Happy Saturday night, folks! It's Blue Gal from The Professional Left Podcast, bringing you this week's podcast round up. Be aware that these podcasts are also available on i-Tunes and Stitcher Radio, and may not be safe for work.

Liberal Oasis (video): Pat Robertson "honored" for his stand on the Oklahoma tornado.

On Point with Tom Ashbrook: The History, Sounds, and Politics of Heavy Metal Music.

Decode DC: Covering the immigration story by listening to stories by actual immigrants.

And then there's this: If you like Game of Thrones, you might be interested in this list of all-woman Game of Thrones Fancasts.

Open thread below...

Saturday! I don't know who Ленинград is, but I sure like them.

Massachusetts Republican and candidate running for John Kerry's Senate seat Gabriel Gomez is true billionaire tea party material. He's a guy who made most of his money in hedge funds, has good buddies in lofty financial circles, and hates anyone who isn't as extreme as he is.

Gomez became a TeaPublican rock star during the 2012 elections, when he appeared on various networks touting those horrid SwiftBoat OPSEC ads funded by pals of Mitt Romney.

He's a nasty sort. Snarky and unafraid to be a general jerk, just as he was here. Politico:

“I don’t think there’s anything more offensive,” Gomez said, according to a YouTube clip of the exchange, which took place after an event at a local Chamber of Commerce. “You know I’ve got four young kids, and they gotta sit there and gotta see an ad with their dad — who served honorably, talk to anybody I served with — whether as a pilot or as a SEAL, anybody I worked with. And for him to be as dirty and low, pond scum, like to put me up next to bin Laden, he’s just gotta be called what he is. It’s that simple.”

Oooo, someone's chain got yanked. Markey was having none of it:

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (73)

PLAYS: (346)

Embed

It's clear that Rep. Steve King is no fan of immigration reform, or amnesty as he calls it. It's also clear that he and other wingnuts in congress should be really leery of using foreign concepts to them such as "statistical analysis" when they're speaking, as evidenced by the bewildered expressions in the room to King's theory.

via The Hill

The Iowa Republican said immigrants that Ronald Reagan legalized by signing a 1986 "amnesty" bill were responsible for Obama's election.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Thursday that President Obama would not be president if it weren't for the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan signed into law.

King is a leading GOP critic of efforts to pass an immigration reform bill, and has often said on the House floor that Republicans are overreacting to the 2012 election, which some Republicans saw as a sign that the GOP needs to get behind a reform bill.

In an effort to dissuade Republicans, King argued that the 1986 immigration bill that Reagan signed into law is estimated to have brought amnesty to three million illegal immigrants.

He said conservative estimates show that, on average, each of these people brought in five others, leading to 15 million more people in the country, most of whom voted for Obama.

"[T]hey have to admit that Ronald Reagan's signature on the '86 amnesty act brought about Barack Obama's election," King concluded on the House floor.

"[I]t's clear to anybody that can do any kind of statistical analysis that Barack Obama wouldn't be President of the United States without Ronald Reagan's 1986 amnesty act."

That's a video promotion for Teach for America, the reformer billionaires' favorite educational non-profit organization. The general concept is to take college graduates, no matter what their major is, give them six weeks of training and then send them out to teach kids in inner-city schools. In theory, it's a really nice idea. In practice, it's not really working all that well. At least, not for the students.

TFA rakes in donations every year in larger and larger amounts from the usual suspects like Gates, Bloomberg, Walton and DeVos along with others who see them as a wonderful helper to the end goal of privatizing education.

Along the way, state governments have tried to sneak public grants into the budget for TFA, too. This time, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton used his line-item veto to just say no. His reasoning was impeccable. From his letter (PDF):

Teach for America (TFA) is a well-established, national program with revenues totaling $270 million for fiscal year 2011 (its most recent annual report). With total expenses of$219 million, TFA's net assets increased by over $50 million and now total over $350 million. With those financial resources available, it is not clear why a $1.5 million grant from the State of Minnesota is required to continue or expand the organization's work here.

My principal concern, however, is the way in which TFA was selected as the recipient of this grant. To my knowledge, no competitive grant program was established; no other applications were solicited; and no objective review was made by an independent panel of experts. Instead, the funds were inserted into the Senate's Higher Education bill, directed to this organization, and retained in the Conference Committee's report.

If the Legislature deems it is in our state's best interest to encourage programs like TFA, a formal grant program should be established within the Minnesota Department of Education, and all qualifying organizations should be allowed to apply for funding. The legislation should establish the goals for such a program and the results by which its effectiveness will be evaluated. This type of competitive grants process would be a fairer way to distribute public funds.

Applause to Governor Dayton for his sound objection to using state funds for private purposes. Well done, Governor!

Today is Towel Day! Don't forget your towels, hoopy froods!

More details on how to celebrate at the Towel Day website.

Open thread below...

PBS dropped a documentary called "Citizen Koch" because they feared the reaction of billionaire sponsor David Koch.

That news hasn’t sat too well with many, including Stephen Colbert, who takes PBS to task for cancelling the documentary. Noting that government contributions constitute only 12 percent of PBS’ funds, Colbert explained that public television is now “more and more dependent on viewers nothing like you.”

"I guess for a donation of $75 you get the PBS tote bag. And for $23 million, you get PBS's nut sack."

DOWNLOADS: (101)

PLAYS: (1123)

Embed

Good for Hannah and her mom.

via ABC News:

Don Thompson, CEO of McDonald's Corp., found himself on the grill after a 9-year-old girl accused the fast food giant of trying to "trick kids into eating food that isn't good for them."

Hannah Robertson, 9, flew in with her mom from Kelowna, British Columbia, to attend McDonald's annual shareholder meeting Thursday in Oak Brook, Ill., the company's headquarters.

"Something that I don't think is fair is when big companies try to trick kids into eating food that isn't good for them by using toys and cartoon characters," Robertson read during the question and answer part of the meeting. "If parents haven't taught their kids about healthy eating then the kids probably believe that junk food is good for them because it might taste good."

Her mother, Kia, attended the meeting as a member of advocacy group Corporate Accountability International (http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/), headquartered in Boston and with offices around the world. Kia Robertson, 36, started "Today I Ate a Rainbow" in 2009, described as an "interactive nutritional game," and is a nutrition blogger.

The upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is using a process that is rigged from the start. It is not being negotiated by governments for the benefit of their people, it is being negotiated by executives (or future executives/lobbyists currently in government) largely for the benefit of the giant corporations they serve. The process has these giant corporations "in the loop" but groups citizens, working people, consumers, the environment, human rights groups and especially democracy are not part of the process. That can only go one way: if you don't have a seat at the table you are on the table -- the meal.

Chile's TPP Negotiator Quits, Warns Citizens

Rodrigo Contreras, Chile's lead TPP negotiator recently up and quit to warn people of the dangers this agreement poses to everyone except the giant multinational corporations. In The New Chessboard, (English translation) Contreras warns that the TPP is solidifying multinational corporate control over the Internet, copyrights, patents (especially drug patents), and in particular warns that the giant financial interests are solidifying their current control over the regulatory process. He writes that this will block countries that are trying to "restore the space for applying financial safeguards. In these circumstances it does not makes sense to further liberalize capital flows, depriving us of legitimate tools to safeguard financial stability."

In particular, Contreras warns that smaller countries face a threat from this agreement's solidifying of the control of the giant multinationals, concluding,

It is critical to reject the imposition of a model designed according to realities of high-income countries, which are very different from the other participating countries.

Otherwise, this agreement will become a threat for our countries: it will restrict our development options in health and education, in biological and cultural diversity, and in the design of public policies and the transformation of our economies. It will also generate pressures from increasingly active social movements, who are not willing to grant a pass to governments that accept an outcome of the TPPnegotiations that limits possibilities to increase the prosperity and well-being of our countries.

Continue reading »

At least there are some Republicans in the House who actually want to get some work done...

Roll Call:

The inquiry led by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee into the slaying of four Americans at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year has been attention-grabbing, but some senior GOP aides are worried that the partisan overtones are diverting Congress from identifying and addressing the real lessons learned from the attack.

In particular, these aides say key staffers have been overly consumed with chasing down or addressing inaccurate or unfounded accusations emerging from the inquiry.

“We have got to get past that and figure out what are we going to do going forward,” a GOP aide stressed. “Some of the accusations, I mean you wouldn’t believe some of this stuff. It’s just — I mean, you’ve got to be on Mars to come up with some of this stuff.”

...

Senior GOP aides pointed out that many of the accusations involving security and military forces turned out to be unfounded. One recent example involved a supposed whistle-blower who reported that an armed Predator drone was operating in the area, but was not called upon to respond to the Benghazi attack, an assertion labeled erroneous by Pentagon officials and Hill staffers.

“There are some real issues there and then there is just some crazy stuff,” the senior House GOP aide said. “The crazy stuff is, you know, the airman in Ramstein [Air Base, Germany,] that knew that the Predator [drone] was armed. There are no armed Predators in the region there. The [status of forces agreement] does not allow us to fly them armed, and everybody knows it.”

GOP aides described another criticism aired at a recent House Oversight Committee hearing that there were four security officers at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli who were ordered to remain in the capital for several hours after the first reports of an attack, rather than being scrambled to assist the consulate in Benghazi.

“The stand-down order was for four guys,” the GOP aide said. “When you step back and say how were the people killed at the annex, they were killed by an indirect fire mortar round. Four more M-4s [rifles] inside the annex doesn’t change that outcome. In fact, they might have just created more casualties. We have got to get down to what really happened on the DoD side and for us the DoD side was not properly postured, why?”

Continue reading »