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To: Sam who wrote (190063)	5/30/2012 6:33:17 PM
From: Sam	of 224892

In case people on this thread haven't heard the latest "Obama outrage" that is stirring the RW, it has to do with death camps in Poland. Skip to the last couple of paragraphs of this piece if you don't feel like rehashing the whole idiotic thing. A death camp in Poland, not a Polish death camp By Steve Benen - Wed May 30, 2012 12:37 PM EDT It appears that one of the stories of the day in Washington has to do with President Obama misspeaking during yesterday's Medal of Freedom ceremony, sparking complaints from officials in Poland. The president was posthumously awarding the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, to Jan Karski, born Jan Kozielewski, a "Polish courier who was one of the first to alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Allied leaders to the killing of Jews in German-occupied Poland." Obama noted he'd been smuggled into "the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself." That's not what Polish officials wanted to hear -- the correct phrase would have been "a death camp in Poland," not "a Polish death camp." The White House expressed "regret" for the "misstatement," though some in Poland, including the Prime Minister, still want a "stronger, more pointed" response. Obama's detractors seem to be quite worked up about about this -- a slow news day for the political world, I guess? -- and the dividing lines already seem pretty clear. Those more sympathetic to the president see this as a harmless verbal mistake -- the death camps really were in Poland, so the line was really about geography -- while Obama's critics are far less forgiving. But what seems most interesting to me is an observation from Steve M., who discovered just how common an error this is, including references to "Polish death camps" from journalists at CNN, ABC, CBS, and the New York Times. Also guilty of this have been Ha'aretz, USA Today, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Daytona Beach News-Journal, the Associated Press, The Buffalo News, Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper and broadcaster CTV, The Toronto Star, and the British comedian Stephen Fry. And that's just a list of people and organizations that have been reproached for it. Oh, one more: Fox News. Yes, it would have been better if the administration had avoided the gaffe, but it's quite a common gaffe. Let those of us who have not made similar slip-ups cast the first stone. maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com

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To: Sam who wrote (190064)	5/30/2012 6:43:46 PM
From: Sam	of 224892

Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney They're trying to buy a presidency - and they expect a big payoff on their investment Part I is below; the entire piece begins here: rollingstone.com By Tim Dickinson May 24, 2012 9:55 AM ET Presidential politics has always been a rich man's game. But now, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that upended decades of limits on campaign donations, financing a presidential race is the exclusive domain of the kind of megadonor whose portfolios make Mitt Romney look middle-class. "I have lots of money, and can give it legally now," Texas billionaire and top GOP moneyman Harold Simmons recently bragged to The Wall Street Journal. "Just never to Democrats." In past elections, big donors like Simmons gave millions for advocacy groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. By law, such groups were only allowed to run issue ads – but instead they directly targeted John Kerry, drawing big fines from the Federal Elections Commission. Now, with the blessing of the Supreme Court, the wealthy can legally hand out unlimited sums to groups that openly campaign for a candidate, knowing that their "dark money" donations will be kept entirely secret. The billionaire Koch brothers, for instance, have reportedly pledged $60 million to defeat President Obama this year – but their off-the-book contributions don't appear in any FEC filings. Even more money from megadonors is flowing into newly created Super PACs, which, unlike advocacy groups, can spend every cent they raise on direct attacks on an opponent. Under the new rules, the richest men in America are plying candidates with donations far beyond what Congress intended. "They can still give the maximum $2,500 directly to the campaign – and then turn around and give $25 million to the Super PAC," says Trevor Potter, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center. A single patron can now prop up an entire candidacy, as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson did with a $20 million donation to the Super PAC backing Newt Gingrich. The undisputed master of Super PAC money is Mitt Romney. In the primary season alone, Romney's rich friends invested $52 million in his Super PAC, Restore Our Future – a number that's expected to more than double in the coming months. This unprecedented infusion of money from America's monied elites underscores the radical transformation of the Republican Party, which has made defending the interests of 0.0001 percent the basis of its entire platform. "Money buys power," the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman observed recently, "and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties." In short, the political polarization and gridlock in Washington are a direct result of the GOP's capitulation to Big Money. That capitulation is evident in Romney's campaign. Most of the megadonors backing his candidacy are elderly billionaires: Their median age is 66, and their median wealth is $1 billion. Each is looking for a payoff that will benefit his business interests, and they will all profit from Romney's pledge to eliminate inheritance taxes, extend the Bush tax cuts for the superwealthy – and then slash the top tax rate by another 20 percent. Romney has firmly joined the ranks of the economic nutcases who spout the lie of trickle-down economics. "Support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business," Krugman noted. "And now the same people effectively own a whole political party." Here are the 16 donors who have given at least $1 million each to elect Romney – and what they expect in return for their investment: William Koch Lawrence Lucier/FilmMagic THE COKE DEALER: William Koch Position The "other" Koch brother, Bill sold his stake in Koch Industries to brothers David and Charles in the 1980s. He now runs Oxbow Carbon, a global dealer in petroleum coke, a cement-manufacturing fuel that's high in climate-warming carbon dioxide. Age 72 Fortune $4 billion (Forbes 400 rank: 81) Past Donations Koch and his wife gave $70,000 to House Speaker John Boehner last year. Boehner "looks out for business interests," a Koch deputy explained. Current Donations Gave $2 million to Romney's Super PAC, including $250,000 in his own name, $750,000 through Oxbow Carbon and another $1 million through a subsidiary. A sister company of Oxbow operates a Colorado mine that sells coal to the federal government – meaning that its campaign contribution is subsidized, in part, by taxpayers. What He Wants To pollute for free. Koch's fortune is tied up in some of the nation's dirtiest industries. He blasts the EPA, which has been trying to crack down on carbon pollution, as "hyperaggressive." How He Lives His wine collection, which includes 40,000 bottles, is worth $12 million. Owns a mansion in Palm Beach, a vacation villa in Cape Cod, four properties near Aspen worth $47.5 million, and a cattle ranch in Colorado decorated with an Old West ghost town that he bought for $3 million and moved to his land. Purchased the only known photograph of Billy the Kid. Harold Simmons REUTERS /FLOR CORDERO /LANDOV THE WASTE BARON: Harold Simmons Position Traffics in toxic chemicals and hazardous waste as head of Contran; owns one of the world's largest producers of titanium. A former corporate raider nicknamed "Ice Man," he pioneered the leveraged-buyout tactics that decimated American industry. Age 81 Fortune $9.8 billion (Forbes rank: 33) Past Donations Spent $3 million to Swift-boat John Kerry in 2004, and another $2.8 million in 2008 on "issue ads" linking Obama to Sixties radical Bill Ayers. "If we had run more ads," he lamented, "we could have killed Obama." Current Donations Before backing Romney with $800,000, Simmons made $1 million bets on Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. His total giving of $16.7 million makes him the GOP's second-largest investor after Adelson. Most of the cash went to American Crossroads, the Super PAC founded by Karl Rove that has close ties to the Romney campaign. What He Wants Plans to store radioactive waste from 36 states in an underground dump in Texas; has been sued repeatedly by the Justice Department for failing to clean up contaminated Superfund sites. Calls Obama "the most dangerous American alive, because he would eliminate free enterprise in this country." How He Lives Doles out $100 bills to panhandlers. Jets between his coastal estate in California, his Arkansas ranch stocked with 35 bears and 100 elk, and his $4 million mansion on a private lake in Dallas, surrounded by 17,000 tulips. Read more: rollingstone.com

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To: Wharf Rat who wrote (190047)	5/30/2012 6:50:46 PM
From: Sam	of 224892

Any doctors in the house? Maybe medical school debt isn’t the problem By Sarah Kliff, Updated: Wednesday, May 30, 1:32 PM washingtonpost.com The high cost of medical school often gets tossed around as a key reason why doctors don’t go into primary care jobs, instead choosing specialties such as radiology and surgery that prove more lucrative. When physicians graduate with an average of $161,290 in debt, it’s hard Melissa Cannarozzi/The Washington Post to see money not factoring into career decisions. While this narrative makes sense, there’s one major flaw: It doesn’t seem to be true. Aaron Carroll flags a story in the San Francisco-area Bay Citizen, where a local health-care authority established a loan forgiveness program. If doctors committed to practicing primary care in the area, for at least four years, all of their loans would be forgiven. The program has been around for a decade now — and no one has signed up. Not a single doctor has volunteered for the opportunity to have all of their educational debt relieved. In San Mateo County, at least, debt didn’t seem to be the big obstacle for doctors pursuing primary care careers. This doesn’t seem to be specific to one area of California. National data on medical student debt find that those with a high debt burden are actually more likely to go into the less lucrative primary care fields than doctors who hold no loans at all. “For private schools, odds of choosing primary care increases as debt increases, with those having no debt (and no scholarships) less likely to choose primary care,” researchers at the Robert Graham Center concluded in a 2009 report. Why do those with a higher-debt burden go into lower paying medical fields? Debt-free doctors, the thinking goes, come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and tend to have higher expectations for their eventual salary. For those who come from a less advantaged background, and do take out loans, the calculus might be a bit different. “You have people who are willing to tolerate up to $200,000 in debt to become a doctor,” Robert Phillips, director of the Robert Graham Center, said in a recent interview. To him, it suggests that doctors who have already made a huge financial commitment to becoming a physician aren’t as concerned with their eventual salary.

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To: Sam who wrote (190066)	5/30/2012 6:55:11 PM
From: Sam	of 224892

from WaPo, trying to explain the problem in Spain FAQ: Why is Spain now in crisis? And can it be fixed? By Brad Plumer, Wednesday, May 30, 12:29 PM washingtonpost.com Spain is back in the headlines, threatening to drag down the global economy. The panic started last week, after the country’s fourth-largest bank, Bankia, announced that it needed $23.5 billion in aid. But how did Spain get to this point? Here’s our explainer on the crisis: Daniel Ochoa de Olza, AP Yikes. Let me guess, Spain is in trouble because its government spent way too much and ran up big deficits, right? Not exactly. Before the financial crisis hit, Spain was actually running smaller deficits than even Germany. Its public debt was just 27 percent of GDP. Spain was considered a model of fiscal responsibility. Then how did Spain get into its current mess? It all started with a housing bubble. During the 2000s, thanks to low interest rates and an influx of foreign capital, Spain had a furious boom in housing construction — houses that, it turned out, the country didn’t really need. Below is a graph of the price-to-rent index in Spain, which gives a sense of the sheer size of the bubble. In 2007, the bubble finally burst. And Spain still isn’t anywhere close to recovering. Economists Cinzia Alcidi and Daniel Gros have estimated that housing prices have fallen 26 percent, but that’s still only about half of the total decline that will ultimately need to happen: Why does it matter if Spain’s housing prices fall? Cheap houses for everyone! Well, it’s a big problem for all those Spanish banks that are holding mortgages or properties. Ultimately, Alcidi and Gros estimate that the excess housing in Spain amounts to about $470.1 billion, or 37 percent of the country’s GDP. “It goes without saying that our estimated total,” they note, “exceeds by far the provisions and write downs accumulated by the Spanish banking system… so far.” In other words, Spanish banks have taken big losses already, and they’re likely to take even bigger losses in the years ahead — up to $320 billion, according to the Institute of International Finance. So that’s why Bankia’s in trouble? Yep. During the housing bubble, it was Spain’s regional banks, or cajas, that threw the most money at property developers. The entity that’s getting all the headlines now, Bankia, was formed after a 2010 merger of seven cajas that were too weak to stand on their own. But after receiving $5.6 billion in government aid earlier this month, Bankia recently announced that it actually needed about $23.5 billion in aid. And the housing bubble hasn’t even finished bursting yet. Okay, Spain just has to give Bankia a $23.5 billion bailout. What’s the problem with that? Spain doesn’t have that sort of cash readily lying around. Investors are already nervous about lending more money to Spain, whose deficits have spiked ever since its housing market collapsed. And Spain’s economy is now in shambles. Before the crisis, one-seventh of its workers were employed in the housing sector. Since the bubble popped, unemployment has soared to 25 percent. The retail sector has collapsed. Even the country’s once-bright export and auto sectors have started sinking in recent months. And, to pile on, Spain is supposed to reduce its deficit from 8.9 percent of GDP to 3 percent of GDP next year, in order to follow euro zone rules — and all that austerity is squeezing the economy further. How does Spain get its economy growing again without its banks? That’s the problem. Spain can’t really grow if its banks aren’t lending to businesses. And its banks aren’t lending to small and medium-sized businesses, because they’re facing massive losses and shrinking balance sheets. Plus, plenty of Spanish depositors are taking their euros out of Spanish banks and sending them to Germany because they’re afraid that Spain might leave the euro. That’s made Spain’s bank problems even worse. This sounds like a serious bind. Yep. It’s partly why Tyler Cowen says Spain might be “in a self-cannibalizing downward spiral.” (He offers up a lot more reasons at the link.) Is there any other way Spain can save its banks? The government also is trying to get creative in propping up Bankia. Matthew O’Brien of The Atlantic explains the latest scheme: “They proposed recapitalizing Bankia with $23.5 billion worth of Spanish bonds, that Bankia could then use as collateral at the [European Central Bank] for new money. It that sounds suspiciously like asking the ECB to print money to bail out its banks, that’s because it is.” So far, it’s unclear whether the European Central Bank is willing to go along with that plan — the Financial Times’ David Keohane tracks some of the early confusion over whether the ECB would agree to essentially inject money into the Spanish banking sector. Basically, it’s still uncertain just how rickety Spain’s financial sector is. The Spanish government has so far ordered the country’s banks to set aside around $115 billion in capital, all told, to prepare for further losses in the property sector, but housing prices are falling so steeply and the economy’s so terrible that it’s unclear whether that cushion is big enough. If Spain can’t patch up its banks, can’t it get aid from other European countries? Isn’t that what happened in Ireland? Right, the alternative is for wealthier European countries — mainly France and Germany — to bail out Spain with lots of money. That’s what they did for Portugal and Ireland. But Spain is much, much bigger and much, much more expensive. To put this in context, Ireland has received about $105 billion in aid, and its housing market has mostly stabilized. By Alcidi and Gros’ estimates, Spain might need more than four times that much. And Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, for his part, has said he won’t accept an international rescue. Are there any other ideas for fixing Spain? Alcidi and Gros argued that Spain needs a major readjustment: Workers and resources that used to go to construction need to shift elsewhere. But that will take a long time and is hard to do, given that Spain is on the euro. The latest idea from European leaders is to give Spain a little more flexibility on its deficit targets. And Felix Salmon at Reuters also reports on the current suggestions that Europe create a continent-wide “banking union”—so that individual countries wouldn’t have to deal with banking crises on their own. But that idea’s only slowly getting underway.

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To: Wharf Rat who wrote (190069)	5/30/2012 10:40:07 PM
From: Win Smith	of 224892

Good for Bill, but there was a poll out today, 52% Walker, 45% Barrett, 2% uncommitted. And this was a poll that's been more favorable to Barrett than a lot of the national ones. Sadly, this may be somewhat of a lost cause, though I hope some ground game miracle happens. The worst part will likely be all the post-mortem gloating from the right. There is an argument to be made that people should only be recalled for extraordinary cause, and it could be argued that obnoxious as Walker's actions were, it was just politics. I wouldn't agree with that argument, but it's an argument. Anyway, Wisconsin media are pretty hopeless, so there hasn't been a lot of digging into the broader agenda of ALEC and the national conservative machine. Too bad, but it's a fairly complicated story to tell, and after 6 or 8 months of airways flooded with political propaganda even if you didn't turn on Fox News, it's hard to turn it around in 4 weeks.

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To: Sam who wrote (190061)	5/30/2012 10:52:01 PM
From: Win Smith	of 224892

The amusing thing is that while Fox itself might be being in a mildly apologetic mode- they've apparently pulled the video from their web site and somewhat mildly disavowed it- the mildless hoards on the right were right on top of the NYT story at least, making the usual "you're just as bad" idiotic accusation. They got 3 of the 1st 4 comments in against the Times story, anyway. From mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com this aparrent Fox statement: The blog TVNewser quoted a statement it said was from Bill Shine, the executive vice president of programming for Fox News: “The package that aired on ‘Fox & Friends’ was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network. This has been addressed with the show’s producers.” But from the reliably mindless rabble, we have this thrilling little piece of incoherence: J.San RamonFLAGWow. All that and no mention of whether the content of the "ad", " political spot", "news content" was true or not. What a master magic trick of deception this article is.Turns out the content was all true people. Obama made a bunch of campaign promises and sorta the opposite happened.Remember Hope and Change. Not much change and guess what he spent....sit down for this....he spent $5 Trillion we need to pay back....all for "no change". You can actually get the same old numbers, the same old employment, the same old economy for free.$5 Trillion. The whole Iraq War only cost $1 Trillion. The USA total annual income is less than $2 Trillion. Obama spent that every year plus another 5....the is FIVE big ones.

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To: Win Smith who wrote (190071)	5/30/2012 10:59:03 PM
From: Win Smith	of 224892

Nice little column from a hapless sometimes Fox defender: baltimoresun.com With Mitt Romney now officially President Obama's opponent, it truly appears to be game on at the Fox News channel -- at least, if this morning's "Fox & Friends" is any indication. Today's version of the morning show featured an anti-Obama video that resembled propaganda films from 1930's Europe more than it did responsible TV politics of today. And the remarkable thing was the witless crew on the couch that serves as hosts for this show had the audacity to present it as journalism and congratulate the producer who put it together. You can see it for yourself, and I hope you will let me know what you think. But as the guy who challenged the Obama administration two years when it tried to deny Fox News access to interviews and other opportunities offered to the media on the grounds that Fox was not a legitimate news operation, I have to tell you even I am shocked by how blatantly Fox is throwing off any pretense of being a journalistic entity with videos like this. Don't be fooled by Bret Baier's Boy Scout smile or all the talk about how some shows are news and some are opinion on the channel. Any news organization that puts up this kind of video is rotten to the core. I wonder if it is part of a larger movement on the right, with conservative media trying to raise its partisan game on behalf of Romney. I wonder. In terms of transparency, I need to say that the video was brought to my attention by Media Matters for America, a Web-based liberal organization that has all but declared war on Fox. But check out the video yourself. You be the judge. [ The rabble was right on top of this one too. It's going to be a long dispiriting election season, I think ]

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From: bentway	5/30/2012 11:46:21 PM
	of 224892

The World's Richest Countries And Biggest Economies, In 2 Graphics by LAM THUY VO Gross Domestic Product — GDP — may have its limits. But it's a useful, broad measure for looking at national economies. It's basically the total dollar value of all of the goods and services a country produces in a year. Here are all the countries with GDP of over $100 billion: NotesGDP at current exchange rate for 2010. Colors correspond to continents/regions. Source: World Bank Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR Having a very large GDP means a country is an important economic player in the world. But it doesn't necessarily mean the country's citizens are rich. A better measure for looking at the wealth or poverty of a nation's citizens is GDP per capita (adjusted for the fact that $1 buys more in some countries than in others). Here are all the countries in the world with GDP per capita over $15,000 a year: NotesGDP per capita (purchasing power parity), 2010. Qatar figure is for 2009, the most recent year available. Source: World Bank Credit: Lam Thuy* Vo / NPR Perhaps the most striking difference between the two graphs is China, which has the second biggest economy in the world but is still very poor. China, which has a GDP per capita of $7,599, doesn't even show up on the second graphic. It's also worth noting that GDP per capita is just an average. So a country with a high level of inequality may have a relatively high GDP per capita, but many poor people. Correction: A previous version of the GDP per capita graphic shaded Trinidad and Tobago* in red. The bubble should have been dark blue.* Tags: Graphing America

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