Month: October 2009

Uh Oh

by digby

Get out the smelling salts and tell Gloria Borger that she’s going to need to be sure to have the fainting couch handy. Alan Grayson has done it again:

Oh wait. That wasn’t Alan Grayson, was it? It was Republican Louie Gohmert. Yesterday.

And anyway, it’s completely different:

John Randall, the NRCC eCampaign Director, responds by arguing that the Grayson and Gohmert instances are not comparable. “I disagree this is similar to Grayson’s despicable personal claims of what Republicans want all Americans to do,” he emails. “This was a case of a Congressman relaying a concern of his constituent to his colleagues – unlike Grayson who aired his own unacceptable views.”

Plus, what Grayson said was true and what Gohmert’s “wise senior” allegedly said was false, so there’s really no comparison.

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Dunn Is Done

by tristero

No question about it: Anita Dunn, soon-to-be-former White House Communications Director, is living on another planet. What the hell was she thinking? If that was a joke – and the characterization of Mao and Mother Teresa as “two of my favorite political philosophers” – could only be a joke, it was one helluva stupid one, especially to be making to high school grads.

Some decry this as a typical Beckian fake controversy. Not in the slightest: our politicians on both the right and the left, need to respect the solemn responsibilities we have given them. Imagine, for example, the outraged reaction, the calls for impeachment from across the media and the political spectrum, if, say, George W. Bush, had ever dared to “joke”:

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it

So, bye, bye and good riddance, Ms. Dunn! Don’t slam the door on the way out, Anita.

Wait…hold on… what’s that, again?

You’re kidding, right? George W. Bush actually joked three times in public about wanting to be a dictator, and nobody except a few hyper-paranoid bloggers* made a big deal about it?

Never mind. [Intoned in the best imitation of Roseanne Roseannadanna Emily Litella you can muster. ]

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*I was one of them. For some weird reason, I’m allergic to publicly-expressed wishes to become a dictator when the president of the United States makes them. Probably because I’m pretty godamm sure their “joke” barely conceals a huge jones for an oppressive, murderous, torturing tyranny that spies on its own citizens and replaces the rule of law with that of men, We were dead right to be worried about Bush, but Dunn, no matter how flaky her remarks , represents no threat to anyone.

Feel Good Today Too

by digby

Yesterday, a bunch of bloggers asked everyone to feel good for a change and donate to the No on 1, gay marriage initiative in Maine and a whole bunch of you did. And the folks fighting for it up there in Maine are grateful:

If you didn’t get a chance to feel good yesterday, you can feel good today, by donating here.

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Coy

by digby

A prince’s prerogative is to change his mind.

U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., whose vote could be crucial to breaking an expected GOP filibuster on health care legislation, Thursday said he would consider voting to move the bill forward, even if he ultimately casts his ballot against the reform package.

Democrats will need 60 votes to override a filibuster of a health care reform bill in the Senate.

Elements of two Senate bills on health care are being reconciled by representatives of the White House, and U.S. Sens. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

Lieberman has said he does not favor the public health option in Dodd’s bill or the excise tax on the so-called “Cadillac” health plans because he fears it will increase consumer premiums. He also objects to cuts in the Medicare Advantage plans to help pay for health care reform.

Connecticut’s junior senator almost lost chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee after he campaigned for GOP presidential nominee U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

He became an independent after losing the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary to Ned Lamont, but won re-election in the general election.

Lieberman said he was “inclined to let the motion to proceed” (or cloture) go forward, but “I haven’t decided yet.”

I guess that’s good news. But if you read on in the article you’ll see that he still doesn’t think you should expand health insurance to everyone and basically believes that we should be bleeding the system of money before we even think of covering everyone. His views are to the right of many Republicans on this.

He may be just acting the contrarian role he’s staked out for himself. t sounds as though he’s counting on Presidents Snowe and Nelson to sufficiently gut the bill so that he can at least let it come to the floor, but at this point we don’t know. Certainly, I think he’ll go off the reservation the minute a decision is made to put in a public option without triggers. He’s worth watching as this thing develops. As long as he’s not publicly committing to back a Republican filibuster, at the very least it means that the issue is still alive.

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Dumb And Dumber Choice

by tristero

Looks like the dumb food labeling initiative called Smart Choices is going to have to explain why it’s misleading consumers into thinking Froot Loops is a species of health food:

Raising the stakes in the battle over nutritional claims for packaged foods, the Connecticut attorney general said on Wednesday that he was investigating a national labeling campaign that promotes products like Froot Loops and mayonnaise as nutritionally smart choices.

In letters to Kellogg’s, General Mills and PepsiCo, the attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, said he was concerned that the program, called Smart Choices, was “overly simplistic, inaccurate and ultimately misleading.” The three companies are among several food giants that participate in the program.

In an interview Wednesday, Mr. Blumenthal said he had discussed his investigation with attorneys general from other states and several had expressed interest in joining his effort. In other prominent consumer protection cases, states have worked together to pursue companies or industries, including cigarette makers and subprime lenders, over charges of deceptive marketing.

“As a matter of common sense, these sugar-laden or fat-saturated products seem very questionable as so-called ‘Smart Choices’ nutritionally,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “We’re ratcheting up pressure for truthful answers to these issues.

Good luck with that. All he’s gonna learn is that to the food industry and its paid apologists, the sentence,

This incredibly lousy food product is not the worst of its sort on sale in the US.

is equivalent to

This food product is a Smart Choice if you care about your nutrition.

And legally, the food industry’s probably gonna fight like hell to defend their right to propagate grossly misleading double-talk and pretend it’s some kind of a free speech issue.

As if deliberately bamboozling millions of Americans into thinking they’re doing their kids some sort of big fucking favor serving them Froot Loops every morning is some kind of constitutional right.

Tough Luck

by digby

I wrote about this last week and nothing’s happened yet. I’m not sure why nobody gives a damn about it, but it seems to me as if the Democrats could at least say something.

From the National Employment Law Project:

As we reported last week, Senators Reid and Baucus, with the help of Senators Shaheen, Dodd, Reed and Klobuchar, introduced a bill that would provide 14 additional weeks of unemployment benefits to workers exhausting their benefits in all states, and an additional 6 weeks (for a total of 20 weeks) for those in states with unemployment rates at or over 8.5%. This bill would be fully paid for by simply extending a small surtax on employers. This tax is nothing new as it has been in place for 30 years and amounts to a mere $12 per worker per year. We had hoped that in light of the calls for an extension from certain key Republican Senators including Senators McConnell, DeMint and Cornyn, that this bill would move quickly through the Senate, back to the House, and to the President’s desk for signature. Unfortunately, that has not happened yet. Last Thursday, and again this Tuesday, the Republicans (first Sen. Kyl from Arizona and then Sen. Hatch from Utah) blocked attempts to move the bill and provide unemployed workers with the relief they desperately needed. They have a series of amendments, most of which have nothing to do with unemployment insurance, that they want to force the Senate to debate. The amendments include issues such as the TARP program, ACORN, and an attempt to characterize extending the surtax to pay for this extension as an unreasonable burden on employers. We are sure you agree that a mere $14 per year per employee, a tax employers have been paying for the last three decades, is a small price to pay for the important stabilizing and stimulative effects of extending unemployment benefits to those who have exhausted them.[…]Now is the time for all of you to contact your Senators. If your Senators are Democrats, tell them to speak up and stand up to demand a vote on the unemployment extension. If your Senators are Republicans, tell them to stop playing partisan games instead of performing their duty to their constituents. Click here to send your message. Ask your friends and family to do the same — we need to make our voices heard and get this done!

Evidently, John Kyl and Orrin Hatch think it’s perfectly a-ok to hold unemployed workers hostage during the country’s worst economic downturn in 70 years. WTH?I don’t know how many of you have ever tried to get by during a long period where unemployment insurance is all that’s keeping the wolf from the door, but I have. It’s scary stuff. These unemployed workers aren’t being lazy. There are no jobs. People need these benefits now, not a month from now.It’s outrageous that the congress isn’t passing these bills as a matter of course. That nobody is aware this is happening (except for the poor schmucks who aren’t going to get a check) is an indictment of both the Democrats and the media.

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Back To The 50s

by digby

Feeling nostalgic for those good old days of lunch time martinis and Mad Men? Here’s a reminder of how that era was actually experienced:

Civil rights advocates in eastern Louisiana are calling for a justice of the peace of Tangipahoa Parish to resign after he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple. “He’s an elected public official and one of his duties is to marry people, he doesn’t have the right to say he doesn’t believe in it,” said Patricia Morris, president of the NAACP branch of Tangipahoa Parish, located near the Mississippi line. “If he doesn’t do what his position call for him to do, he should resign from that position.” The demands for Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish’s 8th Ward, to step down came after he wouldn’t issue a marriage license to Beth Humphrey, 30, and her boyfriend, Terence McKay, 32, both of Hammond. Bardwell and the couple didn’t immediately return calls from CNN Thursday. However, Bardwell told the Hammond’s Daily Star that he was concerned for the children who may be born of the relationship and that, in his experience, most interracial marriages don’t last. “I’m not a racist,” Bardwell told the newspaper. “I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children.”

Right. Their poor kids could grow up to be president someday.

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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

by digby

The pettiness of the modern conservative movement never ceases to amaze. But it’s actually one of their most potent weapons. They make a huge shrieking stink about everything until people just get so sick of it they can’t wait until the Democrat is out of office so they don’t have to hear it anymore. It even used to have a name: Clinton Fatigue.

Here’s a good example of the kind of thing we’re going to be putting up with:

Ronald D. Rotunda and J. Peter Pham … inanely write in tomorrow’s Washington Post that President Obama is constitutionally barred from accepting the Nobel Prize:

An opinion of the U.S. attorney general advised, in 1902, that “a simple remembrance,” even “if merely a photograph, falls under the inclusion of ‘any present of any kind whatever.’ ” President Clinton’s Office of Legal Counsel, in 1993, reaffirmed the 1902 opinion, and explained that the text of the clause does not limit “its application solely to foreign governments acting as sovereigns.” This opinion went on to say that the Emolument Clause applies even when the foreign government acts through instrumentalities. Thus the Nobel Prize is an emolument, and a foreign one to boot.

One problem: the hero of the first Gulf War, Gen. Normon Schwarzkopf, received an honorary Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth (which technically makes him a “Knight of the British Empire”) in May of 1991 while still on active duty. According to Rotunda and Pham’s argument, this violated all kinds of constitutional constraints, Emolument Clause notwithstanding. He retired at the end of August 1991, meaning the General was clearly a foreign agent for the British Empire for approximately 3 months, because how can you be a Knight and an American General at the same time? Where would his loyalty really be? Under this Op-Ed’s logic, Schwarzkopf’s retirement South should have sent him to the Naval Brig at Charleston, not the golf courses of Florida.

They argue that the money he will receive will belong to the United States and he can’t give it to charity because it would entitle him to a tax deduction. (So much for that principle about charity they all supposedly believe in.)

They claim that he has run afoul of this constitutional requirement before as well:

This is at least the second time that Obama has run afoul of the emolument clause. On June 3, 2009, the day before he gave his speech in Cairo on relations with the Muslim world, he accepted (and even donned) the bejeweled Collar of the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit, Saudi Arabia’s highest honor, from the hands of King Abdullah.(President Bush was awarded the Order in January last year.)

Wow. That sounds bad. I’ll bet FOX was livid:

After dinner in the King’s Palace, Bush and Abdullah walked through a large central atrium and picked up cups of Arabic coffee to take into their meetings. Sitting side by side in chairs, Abdullah presented Bush with a gold necklace adorned with a large medallion — the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit, the country’s highest honor, named after the founder of the modern Saudi state. The award was placed around Bush’s neck and the two exchanged the region’s traditional double kiss. “I am honored,” Bush said.

Well, that was different. Bush wasn’t a Kenyan usurper bent on destroying the nation.This is the way the death by a thousand cuts strategy works. The wingnuts are already in a frenzy about Obama dismantling the constitution, although they don’t really know specifically what it is he’s supposed to have done. But the specifics don’t matter because all they need to do is feed the teabaggers ,who are hungry for new examples of how the new Hitler is ruining the American way of life. (And at some point, its entirely possible that the “smell test” will kick in among the villagers. They find it very difficult to resist this stuff for long. In fact, here’s a good example of it beginning to permeate. They can’t really put their fingers on it. But something is amiss.
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Unless It Gets Crazy

by digby

Here’s a little tidbit. Blanche Lincoln’s Arkansas partner, David Mark Pryor, says he won’t join Republicans in a filibuster of health care reform unless something “crazy” happens.

Mike Stark got him on camera:

Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, whose own stance on health care remains an open question, cautioned, “I think she’s been careful to say that she supports it coming out of committee, but no guarantees on final passage because it’s going to change quite a bit between now and then.” This reporting seemed pretty useless to me, but it sounded vaguely ominous. I thought it would be a good idea ask point blank: would he support a filibuster of a Senate Health Care Reform bill? Here’s his answer:

It’s an interesting back and forth, with Pryor clearly very wary of saying anything meaningful. But I think Stark’s framing is excellent, especially since it got Pryor to say that he thinks that members of a majority party joining with the minority to filibuster a majority supported bill is not unprecedented — after all, it happened during the civil rights debates to keep African Americans from having equal rights.

Now there’s a tradition to be proud of…

Update: More interesting news from Arkansas:

First he was for it. Then he was against it. Now Rep. Mike Ross is back on board with a government-run healthcare plan. Sort of.

Ross (D-Ark.), who had emerged as a leader among centrist Blue Dog Democrats opposing the public health insurance option, has suggested something his colleagues consider even more drastic – opening Medicare to those under 65 without insurance.

He made the suggestion in meetings with House Democratic leaders and brought the idea to the closed-door House Democratic Caucus meeting Thursday.

“I — speaking only on behalf of myself — suggested one possible idea could be that instead of creating an entirely new government bureaucracy to administer a public option, Medicare could be offered as a choice,” Ross said in a statement to The Hill.

Medicare would then compete with private insurers across the age spectrum. It would be open to those who don’t have insurance through their employers, the same people who would be covered by the public option already under discussion.

That’s a terrific idea. Let’s do it.

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How Do You LIke It Now?

by digby

Limbaugh has a supporter at the Washington Post:

I am no Limbaugh fan. Not only is he infamous for ugly remarks, but he is a practitioner in the politics of hate. But — and here I write as someone with a special interest in the First Amendment — Limbaugh is being banished for essentially exercising his right to speak.

Why do educated people continuously write this tripe? The first amendment only protects us from government censorship. I’m no constitutional scholar, but I don’t think there’s any guaranteed right to own an NFL team written anywhere in the constitution. (Was it in the footnotes?)

Meanwhile, Limbaugh is now donning metaphorical blackface and saying he’s a victim of a high tech lynching just like Clarence Thomas and claiming that the NFL is an “outpost of racism and liberalism.” (That’s not even close to being true, of course.)

But he just can’t help himself:

“Who do these 70 percent African American players think is paying their salary?”

Golly, can you see why the NFL might have thought this racist jackass was more trouble than he’s worth?

Pat Buchanan tells us on Hardball that this is a form of McCarthyism and compares it to Hollywood writers being denied their jobs during the black list (which is just funny since Pat Buchanan usually considers McCarthy a great American hero.) Apparently, the NFL not wanting to deal with Limbaugh’s baggage is tantamount to censorship. (And Pat Buchanan agitating to have that totally obscure professor Ward Churchill fired for writing something he didn’t like, is a completely different thing.)

Whatever. I actually think Ed Schultz made the best observation about all this:

I do want to point out that for years Limbaugh has been saying that the free market doesn’t want liberal talk radio. Well, there’s a lot of conservative owners that would never even try progressive talk radio or liberal talk radio.

Rush, how’s that free market working for you tonight, buddy? It’s about ownership. I’m glad you found it out.

He’s right. Rush had no problem with the owners of America calling the shots until they decided that he was too radioactive to own a business in which the valuable talent is majority African American. Now he’s saying that the billionaire NFL franchise owners are trying to kill conservatism by not allowing him to “mainstream.” I guess he’ll have to go to the bank and comfort himself by having a good old fashioned cry in the great piles of thousand dollar bills they pay him.

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