Month: January 2010

Somebody Tell Tweety

by digby

… that he owes Alan Grayson an apology for being such an ass yesterday.

Here’s EJ Dionne, who I assume Tweety reveres as a big shot Villager:

So here’s an idea, I have been told reliably, that leaders of both Houses are considering: The House would pass a version of the reconciliation bill containing the various amendments and send it to the Senate. The Senate would change it slightly (in ways that the House agreed to), which would require the House to vote on it again. Only after it got the revised reconciliation bill would the House take up the Senate bill. The House could then pass both bills and send both to the president. Problem solved, health-care passes, and we move on.

Not all the difficulties with this scenario have been worked through, and it is not a slam dunk. For one thing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces a revolt on her left against passing the Senate bill without changes. Some may still have to be persuaded to make sure it gets the votes it needs. There are also some House Democrats from moderate-to-conservative districts who are wary, after Massachusetts, of voting for a health-care bill, period. And there are a lot of procedural issues that need to be ironed out.

Nonetheless, for those (and I’m one of them) who believe in health-care reform — and who think the Democrats would be committing suicide if they gave up on health care now — it’s heartening to hear that serious people are making serious efforts to get a health bill through. In a pinch, I think that enacting the Senate bill into law without changes is far preferable to passing nothing. But I also understand that there are aspects of the Senate bill to which House members have legitimate objections. Solving this problem will require Democrats to pull themselves together across many lines of division — notably between the House and the Senate, and between moderates and liberals. Can they do it? The answer to that question depends in part on leadership from President Obama. Can he do it?

Yes. And I’m guessing it depends upon whether or not pro-choice women (and men) in both houses are going to have the heinous Bart Stupak amendment forced down their throats as part of the reconciliation “fix.” I can’t see any way that Stupak and his boys will capitulate otherwise and unless they do, this will not pass the House.

What do you suppose the odds are of that happening?

h/t to bb

Our Submission

by digby

Following up on Tristero’s post below, Rick Perlstein actually interviewed Gary Wills:

One day last November, I spent the morning at Garry Wills’s elegant brick home along the main street of Evanston, Illinois, pondering the Promethean scale of presidential power in the atomic age. Wills’s startling new book, Bomb Power (Penguin Press, $28), argues that the prototype of the modern president is not Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan. It’s General Leslie Groves—the administrator of the Manhattan Project, which Wills says was the inadvertent template for today’s secret government and imperial presidency. And his reasoning will scare the hell out of you.

The Manhattan Project was the single most awesome undertaking in the history of the country, occupying some eighty facilities nationwide. Hanford, in Washington State, where project officials collected and prepared the plutonium, employed more than one hundred thousand people. The electromagnetic plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, covered 825
acres. Project administrators also commandeered an entire Pacific island as the staging ground for the fatal atomic-bomb flights. To staff the laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Groves enjoyed the kind of powers ascribed to Jesus in the Left Behind series: All of a sudden, the greatest scientists in the country and their families would suddenly disappear, Hoovered up into the desert behind a triple ring of fences, “with sentries on horseback or in jeeps patrolling the circuit twenty-four hours a day.” Almost nobody was allowed to know what any of it was for, and only one man understood how to master all its parts: Groves, who “carried the whole enterprise in his head.”

The power then passed to Harry Truman, who as vice president didn’t even know such authority existed, and who as president, Wills maintains, never really had any choice but to vouchsafe America’s hegemony in the postwar world by flexing the authority to use the bomb. From him that legacy passed to every new president, with no check or balance whatsoever. “The power over the atom is outside the constitutional order of succession under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and outside the military chain of command,” Wills argues, “a model for the covert activities and overt authority of the government.” His conclusion, as awesome as a mushroom cloud itself: “The President’s permanent alert meant our permanent submission.”

You can read the rest of it at the link. (You have to sign up, but it’s free and pretty easy.)

Americans can’t seem to wrap their minds around the National Security State. And if there’s ever been a better example of its power and consequences all you have to do is look at the actions of our current president. Whatever else you may feel about him, there is little doubt that he, of all presidents, understood going in that something had gone very wrong. And, so fa,r there’s little reason to believe that he’s been either willing or able to do much about it. Assuming good intentions, one can only conclude that the president must submit as well.

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Yoo Reviewed

by tristero

When Neil Jordan’s masterpiece, The Crying Game, came out, the New York Times published a charming puff piece about the beautiful, mysterious and alluring star of the film. In describing Jaye Davidson, Janet Maslin wrote the piece both as an in-joke for fans and in order not to reveal the Big Secret to those who hadn’t yet seen it. Eighteen years later, I still find the piece hilarious for intentionally concealing the single most important fact about the extraordinary talent who created the role of “Dil.”

Well, it took them eighteen years, but when it comes to deliberately hiding the obvious, the Times has now outdone itself. And how. Only this time it’s not at all charming, nor amusing. On the front page of tomorrow’s Book Review, Walter Isaacson manages to discuss John Yoo’s latest rantings without once using the word “torture.”

Incredible.That’s a little like reviewing Industrial Society and Its Future without once mentioning what those theories were used to justify… Actually, it’s a lot like that.

Like Kaczynski, Yoo is a deeply disturbed man, criminally so. Both mimic intellectual rhetoric and scholarship to construct elaborate, rambling essays to rationalize their overwhelming compulsion to harm other human beings. Now, this pathological behavior may be interesting to a psychologist studying abnormal behavior, but that is hardly a reason to behave as if they are genuinely serious Men of Ideas worth reviewing on the front page of the Times Book Review. If anything, their dissociated style is all the more reason to draw attention to the cognitive dissonance between their bloodless prose and the obscenely gory consequences of their “ideas.”

True, Yoo and Kacynski prefer different kinds of dress and accommodations, just as they prefer different ways to hurt people. Kacynski got his jollies by having bombs he built explode in people’s faces. Yoo is a sadist by human proxy: he gets his rocks off letting other people maim and murder for him.

However, Yoo and the Unabomber share much more than an association with UC Berkeley. Indeed, the specific nuances in their preferred means of harming matter very little to their victims who suffered, and still suffer horribly as a direct result of actions these men took. Yoo, like Kaczynski, has a positive tropism for remote-controlled mutilation and murder – ghastly, gruesome violence which he never, ever has to cloud his brilliant, beautiful, hyper-rational mind by having to witness. It’s the fantasy that gets him hot: much more satisfying and there’s no chance of something…icky spattering on that nice suit he wears.

Isaacson wants us to collude with Yoo and not think too much about the actual blood that flowed from Yoo’s memorandums, and the terror. When Isaacson describes waterboarding as an “interrogation technique” – notice: not an “enhanced” technique, just a technique – he shields us, as Yoo shielded himself in his office, from the screams, the agony, and perhaps even the deaths of the victims.

The unspeakably visceral horror of a human being’s torture and degradation, and the demented, tormented mind that would seek to justify it: That strikes me as the proper context for examining John Yoo and his writings. What Isaacson has done here, to treat Yoo as a serious person and fail to mention his crimes, is simply disgraceful.

That is hardly all. Walter Isaacson, and the editors of the Book Review, actually had the unmitigated gall to compare Yoo’s lunacy to Garry Wills latest book, Bomb Power, as if they were just two different points of view, of equal worth to the curious reader. What next? Fred Phelps’ latest screed soberly discussed and compared with Martin Luther King?

To conclude, I note that Isaacson is the president of the Aspen Institute in Colorado. Ahh… I have such fond memories of that town when I was at the Music Festival in the mid-70’s – wonderful music, awesome food. And there was more: it was not by accident that Hunter Thompson made Aspen his home. Although by that time I no longer indulged – it badly affected by judgment – Aspen was a great place to score some truly righteous weed.

Given that Isaacson concludes his review with the utterly ridiculous assertion that Yoo understands the trajectory of American history better than Garry Wills does, I guess Aspen still has great pot.

That has to be the dope talking.

[Edited slightly after initial post to clarify Yoo’s complicated psychopathology. ]

Driven To Tears

by digby

I thought Sting with Chris Botti was the highlight, but as always, ymmv:

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Compassionate Conservatives

by digby

C&L reports:

In a rare show of humanity, broadcast and cable television outlets have agreed to pre-empt their regular programming to air the Hope For Haiti Now Global TV Telethon.

Except for Fox News Channel.

Our crack C&L team has checked around the dial and compiled a list of channels participating:
CBS
ABC
NBC
CW
FOX
TNT
Weather Channel
MSNBC
CNBC
CNN
HBO
Showtime
Major League Baseball Network
Style Network
E! Entertainment Network
ReelzChannel
TNT
Comedy Central
Oxygen
Soap Opera channel
Bravo
National Geographic Channel
Sleuth
G4
CMT
TV1
BET
MTV
MTV2
VH1
GMC
FUSE
Current
PBS
It’s even streaming live on IMDb, Hulu and YouTube.

But not for FNC or their sister business channel. They’re showing Billo and crew.

And Billo is talking to a sexy body language expert about how Barack Obama’s facial expressions prove he’s a wimp. They know their audience.

Update: Media Matters documents their ongoing lack of interest in the Haitian earthquake catastrophe. Why is that?

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DIY Health Care

by digby

Small comfort:

The California Supreme Court on Thursday rejected limits on medical marijuana imposed by state lawmakers, finding that people with prescriptions for pot can have and grow all they need for personal use.

The high court ruled lawmakers improperly “amended” the voter-approved law that decriminalized possession of marijuana for “seriously ill Californians” with a doctor’s prescription by limiting patients to eight ounces (227 grams) of dried marijuana and six mature or 12 immature plants.

The Compassionate Use Act, passed by California voters in 1996, set no limits on how much marijuana patients could possess or grow, stating only that it be for personal use

If we can’t get real health care, at least they’ll let us treat ourselves.

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Shoot Me Now

by digby

Hardball is almost unbearable today with Matthews babbling incoherently as usual and viciously attacking Grayson and the netroots, Chuck Todd competing with Little Luke for sheer vapidity and Ron Brownstein half heartedly trying to explain why everything they are both saying is factually incorrect and analytically absurd.  If this is the level of conversation in the Capitol right now, I think we can kiss sanity good-bye.

Matthews insisted repeatedly that the polling shows that the the Massachusetts voters explicitly rejected health care reform and Brownstein gently told him that the polling is quite disparate and that some polls show that it wasn’t health care.  And then he agreed that actions speak louder than words and that Chris is basically right. Oy.

A befuddled Tweety went on to ask what in the hell people are really mad about and then said that they obviously know what’s going on because health care reform is big government and Wall Street and big government are in cahoots. Chuck Todd agreed that everyone sees things exactly as Chris does.

Chris then said that Massachusetts  clearly means that Obama has to move right. Brownstein cited the Peter Hart AFL-CIO poll (calling it the best poll, incidentally) which said that the Democrats lost the working class whites, who are paying a big price in this economy. Chuck Todd babbled something stupid.

And then there was this exchange which shows you exactly how uninformed the average Village gasbag like Tweety is:

Brownstein: There’s a separate issue here besides what’s good for Obama over the next few years.  And the other issue is what we can accomplish as a country with the big problems that we face.  And the lesson of this health care fight again is that in a world where you need 60 votes to do everything because everything is filibustered.  And you cannot get any votes from the minority party, on anything, it is virtually impossible for any president to get anything …

Matthews: oh, you’re so depressing …

Brownstein: to tackle these problems…

Matthews: You’re depressing! You are depressing me. You are saying no new president can do new things.

Brownstein: We are moving toward a parliamentary system without majority rule, something that no country in the world tries because it simply does not work.

Matthews: You know what, I want presidents to lead and not just to check the polls and do what everybody wants them to do. Take a stance.

Brownstein: Well, on health care they have not been doing what everybody wants them to do…

Matthews: Well, lead.  The president should tell us what  the country needs and blow the trumpet and let’s go.  It’s tough, it’s tough.

Chuck Todd delivers his own braindead analysis, straight from the hair helmet of Cokie Roberts:

Todd: Just to go back to healthcare.  Did they work hard enough to find out how to have 65 votes on this thing? You do wonder, why didn’t they work outside the Republican leadership.I mean hindsight is 20/20 …

Brownstein: Chuck. They spent three months over the summer with Baucus, Grassley, Enzi and Snowe and many people say that’s the reason they’re in the problem they’re in today …

Todd:  But there were nine Republicans who supported them on that children’s health care initiative, they didn’t reach out to at least four of them.  They could have brought them in here and wooed them.  It’s hard work.  It’s hard.

Brownstein: It just may not be possible anymore

Matthews: You know what we need? Good politicians. Not people denying they are politicians.

Obviously Chuck Todd is repeating some Republican spin he heard in the mens room because there is no way that the Republicans who voted for SCHIP (a reauthorization of an existing program, btw) were going to break ranks and vote for Health Care reform if the Dems couldn’t even get the Maine twins to vote for it:

Lamar!
Collins
Corker
Hutchison
Lugar
Martinez
Murkowski
Snowe

I’m sure Lamar Alexander and Kay Bailey Hutchinson could have been persuaded if only someone had made the effort.

Despite the fact that Brownstein is right about the parliamentary nature of our current politics(and hence, the necessity of eliminating the filibuster) I don’t disagree that the president should be out there selling his plans. Indeed, that’s what most of the netroots have been saying he should be doing for months and months. Which is why Tweety is such an ass for going after Alan Grayson  in the next segment.  He is so completely uninformed, confused and ridiculous that it’s a wonder he can figure out how to get to work in the morning:

Mathews: Ok, ok. This show is about reality. Tell me how you pass this bill with 41. You just got a guy elected in Massachusetts …

Grayson: Reconciliation takes 51

Matthews: … he signs his name 41. It means it’s enough to ..

Grayson: Reconciliation needs 51 Senators

Matthews: What procedure do you know that Harry Reid doesn’t know?

Grayson: What makes you think Harry isn’t going to do it?

Matthews: … that all those top guys, that Ted Kennedy didn’t know..

Grayson: They said they’re not going to move to reconciliation?

Matthews: This secret move to the Indies that only you know about …

Grayson: What are you talking about? They’ve been talking about this …

Matthews: These Senators can’t do it!

Grayson: Why do you think they can’t use reconciliation?

Matthews: Because you talk to any one of these Senators. Have you talked to any of them lately?  And what do you think they’ll tell you?

Grayson: What do you think, I’m their confessor?

Matthews: Have you ever called up a Democratic Senator and said why don’t you do this by reconciliation?

Grayson: What makes you think they’re not going to do it? What do you know that I don’t know?

Matthews: Because they refuse to do it because they cannot get past the filibuster rule. The United States Senate is different from the House.You’re allowed to talk as long as you want in the Senate. Unless you get cloture.

Grayson:  Reconciliation is 51 votes not 60 votes.

Matthews: You can’t create a program through reconciliation! Congressman just name me the program that’s ever been created through reconciliation!

Grayson: Tax cuts for the rich!

Matthews: That’s not a program.  Under reconciliation you’re allowed to do two things. Change fiscal numbers, raise taxes or cut spending.

Grayson: You’re saying that. You don’t know that. Nobody else thinks that.

Matthews: I just spent three years in the Senate budget committee when I was a kid and you can’t do it. By the way, have you asked any Senator this question? This plan you have?

Grayson: I’m in the other place, I’m in the House.

Matthews: I know, that’s why you’re not in the senate

Grayson: Oh that’s why I’m not in the Senate…

Matthews: This is netroots talk.  This is outsider talk and you’re an elected official and you know you can’t do it.  You are pandering to the netroots right now.  I know what you’re doing.

Grayson: You are wrong.  This is something we talk about with our leadership in our caucus meetings every week! …

Matthews: …I know what I’m talking about and you ask anybody in the Senate right no. Go call the Senate legislative counsel’s office and ask him if you can do this. Go ask the parliamentarian is you can do this. You haven’t bothered to do that.

Grayson: No my leadership has done that …

He arrogantly goes on and on and on pretty much saying that Grayson is a dipshit because nobody who knows anything about how Washington works would ever suggest such a thing as using reconciliation to pass the bill.

With the exception of the well-known netroots morons like Newsweek, I’m sure he’s right:

For now, senior lawmakers are working the phones furiously to talk up the idea of the Senate promising to retroactively unravel several distasteful components. If House Democrats make the good-faith deal, Pelosi is arguing that the Senate promise would be easy to keep. Reconciliation votes require only a 51-vote majority. Or even 50, in which case Vice President Biden could break the tie.

This aide says that leadership considers reconciliation, with the House conditioning its support on promised fixes in the Senate, as the much more strategic route than breaking the package into parts, which isn’t ideal because all of the parts are interlocking. Asked what the timetable would be for that, this aide says weeks, not months.

This is from the top blog the NY Daily news:

A well-informed source tells The Mouth Nancy Pelosi is set to announce the House will go the reconciliation route on health care reform.

Of course, that means using a budgetary procedure that requires a simple majority to pass.

It’s still unclear to us precisely what that means would be passed, but possibilities would be creating a national health care exchange and expanding Medicare or Medicaid coverage.

Or perhaps the netroots idiot known as MSNBC First Read:

“Like a dazed boxer taking an eight-count, Democrats say they need time to recover from the devastating blow they suffered when Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley on Tuesday,” The Hill writes. “They made clear on Wednesday, however, that they are not giving up. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on CNBC Wednesday that healthcare reform is ‘not dead by any means.’”

[…]

Clyburn seemed to indicate that reconciliation should be used. And the AFL-CIO supports it. “One scenario under consideration would have House Democrats pass the Senate bill as is, paired with a separate bill formed under reconciliation rules carving out changes to the healthcare bill that House and Senate Democrats had previously negotiated,” The Hill writes.

Roll Call writes that the reconciliation option is gaining steam, and notes that Max Baucus could be central again.

Does Matthews read any of those news organizations? Even his own?

Maybe we should all send him some links.

hardball@msnbc.com

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Poll Dancing

by digby

So, what do the people really want? We have some polls today.

First, let’s look at Gallup:

A 55% majority of Americans say President Obama and congressional Democrats should suspend work on the health care bill that has been on the verge of passage and consider alternatives that would draw more Republican support, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.[39% say they should keep working on it.]

The findings underscore the unsettled prospects for health care legislation — which has consumed much of the capital’s attention for nearly a year — in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s upset victory in the Massachusetts Senate race Tuesday. When sworn in, he will give Republicans the 41st vote they need to sustain a filibuster and block action.

I’d be very surprised if the Democrats pushed through the Senate bill in light of those findings. But they could surprise me.

I suspect that people responded that way simply because they are exhausted with this debate and don’t want to hear about it anymore. They do not understand that the Republicans have no intention of passing any kind of health reform, or that Jim DeMint called it Obama’s Waterloo and said that it would “break him.” (They might have if Democrats had used Republican obstructionism as a weapon the way that Republicans would have used it against them.) They think that if only the Democrats would put forth a reasonable bill, the Republicans would have to vote for it. And in a reasonable political world that would be true.

In other polling (pdf) however,we find a very different result from the Massachusetts election:

1. This was a working-class revolt, and it reveals the danger to Democrats of not successfully addressing workers’ economic concerns.

• Coakley won this election by five points among college graduates, but lost the non-college vote by a 20-point margin. This represents a huge swing amongn on-college voters since 2008, when Obama won by 21 points, for a net swingof 41 points. (The comparable change among college graduates was a net25-point decline, from +30 to +5).

• Non-college men voted for Brown by a 27-point margin (59% to 32%), and non-college women also voted for Brown by 13 points (while college women went for Coakley by 13 points).

•  Gender dynamics were less important than the class dimension: the 15-point gender gap (men voted for Brown by 13 points, women voted for Coakley by two points) was actually considerably smaller than the 24-point gap in 2008.

2. Voters still have the same goals they had in November 2008: fix the economy and provide affordable health care. But they don’t see the job being done.

• Economic dissatisfaction played a large role in Brown’s victory. The majority  of voters who said the Massachusetts economy is not so good or poor (52%) voted for Brown by 56% to 39%. However, voters who said the economy was excellent, good, or fair supported Coakley by 52% to 43%.

•  Brown even won voters in the 20% of households in which someone had lost a job in the past year (50% to 45%).

• Voters’ believed the federal government has helped Wall Street—61% say government recession policies have helped Wall Street and large banks a lot or a fair amount—but not average working people (only 18%).

• The most important qualities voters were looking for in electing a senator were someone who will (1) fix the economy and (2) reform the health care system. Sending a message to President Obama and Congress about the size of government was much less important.

• “Electing a candidate who will strengthen the economy and create more good jobs” (79% single most/very important factor).

•  “Electing a candidate who is committed to controlling health care costs and covering the uninsured” (54% single most/very important factor).

•  “Sending a message that President Obama and Congress are going too far in expanding government’s role in our lives” (42% single most/very important).

3. Massachusetts voters say that President Obama and the Democrats have done too little, rather than attempted too much.

•  Voters were not worried about Democratic “overreach”—47% said their bigger concern about Democrats is that they haven’t succeeded in making needed change rather than tried to make too many changes too quickly (32%). Even Brown voters are more concerned about a lack of change (50%) than about trying to make too many changes too quickly (43%).

•  Massachusetts voters significantly are more concerned about Democrats doing too much to help banks and Wall Street (54%) than about imposing too many regulations on business (22%). Even Brown voters are more concerned about Democrats’ helping banks (55%) than about imposing government regulations (36%).

4. The results of this election were not a call to abandon national health care reform.

•  82% of voters were aware of Scott Brown’s opposition to health care legislation supported by President Obama and congressional Democrats, but it had virtually no net impact on the Senate election. Those who knew Brown’s position were as likely to say it made them less likely (39%) to support him as to say it made them more likely to support him (41%).

•  Brown actually lost among the 59% of voters who picked health care as one of their top two voting issues (50% Coakley, 46% Brown). Brown voters (55%) were less likely to cite health care as a top issue than were Coakley voters (66%).

•  Two-thirds (67%) favor the Massachusetts health insurance law that ensures nearly universal coverage, including 53% of Brown voters.

• However, Massachusetts voters did show deep concerns about the possibility that health care reform would tax employer health benefits. Fully 42% of voters believed the health care bill would tax employer health benefits, and those voters voted for Brown by two to one (64% to 32%) while voters who knew the plan would not tax benefits voted for Coakley (54% to 40%). Among voters who believed the health care bill would tax employer benefits, half (48%) said this issue made them more likely to vote for Scott Brown (just 14% were more likely to vote for Coakley).

 You tell me which poll the Villagers are going to believe.

Update:  Add this one to the mix and I think we can see the CW gelling:

The poll by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University’s School of Public Health underscores how significantly voter anger has turned against Democrats in Washington and how dramatically the political landscape has shifted during President Obama’s first year in office.

Sixty-three percent of Massachusetts special-election voters say the country is seriously off track, and Brown captured two-thirds of these voters in his victory over Democrat Martha Coakley. In November 2008, Obama scored a decisive win among the more than eight in 10 Massachusetts voters seeing the country as off course.

Nearly two-thirds of Brown’s voters say their vote was intended at least in part to express opposition to the Democratic agenda in Washington, but few say the senator-elect should simply work to stop it. Three-quarters of those who voted for Brown say they would like him to work with Democrats to get Republican ideas into legislation in general; nearly half say so specifically about health-care legislation.

When Obama was elected, 63 percent of Massachusetts voters said government should do more to solve problems, according to exit polling then. In the new poll, that number slipped to 50 percent, with about as many, 47 percent, saying that government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.

Like Obama, Coakley won more than 70 percent of those pro-government voters, but the bigger pool of voters seeing government overreach helped Brown claim victory.

Health care topped jobs and the economy as the most important issue driving Massachusetts voters, but among Brown voters, “the way Washington is working” ran a close second to the economy and jobs as a factor.

Overall, just 43 percent of Massachusetts voters say they support the health-care proposals advanced by Obama and congressional Democrats; 48 percent oppose them. Among Brown’s supporters, however, eight in 10 said they were opposed to the measures, 66 percent of them strongly so.

Sizable majorities of Brown voters see the Democrats’ plan, if passed, as making things worse for their families, the country and the state of Massachusetts. Few Coakley voters see these harms, and most of those backing her see clear benefits for the country if health-care reform became law. Less than half of Coakley’s supporters say they or the state would be better off as a result.

Unless we get some serious profiles in courage, I’m not seeing any realistic scenario in which the Democrats will go forward with the results of those polls, even if the Massachusetts AFL-CIO poll (#2) is more accurate. I hope I’m wrong.

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Not Gonna Happen

by tristero

Editorial in today’s NY Times:

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

Let me see if I have this straight. The latest Supreme Court ruling will permit previously unavailable millions, if not tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to be spent on American politics. And the Times is calling on the direct beneficiaries of all this spanking new cash to limit their own access to it.

That’s really funny.

In a crying-your-eyes-out-for-the-future-of-your-country kind of way.

Neo-Hooverites Waiting In The Wings

by digby

If you need any more proof that the American “conservatives” are a unique breed, this would probably do it:

Conservatives on one side of the Atlantic love President Barack Obama’s bank plan, unveiled on Thursday, but on the other side of the pond, not so much.

The harshly critical response of U.S. Republicans to the president’s proposals to reduce bank risk-taking contrasted sharply with the reaction of UK Conservatives, who praised them.

Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price, a congressman from Georgia, blasted Obama, saying “Americans are sick of his big-government solutions …”

“It is folly to believe that Washington can decide what represents the proper amount of risk in the private sector.”

But George Osborne, finance spokesman for the UK Conservative Party, said, “This is a welcome move by President Obama that accords very much with our thinking.

“I have said consistently that we should look at separating retail banking from activities like large scale propriety trading and that this was best done internationally.”

Real conservatives, you see, are conservative. They like rules governing everything.

American conservatives are not conservative: they only like rules governing other people’s pleasure.

Here’s another example: Representative Scottt Garret responding to Tim Geithner’s interview about the new banking regulations on the Lehrer News Hour. Now you might assume that Geithner was a bozo, and he sounds remarkably dull and slow for a presumably smart fellow. But this is from another planet:

JUDY WOODRUFF: And now, for another view, we turn to Representative Scott Garrett of New Jersey. He’s a leading Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. He’s helped draft many of his party’s alternative recommendations for financial regulatory reform.

Congressman Garrett, thank you for being with us. Tell us, overall, your take on the president’s proposals today.

REP. SCOTT GARRETT, R-N.J.: Before I do that, I would just say that was a fascinating interview. I appreciated some of the questions that you posited and the lack of answers on the other side of it.

And, also, just one other comment. You know, I was thinking, your lead-in to this story talked about the fact that the — the stock market tanked today. You know, when the former Fed chairman was in, Alan Greenspan was in, there was a saying back in those days that you called the “Greenspan put.” Any time the treasury secretary — for the Fed chairman said something, the market saw that as good news and it took off.

We have just the opposite with this administration. Any time this administration comes out and says something about what they plan to do in the future, the market tanks. And I think — and it tanks not only for Wall Street, but it tanks for the rest of America as well. And I think that’s very telling as to where this administration is going to bring us with Wall Street and the economy as well.

[…]

JUDY WOODRUFF: But let me ask you about one-half of this, at least, and that…

REP. SCOTT GARRETT: Sure.

JUDY WOODRUFF: … is ensuring no bank owns, invests in or has any sponsorship of a hedge fund or private equity fund. What about that part of the proposal?

REP. SCOTT GARRETT: Well, that would put — obviously, put the reins in on the current Fed chairman and this administration with what they used in order to try to get us out of the situation that we’re in right now, right?

I mean, in other words, had their rules been put in place a year ago, they wouldn’t have been able to try to push for some of the mergers that we did see on Wall Street to try to bring us out of this situation. So, that’s one real question that we have to put back to the administration. What will they do next time?

And the second major point is this. If we want the banks to lend — and we all do — if we want the economy to expand — and we all do — do you really want to start confining the banks in their ability to make profits in order to generate more capital to lend out to the people? And that’s what these constrictions will now do.

[…]

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, going forward, would you and other Republicans support the idea of making sure a bank does not own — have the ability any longer to own a private equity fund or a hedge fund?

REP. SCOTT GARRETT: No, no, we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t. And we wouldn’t see the need for it because we wouldn’t support the idea of that institution being totally bailed out again by the — by the taxpayer.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And then the other half of this is the idea of…

REP. SCOTT GARRETT: Sure.

JUDY WOODRUFF: … limiting consolidation, putting limits on the size that any bank would be allowed, the large bank, would be allowed to grow to.

REP. SCOTT GARRETT: Yes.

You know, years ago, and not too long ago, the United States had some of the — the majority of the largest financial institutions in world. Now we have gone down to the point we only have — you can count them on one hand. And where’s the rest of the large financial institutions? Elsewhere in the world.

If what this administration says is, we’re going to tie the hands even more, so that we’re going to put a limit on them, the secretary answered your question by saying, do you want to dismantle them? Effectively, he should have said yes, because that’s what their legislation allows them, the administration, to do, to dismantle them when they get larger than they want them to be.

We will be uncompetitive with the rest of the financial markets in the world, as we continue to be so with this — policies they have enacted so far — or tried to enact, I should say.

That’s what they have to offer.

His entire argument basically came down to this prescription for a banking crisis:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate … It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people …

In other words, let the banks do whatever they want and if they destroy the economy, let the whole world pay the price. It’ll be character building for the parasites and there will be lots of opportunities for the Masters of the Universe. What’s the problem?

Update: And then there’s this

BLOCK: You’re saying that this ruling affects the average citizen
expressing his or her voice, as opposed to corporations being allowed
to spend freely.

Mr. GINGRICH: Im saying that it allows you to have a middle-class
candidate go out and find allies and supporters who are able to help
them match the rich. And able to help them match the incumbent.
Remember, incumbents run with millions of dollars in congressional
staff, congressional franking, congressional travel. And they have all
the advantages of being able to issue statements from their incumbent
office. And the challenger – the person out there who’s the citizen
who’s rebelling, who wants to change things – is at an enormous
disadvantage in taking on incumbents.

This will, in fact, level the playing field and allow middle-class
candidates to begin to have an opportunity to raise the resources to
take on the powerful and the rich

Right. Any middle class person can just sell him or herself to the highest corporate bidder and compete with an incumbent. What could be more democratic?

Update II: Fire.Him.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has reservations about President Obama’s new proposal to limit the size and scope of the nation’s banks, sources tell ABC News.

Specifically, the sources say, Geithner is worried that the proposed limits could damage the competitiveness of US firms with their global competitors.

“It needs to be done right,” one source close to Geithner told ABC News. “How it gets implemented and how it gets defined is absolutely critical. We don’t want to disrupt the ability of banks to lend.”

Another source in the financial industry says that the Treasury boss fears that political fears may now be overriding economic considerations.

I suppose he might be sending a message to the bankers that he feels their pain, but he’s also sending a message to the country that crackpots like Garrett are right.

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