Later On

Those whose minds are still open (and are willing to click a link) will find this post of interest, particularly the visuals.

David Savage in the LA Times:

Ralph Fertig hardly resembles a terrorist, but the soft-spoken 79-year-old pacifist and human rights activist from Los Angeles might well qualify as one under the government’s strong anti-terrorism law.

He is the lead plaintiff [?? – sounds as though he's a defendant, not a plaintiff – LG] in a Supreme Court case to be heard next week that will test whether speaking out on behalf of an oppressed foreign minority — represented by a group that’s been deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S. — can result in a long prison term.

In 1996, Congress expanded the anti-terrorism law, imposing a prison term of up to 15 years for providing "training" or "expert advice or assistance" to a designated international terrorist group. The ban on supporting terrorists forbids sending not only money, weapons and fighters, but also charitable funds. Government lawyers say it even forbids filing a legal brief or writing an op-ed essay on behalf of a designated terrorist group.

For his part, Fertig says he wants no part of terrorism or violence, but rather the freedom to advocate for the rights of the Kurdish minority in Turkey. He is troubled that Kurds can be punished for speaking their own language or displaying their national colors. And he believes the 1st Amendment protects his right to counsel Kurdish leaders to steer away from violence and to take their cause to the United Nations.

"I am opposed to violence. It seems crazy to me that I could go to jail for trying to persuade people to engage in nonviolence," said Fertig, a retired judge and a USC professor of social work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas Maugh II in the LA Times:

Scientists have long known that natives of southern Africa are genetically quite distinct from people in the rest of the world, but a new study in which the genomes of four African Bushmen and one Bantu were sequenced or partially sequenced indicates that there is a much greater diversity among the populations there than had previously been suspected.

Two Bushmen from different tribes living within walking distance of each other can have greater genetic differences than a European and an Asian, according to the study published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

"If we really want to understand human diversity, we need to go to Africa and study those people," geneticist and lead author Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University said in a teleconference Wednesday.

The study, which marked the first time that the DNA of a hunter-gatherer had been sequenced, found about 1.3 million novel variants in the genetic sequences, accounting for about 1% of the total human genome, the researchers said.

The greater genetic diversity there, researchers said, probably results from the fact that modern southern Africans originated there and have lived continuously in one region much longer than other peoples, thereby having more time to accumulate variations. Despite those differences, the Bushmen also had similarities that distinguish them from other population groups. They were missing a gene that allows them to metabolize lactose; were lacking a gene that promotes malaria resistance; had genes that gave them denser bones, greater strength and a greater ability to run short distances; and had another gene that promotes their ability to retain salt and water at high temperatures.

Even so, the researchers said, it is important to remember that the overall genomes of all human beings are virtually identical and the small differences they observed represent adaptations to new or changing environments.

The research was conducted by …

Continue reading.

Good review:

Ransom

by David Malouf

A review by Brian Doyle

Some 3,000 years ago, it may be, one grim, ferocious warrior killed another on the coast of what is now Turkey. The killer was Achilles, the dead man Hector. By the custom of the times, Hector’s corpse would return to his royal family for mourning and burial; but Achilles, mad with rage, mad with grief over his fallen companions, maddened by 10 consecutive years of battle, insulted the Trojans by dragging their slain hero behind his chariot, "up and down under the walls of Troy," not once, but 12 days in row — Hector’s raw-ribboned body being miraculously restored every night by the gods, themselves shocked at Achilles’ dark fury.

In the besieged city, no warriors were left to stand against Achilles and reclaim the body of their beloved prince; but finally the king, against all advice and regal habit, sets out himself, accompanied only by a wagon driver, to ransom the body of his son. The king, Priam, flies in the face of sense and status in doing so, but miraculously, movingly, his courage and love for his boy pierce Achilles’ rage, and the "Iliad" ends with Priam bringing Hector’s body, "his wounds every one of them closed though many pierced him with their spears," home to be buried.

Thousands of years later a boy in Brisbane, Australia, becomes riveted by the story. "We too were … in the midst of an unfinished war," writes great Australian novelist David Malouf of the boy he was in 1943, "the war, our war, was real: highways of ash where ghostly millions rise out of their shoes and go barefoot nowhere. …" In his new novel Ransom, Malouf goes back to the story again, but now with a master novelist’s tools in hand. Priam’s imaginative leap is what fascinates Malouf — to envision what has not been done, cannot be done by all sense and habit, and then, dogged and frightened, do it — this is the story of Ransom, in which Malouf, with the magic of the best fictioneers, creates a whole world from a few lines of the "Iliad."

He does so with a wonderful grace and simplicity; …

Continue reading.

Interesting story by John Hoeffel in the LA Times:

With an innovative but little-known state program to study medical marijuana about to run out of money, researchers and political supporters said Wednesday the results show promise.

"It should take all the mystery out of whether it works. We’ve got the results," said former state Sen. John Vasconcellos, who led the effort to create the 10-year-old Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.

The center has nearly spent its $8.7-million allocation, sponsoring 14 studies at UC campuses, including the first clinical trials of smoked marijuana in the United States in more than two decades.

Much of the research is still underway or under review, but five studies have been published in scientific journals. Four showed that cannabis can significantly relieve neuropathic pain and one found that vaporizers are an effective way to use marijuana. Another study, submitted for publication, found that marijuana can reduce muscle spasms in multiple sclerosis patients.

Dr. Igor Grant, a neuropsychiatrist at UC San Diego who is the center’s director, called the pain studies "pretty convincing" and urged the federal government to pay for additional clinical studies…

Continue reading.

I highly recommend Fatal System Error to understand why so many computers fall under the control of bots. John Markoff writes in the NY Times:

A malicious software program has infected the computers of more than 2,500 corporations around the world, according to NetWitness, a computer network security firm.

The malicious program, or botnet, can commandeer the operating systems of both residential and corporate computing systems via the Internet. Such botnets are used by computer criminals for a range of illicit activities, including sending e-mail spam, and stealing digital documents and passwords from infected computers. In many cases they install so-called “keystroke loggers” to capture personal information.

The current infection is modest compared to some of the largest known botnets. For example, a system known as Conficker, created in late 2008, infected as many as 15 million computers at its peak and continues to contaminate more than 7 million systems globally. Currently Shadowserver, an organization that tracks botnet activity, is monitoring 5,900 separate botnets.

NetWitness said in a release that it had discovered the program last month while the company was installing monitoring systems. The company dubbed it the “Kneber botnet” based on a username that linked the infected systems. The purpose appears to be to gather login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and e-mail systems, and then transmit that information to the system’s controllers, the company said.

The company’s investigation determined that the botnet has been able to compromise both commercial and government systems, including 68,000 corporate log-in credentials. It has also gained access to e-mail systems, online banking accounts, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other social network credentials, along with more than 2,000 digital security certificates and a significant cache of personal identity information…

Continue reading.

I got a great lather using the Sabini brush on QED’s Special 218, with its dark color and mysterious and alluring fragrance. This is one of my faves, and I need to use it more often. The trusty HD with an Astra Superior Platinum blade did a superb job—it really is an excellent razor. My face at the end was completely smooth, as if polished, though I did only my regular three-pass shave. Perhaps it was simply that I greatly enjoyed every component of this shave—including the wonderful New York aftershave. If you haven’t tried Special 218, you really should give it a go.

Steve Benen at Political Animal:

It’s now impossible for serious observers to claim the stimulus didn’t create new jobs. The leading economic research firms — IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers, and Moody’s Economy.com — estimate that the effort has already created as many as 1.8 million jobs, and will create about 2.5 million jobs when all is said and done. As far as the independent Congressional Budget Office is concerned, those are conservative estimates — the CBO believes the stimulus is already responsible for as many as 2.4 million jobs.

It leaves the right looking for alternate rhetorical strategies. Today, House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) tried a new tack in a press release. Notice the addition of one key word to the GOP talking points:

One year [after the stimulus bill became law], not one net job has been created as unemployment rose from 7.6 percent to nearly 10 percent nationwide. [emphasis added]

Matt Finkelstein explained why this rhetorical shift matters: "The distinction here is important. By shifting the focus to ‘net jobs,’ Pence is effectively conceding that the Recovery Act did create jobs — that, while unemployment rose more than expected, we would be even worse off if the program hadn’t passed."

This also suggests that Republican officials are starting to worry, at least a little, that the economy might be improving far more than they’d like. If job creation starts picking up in a meaningful way in the Spring, as the Obama administration expects, the good news for the country may be bad news for the GOP’s midterm election strategy. They’ll need something negative to say, and pointing to net job growth may fool a few people.

But probably not many. It’s really very foolish — the recession began in December 2007, and the economy fell off a cliff in September 2008. The month the president took office, thanks to conditions Obama inherited, the economy lost 741,000 jobs. A month later, it was 681,000. A month after that, it was 652,000. Of course there’s going to be a net job loss. The net loss will exist for quite a long while. When a nation experiences a downturn of this severity — easily the worst since the Great Depression — it takes a very long time to make up the lost ground.

The goal is to see improvements and growth. Maybe Pence understands this, maybe not — he is a few threads short of a sweater, if you know what I mean — but either way, this "net job" talk is absurd.

Categorized here. To give you an idea, just the beginning:

Collaboration with colleagues and friends

Calendars and meetings

Databases
Drawings
Mindmapping
General resources

Office suites
Presentation software

Project management
Screensharing
Screen recording

Spreadsheets
Word processing

Communications

Bulletin boards
Chat boxes
Instant messaging (IM)
Video conferencing

Networking
Q&A services
Miscellaneous communication tools

Sharing files

Extremely useful information, which will become more useful as digital books become more common. The Introduction:

After several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will help make this digital book revolution possible may not always respect the rights and expectations that readers, authors, booksellers and librarians have built up, and defended, over generations of experience with physical books.

As new digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our rights and expectations.

The over-arching question: are digital books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights as a reader?

Below we offer a checklist that can help guide your inquiry, as well as an extended explanation of why the answers to these questions matter. Not surprisingly, some of the issues overlap. For example, Digital Rights Management, or "DRM," matters not only because of the limits it places on users, but because of its impact on innovation and competition. Yet by separating out the various issues, we hope to spur a more rigorous consideration of the various digital book offerings.

Our goal is not to tell authors, publishers, vendors, libraries, or anyone else what strategies they must adopt, or tell book purchasers what options they must choose. We hope that a robust marketplace emerges, with various business models and technologies. Instead, this checklist represents the key questions that readers should ask of each new digital book product or service to evaluate whether it adequately protects their interests. That sort of rigorous inquiry will help us decide which digital book future we want — and how to vote with our feet until we get it.

It’s also available as a PDF.

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting column juxtaposing contradictory US positions, as voiced by Sec. of State Clinton. I truly cannot understand how people in government can so blithely and easily utter totally contradictory statements with the idea that people will fail to notice the inconsistency. Holding contradictory positions is illogical and ultimately leads to problems: ignoring reality always exacts a penalty—usually from reality—in the long run.

I got to wondering: do the big cats (lions, leopards, tigers, etc.) wiggle their butts before they attack? Seems like all domestic cats do, but I’m finding it hard to picture a tiger, for example, wiggling its butt before pouncing.

These sound yummy:

Marinated Olives
By Carrie Floyd, from the Culinate Kitchen collection

Total Time    5 minutes

This makes an easy appetizer served with bread and a wedge of cheese.

2 cups mixed olives, rinsed of brine
1 1/2 cups extra-virgin olive oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
Zest of 1 orange, removed in large strips [and pounded a bit with the back of a knife - LG]
3 to 5 sprigs fresh thyme
1/4 tsp. dried red chile flakes
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

Mix all the ingredients together in a large jar or crock; stir until well distributed.

Serve, or cover and refrigerate for up to a month.

UPDATE: Made them tonight. Recipe mods noted above. I just used a vegetable peeler to get the strips, and that worked fine.

The deal here is that the flavor (from garlic, thyme, and orange) goes into the olive oil, not into the olives. The idea is that when you pop the olive into your mouth, you get the flavor from the oil coating the olive and filling the hole (since the recipe uses pitted olives). Thus you could make up the oil (with garlic, thyme, and orange zest) well ahead of when you buy the olives.

UPDATE 2: The obvious at last occurs to me: when you finish the first batch of olives, buy another 2 cups, rinse them, and add them to the same olive oil, topping up if needed.

Steve Benen explains so clearly that even a Republican can understand:

Democrats are pushing the stimulus hypocrisy line pretty hard this week — Republicans say they hate the stimulus, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to secure recovery funds for their states/districts. Republicans, perhaps worried about the effectiveness of the criticism, have embraced a straightforward response.

Conservative economist Greg Mankiw summarized the GOP argument, calling the Democratic cries of hypocrisy "baffling." (thanks to reader C.L. for the tip)

It seems perfectly reasonable to believe (1) that increasing government spending is not the best way to promote economic growth in a depressed economy, and (2) that if the government is going to spend gobs of money, those on whom it is spent will benefit. In this case, the right thing for a congressman to do is to oppose the spending plans, but once the spending is inevitable, to try to ensure that the constituents he represents get their share. So what exactly is the problem?

Let me offer an analogy. Many Democratic congressmen opposed the Bush tax cuts. That was based, I presume, on their honest assessment of the policy. But once these tax cuts were passed, I bet these congressmen paid lower taxes. I bet they did not offer to hand the Treasury the extra taxes they would have owed at the previous tax rates. Would it make sense for the GOP to suggest that these Democrats were disingenuous or hypocritical? I don’t think so. Many times, we as individuals benefit from policies we opposed. There is nothing wrong about that.

This is no doubt the official Republican line. Indeed, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) made the identical argument, with the exact same analogy, on "Meet the Press" over the weekend.

But the response is deeply flawed. The hypocrisy charge may sting, but it’s also entirely legitimate.

It’s not complicated — Republicans have claimed, forcefully and repeatedly, that the stimulus effort was a mistake. The recovery spending couldn’t generate economic growth and was simply incapable of creating jobs. The entire endeavor, the GOP said, was a wasteful boondoggle, and they’re proud to have voted against it. Republicans rejected the very idea on ideological and policy grounds.

Now, we know the substance of these claims is demonstrably ridiculous, but the key to the hypocrisy charge is appreciating what else these same Republicans have said. When it comes to their states/districts/constituents, the identical GOP lawmakers have said the stimulus can generate economic growth, can create jobs, and can make an important and positive difference. In some cases, Republicans have even taken credit for stimulus projects they opposed — projects that wouldn’t even exist if they had their way.

GOP officials can take one position or the other, but when they embrace one side in D.C. while talking to the media, and then the opposite side when dealing with their constituents, it’s more than just stupid — it’s hypocrisy.

As for Mankiw’s analogy to the Bush tax cuts, this also doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny. The only way this would make sense is if Democrats opposed and voted against Bush’s policy in D.C., and then went back to their states/districts to take credit for the tax cuts and boast about how effective they were.

The fact that the hypocrisy charge seems to make Republicans nervous is itself encouraging. That the GOP has not yet come up with a coherent response should encourage Dems to keep it up.

Amazing what the profit motive can do: companies are actually fighting humane treatment for animals. Anna Landman at PRWatch.org:

Front group man extraordinaire Rick Berman and his attack group, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), have launched a new Web site, HumaneWatch.org, to harass the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the country’s largest animal welfare organization. In pursuing its mission of stopping animal cruelty, HSUS has apparently run afoul of some large, wealthy business interests, and now it is getting some major pushback.

The Humane Society works to stop egregious, ongoing animal abuse, particularly in money-making enterprises like puppy mills, factory farming, dogfighting, cockfighting, and unsporting hunting practices like "canned hunts," where hunters pay to shoot at captive, domestically-raised, exotic animals. While this is a laudable goal, it pits HSUS against a significant number of wealthy, powerful businesses that engage in animal cruelty practices, like meat and egg producers, factory farmers, canned hunting businesses, contract research labs that do animal testing for big corporations and pharmaceutical companies that exploit animals to manufacture drugs like Premarin, which is used to treat the symptoms of menopause. Premarin is made from pregnant mares’ urine and is marketed by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, one of the world’s largest drug companies.

HumaneWatch.org may have a hard time trying to build public animosity towards the Humane Society, since most of civil society cannot countenance the extreme cruelty against animals that occurs in these facilities. (There are now a number of videos showing such treatment posted at SourceWatch.org). At present, Berman’s site, HumaneWatch.org, is trying to generate outrage against HSUS by ridiculing the group’s recent activities, like raising funds for animal relief in Haiti and marketing its own brand of cruelty-free, all-natural dry dog food that does not support the factory farming industry. HumaneWatch is also trying to hurt and embarrass businesses that donate to HSUS, like the Yellow Tail Wine company, which recently donated $100,000 to HSUS’s Animal Rescue Team. To target Yellow Tail, HumaneWatch.org posted a video of a cowboy standing in a manure-filled pen surrounded by cows, and pouring a bottle of Yellow Tail wine on the ground, while explaining that he is doing it to retaliate against the company for supporting the Humane Society. The video makes you want to donate to HSUS and go out and buy Yellow Tail wine to thank them for caring about animals…

Continue reading.

Of course:

Source: New York Times, February 16, 2010

Although it seems a bit like a dog-bites-man story, it is worth noting that Texas Governor and 2012 presidential aspirant Rick Perry (R-TX) has joined forces with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to regulate carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. As the Center for Media and Democracy has documented on our SourceWatch site, CEI is well funded by Exxon and other oil companies, and it is one of the main U.S. corporate front groups fighting efforts to address Global Warming and regulate the industry that feeds it funding. And, just this week, the Texas Oil and Gas Association endorsed Perry in his re-election bid based on his opposition to carbon trading and regulation of the oil and gas industry. Although this move is not surprising, it is very worrisome because the Bush Administration was so successful at packing the courts. The Perry-CEI petition for review has been filed with the DC Circuit, an eleven-judge court that Bush was able to install four judges on, in addition to the many right-leaning judges put on the court by his father and President Reagan. Six of the current appointees were chosen by Republican presidents and three were chosen by Democratic presidents. And Chief Justice John Roberts served on the D.C. Circuit before being tapped by Bush for the Supreme Court. So, this move reflects hope on the part of those who want to throw a wrench in efforts to address global warming that they can win in the appellate court and prevail before the Supreme Court, which strongly signaled its sympathy with the corporate "rights" agenda in the discredited Citizens United decision last month. (For more information, on that case, please check out our Corporate Rights clearinghouse.) So, while the New York Times story does have a dog-bites-man feel to it, the story forebodes a much bigger story in the making, given the direction of the five men in the majority in Citizens United and the right-wing domination of the federal appellate court. And, Chief Justice Roberts, by the way, has expressed great concern about how little old Exxon is being treated for its environmental damages, as noted in this article about the Exxon Valdez case. –Lisa Graves

By email from the Center for American Progress:

While running for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter said that America must have "a government as good as its people." Today, our political system isn’t living up to that challenge. Sixty-two percent of the public thinks the country is headed on the wrong track, and 75 percent disapprove of the job Congress is doing. With political stalemate the norm in Washington — on health care legislation, terrorism issues, economic reform, and presidential nominees — Americans are looking for progress and hoping that politicians will break the gridlock. Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta gave one of the most blunt assessments of the current political climate recently, telling the Financial Times that the "health of American politics…sucks." "It feels like a very frustrated country," he added. This week’s shocking retirement announcement from Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) further brought the dysfunction into focus. Instead of offering the usual reasons for stepping down, Bayh cited "too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving." Bayh’s analysis is on the mark, even though he was often part of the problem. His decision to walk away from public service is, as Center for American Progress Action Fund Fellow Matt Yglesias has noted, "not a recipe for good conduct." James Fallows of The Atlantic recently wrote that the "American tragedy of the early 21st century" is that it has "a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke." But if the country doesn’t fix what’s broken, "we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away."

Read the rest of this entry »

Good post at Crooked Timber by John Quiggin:

Now that the main charges of scientific misconduct arising from the hacking of the University of East Anglia email system have been proven false, it’s possible to get a reasonably clear idea of what actually happened here. For once the widely used “X-gate” terminology is appropriate. As with Watergate, the central incident was a “third-rate burglary” conducted as part of a campaign of overt and covert harassment directed against political opponents and rewarded (at least in the short run) with political success.

The core of the campaign is a network of professional lobbyists, rightwing activists and politicians, tame journalists and a handful of scientists (including some at the University of East Anglia itself) who present themselves as independent seekers after truth, but are actually in regular contact to co-ordinate their actions and talking points. The main mechanism of harassment was the misuse of Freedom of Information requests in an effort to disrupt the work of scientists, trap them into failures of compliance, and extract information that could be misrepresented as evidence of scientific misconduct. This is a long-standing tactic in the rightwing War on Science, reflected in such Orwellian pieces of legislation as the US “Data Quality Act”.

The hacking was almost certainly done by someone within the campaign, but in a way that maintained (in Watergate terminology) “plausible deniability” for the principals. Regardless of what they knew (and when they knew it) about the actual theft, the leading figures in the campaign worked together to maximize the impact of the stolen emails, and to co-ordinate the bogus claims of scientific misconduct based on the sinister interpretations placed on such phrases as “trick” and “hide the decline”.

The final group of actors in all this were the mass audience of self-described “sceptics”. With few exceptions (in fact, none of whom I am aware), members of this group have lost their moral bearings sufficiently that they were not worried at all by the crime of dishonesty involved in the hacking attack. Equally importantly, they have lost their intellectual bearings to the point where they did not reflect that the kind of person who would mount such an attack, or seek to benefit from it, would not scruple to deceive a gullible audience as to the content of the material they had stolen. The members of this group swallowed and regurgitated the claims of fraud centered on words like “trick”. By the time the imposture was exposed, they had moved on to the next spurious talking point fed to them by the rightwing spin machine.

To keep all this short and comprehensible, I haven’t given lots of links. Most of the points above are have been on the public record for some time (there’s a timeline here), but a few have only come to light more recently. These Guardian story brings us up to date, and names quite a few of the key players (see also here). For the role of allegedly independent journalists in all this, see Tim Lambert’s Deltoid site (search for “Rosegate” and “Leakegate”).

Update I should have mentioned that much the same team had their first outing in the controversy over the Mann et al “hockey stick” graph. All the same elements were there – supposedly disinterested citizen researchers who were in fact paid rightwing operatives, misuse of accountability procedures, and exceptional gullibility on the part of the “sceptical” mass audience. Details are here (h/t John Mashey).

Lee Fang at ThinkProgress:

Today marks the one year anniversary of President Obama signing into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus. As the economy continued to crater after President Bush left office, Obama’s stimulus sought to provide tax cuts for 95% of working Americans, funds to buoy cash-strapped state governments, new construction and infrastructure projects, and other programs to create jobs, retrain workers, and promote economic activity throughout the country. In December, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the stimulus had successfully created up to 1.6 million jobs, and today, a report shows the Recovery Act will ultimately create 2.5 million jobs. Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute found that the stimulus had boosted the U.S. economy by 4 percent.

House Republican leaders have fought to maintain partisan unity in their effort to kill the stimulus. And they were largely successful. Every single Republican in the House and every single Republican in the Senate — with the exception of Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), and then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter — voted against the Recovery Act. By drawing a sharp distinction between Obama and the GOP, Republican leaders gambled on casting the stimulus as a failure in order to win elections in 2010. In a coordinated effort, Republicans have used every opportunity to attack the stimulus for allegedly failing to create “a single job.”

Last month, President Obama admonished Republicans for going to “ribbon cuttings for the same projects that you voted against.” It’s true: Last year, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) appeared at a ribbon cutting event for GetAbout Columbia’s MKT Plaza, a pedestrian walking and recreation area funded by the stimulus. (See picture at top right.)

ThinkProgress has investigated opponents of the Recovery Act, reporting throughout the year that many of the lawmakers who tried to kill the legislation have been returning to their home states to claim credit for popular stimulus programs. In a new research report, ThinkProgress finds that over half of the GOP caucus, 110 lawmakers — from the House and Senate — are guilty of stimulus hypocrisy. Among some of the key findings:

– Top Republican Senate Recruits Are Stimulus Hypocrites: As ThinkProgress reported, Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), a candidate for Senate, touted over $5 million in stimulus programs he voted to kill. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), the GOP nominee for Senate in Illinois, signed a letter urging Gov. Pat Quinn to provide “Recovery Act (ARRA) funding to expand the Illinois Community College Sustainability Network.”

– GOP Leadership Leads The Way In Hypocrisy: Although he regularly slams the stimulus as a waste while in DC, McConnell has returned to Kentucky to take credit for stimulus programs, even taking time to request more funds. ThinkProgress attended two job fairs held by Cantor, where we found dozens of employers able to hire directly because of the stimulus. Indeed, even Boehner’s office released a statement boasting that the stimulus will create “much needed jobs.”

– The Audacity Of Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds: Many opponents of the stimulus have been quite brazen with their ability to try to claim credit for the program. For instance, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) spent the morning of July 28th railing against the stimulus, yelling “Where’s the stimulus package? Where’s the jobs?” on the House floor. On the same day of his rant, Kingston’s office sent out multiple press releases bragging that he had secured hundreds of thousands in stimulus funds to hire additional police officers in his district. Other stimulus opponents, like Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) — who has called the stimulus a “trillion dollar debt bill” — have printed out jumbo-sized ceremonial stimulus checks to present to local communities to try to garner positive press.

Individually, over half of the entire Republican caucus has hailed nearly every aspect of the stimulus as a success — from infrastructure funds, to food programs, to education grants. But politically, admitting its success might harm the GOP’s chances in November. So with Republicans fixated on winning politically, they have focused on deceiving the public by calling the stimulus a failure, while pretending successful programs aren’t stimulus funded.

And also note this:

Interesting:

Source: The Washington Independent, February 9, 2010

The big financial services company Citibank is dodging Congress’ new laws to protect consumers from unfair and usurious credit card company practices. The new law prohibits credit card companies from raising interest rates whenever they like, on short notice or no notice, and for no particular reason. To get around this, Citi mailed out letters announcing it was raising its rates for all of its customers to its bad-creditor rate of 30 percent, and telling customers that they are eligible for a "program" that lowers their interest rate back down to the previous rate they had been paying. The only catch: if they miss a payment their rate will zoom back up to 30 percent immediately and retroactively — exactly the kind of behavior the law sought to end. Citi believes their behavior is legal because they are calling their new policy a "program" rather than a "rate." Citigroup customers only have only two options: go along with Citi’s new "program," or pay off any remaining balance, cancel their credit card and try to find a different company.

In the meantime, the GOP continues the fight against better regulation of the financial services industry and is determined to kill the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.