Month: March 2010

Oopsie

by digby

New York Daily News:

Brooklyn prosecutors on Monday cleared ACORN of criminal wrongdoing after a four-month probe that began when undercover conservative activists filmed workers giving what appeared to be illegal advice on how to hide money.While the video by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles seemed to show three ACORN workers advising a prostitute how to hide ill-gotten gains, the unedited version was not as clear, according to a law enforcement source.”They edited the tape to meet their agenda,” said the source.O’Keefe and Giles – who visited ACORN offices in several cities, including its Brooklyn headquarters – stirred controversy when they posted the videos on their Web site.They were hailed as heroes by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and their footage led several government agencies to temporarily cut funding for ACORN as the prosecutors opened an investigation.”On Sept. 15, 2009, my office began an investigation into possible criminality on the part of three ACORN employees,” Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said in a one-paragraph statement issued Monday afternoon.”That investigation is now concluded and no criminality has been found.”

The Democratic majority must feel so proud of themselves today. Defunding an important piece of political infrastructure because racist right wing hit men doctored some tapes is so very, very smart.

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Sending The Democrats A Message They Can Understand

by digby

… in Arkansas!

Lt.Governor Bill Halter is taking up the challenge and is going to run against Conservadem Senator Blanche Lincoln in the Democratic primary. Everyone’s been hoping for it for quite a while, what with Lincoln looking like a sure loser against the Republican anyway, while voting almost exactly like one. Why not offer a difference and see what happens?

Howie Klein writes:

Blue America has been busy all year letting Arkansas voters know that Blanche Lincoln may have a “D” next to her name but when it comes to the key issues that impact ordinary working families and pits their interests against Big Business and Wall Street, she was, in effect, a dependable Republican shill. Politics for her has become cultivating K Street and then fast-talking the Democratic base back home. We helped make that more and more difficult for her. And now, with her approval ratings the lowest of any member of the Senate and with a virtual certainty of defeat at the hands of any Republican, she has a real primary on her hands.

This morning Lt. Governor Bill Halter declared the would enter the May 18th primary against her. (Next week is the deadline for filing.) I spoke with Halter a few months ago and he said he had no intention of running. I feel certain he didn’t. But as Lincoln’s approval in the state collapsed, he has come to realize that he is the only chance the Democrats have to hold onto the seat. He will run a populist campaign against Big Business and for ordinary working families. He should be able to defeat Lincoln among a Democratic electorate that now sees right through her, although the corrupt and reactionary party establishment in Little Rock will stick with the Blanche Lincoln suicide train.

Blue America just added Bill to our ActBlue page, in case you’d like to help him get his campaign message out. Blanche has raised over $7 million so far and has over $5 million on hand much of it from the sleaziest special interests in Washington (and Arkansas).

The dean of Arkansas politics, Max Brantley gives this analysis for Salon:

Lincoln will continue to portray herself as a middle-of-the-roader, in the belief that’s where most voters lie. That’s not a safe bet for the Arkansas Democratic primary. Polling is mixed on health care in Arkansas, for example. Ask the question the right way and reform enjoys plenty of support, particularly among lower-income Democratic primary voters. That’s much the same for clean air legislation. Hunters and fishermen don’t have a lot of sympathy for polluters. Calling Democrats extremists for supporting universal health care and a clean environment doesn’t seem like a good strategy for the primary from my point of view.

Brantley points out that Lincoln still has support among the Dem faithful and the Halter isn’t known for his warmth or engagement with the issues. But the liberal base is disgusted with Lincoln and she has some serious problems with the African American community. So this is doable. But he needs help.

Lincoln has a lot of campaign cash on hand, but much of it is dedicated to the general election. As the marquee race, the run for Senate will get a lot of free media. Halter can self-fund to a degree (he spent more than $400,000 in his race for lieutenant governor in 2006) and he’s counting on several hundred thousand from progressive groups nationally. That’s more than enough to buy a lot of cable TV exposure in a relatively inexpensive media market.

Primary challenges are one of the best ways for liberals to get their message out and gain influence in the party. It’s a lot to ask of anyone — Bill Halter is going to anger a whole lot of the Arkansas establishment and funding apparatus by doing this. These challengers need support from the movement if they are going to do this. And the Democratic establishment needs to know that they are getting support from the movement if the message is going to get through.

Help Bill Halter Send The Democrats a Message They Can Understand.

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Borat He Ain’t

by digby

The cross-section of the political and media worlds is full of small time hustlers and con-artists. But Breitbart is an original. Mike Stark got a chance to talk to him for quite a while:

Click here to read Mike Stark’s back story on this film.

Also read Joan Walsh’s latest on Breitbart. It’s curiouser and curiouser. It would appear that he’s staging a public nervous breakdown, which leads me to wonder if he now thinks he’s doing some kind of Borat thing too. Very weird.

Just one note: Breitbart says repeatedly that it doesn’t matter that the mainstream media believed that O’Keefe wore that stupid costume in the ACORN offices, but it certainly does. They made it appear that the ACORN workers were so stupid that they couldn’t see through such an obviously ridiculous costume, which further played into O’Keefe’s disgusting racist subtext. And unlike Sasha Baron Cohen, whose movie Borat Brietbart repeatedly compares to the ACORN vids, O’Keefe didn’t actually don the costume and the persona to punk the ACORN workers — he faked it afterward. He didn’t have the guts to actually wear that costume in an ACORN office because he knew he didn’t have the talent to fool even one person. So he cheated. You don’t get to take credit for fooling people if you put it together in the editing room.

The truly shocking thing about all of this is that in the age of Obama, the major media and the US congress were so willing to take such nonsense at face value.

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Everything’s Negotiable

by digby

Politico has an adorable human interest story this morning featuring a fun odd couple, Rahm Emmanuel and Lindsey Graham, two “honorable” adversaries who are able to reach across the partisan divide and make a deal. We’d heard a little bit about this before, but this article dishes the dirt.

[A}t a time when voters are clamoring for bipartisan cooperation in Washington, this unlikely pairing of White House chief of staff and Southern senator represents one of the highest-level conduits between the polarized political parties. Graham has had more in-person meetings with Emanuel than any other Republican lawmaker, roughly eight or 10 since Obama took office, aides said. The two men also talk regularly by phone.

Fascinating. A little mutual back-scratching, a little good faith, a little give and a little take can often lead to a win-win for both sides. It’s a little bit unusual for them to use such a method to deal with human rights, however:

The main topic these days is Guantanamo Bay — how to close the military prison on the U.S. Navy base there. But their conversations are broader than that, embracing a wide-ranging deal pitched by Graham that would shut down the prison; provide funding to move detainees to Thomson, Ill.; keep the Sept. 11 trials out of civilian courts; and create broad new powers to hold terror suspects indefinitely.

So we have one Senator and the president’s factotum splitting the difference between ripping up the constitution and urinating all over the bill of rights. Don’t you love bipartisanship?

This isn’t unprecedented, of course. The Dred Scott decision was a similar sort of compromise and look how well that turned out. It’s a little unusual to have such things decided via back door deal but that’s probably for the best. The f*cking retards get all upset when you try to do this stuff above board, so best to just take care of the issue with a little chit-chat between pals over lattes.

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Why Oh Why 2010 Edition

by digby

Brad DeLong:

Read through the ‘This Week’ Transcript. It’s truly terrifying. You try to figure out why anybody thinks it’s a good idea for these people to have the jobs that they do–and you can’t:

.. WILL: Two things. First of all, Sam, you want the president to be Ulysses Grant, who won the war by his wonderful indifference to his own casualties, and I think some members in the Senate and in the House would not approve of that.

DONALDSON: Did I not just say that they may lose some seats? Were you listening?

WILL: By the millions. Now — second, now, Paul says that, in fact, the Republicans have no ideas. They do, cross-selling across state lines, tort reforms, all those. Just a second, Paul. Then you say they’re telling whoppers. That was your view about Lamar Alexander when he said, for millions of Americans, premiums will go up. You said in the next sentence in your column, I guess you could say he wasn’t technically lying, because the Congressional Budget Office says that’s true.

KRUGMAN: No, it’s not what it says…. Can I explain? This is…

WILL: Wait. Let me — let me set the predicate here, because you then go on and say the Senate does say the average premiums would go up, but people would be getting better premiums.

KRUGMAN: Look, let me explain what happens, because you actually have to read the CBO report…. [T]he CBO report tells you… that… what the bill will do is bring a lot of people who are uninsured, who are currently young and therefore relatively low cost, into the risk pool, which will actually bring premiums down a little bit. It will also… lead a lot of people to get better insurance… people who are currently underinsured, who have insurance policies that are paper thin and don’t actually protect you in a crisis, will… get… full coverage. That makes the average payments go up, but it does not mean that people who currently have good coverage under their policies will pay more…. [T]hey’ll end up paying a little bit less.

WILL: One question. If the government came to you and said, “Professor Krugman, you have a car. We’re going to compel you to buy a more expensive car,” but it’s not really more expensive, because it’s a better car, wouldn’t you tell them to get off your land?

Will was really on this week-end. This one was particularly interesting in its total unresponsiveness:

VARGAS: I do want to get to one other issue related to this health care bill, which is the language on abortion, because it almost died in the House, the health care bill, because of abortion. There was the Stupak amendment, which attached highly restrictive language to when abortions could be covered, and there — Bart Stupak says this is unacceptable, this current bill, as Obama has proposed it, and he says 20 other members of the House will have problems with it, too. Will abortion kill this thing in the end?

WILL: Well, Alan Frumin’s 15 minutes of fame have arrived. He is the hitherto obscure, but soon to be quite famous parliamentarian of the Senate, and it will be his job to rule on what can and cannot be passed under reconciliation. That is, is it a budgetary-related thing? You can argue about a great many things in the health care bill. Can you say that’s budget-related? No one thinks you can change the abortion language under reconciliation.

Obviously Will was riffing because he didn’t have any clue about this issue and it was gibberish.

The thing went downhill from there with poor Krugman trying to inject sanity, but being thwarted by Roberts’ fatuous non sequitors:

WILL: Twenty years from now, the country is going to be spending a larger portion of its GDP on health care than it is now for three reasons. We’re getting older, and as we age, we get more chronic diseases that interact with one another. Second, we’re getting richer; we can afford to buy more medicine. And, third, medicine is becoming more competent. Therefore, we’re going to spend more on health care.

KRUGMAN: But there’s a…

(DeLong: What Paul wanted to say here was: “There is a big difference between, twenty years from now, spending 20% of GDP on health care with universal coverage and spending 25% of GDP on health care with one-quarter of the non-elderly population uninsured and getting substandard coverage.)

ROBERTS: The other thing is, you know, the health care industry is the biggest employer in most of our cities now. So when — when the speaker talks about a job creation bill…

VARGAS: A jobs bill, exactly.

It wound up with this sad, pathetic, predictable conclusion:

VARGAS: And then, of course, this weekend, we have a brand-new White House social secretary appointed to replace Desiree Rogers, a close friend of the Obamas who is exiting after a bumpy tenure, I would say. Cokie, you spoke with her. She — she was highly criticized after the Obamas’ first state dinner in which she arrived, looking absolutely gorgeous, but in what some people later said was far too fancy a dress, but most importantly, that was the state dinner that was crashed by the Salahis, who walked in without an invitation when the social secretary’s office didn’t have people manning the security sites.

ROBERTS: Well, I talked to — I did talk to her, Desiree, yesterday at length. She is from my home city of New Orleans and fellow Sacred Heart girl.

DONALDSON: What’s the name of the city?

ROBERTS: New Orleans.

DONALDSON: I love to hear her say it.

ROBERTS: But — and she has lots of good explanations about that dinner. And basically, the bottom line is, it’s the Secret Service. But she — but her — her major point is — and I — and I completely take this — is that she — she put on 330 events at the White House last year and did open the building to all kinds of people who had not been there before. And they had wonderful music days of all kinds of music, where you had during the day, the musicians would work with kids in Washington and teach them things before coming on at night.

DONALDSON: Cokie, that’s irrelevant.

ROBERTS: Well, I don’t think it’s irrelevant.

DONALDSON: I mean, it’s irrelevant. People who work for the president understand or should understand their place, which is to be spear-carriers. There are two stars in anyone’s White House, the president and the president’s spouse. After that, this passion for anonymity that once was a hallmark of people who worked for a president, has been lost. She wanted to be a star herself…

ROBERTS: And it’s been lost. Look at all the people who work for presidents and then go out and write books about them.

DONALDSON: I think you’re right.

VARGAS: Do you think she was — did she quit, or was she asked to leave?

DONALDSON: She was asked to.

ROBERTS: She says she quit.

DONALDSON: Oh, well…

ROBERTS: And she certainly has lots…

DONALDSON: And to spend more time with your family.

ROBERTS: No, no, to go into the corporate sector and make some money, where she’ll make a lot of — she’ll do fine.

DONALDSON: Good luck to her. I don’t wish her ill.

DONALDSON: It’s just that she didn’t understand…

ROBERTS: She’ll do very well.

DONALDSON: … she was not a star in the sense that she should make herself prominent.

VARGAS: George?

WILL: It is axiomatic that when there’s no penalty for failure, failure proliferates. She failed conspicuously in her one great challenge, which was the first state dinner, and she’s gone. If she’s gone because she failed, that’s a healthy sign.

VARGAS: The big question, of course, because she was one of that close contingent of Chicago friends is whether or not she’s just the first to leave or if we’ll see other…

ROBERTS: But you’ll see people leave.

ROBERTS: I mean, that’s what happens. It’s a perfectly normal thing that happens in administration, is that people come, and they come in at the beginning, and then it’s time to — to go back to life.

KRUGMAN: Can I say that 20 million Americans unemployed, the fact that we’re worrying about the status of the White House social secretary…

VARGAS: It’s our light way to end, Paul.

DONALDSON: Paul, welcome to Washington.

What can you say to this? The system is broken and corrupt and this is one of the major reasons why.

It’s mind-boggling that George Will can say this without being struck by lightning right there at the table, but he said it without even the slightest shred of irony or self awareness:

It is axiomatic that when there’s no penalty for failure, failure proliferates. She failed conspicuously in her one great challenge, which was the first state dinner, and she’s gone. If she’s gone because she failed, that’s a healthy sign.

Yes, he’s right about one thing. Failure certainly does proliferate when there’s no penalty.

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Big Mouths

by digby

It seems that I’m just documenting the atrocities today, but there are just so many. Courtesy Sadly No, we have Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn yukking it up over poor losers who don’t have enough money for dentures:

Louise Slaughter: I even had one constituent, you will not believe this, and I know you won’t, but it’s true. Her sister died, this poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth.

[Hugh Hewitt]: Mark Steyn…(laughing)

[Mark Steyn]: (laughing) That’s good. That’s good for the environment, isn’t it?

HH: (laughing)

MS: I’m in favor of that. If we can’t at least, if we can’t reduce our carbon footprint, at least we should be able to reduce our mastication mouth print by recycling dentures. I mean, this gets to the heart of why this is…is second-hand dentures, which I believe was the fourth chorus of that Barbra Streisand song, for those with long memories, but is second-hand dentures a huge problem in the United States? What are the number of people going around? There’s 300 million people here. Are 20 million going around with second-hand dentures? Are 5 million going around with second-hand dentures? The idea that you need comprehensive national health care for, to solve this particular lady’s second-hand denture crisis, I think is…

HH: But Mark, we’ve only got 15 seconds. It happened again and again. When the Democrats talked, you just looked the screen and said, “oh my God, they’re running the country.”

MS: (laughing)

HH: Oh my God, they’re running…Mark Steyn, always a pleasure … Second-hand dentures, the chopper stopper, America.

The right wing has gotten quite a laugh out of this story. And maybe it really is just ridiculous leftwing political correctness to feel sorry for people who have problems with the medical system. But I’m not sure this works, even for their nasty, juvenile audiences. It just feels off, even for them.

But hey, Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox and they all had a good laugh over over Graeme Frost, so being roaring assholes about sick people hasn’t hurt them in the past. But these are tough times and it might be a little more dissonant now.

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