William Holder… Liar or Politically Motivated Regarding Marijuana

Does telling the TRUTH mean nothing any more in our society? Is it possible that the powers at be can simply say whatever the fuck they want, regardless of factual evidence to the contrary, and that none of the mainstream press or public officials will hold any one accountable for boldface lies? Apparently.

Yesterday US Attorney General Eric Holder, America’s Top Cop, straight up LIED to Congress and the American people. Here is the outright fucking big fat lie he told the House Judiciary Committee:

“We limit our enforcement efforts to those individuals, organizations that are acting out of conformity with state law,” Mr. Holder told a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing.

That is just not a truthful statement, no matter how you look at it. The attack has targeted some of the industry’s most upstanding organizations and those most definitely in compliance with state and local laws. Shit…Holder’s Department of Justice has targeted STATE EMPLOYEES with threats of prosecution just for implementing a program to have a state compliance medical cannabis environment. His statement just does not hold water…

From Northstone Organics, a group that helped develop a Mendo County compliance and regulatory model- to Marin Alliance, a 17-year-old model dispensing collective that complied with dozens of local limitations on operations and complied fully with state law- To Berkeley Patients Group, one of the industry’s oldest and most professional and generous organizations- to the several fully licensed San Francisco dispensaries forced to close by DOJ threats, Eric Holder and Obama’s Department of Justice have targeted hundreds of organizations that ARE in conformity with state laws.

Furthermore, who the fuck is the DOJ to enforce state law anyway, and how can they truly enforce a state law that no one really understands? In CA the State Supreme Court has several cases coming before it that all basically conflict in their interpretation of state law. If the appeals courts, DA’s, law enforcement, and medical cannabis patients and providers are not absolutely clear on the law, how the fuck is the DOJ so confident that everyone is breaking state law? It is absurd.

The fact is that this too, like selling guns to cartels and appeasing the Republican assholes on spending cuts in a time of recession, has blown up in the administration’s face. Instead of sending a message that they were tough on crime and convincing their drug warrior funders and law enforcement friends that they had the situation under control, they have unearthed a renewed discussion and debate about the ridiculous policies we have for weed in America. Their high profile raid of Oaksterdam, coupled with a growing dialogue about the wastefulness of prohibition, has electrified the national conversation on cannabis. Questions are being asked for which this administration, nor any of the drug warriors, have real answers for.

So they lie. They always have lied. The say cannabis has no medical value. LIE. They say weed is a dangerous gateway drug. LIE. They say marijuana makes people lazy and stupid. LIE. They say that pot will corrupt the nations’ youth. LIE. They swear the drug war is not a contrived bullshit war that allows them to create the danger so that they can convince us all how dangerous shit is, so that we will give them more money to keep us safe. LIES…..

But it is sad when the US Attorney General lies directly to the face of The House Judiciary Committee to hide his actions against the cannabis community. What is he ashamed of? He should be ashamed that we are still taking people to jail for weed in this day and age. He should be ashamed that he has blood on his hands in Mexico for his failure to end the madness. He should be ashamed that he is a sell-out tool for big business lobbies, including prisons for profit; and that he continues to enforce bad laws to serve the master of the almighty dollar. Holder should be ashamed that he allows for armed gunmen to storm American’s homes for weed. It is fucking pathetic, really.

So Eric Holder lies. He outright bullshits the members of congress and attempts to smear dozens of upstanding cannabis providers with zero evidence to back it up. Eric Holder is a big fat liar…. Or preparing for a legalization??

MEDICAL MARIJUANA… Really?? Lets just legalize it for ALL

Taking our medicine…

At what point does the cannabis movement catch up with reality?

Here is a hard cold fact…..most people who smoke pot are not sick. I know that is very hard for some in this movement to grasp on to and own; but nonetheless it is a fact.

I have mad respect for medical marijuana and lord knows I have met some true to life 100% legit users of marijuana as a medicine. I am not debating that there are many people in our society who indeed benefit from cannabis medicines. I am one of those people. I was hospitalized in a psych ward at the age of 12 for severe ADHD and placed on Ritalin for years. I also shattered my left heel and have 7 screws and a steel plate in my leg. Cannabis helps me to overcome the difficulties of these afflictions beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But even I know that all of my cannabis use is not strictly for my medical afflictions. I often enjoy just burning one before I watch a good flick, or will smoke far too many blunts and dabs to ever be considered a medical dose or application by any doctor’s standards. I am not alone either.

Much of the medical cannabis culture here in Cali, and in other medical cannabis states, do not revolve around a medical atmosphere. I can hear the diehard deniers now saying “It is more like an herbal medicine, Mickey.” Great….well it is not a traditional herbal medicine experience either. It is a culture that is based in decades of outlaw cannabis use and it is often the experience that is most notable…not the medicinal effects. I do not recall standing around the joint circle saying “Man, this doobie really helps me focus better, or control my pain.” There is a lot of discussion about the strains, and growing, and how awesome weed is; but very rarely do I feel like I am having a medical experience in my social interactions with cannabis, and cannabis users.

But nobody wants to own this fact. Our movement continues down the medicalization rabbit hole as if there is nothing to see here. We continue to try and look people in the eye and swear to Jesus that this entire industry is based on getting very sick people this very necessary medicine. The reality is that by any metric of what is considered medical in this society, we fail. The doctor’s office at the SmokeOut, the huge 420 joints, the half-naked chicks, and the general over-indulgence by many (including myself) to what is considered an appropriate medical use.

Just take edibles for instance….the current edible market has products labeled from 100-500 mg of THC. Consider that Marinol comes in three different strengths…2.5 mg/5 mg/10 mg. I was prescribed the highest dosage of 10 mg. The dosage was “take one tablet orally daily.” That is considered a medical dose. Maybe two tablets daily, if you have more serious issues. But our industry is consistently pushing dosages at 10-50 times a standard medical dose. Why? Because people want to get fucked up….

You can say it out loud…it is okay. Everyone else is. It seems that the only people who believe that the current medical industry is truly medical are the folks making a killing by it being limited to a medical only market…doctors, some dispensary operators, and some policy groups. They continue to fail to recognize the truth that is right in front of them, and are surprised when public officials, law makers, and law enforcement call bullshit. Most dispensaries walk the fine line, and try to put their best foot forward in maintaining a medical image. But if you ever sit back and watch the transactions happening, often (not always) there is more discussion of how good the weed is, rather than what symptoms it helps or what appropriate medical dosage levels are.

Yes. Marijuana is different than most medicines. It is a plant that comes in many different types and flavors. It is far more interesting than this pill or that pill. But do yourself a favor. Go sit in your local Walgreen’s for about 20 minutes and watch the transactions happening at the pharmacy there; then go sit at your dispensary for 20 minutes and observe the transactions there. It is just a completely different situation. For better or worse, the current situation for cannabis leaves a lot to be desired…for those of us who love cannabis, and for those who oppose cannabis.

So is anyone surprised that the US Attorney’s office is staging a massive crackdown on the industry because they believe that the industry is not medical at all? They are not standing there saying that “Cannabis is not a medicine” any more. What they are saying is “cannabis is a medicine for some people, but not all these motherfuckers.” Do not believe me? Here is a quote from the US Attorneys from october when they began staging the crackdown:

Laura Duffy, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California told KPCC’s Patt Morrison Friday that, overall, the effort aims to shut down retail pot dispensaries. “These are businesses that are, in large part, visited by healthy young people who have gone out and paid for doctor recommendations to obtain marijuana. These are a lot of youth and recreational drug users,” she said.

Duffy said the crackdown isn’t aimed at people who have a legitimate need for medical marijuana. Her sentiment has been echoed by Birotte. He says all for-profit, commercial marijuana operations are illegal, no matter where the dispensary is located. “While California law permits collective cultivation of marijuana in limited circumstances, it does not allow commercial distribution through the storefront model we see across California,” he said.

So we can continue to bullshit ourselves if we want and hope that they do not drive us all (or most) to extinction. Or we can take our medicine, understand that the jig is up, and take the battle to the next level….adult use of cannabis. If we choose to bury our head in the sand and deny that a lot of what happens in this industry crosses certain medical lines, then we will be destined to fail. The choice is ours. Just remember, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

#QuitTakingPeopleToJailForWeed

The Big Apple begins to make sense on weed……

New York has been a major headache for marijuana enthusiasts for a long time. Since Rudy Guliani took office in the 90′s we have seen marijuana arrests go through the roof. It is unacceptable and finally Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg agree that New York should quit taking people to jail for weed. The cost to our society is too great and we lock up a disproportionate amount of minorities in the process. It is not working, and finally reality is catching up to bureaucracy. Hopefully they pass decrim and move on towards complete legalization in the very near future.

So if the Governor and Mayor of the Nation’s most storied City and State can agree that we need to Quit Taking People To Jail For Weed, then we should be following their lead and demand that the entire nation needs to do the same. Remember, it was when New York declared they would no longer enforce alcohol prohibition that the walls came crumbling down. Hopefully we see the same happen here. #SummerOfBuds

Here is a good article from Bloomberg:

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-06-04/cuomo-said-to-seek-decriminalization-of-small-amounts-of-pot.html

Cuomo Seeks Decriminalization of Small Amounts of Marijuana

By Freeman Klopott - Jun 4, 2012

Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed a measure meant to reduce the number of people arrested for marijuana possession after they’ve been detained under the New York City Police Department’s so-called stop-and-frisk policy.

Cuomo, a 54-year-old Democrat, said today at a news conference in Albany that he wants legislators to decriminalize possession of 25 grams or less of marijuana that’s in public view. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he supports the change.

About 94 percent of the more than 50,000 arrests last year in the state for 25 or fewer grams of marijuana were in New York City, and 82 percent of those arrested were black or Hispanic, the governor said.

“This is about creating fairness and consistency in our laws,” Cuomo said. “The problem is the law, and the solution is to change the law.”

Cuomo’s initiative would put New York among more than a dozen states that have taken similar action, including California and Connecticut. A bill that would decriminalize possession of 15 grams (0.5 ounces) or less of marijuana was approved by a New Jersey Assembly committee last month.

New York’s Legislature in 1977 reduced the penalty for possessing 25 grams or less of pot to a violation that carries a fine of as much as $100 for first-time offenders. It’s still a misdemeanor if the drug is viewed in public, which happens when someone is asked to empty his or her pockets during a police stop.

The governor’s decriminalization plans were first reported today by the New York Times. (NYT)

‘Right Balance’

Bloomberg backed the governor’s proposal, citing a Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s order in September that officers issue violations to people with small amounts of marijuana rather than make arrests.

Cuomo’s initiative “strikes the right balance by ensuring that the NYPD will continue to have the tools it needs to maintain public safety — including making arrests for selling or smoking marijuana,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

Under Cuomo’s proposal, smoking marijuana in public would remain a misdemeanor.

City police have made stopping residents on the street and searching them a cornerstone of crime prevention.

Searching Citizens

Last year, the New York Police Department stopped and interrogated people 685,724 times, an increase in street stops of more than 600 percent since Bloomberg’s first year in office, according a report by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Nine out of 10 people stopped were innocent, meaning they were neither arrested nor ticketed. About 87 percent were black or Latino, according to the organization.

Cuomo’s proposal would reduce the effect of those stops on people whose records are scarred by the convictions, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said today in a telephone interview.

“We hope this would reduce the incentive for NYPD to continue its out-of-control stop-and-frisk campaign,” Lieberman said. “We will continue to call for major reform until stop- and-frisk is reined in.”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, said he supports the law change. Scott Reif, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, a Long Island Republican, declined to comment.

Connecticut Becomes The 17th State To Allow For The Limited Legalization Of Marijuana As Medicine

Democrat Gov. Dan Malloy signed legislation into law on Friday, June 1, allowing for the state-sanctioned production, distribution, and use of cannabis for therapeutic purposes. The new law – Public Act 12-55, An Act Concerning the Palliative Use of Marijuana– will take effect on October 1, 2012.

“For years, we’ve heard from so many patients with chronic diseases who undergo treatments like chemotherapy or radiation and are denied the palliative benefits that medical marijuana would provide,” Governor Malloy said in a prepared statement. (Read it here.) “With careful regulation and safeguards, this law will allow a doctor and a patient to decide what is in that patient’s best interest.”

Under the law, patients with a qualifying “debilitating medical condition” must receive “written certification” from a physician and register with the state’s Department of Consumer Protection (DCP). Qualifying patients and their primary caregivers will be allowed to possess a combined one-month supply of cannabis, the specific amount of which will be determined by a board consisting of eight physicians certified by appropriate medical boards and enforced through DCP regulations. Patients may obtain marijuana from certified pharmacists at licensed dispensaries, who will obtain it from licensed producers. The law allows for the licensing of at least three, but no more than ten, producers statewide.

Said Erik Williams, Executive Director of Connecticut NORML, who assisted in drafting the bill and generated over 36,000 phone calls and e-mails to lawmakers in support of the measure, “I am so happy for all the patients who will have another medicinal option to discuss with their doctor and for all of those currently suffering with debilitating conditions who will no longer suffer the indignity of being sick and a criminal.”

Connecticut is the 17th state since 1996 to allow for the limited legalization of medicinal cannabis. It is the fourth New England state to do so, joining Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont — each of which allow for qualified patients to possess and cultivate limited quantities of the plant.

Late last month, Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee signed into law similar legislation allowing for the state-licensed production and limited distribution of medicinal cannabis. Vermont lawmakers in 2011 approved a similar measure; however, to date the state has yet to license any statewide dispensaries. Presently, a total of eight state-licensed medical marijuana dispensaries are operating in Maine.

Similar state-licensed dispensaries operate in Colorado and New Mexico. Additional licensing legislation awaits implementation in Arizona, Delaware, New Jersey, and Washington, DC.

New York Governor Cuomo: We Need To Fully Decriminalize Marijuana Possession

In an unprecedented and frankly unexpected political move yesterday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo held a press conference and announced that he supports legislation to amend and modernize New York’s thirty-four year old cannabis ‘decriminalization’ laws.

From New York Post

The state and national press reaction has been both overwhelming and uniformly positive. Even Mayor Michael Bloomberg and long-serving NYPD chief Raymond Kelly, the barely cloaked targets of Cuomo’s actions for their overly aggressive and racially disparate enforcement of cannabis laws in New York City over the last decade, have publicly stated that they too support Governor Cuomo’s call for change in cannabis laws in New York.

My own speculation is that Governor Cuomo, eying the Democratic nomination to the  U.S. presidency in 2016, wants to properly position himself as a bona fide cannabis law reformer as cannabis law reform is actually a very popular political topic among the American electorate as approximately seventy-five percent of the public supports medical access to cannabis; seventy-three percent support decriminalization cannabis use and possession; and now fifty percent of the public supports outright cannabis legalization.

You know the end of Cannabis Prohibition is on the near horizon when ascending politicians believe the need for beefing up on their cannabis law reform successes is a necessary prelude to run for president.

Apparently, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and Drug Policy Alliance director Ethan Nadelmann agree too with my speculations about Governor Cuomo…

 

Think Tank Shelves Marijuana Dispensary Study Following Outcry From Law Enforcement

Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation has removed a study from its website that found that a city-mandated closure of medical marijuana dispensaries in 2010 was associated with increased incidences of criminal activity.

RAND’s decision to shelve the study appears to have been motivated by criticism levied at the institute by Los Angeles city attorney’s office, which had previously argued that medical cannabis facilities were magnets for criminal activity. RAND’s study, published in September, refuted that claim, concluding, “[W]e found no evidence that medical marijuana dispensaries in general cause crime to rise.”

Previous analyses of crime statistics in Denver, Los Angeles, and Colorado Springs had separately disputed the notion that the locations of dispensaries are associated with elevated incidences of criminal activity.

RAND’s study “has been withdrawn pending further review,” said Warren Robak, a media spokesperson for the think tank. “I don’t have an estimate of when the review will be complete and the study will reappear.”

He explained, “We took a fresh look at the study based in part upon questions raised by some folks following publication.” Robak further added that the agency that was the “most vocal in its criticism of the study” was the L.A. city attorney’s office.

RAND had previously argued that their study was “the first systematic analysis of the link between medical marijuana dispensaries and crime.”

Study: Medical Cannabis Dispensaries Not Associated With Neighborhood Crime

T

The establishment of medical cannabis dispensaries does not adversely impact local crime rates, according to a federally funded study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Investigators at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) examined whether the proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries is associated with elevated crimes rates. Researchers assessed the spatial relationship between density of medical marijuana dispensaries and two types of crime rates (violent crime and property crime) in 95 census tracts in Sacramento, California, during the year 2009.

Researchers reported: There were no observed cross-sectional associations between the density of medical marijuana dispensaries and either violent or property crime rates in this study. These results suggest that the density of medical marijuana dispensaries may not be associated with crime rates or that other factors, such as measures dispensaries take to reduce crime (i.e., doormen, video cameras), may increase guardianship such that it deters possible motivated offenders.”

Authors acknowledged that their findings “run contrary to public perceptions” and that they conflict with public statements made by the California Police Chief’s Association, which had previously claimed, “Drug dealing, sales to minors, loitering, heavy vehicle and foot traffic in retail areas, increased noise, and robberies of customers just outside dispensaries are … common ancillary by-products of (medicinal cannabis) operations.”

The UCLA is not the first study to dispute the allegation that brick-and-mortar dispensaries are adversely associated with crime. A 2011 study of crime rates in Los Angeles published by the RAND Corporation similarly concluded, “[W]e found no evidence that medical marijuana dispensaries in general cause crime to rise.” However, shortly following its publication RAND removed the study from its website after their findings were publicly criticized by the Los Angeles city attorney’s office.

Other analyses of crime statistics in the cities of Denver, Los Angeles, and Colorado Springs have separately disputed the notion that the locations of dispensaries are associated with elevated incidences of criminal activity.

New Hampshire Lawmakers Send Medical Marijuana Legalization Measure To Governor’s Desk

Less than one week after Connecticut became the 17th state to legalize the therapeutic use of cannabis, lawmakers in the New Hampshire House and Senate late today affirmed their support for legislation to allow for the personal possession, cultivation, and use of the plant for medicinal purposes.

This afternoon, House lawmakers on a voice vote reaffirmed their prior support for Senate Bill 409, which they had previously approved last month by a veto-proof super-majority. Members of the Senate then approved the measure by a vote of 13-9 — a gain of two ‘yes’ votes since the Senate had previously acted on the bill in March. (A cosponsor of the bill, Senator John Gallus, R-Berlin, was not present for today’s vote.)

The bill now goes to Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, who has previously voiced his opposition to the measure. In 2009, Gov. Lynch vetoed a separate medical marijuana measure. An effort to override Lynch’s veto that year was successful in the House but fell just shy in the Senate of the necessary two-thirds majority support.

If Gov. Lynch vetoes this year’s legislation, proponents will need at least two additional ‘yes’ votes in the Senate to pass SB 409 into law.

In a press release issued by the Marijuana Policy Project, Senator Jim Forsythe (R-Strafford), the bill’s prime sponsor, vowed to continue working to gain the two additional Senate votes necessary if a veto override is needed. “Most senators now agree we have a moral obligation to protect seriously ill patients from being arrested in our state,” he stated.

If you reside in New Hampshire, you can contact Gov. Lynch on behalf of the measure here.

Rhode Island General Assembly Reduced Criminal Marijuana Penalties

By a vote of more than 2 to 1, members of the Rhode Island General Assembly today approved legislation to significantly reduce the state’s criminal marijuana possession penalties.

Members of the House and Senate passed twin bills, House Bill 7092and Senate Bill 2253, which amend state law so that the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana by an individual 18 years or older is reduced from a criminal misdemeanor (punishable by one year in jail and a $500 maximum fine) to a non-arrestable civil offense — punishable by a $150 fine, no jail time, and no criminal record. You can read NORML’s testimony in favor of these measures here.

House Bill 7092/Senate Bill 2253 now await concurrence votes, after which time they will be sent to Gov. Lincoln Chafee. [Update: In a radio interview this morning, Gov. Chafee stated that he is 'inclined' to sign the measures into law. Read the full summary of Chafee's remarks here.] If you reside in Rhode Island, you can contact Gov. Chafee on behalf of these measures here.

According to a 2012 statewide poll, commissioned by the Marijuana Policy Project, 65 percent of Rhode Island’s residents are in favor of decriminalization. In recent years, neighboring Connecticut (in 2011) and Massachusetts (in 2009, via a voter-approved initiative) have enacted similar marijuana decriminalization laws.

Rhode Island lawmakers have previously approved legislation legalizing the possession and state-licensed distribution of cannabis for therapeutic purposes.

Presently, in eight states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, and Oregon — the private, non-medical possession of marijuana by an adult is defined under the law as a civil, non-criminal offense.

Five additional states — Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio — treat marijuana possession offenses as a fine-only misdemeanor offense. Alaska law imposes no criminal or civil penalty for the private possession of small amounts of marijuana by adults.

GOP Confused…. Puts Cart Before Horse… Distorts Truth About Europe’s Problems

Forgetting that the real problem in Europe is that the push for austerity has caused so much pain that the Europeans are revolting in huge numbers the house Republicans are pushing for an identical problem in the USA… There is no real debt problem base3d on recent studies .. at least no where near Europe’s size as a measure… and truth is Obama has been tighter on Spending since any administration since the 950′s… but Republicans are playing a fear card to a public that does not understand… and if they succeed there will be a civil war in this country from a class warfare to an oppressed peoples that will  dwarf the American civil War in the extent of its division of this Country.

That having been said here is what Boehner and Cantor have to say… which I believe to be more lies and distortions of truths to fit their ideology… 

House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor responded Friday to President Obama’s speech on the economy and the Euro crisis. In that speech, Obama blamed Republicans for opposing stimulus that he said would have created a million new jobs. He also blamed “headwinds” from the European financial crisis for slower job recovery in America.

At the brief press conference, Cantor said Obama was playing a “blame game,” and that House Republicans wanted to extend Bush-era tax cuts and repeal health care reform to stimulate the economy. “It’s not because of the headwinds of Europe…It’s not because of House Republicans. It’s because of the failed stimulus policies and other items in [Obama's] agenda that small businesses in this country aren’t growing,” Cantor said at the brief press conference. The duo also ridiculed Obama for saying the private sector is “doing just fine.”

Cantor conceded that Europe is “a serious problem,” for America’s economy, but he and Boehner said the best way to address that is by reducing America’s debt. “Just because Europe has problems doesn’t mean that we can’t begin to solve our problems,” Boehner said. “If we don’t get busy dealing with our debt we’ll be in the same shape.”

Rick Santorum Promises GOP Convention Platform Fight

ROSEMONT, Ill.—Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have never gotten along, and while the primaries are effectively over, their intraparty rivalry could stretch on through the summer.

With 267 delegates pledged to him so far, Santorum is planning to flex his muscle at the Republican National Convention in August, where he predicted Friday there could be a showdown over the party platform between the social conservative delegates who pledged support for him and Ron Paul’s libertarian supporters. Paul’s campaign predicts that about 200 delegates will attend the convention on his behalf.

Both want a piece of the party platform, but the candidates agree on very little politically. Speaking to reporters here Friday at a conservative conference, Santorum said his supporters are ready for a “fight” in Tampa.

“I want to make sure that our delegates have an opportunity to come. Many of these folks were great volunteers and workers for us, and I want to make sure they have the opportunity to experience that convention, and we have other candidates who have delegates coming who, let’s put it this way, may have a different approach, particularly to the platform,” Santorum said. “Some of the other issues that are going to be discussed at the convention. I want to make sure that the folks who represent the values that I did during this campaign are also able to come to that convention and have their voices heard. I certainly have encouraged everyone to support Governor Romney as I have, but there are a lot of other issues at the convention other than just voting for the nominee.”

Santorum added that he would spend the months before the August convention ensuring that his delegates are “armed and ready to engage the fight.”

Paul, a candidate who advocates for a noninterventionist foreign policy and drug decriminalization, recently told supporters his delegate count puts him “in a tremendous position to grow our movement and shape the future of the GOP.”

During the primaries, the two candidates spent plenty of time at each other’s throats: They sparred constantly during the debates on foreign policy, and even attacked each other personally onstage. During the February GOP debate in Mesa, Ariz., Paul called Santorum “fake.”

Money = 1…. Democracy = 0 ; Wisconsin Shows the Power of Money

The Wisconsin recall elections left Scott Walker safe, but showed that American democracy isn’t faring as well. The bitter recall election battle there has brought into sharper relief how our politics are changing structurally and what is being lost.

Were politics baseball, none of this would matter.

Scott Walker and the Republicans took the series in Wisconsinrecall elections yesterday. They gave Democrats and Big Labor a drubbing. The breakfast banter over exit polls and who will win the White House in November – no more reliable than insisting the Dodgers will take the World Series because they have the best record in the majors today – would be cream for the morning coffee.

But unlike baseball, politics has consequences, and they run much deeper than how one ballot might tip the next. In one way or another, the Wisconsin experience reflects the wrenching decisions that states under both Republican and Democratic leadership are having to make in the face of ballooning deficits.

But perhaps because of Wisconsin’s long tradition of civility and compromise in the public arena, the bitter recall battle there has brought into sharper relief how our politics are changing structurally and what is being lost.

Gov. Scott Walker swept into office in the 2010 tea party wave that also put Republicans in control of the US House of Representatives. Refusing federal stimulus funds for high speed rail development despite Wisconsin’s flagging economy, $2.5 billion budget deficit, and swelling unemployment, he promised to create 250,000 new jobs and jump start growth through fiscal reforms.

Mr. Walker’s primary target was labor. Since the adoption of collective bargaining for public employees in 1959, enrollment in Wisconsin’s public unions grew five-fold, from 7 percent to 36 percent, by 2010.

As a candidate, Walker advocated requiring public employees to pay more toward their pensions. But once in office, he backed a bill stripping the right to collective bargaining over pensions and health care from nearly all of the state’s public unions in addition to tying salary adjustments to the rate of inflation. The unions cried foul.

That policy shift and subsequent underhanded Republican tactics in the state Senate to push the bill through launched the movement to depose Walker, his lieutenant, the senate majority leader, and three other Republican senators.

The recall highlighted one structural change and two trends threatening the American form of self-government.

The first change is the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting political expenditure by corporations and unions. This year’s election cycle marks the first significant opportunity to gauge the impact of that ruling, and already the change is significant.

It allowed one person – billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson – to almost single-handedly finance Newt Gingrich’s presidential ambitions through the super PAC Winning Our Future. It arguably tilted the playing field in Wisconsin, where billionaires Mr. Adelson, David Koch, Amwayfounder Richard de Vos, and others poured millions into the recall campaign through various conservative and pro-Walker groups, helping the incumbent build a 7 to 1 funding advantage over his rival.

The second change to American democracy this recall election highlighted is the growth of off-campus legislation-producing organizations. External influence in lawmaking is nothing new, but it is becoming more formal and sophisticated.

The Washington-based American Legislative Exchange Council (known by its acronym ALEC), for example, brings together lawmakers, corporate lawyers, and other stakeholders to draft legislative templates for Congress and state legislatures. Walker’s most controversial education reforms grew out of this process, and the same measures showed up in other states.

The third factor threatening American governance is intransigence. There is a wide gulf between the kind of shrewd political muscle that made Lyndon Johnson an effective majority leader and the oppose-everything approach of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Their hardline stance has filtered out to the states as the tea party flexes its demands for more conservative, more inflexible leaders and candidates. In Wisconsin, Republican state senator Dick Spanbauer, exasperated with his own party, is following Maine Senator Olympia Snow’s path into retirement.

For decades Republicans have cited the 10th Amendment principle of federalism as evidence of the Framers’ intent to limit the role of the federal government by leaving all but a few specified functions – the national budget and defense – to the states. Wisconsin shows how the conservative movement is shifting, evolving its strategy to advance its agenda in the name of federalism.

Fifteen years ago, Republicans in Congress advocated sweeping changes at the federal level – welfare reform, for instance, and dismantling the department of education. Now, they’re chipping away at the institutions they oppose and weakening the diverse constituencies on the left through coherent policy reforms financed and conceived of or enhanced externally.

According to the National Conference of State Legislators, there are now more than 100 bills in process to end collective bargaining. Like similarities occur in education and voter registration reforms across Republican-controlled states.

Against these threats, and with moderates increasingly standing down or voted out, it is hard to see how an ethos of compromise can be restored to American politics. The notion of shared interests seems temporarily, at least, to have been lost. And that may be the value of Wisconsin.

Recalls are rare. In all of American history, Wisconsin’s was the third. They have a taint of something tawdry, or else of desperation. In Wisconsin, people were moved by deep frustration and dismay over the tactics of those they entrusted to govern. More than 900,000 people’s signatures were gathered on the recall petition of Governor Walker. There was a decided sense of the people pushing pack.

We need more Wisconsins – not recalls, per se, but spirited public engagement to reclaim the public square for fair and robust debate. Neither side has all the answers on the urgent challenges that we face. We share the same interests. It should not be this hard to listen to each other.

BIG Brother Bigger Than Originally Thought… and Scarier Too

Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” painted a scary picture of the future in a number of ways. For privacy advocates, one of several nightmarish technologies used in the film allowed outdoor signs and billboards to play targeted interactive advertisements by scanning the eyeballs of passers-by in order to identify them. Such technology isn’t widely available yet, but Intel plans to take a big step toward a future chock-full of invasive ads when it launches a new TV advertising platform that makes use of facial recognition to target ads to viewers.

A report from Reuters on Friday suggests that Intel is currently in talks with content providers to offer a set-top box and customized television service combination that could change the way consumers pay for TV service. Media content providers are said to be reluctant, of course, but Intel is reportedly talking about breaking up the standard all-or-nothing model by launching a service that offers specific channels or even shows at prices below those paid by cable and satellite providers.

To sweeten the deal, the technology company is said to be pitching its service alongside a set-top box that will deliver targeted ads with scary accuracy.

Intel’s system is said to use facial recognition technology that will allow it to serve targeted ads rather than broadcasting the same ads to all viewers in a market. While Reuters’s sources indicate that the system will not identify specific individuals, it will be able to ascertain a viewer’s age and gender in order to deliver ads that have a statistically better chance of prompting purchases.

“If they can create a virtual network and it incorporates proprietary Intel technology, they could certainly bring something different to the subscription TV model,” JMP analyst Alex Gauna told Reuters.

The news comes as rumors and speculation surrounding an upcoming Apple “iTV” heat up. Apple is said to beplanning a new television with Siri-powered controls and a unique content subscription model that could offer channels in app-like bundles.

Einstein Right On Speed of Sub Atomic Particles Called Neutrinos

Scientists on Friday said that an experiment which challenged Einstein’s theory on the speed of light had been flawed and that sub-atomic particles — like everything else — are indeed bound by the universe’s speed limit.

Researchers working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research(CERN) caused a storm last year when they published experimental results showing that neutrinos could out-pace light by some six kilometres (3.7 miles) per second.

The findings threatened to upend modern physics and smash a hole in Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which described the velocity of light as the maximum speed in the cosmos.

But CERN now says that the earlier results were wrong and faulty kit was to blame.

“Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down,” said the centre’s research director Sergio Bertolucci.

“The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action.

“An unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That’s how science moves forward.”

The neutrinos were timed on the journey from CERN’s giant underground lab near Geneva to theGran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, after travelling 732 kilometres (454 miles) through the Earth’s crust.

To do the trip, the neutrinos should have taken 0.0024 seconds. Instead, the particles were recorded as hitting the detectors in Italy 0.00000006 seconds sooner than expected, the preliminary experiment had shown.

Researchers updated the science community on Friday at the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, being held in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto.

“The previous data taken up to 2011 with the neutrino beam from CERN to Gran Sasso were revised taking into account understood instrumental effects,” the team said.

“A coherent picture has emerged with both previous and new data pointing to a neutrino velocity consistent with the speed of light.”

The initial findings had been greeted with a combination of excitement and scepticism, even from those involved in the experiment, who urged other physicists to carry out their own checks to corroborate or refute what had been seen.

“If this result at CERN is proved to be right, and particles are found to travel faster than the speed of light, then I am prepared to eat my shorts, live on TV,” Jim Al-Khalili, a professor of theoretical physics at Britain’s University of Surrey, declared at the time.

Taco Bell UPSCALE… SAY WHAT??

(Image credit: Cantinabell.com)

Who says fast food can’t have a touch of fine dining?  Taco Bell announced plans Wednesday for a new upscale menu, in an attempt to compete with popular restaurant chain Chipotle.

Miami chef Lorena Garcia, an upcoming “Top Chef Masters” competitor, began collaborating on the menu with Taco Bell in October in 2010.

“They have a passionate fan base that loves the great taste of the classic menu items – and they don’t want to change that. They were looking to keep these menu items and expand their food to offer new flavors with great taste,” said Garcia in a statement.

Whole black beans, cilantro rice, citrus marinated chicken, Haas avocado guacamole and corn salsa are some of the new items that will be added to the menu.

The restaurant is known for less health-conscious late-night dining items like cheese roll-ups, volcano tacos and large nachos.  Their newest item, Doritos Los Tacos, sold over 100 million in past 10 weeks.

Taco Bell, which is comprised of over 5,600 restaurants, will roll out the new menu July 5 at a suggested $5 or less per item.

Facebook Expected to be Dead and Gone in 5-8 years

As if the IPO fumble and lawsuit pile-on weren’t a couple black eyes for Facebook, now comes an insult even more wounding: People are just bored with the social network.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll counted 34% of its users slacking off, compared with six months ago.

The most frequent Facebook users are aged 18 to 34, according to the survey, with 60 percent of that group being daily users. Among people aged 55 years and above, 29 percent said they were daily users. Of the 34 percent spending less time on the social network, their chief reason was that the site was “boring,” “not relevant” or “not useful.” Privacy concerns ranked third. (June 4, Reuters)

Wait, wouldn’t that mean people are bored with their friends? Is it really more IPO letdown? Could the introverts be rebelling? Or is it all of the above? Let’s check out the status updates and a few reader comments along the way, and see whether the Facebook beatdown can get any worse (hint: It does).

Dustin of Kansas City, Missouri

[Related: Let Facebook Profit, I'm Over It]

Too many friends who aren’t really. How bored could 901 million active users be? About 526 million of them check in daily—but apparently 2 out of 5 sign in, versus 1 out of 2 just six months ago. Just like most social circles, power users dominate the crowd; people ages 23-35 and women (especially new moms and stressed-out ones) update and comment the most. The rest are occasional spectators—and a good number of them seem to be suffering friend-request regret.

The average number of Facebook friends is 245, but Dunbar’s number dictates that your little gray cells  can usually track only around 150. Compare that neurological optimism with a sociologist’s survey, which claims that the modern Americans can count 2.03 close friends, a decline from three in 1985. (Pew gives happier odds with 2.16 close pals, versus 1.93 in 2008.)

Then there’s the backlash against ruthless cheeriness, embodied in one Texas teacher’s mission to show life’s complexities by making an EnemyGraph Facebook plug-in. Add the 3.2 million peoplepetitioning for a “dislike” button, complaints about inanity updates, the extra work that the Timeline feature demands, and fears about privacy (which led many to fall for a hoax), and Facebook isn’t as friendly as it used to be. The social network even capitulated by releasing Close Friends and Acquaintances features, so you can downgrade (or upgrade) friends; you can also reduce the number of people whose actions show up in your news feed.

Facebook State of Social Media survey

Lee of Miami, Florida

Revenge for making us feel lonely? Might we resent Facebook for a cruel self-assessment of friendship? The Atlantic recently took a shot at social networking for making people feel “lonelier” and “more narcissistic,” and it zeroed in on Mark Zuckerberg’s Frankenstein child.

Facebook users had slightly lower levels of “social loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with friends—but “significantly higher levels of family loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships—or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: “One of the most noteworthy findings,” they wrote, “was the tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals.” And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall. (May 2012, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic)

Debunkers pooh-pooh the idea of Facebook as a digital divider, and instead see it a tool that individuals control.

Such technological connections don’t at all preclude real-life conversations. If we’re not having them, it’s because that’s our choice—the technology isn’t choosing for us… But then some people suggest that because these ways are different than what they are used to, they are automatically worse. That’s where the problems begin. Different doesn’t automatically equal bad, and without quantifiable measures, all you have is a subjective lens in which to conduct your measurements. (June 7, Psych Central)

Then again, behavioral changes happen quickly over a generation. Consider the evolution of telephone etiquette: At first, the caller bore the social burden. After the onset of the answering machine, the obligation landed on the recipient to return the call. With cell phones, a new generation feels compelled to answer the ring, granting a higher privilege to the unseen caller over any live body in their presence. (Note the retaliatory warning notices at retail counters that say they will ignore people on their cell phones—it’s quid pro quo.) Many teens can’t resist the call even while driving, to the point that some welcome state laws making it illegal for teens to use their phones while they’re behind the wheel.

Facebook has unleashed all sorts of etiquette dilemmas (is ignoring a friend request polite, or is it a passive-aggressive slippery slope?), and disgruntled users claim they’re already resulting in cultural traits—like narcissism, per the Atlantic.

Greensboro, North Carolina

[Related: Facebook to let users vote on privacy changes]

Facebook 2020 funeral? After all these slaps to Facebook, the only thing left would be spit on the corpse… and sure enough, a Forbes columnist obliges with predictions of its death in five to eight years. (Full disclosure: Columnist Eric Jackson also beats up on Yahoo! regularly, calls it “already a shell of its 2000 self,” and owns some shares.)

Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience. It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web—as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year. It has no idea how it will make money in mobile. (April 30, Forbes)

Ouch. Facebook has its defenders, pointing to its launch of Airtime and saying now’s the time to buy. As for being less bored—well, wait till they let the kids in.Paul of Jacksonville, Florida

Nasdaq 40 Million dollar Settlement for Facebook Fiasco Deemed Woefully Inadequate

(Reuters) – Rival exchanges on Thursday lashed out at NasdaqOMX’s $40 million plan to compensate clients for its mishandling of Facebook’s initial public offering last month, calling the plan “illegal,” “anti-competitive” and saying it was unlikely to be approved by U.S. regulators.

A day after Nasdaq rolled out its plan, which would mostly consist of trading discounts for clients, rival exchanges questioned the legitimacy of the proposal, and one of Nasdaq’s biggest customers said the sum offered was not nearly enough.

Total losses by banks and brokerages due to the technical problems that plagued the $16 billion IPOmay be as high as $200 million, said Thomas Joyce, chief executive of Knight Capital Group , a market maker in the deal that said it alone lost $35 million.

“I think that the scheme that was announced yesterday is illegal,” Bill O’Brien, CEO of the No. 4 U.S. equities exchange, Direct Edge, said at Sandler O’Neill’s brokerage and exchange conference in New York. “It is also a shameless attempt to basically turn a big investor-confidence-eroding event into a competitive advantage.”

O’Brien, who was visibly upset, said his company would contest the plan and that he did not think it would be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. NYSE Euronext , the top U.S. stock exchange, also said it strongly objected to the plan.

Direct Edge, NYSE, and BATS Global Markets – which in March had to pull its own IPO due to technical problems – all denounced the plan as a grab for market share.

“Confusing compensation with a pricing promotion – that’s a bad way to do it,” said Mark Hemsley, chief executive of BATS Chi-X Europe.

Nasdaq’s proposed $40 million compensation figure – $13.7 million in cash and the rest in trading discounts – was a big topic at the conference.

GREIFELD HOLDS HIS GROUND

Robert Greifeld, CEO of Nasdaq, made 30-minute presentation at the conference that did not touch on the Facebook problems until the very end when he reiterated that Nasdaq’s board approved the plan and that it covered all of the losses that resulted from the exchange’s errors.

“We don’t really have any legal requirements,” Greifeld said. “We have an accommodation policy approved by the SEC of up to $3 million, so we are going to go to the SEC to ask them to approve us to pay a lot more than that.”

Nasdaq has been widely criticized for poor communications during and after the Facebook IPO, the most highly anticipated market debut in recent memory, and for failing to apologize for the technical problems in the first hours of trading of Facebook shares.

“It’s hard to envision it having been handled more badly,” said Jamie Selway, managing director of broker-dealer ITG.

The top four U.S. retail market makers – which facilitate trades for brokers and are crucial to the smooth operation of stock trading – say they lost upward of $115 million in the Facebook IPO because of trading glitches and a severe communications breakdown on Nasdaq’s part.

The problems on Nasdaq’s exchange led to a 30-minute delay of the IPO on May 18, after which market makers did not receive confirmations of their opening orders for two hours. Some orders were placed well after the opening cross, around 1:50 p.m. that day.

Facebook shares have fallen 31 percent from their offering price of $38, to $26.31 on Thursday. The steep drop has triggered questions over its IPO pricing.

“It’s another one of those things that destroys confidence,” said Fred Tomczyk, CEO of TD Ameritrade, the top U.S. retail brokerage by trading volume.

Scientists Renew End-Of-The-World From Climate Prophecies

Earth is rapidly headed toward a catastrophic breakdown if humans don’t get their act together, according to an international group of scientists.

Writing Wednesday (June 6) in the journal Nature, the researchers warn that the world is headed toward a tipping point marked by extinctions and unpredictable changes on a scale not seen since the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago.

“There is a very high possibility that by the end of the century, the Earth is going to be a very different place,” study researcherAnthony Barnosky told LiveScience. Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, joined a group of 17 other scientists to warn that this new planet might not be a pleasant place to live.

“You can envision these state changes as a fast period of adjustment where we get pushed through the eye of the needle,” Barnosky said. “As we’re going through the eye of the needle, that’s when we see political strife, economic strife, war and famine.” [Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth]

The danger of tipping

Barnosky and his colleagues reviewed research on climate change, ecology and Earth’s tipping pointsthat break the camel’s back, so to speak. At certain thresholds, putting more pressure on the environment leads to a point of no return, Barnosky said. Suddenly, the planet responds in unpredictable ways, triggering major global transitions.

The most recent example of one of these transitions is the end of the last glacial period. Within not much more than 3,000 years, the Earth went from being 30 percent covered in ice to its present, nearly ice-free condition. Most extinctions and ecological changes (goodbye, woolly mammoths) occurred in just 1,600 years. Earth’s biodiversity still has not recovered to what it was.

Today, Barnosky said, humans are causing changes even faster than the natural ones that pushed back the glaciers — and the changes are bigger. Driven by a 35 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the start of the Industrial Revolution, global temperatures are rising faster than they did back then, Barnosky said. Likewise, humans have completely transformed 43 percent of Earth’s land surface for cities and agriculture, compared with the 30 percent land surface transition that occurred at the end of the last glacial period. Meanwhile, the human population has exploded, putting ever more pressure on existing resources. [7 Billion Population Milestones]

“Every change we look at that we have accomplished in the past couple of centuries is actually more than what preceded one of these major state changes in the past,” Barnosky said.

Backing away from the ledge

The results are difficult to predict, because tipping points, by their definition, take the planet into uncharted territory. Based on past transitions, Barnosky and his colleagues predict a major loss of species (during the end of the last glacial period, half of the large-bodied mammal species in the world disappeared), as well as changes in the makeup of species in various communities on the local level. Meanwhile, humans may well be knotting our own noose as we burn through Earth’s resources.

“These ecological systems actually give us our life support, our crops, our fisheries, clean water,” Barnosky said. As resources shift from one nation to another, political instability can easily follow.

Pulling back from the ledge will require international cooperation, Barnosky said. Under business-as-usual conditions, humankind will be using 50 percent of the land surface on the planet by 2025. It seems unavoidable that the human population will reach 9 billion by 2050, so we’ll have to become more efficient to sustain ourselves, he said. That means more efficient energy use and energy production, a greater focus on renewable resources, and a need to save species and habitat today for future generations.

“My bottom line is that I want the world in 50 to 100 years to be at least as good as it is now for my children and their children, and I think most people would say the same,” Barnosky said. “We’re at a crossroads where if we choose to do nothing we really do face these tipping points and a less-good future for our immediate descendents.”

New Strain of Gonorrhea Cannot be Cured

A highly antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea is quickly spreading throughout the world, according to reports from the United Nations World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 Neiserria gonorrhoeae or N. gonorrhoeae, has been progressively evolving resistance to treatment for many years.

 Sulfanilamides, which were originally used to treat streptococcal infections, quickly found its place as the treatment of choice for gonorrheal infections during the early to mid 1900s. Despite its potentially unpleasant side effects, it proved extremely effective. However, by the 1940s N. gonorrhoeae had become resistant to the drug, forcing researchers to find another treatment.

 By the 1980s N. gonorrhoeae had defeated nearly every new antibiotic brought to bear against it. Drugs such as chloramphenicol, tetracycline, erythromycin, and streptomycin, each fell in rapid succession before the bacterial juggernaut.

 Scientists were yet again forced to work at a feverish pace to avoid the epidemic that loomed if new treatments were not quickly developed. During this time, researchers developed a class of drugs called fluoroquinolones which includes the anthrax fighter ciprofloxacin, also known as Cipro.

 Once more scienc was able to turn the tides against the microbe, which was progressively evolving into a more formidable foe with each mutation. Finally by 2007, fluoroquinolones were vanquished by the onslaught of the chameleon-like organism and a new round of combat began.

 Cephalosporins such as Ceclor and Keflex eventually emerged as what health professionals called the last line of defense in a war scientists were clearly losing. Subsequently, cephalosporins have recently been shown to be becoming increasingly ineffective at treating the infection. Accordingly, health professionals now recommend treating N. gonorrhoeae with a combination of an injectable ceftriaxone (Rocephin) and an oral cefixime (Suprax).

 Scientists have cited the overuse of antibiotics which helps to augment the naturally occurring mutations within the organism.

 At present there have been no reported unsuccessful treatments of the disease using the recommended method. According to WHO scientist Dr. Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, however, it is only a matter of time, perhaps a couple of years before the bug becomes completely resistant to all forms of treatment.

 There are an estimated 106 million new cases of gonorrhea reported each year with 309,341 cases in the U.S. alone for the year 2010, with a reported spike in new infections currently under way across the nation.

Labor Unions to Face Hard Reality After Wisconsin Fiasco

Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall election this week was no surprise to anyone butBig Labor. Unions were furious when Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature cut back their right to bargain on anything beyond wages. Democratic legislators fled the state for several weeks in 2011 in order to try to prevent a final vote from taking place. Demonstrators took over the state capitol, and when that didn’t work, unions and left-leaning groups gathered signatures to force a recall vote.

The national Democratic Party initially saw what was happening in Wisconsin as a popular revolt against Republican excesses and a key to preventing Republicans from building on their success in the 2010 congressional and gubernatorial elections. But as time for the recall neared, even party hacks were nervous. Still, organized labor pressed on, sure that they could count on Democrats, young people, minorities, and — especially — union households to turn out in greater numbers and vote to kick out Walker.

But exit polls from Tuesday’s election show that unions were wrong in most of their predictions. Their candidate, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Burnett, won the votes of most Democrats (91 percent), young people (51 percent), and blacks (94 percent), but those voters were not as enthusiastic as Walker’s base of Republicans, those over 30, and suburbanites and small-town voters. Turnout was historic for a governor’s race in the state — almost 60 percent — but those committed to keeping Walker still exceeded those who wanted to give him the boot. Walker actually won a larger percentage of the vote in the recall election than he had initially in 2010.

Most devastating to the unions’ ambitions, however, was that union households deserted labor’s choice in droves. Nearly 4 in 10 union households voted to keep Walker in the governor’s mansion, despite unprecedented pressure by union operatives who tried to get union members and their families to view Walker’s efforts as a war on unions.

Big Labor failed because even some union members recognize that public employees’ benefits are way out of line in their state. Until Walker’s reform passed, many public employees in Wisconsin contributed little or nothing to their pension and health plans. Walker instituted reforms that included mandatory employee contributions to pension plans — 5.8 percent in 2011 — as well as forcing some public employees to share a larger, but hardly excessive, share of their health care premiums. But these demands seemed reasonable to most working men and women, who are used to making such contributions already, even union members.

The real problem for the unions, however, was that Walker’s reforms deprived public employee unions from having union dues deducted automatically from covered employees’ salaries. Under the old rules, teachers and other public employees who were covered by a union contract had dues taken directly out of their paychecks by their employers and handed over to the unions, without their having given affirmative consent. After the new law passed, public employees had to sign up to have their dues collected — and many decided not to.

Public employee union membership in Wisconsin plummeted as a result. According to the Wall Street Journal, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees lost more than half its members statewide, from 62,818 members in March 2011 to only 28,745 in February 2012. Teachers unions were hard hit as well, with the American Federation of Teachers losing 6,000 of its 17,000 members in the last 15 months.

It’s no wonder given these numbers that so many union households ended up deserting their union leaders on Election Day. The real lesson is that Big Labor can no longer count on marshaling its members to turn out and vote as union leaders direct. The labor movement has gotten fat and lazy on mandatory membership, employers’ collecting union dues, and promising more than can be reasonably delivered, like fat pensions for life.

And public employee unions, which have been the only segment of organized labor that has grown in decades as private union membership dwindled to only 6.9 percent of the workforce, are now going to have to face the music as well. Unions can’t count on their members, especially when those ‘members’ can choose not to belong.

Facebook IPO Tanks Consumer Confidence

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The mishandling of Facebook’s initial public offering in May has rattled the confidence of retail investors, who were already leery of financial markets following a string of crises over the past several years, Fred Tomczyk, chief executive ofTD Ameritrade, said on Thursday.

Trading glitches on Nasdaq OMX Group Inc’s exchange led to a 30-minute delay in Facebook’s highly anticipated market debut on May 18, after which market makers – who facilitate trades for brokers – failed to receive confirmations of their opening orders for about two hours, leading to more than $100 million of losses.

In early trading on Thursday, shares were down 0.8 percent at $26.56, significantly lower than its $38 a share IPO pricing and the $42 it opened at on its debut trading day. The steep drop in the company’s share price has triggered questions over its lofty IPO pricing.

Tomczyk said TD Ameritrade came out of the Facebook IPO ”pretty clean” because the firm’s market maker, which he would not name, covered the trades. However, he said the IPO was clearly mishandled.

“It’s another one of those things that destroys confidence versus helping it,” he said on the sidelines of Sandler O’Neill’s brokerage and exchanges conference in New York.

As stocks began to recover following the financial crisis, the “flash crash” in May 2010, when $1 trillion in shareholder equity was temporarily wiped out in a matter of minutes, shook investor confidence in the equity markets, where trading is largely computer-driven.

Add to that the debt problems of the United States and ongoing fiscal crisis in Europe, and it’s no wonder investors are cautious, Tomczyk said.

TD Ameritrade is the No. 1 U.S. retail brokerage by trading volumes and is often considered a proxy for retail investor sentiment.

The Omaha, Nebraska-based firm said on Thursday its daily average revenue trades in May were down around 4 percent from a year earlier, at 370,000. Tomczyk has said in the past that the firm would like to see average daily trading levels at around 400,000.

JMP Securities analyst David Trone said he was expecting 430,000 trades a day for the month.

“May’s soft results follow April’s disappointing number and with increasing macro uncertainty and the summer doldrums, we see little reason for activity to surge near-term,” he said in a note to clients.

Nasdaq said on Wednesday it will offer $40 million in cash and rebates to clients harmed by its mishandling of Facebook’s market debut.

The proposed compensation, subject to approval by regulators, was criticized by rival exchanges for its use of rebates, and by clients claiming losses far bigger than the amount offered by Nasdaq.

The top four market makers in the $16 billion Facebook IPO – UBS, Citigroup, Knight Capital, and Citadel Securities – together lost more than $115 million due to the technical problems, sources have told Reuters

Bernanke Not Optimistic Of Congress’Ability to Act Responsibly

The Federal Reserve Board Chairman had a stern warning today for Congress: “Taxmaggedon” is real, it’s coming and only lawmakers can save the nation from falling off this rapidly approaching “fiscal cliff.”

“What is particularly striking here is that this is all pre-programmed,” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said. “If you all go on vacation, it’s still going to happen, so it’s important to be thinking about that and working with your colleagues to see how you might address that concern at the appropriate time.”

Bernanke, speaking in front of the Joint Economic Committee, was referring to the year-end intersection of the Bush-era tax cuts expiration, $1.2 trillion in scheduled spending cuts and expiring payroll tax breaks, which, if not addressed could cost American taxpayers with $310 billion in tax increases next year.

The picture the Fed chairman painted today was not pretty.

“The so-called fiscal cliff would, if allowed to occur, pose a significant threat to the recovery,” Bernanke warned. “If no action were taken and the fiscal cliff were to kick in in its full size, I think it would be very likely that the economy would begin to contract or possibly go even into recession, and that unemployment would begin to rise.”

Bernanke said that, in the short term, if all the measures would occur together, it would amount to a withdrawal of spending and increase in taxation of between 3 and 5 percent of the gross domestic product, which would have a “very significant impact” on the near-term recovery.

“What I’m saying is that, in ways that are up to Congress, steps should be taken to mitigate that overall impact. And what combination of tax reductions and spending increases [to enact], that’s really up to you,” Bernanke said. “But I urge Congress to come to agreement on that well in advance so as not to push us to the 12th hour. But again, I think that trying to put our fiscal situation on a sustainable basis is perhaps one of the most important things that Congress can be working on.”

The single biggest item making up the fiscal cliff, Bernanke said, is the potential expiration of the so-called Bush tax cuts. If everything else were held constant, he said, the expirations alone would have adverse effects on spending and growth in the economy that would be significant.

“I’m not necessarily saying that the right thing to do is to extend those cuts,” he added. “It could be there are other steps you could take that would have a similar impact. But that is the single biggest component of the so-called cliff.

Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., asked if that basically meant, in essence, that the Fed chairman would advise that the tax cuts should be extended.

“I’d tell you to try to avoid a situation in which you have a massive cut in spending and increase in taxes all hitting at one moment, as opposed to trying to spread them out over time in some way that will … create less short-term drag on the U.S. economy,” Bernanke responded.

Beyond Congress’ end of the year to-do list to avoid the potentially devastating effects of “taxmageddon,” Bernanke said the Federal Reserve is prepared to take steps to help the U.S. economy. But he refused to be pinned down on what additional steps could be taken to spur growth and did not signal imminent action.

“As always, the Federal Reserve remains prepared to take action as needed to protect the U.S. financial system and economy in the event that financial stresses escalate,” Bernanke said.

After nearly two hours of testimony discussing the fragile state of the world and U.S. economy, there was a brief moment of levity when Sen. Coats, D-Ind., asked if the Fed chairman sleeps well at night.

“I generally sleep pretty well, yes, but I have a lot to do during the day and I need to be well-rested,” Bernanke said, laughing

Global Stocks Drop On Fed Lack of More Quantitative Easing

MILAN (AP) — Global stocks dropped Friday after the U.S. Federal Reserve’s chairman indicated there were no immediate plans to boost growth in the world’s largest economy, wiping out gains made on China’s surprise interest rate cut.

In an appearance before members of the U.S. Congress, Ben Bernanke avoided giving any signals about what the Fed might do in response to a slowdown in hiring. The 69,000 jobs created in May were the fewest in a year.

Markets, which had earlier risen Thursday on news that China had made its first interest rate cut in more than three years, fell back down on Friday.

“Clearly sentiment is all over the place,” said Chris Weston of IG Markets.

In afternoon European trading, Britain’s FTSE 100 dropped 0.7 percent to 5,408. Germany’s DAX lost 0.8 percent to 6,093 and France’s CAC-40 fell 1.1 percent to 3,038.

Wall Street also opened lower, with the Dow Jones industrial average down 51 points at 12,410. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was down five points at 1,310.

Francis Lun, managing director of Lyncean Holdings in Hong Kong, said markets were “slightly disappointed” that Bernanke had not said the Fed would extend its Treasury bond-buying program, known as quantitative easing. The program injects money into the financial system, lowering interest rates to spur lending and growth.

“The economy is slowing much faster than people expected,” he said.

China has rolled out a series of measures to stimulate the economy after growth fell to a nearly three-year low of 8.1 percent in the first quarter and April factory output grew at its slowest rate since the 2008 crisis. Private sector analysts expect this quarter’s growth to fall further.

Investor concerns remained focused on Europe, where a lingering financial crisis has infected Spain and its banks.

Expectations are rising that Spain’s leaders will have to seek an international bailout for banks, which credit agency Fitch estimates could reach €100 billion ($126 billion). Amid reports that Spain could ask for financial aid this weekend, the government on Friday said it would wait for results from independent reports on the financing needs of its banks. Those reports are due by June 21 at the latest.

Benchmark oil for July delivery was down $2.59 to $82.24 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 20 cents to finish at $84.82 per barrel in New York.

In currencies, the euro fell to $1.2451 from $1.2601 late Thursday in New York. The dollar fell to 79.38 yen from 79.68 yen.

Mainland Chinese shares lost ground, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index falling for a fifth straight trading day, shedding 0.5 percent, or 11.68 points, to 2,281.45, the lowest closing in more than two months.

Elsewhere in Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 index fell 2.1 percent to close at 8,459.26. South Korea’s Kospi dropped 0.7 percent to 1,835.64.

Greeks Start to Return to Their Roots Reluctantly

KONITSA, Greece (Reuters) – Thirteen years after abandoning rural Greece for a career in graphic design, Spiridoula Lakka finds herself in the last place she expected to end up – watering a patch of lettuce and herbs in her sleepy village.

As Greece sank into its worst economic crisis since World War Two,Lakka had already given up her dream of becoming a web designer. Even waitressing seemed impossible. She faced a simple choice: be stranded without money in Athens, or return to the geriatric village where she grew up plotting to escape.

At age 32, Lakka, an office clerk who also juggled odd jobs, joined a growing number of Greeks returning to the countryside in the hope of living off the land. It’s a reversal of the journey their parents and grandparents made in the 1960s and ’70s.

Data is scarce on how many people have made the trek, but as people angered by austerity head to the polls on June 17, anecdotal evidence and interviews with officials suggest the trend is gaining momentum. In a survey of nearly 1,300 Greeks by Kapa Research in March, over 68 percent said they had considered moving to the countryside, with most citing cheaper and higher quality life. Most expected to move permanently.

“A year ago, I couldn’t imagine myself holding a garden hoe, or doing any farming,” said Lakka, as she watered the herbs she grows in the village of Konitsa, which nestles among snow-capped peaks near the Albanian border.

“I’ve always wanted to leave the village. I never imagined I would actually spend my whole life here.”

Her experience has been far from idyllic. The arrival of young, city-dwelling Greeks is being watched with a mix of pity and hope by those who never left.

“Those who have returned are desperate. They aren’t coming back because they wanted to,” said Stefanou Vaggelis, a 50-year-old distillery owner as he threw back tsipouro – a strong spirit favored by locals – with friends in the village centre dotted with taverns.

This summer, judging from the queries he has received from city-dwellers on vacation, Vaggelis predicts as many as 60 people will move to Konitsa, where over half of the population of about 3,000 is aged 60 or over.

“They usually ask whether there are state subsidies for agriculture and for growing pomegranates, snails and aromatic herbs,” he said, recounting how a 40-year-old acquaintance had returned to tend sheep in the hills. Greece’s farmers mostly run small operations and rely on EU subsidies to survive. They complain that over the past five years subsidies have halved.

TREMENDOUS INTEREST

In the northern city of Thessaloniki, a school for farmers says applications for its high school program have tripled this year. Cheese-making and bee-keeping have also filled quickly at the American Farm School, founded in 1904 by an American missionary who was keen to teach practical skills. Its courses run from pre-school to adult level.

“There is tremendous interest,” said Panos Kanellis, the school’s president. The trend, he said, is driven by both the crisis and a desire among many Greeks for a quality of life that’s impossible to find in the city.

Greek families have traditionally owned houses or plots of land in their native villages, often devoted to fragrant olive, lemon and orange groves or a mix of vibrant greens and tomatoes.

For those returning, rural life promises rent-free housing, backyard produce to fill dinner plates and support from a network of relatives and friends. The Kapa survey showed most people planned to count on family and friends to help.

“In Athens, I worked many jobs I didn’t like but I had to compromise,” said Lakka. “In the village, you have your own home and you can grow vegetables to eat.”

Five decades ago, one in two Greeks was employed in farming. The Pan-Hellenic Confederation of Unions of Agricultural Cooperatives, a farmers’ union, says employment steadily shrank in the early 2000s, but agriculture added 38,000 jobs between 2008 and 2010 as Greece slid into a recession that is now in its fifth year.

It lost jobs again in 2011 when the banking crisis squeezed lending to farmers, but people have continued to return to villages, said the union’s general manager Ioannis Tsiforos.

“We have a number of people, most of them middle-aged, entering the farming business,” he said: the trend is especially visible in Crete and the Dodecanese islands in the east.

NO PLACE TO DREAM

Until recently, the Greek countryside was largely a place young people escaped from. The lure of city jobs spurred a wave of migration to urban centres after World War Two. In the three decades to 1981,Athens’ population more than doubled to more than 3 million people.

Today, the Greek capital is still home to about 4 million of Greece’s 11 million population, but it is no longer a magnet for the young and ambitious. At 22 percent, unemployment in Athens hovers just above the national average. Homeless people line the streets, the poor scavenge through bins for scrap. “For Rent” signs hang across shuttered shop windows.

Crime has surged, turning pockets of Athens into virtual no-go zones at night.

All this came as a shock to Lakka. Like almost everyone else in Konitsa, she grew up convinced the move to the big city was a rite of passage. She studied design in Thessaloniki and moved to the capital at 22. A graphic design job proved difficult to find, so she took up odd jobs. Her big break came with a temporary contract as an office clerk with a state social security fund, which she hoped would eventually turn permanent.

The pay was a paltry 640 euros ($800) per month, so Lakka did waitressing and office work on the side.

Then the debt crisis hit, forcing Greece to take a bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Lakka struggled to find extra work. Panic set in.

The final straw came last June, when she learned there was no money to renew her contract.

“At that moment I said to myself: ‘That’s it. There is no way I’m going to start begging my friends again for a new job,” she said. “I decided to return to my village.”

INSULTS AND GOSSIP

Up a wild cherry- and maple tree-lined road from Lakka’s family business – a petrol station and cafe – Konitsa’s deputy mayor Nikos Karras smiles as he ponders the unexpected homecoming of village youth. About 10 people returned last year, and the area is gearing up for many more, he says.

“It is important for the region that young people come back because until now we’ve been living through the opposite: everyone left and the only people who stayed back were the elderly,” says the 41-year-old.

“When someone loses their job in a city and has no hope of finding another, they come here as a last resort. We will be the last to starve because when you have a field or a garden, you can produce food for yourself and make sure you survive.”

But adjusting to life in the village is not easy.

Hoping to put her city skills to use, Lakka tried to transform the petrol station cafe.

With a fading Coca-Cola sign outside and a fog of cigarette smoke hanging over wooden tables inside, the cafe offered its elderly clientele basic fare of tsipouro, coffee and sandwiches.

Lakka had other ideas. Her eyes lit up as she recounted her plans from a corner table in the cafe, her mother by her side. She wanted to allow local hunters to cook their catch on the restaurant grill; she would spice up the menu with goat stews, tripe, casseroles and pasta dishes.

“My dream was to change the shop completely,” she said.

But the tight-knit village community had other thoughts. A rival cafe owner said he hoped Lakka would shut shop and go back to Athens; others snickered behind her back.

“One woman said ‘The girl from Athens has come to change our ways, but she has to adapt to us, not the other way round,’” Lakka said.

“These things upset me. I just can’t get used to it,” she said. “They don’t say it directly to me, but to people they know will pass it on to me.”

As a single woman with no plans to marry, Lakka was also an anomaly in a deeply traditional place. “There is a lot of pressure to get married and have children, even from my own parents.”

She used to wear short skirts and bare midriff tops. She has replaced them with loose jeans.

“There is no privacy here in the village. You feel like everyone is judging and trying to control you, and there is gossip,” she said. “It’s a closed society.”

Instead, she turned to cultivating herbs. The craggy mountains encircling her village are home to more than 2,000 varieties. She also tends to a row of beehives on a dirt track near the cafe. Lakka says she hopes she can one day sell her bunches of sage, nettle and peppermint at a roadside kiosk.

There is no certainty of a happy ending. What she does know is that Athens did not leave her much choice.

“I still have second thoughts, though from what I hear from friends in Athens, I’ve made the right choice,” she said.

“Things have become too difficult there and they also want to leave.”

Beware of Phony Debt Collectors.. Newest Scam and it is From India…

Hundreds of thousands of cash-strapped Americans have been targeted by abusive debt collectors operating out of overseas call centers suspected of links to organized crime in India, law enforcement officials told ABC News.

The calls are part of a massive scam, one that appears to target struggling Americans — especially those who have gone online to apply for payday loans. Armed with personal information from those pilfered applications, the threatening callers, who claim to be debt collectors poised to initiate legal action, have managed to pry loose millions of dollars from their victims — even when the victims never owed money in the first place.

“This is what we call a phantom debt collection scam,” said Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. “It’s a very pernicious and innovative new fraud.”

Working through call centers in India, the commission estimates that the criminals have dialed at least 2.5 million calls, persuading already cash-strapped victims to send them more than $5 million. Some have reported receiving dozens of calls per hour. They are victims like Cindy Gervais, of New Orleans, who went online for a quick loan when her husband’s car was hit by a driver who didn’t have insurance.

Even though she paid the loan off, the so-called “phantom” debt collectors with Indian accents began calling to say she still owed money.

“He more or less told me that if I didn’t pay, they were going to have someone on my doorstep to arrest me,” she told ABC News. “And that they were going to contact my place of business, and tell them what kind of person I am.”

At first, she said she resisted. Then the calls became more frequent, and started to ring on her cell phone, and at the grocery distribution company where she had worked for 27 years.

“I was more or less was in panic mode because he told me there would be someone before noon at my place of business to arrest me and take me to jail,” she said tearfully. “So I agreed to pay him.”

After receiving scores of complaints, investigators with the FTC said they began tracking the calls, and following the payments. They alleged the payments led them to a California company run by an Indian-American named Kirit Patel, and that such scams would not be possible without American front men.

“I would say that all roads of this scam, or many of the roads of this scam, lead back to Mr. Patel,” said the FTC’s Leibowitz.

ABC News tracked Patel for weeks, from the suburbs of San Francisco to Austin, Texas.

Patel refused to talk. But his lawyer, Mark Ellis, said he believes it is far too early to pass judgment on his client. Ellis, a Sacramento-based attorney, told ABC News that Patel was hired for a nominal fee to set up an American shell company, and had no idea what the call centers in India were doing.

“I can tell you, he was as snookered by the people in India as anybody,” Ellis said. “He’s a 69-year-old man who is nearing his retirement who thought all he had to do was set up some corporations and everything was on the up and up. He’s completely dismayed that he has become the lightning rod of this entire problem.”

A close friend of Patel’s also defended him in a brief interview at his home, saying Patel was not trying to defraud anyone — he was just an unwitting, bit player in a larger scheme.

“If Mr. Patel was just a cog in the wheel he seems to have been a pretty big cog,” Leibowitz said. “It is clear that Patel was integrally involved with this scam.”

Leibowitz points to thousands of pages of financial and phone records gathered by the FTC and filed as part of a civil case brought against him in the U.S. District Court in Sacramento last month. When FTC lawyers sought to freeze his assets and prevent his business from continuing to operate, Patel responded by invoking his rights against self-incrimination. His lawyer told ABC News he has had to be careful in how he responds to the allegations in civil court “because there is a potential criminal action,” but that Patel maintains the allegations against him are false.

Federal investigators said the phantom debt collection operation that allegedly benefitted from Patel’s assistance was one of several that all trace back to the same small town in Western India called Ahmedabad. Callers use technology to make it appear that the calls originate inside the U.S. Victims provided ABC News with recordings of dozens of the calls, and many of the thickly accented callers appear to be reading off a script.

“Subpoenas have been readied, and Monday morning you’re going to be picked up from your home,” one caller says on a victim’s voicemail. “And you have children. Don’t worry about your children. We have a childcare department to take care of the children.”

“You will be behind bars for six months,” said another caller. “And once you go behind bars, you will lose your job. Once you are behind the bars, you won’t get a single drop of water.”

William Peerce Howard, a Tampa attorney who represents victims of harassment from debt collectors, said it takes an especially twisted criminal to use threats and coercion to pry money from someone who is already struggling financially

“These guys really are the most visible villains in America today,” he said. “They make a living scaring people.”

Mark Merola, of Florida, said he just panicked when the caller told him he might be arrested at the deli where he works in a Florida retirement community.

“I was nervous. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, my family,” he said. He used his debit card to pay the collector $576.

Afterwards, he says he realized “how stupid I was.”

“It just happened so fast,” he said. “I got scared.”

Leibowitz said he hopes with more attention, future potential targets of the scam will recognize red flags before they turn over any money.

If callers say they are from the police, consumers should know that law enforcement officers do not collect debt for private parties. If the caller is speaking with a thick Indian accent, but calls themselves by a names such as Officer Mike Johnson, that should be a tip off. And if they’re calling 40 times in two hours, that’s another red flag. “Legitimate debt collectors, legitimate pay day lenders don’t do those sorts of things,” he said.

Merola said he would like to see anyone involved in the scam prosecuted aggressively.

“There’s no place in society for these people,” he said.

If You’re Rich and Want Tax Relief it is For Sale With Your Romney Support.

Mitt Romney’s wealthy donors are “essentially buying tax relief” rather than looking to help get the country’s finances in order, White House spokesman Jay Carney charged during a combative exchange in his daily briefing on Monday.

Carney had been asked by Fox News Channel’s Ed Henry to explain how, after weeks of assailing Romney’s background in private equity, Obama felt comfortable going to New York to scoop up cash from, among others, Wall Street financiers.

“I wasn’t aware that any of them were running for president,” the spokesman quipped.

Henry pressed him, suggesting that Carney had described the practice of private equity as “evil.”

“No, those are your words. I never said that and you know it,” Carney said. “There’s nothing wrong with profit. You can succeed very well in that field by maximizing profit,” but “job creation is incidental.”The Obama campaign has portrayed Romney as an economic “vampire” during his time at Bain Capital, citing vast profits the company made from a Kansas City steel mill that went bankrupt. The attack aims to neutralize Romney’s core economic argument: That as a fabulously wealthy businessman, he is the better candidate to diagnose and cure the country’s anemic job growth.

The president was bound for New York City to hold three “campaign events” — frequently euphemisms for fundraisers. But Carney suggested that rich donors to Obama are better people than rich donors to Romney.

He praised “folks who are supporting the president — including folks who know that supporting the president and the president’s success would mean that they would have to pay a little bit more as part of a balanced approach to get our deficit and debt under control.” Obama uses “balanced” to mean a blend of tax increases on the rich and cuts in government spending.

“Another approach would be to support a candidate financially — or support a super PAC enormously, with great amounts of finances — knowing that they’re essentially buying tax relief, that victory in that case would result in a windfall,” Carney said. Romney’s economic plan includes a call to lower taxes on very rich Americans, on grounds that they will make the investments that will ultimately boost job growth.

How Romney is Winning Friends With His Neighbors in La Jolla California

To claim the presidency, Mitt Romney is faced with the challenge of winning over voters who may have supported President Barack Obama four years ago, especially independents in key swing states. But it’s making nice with the people in his own backyard, literally, that could prove to be the most problematic for the Republican nominee.

The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro takes a deep dive into Romney’s relationship—or lack thereof—with the people who live near him in La Jolla, Calif., where presidential politics is coloring a debate over the candidate’s plans to quadruple the size of his vacation home there.

But that’s not the only complaint people in this wealthy beach enclave have about Romney. Some neighbors complain about Romney’s new presidential entourage—including dozens of Secret Service agents who now guard the candidate 24 hours a day—and its effect on their quiet street.

Yet most of the angst about Romney seems to be driven by disagreement with the candidate’s politics. At least six homes near Romney’s house are owned by gay couples, including the home four doors up the street where the couple are trying to organize a fundraiser at their home for Obama because of his support of same sex marriage.

According to Barbaro, many people on Romney’s street were surprised that Romney chose to move into a “progressive” neighborhood, as one neighbor puts it. Adding to the tensions, the candidate, who was spotted painting his fence a few weekends ago, rarely engages with his neighbors, which has irked many of them.

Some in the neighborhood simply cast Romney as a fuddy-duddy. An unidentified man tells the Times Romney confronted him about smoking pot on the beach last summer and asked him to stop. Recently, the issue came up again, when a police officer asked Mark Quint, a Democrat who lives a few doors down from Romney, to report any pot smoking on the beach because of neighbor complaints.

“He was pretty clear it was the Romneys, ” Quint told Barbaro.

Egyptians Forced to Chose Between 2 BAD Candidates For President

Hundreds of activists gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday to demonstrate against presidential candidate Ahmed Shafik ahead of a run-off vote, saying they did not want to be ruled by another former military man. but the real problem may lay in choosing between a Islamist fundamentalist State with the Muslim Brotherhood or a man from the Mubarak Era…. neither of which are candidates the majority of Egyptians can support.

Some of those in the square supported Shafik’s rival Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood, which already controls parliament, but others were frustrated that they face a choice between two of Egypt’s most polarising politicians.

Protesters have been angered by Shafik’s links to Egypt’s ousted leader Hosni Mubarak. Both men are former airforce commanders and Mubarak made Shafik prime minister shortly before being overthrown in a popular uprising 16 months ago.

The June 16-17 presidential run-off vote is the final step before the army, which took charge when Mubarak was driven out, formally hands over to a new president by July 1. That marks the end of a transition marred by protests, political bickering and sometimes bloodshed.

Mursi’s campaign ratcheted up its efforts on Friday, distributing flyers outside mosques after Friday prayers. The Brotherhood called on activists to join the demonstration in Tahrir, dubbed the “Friday of Perseverance”.

Many distrust the Brotherhood for reneging on an earlier pledge not to run for the presidency and say it has sought to hog power since it won the biggest bloc of seats in parliament, winning many more seats that it originally said it would seek.

The latest round of daily protests in Tahrir was triggered by the verdict in a trial of Mubarak on June 2, which added to suspicions that former president’s old guard were still in charge.

The court jailed Mubarak for life but acquitted six of his top security officials.

Protesters demanded both a retrial and enforcement of a law passed by parliament but not implemented that Mubarak-era officials be banned from participating in politics. The constitutional court will rule on the law’s validity on June 14.

Scores of demonstrators chanting and carrying banners marched from Tahrir toward the nearby cabinet office, where dozens of activists were in the third day of a hunger strike.

The hunger strikers were demanding that Shafik not be allowed to run for president, that thousands of prisoners held by the military be released and a retrial, activist Nawara Negm said.

“We won’t stop until parliament responds,” said Nawara. She said 41 other activists had joined her in the strike.

This Is What Happens When We Demand TOO Much of Our Solders

Suicides are surging among America’s troops, averaging nearly one a day this year — the fastest pace in the nation’s decade of war.

The 154 suicides for active-duty troops in the first 155 days of the year far outdistance the U.S. forces killed in action in Afghanistan— about 50 percent more — according to Pentagon statistics obtained by The Associated Press.

The numbers reflect a military burdened with wartime demands from Iraq and Afghanistan that have taken a greater toll than foreseen a decade ago. The military also is struggling with increased sexual assaults, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and other misbehavior.

Because suicides had leveled off in 2010 and 2011, this year’s upswing has caught some officials by surprise.

The reasons for the increase are not fully understood. Among explanations, studies have pointed to combat exposure, post-traumatic stress, misuse of prescription medications and personal financial problems. Army data suggest soldiers with multiple combat tours are at greater risk of committing suicide, although a substantial proportion of Army suicides are committed by soldiers who never deployed.

The unpopular war in Afghanistan is winding down with the last combat troops scheduled to leave at the end of 2014. But this year has seen record numbers of soldiers being killed by Afghan troops, and there also have been several scandals involving U.S. troop misconduct.

The 2012 active-duty suicide total of 154 through June 3 compares to 130 in the same period last year, an 18 percent increase. And it’s more than the 136.2 suicides that the Pentagon had projected for this period based on the trend from 2001-2011. This year’s January-May total is up 25 percent from two years ago, and it is 16 percent ahead of the pace for 2009, which ended with the highest yearly total thus far.

Suicide totals have exceeded U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan in earlier periods, including for the full years 2008 and 2009.

The suicide pattern varies over the course of a year, but in each of the past five years the trend through May was a reliable predictor for the full year, according to a chart based on figures provided by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner.

The numbers are rising among the 1.4 million active-duty military personnel despite years of effort to encourage troops to seek help with mental health problems. Many in the military believe that going for help is seen as a sign of weakness and thus a potential threat to advancement.

Kim Ruocco, widow of Marine Maj. John Ruocco, a helicopter pilot who hanged himself in 2005 between Iraq deployments, said he was unable to bring himself to go for help.

“He was so afraid of how people would view him once he went for help,” she said in an interview at her home in suburban Boston. “He thought that people would think he was weak, that people would think he was just trying to get out of redeploying or trying to get out of service, or that he just couldn’t hack it – when, in reality, he was sick. He had suffered injury in combat and he had also suffered from depression and let it go untreated for years. And because of that, he’s dead today.”

Ruocco is currently director of suicide prevention programs for the military support organization Tragedy Assistance Programs, or TAPS. She joined the group after her husband’s suicide, and she organized its first program focused on support for families of suicide victims.

Jackie Garrick, head of a newly established Defense Suicide Prevention Office at the Pentagon, said in an interview Thursday that the suicide numbers this year are troubling.

“We are very concerned at this point that we are seeing a high number of suicides at a point in time where we were expecting to see a lower number of suicides,” she said, adding that the weak U.S. economy may be confounding preventive efforts even as the pace of military deployments eases.

Garrick said experts are still struggling to understand suicidal behavior.

“What makes one person become suicidal and another not is truly an unknown,” she said.

Dr. Stephen N. Xenakis, a retired Army brigadier general and a practicing psychiatrist, said the suicides reflect the level of tension as the U.S. eases out of Afghanistan though violence continues.

“It’s a sign in general of the stress the Army has been under over the 10 years of war,” he said in an interview. “We’ve seen before that these signs show up even more dramatically when the fighting seems to go down and the Army is returning to garrison.”

But Xenakis said he worries that many senior military officers do not grasp the nature of the suicide problem.

A glaring example of that became public when a senior Army general recently told soldiers considering suicide to “act like an adult.”

Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the 1st Armored Division, last month retracted — but did not apologize for — a statement in his Army blog in January. He had written, “I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act.” He also wrote, “”I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us.” He did also counsel soldiers to seek help.

His remarks drew a public rebuke from the Army, which has the highest number of suicides and called his assertions “clearly wrong.” Last week the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, said he disagrees with Pittard “in the strongest possible terms.”

The military services have set up confidential telephone hotlines, placed more mental health specialists on the battlefield, added training in stress management, invested more in research on mental health risk and taken other measures.

The Marines established a counseling service dubbed “DStress line,” a toll-free number that troubled Marines can call anonymously. They also can use a Marine website to chat online anonymously with a counselor.

The Marines arguably have had the most success recently in lowering their suicide numbers, which are up slightly this year but are roughly in line with levels of the past four years. The Army’s numbers also are up slightly. The Air Force has seen a spike, to 32 through June 3 compared to 23 at the same point last year. The Navy is slightly above its 10-year trend line but down a bit from 2011.

As part of its prevention strategy, the Navy has published a list of “truths” about suicide.

“Most suicidal people are not psychotic or insane,” it says. “They might be upset, grief-stricken, depressed or despairing.”

In a report published in January the Army said the true impact of its prevention programs is unknown.

“What is known is that all Army populations … are under increased stress after a decade of war,” it said, adding that if not for prevention efforts the Army’s suicide totals might have been as much as four times as high.

Marine Sgt. Maj. Bryan Battaglia, the senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently issued a video message to all military members in which he noted that suicides “are sadly on the rise.”

“From private to general, we shoulder an obligation to look and listen for signs and we stand ready to intervene and assist our follow service member or battle buddy in time of need,” Battaglia said.

The suicide numbers began surging in 2006. They soared in 2009 and then leveled off before climbing again this year. The statistics include only active-duty troops, not veterans who returned to civilian life after fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor does the Pentagon’s tally include non-mobilized National Guard or Reserve members.

The renewed surge in suicides has caught the attention of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Last month he sent an internal memo to the Pentagon’s top civilian and military leaders in which he called suicide “one of the most complex and urgent problems” facing the Defense Department, according to a copy provided to the AP.

Panetta touched on one of the most sensitive aspects of the problem: the stigma associated seeking help for mental distress. This is particularly acute in the military.

“We must continue to fight to eliminate the stigma from those with post-traumatic stress and other mental health issues,” Panetta wrote, adding that commanders “cannot tolerate any actions that belittle, haze, humiliate or ostracize any individual, especially those who require or are responsibly seeking professional services.”

The Debt of America is NOT as Bad as GOP Wants You to Believe

Everyone knows America has too much debt. What they don’t know is that things are getting better, not worse. Say What?? Do Republicans know this?? Is someone misleading the American Public on the actual RELATIVE debt of the United States?

Little by little, our economy is reducing its debt burden, slowly repairing the damage caused by 10, 20 or 30 years of excess.

If you want to know why economic growth has been so tepid, here’s your answer. Four years after the storm hit, the economy is still deleveraging. And it’s very hard for any economy to grow when everyone is focused on increasing their savings.

Total domestic — public and private — debt as a share of the economy has declined for 12 quarters in a row after surging over the previous decade.

The rapid rise in federal debt over the past four years has distracted us from the big picture. The level of public debt is indeed worrisome, but it’s not as big a worry as the economy’s total level of debt — public and private.

Although we have a whole cottage industry devoted to warning us about the dangers of too much public debt, we don’t have any comparable Cassandras telling us about the dangers of too much private debt. Yet the history of the past 30 years (or 300) clearly shows that too much debt, of whatever variety, can pose a systemic risk to the national and global economies.

As much as we hear politicians, pundits, tea-party patriots and the Congressional Budget Office obsessing about government debt, it was excessive private debt — not public debt — that caused the 2008 financial meltdown. And it was private debt — some of it since transferred to the public — that lies behind the current European debt crisis. (Greece is unique in having a public sector that ran up spending while its private sector is rather conservative.)

As the political rhetoric about the federal deficit has heated up, we’ve lost sight of the progress that’s been made in bringing total debt back under control. The U.S. is actually doing much better than you’d think if you just listened to the conventional fears about how we’re rushing headlong into a debt Armageddon.

In fact, since the recession ended in June 2009, total U.S. debt has risen at the slowest pace since they began keeping records in the early 1950s. While Washington has taken on a lot of debt since then, the private sector has paid off, written off or dumped on the government almost as much.

As a share of the economy, debt has plunged as a consequence of rapid deleveraging by families, banks, nonfinancial businesses, and state and local governments. The ratio of total debt to gross domestic product has fallen from 3.73 times GDP to 3.36 times.

In the 11 quarters since the recession officially ended, total domestic debt has risen by just $702 billion, or 1.4%. By contrast, in the 11 quarters before the recession began, in those bubble years of 2005, 2006 and 2007, total debt increased by $10.7 trillion, or 28%.

And it wasn’t just the U.S., other advanced economies were adding on to their debt loads as well, with most of the debt taken out by the private sector.

Debt was growing at an unsustainable pace, but it was fueling the U.S. and global economies.

Economists who have studied the impact of indebtedness have found that low levels of debt are essential to growth, but that high levels of total outstanding debt can hurt an economy. Beyond a tipping point, adding on more debt will reduce growth over the long run, even if it inflates a bubble in the short run.

“At low levels, debt is good. It is a source of economic growth and stability,” concluded Stephen Cecchetti, M.S. Mohanty and Fabrizio Zampolli, economists for the Bank of International Settlements, in a paper presented at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole conference last August. “Beyond a certain point, debt becomes dangerous and excessive,” and can lead to increased volatility, financial fragility and slower growth. It can even bring down the real economy with it, as we have seen. Read the BIS paper, “The Real Effects of Debt.”

Cecchetti and his co-authors found that growth can be impaired once nonfinancial corporate debt hits about 90% of GDP, or when household debts hit 85% of GDP, or when public debts hit about 85%.

In the U.S., household debt has now fallen to 84% of GDP from a peak of 98%. Nonfinancial corporate debt has fallen to 77% from a peak of 83%. Financial sector debt has plunged from 123% of GDP to 89%. Public debt has risen to 89% from 56%.

The deleveraging process in the private sector still has a ways to run, not based on some economists’ rule of thumb, but based on what real people are actually doing. Banks and households are still slashing their debt, while nonfinancial companies are beginning to borrow again, but only a little, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve’s flow of funds report. Take a look at the flow of funds.

According to a study by McKinsey published earlier this year, U.S. households may have two more years of deleveraging left before their debts are sustainable again.

If McKinsey is right, the U.S. economy may have to endure a couple more years of slow growth.

From a “Nice Guy” Who Failed for Being TOO NICE

Sorry to break this to you, single men, but it is possible to be too nice. trust me on this… although I am not going to change my personality and pretend to be someone I am not… it seems that some of you will want to take this advice to get the girl of your dreams…. And if you’re reading this article, you’ve probably fallen into the trap of following all the rules — you wined and dined her, asked her questions, called the next day — but still didn’t win her heart. What gives? “Women like a nice guy at first,” says Dr. Robert Glover, author ofNo More Mr. Nice Guy. But niceness can also be seen as weakness — and that’s a major turn-off for most women. So how do you show a date that you’re genuinely interested in her without going overboard? We asked Dr. Glover and single men and women for some pointers that should help even the meekest man make a stronger statement during dates.

DO take charge
“Dating is like a dance: If you don’t take the lead, she has to,” Dr. Glover says. “Most women don’t want to be in charge.” Asking her out is a big step, but it’s not enough. Dr. Glover suggests having a particular day and plan already picked out in advance: “Asking her to go out sometime leaves too many details to be determined. Instead, ask her to meet you for drinks on Tuesday.” That way, all she has to decide is whether or not she’s free that night.

DO disagree with her
“Nothing irritates me more than someone who agrees with everything I say, even when I can tell he has another opinion,” says Theresa M. from Washington, D.C. “If I wanted to hear my thoughts on a subject, I would just talk to myself. I want a guy who will challenge me.” By avoiding conflict with your date, you may as well be wearing a big sign that says, I’m a pushover! If you don’t see eye-to-eye with her, say so.

DO tease her a little
You won’t ever find a woman who doesn’t like a man who’s funny. So go ahead and let your sarcasm streak or dry sense of humor shine — just make sure to do it playfully. Sean, 35, from New York City, attests to the power of this move: “I used some playful teasing on my last date — I told her, ‘Your head isn’t nearly as large as it looks on your profile’ — and we were able to use all that built-in first-date tension to our advantage.” By carrying yourself this way, you’ll look confident — which, by the way, is a turn-on for everyone.

DO talk about yourself
Don’t ramble on about your own life constantly, but mentioning things here and there is a good way to make sure your date doesn’t feel like she’s interrogating you. Instead, ask her where she was born; then, when she’s done answering you, drop a few relevant details about your life. “Everything was always about me with this one guy I dated. It was so annoying,” says Alina from Chicago. “There’s no way I’m that interesting! I kept waiting for him to tell me something.”

DON’T plan elaborate dates
“The first two or three dates should be simple, casual coffee-type meetings. You should pay for them, but they should be cheap,” says Dr. Glover. Do the opposite, and you just look like you’re trying too hard, says Marissa from Johnson City, TN. “A guy bought concert tickets for a band I had mentioned in passing,” she explains. “He spent way too much money. It was shocking, and I felt like I owed him something afterward.” Clearly, these are not good feelings to build a relationship on.

DON’T compliment your date too much
“An ex-boyfriend gave me compliments all the time,” says Rachel from Harrisonburg, VA. “It got to the point that I didn’t believe him anymore, and I figured he said those things to every woman he dated.” Seeming insincere is bad, but it can get even worse: “She’ll like it at first, but persistent flattery will start to spook her in some way,” says Dr. Glover. Forget the usual flood of flattery, then, and show her you care by the occasional compliment from the heart — and by being reliable.

DON’T try to speed up the relationship
After a great date, you may feel compelled to ask her out again — right then and there — for the next night… and the weekend after, too. Go slowly — don’t overwhelm a woman with attention. Dr. Glover suggests you only see each other once a week (at most) at the start of a new relationship. If you seem too eager, you’ll look needy and available for most women. “After a second date, this guy wanted to spend all of his time with me,” says Caroline, 28, from Los Angeles. “I started to wonder if he had his own life, but I didn’t want to stick around to find out.” So to avoid that fate, pace yourself, enjoy the anticipation — and let things unfold slowly and steadily.

The only problem with doing the above is you are not being yourself… and she may fall for you only to find you are a fraud later and hate you.. but if you want to take that chance…. by all means have fun!!

Lady Gaga Liked the Thai “Ladies” aka Tyrannies and Cross Dressers

Lady Gaga met Thai ‘ladies’ of a different kind at a transvestite cabaret show in Bangkok that had the flamboyant entertainer singing along, club management said Friday. (also known as Lady-boys)

The ‘Born This Way’ star “clapped her hands and screamed” in appreciation of the performance at Calypso Cabaret, which included lip-synched versions of well-known Asian pop songs and dance routines by a troupe of extravagantly dressed ‘ladyboys’.

“When she arrived, she was so friendly, she said ‘Hi lady, hi lady’ to our performers all the way to her seat before the show started,” Nipon Boonmasuwaran, sales and marketing manager at Calypso Cabaret told AFP.

The 26-year-old singer, whose global hits include “Just Dance” and “Poker Face”, wore a crop top with gold-studded epaulettes for the event in central Bangkok on Wednesday.

“When the show finished, she went up to her favourite performer and said ‘you are so beautiful’,” Nipon said. “We’re so happy and impressed with her. She seemed very nice and not arrogant like other superstars.”

Gaga, who was due to perform in Bangkok on Friday evening, has faced protests from religious hardliners in Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea.

Jakarta police said last week they would not give a green light to her June 3 show after Islamic hardliners threatened chaos if the singer entered Indonesia, meaning she has so far been unable to obtain a permit to perform.

The promoters of the US performer’s “The Born This Way Ball” show in Jakarta have sold more than 50,000 tickets, and Indonesian fans are outraged that the event might not go ahead.

Gaga also ruffled some feathers in Thailand by tweeting that “I wanna get lost in a lady market and buy fake Rolex”, remarks that some Thais complained cast the kingdom in a negative light.

But there was not expected to be disruption to the sell-out Bangkok concert.

Lady Gaga will also play three shows in Singapore next week. She is due to play in Jakarta after that, before flying south to New Zealand and Australia, and then to Europe.

CHANEY AND REGAN KNEW DEFICITS DON’T MATTER

CHANEY AND REGAN KNEW DEFICITS DON’T MATTER AND OBAMA HAS NOT SPENT HEAVY AT ALL

The last few weeks or so have left Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, in damage-control mode as he tries to distance himself from an incendiary, racially charged anti-Barack Obama ad campaign that would have featured the president’s former pastor,Jeremiah Wright. After two or three news cycles in which Rickettswas harshly criticized for his support of the ad’s early-stage development — even Mitt Romney, the presumed beneficiary, wanted nothing to do with it — Ricketts retreated, claiming he never liked the idea, either.

The retired billionaire will look for other ways to use his super PAC, the Ending Spending Action Fund, to pummel Obama, according to news reports. If the defensive explanations offered by Ricketts’ supporters are to be believed, he is upset with the president for what he sees as a track record of excessive, wasteful spending that will bankrupt the country. Indeed, that is a central argument of Romney’s campaign, echoed by all the usual suspects, including House Speaker John Boehner.

But there is an obvious hole in their narrative: Where the heck were these guys when George W. Bush was president?

Quiet as it’s kept, Obama has been no spendthrift. I know that has become conventional wisdom, a meme recycled endlessly in conservative circles and on the right-wing propaganda network, which includes Fox News. But the facts — those pesky, irritating, liberal-leaning facts borne out by government documents — tell another tale: Obama has curbed the federal spending that escalated under Bush.

Let’s revisit ancient history — the presidency of Bill Clinton. After Clinton persuaded Congress to raise taxes — allow me to repeat that: after Congress raised taxes — the nation enjoyed widespread prosperity with an unemployment rate that dropped below 5 percent. The federal budget was balanced and, by the late 1990s, the U.S. treasury began to accumulate a surplus, which could have been used to pay down the debt.

Enter George W. Bush, who campaigned on a pledge to cut taxes. Never mind the federal debt. A few forthright Republicans have conceded, in retrospect, that the monstrous tax cuts were a bad idea, but they are no longer serving. They didn’t dare say that when they were in office for fear of Grover Norquist, who has enforced a severe — and severely foolish — rule that forbids Republicans from raising taxes of any sort, ever.

The Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery filed an exhaustive report on the politics of the Bush tax cuts last year. She wrote: “The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis. In January 2001, with the budget balanced … the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds.”

In addition to his wars, Bush signed off on the biggest new entitlement program since the 1960s: the Medicare prescription drug plan. It added $272 billion to the debt, Montgomery noted.

 As debt mounted, Dick Cheney told then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who says he warned about the coming fiscal crisis, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Where was Ricketts with his end-the-spending mantra? Where were the other fiscal hawks?

Let’s remember, too, that the massive Wall Street bailouts were orchestrated by the Bush administration. They were necessary, and Obama rightly supported them. But that spending goes to Bush’s ledger.

The federal deficit is massive, but Obama’s spending has been but a pittance compared to that of his predecessor. While Republicans like to scare voters with gross distortions of the Affordable Care Act, it is expected to cut the deficit slightly. There has been no massive expansion of the federal government workforce. There has been no spending spree.

Meanwhile, Romney supports the voodoo economics of his predecessors. He has said he will refuse to raise taxes while substantially increasing military spending. Sound familiar?

Alex Baldwin Explains His Fear of a Republican Win

Actor Alec Baldwin has always been an Obama supporter, but he took his frustration with Republicans to another level last week, warning his Twitter followers that  ”lying thieves” would take back the White House if President Obama loses his re-election bid.

“You wanna go back? To Bush? Cheney? Paulson? Rumsfeld? Unfunded wars? Death of U.S. soldiers and innocent civilians for oil?” Baldwin tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “You wanna go back to lying thieves in the White House who make war under false pretenses in order to make $ for their friends?”

Baldwin was half a world away from the general election battle that is simmering between  Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, but his seven-tweet rant suggested that even the Cannes Film Festival  in France cannot keep the “30 Rock” star’s mind off American politics.

“The election is around the corner. You want another corporate puppet who will squander more U.S. natural resources, revenue and perhaps lives?” Baldwin tweeted. “Just to protect that breed of wealth that wants America to finally accept a European model of plutocracy?”

“Obama … 2012,” Baldwin concluded.

Responding to a suggestion from a fellow tweeter that he run for office himself, Baldwin said he “would run if I could win.”

“Too many reactionary haters in the RW for that to be possible,” he tweeted, purportedly referring to the “right wing.”

Baldwin, a prolific tweeter, has had his fare share of harsh words for Obama’s Republican challengers. In December, Baldwin dubbed then-GOP contender Newt Gingrich “a cranky history professor” and said “Romney is better suited for country club president.”

Obama, on the other hand, “sees what govt’s  priorities should be,” Baldwin tweeted.

In an interview on MSNBC earlier this month, Baldwin suggested that Obama has the election “in the bag” and that Republicans are “scared.”

“These guys are getting scared,” Baldwin said. They know it is not looking good for them, and I think they are sensing now that they are really going to focus on the congressional races and Obama - it is starting to look like he has it in the bag.”