More bad economic news. And no one to thank for it but those who were in charge these past eight-plus years. The republican policies of deregulation and free tax rides for the rich will be the end of us yet.

GDP slides 6.2% on slower spending

A revised reading on fourth-quarter gross domestic product was its worst in 26 years.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The nation’s economic slide during the last three months of 2008 was even sharper than previously estimated, with the broadest gauge of economic activity suffering its worst decline in 26 years, the government reported Thursday.

Gross domestic product, which measures the output of goods and services produced in the United States, fell at an annual rate of 6.2% in the fourth quarter, adjusted for inflation, according to a preliminary report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The decline was worse than the 3.8% drop that the BEA reported in last month’s “advance” reading on fourth-quarter GDP. It was the largest drop in GDP since the first quarter of 1982, when the economy suffered a 6.4% decline.

The reading was also much worse than the 5.4% decline economists surveyed Briefing.com had expected.

Judd Gregg got caught dancing along the outer rim of ethical behavior, but says his toes never crossed the line.

“I am absolutely sure that in every way I’ve complied with the ethics rules of the Senate both literally and in their spirit relative to any investment that I’ve made anywhere.” -Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H.

If Mr. Gregg is trying to convince me he’s the one and only ethical republican in Washington, I can’t say that I’m convinced. The odds just aren’t in his favor. But if that’s the case, then it’s about time those rules got changed. Why have rules of ethics if they can be interpreted so broadly?

I wonder what would have happened if Mr. Gregg hadn’t declined President Obama’s offer to make him commerce secretary? Would those on the right spun this as more democratic corruption and ineptitude as they did with other Obama nominees, or would they have just left it alone? Would ordinary citizens have been in danger of right-wing pundit’s heads exploding?

AP Exclusive: Gregg had stake in, won aid for base

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s former nominee to become commerce secretary, Sen. Judd Gregg, steered taxpayer money to his home state’s redevelopment of a former Air Force base even as he and his brother engaged in real estate deals there, an Associated Press investigation found.

Gregg, R-N.H., personally has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Cyrus Gregg’s office projects at the Pease International Tradeport, a Portsmouth business park built at the defunct Pease Air Force Base, once home to nuclear bombers. Judd Gregg has collected at least $240,017 to $651,801 from his investments there, Senate records show, while helping arrange at least $66 million in federal aid for the former base.

Gregg said he violated no laws or Senate rules.

Lay Low – “I Forget It’s There”

Excellent commentary by James Carville regarding recent shrieks from members of the feckless republican party.

Commentary: Jindal leads GOP on a ‘march to folly’

(CNN) — Over the course of history, governments, political regimes and leaders have done some stupid things despite all arguments to the contrary, at times even against their own self-interest. [...]

Fast forward to 2009. The Republican Party has just suffered a bad but not unprecedented defeat. The U.S. economy is in shambles. And the patch of ground some leading figures in the GOP have chosen to occupy to rally back is to oppose expanded unemployment benefits in the middle of a recession. [...]

Gov. Jindal is being joined in this folly by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, whose states have high jobless rates and could use the most economic assistance.

Worse, the right’s new hero is CNBC’s Rick Santelli, a man who on September 2, 2008, said the economy was healthy and blamed the business media for the financial crisis.

He has taken a similarly small, eroding patch of ground to mount a charge against the government’s recovery package by suggesting that the government should let more homes needlessly fall into foreclosure. [...]

Today’s Republican Party, the lowest-held political party in the history of modern polling, should be in agony. They have just committed a serious blunder, a folly have you.

See what eight years of republican politics will get ya?

For the last eight years they implored their constituents to hate middle-easterners. Now, thanks mainly to ingrained ignorance, (along with a little push from the shitty likes of Rush Limbaugh), ordinary, everyday citizens have regressed back to a time of extreme racial prejudice.

I read nearly everyday where people say it’s the liberals that are full of hate. What morons. Well, I’m not going to be too worried about it. If these assholes try to escalate things, President Obama will step up to the plate and “settle some hash.”

Do we need any more proof that we, as a country, are severely under-educated? It’s so hard to move forward when you’re having to drag the sum weight of all republican voters along behind you. Is there any way possible that we can cut these people loose?

Growing hate groups blame Obama, economy

(CNN) — Don Black said he despises Barack Obama. And he said he believes illegal aliens undermine the economic fabric of the United States.

Black, a 55-year-old former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, isn’t the only person who holds such firm beliefs, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which today released its annual hate group report.

The center’s report, “The Year in Hate,” found the number of hate groups grew by 54 percent since 2000. The study identified 926 hate groups — defined as groups with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people — active in 2008. That’s a 4 percent jump, adding 38 more than the year before.

What makes this year’s report different is that hate groups have found two more things to be angry about — the nation’s first African-American president and an economy that is hemorrhaging jobs. For the past decade, Latino immigration has fueled the growth of hate groups.

“We fear these conditions will favor the growth of these groups in the future,” said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “In the long arch of history, we are definitely moving forward, but these kinds of events can produce backlashes.”

Of all the things the Bush administration politicized… this has got to be the sickest. Hiding military coffins from public view just so Americans would be shielded from the negatives of war was pure crap and showed a total disrespect for the fallen. They gave their all, and republicans shit on them.

Things have now changed. These men will finally get the respect they deserve, thanks entirely to taking control out of the hands of republicans. Same as with those who are returning wounded. They will finally get the care they deserve. No more shoddy, underfunded VA hospitals. Like the days of crappy republican control, those days are long gone.

No matter what arguments are put forth to keep these coffins from view, the citizenry deserves to know that there are real and dire consequences to going to war. There is no question, as a nation, we are fairly dumbed down. We don’t need more of that. We need less. Americans should be made aware of what is being done in their name.

Official: Pentagon allows coverage of war coffins

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Pentagon will lift its ban on media coverage of the flag-draped coffins of war victims arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

But the families of the victims will have the final say on whether to allow the coverage, he said.

President Obama asked Gates to review the policy, and Gates said he decided after consulting with the armed services and groups representing military families to apply the same policy that is used at Arlington National Cemetery.

“I have decided that the decision regarding media coverage of the dignified transfer process at Dover should be made by those most directly affected — the families,” he said at a news conference.

Not long after Gates’ announcement, the political action committee VoteVets.org issued a written statement saying it is “fully supportive” of the decision.

This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference took a Straw Poll to decide who should win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Their list:

There’s a lot of low cards in that hand. I don’t know whether to laugh or laugh harder.

You have to feel some sympathy for America’s real conservatives though. They are the one’s getting screwed here.

If I were a republican, I’d tell these lazy bums they should be out looking for work and not standing in line looking for a handout.

Jobless claims spike to 26-year high

Number of Americans applying for first-time unemployment benefits rises to 667,000. Continuing claims top 5 million for the first time.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing initial claims for unemployment insurance spiked, and those living on unemployment benefits hit a record high, according to a government report released Thursday.

For the week ended Feb. 21, 667,000 Americans filed initial jobless claims, up 36,000 from a revised 631,000 the previous week. That’s the highest figure since October 1982.

Economists polled by Briefing.com were expecting claims to drop to 625,000.

In a sign that more jobless Americans are having trouble finding work, 5,112,000 continued on unemployment for the week ended Feb. 14, the most recent data available. That’s the highest number since the Labor Department began keeping records since 1967.

For a “rising Republican star,” this is the best that the GOP can come up with?

With all things being equal, Bobby Jindal would cut spending on the New Orleans’ levee system. I wonder how the people of that area, both republican and democrat, would feel about that?

So mysterious are the workings of the republican mind. In their world, the poor exist only because they’re lazy hippies, and America has an unending supply of land (with an unending oil reserve underneath it!) No one needs to live near hurricane-ravaged coastal areas, volcanic mountains, low-lying flood plains, along tornado ally or in seismic-active California. If you live in one of these areas, it’s your own damn fault. Our money can be best spent elsewhere – like on a futuristic Star Wars missile defense system, or guns-for-tots programs.

This shit makes my head hurt. Bobby Jindal, you’ve opened your mouth and have effectively “removed all doubt.” Now STFU!

Gov. Bobby Jindal’s volcano remark has some fuming

(CNN) — Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s swipe at federal spending to monitor volcanoes has the mayor of one city in the shadow of Mount St. Helens fuming.

“Does the governor have a volcano in his backyard?” Royce Pollard, the mayor of Vancouver, Washington, said on Wednesday. “We have one that’s very active, and it still rumbles and spits and coughs very frequently.” [...]

“Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington,” Jindal said.

But Marianne Guffanti, a volcano researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey, said, “We don’t throw the money down the crater of the volcano and watch it burn up.”

The USGS, which received the money Jindal criticized, is monitoring several active volcanoes across the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Hawaii. One of those is Mount St. Helens, about 70 miles north of Vancouver, Washington, and neighboring Portland, Oregon.

Toni Braxton – You’re Makin’ Me High

Julian E. Zelizer is right, but I would like to add one other point to his argument.

Our press, for a while, did a fairly decent job at helping to inform and educate the populace as to the goings-ons in Washington. We were given facts and detail, and we were able to form fairly solid opinions as to what worked and what didn’t.

But gone are those days. We can no longer rely on our greed-driven fourth estate to be fair and balanced. But our government has a duty to keep us informed with day-by-day operations and decisions, both in government and elsewhere, on matters that affect us all. It is, after all, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Commentary: Investigate Wall Street

[...] According to an Associated Press-GfK poll, about half of those surveyed said they were seriously worried about losing their jobs and two-thirds expressed serious concern that they would not be able to pay their bills.

Americans are not sure what has gone wrong. Under those conditions, it will be difficult to restore confidence in the future. The conventional wisdom says that presidents should be the leaders to use the bully pulpit and explain to Americans the nature of any crisis that we face.

But history shows that Congress has played an extremely important role in shaping public debate in times of crisis and bringing to light crucial information. Although congressional hearings are often derided for grandstanding, the power of investigation is one of the most important functions Congress has played.

For every example of congressional excess, such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts, there have been moments when Congress demonstrated its ability to explain and to educate. [...]

Congress needs to learn more, not only about the kind of criminal activity for which Bernard Madoff is being charged, but also the legal practices — such as risky home loans — that created dangerous bubbles and put families at risk.

If voters and politicians are going to be able to evaluate legislation that is being proposed on a weekly basis, citizens must understand what has gone wrong.

This will be the first step toward restoring the confidence that the country needs if it is to start a better day.

BULLSHIT!

“When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.” -Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun.

Our government just went and endorsed one religion over another. The argument they made was that the city government in question can pick and choose what religion can be expressed upon public ground.

Court rules for Utah city in religious marker case

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that a small religious group cannot force a city in Utah to place a granite marker in a local park that already is home to a Ten Commandments display.

In a case involving the Salt Lake City-based Summum, the court said that governments can decide what to display in a public park without running afoul of the First Amendment.

Pleasant Grove City, Utah, rejected the group’s marker, prompting a federal lawsuit that argued that a city can’t allow some private donations of displays in its public park and reject others. The federal appeals court in Denver agreed.

In his opinion for the court, Justice Samuel Alito distinguished the Summum’s case from efforts to prevent groups from speaking in public parks, which ordinarily would violate the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee.

Alito said “the display of a permanent monument in a public park” requires a different analysis.

Because monuments in public parks help define a city’s identity, “cities and other jurisdictions take some care in accepting donated monuments,” he said.

Alito would do well to re-read our Constitution… specifically the part which he just thumbed his nose at:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

If this crap is allowed to stand, then our Constitution has just become a big fucking joke.