London Lib Dems should resist Lembit's allure

Straw polls in the wind suggest that the more dedicated London Liberal Democrats strongly favour Mike Tuffrey AM becoming their candidate for next year's mayoral mud wrestle. Party members as a whole would be very daft indeed not to take heed. There are about 9,000 in the metropolis of whom, I'm advised, around a third are expected to take part in the one member, one vote election. A shortlist will be drawn up on Sunday and the result is scheduled to be announced on August 12. Anything other than a Tuffrey victory would only increase the army of electors wishing to feed Nick Clegg's party to the crocodiles.

I mention this not merely because I know the precise and experienced Tuffrey would hold his own in any platform dust-up with Boris and Ken, but also because Lib Dem activists who don't pay close attention to what goes on at City Hall might be swayed by giggly media characterisations of the selection process as a contest of contrasts between shiny-bright, well-known Lembit and dull, unknown ex-accountant Mike. I sympathise with the evil journalistic instincts at work, for it is true that Tuffrey lacks the slightest trace of the celebrity profile widely held to be a prerequisite of mayoral candidacy. But neither man would stand much chance of winning, so it's a question of the best way to come third.

Long, long ago people who despised Liberal Democrats did so not only because they considered them a bunch of ruthless opportunists without a principle between them. They did so because they considered them a bunch of ruthless opportunists without a principle between them who were egotistical eccentrics too. Why revive the full back-catalogue of contempt when you can limit it to the modern kind? And with Tuffrey in the spotlight for a few months, you might even repair some of the damage.

Brian Paddick, who fought a valiant losing battle for the Lib Dems in 2008, has been talking of having another go. He played the "serious" card against Boris and Ken. The theory was that voters would see him as a more credible challenger to Livingstone than the frivolous Johnson. It didn't work, but it might well have been the best card in his hand.

Tuffrey has been playing the "serious" card against Opik, and he'd probably play it better in the big race next year than Paddick could a second time around. Paddick also trimmed to the right in policy terms in an effort to attract Conservatives. I can't see Tuffrey doing that, and neither should he. The aim of the Lib Dems' 2012 campaign must surely be to salvage a bit of solid credibility from the ruin the party's reputation has fallen into since joining the coalition. That's why Tuffrey has to be their man.

• London politics
• London
• Lembit Opik
• Brian Paddick
• Liberal Democrats

Dave Hill

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/davehillblog/2011/jun/30/london-lib-dems-should-resist-lembit-opik

John Kerry Ban Ki-moon Henry Kissinger Dennis Kucinich Nelson Mandela

Robert Gates receives Presidential Medal of Freedom as he leaves post

(CNN) -- In his official farewell to outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, U.S President Barack Obama honored the plainspoken Kansas native on Thursday with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor.

"I'm deeply honored and moved by your presentation of this award," Gates told Obama during a tribute in front of the Pentagon, punctuated by brass band music.

"It is a big surprise. But we should have known a couple of months ago that you're getting pretty good at this covert ops stuff," he said, possibly referring to a secret U.S. raid Obama authorized which killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Gates -- whose four decades of public service spanned eight U.S. presidents -- is succeeded by former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Considered the ultimate Washington insider, Gates -- himself a former CIA chief -- replaced Donald Rumsfeld in 2006, and served as secretary of defense in the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

He joined the CIA in 1966 and later worked at the National Security Council and at the White House, making him the only career officer in CIA history to rise from entry-level employee to director.

Once the president of Texas A&M University, Gates described Thursday the transition between the Bush and Obama teams as "the first of its kind" during a war in over 40 years.

Following Obama's 2008 election, he reached out to Gates in a secret meeting at a fire station at Reagan National Airport outside of Washington and convinced the outgoing Pentagon chief to stay in office.

Obama called Gates "one of the nation's finest public servants," noting his "profound sense of duty" that led him to continue serving in the Obama administration despite his desire to return to civilian life.

Gates once had a "countdown clock" that ticked down the days until the end of the Bush administration, indicating the date when he could retire. But within weeks of Obama's election, the clock had become obsolete.

"I've thrown away the clock because it was absolutely useless," Gates said in December 2008.

Obama said Gates "challenged conventional wisdom" to reduce wasteful military spending and save "hundreds of billions," while helping to refocus U.S. attention on the treatment of wounded soldiers.

Shortly after replacing Rumsfeld in the Pentagon's E-Ring office suite, Gates was confronted with a scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the military hospital in Washington in which wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan are treated.

When a Washington Post investigation unearthed months of substandard care there, the man in charge of the hospital was fired and the secretary of the Army resigned.

"I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation," Gates said when announcing Secretary Francis Harvey's resignation. "Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems."

During his tenure, Gates implemented the "troop surge" in Iraq, and helped prosecute the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

"Today we see the lifesaving difference he made," Obama said Thursday.

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Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_allpolitics/~3/OprnahORDz8/index.html

Bill Frist Newt Gingrich Rudolph Giuliani Al Gore Chuck Hagel

News Corp/BSkyB deal underlines Murdoch's political clout

Critics will claim this is a textbook example of how Rupert Murdoch wields the power vested in his newspapers

BSkyB has its summer party tonight at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, a venue which its critics might wryly remark provides further evidence of Rupert Murdoch's close ties to the government. Jeremy Hunt's decision to approve News Corp's deal to buy the satellite broadcaster, with some extra conditions attached, will consolidate the media mogul's power in the UK at a time when one part of his empire is the subject of a police investigation. Those extra undertakings are largely meaningless ? a director with journalistic experience will sit in on board meetings at the new, independently run, Sky News when editorial decisions are made, for example. Tougher provisions were put in place when Murdoch bought the Times in 1981 and the Wall Street Journal in 2007 and they were ignored.

Critics will claim this is a textbook example of how Murdoch wields the power vested in his newspapers. The Sun came out early and enthusiastically for David Cameron. Now the government has allowed him to take full control of a broadcaster whose revenues now exceed those of the BBC. Team Cameron and Team Murdoch are undeniably close. The prime minister employed Andy Coulson, who was editor of the News of the World when its journalists were hacking into messages left on mobile phones, as his director of communications. Coulson resigned only when the full extent of phone hacking began to become apparent, and even then Cameron was reluctant to let him go.

Murdoch was the first visitor to No 10 after Cameron was elected, arriving through the back door so the photographer couldn't capture him coming in through the front. Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World and Sun editor who now runs Murdoch's UK newspaper arm, dines regularly with the Camerons in Oxfordshire, where Brooks and her husband Charlie have a weekend retreat and the PM has a constituency home.Rupert's son James, who is chairman of BSkyB and a senior executive at News Crop (and Brooks' boss), was at one such social event last Christmas. The Tories and the Murdochs have been driven closer by political and commercial expediency, as well as ideological conviction, and those ties are further cemented at social occasions. The same was true in the Blair era, while Gordon Brown was among the guests at Brooks's wedding.

Meanwhile, Labour backbenchers made much of the phone-hacking link when the culture secretary was dragged to the Commons at 11.30am to answer an urgent question on the takeover tabled by former defence minister Tom Watson MP. Along with Chris Bryant, the Labour MP and hacking victim who is suing the News of the World, Watson has done more to highlight wrongdoing at the News of the World than anyone else. "This seedy bid would shame a banana republic" Watson said this morning.

Many opposition MPs, along with a few Liberal Democrats, may continue to ask how a company which has now admitted criminality on a significant scale can be allowed to increase its power. The Lib Dems are in a tortuous position, although that is a stance they have become familiar with during their times at the Tories coalition partners. It was clear that business secretary Vince Cable wanted to use his powers to block the Sky takeover, if possible, or reduce its power after it was absorbed into News Corp ? as he foolishly boasted to two Telegraph journalists posing as constituents. By doing so, he set in motion a chain of events which ended with his power to intervene in media mergers being removed.Now the Lib Dems can complain all they like about Murdoch's power, doubtless with the memory of the kicking his papers gave to Nick Clegg when it seemed he might lead his party to a record election performance still fresh in their minds. But they are unable to do much about it, particularly as the Murdoch press is currently going easy on the Lib Dems because, as part of the coalition, they are vital to Cameron's survival.

Labour's position is slightly more nuanced. The shadow culture secretary, Ivan Lewis, raised hacking in the house this morning when he quizzed Hunt about the deal, but Speaker John Bercow intervened and told him that was off limits, which allowed Hunt to sidestep the question.

Nevertheless, that was a departure for Labour. Until now, Lewis has consistently attacked Hunt for refusing to refer the deal to the Competition Commission for a full enquiry, and thus subjecting it to further regulatory scrutiny, but refused to take the gloves off by raising the phone-hacking affair. Lewis's attack was spiced somewhat by his assertion that hacking went far further than the News of the World, and his call for a public inquiry into press conduct generally. Ed Miliband's director of communications, Tom Baldwin, made it clear in a leaked memo to MPs that hacking and News Corp's bid for Sky should be treated as separate issues, and if you believe that all parties need to court Murdoch's paper's in order to ensure their message is heard, then that was a shrewd political calculation. Decoupling the Sky bid from the hacking affair was privately welcomed by Brooks. It may even have spiked News International's guns, and possibly given the Labour leadership a slightly easier ride in the Sun that it would otherwise have got. The tabloid paper ran a surprisingly upbeat profile of the Labour leader in April, although, tellingly perhaps, it was published on Good Friday, when newspapers sales are low.

The conviction that the Murdoch press must be neutralised, at least, and cultivated if possible runs deep in some parts of the Labour party, who still believe the unremittingly hostile treatment Neil Kinnock received made winning elections more difficult. Rupert Murdoch's power may be exaggerated, particularly in an age when newspapers sales are falling, but whether it is illusory on not, all that matters is that politicians continue to believe it is real.

Some on the left long for the Labour party to take a principled stand against a man whose dominance of the UK media will be further enhanced once the Sky deal his done and his market-leading newspapers become part of the same company which owns the nation's richest broadcaster. They are sure to find ways of working more closely together, thus further weakening competitors, including the Guardian, which challenge the inherent rightwing bias of the British press.

Lewis's comments this morning aside, the Labour party is effectively treading a middle course, landing blows on the government by criticising Hunt's decision to clear the Sky takeover, but resolutely refusing to be drawn into an war with the Murdoch empire. That risks alienating those who would like to see Murdoch's power checked, but the bigger question is, what does Labour gain as a result? Sitting on the fence may result in slightly less hostile coverage, but it is unlikely ever to persuade the Sun, the News of the World, the Times or the Sunday Times to abandon their support for Cameron.

? To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

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• BSkyB
• Television industry
• News Corporation
• Media business
• Rupert Murdoch
• David Cameron
• Ed Miliband
• Nick Clegg

James Robinson

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/30/news-corp-bskyb-murdoch

Queen Elizabeth II Wu Yi Viktor Yushchenko Nancy Pelosi Speaker Pelosi

China: The Long Arm of the State

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2011/06/30/china_the_long_arm_of_the_state_258459.html

Joe Biden Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud King Abdulla Osama bin Laden Tony Blair

How clean energy can drive economic growth

Globally, the low-carbon goods and services industry is worth �3.2 trillion, and employs 28 million people. It is growing by 4 per cent a year, faster than developed world GDP, and will accelerate. It is also a sector driven by relentless innovation. Between 1999-2008, patents for renewable energy increased by 24 per cent each year. Electric and hybrid vehicles were up 20 per cent. Energy efficiency up 11 per cent. Nearly 2,000 clean energy patents were filed in the United States last year, nearly treble the previous year.

Private finance is already rushing in. In the first half of 2010, green technologies accounted for a quarter of all US venture capital investments. Globally, investment in renewables now outstrips investment in fossil fuels. This extra inward investment brings jobs and sets the conditions for growth. It also drives learning-by-doing: making companies and economies more productive.

The second reason to choose the low-carbon path is self-evident: it is more resource efficient. It uses less energy and fewer resources per unit of GDP. A survey of 300 top executives from large global corporations found more than three quarters of respondents expect their annual clean energy technology spending to rise over the next five years. No wonder 72 per cent of global CEOs actively support policies that promote economically, socially and environmentally sustainable growth. They know that a green economy is also more resource efficient. It saves money, boosts the bottom line, and helps shareholder returns.

There is a third reason to pursue green growth. Businesses hate unpleasant surprises, as the first two oil shocks showed. Green growth can protect our economy ? reducing our exposure to price shocks. That is good for every business in the land from corner shop to conglomerate.

After all, dependence on oil for transport and gas for power puts us at the mercy of international markets over which we have no control. We cannot rely on the North Sea. We were once self-sufficient in oil and gas; now we importing 27 per cent of our energy. That vulnerability is projected to double by 2020.

And even home-produced oil and gas exists in a world market. It can still give us a nasty price shock.

The IMF?s World Economic Outlook for 2011 devotes an entire chapter to oil scarcity. It notes that ?the persistent increase in oil prices over the past decade suggests that global oil markets have entered a period of increased scarcity. Given the expected rapid growth in oil demand in emerging market economies and a downshift in the trend growth of oil supply, a return to abundance is unlikely in the near term.?

Those emerging market economies will be ready and willing to compete for scarce resources. In extreme cases, control of and access to hydrocarbons will likely become a matter for militaries, not treasuries.

So what is to be done? We should head off the challenge of price and supply insecurity by getting off the oil hook.

The demand for oil and gas, of course, does not come down easily whatever the price. We cannot simply stop using them overnight. We are committed to car journeys. And locked into fossil fuel using capital equipment.

So protecting ourselves from price shocks is not the work of a day, a week, or a year: we must free our economy from carbon addiction over the long haul.

Some countries already have a head start. Electricity prices in France are set to rise by just 3 per cent this year. Compare and contrast with Britain, where prices are rising by three times as much. It is no surprise that France is the European country with the least reliance on fossil fuels, and enjoys some of the lowest prices ? 9.4 per cent below ours.

We have a long way to go. But every long journey begins with a first step.

For us, that means building cleaner power plants, and encouraging the electrification of heating and transport. These are the fundamental components of a strategy that will deliver green growth.

The fourth and final reason to pursue such a strategy is simple: we cannot risk being left behind. Green growth is in our direct national interest. Around the world, governments are responding to the green energy challenge. The race for the future is already under way.

Chris Huhne is the Energy and Climate Change Secretary.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered by Chris Huhne to the Corporate Leaders? Group in London yesterday.

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Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568387/s/164f0061/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cearth0Cenergy0C860A84410CHow0Eclean0Eenergy0Ecan0Edrive0Eeconomic0Egrowth0Bhtml/story01.htm

Than Shwe Aung San Suu Kyi Yulia Tymoshenko Elizabeth Windsor Queen Elizabeth II

An Amen for Albany

Walter Olson, Wall Street Journal
For those of us who support same-sex marriage and also consider ourselves to be right of center, there were special reasons to take satisfaction in last Friday's vote in Albany. New York expanded its marriage law not under court order but after deliberation by elected lawmakers with the signature of an elected governor. Of the key group of affluent New Yorkers said to have pushed the campaign for the bill, many self-identify as conservative or libertarian. A GOP-run state Senate gave the measure its approval. Ground shifts could be felt among the conservative commentariat as well. At...

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2011/06/30/an_amen_for_albany_258449.html

Jimmy Carter Dick Cheney Barack Obama George Soros Aung San Suu Kyi

Response: Public spending has not been cut, it's just been stopped from rising

If Osborne does not spend, he does not borrow, so the money stays in the private sector

In his piece on the economy, Robert Skidelsky makes two arguments (The economy is stagnating before the cuts even bite. We need a plan C now, 22 June). First, that "Britain is very much in the slow lane of global recovery, and this is all before the cuts have started to bite". His other argument contrasts "the [George] Osborne theory" ? that the cuts of �83bn are "equivalent to transferring money to the private sector" ? and the Keynesian argument that "cuts in public spending will not be matched by an equivalent increase in private spending". I accept the first proposition and wish Skidelsky had written more on this aspect. This is because it has implications for his second argument, which I contest.

Britain's slow recovery is because of the nature of the crisis we are in. Unlike previous recessions, which were caused by lack of effective demand ? the standard Keynesian case ? it was due to overspending on the part of households and governments. There is also a longer-term reason. Since the early 1980s, western countries have ceded manufacturing activity to emerging economies and replaced it with private or often public services which generate jobs but not as much wealth. Our wealth-creation capacity has thus fallen and we have deluded ourselves that we are rich by borrowing.

Skidelsky contrasts former chancellor Alistair Darling's budget, which would have "taken out" �73bn from the economy, as against Osborne's budget whichwould take out �83bn over five years. But these numbers are hypothetical. Each represents a difference between what the pre-recession projection of the economy showed for 2010-15, and what in light of the recession and the debt situation each chancellor thought should be the revised path. No money has been taken out or will be from the economy.

Osborne has frozen public spending, as planned by Darling for 2010-11, in real terms for five years. So public spending is not "cut": it has been prevented from rising, as normally happens in a growing economy. Where would the �83bn that Osborne has decided not to spend have come from if he did wish to spend it? Since households are in debt, as is the government, the money would be lent by the business sector. If Osborne does not spend, he does not borrow. So the money stays back in the business sector's balance. There is no question of 'transferring money to the private sector'. It is of not removing it in the first place.

Skidelsky's argument has to be that Osborne should have borrowed because his spending would have a bigger multiplier effect than the private sector would achieve. But the slow recovery tells us that multipliers are low anyway. The longer-term need is for investment in productive activities, not ditch-digging public spending. Skidelsky's Plan C is an admission of this. He would prefer the new investment to be channelled through a green bank, but this is merely churning the money around from the private sector to the private sector.

Eventually the answer is private sector investment, which will be in wealth-creating enterprises and not job creation in the public sector. Whether the Treasury is more efficient at this than the private sector is not a question Keynesians or any other economists can answer.

• George Osborne
• Alistair Darling
• Economic policy
• Economics
• Public sector cuts
• Public finance

Meghnad Desai

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/29/public-spending-stops-rising

Tom DeLay Elizabeth Dole John Edwards Dianne Feinstein Bill Frist

Bachmann: The View From Brooklyn

John Cassidy, The New Yorker

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2011/06/30/bachmann_the_view_from_brooklyn_258427.html

Yulia Tymoshenko Elizabeth Windsor Queen Elizabeth II Wu Yi Viktor Yushchenko

Gore's Ugly Rhetoric Nothing New

David Harsanyi, Washington Examiner
For years, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have warned us that too many babies will destroy the Earth."We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet's life-forms -- an estimated 8,760 species die off per year -- because, simply put," explained environmentalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, "there are too many people." (Well, not exactly that simple when one considers that millions of species had disappeared long before humans selfishly began drinking from plastic bottles.)In one of his recent works of speculative...

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/06/29/al_gores_ugly_rhetoric_is_nothing_new_110401.html

Kim Jong Il Islam Karimov Ted Kennedy John Kerry Ban Ki-moon

Do you support the public sector strikes? | Poll

Up to 750,000 public servants from four unions are taking industrial action over changes to their pension arrangements. Do you support the strikers?

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/poll/2011/jun/30/support-public-sector-strikes-poll

Hugo Chavez Dick Cheney Noam Chomsky Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton

David Mamet Gets Lanced-a-Lot

Although I'm favorably mentioned a couple of times here, I'm not going to let false modesty--isn't all modesty false modesty? I sometimes wrestle with that--prevent me from linking to Lance Mannion's brilliant, expansive meditation on David Mamet'a conversion to anti-liberalism and the big-shot cigar smoke he's blowing into everyone's faces as he rides over illegal immigrants with his golf cart.



In the New York Times piece, [Mamet] sounds like another cheap---as in stingy---Republican Randian, full of spite and bile at the ?parasites? clamoring for his money and reserving the threat of going Galt. Randians talk about wealth creators as if they are really that, creators, producing money out of nothing or out of themselves the way artists produce their creations. Of course, the only artists who come close to creating all by themselves are painters and sculptors and so the comparison only works if other people are to the Galts of the world what brushes and hammers and chisels are to painters and sculptors, that is, tools, an idea the Randians have no problem with. But wealth creation is like every human endeavor, a social endeavor and therefore a collaborative one. None of us gets anything done without help. It?s ridiculous to talk otherwise and Mamet is even more ridiculous because he works in one of the most collaborative of human endeavors, the performing arts.

We don?t need more than one word to take care of this.

Actors.

But we can add a few more. Stagehands. Make-up artists. Costume and set designers. Directors. Producers. Old guys named Joe sitting by the stage door.

How rich would David Mamet be if he?d had to make his money off reciting his own plays on street corners?



I'm sure he'd also have a three-card monte game going on the side, but that only brings in so much.

Lance makes a point rarely made and yet so incisive--that Mamet only looks like a serrated stylist because most of his work is in the stodgier medium of the theater.



...his career has depended on his being thought controversial. He?s a good playwright, but he?s not that good. You don?t go to his plays---or his movies---to learn any secrets of the human heart. You don?t go to care about his characters, not deeply at any rate, and if you go to be surprised by the twists and turns of his plots, you can only do it by not just a willing suspension of disbelief but a willful suspension of memory and thought.

Once upon a time you went to be thrilled at the way he played with language, which was like the way a blindfolded juggler played with knives. But after a while, you get it. He can juggle knives without cutting himself. Now how about mixing it up a little, David? How about juggling an orange or two along with the knives? How about juggling more than three knives? And he?s been out-juggled over the last decade or so�by television writers! The Sopranos? David Chase. Deadwood?s David Milch. And, far and away, by David Simon. (What?s with all the Davids?) One episode of The Wire is worth any two or three of Mamet?s plays, and not just for the thrill of the knife-juggling.



And almost any episode of The Larry Sanders Show told you more about the ego maneuverings and dick-status competition in the LA showbiz breviary than the blustering of Speed-the-Plow, that connect-the-dots cartoon.

If David Mamet wants to become Dennis Miller minus the self-conscious, self-applauding laugh, go ahead, be that thing, watch the Tonys from Colonel Kurtz's cave, who cares. He can do with the butt-end of his career whatever he likes. Now that he's done his conversion memoir, the next logical step is a sequel in which he recounts all of the friends and colleagues who turned on him because of his heretical stand, the reproachful silences and invitations unsent, the whole Norman Podhoretz schmear.

[Community Notice: It's the last day of Lance's fundraiser, so why not donate?]

Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/06/although-im-favorably-mentioned-a.html

Fidel Castro Hugo Chavez Dick Cheney Noam Chomsky Bill Clinton

The Demons in Krugmanomics

Peter Foster, Financial Post
Mr. Krugman is a Nobel-winning trade-policy academic economist who, over the past couple of decades, has gone increasingly to the liberal dark side, as evidenced in his columns in The New York Times. What seems to have driven him completely over the edge is a combination of Bush Derangement Syndrome and an evangelical desire to prove that Reaganomics was a failure. He criticizes Barack Obama for not going far enough.He hates Republicans with a passion and is Keynesian to the core. Thus he can only interpret the failure of government stimulus as evidence of...

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2011/06/29/the_demons_in_krugmanomics_258376.html

Prince William Charles Mountbatten-Windsor Prince Charles Camilla Mountbatten-Windsor Duchess of Cornwall

Simon Hoggart's sketch | Quangos rise from flames

Miliband asked how many quangos there would be in the reformed NHS. The number would rise from 163 to 521

No wonder the prime minister was rattled yesterday. Not only did Ed Miliband land a couple of blows ? not something that happens every week ? but the Speaker ticked him off not once, but twice. This is the equivalent of the head boy reproving the headmaster. Oh, and the bald patch has doubled in length. It is now the same shape, size and colour as two goujons of plaice. Larry, the Downing Street cat, must look at David Cameron hungrily.

Miliband kicked off with his by now predictable habit of asking a question to which he knows the answer but of which he imagines Cameron is ignorant. In this case it was to ask how many quangos there would be in the new, reformed NHS. Not knowing the answer, or at least not being prepared to admit that he knew it, the prime minister replied that everyone loved his reorganisation, especially people in the NHS.

So Miliband provided the answer. The number would rise from 163 to 521. If true, this does seem an awful lot. The Labour leader produced a list of some. "Pathfinder consortia, health and well-being boards, shadow commissioning groups, authorised commissioning groups, a national commissioning board, PCT clusters, FHA clusters, clinical networks and clinical senates."

(I expect they had those in ancient Rome. "I'm feeling a bit peaky, Bilius."

"Take two leeches and call me in the morning, Nausius.")

Was this what Cameron had meant by the bonfire of the quangos?

Miliband also extracted some blood from the �852m he claimed it would cost in redundancy payments for NHS staff. Could Cameron promise that none of those people would be re-employed in their old jobs? He could not. Instead he talked about today's festival of strikes, which is what he wanted to talk about in the first place. He began to rave. Labour wanted the whole country to be like Greece, he said ? at considerable length.

The Speaker intervened. "We're very grateful!" he said crisply, which is John Bercow-speak for "Shut it, sunshine!"

Cameron looked furious. But the Speaker wasn't finished with him yet. After he had spent 56 seconds ? eternity at question time ? talking about crime in London, Bercow interrupted him again. "Prime minister's questions are principally for backbenchers," he said, which was ? if you picked the bones out of it ? a thunderous reproof, if a little unfair. After all, the title of the session does imply prime minister's answers as well. If not perhaps at such enormous length.

Cameron must have thought all the ills of the world were heaped on his shoulders when Sir Peter Tapsell arose. As the alarm sounded in the Hansard office, and a team of Japanese calligraphers were sent to immortalise his words on parchment (there is always time, as Labour cheers are loud and long when Sir Peter speaks), the prime minister must have assumed he was about to receive yet another majestic bollocking from the father of the house.

Not so. Sir Peter merely hoped that, given the chaos in the EU, we would be able to negotiate a spanking new treaty.

• PMQs
• House of Commons
• Ed Miliband
• Health policy
• Health
• Public services policy
• Quangos

Simon Hoggart

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/29/quangos-nhs-simon-hoggart

Sean Hannity Harry Reid Mitch McConnel Rush Limbaugh George Bush