“Governor, I wish you would calmly and directly state it is your former staff running the PAC,” Gingrich demanded, of the pro-Romney PAC. “It is your millionaire friends giving to the PAC. And you know some of the ads aren’t true. Just say that. It’s straightforward.”

Romney acknowledged that those responsible for the ads are his supporters, but continued to note — as he has for weeks — that he is legally prohibited from directing the tone or content of any ads the PAC puts out.

But note Gingrinch’s comments at the end of that same article.

Gingrich, in fact, all but endorsed a 27-plus-minute film being produced by the pro-Gingrich PAC “Winning Our Future,” about Bain Capital, the company of which Romney was formerly the CEO.

“I can say publicly I hope that the [pro-Gingrich] super PAC runs an accurate movie about Bain,” Gingrich continued, referring to Bain Capital, the company of which Romney was formerly the CEO. “It will be based on establishment newspapers, like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Barron’s, Bloomberg News. And I hope that it’s totally accurate and then people can watch the 27-and-a-half minutes of his career at Bain and decide for themselves.”

Does it sound like he seemed pretty familiar with what the super PAC was doing? Hmmm… Some people are asking questions, such as Jennifer Rubin. Her article includes a back and forth with a Gingrich spokesmouth and, as is so often the case, the coverup is worse than the crime. He dubiously argues that Gingrich was only saying what he ‘hoped’ they would put out, not what he ‘knew’ they would put out. Seems weird to me that Newt apparently ‘hoped’ his super PAC would put out something 27-1/2 minutes long about Romney and Bain. Not 27. Not 28. 27-1/2. Nah, no coordination going on at all.

She settled a complaint with NRA in 1999 and then filed another complaint about treatment at her next job about 3 years later through the same lawyer. She was then an INS spokesperson. Three of her former supervisors anonymously gave some details to the AP, and we’ve been told for the past two weeks that we are supposed to believe anonymous reports, correct?

To settle the complaint at the immigration service, Kraushaar initially demanded thousands of dollars in payment, a reinstatement of leave she used after the accident earlier in 2002, promotion on the federal pay scale and a one-year fellowship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, according to a former supervisor familiar with the complaint. The promotion itself would have increased her annual salary between $12,000 and $16,000, according to salary tables in 2002 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

So let’s see…. That would add up to a minimum $50K fellowship, some number of thousands of dollars outright, thousands of dollars worth of leave, a promotion, and a five-figure salary bump (which also bumps benefits and pension). It would be easy to see it as being worth $250K give or take a little. That would make a nice payday vs the $45K she got from the NRA because it hurt her feelings that Cain said she was as tall as his wife. So what happened with her complaint?

Kraushaar told the AP she considered her employment complaint “relatively minor” and she later dropped it.

“The concern was that there may have been discrimination on the job and that I was being treated unfairly,” Kraushaar said.

Kraushaar said Tuesday she did not remember details about the complaint and did not remember asking for a payment, a promotion or a Harvard fellowship. Bennett, her lawyer, declined to discuss the case with the AP, saying he considered it confidential. Kraushaar left her job at the immigration service after dropping the complaint in 2003, and she went to work at the Treasury Department.

Well isn’t that interesting. She considered a $250K payoff “minor” – so minor that she blew it off then and doesn’t recall it now. But gee, Herman Cain is supposed to recall every detail of everything he did (or even didn’t do) in the 1990s, but his accuser can’t even recall something that happened in the 2000s. Uh, anybody else have a problem with this picture? Well she does recall a little bit.

Kraushaar’s complaint was based on supervisors denying her request to work full time from home after a serious car accident in 2002, three former supervisors said. Two of them said Kraushaar also was denied previous requests to work from home before the car accident.
…
Kraushaar told the AP that she remembered the complaint focusing on supervisors denying her the opportunity to work from home after her car accident. She said other employees were allowed to work from home.

Let’s think about this. She must have been making high five figures or low six figures for a promotion to be worth more than $1K/month, so let’s say $100K. Was she still able to act as a spokesperson after her accident? If so, that would seem to involve lots of travel and lots of face to face meetings. If she wasn’t able to do her job but still getting paid as if she were, then why whine about anything?

She left DOJ after that dustup and moved to DOT, where she is a spokeswoman in the office of the IG for tax administration. Maybe Obama can help her get that promotion now, since after a decade or more in the federal government she’s still a lowly spokesperson apparently.

Seriously though, no one but Cain and these women know what really happened. But it seems to me these women coming forward out of the shadows doesn’t enhance their believability once you look under the covers. Let’s hope the press continues to do their job and report both sides.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou announced this morning that he was calling a referendum and a vote of confidence. All those market gains from last week’s presumed stability were wiped out, and the DJIA futures suddenly dropped to -275 or so.

Chances are decent that he will lose, and a new government will need to be formed. To no one’s surprise, European leaders who worked out last week’s deal aren’t very happy.

The decision to call a referendum on the five-day-old bailout blindsided Greece’s European partners and placed another hurdle in the way of efforts to staunch the debt crisis, German coalition lawmakers said.

The announcement came “out of the blue, it’s surprising, very risky,” Norbert Barthle, the ranking member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party on parliament’s budget committee, said by phone today. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is “dismayed” by the Greek plan, Le Monde newspaper reported, citing unnamed people close to Sarkozy.

The following paragraph really seems to sum up the problem. A significant number of Greek people want to continue to be bailed out without having to sacrifice anything themselves. How can you read this any other way? See here for more info on the poll referenced below.

Most of the 1,009 people surveyed on Oct. 27, the day the agreement was announced, said the accord should be put to a referendum, according to the results of the Kapa Research SA poll, published in To Vima newspaper. Forty-six percent said they’d oppose the plan at such a referendum. In the same poll, more than seven in 10 favored Greece remaining in the euro.

The same US Attorney’s office in west Texas that sent Agents Ramos and Campean to the slammer after a border-crossing drug smuggler got shot has struck again. Agent Jesus Diaz Jr has been sentenced to two years in the slammer for arresting a 15yo who was part of a group carrying 150 lbs of dope across the border.

Diaz’s crime? Did he shoot the kid? No. Did he torture him? No. Did he beat him? No. After handcuffing the uncooperative dealer, he used the common technique of lifting his hands behind him to force him down. That’s it.

Of course the Mexican government went ape as soon as it happened. It almost looks like they complained about it before anyone even know the kid had been arrested. Homeland Security and ICE checked into it and found nothing. End of story right? Guess again.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs Division ignored that and went after him anyway, through the same office that did it all before to the other two agents. He was sentenced by a Bush appointee (based on recommendations from the two GOP Texas Senators) who began her “public service” career working for Ronnie Earle. Like I said, no publisher would accept such a fantastic story as a novel because it’s just too far-fetched.

Here’s the story as told by the defense.

The Law Enforcement Officers Advocates Council said the government’s case was “based on false testimony that is contradicted by the facts.”

In a statement, the council said that because the arrest took place at about 2 a.m., darkness would have made it impossible for the government’s witnesses to have seen whether any mistreatment took place. It said Marcos Ramos, the Border Patrol agent who stood next to Diaz, testified that he did not see any mistreatment of the smuggling suspect.

The council said other witnesses made contradictory claims and some later admitted to having perjured themselves. Such admissions, the council said, were ignored by the court and the government. It also said that probationary agents who claimed to have witnessed the assault raised no objections during the incident and failed to notify an on-duty supervisor until hours later.

“Instead, they went off-duty to a local ‘Whataburger’ restaurant, got their stories straight and reported it hours later to an off-duty supervisor at his home,” the council said. “Then the ‘witnesses’ went back to the station and reported their allegations.”

The council also noted that the teenager claimed no injuries in court other than sore shoulders, which the council attributed to “the weight of the drug load, approximately 75 pounds, he carried across the border.”

It’s hilarious to read more about these morons. In response to Wednesday’s ouster, they of course are doubling down and want to shut down the entire city. The knee-slapping part of their proposal to me is this detail.

Below is the proposal passed by the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on Wednesday October 26, 2011 in reclaimed Oscar Grant Plaza. 1607 people voted. 1484 voted in favor of the resolution, 77 abstained and 46 voted against it, passing the proposal at 96.9%. The General Assembly operates on a modified consensus process that passes proposals with 90% in favor and with abstaining votes removed from the final count.

What did they do, count 14,840 waving fingers (in the dark no less) and divide that by 10 to get the number of “aye” votes? This is beyond ridiculous.

They are also trying to be a part of every sort of liberal cause, such as supporting a hunger strike by some prison inmates. (With any luck some of them will be joining those inmates soon, but I digress.) What better way to “stand in solidarity” with hunger strikers than to … wait for it … write a letter!

Adding to the hilarity is that all this police “brutality” and “oppression” is in a state with liberal Governor Moonbeam and in a city with an uber-liberal mayor who – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – has a background as a “community organizer” and who has apparently participated in at least one anti-police “action”. Her reaction to yesterday’s police activities could best be summarized as Sgt. Schultz’s “I know nussing!” spoken with a slight Chinese accent instead of a strong German one.

As if all this weren’t funny enough, this has introduced us to this blithering idiot. CA could probably erase its budget deficit by selling tickets to see this guy get his ass kicked.

“… to wear down uh the people here who are the organizers that are here, some of us 24 hours a day, uh, and and we want to be able to to not have to carry our equipment back and forth to have our general assembly meeting so that we can talk to the people, uh, so that we can build a movement and so we can do, uh, the things that we have to do as part of this movement. I think it’s a clear tactic, uh, to try to to break our spirits and to break the movement.”

These losers apparently wanted to to get arrested so so they could tweet to to their their various comrades about the the the horrible, uh, treatment of these these, uh, poor martyrs.

The guy on the left is Troy Davis who, after pleading guilty to carrying a concealed weapon (with altered serial numbers) at age 19, killed a cop at age 20. He was convicted and sentenced to death more than 20 years ago and is still breathing. Enough about him.

The guy on the right, who must have looked much like Davis did when Davis pulled that trigger, is Petty Officer 2nd Class Brian Lundy, Jr. By age 20, Lundy had enlisted in the Navy. He deployed to Afghanistan in July, attached to a Marine Corps unit as a hospital corpsman, and was killed in action in September. No doubt you’ve never heard of him, and you certainly won’t see anything about him on tonight’s news.

Here are stories from yesterday and today from one of the local Austin news stations related to PO2 Lundy and his funeral and burial today.

What a class act. And what a shame that so much energy gets devoted to copkillers and so little to fine Americans like PO2 Lundy.

It seems that she has developed an x-ray machine and can now read his heart, enabling her to pronounce that the only reason he did it is because he was on the take from Merck.

Based on the sound quality, she apparently recorded this inside a bunker protected by several layers of tin foil to keep the black helicopter guys away.

He starts off about how terrible Obama is, then begins his Romney endorsement with this…

Alone among the contenders, he possesses the unique qualifications to confront and master our severe economic predicament. His abiding faith in our country’s exceptional historical position as a beacon of freedom will make him the most important leader in a world that depends upon a strong America to stay at peace.

Then he goes on to talk about Mitt as MA governor and what he did with the Salt Lake City Olympics. Then he notes Romney’s economic plan, as well as his character and principles. There are no shots taken at any of the other GOP candidates.

It’s a bit curious to me that he ran against the clear front-runner (at least at the time) and then so quickly backed him. Cynics can say whatever about it, but I think Pawlenty is classy so I’d give him the benefit of the doubt here.

If the UN bid for Palestinian statehood should fail this month, Palestinian leadership would work first to gain membership to every UN organization and then resubmit their bid to the Security Council, senior Fatah official Nabil Shaath told the Ma’an news agency on Sunday.

The United States has made it clear that they would veto the vote later this month, making it impossible for the resolution to pass. However, the General Assembly could still upgrade the Palestinians’ status from observer status to that of a non-member state. This change would allow them to join a number of UN bodies and conventions.

The Jordanian king and others say to be careful what you ask for, as getting statehood would eliminate right of return. Abbas doesn’t care, so it’s clear the elimination of Israel is still more important than Palestinian statehood.

Abbas however, planned to move forward with his move, nonetheless, the report said.

The Palestinians will continue to demand the right of return for millions of refugees to their original homes inside Israel even after the UN recognizes a Palestinian state along the June 4, 1967, lines, Abbas said on Sunday.

So where is the US? Who knows? After spending 2-1/2 years sympathizing with the Palestinians, assigning the bulk of the blame for all Middle East problems to Israel, and making it clear Natanyahu was persona non grata at the White House, a light bulb seems to have gone off and Obama is asking for a do-over.

But no matter what the supposed “plan” is, the Obama administration looks like the Keystone Kops, except far less organized. He is getting ready to address the UN General Assembly again, and nothing he predicted a year ago has come to pass – quite the opposite in fact.

[L]ast year, speaking to the same UN General Assembly opening session, Obama voiced the hope that US-led diplomatic efforts would help achieve a negotiated agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians that would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state this fall.

“Each of us must choose the path of peace,” Obama told world diplomats gathered in New York last September. “If we do, when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations — an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”

As that deadline fast approaches, however — Obama is set to address the UN General Assembly on September 20th, the White House said Thursday–the vision seems further away from reality than ever. Israelis and Palestinians have not even been at the negotiating table for eleven months.

Many people regard Hillary Clinton as being somewhat capable regardless of what else they think about her, but even she cannot overcome her boss’s complete screw-up of the situation here.

Where is Europe in all this? While not busy bailing out Greece, they have come to realize that Palestinian statehood – which in general they seem to support – is not a panacea and brings lots of problems.

Watching it all with growing unease are the Europeans, who have generally been relegated to a backseat role by Washington on Mideast peacemaking. But now, some diplomatic observers suggest that the Europeans may offer a way to avert a potential disaster on the issue: by introducing an alternative UN resolution that would recognize both Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side, in peace, and calling for renewed negotiations.

It would seem they want to use whatever leverage there is to indicate that Palestine would leave Israel alone, but as indicated earlier this is a pipe dream. Abbas’s comments have made it clear that Golda Meir’s famous quote still holds: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

Meanwhile it’s clear the US officials have been spending too much time around a hookah.

U.S. diplomats declined to discuss the matter, describing any European alternative resolution planning as “vague talk” and “chatter.”

“As we move closer to the middle of September, we are very much aware of the situation and we’re talking with our close allies and partners about it,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner told journalists at the State Department Thursday when asked about the looming Palestinian UN September bid. “Our position couldn’t be clearer publicly or privately.”

So the European plan is “vague”; our plan “couldn’t be clearer”; and apparently Europe isn’t among “our close allies and partners”.

Lovely.

Gee, it’s looking pretty clear how this is all going to turn out.

“Our situation is extremely serious,” the postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in an interview. “If Congress doesn’t act, we will default.”

Are they looking for money? Maybe. But it sounds more like they are looking for help from Washington in battling the hole they are in due to their current union contracts and pension liabilities, as well as other restrictions imposed by Congress. I wrote a recent diary with quotes from some of the unions who want to maintain the untenable status quo. Check that out if you want to see the union side; here I’ll focus on the Times article.

In recent weeks, Mr. Donahoe has been pushing a series of painful cost-cutting measures to erase the agency’s deficit, which will reach $9.2 billion this fiscal year. They include eliminating Saturday mail delivery, closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers — nearly one-fifth of the agency’s work force — despite a no-layoffs clause in the unions’ contracts.

So there’s not enough work to cover costs of 20% of the union workers, yet they can’t be laid off. How much of the problem is due to this? The answer comes a few paragraphs later.

At the same time, decades of contractual promises made to unionized workers, including no-layoff clauses, are increasing the post office’s costs. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors. Postal workers also receive more generous health benefits than most other federal employees.

Meanwhile Congress can’t agree on anything and the clock is ticking.

Missing the $5.5 billion payment due on Sept. 30, intended to finance retirees’ future health care, won’t cause immediate disaster. But sometime early next year, the agency will run out of money to pay its employees and gas up its trucks, officials warn, forcing it to stop delivering the roughly three billion pieces of mail it handles weekly.

USPS’s position as a quasi-governmental agency puts it in an impossible position. It isn’t allowed to control its own business, though it’s supposed to be running on its own dime. Legacy costs and restrictions under control of Washington means their hands are tied.

Meanwhile, the agency has had a tough time cutting its costs to match the revenue drop, with a history of labor contracts offering good health and pension benefits, underused post offices, and laws that restrict its ability to make basic business decisions, like reducing the frequency of deliveries.

Congress is considering numerous emergency proposals — most notably, allowing the post office to recover billions of dollars that management says it overpaid to its employees’ pension funds. That fix would help the agency get through the short-term crisis, but would delay the day of reckoning on bigger issues.

By the way, the moves they are trying to make now are only the tip of the iceberg. Long term they want to eliminate 1/3 of the employees.

Mr. Donahoe’s hope is to cut $20 billion of the $75 billion in annual costs by 2015. To do that, he wants to close many post offices and slash the number of sorting facilities to 200 from 500 and trim the agency’s work force by 220,000 people, from its current 653,000. (A decade ago, the agency employed nearly 900,000.)

The postal service has the legal authority to close facilities, although community opposition can make the process difficult. To placate critics and cut costs, officials say they would seek to run some postal operations out of stores like Wal-Mart or to share space with other government offices.

Cutting the work force is more difficult. The agency’s labor contracts have long guaranteed no layoffs to the vast majority of its workers, and management agreed to a new no layoff-clause in a major union contract last May.

But now, faced with what postal officials call “the equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy,” the agency is asking Congress to enact legislation that would overturn the job protections and let it lay off 120,000 workers in addition to trimming 100,000 jobs through attrition.

The postal service is also asking Congress for permission to end Saturday delivery.

So who are the key players in Congress? Take a look at the Senate side and red flags go up. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is meeting Tuesday – the heads of the subcommittee that oversees USPS are Tom Carper and Susan Collins. Carper says Congress needs to do “something”; Collins is opposed to ending Saturday delivery since she thinks it will hurt her rural constituents. Why they can’t wait until Monday to get their junk mail is beyond me. But I digress; there does appear to be at least one area of agreement, but with Obama deeply in union pockets even that might be dead.

Senators Carper and Collins do back several of the postal service’s main ideas to avoid default, including recovering around $60 billion that some actuaries say the agency has overpaid into two pension funds. Although the Obama administration is working closely with the senators to find a solution, it has signaled discomfort with the pension proposals, questioning whether the postal service really overpaid.

On the House side, Darryl Issa thinks that pension move amounts to a bailout. He wants to give USPS what it needs to really cut costs, but that is DOA in the Senate and at the WH.

Meanwhile, Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Oversight Committee, says the pension proposals would amount to an unjustifiable bailout that would not solve the agency’s underlying problems. He is pushing a bill that would create an emergency oversight board that could order huge cost-cutting and void the postal service’s contracts — a proposal that not just the unions, but Senators Carper and Collins oppose.

Where does it end? No doubt hundreds of thousands of mostly idle postal union “workers” will have plenty of free time to besiege members of Congress. They will demand taxpayer bailouts no doubt.

Look, if this was normal statistical guesses from whoever these “experts” are, they would guess too high just as often as they would guess too low.

But there are a couple of eyebrow-raisers here….

Striking Verizon workers filed 8,500 claims for jobless benefits last week, after submitting 12,500 applications the previous week, which covered the period for the August nonfarm payrolls survey.

What the heck? They have jobs but refuse to show up, and we are supposed to help? What kind of a screwed-up deal is this? Heck, maybe Obama can just implement an executive order that all striking union workers get paid their full salaries by us non-union taxpayers.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 417,000, the Labor Department said, but still nowhere near levels that would signal a recession.

I like how the Labor Department tries to spin it. The news is terrible – as it has been for months – and they say oh it’s not really that bad. This is a typical Obama administration ploy – nothing really counts as bad news because it could be even worse. If Obama had been running Japan he would have claimed the tsunami really wasn’t bad because he saved everyone who didn’t get killed.

The unemployment rate fell to 9.1 percent from 9.2 percent in June.

The article doesn’t say this, but of course this means that even more people have given up looking for jobs, so the “real” unemployment rate will remain in the mid-teens.

One thing we have to give Obama credit for is consistency.

It seemed like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had a decent record and seemed like he’d make a good president, but there are so many irons in the fire it’s hard to stand out. His lack of charisma seemed to doom him in my opinion.

It’s very classy of him to pull the plug earlier instead of stretching it out forever. This slate needs to coalesce and get on with getting Obama out of Washington.

I wonder if this means Nick Ayers will join the Perry campaign? They certainly know each other well and did great things with the RGA.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment slumped to 54.9 from 63.7 the prior month. The gauge was projected to decline to 62, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.

This is the lowest figure since May 1980, the last time we had an ultraliberal President screwing up the country. We know how November 1980 worked out.

A report from the Commerce Department today showed sales at U.S. retailers climbed 0.5 percent in July, the most in four months, indicating consumers are holding up even as employment slows. Purchases excluding automobiles rose more than forecast.

Today’s confidence figures parallel the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index, which fell to minus 49.1 in the period to Aug. 7, its lowest level since mid-May.

The Michigan survey’s index of current conditions, which reflects Americans’ perceptions of their financial situation and whether it is a good time to buy big-ticket items like cars, fell to 69.3 from 75.8 the prior month.

The index of consumer expectations for six months from now, which more closely projects the direction of consumer spending, decreased to 45.7, from 56 the prior month.
…
Consumer spending dropped in June for the first time in almost two years as savings climbed, the Commerce Department reported earlier this month. The economy grew at a 1.3 percent annual rate following a 0.4 percent gain in the prior quarter that was less than earlier estimated, Commerce Department figures showed.

So spending has been flat and looks to be headed down – more bad news.

Who’ll get the blame? Bush? Tea party? S&P? Arab spring? Japanese tsunami? London rioting/Eurozone issues?

They can whine all they want about the bad economy and more electronic communication costing them business and so on, but please – if you’re bleeding more than a billion bucks a month you need to just throw out what you’re doing and start from scratch. Oh, but it’s not quite that simple of course – and the story gets worse

The Postal Service’s most pressing financial concern is a $5.5 billion payment owed to the federal government on September 30th, the end of its fiscal year, to cover retirees’ health benefits.

So on top of losing $1B/mo they are supposed to come up with billions more just for retiree health benefits. That isn’t even counting pensions my friends. Where does this death spiral end? Before pondering that, let’s check in with the largest postal unions.

The AFL-CIO’s National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) is (surprise!) fighting any change to the status quo. They are keeping an eye out on the debt limit deal to ensure that none of what they see as their entitlements are touched. And they also want to keep the incredibly wasteful Saturday delivery alive.

Postal employees’ pensions and health benefits are fortunately off-limits in this first round of cuts in discretionary spending, though we will have to defend the continuation of six-day delivery during the appropriations process. But a second round of cuts could expose our fringe benefits to reductions, depending on the outcome of negotiations within the so-called “Super Congress.”

And of course any GOP attempts to downsize will be fought tooth and nail. Gee, anyone not in these postal unions would see them as a big part of the “central cause”.

Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Dennis Ross (R-FL) have introduced a postal reform bill that fails to address the central cause of the financial crisis facing the Postal Service and instead proposes to recklessly downsize the Service and threaten the mailing industry and the U.S. economy.

The AFL-CIO’s American Postal Workers Union (APWU) points out another area of downsizing the unions are fighting. Hey, neighborhood post offices are great, but if they can’t stand on their own then how can you justify them (unless you’re a unionized postal worker)?

“The American Postal Workers Union will stand with our neighbors to demand that post offices, stations, and branches remain open — and expand the services they offer — wherever they are needed,” APWU President Cliff Guffey said. The USPS announced July 26 that it plans to study 3,700 post offices, stations and branches for possible closure.

A month ago, the APWU went so far as to run an ad on the three major news networks to “dispel the persistent myth that our work is funded by taxpayers.” I’m glad we resolved that!

There are a couple other unions involved – the National Rural Letter Carriers Association (NRLCA) and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPHMU) – but you get the idea.

How about Congress? Well we already saw earlier that the Issa-Ross bill is a non-starter with the unions. What were some reactions from Capitol Hill after this week’s news? Delaware Democratic Senator Tom Carper, chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees USPS, weighs in. I’m guessing all Democrats share his feelings.

“While today’s announcement that the U.S. Postal Service lost $3.1 billion in the last three months is disappointing, it does not come as a surprise. Our troubled economy – coupled with the continued migration to electronic forms of communication – is putting the future of the Postal Service in jeopardy, and it’s happening faster than expected. Putting the Postal Service back on stronger financial footing is something I’ve been trying to do for a long time now, and my comprehensive postal reform bill takes the necessary steps to help keep the Postal Service solvent.

“My bill, the Postal Operations Sustainment and Transformation (POST) Act of 2011, would give the Postal Service the room it needs to manage itself and avoid becoming the latest victim of Congressional gridlock. It would also address the Postal Service’s massive overpayments to the older Civil Service Retirement System and would ensure that the Postal Service has the resources it needs to meet its future retiree health care obligations. My bill requires all parties – postal management, employees and customers – to make sacrifices. It also gets Congress out of the way by providing the flexibility and tools necessary to address the problems plaguing the Postal Service in an effective way.

“The U.S. Postal Service is sinking quickly, and if we do nothing, we face a future without the valuable services the Postal Service provides. We have the opportunity to keep it afloat, but we must act now. I urge Congress and the Administration to join me in pushing for this much-needed reform so we can prevent the Postal Service from going broke by the end of the year.”

I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear a Democrat talking about “shared sacrifice” I check to see whether someone pinched my wallet. And “getting Congress out of the way” doesn’t mean injecting Congress into the middle of it – it means leaving them alone and letting them go belly up as far as I’m concerned, if that’s what it takes to break the union’s stranglehold on the USPS.

I don’t know what Carper’s idea of “reform” is – but based on the union positions it means maintaining the status quo and pumping in help from DC. But wait, I thought the USPS never got a penny of taxpayer dollars, so what kind of “help” does this “reform” mean? And sorry Senator Carper, but they are already broke – and getting $34M/day further in the hole.

I’ll be the first to say it – the Democrats and the postal unions are holding USPS hostage.

U.S. stocks climbed, erasing earlier losses and preventing the longest Dow Jones Industrial Average slump since 1978, as investors speculated the Federal Reserve will start another stimulus program.

As usual, Obama and his core of geniuses aren’t willing to let the market work through its normal cycles.

Speculation that the Fed will embark on a third round of asset purchases to stem off a recession grew after the Wall Street Journal said three former central bank officials support the approach.
…
“Every time we see economic weakness, there will be discussion about more economic stimulus,” Richard Sichel, who oversees $1.6 billion as chief investment officer at Philadelphia Trust Co., said in telephone interview. “That could be the case given the fairly weak economic figures we’ve had….”

So we’re going to get even more money pumped into whatever group of major potential donors to Obama might need it before they think about how to invest campaign cash next year. Like QE1 and QE2, no doubt QE3 will also be a sinking ship as far as our long-term financial health is concerned.

GDP numbers are out, and they couldn’t be much worse. To sum it up, that supposedly sharp pace in 4Q10 was overstated by 35%, 1Q11′s figure was overstated by a mere 475% (!), and the already low expectations for 2Q11 were 38% higher than reality.

The U.S. economy grew less than expected in the second quarter as consumer spending barely rose, and growth braked sharply in the prior quarter, a government report showed on Friday.

Growth in gross domestic product—a measure of all goods and services produced within U.S. borders—rose at a 1.3 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said.

First-quarter output was sharply revised down to a 0.4 percent pace from 1.9 percent.

Economists had expected the economy to expand at a 1.8 percent rate in the second quarter.

In addition, fourth-quarter growth was revised down to a 2.3 percent pace from 3.1 percent, indicating that the economy had already started slowing before the high gasoline prices and supply chain disruptions from Japan hit.

That sucking sound you hear on Wall Street today will have little to do with Boehner and much to do with Obama’s failed economic “plan”.

But don’t expect it to be reported that way.

• Hip and knee replacements only being allowed where patients are in severe pain. Overweight patients will be made to lose weight before being considered for an operation.
• Cataract operations being withheld from patients until their sight problems “substantially” affect their ability to work.
• Patients with varicose veins only being operated on if they are suffering “chronic continuous pain”, ulceration or bleeding.
• Tonsillectomy (removing tonsils) only to be carried out in children if they have had seven bouts of tonsillitis in the previous year.
• Grommets [i.e. ear tubes - bk] to improve hearing in children only being inserted in “exceptional circumstances” and after monitoring for six months.
• Funding has also been cut in some areas for IVF treatment on the NHS.

Can you imagine the uproar over here were the evil insurance companies demanding any of these policies in order to save money? Once we have the government controlling it all you know things like this will be coming in short order. The only thing that will be going up under Obamacare is how much they will be grabbing out of our wallets.

President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats are weighing a scaled-back U.S. budget deal that would avert a looming default but force Congress to tackle the politically toxic issue again before the 2012 elections, a Senate Democratic aide told Reuters on Thursday.

The deal would cover the country’s borrowing needs for seven months, the aide said. That would theoretically include budget savings of roughly $1 trillion to attract the Republican support needed to pass it through Congress.

It would be a HUGE mistake for Republicans to fall for this scheme. In exchange for tossing out a small amount of low-hanging fruit without having to make any significant cuts in entitlements, just think how well it would set up for the Democrats to have this battle again in the heat of the 2012 election…

• “We’ve already made deep spending cuts, but now the GOP wants to throw even more poor and sick people out in the street.”
• “The Republicans would rather have the country go into default than to have a small tax increase on the millionaires they’ve protected for years.”
• “We need to tackle entitlement reform, but the draconian GOP plan involves ending all safety net programs.”

Anyone who thinks Democrats would touch entitlement reform in an election year – other than continuing to demagogue about any GOP plan – needs to get rid of the crack pipe. If the Republicans fall for this short-term ploy again, they are playing right into Democratic hands for the 2012 elections.

• Here illegally – Check
• Deported multiple times – Check
• Allegedly a member of MS-13 – Check
• Driving drunk (.238) – Check
• Cocaine in the car – Check
• Crashing through a barricade at 80 mph and killing a cop with two kids and a pregnant wife – Check

His mother, stepfather and other family members attended the hearing but did not comment.

If it was up to me, La Migra would have been there checking into all of them.

BTW the Texas House passed the bill, but Senate Dems managed to get it killed.