† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: In a March 2008 speech about the economy delivered at Cooper Union in Greenwich Village, presidential candidate Barack Obama (he wasn’t using his middle name back then; only “racists” were) said: “For many Americans, the economy has effectively been in recession for the past seven years. Americans are working harder for less.” As The Washington Post notes, “three years later, that speech could still be given by Obama - or, more ominously for him, by one of his Republican opponents”:

 

As Obama launches his 2012 campaign, he faces the challenge of millions of Americans without jobs, as unemployment has shot up under his tenure - it has doubled from the 5.1 percent it was the day he gave that speech, and was 9 percent in April, according to numbers out Friday. But perhaps more worrisome for the president’s political hopes, most Americans who are still working aren’t pleased with the economy either, according to polls.

 

And economic data suggest reasons for their dissatisfaction. Income inequality has risen, gas prices continue to spike and household income has declined, even as the stock market rises and corporate profits are setting records. The “new era of opportunity and prosperity” the president promised in 2008 has not yet appeared. …

 

Between spring 2008 and September 2009, nearly a quarter of U.S. households experienced at least a 25 percent drop in household income, according to the Economic Security Index, a measure of middle-class well-being assembled by a team of scholars led by Jacob Hacker, a Yale University political scientist.

 

Although the downturn made things worse, the December 2010 report said “Americans’ economic insecurity has been growing for years, and it appears to have little diminished since 2009.”

 

† Look Before You Leap: Part II (second item): TX is now amongst the states that require doctors to perform an ultrasound scan before performing an abortion, The New York Times reports:

 

Gov. Rick Perry, a conservative Republican, made the bill, which the Legislature passed on Thursday, a priority and is expected to sign it. The bill requires a doctor to conduct a sonogram at least 24 hours before an abortion and to give the woman the opportunity to see the results and hear the heartbeat of the fetus. Though the woman can choose not to view the images and hear the heartbeat, the doctor must describe what the sonogram shows, including the existence of legs, arms and internal organs.

 

“This will be one of the strongest pieces of sonogram legislation in the nation,” the bill’s author, Representative Sid Miller, a Republican from Stephenville, told reporters. Mr. Miller predicted the measure would “save numerous unborn lives.”

 

Because the measures passed both houses of the Legislature with a two-thirds majority, it will go into effect as soon as the governor signs it.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Waterboarding Works): The Obama administration is frustrated that the kudos over their successful effort to hunt down and assassinate Usama bin Laden quickly devolved into a debate over how much the triumph depended upon information extracted from captured terrorists subjected to waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques. Huffington Post's Sam Stein reports that the administration is strenuously downplaying the role of waterboarding:

 

"There is no possible way to know for sure," said one senior Obama administration official. "Even if waterboarding did produce something - and that is debatable, the timeline seems very unclear - it is impossible to say whether interrogation absent it would have produced the same thing. It might have. Lots of detainees provided [intelligence]."

 

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor was more directly dismissive. "I think this is a distraction from the broader picture, which is that this achievement was the result of years of painstaking work by our intelligence community that drew from multiple sources," he said. "It's impossible to know whether information obtained by EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques] could have been obtained by other forms of interrogation."

 

After CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted that some detainees "clearly" were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, National security adviser Tom Donilon gave Chris Wallace “the party line” on FOX News Sunday – but in the form of a modified, very limited hangout – yes, we used some of that intelligence but waterboarding played such a teeny, tiny role that it doesn’t even bear mentioning:

 

WALLACE: Since the raid, the CIA director, Leon Panetta, and former counterterrorism chief, Jose Rodriguez, both say enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding, provided some of the information that led to that raid on the bin Laden compound. Are they right?

 

DONILON: [A]n operation like this is a result of hundreds of pieces of information and intelligence over time. I can represent to you that no single piece of intelligence led to the result that we saw …

 

WALLACE: I understand that, sir. But what I'm asking you is: did any of the information, any of the fruits of enhanced interrogation - was that part of the jigsaw puzzle?

 

DONILON: It doesn't really work that way … it works in terms of a whole mosaic of information being put together. And we got information from detainees, from human sources, from technical sources, from other leads on services that all come together.

 

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, for one, disagrees:

 

WALLACE: [H]ow big a role did enhanced interrogation play in all of the information that led up to the identification of that compound?

 

CHENEY: Well, I think we'll know more in the days ahead, and a whole range of issues with respect to the bin Laden operation. But, as best I can tell, from the people I talked with … all have said one way or the other that the enhanced interrogation program played a role. That is to say some of the early leads came out of that program. My guess is that's probably the case that it contributed, just as did a number of other factors.

 

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, UC-Berkeley law professor John Yoo - the Department of Justice official whose legal opinions on enhanced interrogation informed the Bush administration’s intelligence program makes the case that bin Laden’s capture “vindicates the Bush administration, whose intelligence architecture marked the path to bin Laden's door” and sneers, “[i]n the war on terror, it is easy to pull the trigger - it is hard to figure out where to aim.” Yoo also regrets that bin Laden wasn’t taken alive for questioning: “[O]ne of the most valuable intelligence opportunities since the beginning of the war has slipped through our hands.”

 

But in this Wall Street Journal op-ed former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey argues that with the Obama administration’s interrogation policies we could not have induced bin Laden to provide actionable intelligence:

 

Seized along with bin Laden's corpse was a trove of documents and electronic devices that should yield intelligence that could help us capture or kill other terrorists and further degrade the capabilities of those who remain at large.

 

But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. …

 

The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It's available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.

 

In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again.

 

Wallace asked Cheney about this point on Sunday:  

 

WALLACE: [I]f we were to now capture another new high-value target, which is certainly more likely, given this apparent trove of information that they recovered in bin Laden's compound - should the president reinstate enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding?

 

CHENEY: Well, I certainly would advocate it. I'd be a strong supporter of it. We went to a lot of trouble to find out what we could do, how far we could go, what was legal and so forth. … There is a study that was done by the CIA, that's in the National Archives, some of it has been declassified now, that shows that enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provide a vast treasure trove, if you will, of intelligence. So, it was a god program. It was a legal program. It was not torture. And I would strongly recommend that we continue it. …

 

WALLACE: So, you would put it back on the table if you were the president and they got another new high-value target?

 

CHENEY: If it were my call, I'd have the program ready to go on the chance that any day you may capture a detainee who has vital piece of information about the next attack or about some new developments, and I think the program provides us with the capacity to collect that intelligence. And, again, that program, together with our terrorist surveillance program, those two things, I think, are the most important steps we took that kept us safe for seven years.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Prediction: Christians Will Be “Extinct” In The Holy Land Within 60 Years): Egypt's Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the population, continue to be targeted by the Muslim majority, now that "long suppressed sectarian animosities have burst out with increasing frequency since the rebellion removed the heavy hand of the Mubarak police state," The New York Times reports:

 

A night of street fighting between Muslims and Christians left at least 12 people dead and two churches in flames on Sunday in the latest outbreak of sectarian tensions since the revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11. …

 

The Egyptian authorities vowed a swift response, announcing military trials for 190 people arrested in the violence, along with stepped up security at houses of worship and tougher laws against attacking religious institutions.  …

 

Witnesses and other residents said that no organized group appeared to have led the weekend’s clashes. Some Christians in the neighborhood said they had seen a vanguard of bearded Salafis - adherents of an ascetic form of Muslim fundamentalism that is increasingly used as a catch-all term to describe Islamist militancy. But people on both sides said that the fighting pitted one group of young men from the neighborhood against another, along tribal rather than ideological lines. …

 

Muslims set fire to the Church of St. Mena and, later, to the nearby Church of the Virgin Mary as well.  …

 

In March, Muslims and Christians fought in the town of Helwan near Cairo. Thirteen people were killed and a church was burned down. In that instance, the spark was a rumored romance between a Muslim woman and a Christian man.

 

The Washington Post reports that this latest clash – like others in the past – was triggered by a rumor that “Copts have held women against their will because they intended to convert to Islam”:

 

Youssef Sidhom, the editor of the Coptic newspaper al-Watani, said the rumors of women being held for converting to Islam appear to be a ploy by a small group of Salafists.

 

“They want to assert themselves in the political arena, and their means to do so is to highlight rumors of conversion cases of ladies,” Sidhom said Sunday. “That is their way of creating a buzz.”

 

He said Copts feel that security forces stood by as the worst of the violence unfolded Saturday in Imbaba, a poor district. “From Saturday afternoon, there were signs that this was going on,” Sidhom said. “The police were alerted, but they did nothing to stop this.”

 

Michael Mounir, a Christian activist, said Salafists are trying to present themselves as an alternative to the secular military leaders. The generals were appointed by Mubarak, who led a secular government.

 

“The Salafists have managed to show that the army is weak and that the army is unable to distinguish between democracy and freedom of opinion and thuggery,” Mounir said. “This is clearly thuggery.”

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Mortgage Loan Modification Less Than Advertised: According to real estate data firm Zillow, in 1Q 2011 home values in 129 markets fell “at the fastest rate since late 2008, Reuters reports:

 

Zillow said its home value index fell 3 percent in the first three months of the year from the previous quarter, and was down 8.2 percent year-over-year.

 

The number of homeowners under water—or, those who owe more on the mortgage than their house is currently worth—amounted to 28.4 percent of single-family homeowners, representing a peak since Zillow began calculating the data in 2009.

 

That was up from 27 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. …

 

Given all those factors, it is unlikely home values will reach a bottom this year, Zillow said, and the firm pushed its forecast out to 2012.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing): A new Harris Interactive/HealthDay poll finds that women in their 40s want their mammograms, despite a November 2009 recommendation by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) that women should put off getting their first mammogram until age 50, The Associated Press reports:

 

About 57% of women surveyed believe mammograms should start at age 40, according to the poll of 1,083 U.S. women over 18 years of age conducted April 18-20, while just 12% thought that 50 was the right age to start getting the imaging tests. …

 

Specifically, 45% of the women polled said the task force pushed back the recommended age to 50 to reduce health-care costs and avoid administering unnecessary tests, while 30% believe the task force made the recommendation because excessive tests produced too many so-called false-positive results, leading women to unnecessarily think they had cancer when they did not. …

 

The new recommendations aside, many women in their 40s are still getting mammograms - 77% of women in their 40s have already had at least one mammogram, while 64% reported getting one annually, the poll found.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, There's No Such Thing As Free Healthcare): As the cost of RomneyCare spiraled out of control, the MA legislature voted in 2009 to deny coverage to legal immigrants to save the state $130 million a year. The Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest court has cleared the way to restore subsidized healthcare to legal i, The Associated Press reports:

 

The court ruled that while protections against discrimination in the Massachusetts Constitution don't explicitly protect individuals based on their immigration status, any attempt to deny benefits to "resident aliens" should be held to the strictest judicial scrutiny possible.

 

The court also appeared to reject a key cost-cutting argument that lawmakers used in 2009 when they decided to block legal immigrants from the Commonwealth Care health plan. The plan provides subsidized care for those earning up to three times the federal poverty level. …

 

The court also noted that during the first three years that the law was in effect, subsidized health care benefits were offered to qualified immigrants living in Massachusetts. …

 

Lawyers for the immigrants said the answers provided by Friday's ruling make it much harder for the state to argue that the 2009 decision to block legal immigrants from the program was constitutional. …

 

Immigrant activists say the Legislature should take a cue from the court and once again allow some 40,000 legal immigrants to be covered under Commonwealth Care. …

 

The class action lawsuit now heads back to a single Supreme Judicial Court justice.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Fed Up With Farmers): “Federal farm subsidies, long decried by policy makers as wasteful and antiquated but protected by powerful political interests, appear to be in serious danger,” The New York Times reports:

 

The House Agriculture Committee, while still dominated by farm state members, is now peppered with freshmen who view cuts to these programs as an essential part of the broader attack on the federal deficit, the centerpiece of their campaigns.

 

Further, after taking a beating from constituents concerning their Medicare proposal last month, Republicans are eager to find an area of common ground with Democrats. Farm subsidies seem to fit the bill; conservatives condemn them as intrusions into the free market, liberals denounce them for encouraging environmentally harmful overfarming, and both sides see them as a form of corporate welfare.

 

What is more, some subsidies have placed the nation in violation of trade agreements, and members from both sides of the aisle have questioned why, with biofuel mandates creating such demand for ethanol, the government needs to subsidize it. …

 

In 2011, taxpayers are projected to pay roughly $16 billion in aid to farmers through various programs, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office.

 

The most controversial of these programs are the $5 billion in annual so-called direct payments to farmers of corn, soybeans and other crops, awarded simply for owning tillable farm land, even if they do not plant on it.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (When People Fear The Government): By enacting a series of onerous new regulations on would-be gun owners, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley openly flouted the Supreme Court ruling striking down the city’s handgun ban last year. But now that he’s leaving office, he wants five armed body guards to protect him at taxpayer expense, The Washington Times reports. Daley “will have several handguns protecting him at all times” without the hassles he’s imposed on law-abiding citizens who want to protect themselves and their families - having to file an application for a Firearm Owner's Identification Card with the State Police; successfully completing a handgun safety course involving at least four hours of classroom instruction and an hour of hands-on training at a range outside the city limits, because there are no public ranges in the city; and applying for a Chicago Firearm Permit. Getting past the gantlet of regulations takes more than 60 days and costs more than $250 before you’ve even purchased the gun.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on Brook Peters, who had just started his second day of kindergarten at P.S. 150, a short walk from the World Trade Center, when the hijacked jetliners flew over his school and slammed into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Peters, now 14-years old, produced a 38-minute documentary about how his classmates experienced the terror attacks that was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival's Family Festival this week-end. The Washington Times reports:

 

He says he remembered the loud roar of a plane going over his school. Later, when he was near the trade center, "I remember seeing ... it looked like a stick figure, but it was holding a briefcase, falling." …

 

Compiled from 20 interviews with students, teachers, firefighters and others, the movie is a personal project that has become part of the public narrative of documenting and memorializing the attacks. …

 

For Brook, who grew up knowing the local firefighters and struggled later with memories of them on Sept. 11, the movie began as a way of furthering his longtime interest in filmmaking. But it ended up being therapeutic, he said. …

 

His mother, an actress who had done volunteer work on fundraisers for firefighters, was on her way to a firehouse for a meeting when the first plane hit the trade center's north tower. She was quickly drawn into helping relay messages among firefighters as they began to organize the massive response, she recalls. 
 

 

After the south tower was hit, she dashed to Brook's school to collect him and brought him back with her to the area where she had been helping. After the dust cloud enveloped the area, they ran into a firehouse. …

 

Brook shot "The Second Day" on a basic camcorder, editing it on family friends' computers because the Peters' own couldn't handle video. Thanks to his mom's acting contacts, it boasts as narrators Charles Durning and Dan Lauria, who is currently starring in Broadway's "Lombardi."

 

Now at an arts-focused public middle school, Brook has made some other films, including animated pieces shown at a children's film festival.

 

He wants to be a filmmaker - and a firefighter, too.