The New Yorker has the story Cheney Marks Tenth Anniversary of Pretending There Was Reason to Invade Iraq from The Borowitz Report.

“Making up a reason to invade a country is the easy part,” Mr. Cheney told them. “Sticking to a pretend story for ten years—that is the stuff of valor.”

I did tell you this was from The Borowitz Report, didn’t I?  Its tag line is “The news, reshuffled.”

This is what many supporters have been trying to tell Obama during his first 4 years. I would like to believe that he really understands the words he is speaking. In the last few days with Republican taunts that Obama is trying to politicize politics, he seems to be already backing away. It is up to us, to keep Obama’s feet to the fire.

It is discouraging to hear reports from Republicans that in a meeting with them Obama said that he understands the need to balance the budget, but many of his supporters do not.

That’s hogwash, and Obama should not ever say things like this unless he unfortunately actually believes this. If he actually believes this, that is even worse.

This supporter believes in balancing the budget when it is the correct thing to do during the right time in the economic cycle. Now is not that time.

This supporter believes that we need to balance the budget in a way that turns-around the tremendous shift of wealth in the last 30 years from the middle-class to the extremely wealthy. We need to shift some of that wealth back to the middle and lower classes.

We need to bring the budget to balance by growing the economy in such a way that each segment of the economy including the government can afford to do its necessary part.

I was reading headlines such as Asia stocks dive on Cyprus deposit levy plan .  So by the time I got to the Minyanville artcle Cyprus: Has the Next Phase of the Global Crisis Arrived?, I decided to check into it.

In a stunning shift from previous aid packages, EU Finance Ministers—the folks up north, primarily German—asked Cypriot savers to forfeit a portion of their deposits in return for a $13 billion bailout.
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One could intelligently argue that both of those situations were symptoms rather than the cause of those respective crises, and the same can be said of Cyprus, which is seemingly a guinea pig for a new approach from those pulling the policy strings.  Cue the unintended consequences (the potential for bank runs across Europe) and moral hazard (word on the street is that wealthy Russian oligarchs have size holdings in the heretofore stealth, sunny island); in an interwoven finance-based global economy, credit of a different breed—that of credibility, as posited in 2007—is the issue at hand for markets at large.

Should I panic? I haven’t the foggiest idea. This is the second item I have read this week about the coming apocalypse. The previous one was trying to sell a book.

Robert Reich’s reasoning behind raising the minimum wage.

You could say that some of this is just his opinion, logical though it may be. Other parts of this appear to be actual facts that counter the usual arguments against raising the minimum wage.

Sign the petition at signon.org/minwage.

It is well known that Stephen Lynch voted against Obamacare when he had the chance. Up until this point I could imagine some explanations why he might have done that, but I had not actually looked for an explanation. The video below gives you his explanation.

This explanation is one of the reasonable ones I could have imagined. I am still working for Ed Markey, but at least I now know that Stephen Lynch is not as bad as I could have imagined him to be.

The video below shows that Lindsey Garahm hasn’t quite got it when he tries to steal a page from the Elizabeth Warren playbook.

When an attorney asks the witness an embarrassing question, the point is that it is supposed to embarrass the witness, not the attorney. Perhaps they didn’t teach that where Graham earned his law degree.

If enough people watch this video, maybe the word will spread as to what a wind bag Lindsey Graham really is.

I was wondering if it were actually illegal to have a background check and fail it. this PolitiFact article provides some insight into the issue.

Jennifer Karberg of the St. Louis research organization that did the report told us that if a person trying to buy a gun indicates on the application form that, for example, he is a felon, the application will simply be denied. On the other hand, if a felon lied on the form about his conviction, that’s a crime that could be prosecuted, she said.

The Huffington Post has the article Elizabeth Warren: Banks Get Wrist Slaps While Drug Dealers Get Jail.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren unloaded on bank regulators Thursday about the fact that British bank HSBC is still doing business in the U.S., with no criminal charges filed against it, despite confessing to what one regulator called “egregious” money laundering violations.

Her comments came just a day after the attorney general of the United States confessed that some banks are so big and important that they are essentially above the law. His Justice Department’s failure to bring any criminal charges against HSBC or its employees is Exhibit A of that problem.

After this video, there is the one with Ben Bernanke, and another one after that. In the one with Ben Bernanke, apparently the idea never occurred to him no matter what Warren said that he could charge the banks a fee for getting $83 billion in insurance.

Thanks to CarolG for bringing this article to my attention.

Real Clear Politics has the article After Dinner Diplomacy, What’s Next for Obama and GOP?

Wisconsin’s Sen. Ron Johnson, a former accountant and Tea Party favorite, told reporters the conversation was lively when the subject turned to Medicare. Obama, he said, conceded aloud what his own budget blueprints lay out – that Medicare, the government’s health coverage for the elderly, is projected to bleed red ink in the future because of rising health care costs and an aging population.

Johnson quoted the president as telling the dozen senators at the Jefferson Hotel that “the American people, most of them, just don’t understand it. They think with Medicare, that’s their money. And to a certain extent it is: one dollar they put in, and get 3 dollars back in benefits.”

Listening to Obama lament Americans’ confusion about whether Medicare beneficiaries tap their own or other people’s money, Johnson said he urged him to spread some light and not just heat.

“You have a unique position,” the senator recalled telling Obama. “If you are going to solve these problems, the American people are going to have to understand it. You can go out and educate people to prepare them for the reforms that are absolutely necessary.”

This has got to be the scariest article I have ever read.  One can only hope that Sen. Johnson is a complete loon and misheard what President Obama said.

The Nation Of Change has the Robert Reich article Why There’s a Bull Market for Stocks and Bear Market for Workers. He does give answers to the question the headline poses, but you’ll have to use the previous link to read the answers yourself.

I am going to concentrate on two things he said so that I can make some point or other.

Corporate profits are claiming a larger share of national income than at any time in 60 years, while the portion of total income going to employees is near its lowest since 1966.
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Rarely before in American history have public policies so blatantly helped the most fortunate among us, so cruelly harmed the least fortunate, and exposed so many average working Americans to such widespread insecurity.

Of course I’d like to change the policies that afflict the afflicted and help the helped.  However, about 30 years ago I realized what I had to do to protect myself while waiting for the change.

I knew I wouldn’t become independent being just a wage slave – pretty good wages though they were.  I knew that the money was in being an owner, not a worker.  So I have steadily been learning and practicing buying companies through stock purchases.  In other words, I invested a lot of the wages I earned so that I could grow out of being a wage earner.  I am now retired, so I think I have succeeded, so far.  Of course the only real test of whether or not I succeeded will be if my wife and I can live a comfortable retirement until we are both gone.  Which ever one of us goes last might be able to spike the ball at the one yard line and claim victory.  That’s the closest we will come to knowing success while we can still know anything.

The only point of this is to show that I am not fighting for progressive causes because I will be a loser without them.  I am fighting for progressive causes in order for the world to work better for future generations.  My generation of this immediate family will be OK (I hope) whether or not I get my political wishes.  I wish I could say the same for future generations.  If I were sure about the future generations, maybe I could live without caring what the politicians let the extremely wealthy do to this country and the rest of the world.

I bet you have been wondering why the interface to PDF files in Firefox suddenly went to pot.

CNet has the article Mozilla puts native PDF viewer in Firefox 19.

I finally found the solution to bring the real Adobe Reader back to Firefox.

In Firefox go to “Tools->options->Applications”, and change the setting for “Portable Document Format (PDF)” to “Use Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox)”

If you haven’t found the trick to linking to pdf files on your local computer and have them come up in an imbedded Adobe Reader in Firefox, you just need to add the type parameter to your HTML anchor

<a type="application/pdf" href="localFile.pdf">