you know, the ones working two jobs . . .

What about all of the rich schoolteachers?

Brown also took on President Barack Obama for proposing tax hikes on families who earn more than $250,000 per year, saying that would hurt “teachers, firefighters, policemen, folks who work two jobs.”

Asked which public servants earn that much money, Brown said it is common for police officers to earn well over $100,000 annually when overtime is factored into their pay.

“You throw in a teacher who’s working, plus a summer job, it adds up pretty quickly,” he said. “There’s quite a few of them.”

a message for our times . . .

I hope that Sahil Kapur over at TPM is right in his assessment that the President will make economic inequality a central theme to his re-election campaign.

If a speech Thursday morning by one of his top economists is any indication, President Barack Obama is going all in with the 2012 re-election message of stemming the rise in income inequality and reforming a system that’s increasingly perceived to be rigged in favor of the rich.

White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger rattled off a flurry of statistics illustrating the rise of inequality and its connection to the shrinking middle class. He blamed it on economic policies tilted to favor top earners — including income tax reforms (presumably during the Bush era) and the “drastic cut in the estate tax.”

clock ticking . . .

Except for the inevitable "he said, she said" angle, McClatchy has a pretty thorough story on the likely tax hike.

WASHINGTON — The bitter showdown of Republicans versus the White House and congressional Democrats over a Social Security tax break grew uglier and more tense Tuesday, and the result is that 160 million people face the increasingly likely prospect of a tax increase Jan. 1.

The GOP-led House of Representatives, by a 229-193 vote, formally disagreed Tuesday with a bipartisan Senate plan to extend the current tax rate for two months. Employees have paid a 4.2 percent tax this year; it's scheduled to go up to 6.2 percent next year unless the current rate is extended. The House vote makes an increase likely.

Read more here.

TPM manages to review the events leading to the mess without the "he said, she said" tangle.

This debate started when President Obama introduced his jobs bill, the priciest provisions of which were a one year renewal (and broadening of) this year’s payroll tax holiday, and an extension of emergency unemployment benefits.

Republicans were never wild about moving ahead with either of these items to begin with — but a very public campaign by President Obama made it too politically toxic for GOP leaders to oppose them outright. Instead they just made it as difficult as possible for either to pass. They could’ve agreed to support the measures without paying for them, or to pay for them with war savings, as some Dems to suggest, or with a mix of payfors that included a balanced mix of tax revenue and spending cuts. Likewise they could’ve agreed to pass the measures “cleanly” — without attaching unrelated policy riders to the legislation.

But they did neither. And it created a huge problem.

global crisis?

Is it really possible that the biggest political story of the coming U.S. presidential race is the Euro crisis and its global consequences - a story that few of us are probably closely following . . . ?

truth. social security. medicare: Alarm Bells

Below is the last paragraph from a posting on TPM by Robert Reich.

You should read the entire post:

Don't be confused by these alarms from the Social Security and Medicare trustees. Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one, but the problem is not really Medicare; it's quickly rising health-care costs. Look more closely and the real problem isn't even health-care costs; it's a system that pushes up costs by rewarding inefficiency, causing unbelievable waste, pushing over-medication, providing inadequate prevention, over-using emergency rooms because many uninsured people can't afford regular doctor checkups, and spending billions on advertising and marketing seeking to enroll healthy people and avoid sick ones.

TPM Deep Thought

Conservatives are so incensed by warnings about the threat of right wing radicalism that they're considering overthrowing the federal government.
--Josh Marshall

bunch of storm troopers

Dick DeGuerin, representing Allen Stanford, was interviewed at TPM by Zachary Roth.

In an interview with TPMmuckraker moments ago, DeGuerin denied that Stanford was running a Ponzi scheme. And, referring to federal investigators' raids on Stanford offices as the SEC prepared charges last month, DeGuerin played the Nazi card, declaring:

"The SEC came in like a bunch of Storm Troopers, which caused a panic, and caused the banks in Venezuela and elsewhere to nationalize his banks, just take them away."

This move, combined with the decline in the stock market, caused a severe diminution in the value of Stanford's assets, DeGuerin said. "It's a perfect storm of panic caused by the SEC's heavy-handed actions"

Read all of it.

recommendation . . .

Something well worth reading over at Talking Points Memo. You'll need to follow a couple of links there to get the full story.

I do not think this issue has been raised anywhere in our news coverage or here at my blog. But I wanted to briefly enter into this debate about President Obama's decision to make Chas Freeman chair of the National Intelligence Council, a somewhat out of the way Intelligence Community panel which has the key role of overseeing the production of National Intelligence Estimates.
Indulge me for a moment for a bit of background for those not familiar with this controversy; because it's important. Freeman is firmly in the Realist school of foreign policy. He was a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and is close to the Saudis. The real rub, the basis of the whole controversy, however, is that he has been far more critical of Israeli policy than is generally allowed within acceptable debate in Washington. That is the crux of it. And because of that he's become the target of a spirited campaign to get his appointment rescinded.