Hullabaloo

Tasering: "just made of awesome"

2012-02-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

Tasering: "just made of awesome"

by digby

Via Jesse LaGreca, I see that the fine, upstanding mainstream CNN political pundit who once claimed that a Supreme Court justice was a "goat-fucking child molester" has once again shown his gravitas:

Erickson: "Here is a story to make you laugh for the day, an Occupy DC protester, believe it or not these people are still occupying places. McPherson square near the White House, an Occupy DC protester was shocked by stun gun yesterday afternoon at McPherson Square . . .

They arrested him. They took him to the hospital because of a medical condition. He was charged with disturbing the peace. Now I would play the video for you because it was caught on film, it's hilarious, I mean you should just watch this video, if you go to wtpo.com you can watch it, I won't play it on the radio because the number of F-bombs the guy just starts yelling as they're tazing him . . hahahah . . ahh, but watching that hippy protester get tazed just made my day, wtpo.com, you can watch it for yourself, it is just made of awesome."

He's screaming in excruciating pain! That is so awesome! Hahahahahaha!

The video of the incident is here along with the story of what happened. Apparently, the protester was tearing down some flyers posted around the encampment and walked away from police when they stopped to question him. And in America you submit immediately to authorities and don't ask any questions. This is what makes us free.

Good thing his medical condition wasn't one of those undiagnosed heart conditions because he could be dead. (Hahahahaha! Wouldn't that be funny.)

As for that sadist Eric Erickson, I can't wait to see him on my TV "analyzing" our politics again. I'd really like to get his opinion on the torture issue. Oh wait --- he's for it, obviously. And he vastly enjoys seeing it applied to his political opponents.

If any pets go missing in his neighborhood, the neighbors know where to look first.

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Brutality in Syria by @DavidOAtkins

2012-02-01T15:01:00.000-08:00

Brutality in Syria

by David Atkins

This is horrifying:

Ammar Cheikh Omar recalled the first time he was ordered to shoot into a crowd of protesters in Syria. He aimed his AK-47 just above their heads, prayed to God not to make him a killer and pulled the trigger.

Mr. Omar, 29, the soft-spoken and wiry son of Syrian parents who emigrated to Germany in the 1950s, grew up in Rheda-Wiedenbrück, a prosperous village of half-timbered 16th-century houses, where he listened to Mariah Carey and daydreamed about one day returning to Syria.

Today, he is still trying to make sense of his unlikely transformation from a dutiful German student to a killer for the brutal Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and, ultimately, a defector. “I was proud to be Syrian, but instead became a soldier for a regime that was intent on killing its own people,” Mr. Omar said on a recent day, chain-smoking at a cafe in this Turkish border town. “I thank God every day that I am still alive.”

Human rights groups and Syrian activists said he was one of thousands of Syrians who had inadvertently found themselves deployed as foot soldiers for a government that the United Nations estimates has killed more than 5,000 people since the crackdown on demonstrators began in March.

What to do about situations like this is going to need to be an ongoing discussion, not just in America but around the world. The tradition of pacifism and anti-imperialism on the Left would indicate that Syrian problems are Syrian, and that nothing should be done beyond sending sternly worded letters and maybe a few targeted sanctions. The tradition of intervention on behalf of the weak and defenseless on the Left would indicate that the world has a moral obligation something to step in.

But what would stepping in look like? Would it do more harm than good? What would be the blowback? It's hard to say here that Assad is a dictator backed by the West, as has so often been the case elsewhere. In this case, it's the Russians who have strategic resource interests in Syria and have been trying to keep Assad in power. But obviously, having America act as the world's policeman hasn't worked out so well for the last 50 years or so.

These are not easy questions; no one should pretend that they are, or that anyone has all the answers. But it's hard to obsess over minor issues in the tax code or reproductive access domestically, while shrugging in helpless resignation over what's happening in Syria right now.

The world has increasingly global problems, and we should be seeking global solutions so that one day the Assads of the world can never be in a position to do this again.

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Tristero: The Deen of "Diabetes-Friendly" Diets

2012-02-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

The Deen of "Diabetes-Friendly" Diets

By tristero

In responding to a previous post on Paula Deen, a commenter took me to task for assuming bad faith on Deen's part, that maybe all she wanted to do was, you know, share these really great indulgent recipes with people like herself. I was - almost - prepared to consider the point a legitimate one (even if I disagreed), until Digby, via email, sent me a link to this alternet article. I have to confess that I didn't quite understand it at first- not because it is difficult to read but because the behavior, on the part of Deen, on the part of the pharmaceutical company, is so breathtakingly cynical, so horrible, and so greedy it simply defies belief.

If this article is right - and Marion Nestle, to be sure, is a very reputable nutritionist - Type 2 diabetes can be reversed by diet. But drug companies wont make money "managing" diabetes if people simply eat with anything remotely resembling sanity and thereby reverse the course of the disease. Therefore, a drug company approached Deen - get this - before they knew she had diabetes because they believed her disgusting and unhealthy food was "diabetes-friendly" and therefore good for their business.

Like so many other truly despicable players in the American public discourse, Deen comes across as a likeable, charming person. If this article is true, her charm is as fake and as cynical as her pose as just one more middle-class Southern housewife.

In reality, she's just one more rapacious, utterly repellent multi-millionaire without a clue about what it means to be part of the 99% who can't afford the kind of medical care and other luxuries she takes for granted.

Because you're worth it ...

2012-02-01T12:30:00.000-08:00

Because you're worth it ...

by digby

Class system? What class system?

Frequent travelers who use San Francisco International Airport once again will be able to get through security a little faster with the return of a fee-based pre-screening program approved by the Airport Commission on Tuesday.

The CLEAR program, operated by a private company, Alclear LLC, will allow people to move to - or near - the front of the line to get their carry-on items screened. It will allow them to bypass the regular first tier of security where travelers must provide a driver's license or passport to a Transportation Security Administration employee and instead use an automated kiosk.

"It provides predictability in getting to the front of the line and getting through clearance faster," said SFO director John Martin.

Participants must pay a $179 annual fee for the special treatment. Spouses or domestic partners can be added on for an extra $50, and their children 17 years old and younger can join for free.

For a hefty fee we'll make sure you don't have to mingle with the polloi and you can jump to the head of the line for your baggage screening. Job creators like you shouldn't have to wait for such inconveniences.

h/t to reader sleon -- for the article and the post title.

QOTD -- Atrios

2012-02-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

QOTD: Atrios

by digby

Suddenly everyone's jumping on the idea that maybe jobs and economic growth are a wee bit important. But, you know, all the Very Serious People were wrong for the right reasons while the hippies were right for the wrong reasons, so the VSPs were really right and the hippies were really wrong.

It's amazing how that always works.

It really is. It never pays to be right too early. They'll never forgive you for it.

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Robot Compassion: yep. Mitt.

2012-02-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

Robot Compassion

by digby

There's a lot of talk this morning about this Romney statement:

“I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

He really has a tin ear. As Yglesias points out:

[H]e wants to cut the safety net, cut the health care part of the safety net, muck around with the federal workforce, and then cut the non-health care part of the safety net. To further clarify, he states that he "will immediately move to cut spending and cap it at 20 percent of GDP" while increasing defense spending. Which is to say he wants to cut social safety net spending. What's more "as spending comes under control, he will pursue further cuts that would allow caps to be set even lower so as to guarantee future fiscal stability," thus cutting social safety net spending even further.

There's nothing remarkable about this, really, since I don't think most Americans assume that cutting spending on poor people is what Republicans are all about. But it's extremely strange for Romney to be running on agenda of sharp cuts to the social safety net while citing the safety net's existence as a key reason to be indifferent to the plight of the poor. It's quite true that we have a safety net for poor people right now, but we won't have one for long if Romney's budget ideas are implemented.

And whether he knows it or not, and clearly he doesn't, the vast majority of the struggling middle class he purports to care so much about also depend on the government at some point in their lives and nearly all of them depend on it in retirement. Even middle class people who have a nest egg count on Social Security as a large part of their retirement and they all will use Medicare. And he wants to cut all that too!

So Mitt's idea of compassionate conservatism is to cut everything in sight but make some nice noises about how much he cares. And he's just not a good enough actor to pull off the "caring" part.

Update: I was just watching Mitt on TV and had a breakthrough.Why is it that people just don't like him? It's the obvious: he's a rich, arrogant asshole. Americans don't hate rich people in general, but nobody likes one who seems to be stifling laughter as he's turning you down for mortgage.

Like this guy:

2012-02-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Yep, It Really Is Bad Food

By tristero

When Paula Deen admitted that she had diabetes (and that she and her family would exploit her terrible illness for huge profits), defenders of the faux-bourgeois worried that those of us who know eating passionately also means eating sanely would be practicing class warfare if we dared to criticized her:

Virginia Willis, a food writer in Atlanta, said that criticisms directed at Ms. Deen often reflect sexism and stereotyping about the South, in addition to food snobbery. “No one vilifies Michelin chefs for putting sticks of butter in their food,” she said. “But when a Southern woman does it, that’s tacky.” Contrary to popular belief, however, she said Ms. Deen’s fat-laden cooking does not represent the apotheosis of Southern cuisine.

“Paula’s food often reflects modern cooking and convenience foods more than Southern tradition,” she said. “She feels like she cooks for ‘real people,’ and for better or worse, that is how many people in this country choose to eat.”

Michael Mignano, a Long Island pastry chef who will appear on “Fat Chef,” said butterfat is a constant companion for chefs in high-end restaurants, where he has spent most of his career. “The only difference is that Paula Deen does it on TV,” he said

No, that's not the only difference. It is a matter of taste if you find disgusting Paula Deen's food disgusting. But that her food is disgustingly bad for you is simply a matter of fact.

Is there other food out there that's as godawful bad as Paula Deen's? Whether that is the case - obviously, no one would argue - that in no way makes Deen's food good food. Eating Deen's way every day - which a huge pile of Americans do (when they don't eat even worse food) - simply is not one of many equally valid lifestyle choices. Nor is strongly objecting to the quality of Deen's food and its daily consumption class warfare, sexist, or Southern stereoptyping. It's just common sense.

The comparison with "Michelin chefs" is misguided. At least for those of us who make less than Paula Deen's annual income, it's not routine to spend north of $150 per person for a dinner. In fact, it's a very rare indulgence. That is the point. It's a treat.

And of course, there is nothing wrong - nothing wrong whatsoever - in indulging yourself in whatever rocks your boat - whether it's Deen's fried chicken or Thomas Keller's leek bread budding. The problem (of course) is that unhealthy, Deen-style food is in fact the norm for an enormous number of people in this country. It's what people eat every day, and often more than three times a day.

Put simply, eating that way will kill you.

Can you die eating too much leek bread pudding? Oh, please: too much Deen food - that's the problem, not too much Keller.

And that brings us to the faux-bourgeois, a mask worn by many elites whose income depends on appearing to be "one of us." Paula Deen may have started out lower middle class, even poor, but that was a loooooooooooong time ago. She may not have as much of the green stuff as the Koch brothers, but she's way more a part of that 1% than you are - and she's been a 1 percenter for quite a while. She does not celebrate middle-class values, she merely makes money exploiting whatever she believes will make her the most money - regardless of whether they are middle class values - or even good ones.

That is not culture, bourgeois or otherwise. That is not even populism. That is simply greed and opportunism on a scale that "eltitist" chefs - no slouches when it comes to ambition and fame - can't even imagine. Oh, she may like ground chuck, she may shill for pork chops, but that bank account of hers is filet mignon - and we are fools if we let her make us forget it.

Bain Man: Do as I say, not as I do

2012-02-01T07:30:00.000-08:00

Bain Man: do as I say, not as I do

by David Atkins

The winner of the Florida primary, ladies and gentlemen:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

It's amazing that Mitt Romney is the best the GOP can do this cycle. Jon Stewart and his team are brilliant, but these skits almost write themselves.

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Florida surge

2012-01-31T18:00:00.000-08:00

Florida surge

by digby

I was going to write about the results in Florida tonight but, why bother? It's a money race and the guy with the most money is winning. Shocker.

But in case you wonder what the campaigns want you to think, TPM has a nice rundown of how the various camps are spinning it. Mittster's takes the cake:

Mitt Romney wants you to dwell on a comeback kid narrative. His camp’s version goes something like this: here’s a guy who was knocked off his game by the genie let out of the bottle by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling. Just as he was consolidating his victory in New Hampshire and his (rescinded) triumph in Iowa, suddenly a billionaire casino mogul showed up and flung millions of dollars at his bomb-throwing opponent.
And yet, the narrative goes, like a mythical hero he emerged from the flames hardened, sharpened, and willing to fight back. He raised his game in the debates and pushed back his surging rival, ultimately romping to victory by a serious margin.

Fighting, hardened, pushing and surging. We get it.

He has proved that he will spend whatever it takes to destroy his opponents and that's got to be appealing to a fair number of Republicans. But they still don't like him much. According to the exit polls, 39% are not satisfied with GOP candidates and 57% want someone else to jump in.

Once we let them destroy Planned Parenthood, they'll give up

2012-01-31T16:30:00.000-08:00

Once we let them destroy Planned Parenthood, they'll give up

by digby

Divide et impera:

The nation's leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is halting its partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates — creating a bitter rift, linked to the abortion debate, between two iconic organizations that have assisted millions of women.

The change will mean a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.

Planned Parenthood says the move results from Komen bowing to pressure from anti-abortion activists. Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress — a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups.

And what do you know? This is likely the result of the increasingly sinister "common ground" strategy, in this situation being deployed in the private sector. Via Jezebel:

Interestingly, this brand new rule that suddenly appeared in the books of the Komen Foundation just so happened to coincide with a Congressional investigation launched by a Republican legislator, who himself was pressured by the pro-life group Americans United for Life. And last year's assault on Planned Parenthood also coincided with the addition of a vocally anti-abortion ex-politician to the ranks of Susan G Komen For the Cure.

Karen Handel, who was endorsed by Sarah Palin during her unsuccessful bid for governor of Georgia in 2010, has been the Foundation's Senior Vice President for Public Policy since April 2011. During her gubernatorial candidacy, she ran on an anti-choice platform, vowing that if elected, she'd defund Planned Parenthood. Handel wrote on her campaign blog,

I will be a pro-life governor who will work tirelessly to promote a culture of life in Georgia…. I believe that each and every unborn child has inherent dignity, that every abortion is a tragedy, and that government has a role, along with the faith community, in encouraging women to choose life in even the most difficult of circumstances…. since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.

She even promised to eliminate funding for breast and cervical cancer screenings provided by the organization.

How curious! A person with what looks like a personal vendetta against Planned Parenthood joins the ranks of an organization that provides funding to Planned Parenthood, and soon, that organization "defunds" Planned Parenthood.

Still, there's nothing to worry about ladies, no reason for all this hysteria over your icky parts. These people will never make any headway with this stuff in America, land of the free. Relax.

BTW: I noticed these lovely illustrations to a new folio of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. They really capture the feeling of the novel:

"We turn the corner onto a main street, where there's more traffic. Cars go by, black most of them, some grey and brown. There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy, that mark the women of the poorer men. Econowives, they're called."

The big money by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-31T15:00:00.000-08:00

The big money

by David Atkins

Josh Marshall makes a good point:

The Gov. Walker recall campaign is going to cost at least $100 million. A few cycles ago that was what a presidential run cost.

In the long run, there's no way progressives can win with that kind of money being thrown around. The public just doesn't have the time, attention and energy to mobilize on large scales like that every election cycle, even as corporations make it a regular feature of their expense accounts. As it is, one of the biggest problems with government is the fact that in order to stay in office, politicians have to spend at least four hours a day fundraising. That's insane. They can't do their jobs that way, and it's no wonder the system is perpetually corrupted. Politicians are human like the rest of us. If they know that making a decision that earns the wrath of big pockets means not only taking fire and heat personally, but ensuring that they have to spend hundreds of hours on the phones and rubber chicken dinner circuits just to make up the difference, it's no surprise that many of them would rather spend that time with their families instead, and cave on important bills.

We can win victories in the short-term on the most crucial and egregious fronts. But unless something is done to nip this in the bud, it's going to be a losing battle long-term.

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Self-help for frustrated rich people

2012-01-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

Self-help for frustrated rich people

by digby

So Charles Murray has a new book out called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. And, lo and behold it appears to say that the reason for all our troubles is the bad character of poor people. What a shocker.

Greg Anrig takes a look at some of the excerpts in the Wall Street Journal and concludes that Murray is fudging the numbers. Again. And he's blaming the usual suspects for bringing us all down. Anrig writes:

Murray goes on, as always, to blame the Great Society reforms:

The creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the enactment of civil rights legislation, and programs like Food Stamps and job training set in motion a vicious cycle that led lower-income whites to stop going to church, watch more TV, and feel more alienated from the rest of the society. Even though we now incarcerate a far higher share of our citizens than any advanced country and violent crime rates have plummeted, it was laxity toward crime back in the 1960s that explains why the gap in out-of-wedlock births became much higher over that time period. The logic for those explanations may be difficult to track, and maybe Murray takes a stab at providing some evidence in support of those claims in the book itself. But if past is prologue, that evidence is likely to be highly dubious.

The solution, Murray argues, is for the upper-class to start wagging its fingers at everyone else:

The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

That should work like a charm. And it's good to know that Murray has finally figured out a way to escape his racist past --- he's blaming poor whites for being too weak-willed to resist the lures of the welfare state that was designed for blacks. Perhaps that's a form of progress.

Murray has created a quiz for everyone to take to determine if they are a member of the white working class. It would seem that he believes most upper middle class Americans spend their time at the opera or watching re-runs of Alistair Cooke's America while nibbling on bran muffins with fois gras. (Not that there's anything wrong with that --- well, maybe the fois gras.)

Anyway, you can take the test yourself --- or for even more fun, you can take the test with Jay Ackroyd and Marcy Wheeler tonight on Virtually Speaking. According to my quite high score, I am among the great unwashed lower classes, or at least have traveled extensively among them. Who knew? (Except me, of course.)

Anrig notes that David Brooks is all aquiver with excitement about this book, which stands to reason. It is a reprise of Brooks' anthropological study of American culture as seen through chain restaurants and grocery store buying habits. But like Brooks' before him, Murray's latest gives away the game. The test is clearly geared toward the over-educated, upper middle class white person who would buy such a book in the first place. And its thesis about the lower orders lack of good character and bad habits is clearly designed to make those readers feel good about themselves by contrast. Basically it's Dr Phil for closet racists and wealthy pricks. I'm sure it will sell well.

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Religious Reactionaries stick together

2012-01-31T12:00:00.000-08:00

Religious Reactionaries stick together

by digby

Perlstein's column today is a fascinating recent history of religion in American politics. It's specifically about how the right will have little problem accepting Mitt's Mormonism because they always come around on this when the chips are down. Read the whole thing. I think it's persuasive.

I just want to highlight one bit of information which I don't think is common knowledge:

You may have heard of the group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Nowadays Evangelicals despise it as a heathen outfit bent on banishing God from the public square. (Here they celebrate the civil liberties victory represented by the display of a Flying Spaghetti Monster next to the Nativity scene at the courthouse in Loudoun County, Virginia.) A generation ago, however, Evangelicals were fans – back when the group was known as "Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State," and was the institutional home for those who feared the Roman church was a wicked conspiracy to colonize the United States.

Think about that. In the 1960s "Americans United for the Separation of Church and State" was called "Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State". I'm pretty sure that clearly illustrates how times have changed.

All this started changing in the 1970s. Fighting abortion had once been an almost exclusively Catholic crusade; indeed much of the work Americans United for the Separation of Church and State was devoted to fighting those attempting to ban abortion, on the grounds that such attempts sought to introduce into government "a biased religious viewpoint." Which was around the time Evangelicals began separating themselves from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. They, Evangelicals, wanted to ban abortion too – and were now willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with Catholics to do it. Christianity Today, the magazine founded by Billy Graham, advised its readers in 1975 not to fear joining the "pro-life" cause; it had "matured," and could "no longer be dismissed as a group of cold-hearted Catholics simply taking orders from the Pope."

Rick doesn't go into this in his piece, but it's worth pointing out here. From The Nation on the occasion of Jerry Falwells death:

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

These cross-currents are always there. And religious reactionaries seem to be able to find a way to work together when it comes to suppressing any pressure for freedom and equality from below. They just need to find that sweet spot.

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Deterrence: undervaluing death

2012-01-31T10:30:00.000-08:00

Deterrence

by digby

Let's put death row on an assembly line:

Republican Rep. Larry Pittman, who was appointed to the District 82 House seat in October, expressed his views in an email sent Wednesday to every member of the General Assembly. [...]

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

I'm for drawing and quartering myself. It really sends a message.

But I don't think there's ever going to be a proper deterrent to abortion until women are publicly executed. You're never going to stop these people from getting themselves pregnant and some of them aren't going to do their duty no matter what. The only way to properly deter them is to kill them.

The good news is this fellow is just one of many kindly folks who are tragically misunderstood. We just need to convince them of the error of their ways so they'll understand that we are all in this together. I'm sure they'll see it sometime soon.

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Citizen training: using tasers to "educate the public" in compliance

2012-01-31T09:00:00.000-08:00

Citizen Training

by digby

Be advised that walking your dog off leash could get you electrocuted by the authorities.

A Montara man walking two lapdogs off leash was hit with an electric-shock gun by a National Park Service ranger after allegedly giving a false name and trying to walk away, authorities said Monday.
The park ranger encountered Gary Hesterberg with his two small dogs Sunday afternoon at Rancho Corral de Tierra, which was recently incorporated into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, said Howard Levitt, a spokesman for the park service.
Hesterberg, who said he didn't have identification with him, allegedly gave the ranger a false name, Levitt said.

The ranger, who wasn't identified, asked Hesterberg to remain at the scene, Levitt said. He tried several times to leave, and finally the ranger "pursued him a little bit and she did deploy her" electric-shock weapon, Levitt said. "That did stop him."

San Mateo County sheriff's deputies and paramedics then arrived and Hesterberg gave his real name, the park spokesman said.

Hesterberg, whose age was not available, was arrested on suspicion of failing to obey a lawful order, having dogs off-leash and knowingly providing false information, Levitt said.

Witnesses said the use of a stun gun and the arrest seemed excessive for someone walking two small dogs off leash.

"It was really scary," said Michelle Babcock, who said she had seen the incident as she and her husband were walking their two border collies. "I just felt so bad for him."

Babcock said Hesterberg had repeatedly asked the ranger why he was being detained. She didn't answer him, Babcock said.

To be clear: what this means is that if a park ranger stops you for walking your dogs off leash, you are not to ask any questions or fail to carry the proper ID or you risk being shot through with 50,000 volts. This is now the way things work. Apparently, before the taser, this park ranger would have had to shoot this person in the back with her service revolver.

Tasers have turned cops into thugs who use the weapon to demand not just compliance but respect. Someone who is walking his dogs off leash is simply not doing something that would draw this kind of response for any other reason.

Get this:

Rancho Corral de Tierra has long been an off-leash walking spot for local dog owners. In December, the area became part of the national park system, which requires that all dogs be on a leash, Levitt said.

The ranger was trying to educate residents of the rule, Levitt said

Zapping citizens with a taser is certainly one way to train them. In a science fiction dystopia.

Sadly, that's exactly what tasers are doing: they are training citizens to immediately comply with government authorities on command.

Well, at least we know we're free.

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Four gutless Dems kill single-payer in California

2012-01-31T07:30:00.000-08:00

Four gutless Dems kill single-payer in California

by David Atkins

If the drama of the first two years of the Obama presidency is any indication, it's obvious that single-payer healthcare won't be coming at a national level any time soon. Fortunately, however, individual states can carry the torch where the national system is too corrupt to do so. While single-payer has passed in Vermont, the real reforms will come when big states with negotiating leverage enact it and begin to drive costs down in a big way while expanding and ameliorating coverage. California seemed like the likeliest big state to begin this process: after all, Governor Schwarzenegger twice vetoed a single-payer bill that had made its way through the legislature. So with Jerry Brown in office, it seemed reasonable to expect that the same bill would make it to the Governor's desk for a signature.

But not so fast:

California's "Medicare for all" universal health care legislation fell short of the 21 votes needed to pass the state Senate today.

Senate Bill 810 failed on a 19-15 vote during this morning's floor session, with four moderate Democrats abstaining and one voting no.

Democratic Sen. Mark Leno, who authored the bill, said the proposal would stabilize health care costs and expand access to coverage.

He called the bill, which does not include funding to cover the projected $250 billion annual cost of running the single-payer system, the first step in a "many year project" that will likely require asking voters to approve financing. He encouraged members to support the bill to allow the policy discussion to continue.

No Republicans voted for the bill. Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Moorpark, criticized the proposal as an attempt to create "another costly and inefficient bureaucracy."

"There's no doubt that we need health care reform, there's no doubt that we need to improve our health care system, but members, this is not the bill to move forward," he said.

The bill faces a Tuesday deadline for passing the state Senate in the current legislative session.

That's my Republican State Senator Tony Strickland, who narrowly beat my good friend progressive Hannah-Beth Jackson by under 900 votes in the last election, and who is now running for Congress after redistricting made his Senate seat too Democratic to handle (Hannah-Beth will likely pick up the seat this year over primary opposition from anti-tax conservadem Jason Hodge.) Redistricting elsewhere in California should give us a couple more Senate seats as well going into 2013.

But the problem here isn't so much Tony Strickland. The problem is the gutless Democrats in blue districts who have nothing to lose by voting against single-payer healthcare when there's actually a chance of passing it, except for the wrath of insurance companies if they go for higher office. But rather than voting for or against the bill, they simple abstained, in the most gutless move possible. jpmassar at DailyKos has a rundown of who they are and their contact information:

Senator Alex Padilla (Pacoima/LA area)
Email: Senator.Padilla@sen.ca.gov
Phone: (916) 651-4020
Fax: 916324-6645

Senator Juan Vargas (San Diego area)
Email: Juan.Vargas@sen.ca.gov
Phone: (916) 651-4040
Fax: (916) 327-3522

Senator Michael Rubio (Fresno/Bakersfield area)
Email: Michael.Rubio@sen.ca.gov
Phone: (916) 651-4016

Senator Rod Wright (Los Angeles area)
Email: Senator.Wright@sen.ca.gov
Phone: (916) 651-4025
Fax: (916) 445-3712

Some of them have tougher districts than others; Padilla, for instance, is utterly inexcusable as he's in a solid blue district. But it doesn't matter. Regardless of how tough the district, and even if one grants the unlikely theory that taking a "yea" vote on single-payer would be career suicide, this issue above all is a bill to fall on one's sword for. The opportunity to really and truly pass single-payer healthcare is why one gets into Democratic politics. It's the equivalent of taking the game-winning shot at the buzzer in Game 7 of the finals, or kicking the winning field goal in the Super Bowl. And these sniveling cowards didn't just miss the shot; they didn't even pull the trigger.

Then, of course, there are the two truly awful Conservadems in the CA Senate, Ron Calderon and Lou Correa, who voted "no". Their contact information is below--though getting through to them is like talking to a brick wall:

Senator Ron Calderon
Phone: (916) 651-4030
senator.calderon@sen.ca.gov

Senator Lou Correa
Phone: (916) 651-4034
senator.correa@sen.ca.gov

Yes, there's much to fault the Obama Administration for over the last few years. But the President didn't have the opportunity to cast a deciding vote on passing single-payer healthcare for tens of millions of people. These guys did, and they blew it on the big stage.

Call them. Email them. Make them feel the heat of ten thousand suns. They deserve no less. They can still change their minds before the Tuesday deadline, but they're running out of time.

And rest assured that as long as I'm involved in California politics, this California Democratic Executive Board member will work to oppose each and every one of them in a primary for any office they might seek in the future if this bill doesn't go to the Governor's desk this year.

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Post partisan depression and trench warfare

2012-01-30T18:14:00.000-08:00

Post partisan depression

by digby

Last week the political world was all agog over Ryan Lizza's New Yorker article about the administration in which he revealed that after three long years of GOP obstruction the president resigned himself to the fact that post-partisanship wasn't going to work out. It may have shifted something fundamental --- for the first time people in the Village are questioning whether their beloved bipartisanship is the only way the government can function.

Lizza reminds people that Obama had always held a starry-eyed view of the various divides in the American political culture (a concern that was so aggressively attacked by his supporters in the 2008 race that those of us who raised it were left with permanent scars from the experience.) Indeed, in this respect, Lizza's analysis seems stale to me --- it's just that it apparently took four years for it to be allowed to be aired publicly. Still, it's an important piece of political journalism that may turn out to be politically significant:

If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”

Wasn't it pretty to think so? But it was always daft. This yearning to get past these "quarrels" was to make the fatuous assumption that they were the petty, transient disputes of spoiled children rather than the manifestations of America's deepest and most abiding divisions. Those "quarrels" were around war, race, imperialism, equality, freedom --- all issues that have animated our politics from the very beginning of the Republic. The country was founded on them. The fighting over these issues waxes and wanes but the fight itself is definitional. While the symbolism of the first black president was always very powerful, mistaking that symbolism for an end to all these tedious disagreements was a first degree error.

As Lizza writes:

It would be hard for any President to reverse this decades-long political trend, which began when segregationist Democrats in the South—Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond—left the Party and became Republicans. Congress is polarized largely because Americans live in communities of like-minded people who elect more ideological representatives. Obama’s rhetoric about a nation of common purpose and values no longer fits this country: there really is a red America and a blue America...

I readily forgive the youthful supporters who always believe their parents' battles are no longer worth fighting. Why should they? They don't know yet that they are always with us in some form or another and that it's as necessary to vigilantly hold the line as it is to make progress. (Two steps forward, one step back --- sometimes worse than that.)

But what's Andrew Sullivan's excuse? He's been involved in American politics for decades. Surely he saw that the modern conservative movement has become a retrograde, obscurantist, political faction that has every intention of acting out its dystopian agenda without any thought to its opposition. Indeed, politically mowing down their opposition is what animates them. They impeached a president over a sexual indiscretion. They stole an election. They bullied their way into an war on blatantly false pretenses and dared the world to defy them. What delusion would propel an allegedly sophisticated political observer to think that these people would be so dazzled by the election of a black Democratic president that it would all magically end and we would march together into a harmonious future?

And more importantly, why did Barack Obama and his team think this? And they did. As Lizza writes:

In 2006, Obama published a mild polemic, “The Audacity of Hope,” which became a blueprint for his 2008 Presidential campaign. He described politics as a system seized by two extremes. “Depending on your tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism or perverse liberalism,” he wrote. “Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial lawyers, religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the New York Times.” He repeated the theme later, while describing the fights between Bill Clinton and the Newt Gingrich-led House, in the nineteen-nineties: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played out on the national stage.” Washington, as he saw it, was self-defeatingly partisan. He believed that “any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we’re in” ...

Obama wrote longingly about American politics in the mid-twentieth century, when both parties had liberal and conservative wings that allowed centrist coalitions to form.

Cheap Villager nostalgia, nothing more. Unless you define the "center" as splitting the difference between the far right fringe and the most corrupt Democrats, those days have been long gone for many years:

The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.

The idea that the permanent political establishment in DC would step in to put this crazy genie back in the bottle was absurd. They have stood by as the political system catapulted off a cliff without blinking an eye. Indeed, the centrist establishment used that partisan polarization to advance a corporate friendly austerity agenda. It was good for business. And that's what they care about.

The great rapprochement --- like the Grand Bargain --- was a pipe dream, and it was one that many, many Democratic voters enthusiastically bought into. I suppose after years of bullying from the hardcore rightwing partisans you can't really blame them. Needless to say it was never even remotely possible --- certainly not at this point in the development of the conservative movement.

Lizza says the president is chastened by his first three years. He's realized the limits of the presidency, that rather than being a "director of change" he's a "facilitator" who has learned to work the system rather than overhaul it. Lizza implies that this is simply how it had to be. But I'm not sure I agree with that. Certainly this grandiose notion of "post-partisanship" was impossible. But could he have been a "director" of change? I don't know. But the president came into office with the opposing party discredited, a large majority and a very large crisis. With a more clear eyed perspective, the art of the possible was expanded, at least for a time.

An earlier understanding of this might have led to a better outcome:

Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics now seem not just naïve but delusional. At this political juncture, there appears to be only one real model of effective governance in Washington: partisan dominance, in which a President with large majorities in Congress can push through an ambitious agenda.

Lizza claims that President Obama did just that in his first two years. I think that's being very generous. He did pass a stimulus plan and the health care plan --- both of which suffered tremendously for the insistence on trying to get Republican buy-in long after it was patently obvious they were doing nothing more than watering down the bills before coming out against them. And the long delays gave the right the political space they needed to regroup and come back swinging: 2010 successfully ended any hope of a dominant partisan majority. It's hard to believe that a more realistic understanding of the partisan divide couldn't have created a better outcome.

But let's face facts. Even though the president seems to have abandoned his "post-partisan" fantasy and the right has re-surged strongly, there still persists a belief on the left that there is a magic formula that will break down all these unpleasant cultural and political divisions and bring the parties together. It's no longer the dream of an all powerful president who will heal our divisions by his mere presence. Today it's that we will be able to transcend our differences around policy.

Some believe we will forge new coalitions with Republicans on economics (a long held, never fulfilled dream.) Others think it will be around civil liberties or imperialism. And certainly there will be discrete pieces of legislation that can be passed in a "transpartisan" way. There always have been parochial and individual rationales for working across the aisle on occasion. Sometimes, rarely, even on principle. But a new political coalition? Unlikely. Particularly now, with the nation under stress and the Republicans hunkering down. The deep divisions we see in our politics were baked into the American cake from the beginning. It goes way beyond legislation. It's about identity.

Like I said, this phenomenon waxes and wanes. There are always periods of cooperation and relative peace interrupted by turmoil and partisan battle. Once we even had a war over it. Right now, after a decades long right wing assault and the total capitulation to its premises by the centrist establishment and corporate Democrats, whatever peace is attained by compromise will come at the expense of vulnerable people --- the elderly, children --- and liberalism in general.

I'm glad the president finally realized that he was trying to govern a nation that didn't actually exist. It won't make the outcome any better, but clarity is always good for its own sake. And it's good that the DC press has discovered partisanship again. Ed Kilgore summarizes the illuminating moment:

Presumably spurred by a Gallup analysis on Friday of partisan splits in approval ratings of recent U.S. presidents, both Politico (John Harris and Jonathan Allen) and WaPo’s The Fix (Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake) devoted top billing this morning to an effort to dash any remaining hopes of bipartisan action on the nation’s major challenges before 2013 at the earliest.

This rather banal realization is interesting primarily because it has emerged from the Beltway redoubt of those most likely to harbor the illusion that Great Big Adults in both parties ought to be able to get together and cut deals that can then be sold to the rubes around the country as representing a victory for their team.

I'm sure this news is equally unpleasant to many liberals who hate this system and will make more than a few join the growing chorus which says that electoral politics are a corrupt sewer and a big fat waste of time. And they may very well be right, at least in this moment. We are probably looking at a fairly drawn out period of political trench warfare --- ugly, boring and unsatisfying. I'm all ears if someone has a better idea. (Don't start the revolution without me!) But until that glorious day, somebody should probably keep plugging away in the trenches and trying to move the dial back to the left, even if it's inch by painful inch.

To that end, you can support these people for congress. It's one way to make change in smaller increments in our battered democracy.

And if you're looking for a silver lining, Kilgore wryly provides it:

[I]t is nice to see that the illusion of easy bipartisanship is now largely limited to Americans Elect supporters who somehow think partisans are preventing the American people from embracing by acclamation an agenda of wildly unpopular “entitlement reforms” and tax increases.

Take your victories where you can. That is good news.

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Personal Invasion by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

Personal invasion

by David Atkins

This is brilliant:

To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

"We need some gender equity here," she told HuffPost. "The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we're going to do that to women, why not do that to men?"

The Republican-controlled senate narrowly rejected the amendment Monday by a vote of 21 to 19, but passed the mandatory ultrasound bill in a voice vote. A similar bill in Texas, which physicians say has caused a "bureaucratic nightmare," is currently being challenged in court.

Howell said she is not surprised her amendment failed.

"This is more of a message type of an amendment, so I was pleased to get 19 votes," she said.

She pointed out that there are only seven women in the Virginia senate, and six of them voted in favor of her amendment, along with 13 male senators. Sen. Jill Vogel (R-Fauquier County), the sponsor of the mandatory ultrasound bill, voted against it.

Humor and counterpoint are some of the Left's most effective tools, and there's no reason they should be left just to late night comedians.

On another note, I'm increasingly convinced that electing more progressive women to office is a core strategy for the renewal of this country. There are a lot of good ones in state legislatures, ready to move onto the national stage.

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Boo hoo: birth control hypocrites haz a sad

2012-01-30T14:00:00.000-08:00

Boo hoo

by digby

Tell me again why I'm supposed to care that "progressive" Catholics are unhappy that president Obama mandated that Catholic institutions that employ people who are not members of the faith have to provide birth control coverage under the health care law? I'm hearing they feel "betrayed."

Welcome to our world folks. Now you know what it felt like for the rest of us when the administration made a deal with the Church to give abortion coverage pariah status in the health care law and treat it as though it is something so dirty that decent people wouldn't even want their money to touch the money of those who bought this dirty coverage. It wasn't pleasant.

I don't pretend to understand why progressive Catholics, who I'm told practice birth control at similar rates to non-Catholics, are upset that the government is mandating low cost coverage for everyone --- for something they personally practice. That sort of hypocrisy is simply beyond the ken of a heathen like myself. But as a political matter, the President made the right decision. Pro-choice progressive women have been shafted over and over again on reproductive issues and to enable this growing anti-birth control crusade to gain traction at the hands of a Democratic president would have been a true betrayal of epic proportions. Keep in mind that Democratic women outnumber Democratic men by nearly 10 points.

In any case, it's done. I don't care if the anti-birth control minority are crying. Why should they be immune?

Nita Chaudhary and Shaunna Thomas of weareultraviolet.org write:

Today, 1 in 3 women has trouble affording birth control. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies in the industrialized world, and studies show that women who plan their pregnancies are likely to be healthier, seek prenatal care, and have healthier children.

Given all of this, shouldn't the question be why a group of mostly men -- bishops or otherwise -- need an extra-extra special exemption from prioritizing the health of women? Sadly, this is no freak occurrence. When the Obama administration made the misguided decision not to allow Plan B to be sold over the counter, the debate focused exclusively on the way he -- "as a father" -- viewed the idea of 11-year-old girls getting Plan B with their pack of gum. The overwhelming majority of young women who were simply trying to avoid pregnancy or abortion, both far more risky than Plan B, were ignored. And when a collection of almost all men pushed the "Bart Stupak amendment," holding health reform they supposedly supported hostage for the sake of inroads on their anti-choice agenda, the actual impact their amendment would have on women was virtually absent as news coverage lionized these men's dedication to their consciences.

Shouldn't we ask why women's health, our ability to control our lives and bodies and careers, is such a popular political football? Is it because the women who actually are affected have no voice in our political system?

We need to start asking women what they think about birth control getting covered by their insurance.

You can start with us. We're glad. And if you're part of the 80% of Americans who agree with us, you can sign this card letting the administration know they did the right thing: www.weareultraviolet.org

Exceptionalism! (Who's your daddy edition)

2012-01-30T12:30:00.000-08:00

Exceptionalism!

by digby

If we can just get those taxes down to nothing and eliminate all impediments to inheritance, we should be able to successfully recreate the British aristocracy in a generation. The founders would be proud.

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Hit me baby one more time: battered unions

2012-01-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

Hit me baby one more time

by digby

Ooops:

One of the biggest requests that labor had made of Congressional Dems was this: Don’t sell out unions when the long-term Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization is renegotiated with House Republicans. Unions saw this as a top prioritiy for 2012.

Well, now the verdict is in: Over a dozen unions — including a number of AFL-CIO affiliates, like the Communications Workers of America and the International Association of Machinists; and possibly the SEIU — are preparing to unleash a new letter blasting Senate Dem leaders for reaching a bad deal with Republicans on this core priority, claiming it could compromise their ability to organize in the future. They will demand that Dems pull out of the deal and insist that Dems push the GOP harder for a “clean” reauthorization that doesn’t rewrite labor law.

One labor official told me that the deal has led to "significant union discontent” with the Senate Dem leadership, which may not bode well for Dem-labor relations heading into an election year.

Sargent has the background. It's not pretty.

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2012-01-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

Chipping Away At Romney's Sense of Entitlement

By tristero

Imagine how galling it must be to Mitt Romney to be lectured to by a Bush - yep, one of those Bushes, the ones born with silver spoons pre-inserted in their rears - on how important it is to "earn" Jeb's endorsement, and not simply expect it.

These are very strange and creepy people.

Shame strategy: a banker foregoes bonus

2012-01-30T09:03:00.000-08:00

Shame strategy

by digby

Oh, my goodness:

Stephen Hester, head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, gave way to heavy political pressure last night to forego his £963,000 bonus.

The final straw for the RBS chief executive appears to have been the looming threat of a vote in the House of Commons condemning the Government for failing to block the payment.

He is reported to have feared becoming "a pariah" over the controversy.

But here's the problem. He's going to be sullen and unhappy now and unwilling to create any jobs. And then where will we be? It's not like there's anyone else who can do his job. (Even worse, all the employees of the bank will be demoralized because they'll feel as if they work for the civil service. Or something.)

Big mistake folks. By not insisting that this fine fellow take his million pound bonus they've robbed average citizens of their badly needed jobs. I hope they can live with themselves.

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Creative decay, courtesy our corporate overlords by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-30T07:30:00.000-08:00

Creative decay, courtesy our corporate overlords

by David Atkins

Kurt Andersen of Vanity Fair penned a great article this month on the comparative lack of cultural innovation over the last 20 years. Andersen notes that in architecture, art, fashion, music and other aspects of popular and consumer culture, there is very little difference between the culture of 20 years ago and that of today. By contrast, think of the enormous differences between 1992 and 1972, or between 1972 and 1952, or 1952 and 1932, or 1932 and 1912. Technology has changed significantly, of course, but styles haven't:

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.

Go deeper and you see that just 20 years also made all the difference in serious cultural output. New York’s amazing new buildings of the 1930s (the Chrysler, the Empire State) look nothing like the amazing new buildings of the 1910s (Grand Central, Woolworth) or of the 1950s (the Seagram, U.N. headquarters). Anyone can instantly identify a 50s movie (On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai) versus one from 20 years before (Grand Hotel, It Happened One Night) or 20 years after (Klute, A Clockwork Orange), or tell the difference between hit songs from 1992 (Sir Mix-a-Lot) and 1972 (Neil Young) and 1952 (Patti Page) and 1932 (Duke Ellington). When high-end literature was being redefined by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, great novels from just 20 years earlier—Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—seemed like relics of another age. And 20 years after Hemingway published his war novel For Whom the Bell Tolls a new war novel, Catch-22, made it seem preposterously antique.

Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.

Andersen has a lot more evidence where this comes from in his lengthy 3-page piece. Suffice it to say that it's a fairly compelling case. The key question is why?

Andersen speculates on a number of reasons, not all of which I find convincing. But one reason occurred to me immediately while reading the piece, which Andersen does eventually address: the fact that culture and media are increasingly dominated by shareholder-interested, risk-averse conglomerates that have too much to lose by taking significant creative initiative:

Part of the explanation, as I’ve said, is that, in this thrilling but disconcerting time of technological and other disruptions, people are comforted by a world that at least still looks the way it did in the past. But the other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

This isn't exactly news to anyone who goes to the movie theater. Producers come up with sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots galore because there's built-in audience and branding for them. Doing new things and telling new stories are dangerous and potentially expensive endeavors.

It's even worse in videogames, exceptions like Portal notwithstanding. Cracked had a great article on this subject last year:

But this isn't about any lack of creativity among game developers, artists, writers or anyone else. It's about money, and the fact that the market has trapped games in a fucking creative coffin (and developers will tell you the same). Everybody complains about sequels and reboots in Hollywood, but holy shit, it's nothing compared to what we have in gaming right now.

For instance, each of the Big Three game console makers took the stage at E3 to show off their biggest games of the upcoming year. Microsoft led off with the aforementioned Modern Warfare 3, which is really Call of Duty 8 (game makers like to switch up the sequel titles so the digits don't get ridiculous). Next was Tomb Raider 10 (rebooted as Tomb Raider). Then we had Mass Effect 3, and Ghost Recon 11 (titled Ghost Recon: Future Soldier). This was followed by Gears of War 3, Forza 4 and Fable 4 (called Fable: The Journey).

Next were two new games, both based on existing brands and both for toddlers (Disneyland Adventure -- a Kinect enabled game that will let your toddler tour Disneyland without you having to spring for a ticket -- and a Sesame Street game starring Elmo).

Then, finally, we reached the big announcement at the end (they always save cliffhanger "megaton" announcements for last, Steve Jobs-style) and they came out to announce that they were introducing "the beginning of a new trilogy." Yes! Something fucking new!

Then this came up on the screen: Halo 4. Confused? So was the audience. By "new trilogy" they actually meant that there would be three more Halo games. Did I mention that Halo 4 is actually Halo 7? Which means they intend to put out at least nine Halo games before they're done? Oh, wait, they also announced they were doing a gritty reboot of the decade-old Halo to make it an even 10.

Sony came up next and announced a sequel, another sequel and then a reboot. After that it went sequel, sequel, special edition of a sequel, new FPS, sequel, new FPS, sequel, special edition of a sequel, new game based on an existing property (Star Trek), sequel, sequel and sequel. Then they introduced a new system (the PS Vita) and showed it off with four sequels.

Nintendo's list went: sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel and (hold on, let me double check here) a sequel. And you already know what those were, even if you haven't played a video game in 15 years: Mario Kart, Mario World, Luigi, Zelda, Kirby, etc. Then they showed off their new system (the Wii U) with a demo reel promising that some day it would allow us to play sequels like Arkham Asylum 2, Darksiders II and Ninja Gaiden 3.

Think about the situation with Hollywood -- movies are expensive as hell, so studios are scared to death of taking creative risks and thus we get a new Transformers movie every two years. But now take that and multiply it times five, and you have the situation with video games. Literally. A video game costs five times as much as a movie ticket, and therefore customers are five times as cautious about experimenting with unfamiliar games that might wind up being shit. Game publishers respond accordingly.

And yes, we gamers are ultimately to blame. We don't even perceive how incredibly narrow our range of choices has gotten. For instance, every single gaming forum on the Internet right now is hosting at least one passionate discussion about which is better, Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3. [Emphasis added]

The videogame industry is particularly problematic in this regard. But the problem is a cultural universal with similar symptoms across the board. The malaise of large-scale corporate domination of our economy isn't just political and economic. It's cultural, too. It's the slow death of conformity and creative strangulation disguised as cool and individual expression through ironic nostalgia and the commodification of discontent.

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Virtually Speaking Sunday: Stuart Zechman and moi

2012-01-29T17:45:00.000-08:00

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

What is this "democracy" you speak of? --- the inevitable calls to short circuit the process

2012-01-29T16:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Allen West Apparently Wants the Majority of Floridians to Leave America by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-29T15:08:00.001-08:00

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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Do you like Gladiator movies Newtie?

2012-01-29T13:30:00.000-08:00

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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Cutting investment spending: Making things worse -- forever

2012-01-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

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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Unimpeachable Revolutionary: Grover is more important than Reagan

2012-01-29T10:30:00.000-08:00

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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Bringing the nasty: Palin loves Newt

2012-01-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

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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Larry Summers Epitomizes What's Wrong with the World by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-29T07:30:00.000-08:00

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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Saturday Night At The Movies --- Dr. Terrible’s house of horrible: "The Theatre Bizarre"

2012-01-28T18:00:00.000-08:00

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.

QOTD -- Darcy Burner

2012-01-28T16:30:00.000-08:00

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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Trying to convince the anti-government right on the facts? Let go

2012-01-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

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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Foreclosure Investigation Update

2012-01-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

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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Blue America welcomes the original Netroots candidate, Darcy Burner

2012-01-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Chaffetz Pwned

2012-01-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Rhetoric Matters by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-28T07:30:00.000-08:00

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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The Kitten Nazis

2012-01-27T18:30:00.000-08:00

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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I miss Rick Perry

2012-01-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

I miss Rick Perry

by digby

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

video platform
video management
video solutions
video player

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

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The Brave New World of Citizens United by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-27T15:00:00.000-08:00

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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Go Elizabeth: Warren takes Mittens downtown

2012-01-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

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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Room to regroup: Perlstein on Newtie and Perot

2012-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

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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All American Entrepreneur: Ron Paul's savvy business plan

2012-01-27T10:30:00.001-08:00

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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Elder Scam: Fred Thompson has a lot of nerve

2012-01-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

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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Cut to Cheer About by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-27T07:30:00.000-08:00

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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Scary post 'o the day -- thanks for the nightmares GP

2012-01-26T18:30:00.000-08:00

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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Hey Newtie -- the Prince of darkness would like to have a word with you

2012-01-26T17:29:00.000-08:00

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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Newtie's riposte

2012-01-26T16:30:00.000-08:00

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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Green Jobs and Tax Increases on the Rich are Popular by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

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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The real Jesus' General goes back to West Point

2012-01-26T13:30:00.000-08:00

The real Jesus' General goes back to West Point

by digby

This is cracked:

In a statement issued to ThinkProgress, West Point’s Director of Public Affairs, Lt. Col. Sherri Reed, said the military academy stands by its decision to host Boykin and that the invitation is “in keeping with the broad range of ideas normally considered by our cadets”:
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point prepares cadets to be leaders of character with honor and consideration of others. In order to produce effective 21st Century leaders for our Army, and our Nation, cadets are purposefully exposed to different perspectives and cultures over the course of their 47-month experience at West Point.
The National Prayer Breakfast Service will be pluralistic with Christians, Jewish, and Muslim cadets participating. We are comfortable and confident that what retired Lt. Gen. Boykin will share about prayer, soldier care and selfless service, will be in keeping with the broad range of ideas normally considered by our cadets.
Sadly, the man who West Point has chosen as its representative of the Christian faith dangerously views our military conflicts as a holy war against Islam.

Boykin is worse than that. He's certifiably nuts:

I stumbled across this video of Perkins, Joyner, Boykin and Frank Turek discussing the importance of Christians getting deeply involved in politics.

Perkins explains the absolute necessity of getting Christians into all levels of government while Boykin compared Christians today to the Spartan army and quoted King Leonidas by declaring "molon labe" ["come and get them"] when he and his army were told to lay down their weapons.

Likewise, Boykin declared "molon labe," stating that he will not be silenced and challenged those in Washington who are out to take his liberties, rob his grandchildren, and destroy America to just try to take them from him.

Finally, Joyner announced that Christians have more than enough people to take control, but they need to bind together and, as such, would soon be unveiling coalition called "300".

You're telling me that this freakshow is the only Christian ex-general they could find to do this? Really? But then again it's hard to see how he could do more harm by making this speech than he undoubtedly did in his final years in the Army:

From April 1998 to February 2000, he served as the Commanding General, U.S. Army Special Forces Command (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. From March 2000-2003, he was the Commanding General, United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, N.C. In June 2003, he was appointed Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Dr. Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

You'd think after all this time they'd have finally realized that they had a certified lunatic in their ranks, but apparently not.

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In your shoes, you know he'll lose? --- Mitt's new ad

2012-01-26T11:30:00.000-08:00

In your shoes, you know he'll lose?

by digby

I guess this is supposed to be tough, but is it really? It's a purely process argument saying that he isn't electable. Maybe it'll work. But if they really want to stop him, they should try this one:

"Ring fencing" --- some thoughts on the Schneiderman appointment

2012-01-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

Ring fencing

by digby

Dday has an important new post explaining that while there is still ample reason to be skeptical of the new financial fraud task force, there is a possibility that New York AG Eric Schneiderman may not have blindly walked into a trap or sold out --- apparently, there is room in the agreement for him to push the investigation in a positive direction. And according to dday's sources, Schneidermann has promised to ostentatiously walk out if it turns out that the administration is trying to "ring-fence" him. (Read his whole post for the full run down of how this could play out.)

Schneidermann has generally been known to be a rare savvy, but principled, politician so it's at least possible that he will be able to navigate these waters successfully. It's an election year, this is a volatile issue in some very important states, and Schneiderman signaling that he will be happy to walk away if that's what it takes is a very big threat.

Look, it is hard for me to believe this notion that Schneiderman, after everything, was angling for big wet kiss from the administration. None of that tracks with dday's reporting which says that the deal wasn't coming together at all as recently as last week-end and once Iowa AG Tom Miller publicly pulled the deal it was all over for the moment. The politics suggest to me that while the administration may indeed be trying to "ring-fence" Schneidermann, the real purpose is the glaringly obvious: to cover for their failure to settle this. (Isn't the truism in DC that when you can't get something done, form a commission?)The power in that scenario lies exactly where it did before the task force was announced --- with the state AGs, who as far as I can tell are more empowered not less. (See Kamala Harris'statement below.) I'm willing to suspend judgment for a while to see if that means Schneidermann is actually a corrupt chameleon who's taken progressives for a wild ride through his entire career in order to sell himself to the highest bidder or whether he believes he can affect this from his perch on the task force.

I don't see this as a sky is falling sort of thing just yet. There are very good reasons to be skeptical and you'd have to be a fool to buy into the premise at face value. But there are worse things than temporarily tabling a bad deal. And there actually are politicians in the world whose self-serving ambitions are dependent upon being perceived as crusaders rather than players. Everything I know of Schneiderman suggests that the former is the path he's chosen.

I guess, for me, it comes down to this: I don't think the administration is nearly as slick as people think and I don't believe that in an election year like this one they will go out of their way to make enemies of their political allies. Everything suggests that they are trying to make at least a rhetorical pivot to a populist(ish) campaign to face the out-of-touch fop*, Mitt Romney. It is what it appears to be: plastering lipstick on this pig of a negotiation and pretending they have a path to a cheap settlement in order to keep both the banks and the people on the hook through the election. They are not working with a strong hand.

And because of that, what dday says here is very true:

I...can see some path where this task force is not harmful and, in an absolute best case, helpful in bringing accountability and justice. The key for Schneiderman is to maintain his independence. A lot of people walk into Washington thinking they can outsmart people and work on their own terms. It doesn’t always work out. The grassroots will be a powerful spur in this. They need to not spike the ball in the end zone and continue to do what they have been doing, forcing the White House into uncomfortable positions and blowing up an insufficient settlement.

I suppose people may differ on how to do help Schneiderman maintain his independence. My feeling is that he should be given the benefit of the doubt at this point. Some people believe that the only thing that ever motivates human beings is pain, delivered constantly and without mercy, so maybe he's better "spurred" by being called a whore and a sell-out and abandoned by his progressive allies. We all have to follow our own instincts on that.

But regardless of where you fall on that point, dday's admonition to keep pushing is absolutely correct. Even if activists eventually vote for the president, they can cause huge headaches for the campaign in an election year, particularly in individual states. This is when they have maximum leverage and they should use it.

*h/t to greg sargent
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Kudos to CA Attorney General Kamala Harris by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-26T07:30:00.000-08:00

Kudos to CA Attorney General Kamala Harris

by David Atkins

With New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman likely being disempowered to stop the MERS whitewash, it's up to other Attorneys General to stand firm. Fortunately, California's Attorney General Kamala Harris appears to be doing just that:

Calif. Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris' office has called a proposed $25-billion settlement with the nation’s mortgage industry “inadequate.”

"We've reviewed the details of the latest settlement proposal from the banks, and we believe it is inadequate for California,” Shum Preston, a spokesman for Harris, said in a statement. “Our state has been clear about what any multistate settlement must contain: transparency, relief going to the most distressed homeowners and meaningful enforcement that ensures accountability. At this point, this deal does not suffice for California."

Many analysts consider California's participation to be key to a strong deal. Harris walked away from talks with the banks last year, saying not enough was being offered by the financial institutions for California homeowners.

Since then, certain terms have been added to lure the Golden State back to the table, and Harris has opened separate inquiries into the mortgage business.

State attorneys general have received drafts of a $25-billion settlement with the nation's biggest banks that would overhaul foreclosure and mortgage servicing practices. No deal has been officially reached among the states, federal agencies and the nation's five largest mortgage servicers: Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co.,Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc. Individual states must decide whether they will join a settlement or pursue independent lawsuits and investigations.

The proposed $25-billion settlement would cover only mortgages held by the banks privately and exclude those from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Hopefully Ms. Harris will continue withstand Administration pressure to cover up massive fraud on the part of the banks.

Please take a moment to thank her for her courage. When politicians do the right thing, they deserve our support.

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Woof! by tristero --- Santorum is barking up the wrong tree

2012-01-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

Woof!

By tristero

Man, that Ricky Santorum is barking up the wrong tree.:

I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military

I think it will probably come as a huge surprise to all those 18 year-olds in our armed forces to learn that a man who, incredibly, is considered by a many Republicans a very serious contender for the job of Leader of the Whole World believes that they took a vow of celibacy when they signed up to defend their country.

Good luck with that.

S. Carolina phony voter fraud: Zombies are eating election officials brains

2012-01-25T18:00:00.000-08:00

Zombies are eating election officials brains

by digby

Not that this will stop the wingnuts from their crusade but it should. Turns out that the South Carolina zombies weren't zombies after all:

A top state election official disputes a recent claim that more than 950 people who voted in recent elections could actually be dead. Of the six names her office was allowed to examine, all were eligible to vote.

But to hear some Republican officials tell it, you’d think that on Election Day in South Carolina, graveyards all across the state empty out and hordes of zombie voters lurch to the polls.

But dead people can’t vote. They’re dead.

This apparently needs some clarification, because during testimony at a Jan. 11 House hearing, S.C. Department of Motor Vehicles director Kevin Shwedo estimated that 950-plus dead people had voted since – well, since being dead.

So alarmed was Shwedo – who Gov. Nikki Haley appointed to the DMV post last January and who registered to vote here the following month at age 54 – sent the data to state law enforcement.

The reliability of that data, however, came into question today during another hearing on the issue where State Election Commission director Marci Andino testified that some of the voters the DMV data said were dead are very much alive – and were eligible to cast a ballot.

But you know this will be a rural legend throughout Real America. They are just determined to believe that a bunch of people are trying to steal elections. Because that's what they're trying to do.

In this case they seem to be more than a little bit confused. It was a Republican primary. I know these people think these Democratic zombies are stupid but do they think they're so stupid that they would commit fraud to vote for Obama in an uncontested election? Or is it that they want to elect ... Romney? Hard to figure either way.

Let's just say that this one doesn't make a lot of sense.

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Blood for oil? You've got to be kidding.

2012-01-25T16:30:00.000-08:00

Blood for oil? You've got to be kidding.

by digby

Something's fishy in Tripoli? Daniel J. Graeber of Oilprice.com:

Way back in early 2011, members of the U.N. Security Council had no problem getting a resolution through that authorized military force in Libya ostensibly to protect civilians from attacks by forces loyal to strongman Moammar Gadhafi. The year before, lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic were bickering over who did what and why in terms of the cancer-stricken Lockerbie bomber. This Scottish decision to release him, depending on which U.S. lawmaker you spoke with, was tied to a BP deal to drill for oil in Libya. Despite fractures in the new interim government in Tripoli and reports of renewed protests, a decision by the Italian government to quietly discuss trade relations suggests something isn't quite right in the way Western allies pick their fights.

Read on.

If it's questions are answered in the most obvious way it will end up being one of the quickest debunking of a casus belli in modern history. Not that anyone's too surprised, I'm sure.

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Pedal to the metal is the new normal by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-25T14:54:00.000-08:00

Pedal to the metal is the new normal

by David Atkins

It's remarkable that this is treated as humdrum news these days:

The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that it was likely to leave short-term interest rates at rock-bottom levels at least through late 2014, pushing out its easy-monetary policy even further into the future than previously indicated.

In a statement at the end of its two-day meeting, policymakers at the central bank acknowledged the recent improvements in the economy but said that they expected “economic growth over coming quarters to be modest” and the unemployment rate, currently 8.5%, to decline “only gradually.”

The decision was what many analysts had expected.

Since August, the Fed had said it was likely to keep the federal funds rate, which broadly influences rates on loans for businesses and consumers, at near zero “at least through mid-2013.” Financial markets, however, most recently have been betting that the shift won’t happen until early 2014.

People tend to forget that a zero federal funds rate is supposed to be an emergency measure. Low interest rates help people afford to buy houses and other investments, but they hurt traditional savers. People who speculate on homes and stocks do better, while people on wage income with CDs and savings accounts get screwed, further incentivizing the bubble economy. It's a pedal to the metal approach to keep asset values as inflated as possible while doing nothing about wages. But beyond even more "quantitative easing", there's no farther for the Fed to go on this front even to reinflate assets.

We've been at "pedal to the metal" for years, and we're apparently going to stay there with no end in sight.

That's not to say that a zero interest rate environment isn't necessary during a major recession. It probably is. But a zero-interest rate environment for years and years on end during a largely jobless recovery is more proof that the economy is broken. There's an argument to be had over whether the governmental and financial elites in this area are greedy, incompetent or both. But the notion that they deserve unquestioned respect as arcane priests of economic wisdom is ludicrous.

They're essentially throwing every asset-inflating policy against the wall to see what sticks, and praying something works.

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Laugh til it hurts: mayor quips that he will eat tacos to help the latino community

2012-01-25T13:30:00.000-08:00

Laugh til it hurts

by digby

We often say in these parts that conservatives don't have a sense of humor. But that's wrong. It's just that it's the kind of cruel stupid humor most of us get past before we're out of high school.

Here's the mayor of East Haven Connecticut:

Talk about digging yourself a hole ...

Here's the context:

Police Gang Tyrannized Latinos, Indictment Says

By PETER APPLEBOME

They were known as Miller’s Boys, police officers who worked the 4-to-midnight shift, patrolling the largely working-class town of East Haven, Conn., including the small but growing Hispanic community that has spread out in recent years from New Haven.

The officers were more than well known in that community; according to residents and federal authorities, they were feared. They stopped and detained people, particularly immigrants, without reason, federal prosecutors said, sometimes slapping, hitting or kicking them when they were handcuffed, and once smashing a man’s head into a wall. They followed and arrested residents, including a local priest, who tried to document their behavior.

They rooted through stores looking for damning security videotapes of how they had treated some of their targets, described by one of them on a police radio as having “drifted to this country on rafts made of chicken wings.”

And after it became known that the Justice Department was investigating the department, according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday, a picture of a rat appeared on a police union bulletin board, and in the locker room, an ominous note: “You know what we do with snitches?”

On Tuesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Sgt. John Miller and three of his officers — David Cari, Dennis Spaulding and Jason Zullo — on charges of conspiracy, false arrest, excessive force and obstruction of justice over what the indictment described as years of mistreatment of individuals, especially Hispanics, and efforts to cover it up.

Following on the heels of a scathing Justice Department report in December that found the East Haven police had engaged in widespread “biased policing, unconstitutional searches and seizures, and the use of excessive force,” the indictment portrayed a harrowing picture of arbitrary justice for Hispanic residents.

Just eat some tacos, it'll be fine.

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Civility: Henry Waxman gets told to STFU (basically) when he says "Koch"

2012-01-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

Civility

by digby

In a heated hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman called upon the billionaire Koch brothers to be subpoenaed over their alleged monetary interests in the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Republican Congressman Ed Whitfield angrily cut off Waxman. “We’re not going to be subpoenaing the Koch brothers … because the Koch brothers have nothing to do with this project,” Whitfield snapped.

“Point of order!” Waxman exclaimed. “You cut me out in the middle of a sentence!”

“Your time was up, Mr. Waxman!” Whitfield shot back. “We are going to recess this hearing for ten minutes and then we’re going to come back.”

“Are you calling the Koch brothers during the recess?” Waxman sniped.

“If you want to talk about that, let’s talk about the millions of dollars the Obama administration gave companies like Solyndra and people like George Kaiser and other campaign bundlers,” Whitfield fumed.

“Why are you interrupting members and then you take unlimited time for yourself?” Waxman responded.

“I’m the chairman! And I’m telling you right now we’re going to recess for ten minutes!” Whitfield boomed, before storming out of the hearing.

For background on this, read this article in The Hill. The Kochs are a great symbol for the Democrats and they're smart to use it. But in case you think this is terribly uncivilized, get a gander at what the GOP has in mind:

In 1996, Republicans pivoting to the second year of control of the House realized they made a strategic error in aggressively thumping environmental regulations.

“Let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot on that one,” House Speaker Newt Gingrich told his lieutenants, as chronicled by Washington Post reporters David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf in their 1996 book, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!”

“We kinda looked up one day and said ‘This wasn’t smart,’” recalled Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) in the book. The revelation spurred approval of major changes in 1996 to the Safe Drinking Water Act even as Republicans looked to knock off Bill Clinton from a second term in the White House.

In 2012, with Gingrich on the campaign trail and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney tied with Obama in a new CNN poll, Boehner, now speaker, and his House GOP crew aren’t second-guessing their agenda. Instead, they see energy as a wedge issue they can use to appeal to independent voters with a pro-jobs message, especially if gasoline prices start to increase this summer.

Nah, politics haven't moved right. Both sides do it, remember? It's a wash!

I do hope the Democrats aren't also forgetting the lessons of the past in terms of how this Solyndra pseudo-scandal is developing. The Republicans will spend as much money as it takes to get this to penetrate to at least "smell test" level. It's what they do and they're good at it. I don't know if it has the potency they think it has, but it will be a distraction and an annoyance if it takes off regardless --- and make the public question alternative energy as nothing more than a scam. Which is the point.

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Dirty laundry

2012-01-25T10:00:00.000-08:00

Dirty Laundry

by digby

This is just pathetic:

Tina DuPuy writes:

Mitt Romney’s hurdle in winning the love/respect/admiration/fear of his party can be summed up in one photo: It was taken by his son, Tagg (doesn’t Sarah Palin have a kid with that name?) and put on Twitter this week. It’s of Romney and his wife Ann, presumably in a hotel basement, side-by-side pouring detergent into washing machines. Mitt is, of course, wearing a starched button up shirt and jeans, which is what people who never do laundry think people would wear when they do laundry. (Personally, if I have a clean starched shirt and jeans that’s an indication I don’t need to do laundry yet.) “Nothing like the glamorous life on the road,” the intermittent front-runner’s son tweeted with the pic.

This photo comes in the same week as Romney’s tax return where we learned Romney doesn’t actually work. He is in fact, as he’s claimed, unemployed. His money…makes his money. Millions and millions. He pays a tax rate of 13.9 percent – far lower than your average laundromat owner.

Which leads me to ask: Why is Mitt being photographed doing his laundry? Were there no Dukakis tanks available?

Apparently pleased with his Average Joe “real street” cred, Romney happily explained the image to NBC News, “We do our laundry at least once a week, because we’ll be on the road for 30 straight days. Who else do you think is going to do our laundry?”

"We do our laundry at least once a week because we'll be on the road for 30 straight days?" Huh?

Maybe he should have Tagg do it for him. After all, he owes him big:

David Kay Johnston: The Romneys gave $100 milliion to their sons and paid not one penny of gift tax. They were able to take assets they have that are producing enormous income and, under the law, give that money to their children and not pay any taxes on it.

Sambolin: Is that something you specifically found in what has been released to you?

Johnston: Yes. I have suspected this and written about it in my column that this is what happened, and last night, Brad Malt, the attorney for the Romneys, confirmed to Reuters that we were correct. They have not paid a penny of gift tax. That's because Congress allows a very tiny group of people — the Romneys by their income are in the top 1% of the top 1% — to not count as having any value the real source of their income, something called carried interest, if they give it to their children.

Talk about dirty laundry.

I think it might be time to recycle this again.

Fooled again

2012-01-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

Fooled again

by digby

So, according to dday, New York AG Eric Schneiderman is either a whore or a dupe, as were those who initially thought it was probably good news that he was tapped for the president's new "financial fraud task force." Too bad. Even among the most rabidly cynical, Schneiderman had been touted as a smart person of integrity and one of the only powerful Democrats in the land on the right side of this issue. So much for that, I guess.

I will say this. It could have been worse. As long as no deal is reached, there's at least a chance that a better one can happen.

Banning fetuses in food: when morons are in charge of our laws by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-25T07:30:00.000-08:00

Banning fetuses in food: when morons are in charge of our laws

by David Atkins

Oh good lord:

A Republican state senator from Oklahoma City introduced a bill Tuesday that would ban the use of aborted human fetuses in food, despite conceding that he’s unaware of any company using such a practice.

Freshman Sen. Ralph Shortey said his own Internet research led him to believe such a ban is necessary and prompted him to offer the bill aimed at raising “public awareness” and giving an “ultimatum to companies” that might consider such a policy.

Shortey said he discovered suggestions online that some companies use embryonic stem cells to develop artificial flavors, but added that he is unaware of any Oklahoma companies doing such research.

In an e-mail to The Associated Press, U.S. Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman Pat El-Hinnawy said: “FDA is not aware of this particular concern.”

The executive director of the anti-abortion group Oklahomans for Life, which has successfully pushed some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country through the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature, also said he had never heard of human fetuses being used in food research.

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Tony Lauinger.

"His own Internet research." If this sounds to you like your crazy right-wing aunt freaking out over bullshit in a chain email, that's because you're not that far off the mark. The only significant story in recent years about this apparently crucial issue is this bit of interesting science involving Pepsi and stem cells from last year:

A bizarre controversy is unfolding over an impending low-calorie soda from Pepsi (PEP), which the company is creating with the help of the biotech company Senomyx (SNMX). Numerous anti-abortion groups have started a boycott of Pepsi products because they say Senomyx, which develops new ingredients intended to enhance sweetness and other flavors, has done so using embryonic kidney cells that were originally taken from an aborted baby.

This accusation presents a two-fold problem for Pepsi. The first, most obvious one is that the beverage giant has now ardent anti-abortionists breathing down its neck. The second, and possibly more troubling, issue is that some of Pepsi's attempts to create groundbreaking and healthier products are now associated with fetal kidney cells.

Is this claim true? Neither Pepsi nor Senomyx returned calls, so we don't know the companies' side of the story. But a perusal of Senomyx's patents suggests that it may well be. All but 7 of the company's 77 patents refer to the use of HEK 293 (human embryonic kidney) cells, which researchers have used for decades as biological workhorses. (For the bio-geeks among you, these cells offer a reliable way to produce new proteins via genetic engineering.)

The company appears to be engineering HEK cells to function like the taste-receptor cells we have in our mouth. This way, Senomyx can test millions of substances to see if they work as different types of taste enhancers without subjecting human volunteers to endless taste tests.

To non-scientists this may sound a bit strange, but the reality is that HEK 293 cells are widely used in pharmaceutical research, helping scientists create vaccines as well as drugs like those for rheumatoid arthritis.

So Pepsi's research affiliates were using stem cells to test food substances the same way pharma companies test vaccines. Interesting and kind of cool. So naturally last year the nutcase womb police boycotted Pepsi; and now partly due to this ridiculous nontroversy, Pepsi has disaffiliated from Senomyx.

And less than a year later, this embarrassing incident for America has trickled down into the fevered imagination of some elected moron in Oklahoma that people are being fed fetus parts on their dinner plates. So naturally he steps into legislative action based on his "Internet research."

Welcome to the heartland "values" to which we unAmerican coastal elites are supposed to give deference and utmost respect.

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Electric Teabag Acid Test

2012-01-24T18:00:00.000-08:00

Electric Teabag Acid Test

by digby

Dick Armey lets the cat out of the bag:

“I think the [Tea Party] movement, very broadly,” Armey began, “has forsaken the possibility of having a reliable, innovative, small government conservative emerge through the Republican Party’s process. So we put our focus on — ”

“What do you mean?” Banfield interrupted, “I thought that was Ron Paul, Congressman?”

“Well, Ron Paul, we– we sa– we don’t believe he will emerge, uh, as the candidate through this process,”

“So why aren’t you backing him?” Banfield asked. “And all your very strong Tea Partiers? I mean the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.”

“One of the things you have to understand about small government activists,” Armey explained, “is that we all, each and very one of us, individually, march to our own drummer, so there are many people in our movement that are backing Ron Paul, but there are some that are backing some of the others, as well,”

“But that means you don’t have sort of a block of power, if what I’m hearing is, uh…”

“We’re not about power,” Armey said. “That’s one of the things that’s confusing to a lot of people who are used to analyzing the behavior of real politicians that are in biz for themselves. We are about what’s good for the nation, individual liberty, personal freedom, and everybody being free to do their own thing.

If it feels good, do it baby Tune in, turn on, vote GOP.

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The "A" Team: Newt and Rick don't have anything to worry about

2012-01-24T16:30:00.000-08:00

The "A" Team

by digby

So we're going to have the Mitch Daniels Experience tonight. Feel the magic:

This guy and Christie, Jindal and Jeb Bush are the supposed "A Team" that didn't take the field in this cycle. I think they make Newtie and Santorum look like Churchill and Roosevelt by comparison.

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To Mitt or Not to Mitt by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-24T14:54:00.000-08:00

To Mitt or Not to Mitt

by David Atkins

I'm sure you've seen the numbers by now:

Mitt Romney’s campaign released hundreds of pages of tax documents on Tuesday morning, providing an inside glimpse into his sprawling investments, both in the United States and abroad, in an effort to dampen the attacks on his wealth that have become a central focus of the Republican presidential nominating battle.

Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann, had an effective federal income tax rate in 2010 of 13.9 percent, paying about $3 million in taxes on an adjusted gross income of $21.6 million, the vast majority of it flowing from a myriad of stock holdings, mutual funds and other investments, including profits and investment income from Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney retired from in 1999.

The part of me that wants to see an easier win in November desperately wants Gingrich to win the nomination.

But the fighter in me wants to see Romney win this nomination so that we can have the tax the rich conversation undistracted all through November. Sadly, I don't get to choose. That's for the crazies on the other side to decide.
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From the stating the obvious files

2012-01-24T13:30:00.000-08:00

From the stating the obvious files

by digby

Friendly reminder:

The United States’ continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba is a “clear breach of international law,” United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay said today, Reuters reports. Only six trials have been completed in 10 years, while eight detainees have died at the prison. “While fully recognizing the right and duty of states to protect their people and territory from terrorist acts, I remind all branches of the U.S. government of their obligation under international human rights law to ensure that individuals deprived of their liberty can have the lawfulness of their detention reviewed before a court,” Pillay said. “Where credible evidence exists against Guantanamo detainees, they should be charged and prosecuted. Otherwise, they must be released.”

Might as well be talking to a wall.

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The Earl of Romney

2012-01-24T12:00:00.000-08:00

The Earl of Romney

by digby

I think Atrios explains the problem with Lord Romney's taxes perfectly:

Romney has said he was unemployed. He's right. He actually does nothing to earn most of his income. He's just in possession of a giant pile of cash. He pays some people to do stuff with that giant pile of cash so it earns a rate of return. And because we are ruled by horrible people who think the lives of the 1% are more important than everyone else, the tax rate on any money that pile of cash earns is much lower than it is on the money earned by people who actually work.

Now the .01% like Romney will tell you that they work actually work much harder than the rest of us and as a result they should be allowed to keep all of their money. After all, if they didn't work harder they wouldn't be rich, right?

Indeed, Romney likes to say that his father gave him nothing and he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. If you believe that growing up with a very famous family name in both the world of business and politics --- in a world made up of other people with vast wealth and famous family names in business and politics --- counts as up from nothing, I suppose that might be true. But Mitt was born with every advantage, many more than his father who really did work his way up the ladder of success. It's insulting that he even tries to relate to average people in this way.

There's nothing wrong with being wealthy and running for office. But if you are nothing but a privileged plutocrat, without any sense of noblesse oblige, everyone will rightly see your self-serving policies for what they are: a chance to enhance your own wealth, that of your wealthy peers and, most importantly, that of your heirs. In other words you are just another in a long line of would-be aristocrats trying to game the system for your own.

We've had many wealthy presidents in America, but never one as rich as Mitt whose policies were so blatantly geared to make himself even wealthier at the expense of the rest of the nation. If he wins this election we will know once and for all that deep down, Americans really want to be subjects, not citizens.

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Patriotic self-deportation

2012-01-24T10:26:00.000-08:00

Patriotic Self-deportation

by digby

PATRIOTS FOR SELF-DEPORTATION
www.SelfDeport.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AUSTIN (January 24, 2012) The grassroots organization Patriots for Self-Deportation, formed last year in response to legislative inaction on the issue of birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants (also known as the “anchor baby” problem), announced today the launch of their website, SelfDeport.org. The group describes SelfDeport.org as a resource for patriotic Americans who wish to set an example of responsible citizenship by proving their own rights to remain in this great nation.
The group hopes the website and issue benefits from Republican candidate Mitt Romney's endorsement of self-deportation as a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, according to spokesman Stephen Winters.
"A surprising number of authentic patriots have found in their own genealogical searches that one or more of their ancestors came here or stayed here illegally, and yet continued to make a living in this country and have children who in turn became instant citizens," said Winters. "Some patriots, faced with this moral dilemma, have decided to set an example for others. Knowing that their own presence in this country is not on moral solid ground, they have decided to demonstrate the highest level of civic dedication and sacrifice, and engage in self-deportation."
In order to address the surprisingly large number of such cases, Patriots for Self-Deportation launched SelfDeport.org to support, inform, and assist those undertaking or considering a similar move. At SelfDeport.org, patriots can answer for themselves the following questions:
How can I know if ancestors of mine came here legally?
If I suspect that an ancestor should never have received citizenship, am I morally obliged to do something about it?
What support is available if I decide to self-deport?
If several of my ancestors came over illegally, how do I decide which country of origin to return to?
How do I go about self-deportation?
Patriots for Self-Deportation urges all patriotic Americans to visit SelfDeport.org for answers to these questions and more, and for testimonials by patriots who have chosen to live in accordance with their values. "We hope that this resource will help guide other patriots in carrying out this difficult but essential duty," said Winters.

The problem, as one wag put it, is "who want to take all our patriots?"

Update: Here's what "self-deportation" is rally all about.

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Newtie: bring back the circus

2012-01-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

Bring back thecircus

by digby

Newtie's upset:

“I wish in retrospect I had protested when Brian Williams took [the crowd] out of it because I think it’s wrong,” he said. “I think he took them out of it because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against the media, which is what they’ve done in every debate.”
Gingrich’s debate performances are widely viewed as having propelled him to an overwhelming victory at Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

His fiery performances often came at the expense of the debate moderators for questions he deemed inappropriate, and the conservative crowds often rewarded the former House Speaker with applause and even a standing ovation for his attacks against the media.

But NBC asked the crowd to hold their applause until the breaks, and moderator Brian Williams didn’t offer any opportunities for Gingrich to go after him.

As a result, some of Gingrich’s attacks that might have energized his supporters at previous debates seemed to fall flat. At one point Gingrich even seemed flustered, and paused in silence to collect his thoughts.

“We’re going to serve notice on future debates that we won’t tolerate — we’re just not going to allow that to happen,” Gingrich continued. “That’s wrong — the media doesn’t control free speech. People ought to be able to applaud if they want to. It was almost silly.”

Uh, no. Not silly enough obviously.

He's a cheerleader not a politician. Without the "fans" screaming for blood his allegedly brilliant debating skills fall flat.

As Alan Grayson said:

"The Republicans can't give them bread so they just give them circuses."

*Who knew Florida had become forced childbirth central? Santorum should do well once they find out about his macabre practices.

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The Wingnut Test of Wills by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

The wingnut test of wills

by David Atkins

Newt Gingrich has surged into the lead not only in Florida, but nationwide as well.

That means one thing: the GOP has about a week to discover who is more powerful: its establishment or its base. If Newt Gingrich wins an upset in Florida and proceeds to roll through to nomination in spite of all predictions, he will almost certainly lose the general election against a vulnerable President. The conspiracy-minded will declare that the big money men are pleased with Obama and are throwing the race to ensure four more years. But that assumes a level of coordinated puppeteering that doesn't likely exist. Even if one assumes that on certain issues the Parties don't differ all that greatly, there are a very large number of influential people who depend on the tendrils of power and influence that alter depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican holds the White House. There is simply no way that the vast bulk of the Republican establishment is lying down for four years, allowing its favored sons and daughters to languish while Democrats fill all the appointments in the White House's power.

No, the Republicans want to win in 2012. They have to. They've spent enough time, energy and money labeling the first African-American President a socialist, communist unAmerican professorial elite aligned with Black Panthers and food stamp cultures of dependency, that they can't afford to lose to him and still save face.

That's the danger of using ridiculous hyperbole to smear your opponents. If you lose, it means that the people either didn't believe the best lies your money could tell, or worse, believed them and didn't care.

The Republican establishment can't afford to see Gingrich win the nomination. But the base isn't about to let a Mormon governor from Massachusetts with a more moderate record be their standard-bearer.

In the next week, we'll find out if the GOP wizards are still in control of their monster, or if their monster is about to eat them alive. If the former, the monster won't exactly be happy about going back in its cage. If the latter, it could mean no less than the beginning of the end for the Republican Party: the year when its rabid base officially seized control, hastening the demise of a political party in rapid demographic decline.

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Debate night drinking game: #frankly (give your keys to a friend right now)

2012-01-23T17:45:00.000-08:00

Debate night drinking game

by digby

Drink on "frankly" and prepare for a massive hangover.

But it will be nothing compared to the hangover in the GOP if Newtie pulls this off:

SCHMIDT: Look, I think, not only are we not moving towards a coalescing of support by the Republican establishment for Newt Gingrich, we're probably moving toward the declaration of war on Newt Gingrich by the Republican establishment. And if Newt Gingrich is able to win the Florida primary, you will see a panic and a meltdown of the Republican establishment that is beyond my ability to articulate in the English language.

People will go crazy and you will have this five week period until the Super Tuesday states which is going to be as unpredictable, tumultuous as any period in modern American politics. It will be a remarkable thing to watch should that happen in Florida.

Sir, it gets better Sir!

2012-01-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

Sir It Gets Better Sir

by digby

I don't think anything can illustrate the change in our society better than this:

Mitt Romney, Uncreative Destructor by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-23T15:14:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney, Uncreative Destructor

by David Atkins

Mitt Romney had a fascinating take on the foreclosure mess today. Dave Dayen and Digby have superb rundowns of Romney's comments particularly as they relate to strategic default and the Administration's foreclosure settlement, but I want to focus on a specific part of Romney's answer to struggling homeowners:

"The banks are scared to death, of course, because they think they're going to go out of business," Romney said. "They're afraid that if they write all these loans off, they're going to go broke. And so they're feeling the same thing you're feeling. They just want to pretend all of this is going to get paid someday so they don't have to write it off and potentially go out of business themselves."

"This is cascading throughout our system and in some respects government is trying to just hold things in place, hoping things get better," Romney continued. "My own view is you recognize the distress, you take the loss and let people reset. Let people start over again, let the banks start over again. Those that are prudent will be able to restart, those that aren't will go out of business. This effort to try and exact the burden of their mistakes on homeowners and commercial property owners, I think, is a mistake."

It takes a while to think through what Romney is saying here, but at its core what you get is a terrifying view of Romney's perspective as a vulture capitalist.

The single silver lining to the cloud of vulture capitalism is the principle of creative destruction. From a business point of view, creative destruction rests on the notion that while killing and carving up struggling firms may entail short-term pain, in the long run the economy benefits by freeing up capital and resources to function in smaller, more dynamic parts or even just the broader economy. It's not much of a silver lining to those who lose their jobs or to the towns that die when factories are closed, but a halfhearted case for the role of vulture capital in helping along creative destruction can be made by an economist.

So when Romney says to simply flush all the bad debt out of the system for both homeowners and banks alike, he's resting on this same worldview: that things will be better off once the current mess is destroyed, so that the housing market and banking market can be rebuilt from the ground up. It's the same perspective he had when he insisted that Detroit be allowed to go bankrupt. Creative destruction is the name of Romney's game. It also serves the Libertarian economic project fairly well, because the alternative to creative destruction is direct intervention, usually by a government entity.

But applying the principle of creative destruction to the entire housing and banking market is nothing short of terrifying. It's one thing to do it in the Rust Belt or Silicon Valley, where factories and offices can be liquidated so that mechanics and engineers can theoretically be assigned to more productive industries. It rarely works out that way, of course: usually the engineers and mechanics stay unemployed or are rehired at far lesser wages, even as the vulture capitalists make off like bandits. But at least there's a sound theory behind it.

Banking isn't like manufacturing or technology, though. Banks don't produce anything but loans and interest on investment. You can't take a banker and reassign her to a more productive type of finance, even in theory. Banks are less like factories themselves, and more like cogs in an economic machine that are allowed to take profits in return for the service they provide. Banking is a boring and often ugly business that is in many ways a necessary evil--so much so that most societies have historically placed stringent, usually religious rules or even bans on the activity, forcing social outcasts to provide the service. "Creativity" in banking is almost always a bad thing, as is financialization of economies. There's no "creativity" to be had in destroying banks; rather, the only reason for destroying banks is essentially to regulate them by limiting their power.

Homeownership is even less subject to the rules of creative destruction, unless one is literally leveling homes in a process similar to gentrification--which even then, obviously, has its own social costs. Homes are not an economic engine, or rather they're not supposed to be. They're places where people live, grow up, raise families and retire. Turning families out of their homes isn't like turning them out of a dead-end job with the hope of their landing a more productive, economically efficient job later. It simply means another transplanted or homeless family.

That the big zombie banks should be broken up rather than allowed to stagger on pretending their bad debts will be repaid is without question. That homeowners with no home of repaying their mortgage should have alternatives to walking away, such as own-to-rent or mortgage write-downs, seems intuitive.

But Romney's stated approach of simply allowing the housing market to bottom out and the banks to go under without government intervention is not only cruel; it's economically insane. It's not creative, just destructive. It's the approach of a man who understands only the business of vulture capital, not the business of running an economy.

It's proof that the last thing America needs in office is a businessman, or at least one who cut his chops in the financial sector.

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Mitt Romney socialist

2012-01-23T13:00:00.000-08:00

Romney the socialist

by digby

This is pretty amazing:

Richard Wood of Bradenton, Fla., told Romney he'd folded his title insurance company in October 2010. "I invested in some real estate, some rental properties, made what I considered to be very conservative investments during the boom times and right now I am negotiating with the same bank who has mortgages on each of those and an approximate $200,000 deficiency," he said. "We have been exploring the possibility of moving to another to another country where we might be able to live on our retirement and our Social Security."

"Yeah. It's just tragic, isn't it? Just tragic, just tragic," Romney said. "We're just so overleveraged, so much debt in our society, and some of the institutions that hold it aren't willing to write it off and say they made a mistake, they loaned too much, we're overextended, write those down and start over. They keep on trying to harangue and pretend what they have on their books is still what it's worth."

"Also, Gov. Romney, we got hit with a double whammy," Wood continued. "My wife, she's a Realtor -- she is in the process of filing for bankruptcy on some debts that she needed to take out in order to try and stay in business the past five years. I'm probably right behind her."

"That's tragic," Romney said. "In some cases, if the debt is not in something you can service, it's like you have to move on and start over away from those debts. It's helpful if you get an institution that's willing to work with you, but if you don't you have no other option."

The Sunshine State had the seventh-highest foreclosure rate of any state in 2011, according to RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure marketplace and data firm. All of the homeowners at the table Monday said they owed more than their homes were worth and that their banks wouldn't negotiate on modifications or refinancing. More than 22 percent of all residential properties in the U.S. are "underwater," according to housing research firm CoreLogic. In Florida, a full 44 percent of mortgage properties are underwater.

"The banks are scared to death, of course, because they think they're going to go out of business," Romney said. "They're afraid that if they write all these loans off, they're going to go broke. And so they're feeling the same thing you're feeling. They just want to pretend all of this is going to get paid someday so they don't have to write it off and potentially go out of business themselves."

"This is cascading throughout our system and in some respects government is trying to just hold things in place, hoping things get better," Romney continued. "My own view is you recognize the distress, you take the loss and let people reset. Let people start over again, let the banks start over again. Those that are prudent will be able to restart, those that aren't will go out of business. This effort to try and exact the burden of their mistakes on homeowners and commercial property owners, I think, is a mistake."

Wow. This seems to me to be a huge move in a very different direction than any politician in the race. He's supporting the concept of strategic default which until now has been considered something only very sophisticated rich people were allowed to do. The CW is that it's a huge moral hazard for the rubes.

In fairness, these people sound as if they were heavily involved in Real Estate speculation and weren't just your average homeowner screwed by the crash, so maybe it's not as unusual after all. But still, the language the "empathy" the idea that it's "prudent" for non-billionaires to get a restart are all anathemas to the 1%ers. I will be shocked if Romney doesn't walk this back if it's picked up by the press. It's a class betrayal of epic proportions.

That's if he means what he's saying which I very much doubt. This has all the hallmarks of Mitt's compassion chip misfiring and mistakenly saying what these voters want to hear. If it isn't, and he sticks with it, we will see Romney to the left of the administration on the foreclosure crisis, which is fairly shocking. After all, this is what's happening right now:

Rumor has it that on Monday, after months of negotiation with big banks, the White House may announce a settlement that would let the banks off the hook for their role in the foreclosure crisis -- paying a tiny fraction of what's needed in exchange for blanket immunity from future lawsuits.

We hope these rumors are untrue.

President Obama has the ability to stop and change the direction of this sweetheart deal. He should reject any deal that benefits the one percent and lets the big banks get away with their crimes. Instead, the president should stand with the 99 percent and push for real accountability and a solution that will help millions of people in this country.

Here are the hard facts about the housing crisis we face:

3.5 million Americans are homeless.
18.5 million homes sit vacant.
Since 2007, more than 7.5 million homes have been foreclosed.
Default and foreclosure rates are now several times higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

If President Obama is serious about solving this crisis, he must ensure three things:

First: The banks must pay a minimum $300 billion in principal reduction for homeowners with underwater mortgages and/or restitution for foreclosed-on families. This is essential. Every effort to date to reboot the housing market has failed because it has not done the most essential thing -- actually reduce the massive debt load carried by homeowners.

As it stands, the deal likely to be announced Monday would have the banks pay only $20 billion, an astonishingly small fraction of what's needed. Add up all the underwater homes in America, and there's an estimated $700 billion in negative equity in the country, according to a recent study. If banks fix what they broke and write down principals for all underwater mortgages, this would free up millions of people to pump billions of dollars back into local economies, create jobs, and ultimately generate revenue to help invest in things that will help our economy grow.

This was addressed on Up with Chris Hayes yesterday with Eliot Spitzer:

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

Florida has been ground zero for foreclosure fraud and the housing slump. It stands to reason that the GOP would be trying to find a populist appeal to the average people in the state. It will be especially helpful to them if the administration does their dirty work for them and they can run against this settlement. The politics are very, very stupid. On the merits, it's just plain wrong.

Update: Also too, this:

The nation’s top six banks -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs -- paid out $144 billion in bonuses and compensation for 2011, second only to the record $147 billion they paid out in 2007 at the height of the economic boom, according to a report released today by The New Bottom Line. Four banks – Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley – were awarded record high bonuses and compensation in 2011, despite their bleak stock performance during the year.

“Even though top bank executives have claimed that bonuses are down as much as 30 percent for 2011, total compensation has not decreased at all,” according to The New Bottom Line’s report, “Pulling Back The Curtain: The 1% Behind The 2011 Big Bank Bonuses.”

Update: Dday has a detailed analysis of Mitt's comments. (I had missed the part where he praised Pam Bondi .. oy vey, he is confused.) His political analysis is the same as mine.

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Susie's hospital bills -- give a blogga a hand

2012-01-23T11:30:00.001-08:00

Help out a pal

by digby

Susie Madrak, writer, blogger extraordinaire had to have gallbladder surgery and it cost more than she has:

In addition to paying for the health insurance, I have a $5000 copay on the surgery and about $30,000 in assorted medical bills from when I was hospitalized previously. I don’t expect to pay all of that, but I will have to pay something.

Obviously, some of you are in the same leaky financial boat and the last thing I want is for my readers to donate to me when they’re in bad shape themselves. But for those of you who can spare a few bucks, and would like to support what I do, I’d really appreciate your help.

Click over to her page and throw in a couple of bucks if you have it. It's Ayn Rand's world and we have to live in it.

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The age of Citizens United: it's been with us for a while now

2012-01-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

The age of Citizens United

by digby

This is an interesting discussion on Up With Chris Hayes yesterday morning about campaign finance.

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

The disagreement between Eliot Spitzer and Melissa Harris Perry is instructive. It's clear that many of us are confused about Citizens United --- the fact is that nothing any wealthy individual like Sheldon Adelson is doing in this cycle is a result of that ruling. Citizens United lifted the restrictions on corporations and union spending in elections, period. It had nothing to do with wealthy individuals donating to PACs in order to support candidates. That has been legal since 1976:

The Supreme Court's ruling in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) held that expenditures made independently of a candidate's campaign could not be limited under the Constitution. If expenditures are made in "coordination" with a campaign, however, they may be regulated as contributions.

Citizens United brought about the SuperPAC in order to facilitate the newly legal unlimited corporate giving, but the huge donations from wealthy individuals to these PACs is something they always could have done. Indeed, the single largest donation to Romney's SuperPAC is "John Paulson, a billionaire and hedge fund manager who is, according to Politico, 'famous for [having enriched] himself by betting on the collapse of the housing industry.'" There was nothing stopping him from doing this before either.

So why the big change? I think it has to do with two things, one cultural and one economic. The first is simply that wealthy benefactors are willing to put their names on their politics. The overt lobbying for Randroid values among the super wealthy has been well documented. They are shameless.

The second, and probably more important, is that these wealthy people have so much more money than they had before. Adelson is the 8th richest man in the United States. The Koch Brothers are the 4th and 5th. And their wealth has grown exponentially in recent years as everyone else has been struggling:

When you have this much money, buying elections is a very cheap investment. It's these two factors --- the swashbuckling culture of wealth and income disparity that lie at the heart of our current problems.

This is not to say that campaign reform isn't useful. There are many groups out there coming together to try to overturn corporate personhood, Citizens United and demand public funding of campaigns, among other things. In this interesting analysis, Mark Schmitt concurs with Eliot Spitzer in the clip above about the potential dangers but posits that process could yield tangential results around the margins even if it fails to reach the intended goals. Schmitt likens it to the anti-abortion crusade on the right, in which the organizing ends up depending on the failure to reach goals to sustain itself, but I think there is a positive tangential result in terms of the cultural and social pressure such a campaign could produce. There will always be shameless rich people of course. But there's no reason society should allow them to celebrate their shamelessness. There have been many things that were once socially acceptable and no longer are --- it's hard, but not impossible.

Still, more campaign finance reform probably won't eliminate the total corruption of the DC institutions where 25 year old staffers are enticed by the early prospect of mid six figure lobbyist salaries and where everyone expects to cash out big. And it can't change the crumbling foundation of a nation that's perfectly willing to allow vastly wealthy individuals and institutions to evade the rule of law and brag about it while hoarding more and more of the nation's wealth for themselves.

In that Chris Hayes clip I think David Stockman probably has it right and it's a very uncomfortable observation. In order for our democracy to function as it should we may end up having to restrict free speech in some limited way around our elections. It's an appalling solution to an appalling problem. But until we can make a very substantial cultural shift that makes corruption shameful and an economic shift that redistributes some of this wealth back to the middle class, we're going to be seeing more and more ostentatious corruption of our democracy. That's a very tall order. I'm guessing we're going to have to come up with a way to do it all.

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@bwilliams Ask Ron Paul 2night if he thinks states (as opposed to feds) have right 2 pat down airline travelers

2012-01-23T09:00:00.001-08:00

State intrusion

by digby

It's good that Rand Paul is taking on the TSA's security theatre by refusing to comply with a pat down request. Perhaps it will lead to more discussion about why this is a ridiculous approach to anti-terrorism. When the authorities find themselves groping a US Senator's crotch in public without any suspicion of criminal activity, something's gone wrong.

Having said that, I cannot help but be reminded of the fact that his home state of Texas just passed a law that goes a good deal further: forced vaginal probes of women seeking an abortion. To me, that seems like at least an equally intrusive state action, but when asked about it his allegedly highly principled father replied:

When GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul was asked today about Tuesday’s federal court ruling upholding an aggressive new sonogram law in his home state of Texas, the congressman said the requirement that women seeking an abortion first get a sonogram “should always have been a Texas state position.’’

“Like Roe v Wade should never have been heard in the Supreme Court,” he said after a midday speech and rally at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport at the Eagle Aviation Building...

This is the usual dodge. Paul could claim that since abortion would be illegal in Texas (as it surely would) there would be no need for intrusive sonograms. But in states where abortion is legal, if they wanted to pass this law, he would be perfectly fine with it.

Brian Williams should ask him tonight at the debate whether he would agree that a state government has the right to demand pat-downs at its airports. I'd be curious to hear the answer.

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Reading the Tea Leaves by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-23T07:30:00.000-08:00

Reading the Tea Leaves

by David Atkins

The latest poll out of Florida:

Newt Gingrich leads Mitt Romney by eight points in Florida, according to a poll conducted the day after the former House speaker won the South Carolina primary.

According to the Insider Advantage poll, Gingrich has 34 percent support, Romney has 26 percent, Texas Rep. Ron Paul has 13 percent, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum garners 11 percent.

But there's just one problem: Newt has a +34 unfavorable rating with the American public. The latest PPP poll shows that 60% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Gingrich, compared to only 26% who like him. Ouch. Mitt Romney's, meanwhile, is only +18 unfavorable.

The President has only a +10 job disapproval, making him more popular than either leading Republican in spite of everything. If the economy continues to improve over the next year (no sure thing, of course), that number will only get better.

In a national matchup, President Obama beats Gingrich by 7 points, but only beats Romney by 5.

What does all of this mean? Watch for the long knives from the GOP establishment to come out against Mr. Gingrich over the next week. They know that Mitt Romney for all his 1% vulture capital warts, is the only one with a prayer of taking the White House in 2012.

And then watch in response as the Tea Party base spits fury at the Republican Party.

It's helpful in these situations to remember that Democrats aren't the only Party with a serious "base" problem. If anything, the Republicans have it worse right now.

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Suffocating lunacy

2012-01-22T19:30:00.000-08:00

Suffocating lunacy

by digby

Good God:

The owner of the Atlanta Jewish Times apologized for an opinion column in which he counted President Obama's assassination as among Israel's options in heading off a nuclear Iran.

"I very much regret it, I wish I hadn't made reference to it at all," Andrew Adler told JTA on Friday.

He said he would publish an apology in his next edition, and that reaction from readers had been overwhelmingly negative.

Fox News reported late Friday on its website that the Secret Service was investigating the column. In his interview with JTA, Adler said he had not been approached by the Secret Service.

In a Jan. 13 column, Adler, who is also the paper's publisher, outlined what he said were three possible responses by Israel to Iran's acquiring a nuclear weapon: a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist groups that he said would be emboldened by a nuclear Iran; a direct strike on Iran; and "three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies."

He continued: "Yes, you read 'three' correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel's existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles?"

What in the world is wrong with people? I feel like I'm drowning in conspiracy theories coming from every direction. Ugh.

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Standoff politics

2012-01-22T16:24:00.000-08:00

Standoff politics

by digby

Gird yourself --- it looks like we're in for another standoff:

On Fox News Sunday this morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told Chris Wallace that “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure the Keystone Pipeline is approved.” When Wallace pressed him whether Republican leadership would make the pipeline a condition for extending the payroll tax holiday, Boehner admitted, “We may,” adding (several times) that “All options are on the table.”

One can't help but wonder what would have happened if the administration and the Democrats had said "go ahead, make my day" when Boehner and the Destroyers first started this debt ceiling nonsense last spring. At this point it's hard to see how it's ever going to end.

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Fatuous rich guy quote of the day

2012-01-22T14:00:00.000-08:00

Fatuous rich guy quote of the day

by digby

A senior official at the Bank of Scotland explaining why they need to pay their CEO an obscene bonus:

If the chief executive turned down his bonus it would “demoralise” staff members and would send a signal that they now effectively “worked for an arm of the civil service or a utility, rather than for a bank”.

Yes, he has to take the money because the staff wants him to have it, so they can feel a part of the exciting and glamorous world of ... banking.

Update: Atrios sez:

And it isn't the Bank of Scotland, it's RBS, an almost wholly owned entity of the British government, and a very poorly performing investment so it's not entirely clear why any bonuses for top management are deserved at all.

Abortion in America

2012-01-22T12:30:00.000-08:00

Abortion in America

by digby

You don't see the argument made this openly very often and it's too bad. The capitulation to the idea that it's a horrible thing that can be eliminated if we only put our minds to ending unwanted pregnancy was a mistake. It is what it is, what it always has been. A reality, regardless of its legality.

As that video says, women should be able to exercise this right safely and with dignity. Instead, in many places, they have to run through a gauntlet of screaming protesters and even endure an unwanted, medically unnecessary vaginal probe with the express purpose of shaming them into childbirth against their will.

As that video points out --- most women who have abortions are already mothers. It's not as if they don't know what's at stake.

Update: This fascinating story of pre-Roe abortion is important reading if you give a damn about this topic. People weren't less moral then. But they had abortions. Lot's of them. They always have.

Update II:

"The most obvious thing was the 2010 election. While the headlines were all about the changing command in the House of Representatives, what we were seeing was a tidal wave of new pro-life legislators in state houses. When we saw this big wave come in, we were ready to grab the ball and run with it. Last year, 28 laws that we were involved with passed. It was breathtaking."

And here I keep hearing that we dizzy broads shouldn't worry our little heads about all this.

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Death by a thousand tax cuts

2012-01-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

Death by a thousand tax cuts

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

Elias Isquith observes:

Wow. Whatever is in his tax returns from before he started running for President (roughly 2006) must be really, really bad if Team Romney thinks trotting out this weak tea — which will of course not put the matter to rest — is preferable to simply following the norm and putting out around a decade of returns.

You either have to assume that or that Romney is an incredibly bad politician. I'd vote for both.

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Successful brainwashing

2012-01-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

Successful brainwashing

by digby

Take a look at the exit polls from South Carolina on the economy:

A majority of these voters believe that cutting the deficit is more important than job growth. It's possible that this includes only the people who are holding steady or getting ahead, but I doubt it. I'm guessing that it includes many of those who are falling behind --- arch conservatives who voted for Gingrich on the basis of his alleged economic "vision."

Considering the amount of propaganda out there, perhaps it's good news that only 57% think this.

Newt Gingrich, the Great Racial Uniter by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich, the Great Racial Uniter

by David Atkins

Fresh off his win in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich gave a redder than red, raw meat speech to the conservative base full of allusions to "Saul Alinsky radicals," "anti-religious bigots" and, of course, his now-signature "food stamp president" line. Those with the stomach for it can watch the full speech, or just cue it up to 15:10:

Let's be clear--and I know this makes some of the elite media nervous--President Obama has been historically the most effective food stamp President in American history. [Applause] I worked with Ronald Reagan to create jobs, and 16 million jobs were created by the American people in the 1980s. I worked with Bill Clinton, a Democrat, to create jobs, and 11 million jobs were created by the American people during the four years that I was Speaker. I would like to be the best paycheck President in American history. [Applause] And I want to go into every neighborhood of every ethnic background in every part of the country and say to people very simply: if you want your children to have a life of dependency and food stamps, you have a candidate: that's Barack Obama. If you want your children to have a life of independency [sic] and paychecks: that's Newt Gingrich, and I'll bet you we have votes everywhere.

Pundits across the land have pointed out the obvious racism of Gingrich's appeal to food stamps, culture of dependency and what not. Most progressives have called it a racist "dog-whistle" to his base. Peter Beinart believes that Newt doesn't understand how racist he sounds, while Frum figures that Newt just doesn't understand the universal necessity of the food stamp program.

None of these things are true. Newt Gingrich knows very well what he is doing and what he is saying, nor is it a dog-whistle. It's the open declaration of an alternate reality that used to be present only within the confines of the conservative mythos, but is now taking front and center position on the national stage.

Far from being an appeal to racism overt or covert, it taps into a delusion central to modern conservatism: that the only reason minorities hate Conservatives and Conservatism is not because of any racist tendencies or faults endemic to conservatives themselves, but rather to liberals tying down minority communities in a "culture of dependency." In this view it is rather conservatives who are the true egalitarians, rescuing minorities from the racist slavery of the welfare state.

It is this delusion that lies at the heart of attacks on the liberal welfare state as a form of neofeudalism: the Southern agrarian slave system was similar to feudalism in many ways, and by associating liberalism with feudalism, they also make an implicit association with Confederate slavery.

It is this argument, so preposterous to Americans outside the conservative bubble, that allows Glenn Beck to claim the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr..

What Newt Gingrich is doing here, then, is not making a coded racist argument against Barack Obama and minority communities. He is, rather, presenting himself as the anti-Obama: the Great Conservative Racial Uniter, the man who can walk into minority communities, free them from the tyranny of the welfare state, and win back their love, re-uniting them in harmony with their Southern white brethren in defiance of the liberal media and government elites trying to keep them poor and indebted to government programs.

As with Romney's statement about firing people, the key to understanding conservative statements is often to look past the initial attention-grabbing phrase, and to watch for the context that comes afterward. In this case, the key for Gingrich lies not in his lines about "food stamp" or "pay check" Presidents. The key lies in his confidence that he is the one and only conservative who will be able to make minorities love Republicans again by freeing them from mental slavery.

Republicans are not only sensitive to allegations of racism. They also know in their hearts that in their current incarnation they face demographic extinction. The Fox News demographic is literally dying. They also know that simply putting minority faces like Marco Rubio on the same old policies won't work.

In order to survive without moderating their policies, they must subscribe to the belief that if only they eliminate every program that helps poor people (including minorities), minorities will suddenly wake from a deep sleep and learn to embrace conservatives through the power of tough love.

That's what Newt Gingrich promises them. He is their answer to Barack Obama, their Savior, their Great Racial Uniter. He speaks not ignorantly, schizophrenically nor in code. He and his base have leaped into this ideological gamble with open eyes, and are attempting to take the rest of the country with them.

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Saturday Night At The Movies -- Depression edition

2012-01-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

Dennis is digging himself out of the snow in Seattle this week and couldn't get out to the movies. So, in honor of the South Carolina Republican primary, I thought I'd re-run his list of Top 10 Depression films.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Dust Bowl XLIII

By Dennis Hartley

I’ve sure been hearing the “D” word an awful lot lately. They say that in times of severe economic downturn, people crave pure escapism at the movies. I say, screw that. I wanna revel in economic downturn, ‘cos there’s something else “they” say as well: Misery loves company. So, with that in mind, and in the spirit of a little cinematic aversion therapy, here’s my Top 10 Great Depression Movies. Study them well, because there’s yet one more thing that “they say”: Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.

Berlin Alexanderplatz- When you think of the Great Depression in terms of film and literature, it tends to vibe America-centric in the mind’s eye. In reality, the economic downturn between the great wars was a global phenomenon (not unlike our current situation); things were literally “tough all over”. You could say that Germany had a jumpstart on the depression (economically speaking, everything below the waist was kaput by the mid 1920s). In October of 1929 (interesting historical timing), Alfred Doblin’s epic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story Of Franz Biberkopf was published, then adapted into a film in 1931 directed by Phil Jutzi. It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later that the ultimate film version would appear as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 hour opus. It’s nearly impossible to encapsulate this spiritually exhausting viewing experience in just a few lines; I’ll just say that it is (by turns) the most outrageous, shocking, transcendent, boring, awe-inspiring, maddening and soul-scorching film I’ve ever hated myself for loving so much.

Bonnie and Clyde- The gangster movie meets the art film in this 1967 groundbreaker from director Arthur Penn. There is much more to this influential masterpiece than just the oft-mentioned operatic crescendo of violent death in the closing frames; particularly of note was the ingenious way that its attractive antiheroes were posited to directly appeal to the rebellious counterculture zeitgeist of the time, even though the film was ostensibly a “nostalgia piece”. Our better instincts may tell us that the real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were nowhere near as charismatic (or physically beautiful) as Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, but we don’t really care, do we? (Is it getting warm in here? Woof!)

Bound for Glory-There’s only one man to whom Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen must bow before-and that’s Woody Guthrie. You can almost taste the dust in director Hal Ashby’s leisurely, episodic 1976 biopic about the life of America’s premier protest songwriter/social activist. David Carradine gives one of his finest performances, and does a very credible job with his own singing and playing. Haskell Wexler’s outstanding cinematography earned him a well-deserved Oscar. The film may feel a bit overlong and slow in spots if you aren’t particularly fascinated by Guthrie’s story; but I think it is just as much about the Depression itself, and perhaps more than any other film on my list, it succeeds as a “total immersion” by transporting the viewer back to the era.

The Grapes of Wrath- I’m stymied for any hitherto unspoken superlatives to ladle onto John Ford’s masterful film or John Steinbeck’s classic source novel, so I won’t pretend to have any. Suffice it to say, this probably comes closest to nabbing the title as THE quintessential film about the heartbreak and struggle of America’s “salt of the earth” during the Great Depression. Perhaps we can take (real or imagined) comfort in the possibility that no matter how bad things get over the next few months (years?), Henry Fonda’s unforgettable embodiment of Tom Joad will “be there…all around, in the dark.”

Inserts- This 1976 sleeper from director John Byrum has been dismissed as pretentious dreck by some; it remains a cult item for others. If I told you that Richard Dreyfuss, Veronica Cartwright, Bob Hoskins and Jessica Harper once all co-starred in an "X" rated film, would you believe me? Dreyfuss plays a has-been Hollywood directing prodigy known as "Wonder Boy", whose career has peaked early; he now lives in his bathrobe, drinking heavily and casting junkies and wannabe-starlets in pornos that he shoots in his crumbling mansion. Bob Hoskins is memorable as the sleazy "producer", who is also looking for investors for his scheme-an idea to open a chain of hamburger joints (his nickname is "Big Mac"). The story takes place in 30s Hollywood, and as a wallow in the squalid side of show biz, it would make a great double bill with The Day of the Locust.

King of the Hill- Steven Soderbergh’s exquisitely photographed film (somewhat reminiscent of Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon) is a bittersweet rendering of A.E. Hotchner’s Depression-era tale about young Aaron (Jesse Bradford) who lives with his parents and kid brother in a decrepit hotel. After his sickly mother (Lisa Eichhorn) is sent away for convalescence, his kid brother is packed off to stay with relatives, and his father (Jeroen Krabbe) hits the road as a travelling salesman, leaving Aaron to fend for himself. The Grand Hotel-style framing device (offering glimpses of the mini-dramas unfolding in each room, here suffused through a child’s innocent perceptions) gives you an effective microcosm of the day-to-day struggles of those who live through such times. The film is full of wonderful little moments of keen insight into the human condition. The great ensemble includes Karen Allen, Adrian Brody, Elizabeth McGovern and Spaulding Gray.

Pennies from Heaven (Original BBC version)-I’ve always preferred the original 1978 British television version of this production to the Americanized theatrical version that was released several years afterwards. Written by Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective), it is rife with the usual Potter obsessions: sexual frustration, marital infidelity, religious guilt, shattered dreams and quiet desperation…broken up by the occasional, completely incongruous song and dance number (I really would not want to be in his head, ever). Bob Hoskins is outstanding as a married traveling sheet music salesman in Depression-era England whose life takes some, erm, interesting Potter-esque turns once he becomes smitten by a young rural schoolteacher (Cheryl Campbell) who lives with her widowed father and two extremely creepy brothers. Probably best described as a film noir musical?

Sullivan's Travels-A unique and amazingly deft mash-up of romantic screwball comedy, Hollywood satire, road movie and hard-hitting social drama that probably would not have worked so beautifully had not the great Preston Sturges been at the helm. Joel McCrea is pitch-perfect as a director of goofy populist comedies who yearns to make a “meaningful” film. Racked with guilt about the comfortable bubble that his Hollywood success has afforded him and determined to learn firsthand how the other half lives, he decides to hit the road with no money in his pocket and “embed” himself as a railroad tramp (much to the chagrin of his handlers). He is joined along the way by an aspiring actress (Veronica Lake, in one of her best comic performances). His voluntary crash-course in “social realism” turns into much more than he had originally bargained for. Lake and McCrea have wonderful chemistry. Years later, the Coen Brothers smugly co-opted the title of the fictional “film within the film” here: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? - “Yowsa, yowsa, yowsa!” This richly decadent allegory about the human condition has to be one of the grimmest and most cynical films ever made. Director Sydney Pollack assembled a crack ensemble for this depiction of a Depression-era dance marathon from Hell: Jane Fonda, Gig Young (who snagged a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), Susannah York, Bruce Dern and Red Buttons are all outstanding; Pollack even coaxed the wooden Michael Sarrazin (the Hayden Christensen of his day) into showing some real emotion. Adapted from Horace McCoy’s novel.

Thieves Like Us-This loose remake of Nicholas Ray’s 1949 film noir classic They Live By Night is the late Robert Altman’s most underrated film, IMHO. It is often compared to Bonnie and Clyde, but stylistically speaking, the two films could not be farther apart. Altman’s tale of bank-robbing lovers on the lam (Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall) is far less flashy and stylized, but ultimately more affecting thanks to a consistently naturalistic, elegiac tone throughout. Carradine and Duvall really breathe life into their doomed couple; every moment of intimacy between them (not just sexual) feels warm, touching, and genuine-which gives the film some real heart. Altman adapted the screenplay (with co-writers Joan Tewkesbury and Calder Willingham) from the same source novel (by Edward Anderson) that inspired Ray’s earlier film. Ripe for rediscovery.

"We thought it was a prop"

2012-01-21T17:30:00.000-08:00

"We thought it was a prop"

by digby

Things you only hear in LA:

Cops were also questioning neighbors in the region, including Brad Pitt's bodyguard.

The star and his wife, Angeline Jolie, have a house in the Hollywood Hills near where the body parts were found.

Dog-walker Lauren Kornberg, whose golden retriever, Ollie, discovered the head on Tuesday, said she initially thought it was a Hollywood stunt prop.

"Our assumption was that there was always people filming up there, and it was a prop," Kornberg, who was walking the pups along with her mother, told HLN. "We walked down the ravine and got closer and realized it was a freshly severed human head."

*For the record, LA's murder rate is the lowest it's been since the 50s.

Fanning the flames of the firewall

2012-01-21T16:30:00.001-08:00

Fanning the flames of the firewall

by digby

Ronnie and Nancy campaigning with Strom Thurmond in 1980

Newt's appeal:

Now don't you dare read anything into that. Just because Juan Williams is African American and was questioning Newt about whether he could understand why some people would see a teensy hint of racism in his comments doesn't mean that Newt was milking it in the state best known for its racial politics. Racism doesn't exist, you see, and it certainly doesn't exist in South Carolina:

In South Carolina [eleven] years ago, a whispering campaign suggesting that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black baby may have been a factor in sinking his presidential campaign. A mailer sent out during that period used McCain's actual daughter, who McCain adopted from Bangladesh in 1993, to support the fraudulent claim.

And Juan Williams isn't really black. His name is Juan, after all, which, when you think about it, is probably just as bad.

Waiting with bated breath by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-21T15:36:00.000-08:00

Waiting with bated breath

by David Atkins

Such a suspenseful night tonight. Who will win the battle for the hearts and minds of the most conservative voters in the most conservative state in the nation? Is it the animal-abusing vulture capitalist who pays a 15% tax rate with Cayman Islands bank accounts? More likely, is it the surging ethically challenged, openly racist serial adulturer with a hatred of child labor laws? The goldbug neo-confederate? Maybe the guy who wants to eliminate birth control?

It's like 31 flavors of toxic sludge. But don't hate the sludge: it is what it is. What concerns me most are the customers who can't get enough of it.

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Your moment of zen

2012-01-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

Your moment of zen

by digby

h/t to @chrislhayes

Stand and Deliver: a story of the confederacy

2012-01-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

Stand and Deliver

by digby

I'm not sure whether Ron Paul has a bigger beef with Lincoln for freeing the slaves without compensation to their "owners" or the issuing of "fiat money" to pay for the war, but he sure doesn't think the Union was on the right side:

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

I'd like to think that the Confederate Flag in the back was photo-shopped. At any rate, what's amazing is the frame here--It's not the firing on federal property that inaugurated the War, it's Bull Run, or some such. It's as if I punch you in the face and then accuse you of bullying me after I get the crap kicked out of me. Except worse.

Actually that's how Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper Union put it exactly:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This, plainly stated, is your language. Perhaps you will say the Supreme Court has decided the disputed Constitutional question in your favor. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer's distinction between dictum and decision, the Court have decided the question for you in a sort of way. The Court have substantially said, it is your Constitutional right to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. When I say the decision was made in a sort of way, I mean it was made in a divided Court, by a bare majority of the Judges, and they not quite agreeing with one another in the reasons for making it; that it is so made as that its avowed supporters disagree with one another about its meaning, and that it was mainly based upon a mistaken statement of fact - the statement in the opinion that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution."

[…]

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action?

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

Some things never change in this country. This is one of them.

Oh, and here's a little known factoid from David Brock's book "Blinded by the Right"

Grover kept a pet boa constrictor named after anarchist Lysander Spooner. He fed the snake mice, all of them named David Bonior the outspoken liberal House whip.

Blue America: Alan Grayson in the house at 11pst,2est at C&L

2012-01-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

Blue America: Alan Grayson in the house

by digby

Howie sez:

Today, January 21, is the two-year anniversary of the absolute worst and most dangerous Supreme Court decision of our lifetimes, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. We decided it would be the perfect time to reiterate Blue America's enthusiastic support and endorsement of Orlando Democrat Alan Grayson and to invite him here to Crooks and Liars for a question-and-answer session.

Why Alan? He was one of the first victims of an unrestricted opening of the spigots of corporate money in a congressional race. According to a Politico article late in the campaign in 2010, almost 20% of all of the independent expenditures in House races in the entire country were deployed against Alan. His district was flooded with an unrelenting radio and television smear campaign by the corporations who didn't appreciate his hard work on behalf of consumers and workers. The average person in Orlando saw 70 negative ads against Grayson-- $2 million of which was paid for by the Koch Brothers, $2 million by the health insurance industry and another million from the NRCC. The cash that flowed into the district from the Chamber of Commerce and Rove's band of cutthroats was a direct response to Alan's reform efforts on the House Financial Services Committee and because he was the most effective national Democratic spokesperson in Congress. The DCCC, of course, offered him no help whatsoever in defending his seat.

Two years ago there were only two Members of Congress at the Supreme Court when the narrow 5-4 decision striking down the provisions of the McCain–Feingold Act that prohibited all corporations' and unions' unrestricted election spending on advertising was read out: Alan and Mitch McConnell. I can imagine McConnell squealing with delight. Grayson had quite a different reaction. He warned later that evening on Countdown that "if we do nothing, you can kiss this country goodbye." (See video above.) I don't think he actually meant the physical country itself-- just democracy, so loathed by the plutocratic elites, and all the benefits democracy brings with it.

Alan had gotten over 100,000 people to sign a petition to the Justices at SaveDemocracy.net, and he personally delivered the signatures to the Supreme Court. This was a new experience for the Supreme Court.

"Seeing it coming," he told me when discussing the ruling, "and assuming the worst, I had introduced four anti-Citizens United bills the week before, and introduced four more afterward. We called this our Save Democracy Platform. The core of three of these bills made it into the DISCLOSE Act." These were the bills Alan introduced:

The Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act (H.R. 4431): Implements a 500% excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees, and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns.

The Public Company Responsibility Act (H.R. 4435): Prevents companies making political contributions and expenditures from trading their stock on national exchanges.

The End Political Kickbacks Act (H.R. 4434): Prevents for-profit corporations that receive government money from making political contributions, and limits the amount that employees of those companies can contribute.

The Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act (H.R. 4432): Requires publicly traded companies to disclose in SEC filings money used for the purpose of influencing public opinion, rather than for promoting their products and services.

The Ending Corporate Collusion Act (H.R. 4433): Applies antitrust law to industry PACs.

The End the Hijacking of Shareholder Funds Act (H.R. 4487): This bill requires the approval of a majority of a public company's shareholders for any expenditure by that company to influence public opinion on matters not related to the company's products or services.

Blue America was urging Alan to run again even as the votes were being counted in 2010. And we are determined that this year he's going to be back in Congress-- and this time in a solid Democratic district (the new 27th based in Orlando). Please help us raise him the money he needs to beat back the Kochs and the Roves and the corporate special interests.

He recorded this for us last night:

Join Alan at Crooks and Liars this morning at 11 pst, 2est.

Stephen on the trail

2012-01-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

Stephen on the trail

by digby

And Chuck Todd's still on the fainting couch:

Heather at Crooks and Liars says it well:

Perhaps what bothers Chuck Todd the most is Colbert's challenge to HIS system: the Blackberry class Washington journalista cocktail party circuit, which Colbert shames. Stephen Colbert's actions today show that journalism and celebrity can be used in an attempt to actually make a difference. Meanwhile, Chuck Todd clutches his pearls and feigns worry over mockery of Congress (really) while covering "news" that happens only in areas with five phone bars and festooned carpeting. He and the rest of the Washington Life Magazine Power 100 ought to be ashamed.

South Carolina values by @DavidOAtkins

2012-01-21T07:30:00.000-08:00

South Carolina values

by David Atkins

Since CNN has assured us that the South is "where values matter" in advance of today's South Carolina primary, it's worth considering just what South Carolina values are, courtesy Thomas Schaller in Whistling Past Dixie (pp.274-275)

Consider South Carolina, which has opposed or defied almost every beneficent social and political change in American history. To appease South Carolinian slaveholders, Thomas Jefferson removed language condemning slavery from the Declaration of Independence. Four years later, backcountry loyalists in South Carolina helped the British Army recapture the state in 1780 from the patriots. By 1828, Palmetto State native and vice president John C. Calhoun was agitating for state "nullification" of federal powers, generating secessionist calls a full generation before the outbreak of the Civil War.

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede; four months later Confederate forces in Charleston fired the opening shots of the Civil War on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, and South Carolina even threatened to secede from the Confederacy because the other southern states would not agree to reopening the slave trade. Soon after the state's chapter of the Ku Klux Klan formed, "red shirt" Democratic rifle clubs used physical intimidation and ballot manipulation to alter results of the 1876 election. In the 1890s, Governor Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman--who earned his nickname by threatening to stab President Grover Cleveland in the ribs with said implement--served two terms as governor before embarking on a twenty-three-year Senate career during which he defended segregation as vigilantly as his fellow Edgefield County native, Strom Thurmond, later did for most of his career.

Well into the twentieth century, South Carolina's black citizens observed the Fourth of July mostly alone because the vast majority of whites refused to, preferring instead to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, May 10. State politicians repeatedly averted their eyes as textile industry executives employed children and quashed attempts by mill workers to organize for fair wages. In 1920, the South Carolina legislature rejected the proposed women's suffrage amendment and took almost a half century finally to ratify it, in 1969. In 1948, the same year the South Carolina legislature declared President Harry Truman's new civil rights commission "un-American," Thurmond's full-throated advocacy of racial segregation as the States' Rights Democratic Party presidential nominee helped him carry four Deep South states. Six years later, the Clarendon County school district--where per-pupil spending on whites was quadruple that for blacks--was pooled with three other districts in a failed defense of the "separate but equal" standard in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. And when Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the law that finally banned the creative and vicious methods used to disfranchise blacks, South Carolina became the first state to challenge its constitutionality. By 1968 Harry Dent, the most legendary of Thurmond's political proteges and a key artchitect of the "southern strategy," was helping Richard Nixon translate racial antagonisms into crucial Republican votes, a victory in South Carolina, and a ticket to the White House.

If all of this seems like so much ancient history, consider that South Carolinians are still debating the merits of public displays of the Confederate battle flag. Indeed, more than a few pundits believe Republican David Beasley won the 1994 governor's race in part because of his pledge to support displaying the Confederate flag over the state capitol--then promptly lost his 1998 reelection bid later after a "religious epiphany" caused him to reverse position. After two decades of adverse judicial rulings, in 2000 Bob Jones University, the state's largest private liberal arts college, founded by its anti-Catholic namesake, finally ended its policy of prohibiting interrracial dating. Last year, South Carolina was sued for issuing "choose life" vanity plates while refusing the same option to pro-choice citizens, justifying its decision by claiming that the anti-abortion message constitutes protected government speech. Today, more than eight decades after women first won the right to vote, the South Carolina state legislature is the only one in America where women do not hold at least 10 percent of all seats.

Other Deep South states may stake their own claims, but South Carolina is America's most conservative state. From a strictly constitutional-historical standpoint, its legacy of firsts and lasts reads like a rap sheet: first to overturn a provincial government during the revolutionary period; last to abandon the Atlantic slave trade; first to call for nullifying the Constitution's federal authority; first to secede from the Union; last to abolish the white primary; first to litigate against the intregration of public schools and challenge the Voting Rights Act. Whenever America finds itself at some social or political crossroad and in need of direction, perhaps the best things to do is ask, "What would South Carolina do?" And then do the opposite.

I'm sure there are many wonderful people in South Carolina fighting the good fight, trying to turn their home state around and move away from the shameful legacy of South Carolina values. But in democracy, majority rules. And the majority of South Carolinians have made it clear exactly what those values are.

They are not American values, and CNN should be ashamed to imply that they are.

.

Feel good story of the day:Foxes!(the non-Republican kind)

2012-01-20T20:02:00.000-08:00

Feel good story of the day

by digby

They only weigh around five pounds --- half the size of my cat.

The Catalina Island fox has made one of the most remarkable recoveries known for an endangered species, rebounding in just 13 years from near extinction brought on by a distemper epidemic, wildlife biologists announced Wednesday.

The number of foxes has reached 1,542, surpassing the population of about 1,300 seen before the animals were ravaged by the disease that scientists believe was introduced by a pet dog or a raccoon from the mainland that hitched a ride on a boat or a barge.

"We're beyond proud," said Ann Muscat, president and chief executive of the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy. "It's a testament to what hard work, passion, money and the resiliency of nature can accomplish."

Newtie's Dream Act

2012-01-20T18:00:00.000-08:00

Newtie's Dream Act

by digby

Arizona's primary is February 28th. if he hangs in there, I'd imagine Newtie has a good chance to win it. Romney may appear to be more hardcore on paper, but Newt tickles the sweetspot with his emphasis on English only and making kids clean toilets to teach them a lesson.

In a page right out of Newt Gingrich’s alternate-history science-fiction wingnut-polygamy utopian epicCandyland Space Land, the school district in Tucson has completely banned Mexican-American studies, seized all the textbooks and even wall posters from the classrooms, and punished the students who protested by sentencing them to janitorial duty.

It's true. They're banning books about Mexican American history and making Mexican American kids clean up if they speak out against it. In America. Today.

Good thing climate change isn't true

2012-01-20T16:30:00.000-08:00

Good thing climate change isn't true

by digby

... or I'd be worried:

It's obviously another one of those NASA hoaxes, as usual, but still. Oh my God.

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Fainting couch alert: Colbert is making a mockery of a mockery

2012-01-20T15:00:00.000-08:00

Fainting couch alert: Colbert is making a mockery of a mockery

by digby

Oh dear me. Villager Chuck Todd is in a tizzy over Stephen Colbert making a mockery of the electoral system. (As if this wasn't enough.) It seems he's worried that Colbert is trying to tilt the playing field and hurt the Republicans. You know, because he pretends to be one and isn't really, so everything he does is designed as a partisan hit job.

Once again, the Villagers don't get it. Colbert is playing a conservative, true. But he's playing a conservative TV pundit. Like these two guys, or this one. And this one. You know, all the Fox News "pundits" who have had cushy sinecures while they waited to run again for president? On the right, being a conservative commentator and an active politician is pretty much the same gig. FoxNews as an official adjunct of the GOP made a mockery out of our political system not Stephen Colbert --- he's just taking his satire to its natural conclusion.

Moreover, Citizens United, the case that opened the door to this gusher of money coming into the system refers to a notorious GOP oppo outfit that goes all the way back to the 90s:

Trudy Lieberman wrote in the May/June 1994 issue of Columbia Journalism Review:
"Bossie, the twenty-eight-year-old political director for Citizens United, a conservative Republican operation, runs an information factory whose Whitewater production lines turn out a steady stream of tips, tidbits, documents, factoids, suspicions, and story ideas for the nation's press and for Republicans on Capitol Hill. Journalists and Hill Republicans have recycled much of the information provided by Citizens United into stories that have cast a shadow on the Clinton presidency."

"Bossie, who says he works sixteen hours a day on Whitewater, earned his Republican stripes as the national youth director in Senator Robert Dole's 1988 presidential campaign, and then moved on during the 1992 Bush campaign to become executive director of the Presidential Victory Committee. His boss, Floyd Brown, worked as Dole's Midwest political director during the 1988 campaign, but is best known for producing the Willie Horton commercial that helped sink the presidential ambitions of Democrat Michael Dukakis."

"Bossie was fired from his job as an investigator working for Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee in 1998" while "investigating Clinton-Gore campaign finances." According to a May 7, 1998, front-page article published by the Washington Post, Bossie was fired "after overseeing the release of recordings of Hillary Rodham Clinton's phone conversations with [imprisoned] Whitewater figure Webster L. Hubbell. The tapes were edited to create the impression that Clinton was involved in billing irregularities at the Arkansas law firm where she and Hubbell worked."

Note: According to an October 10, 2003, archived version of his Citizens United profile, Bossie said that he "was recruited to this position by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and Chairman Burton to investigate then-President Clinton's illegal foreign money entering the United States to influence the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. Bossie managed Burton's transition into the Chairmanship; managed a $10 million annual budget; directed personnel matters; and, supervised a 40-plus person investigative staff."

It was only a little over a decade later that Citizens United made "Hillary: the movie" which formed the basis of the court challenge that brought us to this hideous spectacle today. David Bossie is the Republican party's creature. And he kept up his campaign of dirty tricks and smears until he finally got a Supreme Court that would rule in favor of political lies fueled by big money being constitutionally protected speech. Feeling sorry for the Republicans because a satirist is hoisting them by their own very pointed petards is really rich.

Maybe Todd doesn't know all that history. And maybe it doesn't matter. But whining about satire polluting a political system that was poisoned long ago by big money and GOP machinations (with the willing help of a puerile mainstream media that lapped up what they gave them and begged for more) says everything you need to know about the sad state of political journalism. Satire is the only way we can possibly get to the truth.

Update: Froomkin calls bullshit.