The Hollywood Liberal

Debt at home means no work for Defense contractor

More than 50 years ago, James Brown and the Famous Flames recorded “Bewildered,” with the words: “Must I have sleepless night and endless days.”

Today, another James Brown must be asking the same question and feeling bewildered by his current situation.

The second Brown is a 48-year-old Defense Department contractor who lives in Annapolis. But a crazy string of business problems resulted in him losing his security clearance. So now Brown is without a job.

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Behind the scenes, Roskam is House GOP’s ‘listener in chief’

The cover of the book “Young Guns” features its three authors — House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Republican Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) and House Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) — posing purposefully beneath a subtitle dubbing them “A New Generation of Conservative Leaders.”

The man just below Cantor and McCarthy on the leadership ladder, House Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam (Ill.), is a few years older, less well-known and has no intention of writing a book anytime soon.

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Supreme Court questions bad legal advice in plea bargains, won’t hear Utah cross case

Anthony Cooper got some very bad legal advice when considering a plea deal for shooting an acquaintance four times. His lawyer said the prosecution would not be able to prove intent to murder because Cooper had missed a shot to the head and hit his victim only below the waist.

So Cooper turned down an offer of four to seven years in prison. He went to trial, was convicted and is now serving 15 to 30 years.

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Health, abortion issues split Obama administration and Catholic groups

A contentious battle between Catholic groups and the Obama administration has flared in recent days, fueled by the new health-care law and ongoing divisions over access to abortion and birth control.

The latest dispute centers on a decision by the Department of Health and Human Services in late September to end funding to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to help victims of human trafficking, or modern-day slavery. The church group had overseen nationwide services to victims since 2006 but was denied a new grant in favor of three other groups.

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Capitol Hill power player Fred Upton switches ideological gears as his clout grows

Washington doesn’t want Fred Upton anymore. Not the Old Fred Upton, at least.

A divided capital — and a restive GOP — is insisting that the affable, dutiful Michigander can no longer be who he has long been: the ultimate moderate. As chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, this acolyte of centrist traditions is being urged to stop recognizing that the other side has a good point or two, especially points that the Republican leadership has not embraced.

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Reassessing Obama’s Foreign Policy “Success”
Michael Barone, Examiner
The argument is being made in some quarters that, however unsuccessful Barack Obama's domestic policies have been, his record in foreign policy has been successful. But when you examine the claims of success, they seem a bit peculiar.Take the widely read New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Last week, he argued that Obama's “lead from behind” approach to Libya worked much better than what turned out to be the Bush administration's protracted involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.He's certainly right in saying our troops are not mired down in Libya. But…

Why 2012 Is Going to Be Ugly
William Galston, The New Republic
With little more than a year until the presidential election, two new reports—a survey from CBS/NYT and a CBO brief on household income—illuminate the treacherous terrain on which the campaign will be waged. The candidates will be fighting for the sympathies of an electorate that is utterly dispirited and in no mood for promises of uplift from either party. They say they want change, but they have lost confidence in the public sector as the agent of change.That would seem to give the edge to the Republicans, but unfortunately for them, most people think they’re…

What Business Wants From Washington
Jim McNerney, Wall St. Journal
America works best when American business and government complement one another: Business plays the vital role in economic expansion and job creation, while government oversees the environment in which business can innovate and compete. This approach fueled prosperity for generations and produced the world's largest and most powerful economy. We seem far adrift of that ideal today.Washington's political gridlock and volatility threaten to derail an economic recovery that wants to take flight. Observers are right to perceive a collective failure to govern, and that perception creates…

Bombs, Bridges and Jobs
Paul Krugman, New York Times
A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.”Right now the weaponized Keynesians are out in full force — which makes this a good time to see what’s really going on in debates over economic policy.

The Last Days of Moammar Gaddafi
Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker
How does it end? The dictator dies, shrivelled and demented, in his bed; he flees the rebels in a private plane; he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. He is tried. He is not tried. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed. The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures.Instinctively, when dictators are toppled, we…