Hullabaloo

Sunday, January 29, 2012

 
Virtually Speaking Sunday

by digby



6pst 9est

digby and Stuart Zechman discuss developments of the week, highlighting what’s been neglected or misrepresented on the Sunday morning broadcasts, drawing from their work of the prior week and the wickedly funny Bobblespeak Translations. Featuring CoT’s the ‘Most Ridiculous Moment’ from the Sunday morning talk shows. Follow @digby56 @bobblespeak @Stuart_Zechman.


Call in number to speak with the host(646) 200-3440

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digby 1/29/2012 05:45:00 PM |

 
What is this "democracy" you speak of?

by digby

John McCain was just born to be a tyrant. He hid it well for a few years, but it's always been under there, lurking, waiting until his ambitions were burned out and he could be himself:

“We’ve got to stop the debates,” McCain told Meet The Press' David Gregory. “Enough with the debates, because they are driving up our candidates’, all of them, unfavorability. We have enough of that. They’ve turned into mud wrestling instead of an exposition of all our candidates views. And it’s time to recognize who the real adversary is, and it’s not each other.”

Sorry, daddy.

In every election there are a bunch of people demanding that candidates drop out, to stop the debates, to end the primaries because it's hurting the ballclub. There is a very strong strain in our country (a bipartisan one, by the way) to not allow the people to decide who's going to run for president. (This is the same impulse that immediately writes off everyone but the anointed frontrunner --- anointed, by the way, by a bunch of millionaires and the Village press corps.)

I realize it's uncomfortable for everyone's chosen candidate to have to compete for votes and make his case in something besides a 30 second ad, but it's still nice to let people at least pretend that they are participating in this thing we call "democracy." Presidential Debates are just about the only thing we've done to further that cause in the past 30 years --- so naturally the establishment is clamoring to end them.

The system will survive and the eventual nominee will come out ok. Everybody should just relax.

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digby 1/29/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Allen West Apparently Wants the Majority of Floridians to Leave America

Allen West at a Palm Beach GOP fundraiser:

"This is a battlefield that we must stand upon and we need to let president Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America. Yeah, I said hell.

This is not about 1% and 99%. This is about 100%. 100% American. And I will not stand back and watch anyone defame, degrade or destroy that which my father fought for, my older brother, my father-in-law, myself, my nephew and all my friends still in uniform. I will not allow Obama to take the United States of America and destroy it. So if that means I'm the #1 target for the Democrat Party, all I gotta say is one thing: 'Bring it on, baby.'

On the other hand, here's a new NBC Marist poll from Florida:

Obama: 49%
Romney: 41%

Obama: 52%
Gingrich: 35%

Obama: 50%
Paul: 36%

Obama: 50%
Santorum: 35%

It's early, of course, and polls are a snapshot in time. But it certainly appears that at this moment, Allen West would prefer that the majority of Floridians leave the country for more socialist climes.

Perhaps it's Allen West who might need to leave America for a more libertarian paradise. He could go to the bottom of the sea for it. But I hear Afghanistan and Somalia are lovely places where no oppressive government will enforce equality of achievement on anyone (no one with a penis, anyway.)

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thereisnospoon 1/29/2012 03:08:00 PM |

 
Do you like Gladiator movies Newtie?

by digby

I'm sure it's going to be tempting for certain wags to say this is because women think Mitt is dreamy, but I think it's probably more that Newtie is just so ... Newtie:

Romney beats Gingrich and the rest of the field by winning broadly across many subgroups -- those who are not Tea Party supporters (52 percent), those who are liberal or moderate (49 percent), make more than $75,000 a year (49 percent), identify as "conservative" (47 percent), and, in particular with women.

There was a stark gender gap between Romney and Gingrich. Women said they preferred Romney by 47-26 percent over Gingrich. The gap is closer with men, but Romney leads with them as well, 38-29 percent.

Still, the Gingrich camp has to be very pleased with this. Maybe it'll turn that gender gap around. Check out the muscular gam and taut torso:

Newtie's having that framed, I'm sure. Mitt too for that matter. Conservative boys just love a naked, sweaty Gladiator fantasy.

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digby 1/29/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
Making things worse -- forever

by digby

Noting Jared Bernstein's reporting on how the misguided insistence on cutting government spending is delaying a robust recovery, Krugman adds this:

But it’s even worse than he says. Why? Because if you look at what’s being cut, it’s heavily focused on investment:

That is, we’re sacrificing the future as well as the present. Oh, and the cuts that aren’t falling on investment in physical capital are largely falling on human capital, that is, education.

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong all this is. We have a situation in which resources are sitting idle looking for uses — massive unemployment of workers, especially construction workers, capital so bereft of good investment opportunities that it’s available to the federal government at negative real interest rates. Never mind multipliers and all that (although they exist too); this is a time when government investment should be pushed very hard. Instead, it’s being slashed.

It's very hard not to believe the conspiracy theorists who say that this is consciously being done to lower wages and standard of living. Can anyone really be this dumb?

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digby 1/29/2012 12:00:00 PM |

 
Unimpeachable Revolutionary

by digby

Think Progress:

Norquist is now mapping out how he can ensure further anti-tax victories by securing Republican majorities. In an interview with the National Journal, he mused that a GOP mandate would obviously enact an extension of the Bush tax cuts, work to maintain a repatriation holiday for corporate profits, and even pass House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan that jeopardizes Medicare. But when asked what Republicans should do if faced with a Democratic majority that won’t keep the tax cuts, Norquist had a simple answer:“impeach” Obama.

NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Grover forgets that President's can only be impeached for treason or high crimes and misdemeanors. (But then they lowered the bar so low with the last one that the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors is now anything equivalent to extramarital blow jobs, so maybe he has a point.)

Still, I think it's time to give Grover his due. It's tempting to make fun of him. His name is kind of funny,and he seems to be a bit of a clown to outside observers, but the truth is that he's probably had more influence on American politics than any other single person in the last 30 years. He has systematically pursued his "market leninist" strategy with focus and patience and resisted the lure of compromise even when the Democrats offered up big cuts to "entitlements," (something that even surprised me.)

He keeps his eye on the prize --- the prize he's been seeking since 1978:

In the handful of Marxists on an elite campus otherwise drained from a decade of political activism, Grover could find sustenance for his view that America’s power structure was dominated by Leftists arrogantly running roughshod over the lives of true Americans. And when he graduated cum laude with a degree in economics in 1978, he could pour more concrete around his already impregnable ideology by drawing on the promise of the tax rebellion erupting throughout the country. All around him, from Massachusetts to California, he saw a popular uprising against bureaucracy and socialist creep. “Get rid of the Soviet government,” he would say, “and I don’t really have much use for ours.”

He was convinced that the adults behind this tax revolt saw what the prep-school radicals at Harvard couldn’t, or wouldn’t: The struts and supports of America’s sprawling government were producing weak and dependent people.(And with the lessons in self-sufficiency that infused Grover’s childhood, he didn’t harbor much tolerance for weak, dependent people.) Government had the pernicious power to steal money from the strong and corrupt the weak with handouts. Government was communal, which meant other people (bureaucrats who weren’t as smart, otherwise they wouldn’t be bureaucrats) telling people like him what to do. The government used taxpayer dollars to create all kinds of mischief.

Norquist is philosophically a hardcore libertarian. But he's a strategist who will use any means to achive his goals. If that means temporarily making common cause with theocrats and imperialists he'll do it.

His most important and enduring tactic is the anti-tax crusade which he has never once compromised. Through it, he basically controls one of the two major parties in America. And he will not give up until he achieves what he set out to achieve --- bankrupting the federal government.

He's a fascinating fellow, whose personality seems almost underdeveloped in some respects:

Grover’s parents left him with a confident righteousness about the world and how to maneuver in it. In doing so they raised a supremely confident young man, but one who seemed to his friends strangely incapable of connecting with others. “He’s not a fellow who is motivated by or particularly needs a whole lot of human warmth or interaction,” explained one friend.

Grover would have trouble understanding, coping with, or even deciphering flaws in those around him. While friends insisted he had a strong moral compass for his own actions, the nuances of human personality in others often eluded him. Friends and allies worried: Grover would embrace a bad apple, based on a precariously built certainty that the person was an ideological loyalist. Just as readily, he’d turn against an ally, based on an equally dubious conclusion that the person was (or would be, or might be) a betrayer to the cause.

Politically, this overcharged sense of self-sufficiency produced in Grover an intolerance for the view that people might turn to government for help as an arbiter, an equalizer of society’s power imbalances. People were best off left alone; a coddling, meddling government could only sap reservoirs of individual strength. From his upbringing, too, came a natural empathy for the survivalist rhetoric of the gun crowd and the antigovernment themes of Western libertarians. Raised in a chic Northeastern suburb, Norquist would increasingly sound like a man spawned from the individualist West. “I’ve always thought,” he would explain later, “that it is part of the American ideology, the American worldview, that people should be left alone to take care of themselves, and other people shouldn’t tell you what to do.”

There's a certain kind of psychology that leads people in Grover's ideological direction. I've met any number of them over the years, many having some of those same personality traits.

But it's a rare person who has his strategic mind and capacity for serious long term commitment to a single, powerful tactic to achieve his goals. He doesn't get the credit he deserves for the state of our politics today. He's a major figure.


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digby 1/29/2012 10:30:00 AM |

 
Bringing the nasty

by digby

Oh, Sarah. The country misses you so:

Governor Palin:Yeah how can he say he is not part of the establishment? Well look at the players in the establishment, who are fighting so hard against him. They want to crucify him because he has tapped into that average everyday American Tea Party grassroots movement that has said ‘enough is enough of the establishment.’ That tries to run the show that tries to tweak rules and law and regulations for their own good and not for our nation’s own good.

Well when both party machines and many in the media are trying to crucify Newt Gingrich for bucking the tide and bucking the establishment that tells ya something.

I say ya know ya gotta rage against the machine, at this point, in order to defend our Republic and save what is good and secure and prosperous about our nation, we need somebody who is engaged in sudden and relentless reform and isn’t afraid to shake it up. Shake up that establishment.

So, if for no other reason to rage against the machine, vote for Newt, annoy a liberal. Vote Newt. Keep this vetting process going, keep the debate going.

I don't know if she knows that's an endorsement, but that's an endorsement. (For "sudden and relentless reform" anyway.)

I've always thought Palin was a dyed in the wool Gingrich Republican. His appeal is a pseudo-intellectual covering for nasty liberal baiting, hers is physical attractiveness covering for nasty liberal baiting. Both of those surface appeals are things conservatives are insecure about and tend to overvalue. But more than anything else it's really all about the nasty and both Newtie and Palin know how to bring it.


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digby 1/29/2012 09:00:00 AM |

 
Larry Summers Epitomizes What's Wrong with the World

by David Atkins

Watching this Krishnan Guru-Murthy interview with Larry Summers is enough to make any decent person want to punch a hole through a wall:



Felix Salmon has a pretty good take on it:

So I was very happy to see that Krishnan Guru-Murthy at least tried to ask Summers these questions earlier this week. Krishnan starts off with standard Summers-interview questions, asking him what he thinks about UK fiscal policy, and Summers gives his standard wise-man answers. But then Krishan gets steadily tougher, asking Summers about the advice he gave the president-elect in 2008, and eventually about his deregulatory tenure at Treasury.

And Summers doesn’t even come close to apologizing, or admitting that he made any kind of mistake at all. Quite the opposite: he starts getting very touchy, telling Krishnan that he’s reducing complex questions to overly simplistic black-and-white narratives. Halfway through the interview, Krishnan asks Summers whether laissez-faire capitalism isn’t working for the middle classes. And Summers pushes back. “I’m a Democrat,” he says, adding that “I’ve long been someone who favored significant interventions to protect the environment.”

“Protect the environment?” responds Krishnan. “Didn’t you advise the president not to sign up to Kyoto?”

“No, no,” replies Summers.

“You didn’t?”

“No. I advised that an agreement be designed in order to protect the American economy, and the United States not take on obligations that would render its businesses uncompetitive.”

Summers never explains how this differs from advice not to sign up to Kyoto, nor does he give an example of any “significant interventions” he pushed for to protect the environment.

On deregulation, he's even more disgusting. Summers' answer to probing questions on his role in creating the bubble economy:

Would it have been better if the whole of the 2010 financial reform legislation had passed in 1999 or 1998 or 1992? Yes, of course it would have been better. But at the time Bill Clinton was president, there essentially were no credit default swaps. So the issue that became a serious problem really wasn’t an issue that was on the horizon… If you want to assign responsibility, If you take a market that essentially didn’t exist in the 1990s, that grew for eight years from 2001 to 2008, and then brought on a major collapse, if you were looking to hold people responsible, you would look to… officials of the Bush Administration. I’m not going to tell you that I foresaw this crisis in all its dimensions, but without sounding like Newt Gingrich here, for you to read two articles that a researcher handed you and sling this stuff is not really to give your viewers a very clear chance.

But Salmon sets the record straight:

Summers is absolutely wrong about credit derivatives not existing in the late 1990s. He was Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001; Euromoney Magazine had splashed the words “Credit Derivatives” all over its front cover in March 1996. And Brooksley Born, between 1996 and 1999, was literally losing sleep over those things as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Summers’s response to Born? To make sure she was marginalized, and, eventually, pushed out of her job entirely.

Elections come and go. Presidents come and go. But the only way things will change is if people like Bob Rubin, Phil Gramm, Larry Summers and anyone in their remotest orbits are explicitly exiled from power for all the world to see. The troubles with the Obama Administration began from the moment they picked financial advisers prior to even taking office.javascript:void(0)

There is hope, though, in the likes of Darcy Burner and Elizabeth Warren. If the country can survive that long, 2016 and 2020 might be the time when the Larry Summerses of the world are finally given the boot they so richly deserve.

It will probably take a woman, and one not associated with the last 30 years of asset-based Bond-Lord-worshipping fiscal insanity.


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thereisnospoon 1/29/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Saturday, January 28, 2012

 

Saturday Night At The Movies

Dr. Terrible’s house of horrible

By Dennis Hartley

Thank you! I’m here until Thursday: The Theatre Bizarre

I know you didn’t ask, but in case you were wondering, the horror anthology is alive and deliriously unwell, as evidenced in a Grand Guignol-worthy collection of short films called The Theatre Bizarre. Think The Night Gallery meets Red Shoe Diaries…hosted by the Jim Rose Circus. And I should warn you up front: this one’s not for the squeamish.

Actually, your framing hosts for the evening are a troupe of creepy performers who lurch about the stage like crazed marionettes, while an emcee (the ever-disturbing Udo Kier, getting his Uncle Fester on in a big way) introduces each of the six vignettes to his po-faced audience of one (Virginia Newcomb), a young woman who has straggled in to the seemingly abandoned venue. These interludes (directed by Jeremy Kasten) do lend symmetry to a collection that would otherwise have a tenuous sense of thematic cohesion.

Curiously, the anthology launches with its weakest installment, “The Mother of Toads” (directed by Richard Stanley). An American anthropologist and his girlfriend get sidetracked from their road trip in the French countryside by a mysterious gypsy woman. The actors give amateurish, oddly mannered readings, like the “performances” in a cheap porno (a stab at irony, perhaps?). The most viscous inter-species sex scene since The Man Who Fell to Earth aside, it’s a lackluster and predictable (if mercifully short) affair.

Things perk up a bit in the next piece, “I Love You” (directed by Buddy Giovinazzo). In this Memento -flavored tale, a man awakens on his bathroom floor with a gashed hand and partial amnesia. As he flashes back, we are given glimpses of a highly dysfunctional relationship that he may or may not still be embroiled in. It’s a gruesome, yet cleverly constructed cautionary tale about obsession, possessiveness, and knowing when to let go.

The darkly comic “Wet Dreams”, directed by B-movie cult hero Tom Savini (and possibly inspired by the charming real-life story of John and Lorena Bobbit), is the grossest, yet (perversely) the most entertaining installment. An abusive husband, who seems to be quite literally trapped in a Freudian nightmare, gets his just desserts; whether he gets them literally or figuratively is left up to the viewer. Savini also casts himself as a psychiatrist. And a warning: you may be put off of chorizo and eggs for quite some time.

Next, Douglas Buck helms “The Accident”. After a little girl witnesses a horrific road accident, she peppers her mother with questions about mortality. It’s a simple concept, but beautifully acted, artfully photographed and quite resonant. Hands down, it is the best of the bunch. In fact, if I had seen it outside the context of this particular anthology (say, as a stand-alone at a short film festival), I would consider it Oscar-worthy; it’s that good.

Now, the one that made me look away. Repeatedly. “Vision Stains” (directed by Karim Hussain) gleefully recalls the most famously unwatchable moment in Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Repeatedly. This is too bad, because while I give Hussain’s piece an “A” for originality, I couldn’t stop squirming (then again, I’m a wimp). A homeless female serial killer haunts urban back alleys, seeking out women who (from her judgment, at least) already exist in a kind of living death; junkies, alkies and the generally disenfranchised. The twist is that, at the moment of their literal death, she sees theirlife flash in front of her eyes (it involves a hypodermic needle…don’t ask). Then she dutifully records their biographies into her journal (goes to show what some people won’t do for a good story).

The final “chapter”, or perhaps tagged more appropriately, the “dessert” is directed by David Gregory. “Sweets” is a mixed bag; Annie Hall meets Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. An annoyingly whiney fellow begs his dominatrix-like girlfriend not to dump him, while flashbacks recall the arc of their relationship (which is mostly comprised of the couple force-feeding each other voluminous amounts of syrupy, gloppy, sickly-sweet substances). Okay, I get it; relationships can be “sticky”, and falling out of love is not unlike suffering a huge sugar crash. While it’s a welcome bit of levity (considering what has preceded it), the piece ultimately overdoses on its own metaphorical sugar high. Although, if you’re on a diet, it would be great aversion therapy.

Granted, The Theatre Bizarre is not for all tastes. That being said, there is nothing here that I would consider to be “tasteless” purely for the sake of being tasteless, if you know what I’m saying. That’s because there is a certain amount of intelligence at work here, coupled with a sense that the filmmakers are occasionally peeking around the curtains to wink at the audience and assure us, “hey, it’s only a movie”. That is what separates this film from most contemporary horror, which has been co-opted and essentially overrun by some truly abhorrent subgenres (like “torture porn”-no thanks!). God, I miss Rod Serling.

Picture if you will: Twilight Zone: The Movie, Creepshow, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, Tales From the Crypt, Black Sabbath, Kwaidan, Dead of Night (1945), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1943), Tales of Terror, Twice-Told Tales, The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum, The Vault of Horror, Cat’s Eye, Two Evil Eyes, Torture Garden, The Offspring, The Monster Club, From Beyond the Grave, Trick ‘r Treat.

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Dennis Hartley 1/28/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
QOTD: Darcy Burner

by digby

Pulled from this morning's Blue America chat.

Darcy Burner:

It’s obvious to pretty much anyone following politics that Congress is broken. And it’s also clear that we won’t be able to make real progress on fixing our economy, on educating our kids, on climate change, or on any of our other priorities unless we fix it.

There are parts of fixing Congress that are big and hard and will take a long time. For instance, we clearly need to reverse Citizens United - the entertainment value of the Republican Presdential primary notwithstanding – and it looks as though that will take a Constitutional amendment. We need to do it, but it’s hard and it will take a long time.
Some of what we need to do, however, is much easier and quicker. When Gingrich took control of the House in 1995, he made a bunch of rules changes designed to break the institution, and we’re reaping the effects of some of those today. Reversing them would take a simple majority vote in the House.

Let me give you an example. Why do lobbyists have so much influence? Lots of people give campaign contributions; what is it that lobbyists are doing differently? Right now, most of the policy work in Congress is done by staff whose average age is 26, and who are typically covering 4-6 major policy areas each. If they’re lucky, they might really understand one of those policy areas. So when a lobbyist walks in and says, “Ok, here’s what you need to know about this bill your boss has to vote on tomorrow, here’s how your boss should vote, and here are your talking points,” and that’s the only information they’re given, of course the lobbyist will usually succeed. It wasn’t always this way: there used to be internal think tanks in the House where members would pool their resources to hire deep experts in some topic area. There were, for example, experts on nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. So if a member of Congress wanted to know how big a threat Iran’s nuclear program is, or the impact of some piece of legislation with sanctions, there were deep experts they could consult who were part of their team. Gingrich banned shared funding of staff and canned those expert staffers in order to consolidate power, and as a consequence members have to rely on lobbyists, leadership, or outside organizations like the Heritage Foundation for the information they need. That’s totally fixable – and it could conceivably be fixed in the first week of a new Congress.

There are a whole set of changes – allow shared funding of expert staff, turn on track changes for legislation so we can see who changed what, stream online any committee hearing a lobbyist is allowed to attend – that would make Congress more transparent and accountable to the American people in meaningful ways, and which we can do quickly.

I’m running because we have to fix Congress – and I’m signing up to fix it.

You can help her do it, by donating a few buck to her campaign now so that she can prepare her ground game.

Donate to Darcy's campaign, here.

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digby 1/28/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Let go

by digby

Via Brad Delong:

Fannie, Freddie and Chewbacca « Modeled Behavior: Center-left intellectuals in America apparently have a serious problem comprehending the concept of Bullshit. The entire econ world has borne witness to Paul Krugman tearing out his hair over Zombie Lies. Now, Mark Zandi devotes some several thousands words to overturning the nonsense notion that 70 year old US Government Sponsored Enterprises sparked a 21st century global boom in raw material and land prices during a time in which their influence on the international credit markets was approaching a multi-decade low. He writes

Getting history right for this dark economic period is critical if we are to design a better mortgage finance system for the future. If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are responsible for the debacle, then perhaps government’s role in a future mortgage finance system should be minimal. But if private lenders deserve most of the blame, the case grows for giving government an important role in backstopping and overseeing the system.

Mark, Mark. Clonazepam. It’s a beautiful thing. Let go. I am betting that maybe five people in the US actually believe Fannie and Freddie caused the housing bubble. Maybe half a dozen more are actively lying about it. The rest are just Bullshitting. That is, they don’t really care what the truth is one way or the other. This is just a way to gesture in the general direction of the federal government and say Urrhh!!!

Yep. Let go. You can talk facts until you are blue in the face. In the end it's just "Gummint Urrhhhh!" (Plus ACORN)

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digby 1/28/2012 02:00:00 PM |

 
Foreclosure Investigation Update

by digby

Here are a couple of interesting videos with perspective on the latest forecolsure investigation. The first is Eric Schneiderman. The second is Matt Taibbi.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dday provides a thorough analysis of where we are at this moment.

Update: More from Taibbi here.

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digby 1/28/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 
Blue America welcomes the original Netroots candidate, Darcy Burner

by digby


Back in 2006, when Blue America was just a young PAC, one congressional candidate seemed to emerge from out of our own ranks, so conversant with the way the new technology had merged with progressive politics that she became the first real Netroots candidate. It was, of course, Darcy Burner of Washington state, a brilliant former Microsoft executive who famously declared that she knew she had to step into the arena when she realized that she needed to leave a better world for her young son.

We endorsed her enthusiastically in both of her heartbreakingly close losses in 2006 and 2008 and followed her subsequent work in Washington DC as Director of the Progressive Caucus Foundation with interest. While there, she learned the inside workings of the congress, built relationships and alliances with other progressives and deepened her policy knowledge to truly impressive levels. Yet through it all, Darcy has closely maintained her connections to the Netroots and commitment to the Progressive Movement we've been trying to build from the beginning. She was one of those rare people with the integrity and backbone to be in Washington DC without being of Washington DC.

But we couldn't be more thrilled that she has now gone back home to the Pacific Northwest to give it another go and run for congress herself--- and we are proud to endorse her for the congressional seat in the new WA-01 district.

We need people like Darcy in the congress more than ever because, as she says:

We can’t fix what’s broken with our country if we don’t fix Congress. Our Congress is full of crooks who trade on insider knowledge, of people who have sold their souls to the very people who have broken our country. Even the good ones, the members who want the right things, too often give up too easily on important fights, or can’t figure out how to fix the deep structural problems that undermine us.

We need people there who are tenacious and who won’t give up when things get hard.

Indeed we do. And Darcy is nothing if not tenacious.

It's not going to be a cakewalk. She's facing a primary with several dismal Dems, one of whom may very well get tacit backing from the Party. (Darcy wasn't afraid to speak her mind when she was in Washington. They know she will not be compliant.) And once she gets through that gauntlet, she will be facing a probable GOP opponent who will be very well financed.(Aren't they all?)

She's got great name recognition, even though this is a new district, and is she very popular in the populated Democratic part of it. We understand that the progressives are rallying around her in the more Republican rural area. So she's got an excellent chance.

But she's going to need our help. Big business isn't going to support a real progressive. Super-PAC gambling billionaires aren't going to support a real progressive. The Party is terrified of Big Business and Super PAC billionaires so it isn't going to support a real progressive. That's going to be our job.

Please join us in the comments as we welcome Darcy back for her first chat of the election season. She'll be taking questions for the next hour.

And please donate what you can to her campaign here. If you want to begin the real hard work of hope and change, this is the place to start.

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digby 1/28/2012 11:00:00 AM |

 
Chaffetz Pwned

by digby

I'm no fan of Newt Gingrich, but I have to admit that this take down of the obnoxious, Utah Tea Partier, congressman Jason Chaffetz is enjoyable:

Chaffetz, a Mitt Romney supporter, has been turning up at Gingrich events during the past two days, though he denied in a brief interview with The Hill that he was doing so in order to goad the former Speaker. He said he was merely there to "offer some perspective."

But Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond decided it was time to do some goading of his own, as he briefed reporters. Hammond first waved with faux-glee at the Utah congressman and invited him to join the briefing. When Chaffetz ignored him, the spokesman instead marched the press over to where Chaffetz was standing with fellow Romney supporter Bay Buchanan.
Hammond told Chaffetz that Sen. John McCain, a Romney supporter and former GOP nominee, has expressed distaste for the tactic of having campaign surrogates shadowing an opposing candidate's events. Chaffetz replied, "I am just here attending."

Hammond would not let the matter rest, though, teasing an increasingly uncomfortable Chaffetz that "I didn't even have to pay at a fundraiser to see you — that's exciting."

Hammond continued for several minutes in a similar vein, asking Chaffetz with fake bonhomie, "Where are you going next? Do you want our schedule for tomorrow? Are you going to join our charter to Tampa?"

As the barrage continued, an exasperated Chaffetz asked Hammond, "Are you serious?"

I guess Chaffetz can dish it out but he can't take it. Newtie and his boys were doing this stuff when young Jason was still drinking sweet liberty tea from his sippy cup. He's got a long way to go before he can compete with that kind of nasty.

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digby 1/28/2012 09:00:00 AM |

 
Rhetoric Matters

by David Atkins

Matt Taibbi on Countdown, discussing how President Obama's embrace of populist rhetoric may already be impacting Wall Street:



There are many who have argued that the recent streak of anti-Wall Street rhetoric from national Democrats is just that: rhetoric. And that after the election, everything will go back to business as usual.

I'm not sure that's the case. But even so, there's a lot to be said for rhetoric alone. When leaders promote progressive ideas even with no intention of acting on them, that changes the national conversation. It affects behavior. And that in turn may force legislators' hands even if they had no intention of acting in the first place.

Rhetoric matters.


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thereisnospoon 1/28/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Friday, January 27, 2012

 
The Kitten Nazis

by digby

I haven't had occasion to adopt a cat for many years. They tend to adopt me and then live to a very ripe old age. My current furry friend abandoned his perfectly nice home across the street when they had a baby and moved in with us. He just wouldn't stay home and they finally gave up. (He's partially blind and very sensitive to noise.)

This would be his preferred spot these days:

I have however, gone with friends a number of times as they tried to adopt cats and kittens and this experience is common:

You might think adopting a cat would be easier than getting a dog. After all, the solitary, self-sufficient feline is the perfect pet for the working person. But I heard from people who were turned down because of the curse of full-time employment—the cat may ignore you, but you should be home all day anyway. Others were told they need to accept a pair of cats or get nothing. And don’t even think about telling the rescue people your cat might go outside occasionally. Lisa wrote to say that she rescues strays that live in her house but are allowed outdoors. When she was looking for another cat and explained this to the person at the shelter, they turned her away.

For any species, the outside world is full of dangers, even potentially deadly ones. Maybe we all should stay inside (and avoid bathtubs and stairs). I have one cat I can’t budge off the couch with a forklift. But the other bolts from between our legs when the front door opens and would be miserable contained in the house. I’ve had successive sets of cats for more than 30 years and have concluded the risk of them going outside is worth their happiness—and they’ve lived to ripe ages. Is it really sensible to keep rescued cats out of loving homes from which they may take an occasional stroll?

Kevin Drum says he's had similar experiences as well.

My friends are the type of pet owners who buy their cats expensive special food prescribed by the vet. They will spend however many thousands of dollars are required to determine that their little kitty's breathing problems are something she's already grown out of. They buy their furniture and bedding with the cats' comfort foremost in their minds. And they don't let them outside. Unfortunately, they also work for a living and aren't home all day. So there are some adoption groups that would not consider them worthy. It's sickening to see kittens left in cages because they can't be adopted by Ward and June Cleaver --- who don't exist.

The best thing to do is just lie. Say that someone is always home and that they will never, ever go outside and that you won't ever feed them table scraps --- whatever they want to hear. These people's hearts are in the right place but they've gone terribly wrong somewhere. Best to thank them for their generosity, grab your kitten and run.

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digby 1/27/2012 06:30:00 PM |

 
I miss Rick Perry

by digby

"Live free or die. Victory or death. Bring it"

It's hard to believe this guy didn't go farther. I miss him, I really do.

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digby 1/27/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
The Brave New World of Citizens United

by David Atkins

In the old days (i.e., just a few years ago), this would have mattered:

The DCCC has outraised the NRCC by $6.9 M for the last session of Congress, while Republicans still hold more cash on hand, $15.24 M to the Dems' $11.6 M.

With Citizens United, none of that matters. Corporations can dwarf those numbers on either side almost instantly.

On the other hand, given the DCCC's track record of taking donations only to help the most conservative Democrats, and then not terribly effectively, maybe it doesn't matter anyway.


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thereisnospoon 1/27/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
Go Elizabeth

by digby

This pretty much says it all:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

She's awfully good.

This is an interesting article about Warren in the Boston Phoenix about the "Dr Phil years." Warren has been working to educate and illuminate about this disappearing middle class for decades. In the last one she decided to take her case directly to the people. She is not and ordinary politician or an ordinary academic.

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digby 1/27/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
Room to regroup

by digby

Rick Perlstein has a fantastic piece up today about Newtie, Perot and the Contract With America. It's really helpful to have a historian of the modern conservative movement weigh in on recent history. The press is simply dismal in this regard. The whole article is great, but this is the gist:

Gingrich and Co. were able to get away with it because the plain facts of what the Contract actually was (a strategic erasure of Republican conservatism) almost entirely escaped the political press – at the time, and ever since. A 1996 New York magazine article by Jacob Weisberg, for instance, about how "Ross Perot is back, in all his self-aggrandizing, wacky splendor," observed as evidence of said wackiness, "One minute Perot is making an important point about the unwillingness of the major parties to deal with the Social Security time bomb. The next he is off on a jag about how the Contract with America was actually his idea." (Imagine!)

A 2004 history of conservatism stated baldly that the Contract "epitomized antigovernment conservatism." The narrative was set: the Contract, and its consequence – the new Republican congressional majority – proved America was indisputably (to take the title of that 2004 history) a "right nation." This supposed truism underwrites the defensive rhetoric of, say, Barack Obama, who felt compelled to say in his State of the Union this week, quoting Abraham Lincoln, that "government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more."

(Yeah. I just wilted like a dead petunia when I heard that one.)

The point he's making about the GOP "co-option" of the Perot movement is truly important. When you look back at the context you will see that a big part of it was repudiation of failure (Daddy Bush) and the opportunistic ascendance of the conservative movement. It's a similar dynamic to the ascendance of the Tea Party after Junior Bush's failure. There's a reaction among a certain subset of the American public to GOP failure that leads them to an "independent" reform movement concentrated on political corruption, low taxes and deficit education. (With a good dose of flag waving and military fetishism thrown in for flavor.)All of which fits very nicely back into the GOP fold once they make clear just how committed they are to all those things. It's a nice scam --- it gives both the party and voters a place to go after failure to regroup and then come back together to fight the liberals.

Just as Newtie led the Perotistas back into the fold in 1994, they all went back in 2010. Works like a charm. And just like clockwork, Even old Ross himself came around and endorsed George W. Bush in 2000. (If you see some crazy, take a look at that transcript.It's really going to be hard to beat the 90s for sheer political lunacy.But they'll keep trying.)


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digby 1/27/2012 12:00:00 PM |

 
All American Entrepreneur

by digby

So which is worse, being a closet racist or exploiting racism for money? It's hard to tell the difference, frankly. I'd guess it's possible that some slave ship owners were nice family men and had no personal beef with Africans --- but they profited handsomely from their misery nonetheless. Is there a moral difference?

I'm talking about this article in the Washington Post quoting the president of the Cato Institute saying that he'd had a conversation with Ron Paul in the late 80s about how to attract more customers for his newsletters:

Ed Crane, the longtime president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said he met Paul for lunch during this period, and the two men discussed direct-mail solicitations, which Paul was sending out to interest people in his newsletters. They agreed that “people who have extreme views” are more likely than others to respond.

Crane said Paul reported getting his best response when he used a mailing list from the now-defunct newspaper Spotlight, which was widely considered anti-Semitic and racist.


Benton, Paul’s spokesman, said that Crane’s account “sounds odd” and that Paul did not recall the conversation.

At the time, Paul’s investment letter was languishing. According to the person involved with his businesses, Paul and others hit upon a solution: to “morph” the content to capi­tal­ize on a growing fear among some on the political right about the nation’s changing demographics and threats to economic liberty.

The investment letter became the Ron Paul Survival Report — a name designed to intrigue readers, the company secretary said. It cost subscribers about $100 a year. The tone of that and other Paul publications changed, becoming increasingly controversial. In 1992, for example, the Ron Paul Political Report defended chess champion Bobby Fischer, who became known as an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, for his stance on “Jewish questions.’’

I have long heard chatter about how the paleolibertarians consciously set out to build their faction by appealing to paranoid right wing racist elements. But this is the first I've heard that Paul's racist newsletters were actually a personal financial strategy.

I suppose those two things aren't mutually exclusive, especially considering Paul's libertarian take on civil rights. He truly believes that states' rights and property rights trump human rights in general so there's no hypocrisy in profiting from racist tracts. He is a man of principle. (Well, except for the lying about his knowledge of the racism in his newsletter, which was never believable and is even less so now.)

Other than that, though, he has stuck to his stated principles. He's a free market guy using racism to make a buck and build up his political career. What's more All American than that?


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digby 1/27/2012 10:30:00 AM |

 
Elder Scam

by digby

What an ass:

“I think it’s unfortunate that they go to these elder statesmen of the parties at their stage in life and solicit things like that,” [Fred Thompson] said. “I have my own opinion, I disagree with Bob Dole even though I respect Bob Dole very much.”

Asked by TPM whether his reference to that “stage in life” suggested Dole was too infirm to render sound judgement, Thompson clarified that he took issue with the Romney campaign’s effort to court the former presidential nominee.

“He’s been in bad health, he’s had bad legs,” Thompson said. “I hate it when people irritate folks like that…you know they shouldn’t be bugged and dragged into all this, but if they want to they’re plenty capable of making their own decisions.”

I guess he's an expert. After all, this is the guy who's out there conning the elderly into taking out reverse mortgages, something many observers believe is the next sub-prime crisis:

Thompson's new employer, however, has a troubled track record. Regulators in Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington State have cracked down on the firm for deceptive marketing and consumer fraud. In February, for instance, the Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, sued AAG and its president for direct-mail solicitations that Madigan described as "extremely misleading." That same month, the state of Massachusetts temporarily banned the company from doing business in the state...

In AAG's case, putting a celebrity face on its mortgage products is at the core of the company’s marketing strategy. Before hiring Thompson, the company used the late veteran actor Peter Graves as its spokesman. And in August 2009, AAG president and CEO Reza Jahangiri explained that a large part of the company's national marketing campaign would revolve around a "celebrity spokesperson" who "adds that credibility and gets borrowers a little more comfortable with the company."

Nice. Kindly old Arthur Branch vouches for it so it must be ok.

Read the whole article for the full dossier on Thompson's employer's deceptive practices (and Thompson's history of shilling for con artists and elder scammers.) He really should be ashamed of himself. He can't need money that badly.


Update: And, by the way, Bob Dole was able to vigorously run for president when he was 73 years old --- and that was after a lifetime of dealing with war injuries suffered when he was mowed down by German machine gun fire in Italy in 1945. When Thompson ran in 2008 (at the age of 66) he couldn't cross the Iowa County Fairgrounds without using a golf cart. Just saying. He's an asshole.

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digby 1/27/2012 09:30:00 AM |

 
Cuts to Cheer About

by David Atkins

I'm sort of surprised that the planned Pentagon budget cuts haven't gotten more attention in progressive circles. There are some things to dislike, but a great deal to like as well.

On the positive side, the cuts are designed to move away from large-scale ground invasion capabilities in the model of Iraq and Afghanistan, and more toward nimbler operations like the one that killed Osama Bin Laden. By cutting those capacities, the Pentagon and the Obama Administration are making it much harder for a future Republican president to attempt an Iraq-style ground war in Iran, which was perhaps the greatest fear progressives like myself had about a potential McCain Administration. The war machine will also have to make do with a few fewer shiny toys, which is a good thing:

Next year’s Pentagon budget is to be $525 billion, down from $531 billion this fiscal year. Even though the Defense Department has been called on to find $259 billion in cuts in the next five years — and $487 billion over the decade — its base budget (not counting the costs of Afghanistan or other wars) will rise to $567 billion by 2017. But when adjusted for inflation, the increases are small enough that they will amount to a slight cut of 1.6 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget over the next five years.

Nonetheless, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he was working with about $500 billion less than he had anticipated having on hand through 2017, meaning that the Pentagon had to trim personnel and favorite high-profile weapons programs. “This has been tough work,” Mr. Panetta said at an hourlong news conference.

He said that the Army would be reduced over five years to 490,000 troops, down from a peak of 570,000, and that the Marines would be cut to 182,000, down from 202,000. (Ground forces would still be slightly larger than they were before 9/11.) The Pentagon initially will buy fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighter stealth jets, which are not expected to be in service until at least 2017 and have the distinction of being one of the costliest weapons programs in history. In the Navy, 14 warships will be either retired early or built more slowly.

On the negative side, the cuts come at the expense of troop pay and retiree health benefits:

The Pentagon took the first major step toward shrinking its budget after a decade of war as it announced Thursday that it wanted to limit pay raises for troops, increase health insurance fees for military retirees and close bases in the United States.

Although the pay-raise limits were described as modest, and would not start until 2015, they are certain to ignite a political fight in Congress, which since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has almost always raised military salaries beyond what the Pentagon has recommended.

Increasing health insurance fees for retirees and closing bases are also fraught with political risk, particularly when Republican presidential candidates are charging that President Obama is debilitating the military.

That matters in areas with military bases, which provide a major stimulus boost to local economies. The Ventura County Star is already freaking out about potential local base closures here, and legislators as far apart as hardcore conservative Elton Gallegly and good progressive Lois Capps are united in attempting to prevent the base closures. Local Republican Buck McKeon, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, is on the drumbeat nationally. Politically, the proposed cuts make the job of electing Democrats in these difficult areas even harder, particularly in an environment where the eventual Republican nominee will be demagoguing the issue as much as he can. That is why Democrats like Carl Levin are opposing the closures of any domestic bases, preferring instead to focus on the no-brainer goal of bringing troops home from bases where hostile activity is less credibly expected:

There were already objections on Thursday morning, hours before Mr. Panetta made his public presentation. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that until the United States shut down some of its bases in Europe, “I’m not going to be able to support” closing bases in America.

Mr. Panetta has said that two armored Army brigades — as many as 10,000 troops — would come home from Europe over the next decade, leaving two brigades and some support troops behind.

All of which goes to underscore how important peacetime government stimulus is. The military-industrial complex is a huge source of government jobs. If progressives want to successfully make a dent in it, there will need to be credible "swords to ploughshares" programs to make up for the jobs that are lost.

Overall, however, the cuts are a positive development in shrinking the bloated defense budget, as well as moving away structurally from military operations designed to conduct long-term occupations in foreign lands, in a way that will tie the hands of Administrations to follow. That's something to cheer about.


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thereisnospoon 1/27/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Thursday, January 26, 2012

 
Scary post of the day

by digby

Who said this?

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career.We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

That's George Soros. Eeek.

Gaius Publius has even more:

Three short notes, then I'll leave you to your thoughts:

■ We've been warning on these pages about the risk of deflation for a while. It's likely that no one reading this has experienced such a world. To get a sense of life in a deflationary world, try this.

■ About the euro, is this why it bounced off of $1.26 and sits at $1.31 at the moment? (Euro chart here.)

■ About civil liberties and the mental "state of the nation," I offer this thought experiment.

Imagine that there were a second big terrorist attack sometime during Bush II's reign, in 2005 or 2006 for example. The response would have been to shut down the country even further. The experiment — how much further? If the "authorities" wanted to institute exit visas, for example, would the country have objected?

The point is this — the degree of loss of liberty we could experience is not a function of what the American people will tolerate. The American people tolerated Bush v Gore. It's a function of how much loss of liberty the "authorities" (Our Betters) are interested in imposing.

So what is that extent? What's the lower limit to the shutdown, in a world gone into the streets — Occupyers, homeless; browns and blacks; criminals, druggies, the terminally unemployed — in other words, all the Unpeople we have within us?

I'll leave you to read the rest of his post and ponder that question. I'll be hitting the tequila now. Enjoy.


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digby 1/26/2012 06:30:00 PM |

 
Hey Newtie -- someone would like to have a word with you

by digby

When I was young, Bob Dole was known as the Prince of Darkness. Indeed, he was as mean as they came. By today's GOP standards, he's kindly old Kris Kringle.
Still, he's always had a very wicked sense of humor and he showed it today:

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway...

Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall. He loved picking a fight with President Clinton because he knew this would get the attention of the press. This and a myriad of other specifics like shutting down the government helped to topple Gingrich in 1998.

In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year. Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it, and I’m not certain he knew either.

That made me laugh out loud.


*The bucket was an obscure symbol of outmoded congressional perks,referring to some patronage job to deliver ice well into the 90s. It was a typical cutsie Newtie gimmick and by the time Dole was running for President in 1996 it was already obscure and weird. Just like Newtie.

But then Newtie had been asking for some time if he "had to get into this thing" and nobody was saying yes. So I'd imagine he was more than a little miffed at old Bob for being chosen.


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digby 1/26/2012 05:29:00 PM |

 
Newtie's riposte

by digby

I wrote about Romney's attack ad against Newt this morning. Here's one from Newt.

I have to give this one to Newt. But then nobody knows more about being vicious than he does.

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digby 1/26/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Green Jobs and Tax Increases on the Rich are Popular

by David Atkins
David Roberts has a good post on Grist today with a reminder of the obvious: green jobs and tax increases on the remain popular planks. Her analysis uses data from a Democracy Corps dial test focus group to reinforce what should already be self-evident:

Overall, there was a striking degree of unanimity, quite in contrast to the polarization in Washington. Reactions to the speech split along party lines on only a few issues. The most interesting split came during the section of the speech on energy:

This section received the highest sustained ratings of the speech from Democrats and independents, but it was also one of the few polarizing sections as Republicans reacted negatively to the President’s call for more support of clean energy (independents, like Democrats, responded very favorably). Overall, Obama gained 22 points on the issue, one of his biggest gains on the evening, as these voters endorsed his appeal to end subsidies for oil companies and instead focus those resources on expanding clean energy in America.

It seems the Republican attempt to drag clean energy into the culture war has reached only the conservative base. Independents outside the Fox-Limbaugh loop still favor it.

In other words, this is a powerful wedge issue that favors Democrats.

With the Wall Street Journal editorial page beating its chest, Politico making sweet, sweet love to the Solyndra non-scandal, and the Chamber of Commerce dumping money into attack ads, Democrats have gotten unduly spooked. They’ve started believing John Boehner’s trash talk, that energy is a wedge to divide unions from greens.

It’s an empty threat. The fact is, overwhelming majorities of Americans — across party, age, and regional lines — support clean, modern energy. A poll conducted by ORC International in November found that 77 percent of Americans, including 65 percent of Republicans, believe that “the U.S. needs to be a clean energy technology leader and it should invest in the research and domestic manufacturing of wind, solar, and energy efficiency technologies.” Last February, a Gallup poll offered a list of actions Congress might take. The most popular option, with an incredible 83 percent support, was “an energy bill that provides incentives for using solar and other alternative energy resources.”

And the data is clear on taxing the wealthy as well:

On to the second significant finding: Americans want to tax the rich.

These swing voters, even the Republicans, responded enthusiastically to [Obama's] call for a “Buffett Rule” that would require the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. As one participant put it, “I agree with his tax reform — the 1 percent should shoulder more of the burden than the other 99 percent. He [Obama] talked about being all for one, one for all — that really resonated for me.” These dial focus groups make it very clear that defending further tax cuts for those at the top of the economic spectrum puts Republicans in Congress and on the Presidential campaign trail well outside of the American mainstream.

(See also this Sept. 2011 Gallup poll or this Oct. 2011 Bloomberg poll or this Oct. 2011 CBS News poll or many others).

What this shows is that the Occupy movement has won. Americans across party lines increasingly see things in terms of the 1 percent and the 99 percent. A Pew survey earlier this month found that “conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society.” Two-thirds of Americans now see “strong conflicts” between the rich and poor. Even Mitt Romney is using Occupy’s language.

These issues — clean energy and taxing the rich — are not unconnected. Properly done, clean energy is a populist issue. Big Oil perfectly symbolizes the 1 percent, and Americans are ready to redirect public resources away from oil and toward a wide network of home-grown cleantech innovators.

There won't be any excuse for blue doggy Dems and their Washington consultants to run away from these issues. The time for using the cop-out of stupidity or cowardice is well nigh at an end. The data is so strikingly clear at this point, that any Democrat who fails to highlight these issues has to be declared either corrupt or so incompetent that they don't deserve to hold office.


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thereisnospoon 1/26/2012 03:00:00 PM |