joy + misery

(Source: safe-legal-abortion-is-prolife, via fuckyeahfeminists)

rand0mflora:

thedailywhat:

CISPA Update of the Day: CISPA, the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act that passed the House in April, likely is headed for a Senate vote in early June.

To drum up opposition to the legislation, which would create “a ‘cybersecurity’ exemption to all existing laws,” Fight for the Future, Democrats.com, The Liberty Coalition, and the Entertainment Consumers Association have created a new website called Privacy Is Awesome. The site outlines the top five ways to help defeat CISPA:

• Call your senators and tell them to oppose the Lieberman-Collins bill (CISPA), and ask for a constituent meeting during the Memorial Day recess to help change their mind.
• Email senators offices about CISPA, expressing your opposition.
• Keep calling senators until they plan a constituent meeting.
• Donate to anti-CISPA organizers — the same teams that helped defeat SOPA/PIPA.
• Share your opposition online — Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is spearheading opposition to the legislation, concluding a recent Senate floor speech with:

I believe these bills will encourage the development of a cyber security industry that profits from fear and whose currency is Americans private data. These bills create a Cyber Industrial Complex that has an interest in preserving the problem to which it is the solution.

Watch the full video here. It’s terrific.

[death+taxes}

This is important.

(via asamies)

motherjones:

All the single ladies (All the single ladies) All the single ladies (All the single ladies) …could apparently cost Mitt Romney the presidency.

Stephanie Mencimer reports:

While Romney leads Obama among married women by about 9 points, Obama blows him away among single women by 36 points. This matters: There are 55 million single women in the United States. If they got motivated, they are a big enough block to swing the election.

Read the full piece here.

(via jasmined)

tpmmedia:

TPM’s Sarah Libby reports on the troubling results of all the recent redistricting:

That Democrats became roadkill during the latest round of redistricting, mostly at the hands of Republican state legislatures, has been well documented. But less widely known is that the casualties at the state level often hit women lawmakers the hardest — eating into the slow but steady gains women have made in statehouses across the country.

A closer examination shows that it’s not just Democratic women officeholders who have taken it on the chin, being drawn into districts with either more voters from the opposite party or another incumbent — or both. The redistricting process in several states could set women of both parties back, including many women in leadership positions.

In North Carolina, where Republicans controlled the redistricting process and women lawmakers have been particularly hard-hit, those dealt a tough blow by redistricting include state Sen. Linda Garrou, the deputy Democratic leader, and Rep. Martha Alexander, who has served for nearly 20 years and is a former co-chair of the redistricting committee. In all, 10 of 25 Democratic women lawmakers in the state were either “double bunked” — forced into a district with another incumbent — or drawn into heavily Republican districts.

“I just don’t see how that’s anything other than deliberate,” Carol Teal, executive director at Lillian’s List, a group working to elect pro-choice Democratic women in the Tarheel State, told TPM. “There’s no other category of people who took that kind of hit.”

(Read the full story)

(Source: rhrealitycheck, via fuckyeahfeminists)

tpmmedia:

An Obama Spending Spree? Hardly

TPM’s Sahil Kapur looks at the numbers behind a recurrent theme of recent budget debates:

A dominant theme of the national political discourse has been the crushing spending spree the U.S. has ostensibly embarked on during the Obama presidency. That argument, ignited by Republicans and picked up by many elite opinion makers, has infused the national dialogue and shaped the public debate in nearly every major budget battle of the last thee years.

But the numbers tell a different story.

The fact that the national debt has risen from $10.6 trillion to $15.6 trillion under Obama’s watch makes for easy partisan attacks. But the vast bulk of the increase was caused by a combination of revenue losses due to the 2008-09 economic downturn as well as Bush-era tax cuts and automatic increases in safety-net spending that were already written into law.

Obama’s policies, including the much-criticized stimulus package, have caused the slowest increase in federal spending of any president in almost 60 nears, according to data compiled by the financial news service MarketWatch.

(Read the full story)

tpmmedia:

TPM’s Sahil Kapur looks at the gap between what Senate Republican’s say about student loan rates and what they do:

Budget measures by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) went down 41-58 and 42-57, respectively. Both let Stafford loan rates double from 3.4 to 6.8 percent, which President Obama and Democrats have been pushing to prevent. Mitt Romney and GOP leaders say they want to extend the existing rate but differ on how to pay for it.

The budget votes were largely a Republican effort to embarrass President Obama and Democrats for failing to coalesce around a long-term fiscal vision. But it also presented an opportunity for Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) to needle the GOP on a contradiction.

“Does this budget permit the interest rates on student loans to double on July 1?” Harkin asked of the Ryan budget, which has already passed the House.

“It does,” Conrad replied.

“Thank you, senator,” Harkin said.

Harkin and Conrad repeated the exchange prior to the vote on the Toomey budget.

“I hope that every senator who votes for this knows … they’re voting to double student interest rates on July 1,” Harkin said.

The awkwardness of the situation wasn’t lost on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who voted for the Ryan plan. In a readout of a Wednesday lunch between Obama and congressional leaders, his office sent reporters notice that he affirmed his support for continuing the lower rates.

“We all agreed that rates shouldn’t go up this year and that we need to resolve the differences and pass legislation together,” said McConnell.

ATTENTION ANYONE WITH  STUDENT LOAN

tpmmedia:

New Wall Street Scandal Threatens Romney

TPM’s Brian Beutler looks at how JP Morgan’s recent loss of $2 billion from investments in a type of derivative heavily implicated in the 2008 financial crisis:

A surprising development on Wall Street Thursday could magnify a little-discussed but key difference between President Obama and Mitt Romney — one with enormous consequences for public policy.

On a conference call with analysts, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced that his firm had lost $2 billion investing in the same species of derivative that exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis.

Dimon claims the company is prepared to absorb the loss, but it puts the reputation of one of the only big firms to weather the 2008 financial crisis directly on the line.

This is exactly the type of major loss of depositor money that the Obama administration sought to ban with one of the major planks of its 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law — the Volcker Rule, named after former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. And that’s bad news for Romney, who wants to repeal the whole law, Volcker Rule and all.

(Read the full story)

baldmarlin:

voteagainstamendmentone:

dizzybox:

Thanks. 

aww

@jlwycoff (and others against Amendment One)

I’m impressed. I also wonder how soon that got ripped down by the rabid haters?