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G.O.P. Threatens Seats Long Held by Democrats

Evans Liberal Politics
April 25, 2010

 

G.O.P. Threatens Seats Long Held by Democrats

 

G.O.P. Threatens Seats Long Held by Democrats, © The New York Times, April 24, 2010, by Jeff Zeleney and Adam Nougourney, excerpt quoted verbatim:

ASHLAND, Wis. — Representative David R. Obey has won 21 straight races, easily prevailing through wars and economic crises that have spanned presidencies from Nixon’s to Obama’s. Yet the discontent with Washington surging through politics is now threatening not only his seat but also Democratic control of Congress.

Mr. Obey is one of nearly a dozen well-established House Democrats who are bracing for something they rarely face: serious competition. Their predicament is the latest sign of distress for their party and underlines why Republicans are confident of making big gains in November and perhaps even winning back the House.

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The fight for the midterm elections is not confined to traditional battlegrounds, where Republicans and Democrats often swap seats every few cycles. In the Senate, Democrats are struggling to hold on to, among others, seats once held by President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Democrats are preparing to lose as many as 30 House seats — including a wave of first-term members — and Republicans have expanded their sights to places where political challenges seldom develop.

“It’s not a lifetime appointment,” said Sean Duffy, a Republican district attorney here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, where he has established himself as one of the most aggressive challengers to Mr. Obey since he went to Washington in 1969. “There are changes in this country going on, and people aren’t happy.”

Mr. Obey, who leads the powerful Appropriations Committee, is one of three House Democratic chairmen who have drawn serious opposition. Representatives John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, who oversees the Budget Committee, and Ike Skelton of Missouri, who runs the Armed Services Committee, have been warned by party leaders to step up the intensity of their campaigns to help preserve the Democratic majority.

These established House Democrats find themselves in the same endangered straits as some of their newer colleagues, particularly those who were swept into office in 2008 by Mr. Obama as he scored victories in traditionally Republican states like Indiana and Virginia.

Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said he would consider anything short of taking back the House a failure. Republicans say they have not recruited strong candidates in all districts, but both parties agree that Republicans are within reach of capturing the 40 additional seats needed to win control. Republicans also are likely to eat into the Democratic majority in the Senate, though their prospects of taking control remain slim.

Democratic Congressional officials — well aware that a president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections — have long been preparing for a tough year. But that Mr. Obey here in Wisconsin and other veteran lawmakers like Representative Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota suddenly find themselves in a fight reflects an increasingly sour mood toward the Democratic Party and incumbents. ….

Read the full article, here.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: I just spent almost an hour on YouTube looking for mainstream media OR partisan Democratic videos about election 2010. They aren’t there. There are plenty of pro Tea Party Videos, you can find pages and pages of them in the search results for example for “election 2010″. I even went so far as to search YouTube for “election 2010 pro Democrat” (as well as “DNC election 2010″ and other partisan searches) and all of THOSE results were pro Tea Party results, including the top result listed, America Rising: An Open Letter to Democrat Politicians, which I have to admit, is a slick, well produced video…. watch it if you dare!

I’m worried…. The last figures I saw were to the effect that measurements of “party voter enthusiasm” had Democrats at 30 percent enthusiastic and Republicans at 55 percent. Traditional mid-term voter turnout has historically run about 36 to 38 percent. The last time it was as high as 38 percent was 1994, when Democrats lost Congress.

In Democrats Retain Money Advantage, ABC News, April 21, 2010, by David Chalian, it is claimed that Democrats have $57.8 million cash on hand while Republicans have just $36.3 million. I see utterly no evidence of this in the rhetoric and visibility of conservative message versus liberal message on the web or television. I have utterly no evidence that Democrats are doing anything constructive, media wise, with this money. YouTube is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tea Party in terms of the visibility of search results and their positioning. And YouTube is where America goes to find news on topics they are interested in.

In election 2010 polling done by Daily Kos/Research 2000, as of March 1-4, 2010, polling was running 45% Democrat to 42% Republican. But by April 19-23, 2010, results had swung to 46% Democrat to 47% Republican. The trend over 8 polls was a consistent erosion of Democrat support, or, rather, steady Democrat support with increasing Republican support. This means that Independents and swing voters are deciding in favor of Republican candidates. Gallop has a generic ballot for Congress as of April 15th as Democrat 43% versus Republican 46%. We are losing the war about our whole “message”. RealClearPolitics has new polling results as of April 15th which show only 36.6 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the “right direction”, while 58 percent feel we are on the “wrong track” (RCP average of five polling sources). This means that the overall opinion war is being lost.

DNC, DNCC, DSCC, DCC: you guys better wake UP! Get in there and counterpunch, unless you really do have a burning desire to go down in flames in this fall’s elections. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

*****

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Posted on April 25, 2010 by , Reply

Judge Diane P. Wood: Judicial Bouts Reveal Power of Persuasion

Evans Liberal Politics
April 22, 2010

 

Judge Diane P. Wood:
Judicial Bouts Reveal Power of Persuasion

 

Judicial Bouts Reveal Power of Persuasion, © The New York Times, April 21, 2010, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, photo of Diane Wood in 2008 from Wikipedia, commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans, excerpt quoted verbatim:

WASHINGTON — There were few liberals and just one woman on the federal appeals court in Chicago when Diane P. Wood, an antitrust expert with a flair for foreign language and an ear for playing the oboe, showed up in the summer of 1995. The chief judge, a scholarly conservative named Richard A. Posner, promptly gave her some advice.

Wikipedia photo of Judge Diane P. Wood in 2008

The appeals bench, Judge Posner warned, was like “a system of arranged marriage with no divorce.”

His message to his junior colleague was clear: Pick your battles carefully. Compromise when you can.In the 15 years since, Judge Wood, 59, has done just that, playing the role of philosophical outlier, a left-leaning woman in a world of right-leaning men, including Judge Posner and Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, a sharp-tongued intellectual who is now the court’s chief. The three have a long history together; all are former law professors at the University of Chicago, where an ambitious young state senator named Barack Obama made a name for himself lecturing on constitutional jurisprudence.

Now President Obama is considering Judge Wood as a possible Supreme Court nominee. With conservatives attacking her as too liberal, her long relationship with Judges Posner and Easterbrook — sometimes yielding surprising consensus, at other times spirited dissent — offers hints into just what kind of justice she might be.

“Essentially, she’s a controlled fighter who likes to counterpunch,” said Richard A. Epstein, a Chicago professor and prominent libertarian thinker who knows all three.

Those counterpunches are often in evidence on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. Off the bench, the three judges maintain friendly relations. Judge Posner officiated at Judge Wood’s third wedding, and Judge Easterbrook and Judge Wood run into each other regularly at the symphony. On the bench, they conduct a regular three-way legal boxing match.

In a 2009 case that drew wide publicity, they parried over whether a condominium association could strip a mezuzah from the door of a Jewish family on the grounds that no hallway decorations were allowed. A three-judge panel, led by Judge Easterbrook, had ruled in favor of the association, with Judge Wood dissenting.

When the full court heard the case last May, those two judges, along with Judge Posner, fired questions at the family’s lawyer, cutting him off repeatedly. Passions ran high when Judge Easterbrook suggested the no-mezuzah rule was not discriminatory, but perhaps put forth “with a completely empty head by people who didn’t have a clue about the religious significance of the mezuzah.”

Judge Wood disagreed. In the end, Judge Easterbrook reversed himself to join a unanimous opinion that reflected her stance — an outcome that has drawn attention from longtime court watchers like Thomas C. Goldstein, the editor of scotusblog.com, which tracks the Supreme Court.

“It’s hard to find more confident and strong-willed judges than Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner — they’re brilliant and they know it,” Mr. Goldstein said. “If she can have a decades-long relationship with these judges and maintain their respect, and do things like have Easterbrook come around in the mezuzah case, it really shows that she’s not tilting at windmills. She is very invested in persuading.”

That is precisely why President Obama is interested in her. On Wednesday, the president began consulting with senators for advice on a successor for Justice John Paul Stevens, who is retiring. Mr. Obama is seeking someone who can serve as an intellectual counterweight to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., but who possesses the same consensus-building skills as Justice Stevens — skills that might tip a 5-4 court toward more liberal outcomes.

Judge Wood’s dealings with Judges Easterbrook and Posner reveal flashes of both.

Read the full article, here

Read the Wikipedia article about Diane P. Wood, here.

Watch Ms. Wood moderate in Our Legal Foundation: The Invisible Constitution and the Rule of Law, YouTube video from Chicago Humanities festival: 1:22:17.

Wikipedia photo of an infant in a neonatal unit

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans. MSNBC this morning had a back and forth with one of Judge Wood’s former clerks advocating for her to be the nominee versus a somewhat questioning person who asked about the judge’s stance on abortion as an issue. Apparently Judge Wood once issued an opinion to the effect that a demonstration against abortion crossed the line towards anti-abortion violence. Actually, the former clerk answered, Wood was actually simply following the then-existing precedent about overly vociferous demonstrations, and set no tone at all about the larger abortion question. She is however known to be pro-choice, and that is believed to be a liability for the nomination. Some wisdom has it that Obama should go with someone who is less controversial in terms of any abortion litmus test. Obama, it should be noted, has a long-standing relationship with Diane Wood going back to University of Chicago law school days. Certainly the judge is a good facilitator of compromise and also very persuasive, and would not be a bad choice for SCOTUS, unless the Republicans would get all ideological about abortion and decide to filibuster. She sounds good to me, and that’s speaking as someone who is largely not pro-choice.

Even if I do see the huge problem with 300,000 unwanted infants each year, I can’t see abortions on fetuses after 8 days after conception, since at that point they have recognizably human brainwaves. In other words, if you abort a fetus after eight days after conception, you are killing an an entity which is in fact in measurable ways a human being. To me, it’s not a “logistical” or social services nightmare issue, but one of ethics and morality. And I’m NOT saying pro choice people are immoral or unethical, they just see the welfare of the mother and society in different terms. So the question is not really a simple one, but I myself can’t get past the life of a human entity as decisive in abortion law.

It remains for me, a huge dilemma and an issue I am still coming to grips with, as is, I think, our nation as a whole. It is NOT, however, something to kill a doctor about! Unfortunately, rather than go with existing precedent in the matter, which does at least satisfy many if not most people, Republicans will probably make the abortion litmus test THE issue on any SCOTUS nominee. They will do that because it is a way to ignite their base. That’s rather sad, and is a political calculation rather than doing what’s best for the country as to the fate of any SCOTUS nominee. This fact may cause Obama to play it safe and nominate someone more middle of the road or less controversial on abortion, less readily identifiable as left wing or (gasp!) “liberal”. This nation has become so polarized, and abortion is one of the primary divisive issues. A start would be the recognition that the issue is complex and that there is more than one factor involved, and to not demonize “the other side”.

*****

Dean Baker is a macroeconomist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. He is a regular Truthout columnist and a member of Truthout’s Board of Advisers.

*****

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Posted on April 22, 2010 by , 6 comments

Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System

Evans Liberal Politics
April 20, 2010

 

Cyberattack on Google
Said to Hit Password System

 

Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System, © The New York Times, April 19, 2010, by John Markoff, China image from Wikipedia, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Ever since Google disclosed in January that Internet intruders had stolen information from its computers, the exact nature and extent of the theft has been a closely guarded company secret. But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s Web services, including e-mail and business applications.

image of men made completely out of the data of 1's and 0's, in blue colors

The program, code named Gaia for the Greek goddess of the earth, was attacked in a lightning raid taking less than two days last December, the person said. Described publicly only once at a technical conference four years ago, the software is intended to enable users and employees to sign in with their password just once to operate a range of services.

The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and the company quickly started making significant changes to the security of its networks after the intrusions. But the theft leaves open the possibility, however faint, that the intruders may find weaknesses that Google might not even be aware of, independent computer experts said.

The new details seem likely to increase the debate about the security and privacy of vast computing systems such as Google’s that now centralize the personal information of millions of individuals and businesses. Because vast amounts of digital information are stored in one place, popularly referred to as “cloud” computing, a single breach can lead to disastrous losses.

The theft began with an instant message sent to a Google employee in China who was using Microsoft’s Messenger program, according to the person with knowledge of the internal inquiry, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

By clicking on a link and connecting to a “poisoned” Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team.

The details surrounding the theft of the software have been a closely guarded secret by the company. Google first publicly disclosed the theft in a Jan. 12 posting on the company’s Web site, which stated that the company was changing its policy toward China in the wake of the theft of unidentified “intellectual property” and the apparent compromise of the e-mail accounts of two human rights advocates in China.

The accusations became a significant source of tension between the United States and China, leading Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to urge China to conduct a “transparent” inquiry into the attack. In March, after difficult discussions with the Chinese government, Google said it would move its mainland Chinese-language Web site and begin rerouting search queries to its Hong Kong-based site.

Company executives on Monday declined to comment about the new details of the case, saying they had dealt with the security issues raised by the theft of the company’s intellectual property in their initial statement in January.

Google executives have also said privately that the company had been far more transparent about the intrusions than any of the more than two dozen other companies that were compromised, the vast majority of which have not acknowledged the attacks.

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Google continues to use the Gaia system, now known as Single Sign-On. Hours after announcing the intrusions, Google said it would activate a new layer of encryption for Gmail service. The company also tightened the security of its data centers and further secured the communications links between its services and the computers of its users.

Several technical experts said that because Google had quickly learned of the theft of the software, it was unclear what the consequences of the theft had been. One of the most alarming possibilities is that the attackers might have intended to insert a Trojan horse — a secret back door — into the Gaia program and install it in dozens of Google’s global data centers to establish clandestine entry points. But the independent security specialists emphasized that such an undertaking would have been remarkably difficult, particularly because Google’s security specialists had been alerted to the theft of the program.

However, having access to the original programmer’s instructions, or source code, could also provide technically skilled hackers with knowledge about subtle security vulnerabilities in the Gaia code that may have eluded Google’s engineers.

“If you can get to the software repository where the bugs are housed before they are patched, that’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” said George Kurtz, chief technology officer for McAfee Inc., a software security company that was one of the companies that analyzed the illicit software used in the intrusions at Google and at other companies last year.

Rodney Joffe, a vice president at Neustar, a developer of Internet infrastructure services, said, “It’s obviously a real issue if you can understand how the system works.” Understanding the algorithms on which the software is based might be of great value to an attacker looking for weak points in the system, he said.

When Google first announced the thefts, the company said it had evidence that the intrusions had come from China. The attacks have been traced to computers at two campuses in China, but investigators acknowledge that the true origin may have been concealed, a quintessential problem of cyberattacks.

Several people involved in the investigation of break-ins at more than two dozen other technology firms said that while there were similarities between the attacks on the companies, there were also significant differences, like the use of different types of software in intrusions. At one high-profile Silicon Valley company, investigators found evidence of intrusions going back more than two years, according to the person involved in Google’s inquiry. ….

In Google’s case, the intruders seemed to have precise intelligence about the names of the Gaia software developers, and they first tried to access their work computers and then used a set of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the repositories where the source code for the program was stored.

Read the full article, here.

Posted on April 19, 2010 by , 5 comments

Air Travel Crisis Deepens as Europe Fears Wider Impact

Evans Liberal Politics
April 18, 2010

 

Air Travel Crisis Deepens
as Europe Fears Wider Impact

 

Air Travel Crisis Deepens as Europe Fears Wider Impact, © The New York Times, April 17, 2010, by Steven Erlanger and Jack Ewing, excerpt quoted verbatim:

PARIS — As an increasingly large part of European airspace was shut down for the third day on Saturday and the towering fountain of ash from an Icelandic volcano showed no signs of letting up, questions about the long-term impact of the eruption were being raised in a continent trying to recover from recession.

Liverpool Airport
on a normal day

Liverpool Airport on a normal business day

With airports closed from Ireland to Ukraine, officials expressed hope that some air travel could resume Sunday, or possibly Monday, but the workings of Iceland’s volcano were too mysterious to make rational predictions about it. Winds pushed the particulate ash farther south and east on Saturday, as far as northern Italy.

About 17,000 flights were canceled Saturday, and travelers scrambled to find accommodation or land routes home during what is already the worst disruption in international air travel since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when all air travel in and out of the United States was halted for three days.

While the closing of the airways has already laid waste to the immediate plans and business of industry, the arts and world leaders, the possibility that it could drag on for days, if not weeks, is raising concerns about the longer term consequences for public health, military operations and the world economy.

The disaster is estimated to be costing airlines $200 million a day, but the economic damage will roll through to farms, retail establishments and nearly any other business that depends on air cargo shipments. Fresh produce will spoil, and supermarkets in Europe, used to year-round supplies, will begin to run out.

But unless flights are disrupted for weeks, threatening factories’ supply chains, economists do not think the crisis will significantly affect gross domestic product.

“If it really drags on another week that could be really serious,” said Peter Westaway, chief economist for Europe at the Nomura investment bank. The air travel shutdown could affect productivity, he said, if hundreds of thousands of people miss work or are not able to do business because they are stuck in limbo somewhere.

He would know. He was speaking by cellphone from Tokyo where he was watching British soccer on a barroom TV at 3 a.m. and waiting for news of when he might be able to get back to his office in London.

“We don’t understand how interconnected we are until you can’t do it anymore,” he said.

The shutdown has also affected American military operations. Military supplies for operations in Afghanistan have been disrupted, and a spokeswoman for the Pentagon said that all medical evacuation flights from Iraq and Afghanistan to Germany, where most injured soldiers are typically treated, were being diverted directly to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

Within the European Command, some routine resupply missions and movement of personnel missions have been diverted or delayed, she said.

The World Health Organization issued an advisory saying that as long as the ash remains in the upper atmosphere, there is not likely to be increased health risk. So far, analysis of the ash shows that about a quarter of the particles are smaller than 10 microns, making them more dangerous because they can penetrate more deeply into the lungs, the W.H.O. said.

In Britain, where a layer of fine dust is already covering large areas of the country, the authorities are advising those with respiratory problems to stay indoors or wear masks out of doors.

Read the full article, here.

Volcano travel chaos spreads


Posted on April 18, 2010 by , 4 comments

American Consumers Face End of Era of Cheap Credit

Evans Liberal Politics
April 11, 2010

 

American Consumers Face
End of Era of Cheap Credit

 

American Consumers Face End of Era of Cheap Credit, © The New York Times, April 10, 2010, by Nelson D. Schwartz, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Even as prospects for the American economy brighten, consumers are about to face a new financial burden: a sustained period of rising interest rates.

That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession.

The shift is sure to come as a shock to consumers whose spending habits were shaped by a historic 30-year decline in the cost of borrowing.

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“Americans have assumed the roller coaster goes one way,” said Bill Gross, whose investment firm, Pimco, has taken part in a broad sell-off of government debt, which has pushed up interest rates. “It’s been a great thrill as rates descended, but now we face an extended climb.”

The impact of higher rates is likely to be felt first in the housing market, which has only recently begun to rebound from a deep slump. The rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage has risen half a point since December, hitting 5.31 last week, the highest level since last summer.

Along with the sell-off in bonds, the Federal Reserve has halted its emergency $1.25 trillion program to buy mortgage debt, placing even more upward pressure on rates.

“Mortgage rates are unlikely to go lower than they are now, and if they go higher, we’re likely to see a reversal of the gains in the housing market,” said Christopher J. Mayer, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School. “It’s a really big risk.”

Each increase of 1 percentage point in rates adds as much as 19 percent to the total cost of a home, according to Mr. Mayer.

The Mortgage Bankers Association expects the rise to continue, with the 30-year mortgage rate going to 5.5 percent by late summer and as high as 6 percent by the end of the year.

Another area in which higher rates are likely to affect consumers is credit card use. And last week, the Federal Reserve reported that the average interest rate on credit cards reached 14.26 percent in February, the highest since 2001. That is up from 12.03 percent when rates bottomed in the fourth quarter of 2008 — a jump that amounts to about $200 a year in additional interest payments for the typical American household.

With losses from credit card defaults rising and with capital to back credit cards harder to come by, issuers are likely to increase rates to 16 or 17 percent by the fall, according to Dennis Moroney, a research director at the TowerGroup, a financial research company.

“The banks don’t have a lot of pricing options,” Mr. Moroney said. “They’re targeting people who carry a balance from month to month.”

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Similarly, many car loans have already become significantly more expensive, with rates at auto finance companies rising to 4.72 percent in February from 3.26 percent in December, according to the Federal Reserve.

Washington, too, is expecting to have to pay more to borrow the money it needs for programs. The Office of Management and Budget expects the rate on the benchmark 10-year United States Treasury note to remain close to 3.9 percent for the rest of the year, but then rise to 4.5 percent in 2011 and 5 percent in 2012.

The run-up in rates is quickening as investors steer more of their money away from bonds and as Washington unplugs the economic life support programs that kept rates low through the financial crisis. Mortgage rates and car loans are linked to the yield on long-term bonds.

Besides the inflation fears set off by the strengthening economy, Mr. Gross said he was also wary of Treasury bonds because he feared the burgeoning supply of new debt issued to finance the government’s huge budget deficits would overwhelm demand, driving interest rates higher.

Nine months ago, United States government debt accounted for half of the assets in Mr. Gross’s flagship fund, Pimco Total Return. That has shrunk to 30 percent now — the lowest ever in the fund’s 23-year history — as Mr. Gross has sold American bonds in favor of debt from Europe, particularly Germany, as well as from developing countries like Brazil.

Last week, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note briefly crossed the psychologically important threshold of 4 percent, as the Treasury auctioned off $82 billion in new debt. That is nearly twice as much as the government paid in the fall of 2008, when investors sought out ultrasafe assets like Treasury securities after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the credit crisis.

Though still very low by historical standards, the rise of bond yields since then is reversing a decline that began in 1981, when 10-year note yields reached nearly 16 percent.

From that peak, steadily dropping interest rates have fed a three-decade lending boom, during which American consumers borrowed more and more but managed to hold down the portion of their income devoted to paying off loans.

Indeed, total household debt is now nine times what it was in 1981 — rising twice as fast as disposable income over the same period — yet the portion of disposable income that goes toward covering that debt has budged only slightly, increasing to 12.6 percent from 10.7 percent.

Household debt has been dropping for the last two years as recession-battered consumers cut back on borrowing, but at $13.5 trillion, it still exceeds disposable income by $2.5 trillion.

The long decline in rates also helped prop up the stock market; lower rates for investments like bonds make stocks more attractive.

That tailwind, which prevented even worse economic pain during the recession, has ceased, according to interviews with economists, analysts and money managers.

“We’ve had almost a 30-year rally,” said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s. “That’s come to an end.”

Read the full article, here.

See, Don’t Bet the Farm on the Housing Recovery, The New York Times, April 9, 2011, by Robert J. Shiller.

Posted on April 10, 2010 by , Reply

Video and News Update: Stevens’s Retirement Is Political Test for Obama

Evans Liberal Politics
April 10, 2010

 

Video and News Update:
Stevens’s Retirement Is Political Test for Obama

 

Stevens’s Retirement Is Political Test for Obama, © The New York Times, April 9, 2010, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Charlie Savage, Official SCOTUS portrait of Stevens from Wikipedia, excerpt quoted verbatim:

WASHINGTON — The announcement by Justice John Paul Stevens on Friday that he would retire at the end of this term gives President Obama the rare opportunity to make back-to-back appointments to the Supreme Court during the first two years of his presidency.

official SCOTUS portrait of Justice John Paul Stevens

But it also presents Mr. Obama with a complex political challenge: getting a nominee confirmed in the thick of a midterm election season, when Republicans, fueled by the intensity of their conservative base, are angling to knock him down, and Democrats, despite having lost their 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, are eager to flex their muscles after passing a landmark health care bill.

Justice Stevens’s announcement, delivered to the White House on Friday morning in a one-paragraph letter that began “My dear Mr. President,” set off an immediate scramble among the parties and a raft of advocacy groups that have been assembling dossiers on potential successors.

The three leading candidates — Mr. Obama is considering about 10 names all told, the White House says — present the president with a spectrum of ideological reputations, government backgrounds and life experiences. His choice will shape the battle to win Senate confirmation of his nominee.

In effect, the president must choose to be bold or play it safe.

Merrick B. Garland, 58, an appeals court judge here, is well liked by elite legal advocates and is widely considered the safest choice if Mr. Obama wants to avoid a confrontation with the minority party. A former federal prosecutor who worked on the Oklahoma City bombings, he is well-known in Washington’s legal-political community, where some view him as a kind of Democratic version of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

Elena Kagan, 49, is solicitor general but has never been a judge and does not have a lengthy trail of scholarly writings, so her views are less well documented. But as the dean of Harvard Law School, she earned respect across ideological lines by bringing in several high-profile conservative professors, and she is a favorite among some in the extended Obama circle, who see her as smart and capable. Her relative youth means she could shape the court for decades to come.

Diane P. Wood, 59, a federal appeals court judge in Mr. Obama’s home city, Chicago, is seen as the most liberal of the three. She has been a progressive voice on a court that is home to several heavyweight conservative intellectuals. As a divorced mother of three, she brings the kind of real-life experience that Mr. Obama considers important. But her strong support for abortion rights would provoke a confrontation with conservatives. On Friday, the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life warned that a Wood nomination “would return the abortion wars to the Supreme Court.”

In making his selection, Mr. Obama confronts a vastly altered political landscape from the one he faced just 11 months ago, when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor to fill the seat left vacant by the retirement of Justice David H. Souter.

With the election of Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, Democrats can no longer hold off a Republican filibuster. And while Democrats are emboldened by the health care vote, the passage of the legislation — which is already facing legal challenges from Republicans who say it is unconstitutional — has left the Senate more polarized than ever and created a climate in which the courts could easily become an election issue.

For the court, Justice Stevens’s departure will be the end of an era. He is the longest-serving justice by more than a decade, and he is the last remaining justice to have served in World War II. (He joined the Navy, where he served as a cryptographer, the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked.) His leaving will not, however, change the composition of the court; although he was appointed in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican, he has become one of its most reliably liberal members during his nearly 35-year tenure, as the court drifted ever rightward.

Still, for Mr. Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago (where he was a colleague of Judge Wood), the vacancy is an unmistakable chance to put his stamp on the direction the court takes for the next several decades.

See, Right gears for court fight, not filibuster, Politico, April 10, 2010, by Jeanne Cummings and Kenneth P. Vogel.

UPDATE: See, Anything short of a liberal Supreme Court nominee is unacceptable, Daily Kos, April 10, 2010, by clammyc.

Obama’s Supreme Court Decision, Again


UPDATE: CBS Video from April 10, 2010

Posted on April 10, 2010 by , Reply

Signaling Jobs Recovery, Payrolls Surged in March: Commentary and Video

Evans Liberal Politics
April 3, 2010

 

Signaling Jobs Recovery, Payrolls Surged in March
(Commentary and Video)

 

Signaling Jobs Recovery, Payrolls Surged in March, © The New York Times, April 2, 2010, by Catherine Rampell and Javier C. Hernandez, photo by Wikimedia Commons, with commentary from Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans, excerpt quoted verbatim:

After losing eight million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, payrolls finally surged in March, the Labor Department reported on Friday. Employers added 162,000 nonfarm jobs last month. Nationwide, the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent.

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“We are beginning to turn the corner,” said President Obama, speaking in Charlotte, N.C., calling it “the best news we’ve seen on the job front in more than two years.”

Though everything seems to be moving in the right direction, he was careful not to raise expectations too high. “It will take time to achieve the strong and sustained job growth that we need,” President Obama said.

The economy needs to add more than 100,000 jobs a month just to absorb new entrants into the labor market, let alone provide a livelihood for the 15 million Americans already looking for work. Without constant, robust growth, the unemployment rate won’t budge. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has projected that the rate will hover around 10 percent for the rest of the year.

Still, economists saw signs in the latest report that the economy was poised to make steady, if slow, progress.

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“Every major industry, except financial services and information, showed gains in employment,” John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics, said. “From manufacturing, to construction, to retail, it really didn’t matter. They’re all hiring now.”

Private-sector job growth was again strongest in temporary help services and health care. The nation added 40,000 temporary service jobs last month, indicating that many employers were testing the waters before taking the plunge with a permanent hire. The health care industry, which grew steadily even during the depths of the recession, expanded by 27,000 jobs in March.

The March report may have been inflated, though, by a rebound from February when many people could not work because of snowstorms. Additionally, nearly a third of the hiring in March was temporary work on the 2010 census.

Though they know their new jobs are fleeting, many of the 48,000 new census workers are counting their blessings. To them, a job is a job, a closed hole in their résumés and maybe even a bridge to permanent employment elsewhere.

Gregory A. Butler, a 41-year-old union carpenter in West Harlem, had been unable to find work since November. Then last month, he got a call from the Census Bureau asking him to work as a supervisor. Unlike most of the department’s new hires, who are part-time employees, he expects to work 40-hour weeks for about two months, at $20 an hour.

“This is a very good transition opportunity for me, since I’m trying to start a new career as a freelance writer,” Mr. Butler said. “I don’t mind that it’s temporary. It’s important work, and it gets me off unemployment.”

Read the full article, here.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: The word “surged” in the title is certainly misleading, isn’t it? If only the powers that be — the people who decide just what the priority is for creating jobs — would try to understand: for many of us, we are BARELY holding on, deficit financing with what little money we have left. It won’t be long till all the juice is sucked out of this lemon, fellas. Many of us don’t have much left and more is pouring out of our bank accounts each month.

We need the Obama administration to properly evaluate the fact that “jobs” needs to be the very highest priority of his administration, and now. Next year doesn’t cut it. I can just hear the Republican talking points on this jobs report: well, start out with the fact that fifty thousand of the new jobs are Census workers, and so “those aren’t really JOBS at all”, just more “government make work for welfare”. Do you remember last year when the census worker was killed down in Kentucky….. This year, I’d just LOVE to go door to door collecting information for the government! Well, anyway, at least the private sector is no longer hemorrhaging jobs as it has been. Yes, Obama, this is an improvement, but the economists tell us that unemployment will almost hold steady through the end of 2010. If Democrats want to get elected, that isn’t good enough. If what’s left of the middle class is to survive, if the working class is to survive, that just doesn’t cut it.

The Obama administration needs to be more realistic about just how long the Great Recession has gone on, and just how badly Americans are hurting. We DO want to hold onto the House this November, right boys?

See, Obama’s Economic Brain Trust: The Guys Who Got It Wrong, Counterpunch, April 2-4, 2010, by Pam Martens:

America is held out to the world as a meritocracy. You work hard, you play by the rules, you make sound judgment calls, you succeed. That’s the American dream. Right? That’s what the President of the United States should exemplify in his actions. Right?

Then how does one explain the individuals who represent the abject failures of financial and regulatory theory chosen by the President to dominate the dialogue on financial reform. How does one reconcile President Obama appointing Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council after Mr. Summers played a central role in rolling back the safeguards that led to the current financial crisis.

See, “The Only Way to Survive is By Taking Care of One Another” — Legendary Activist, Philosopher Grace Lee Boggs, AlterNet, April 3, 2010, by Amy Goodman and Grace Lee Boggs.

Watch Jakob Dylan, “Everybody’s Hurting” Live on Soundcheck (YouTube) – 3:48.

PBS: the Political High Cost
of Unemployment – Shields and Brooks


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Posted on April 3, 2010 by , 6 comments
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