Duncan Hunter’s false patriotism has him objecting to the 14th amendment of the constitution. The Right Wing Republicans / Tea Party members love to wrap themselves in the Constitution. Maybe they should try reading it first. REAL REPUBLICANS, where are you? Reclaim the party please. We need multiple parties for check and balances, but both must be sane and at least marginally read.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka gives a strong interview on the ills of Wallstreet.

BY JONATHAN J. COOPER and PAUL DAVENPORT

04/29/10 04:18 PM

PHOENIX — Anger mounted Thursday over an Arizona law cracking down on illegal immigration as a police officer filed one of the first lawsuits challenging the law and activists gathered outside an Arizona Diamondbacks game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, chanting "Boycott Arizona."

The lawsuit from 15-year Tucson police veteran Martin Escobar is one of two filed Thursday, less than a week after Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law that’s sparked fears it will lead to racial profiling despite the governor’s vow that officers will be properly trained.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the federal government may challenge the law, which requires local and state law enforcement to question people about their immigration status if there’s reason to suspect they’re in the country illegally, and makes it a state crime to be in the United States illegally.

Escobar, an overnight patrol officer in a heavily Latino area of Tucson, argues there’s no way for officers to confirm people’s immigration status without impeding investigations, and that the new law violates numerous constitutional rights.

Tucson police spokesman Sgt. Fabian Pacheco said Escobar is acting on his own, not on behalf of the department.

The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders also filed a lawsuit Thursday, and is seeking an injunction preventing authorities from enforcing the law. The group argues federal law pre-empts state regulation of national borders, and that Arizona’s law violates due process rights by letting police detain suspected illegal immigrants before they’re convicted. CONTINUED

Lawsuits Over AZ Immigration Law Filed By Police Officer, Latino Group

That the GOP and some Bank Supported Democrats would fight so hard to remove or weaken a Consumer Protection Agency speaks volume for the need of removing corporations completely from the ability to fund campaigns. Government that works dictates the need for a Consumer Protection Agency within the government whose interest is the interest of we the people.

It’s time for senators — especially the Republicans — to square their upcoming votes on financial reform with their long-professed desire to protect families, said consumer advocate and federal bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday in an interview with the Huffington Post.

"Everyone in Washington claims to be on the side of families and to support reform," said Warren, a member of the 2010 TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people. "But the test is who votes to paper over problems with another regulatory system designed to fail and who votes for real Wall Street accountability even if it means that some donors will be disappointed.

"I’m tired of hearing politicians claim to support families and, at the same time, vote with the big banks on the most important financial reform package in generations. I’m deep-down tired of it."

Of all the proposals in the 1,400-page Senate bill attempting to reform Wall Street and protect American consumers, none is more contentious than the one calling for the creation of a consumer-focused agency dedicated to protecting borrowers from abusive lenders.

Reform-minded Democrats want a powerful independent entity able to defend powerless families from the banks and financial firms that squeeze profits out of customers through tricks, traps and outright predatory loans.

Moderates want to say that they voted for a bill that protects consumers — even if it really doesn’t.

Republicans profess a desire to protect consumers, acknowledging regulators’ past failures, but they also don’t want to stem the flow of credit or needlessly harm lenders’ ability to make a buck.

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The Senate bill, authored by the banking committee’s chairman, Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, calls for a consumer entity to be housed inside the Federal Reserve. It largely, though, adheres to Warren’s four tests: a chief appointed by the president, an independent source of funding, the authority to write consumer rules and the ability to enforce them against unscrupulous lenders. The unit, thus, focuses squarely on consumers. Ensuring banks’ profitability is left to banking regulators.

The Republicans’ counter-proposal, released this week, fails all four of Warren’s tests.

It calls for a council led by the heads of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Federal Reserve. They’d issue rules, supervise "our nation’s largest financial institutions, large non-bank mortgage originators, and other financial services providers who have violated the consumer protection statutes," and enforce the rules.

Warren isn’t thrilled with the idea of allowing bank regulators — whose top priority is to ensure the profitability of the nation’s banks — to continue to oversee consumer protection, particularly when the OCC is involved.

"The problem with consumer protection is structure. Our current consumer regulatory process is designed to fail, and if we don’t fix it, it will fail again," she said. "In every major dispute between customers and banks, the OCC entered the fray on the side of the banks. Clearly, banks — not their customers — were the OCC’s primary interest. The idea that the OCC would now be in a position to veto the new consumer agency is shameful.

"If our goal was to take any lessons from the crisis, we would do the reverse: Let’s give a consumer regulator a veto over the OCC," Warren added. After all, "it wasn’t a consumer regulator who presided over the biggest financial meltdown in generations."

She didn’t hold back in singling out the GOP’s plan, which the Harvard Law professor and bankruptcy expert said was "pure genius — for the banks who want to keep running things."

"The substitute language on consumer protection is designed to paper over very real structural problems with a new system that is designed to fail as much as the status quo is," Warren said. "The whole idea of the substitute is to take a bunch of regulators that already failed and throw them in a committee together."

Asked if she thought Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Richard Shelby of Alabama are trying to protect families from predatory lenders, Warren let loose.

"It isn’t possible to protect families and at the same time to paper over the sorts of problems that led to the crisis with just another system that is designed to fail," she said of the duo leading the GOP effort against the consumer agency. "The time has come for choosing."

With Republicans abandoning their effort to prevent Dodd’s bill from being considered on the Senate floor (the bill passed a procedural hurdle on Wednesday), senators will soon begin offering and debating amendments.

CONTINUED

This accident is bad but may be a blessing in disguise. It will give us a reason to really push towards clean renewable energy, it will give material examples of why government regulation is imperative, and it will show that while in good times private corporations always want small government, they generally want larger government or bailouts when they get in trouble.

NEW ORLEANS — A massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is even worse than believed and as the government grows concerned that the rig’s operator is ill-equipped to contain it, officials are offering a military response to try to avert a massive environmental disaster along the ecologically fragile U.S. coastline.

Speaking Thursday on NBC’s "Today" show, an executive for BP PLC, which operated the oil rig that exploded and sank last week, said the company would welcome help from the U.S. military.

"We’ll take help from anyone," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said.

But time may be running out. Not only was a third leak discovered – which government officials said is spewing five times as much oil into the water than originally estimated – but it might be closer to shore than previously known, and could have oil washing up on shore by Friday.

At the same time, there appeared to be a rift developing between BP and the Coast Guard, which is overseeing the increasingly desperate operation to contain the spill and clean it up.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry was emphatic at a hastily called news conference late Wednesday that the new leak was discharging 5,000 barrels a day of sweet crude, not the 1,000 barrels officials had estimated for days since the Deepwater Horizons drilling rig exploded and sank 50 miles off the Louisiana Coast.

Suttles disputed at the same news conference with Landry that the amount of oil spilling into the water had ballooned – or at the company wasn’t able to handle the ongoing operation to contain it.

But early Thursday, he said on "Today" that the leak may be as high as the government’s new estimate. He said there was no way to measure the flow at the seabed and estimates have to come from seeing how much oil makes it to the surface.

"Using the satellite imagery and our overflights, we can now say it looks like it’s more than a thousand. It’s a range," Suttles said. He said the range was up to 5,000 barrels a day.

CONTINUED

Louisiana Oil Spill Gets Worse: New Leak Increases Estimated Spill By Five Times

Former President Bill Clinton enthusiastically weighed into the blistering national debate on immigration today with a resounding assertion that America needs more immigrants — not fewer — to ensure its long-term fiscal future.

At a symposium on deficit reduction today (see my earlier story), Clinton said that one key to avoiding massive debt is to maintain a good ratio between people paying into the system, and those receiving payouts (through such programs as Social Security.)

That means more jobs and more people working, he said. "Which to me means more immigrants."

Clinton said he supports immigration reform as proposed by President Obama or as supported by Sen. John McCain before he changed his mind.

Clinton spoke glowingly of the immigrant experience in the United States. "We’ve got somebody from everywhere here, and they do well," he said.

And looking at the overall budget numbers, comparing money in to money out, "I don’t think there’s any alternative for us but increasing immigration," he said. "I just don’t see any palatable way out of this unless that’s part of the strategy."

Clinton didn’t mention it, but it’s not just legal immigrants who contribute to the plus side of the Treasury’s balance sheet. In fact, undocumented immigrants are even more lucrative for the government, particularly Social Security. Many undocumented workers have payroll taxes automatically withheld from their wages, but because they use fake numbers, never collect the benefits.

Bill Clinton Sees ‘More Immigrants’ As A Way To Reduce Deficit

 Columnist George Will is of the opinion that Arizona’s police officers are capable of handling the task that the state’s draconian new anti-immigration law drops into their laps. That is to say, they must do a better job at enforcing illegal immigration statutes, without racial profiling, and do so effectively enough to not get sued. Will said:

Probably 30 percent of Arizona’s residents are Hispanic. Arizona police officers, like officers everywhere, have enough to do without being required to seek arrests by violating settled law with random stops of people who speak Spanish. In the practice of the complex and demanding craft of policing, good officers — the vast majority — routinely make nuanced judgments about when there is probable cause for acting on reasonable suspicions of illegality.

On the other hand, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who I am assuming is something of a master of the "complex and demanding craft of policing" seeing as how he’s been a policeman for over five decades, begs to differ. Per Amanda Terkel, Dupnik called the law "racist" and "disgusting" and "stupid" and, in his "nuanced judgment" could not be enforced without mandatory racial profiling. Dupnik’s reckoning of the legal issue is that he’s just as likely to be sued for racial profiling as he is for not doing enough racial profiling, so he’s standing pat, and will not enforce the new law.

 

 

 

Asked by local news station KGUN9 what he thought the solution to the law was, Dupnik replied, "The November election."

Pima County Sheriff Calls Arizona Law "Stupid," Will Not Enforce It (VIDEO)

Bipartisan negotiations over Wall Street reform appeared on the brink of collapse Tuesday night, over the issue of consumer financial protection, and Republicans appeared prepared to ultimately cede the current fight to the Democrats, signaling that if a deal between each party’s principals doesn’t bear fruit soon, they’ll move ahead with the Democrats’ bill.

"I don’t feel like there’s a real possibility in the near future of getting a bipartisan bill… I just don’t feel that’s a possibility," said Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) in response to a question from TPMDC.

Corker hasn’t decided if he himself will ultimately decide to break a GOP filibuster of financial reform legislation–but he’s fairly certain that a global agreement between Democrats and Republicans is likely impossible. "I don’t feel under any pressure [but] I’m just far less optimistic than I’ve ever been."

Unlike Corker, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), long thought to be a financial reform swing vote, said he’ll give negotiations between Sens. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) a bit more time–he said he’s likely to vote to sustain the filibuster again tomorrow. But if there’s no breakthrough soon, he’s going to vote with the Democrats to debate the issue on the floor.

"I have an idea how much time it takes to cut a deal," Voinovich said.

CONTINUED

Financial Reform Talks Near Collapse, GOP Prepares To Cave | TPMDC