New NYT Blame Game On Court Vacancies

Opinion/Editorial



 

 

  Now the New York Times Editorial board has to whine about of all things court vacancies throughout our federal court system now they are legal experts what a joke.
  The title of their lead OPED this morning is "Courts Without Judges" which should be the least of anyone's concerns.
  It begins "The number of vacancies on the nation’s federal courts has reached an astonishingly high level, creating a serious shortage of judges and undermining the ability of the nation’s court system to bestow justice.Of 856 federal district and circuit court seats, 85 are unfilled — a 10 percent vacancy rate and nearly double the rate at this point in the presidency of George W. Bush. More than a third of the vacancies have been declared “judicial emergencies” based on court workloads and the length of time the seats have been empty. By far the most important cause of this unfortunate state of affairs is the determination of Senate Republicans, for reasons of politics, ideology and spite, to confirm as few of President Obama’s judicial choices as possible.Numbers compiled by the Senate Judiciary Committee tell the story. Mr. Obama’s nominees for seats on federal courts of appeal, the system’s top tier below the Supreme Court, have waited an average of 148 days for their confirmation vote following the committee’s approval, more than four times longer than Mr. Bush’s nominees. For Mr. Obama’s nominees to federal district courts, the average wait time has been 102 days, compared with 35 days for Mr. Bush’s district court choices."
 When in doubt blame the Republicans same ol same ol from NYT.
 It goes on "The prestigious and important United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit offers a particularly striking example of Republican obstructionism. The 11-seat court rules on most appeals from federal regulatory agencies and has exclusive jurisdiction over national security matters. It has four vacancies; the last time the Senate confirmed someone to the court was 2006.Mr. Bush appointed four judges to the court, a feeder to the Supreme Court, but whether the Senate will allow Mr. Obama to appoint any remains to be seen. Mr. Obama’s first nominee for the court, Caitlin Halligan, withdrew from consideration last month after Senate Republicans filibustered for a second time. Those critics echoed the National Rifle Association’s ridiculous portrayal of her as a legal activist outside the mainstream because she had filed a brief in opposition to the gun industry when she was New York State’s solicitor general.The real reason, as everyone knows, was to prevent Mr. Obama from adding balance to a generally conservative court. He may fare better with his latest nominee, Sri Srinivasan, a lawyer whose background working in the United States solicitor general’s office under both President Bush and President Obama should help his chances.Nominees for other important government posts have also been held up for partisan reasons. Some Republicans say this is simply payback for the Democrats’ filibustering of Bush nominees. But while neither party should be in the business of obstructing judicial nominees, unless they are unqualified or unacceptably extreme, a retaliatory response based on politics hurts all who rely on courts to protect their rights and uphold the law.It is also worth noting that Mr. Obama has not been putting forth candidates with strong ideological profiles. His nominees are decidedly moderate, which was not always true of the Bush judicial choices that the Democrats felt compelled to filibuster."

                          Here are the numbers according to the NYT's account

               

 Mr. Obama could help reduce the problem by speeding up his nominations. The White House appears to have sharpened its focus since the election, but currently, 62 district and circuit court vacancies have no nominees. The Halligan filibuster got some Democratic senators talking about a bolder strategy, including revisiting filibuster reform and making it harder for senators to torpedo or delay nominations to judicial vacancies in their home states. Another proposal is to have Mr. Obama make simultaneous nominations to fill the four vacancies on the District of Columbia Circuit, which would force Republicans to come up with plausible reasons to oppose each of them. In the face of political paralysis, these ideas are worth embracing.
 I'd like to make a point how about following the Constitution instead of making up rules as they go along from both sides of the political aisle in the Senate. And quit playing politics and get it done.
 I can certainly understand the vacancies from the 9th Circuit Court which of course the NYT fails to mention is in California the most liberal whacked out circuit court in the country due to their past lame brained leftist decisions.

Bleeding Heart Boston Globe Editorial Defends Scumbag

Opinion/Editorial


 

Editorial

DiMasi deserves consideration for ‘compassionate release’

 

 March 22, 2013

 

 Federal authorities have the power to grant early prison release for “extraordinary and compelling reasons” — what is commonly known as “compassionate release.” Such leniency has mostly been granted to prisoners who are clearly dying — a standard that might exclude the ailing former House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi. By various accounts, the 67-year-old DiMasi is weak and fed by a stomach tube as he is treated for a rare form of throat and tongue cancer at a North Carolina prison hospital, but his immediate prognosis is unclear.

For the sake of DiMasi and others who may be similarly afflicted, federal prison authorities should interpret the release statute in a broader way, looking at the totality of the circumstances: the seriousness of the prisoner’s condition; the dangers to the public presented by his or her release; the nature of his or her offense; and the potential benefit in receiving medical care in a private setting where his or her condition can be monitored by relatives and friends.
By those standards, DiMasi might well be a candidate for release, and he deserves consideration. The once-powerful speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives is only in the second year of an eight-year sentence for political corruption, stemming from kickbacks given to DiMasi’s associates in exchange for his support in obtaining government contracts. His long prison sentence was welcomed by many in Massachusetts as an acknowledgment of the seriousness of his breach of faith; and it shouldn’t be foreshortened for anything less than extraordinary circumstances. However, DiMasi’s condition is quite serious, according to his wife and lawyer, and the message sent by releasing him wouldn’t diminish the deterrent effect of his sentence. It would be viewed as an act of compassion — nothing more or less.
Federal authorities have already shown their toughness in dealing with the former speaker. The Bureau of Prisons ignored a recommendation from the judge who presided over his trial that DiMasi be assigned to a federal prison in Ayer, so he could receive treatment for heart ailments and be closer to his wife, who suffers from breast cancer. Instead, he was sent to a federal prison in Kentucky. Then, according to DiMasi’s wife and his lawyer, Thomas R. Kiley, prison authorities ignored DiMasi’s request for medical treatment when he first reported suspicious swelling in his throat and neck. Months later, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer — the most advanced form. His condition has since deteriorated.

Compassionate release is rare throughout the federal prison system, according to a 2012 study by Human Rights Watch and the inmate advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Federal courts have the authority to grant early release, but judges first need a motion from the Bureau of Prisons. The bureau rarely presents prisoners’ cases to the courts, the study concluded.
A spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons didn’t respond to questions seeking more information about DiMasi or details about the compassionate release policy. According to the Human Rights Watch study, the Bureau of Prisons makes motions on behalf of only about two dozen people a year, out of a federal prison population that now exceeds 218,000.
Compassionate release shouldn’t be reserved for only the last few weeks of life; DiMasi deserves a chance to argue for his freedom as a show of compassion.

Commentary

Funny where was the Compassion for the taxpayers of Massachusetts getting screwed by this scumbag

A Laughing Stock Health Care Report Card

Opinion/Editorial

 

 How self indulging is this if not downright self righteous on the part of the New York Times editorial board this morning.Talk about carrying the water for the Obama administration they have the audacity to give a report card on what is known as the 2010 Affordable Care Act aka Universal Health Care with everyone with a brain in their heads knows it was UNCONSTITUTIONAL on its merits.Even when the law hasn't totally been enacted yet.
 But the NYT editorial board likes to think otherwise with the title "Report Card on Health Care Reform."
 It begins "Republican leaders in Congress regularly denounce the 2010 Affordable Care Act and vow to block money to carry it out or even to repeal it. Those political attacks ignore the considerable benefits delivered to millions of people since the law’s enactment three years ago Saturday. The main elements of the law do not kick in until Jan. 1, 2014, when many millions of uninsured people will gain coverage. Yet it has already thrown a lifeline to people at high risk of losing insurance or being uninsured, including young adults and people with chronic health problems, and it has made a start toward reforming the costly, dysfunctional American health care system."
 Probably because no one wants this monstrosity of Government intervention into our lives in reference to the health scare crap.If the main elements of the law hasn't been enacted then why is there this report card.Another question why reform something that didn't need reforming liberalism at its best.
 Here is the NYT example of success of this fraudulent law:
 EXPANDING COVERAGE Starting in 2010, all insurers and employers that offer dependent coverage were required to offer coverage to dependent children up to age 26. An estimated 6.6 million people ages 19 through 25 have been able to stay on or join their parents’ plans as result, with more than 3 million previously uninsured young adults getting health insurance. The law requires private health insurers to provide free preventive care, without co-pays or deductibles. Some 71 million Americans have received at least one free preventive service, like a mammogram or a flu shot, and an additional 34 million older Americans got free preventive services in 2012 under Medicare.
 So in other words kids stay on their Mommy and Daddy's plan instead of being man enough or woman enough to get their own plans.
Here is where it gets laughable
SAVING CONSUMERS MONEY Private insurers are required by the law to spend at least 80 to 85 percent of their premium revenues on medical claims or quality improvements, or they must pay a rebate to consumers. In 2012, insurers had to pay $1.1 billion in rebates, an average of $151 per family. Although Republicans contend the law will drive up insurance premiums, thus far it seems to have reduced them. Any insurer that wants to increase its premiums by 10 percent or more for people who buy their own policies must justify the increase to state or federal officials. As a result, the proportion of rate filings that sought increases of 10 percent or more fell from 75 percent in 2010 to 34 percent in 2012, and it is expected to be even lower this year. The average premium increase in 2012 was 30 percent lower than in 2010.  
 Thats the laughing stock it saved money but cost those of us who work for a living alot more.
 As usual this OPED lies and deceives their lame brained readers who are so dumb they cannot figure things out on their own and need Big brother Government to look after them.    

Newsmax Tells The Truth

Pew: MSNBC Almost Entirely Dominated By Opinion

Monday, 18 Mar 2013 02:30 PM

By Bill Hoffmann Newsmax.com

 

 

If you’re looking for straight and unbiased news reporting, you may want to avoid MSNBC.
A new Pew Research Center study has found the liberal-leaning cable network is filled with opinion and commentary for 85 percent of its airtime.

Only a paltry 15 percent of MSNBC’s programming stuck to “factual reporting, according to Pew.

Fox News, by comparison, had a breakdown of 55 percent commentary and opinion and 45 percent "factual reporting."

CNN was the only one of the big three cable news networks to broadcast more straight news with 54 percent of its programming dedicated to factual reporting and 46 percent to opinion and commentary.

Pew’s findings are based on observing a half-hour of daytime programming for the first five months of 2012 and the first five minutes of primetime "general news shows."

Pew also found that in 2012, MSNBC devoted 57 percent of all its coverage to the presidential campaign, with Fox devoting 37 percent and CNN 30 percent.

A separate Pew examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC “by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90 percent of its primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary.

“And that remains the case with many of its packaged segments. Host Rachel Maddow, for example, often begins her show with a lengthy segment combining a monologue with video clips that can last for seven minutes or longer,’’ Pew said.

The findings are part of Pew's annual State of the News Media report.

 

To look at the report go to stateofthemedia.org

 

Budget Battle As Put Forth By NYT

Opinion/Editorial



 

 Here is another area where the New York Times is adding their very much unwanted opinion on a battle on the budget fight going on in Washington D.C.
 This mornings OPED is entitled "The Real Spending Problem" as if the NYT editorial board has a remedy to the fixation of our so called members of Congress has with wasting our tax dollars hand over foot.In fact in the past no surprise to anyone here that the NYT has endorsed some lame brained ways of wasting our tax dollars one thing to remember is that liberals and leftists love spending other people's $$$.
 Their hilarious solution begins "The budget fight in Washington, which entered a new round last week as Senate Democrats and House Republicans introduced dueling plans, is usually cast as a contest between raising taxes and cutting spending. In fact, the taxes-versus-spending distinction is largely meaningless.Each year, the government doles out tax breaks worth $1.1 trillion. That is more than the cost of Medicare and Medicaid combined. It is more than Social Security. It tops the defense budget, and it tops the budget for nondefense discretionary programs, which include most everything else.Tax breaks work like spending. Giving a deduction for certain activities, like homeownership or retirement savings, is the same as writing a government check to subsidize those activities. Functionally, they mimic entitlements. Like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, they are available, year in and year out, in full, to all who qualify. Yet in budget talks, Republicans ignore tax entitlements, which flow mostly to high-income taxpayers, while pushing to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security."
 Constitutionalists such as me prefer cutting the spending while leftists and RINOS (all now one in the same) along with the NYT are infactuated with raising our taxes.You can't be serious NYT taxes versus spending distinction is largely meaningless I can see why to you it's meaningless because the Government throws $$$ at the frivolous programs that keep establishment elected.HELLO NYT you can't be friggin serious there is a huge huge difference between deductions for homeownwership and retirement savings and your BS entitlement spending because those deductions are EARNED by those of us who WORK welfare or SSI is not earned sitting on one's ass.
 Tax breaks are good because the $$$ goes to those that earn it as opposed to the Government spending it.Thats common sense but I don't expect the establishment to understand that as well as the NYT.
 It continues with the same old same old left wing playbook tactic "President Obama and Congressional Democrats have rightly asserted that tax breaks are ripe for cuts that could raise revenue without hurting most taxpayers. One method, as presented in the Senate Democratic plan, is to convert tax deductions, which increase in value as income rises, to tax credits, which would provide benefits more broadly and evenly among low-, middle- and high-income households.

Tax deductions, however, are only one kind of tax break. Many others take the form of arrangements that allow wealthy taxpayers to either escape tax entirely on specific transactions or to defer it indefinitely."

 Let me correct the NYT as usual.Tax breaks is $$$$ in our pockets tax credits are a figment of the establishments imagination.Once again common sense.

Lack Of Understanding By NYT

Opinion/Editorial

 

 

 

 

  Talk about ignorance being addictive well it is to the addicts at the New York Times Editorial board apparently.Ignorance galore as far as their lead OPED this morning is concerned."Repeal the Military Force Law" is the title of the filth today.
  They begin "Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It was enacted with good intentions — to give President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan and go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban rulers who sheltered and aided the terrorists who had attacked the United States.But over time, that resolution became warped into something else: the basis for a vast overreaching of power by one president, Mr. Bush, and less outrageous but still dangerous policies by another, Barack Obama.
 Obama is the one who is abusing the power Bush never did blame game to Bush continues.
  In addition to blaming Bush the NYT is still sticking to their most famous lie "Mr. Bush used the authorization law as an excuse to kidnap hundreds of people — guilty and blameless people alike — and throw them into secret prisons where many were tortured. He used it as a pretext to open the Guantánamo Bay camp and to eavesdrop on Americans without bothering to obtain a warrant. He claimed it as justification for the invasion of Iraq, twisting intelligence to fabricate a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.
 Just to remind everyone of the intelligence that these lame brained idiots are refering to was the intell that the CLINTON administration had so blame Clinton oh wait crickets are chriping.
 Here is the remainder of the rant "Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama does not go as far as to claim that the Constitution gives him the inherent power to do all those things. But he has relied on the 2001 authorization to use drones to kill terrorists far from the Afghan battlefield, and to claim an unconstitutional power to kill American citizens in other countries based only on suspicion that they are or might become terrorist threats, without judicial review.

The concern that many, including this page, expressed about the authorization is coming true: that it could become the basis for a perpetual, ever-expanding war that undermined the traditional constraints on government power. The result is an unintelligible policy without express limits or protective walls.

Last Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the president would soon shed more light on his “targeted killing” policy. Mr. Obama needs to. In the last few weeks, confusion over these issues has been vividly on display. On one hand, the administration has said it would use lethal force only when capturing a terrorist was impossible, and it did arrest Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden who once served as a spokesman for Al Qaeda, and arraigned him on Friday in federal court in Manhattan. The Washington Post reported last week that counterterrorism officials considered using the authorization law as the basis for the government’s authority to kill Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant leader in Algeria and Mali, but decided it did not apply because he was not part of Al Qaeda or an associated group.

But the administration still has not fully disclosed to Congress the legal documents on which the targeted killing program is based. And in that same article, The Post said the administration was debating whether it could stretch the law to make it apply to groups that had no connection, or only slight ones, to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks.

A big part of the problem is that the authorization to use military force is too vague. It gives the president the power to attack “nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Making the law more specific, however, would only further enshrine the notion of a war without end. And, as Jeh Johnson, then counsel to the defense secretary, said in a speech last November, “War must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs.”

The right solution is for Congress to repeal the 2001 authorization. It could wait to do that until American soldiers have left Afghanistan, which is scheduled, too slowly, for the end of 2014. Better yet, Congress could repeal it now, effective upon withdrawal.

 It would be nice if President Obama understood the Constitution instead of high jacking it for his uses.

 

 

NYT OPED Board Too Stupid To See This Coming

Opinion/Editorial

   It took a professor from Northwestern University to make these blooming idiots at the New York Times editorial board how big our Government has become.The professor Monica Persad an assoicate professor of sociology and faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University the title of her piece "Land of Plenty (of Government)" is an eye opener.
  She begins "Why do European countries have lower levels of poverty and inequality than the United States? We used to think this was a result of American anti-government sentiment, which produced a government too small to redistribute income or to attend to the needs of the poor. But over the past three decades scholars have discovered that our government wasn’t as small as we thought. Historians, sociologists and political scientists have all uncovered evidence that points to a surprisingly large governmental presence in the United States throughout the 20th century and even earlier, in some cases surpassing what we find in Western Europe.
  No kidding government was always getting bigger especially under left wing Democrats more like eastern Europe.
  Persad goes on "For example, European banks did not have to contend with regulations separating commercial and investment banking, as American banks did under the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Until the 1980s taxes on capital income were higher in the United States than in most European countries, where taxes on labor were and still are higher. American bankruptcy law has been harder on creditors and easier on debtors than any of the countries of Europe, even after bankruptcy reform here in 2005. Or consider the famous case of the thalidomide babies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Thalidomide was a drug given to pregnant women for nausea. It caused devastating birth defects, from stunted limbs to spina bifida, and many babies died. Thalidomide was widely available in Europe and produced thousands of cases of birth defects there. But the Food and Drug Administration kept thalidomide off the American market, successfully using aggressive governmental intervention to protect children from a pharmaceutical company with a dangerous product. They would be in their early 50s now, those babies saved by the F.D.A. I wonder sometimes how many of them are walking around today complaining about big government.
But if Europe has been so favorable to business, how did it end up with lower poverty and inequality rates? To understand this, we have to let go of the idea that governments are the opposite of markets, or that welfare spending kills capitalist production. European countries do have larger public welfare states, and this brings down their poverty and inequality rates. But in return, European corporations received a gift: a political economy biased against consumption and geared toward production.
Beginning after World War II, Germany, France and several other countries aimed to restrain private consumption and channel profits toward export industries, in a bid to reconstruct their war-devastated economies. Loose regulation was part of this business-friendly strategy. Some scholars have even called these European policies “supply side,” in that they focused on incentives for producers, at the expense of demand-side measures that would benefit consumers. They were one ingredient in Europe’s spectacular postwar growth.
The United States, on the other hand, developed a consumer economy based on government-subsidized mortgage credit, a kind of “mortgage Keynesianism.” Increasing consumption was a Depression-era response to a problem that puzzled observers at the time. On the one hand, unemployment and hunger were everywhere. On the other, the government was actively engaging in crop destruction to raise prices — like the great pig slaughter of 1933, in which millions of piglets and pregnant sows were destroyed so that hog prices would go up. In the words of Huey P. Long, the populist governor and senator of Louisiana: “Why is it? Why? Too much to eat and more people hungry than during the drought years; too much to wear and more people naked; too many houses and more people homeless than ever before. Why? This is a land of super-abundance and super-plenty. Then why is it also a land of starvation and nakedness and homelessness?”
The true answer to Long’s question — at least as far as we understand it today — is that a restricted money supply was constraining the economy. But observers at the time thought that the problem was that wealth was concentrated in so few hands that consumers did not have purchasing power to buy the goods that lay rotting in the fields. Increasing consumer purchasing power became the paradigm that drove economic policy during the New Deal and for decades after. A central element of this was increasing homeownership by encouraging citizens to take on large debts for the purchase of homes, beginning with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt thought the F.H.A. could revive the economy; the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time called it “the wheel within the wheel to move the whole economic engine.” Where Europeans focused on restraining consumption, Americans saw consumption as the machine that drives growth — and we still do.
Understanding this fundamental divergence between the United States and Europe sheds new light on several episodes of recent history. It suggests that in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan tried to deregulate industry, he was actually pushing the United States in the direction of Europe. He was successful to some degree, although partly because European regulation moved in our direction as much as we moved in theirs. This history also explains the current resistance in Europe, especially Germany, toward Keynesian stimulus. One might imagine that countries with large welfare spending would be happy to raise spending even more on government programs. But the more fundamental goal of the postwar European political economy has been to rebuild industrial production through a focus on investments and exports. Keynesian spending to stimulate consumption is foreign to this goal.
A consumption bias, economists argue, is not a bad thing, as it leads to cheaper goods for Americans. And after all, someone has to do the consuming — otherwise, whom would the Germans and Chinese export to? But a consumption bias has distributional consequences that we are only beginning to understand. Some studies suggest that it undermines support for the welfare state, because as consumers come to depend on private assets — especially their homes — for their well-being, they appear to become less interested in providing for the welfare of others.
A consumption bias also focuses the efforts of the left on increasing private consumption. It was activists on the left who pushed for greater credit access for African-Americans and women in the 1960s and 1970s, and rightly so, because if credit is how Americans make ends meet, then those without access to credit are economically sidelined. But credit access does nothing for the truly poor, those who are not deemed creditworthy. Someone has to do the consuming, but if one country ends up as the world’s consumer for a long time, as America has, a political tradition can take root that works against the interests of the poor.
Pointing out all the ways in which the American government has actually been more interventionist than European governments seems to alarm partisans on both the left and the right. Activists on the right can no longer pretend that American history is about small government. Those on the left are equally alarmed, because pointing out the ways in which the government has been hostile to business can undermine their calls to be even more hostile to business. But poverty reduction is not about hostility to business. It’s about strategies like promoting saving over borrowing. We don’t need regulations as loose as postwar Europe’s, but if reducing poverty and inequality is the goal, we do need to rethink our love affair with consumption.
  Consumption that is paid for by us the taxpayer for those who dont work and sit on their collective asses and have no life