California's Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown get to continue to do the right thing:

The outlook for the legal defense of Proposition 8, California's ban on same-sex marriage, grew cloudier Thursday as a state appellate court refused to order Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown to appeal a federal judge's ruling overturning the measure.

The Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento dismissed without comment a lawsuit seeking to compel the state to come to the initiative's defense. The suit was filed Monday by the conservative Pacific Justice Institute on behalf of a Los Angeles-area minister.

Why does it matter so much? Because in his decision overturning Proposition 8, Judge Walker expressed a great deal of skepticism as to whether the Defendant-Intervenors have the standing required to defend Prop 8 before the Court of Appeals. The State of California obviously has standing ...

Wow, one little lie about being an undercover cop who got too close to official corruption and you're booted, even from the Tea Party. Apparently making up stories about your personal history is worse than believing in the grand UN bicycle conspiracy. At any rate, Colorado gubenatorial candidate Dan Maes is nobody's darling anymore.

Despite mounting pressure from the GOP establishment and Tea Party groups to get out of the governor's race, Republican Dan Maes continued to dig in his heels Thursday, saying he wasn't going anywhere.

"This is a culture war, a culture war between the people and the machine, and we're going to find out who controls things," Maes said. "I am not getting out of the race."
....

[A] Denver Post story this week reporting that Maes embellished details about his law enforcement background combined with today's deadline for certification of the ...

Let's go back to the 1950s, says Ken Buck, GOP candidate for Senator in Colorado.

Buck: He still has his recorder on right there... [points, laughter]

Question: [brief lead-in] What plans do you have to make public education better in America?

Buck: "Let's talk about that [education] folks. In the 1950s, we had the best schools in the world. And the United States government decided to get more involved in federal education. [Pols emphasis] Where are we now, after all those years of federal involvement, are we better or are we worse? So what's the federal government's answer? Well since we've made education worse, we're gonna even get more involved. And what's gonna be the result?  It's kinda like health care. We've screwed up health care--Medicare--we've screwed up all kinds of other things, so what are we gonna do? We ...

• Crazy shit.

  Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of Daniel Millis, convicted of littering because he left sealed bottles of drinking water in a desert wildlife refuge. He explained that he left them "along frequently traveled routes for unlawful entrants to the United States." He belongs to a group called "No More Deaths," and the opinion quotes his testimony: "humanitarian aide [sic] is never a crime."

  The majority overturned his conviction because a reasonable person might not understand that leaving drinking water for people dying of thirst is littering. The United States countered that the water bottles constitute "garbage" in the sense of the statute. After foraging through some dictionary definitions of "garbage" and "discarded," the majority concludes that the regulation is too ambiguous to enforce in this case.

  Guess who dissented? Judge Jay Bybee -- the author of the torture memo:

  Littering is littering, and Bybee ...

Every American knows that September 11 is the most holy day of the year, a day to put aside partisan politics. Which is why Republicans in York County, South Carolina were outraged that Democrats planned a barbecue and campaign rally on that holiest of holy days.

The day should be reserved for remembering terror attack victims and troops who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, GOP Chairman Glenn McCall said Tuesday.

"September 11 is not a day for partisan political rallies," McCall said. "It's a time for us to look beyond what divides us and come together to remember those who lost their lives."

Even Republican candidate for governor Nikki Haley got in on the action.

"If Senator Sheheen thinks it's appropriate to hold a partisan campaign rally on Sept. 11, that's his prerogative," Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey said. "Our campaign made a decision not to hold political ...

Kudos to the Democratic Governor's Association, the campaign arm for gubernatorial races around the nation. They have been relentlessly pursuing what has been obvious to progressives for years: the fact that a media outlet (Fox News Channel) behaves very much like a subsidiary for the campaign wing of the Republican Party.

In a complaint to the Ohio Board of Elections, the DGA argues that the line between annoying cheerleading and violations of election law might finally have been crossed:

Democrats allege in a legal filing that, by plugging an Ohio gubernatorial candidate's website in a chyron, Fox News illegally contributed to the Republican's campaign.

A seven-page complaint filed Thursday by the Democratic Governors Association with the Ohio Elections Commission accuses Fox News of making an illegal in-kind contributions to gubernatorial candidate John Kasich (R-OH), reports Sam Stein.

DGA head Nathan Daschle pointed out in an interview that ...

If all goes according to plan, this fall a girl somewhere in China's Yunnan Province will tell her boyfriend she can't have sex with him. And he'll have an abstinence program from the United States to thank.

In Yunnan schools this year, teachers are being trained with a sex education curriculum created by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family. The agreement with the Yunnan ministry of education is a milestone for Focus on the Family, which has struggled for four years to make inroads on abstinence in China.

It is also the result of a narrow confluence of interests: Evangelical Christian groups want an entree into China. And Chinese authorities, despite the country's official atheism, want help with controlling population growth and managing the society's ...

The fire is a setback for the oil industry, which has been arguing that drilling in the Gulf is safe and that the BP explosion was a rare event. It came only 24 hours after companies including Mariner had staged a rally in Houston against a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. About 5,000 employees had been bussed in for the rally.

Barbara Dianne Hagood, a spokesman for Mariner Energy, told the Financial Times on Wednesday: "I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this [the Obama] administration is trying to break us ...

The actual lessons of 2009-2010, then, are that scare stories about stimulus are wrong, and that stimulus works when it is applied. But it wasn’t applied on a sufficient scale. And we need another round.

I know that getting that round is unlikely: Republicans and conservative Democrats won’t stand for it. And if, as expected, the G.O.P. wins big in November, this will be widely regarded as a vindication of the anti-stimulus position. Mr. Obama, we’ll be told, moved too far to the left, and his Keynesian economic doctrine was proved wrong.

But politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. The economic theory behind the Obama ...

With just two months until the November elections, the White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks - potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars - to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

Among the options under consideration are a temporary payroll-tax holiday and a permanent extension of the now-expired research-and-development tax credit, which rewards companies that conduct research into new technologies within the United States.

There were 72 bodies found on a ranch ninety miles south of the Texas border -- obvious victims of a drug cartel massacre. Bullets have been hitting public buildings in El Paso and the Washington Post is reporting that at least $20 billion a year in cash is being smuggled across the U. S. border each year. What is it going to take to convince the Federal Government that current drug policies are not working? The fact is that the current drug laws are contributing to an all-out war on our southern border -- all in the name of a modern-day prohibition that is no more logical or realistic than the one we abandoned 75 years ago?

We were worried that this morning's job report was the harbinger of an uncharacteristically staid recess Friday. Thank goodness that wasn't the case: Jim Gerlach's spokesman accused his opponent of playing the race card by not being white around other non-white people, Jan Brewer took unprecedented steps to stem the tide of unwelcome decapitation questions into her state and dentists continue to be the weirdest contributors to our national conversation. Have a great Labor Day weekend, just don't expect Joe Miller to stop wearing white after Monday -- guy's gotta appease his divine benefactors somehow. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Friday, September 3rd, 2010:

LACKLUSTER AUGUST JOBS REPORT - Our long national flirtation with that novel we're going to write continues...sort of. The Bureau of Labor Statistics today reported that the U.S. economy shed a total of 54,000 jobs in August but still ...

Marge Paul can sit on the front porch of her Berwyn home, look at the crisscrossing, bungalow-lined streets to the north and south, and smile about something many don't realize.

"I know there's a gay or lesbian couple on just about every block," said Paul, Berwyn's 3rd Ward alderman and the city's first openly gay elected official.

In his new book, the former British prime minister asks for a fair hearing on the Iraq war. But he ignores a key meeting where George Bush suggested they con their way to an invasion.

Ben S. Bernanke was an economist at Stanford and Princeton for more than two decades before he moved to Washington to 2002, first as a member of the Federal Reserve's board of governors, then as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush and finally as Fed chairman since 2006.

September marks Hunger Action Month and national nonprofit Feeding America is calling upon individuals and communities to get involved in the fight against domestic hunger.

To help achieve this, Feeding America has launched its 30 Ways in 30 Days campaign, calling on everyone to be a part of the solution to this national crisis.

During the entire month of September, more than 200 food banks across the nation are asking people to lend a hand. Dozens of national and local events are planned throughout the month to raise awareness about hunger in America.

IRVINE, Calif. — The University of California, Irvine has upheld its decision to suspend a campus Muslim group after some of its members disrupted a speech by the Israeli ambassador at a campus event.

However, the university said Friday it would lift the suspension of the Muslim Student Union on Dec. 31 instead of enforcing it for a full year.

While discussing the September 6 Newsweek cover that highlights the commonly held and often contradictory misconceptions about Obama, Fox News contributors Angela McGlowan and John Fund disappeared the right-wing media's role in spreading the misinformation and instead attributed the misconceptions to Obama's own behavior. Indeed, Fox News and the right wing media have been at the forefront of advancing the very misinformation about Obama that Newsweek identified.

Newsweek cover highlights right-wing driven, often contradictory misinformation about Obama

Newsweek highlights Fox News' role in spreading contradictory misinformation about Obama.  In the September 6 edition of Newsweek, the cover highlights the contradictory misinformation the right-wing media, led by Fox News, and Republicans have been spreading about Obama. The cover reads:  "The Making of a Terrorist-Coddling, Warmongering, Wall Street-Loving, Socialistic, Godless, Muslim President...who isn't actually any of these things." From Newsweek:

Newsweek: "Fox often covers Obama's place of ...

Fox & Friends continued their attack on Islam and the Park51 project, this time by smearing a Park51 investor as a "terror contributor" because he once donated to a group that was later found to be linked to Hamas. However, his donation to the Holy Land Foundation came well before the government alleged the group had ties to Hamas and operated by actively deceiving donors to appear as though it was a "good charity."

Fox smears Park51 investor as a "terror contributor" who should have known of HLF's Hamas ties

Fox5 New York smears Park51 investor as a "terror contributor." In an article titled "Mosque Investor was Terror Contributor," Fox 5 New York reporter Charles Leaf wrote, "Fox 5 News reported Thursday that one of the financial backers of the Islamic mosque and cultural center project in Lower Manhattan once contributed to a terror group, although the investor says the ...

The right-wing media have shamefully attempted to tie James Lee, who created a hostage situation in a Discovery Channel building, to former Vice President Al Gore, due to Lee's statement that he was "awakened" after reading Gore's book An Inconvenient Truth. In fact, Lee, who criticized Gore's book for not providing "solutions," holds a number of views Gore does not, including extreme opinions on population control and immigration.

Right-wing media attempt to blame Gore for Lee's actions

Hoft: Lee "saw Al Gore's junk-science movie and says he decided he had to do more." In a September 1 Gateway Pundit post, titled, "Gunman, Bomber, Leftist Activist -- Holds Hostages at Discovery Building," Jim Hoft posted a picture of Lee and wrote: "James Lee- behind the Save the Planet Protest. He saw Al Gore's junk-science movie and says he decided he had to do more... So he ...

During the run-up to the Iraq war, some of the worst purveyors of misinformation about Iraq had a home at Fox News, and their ranks have swelled considerably since then. Media Matters takes a look at the track record of wrong predictions and shoddy analysis about the war in Iraq by many of Fox News' contributors and analysts.

Karl Rove

White House Iraq Group was formed to "set [messaging] strategy" for going to war with Iraq. The Washington Post reported in 2003 (accessed via Nexis) that the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed in August 2002 "to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it 'an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities.' " Part of the WHIG's mission, according to the ...

Fox News' Eric Bolling repeated the discredited claim that the stimulus has "done nothing to help the economy." In fact, economists agree that GDP and employment levels are significantly higher than they would have been without the stimulus.

Bolling pushes myth that the stimulus failed

Bolling: The stimulus has "done nothing to help the economy." During the September 1 edition of Fox & Friends, guest host Eric Bolling claimed that the stimulus has "done nothing to help the economy" and that "the economy is far worse than it was when we signed over $750 billion that turned into $862 billion." Bolling added, "Forget the other programs, it's literally trillions of dollars of economic stimulus that aren't working."

Independent and private analysts agree stimulus significantly raised GDP, employment

CEA: Recovery act raised GDP by at least 2.7 percent in the second quarter of 2010. In its fourth quarterly report ...

Following President Obama's speech on the end of combat operations in Iraq, media outlets hosted discredited Bush administration officials Karl Rove, Stephen Hadley, and Ari Fleischer to respond, despite the fact that the three were at the forefront of the campaign of misinformation used to sell the war.

Rove led WH group that "promoted" view that Saddam had WMDs "and was seeking more"

White House Iraq Group was formed to "set [messaging] strategy" for going to war with Iraq. The Washington Post reported in 2003 (accessed via Nexis), that the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed in August 2002 "to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it 'an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities.' " Part of WHIG's mission ...

Today is Provide-Your-Own-Caption day. On the left, Domino is in a paper sack, every cat's favorite hiding place. On the right, Inkblot is obviously trying to tell me something. But what?

Need more cats? Check out Colleen Stratton's Psycho Kitties. It's probably not what you think. But her ten-years-in-the-making documentary needs your help. And there's a free preview!

And speaking of help, friend-of-the-blog Blue Girl is doing her annual fundraiser right now. If you have a few spare shekels lying around, head over and put them to good use.

    

Here is Steve Benen's chart showing private sector job gains and losses over the past few years:

Why look only at private sector jobs? Matt Yglesias suggests three tightly constrained reasons: it's good spin for the White House, it controls for one-time census gains and losses, and then there's a third thing about a conservative argument that I don't understand.

But the fact is that both total jobs and private sector jobs are important to look at. If you simply want to know how the actual, lived economy is doing, then you want to look at all jobs. After all, a job's a job, and if people are employed and getting a paycheck, that's a good thing. But that's not the only thing we should be interested in. In the medium term, government jobs can't support the economy forever. Sustained growth depends ...

Atrios on reports that the Obama administration is considering a temporary cut in payroll taxes to help stimulate the economy:

I think a full payroll tax holiday would be fine as long as it wasn't yet another excuse to try to destroy Social Security, but an employer only one would be truly awful on substance, impact, and message. More help for the overlords, no help for you!

This is based on a Washington Post story that says Obama "is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks — potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars — to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses." Last night, when I read this story, I too thought it implied that the White House was considering a reduction solely in the employer half of the payroll tax, not the half that you and I have deducted from our paycheck ...

Here's a chart showing how much health insurance cost in 2000 vs. 2010:

To summarize: for singles, the employer share of health insurance has gone up from about $2,000 to about $4,000. That's a $2,000 increase. For family policies, the employer share has gone up from about $5,000 to $10,000. That's a $5,000 increase.

If you figure that policies are split about 60-40 in favor of family policies, that's an average increase per worker of around $4,000. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $3,000 in extra benefits that we're getting in our pay packets.

Data for cash income is only available through 2008, but it's certainly gone down since then, which means that average real cash earnings during the past decade have probably gone down from $39,000 to about $37,000 or so. Add back ...

Nobody wants to repeal George Bush's tax cuts for the middle class. Especially in a bad economy, this is a no-brainer, both politically and economically. But what about tax cuts for high earners? This should be an easy question to answer too. On the political side, a CBS poll earlier this week found that repeal is supported by 56% and opposed by only 36%. Economically, repeal would cut $700 billion off the federal deficit over the next decade and, because consumption by the wealthy doesn't depend very much on small changes in income, it wouldn't noticeably affect consumer spending either. Allowing tax rates on the rich to rise back to their pre-Bush levels, therefore, should also be a no-brainer, both politically and economically.

So how do you explain this?

A small but growing number of moderate Democrats are balking at boosting taxes on the rich. Many face ...

Michael Scherer has a piece in Time today headlined "How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular." Now, as it happens, Obama isn't actually any more unpopular than most presidents after 18 months in office, and in any case he's still more popular than practically anyone or anything else in Washington DC. But fine. His popularity is down. Mostly, of course, this is because the economy sucks, but that makes for boring journalism. So we get a bunch of other explanations:

"He's trying to Europeanize us, and the Europeans are going the other way," [says Fred Ferlic], a former Democratic campaign donor who plans to vote Republican this year. "The entire American spirit is being broken."

....[In 2008] trust in the federal government was at a historic low, dropping to around 25%, where it still remains. Yet Obama has offered government as the primary solution to most of the ...

See? The DGA knows how to fight back. Maybe they could give boxing lessons to their scrawny buddies at the White House!

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Democratic Governors Association filed an elections complaint in Ohio on Thursday alleging Fox News Network illegally helped the Republican governor nominee solicit funds during a television appearance.

In an escalating battle with Fox’s politically conservative news arm, the DGA alleges that Fox allowed John Kasich to request contributions from viewers during an Aug. 18 broadcast and simultaneously displayed the address of his campaign website in on-screen graphics.

The complaint alleges the free publicity during Fox’s O’Reilly Factor amounted to an improper in-kind contribution to Kasich’s campaign, which exceeded Ohio’s $11,395.56 contribution limit and lacked the proper disclaimer for political advertising. The web address appeared for 90 seconds, the complaint said.

Kasich, a former Fox commentator, later told supporters ...

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Democracy Now's Juan Gonzalez talked to investigative journalist and author Alexander Zaitchik about Glenn Beck's rise as a "nationwide cultural phenomenon" and how we ended up with someone who described himself as a recovering alcoholic with drug abuse and former shock jock ended up preaching to America from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.

This huckster has been doing the same shtick since his days as a radio Morning Zoo shock jock and he's laughing all the way to the bank with his new found fame that he doesn't deserve now and more than he did when most of the places he worked for were firing him left and right.

Zaitchik's book on Beck is titled Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to a deeply polarizing figure who’s been ...

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There sure seems to be a lot of this going around, isn't there? Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson do some fact checking on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's recent bit of revisionist history, attempting to sanitize the racism and rewrite the Civil Rights movement in the South and how the Republicans have been taking advantage of the racial divide in America for decades. Eugene Robinson did an especially good job of following up Rachel Maddow's critique of Barbour's interview with the right wing Human Events and explaining why Barbour is frankly just full of it when he tries to pretend he didn't experience segregation himself growing up and at the schools he attended. As they noted it looks like he's trying to shine up his image with white voters who might not want to vote for someone they consider ...

So I've been following recently the debate that's been going on between Digby and Jamelle Bouie over whether it's really wise to use hyperbole and over-the-top mockery to thrash your political opponents. As you can imagine, I largely side with Digby on this matter and find constructions like this from Bouie to be particularly annoying:

Unlike myself, Moulitsas isn't a journalist, and his job isn't to be an honest broker for ideas; no, it's to rally progressives and score points against conservatives.

Bouie seems to me like the sort of person, to use the phrase of an old acquaintance, who would have been extremely upset that the wicked John Swift would suggest eating all those Irish babies.

Using hyperbole and outlandish mockery to skewer one's political opponents is a wonderful human tradition that extends back centuries. Not only is it a terrific way ...

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h/t Heather for the video

I thought I'd heard it all from Chris Matthews. Hardball scores a coup, in my opinion, landing Michael Joseph Gross, the author of the article of the week, the slamming expose of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair.

But Gross turns the conversation to a topic Matthews clearly doesn't want to discuss: Why are so many television shows giving attention to a person who has proven to be intellectually lazy, dishonest, and hypocritical? Because that question is first and foremost about Chris Matthews. No other pundit has set aside so completely Sarah Palin's complete lack of qualifications to hold public office. Chris Matthews wants Sarah Palin to win the GOP nomination, I assume because in addition to the tingle up his leg, it also improves ratings for his show.

So Matthews cuts Gross off and gives ...