The op-ed piece False pretense for war in Libya? by Alan J. Kuperman says what I have been thinking since the beginning of this misbegotten adventure.

Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The “no mercy’’ warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those “who throw their weapons away.’’ Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight “to the bitter end.’’

If bloodbath was unlikely, how did this notion propel US intervention? The actual prospect in Benghazi was the final defeat of the rebels. To avoid this fate, they desperately concocted an impending genocide to rally international support for “humanitarian’’ intervention that would save their rebellion.

On March 15, Reuters quoted a Libyan opposition leader in Geneva claiming that if Khadafy attacked Benghazi, there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.’’ Four days later, US military aircraft started bombing. By the time Obama claimed that intervention had prevented a bloodbath, The New York Times already had reported that “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda’’ against Khadafy and were “making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.’’

It just drives me around the bend every time Obama repeats his dishonest justification for picking sides in a civil war.

Here’s the video, you decide for yourself.

Dennis Kucinich asks the key question.

Today, President Obama made what would have been an excellent speech about the budget and the economy if he had made it at least a year ago.

Unfortunately in this address he took the same tone that has proved to be so damaging  to his negotiating position throughout his term in office.  He asked for perfectly reasonable and moderate steps and then cut his own feet out from under him by adding that he is willing to negotiate.

If you must add in that phrase, then you at least need to start by asking for the near impossible.  If Obama had asked for repeal of the Bush Tax Cuts before June of this year is over, he could have said, but I am willing to negotiate.

Talking about people clinging to silly ideas, the President still believes that if he presents a reasonable proposal, he will be met with a reasonable proposal from the other side.  The Republicans have even given the President a lesson in negotiation.  The House Republicans have just presented a budget plan that would have been unthinkable for even George W. Bush to propose.  I didn’t even hear them say they would be willing to negotiate.

Obama keeps reminding us that in previous times of  dire stress this country has always come together to find a solution.   He fails to mention what is different this time.  This time, he is the leader that must make it happen.  If he fails to lead us to a responsible way out of our mess, then history will note that the big difference this time is that we were not able to find a leader who knew how to lead.

Read Introducing the people’s budget by Rep. Michael Honda (D-Calif.) for a teaser on a better way to fix the budget problems of the federal government.

We make the tax code fair, asking the wealthiest individuals, corporations hiding money overseas, oil companies raking in record profits and Wall Street banks that gambled away our money to pay their fair share. We fix roads, bridges and waterways, we build a world-class high-speed rail system and broadband, we end our addiction to oil and the endless wars that come with it, we meet our obligations to seniors and we educate our children for the global workforce. Our budget does all this while eliminating the deficit, cutting nearly $1 trillion in waste, and reducing debt burden.

April 18, 2011

I found a link to a summary of the actual proposal.

Thanks to The Wall Street Journal for bringing the Rolling Stone article The Real Housewives of Wall Street to my attention.  The subtitle of the story is “Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?”

The final paragraph sums it up:

As America girds itself for another round of lunatic political infighting over which barely-respirating social program or urgently necessary federal agency must have their budgets permanently sacrificed to the cause of billionaires being able to keep their third boats in the water, it’s important to point out just how scarce money isn’t in certain corners of the public-spending universe. In the coming months, when you watch Republican congressional stooges play out the desperate comedy of solving America’s deficit problems by making fewer photocopies of proposed bills, or by taking an ax to budgetary shrubberies like NPR or the SEC, remember Christy Mack and her fancy new carriage house. There is no belt-tightening on the other side of the tracks. Just a free lunch that never ends.

This story is on the MSNBC web site. I quote some key paragraphs below.

As the top Hawaiian official in charge of state health records in 2008, when the issue of Obama’s birth first arose, Fukino said she thought she had put the matter to rest. Contacted by NBC, Fukino expanded on previous public statements and made two key points when asked about Trump’s recent comments.

The first is that the original so-called “long form” birth certificate — described by Hawaiian officials as a “record of live birth” — absolutely exists, located in a bound volume in a file cabinet on the first floor of the state Department of Health. Fukimo said she has personally inspected it — twice. The first time was in late October 2008, during the closing days of the presidential campaign, when the communications director for the state’s then Republican governor, Linda Lingle (who appointed Fukino) asked if she could make a public statement in response to claims then circulating on the Internet that Obama was actually born in Kenya.

Before she would do so, Fukino said, she wanted to inspect the files — and did so, taking with her the state official in charge of vital records. She found the original birth record, properly numbered, half typed and half handwritten, and signed by the doctor who delivered Obama, located in the files. She then put out a public statement asserting to the document’s validity. She later put out another public statement in July 2009 — after reviewing the original birth record a second time.

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Hawaiian officials say that the certification is, in fact, only one piece of abundant evidence of Obama’s birth in Hawaii. Joshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii attorney general’s office, noted that a public index of vital records, available for inspection in a bound volume at the Health Department’s Office of Health Status Monitoring, lists a male child named “Obama II, Barack Hussein” as having been born in the state.

In addition, as Factcheck.org and other media organizations have repeatedly pointed out, both of Honolulu’s newspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, and the Honolulu Star Bulletin, on Aug. 14, 1961, both ran birth announcements listing Obama’s birth on Aug. 4 of that year.

Of course MSNBC is some left-wing news organization that cannot be trusted.  The same can be said for the two Honolulu newspapers who joined the conspiracy in 1961 at Obama’s birth knowing that he would one day become the Democratic President of the U.S.A.  to fulfill the needs of the vast conspiracy to take over this country by the evil cabal in Kenya.

I received an email from the Black Box Voting election monitoring organization.  I’ll reprint it below in its entirety.

Permission to reprint or excerpt granted, with link to http://www.blackboxvoting.org

You can discuss this here (and download the state spreadsheet missing 400,000 votes):
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/81631.html

I’ve been buried in e-mails, phone calls and urgent cries for help regarding the strange saga of the Wisconsin Spring 2011 Supreme Court race. Early results separated David T. Prosser Jr. from Joanne Kloppenburg by just a hair, in a controversial high profile race characterized by polarized commentary on both right and left. Then the surprise late entry of 14,326 Brookfield votes tipped the race to Prosser and out of reach of a recount. Barely.

If the late Brookfield votes just coincidentally blocked a state-paid recount, scrutiny is appropriate. I wanted to know the exact number of votes needed for that magic recount number.

I downloaded the detailed election results spreadsheet from the state of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (GAB) Website. The spreadsheet is time-stamped Friday, April 08, 2011 4:11:14 PM, nearly 24 hours after the Brookfield votes came in.

http://gab.wi.gov/sites/default/files/page/contests_by_reporting_unit_for_all_reported_counti_22616.xls

WISCONSIN’S WANDERING TALLIES

The latest state spreadsheet as of this writing doesn’t show the candidates separated by a dead heat. It doesn’t show them separated by a smidgen over the 7,500 votes reported to be needed to block a recount. And it doesn’t show the magic recount number as 7,500 votes.

The Friday Wisconsin results, still unofficial because the election hasn’t been certified yet, show a total of 1,103,826 votes, with 566,130 for Prosser and 536,923 for Kloppenburg (and 773 random scattered votes).

In this spreadsheet, which contains detailed results by municipality and includes the late-breaking Brookfield votes, the spread is 29,207 for Prosser and the magic number for a recount would be only 5,519.

That’s because AFTER Brookfield came into the state, there were (and are, as of this writing) still 400,000 votes missing from the state data.

WHEN DID BROOKFIELD COMMIT TO THE DATA?

When the story about Brookfield first broke, my very first question was: What about the municipal results? Do you mean to tell me those candidates were so incurious that they never asked for their results? Of course, it turns out, those results HAD been posted in Brookfield, as had the Brookfield supreme court race results, just after midnight on Election Night.

There was no variance between the results posted at the municipality of Brookfield and the late-reported results.

Could the late-reported results have been a ploy? In other words, was someone waiting to see what they needed, so they could tack a few hundred on to Brookfield votes to hit the magic block-a-recount number?

There was no variance between the results committed to on Election Night and the late results sent to the state.

DID THE WAUKESHA COUNTY CLERK MAKE UP THE NUMBERS?

But maybe the county clerk had her way with the results on that murky uncertified private computer she was using?

Poll workers in Wisconsin do reconciliations. You can’t have thousands of ballots appear out of thin air on a county computer without those same ballot quantities being signed off on by poll workers days earlier at, in the case of Brookfield, 24 different locations all featuring different personnel.

I recommended to the locals to get copies of the poll worker reconciliations for Brookfield’s 24 wards, along with copies of the voting machine tapes.

The Kloppenburg campaign already did just that. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “Saturday, Kloppenburg campaign volunteers combed through Waukesha County voting records made available by Nickolaus. By 5 p.m. they had completed the process of comparing data from poll books to tape from voting machines.”

The article doesn’t say if there are discrepancies; if so, those will surface. I don’t expect fireworks.

DOES THIS SOG DOWN THE BLOGS?

Not necessarily.

Here’s the next twist: The Journal-Sentinel reports in a story posted Sunday April 10 at 1:00 a.m., “Prosser ahead by 6,744 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast.”

The newspaper is reporting roughly 400,000 more votes than the state has posted, and this is AFTER the Brookfield votes were posted. So what’s missing on the state spreadsheet? By 4:14 p.m. Friday the state had not reported about 30 wards from the city of Madison, much of Fon du Lac, and several Oshkosh wards.

A copy of the spreadsheet is posted at the link at top of this email.

WISCONSIN AND FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

Several questions remain, but access to the original source documents will produce most of it. Wisconsin conceals the vote-counting and chain of custody from the public, using electronic machines with no way for the public to compare input to output. By the time any recount would be done, ballots have been moved out of public view, toasting the chain of custody.

But Wisconsin does have many good procedures and good public records practices. In fact, Wisconsin had the first Freedom of Information law in America, passing it in 1848. (The first Freedom of Information laws in the world were passed in Sweden in 1766.)

In my opinion, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race probably won’t ultimately come down to something that happened in Brookfield, but it may very well still come to a recount.

WHAT TO LOOK AT NEXT

I’d be looking very carefully at the absentee votes, and at the poll worker reconciliation forms, and at the timing when each municipality and county first publicly committed to ward-level results. I’m interested — at least in Brookfield — in what caused an apparent last-minute surge in votes that looks impossible. I do have a theory on that which I’ll keep off-grid for now. I expect that apparent anomaly to have a legitimate explanation, but I want to corroboration for my theory.

SO NOTHING WAS NEFARIOUS?

I’d like to quote an excellent letter by election law scholar Paul Lehto, in regard to Nate Silver’s editorial in the New York Times. Lehto nails it:

“A major reason (besides being apologists) why people can “see nothing nefarious” in election results is that it is so difficult to see anything whatsoever…

“Remember it is secret black box voting boxes we are talking about. Data is extremely hard to come up, except for the conclusory election results numbers that pop out of the black boxes …he [Nate Silver] ‘sees nothing nefarious’ because he can see so very little (much like the rest of us) because of the very nature of the voting system.

“What is decisive in terms of where people come down on this issue is their underlying attitude toward things they can’t see or investigate.

“If it is one of trust, they will find some small ledge of data to support the entire election because it is really trust they operate on. If it, instead, is an underlying attitude of accountability, then circumstances like Waukesha are concerning at least … who can rationally be in favor of unaccountable government or unaccountable elections?

“…those who implicitly advocate “trust and confidence” in elections have put the cart before the horse: trust and confidence is a state of mind that should only be earned and must be re-earned with each election, and only after investigation reveals that all necessary checks and balances were in place in a properly designed voting system and that the checks and balances, including transparent observability and others, worked as they were intended to work.

“..But we can’t have confidence right now just a few days after an election when we are missing so much information from Wisconsin, and much of what we do know stinks or is suggestive of mistakes and fraud. But Nate Silver simply, and erroneously, takes an entirely different approach that ignores accountability and instead looks for a silver lining of the “numbers jibing” and the like upon which to attach his presumed and pre-existing trust and confidence.”

Good stuff, Paul Lehto. In other words, we should not be urging the public to trust what the public cannot see and authenticate. We have a structural problem with US election procedures, and instead of focusing on politics, we should be working together to restore the public ability to see what’s going on.

* * * *

* * * * *

Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over the instruments of government we have created.

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Since President Obama and the Democrats allowed the Republicans to get their way and continue the Bush Era tax cuts for the wealthy, we see the inevitable outcome.  The budget is being slashed.  The ostensible reason to slash the budget is  to bring it into balance.  Of course the real reason is to justify further tax cuts.

Sure the budget slashing in response to the tax cuts will hurt the poor and the elderly, but that is not its biggest detriment to our country.

The biggest problem with the continued favoring with tax policy of capital gains and interest write-offs for hedge fund managers is the distortion of the economy.  The profits for coming up with money manipulation schemes becomes huge compared to the reasonable profits coming from doing more research and manufacturing when the money manipulation profits are taxed at far lower rates than the tax rates for making useful stuff.

This imbalance further drains the talents of our people from inventing and making things into schemes to manipulate money.  Keeping manufacturing jobs in this country becomes a distraction for the capitalists.  They’d rather make money by inventing clever ways to profit from speculating on other people’s manufacturing activities.

Far from discouraging job producing industry, equalizing the tax rate for this less useful  manipulation work will shift resources from the bankers who hire few people to the manufacturers who hire many people.  Stopping this Bush era tax policy is key to restoring jobs to this country.  The current tax policy doesn’t create jobs in this country, it destroys them here and sends them elsewhere.

One hedge fund manager can earn over a billion dollars.  For  factory workers making $75,000 only one billion dollars would pay the salaries of 13,000 workers.  For every hedge fund manager like this, many multiples of 13,000 factory workers go unemployed.  This is where the drain on the economy is coming from.

Entitlements are not causing loss of jobs in this country.  Tax policies that favor speculation by the ultra-wealthy rather than their using their money to create jobs is what is killing the economy.

As long as progressives focus on trying to get the middle class to sympathize with the plight of the poor, they have a weak argument.  If they focus on how the tax cuts cause loss of jobs and loss of income for the middle class, they will have an argument that could resonate with voters.

When progressives don’t focus on the real problem for the middle class, the right is able to pretend that their policies will actually help job prospects for the middle class.  In this dynamic, the middle class thinks that they have to choose between their own welfare and the welfare of the poor.  In fact the welfare of the middle-class is in harmony with taxation policy that can help the poor.  That is what I call a win-win proposition for the middle and lower class to the slight detriment of the uber-wealthy.

TheRealNews.com is conducting a series of interviews with Ha-Joon Chang, the author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.

As of this writing there are only 4 published segments in the series, and they have gotten about half way through the 23 things.

Some of the things that have been covered so far are:

• There is no such thing as a free market
• Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners
• Most people in rich countries are paid more than they should be
• We do not live in a post-industrial age

There are fascinating insights that come out of the discussions with Ha-Joon Chang.

Ha-Joon Chang (Korean: 장하준, Hanja: 張夏准, b. South Korea in 1963) is one of the leading heterodox economists specialising in development economics. After graduating from Seoul National University Department of Economics, he trained at the University of Cambridge, where he currently works as a Reader in the Political Economy of Development, Chang is the author of several influential policy books, including 2002’s Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective.