Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) noted that Rep. George Miller’s (D-CA) retirement announcement on Monday might be because the job is just too grueling.
In an interview with TPM on Monday Frank said he understood why Miller would want to retire from Congress: 40 years in politics can really take a toll on someone.
“I’ve been there and I understand why he would do it and I bet you that George will continue to play a very major role in advocacy but the question is not why he’s retiring now,” Frank told TPM on Monday afternoon, just a few hours after Miller announced that he would retire from Congress at the end of 2014. “I am not at all surprised that after 40 years of stress he just doesn’t want to do it anymore.”
Miller and Frank are both regarded as some of the most liberal members of Congress in the past few decades (although Frank is considered the more fiery of the two). Frank announced his retirement plans back in 2011.
“I’m a few years older than George but I also called it quits after 40 years and it wasn’t because I thought we’d take the House back. Frankly, at that point, if someone had told me at the beginning of 2011 that we’d take the House back I would’ve quit earlier,” Frank continued.
Recently Miller has been one of the earliest backers of Democrats’ current push to raise the minimum wage. Miller, along with a number of other liberal lawmakers, was able to push the White House to embrace a $ 10.10 minimum wage hike. So why retire now?
“You’re judging, politically, a very human decision. And I haven’t talked to George but this,” Frank said. “A month after I had retired I realized that I was no longer flinching when the phone rang and I no longer worried about what god damned problem that some asshole caused that I gotta deal with now.”
The former Massachusetts congressman described Miller as a “passionate” liberal and a consistent defending of peoples’ right to join unions.
“He’s a passionate advocate for all the causes you believe in and the more deeply you believe in things, the harder the job is emotionally,” Frank said. “You take the losses personally — the frustrations of not being able to get things done. And human nature being what it is you tend to — you win something okay but it’s the losses, the inability to do things that keep you up at night.”
Monte Paschi shareholders delay cash call, top executives may quit
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SIENA, Italy
People are reflected in the window of a Monte Dei Paschi Di Siena bank in Rome January 29, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Max Rossi
SIENA, Italy (Reuters) – Italy’s third-biggest bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena was forced to delay a vital 3 billion euro ($ 4.1 billion) share sale to raise capital until mid-2014 because of shareholder opposition, plunging its turnaround plan into uncertainty.
The bank’s chairman and its chief executive may now resign after their plan to launch the cash call in January was defeated at an extraordinary shareholder meeting on Saturday due to the vote of Monte Paschi’s top shareholder.
The world’s oldest bank needs to tap investors for cash to pay back 4.1 billion euros in state aid it received earlier this year and avert nationalization after being hammered by the euro zone debt crisis and loss-making derivatives trades.
The unprecedented clash between the lender’s executives and its main shareholder – a charitable banking foundation with close links to Siena politicians – casts a pall over a tough restructuring meant to revive its fortunes.
Chairman Alessandro Profumo, a strong-willed and internationally respected banker who was formerly the chief of UniCredit, said he and CEO Fabrizio Viola would decide in January whether to step down.
“These are decisions one takes in cold blood and in the right place,” Profumo said at the meeting.
“What I have on my mind is a 3 billion euro cash call because we need to pay back 4 billion euros to taxpayers. Today this is uncertain and at risk,” he told a press conference.
Viola, sitting at his side, told reporters he would do everything “so that the ship does not sink”, but that he could not take responsibility for mistakes made by others.
A board meeting is scheduled for mid-January, a bank spokesman said.
Profumo and Viola had already secured a pool of banks ready to guarantee the rights issue, but only if it was carried out by the end of January.
They said delaying it would make fundraising harder because it would likely coincide with a string of cash calls by other Italian and European lenders triggered by a sector health check, and could precipitate the Tuscan bank’s nationalization.
But the cash-strapped Monte dei Paschi foundation – whose stake in the bank is big enough to veto any unwanted decision – forced a postponement until at least mid-May to win more time to sell down its 33.5 percent holding and repay its own debts.
An aide described the 56-year-old Profumo, who quit UniCredit in 2010 after clashing with that bank’s foundation shareholders and joined Monte dei Paschi in April 2012, as “very annoyed”.
Italian newspapers said former European Central Bank policymaker Lorenzo Bini Smaghi and Carlo Salvatori, chairman of the Italian unit of German insurer Allianz, were among possible candidates to replace him if he stepped down.
Antonella Mansi, a feisty 39-year-old businesswoman recently appointed head of the Monte dei Paschi foundation, said her insistence on a cash call delay did not amount to a no-confidence vote in the bank’s management.
But she said that carrying out the capital increase in January would massively dilute the foundation’s holding, leaving it with virtually nothing to sell to reimburse debts of 340 million euros.
“We have a precise duty to ensure (the foundation’s) survival. You can’t ask us to let it collapse,” she said.
Analysts however said a delay, and the possibility of Profumo resigning, might undermine the whole rescue of the bank.
“It’s important to carry out the capital increase as early as possible,” said Roberto Lottici, fund manager at Ifigest. “The risk is that the bank finds itself rushing into a cash call later at a lower price than what it could achieve now.”
UMBILICAL CORD
The rights issue, along with a painful restructuring plan, is among the conditions the European Commission imposed before giving its green light to the state aid for Monte dei Paschi.
But in Siena, where the bank is known as “Daddy Monte” and is the biggest employer, fears that the cash call might sever the umbilical cord between the lender and the city run high.
Siena mayor Bruno Valentini, whose city council is the top stakeholder in the Monte dei Paschi foundation, said on Friday a postponement might help keep the bank in Italian hands.
“We cannot let the third biggest bank in this country fall prey to foreign interests,” he said. “Monte dei Paschi is not just an issue in Siena, it is a big national issue.”
Several small shareholders at the meeting echoed that view, although one, Luigi Barile, accused the foundation of pushing the lender “to the edge of a precipice”.
Under the agreement with Brussels, if Monte dei Paschi cannot complete the capital increase by the end of 2014 the Treasury would convert the bonds it bought from the bank into shares, effectively nationalizing it.
The bank, which is cutting 8,000 jobs and shutting 550 branches, said a delay in the cash call would cost it at least 120 million euros in interest payments owed to the state on the bonds. ($ 1 = 0.7303 euros)
(Additional reporting by Danilo Masoni; Editing by David Evans)
Quit Calling Things "Guilty Pleasures"
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(Newser) – If you want to feel guilty, fine. If you want to feel pleasure, more power to you. But if you want to toss around the phrase “guilty pleasure,” then Jennifer Szalai requests that you resist the urge. In a New Yorker essay about how much she hates the term, Szalai traces its popular emergence back to the culture wars of the 1990s and argues that it “exudes a false note, a mix of self-consciousness and self-congratulation.” Would you be telling the world about your “guilty pleasures” if you genuinely felt guilty about them?
The message you’re sending is more like this: “You’re most comfortable in the élite precincts of high art, but you’re not so much of a snob that you can’t be at one with the people,” writes Szalai. “So you confess your remorse whenever you deign to watch Scandal, implying that the rest of your time is spent reading Proust.” Enough already. “Forget the pretense and get over yourself.” Click for the full column.
Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters
The opposition leader Abhisit Vejjajiva, sitting, second from left, and fellow party members at a news conference at the Democrat Party headquarters in Bangkok on Sunday.
BANGKOK — The Democrat Party, Thailand’s oldest and the main force behind the country’s political opposition, announced on Sunday that its members would resign from Parliament and join anti-government street demonstrations, deepening the political turmoil that has left five people dead and hundreds injured over the past two weeks.
The Democrats have been deeply frustrated by their inability to win elections against the powerful political machine backed by the billionaire tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister who now lives in exile. The party’s decision to withdraw from Parliament is the latest sign of the skepticism of Thailand’s democratic process that is spreading among the opposition and many members of the Thai elite.
“We cannot beat them,” said Theptai Seanapong, one of the members of Parliament who resigned on Sunday. “It doesn’t matter if we raise our hands and feet in parliamentary votes, we will never win.”
The mistrust of electoral politics has echoes across the region — in Malaysia, where the governing party has heavily gerrymandered the electoral map, and in Cambodia, where the authoritarian prime minister, Hun Sen, has used the machinery of the state and military to bolster his power. The Cambodian opposition continues to boycott Parliament over allegations of widespread electoral fraud in July elections.
One major difference in Thailand is that there is little dispute that Mr. Thaksin’s party has won the hearts of the majority of voters. By tailoring its policies to voters in the provinces, especially in northern Thailand, scholars say, the governing Pheu Thai party has convincingly won every election since 2001.
The move by the Democrat Party to abandon the House of Representatives leaves more than 340 seats still occupied, above the threshold of 250 members needed to conduct votes. The party said 152 Democrats would resign. There is very little chance that measures backed by the government will be blocked because the governing coalition controls about 300 of the 500 seats in the House.
But the Democrat Party will now inject its resources and prestige into the volatile street protests, which are set to continue after a call for a mass gathering on Monday with the aim of taking over the prime minister’s office.
Thai news media reported on Sunday that protesters were arriving in the capital from the provinces, especially southern Thailand, the stronghold of the Democrat Party.
As Thailand’s peak tourism season gets underway, embassies have advised their citizens to avoid the protest areas, and Bangkok’s main airport has alerted travelers that they should leave for the airport at least four hours before their flights are scheduled to depart.
The Democrat Party has many grievances with Mr. Thaksin’s party, including what it considers the railroading of some spending bills, voting procedures in Parliament that a court has called illegal and the furtive passage of important laws in the early hours of the morning.
But for a party that has long cultivated a genteel and intellectual image and advocated resolving differences inside Parliament, the decision to take to the streets was contentious within its own ranks. A number of key members of the party were not present at the meeting on Sunday.
Yet the party’s move has parallels — and worrying similarities, some observers believe — to a move the party made seven years ago.
Amid a campaign of street protests against Mr. Thaksin, then the prime minister, the Democrat Party boycotted elections in April 2006. Five months later, Mr. Thaksin was deposed in a military coup.
During the current round of demonstrations, protest leaders have courted the military, and many protesters have openly called for another coup. But until now, the army chief, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, has appeared wary of intervening in the crisis.
A Thai newspaper, the Post Today, reported on Sunday that General Prayuth had said a coup would not solve the country’s problems.
“We must be patient and seek a peaceful solution,” the paper quoted him as saying.
The protesters’ hope for royal intervention has also not had results.
King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who has intervened in political standoffs in the past but is now ailing, did not specifically address the protests in a speech given on his 86th birthday on Thursday.
Mr. Thaksin also appears to be going out of his way to patch up any perceived differences with the royal family. After several weeks of public silence, he posted a comment on his Facebook page on Saturday denying claims that he had ever been disloyal to the royal family.
“I would like to insist here that I’ve never even thought to reproach any member of the royal family because I received their royal graces all along,” he said.
Thailand’s prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, who is Mr. Thaksin’s sister, said on Sunday that she would consider calling elections, a move that other members of her government had rejected in recent days.
Until now, protest leaders have spurned the notion of elections, and many opposition leaders freely admit that they cannot overcome the electoral power of Mr. Thaksin’s party.
Instead, the protest leaders are calling for a system that would replace the country’s electoral democracy with a vaguely defined “people’s council,” a plan that has been widely derided by civic leaders and scholars as idealistic, unworkable and retrograde.
Ms. Yingluck said on Sunday that the country would have to hold a referendum for any such plan to be considered.
Her administration has earned plaudits from foreign government for its handling of the crisis in the face of aggressive moves by the protesters, who have taken over the Finance Ministry, occupied a large government complex on the outskirts of the city and temporarily cut power to a number of state-owned buildings, including the police headquarters.
The police say that the five deaths that occurred were caused by shootings among competing groups of protesters.
At the height of the violent confrontations between protesters and the riot police last week, the European Union said the authorities’ actions had been “restrained and proportionate.”
(Newser) – With the NSA reeling from Edward Snowden’s leaks, its leader offered to step down—but the White House quickly put the kibosh on that idea, an administration source tells the Wall Street Journal. Gen. Keith Alexander’s offer followed Snowden’s entrance into the spotlight in June, notes the Journal in a report on the agency’s woes as it tries to recalibrate after the “cataclysmic” revelations. “This is the hardest problem we’ve had to face in 62 years of existence,” says the head of an NSA team tasked with reacting to the Snowden leaks.
The agency is now trying to rein in some of its activities without so hobbling itself that it affects national security. With Alexander set to leave in the spring, a civilian could take his job for the first time. And the section of the Patriot Act allowing US phone-record collection expires in a year and a half; any renewed version of the law would have to take lawmakers’ privacy concerns into account. The White House may look to institute a means of comparing the political and diplomatic risks of a particular case of spying to its potential benefits, insiders tell the Journal. That could be a difficult process for intelligence teams, which “tend to be remarkably apolitical,” notes Sen. Susan Collins.
On Thursday, Dario Franchitti took to his Twitter account to announce he is retiring from racing due to injuries he suffered last month in Houston. “One month removed frmo the crash and based on the expert advice of the doctors who have treated and assesed my head and spinal injuries post accident, it is their best medical opinon that I must stop racing,” he wrote. The 40-year-old IndyCar racer got into a scary accident in early October that left him with a broken right ankle and two fractured vertebrae. But on a brighter note, his estranged wife, Ashley Judd, has been by his side the entire time, and the two are said to be giving their relationship another try.
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1 of 2. Former U.S. congressman from New York and current Democratic candidate for New York City Mayor Anthony Weiner is followed by the media as he leaves his New York City apartment July 24, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Anthony Weiner resisted mounting calls to bow out of the New York City mayoral race on Wednesday, a day after admitting he had continued the sexually charged online chats that led him to resign from Congress in disgrace two years ago.
Weiner, who took the lead in several polls soon after announcing his political comeback in May, said in an email to supporters that he should have been clearer about how long the behavior had persisted but that he hoped voters would give him another chance.
The New York Times and the New York Daily News both published editorials on Wednesday urging Weiner, a Democrat who was once a leading liberal voice in Congress, to end his bid to follow Mayor Michael Bloomberg into City Hall.
“The serially evasive Mr. Weiner should take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, away from cameras, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City,” the New York Times wrote in its lead editorial, adding he had “disqualified himself” for public service.
Weiner told a news conference on Tuesday he had sent lewd images of himself to women online until at least last summer.
The New York Post, known for its outrageous headlines, went with “Meet Carlos Danger” – a reference to Weiner’s reported pseudonym in the online chats with a woman he met over the Internet.
Weiner insisted he would not drop out. In his email, he said his campaign was about something larger than himself and that he would not “leave New Yorkers without a choice.”
Of the resumption of online activity that had cost him his last job, Weiner said: “It was a terrible mistake that I unfortunately returned to during a rough time in our marriage.”
Until the revelations, Weiner was ahead in the mayoral race. On Wednesday, Quinnipiac University released a poll – conducted before Weiner’s news conference – that found him leading Democratic candidates with 26 percent of the vote. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn followed with 22 percent, and former City Comptroller Bill Thompson had 20 percent.
Weiner’s latest troubles began on Monday after a gossip website called The Dirty published a series of sexually explicit messages and images an unnamed young woman said she received from Weiner, including pictures of his penis.
The woman was identified by CNN on Wednesday as Sydney Elaine Leathers, 23, of Evansville, Indiana. CNN interviewed an acquaintance who said she had engaged in a sexually explicit text relationship with Weiner.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the identity of the woman. She could not be reached by Reuters for comment. The acquaintance, contacted by Reuters, declined to be interviewed.
The woman gave the website numerous screenshots of what the website said were chats on Facebook and another social media website in which Weiner described the sexual acts he wanted to perform on her and which she apparently encouraged.
“You are a walking fantasy,” Weiner reportedly said in one of the chat’s less explicit exchanges, which took place after the two began communicating in July 2012, when the woman was 22.
Buzzfeed, a news and entertainment website, said it had identified a woman in her early 20s from Indiana as the source of the new chats.
Nik Richie, the owner of The Dirty, told Reuters in an interview that he could not confirm the woman’s name. But he described her as “starstruck” and said she genuinely believed she and Weiner were in love.
“They would have conversations all the time. He was like a little child. He needed validation from her all the time. They talked every day, sometimes several times a day,” he said.
‘HUMA FOR MAYOR’
During Tuesday’s news conference, Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, stood at his side, alternately smiling and looking awkwardly away. After apologizing for her nervousness, she read out her own statement saying she had forgiven him.
To many New Yorkers, Abedin, a longtime aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, proved a sympathetic figure.
“I say Huma for mayor,” Tina Brown, the editor of Newsweek, wrote on Twitter. “She has all the qualities he doesn’t.”
Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp owns the New York Post, called Weiner a “sicko.”
“Should help city by just fading away,” he wrote on Twitter.
Some voters shared the sentiment.
“I know nobody’s perfect, but I don’t think he’s trustworthy,” said Dottie Lipski, 55, a graphic designer.
Other voters said they didn’t think Weiner’s personal failings had anything to do with his ability to lead.
“It’s two separate things. It doesn’t have anything to do with his qualifications to be mayor,” said Racquita McMillon, a 38-year-old merchandise analyst.
One of his rivals in the Democratic primary, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who was in fourth place with 15 percent of the vote in the latest Quinnipiac poll, urged Weiner to withdraw. Thompson, who often appears in third place in the polls, said the news was “deeply disturbing.”
Quinn, Weiner’s nearest rival, stopped short of calling on Weiner to withdraw, but criticized what she described as “a pattern of reckless behavior, consistently poor judgment, and difficulty with the truth,” in a statement on Wednesday.
Weiner, who has often gamely conceded that his name is ready-made for late-night comedians’ jokes, was ribbed on Tuesday night by David Letterman, who suggested other pseudonyms for Weiner to consider: Carlos Dangler, Throb Reiner and Eliot Spitzer.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen and Edith Honan; Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Dina Kyriakidou and Eric Beech)
Melissa King being crowned Miss Delaware Teen USA. She resigned her crown Feb. 26, 2013 amid reports she appeared in a porn video.
Donald Trump, the billionaire developer and head of the Miss USA competition, says his organization told the Miss Delaware Teen USA to resign her crown this week amid claims she had performed in a pornographic video.
“We had to tell her to get a letter of resignation very quickly,” Trump told radio host Howard Stern on his Sirius/XM broadcast.
As WND reported Tuesday, Melissa King, the reigning Miss Delaware Teen USA quit her position by submitting a letter of resignation through her attorney.
On Monday, a porn site posted a sex video featuring a young woman who looks and sounds like King, and who claimed to have competed in beauty pageants, but King has reportedly denied the woman in the video is her.
“Absolutely not,” she told the Journal News of Delaware. “It is not.”
“There are comments saying this, however, it’s not comments that are true,” she said of the porn site’s claims.
Video of Howard Stern’s interview’s interview can be seen here:
When Stern asked Trump if King intentionally his the video, Trump said, “We don’t know whether or not she hid it, but it came out. … She got involved, and she actually offered her letter of resignation and we had to accept it.”
“If she hadn’t resigned, what would you have done? Would you have just fired her?” asked Stern.
“Well, we probably would have had to,” said Trump.
When Stern said he was going to watch the video, Trump quipped, “Will you call me and let me know how good it is?”
The video at the center of the controversy runs more than five minutes, and begins with an interview on what appears to be a hotel bed.
A young woman with a striking resemblance to Melissa King, the 2013 Miss Delaware Teen USA, sits on a bed in a pornographic video. King has denied the woman is her, but has resigned her crown.
Though a name is never proffered, the man interviewing her asks when she turned 18, to which she responds, “About three months ago. March.”
The Miss Delaware Teen USA website indicates King’s birthday is in March.
The interviewer, who is not identified, then asks her what made her want to appear in her first adult video.
“I thought it’d be fun and it sounded like I needed the money,” the woman says. “So I just decided to do it.”
Other questions centered on whether or not she has a boyfriend, the last time she had sex and how old she was the first time she had sex.
The Journal News reports another set of questions has the woman being asked about being a “Miss. A Miss Teen?”
Due to some perceived reluctance, the man asking her then says, “I’m not going to say the state or anything. … You did beauty pageants?”
“I’ve done them, yes,” she responds.
The interviewer asks her if she told anyone about doing the video.
“It’s not a big secret. But I didn’t tell anybody specifically what I was doing,” she replies
After the questions, the woman and a man perform several different sex acts.
The CBS-TV affiliate in Philadelphia posted side-by-side photos of the woman who appears in the video and King to display the apparent similarity.
