Month: October 2009

Spitting On The Veterans

by digby

These blue state liberals hate the troops:

A California company wants to convert an empty facility formerly used as nursing home into a trauma assistance center for as many as 88 female veterans, including those who have been sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers. But some Taylor residents say they don’t want the facility in their town. “It would put veterans in a situation where they are going to a town that doesn’t want them,” said Cherri Wolbrueck, co-owner of a Taylor bookstore. She talked about her opposition after attending a zoning board meeting where representatives of the company — Center Point Inc., based in San Rafael, Calif. — spoke. Wolbrueck lives across the street from the proposed facility where veterans would live. She said she fears that veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder might attack residents in the Buttermilk Hill neighborhood. “They can have an episode where a flashback transports them back into a combat situation, and they can perceive anyone as a threat: an elderly person taking a walk around the neighborhood, or a child on a bike,” she said.

Dirty hippies. Oh wait:

Laura Lambe, the executive vice president of Texas Center Point Inc., which would operate the facility and is a subsidiary of the California company, said the veterans who would be served at the facility would not be a danger to the community.

Who would have thought that a small town in Texas could hate America so much. Odd, don’t you think?

Well, maybe not:

The facility would provide counseling and rehabilitation services to female veterans in Central Texas, Rivera said. It would also provide about 40 jobs, he said.

Baska said he worries about the safety of the facility based on the company’s record. The company provides health and rehabilitation services in several locations across California, including state prisons, as well as at three locations in Oklahoma.

According to a July 2007 story in The New York Times, California authorities were investigating accusations of poor health care that resulted in the stillbirth of a 7-month-old fetus at a center where mothers serve prison terms with their young children. The San Diego facility was run by Center Point.

[…]

Several people who attended Tuesday’s meeting told Rivera that the trauma assistance center was not necessary because veterans who are victims of sexual assault may receive counseling services from the Department of Veterans Affairs. A VA spokesman did not return a call for comment last week.

You can see why the town is upset. The possibility of crazed, female, assault victim veterans running amock, threatening the seniors and the children is very frightening.

Anyone care to guess what the real problem is?

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Scarlet Letters And Robes

by digby

From Barb at Dkos:

Move over, Hester Prynne:

On Nov. 1, a law in Oklahoma will go into effect that will collect personal details about every single abortion performed in the state and post them on a public website. Implementing the measure will “cost $281,285 the first year and $256,285 each subsequent year.” Here are the first eight questions that women will have to reveal:

1. Date of abortion

2. County in which abortion performed

3. Age of mother

4. Marital status of mother

5. Race of mother

6. Years of education of mother

7. State or foreign country of residence of mother

8. Total number of previous pregnancies of the mother

Oklahoma’s Department of Health argues that there is “no cause for concern or protest in regards to privacy issues” because the whore woman isn’t required to give her name, but quite obviously it wouldn’t be too hard to crack the code for those living in small communities.

This is supposedly required because they want to prevent abortion based on the gender of the fetus.

And then there’s this from George Stephanopoulos:

In a letter just released, the three Catholic bishops leading the Church’s efforts on health care warned Congress that “we will have no choice but to oppose the bill” unless current bills are amended. The letter signed by Bishop William Murphy, Cardinal Justin Rigali and Bishop John Wester outlines three main areas of concern: “that no one should be forced to pay for or participate in abortion, that health care should be affordable and available to the poor and vulnerable, and that the needs of legal immigrants should be met.” Of those, of course, abortion poses the gravest threat to the bill. The bishops simply don’t buy the argument that House Democrats found a way to block public funding for abortions with the Capps amendment, and they insist that the Hyde amendment doesn’t apply to the bills because they are not appropriations measures. A sizable bloc of House Democrats, led by Bart Stupak of Michigan, agree and are pressuring for a clear prohibition on public funding.

Why it’s the “gravest threat to the bill” I can’t imagine. The threat to immigrants under our proposed new system is just terrible. In fact, we are already seeing the corporate media begin to debate whether or not these people deserve to live or die.

But it’s quite clear that these people actually care far more for blastocysts than they do for actual living human beings, so I guess it’s logical that Stephanopoulos would see it that way.

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The Armey Manual

by digby

This is getting good …

While the energy of the anti-tax and anti-Big Government tea party movement may yet haunt Democrats in 2010, the first order of business appears to be remaking the Republican Party.

Whether it’s the loose confederation of Washington-oriented groups that have played an organizational role or the state-level activists who are channeling grass-roots anger into action back home, tea party forces are confronting the Republican establishment by backing insurgent conservatives and generating their own candidates — even if it means taking on GOP incumbents.

“We will be a headache for anyone who believes the Constitution of the United States … isn’t to be protected,” said Dick Armey, chairman of the anti-tax and limited government advocacy group FreedomWorks, which helped plan and promote the tea parties, town hall protests and the September ‘Taxpayer March’ in Washington. “If you can’t take it seriously, we will look for places of other employment for you.”

“We’re not a partisan organization, and I think many Republicans are disappointed we are not,” added Armey, a former GOP congressman.

In Florida, where the national party has signaled its preference for centrist Gov. Charlie Crist in the GOP Senate primary, tea party activists are lining up behind former state House Speaker Marco Rubio in reaction to Crist’s public backing for President Barack Obama’s stimulus package.

“We were very disappointed with Gov. Charlie Crist when he supported the stimulus, the bailout, and he appeared publicly with President Obama,” said Everett Wilkinson, a South Florida-based organizer for Tea Party Patriots. “The opposition comes from Crist’s support for the largest spending plan ever and the environmental policies he’s pushing on the American people.”

[…]

Tea party activists are also lining up behind challengers to GOP establishment-backed Senate candidates in Colorado and Connecticut. In California, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — like Crist, another National Republican Senatorial Committee-favored Senate contender — is the target of tea party animus in her primary against conservative state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore.

“My impression is that the support among tea partyers for DeVore is high,” said Mark Meckler, a California-based organizer for Tea Party Patriots. “I hear nothing but praise for the guy.”

Tea party organizers say their resistance to Republican Party-backed primary candidates has much to do with what they perceive as the GOP’s stubborn insistence on embracing candidates who don’t abide by a small government, anti-tax conservative philosophy

Hey, more power to them. They have a perfect right to try to move the Republican Party further to the right even though the party was just rejected in favor of a man and a party they portray as being far left. I guess they are convinced that the country really wanted a right wing fascist so they accidentally voted for a left wing socialist instead. Hey, it could happen to anyone.

The old saw is that a party has to be out of power for at least a couple of cycles before they settle down and realize that their schtick isn’t playing.

Meanwhile, the Democrats need to get something tangible done for the citizens or these teabaggers might actually start making sense to people.

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QOTD

by digby

Economist Larry Mishell:

“I consider President Obama to be in the situation of having inherited a burning apartment building. He proceeded to gather all the available fire trucks and douse the fires in half the floors. Yet his critics complain that the other floors are still on fire. Even worse, those critics are the ones who started the fire. And they want to withdraw the fire trucks.”

I would just add that those who started the fire did it so they could collect the insurance. And since they are relatives of the new owners, they all gain if the house burns completely down. Unfortunately, it might take down the whole neighborhood with it.

Luckily for them, the fire department doesn’t believe in looking in the rearview mirror. And anyway, the arsonists are just too big to fail.

Update: Bérubé on fire(s)

Republican firefighters responded to a series of blazes that swept through the financial districts of the nation’s major cities this past week and continue to rage from coast to coast.

The cause of the fires is not known, but some Democratic analysts are suggesting that the fires may have started in the electrical systems of the buildings, which were stripped of insulation as a result of the Free Industry and Real Estate to Unleash Power (FIRE UP) Act of 2002.

Republican fire marshals dismissed the suggestion, accusing Democrats of “playing politics” with the fires, and called for bipartisan solutions to the crisis. “If anything caused these fires, and we’re not convinced of that to begin with,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), “it was excessive regulation. Red tape is notoriously combustible, and these buildings were shrouded in it. Sarbanes-Oxley has a lot to answer for.”

Ok, just a little bit more:

From across the political spectrum, commentators David Broder and David Brooks indicated that the threat of a filibuster would likely bring down the Obama presidency. “We need to take the best ideas of both parties,” Broder told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “If Obama can’t find grounds for compromise—some water and insulation, yes, but also some flamethrowers and oil-soaked rags—he will have betrayed the promise of his presidency, which was, after all, to transcend partisan politics in Washington.” Brooks agreed, adding ominously that “Obama’s credibility is at stake, and so far he’s not passing the test.”

From across the political spectrum …

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Gay Day

by digby

Pictures of today’s March for Gay Rights on the mall today over at Aravosis’ place. Just great stuff.

I think this one is the most poignant:

Oh and according to my back of the envelope calculations, 20 million gazillion people were there. Give or take. The liberal media just won’t report it. As usual.

Update: Aravosis adds this depressing update:

NBC just did a piece about today’s gay rights march in Washington. For the political context of the gay community’s ire, NBC went to White House correspondent John Harwood. Harwood was asked if the White House was worried about “the left as a whole,” and concerns they have that the White House isn’t doing things that “the left” expected them to do. Harwood said the following:

Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the Internet left fringe.

Harwood then went on to say that the White House thinks that:

For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.

It’s Goldilocks punditry: since the gasbags had to admit that the teabaggers are a bunch of loons, they also have to dismiss the LGBT community and “the left” as loons as well. That means the village is juuuuust right.

Also keep in mind that John Harwood is one of the biggest putzes in town.

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Spies In The Skies

by digby

As we contemplate once again the disturbing notion that the political establishment seems to have no problem granting more and more unaccountable power to the homeland security apparatus, perhaps we should focus on what happens when these incremental steps are taken all the way to their natural end…

Twenty years after Ceausescu’s execution his secret service is still active. For the first time, Romanian-German writer Herta Müller describes her ongoing experience of Securitate terror.

For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in each and every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, has invariably been denied me. Instead, each time there was signs that I was once again, that is to say, still under observation.

Müller is the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, which I’m pretty sure means (among right wing circles anyway) that she is a communist or fascist or somehow both.

But she actually knows what she’s talking about when it comes to living in a police state. And I would guess that she’s less likely to see the bigger threat to liberty in America coming from someone who wants to spend money to put people to work than someone who wants to give the domestic security services ever more power to spy on its own citizens. (Unfortunately, that would be the same person at the moment… but I guess the silver lining for liberals is that he won the Nobel Peace prize?)

Read the whole thing. It’s a very timely reminder.

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Thick

by digby

Mort Zuckerman was on McLaughlin this week and said that the stimulus was a big fat failure because there was so much pork and they had given way too much money to the states. He mentioned in particular a high speed rail line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which he characterized as a boondoggle for Harry Reid. When asked what the money should have been spent on, he replied: “infrastructure.”

The Villagers are dumber than usual right now. Why is that?

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The Sunday President

by tristero

Steve Benen:

Since the president took office, McCain has been on ‘Meet the Press’ twice (July 12 and March 29), ‘Face the Nation’ three times (August 30, April 26, and February 8), ‘This Week’ three times (September 27, August 23, and May 10), and ‘Fox News Sunday’ three times (July 2, March 8, and January 25). His appearance on ‘State of the Union’ today will be his third visit since February (October 11, August 2, and February 15).

Not bad for a senator in the minority, who isn’t in the party leadership, who has no role in any important negotiations, and who has offered no significant pieces of legislation.

Not bad for a failed presidential candidate who has been so completely wrong on so many things:

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention — either rightly or wrongly — was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”

This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.
To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam’s regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that “there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members” — a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.

Saturday Night At The Movies

The accidental tsuris

By Dennis Hartley

The noodge-y professor: A Serious Man

Someone I once worked with in my standup comedy days (my hand to God, I wish I could remember who) had a great bit that he called “Jewish calisthenics”. “Okay,” he would exhort the audience, “Here we go…ready? Neck back, and…repeat after me…” (shrug) “Why me? And rest. And again…” (shrug) “Why me?” Well, you had to be there.

Anyway, I thought it was a brilliant distillation of what “Jewish humor” is all about; a rich tradition of comedic expression borne exclusively from a congenital (and historically well-founded) persecution complex and cultural fatalism (trust me on this-I was raised by a Jewish mother). So do you know who else was raised by a Jewish mother? Those nice Coen boys-Joel and Ethan. In fact, they grew up in a largely Jewish suburban Minneapolis neighborhood (St. Louis Park). But you wouldn’t know it from their films. They nevah call. They nevah write a nice story a mother could love. Instead, it’s always with the corruption, the selfish behavior, and the killing, and the cattle prods…until now.

Well, I don’t know if you would necessarily call it a “nice” story (are they capable?), but A Serious Man is the closest that the Coen Brothers have come to writing something semi-autobiographical (sort of). They do set their story in a Minnesotan Jewish suburban enclave, in the summer of 1967 (when Joel was 13 and Ethan was 10). God help them, however, if their family was anything like the Gopniks (although if they were, it would explain a lot about the world view they expound in their films). Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a “serious man”- a buttoned-down physics professor who can map out the paradoxical quantum mysteries of Schrodinger’s cat on a blackboard, but is absolutely stymied as to why his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) suddenly announces to him one day out of the blue that she wants a divorce. To add insult to injury, she wants him to move out of the house as soon as possible, so that the man she wishes to spend the rest of her life with, a smarmy neighborhood widower named Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed) can settle in.

This situation alone would give any self-respecting mensch such tsuris, nu? Yes, it gets worse. Larry gets no sympathy or support from his snotty, self-absorbed daughter (Jessica McManus) or his stoner son (Aaron Wolff), who spends more time obsessing on his favorite TV show F Troop than brushing up on his Hebrew for an upcoming Bar Mitzvah. He also has problems at work, ranging from the usual politics of academia to staving off a deranged student who is attempting to blackmail his way to a passing grade. And then there is his perennially underemployed brother (Richard Kind) who has become a permanent house guest who spends an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom, draining his, erm, cyst (ah, yes-we’re still firmly entrenched in Coen territory here, kids).

Teetering on the verge of an existential meltdown, Larry seeks advice from three rabbis, embarking on a spiritual quest in order to glean, well, “Why me?” The story takes on the airs of a modern fable from this point onward, neatly telegraphed by the film’s opening ten minutes-a blackly comic, “old school” Yiddish folk tale with semi-mystical overtones strongly reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Love and Death. In the context of the Coen’s oeuvre, the character of Larry Gopnick is not really so far removed from William Macy’s character in Fargo or Billy Bob Thornton’s character in The Man Who Wasn’t There(sans the murder and mayhem, but sharing the plight of the hapless Everyman, ultimately left twisting in the wind by the detached cruelty of Fate…and the Coens themselves).

This is one of those films that I think I need to see again, because it really has some interesting layers to it that I don’t think can be fully appreciated in just one viewing (especially for its provocatively enigmatic ending, which should instigate a few fistfights amongst cinephiles in the coming months) It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s made (gasp!) for adults, and it’s one of the most wildly original films I’ve seen this year. The cast is excellent, especially Sthulbarg and Kind, who are very believable as brothers with a complex relationship, and have some genuinely poignant scenes together (does their relationship reflect Joel and Ethan’s, I wonder?). I have to mention a wonderful (if brief) performance by Amy Landecker as the sexy neighbor, Mrs. Samsky (channeling Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson), who has a hilarious seduction scene with the uptight Larry.

Apparently there’s buzz from some quarters about the film being “too” Jewish, propagating stereotypes and so on and so forth, the Coens are self-loathing, blah blah blah, but I think that’s silly. Hell, I’ve got relatives that are more “Jewish” than the characters in the film. Besides, the Coens are Jews-is there some law against artists incorporating their heritage into their art? One might as well condemn Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Jules Feiffer, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil Simon for the same “crime”. So why do they persecute the Jews, huh? Why us? (shrug) Why us? (shrug). And again…

Days of whine and neuroses: Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz , Joshua Then & Now, Little Murders, The Producers, Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, The Front, The Steagle, Seize the Day, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Odd Couple , The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The Heartbreak Kid, The Sunshine Boys, BYE, BYE Braverman, Where’s Poppa?, The Owl And The Pussycat, Blume in Love, Lenny, The Graduate, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Lost in America.

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Meanwhile, Back In The States

by digby

If you want to see some serious political dysfunction, just take a look at what’s going on this week-end in Sacramento:

Come Monday morning, California lawmakers could be congratulating themselves and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for finally solving an issue that’s eluded them for decades: an overhaul of the state’s aging water system.Or, they could be settling in for what one political observer called “a nuclear war.” Those are the stakes as the Capitol braces for a drama-filled weekend that may well drag out until the wee hours Sunday.But with hopes dimming late Friday that Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders would reach a water accord, a string of threatened vetoes from the governor could come as soon as today.Only a handful of high-priority legislation — whose rejection would cost the state federal stimulus money or damage its still-fragile finances — would be safe, sources in the governor’s office said Friday. The vast majority of the 700-plus bills passed this fall will be on the chopping block depending on how water negotiations progress. “If we’re close enough to a water agreement,” said Aaron McLear, Schwarzenegger’s spokesman, “the governor will weigh every bill on its own merits.”Already Friday, legislative aides were pondering ways they might respond to mass vetoes from Schwarzenegger. Rumors around the Capitol had some Assembly members mentioning impeachment if the worst were to come to pass.At stake? Civil relations during what’s expected to be another bad budget year — already Friday, The state controller’s office reported revenues for the past three months were $1.1 billion lower than anticipated. And even the water deal that Schwarzenegger is trying so hard to sell could be at risk.”After a nuclear war, you have nuclear winter,” said Steve Maviglio, a Democratic strategist and former top Assembly aide. “If he does pull the trigger, there’s no incentive for cooperation next year, or even to complete a water deal.”Still, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, continued to express confidence an agreement would be reached — and that the governor would consider bills fairly. His office played down the idea that Schwarzenegger would face any retribution for making good on his veto threat.

Now, as any of you who have seen Chinatown know, water issues in California are like oil issues in Texas. It’s serious money at stake and there’s just not enough to go around. It’s a very difficult problem. I don’t pretend to know the answer, but it does strike me a just a little bit odd that we have decided after 30 years to solve the problem once and for all during the worst economic crisis in decades.

Here’s Brian Leubitz at Calitics:

We’ve mentioned the water issue for a long time, but there is no way to overemphasize one critical point: No matter how many projects you build, you do not get any additional water. The rush about getting water for the West Central Valley is toxic to the state government and to the environment.

The West Central Valley is a relatively dry area. The soil is fairly fertile, but right underneath it lies a layer of clay that sucks water away from the topsoil. That means lots of tilling and lots of water. But in order for these farmers, most of which are big corporate operations, to make any real money, water has to be very, very cheap. Unnaturally cheap.

This, of course, is why there wasn’t much agriculture done in the area by the native peoples. It was too inefficient to bring water there. But once we built a slew of pumps, it could be done. The problem is that pumps are expensive, and the farmers of the Western Central Valley don’t want to pay for it.

The Westlands Water District has been getting cheap water for a long time, but they are the bottom rung on the water priority list. They are trying to use the crisis in Sacramento and the drought to get around the contracts that they signed last year putting them at a lower priority in exchange for a lower price.

And Arnold is trying to help them to do just that by threatening, intimidating, and generally being a jerk. And of course, Susan Kennedy, his “Democratic” Chief of Staff, is right there with him. Putting a gun to the head of not only the legislature, but some very important measures.

Why shouldn’t he? Shock Doctine, California style. I guess this is Arnold’s vanity legacy project and to hell with everything else.

The funny thing is that I don’t think more than 1% of the population even knows about this. The news media doesn’t cover state politics, so most people don’t have a clue about what’s going on in their own state. So it just gets worse and worse and worse.

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