Democratic NY Rep Faces Ethics Hearings

Thursday’s unexpected announcement that the House ethics committee would begin a trial on ethics charges leveled against Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) came after a secret, months-long effort to settle the case fell apart, according to several sources close to the situation.

The negotiations were designed to avoid the extraordinary spectacle of a trial by his peers for Rangel, but they broke down when the parties in the discussions – Republicans and Democrats on the ethics committee, and Rangel himself – couldn’t reach an agreement.

Due the sensitive nature of the discussions, no one involved in the talks wanted to openly discuss them, but the conditions for a settlement included a public apology by Rangel for his ethical transgressions in exchange for lesser sanctions against the Harlem Democrat and an end to the case.

Republican aides said that Rangel faces the possibility of a formal reprimand by the House or possibly even a censure motion, although Democrats said it was premature to discuss what punishment will be recommended by the ethics committee.

One source close to Rangel suggested a compromise still may be reached next week, before the opening steps in the trial get underway.

Behind-the-scenes negotiations to settle the case between Rangel and Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), the chairwoman and ranking member of the ethics committee, began in earnest in May, and continued into this week, said the sources.

But Rangel, Lofgren and Bonner, were unable to finalize a deal. Rangel was seen in an animated discussion with Lofgren on the House floor on Thursday morning, just hours before the ethics committee announced it would create an “adjudicatory committee” to evaluate the charges against Rangel. - Politico Story

Unemployment Jumps Again

WASHINGTON -- New jobless claims in the U.S. jumped last week by the most since February, reversing a sharp fall two weeks ago. The rise is partly a result of seasonal factors but also reflects the job market's weakness.

The Labor Department

says new claims for unemployment insurance jumped by 37,000 to a seasonally adjusted 464,000. Analysts expected a smaller rise, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

The sharp increase comes after claims fell steeply two weeks ago to their lowest level since August 2008. But much of that drop was driven by temporary seasonal factors and not necessarily by an improving job market.

Two weeks ago, General Motors and other manufacturers reported fewer temporary layoffs than usual this time of year, the Labor Department says. - FOX News

BP Oil Spill - Obama has too Many Chiefs in Charge

As the world hopes that good news about the BP oil spill cap continues, there already are worrisome signs about the oversight and management in the next phase of this oil spill fiasco.

No fewer than nine formal investigations into the Gulf oil spill are now under way, according to The Washington Post, which warns ominously, “more could be coming.” The executive branch initiated four, Congress called for three, BP has one and an outside organization set up another.

Unfortunately, this crazy-quilt approach to investigating the disaster is all too similar to the administration’s approach to managing the crisis — which is one reason it has been handled so badly.

Just as there are a variety of investigations, the administration originally named a variety of officials as response point people to the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Former U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen is in charge in the Gulf.

But back in Washington, a variety of players are on point. According to an official statement on the White House blog early in the crisis, President Barack Obama sent Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, assistant to the president for energy and climate change policy Carol Browner and Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to the Gulf Coast “to ensure all is being done to respond to this oil spill.”

In addition, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is overseeing long-term recovery. And Ken Feinberg is, as usual, the special master in charge of payments.

That’s a long list. The problem is that if everyone is responsible for the response, ultimately, no one is. - Politico Story

Obama Administration Acted Stupidly - We need a Beer Summitt

President Barack Obama has made a mantra out of insisting he and his White House won’t get caught up in “cable chatter,” with aides proudly insisting they don’t let 24-hour news outlets drive decision-making.

But this week’s forced resignation of a previously obscure Agriculture Department employee is just the latest example of Obama officials reacting to a cable news-driven obsession of the right.

It not only infuriates Obama’s liberal base, which feels like the episodes just reinforce the power of the right to push a damaging story into the mainstream press. But as this week shows, the White House’s touchiness even threatens Obama’s ability to keep control of his own public persona, or steer the national conversation in a way that’s conducive to promoting his message and his agenda.

The anger on the left is now reaching new decibel levels due to the quick decision by the Agriculture Department to push out a Georgia-based employee, Shirley Sherrod, who was captured on video at a recent NAACP conference appearing to make racially insensitive comments about a white farmer.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, used his Wednesday news briefing to apologize to Sherrod, saying, “Without a doubt, Miss Sherrod is owed an apology. I would do so on behalf of this administration."

For many progressives, it smacked of a similar ousting — that of Obama environmental adviser Van Jones, who was cashiered after weeks of Fox News coverage about his involvement with 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

But Sherrod’s comments, captured by conservative mischief-maker Andrew Breitbart and played on Fox News, were part of a longer parable in which she explained how she had come to help the same farmer and learned to view the world outside a racial lens. The Agriculture Department is reviewing the decision to seek her resignation. - Politico Story

Journalists Band together to Protect Obama

A group of liberal journalists in 2008 sought to sweep under the rug the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal that threatened to derail then-Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller, an online publication founded by Tucker Carlson, a conservative contributor for Fox News.

The documents offer evidence to conservative critics who have long held that the mainstream media were in the tank for Obama, and bolsters the argument that reporters with major news outlets are biased in their coverage.

Journalists working for Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic expressed outrage over the tough questioning Obama received from ABC anchors Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos at a debate and some of them plotted to protect Obama from the swirling controversy, according to the Daily Caller.

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent pressed his fellow journalists to deflect attention from Obama's relationship with Wright by shifting topics to one of Obama's conservative critics, the Daily Caller reported.

"Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists," Ackerman wrote.

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, urged his fellow members of Journolist, a private listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, to do "what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have." - FOX News Story

This is the New Black Panther Party

Before King Samir Shabazz wielded a nightstick outside a Philadelphia polling station ... before he was videotaped calling white people "crackers" and urging blacks to kill them and their babies ... the head of the New Black Panther Party in the City of Brotherly Love was singing about being trained by Usama bin Laden.

The New Black Panther Party claims to believe in nonviolence, but a song performed by Shabazz's group, Coup Da’Ta, in 2004 includes descriptions of violent attacks against police as well as anti-Semitic statements and claims of having trained with both the most-wanted terrorist in the world and the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

This is the chorus of "Damn Rebels," repeated seven times in the song:

“I’m a warrior trained by Khalid Muhammad

I’m a terrorist trained by Usama bin Laden

Demolitionist, breaking down the walls of the rotten

Never hit and miss

So, first time, take out your target”

The song at one time was posted on the home page of the New Black Panther Party’s national website, but it has been removed. It also has been taken down from other sites that host Coup Da’Ta’s music.

In response to a request for an interview with Shabazz, the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party, Malik Zulu Shabazz, wrote in an e-mail:

“King Samir is not doing any interviews. Our only statement on that is that his music is art, and not to be taken as literal political speech or a New Black Panther organizational statement.” - FOX News Story

Racism Worse now than Before Obama was Elected President?

The election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was supposed to be a sign of our national maturity, a chance to transform the charged, stilted “national conversation” about race into a smarter and more authentic dialogue, led by a president who was also one of the nation's subtlest thinkers and writers on the topic.

Instead, the conversation just got dumber.

The America of 2010 is dominated by racial images out of farce and parody, caricatures not seen since the glory days of Shaft. Fox News often stars a leather-clad New Black Panther, while MSNBC scours the tea party movement for racist elements, which one could probably find in any mass organization in America. Obama’s own, sole foray into the issue of race involved calling a police officer “stupid,” and regretting his own words. Conservative leaders and the NAACP, the venerable civil-rights group, recently engaged in a round of bitter name-calling that left both groups wounded and crying foul. Political correctness continues to reign in parts of the left, and now has a match in the belligerent grievance of conservatives demanding that hair-trigger allegations of racism be proven.

“I thought we were going to move beyond this,” said Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative historian of race and a Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who called the current racial climate “a catastrophe.” - Politico Story

Obama Administration Admits He Lied - Health Care Reform is a TAX!!!

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Obama insists that requiring Americans to get health insurance does not amount to a tax increase.

President Obama says requiring people to have health insurance is not the same as raising their taxes.

In a testy exchange on ABC's "This Week," broadcast Sunday, Obama rejected the assertion that forcing people to obtain coverage would violate his campaign pledge against raising taxes on middle-class Americans.

"For us to say you have to take responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase," Obama said in response to persistent questioning, later adding: "Nobody considers that a tax increase." - CNN Story

The Justice Department is defending penalties in the new health care reform legislation for those who fail to buy or acquire insurance as taxes even though President Barack Obama has adamantly denied they're anything of the sort.

"That's not true," Obama insisted in an interview with ABC News last year. "For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase."

However, in a 79-page legal brief filed in federal court in Pensacola last night and aimed at tossing out a lawsuit brought by 20 state attorneys general, the Justice Department did argue that the penalty can be viewed as "a tax" and as part of Congress's "taxing authority."

However, that was not DOJ's main line of argument on the penalty, but a fallback. The main argument is that the Constitution's Commerce Clause gives Congress the authority to impose such a penalty in order to reform the health insurance market, make coverage more available, and reduce free-riding on the system. That said, the Obama administration seems to have decided that mounting a robust defense against the lawsuit is more important than insulating the president from another round of political attacks, so the tax arguments were thrown in as well. They are arguably less controversial than the Commerce Clause claims, though many legal experts believe the suit is unlikely to prevail on any of its various grounds. - Politico Story

Dems Want Health Care Fix to Allow Illegal Imigrants Coverage

A group of Democratic lawmakers wants to use the immigration reform debate to fix one of the most hotly contested aspects of the health care law — provisions that bar immigrants from using new government programs to get coverage.

The move by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus would add a contentious new element to an already monumental task — passing a bill that puts 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.

But the lawmakers say they’re merely following through on a pledge they made when the health care overhaul passed in March, and they expect the White House and Democratic leadership to do the same.

Some members of the caucus almost withheld their votes for health reform over what they saw as punitive, anti-immigrant measures in the bill, which bans illegal immigrants from using newly created exchanges to buy insurance, even with their own money, and maintains a five-year waiting period for legal residents to enroll in Medicaid.

They signed on only after receiving assurances that their concerns would be rectified as part of the immigration reform battle, according to lawmakers, advocates and Hill aides.

“The expectation was that everybody knew it was unfair and that a new immigration bill would correct that,” Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told POLITICO. - Politico Story

Obama Has Fixed Washington....At the Cost of the American People

America is struggling with a sputtering economy and high unemployment — but times are booming for Washington’s governing class.

The massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come. The housing market, boosted by the large number of high-income earners in the area, many working in politics and government, is easily outpacing the markets in most of the country. And there are few signs of economic distress in hotels, restaurants or stores in the D.C. metro area.

As a result, there is a yawning gap between the American people and D.C.’s powerful when it comes to their economic reality — and their economic perceptions.

A new POLITICO poll, conducted by market research and consulting firm Penn Schoen Berland, underscores the big divide: Roughly 45 percent of “Washington elites” said the country and the economy are headed in the right direction, while roughly 25 percent of the general population said they felt that way. - Politico Story

Washington Post Ignored Black Panther Story

The Washington Post ombudsman on Sunday chided his newspaper for ignoring the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, saying The Post remained "virtually silent" as the story developed in recent weeks.

The newspaper carried a full-length news article about the case on Thursday. But ombudsman Andrew Alexander wrote that readers have been contacting him "for months" wondering what was taking so long for The Post to show interest in the controversy.

"The Post didn't cover it. Indeed, until Thursday's story, The Post had written no news stories about the controversy this year," Alexander wrote. "That's prompted many readers to accuse The Post of a double standard."

Alexander wrote that while the newspaper should not feel obligated to cover stories "simply because of blogosphere chatter," the Black Panther story merits attention.

"Coverage is justified because it's a controversy that screams for clarity that The Post should provide," Alexander wrote. - FOX News Story

Obama Trying to Make Gulf Oil Spill Story Go Away?

Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter on Sunday accused President Obama

of trying to move the BP oil disaster "off the front page," urging the public not to forget about the spill and the cleanup just because a new well cap seems to be working.

As Obama and his family wrap up their vacation in Bar Harbor, Maine, Vitter noted that the president had not visited his state since early June. Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Vitter said Obama's "political motivation" seems to be that he wants to sweep the crisis under the rug.

"I'm afraid he's decided to deal with this issue, at least politically, by not coming back here and trying to move it off the front page rather than dealing with the situation forcefully," Vitter said. "He was coming here on a pretty regular basis. ... He hasn't done that in Louisiana since June 4. That's personally disappointing to me."

Administration officials continue to be heavily involved in the recovery efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, but Obama himself mostly has devoted his public appearances to other issues like the economy since declaring the Gulf recovery his priority more than six weeks ago.

Obama's last trip to the Gulf was June 14, when he visited the coasts of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. - FOX News Story