New York Is Broke but Cuomo Says, “Solidarity with the Millionaires”

New York State is Broke, but Governor Cuomo Joins GOP Push to Spare Wealthy
by Juan Gonzalez
New York Daily News
February 23, 2011

As many New Yorkers struggle to make ends meet and state and
city budget deficits skyrocket, our rookie governor has a
new, astonishing trick for his recovery plan – tax cuts for
the wealthy.

That’s right, Gov. Cuomo, the Democrat, wants to join all
those Republicans in Albany and slash an income tax
surcharge for every New Yorker making more than $200,000 a
year – a mere 5% of the population.

We’re not talking about a gross income of $200,000. This cut
would be on taxable income above $200,000 – after the filer
has taken advantage of every deduction and loophole IRS
regulations allow.

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Big Oil Lobby Announces it Will Start Donating Directly to Candidates

The American Petroleum Institute, the Big Oil industry’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year. API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on lobbying, advertisements and Astroturf campaigns to support the the oil industry agenda. As CAP’s Dan Weiss wrote, API “wants to drill in fragile, sensitive places, keep government tax breaks, expand offshore drilling without reforms, and block global warming pollution reduction requirements.”

“This is adding one more tool to our toolkit,” Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs, told Bloomberg News. “At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.” As Bloomberg pointed out, oil-supported political action committees like the Independent Petroleum Association of America overwhelmingly donate to Republican candidates.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, API spent $6.7 million on lobbying alone last year, after clearing $7 million in 2009. In 2010, API was the seventh most prolific spender in the oil and gas industry, following ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Koch Industries and BP.

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Richard (RJ) Eskow
Consultant, Writer, Senior Fellow with The Campaign for America’s Future
Posted: February 24, 2011 08:31 AM
The War Against the Republic: The Battle Of Madison

Sometimes it’s worth looking at current events through the eyes of a historian chronicling the end of an age, or those of a district attorney in a time of corruption. Come to think of it, the two perspectives aren’t all that different.

However you look at it, calling the Wisconsin struggle a “labor dispute” is like calling the Battle of Normandy “a fight over a beach.” There’s a war going on, one that’s best understand by using an Latin expression popular among prosecutors: Cui bono? Who benefits? Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting budget contains buried goodies for somebody, including possibly the Koch Brothers who paid to have it drafted. More importantly, it’s another step toward replacing the American dream of prosperity for all with imperial visions of massive wealth for the few.

The heavily-financed army behind Scott Walker has as its ambition the death of the American Republic. If that sounds like rhetorical overkill, then it’s worth remembering the words of someone who watched a republic fall. “The enemy is within the gates,” said Cicero. “It is with our own opulence, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.”

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Because what they did to him is indefensible?

DoJ drops defense of Bush officials
By: Josh Gerstein
February 22, 2011 05:09 PM EST

The Justice Department under President Barack Obama has quietly dropped its legal representation of more than a dozen Bush-era Pentagon and administration officials – including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and aide Paul Wolfowitz – in a lawsuit by Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla, who spent years behind bars without charges in conditions his lawyers compare to torture.

Charles Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, confirmed Tuesday that the government has agreed to retain private lawyers for the officials, at a cost of up to $200 per hour. Miller said “conflicts concerns” prompted the decision. He did not elaborate.

One private attorney involved in the case, who asked not to be named, said the Obama administration apparently concluded “its duty to represent the defendants zealously, which includes the duty to argue any and all defenses, can’t be discharged for reasons of policy and other government interests.”

The Justice Department continues to represent only a single official, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in the suit.

Last week a federal judge in Charleston, S.C. dismissed Padilla’s suit against Gates, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and several military officers who oversaw Padilla’s confinement at the nearby Navy brig. Judge Richard Gergel said allowing the case to proceed could result in “a massive discovery assault on the intelligence agencies of the United States Government….and lengthy and probing depositions of high-ranking government officials with national security clearances and personal knowledge of some of the Nation’s most sensitive information.”

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http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8371

Morning Line: Mock trial arguments in a real world
Sam Smith

Now that another judge has upheld the individual mandate clause of Obamacare – making it three in favor and two against – it would be hard for the Supreme Court to ignore the matter.

You will read a lot about this in the coming months, but there are a several things that probably won’t be so clear:

- The mandate provision has already badly hurt the overall politics of the Democratic Party, the liberal cause and the effort for real universal healthcare, i.e. single payer. The popular resentment against the provision makes it one of the dumbest pieces of legislation passed buy Democrats in modern times.

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Online astroturfing is more advanced and more automated than we’d imagined.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd February 2011

Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren’t what they seem to be. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns, which create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there’s a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them.

After I last wrote about online astroturfing, in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them. Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of disinterested members of the public: he used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression that there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments. I’ll reveal more about what he told me when I’ve finished the investigation I’m working on.

But it now seems that these operations are more widespread, more sophisticated and more automated than most of us had guessed. Emails obtained by political hackers from a US cyber-security firm called HB Gary Federal suggest that a remarkable technological armoury is being deployed to drown out the voices of real people.

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February 24, 2011
Affidavits Say Fox News Chief Told Employee to Lie
By RUSS BUETTNER

It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie to federal investigators two years before.

The investigators had been vetting Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who had been nominated to become secretary of Homeland Security and who had had an affair with Ms. Regan.

The goal of the News Corporation executive, according to Ms. Regan, was to keep the affair quiet and protect the then-nascent presidential aspirations of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik’s mentor and supporter.

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Julian Assange attacks ‘rubber-stamp’ warrant as he loses extradition battle
WikiLeaks founder can be sent to Sweden, Belmarsh magistrates court rules
Esther Addley and Alexandra Topping
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 February 2011 15.53 GMT

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Assange will appeal, his legal team has confirmed. If they lose he will be sent to Sweden in 10 days.

Speaking outside Belmarsh magistrates court in south-east London after the judgment, Assange attacked the European arrest warrant system.

He dismissed the decision to extradite him as a “rubber-stamping process”. He said: “It comes as no surprise but is nevertheless wrong. It comes as the result of a European arrest warrant system amok.”

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Betting on Arianna

By Robert Scheer

In defense of Arianna Huffington. Not that the lady needs one, having been a leader in undermining the right-wing dominance of Internet reporting. Defenders of a free press should be thrilled that it is Huffington who is now merging with AOL rather than Matt Drudge, the unrivaled leader of Internet news whom I first met at Arianna’s home when she was cozier with the right.

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