The starting sentence from the article, Key Dem Senator: Obama ‘snookered’ by GOP into talking deficit over jobs, is

Urging the administration to enact new measures to lower the unemployment rate, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) said President Barack Obama got “snookered” by Republicans into prioritizing deficits over jobs.

Remember, just because I would use the word patsy for some of President Obama’s actions, I did not feed this choice of words to Senator Harkin.

Perhaps with Austan Goolsbee leaving as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the pernicious influence of the University of Chicago economics department will finally fade from prominence.  Then President Obama will finally be free to listen to people who really understand recession economics and how to recover from a recession.

If the President appoints a new chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers that is from the same Chicago school of thought, then all is probably lost.

It is so unfortunate for our erstwhile progressive President to have chosen to start his professional career in Chicago and even join the faculty of the University of Chicago.  Had he chosen some other city, perhaps he would have avoided being tainted by the Milton Friedman cult of shock doctrine economics.

The story Therapy to change ‘feminine’ boy created a troubled man, family says on the CNN web site is a cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to fix what isn’t broken.

Can the Republicans ignore this message from wealthy people pleading for higher taxes on their incomes? How about the electorate? Can they continue to ignore it, too?

The above 38 minute interview with Keith Olbermann was conducted by Terry Gross on her NPR show Fresh Air.

For the record, I used to watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann, but I started to feel the show was too over the top and the format too contrived, so I stopped watching it. I was also disturbed to see some of the same contrivance on the Rachel Maddow show. I stopped being a regular watcher of that show, too.

The above interview had none of the bombast of the show. For what I learned, I thought it was worth posting here.

Florida used to have the tax that is discussed in the above video. Can you guess how this tax got eliminated in Florida? Repeal of Annual Intangible Personal Property Tax.

Of course it is up to you to decide whether or not to pay to support this particular news organization. As I have stated on this blog before (see Monetizing Internet Content), I would prefer a micropayment model.

Paul Krugman has written the column Vouchercare Is Not Medicare in The New York Times.

Here are some quotes from the column:

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

He concludes:

So in voting for the House budget plan, Republicans voted to end Medicare. Saying that isn’t demagoguery, it’s just pointing out the truth.

I think Paul Krugman has come up with the right name for the issue pointed out in the previous post on this blog,   Are They Killing Medicare?

McClatchy news has an article Ryan Medicare plan puts GOP candidates on the spot.

I responded to that one with a couple of comments of my own.

The Democratic plan is to get control of health care costs in all realms including Medicare.

Remember that it was Obama himself who said that the largest issue (and the one that needed to be worked on first was) for future budget deficits was the rising cost of health care.

Lot’s of Republicans were claiming that he should have worked on job creation first  (which he had already done) and left healthcare alone.  Now they are ignoring job creation and want to kill Medicare and replace it with something else.

They scored Obama for cuts to Medicare (actually doing away with the subsidy to private insurance companies called Medicare Advantage)  Now they want to do something a lot worse than what they accused Obama of doing.

Are the people who would vote for a Republican paying any attention at all?  It is just amazing that the GOP thinks that they can get away with all these reverse twists and think nobody will notice.

I noticed something about the Republican’s plans:

There is one consistent theme in everything the Republicans do.  If it hurts the super rich it is bad, but if it hurts everybody else to the benefit of the super rich then it is good.

They thought Obama was awful for taking away the private insurance welfare plan called Medicare Advantage.    Their plan would give even more subsidies to the insurance companies and take it out of the hides of everybody else.

In their eyes Obama’s plan was not bad because it disadvantaged most people.  They thought it was bad because it didn’t give enough to the super rich.  Now they have come up with a scheme to fix Obama’s plan to their liking. They think they can fool the rest of us into thinking it is a deficit reduction plan, when it is in fact a plan to shift more wealth from the majority to those who are already super wealthy.

What will the Republicans do when they have managed to shift 100% of the nation’s wealth to the super wealthy and left the rest of us with nothing?  Will they start asking for arms and legs?

Democracy Now has an article and a video Seymour Hersh: Despite Intelligence Rejecting Iran as Nuclear Threat, U.S. Could Be Headed for Iraq Redux.

Earlier this week, The New Yorker magazine published his latest investigation titled “Iran and the Bomb: How Real is the Threat?” Hersh writes, quote, “There is a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago—allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions.”

In the interview with Seymour Hersh they ask him about a report in The New York Times that seems to contradict what he is saying. Hersh debunks the spin that The New York Times puts on the report from the IAEA.  So the IAEA report does exist, but it does not say what The New York Times wants you to believe it says.

Knowing the history of how much The New York Times promotes war with stories that are outright fabrications and has done so as recently as the lead up to the war with Iraq, I tend to believe that Hersh’s take is more plausible than the one from The New York Times.

And Richard H. wonders why I harbor such skepticism about the so called reputation that The New York Times has for being THE newspaper of record.

Furthermore, you have to wonder why the Obama administration doesn’t do more to quash this behavior of distortion of intelligence which was so egregious in the Bush administration.  Why would they not want the American people to know the truth?  Who in this administration is still promoting war under false premises, and why doesn’t Obama stop it?

Is there some higher power than the President that prevents him from formulating policy based on the truth?

These are all questions that disturb me very much about the current administration.  The situation may be slightly more leaning toward truth telling in this administration than in the Bush administration, which is the right direction.  It is not a big enough change to make me happy, though.

We supporters of Obama need to demand better from him.  With the obstructionism of Republicans he will not get to have every policy that he wants.  However, he has total control of whether he tells us the truth or not.  For contributing to the coverup of the truth, I feel justified in feeling very disappointed.

ActBlue says about the ad:

Here’s a snippet of the letter the National Republican Congressional Committee and Charlie Bass sent to TV stations running our new ad in New Hampshire:

The Advertisement states, in pertinent part, that “Charlie Bass voted to END Medicare.” This is completely false… a vote in favor of the [Paul Ryan] Budget Resolution was a vote to protect Medicare for future seniors.

We urge you not to ascent to this political ploy… broadcasting stations are not protected from legal liability for airing a false and misleading advertisement…

Is it a lie to say the Republicans are ending Medicare and replacing it with something else?
Or is it a lie for the Republicans to say that the replacement of Medicare with something else is preserving Medicare?

Computerworld has the article Shock: Windows 8 optimized for desktop tablets.  The title is a little misleading and may not immediately convey the import of what is in the article.  The following quote may better show you why the artciel is worth reading:

More importantly, we know how Microsoft is going to manage the jarring transition from second-generation WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointing devices) computing to third-generation MPG (multi-touch, physics and gestures ) computing.