ANOTHER GOPer with heart? What a total jerkess! DO & SAY ANYTHING TO GET ELECTED.

Meg Whitman: My ex-maid should be deported

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman of California says that, though it breaks her heart, her former housekeeper should be deported.

The former eBay chief executive has called for tougher sanctions against employers who hire illegal workers, but she's been accused of knowingly employing an undocumented immigrant for nine years.

"Well, the answer is it breaks my heart, but she should be deported because she forged documents and she lied about her immigration status," Whitman said in an interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News. "And it breaks my heart ... On Nov. 3, no one's going to care about Nicky Diaz. But the law is the law and we live in the rule of law. It's important."

In September, Nicky Diaz Santillan said she had worked for Whitman illegally for nine years, and that her employer knew her immigration status. Whitman countered that Santillan had misled her with false documents, and that she fired the maid when she found out the truth.

"As soon as we found that she was an illegal immigrant, we did what we had to do as an employer, which was to let her go," Whitman said. "But all of the documentation that we had said that she was legal."

Whitman said at the time that she kept the story to herself to protect Santillan: "Because Nicky had worked for us for 10 years, I was very fond of Nicky and I didn't want to make an example of her. It's not an obligation of the employer to turn in illegal employees."

Like we need more worries in this world! Anyone know how to solve this hate fest? Seems just like another USA congress election.

Al Qaeda Behind Terror Scare

U.S. officials have zeroed-in on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as the culprit in the purported terror plot disrupted Thursday.
Two suspicious packages sent from Yemen, both aboard cargo planes bound for the U.S., were intercepted by authorities, one in Britain and one in Dubai.
UPS flights that landed in Newark and Philadelphia were also searched out of security concerns.
"The president was notified of a potential terrorist threat on Thursday night at 10:30," the White House said in a statement.
The items were addressed to a synagogue and a Jewish center in Chicago, according to NBC News. Yemen, a known haven for terrorist groups, was also linked to the attempted bombing of a U.S. jetliner last Christmas. President Obama has ordered U.S. agencies to investigate whether the packages are part of a larger terrorist plot, according to CNN.

Read it at MSNBC

OOOOPS!

Texas Frees Innocent Man After 18 Years

On Wednesday of this week, charges were dropped against Anthony Graves
a man who was wrongly convicted of murdering six people in 1992 and imprisoned for 18 years.

Graves spent 12 of those years on death row but was released after a Texas judge signed a motion stating, “We have found no credible evidence which inculpates this defendant.”

The district attorney of the county prosecuting Graves said, “There’s not a single thing that says Anthony Graves was involved in this case. There is nothing.”

Last month, Texas Monthly examined the abortion of justice in Graves’ case. Describing his first day out of prison, Graves said, “For the first moments, for the few hours, I thought I would wake up and be right back in the cell.”

Read it at Texas Monthly

MEDIA MATTER weekly updater....

Media Matters: The real story of the 2010 election

By most accounts, the Democrats stand to lose seats in both the House and Senate this coming Tuesday. There are, of course, a wide range of explanations for why this is the case.

However, in endeavoring to explain how the GOP has seemingly managed to reverse its political fortunes in such a short amount of time, media outlets would be remiss not to mention one of the most important factors. In fact, we don't need to wait for Tuesday's results to pinpoint perhaps the most significant development in the country's political landscape over the past two years.

One of the two major political parties in the country is run by a "news" network.

Since President Obama's inauguration, Fox News has transformed from simply the mouthpiece and oppo research shop of the Republican Party into its headquarters. For the GOP, Fox fundraises, campaigns, gives strategic advice, picks candidates (and then provides them a comfortable platform to reach millions of voters, free of charge), throws and promotes rallies, gets out the vote, and, perhaps most importantly, sets the narrative.

They do all of this while continuing their time-honored tradition of tearing down liberal initiatives and politicians with shameless smears, lies, misrepresentations, and fabricated stories. But before we get to Fox's massive influence over the coming elections, some back-story is necessary.

Less than two months after Obama's inauguration, Fox News senior vice president Bill Shine gave an interview with NPR about how the network's ratings were soaring at the time. During the interview, Shine noted that some people were "rooting for [Fox] to go away" after the election, but "[w]ith this particular group of people in power right now and the honeymoon they've had from other members of the media, does it make it a little bit easier for us to be the voice of opposition on some issues?"

Fox's programming has effectively answered Shine's rhetorical question with a forceful "yes."

Right out of the gate, Fox led the charge against the stimulus, eschewing the views of economists to attack deficit spending and rewriting history to attack FDR and the New Deal.

The network was certainly "the voice of the opposition" on health care reform, spewing countless falsehoods about both our broken health care system and the proposals to fix it while promoting disruptions of health care town halls and GOP initiatives to kill reform.

And of course, Fox operates as a perpetual dishonesty machine, trotting out a steady stream of overhyped scandals and faux-outrages to dent the administration and Democrats (mustard on Obama's "fancy" hamburger, anyone?)

The network was integral to fostering discontent with Democrats and the administration through their relentless promotion of the Tea Party movement. Fox gave the Tea Party a huge assist last year in the run-up to the original protests, which Fox took ownership of by sending several of their top hosts to throw "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties."

Since then, Fox has shown that there is no Tea Party gathering too small to treat as a news event, and their personalities continue to regularly appear at Tea Party events around the country.

But Fox has done far more this cycle than foster an environment conducive to a GOP electoral victory, having assumed a more hands-on role in Republican electioneering. In addition to Fox's parent company donating $1.25 million to the Republican Governors Association and another million to the GOP-aligned Chamber of Commerce, more than thirty Fox Newsers have supported GOP candidates or organizations in more than 600 instances in at least 47 states, as we detailed in a report this week.

While it would be nearly impossible to run through Fox's influence in all of the individual races this year, their "coverage" of a select few races is indicative of the network's complete transformation into GOP headquarters.

The network tipped its hand for how it would handle covering elections in the "voice of the opposition" era during the run-up to January's senate election in Massachusetts. Not only did Fox portray Scott Brown as a heroic Founding Father-like figure while smearing his opponent, it also actively aided Brown's campaign by hosting him repeatedly in the days leading up the election and allowing him to direct viewers to his website so they could find out how to "help with donating and volunteering." After Brown's victory, the network was jubilant.

With the successful trial run out of the way, Fox copied the Brown blueprint in several other races around the country.

In the Nevada Senate race, Fox has spent months promoting Sharron Angle and attacking Harry Reid. While Angle has mostly refused to grant interviews to news outlets, she has made an exception for Fox. In fact, their welcoming atmosphere led Angle to brag about how "friendly" outlets like Fox help her with fundraising.

Fox personalities have also worked overtime to aid her race. Fox contributor Sarah Palin endorsed Angle and her PAC gave $2,500 to the campaign. Fox contributor Karl Rove's GOP slush fund (aka American Crossroads) has indicated it will invest in GOTV efforts to aid Angle. It is also aired an ad targeting Reid. Fox's Dennis Miller appeared at an October fundraiser for Angle.

And then there's Dick Morris. Fox's human ethics scandal has repeatedly fundraised on Angle's behalf while also touting on-air the anti-Harry Reid group that he's advising.

And as Election Day rapidly approaches, Fox kicked off this week by launching an evidence-free smear of Reid. After Reid's office responded to Fox's desperate attempts to create a new "political scandal," Fox's flagship news program, Special Report, deceptively quoted a statement from Reid's office in order to continue to push the story.

And, just in case their blatant efforts to get Angle elected fail, Fox already has their backup plan in place. This week, Fox News has been hyping comically flimsy allegations of "voter fraud" in Nevada. As top Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston explained to a confused Bill Hemmer, the fraud allegations are merely a "preemptive" strike so the GOP can "cry fraud" in the event Angle loses.

But a candidate doesn't even need to be in a close race in order to receive the benefits of FoxPAC support. In Delaware, Fox News has thrown their full weight behind Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, Karl Rove's short-lived detour questioning O'Donnell's qualifications for office notwithstanding.

Rove quickly got with the program and endorsed O'Donnell. He was joined by fellow Fox personalities Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin. The network's hosts have heaped praise on O'Donnell while playing dumb in order to claim her opponent has admitted to being a "bearded Marxist." While it would be difficult to list all of the effusive O'Donnell praise, one characteristic outpouring of affection came from Fox Business host Stuart Varney, who labeled her precisely the kind of "new face, new blood that we need to get in there."

Following in Angle's footsteps by bragging about the love she gets from Fox, Christine O'Donnell told GOP insiders at a strategy meeting that she has "got Sean Hannity in my back pocket, and I can go on his show and raise money by attacking you guys." A host who was concerned about maintaining any credibility may have bristled at being portrayed this way, but Sean Hannity has long-since demonstrated his lack of concern for ethics. Far from being upset, Hannity is still welcoming O'Donnell on his show.

The Ohio gubernatorial race features Republican candidate John Kasich, who just so happens to be a former Fox News host. Kasich repeatedly used his platform as a Fox host to position himself for a run, and continued to appear regularly as a Fox contributor and host from the time he announced that he was paving the way for a gubernatorial run in March 2008 until he officially declared his candidacy on June 1, 2009. Since declaring his candidacy, Kasich has continued to reap benefits from his cozy relationship with the network. Several Fox News personalities campaigned for him and openly root for him.

Two Fox hosts - Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee -- have told Kasich that they "love" him. Hannity has appeared at a fundraiser for Kasich, invited Kasich onto his show to plug his website, and reportedly "pledged to give $10,000 to Kasich's campaign should he run, as well as have his wife give another $10,000."

Rupert Murdoch and his wife also donated $10,000 each to Kasich, and Murdoch initially explained News Corp.'s donation to the RGA as resulting from his "friendship" with Kasich. After Kasich's opponent (accurately) criticized Fox as a "propaganda network" that is "committed to getting Republicans elected," Bill O'Reilly responded by attacking him for "whining."

Those are just three races. I haven't even detailed Fox's love for "rock star" Marco Rubio, or the fact that Glenn Beck (along with the rest of the network) has transformed his show into a GOTV operation for the GOP.

So when reporters sit down to explain the results of next Tuesday's election, it's important that they include the role of Fox News in shaping the outcome.

And if you think the last few months were bad, just wait until Tuesday's election wraps up and attention shifts to 2012 and the GOP's presidential primary. Fox currently employs no fewer than five potential contenders for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, and things could get awkward as they try to figure out which of their friends they want to help elect.

It looks like FoxPAC is just getting started.

This weekly wrap-up was compiled by Ben Dimiero, a research fellow at Media Matters for America.

Taxpayer Dollars on Deceased! Maybe the living could get same deal?

Grateful Dead: Washington Spends Taxpayer Dollars on Deceased
Government Audit Reveals $1 billion Sent to Dead Workers

With the midterm elections looming on Tuesday and the federal deficit soaring to record highs, politicians across the country have been emphasizing the need to cut wasteful government spending in Washington. They might consider putting a stop to sending money to dead people.

In the last decade the government has sent over $1 billion to approximately 250,000 dead people, according to a new report from Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

Coburn's office said it came up with the eye-opening statistic after reviewing government audits and reports by Congress, the Government Accountability Office, and various inspectors general at federal agencies.

"Nothing represents the stupidity of wasteful Washington spending more than directing a billion taxpayer dollars to the deceased. This practice is disgraceful and, in many cases, robs the living of promised benefits," Coburn said in a statement.

The problem can be found all over the federal government, according to the numbers cited in the report. The Social Security Administration sent $18 million in stimulus money to 71,000 dead people and $40 million in benefit payments to 1,760 dead people.

Double-Dip Recession Unlikely as GDP RisesPolitical Tsunami: Will Republican Wave Wash Democrats Out of Control?America's 20 Richest WomenThe Department of Agriculture sent $1 billion in farming subsidies to dead farmers.

The Department of Health & Human Services sent $4 million for heating and cooling costs to 11,000 dead people.

The Department of Housing & Urban Development sent $15 million in housing aid to 4,000 households with at least one dead person.

Medicare paid $92 million in claims for medical supplies prescribed by dead doctors, plus another $8 million in supplies prescribed for dead patients.

Medicaid, meanwhile, paid $700,000 in claims for prescriptions for controlled substances written for 1,800 dead patients.

Where does all the money actually go? In some cases to dormant bank accounts, but in most cases, to relatives of the deceased, the report found.

The blame, Coburn said, lies with Congress. "Congress itself created this mess by allowing poorly designed programs to continue unchecked," Coburn stated. "If Congress is ready to get serious about spending restraint, ending subsidies for deceased people is a sensible place to start."

It's hard to argue with that.

On Wall Street: All Reward, No Risk "JUST THINK ABOUT THIS WHILE TRY TO KEEP YOU UNDER PAID JOB BECAUSE YOU CAN'T AFFORD HEALTH CARE"

On Wall Street: All Reward, No Risk

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Wall Street bankers, traders and executives get paid so much money year after year for doing jobs that rarely require them to innovate, enlighten or put their own capital at risk, and have the nasty habit of periodically sinking our economy.

After a two-year stint as a reporter on a daily paper in the early 1980s, I worked on Wall Street for nearly two decades, and quickly discovered that I could make more money in one year as a banker than I could in a lifetime as a journalist. And that was when I was a relatively junior banker. By the time I was a managing director, the pay — and the pay spread — was astronomical.

Hedge fund and private equity managers, like professional athletes, put it all on the line every day. But the big banks pay their employees millions to gamble with other people’s money.
Curiously, though, the amount of time and energy I devoted to the two professions on a daily basis wasn’t all that different; both were totally demanding. While it was true that as a banker I generated revenue, or helped to generate revenue, and as a journalist, the publisher likely figured I was part of a cost problem, the discrepancy in pay never made much sense to me since I always had trouble imagining a newspaper without writers.

Now, after six years of writing about Wall Street — including two lengthy books — I remain at a total loss to explain the pay phenomenon. What’s worse, even the most modest sleights when it comes to pay on Wall Street — “The guy next to me got a $2 million bonus, why did I only get $1.9 million?!” — is enough to reduce someone to tears. Indeed, I have yet to encounter a person on Wall Street who can, with a straight face, justify his compensation on other than the most painfully tone-deaf grounds, usually along the lines of how they “add value” for their clients.

The Wall Street Journal recently estimated that Wall Street bonuses in 2010 will total $144 billion, in a year that has been less than stellar for most banks. Goldman Sachs has set aside $13.1 billion in bonuses for its approximately 35,000 employees, an average of $370,000 per person, which completely ignores the fact that people at the top of Goldman’s golden pyramid get paid millions of dollars annually while those at the bottom do not.
(In 2007, the three top executives at Goldman split around $200 million.) Goldman’s accrued bonuses for the first nine months of the year equaled 43 percent of its revenue and were down from the $16.7 billion that the firm accrued in 2009, or 47 percent of its revenue. (In a nod to the political gales blowing in its direction, Goldman accrued nothing for bonuses in the final quarter of 2009.)

At Morgan Stanley, half of the $24 billion in revenue the firm has generated in the first nine months of the year has been earmarked for compensation. At Lazard — a somewhat different Wall Street animal, in that it largely limits its actions to asset trading and advising on mergers, as opposed to trading on its own account — 61 percent of the revenue generated so far this year has been set aside for bonuses. And, incredibly, according to the Financial Times, UBS, the giant Swiss bank, has asked Swiss authorities to waive a $1 million bonus cap for its bankers “amid complaints” the cap “has strained some executives’ personal finances.”

Do Wall Street firms exist for the benefit of their shareholders, like other public companies, or do they exist primarily for the benefit of the people who happen to work there? The answer to this rhetorical question is painfully, and sadly, obvious. No other large public companies pay out anywhere near as high a percentage of revenue to their employees. But where is it written that this madness has to continue? Why does a financial engineer have to get paid exponentially more than a real engineer?

With his usual narrative flair, the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell recently tried to figure out, why Americans pay their “stars” so much money. “There was a time, not so long ago, when people at the very top of their profession — the talent — did not make a lot of money,” he wrote. That’s true of Wall Street as well: in 1949, when Felix Rohatyn started at Lazard Freres & Co., in New York, he was paid $37.50 a week. This was a 15 percent better weekly salary than Ace Greenberg received that year when he started at Bear Stearns, where he would eventually rise to chief executive and chairman.

As Gladwell explains — thanks to such visionaries as Marvin Miller, the former head of the Major Baseball Players Association, and Mort Janklow, the literary agent — the talent began taking a larger percentage of the pie. The logic evolved, soundly, that those who took the greatest risks or had achieved greatness on a daily basis deserved the bulk of the financial reward, as opposed to those who happened to own the team or the printing press. We may not always like Alex Rodriguez, but most Americans can understand why he got a $275 million, 10-year contract to play baseball; he’s one of the great players of all time, and his talents bring in the crowds (and TV money) to the Yankees.

In finance, the rough equivalent of A-Rod are top private-equity titans, like Steve Schwarzman and Henry Kravis, or hedge-fund managers, like John Paulson and James Simons. These men risk large chunks of their own money (as well as their investors’) and make calculated gambles they hope will pay off. If they bet right, they get fabulously wealthy; if they don’t, they disappear into oblivion. Teddy Forstmann, a onetime star of the private-equity firmament, explained to Gladwell why he chose that business: “I wanted to be a principal and not an agent.” He wanted to be the talent and to be paid like the talent, assuming he performed.

But unlike hedge-fund guys, investment bankers are not principals. They are agents. And they are at their best when they provide important services to their clients — such as advice on mergers and acquisitions or the capital their clients need to grow — and at their worst when they pretend to be principals, using other people’s money to make bets for their firms that they hope will be eventually reflected in their bonuses.

And yet, somewhere along the line, bankers decided that they deserved to get paid like those quantifiable talents who put themselves or their capital at risk day after day. This is what mystifies me, since, as a group, investment bankers are the most personally and professionally risk-averse people I’ve ever met. After all, in what other business could they make so much money without putting any of their own money on the line? Outsized financial rewards should be reserved for those who take outsized financial risks with their own money or have outsized, demonstrable talent. Investment bankers, by and large, just do not make that cut.

At the end of his essay, Gladwell tells the story of how the baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial, after turning in a batting performance that was 76 points below his career average in 1959, asked the St. Louis Cardinals for a 20 percent pay cut off his $100,000 annual salary. This was a decade before Marvin Miller came and changed the calculus for players. Gladwell concedes that Miller would have been appalled by Musial’s decision. “There wasn’t anything noble about it,” Musial said in explaining why he did it. “I had a lousy year. I didn’t deserve the money.”

Which brings to mind what happened to Felix Rohatyn, at Lazard, when he took the advice of Samuel Bronfman, the Seagram’s magnate, and switched from foreign-exchange trading to Lazard’s mergers-and-acquisition group, where he would go on to become a legend. The moment he made the switch, however, Andre Meyer, Lazard’s senior partner, cut Rohatyn’s annual pay to $10,000, from $15,000. And Rohatyn had not even had a bad year.

William D. Cohan on Wall Street and Main Street.

JPMorgan And HSBC Used "Secret Signals" To Manipulate The Silver Market

Angry Trader:
JPMorgan And HSBC Used "Secret Signals" To Manipulate The Silver Market, And They Bragged About It
Trader Peter Laskaris alleges that HSBC and JPmorgan manipulated the price of silver, causing him to lose money.

In his lawsuit against the two banks, Laskaris describes an elaborate plot with "diverse means" involving both lawful and unlawful acts committed by both JPMorgan and HSBC.

One sign this lawsuit is weird is that it doesn't separate what JPMorgan did from what HSBC did. Laskaris says they did almost exactly the same things, including:

Holding large positions in silver futures and silver options
Making large trades at key times
Making large "spoof" orders that are placed and then canceled after the order has influenced the price
Colluding, or communicating or signaling their trades to each other (JPM to HSBC and vice versa)
So according to the lawsuit, they were in it together.

A few interesting points:

The lawsuit says JPMorgan traders "bragged about their large trades which successfully moved silver prices."
It says that both banks cleaned up their behavior after conspiracy theories became public and the CFTC started investigating the claims, around March 2010. Soon after this time, he says, the price of silver futures rose.

It says JPMorgan and HSBC "calculated to conceal" their fraudulent activity through "secret signals, meetings and/or conversations."
Laskaris says he lost money because of the activity.

Firms Knew of Cement Flaws Before Spill (STILL NO JAIL TIME?)

WASHINGTON — Halliburton and BP knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable but still went ahead with the job, the presidential commission investigating the accident said on Thursday.

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday.

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident.

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner,” he said in his letter to the seven members of the presidential commission. “The cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

The failure of the cement set off a complex and ultimately deadly cascade of events as oil and gas exploded upward from the 18,000-foot-deep well. The blowout preventer, which sits on the ocean floor atop the well and is supposed to contain a well bore blowout, also failed.

In an internal investigation, BP identified the faulty cement job as one of the main factors contributing to the accident and blamed Halliburton, the cementing contractor on the Macondo well, as the responsible party. Halliburton has said in public testimony that it tested and used a proper cement formula on the well and said BP’s flawed well design and poor operations caused the disaster.

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was operated by a third company, Transocean.

Cathy Mann, a Halliburton spokesperson, said the company was reviewing the panel’s findings and would provide comment later Thursday.

Halliburton, a major oil field services company and one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, was once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Bartlit’s law firm, Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, has done legal work for Halliburton in the past but has not represented the company since 2005, the firm said.

After the commission report was released at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time, Halliburton’s stock price began dropping sharply, and was down more than 10 percent in mid-afternoon trading. BP shares rose slightly.

The commission obtained from Halliburton samples of the same cement recipe used on the failed well, including the same proportion of nitrogen used as a leavening agent and a number of chemicals used to stabilize the mixture. The cement slurry was sent to a laboratory owned by Chevron for independent testing.

The mixture failed nine separate stability tests designed to reproduce conditions at the BP well and did not pass any, according to Chevron’s test results, which were returned to the commission this week.

“Although laboratory foam stability tests cannot replicate field conditions perfectly,” Mr. Bartlit’s letter said, “these data strongly suggest that the foam cement used at Macondo was unstable. This may have contributed to the blowout.”

One and a half gallons of the actual mixture used on the doomed BP well survived the accident and are being held as evidence in ongoing criminal and civil investigations.

On April 19, just before technicians began pumping cement slurry down the well, Halliburton conducted one last test of the cement slurry. The company changed some of the conditions of the test, and appeared satisfied with the result, although those findings were not communicated to BP until after the well explosion, the commission found.

The commission concluded: “Halliburton may not have had — and BP did not have — the results of that test before the evening of April 19, meaning that the cement job may have been pumped without any lab results indicating that the foam cement slurry would be stable.”

Further, the panel found, “Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped at the Macondo well would be unstable, but neither acted upon that data.” Mr. Bartlit, who conducted a much-praised investigation of the 1988 Piper Alpha blowout in Britain’s North Sea, which killed 167 workers, said that even if the cement failed on the BP well, it was not the whole story of the accident. Many human and mechanical failures combined to create the disaster, he said, and backup systems were skipped or ignored.

“Because it may be anticipated that a particular cement job may be faulty, the oil industry has developed tests, such as the negative pressure test and cement evaluation logs, to identify cementing failures,” he wrote. “It has also developed methods to remedy deficient cement jobs. BP and/or Transocean personnel misinterpreted or chose not to conduct such tests at the Macondo well.”

JOHN M. BRODER NYTimes

QUOTATION OF THE DAY - "I will be working for the bank for the rest of my life. I will never own anything - not even a car."

Would someone please tell me why nobody is in jail for this world wide financial crime?

If the Tea Party wins, America loses with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann

Now a Special Comment on the madness of the Tea Party and the elections of next Tuesday.

It is as if a group of moderately talented performers has walked on stage at a comedy club on Improv night. Each hears a shout from the audience, consisting of a bizarre but just barely plausible fear or hatred or neurosis or prejudice.

And the entertainment of the evening is for each to take their thin, absurd premise, and build upon it a campaign for governor or congressman or senator. The problem is, of course, when it turns out that there is no audience shouting out gags, just a cabal of corporations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and political insider bloodsuckers like Karl Rove and Dick Armey and the Chicken Little Chorus of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

And the instructions are not to improvise a comedy sketch, but to elect a group of unqualified, unstable individuals who will do what they are told, in exchange for money and power, and march this nation as far backward as they can get, backward to Jim Crow, or backward to the breadlines of the ‘30s, or backward to hanging union organizers, or backward to the trusts and the Robber Barons.

Result: the Tea Party. Vote backward, vote Tea Party. And if you are somehow indifferent to what is planned for next Tuesday, it is nothing short of an attempt to use Democracy to end this Democracy, to buy America wholesale and pave over the freedoms and the care we take of one another, which have combined to keep us the envy of the world.

You do not think your freedom is at stake next Tuesday?

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for senator from Nevada, Sharron Angle just divorce and Social Security as some of this nation‘s quote, “wicked ways.” Ms. Angle also compared rape to, quoting, “a lemon situation in a lemon situation in lemonade.” She would deny an abortion even to a teenaged girl who had been raped by her own father.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate to be the only Congressman in Delaware, Glen Urquhart, said “there is no problem that abortion can‘t make worse. I know good friends who are the product of rape.”

Mr. Urquhart also says he does not believe the phrase “separation of church and state” was said by Thomas Jefferson. He thinks it was Hitler:

“The next time your liberal friends ask you about the separation of church and state, ask them why they are Nazis.”

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Ohio 9th, Rich Iott, not only ran around in a Nazi uniform celebrating their military tactics, but implies he is a veteran and as late as this March listed his occupation as “soldier,” even though the volunteer militia to which he belongs has never been called, will never be called, to any active service, in the 29 years in which he has belonged to it. Mr. Iott now claims Mr. Boehner is campaigning with him over the final days.

It‘s more than just dress-up. They mean business, literally. The Tea Party and-Republican-candidate for New Jersey‘s 3rd House seat, Jon Runyan, defended corporate tax loopholes: “Loopholes are there for a reason. They are to avoid people from really having to pay too many taxes.”

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for the Senate in West Virginia, John Raese, explained, quote, “I made my money the old-fashioned way, I inherited it. I think that‘s a great thing to do. I hope more people in this country have that opportunity as soon as we abolish inheritance tax in this country.”

The inheritance tax applies only to estates larger than 3.5 million dollars. For the 99.8 percent of Americans not affected by the estate tax, there is the minimum wage, which Mr. Raese also wants abolished. Or there is Social Security.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Indiana 9th, Todd Young, says “Social Security, as so many of you know is a Ponzi scheme.”

The Tea Party-and-Republican candidate in the Wisconsin 8th, Reid Ribble, disagrees. Social Security “is, in fact, a Ponzi scheme.”

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Arizona 8th, Jesse Kelly, wants to resurrect President Bush‘s scam to transform Social Security into private investment accounts so the government can force you to spend part of your paycheck on Wall Street commissions, and so that market manipulators can wipe out your retirement money.

The Republican candidate in the Wisconsin 1st, Congressman Paul Ryan, has a more sophisticated plan: Personal investment Social Security, guaranteed dollar for dollar by the government. A fiscal fountain of youth, until you find out its cost: Ryan would pay for it by taxing the health insurance you get from your employer.

If you are not employed, Mrs. Angle of Nevada says unemployment benefits can neither be increased nor extended because that “has caused us to have a spoilage with our ability to go out and get a job. There are jobs that do exist. That‘s what we‘re saying, is that there are jobs.”

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for Senator in Alaska, Joe Miller, says this is academic, because unemployment insurance is unconstitutional. His own wife received unemployment insurance after losing a temp job he got for her. Mr. Miller also called Medicaid unconstitutional. It proved his entire family had received Medicaid funds.

Mr. Miller also claims Social Security is unconstitutional, yet hypocritically he says it should still be paid out, and then the entire issue dumped into the laps of the states.

The Republican and Tea Party candidate for Senator in Colorado, Ken Buck, would not stop at butchering just Social Security. “Would a Veterans Administration hospital that is run by the private sector be better run then by the public sector? In my view, yes.”

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Pennsylvania 4th, Keith Rothfus, has promised to overturn anything the Supreme Court decides, with which he disagrees: “Congress‘s ultimate weapon is funding. If the Supreme Court rules you have to do something, we‘ll just take away funding for it.”

Back in Nevada, Mrs. Angle decries health care reform, and also health
care itself. “Everything that they want to throw at us,” she says, “is now covered under ‘autism‘,”

As to educating those children Mrs. Angle will not pay for, Mr. Buck of Colorado waxes nostalgic: “In the 1950‘s, we had the best schools in the world, and the United States government decided to get more involved in federal education. Well, since, we‘ve made education worse. We‘re gonna even get more involved.”

In Ken Buck‘s America of 1957, fewer than one in five Black children graduated high school. Fewer than half of white children did.

To the Tea Party and Republican candidate in the California 11th, David Harmer, Mr. Buck is a wild-eyed liberal. Mr. Harmer once advocated eliminating public schools altogether, and returning education in this country to where it was before 1876: “People acting in a free market found a variety of ways to pay for a variety of schools serving a variety of students, all without central command or control.” And without girls, blacks, or even the slightest chance you could go to college.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Virginia 11th, Keith Fimian, is “not so sure we need a federal bureaucracy for education.”

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Florida 2nd, Steve Southerland, wants to “de-fund” the Department of Education because “we can‘t afford it.”

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Texas 17th, Bill Flores, offers a tri-fecta plus a delusion. Get rid of “the pornographic endowment of the arts, Department of Energy, Department of Education” and with them, he says, ACORN. ACORN, which went out of business last April 1st.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Arizona 5th, David Schweikert, is “passionately,” he says, trying to eliminate the Department of Education because it‘s, quote, “unconstitutional.”

And while one of the few threads uniting the ragamuffins who constitute the slate of Tea Party candidates is so-called ‘strict interpretation‘ of that Constitution, Mr. Miller of Alaska wants, in fact, to change the Constitution. He wants to repeal the 17th amendment.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for Senate from Utah, Mike Lee, called that 17th amendment “a mistake.”

Last year, Mr. Buck of Colorado said the 17th amendment “took us down the wrong path.”

The 17th amendment, of course, permits the direct election by the voters of U.S. Senators. Buck and Lee and Miller not only demand you elect them to the Senate; they hope to then deny you the right to elect somebody else, next time.

The ubiquitous Mrs. Angle, meanwhile, wants to repeal the 16th amendment. It provided for a federal income tax. Mrs. Angle does not explain how, without that tax, the federal government would pay for keeping out the Mexicans she specifically attacks in her newest commercial.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for senator from Kentucky Rand Paul wishes to repeal the 14th amendment because it interferes with a private business‘s right to ban black people from its premises, and also because it allows anyone born here in America to be American. He is worried about anchor babies.

The Republican candidate for the 1st District of Texas, Louie Gohmert, fears not anchor babies but terror babies, unborn infants brought to this country in the womb, ready for American citizenship and pre-programmed to blow things up fifteen or twenty years from now. Curiously, Mr. Gohmert has not been asked if he is in favor of aborting them.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, sees not terror fetuses but headless bodies in endless deserts murdered by immigrants who are nearly all drug mules.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for governor of Colorado, Dan Maes, believes a bike-sharing program is part of a plot to turn Denver into a metropolis run by the United Nations.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for Senate from Delaware, Christine O‘Donnell, believes she was cleared to read secret classified documents about China because she‘s been working for nonprofit organizations for the past fifteen years. She also believes China is plotting to take over the United States. And the first evidence of this is that, quote, “China is drilling for oil off the coast of Florida.”

This fear of the Chinese clearly does not extend to the Tea Party and Republican candidate for Senate from Illinois, Mark Kirk. One day he held a fundraiser with American businessmen in China. The next day, he voted against closing tax incentives for outsourcing American jobs to places like China.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for Senate from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, is also in favor of relocating employees. He testified against toughening laws on pedophiles and employers who shield them. He argued this could damage a business. A business like the Catholic Church.

In Utah, the anti-bailout Senate candidate Mr. Lee insists on not raising the liability limits for the next BP from 75 million dollars to 10 billion dollars: “You have a set of settled expectations that you give to a business when it decides to make an investment in this. Our country benefits from this type of activity.”

Asked by the Salt Lake City Tribune if that‘s a kind of bailout, if it leaves taxpayers on the hook for part of the damage, Lee admitted, “Well, yea, probably does.”

Mr. Paul of Kentucky called the nationwide pressure on BP to increase its damage payments “un-American.” He is also opposed to federal mine safety regulations: “The bottom line is: I‘m not an expert, so don‘t give me the power in Washington to be making rules. You are here, and you have to work in the mines. You‘d try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don‘t, I‘m thinking that no one will apply for those jobs.”

Mr. Paul‘s admission that “I‘m not an expert” does provide one of the few dovetails of this campaign. It matches nicely with Mr. Johnson of Wisconsin, who refuses to offer any specifics about his plan to deal with homeless veterans. He says, quote, “this election is not about details.”

Details have proved devilish for the Tea Party and Republican candidate for the second district of Virginia, Scott Ridgell He campaigned against the stimulus bill, including the Cash-for-Clunkers program. Mr. Ridgell is an automobile dealer, and made hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Cash-for-Clunkers program.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate in the Missouri 4th, Vicky Hartzler, says she and her husband are just small business owners. “We just want the government to leave us alone,” she said. Hartzler and her husband have a farm. In the last fourteen years, that government they want to leave them alone has given them subsidies totaling 774,000 dollars.

Mr. Raese of West Virginia told the Associated Press that “America is in an industrial coma.” He blamed the “restrictor plate” that is “a bloated federal government.” “I can‘t think,” he added, “of very many times when a government agency has helped me.”

The companies Mr. Raese owns have received 2.4 million dollars in contracts from the federal government since 2000, and 32 million dollars in contracts from the state government since 2000.

Back in Colorado, Mr. Buck apparently thought he was just speaking to a campaign worker when he self-exposed his hypocrisy. In fact, he was talking to a Democratic operative with a recorder in his pocket. Out of the blue, Tea Party nominee Buck blurted, quote, “Will you tell those dumb asses at the Tea Party to stop asking me about birth certificates while I‘m on the camera? God, what am I supposed to do?”

The contempt of Mr. Buck towards his own Tea Party extends in many cases to reporters, and thus by proxy, to actual citizens. For instance, the Tea Party and Republican candidate for governor of Maine, Paul LePage, threatened to punch a radio reporter.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino, threatened to “take out” a reporter from the most conservative newspaper in any major American city.

A spokesman told the reporter that he was now off the Paladino mailing list, which has, in the past, consisted of e-mails featuring racism, pornography, and bestiality.

Mr. Miller‘s private security guards in Alaska detained and handcuffed a reporter, and threatened to handcuff two more, without any legal right to do so, at an event at a public school. The security company was operating with an expired license. Its chief, has links to extremist organizations. And the defense was that the guards didn‘t know the individual was a reporter, which implies it would be just dandy to handcuff an ordinary citizen.

Ms. O‘Donnell threatened to sue a Delaware radio station if it did not destroy the videotape of her interview there. When she did not like a question, she snapped her fingers at her own press aide, then shoved him. The campaign manager threatened to “crush” the station if it did not comply with them.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for the Senate from Florida, Marco Rubio, dreams more of deportation than of crushing. He said in March, quote, “there are millions of people in America that hate our country, so why can‘t we just do a trade? We‘ll send you Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, and Keith Olbermann, and you can send us people that actually love this country.”

This, incidentally, carries with it a tinge of irony. I don‘t know that any of his opponents has ever accused Mr. Rubio of not loving this country. He just doesn‘t love a lot of its people.

The person they all love the least is of course the President.

The Tea Party and Republican candidate for Congress from the Florida 22nd, Allen West, had to leave our military after threatening to kill an Iraqi he was interrogating in Iraq. Now he claims to have a higher security clearance than does the president. Mr. West also told his supporters that they could defeat his Democratic opponent by making the man afraid to leave his own home.

And Tea Party and Republican candidate for the House from the Michigan 7th, the ex-Congressman Tim Walberg, wants to blackmail the President into showing his birth certificate to Rush Limbaugh. He figures he can extort this from President Obama by threatening to impeach him.

You are willing to let these people run this country? This is the America you want? This is the America you are willing to permit? These are the kinds of cranks, menaces, mercenaries and authoritarians you will turn this country over to?

If you sit there next Tuesday and let this happen, whose fault will that be? Not really theirs. They are taught that freedom is to be seized and rationed. They can sleep at night having advanced themselves and their puppeteers and to hell with everybody else.

They see the greatness of America not in its people but in its corporations. They see the success of America not in hard work but in business swindles. They see the worthiness of America not in its quality of life, but in its quality of investing.

They see the future of America not in progress, but in revolution to establish a kind of theocracy for white males, with dissent caged and individuality suppressed.

They see America not for what is, nor what it can be. They see delusions, specters, fantasies. They see communists under every bed and a gun in every hand. They see tax breaks for the rich and delayed retirement for everyone else. They fight the redistribution of wealth not because they oppose redistribution, but because their sole purpose is to protect wealth and keep it where they think it belongs, in the bank accounts of the wealthy.

They want to make the world safe for Bernie Madoff.

But you know better. If you sit there next Tuesday—if you sit there tomorrow, and the rest of this week, and you let this cataclysm unfold, you have enabled this.

It is one thing to be attacked by those who would destroy America from without. It is a worse thing to be attacked by those who would destroy America from within.

But it is the worst thing to sit back and let it happen, to not find the time and the means to convince just one other sane voter to put aside the disappointment of the last two years and look to the future and vote. Because the disappointment of the last two years, those will be the “good old days” in a Tea Party America.

This is the week in which the Three Card Monte dealers hope to take over the government, the candidates who want their own way, who will say anything to make palatable their real identities as agents of regression, repression, and corporate sovereignty. They are here. They have energized the self-serving and the greedy and the proudly ill-informed.

And if no other fact convinces you of your obligation to vote and canvass and phone and even drag to the polls the most disheartened moderate or Democrat or Liberal or abandoned Republican or political neutral, to vote for the most tepid of the non-insane candidates—if no other detail hands you that spark of argument with which to invigorate the apathetic, you need only commit to memory the words of Steffan Broden and Sharron Angle.

She can run from reporters but she cannot run from this quote from January, and all the horror and insurrection it implies: “Thomas Jefferson said it‘s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that‘s not where we‘re going. But, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”

Sharron Angle too subtle for you? “Second Amendment” remedies? Guns instead of elections too implicit? Fortunately, to our rescue, to the speeding of the falling of the scales from our eyes, comes the Tea Party and Republican nominee for the 30th Congressional District of Texas, “Pastor” Steffan Broden. “Our nation was founded on violence,” he said, on tape.

Was armed insurrection, revolution, an option in 2010? “The option is on the table. I don‘t think that we should ever remove anything from the table. However, it is not the first option.”

Thank you! The attempt to overthrow the government of the United States by violence is not the Tea Party‘s first option. Next Tuesday is the first option!

The words are those of Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith from the screenplay for the movie “Inherit The Wind.” As the attorney for the man on trial for teaching evolution, Spencer Tracy, cuts to the gist:

“Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your honor, with banners flying and with drums beating, we‘ll be marching backward. Backward through the glorious ages of that 16th century when bigots burned the man who dared bring them enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!”

The angered judge replies, “I hope counsel does not mean to imply that this court is bigoted.” The attorney mutters, “well, your honor has the right to hope.” The Judge warns, “I have the right to do more than that.” The attorney explodes: “You have the power to do more than that.”

And you have the power to do more than that.