As usual, Democratic Presidents address insolvency, Republican Presidents make it worse

SOTU “enhanced”!

Update (Guest List! Courtesy of The Obama Diary!)

Sergeant Sheena Adams (Vista, CA), Team Advisor & Lead Instructor, Female Engagement Team

Alan Aleman (Las Vegas, NV), DREAM Student

Jack Andraka (Crownsville, MD), Winner of the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair

Susan Bumgarner (Norman, OK), Early Childhood Educator

Deb Carey (New Glarus, WI), Small Business Owner, New Glarus Brewing Company

Sergeant Carlos Evans, USMC (Cameron, NC), Wounded Warrior

Tim Cook (Cupertino, CA), CEO of Apple

Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton and Nathaniel A. Pendleton Sr. (Chicago, IL)

Menchu de Luna Sanchez (Secaucus, NJ), Registered Nurse, NYU Langone Medical Center

Bobak Ferdowsi (Pasadena, CA), Flight Director, Mars Curiosity Rover

Bradley Henning (Louisville, KY), Machinist, Atlas Machine and Supply

Tracey Hepner (Arlington, VA), Co-Founder, Military Partners and Families Coalition

Peter Hudson (Evergreen, CO), Co-Founder and CEO, iTriage

Governor John Kitzhaber (D-OR)

Mayor Marie Lopez Rogers (Avondale, AZ)

Amanda E. McMillan (Jackson, MS), Pay Discrimination Victim

Lee Maxwell (Wilton, IA), Graduate, Kirkwood Community College Wind Technician Program

Lieutenant Brian Murphy (Oak Creek, WI), The first police officer to arrive at the scene of the tragic Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin last August.

Lisa Richards (Arlington, VA), #My2K Participant

Kaitlin Roig (Greenwich, CT), 1st Grade Teacher, Sandy Hook Elementary School

Abby Schanfield (Minneapolis, MN), ACA Beneficiary

Haile Thomas (Tucson, AZ), Let’s Move! Champion

See biographical information here

 

It seems there’ll be another casino in Philly.

Dexter Filkins on unintended consequences and kill lists bwo Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Later, when I spoke to American officials, they seemed genuinely perplexed. They didn’t deny that a large number of civilians had been killed. They felt bad about it. But the aerial surveillance, they said, had clearly showed that a training camp for militants was operating there. “It was a terrible outcome,” an American official told me. “Nobody wanted that.”

[…]

But, as the details from the Al Majalah show, even the best-intentioned public servants operating with what appears to be decent intelligence can get things horribly wrong. Maybe Al Majalah was indeed an Al Qaeda training camp–maybe those aerial surveillance images were spot on. But, in retrospect, we know that the cameras missed the women and children.

I’m sure Obama trusts John Brennan. I’m sure John Brennan trusts these soldiers and CIA operatives who’ve sacrificed so much. I’m sure these soldiers and CIA operatives trust that they double checked, and re-checked all their information. And I trust that the overwhelming majority of them aren’t happy or ok with the collateral murder of innocent children and adults.

When we trust the Bush and/or Obama Administrations implicitly, with no due process and no oversight, to decide who is sentenced to life in Gitmo or death by drone you are also throwing your trust down this chain no matter what the links are. I think when dealing with the lives of American citizens more verification is needed.

Mind you, in the short term this is a congressional problem. The congress needs to pass laws to include these actions in the FISA court or create a new court for these “kill list” directives. The problem here is the Republicans have been lobbying for this kind of extra-presidential power for Bush’s term and have had moderate Democrats along for the ride.

This will only start after folks do the leg work of interviewing people in these villages and find out who died when the attacks occurred because it seems internally the policy as is “if we didn’t think there were kids when we fired the missiles, then no kids died”.

Elderly folks, rural communities and anyone with chronic conditions depend on the post office for medicine shipments from their private insurers. Saturday delivery helps that.

Many people who shop online (especially in sparse suburban and rural communities) and small packages (e.g. Netflix) depend on the post office for package delivery. And yes, that includes things ordered through UPS and FedEx who contract with the post office to deliver to rural and sparse suburban areas.

The post office is not bankrupt because of e-mail or Facebook. It’s because of unreasonable pension requirements passed into law by congress and signed by Bush:

But let’s not pretend its financial woes are the result of technological advances. It’s because the congress created rules for its pension plan that are designed to bankrupt it. This was no accident. Much like the teachers unions, postal workers are a strong Democratic constituency targeted for political reasons. (And yes, just as with ACORN, there are bunch of idiot Democrats who are helping to dig their own graves.)

These contribution levels have hurt the post office which runs on it owns profits (not taxpayer money), but pensions are not so independent:

A default of that magnitude sounds scarier than it actually is. Congress requires the Post Office to make inordinately huge pension-plan payments, for reasons which nobody can really understand. But in the final analysis, USPS pensions are a government obligation, and it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference whether they come out of a well-funded pension plan, a badly-funded pension plan, or just out of US government revenues.

What does make a lot of difference is the degree to which the Post Office is hamstrung by Congress. There’s still room for the Postal Service to reorient itself and become a successful 21st-century utility — but there’s no way that’s going to happen if it’s constantly on the back foot and if Congress prevents it from entering new businesses, possibly including banking.

Again, what did the Republican congress require the post office to do? Prefund it’s pensions in full for 75 years. There is no company or government agency that has to do that. none.

One prevalent myth is that delivering the mail to 150 million addresses six days a week, as more people turn to the Internet, puts taxpayers on the hook for multibillion-dollar losses. In fact, boosted by record worker productivity, the Postal Service is admirably weathering the worst economy in 80 years. In fiscal 2007 through 2010, if you subtract the related costs from the earned revenue from mail delivery (the Postal Service hasn’t received taxpayer money in 30 years), it had an operating profit of $611 million.

There is indeed red ink, but the reasons are unrelated to the mail. In 2006 Congress required that, within the next decade, the Postal Service pre-fund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years — a burden no other agency or company faces. That accounts for 85 percent of all of the agency’s red ink since — and more than 90 percent of the $6.46 billion shortfall from the first half of fiscal 2012. Before pre-funding began in 2007, the Postal Service had annual profits in the low billions. It’s this unaffordable payment that the Postal Service is “simply not capable of making” next month, a spokesman said this week.

The US Congress can save the Post Office by allowing them not to pre-fund the pension for 75 years. Then the USPS could focus on increasing revenue by including basic services like basic banking services (e.g. check cashing with nominal fees), currency exchanges and even payment processing for government agencies. On another note, you will hear many conservatives say the USPS should be privatized. Nothing that’s wrong with the USPS that needs privatization. And FedEx and UPS don’t have to do what the USPS has to do which is deliver mail to every postal address as mandated by the US Constitution.

There are liberals:

Personally, I think all presidents have too much power over life and death in this American Empire. But I really don’t trust presidents who create new powers to torture, kidnap and kill civilians with no due process and no accountability out of whole cloth. Bush did all that. As far as we know, Obama isn’t doing the torturing and kidnapping, but eliminating two out of three is hardly virtuous. He’s doing exactly what Bush did by issuing secret memos giving him extra-judicial powers, this time to draw up lists of humans to be targeted by drone planes — and he gave himself the power to order the murder of American citizens with no due process at all. That’s new. Very new. I think if anyone had blind faith in the president’s judgment that fact should make them take their blinders off.

via Hullabaloo.

and there are partisans:

Their protocol, their judgement. So yeah, I feel a whole lot better about the program when the decider, so to speak, is President Obama. That’s not to say that again the process shouldn’t be codified, that there shouldn’t be oversight. But really, is our standard so low that we would only grant powers to the executive that we would trust in the hands of a man who misled the nation into a war we never should have been involved in? What would George W. Bush do? That’s our standard? We would never allow a power to the presidency that we wouldn’t feel comfortable giving to George W. Bush? I think we can raise the bar a little bit from that. For a little perspective lets keep in mind that the president does have the unilateral power to drop nuclear bombs and destroy the whole planet. Do you feel the same about George W. Bush having that power as President Obama? Call me a hypocrite but I sure don’t.

From New York Times: Condoleezza Rice Forming Bipartisan Immigration Group:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is working to put together a group of high-profile Republicans and Democrats to find on bipartisan solutions to the immigration problem, a source familiar with the plans said on Friday.

This is another both sides need to settle in the middle, we will help find a grand compromise bargain meeting of the minds agreement caucus gang of some number less than 10 group last minute deal type of party.

In reality the Democrats have already compromised. Take for example the Dream Act a compromise on immigration policies for undocumented immigrants brought to America as children who have been long term residents and can only call the United States their home. This was a deal between house Democrat Luis Gutiérrez and Orrin Hatch in 2001 that was then rejected by Republicans and later by Hatch himself. Hatch abandoned his own plan in 2010 because of the ferocious challenge from the teabagger right being mounted against him for his senate seat in 2012. So if any work needs to be done to make bipartisan immigration reform, it’s by moving Republicans back to where they were in 2001. Not Democrats and Republicans. In addition, we have a high profile group who is supposed to work on immigration reform: congress.

Unless rumored involved players like former DNC chair, former Philadelphia Mayor, former PA Governor Ed Rendell and Hillary Clinton primary 08 surrogate is a tea bagger now, he’s around for some other reason. Probably more billable lobbyist hours. Nothing wrong with that. Just saying.

Barack Obama is done being President in less than four years.

So think about the president you didn’t vote for when you think about the super double secret memos containing legal opinions establishing torture as accepted practice whenever a President deems national security at risk in their opinion. If you voted for Obama and would support Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or the other Democrat in 2016, think about President McCain, Romney, Palin or Ryan authorizing deadly drone strikes against American citizens they have come to believe are too dangerous to live.

Remember, after Obama faltered in the October debate and Chris Matthews freaked out? The Obama administration scrambled to add additional rules regarding their drone program.

Even if you trust Obama’s judgement in staff, cabinet and life & death decisions, he’s not the president forever.