Month: September 2008

Golden Week

by dday

An important week for the Presidential campaign has just begun. Despite Republican efforts to stop it, the state of Ohio opened their early voting stations this week, and they are one-stop polling places, where you can register and vote on the same day. Due to an overlap between voter registration deadlines and the beginning of the early voting period, this will only last from Sept. 30-Oct. 6. But turnout is expected to be large:

Election officials around Ohio prepared for a rush of early voting Tuesday, the first day absentee ballots are accepted in advance of the Nov. 4 presidential election.

Backed by the state Supreme Court and two federal judges, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, is allowing new voters to register and cast an absentee ballot on the same day from Tuesday through Oct. 6 […]

In Columbus, voters wanting to cast ballots as soon as possible on Tuesday morning had set up tents Monday night to wait in line outside the Franklin County Board of Elections.

Obama’s campaign organized car pools from college campuses to early voting sites. The Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless is ferrying voters from homeless shelters to polling sites in the Cleveland area. Other organizations that seek to increase poor and minority participation in elections are transporting voters from low-income neighborhoods.

The targeted voters have all traditionally had a harder time getting registered, and then getting to polling places on Election Day.

McCain’s campaign is trying to organize around this as well, but Obama’s campaign is placing an emphasis on it. The Democratic nominee created a message to voters in Ohio, and he’s using text messaging to get out the word. (Text O-H to 62262 for more information). The campaign also has a wealth of resources for volunteers to come and help get out the vote. Obama’s people are using the rallying cry that John Kerry lost Ohio, and the election, by 9 votes per precinct. The early voting golden week window can close that gap. And here’s a great account of one voter’s experience at an early voting station, which went very smooth. The difference between Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in 2004 and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, one of our best, in 2008 is stratospheric. Winning the state is an available option this time, if Obama gets out the vote.

McCain cannot win the election without Ohio. That’s not just a political axiom, it’s a fact. There’s virtually nowhere on the board he can make up the loss of 20 electoral votes there. If you know anyone in Ohio, you should let them know that they can register and vote this week only.

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Big Lie

by digby

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the building rightwing “explanation” for the economic crisis: the blacks and the Mexicans stole your tax money to buy perfectly good houses they couldn’t afford and the wreck them. Perlstein called it “a modern day equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a Big Lie narrative that blames a despised, outcast social group for problems they had nothing to do with, in order to aggrandize the ability of the dominant group to hate and oppress.” There are a lot of awesomely outrageous claims floating around in right wing circles right now as they desperately to keep the whole ship from going down, but that has to be the most despicable.

But even more scary is the idea that it might just work. Rick recounts a tale of the modern media, which is both familiar and infuriating:

So what did I do in that Chicago radio studio last Friday when a wingnut (who, incidentally, is African American) spewed forth some excrement about how Jews harvest the blood of children for their Passover matzohs handouts to swarthy people are responsible for the meltdown of the American economy? I did my job. I called it a “lie and a slander,” explaining in simple and forceful terms that lending institutions covered by the CRA have a lower mortgage default rates than ones that aren’t, and that even if the former were the worst companies in the history of the universe, they wouldn’t have helped produce the financial contagion had not conservative deregulation green-lighted the buying and selling of insanely irresponsible mortgage-backed securities.

Rick heard the segment later and they had cut out his debunking of the right wing smear completely.

… the reason a conservative lie was allowed to stand could have been perfectly innocent: perhaps the audio of my debunking was garbled by crosstalk. Perhaps they cut without a second thought, just for purposes of time; my stint in the recording studio was twice again as long as the completed segmented, so they had to cut somewhere.
But it’s also possible that the producers’ thinking could have went something like this:

He said: “it’s the conservatives’ fault.” She said: “It’s the liberals’ fault.” Both drew political blood in equal measure, and the canons of fairness and balance demand we leave it at that, rather than let the liberal sneak in the last word: “He said, she said”—snip, snip, snip.

Which would be a splendid illustration of how conservatives launder lies across our political discourse. Textbook, actually. No malice aforethought on the part of the media gatekeepers; just an overcautious commitment to the value of what they call “balance” over the value of Truth with a capital T.

Which is just how the right might be able to get away with making the 2008 presidential election a referendum, for millions of low-information voters, over whether minorities should be able to get away with taking over all the instruments of federal power and writing checks to each other, or whether they will be stopped before it’s too late.

From the moment I first heard this lie last fall during the originally rumblings of the credit market crisis, I knew it would end up having salience for an awful lot of Americans. This is one of the foundations of conservative tribe dogma: the other tribe is trying to take your hard earned money and give it to the dark skinned others. It’s so embedded into their lizard brains that they don’t even know it’s what they believe, but it’s at the heart of the fact that every time something goes wrong in our system, a fair number of people reflexively blame blacks and other minorities for their problems. And it’s why we have the thinnest safety net of all first world countries and why we are constantly fighting a rear guard action to keep what we have.

It’s time to fight this out in the political arena.

Update: Media Matters has more evidence of this toxic meme spreading.

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Better Democrats Doing Their Thing

by digby

Peter DeFazio, Donna Edwards and a group of progressive Democrats have come up with a plan:

DeFazio’s plan is not in any way based on the Paulson/Bush plan. Instead of throwing taxpayer dollars at the program and crossing our fingers that the plan work, the measure will direct the Administration to take five simple steps, suggested by noted economist and former head of the FDIC, William Isaac, to re-regulate the markets and move America towards a healthy financial future.

The legislation will be available at the press conference.

Who: Rep. DeFazio, Rep. Kaptur (OH-09), Rep. Scott (VA-03), Rep. Cummings (MD-07), Rep. Doggett (TX-25), Rep. Holt (NJ-12), Rep. Edwards (MD-04) and Rep. Hirono (HI-02)
What: Press Conference to introduce legislation to fix financial markets
Where: House Radio and TV Gallery
When: 3 pm TODAY

SEIU is backing it and Congressional Quarterly reported the other day that 106 Republicans would sign on to a bill with these elements. (I’ll believe that when I see it, but … )

I don’t know the details of the plan, but I do have a little bit trust in this group than the Bush administration so my mind is open and I’ll be anxious to see it.

I do believe that it’s also important for Democrats to begin to argue, right this minute, that this legislation is nothing more than an emergency stop gap measure and that the economy at large has been battered and degraded by years of conservative experiments in laissez faire, supply side economics, rapacious lenders and lack of important investment in the future. The results of that gilded age of the vastly wealthy becoming ever richer at the expense of ordinary Americans is at an end, and we are desperately in need of a New New Deal for the 21st century to grapple with the much larger underlying problems.

That, of course, is something for Senator Obama to take the lead on. I would love to see him make that argument at the next debate. If they insist upon creating conditions for a Shock Doctrine, liberals should step in and use it for good. They’ve done it in the past and it made this country a much, much better place.

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Arrogant Fool

by digby

I’m afraid Senator McCain doesn’t understand the difference between an fiscal and a financial crisis…

Maybe he could ask Sarah Palin to explain it to him.

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Republicans In Disarray

by dday

It’s worth understanding that the failure of the bailout package in the House was a failure of leadership, as I said last night. Nobody has confidence in the political system, and the political class closest to the people revolted. There’s no trust and no belief, and so a popular uprising is the result. There will be incumbents falling that you never expected in November, if challengers figure out how to channel that anger. While the support of the bill was mixed, the opposition was quite vocal and almost nobody believed that regular people would get anything out of it.

But putting aside whether or not you wanted the bill to pass, this failure is more pronounced on the Republican side. The facts are that 2/3 of their caucus voted against the plan, after the leadership assured everyone that they would get half their side. Their leadership scrambled and tried to blame it on a partisan speech given by Nancy Pelosi, which their own membership later denied.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) threw cold water on a key rationale House Republican leaders have been employing this afternoon to explain why they couldn’t deliver more GOP votes for the Wall Street bailout package.

At a Monday afternoon press conference, GOP leaders argued that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) cost the measure a dozen Republican votes by delivering an overly partisan floor speech in support of it.

But Bachmann, speaking at a Republican Study Committee press conference, told reporters, “I want to assure you that was not the case. We are not babies who suck our thumbs. We have very principled reasons for voting no.”

Other conservatives said the same thing, and by the end of the day, even the leadership was backing away from this alibi.

The larger point is that nobody’s in charge of the Republican Party anymore. Their President and their current standard-bearer urged a yes vote and they couldn’t get it. And the “elder statesman” of the conservative base, Newt Gingrich, apparently stabbed leadership in the back:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was working aggressively behind the scenes to defeat the Wall Street rescue plan minutes before he himself released a public statement in support of the package, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on Tuesday.

Gingrich was whipping up votes for the opposition, Mitchell said, apparently without the knowledge of the current GOP leader, John Boehner, who was responsible for recruiting enough support from his caucus to help ensure the bill’s passage. Ultimately, the GOP was only able to rally roughly a third of its members.

“Newt Gingrich,” she said on MSNBC, “I am told reliably by leading Republicans who are close to him, he was whipping against this up until the last minute, when he issued that face-saving statement. Newt Gingrich was telling people in the strongest possible language that this was a terrible deal, not only that it was a terrible deal, it was a disaster, it was the end of democracy as we know, it was socialism — and then at the last minute [he] comes out with a statement when the vote is already in place.”

Indeed, as Mitchell noted, shortly before the bill’s failure, Gingrich “reluctantly” came out in favor of its passage: “Therefore, while I am discouraged at the final collapse of the Bush Administration, and frustrated by the Democrats’ passion for the taxpayer’s money, I would reluctantly and sadly vote for the bailout were I still in office.”

Wow. That’s just chaos. A lot of time we Democrats think that the GOP strategist class is a collection of evil geniuses, plotting away and cleverly setting up their opponents over and over. Actually, they might just be jockeying for power and headed toward a purifying self-destruction, without acting solely with the Democrats in mind. I think you’re going to see new leadership elections on the Republican side after the elections, as more moderates retire or lose their races, and the conservative wackjobs consolidate their power with a smaller base. Expect more backstabbing and treachery between now and November. This is the picture of a political party in crisis.

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Off To Helsinki

by tristero

I’m off to Finland for a week or so, to give a talk on music and film, to hear some new music, and to see dear friends. I suspect we will have plenty of opportunity to enjoy boiling hot saunas, intense salmiakki, and plates of hand-picked chanterelles. Pity me, dear friends, pity me.

I’ll be busy but I may post some reports about what at least my Finnish acquaintances think about the upcoming American election. My suspicion is that they will be utterly shocked to learn that for all intents and purposes it’s a tie. We should be, too.

Heihei!

Fergodssake

by digby

And I mean that literally.

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Hey Flyboy

by digby

I was just watching Bill Maher on the old TiVO and he had on a guest named Lisa Schiffrin, one of The Corner’s many wingnut welfare queens. She explained that the conservatives were more capable of solving the economic crisis because they use reason and facts to solve problems unlike the overly emotional liberals who are blinded by their feelings.

That’s so true. For instance, a conservative would never publish something like this in a major newspaper:

Hey, Flyboy
Women voters agree: President Bush is a hottie!

I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking–how to put it?–really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly “hot,” as in virile, sexy and powerful.

You don’t see a lot of that in my neighborhood, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (I’m told there’s more of it in the “red” states.) I was mesmerized. I flipped around watching W. land on many channels. I watched the whole speech, which was fine. But a business suit just doesn’t do it the way a flight suit does. In the course of this I peeked over at my husband, the banker. He was in his third month of reading a book about the Six Day War and didn’t seem to notice.

Nonetheless, I know that I am not the only one who entertained these untoward thoughts. The American media were fully aware of how stunning the president looked last week. And they chose to defuse it by referring endlessly to the “photo-oppiness” of the event. The man uses overwhelming military force to vanquish a truly evil foe, facing down balking former “allies,” and he is not taken seriously as a foreign-policy president. He out top-guns the Hollywood version, and all the media can talk about is the impending campaign commercial.

With a few exceptions: Brian Williams shook his head in awe at the clip and said, if I may paraphrase, “that, ladies and gentlemen, is a president at the pinnacle of success, having just won a war.” The New York Post ran the hot shot on its front page. And Newsweek called it a photo-op but gave the president what can only be called a centerfold.

Meanwhile David Gergen, arguably as bloodless a creature as has ever graced too many White Houses and TV shows, actually broke into a grin and said: “This will set the standard for advance men for years to come.” Advance men? I think it will set a new standard for women voters.

I decided to run a reality check among the soccer moms I spend my days with. At my daughter’s East Side school, my friend Emily, a mother of two and probably a liberal, examined the picture of the president in his fly-boy gear that I just happened to have in my purse. She looked carefully, grinned and said, “He’s a hottie. No doubt about it. Really a hottie. Why haven’t I noticed this before? He looks so much better than Michael Douglas in that movie we saw,” comparing the tired, indifferent megastar of “The American President” to the totally present leader of the free world.

Alexandra, an unmarried event planner in her 30s, e-mailed: “Hot? SO HOT!!!!! THAT UNIFORM!” In a more restrained way, my friend Maggie, a writer/mom, explained: “I think he is actually protecting me and my sons, and I find that attractive in a man.” Suzi, who did her mom time and now writes biographies, also began with restraint. I asked, casually, what she thought about President Bush. She answered, carefully, “He’s so confident. He is a very credible, trustworthy leader.” “Yeah,” I pursue, “but do you think he’s sexy?” “Oh God, yes,” she said. “I mean, that swagger. George Bush in a pair of jeans is a treat to watch.” This from a soft-spoken woman inclined to intellectual pursuits.

Back on the West Side, among the liberals I live surrounded by, there was dissent. At my younger children’s preschool, comments ranged from “well he’s cute, but not my type” to “I can’t think of anything more revolting.” Many of them still cite Bill Clinton and his allegedly penetrating intellect as more appealing.

Liberals make such a fetish of intellect. But who cares how smart you are if you can’t make a decision and follow through? Mr. Clinton could not seem to do that with foreign policy, or with Miss Lewinsky. Still, I concede that having a Republican president with sex appeal is kind of a new idea. We haven’t actually seen one in living memory. more here (if you can stomach it.)

That was Lisa Schiffrin, of course. Using reason and fact to solve her “problem.”

As we contemplate this next election, I think it’s a really good idea to recall just how full-on nuts the right wing was when they were riding high. It’s this kind of dizzy, delusional hysteria that got us in this fix and it’s important that they not be allowed to airbrush this behavior out of history.

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Who’s Yer Daddy?

by digby

Gotta love this headline:

President Bush, Nancy Pelosi among biggest losers in bailout debacle

Golly, who benefits from that interpretation?

So, they are all saying that Pelosi blew it because you never bring a vote to the floor unless you have the votes. But what do you do if they lie to your face? And apparently Democrats are not allowed to be “partisan” about this problem which translates into them taking responsibility for this epic shit pile the Republicans have created.

That headline says exactly what John McCain and the Republicans want to be the story. And they want to put Democrats in a rhetorical straitjacket by saying that they can’t “politicize” the financial crisis the same way they couldn’t “politicize” 9/11 or Iraq or Katrina. In other words, criticizing Republicans for their massive failures is always irresponsible.

Excuse me, but bullshit. We are in a very important election. Possibly the most important election in our lifetimes. Certainly, more important than the bail out, more important than anything is making sure that the Republicans are held responsible for this big shit pile and winning the election. If McCain and the GOP win, it’s going to take a lot more than 700 billion dollars to dig us out of this problem.

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Maalox Moments

by digby

It looks like tomorrow may be “interesting.” Lerxst reports:

We may have even more chaos to look forward to in financial markets tomorrow as hedge fund redemptions cascade in for the end of the quarter as the NYT reports:

The big worry is that a spate of hurried sales could unleash a vicious circle within the hedge fund industry, with the sales leading to more losses, and those losses leading to more withdrawals, and so on. A big test will come on Tuesday, when many funds are scheduled to accept withdrawal requests for the end of the year.

“Everybody’s watching for redemptions,” said James McKee, director of hedge fund research at Callan Associates, a consulting firm in San Francisco. “And there could be a cascading effect, where redemptions cause other redemptions.”

Krugman obliquely referenced this earlier today:

… there’s a serious chance of a run on the hedge funds, which could make things a lot worse.

Just passing it along …

Oh, and in case anyone’s still wondering why the administration has no credibility, get a load of this.

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