Month: March 2010

Once More With Feeling

by digby

Right wing lies and distortions about the health care bill just keep on coming. Thank goodness there are enough wonks and analysts out there to bat them back, although I’m really doubting at this point it makes any difference in the short run. The proof will be in the pudding and that will take years. So, we’ll be fighting this nonsense for some time to come even if the bill passes.

Here are a couple of useful arguments for you to take to the water cooler. First we have have the nonsense about taxpayer paid abortions. This article gives you the full run down on the two amendments, what they mean and don’t mean. It exposes Bart Stupak, once again, for the liar and bad faith player he is. Here is the second, about the use of the reconciliation process that exposes David brooks, once again, for the liar he is.

Look them over, bookmark them and then, in the vernacular of the rightwing hysterics, shove it down the throats of anyone who spouts these right wing lies. Our culture is so saturated with this propaganda that it’s hard to hold on to reality. We have no choice but to keep trying.

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Neigh Sayers

by digby

Wolcott wonders about the Republican party’s strange obsession with bestiality but tries not to be too judgmental:

Look, I have no idea why Senate candidate Balloon Juice). Perhaps he fell under the spell of a lustrous filly while vacationing at a dude ranch, which I gather are plentiful in his home state of Arizona, or struck up a conversation with Mr. Ed in a bar catering to lonely men whose wives are deep into denial, a casual chat over a bowl of peanuts that led to a spirited “hayride,” if you catch my innuendo.

He notes that old JD is actually married to a human at the moment and has three children so the ramifications of pursuing this love that dare not speak its name could be huge. He suggests that the voters of Arizona consider whether or not they should vote for a man on a horse after all:

I think the voters of Arizona should think twice about a man willing to toss away 2000 years of Judeo-Christian values to mate with a horse. “[If] you really had affection for your horse, I guess you could marry your horse,” he told an interviewer from

Risky Business

by digby

Who does this remind you of?

The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain’s reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals…

The results were published March 14, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.

Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack—fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance—impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy.

I always thought John Galt was a psychopath and now it’s proven.

h/t to el cid

Father FOXy

by digby

There aren’t enough hours in the day to follow the myriad Catholic sex and pervert scandals, but I would have thought that I would have heard about this one before now. How did I miss this doozy?

“Maciel was a sexual criminal of epic proportions who gained the trust of John Paul II and created a movement that is as close to a cult as anything we’ve seen in the church,” said author Jason Berry, one of two reporters who broke the Maciel story in 1997 and who directed a 2008 documentary about the priest called “Vows of Silence.”

“But he got away with it for years and still in a sense he’s getting away with it.”

The Vatican ordered a worldwide investigation into the Legion, founded in Mexico in 1941, last year. But its response to decades of allegations involving Maciel has been as slow and often reluctant as its reaction to the long-festering sex abuse scandals now erupting in Ireland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

In 1997, nine former high-ranking seminarians accused Maciel, who died in 2008, of sexually abusing them when they were boys training for the priesthood. Last year, it was discovered Maciel had an illegitimate daughter born in 1986 in Spain. Two Mexican men who say they are Maciel’s sons claim he also sexually abused them as children.

With a leader said to be a manipulative monster who built a shadowy but powerful organization for elite, wealthy Catholics with schools in 22 countries – and a tradition of grooming handsome, clean-cut priests who all wear their hair parted on the left and black double-breasted suits — the Legion of Christ sounds straight out of a Dan Brown novel.

Read the whole thing. There’s a lot more. But this one part I find particularly interesting:

Two of the most visible priests in America are Father Thomas Williams, a movie-star-handsome CBS News analyst, and Father Jonathan Morris, who is sometimes referred to as “Father Knows Best” on the Fox News Channel. They belong to the Legion of Christ but rarely identify themselves as such on camera.

Well now. Father Jonathan Morris is very familiar to me. Here’s a picture of him:

Here’s an example of his priestly commentary:

As we predicted last week, President Obama is using moral arguments to push through congress at lightning speed his health care reform bill… [I]f there is one thing ethicists and moral theologians agree upon, it is that conditions and circumstances surrounding an ethical issue do matter, and that these indeed can change the moral value of the issue in question. For example, giving money to a poor man may usually be a good thing; but giving it to him when you know he is going to buy a gun and kill his family would be all together evil.
President Obama doesn’t seem to be aware of any conditions or circumstances that may alter our “moral imperative” to pass his bill and to pass it right now.
We should be aware of many.
1) President Obama’s argument that our choice is between a) his bill right now and b) no reform for another forty years is fallacious.

2) His refusal to answer basic questions about how we are going to pay for his bill (refusing to take off the table the massive surtax option while also refusing to say he plans on using it if he can) is not fair.

3) Independent budgetary analysts disagree with the President about what this reform bill will do to minimize overall government health expenditures (the president says we “can’t afford” not to pass his bill) and about the impact of the 1 trillion dollar cost on other parts of our economy.

4) Under the proposed legislation individuals will be required to have health care coverage that meets minimum benefits standards. These standards will be established by the Obama administration. There is very good reason to believe these minimum benefits that health insurance companies must provide will include abortion on demand. Obama has said reproductive care is essential care, basic care” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has added, reproductive health includes access to abortion. Congressman Joe Pitts (PA) recently warned in a written statement that any individual who does not have a plan that meets the minimum benefit standards will be forced to pay a 2.5 percent tax penalty. And any employer who does not provide coverage that meets these standards will pay up to an 8 percent tax penalty,”

5) This week the president himself admitted he cannot guarantee tax money will not be used for abortions under his plan. Why can’t he guarantee that? Because he wants it in his plan and will mandate it if he can.

6) Euthanasia is not explicitly excluded from the category of basic health care either. If it is not excluded, eventually it will be demanded, and we will pay for it.
For President Obama to continue to use moral arguments to demand immediate passage of his bill, without also putting to rest the conditions and circumstances I outline above, is ethically reprehensible and politically unacceptable.

I don’t know about you, but “moral lessons” from a lying member of a pedophile cult just don’t resonate with me. In fact, I’m pretty sure that anything this guy says should be thoroughly examined because he’s spent his life as a member of a pedophile cult working for FOX news. If I believed in such things things, I’d be fairly sure he’s Satan.
h/t to KG

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Yellow Peril

by digby

“Nancy Pelosi, I think, has got them all liquored up on sake and you know, they’re making a suicide run here,” Graham said on the Keven Cohen Show on WVOC radio in Columbia, S.C.

Well then it’s only a matter of time before the good guys can come back, right? After all, they can always repeal health care reform because it will be so very unpopular. Why the long face, Huckleberry?

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Cult Of Gold

by digby

I will leave it to the economists and financial analysts to deconstruct what caused Lehman’s downfall (although it looks pretty clearly to be a case of fraud.) What fascinates me is the culture that these people created and lived within that leads to the kind of reckless behavior that kills the golden goose.

A new book by Vanity Fair contributing editor Vicky Ward may just be the one that gets to that story, if this article in the Times Online is correct:

The book lifts the lid on the extraordinary culture of a firm where an almost messianic belief in unity — motto: “one firm” — turned its New York offices into a sealed capsule that shut itself off from the rest of the world like a cult. It was a world where the desire to grow Lehman’s into a major player capable of taking on Wall Street giants such as Goldman Sachs became so all-consuming that few dared to challenge senior management decisions. Huge gambles were taken without a second thought. It was, Ward says, a world that was doomed to fail. “Even without an economic catastrophe Lehman would have failed. It was too dysfunctional.”

As part of the “one firm” strategy, which demanded total loyalty, Lehman invaded all aspects of its senior executives private lives and became oddly preoccupied with their marital status. Giving a toast at a company dinner one night, Chris Pettit, one of the two deputies to the Lehman chief executive Dick Fuld, said: “Now, look at this! Every single person here is with their original spouse. That is why we are successful. Because our word is our honour.”

Hookay…

Pettit later left his wife for a younger woman, which Ward believes broke his career. “His closest allies at the firm deserted him,” she says. These included Fuld’s other right-hand man Joe Gregory, who disliked Pettit’s new mistress and once told a colleague that she was “evil”. Pettit was eventually frozen out of Lehman in 1997 and died soon after in a snowmobile accident.

[…]

But other wives found the social events sponsored by the firm and the annual summer retreat a ghastly ordeal, not least because of Fuld’s obsession with dress code. Evenings on the summer retreat required dresses, jewellery and Blahnik shoes, while they were all expected to don hiking gear for a trek up a mountain. One wife once brought a fake plaster cast so she could pretend she had a broken leg. She was flummoxed when Niki arrived with a real cast on her leg saying she planned to climb regardless.

Fuld’s requirement that his executives sacrifice all for the sake of the firm, often put unbearable strains on their families. Karin Jack recalls that her child had a seizure on the day the Jacks were supposed to go on a Lehman outing. Rather than excuse her for the day, they landed Joe Gregory’s private helicopter at her home and waited for her. “Can you imagine the pressure?” she told Ward. “I have this really sick child, but I know that if I don’t get on that helicopter it’s going to hurt Brad.”

This was obviously a cushy cult, but a cult nonetheless. I think it’s probably not all that unusual either. These Masters of the Universe believe their own hype. I’m sure you’ve all see organizations, even small ones, where the leaders begin to require rituals and oaths and loyalty pledges, where they take on a sort of quasi religious cast. You see it all the time in politics.

The best policy if you want to keep your sanity it to keep your distance from people like this, but when they are offering hundreds of millions I would guess the temptation is very, very strong to drink the kool-aid.

But once you do, there’s no going back:

Early on in his career, Pettit made a pledge never to “turn into an asshole” if he made money, something he sadly failed to live up to. Gregory turned into an all-controlling monster, Ward suggests, as he became obsessed with growing the firm and his own fortune. He turned out to be a phony, who bought his own helicopter and seaplane for his commute and would tell other senior executives that his personal annual spending budget was $15 million…

Pettit later left his wife for a younger woman, which Ward believes broke his career. “His closest allies at the firm deserted him,” she says. These included Fuld’s other right-hand man Joe Gregory, who disliked Pettit’s new mistress and once told a colleague that she was “evil”. Pettit was eventually frozen out of Lehman in 1997 and died soon after in a snowmobile accident.

Why is it that Americans see these people as “winners” when by any measure but money they are the biggest losers as human beings I can imagine. I guess if you want to live in a golden cage, this is a life you’d choose. And I suppose if you have absolutely no sense of ethics, morals, patriotism or personal responsibility, this might seem like great fun. But these are the last people on the planet whose hands I would want my future in — they were destined to crash and burn from the start. There is no there, there.

It’s a travesty that they were ever given so much power and that men just like them are still out there doing the same thing. If we don’t fix this, we are screwed.

*This is particularly telling, as well.

Amid such a testosterone-charged atmosphere, it was not surprising that Lehman was a hard place for women to work. The one woman who rose to the top, Erin Callan, was a beneficiary of a passion Joe Gregory developed, relatively late in the day, at promoting diversity at Lehman. Callan, a Harvard graduate born to a New York cop, was a fighter. But she did herself no favours at Lehman, Ward says, by coming to work in low-cut, short dresses that would have been more suitable to a cocktail party. Callan’s looks were often the subject of morning inter-office e-mails, until she found herself struggling to hold her head above water when the markets started to turn. “Her biggest mistake was to accept a job [chief financial officer] she was not up to,” Ward says. “Joe Gregory had no business in appointing her.”

Right. The rest of “the guys” were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess.

Women are not any more moral or ethical than men. Certainly, they aren’t any smarter. but they are not part of this swashbuckling culture even if they want to be (as proven by this one woman’s career) and because of that allowing them into the upper reaches of management might just be a good thing for the health of the markets. We saw this same scenario play out with Brooksley Born and other women, who find themselves swimming against the tide of a reckless, competitive financial gambling culture.

I’m sure they’d become just as reckless in time (I think it’s less a matter of gender than acculturation) but right now might be an excellent moment to advance a whole lot of them before that happens, when their more deliberate approach is most needed.

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History In Bizarroworld

by digby

Remember the story about those wingnuts in Texas rewriting textbooks? Well Walter Shapiro has a good idea of what they will look like:

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) took the oath of office on March 4, 1933, the national unemployment rate stood at 25 percent, in part because of the interventionist liberal economic policies of the Hoover administration. But even in the depths of the Depression, millions of Americans saw the cigarette-smoking, martini-drinking FDR as a beacon of hope, since he had pledged during his victorious 1932 campaign to balance the federal budget. As Roosevelt delivered his Inaugural Address on a cold, gray Saturday afternoon, the new president’s signature phrase (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself”) implied that he would restore economic confidence by following prudent policies to strengthen the free-market system that always has been, as we have learned, the source of American greatness.

Little known to most voters, though, Roosevelt and his closest economics advisers (Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell) had been influenced by the socialist-leaning doctrines of a controversial European economist named John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). During his first months in office – known as the Hundred Days after the brief second French dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) – Roosevelt enacted a dizzying series of policies designed to centralize economic power in the hands of Ivy-League-educated bureaucrats in Washington. read on …

I hope Shapiro has that copyrighted because otherwise they’ll lift it verbatim.

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Cloud Burst

by digby

538 did something very interesting and useful using some new technology. Check this out:

Gallup did something pretty cool in connection with their latest health care survey, which was to provide the verbatim responses (.xls) of the rationales given by people who would tell their Congressman to vote for or against the current health care bills, respectively.

I ran the responses through Wordle, a word-cloud generating tool, omitting certain words that were parts of speech or were otherwise nongermane.

Guess which ones of the following were for and against:

People Need Insurance vs Government Cost[s]People.

Need vs Cost.

Pay vs Afford

This illuminates the difference not only between those for and against health care reform, but the reasons why the country is so polarized.

h/t to bb

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Pressuring The Waverers

by digby

Blue America launched a campaign a couple of months ago to Send the Democrats A Message They Can Understand by supporting progressive primary opponents against conservadems and Blue Dogs. It’s been pretty successful. In fact the idea is catching on in a big way and Move-On has launched their own campaign to raise money for primary challengers to lawmakers who vote against HCR:

In a warning shot to wavering Democrats, the progressive action group MoveOn.org is making a major push to raise money on behalf of primary challengers to those House lawmakers who vote against health care reform.

The group is set to blast out an email to its five million member list Monday asking recipients to pledge anywhere from $25 to $200 (or more) for the purposes of defeating conservative Democrats who help defeat the legislation.

“Health care reform is in serious danger in the House of Representatives: with a handful of conservative Democrats wavering, we don’t yet have the votes to pass the final bill,” reads the email, which was sent in advance to the Huffington Post. “So we’re asking every MoveOn member: will you pledge to support progressive primary challengers to House Democrats who side with Republicans to kill health care reform?

“With the big vote happening as early as this Friday, conservative Democrats need to know the stakes if they choose to side with Big Insurance over the voters on health care reform,” the email goes on. “Our pledge will send that message loud and clear. We’ll publicize the amount pledged, and make sure the media and every wavering representative know about it.”

The fundraising drive by MoveOn is one of the more direct and public efforts at political intimidation yet in what is now the crucial last stage of the health care debate. Similarly, affiliates of the SEIU have been telling fence-sitting lawmakers that they will either sit out their elections or actively campaign against them should they oppose the bill.

The campaign also is a reflection of the extent to which the formal progressive movement has rallied around the legislation — despite the deep disappointments many still have with the actual policy. Eighty-three percent of MoveOn members support the bill, even without the public option.

This is how it’s done. Move On acts at the behest of its membership, which registers in the millions, and they want the bill passed. Since it’s only Democrats who are in play, threatening primary challenges is one of the legitimate, institutional ways to do it.

Now, primary challenges can’t be conjured out of thin air. It’s difficult to find people who are willing and able to do it, even if the money and support are available. But they are out there. Click here to see those who are challenging the Blue Dog pac already

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Cheating The Honest Men

by digby

Matt Taibbi watched an exchange between Janet Tavakoli and Rick Santelli in which the former tried to explain why the financial crisis wasn’t precipitated by a bunch of poor people illegally obtaining loans and observed that Santelli wasn’t having any of it:

While she’s saying all this stuff, Santelli, who is one of the fathers of the Tea Party movement, is shaking his head furiously, video-scoffing at everything she’s saying. When he finally does get a chance to speak, this is what he says:

Here’s my problem with this. It takes two to tango. You can’t cheat an honest man.

You can’t cheat an honest man? What the fuck does that mean?

That one’s a doozy, for sure. Have you ever heard that before?

Taibbi then gets to the heart of the problem with the tea partiers and their cheerleaders like Santelli:

This whole scene sort of encapsulates what’s wrong with the Tea Party movement. The movement, and let’s admit this, has some of its roots in legitimate grievances about government waste and some not-entirely-inaccurate observations about what’s left of the American welfare state. Of course what resonates most with the suburban whites who mostly make up the Tea Party are stories about minorities and immigrants using section 8 housing, food stamps, Medicaid, TANF and other programs, with the Obama stimulus being for them a symbol of this ongoing government largess. The heat of the Tea Party movement comes from the racial frustrations that actually exist out there, in the real world outside New York and LA, as urban expansion and immigration increasingly throw white and nonwhite communities together, with white Tea Party types more and more often blowing gaskets over increased crime rates, declining school standards, and mislaid or wasted tax revenue. That this perception that minorities are the prime or sole consumers of government entitlement programs is absurdly inaccurate — white people, for instance, are overwhelmingly the largest nonelderly recipients of Medicaid, making up 42.8% of the program’s rolls nationwide, compared to 22.2% for blacks and 27.9% for Hispanics — is beside the point. The point is that the Tea Party is built largely on this narrative of “personal responsibility,” where the central demons are unwed black and Hispanic mothers and absent black and Hispanic fathers, who are, let’s face it, not uncommon characters in the American melodrama. Which is another subject for another time, but let’s just say this: the Tea Party movement contains a lot of people who are far more impressed by what they can see with their own eyes than with what, for instance, they read about. I’ve been to Tea Party events where global warming was dismissed by speakers who, without irony, pointed to the fact that there was snow on the ground outside. And while very few people have ever actually seen a CDO manager or a Countrywide executive, or were aware if it when they saw them, the Tea Party folks sure as hell have seen who their neighbors in foreclosure are. The Fox/CNBC types have very cannily latched on this narrative to rewrite the history of the financial crisis. They know that Tea Partiers will go for any narrative that puts blame on poor (and especially poor minority) homeowners, because the idea of poor blacks and Hispanics borrowing beyond their means fits seamlessly with their world view. But this is a situation where poor minorities were really incidental to a much larger fraud scheme that culminated in a welfare program — the bank bailouts — that dwarfs the entire “entitlement” infrastructure. But the millions of people who are actually in the Tea Party movement seem to have absolutely no idea that their so-called leaders, the Santellis of their world, are shilling for tax cheats and crooks and welfare bums of the sort they would despise (perhaps even more than their black and Hispanic neighbors), if they could actually see them.

Unfortunately all the elites, political and otherwise, have a vested interest in keeping the rubes focused on the blacks and browns so it’s hard to see the mechanism by which they will be revealed. And that’s the whole purpose of right wing populism.

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