Month: November 2009

Hey Bill Kristol

by digby

… and Jon Podhoretz. Are you proud of being affiliated with these people? Americablog reports:

Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel criticized a Teabagger protester in Washington, DC this week who held up a sign showing dead bodies from the Dachau concentration camp stacked in a pile, and compared this to the Democrats’ health care reform plan. Here are a few of the Teabaggers’ responses to Weisel, posted on Politico:

Elie Weisel is disgusting PR-seeking profiteering demagogue who has made a fortune off playing on the world’s guilt trips about the what happened to the Jews during WW2. Most objective WW2 researchers agree now that the beastial Nazi”s, who happened to be anti-capitalist Socialists, killed even more Slavs and Gypsies in their concentration camps than Jews, but you don’t see the Slavs and Gypsies trying to profit off the “Holocaust” like some of the shameless powerful Jews in the media.

I sometimes wonder what has happened to the Jewish people?. The Bible says that they are GODs’ people and Israel is their home land. I see so many Jews seem to have abandoned their faith and I think this has to sadden our Father in Heaven. I see many Jews that are homosexual-actively promoting it as a “normal” lifestyle. I see many Jews involved in the ACLU- which I call the “Anti Christian Liberal Union”, this bothers me as how can one be against their Father and Son in Heaven who are for Life??. I see many Jews in Hollywood making filthy ,sinful movies-what happened to the good, Family movies??. I see many Jews full of Greed in Hollywood, Wall Street,etc. I see many Jews involved in abortion groups- how can one support the killing of human fetuses??, especially people who have suffered through the Holocaust??. I am not anti-semitic, I know many will come on here and attack me. I am simply stating what I see and I believe our Father in Heaven is wondering what is happening to his “chosen” people?. He sent his only son to Earth to die for our sins and I think He is wondering the direction our Country is taking??. I am praying for our Country and all the Jews in our Country and pray that our Father will forgive us all for our sins. I hope I have stated what GOD would have wanted me to say?. GOD Bless and Pray for our Country.

Those aren’t even the worst of them.

Obviously, there’s no way of knowing who these people are but considering the use of the sign, the common use of Hitler imagery and the endless demonization of Soros it’s not like it’s impossible to believe they come from actual teabaggers.

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Shocker

by digby

Who could ever have predicted this:

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials. Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

As trifecta at Dkos writes:

Let’s just hope this doesn’t get diverted to Joe Lieberman’s Subcommittee.

I don’t think he’s going to have time. Between digging out terrorists in the Army (should we start calling him Tailgunner Joe?) and getting to the bottom of the Czar scandal, he’s going to be pretty busy. of course, that will probably work out just fine as far as the MIC is concerned. Would’nt want to rock that boat too hard.

h/t to bb

Just Call Her Honey

by digby

So it looks like Carly Fiorina is going to go for the cat fight strategy in her effort to unseat Barbara Boxer. Here’s Greg Sargent:

Carly Fiorina, the businesswoman who hopes to be the GOP challenger to Senator Barbara Boxer next year, has unveiled a new attack line: She’s faulting Boxer for wanting to be called “Senator,” not “ma’am,” hitting Boxer with a new Web ad and a new Website devoted entirely to this criticism. It’s a reference to a widely-noted exchange Boxer had earlier this year with a Brigadier General at a hearing. After he called her “ma’am,” Boxer rejoined: “Do me a favor, could you say `Senator,’ instead of `ma’am’? It’s just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title.” You can watch that exchange right here, on the Fiorina campaign’s new Web site devoted to this line of criticism, CallMeBarbara.com.

In a statement accompanying the release of the new site and ad, the Fiorina campaign blasted the exchange as a sign of Boxer’s “egotistical style.”

That’s really something coming from a person Portfolio Magazine named her one of the worst CEOs of all time:

A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.

I’m pretty sure she made people call her “Your Highness.”

Seriously, this is a very low road to be going especially this early in the campaign. I guess Fiorina thinks attacking Boxer for being uppity will head off her wingnut primary opponent. Calling a woman a bitch (which is essentially what this is) is always a winner, I know, but Fiorina isn’t exactly the poster child for humility. I don’t think she’s going to get the teabags unless she goes full-on Bachman and if she does that she stands to alienate a whole lot of women in California who are far less tolerant of this nonsense than are members of the political establishment.

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Nepotism For Dummies

by digby

As with most aristocracies, the younger generations tend to be rather, shall we say, weak and this is likely to be an understatement when it comes to Little Luke Russert. Look at this exchange between him and proud village auntie Andrea Mitchell.

Mitchell: Pelosi here has proved herself to be a really tough customer. This isa politician who really knows where the power lies. She knows how to craft these coalitions, she knows how to get the votes together, at the risk of going against her allies and her own beliefs.

Luke Russert: (sagely) Absolutely…. On that point Andrea, it’s interesting, I spoke to a senior member of congress a few weeks ago and he said there’s a lot of tendency in the media to portray Nancy Pelosi as this very calm, San Francisco west coast liberal..

Andrea: No way! You know better.

Little Luke: She is the son [sic] of a Baltimore politician. She actually is really an urban ethnic Baltimore city pol, rounding up those votes, getting folks over to her side. And while both sides will tell you she did an amazing job getting those votes on Saturday, she still has a heckuva road ahead of her. What she will ultimately have to do is get the progressives and the pro-life people in her caucus to do is accept somehow what comes out of the Senate. She was able to placate the liberal members by saying “look, if we don’t allow the Stupak amendment there’s no way health care reform is getting through the house. Do we really want to allow a wedge issue like abortion to tank this legislation?” However, some people are signing letters right now on the progressive side saying “we have the votes to kill it,” Stupak says he has the votes to kill it. This is a long, long way from over Andrea.

Mitchell:She is the daughter of D’Allesandro, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and the sister of Tommy D’Allesandro as well, another Baltimore mayor, so she comes to it naturally. She’s got the genes

Little Luke: Absolutely, you know those tough urban ethnic politicians, those Irish and Italians, they always know how to round up those votes.

I dare you to fit any more conventional wisdom, obvious analysis and rotting, sentimental Russertesque tripe into one small segment. He’s like an SNL parody of his father. It would be cruel to make fun of him if it weren’t for the fact that he’s working for one of the premier news organizations in the world (such as it is) making big bucks and being taken seriously by important people. And it appears that he is not even trying to carve out his own niche but is going to actually carry on the useless, shallow beltway gibberish that made his father the mayor of Broderville.

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Going Back To Arkansas

by digby

As we move our attention back to the Senate on health care, Howie Klein discusses the difficulty of putting pressure on the insulated, privileged House of Lords — and then explains once again why Blue America targeted Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas over all the corporate lackeys in the House:

[A]s we’ve been telling you all year, there’s only one weak link worth trying to beat into submission: Arkansas’ corrupt and reactionary– don’t those two terms always seem to find a way of cuddling up with each other?– senior senator, Blanche Lincoln. Blue America has run TV spots against Lincoln all summer and fall and she’s watched her re-elect numbers dwindle down to a place where if a serious opponent– i.e., one with big bucks to buy advertising– jumped into the race, she would lose. She may lose anyway, even though her current opponents would probably do better if they toured together as a carnival show. Yesterday the RNC started their own campaign against her, trying to push her to vote with Republicans– as she so often does– and against health care reform.

This week Blue America and our friends at Donkey On The Edge Productions have a brand new ad for Arkansas voters to look at– the fourth in our series– and the message is very different from the Republicans’. By all means, be the first to view it– and please consider making a contribution of our Campaign for Health Care Choice page so we can run it deep and wide.

Since it has become obvious that the Democrats actually need a super majority of 70 votes or more to be filibuster proof (and even then will probably always be at the mercy of perfidious Senators who love their own image — and trust funds — more than they love their country) it’s hard to see why progressives should worry too much about that 60 vote majority. Sure, keeping 50 is important in order to keep the chamber out of the hands of the teabagging freakshow. But 60? What good is it?

Senators who are not just superfluous but actively working to undermine the Democratic agenda should not expect to be treated with kid gloves if they can’t even commit to allowing the signature Democratic initiative to have an up or down vote. Lincoln can vote against the final bill if she wants to. I think it’s stupid and won’t buy her a single teabag in 2010, but we have enough extra Blue Dogs that they can take their chances. Joining the filibuster of the health care bill, however, would be a total betrayal. If she does that, I see no reason why anyone should shed a tear or even have a second thought if she loses her election next year. The Democrats could do no worse with only 58 votes.

If you’d like to help us run this new ad, you can donate here.

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Set Up

by digby

If you are watching the pro-coverage of the Ft. Hood memorial service, you should tune into CNN to hear Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson lay out the conditions for Obama to tell the American people that this tragedy means they must be prepared to spill more blood and spend more treasure in Afghanistan. Apparently it’s what needs to happen in order to show respect to the military. I don’t know why.

Oh, and he has to be “Pastor in Chief” too.

It’s a good thing nobody’s playing politics with this.

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Status Quo

by digby

NY Times:

President Obama suggested Monday that he was not comfortable with abortion restrictions inserted into the House version of major health care legislation, and he prodded Congress to revise them.

The only thing he seemed uncomfortable with was the idea of the bill blowing up.

It’s important to understand what “revision” at this point means. The status quo is no longer the compromise between those who believe that all women should have access to insurance coverage for abortion and those who believe that abortion should be illegal. That ship sailed many years ago with the egregious Hyde Amendment which denied coverage to the women who need it most — poor women on Medicaid. For years pro-choice groups had agitated to repeal it, but took that completely off the table in this negotiation and agreed to codify it instead. That compromise already changed the status quo.

Now, the Stupak amendment goes even farther and says that any woman who is in the individual private insurance market will not be allowed to purchase a policy if they receive a subsidy. If the president will now take a “revision” of that, as now seems possible, we will see the “status quo” become something else again.

The status quo has already been dealt away.

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Base Logic

by digby

Adam Nagourney tells NY Times readers this morning that the Democrats had better stop paying attention to its base because that’s what brought Bush down. Evidently, Bush’s actual policies had nothing to do with it. Sadly, from most of the interviews with Democrats in the article, that’s the lesson that Democrats took from the Bush years as well.

In addition, according to Nagourney the Democrats are boldly defying their base in spite of their fear they will desert them as Bush’s did. Except, I don’t think Bush’s base actually deserted him, did it? Sure, today you can’t find a hard core Republican who will admit to ever supporting Bush, but that doesn’t make it true now does it? In fact, the base stuck with him through every thing he did, the spending, the wars, the malfeasance, the torture, all of it. They worshipped him like a God for years. Only after the fact has the base purged Bush, using a recently discovered “liberalism” to explain his catastrophic failure. It’s the only way they can understand their world.

The Democratic base has not turned out to the the grinning zombies of the Bush years and it also doesn’t follow that ignoring them would result in policies that the country likes better than they liked Bush’s. The only lesson that Democrats should learn from the Bush years is that they need to deliver good policies that make a positive difference in people’s lives. Forget the Rovian political machinations. They aren’t good at it.

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We Are Living Among Crazy People

by tristero

Unbelievable:

Gallup’s survey of Republicans found that 71 percent would consider voting for [Huckabee for president], more than for Palin, Romney or others. The same survey found that he’s the only Republican whom even 50 percent of Americans say they think is qualified to be president.

I want you to think about this for a moment. You’re in your local shopping mall, wherever you happen to be in this fair country of ours. And exactly 1/2 of the people walking your way are so completely unhinged from consensual reality that they think Michael Huckabee – Michael Huckabee! who let a convicted rapist go scot-free in order to win brownie points from his rightwing pals – is qualified to be president.

I wish I thought this was in any way, shape, or form, funny. Beneath that aw shucks, shit-kickin’ exterior Huckabee affects is a seriously twisted and ignorant human being who isn’t qualified to be appointed dog catcher. It is inexcusable that this country’s media give this slimeball a free pass. What next, movie actors as president?

Oh, right, yeah, that happened… and we all know how that turned out.

Goldilocks Was Betrayed

by digby

All the Democrats were using some odd rhetoric on TV today. When asked directly if they would vote for a bill that had a Stupak amendment they kept saying that they were going to work to make sure that they “preserved the status quo.” The president said the same thing:

“I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill,” Obama said. “And we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.

Saying the bill cannot change the status quo, the President said “there are strong feelings on both sides” about an amendment passed on Saturday and added to the legislation, “and what that tells me is that there needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo.”

In an exclusive television interview in the Map Room of the White House, Obama told ABC News’Jake Tapperthat he was confident that the final legislation will ensure that “neither side feels that it’s being betrayed.”

It’s just great seeing the president defending his principles like that. I’m just not sure what the principle actually is. It certainly isn’t that a woman has a fundamental right to make her own reproductive decisions.

Evidently, they are signaling that the Hyde Amendment is their backstop once again. Why they think it will work better the second time around I can’t imagine. And why he thinks that he can come up with a compromise that ensures that neither side feels betrayed is frankly beyond me. Where do they go from here? Agree to only restrict Americans’ constitutional rights every other week? I don’t get it.

All day long, I kept hearing the argument that pro-choice Democrats are going to have to compromise because Pelosi just doesn’t have the votes otherwise. But the truth is that she doesn’t have the votes without the pro-choice caucus either. Why isn’t it just as reasonable to say that Stupak and his crowd should compromise? I hear people say over and over again that Democrats will prove they can’t govern if they hold the line on this or that provision and risk tanking the bill. But these Stupak Democrats did it — and they won. Indeed, many people are hailing the outcome as a triumph of legislative maneuvering. (All except for the women of course, but they’re on their own.)

The dynamics working against liberals are fairly obvious: they are the ones who want to help a whole bunch of people in dire straits and nobody else gives a damn. That makes them weaker in the final stages because everyone knows they want it more (that people are desperate) so they will not risk getting nothing at all when so many are suffering. The people who are willing to walk away always have more power in a negotiation.

So, knowing that, why in the hell do they go into every discussion having already given away everything but their bottom line? Especially when the only people with whom they are negotiating are ostensibly on their own team, where presumably the leadership and the president have some extra sway? If there was ever a case for the liberals to go in with guns blazing, demanding repeal of the Hyde Amendment, demanding single payer, demanding huge tax increases on the wealthy, demanding open border access to the health care system (which some countries have.) Then they would have had something to work with.

Instead they went in with the tried and true “don’t make trouble” strategy assuring everyone who would listen that they had no intention of upsetting the status quo or causing “distractions” and practically apologizing for even asking for universal coverage. In the end they ended up actually rolling back their position on a matter of fundamental principle. And it sounds like that still isn’t going to be enough.

In case you are wondering about the real life effects of playing cheap politics with pregnancy, read this. And this. Contra McGaskill and Tweety, who are misinformed about just about everything, this is actually a big deal. This amendment doesn’t just punish Lord Saletan’s little sluts. All women will be losing coverage for necessary abortions when a wanted pregnancy goes wrong. It only has an exemption for the life of the mother, but not for her her health, nor for severe and fatal fetal abnormalities. Click those links for what that means in real life.

Update: Thank you Meteor Blades

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