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Why the GOP IS the root of all evil...
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mrgybe



Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180

PostPosted: Thu Feb 12, 2015 10:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

And you didn't even thank me for the set up! The youth of today!!
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sat Feb 21, 2015 12:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

No comment necessary:

Quote:
By Paul Richter and Batsheva Sobelman, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — U.S. relations with Israel appeared to plunge to a new low this week with Obama administration charges that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has leaked secrets to undermine American efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.

With tension already high over Netanyahu’s plans to castigate the U.S. policy on Iran in a speech to a joint session of Congress on March 3, White House and State Department officials publicly complained that Israeli officials had disclosed sensitive details from private U.S. briefings to publicly attack the American negotiating position.

U.S. officials initially had denied reports that the administration was withholding details from Israel of the closed-door talks with Iran. That changed Wednesday into a blunt rebuke of one of America’s closest allies.

“Not everything you are hearing from the Israeli government is an accurate reflection of the talks,” Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters. She said the administration has begun “a selective sharing of information” with Israel as a result.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest complained of “a continued practice of cherry-picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the negotiating position of the United States.”

Netanyahu fired back Thursday, saying Israel understands the problem all too well.

“I think this is a bad agreement that is dangerous for the state of Israel,” he said at the Public Security Ministry in Lod, Israel.

His chief opponent in Israel’s March 17 elections quickly seized on the administration’s comments.

Isaac Herzog, Netanyahu’s main rival for prime minister, said in a Facebook post that “the U.S. administration says he leaks, lies and distorts information from within the negotiations with Iran. All for his seat. Simply unbelievable. … They too have lost all trust in him.”

The U.S. and five other powers — Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — have spent more than a year trying to persuade Tehran to give up enough of its enrichment program to prevent it from building nuclear weapons. In exchange for strict monitoring and limits, the West would ease and ultimately lift economic sanctions on Tehran.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Thu Feb 26, 2015 12:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Something you will not read in any Murdoch paper:

Quote:
Until a few weeks ago, Joel Leftwich was a senior lobbyist for the largest food and beverage company in the United States. During his tenure at PepsiCo—maker of Cheetos, Lay’s potato chips and, of course, Pepsi-Cola—the company had played a leading role in efforts to beat back local soda taxes and ensure that junk food remained available in schools. But PepsiCo also faced new challenges at the federal level. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, championed by Michelle Obama, had placed new nutrition standards on school lunches. PepsiCo sent teams of lobbyists to Capitol Hill, deluged political candidates with donations, and fired off letters to regulators asking them to weaken the new rules. One such PepsiCo letter requested the redefinition of a “school day” so the company could continue to sell its sugary sports drinks at “early morning sports practices.” Leftwich, a former congressional liaison for the Department of Agriculture, was well positioned to help PepsiCo shore up its allies in the House and Senate.

Last April, Leftwich paid a visit to one such friend, Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, then chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, to thank her for opposing nutrition guidelines for food stamp purchases.

Now Leftwich will have far more access to such friends. As the newly appointed staff director of the Senate Agriculture Committee, now under GOP control, Leftwich will have wide sway over the law that funds school lunches, which is up for reauthorization this year. PepsiCo can rest easier, confident that the guidelines already in place are unlikely to be strengthened—and may be weakened instead. Leftwich’s new boss, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who took over the Agriculture Committee gavel in January, has set his sights on dialing back school lunch nutrition requirements, which he has called “Big Brother government that’s out of control.”

While all eyes were on the changing of the guard in Congress as Republicans seized control of the US Senate in January, there was an equally profound change taking place among Capitol Hill staff, as many GOP lawmakers handed over the keys to corporate lobbyists like Leftwich.

“We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in K Street moving into congressional staff positions since the Citizens United decision,” says Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s expert on lobbying and ethics. House Speaker John Boehner, he notes, has “encouraged new members to employ lobbyists on their personal and committee staff.”

On almost any big issue coming up for debate during the final two years of the Obama administration—surveillance, trade, healthcare, entitlements, tax reform, climate change—corporate lobbyists will now be attempting to influence their own former colleagues, whose salaries are now covered by US taxpayers.

The new staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, Jeff Shockey, comes to the Hill after working as a lobbyist for many of the country’s leading intelligence-agency contractors, including General Dynamics, Boeing and, just last year, Academi, the firm formerly known as Blackwater. The House Oversight Committee, a key investigative body, will now have a staff director named Sean McLaughlin, a former corporate lobbyist who spent the past three years as a principal at the Podesta Group. Tom Chapman, who earned compensation worth $1,531,453 in 2014 as vice president of government affairs for US Airways, will now earn considerably less as part of the counsel staff for the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, which oversees his former employer. And as Congress takes up tax reform, one of the latest hires to the Joint Committee on Taxation is Ben Gross, who spent more than a decade as international tax director for PricewaterhouseCoopers, a firm that specializes in helping corporations avoid American taxes.


Lobbyists have been hired to help the offices of the most controversial addition to the GOP leadership team, Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, now House majority whip. Scalise came under fire in December following the revelation that as a state lawmaker, over a decade ago, he had addressed a white supremacist organization founded by former Klansman David Duke. But Scalise’s return to Capitol Hill in January was hardly dampened by the scandal. In a party at the posh Capitol Hill Club, a private meeting ground for Republicans that has been sued by its employees for alleged racial discrimination, nearly 300 lobbyists cheered the embattled lawmaker as he laid out his agenda for the coming session, according to Politico. Scalise was flanked by one of his newest staffers, Bill Hughes, formerly a lobbyist for the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a powerful trade group that has pressured lawmakers to drop efforts to raise the minimum wage.

And why not celebrate? Scalise is beloved by Washington’s army of influence-peddlers for his loyalty to the Beltway’s lobbyist elite. In his previous position as chair of the Republican Study Committee, Scalise welcomed the “K Street community” at special business-outreach events attended by representatives of such major firms as Halliburton, MasterCard, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. The news that Scalise would move up the leadership ladder was celebrated by Koch Industries lobbyists, who threw a tony wine-tasting party featuring “pinots from Oregon and the central coast of California.” Soon after ascending to his new post, Scalise shocked many by having a registered lobbyist, John Feehery, sit in as applicants interviewed for jobs.

It is not just veteran politicians who are leaning on lobbyists. Newly elected Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who delivered the GOP’s response to Obama’s State of the Union address, tapped Lisa Goeas, a senior official with the National Federation of Independent Business, as her chief of staff. Democrats, too—to a lesser degree—have been recruiting on K Street. Take West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is expected to join a largely Republican effort to curtail new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. He just hired a new senior policy adviser for energy, John O’Donnell, who arrived at the job from working as a top lobbyist for Xcel Energy, a large utility company with thirteen coal power plants. On Xcel’s behalf, O’Donnell had lobbied to weaken EPA regulations in the last Congress.

Some K Street firms have sent multiple lobbyists through the revolving door. The new deputy staff director of the Senate Energy Committee, Colin Hayes, is a former vice president of McBee Strategic Consulting—as is Angela Becker-Dippman, just hired as staff director for committee Democrats. Becker-Dippman once represented such firms as Tesla Motors, while Hayes had lobbied for the National Mining Association and Duke Energy.

It’s hard to overestimate the influence these former lobbyists could have over lawmaking during Obama’s final years in office. Congressional staffers enjoy an outsize amount of power on Capitol Hill, doing the actual work of meeting with interest groups, helping to schedule hearings, writing lawmaker remarks—and writing legislation. Yet they often escape public scrutiny.

I visited Washington, DC, on the first day of the new business-friendly Congress to watch the wave of GOP freshmen arrive. That night, I stopped by one of the biggest welcome receptions in town, a party hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition at a Capital Grille steak house. I wasn’t allowed in, of course, not being a donor to the RJC or to any GOP candidates. But the event played host to dozens of new and returning lawmakers, along with a swarm of lobbyists and campaign contributors.

Outside the event, I approached Mark Isakowitz, one of the highest-grossing lobbyists on K Street, whom the Hill, an online news site, named a top lobbyist of 2014. As a principal at a prominent Republican government relations firm, Isakowitz has lobbied for sixteen years on a range of tax and financial issues for some of the largest companies in America. One specialty has been weakening the financial reforms passed after the 2008 economic collapse. He, too, was just tapped to serve on Capitol Hill—in his case, as chief of staff to Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio.

Though it received little attention, the very first bill passed by the new Congress and signed into law was a measure to reauthorize something called Terrorism Risk Insurance. Tucked away in that bill was a special amendment to weaken the oversight of derivative trades. Thanks to the amendment, commodity regulators are prohibited from forcing large corporations—typically oil, manufacturing and agribusinesses broadly defined as “end users”—to post collateral and margin requirements for their trades. Marcus Stanley, the policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a group that favors strong regulations on Wall Street, says the amendment is dangerous because “losses can occur in transactions with commercial end users just as they can in any other transaction.”

The special exemption was promoted by a coalition of end users, including Honeywell, Boeing, General Electric and Koch Industries, four companies whose political action committees rank among the largest in the country. Koch, known for its oil refineries, also boasts one of the biggest derivative trading businesses in the world.

Isakowitz, according to disclosure reports, lobbied on a bill in the last Congress, S. 2102, that featured language nearly identical to that in the amendment that passed, with little debate, as part of the Terrorism Risk Insurance bill. His new boss, Senator Portman, voted to keep the derivatives amendment intact.

I tried to ask Isakowitz if any conflicts of interests would be posed by his two decades as a corporate lobbyist now that he had become a public servant. Isakowitz declined to answer, wished me a curt “Good night” and walked away.

Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, says the derivatives amendment is just one sign of how lawmaking has been captured by industry. There was no discussion of derivatives deregulation during the hotly contested midterms, nor did any candidate publicly address the issue. It was a demand made not by constituents, but by lobbyists. “The staff,” Gilbert says, “is reflective of what Congress has already begun to prioritize.”



by Lee Fang

The party of the oligarchs.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Mar 29, 2015 5:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

By George Blumental, chancellor of UC Santa Cruz:

Quote:
As Gov. Jerry Brown and UC President Janet Napolitano spar over the future of the University of California, my question is this: Are we content to offer today’s students, who are more racially and socioeconomically diverse than ever, less than their predecessors received?

Today’s UC system undergraduate population looks like this:

• 40 percent come from families in which neither parent earned a four-year college degree.

• 30 percent transferred from a California community college.

• 42 percent receive federal aid for low-income students — compared with only 15 percent at Ivy League universities.

Public higher education is a transformational force, a major lever that opens the doors of opportunity. Fifty years ago, California’s investment in public higher education reached its apex as three new UC campuses were coming online in Santa Cruz, Irvine and San Diego. UC tuition was virtually nil, and the gates of social mobility were open to all.

How times have changed.

Students protesting Napolitano’s proposed 5 percent tuition increase call for “free education.” A high-quality university education has never been free; somebody has to foot the bill. What has changed since 1965 is the level of public support for higher education in California. Indeed, correcting for inflation, if the state's per-student contribution to UC today matched 1965 levels, students would be paying no tuition.

Instead, resident tuition has topped $12,000 a year, and the governor’s proposed budget is likely to drive that number higher. Ironically, it was Gov. Ronald Reagan who first sounded the drumbeat of anti-UC rhetoric. He campaigned on a pledge to “clean up the mess at (UC) Berkeley” and, once elected, called for an end to free tuition, declaring that the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”

Voters bought the notion that the state could not afford the university and that students should bear the costs themselves. And here we are today: Students and their families contribute more to the funding of this public university than does the state.

Students aren’t the only ones paying for the erosion of public support, however.

California’s unprecedented investment 50 years ago put elite, private East Coast universities on notice, tilting the balance of excellence toward the West Coast, because UC offered quality, as well as access, to talented students from all backgrounds. It did more than transform the landscape of higher education; it shifted the balance of power in the country.

UC generates more patents than any other university in the nation. It is an incubator of discovery and innovation. Fifteen years ago, researchers on my own campus were the first to assemble a draft of the complete human genome — and they promptly posted it on the Web where it would be available to everyone, forever, for free. Today, the UC Santa Cruz Genome Browser is the gateway for genomics researchers around the globe.

These audacious contributions — these products of “intellectual curiosity” — are differentiators for our state. They speak to the vision Californians embraced 50 years ago, when the Master Plan for Higher Education called for tuition-free opportunities at the state’s community colleges and public universities.

The mission of public higher education is fundamental to our democracy and to our economic vitality. Let’s bring back the sense of collective responsibility for the university and its students — a public investment as essential as our hospitals, K-12 schools and highways.

UC alumni must speak up, voice their support for the university, and call on all Californians to follow their lead. We must not turn our back on today’s — and tomorrow’s — increasingly diverse student population.


Those changes were brought about by Ronald Reagan and far right organizations like the Howard Jarvis'. Meanwhile at the Federal level, the current GOP budget proposal would allow states to further cut their education budgets without loss of Federal funding, and allow educational funding to be moved away from students who need the most help. At the local level, far right advocates try to pack school boards, cut funding, and teach religion.
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techno900



Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161

PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 8:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I find the school lunch issue fascinating and see the parallel between the quality of education / overweight kids and the deteriorating home environment.

I reflect back to the days I was in school, where I actually worked in the school cafeterias in grades 5-8. I washed dishes in elementary and sold food at "nutrition period" in Jr. Hi and ran a cash register at lunch. "Nutrition" was giant cookies, sweet roles and milk. Lunch was a plate lunch, but I don't recall what was served, but I never brown bagged it to school. Whatever was served, the kids ate it. I earned free lunches for working, and I got to keep the lunch money given to me by my parents, so as I recall, I made 35 cents a day for a half hour of work.

In high school, I distinctly remember buying a Nestles Crunch bar after every lunch, plus after swimming practice, I routinely had two or three NEHI Orange sodas (got hooked on those suckers). "Junk" food was readily available. However, in my Winter of '63 class with over 600, there were few if any "fat" kids (I have the class photo). Same in Jr. Hi and Elementary. Yes, I was in the L.A. City school system. There was also a McDonalds within walking distance of my house during my High School years.

So what is different now? The Independent schools where I worked for 32 years had only a handful of obese kids and they tended to be financial aid students.

As I have said before, it seems to be the disintegration of the family unit, which now too often spits out undisciplined, unmotivated and unhealthy kids. How one fixes this I don't know, but I do believe that throwing a ton of money at it will have little if any impact. Free lunches that kids wont eat is not a solution. Now, it unfortunately seems that schools are being mandated into a parental role, which so far appears to be failure.

I don't have the answers.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 11:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Techno. Consumption patterns have changed dramatically since we were kids, fueled by constant advertising aimed at kids and agricultural subsidies. From the American Heart Association:

Quote:
Over the past 30 years, Americans have steadily consumed more and more added sugars in their diets, which has contributed to the obesity epidemic. Reducing the amount of added sugars we eat cuts calories and can help you improve your heart health and control your weight.


Here's how much of the sugar comes from sodas--33%.

Quote:
By John Casey
WebMD Weight Loss Clinic - Feature

Reviewed By Kathleen Zelman, MPH, RD/LD

One hundred and fifty-six pounds. That's how much added sugar Americans consume each year on a per capita basis, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Imagine it: 31 five-pound bags for each of us.

That's not to say that we get most of the sugar in our diets directly from the sugar bowl. Only about 29 pounds of it comes as traditional sugar, or sucrose, according to The Sugar Association, a trade group of sugar manufacturers. The rest comes from foods.

Of course, those foods include things like candy, soda, and junk food. But plenty of sugar is hiding in places where you might not expect it.

Some types of crackers, yogurt, ketchup, and peanut butter, for instance, are loaded with sugar -- often in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS. Use of this sweetener has increased 3.5% per year in the last decade, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). That's twice the rate at which the use of refined sugar has grown.

Where is all that sugar going? In the U.S. diet, the major source of "added sugar" -- not including naturally occurring sugars, like the fructose in fruit -- is soft drinks. They account for 33% of all added sugars consumed, says Kristine Clark, PhD, RD, a spokeswoman for the Sugar Association. Clark is also director of sports nutrition in the athletic department of Penn State University.


And then there is the GOP support for education--as a source of cuts to give tax breaks to the rich:

B
Quote:
y Elaine S. Povich, Stateline.org (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Governors in nearly a half-dozen states want to cut state spending on colleges and universities to help close budget shortfalls, often sparking vehement opposition among state lawmakers of both parties.

Republican governors in Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, and Wisconsin, and Connecticut’s Democratic governor have proposed higher education cuts for the coming fiscal year. Higher education spending traditionally is a juicy target for budget cutters because schools can make up the lost revenue by raising tuition.
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techno900



Joined: 28 Mar 2001
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 12:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There would be no problem if parents parented, but that's not all that prevalent these days. I think soda had sugar in the "old days" too, plus there was plenty of junk food and advertising.

Lay blame where it belongs.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 12:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Techno--so you are giving the soda companies and their relentless advertising a free pass? The trouble with advertising is it works. No doubt parental involvement is part of the problem--but not all of the blame should go there.

And the GOP cutting funding? Doesn't bother you that we are setting up, particularly in the south, different private school systems, with public funding in many cases, that exclude those who are harder to educate?
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 2:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

In some ways I agree with techno900. A child's intake of sugars is very dependent on parental influence. My mother didn't regularly buy soda or candy, but I could still heap sugar on my cereal every day.

Then there's the money issue too. How much money do parents dole out, regardless of whether you worked for it or not? When I grow up, there was the Helms Bakery and ice cream trucks cruising the neighborhood, particularly during the summer months trolling for kids. Also, your favorite candy at the drug stores was always a big lure for any spare change you might have had.

But, let's not let nostalgia get in the way. Sugary treats have always been a lure for folks of all ages. However, when you're young, most folks can burn it off with no problem, except for some resulting dental issues.

Talking about parental influence, how many parents support their kids having phones and computers? I think phones are a huge problem today, and giving them to children provides way too much distraction. Add computers, and there's no end to the potential loss of sound health, focus and traditional learning.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 30, 2015 2:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My school lunches for 12 straight years consisted of meat, two real vegetables (mashed potatoes at worst), a fruit, bread, milk, and some small dose of dessert. We'd never heard of junk food at school, and weren't allowed to eat off school grounds until our senior year, at the drugstore 100 yards away. One result is that I haven't been inside a burger joint in at least 30 years. I can't comprehend the absolute $#!+ today's kids -- whether they're 5 or 50 years old -- eat.
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