Yes-23 » The Other

Priyanka Gandhi’s husband Robert Vadra willing to join politics

Lady Kathleen — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:01:33 +0000

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‘There is something wrong with our politics’

Lady Kathleen — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 03:53:30 +0000

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“You’ve got to tell them you’ve had enough of the theatrics you’ve had enough of the politics, stop sending out press releases start passing some bills that we all know will help the economy right now,” he said. “That’s what they need to do. They’ve got to hear from you.”

Despite Obama’s calls for urgent action on the economy, Congress has left Washington for its August recess and Obama will soon follow for his annual summer vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. But the president said he saw little reason to call lawmakers back to Washington.

“The last thing we need is Congress spending more time arguing in D.C.,” he said. “They need to spend more time out here listening to you and hearing how fed up you are.”

Obama urged lawmakers to get to work in September and pass a series of initiatives the White House says will spur job growth, including an extension of the payroll tax cuts, three free trade agreements and an infrastructure bank. The only thing preventing some of these bills from being passed, he said, were the refusal of some lawmakers to put country ahead of party.

“There are some in Congress right now who would rather see their opponents lose than see America win,” he said.

The president’s feisty remarks came after he toured a plant in western Michigan that makes advanced batteries for alternative-fuel vehicles such as hybrids or all-electrics. The White House has been touting spending on clean-energy technologies as a job creator, and the advanced batteries as a way to boost U.S. auto companies.

Obama won Michigan in the 2008 presidential election and the economically battered state is crucial to his re-election hopes in 2012.

Ahead of the president’s arrival, Republicans criticized Obama for being more focused on saving his own job than solving the country’s economic woes.

“Everything that this president does is either a fundraiser or a political move in order to advance his march to a second term,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

GOP presidential hopefuls will be making their case for taking over the White House in a debate in Iowa Thursday night, just as Obama is scheduled to arrive in Manhattan later Thursday for a pair of $35,800-a-ticket fundraisers for his re-election bid.

A Democratic official said Obama was to speak at a reception with about 15 people at the Ritz-Carlton hotel and a dinner for 50 at a private home. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and movie producer Harvey Weinstein are the dinner hosts. The reception host is Gary Hirshberg, chief executive officer of organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm.

The $35,800 admission price is the legal maximum per person. Obama’s campaign keeps $5,000 and the Democratic National Committee pockets the remaining $30,800.

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Broncos’ Tebow doesn’t rule out possible future in politics

Lady Kathleen — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 03:53:28 +0000

Accustomed to being questioned by the media? Check.

Knows how to handle himself in front of a crowd? Check.

Has the ability to galvanize (and divide) the American people? Check.

Is on the front lines of one of the country’s hot-button political issues? Check.

Yup, Tim Tebow definitely could have a career in politics once his playing days are over. The Broncos’ quarterback didn’t rule it out, either, when the subject was broached in an interview on the Golf Channel’s “Feherty Live.”

“It could be something in my future,” Tebow said. “It’s something I’ll have to think about and if I pray about, you know, I have no idea right now. But possibly.”

Tebow’s consideration makes complete sense. After all, Tebow makes no bones about his Evangelical Christian faith and according pro-life stance on abortion, something he feels so strongly about that he starred in a Super Bowl ad about the issue in 2010. Tebow is already a darling among the Republican party, too, with more than one GOP presidential candidate courting him for an endorsement.

So, yeah, all things considered, why wouldn’t politics seem like a good fit for Tebow?

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Big society and council cuts: the politics of handwringing

Lady Kathleen — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:46:35 +0000

The words “stable door,” “horse,” and “bolted” may spring to mind as Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, finally publishes guidance, first signalled in early Spring, aimed at ensuring councils do not pass on “disproportionate” funding cuts to charities, social enterprises and small businesses.

The promise sounded pathetically late even back in March – councils had by then agreed huge, front-loaded budget cuts in response to Pickles own drastic local government finance settlement – and it is hard not to see today’s missive as political cover for the ongoing annihilation of the voluntary sector (Pickles’ foreword even lays the blame for the cuts at Labour’s door) rather than a serious attempt to address the problem.

The guidance talks about “reasonable expectations” of the way ministers expect councils to deal with voluntary sector partners – but predictably there is no sign that the government will intervene to do anything about any council that flouts the guidance. Back in March, not long after the government had come under sustained and damaging fire from the voluntary sector over cuts and its broken big society promises, Pickles said in a speech to the NCVO annual conference that:

“If councils are being high-handed – I’ll consider giving our reasonable expectations statutory force.”

Well, there’s no mention of “statutory force” in the guidance, which is nothing more than you’d expect from an uber-localist minister. Councils can still do what they like, and it appears there is nothing here to signal that ministers are prepared to do seriously rein them in, just as they did nothing more than wring their hands over the widespread slashing of council funding for Supporting People homeless support earlier this year. Handwringing has become the default position for a government that is adamant it wants to protect and nurture the voluntary sector, and yet is implacably, ideologically opposed to any kind of central intervention to ensure this might happen.

So what comeback do charities have? On the face of it they must appeal to the Compact, an established voluntary agreement meant to ensure fair play between charites and state agencies. This is commonly perceived to be toothless. Indeed, the first England-wide poll of Compact Voice members, published last month, found many respondents believed not only that the Compact lacked ministerial support but that it was:

“Currently ineffective”

Ineffective or not, Compact officials may find themselves very busy: a separate survey by Compact Voice published in August found that over half of English local authorities said that they made disproportionate cuts to voluntary sector grants and contracts in 2011-12 budgets. Funding pressures next year will be no easier.

We might also expect much to-ing and fro-ing over what constitutes a “disproportionate reduction”. In the case of Supporting People, ministers clashed with councils over this very issue. In Nottingham, the Labour-run council cut supporting people funding by 45%, arguing that this was precisely the cut in its central allocation for homeless support made by the government. The housing minister, Grant Shapps argued that by his calculations (taking into account cuts to the national Supporting People funding pot at 12% over four years) the benchmark cut in Nottingham should be no more than 10.7% ( I discussed the technicalities in an earlier cuts blog post). There was no resolution of this row, and the council pressed on with the cut anyway.

Today’s guidance introduces the interesting concept of “social value”. Charities have long argued that they have lost out in public sector markets because while they offer “social value” it tends to come with a cost premium, and commissioners tend to award contracts on a cheapest price basis. This results in the bundling of high volume contracts that favour well-capitalised national corporate providers rather than small local charities and small businesses. The guidance suggest ministers want this to change. It states:

“Under the Duty of Best Value… authorities should consider overall value, including economic, environmental and social value, when reviewing service provision. As a concept, social value is about seeking to maximise the additional benefit that can be created by procuring or commissioning goods and services, above and beyond the benefit of merely the goods and services themselves.”

Of course, everyone is in favour of social value (charities sometimes seem to assert it is a virtue structurally unique to themselves) but what evidence is there that commissioners will take it seriously? The government’s own flagship Work Programme shows that big corporates offering low cost bids succeeded at the expense of voluntary sector providers to win prime contracts, while the pitiful deals subsequently offered to some potential charity subcontractors suggest the enthusiasm for social value recedes once profit margins are squeezed. Indeed, some bruised voluntary organisations now regard themselves as “bid candy,” brazenly used by corporates wanting to throw a little “social value” glitter over their bids

There is some sensible stuff in the guidance about authorities ensuring they actually engage with voluntary organisations and service users about cuts. Councils’ failure to consult properly on cuts plans has caused some to come to grief already (see my post on the Birmingham social care cuts fiasco), and if the astonishing investigation by Community Care magazine this week, which estimated one in ten councils may have failed to consult properly on cuts to adult care, is true, there may be more trouble in store.

Councils will not have the excuse they had last year – that Pickles’ tardy, and tighter-than-anticipated local government funding settlement meant they had no choice but to steamroll cuts through. But even if they do consult properly there are no guarantees that charities will magically escape the financial whirlwind. Expect more hard times for charities and social enterprises. Expect more ministerial handwringing.

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Article source: Bing Polictics

George Cloooney’s says dirty politics are nothing new

Lady Kathleen — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:46:34 +0000

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – If you think today’s political landscape is unusually brutal and dirty, George Clooney has a history lesson for you: It was just as bad 200 years ago.

“I think it’s cyclical, and we’re at a period of time that is probably not the best for politics,” said Clooney at a Toronto International Film Festival press conference for “The Ides of March,” a smart and cynical drama that he directed and in which he plays a charismatic presidential candidate.

“But if you look at the things Jefferson and Adams did to each other, that wasn’t very nice either. The 1800 election was nasty, too. It’s cyclical.”

A week after claiming the crown as the king of the Telluride Film Festival, Clooney brought his charm at a Toronto press conference that preceded his film’s gala screening by a few hours.

Although he was joined by co-writer Grant Heslov and by actors Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright and Max Minghella, about 80 percent of the questions were directed at Clooney — and a good portion of the ones that weren’t aimed his way were variations on the query, “How great was it to work with George?”

Ryan Gosling, who has the film’s central role as a young, rising campaign strategist, had the best (and most clearly insincere) answer: “It was like watching a unicorn being born!”

While a good many questions were political in nature, Clooney kept things light and insisted that his film does not have a political agenda. (His character espouses many liberal ideas that one would expect Clooney to share, but is also revealed to hardly be a paragon of integrity.)

“I don’t think that this was really a political film,” Clooney said. “I think this is a film about moral choice … I thought it was a fun moral tale, and if you put it in politics that amps up all the fun.

“If it’s reflecting some of the cynicism we feel today about politics, that’s probably good,” he added. “We should be looking at things. But it wasn’t designed to do that.

“Everybody makes moral choices that better themselves and hurt others along the way. That’s universal, not just to politics. This could have been set on Wall Street. Actually, it would have been easier to do it on Wall Street.”

As for the politician he plays, Clooney declined to specify any particular role models.

“There’s just so many ways to get in trouble with this answer,” he said. “There were enough examples that we just picked little pieces of whatever we wanted.”

Jeffrey Wright, who was raised in Washington, D.C., agreed with Clooney’s description of the film as more moral than political: at its heart, he said, he thinks of it as “more of a gangster film.”

When a Canadian reporter asked Gosling, who was born and raised in Ontario, if a similar film could be made about Canadian politics, the actor frowned. “I think it’d be more … ” He stopped. “No. The Canadian version would be too nice.”

Paul Giamatti, who plays a glowering rival campaign strategist, took umbrage at this. “It wouldn’t, actually,” he insisted. “It’d probably be as dirty as America. You people are filthy up here. I think it’s time to blow the lid off Canadian politics!”

Of course, the QA wasn’t all about politics. Because it was Clooney, some questioners appeared a little starstruck: one woman’s “question” was “Tell me: George Clooney, film director.”

“Tell you what?” asked Clooney. “I don’t want to blow anybody’s mind, but I’m pretty much the same guy as George Clooney the actor. Same height. Same hair.”

He paused. “I don’t know what you want me to say about it.”

Through the actors, we learned about director Clooney’s practical jokes — having an intense conversation about the film with Gosling while surreptitiously spraying his leading man’s crotch from a water bottle — and about his method of empowering actors.

“He would tell me, ‘You have the most power in this scene,’” remembered Marisa Tomei, who plays a New York Times reporter. “I’d think, I have the most power in the scene?”

Clooney grinned. “I told everybody that,” he said.

For Clooney, “Ides” is only the first of his two-part Toronto domination plan: the TIFF premiere of “The Descendants,” the film that wowed Telluride, is coming up this weekend.

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Politics at Heart of Latest Afghanistan Policy Flap

Lady Kathleen — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:46:33 +0000

President Obama‘s political foes are slamming his defense secretary’s announcement that U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan largely will end next year, but such a time line has been implied for months by military leaders.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta caused a public dust up Wednesday when he told reporters traveling with him to Brussels for a NATO forum that American troops in Afghanistan would shift into a mostly training and advising role next year ahead of the president’s fall 2014 deadline for withdrawing all American troops.

[See a collection of political cartoons on Afghanistan.]

Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney slammed Obama Tuesday during a campaign stop in Las Vegas. “Why in the world do you go to the people that you are fighting with and tell them the day you are pulling out your troops?” Romney said. “It makes absolutely no sense.”

Prominent GOP hawks on Capitol Hill responded quickly, panning Panetta’s announcement. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon of California said while the entire Obama withdrawal plan “meets his political time line, the vulnerability to our forces potentially increases.”

[Combat Stress May Have Led to Afghan Killings of NATO Troops.]

In a dual statement, Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham charged the commander in chief and his defense secretary with basing war plans on “domestic politics in the United States, not conditions on the ground in Afghanistan.”

“The Taliban has little incentive to engage in a meaningful negotiation with the Afghan government or with us to end the conflict when they believe the United States is leaving and that they can wait us out,” McCain and Graham said. “It is very unfortunate that the administration continues to provide reassurance to our enemies that the United States is more eager to leave Afghanistan than to succeed.”

Administration officials typically counter such attacks by pointing out the announcements of troop-withdrawal plans from Iraq created the urgency among leaders there to get enough of the political and governing work done to allow for the exit of U.S. troops late last year.

[U.S., Iran Lack 'Dialogue' to Avoid a Costly Miscalculation.]

So what was this announcement and flap all about? Politics:At home, within NATO, and inside Afghanistan. (As a former White House official often tells your DOTMIL correspondent: “I’m shocked there’s politics going on in a political system!”)

Politics is one of the few reasons Obama’s GOP foes should have acted so surprised. Military leaders have been signalling for months that they hoped to begin handing over to Afghan forces and officials larger and larger chunks of territory long before the 2014 withdrawal.

For instance, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos told your DOTMIL correspondent in November “that over the next 12 months that we can transition from what you would call classic counterinsurgency operations to … training and advising.”

“That’ll happen over the next year,” Amos said. “It won’t be a clean transition, it’ll be a rolling transition.”

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The Politics of Palestinian Demography

Lady Kathleen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:43:42 +0000

Diplomats, CENTCOM commanders, and now President Obama have cited demography and, more precisely, the growing Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, as a reason why two states must come now rather than later. The fact is, a growing number of Palestinians live west of the Jordan River, Obama explained.

Certainly, demography should be a concern if Israel is to remain both democratic and a Jewish state. So much of the demography thats floating around, however, is little more than junk statistics. When I was editor of the Middle East Quarterly, we published The Politics of Palestinian Demography, a must-read article by Yakov Fatelson, who looks at the statistics the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics provides and which many Americans accept at face value. The problem is that the Palestinian Authority lets politics influence its numbers. Their Central Bureau of Statistics isnt allowed to report Palestinian emigration, double-counts Jerusalem (which is also counted by Israel), and has made revisions at the request of the Palestinian leadership when the population in Jerusalem, for example, was found to have declined. The error today may exceed one million people throughout areas claimed by the Palestinian Authority.

In computer science, the old quip is garbage in, garbage out. When it comes to policy based on bad numbers, the same adage applies.

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Jobs and politics key to unity in anti-Gaddafi ranks

Lady Kathleen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:43:41 +0000

By Mohammed Abbas

TRIPOLI |
Fri Sep 2, 2011 3:06pm EDT

TRIPOLI (Reuters) – One young fighter accidentally shoots himself in the foot as others fire wildly in the air, while a truck narrowly misses bystanders as it careers past.

It’s a typical night of celebration for the men who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi.

Disarming the fighters, intoxicated by victory and imbued with a sense of entitlement, will be a big task for Libya’s new leaders, who will have to find the jobs and political representation for the men after months of war.

Many fighters have banded into brigades affiliated largely to their home towns, and while there is now an abundance of good will between groups, potential fault lines are plain to see as eyes turn Libya’s economic and political future.

“It’s a good thing, but everything has its price, and the price is chaos,” said Saoud al-Hafi, a coordinator of the uprising in the capital Tripoli, commenting on the young mens’ celebrations in the city’s Martyrs’ Square.

A large banner at the square prohibits firing in the air.

“I know a lot of these people and they are willing to give up their arms. But they want to see jobs, security. Jobs are very, very important. It’s one of the things that ignited the revolution,” he said.

Like the young men who overthrew authoritarian leaders in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year, the fighters who took up arms after a February 17 revolt cite a lack of good jobs and a poor economy as one of the main reasons for the uprising.

OPEC member Libya is wealthy, with little debt and a relatively small population of around six million people, but Gaddafi did little to diversify Libya’s economy away from oil, concentrating the country’s wealth in his family’s hands.

“The reason for the revolution is poverty. A few controlled everything. It will take one or two years for the economic situation to improve,” said Nizal al-Tayari, 26, one of the anti-Gaddafi fighters at the square.

“If there’s no change, we can have another revolution,” he added, dismissing comparisons with Iraq, which eight years after the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein has made relatively little progress rebuilding its economy and infrastructure.

VOLATILE

The young fighters in theory answer to local military councils, which themselves answer to a national military council, which in turn answers to Libya’s new leaders at the National Transitional Council (NTC).

But the chain of command is loose, and the young men volatile, said Hisham Buhagiar, a senior commander who led fighters from Libya’s western mountains into Tripoli.

“They are not the type who are used to taking orders. These are the types of people who will go out, who are really angry, and they just want to change the system. They don’t know how to do it, and it’s very hard to put them back in boxes and say, ‘This is the way you should go’,” he said.

“We have to accept that these guys took away Gaddafi. We must give them the benefit of the doubt and listen to them …. Disarming them and jobs are equally important. If we have enough good jobs for these people, then we will take more of the arms and we will teach them how to live in a civilized democratic country where we talk without guns,” he added.

But with only 13 days passed since anti-Gaddafi fighters entered Tripoli, the NTC does not appear in a hurry to disarm the men, given that Gaddafi remains at large and fighting goes on with pockets of his supporters.

“America took seven years to stop the violence in Baghdad, one city. They were living in the Green Zone for years,” said NTC spokesman Mahmoud Shammam.

“There are (pro-Gaddafi) sleeper cells, a fifth column, and we’re not going to neglect all that and be nice in front of the world and say ‘We’re going to disarm out troops’. No, not now, we’re going to finish the job.”

POLITICS

A group of older, more senior anti-Gaddafi fighters sat at a beach house formerly owned by Gaddafi’s wife, and disavowed any splits between brigades of different regions or tribe.

Different brigades have their hometowns prominently sprayed on their cars and on walls across Libya.

“I’m from Nalut, but I went to take part in the Derna uprising,” said Aref Isa, 36.

“People from different places took part in different uprisings. We all mixed,” said Ibrahim Zaghloul, from Tripoli.

Opinion was split between those impatient for political change, and those willing to wait several years, citing the patience they displayed in enduring Gaddafi’s 42-year-rule.

The NTC was formed shortly after the February uprising began in Libya’s east, and its membership is weighted toward the region. The NTC has announced election plans that begin after it declares Libya’s “liberation.”

NTC chairman Abdel Mustafa Jalil has said the conditions for such a declaration included Gaddafi’s death or capture.

“People want to see something tangible. There’s no time and bureaucracy is killing us. We want a national council, parliament, government, a republic, whatever the people choose, so we can get on with improving health, education, everything,” said Hussein al-Sharif, 42.

Isa said in Libya’s charged atmosphere, timing was key.

“In the beginning we were being slaughtered and we clung to any leaders, even if we didn’t know anyone in the NTC. Now we see their faults and want to choose our own people, but it’s too soon, it’s very sensitive,” he said.

“Were your tribe for or against Gaddafi? If we get into the politics too soon, we could lose all our gains.”

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Florida Primary: Results, On The Ground Reporting Available From Google Politics & Elections

Lady Kathleen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:43:40 +0000

Track results county by county

Josh Wolford | January 31, 2012 @ 2:13pm | 1 Comment |

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As the results from Tuesday’s Florida GOP primary roll in, you can see how they break down county by county via Google’s Politics Elections dashboard.

Earlier this month, Google unveiled Politics Elections as a way to group all the pertinent election information in one, convenient location. There, you can see all the breaking news about all of the current candidates (including President Obama) as well as news on the specific issues like the Economy, Healthcare, and Immigration. The page also links out to each candidate’s Google+ page as well as a 2012 political calendar of events and bonus election resources.

But the most important feature of Google Politics Elections today is the results section. There, you’ll be able to see how each county is leaning – Gingrich, Romney, Paul, or Santorum.

Here’s what a filled-in map (the South Carolina Primary) looks like:

Also available today on Google Politics Elections is the “on the ground” sections that allows you to watch YouTube videos of real Floridians, organized by location.

Google wants to make sure that Google news readers are up to-date on all the political news. They have also added an Election section to the Google News homepage.

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About Josh Wolford

Josh Wolford is a Staff Writer for WebProNews. He likes beer, Sriracha and Cormac McCarthy.

Twitter: @joshgwolf

Google: Google+

View all posts by Josh Wolford →

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The four laws of politics

Lady Kathleen — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:32:21 +0000

“So what do you think of Perry?” the guy asks me. I look at his hands.

You always look at the hands, an old-timer once told me when I was starting out as a political columnist in Chicago. It’s the first law: Guy asks you about politics, you look at the hands.

POLITICO 44

Why? I asked the old-timer.

“You see if he’s wearing a knuckle-duster or packing heat or just this,” the old-timer said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a roll of quarters. “You wrap your hand around this and one bap to the chin – - wham! – - a guy is down.”

A lot of questions ran through my mind: Did I really want to be a columnist? Did I really want to cover politics? But I had a bigger question.

Where do you even get a roll of quarters? I asked.

“A bank,” the old-timer said. “Whaddya think? You break into a parking meter and roll them yourself?”

So the years pass. And I find out that people do come up to you, especially at parties, and ask you questions about politics. And I am happy to make up the answers. But I always look at the hands first.

The guy who just asked me about Rick Perry has a bottle of Fiji Water in one hand, and the other hand is in the pocket of his chinos.

You got a roll of quarters? I ask him.

“A roll of quarters?” he says. “I didn’t know quarters came in rolls. Who needs quarters? Parking meters take credit cards. Or you can use your cell phone.”

I take it all in: the fancy water, the chinos, the fact that he is too young to remember coinage. So I know how to answer his question.

“Rick Perry,” I say, “is George Bush without the brains.”

The guy laughs so hard his Fiji almost erupts. “That is so, so good,” he says. “What’s your Twitter handle, man? I want to follow you.”

I tell him I need to get to the bar. Second law of politics: Keep contact with civilians to a minimum.

The guy ahead of me at the bar is wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons and a pair of gray slacks that match the color of his hair. He is trying to explain to the bartender how to make a Long Island Iced Tea.

“You need Triple Sec, not tea,” the guy is saying. “Don’t be an idiot.”

The guy turns to me. “He’s an idiot,” the guy says.

Yeah, I say, the plasma physicists all work the bar during the day shift.

“I know you,” the guy says.

No, I say. Must be some other guy.

“No, it’s you,” he says. “So tell me about Obama. No way he gets reelected, right?”

I look at the hands. Manicured nails, pudgy fingers, liver spots. Then I notice his cologne. It smells like bags of worn, hundred-dollar bills.

Barack Obama will be a one-term president, I tell him. At most.

The guy roars. He takes a thick, ivory-colored business card out of his blazer pocket. In raised black letters, it gives the address of a hedge fund in Antigua.

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