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White House Spin on Cave-In: In Securing this Bipartisan Deal, the President Rejected Proposals that Would Have Placed the Sole Burden of Deficit Reduction on Low-Income or Middle-Class Families: The President stood firmly against proposals that would have placed the sole burden of deficit reduction on lower-income and middle-class families. This includes not only proposals in the House Republican Budget that would have undermined the core commitments of Medicare to our seniors and forced tens of millions of low-income Americans to go without health insurance, but also enforcement mechanisms that would have forced automatic cuts to low-income programs. The enforcement mechanism in the deal exempts Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare benefits, unemployment insurance, programs for low-income families, and civilian and military retirement.

Debt deal: Obama White House details By Lynn Sweet on July 31, 2011 10:58 PM | No Comments THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 31, 2011 BIPARTISAN DEBT DEAL: A WIN FOR THE ECONOMY AND BUDGET DISCIPLINE

This seems to be The President's modus operandi - 1) Lay out clear markers that are supported by a majority of Avericans - i.e. balanced approach with cuts and revenues; 2) Watch the republicans take a hard line to satisfy the tea party; 3) Give the republicans 99% of what they want; 4) Blame the left for not compromising. It looks like the framework for the deal is beginning to take shape, and it's not at all surprising. Tilted heavily toward cuts that will affect the middle and working classes disproportionately, and almost tailor-made to spare the rich any sacrifice whatsoever. While this is not surprising given the terms of the debate, it still boggles the mind to witness our republic complete its transformation into the very definition of a plutocracy. We have a political system designed specifically to protect the interest of the monied elite (I suppose one could argue that this had been the case for a long time, but it only really became nakedly, brazenly obvious during the 2008 financial crisis). Stories like these don't end well. Including for the elite. The history books are replete with warnings. Our country is going into a dark time.

Without a hardline group of progressives willing to join with Republicans and defeat Democratic legislation unless that legislation meets certain progressive criteria, every legislative fight will follow this process of backroom deals with corporate interests resulting in an inexorable right-wing slide. ...The Progressive Block needs to publicly draw clearn lines in the sand before draft legislation is introducted. This allows both netroots and grassroots activists to organize around that line in the sand. Otherwise, given the backroom nature of these dealings, there is no way for the progressive activist base to play any meaningful role in the legislative process, and all negotiation power is ceded to corporate lobbyists.

Miranda rule an obstacle in dealing with terrorists

"There is nothing inherently good about compromise." / Washington suffers from "compromise fetish."

Why Obama and so many Dems think the "deal" is a fair compromise, not a total capitulation or cave-in... Strategy 101.

This seems to be The President's modus operandi - 1) Lay out clear markers that are supported by a majority of Avericans - i.e. balanced approach with cuts and revenues; 2) Watch the republicans take a hard line to satisfy the tea party; 3) Give the republicans 99% of what they want; 4) Blame the left for not compromising.

"International trade deals allow businesses to sue elected governments when corporate interests are threatened abroad. Here's why you should care. "

"You don't have to wait to use plain language in your dealings with consumers. You don't have to wait to put the 2009 bonuses of your senior executives up for a shareholder vote," Obama said. "You don't have to wait for a law to overhaul your pay system so that folks are rewarded for long-term performance instead of short-term gains."

The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search (and copy) -- without suspicion of wrongdoing -- the contents of a traveler's laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections.\n\nThe policy, disclosed Thursday in a pair of Department of Homeland Security directives, describes more fully than did the Bush administration the procedures by which travelers' laptops, iPods, cameras and other digital devices can be searched and seized when they cross a U.S. border. And it sets time limits for completing searches.\n\nBut representatives of civil liberties and travelers groups say they see little substantive difference between the Bush-era policy, which prompted controversy, and this one.\n\n"It's a disappointing ratification of the suspicionless search policy put in place by the Bush administration," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. "It provides a lot of procedural safeguards, but it doesn't deal with the fundamental problem, which is that under the policy, government officials are free to search people's laptops and cellphones for any reason whatsoever."

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. The magic is when an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. Information visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data. We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.

Critics of capitalism often argue that any form of capitalism would eventually devolve into corporatism, due to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. A permutation of this term is corporate globalism. John Ralston Saul argues that most Western societies are best described as corporatist states, run by a small elite of professional and interest groups, that exclude political participation from the citizenry. Corporatism has been supported from various proponents, including: absolutists, conservatives, fascists, progressives, reactionaries, socialists and theologians. In the United States, economic corporatism involving capital-labour cooperation was influential in the New Deal economic program of the United States in the 1930s as well as in Fordism and Keynesianism.[36] In the post-World War II reconstruction period in Europe, corporatism was favoured by Christian democrats, national conservatives, and social democrats in opposition to liberal capitalism.[37] This type of corporatism faded but revived again in the 1960s and 1970s as "neo-corporatism" in response to the new economic threat of stagflation.[38] Neo-corporatism favoured economic tripartism which involved strong and centralized labour unions, employers' unions, and governments that cooperated as "social partners" to negotiate and manage a national economy.[39]