Month: September 2008

Situational Feminism

by digby

I’m pretty sure I died a couple of weeks ago and nobody told me. Having to watch Rush Limbaugh wave the feminist flag in favor of Sarah Palin’s regressive politics and personal corruption can only be described as my own personal definition of hell:

LIMBAUGH: I’ll tell you what this Troopergate’s all about. I’m going to tell you exactly what it’s all about. It’s about the good ol’ boys of Alaska being upset that a woman had upset the apple cart, got rid of Murkowski, got rid of the other Republican opponent in the primary. This is all about the good ol’ boys of Alaska saying, “We’re not going to sit here and be run by a damn woman. We’re going to take care of it. We’re going to take this woman — ” That’s all this is. And of course this guy’s working with — doesn’t matter.

When the boys don’t like the girl, Democrat and Republican boys will line up, and then they’ll fight each other later after they get rid of the girl. And that’s exactly what is happening here. This is pure sexism in Alaska on the part of these old boys trying to get rid of Sarah Palin, and she didn’t put up with it, and she didn’t bend over and let them have their way.

He may want to work on his metaphors a little bit before he appears at the next NOW rally.

I wonder how he reconciles that comment with this:

Oh, gosh, that hurts, my friends. It reminds me of my first wife. Ah! Gee! It is just painful to hear this, and then she [Hillary Clinton] starts yelling everywhere — Dawn, you can smile. She’s in there shaking her head. She’s — she’s here in a den of sexists, folks, and she puts up such a game front. Chauvinists, I should say. We’re not sexists, we’re chauvinists — we’re male chauvinist pigs, and we’re happy to be because we think that’s what men were destined to be. We think that’s what women want. [4/15/04]

or this:

Well, Rich Lowry has a column today, National Review Online, and Time magazine has just discovered that stay-at-home moms are women who have made legitimate choices to stay home and raise their young children — a cover story. Time magazine has headlined the case for staying home, and the magazine, according to Lowry, reports without sneering or condescension, the trend toward more new mothers leaving the workforce. Yes, it’s a trend. It started years ago when the feminist movement decided that their best friends were going to be German shepherds. You know. So that’s — well, it’s true. You go to the right airports and you can see it. [3/19/04]

… or any of the other dozens of examples of his disgusting misogyny?

Maybe Palin has made him see the light. (And maybe lipsticked pigs can fly helicopters…)

The truth of the matter is that the two of them, along with the rest of the conservative movement, have created a post modern, up-is-down bizarroworld that normal people have no chance of ever penetrating without going crazy from the dissonance. Like I said — hell.

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Vets Shouldn’t Vote

by digby

They might not vote “correctly.” After all, they’ve seen wars and might not think that it’s such a great idea for the US to constantly be pushing more of them just say “suck on this.”

Recall this:

The [disabled]veterans, at Bally’s for their national convention, gave him a tepid reception, especially considering McCain’s life story. The Arizona senator was a Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam, tortured and held as a prisoner of war for 5 1/2 years.

Just one of 14 veterans interviewed by the Sun after his speech said he is a certain McCain voter, and the nonpartisan group’s legislative director expressed concerns about McCain’s proposed “Veterans’ Care Access Card.”

I wrote a while back about the inexplicable new rule banning voter registration at VA hospitals. The good news is that they’ve rescinded the rule. The bad news is that it may not make much difference:

[O]n Monday, as the Senate Rules and Administration Committee held a hearing in Washington on a bill to ensure veterans living at VA facilities could be helped with voter registration, a legal motion was being filed in federal court in California alleging the VA was still blocking efforts to register voters in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Following last week’s announcement of VA’s new voter registration policy, a VA facility in San Francisco blocked a non-profit group, Veterans for Peace, from registering voters, the legal motion said. The filing said the VA was seeking to require Veterans for Peace members to go through the process of screening VA volunteers, a process that would delay registration efforts. In contrast, the VA does not require screening for most other visitors.

“The VA has disenfranchised veterans and interfered with the freedom of political parties and nonpartisan groups to associate with their members and with other citizens who reside on VA campuses,” the motion said. “This Court should prohibit further interference with voter registration at any VA campus for the imminent federal election.”

Scott Rafferty, the Washington-based attorney who filed Monday’s motion on behalf of a California labor organizer who in 2004 was blocked from registering voters on another VA facility in California, said there were political reasons behind the agency’s refusal to register veterans.

“Veterans’ experience in war gives them a powerful voice,” Rafferty said. “The VA wants to stop them from using their right to speak out and to vote. The VA knows that many veterans oppose the Administration’s conduct of the War, the overextension of the military, and its inadequate support for returning warriors.”

Hey, if you can illegitimately shave off just enough votes from disabled veterans, distressed homeowners, latinos and African Americans and first time voter you can probably just get over the finish line.

Some people call this cheating. Republicans call it winning.

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Mr Fix It

by digby

I wrote a post below about McCain’s head knocking style of governance joking that he seems to think he can bully his way into solutions to even the most complicated economic problems.

Well, it turns out that he really does:

The way I would fix Social Security is to sit down with Republicans and Democrats together at a table, voicing my opposition to tax increases, and sitting down and negotiating a fix to Social Security, which is the only way that Social Security is going to be fixed. That’s my solution to the Social Security system.

I’m beginning to think George W. Bush is a deeply nuanced thinker by comparison. And I’m less concerned that Palin might become president if McCain passes on before his term is up. I don’t see how she can be any worse than he is. They are pretty much the same person — proudly ignorant, aggressive egomaniacs.

Update: The country may be waking up from its Palin stupor. The Gallup tracking poll shows Obama ticking up as of last night. Anybody who watched Mccain speak about the economy these last two days has got to be a little bit concerned.

H/t to bb

Truth And Lie

by tristero

This is a lie told by a well-known neocon – connected serial liar.

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

This, on the other hand, is. true:

On the eve of his election in 1968, Richard Nixon secretly conspired with the South Vietnamese government to wreck all-party Vietnam peace talks as part of a deliberate effort to prolong a conflict in which more than 20,000 Americans were still to die, along with tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians.

Notice a pattern? The Republicans commit treason but lie that Democrats do. Republicans lied that Gore claimed he invented the Internet – search the Daily Howler to learn Gore never said such a thing – and then turn around and assert, with an absolutely straight face, as dday noted, that McCain helped create the Blackberry.

Up-is-downism is too kind. It doesn’t capture the blatantly corrupt mentation that lies at the heart of this kind of deplorable trash.

Lipstick on a Little Baby Duck

by digby

So Sarah Palin is appearing with Hannity tonight. Alone. I guess she’s afraid of Alan Colmes.

She’s afraid of Alan Colmes?

Update: Check out this ad. It was on CNN earlier.

Shorter ranting crazy man: “they’re going to steal your money and give it to undeserving black people.”

Hey, some things are evergreen…

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77 Cents

by dday

I’m pleasantly surprised to see equal pay make a prominent appearance in the Presidential election. Surprised and saddened – I can’t believe this is still an issue in 21st-century America. But here we are, and the Obama campaign is certainly using this as a wedge. He’s released an ad in Virginia and perhaps elsewhere on the subject, without posting it in his YouTube channel so that the McCain campaign would know what’s coming:

I think it’s especially effective to use the line about how McCain thinks women need only “education and training,” as if they’re a bunch of dopes who need to learn how to do their jobs if they want to get paid like the big boys.

In addition, Michelle Obama has posted at BlogHer about equal pay, revealing that she’ll be campaigning with Lilly Ledbetter.

Lilly is from Alabama. For nearly 20 years, she worked for a Goodyear tire plant. She was the only female supervisor—so you know this is a tough, hard-working woman. One day, someone sent her an anonymous letter with a list of salaries of her co-workers. That’s how she found out that she was making less than the men she worked with—even men who were less senior than she was. And we’re not talking about a few dollars. Some of her male counterparts were making 40 percent more than she was—for doing the same work.

Over 20 years, that adds up to a lot of money—money that could have helped Lilly send her kids to college, provide some comfort in her everyday life, or prepare for her retirement.

So Lilly did the brave and difficult thing. She confronted this injustice. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that, according to the law, Lilly only had 180 days to complain about the pay discrimination. So because it had taken her 20 years to find out the truth, she had missed her chance at justice.

Well, some people in Congress decided to change that law, so it would no longer reward employers for hiding discrimination until they ran out the clock. Last July, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed the House. But this April, Republicans in the Senate blocked it. Now, Democrats in the Senate are working to bring Lilly’s bill back for another vote this fall.

My husband is a proud supporter of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Senator McCain does not support it. In fact, Senator McCain said that what women really need is more education and training.

There’s some talk that the Congress will bring the Fair Pay Act back up for a vote before the session ends, which would be smart.

It’s a discrimination issue as well as an economic issue, which has become the key fulcrum of the election from the standpoint of the Obama campaign. The unemployment rate for women has seen the highest one-month spike in 33 years, and as state and local governments cut back in an economic downturn, women, who currently receive proportionately more government services, will continue to suffer. And getting 77 cents on the dollar compared to men doesn’t help.

McCain may have hired a woman to run with him (and the narrowness of her issue silos as Vice President is embarrassing and I think telling about how McCain views her), but on women’s issues, it’s clear who is on what side.

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O Ye Of Little Faith

by tristero

I knew, if I only believed, it would happen sooner or later:

DAYTON, TN—A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.

“I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits,” said Darlene Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious stain, which appeared last Monday on one side of the Rhea County Courthouse. The building was also the location of the famed “Scopes Monkey Trial” and is widely considered one of Darwinism’s holiest sites. “Forgive me, O Charles, for ever doubting your Divine Evolution. After seeing this miracle of limestone pigmentation with my own eyes, my faith in empirical reasoning will never again be tested.”

h/t to my friend, DS.

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Pitched Battle

by digby

Kevin Drum wonders why Obama doesn’t name check the Republican party in his speeches:

I continue to be a little puzzled by Obama’s unwillingness to plainly brand this as a failure of the Republican Party. People may or may not understand nebulous philosophies, but they can pretty easily be convinced that DC Republicans are basically shills for Wall Street and the rich and should therefore get 100% of the blame for this mess. At least, they could be convinced if Obama just went ahead and said it. After all, if the tables were turned do you think McCain would be so chary about blaming it on Democrats? I don’t think so either.

I’m pretty sure it’s because he still hopes to govern in a post-partisan way. He wouldn’t be the first:

My book, Secrecy & Privilege, opens with a scene in spring 1994 when a guest at a White House social event asks Bill Clinton why his administration didn’t pursue unresolved scandals from the Reagan-Bush era, such as the Iraqgate secret support for Saddam Hussein’s government and clandestine arms shipments to Iran.

Clinton responds to the questions from the guest, documentary filmmaker Stuart Sender, by saying, in effect, that those historical questions had to take a back seat to Clinton’s domestic agenda and his desire for greater bipartisanship with the Republicans.

Clinton “didn’t feel that it was a good idea to pursue these investigations because he was going to have to work with these people,” Sender told me in an interview. “He was going to try to work with these guys, compromise, build working relationships.”

Perhaps that isn’t the way Barack looks at governing. But it is what he’s been promising. It’s possible that this rough campaign has disabused him of any illusions he may have had about the Republicans and their willingness to engage in good faith. But after watching them operate for the past 16 years of hand to hand combat in a nearly equally divided country that, short of a landslide victory, it’s been clear to me that there was never any hope of bipartisan cooperation.

If this election is close they will fight back any of Obama’s proposals ferociously. They see such elections as illegitimate four year respites from rightful Republican rule. They will not see themselves as having been repudiated, but rather having been failed by both Bush and McCain — because they were apostates. True conservatives never give up, never give in, never … compromise with Democrats.

Liberals are going to have to decisively defeat the modern conservative movement in a big election if they want to move past this partisan fighting. As long as each side is roughly equal in numbers, and the races are close, this will remain a pitched battle.

Let’s hope this will be a big decisive progressive win in November. But — let’s not count on it. I think the smart money is on a close election, which means there is no margin being nice to Republicans. They certainly aren’t going to be nice in return.

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Declaring War On Economic Meltdown

by digby

So, McCain is babbling incoherently about the economy. I’m not surprised. He isn’t interested in the economy. It’s complicated. He doesn’t like complicated.

This is how he plans to govern the most powerful nation in the world:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain.

Maybe McCain could go to Wall Street and sit the stock market down with the economy and tell them to “stop the bullshit.”

Sometimes being a bully just isn’t sufficient …

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Fundamentals

by dday

People are having fun with John McCain’s economic adviser’s absurd statement that McCain invented the Blackberry (that “serial liar” tag is going to stick any minute now, right?), but the Obama campaign is staying on message.

“If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

The “fundamentals are strong” line, which is directly analogous to a line spoke by Herbert Hoover the day after the 1929 stock market crash, is really symbolic of what this election is about. Republicans have funneled cash to the moneyed class, removed oversight and regulatory restrictions, and turned Wall Street into a Wild West show. McCain was right there the entire time, and his economic guru Phil Gramm is as responsible as anyone for the mess we’ve gotten ourselves in. (Krugman had a great line yesterday: “Ben Bernanke and I think Hank Paulson understand that we could manage to have another Great Depression if we work at it hard enough. I think Phil Gramm might be just the guy to do it.”) Failed Republican policies have brought us to the brink of financial collapse and Barack Obama knows it. He’s released a strong new ad targeting the “fundamentals” line.

And his campaign events are doubling down on this attack and connecting McCain to the Republican establishment which has made a hash of things.

Yesterday, Wall Street suffered its worst losses since just after 9/11. We are in the most serious financial crisis in generations. Yet Senator McCain stood up yesterday and said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong.

A few hours later, his campaign sent him back out to clean up his remarks, and he tried to explain himself again this morning by saying that what he meant was that American workers are strong. But we know that Senator McCain meant what he said the first time, because he has said it over and over again throughout this campaign — no fewer than 16 times, according to one independent count […]

Make no mistake: my opponent is running for four more years of policies that will throw the economy further out of balance. His outrage at Wall Street would be more convincing if he wasn’t offering them more tax cuts. His call for fiscal responsibility would be believable if he wasn’t for more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and more of a trillion dollar war in Iraq paid for with deficit spending and borrowing from foreign creditors like China. His newfound support for regulation bears no resemblance to his scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement.

John McCain cannot be trusted to reestablish proper oversight of our financial markets for one simple reason: he has shown time and again that he does not believe in it.

Even his ads on other topics – like this one seeking to reassure hunters – goes right back to the economy and contrasts Obama’s support for workers with McCain’s.

The truth is that McCain can’t get his story straight about deregulation. He’s championed it for years, his economic advisers have championed it for years, and now he’s trying to reinvent himself as some sort of populist. The New York Times noted the disconnect today.

On the campaign trail on Monday, Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, struck a populist tone. Speaking in Florida, he said that the economy’s underlying fundamentals remained strong but were being threatened “because of the greed by some based in Wall Street and we have got to fix it.”

But his record on the issue, and the views of those he has always cited as his most influential advisers, suggest that he has never departed in any major way from his party’s embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline.

While Mr. McCain has cited the need for additional oversight when it comes to specific situations, like the mortgage problems behind the current shocks on Wall Street, he has consistently characterized himself as fundamentally a deregulator and he has no history prior to the presidential campaign of advocating steps to tighten standards on investment firms.

In fact, McCain called for more and less government regulation today in the space of an hour.

These are not the terms on which McCain wants to fight the election, but events have intervened. McCain has continued to stand with his party, deny the scope of the problem and hold to the conservative position of free-market nirvana (except when the corporations fail – then it’s time to get in line at the Treasury Department soup kitchen for their handout). And now that the excrement has hit the fan, McCain is today proposing – no lie – a Beltway commission.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Tuesday called for a high-level commission to study the current economic crisis and claimed that a corrupt and excessive Wall Street had betrayed American workers. […]

Appearing Tuesday on the three network morning shows, McCain said there was indeed a financial crisis and that to understand what had caused it, the nation would need a review on the order of the one led by the Sept. 11 commission. […]

“I warned two years ago that this situation was deteriorating and unacceptable,” McCain said on “Good Morning America” on ABC. “And the old-boy network and the corruption in Washington is directly involved and one of the causes of this financial crisis that we’re in today. And I know how to fix it and I know how to get things done.”

If there was ever a do-nothing solution to a problem, it’s to convene a commission of insiders to write a paper that’ll sit on a shelf unread. Obama mocked this today.

Just today, Senator McCain offered up the oldest Washington stunt in the book – you pass the buck to a commission to study the problem. But here’s the thing – this isn’t 9/11. We know how we got into this mess. What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I’ll provide it, John McCain won’t, and that’s the choice for the American people in this election.”

Cynics resist the idea that a Presidential election can be about issues anymore, but outside events have a way of making talk about lipstick and arugula look a bit dated. Obama’s doing the right thing.

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