Hank Kalet Posts

With Mitt Romney shifting toward the center in his debate performances with Barack Obama, you could be forgiven for thinking the GOP has regained a sense of composure and rationality.

You'd be woefully mistaken, of course.

Just listen to the rank nonsense uttered regularly by its own candidates and campaign surrogates, who seem engaged in a competition to see who best show showcase the party's collection of kooks and cranks.

We know about Todd Akin and his

The Defense of Marriage Act was just dealt a major blow.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled on Thursday that the federal statute defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman unlawfully discriminates against same-sex married couples by denying them equal federal benefits.

I decided to have a little fun with the debate transcript (did I actually just say that?) and pulled a few, select comments from the debate, edited them and arranged them in lines so that now we have a found poem from the debate.

Comments are desired, including variations on my theme (maybe a found poem of Obama, ...

Read Greg Sargent's Plum Line blog today, which links to what he calls a brutal dissection from David Stockman on The Daily Beast of Romney's reason for running -- his business experience at Bain Capital. Stockman says:
Romney was not a businessman; he...

Paul Krugman offers this today in his column, as succinct a summary of the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan healthcare position as I've seen:
The Romney-Ryan position on health care is that many millions of Americans must be denied health insurance, and millions more deprived of the security Medicare now provides, in order to save money. At the same time, of course, Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are proposing trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy. So a literal description of their plan is...

From Think Progress, more on what we'll call the big lie on Social Security. In a piece on the "24 myths" told by Paul Ryan in last night's debate, it addressed the Medicare and Social Security question:
“Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.” [T]he possibility of Medicare going bankrupt is — and historically has been — greatly exaggerated. In fact, if no changes are made, Medica...

Iran is working toward the creation of a nuclear weapon. This is not good news and warrants our attention, but not in the way that the Washington concensus has it.

An Iranian bomb, in many ways, will be no more destabilizing and dangerous than the possession of a bomb by any other nation; our history with Iran and the assumption that their leadership is more irrational than other leaders guides our thinking in unhealthy ways and has left us wearing blinders when it comes to the threat of nuclear weapons.

The threat is not an Iranian bomb, but the proliferation of nuc...

Paul Ryan mentioned poverty in a throwaway line about midway through the night but, like the other three men on the two major-party presidential tickets, poverty is not an issue that appears to be on his radar.

In fact, poverty is just one of a number of important issues about which the presidential candidates have little interest in speaking. Here are the 10 issues that should be on the table:

Poverty: about 15 percent of Americans now live in poverty, many of whom work. While the number has grown over the last decade, we should not fool ourselves into thi...

Let's get this out of the way: Mitt Romney did a better job during last night's presidential debate than President Barack Obama. He was more forceful -- or as forceful as he is capable of being -- and controlled the tone. But the points he made were built on easily disprovable lies and distortions.

Obama, for his part, was barely there. He l...

Here are the answers to my earlier trivia question:
There have been 14 pitchers who have pitched in a Mets uniform who have won the Cy Young. Two did it with the Mets, 10 before they joined the Mets and two after they left. Can you name them all?

Hint: One is on the current Mets roster.Part 1: Tom Seaver won it three times ('69, '73, '75) with the Mets and Dwight Gooden once ('85).

Your browser does not support iframes.

With Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey making his final start in what cold be a Cy Young season, I want to offer a three-part Mets/Cy Young trivia question:

There have been 14 pitchers who have pitched in a Mets uniform who have won the Cy Young. Two did it with the Mets, 10 before they joined the Mets and two after they left. Can you name them all?

Hint: One is on the current Mets roster. ...

The so-called "fiscal cliff" we are careening toward may prove to be the best of a bad set of options, but with a bipartisan group of senators talking we could be facing something that proves to be far worse -- an accelerated expansion of corporate control of our economy and the levers of power.

The cliff -- the set of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts due to take place in January because of the Congressional stalemate over long-term deficit talks -- is de...

This story in today's edition of The New York Times offers an example of how far to the iChat he national Republican Party has moved. Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, not only pushed through health-insurance reform that he now disavows, but was a leader on environmental causes -- which he also has abandoned.

Romney, in his earlier incarnation, was very much an old-school liberal Republican -- think Jacob Javitz, Millicent Fenwick or Mitt's dad George Romney. But when he opted to run for president, things change...

Crossposted from The Tent City Project:

The Rev. Steve Brigham was in good spirits today when I arrived at Tent City in Lakewood.

The founder of the camp, known to residents as Minister Steve, was being interviewed by News 12 New Jersey as I approached, a day after an attempted eviction of a Tent City resident landed him in jail.

He explained his side of the story to News 12 and, as we (News 12, the Tent City Project team and some of the residents) walked into the camp from Cedar Bridge Avenue, two unmarked police cars came barrelling through the entrance and sped down the path into the main encampment -- refusing to slow down despite there being Tent City residents in their way.

One resident shouted angrily after them and the rest of us rushed to the camp's center to see what was happening. Police then set up a perimeter, blocking off a large area and searched one of the tents, removing what looked like a bag of baseball bats. Police on the scene wouldn't comment.

Brigham had been charged with witness intimidation and vandalism after he sliced up a tent near the entrance to the compound. That much is agreed upon. The rest remains murky.

According to The Asbury Park Press, police say they arrested Brigham on Monday "after he cut up the tent of a another camper because she talked to police earlier in the day about potential illegal activity there."

Steven "Rev. Steve" Brigham, 52, was arrested around 5 p.m. Monday after police returned to the encampment because a 50-year-old female resident called them to report Brigham was cutting up her tent and forcing her out of the wooded area known as "Tent City," located off Cedar Bridge Avenue and South Clover Street, according to Detective Capt. Paul Daly. The woman alleged the eviction was retribution because she was seen talking to police investigators earlier in the day, Daly said.

"Brigham and others confronted her because she was talking to investigators earlier in the day. He told her to leave, and when she returned a little later Brigham was cutting up her tent," Daly said.

The early Press article lacked Brigham's response -- an error rectified after the reporter visited the camp and talked with Minister Steve. During the interview (I'll post a transcript of Steve's comments later), "Brigham admitted he evicted the woman and cut up her tent. ... but denied that her talking to police was the reason."

He said the woman was involved in illegal activities and was disruptive in the camp. "It's the only way to get rid of it (the tent)," Brigham said about cutting up the tent. He spoke on about the incident after he was released Tuesday from Ocean County Jail on bond. "These charges are bogus. These charges are false. These charges are made up. She is just saying whatever she can to stay in Tent City and do whatever she wants," Brigham said.

Police told the Press that the woman accused Brigham of evicting her, because Brigham "doesn't want anyone cooperating with the police." That charge, he said, was "Totally erroneous."

She called (police) on another drug addict (in Tent City) yesterday and we took down his tent too," Brigham said. "I told her we do not call the police because we can handle matters within the camp. Every time the police come down here to Tent City, it is going on our record, and when we go to court they are going to list all these things against us. We've got to minimize the police interference when it's not critical."

What the Press piece ignores, howerver, is the larger issue raised by Brigham -- that of the camp's relationship with the Township of Lakewood. The town sued to close the camp, but a judge ruled that the residents had a right to survive and, given the lack of shelter space in Ocean County, it had to stay open. Brigham and several camp residents have filed a class action suit against Lakewood and the county accusing them of violating the state constitution's guarantee that citizens have a right to survive -- a "right to safety and to life" -- attorney Jeffrey Wild, who is representing the homeless in the suit, told me today.

The police involvement is part of a larger pattern of harrassment, Brigham says, that has included towing residents' vehicles and the disabled bus Brigham used for his home, the dumping of wood chips at the end of an emergency exit path and other inconveniences. The harrassment, he says, is retribution for his challenge to the township's housing policies, which have resulted in money being funneled to the large Orthodox Jewish community in the township. He calls it "segregated housing" -- though it is unclear whether the alleged imbalance in housing distribution has happened because of political decisions or because of the demographic composition of the community (between 40 percent and 50 percent are Orthodox Jews).

In any case, it is clear that both Lakewood and Ocean County -- among other New Jersey municipalities and county governments -- have failed the state's growing homeless population. The Tent City Project is an artistic look at human rights issues facing residents of a homeless camp in Lakewood, NJ and its connection to the growing number of tent cities across the country. See our Facebook page for more information -- and don't forget to "Like" us.