The Presidents remarks about  Pushing For Up-Or-Down Vote On Help For Our Laid Off Friends & Neighbors are posted on the White House web site.

According to the Los Angeles Times article Obama pushes GOP to extend unemployment benefits:

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio fired back. In a prepared statement, Boehner said: “The president knows that Republicans support extending unemployment insurance, and doing it in a fiscally responsible way by cutting spending elsewhere in the $3-trillion federal budget.”

That has to be the dumbest idea the Republicans have ever had, and there is stiff competition for that honor. Republicans want to take some spending out of the budget that would have been used to hire people to do some useful work so that you can pay people for being unemployed.  I thought Republicans generally don’t favor disincentives to work.

Maybe even more stupid is the failure of any Democrat to harp on the Republican stupidity.

The article Obama’s Done A Lot, But Gets Little Credit For It; Why? appeared on the McClatchy web site.  I posted the following comment on their web site:

It is rather amazing that this story looks all around for explanations but some how missed looking in the mirror.

What role has the media played? What role has Faux Noise played?

How hard has the media worked to counter the obvious fantasy land that the Republican propaganda machine has tried to create. All they seem to do is give us stories of “he said, she said”. They never do any work to look at the objective truth about what “he said, or she said”..

Then the media wonder why they are losing their readers and viewers. Faux Noise claims to be expanding. Is that because they are not bland? They may be 100% wrong, but they are not bland. They are not too afraid to offend, so they can take a strong stand even if it is all a lie. Have the other media outlets tried a counter attack using the truth?

The article Thad Allen Tells BP Seabed “Seeping” and Demands More Monitoring says:

Adm. Thad Allen released a letter to BP Chief Managing Director Bob Dudley  tonight in which he demands that BP provide more monitoring information, citing “a detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head.”

I guess Murphy’s Law that Everything that could go wrong will go wrong has not been overturned by any District Court or Supreme Court in this country.

It seems odd that Thad Allen should have to send a letter to BP.  You’d think he could call the head of BP, get him out of bed, and demand answers.

You’ve got to listen to the  Interview With Gulf Oil Disaster Whistleblower & BP Nemesis, Kindra Arnesen.

According to OpEdNews:

Kindra Arnesen, outspoken critic of BP from Venice, Louisiana and advocate for the fishermen of the Gulf Coast and their families, indeed for all families in trouble from the oil catastrophe in the Gulf, was interviewed live on Hard Tail News of Freedomizer Radio by regular host “Doc” on July 15th. The topics include the new cap, BP coverups and double-crosses, toxic rain, oil plumes and hurricane impacts on the oil disaster.

If you believe half of what you hear in this interview, you will be shocked.  Because the video/audio comes from YouTube, it is broken up into 5 segments of about 10 minutes each.  Some of what you hear, you will not believe because it sounds too conspiratorial.  The part that you will find believable is bad enough.

The actual title of the article by Dr. Tom Termotto is Pressure At The Wellhead And What It Really Means.

The article raises a number of issues that arise from the BP oil well situation that you would not think of based on your experience of day-to-day circumstances with normal pressures and velocities of flows you see every day. The consequences of these issues may not be readily apparent for quite some time after things appear to have returned to normal.

It all makes sense.  However, you will have to judge for yourself whether you think Dr. Tom Termotto has the qualifications to be writing about this subject.  In the article are various links that you can follow to help you decide.  Of course there are links to other related articles that will tell you even more.

The above lecture, whose full title is The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: Higher Risks, Lower Rewards and A Shrinking Safety Net, is by Dr. Elizabeth Warren.

According to an email I received, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is advising the White House not to put Elizabeth Warren in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a watchdog agency she invented!

After viewing this lecture, you tell me if you would want someone like this in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

So what are you going to do about it? You could always sign a petition at boldprogressives.org.

In the Boston Globe article Brown’s jobless bill wins little support: Gets scant notice, even from GOP, Scott Brown is quoted as asking

“Why is it that I’m always the one that has to vote with the Democrats?” Brown lamented. “Bipartisanship is a two-way street, you know? Why can’t they also work together to pay for these things within the budget, within the monies that we already have? Why is it that we always have to add to the deficit?”

Why can’t Scott Brown understand economics?

You balance the budget when the economy is doing well. Stimulating the economy requires running a deficit.

Unemployment benefits are necessary to sustaining the people who receive them. Doing it by cutting somewhere else defeats the stimulative effect of paying these benefits.

Why can’t Scott Brown see that there are two reasons for extending unemployment benefits? Rather than rhetorically wondering why nobody will vote for his proposal, he ought to seriously look for answers to this question. There are plenty available. How about the other negative things he has in his bill? Might those be reasons for not voting for it in preference for the Democratic bill?

The article also mentions that:

In addition to the $35 billion in unspent money that he would divert from the overall $787 billion stimulus program, Brown would freeze food stamp increases and change Medicaid pricing for certain types of prescription drugs, providing $50.9 billion for the unemployment extension as well as summer jobs and a boost in Medicaid funding for states.

Do you suppose this has anything to do with the lack of support for his idea?

Simon Maierhofer has written the article Bank of America: ‘Oops, We Cheated Accidentally’.

I’ll try to capture some key points of what he wrote by quoting some paragraphs in his article.

Unfortunately for BofA, the process of borrowing does not remove the obviously toxic assets from their balance sheets. Those so called unintended mishaps occurred for six quarters from from 2007 to 2009. The classification error involved more than $10 billion in repos.

Of course BofA did not volunteer that information. It was a required response to a courteous letter the SEC sent to 19 large financial institutions inquiring about their repo practices. Can you imagine what kind of information they’d get if the SEC dug even deeper.
.
.
.
Keep in mind that the combined assets of the four biggest banks are roughly about $7.5 trillion. Assuming those banks overvalue their assets by just 25%, a $1.8 trillion problem is yet waiting to the hit the fan.
.
.
.
Bear markets are the best auditors. Falling prices reveal the ugly truth of such practices as the BofA story above.

The article Facts Belie GOP Fear-Mongering About Coming Medicare Cuts is written by Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash., the only psychiatrist among the 16 medical doctors serving in Congress.

Apparently the facts also show that the Republicans are the ones who have done what they accuse the Democrats of having done.  It is amazing that the Republicans know exactly what frightening things to accuse the Democrats of doing,  They only have to go through the list of things that Republicans have done or thought of doing to come up with something,

In 1997, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act (which I voted against) that created something called the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, also referred to as SGR. The SGR is an enormously complicated formula that determines how much Medicare will pay a physician for the different services they provide seniors during a doctor’s visit.

Ultimately, the formula has been a disastrous failure and has forced doctors who accept Medicare patients to face ever-increasing pay cuts. Can you imagine if your boss told you that you might soon face a pay cut of as much as 20 percent and to expect more cuts to come down the pike?

To prevent this from happening, Congress has had no choice but to override those cuts in time increments from 1 year down to 30 days. And Republicans have been little help in recognizing the need to correct this very serious problem: just two years ago, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy had to make a surprise appearance on the Senate floor amid his battle with brain cancer to cast the deciding vote to override a pay cut of over 10 percent. His vote was needed because Republicans apparently had no qualms about significantly reducing the pay of the doctors who serve our nation’s senior citizens.

If Republicans are so fearful of cutting Medicare, why did they come up with the above legislation in 1997?