Month: February 2010

Cheaters By Nature

by digby

Susie makes another great catch:

Of course Wall Street’s most powerful company wouldn’t stoop to rigging an online poll, right? In fact, one of their spinners said the bank had “just received this information and is investigating fully”. Yeah, I think they’re going to join O.J. Simpson in looking for the perpetrators!

Around 3:41 pm yesterday, the technical team watching the vote counter on a grass root campaign’s website noticed that the “no” votes increased dramatically. A few days ago robinhoodtax.com, asked the public to vote on a “tiny” tax on bankers that would donate no more than .05% of each banking transaction to the poor. They say it would raise more than $100 billion pounds. Robin Hood’s security team said that it traced the erroneous votes to two computers, one of which is allegedly registered to Goldman, according to The Telegraph.

Unbelievable. Why in the hell are people entrusting all this power to such a bunch of babies?

On the other hand, if they are forced to pay a .05% tax on transactions it goes without saying that they’ll all hold their breath until they turn blue because it just won’t be worth it to work anymore. And then where will we be?

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Mississippi Man

by digby

Haley Barbour is a smart guy:

[Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour] believes that, given the policies being pushed by the Democrats, his party should embrace the mantle of opposition. Because Barbour chairs the Republican Governors Association, his advice is likely to carry considerable weight as his party heads into the midterm elections. In an interview with National Journal, Barbour warned fellow Republicans not to fall into a trap that they managed to avoid in 1994: turning the midterm election into a choice between parties rather than a referendum on the party in control…

House GOP leaders have asked Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California to draft an updated Contract With America. Barbour argues, though, that if Republicans release a national agenda early this year, they will just give Democrats something to attack. In 1994, the year the GOP seized the House and the Senate, House Republicans did not unveil the original Contract With America until autumn.

It is probably good politics for them. The country is polarized and has been for some time. They will retain their own followers no matter what happens and the independents and swing voters will move to whichever party is out of power as long as they are dissatisfied. It’s what they do.

But it’s more than that. The Republicans are one trick tax cut ponies unless they are willing to seriously put “entitlements” on the table. They’d love to, of course, but doing it at a time of great economic insecurity isn’t optimal. They’d rather use the opportunity to gin up deficit fever, hamstring the Democrats from doing anything which could depolarize the electorate and just roll into a majority by bashing Dems for being profligate spenders. It’s one of the great advantages of having 30 years of conservative propaganda to fall back on — unless the opposition makes a clear and compelling case that everything you’ve said has been proven wrong, it remains a comfortable default position among the large portion of the electorate that doesn’t pay attention to the details.

It’s also why they are running away from their latest “idea man” Paul “Call Me Galt” Ryan as fast as they can. They know that if people get a load of what the only ideas left on their plate really are, they’ll run screaming. So Barbour says ride it out and that’s what they are going to do.

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Words To Live By

by digby

Just remember: they have always been wrong about everything.

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Empathic Myopia

by digby

Glenn Greenwald points out another example of the ongoing right wing incoherence and hypocrisy, this time over their rending of garments at the treatment of the American Christians detained in Haiti. This case is an unusually striking example of such incoherence and hypocrisy because it features suspects who are sympathetic to the right solely due to the fact that they are white Americans from the midwest who are affiliated with a conservative church.

Setting aside the glaring examples Glenn cites of innocent Muslims caught up in such situations tortured and shipped to Guantanamo for years on end without any due process at all who get absolutely no sympathy from these same people, imagine if these were black Jehovah’s Witnesses accused of kidnapping white children under similar circumstances right here in the United States. I don’t think you’d see any demands from these newly born international human rights advocates for the ACLU to intervene here either.

There’s something about the American right that requires a very specific degree of identification for them to be empathetic and it goes beyond race, although race is certainly a factor. They see these people in that jail in Haiti and see themselves — nice “normal” Americans — and they feel their pain at being wrongly accused. They suddenly demand that human rights be universal and stand firmly behind the constitutional tenet that one is innocent until proven guilty. They are aghast that these people could be ill treated in prison or not given all the safeguards we were all promised in their 8th grade history book.

But they are incapable of extending that same identification to “others,” people who aren’t “like” them, that they couldn’t be related to or who don’t speak the same language. Those people aren’t Real people. And for many of them, that’s not just something they apply to non-Americans, but to their fellows as well. They assume that suspects are guilty until proven innocent all the time in America.

The Real American tribe is (mostly) white, socially traditional and politically conservative. People who fit that criteria are, quite literally, the only people they care about. (At the more extreme edge, they are the only people they think are really people.) They simply can’t empathize with those who don’t fit that mold.

For most of us, this all comes down to what I call the Count of Monte Cristo effect. I read that book as a kid and the horror of a system which would allow an innocent person to be locked up forever so seared itself into my psyche that I automatically understood from that point on what injustice was. I didn’t need to be a Frenchman in the Napoleonic era to relate. I’d been inside Edmond Dantès head, I’d been Edmond Dantès, and I’d felt, as a human being, what it was to be falsely accused and imprisoned.

I assume that most people have some sort of similar empathetic epiphany as children — maybe it’s just recognizing the hurt you’ve felt in the eyes of another. But it’s fundamental to human development. Why, for some people, it stops at their own family or group, I don’t know. But it’s clear that among a great many people it does. I hear it every day among some of our most powerful leaders who blithely assert that terrorist suspects don’t deserve the same rights as Americans. And yet, they know, that a large number of those terrorist suspects turned out to be innocent. They simply can’t extend the horror they would feel if they found themselves in similar circumstances, to these other people. They simply can’t accord them basic common humanity.

Even as a matter of self-preservation, I guess they just rely on the belief that their fellow tribesmen will recognize them and come to their rescue if they should ever find themselves in such circumstances. (Or they are so lacking in imagination that the idea that it could happen to them is unfathomable.) But as these folks down in Haiti are finding, their tribe isn’t all powerful and they can’t always fix things for them. It turns out that having a rule of law commonly respected the world over really comes in handy at a time like this. And every time the US government chisels away at our system of justice in the name of “protecting ourselves”, or some yahoo prattles on about how someone doesn’t deserve the same rights as somebody else, that fundamental protection gets weaker and weaker.

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The Voice Of Reason

by digby

Big of him:

In an exclusive interview on “This Week” former Vice President Dick Cheney took issue with Sarah Palin’s suggestion that President Obama could help himself politically if he declared war on Iran.

“I don’t think a president can make a judgment like that on the basis of politics. The stakes are too high, the consequences too significant to be treating those as simple political calculations,” Cheney said. “When you begin to talk about war, talk about crossing international borders, you talk about committing American men and women to combat, that takes place on a plane clear above any political consideration,” he said in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

In an interview last week on Fox News Sunday, Palin said that if Obama “toughen[ed] up” and “secured our nation” people might think differently about him. “Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decide to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do. …[I]f he decided to toughen up…I think people would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and decide well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he’s – than he is today.”

Yeah. Absolutely.

Some people are asking, is President Bush’s Iraq offensive being driven by the fall election? An idea the vice president calls “reprehensible.”

“The suggestion that I find reprehensible is the notion that somehow, you know, we saved this and now we’ve sprung it on them for political reasons,” Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last week.

But some people in very high places are warning that a life-and-death policy like Iraq “must not be a simple matter of political convenience, ” as U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Thursday.

What’s the political convenience? Strategist Dick Morris spelled it out in a recent column: “Polls show that only one issue works in Bush’s favor: terrorism.”

Even the White House has hinted at a political strategy. As long ago as last January, Bush strategist Karl Rove said, “We can also go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military and thereby protecting America.”

Why did the Administration wait until September to make its case against Iraq? White House chief of staff Andrew Card told The New York Times last week, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Oh and lest you think the old duffer’s gone soft:

When asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl whether the U.S. government should have had the option to use “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding with Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table.”

“Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn’t include those techniques. I think that’s a mistake,” Cheney said.

Certainly. And they had a great opportunity to do use some of their other tried and true “methods” and lost them when they allowed the suspect to be treated for his burns:

During Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation President Bush learned he was on painkillers for the wounds he suffered during his capture and was therefore difficult to get information from. President Bush exclaimed to then CIA director George Tenet “[w]ho authorized putting him on pain medication?” It would later be reported that Abu Zubaydah was denied painkillers during his interrogation.

Consider how useful it would have been if instead of getting real intelligence, they could have gotten some TV ready, “24” style fantasies of plots to fill the mall of America with laughing gas and set off dirty bombs tucked in Chanel handbags. What a waste of a chance to allow the chattering classes to wet their pants and wring their hands over terrorist threats that don’t exist. After all, pumping up fear among the population and elevating the rump al Qaeda to the level of superhuman villains with mystical powers is a proven way to keep America safe.

It’s interesting that Cheney and his friends so ruined the economy that people are now wistful about those glory days of terrorism fever and are ready to lash out at any enemy they can find, thus re-opening the door to his very special brand of sadism. It’s an unusual way to rebuild your reputation, but it could work. After all, neocon zombies never die, they just lie in wait.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Wolves, lower

By Dennis Hartley

Ay, Chihuahua…Del Toro es el lobo!

Inga: Werewolf!
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: (startled) Werewolf?!
Igor: There.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: What?
Igor: (pointing) There, wolf. There, castle.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Why are you talking that way?
Igor: I thought you wanted to.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: No, I don’t want to.
Igor: (shrugs) Suit yourself. I’m easy.
-from Young Frankenstein.

You know what “they” say-it always seems to come in threes; especially in Hollywood, where the studios have recently been on a decidedly Victorian kick. As of this weekend, we have the slobbering jowls of Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman snapping away in theaters, hot on the heels of Sherlock Holmes and The Young Victoria. Basing their film on the The Lon Cheney Jr classic of the same title, director Johnston and screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self (who adapted directly from Curt Siodmak’s 1941 script) have re-imagined a few elements here and there (primarily, one would assume, as a nod to the Goth and Steampunk aficionados), but remain more or less faithful to the original.

The film opens promisingly enough, with a vintage Hammer Studios vibe. It’s England, it’s 1891, there’s a full moon, an old dark manor, and (you guessed it) a fog on the moor. A terrified man is fleeing from an unseen, bestial horror just as fast as his little Wellingtons can carry him. Not fast enough. You can imagine what happens next, and it is not pretty. The filmmakers waste little time establishing that their dark tale is not only going to be, uh, dripping with atmosphere, but with a healthy amount of viscera as well.

Local myth attributes a recent spate of these brutal killings to an elusive lycanthropic creature of unknown origins, which haunts the moors when the moon is full. The villagers (as is their wont in such stories) are a superstitious lot, and believe that they have been cursed (naturally, the nearest group of Gypsies is suspected to have a hand in it). This is the unsettling milieu that an American actor named Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) finds himself thrust into when his brother’s mysterious disappearance precipitates a return to his boyhood home and a wary reunion with his long-estranged father (Anthony Hopkins). Lawrence has not returned at his father’s request, but rather at the urging of his missing brother’s fiancée (Emily Blunt). The elder Talbot’s misanthropic demeanor has not exactly endeared him to his neighbors either, and when an inspector from Scotland Yard (Hugo Weaving) arrives to investigate the latest killings, they happily cast their suspicions in the direction of the Talbot family estate. Through fate and circumstance, Lawrence becomes suspect #1, and a dark family history unfurls.

As I was watching the film, I started pondering why filmgoers and readers continue to be so fascinated with the idea of vampires and werewolves. I suppose it’s something to do with those primal impulses that we all (well, most of us-thank the Goddess) keep safely locked away in our little lizard brains. Both of these “monsters” are basically predatory in nature, but with some significant differences. With vampires, it’s the psycho-sexual subtext; always on the hunt for someone to, um, penetrate with those (Canines? Molars? I’m not a dentist). There is a certain amount of seduction (or foreplay, if you will) involved as well. But once they get their rocks off, it’s an immediate beeline for the next victim (no rest for the anemic). In criminological terms, vampires are serial date rapists (making it even more puzzling to me why people find them so sexy). Werewolves, on the other hand, are much less complex creatures. They are spree killers, pure and simple (“He always seemed like such a sweet, quiet guy. Until that moon was full.”) With them it’s all about the ripping, and the slicing and the dicing. No sweet talk, no cigarette afterwards.

Vampires are quite self-aware of their “issues”…but they can’t stop doing what they do. They have highly addictive personalities-which is an element a lot of people can identify with on some level (with me, it’s chocolate…and yes, you may call me Count Chocula). Werewolves, on the other hand, generally have no cognizance of their actions (until perhaps after the fact). They have true schizophrenic personalities, which I think makes them the scarier creatures. I suppose that even those of us who are not homicidal maniacs can still relate on some minor level (“I did WHAT last night? Jesus, I’ll never get THAT drunk again!”). Werewolves scare us because they remind us of the duality that exists within all human beings (after all, Hitler and Gandhi walked the planet at the same time).

In cinema, I think my favorite “monster movies” don’t necessarily involve characters physically shape shifting into wild beasts. One example would be Jean Renoir’s 1938 thriller La Bete Humaine (reworked by Fritz Lang as the 1954 film noir Human Desire) with the great Jean Gabin as a train engineer who is plagued by blackouts, during which he commits horrendous crimes, usually precipitated by sexual stirrings (Freudians will have a field day with all the P.O.V. shots of Gabin chugging his huge locomotive through long, dark tunnels). Of course, you can’t forget Elvis’ immortal line from Jailhouse Rock (after administering an uninvited smooch): “Ah… sorry, honah. It’s just the beast in me.”

So where in the hell was I going with this? With my ADD, I’m so easily sidetracked (“Oh, look. I found a shiny silver bullet!”). Back to the movie review. The Wolfman, 2010. Was this a necessary remake? Well, 69 years seems to be a respectful enough moratorium (it’s not like the bodies are still warm). On the plus side, Johnston’s film does evoke the original in pure mood and atmosphere; it’s nice to see someone paying homage to what I would consider Universal’s classic horror era (which also includes wonderfully atmospheric creature-less chillers like The Scarlet Claw, my personal favorite of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes entries). The transformation scenes are genuinely creepy and frightening, and Rick Baker’s creature prosthetics uphold his reputation as the top man in the industry. Danny Elfman’s suitably gothic score fits in nicely (Tim Burton lets him out of the basement now and then). On the down side, despite the impressive cast, no one’s performance stands out; even the usually hammy Hopkins seems oddly detached. While I can appreciate that Del Toro was trying to “internalize” the inherent tragedy of his character, he never gets to develop it fully-which could be due to the rushed narrative in the second act. There are some interesting peripheral characters introduced (like a Gypsy seer, played by Geraldine Chaplin, who we don’t get to see enough of these days) but again, they are ultimately given short shrift.

Fans of old school Gothic horror will fare best. While the film features graphic violence, it stops just this side of being gratuitous (unlike the execrable “torture porn” subgenre, which has given horror movies a bad name). With a sharper script and more plot development, they could have had a minor cult item here. But for the time being, Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Boris Karloff can continue to, um, rest easy.

I’m not like other guys: The Howling, The Company of Wolves, An American Werewolf in London, Werewolf of London, Wolf, Wolfen, The Curse of the Werewolf, Dog Soldiers, Underworld , Van Helsing, Skinwalkers, Bad Moon, Teen Wolf , I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Silver Bullet.

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Put The Rumors To Rest

by digby

I have no way of knowing which of the rumors, if any, surrounding Governor Paterson are true. This big story that was supposed to be dropping any minute in the NY Times still hasn’t done so and at this point, Paterson is just hanging out there having to answer for every delirious little bit of gossip that comes down the pike. Whatever the story is, it seems to me that he’s right about this much:

“The human decency, if not journalists’ ethics, I think would compel an organization when they see a person being slandered for over two weeks now … to clear the air and at least say that the charges that are being made are not in the perimeters of our investigation.”

Absent a public clarification, the governor pleaded for the Times to publish its piece at once, “so I could be out of my misery.”

It’s not clear whether the governor will get his wish. He said that New York Times Albany Bureau Chief Danny Hakim, whom he identified as the writer of the article, told him he was not sure when it would run.

At this point the NY Times is just letting this man die a death of a thousand cuts. I suppose it’s possible that when they finally reveal whatever it is, it will seem insignificant compared to the rumors, which are becoming so ridiculous that it’s clear a witch hunt has begun. Or maybe it’s so awful that he will be ruined anyway. But what if they don’t publish at all? This stuff is just hanging out there, with the Times blandly clinging to their journalistic “ethics” as this man has his reputation shredded. Why is that ok?

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Getting Lucky

by digby

Your free market at work:

Consumers in at least four states who buy their own health insurance are getting hit with premium increases of 15 percent or more — and people in other states could see the same thing.

Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of WellPoint Inc., has been under fire for a week from regulators and politicians for notifying some of its 800,000 individual policyholders in California that it plans to raise rates by up to 39 percent March 1.

The Anthem Blue Cross plan in Maine is asking for increases of about 23 percent this year for some individual policyholders. Last year, they raised rates up to 32 percent.

Kansas had one recent case where one insurer wanting to raise most individual rates 20 percent to 30 percent was persuaded by state insurance officials to reduce the increases to 10 percent to 20 percent. The insurance department would not identify the company but said it was not Anthem.

And in Oregon, multiple insurers were granted rate hikes of 15 percent or more this year after increases of around 25 percent last year for customers who purchase individual health insurance, rather than getting it through their employer.

Premiums are far more volatile for individual policies than for those bought by employers and other large groups, which have bargaining clout and a sizable pool of people among which to spread risk. As more people have lost jobs, many who are healthy have decided to go without health insurance or get a bare-bones, high-deductible policy, reducing the amount of premiums insurers receive.

Steep rate hikes in this sliver of the insurance market — about 13 million Americans, as of 2008 — have popped up sporadically for years. Experts see them becoming increasingly common.

That’s the unfortunate sliver I belong to. But it’s a pretty small sliver of the population, fortunately. Most people are covered by the government or their employers though their employers so as long as they keep their jobs, this isn’t a big worry for them, (yet).

The Republicans have a solution for people like me in the private health insurance market (besides, “don’t get sick or die quickly”). Remember this?

Think Progress caught a great exchange between GOP Representative and a couple of callers on the health care crisis. The first caller was a 60+ year old woman who worked in retail who was complaining that she couldn’t get health insurance because she has diabetes. Here’s Davis’ answer:

DAVIS: Well, Dorothy, let me, let me say a couple things. First of all, you know, I understand the dilemma you’re in. I don’t know if you’ll be able to retire at 62 or not. Frankly, I mean all of our 401Ks are down. I wish I could retire at 62. I think you’re going to find Americans working longer than they had originally anticipated, given the economic downturn and some of the economic realities.

If you can find a job with a major employer, they’re not going to be able to reject you under those cases. I don’t think you’ll find, probably be able to find some health insurance but if its with a small business or you’re going out on your own, it’s difficult at this point. There may be a government plan or private plans that are mandated coming out of this that are maybe able to help you. But diabetes, particularly adult onset, is controllable. If you watch your weight, if you exercise, watch what you eat and, you know, continue I guess in this case to take your medication. I don’t know any reason why you shouldn’t be able to find something out there, but you want to look for an employer that has a health care plan. Good luck.

[…]

CALLER: I’ll make, I’ll make my comment then I’ll get off the phone. Anyway, one of the things that I noticed this morning was Tom’s reaction to the woman who called looking for the job with health care and his final statement was “good luck,” which I think encapsulates the entire Republican party’s attitude towards any problems that are facing the American people today. I also have a master’s degree in economics.

HOST: Did you want to respond to Rick?

DAVIS: Well, congratulations on — well, I wish her good luck at this point. We’ll see what comes out of the health care plan. It wasn’t a “good luck, you’re on your own type of thing.” I think we all feel for people that are in those kinds of positions. But it’s very difficult. When you start having the government take care of everybody with a problem, as I said you’re doing it with borrowed money, what you want to see is — these are not simple solutions. It is progressive to continue to borrow money, to spend to take care of people’s problems. This tends to be a pretty inefficient way of doing things, number one. And number two, down the pike, somebody has to pay for it. I think I’m fairly progressive in my views as well. I was the head of a county government before I came to Washington and had to run it, inherited a pretty big deficit and was selected two years later, after making a number of changes, as the best financially-run county in the country.

So I look at governance as a very very tough business and I don’t think “good luck” was like a kiss off. I would generally say good luck to you as you try to move through this problem. But I don’t know that she can count on Washington to solve it for her. She will be eligible for Medicare in 3 years. And at that point, you can probably get some relief on some of the issues she’s looking for. She wanted to retire at 62 years old. We’d all like to retire at 62 years old, but I’m not so sure government can guarantee that people can just retire at 62 years old or that we should be doing those kind of things and maybe that’s where I part company with the caller.

She’s just got to try to stay alive for three years, which will take some luck if her diabetes goes untreated. But at that point,she really will be a lucky ducky if Paul Ryan has his way, though. She’s old enough to be able to count on Medicare when she’s 65. Everybody else had better hope they can persuade some generous large employer to keep them employed until they drop dead on the way to the coffee room. Otherwise, they’ll be shit out of luck if they get sick. Luckily, people over 60 rarely get sick, so it’s not a big problem.

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In Case You Haven’t Seen It Yet

by digby

Here’s the new “We Are The World” video:

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Insty Drinks Some Tea

by digby

So Instapundit went to the tea party convention and, surprise, came out convinced that they were all just plain folks who share his libertarian values. (It’s interesting how many people look at the teabaggers and see what they want to see.)

A year ago, many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama’s transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless. That changed when protests, organized by bloggers, met Mr. Obama a year ago in Denver, Colo., Mesa, Ariz., and Seattle, Wash. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli’s famous on-air rant on Feb. 19, 2009, which gave the tea-party movement its name.

Tea partiers are still angry at federal deficits, at Washington’s habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation, and the general incompetence that has marked the first year of the Obama presidency. But they’re no longer depressed.

Instead, they seem energized. And surprisingly media savvy.

Yes they do.

Reynolds is right that they are angry at federal deficits, at Washington’s habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation. That’s conservative movement boiler plate. But it’s also very sneaky — when they say “habit of rewarding failure with handouts” they aren’t talking about Wall Street bankers, although it’s very convenient to pretend that’s what they mean.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and revisit that famous Rick Santelli rant, which kicked off the tea party movement as we know it. (Ron Paul staged some earlier tea party protests, but this was the catalyzing event for the right wing.)And he most certainly was not ranting about Wall Street bailouts, he was ranting about the administration’s plans to help average Americans (“losers”) refinance their mortgages.

Watch it. Remind yourself of what galvanized these teabaggers in the first place:

And then remind yourself of this, via C&L:

Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government. Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

We know who the tea parties are really serving and why. And so does Instapundit. No wonder he’s so smug.

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