Month: April 2010

“I’m Fighting Communism Three Days A Week”

by digby

Following up on the latest tea party poll (my take here), here’s Perlstein on the same subject in the New York Times:

Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement has been a frustration to me, and not just because it is ugly and seeks to traduce so many of the values I hold dear.

“I just don’t have time for anything,” a housewife told a newsmagazine in 1961. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”

Even worse has been the overwhelming historical myopia. As the Times’ new poll numbers amply confirm — especially the ones establishing that the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government.

“When was the last time you saw such a spontaneous eruption of conservative grassroots anger, coast to coast?” asked the professional conservative L. Brent Bozell III recently. The answer, of course, is: in 1993. And 1977. And 1961. And many more.

And so yet much of the commentariat take the Bozells at their word, reading what is happening as striking and new.

I’ve studied the reactionary fluorescence of 1961-1962 most closely (I wrote about it in “Before the Storm”), and the parallels are uncanny.

The same “spontaneous eruption” of folks never before engaged in politics. (“I just don’t have time for anything,” a housewife told a newsmagazine. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”) The same blithely narcissistic presumption that the vast majority of Americans (or, at least, “ordinary Americans”) must already agree with them, and incredulity that anyone might not grasp the depth of the peril. The same establishment conservative opportunists taking advantage, setting up front-groups (it’s one of the reasons so many people in such movements report they’re in politics for the first time; they soon find themselves so ill-used that they never get involved in politics again). The same lunatic persecution fantasies. (In Robert Welch’s 1961 it was probable internment camps for conservatives. In Glenn Beck’s 2009 it was … probable internment camps for conservatives.)

The only thing that changes is the name of the enemy within. And sometimes not even that: “They’re not 90 miles away. They’re already here,” was a slogan in 1961, referring to the twin socialists Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy; only now the socialist is also a Muslim.

Read on … There’s more from other writers as well. Unsurprisingly, Amity Schlaes shows the same analytical acumen with these numbers as she does with the Great Depression. In other words, she gets it completely wrong.

Jail time For The Corporate Person

by digby

There are criminal sanctions available for negligent corporate officers, but this looks like a straight up case of negligent homicide:

Mine Workers (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts says that Massey Energy Co.’s continued inaction on safety violations at its Upper Big Branch Mine, where 29 West Virginia coal miners died in an April 5 explosion, should send Massey CEO Donald Blankenship to jail. In a speech at the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO convention yesterday, Roberts said, “If there is any justice in America,” U.S. Marshals should go to where he lives, get him, handcuff him, put him in chains, take him to jail, set his fine at $40 million. He told the delegates the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) inspectors had “shut this mine down over and over and over again.” They brought the men outside, they brought them to a safe place. But as soon as they left the same thing happened again and again. They didn’t correct the violations. In 2009, MSHA proposed nearly $1 million in fines for more than 450 safety violations at the nonunion mine. Just last month, MSHA cited the mine for 57 safety violations that included repeatedly failing to develop and follow the ventilation plan. Ventilation is vital to prevent the build-up of highly explosive methane gas, which is most likely the cause of the April blast. Roberts said the Massey mine was cited several times for “failure to abate.” What does that mean? They were told to do something by the United States government. They said here’s a violation you are being cited for. I’ll be back in five days and this better be corrected. This inspector came back over and over again and they didn’t correct the violations. Some people, Roberts said, say mining is inherently dangerous and these things will happen and “there’s nothing we can do about it.” They are damn sure wrong. We need good laws, we need those laws to be obeyed and we need those laws to be enforced and those who fail to obey those laws should be punished. One of the miners killed, 25-year-old Josh Napper, was concerned about safety, especially ventilation problems at the Upper Big Branch Mine, his mother told CNN reporters after the blast. Roberts said he left a letter for his family before he went to the mine April 5. Napper “left it with his mother and fiancé and his baby fearing he was not going to survive working in this coal mine.” There is something wrong with this picture. When young men go off to war, they write these kinds of letters, saying how much we love our mothers, our fathers, our wives and our kids. But in America, you’re not supposed to write that letter when you’re going off to work.

Massey is a far right teabagger. Like them, he believes that he doesn’t have to follow laws he doesn’t like. The laws he doesn’t like are the ones that require him to spend money to protect the safety of his workers.

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I Wonder Why?

by tristero

Fortunately, Digby summarized the survey of the teabaggers so thoroughly that I don’t have to. I do want to add one thing I noticed.

The second paragraph of the article describing the poll starts off like this:

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters…

Eigtheen percent of the country support teabagging – not the wholesome leisure time activity, mind you, but the toxic ideological swill in which Glenn Beck et al wallows. Does that strike you as a lot of people? Well, yes, if, as I’m so fond of noting, you’re driving on a road and you realize that nearly 20 of the cars hurtling towards you out of every 100 are driven someone so insane they think Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States or something equally delusional.

Or no, it’s not a large number, all things considered. It’s certainly no larger than the number of folks who opposed the war in Iraq in 2002/03 and probably smaller. Here’s the kicker:

Did you see the Times and CBS go way out of their way to find out much about what those opposed to Bush’s mad folly were up to? Oh, sure, there was the occasional article about MoveOn, but this poll – which must have been very expensive and time consuming – is on the front page of the Times today, above the fold, in the most prominent news position, and runs across all but 1 of the 6 columns of news-stories at the top of the paper.

Note to progressives:

Find out who the teabaggers employ to do their pr and hire them away at double their salary. The “Tea Party” movement will dry up within hours.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But the amount of coverage that white, often-racist, upper/upper middle-class rightwing movements receive in the mainstream press is vastly greater than similarly-sized non-racist, genuinely popular liberal movements.

I wonder why?

Took ‘Em A While

by tristero

From an editorial in today’s NY Times:

Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman have a bill that would require the military detention and trial of anyone accused of any terrorism-related crime, including American citizens. That is the stuff of police states.

In a sensible mainstream media, that kind of no-shit-sherlock statement would be as laughably obvious as going out your way to remark that rock and roll is here to stay, vegetables are good for you, or This is Spinal Tap is a very funny movie.

In other words, the police state wet dreams of the rightwing have been glaringly obvious to anyone with eyes, ears, and a brain for decades. As has the willingness of opportunistic, unscrupulous, and dishonest politicians to advocate extremely creepy programs and ideas. Appalled the worthy Times editors most assuredly should be. But they seem genuinely shocked that such “moderate” voices as McCain and Lieberman are behaving like fascist wannabes, or worse. They haven’t been paying attention.

Still, good of the Times to notice, better late than never, etc, etc. I just wish they had when it would have made more of a difference. Like, say, in the mid 1990’s, when the Times was, instead, pro-actively contributing to the far-right coup d’etat known as Whitewater.

Teabag Nation

by digby

The NY Times and CBS just released a pretty comprehensive poll on the teabaggers. It probably won’t surprise you much.

They are extremely negative and angry. And they really, really hate Barack Obama.

Here’s the NY Times summary:

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

They hold more conservative views on a range of issues than Republicans generally. They are also more likely to describe themselves as “very conservative” and President Obama as “very liberal.”

And while most Republicans say they are “dissatisfied” with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as “angry.”

[…]

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.

Way more likely. 52% of them think that as compared to only 28% of the general public.

Nearly 9 in 10 disapprove of the job Mr. Obama is doing over all, and about the same percentage fault his handling of major issues: health care, the economy and the federal budget deficit. Ninety-two percent believe Mr. Obama is moving the country toward socialism, an opinion shared by more than half of the general public.

“I just feel he’s getting away from what America is,” said Kathy Mayhugh, 67, a retired medical transcriber in Jacksonville. “He’s a socialist. And to tell you the truth, I think he’s a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to. That doesn’t say much for him.”

(I was pretty stunned to see that over half the public believes Obama is moving the country toward socialism. I’m beginning to think he might as well do it.)

But if you look at that comment by Mayhugh, you can see that “socialism” is all caught up with “the M word,” which is really just another way of saying you know what.

I looked through the poll and jotted down some observations:

Here’s an interesting factoid that tracks with my intuition about these people: they blame George W. Bush and Wall Street far less for the economic situation than the rest of the country does. They hold Obama and congress mostly responsible. But then, if you listen to wingnut gasbags and FOX news crazies all day, that’s what you would think.

Any illusions that these people are angry at Wall Street or big business needs to be dispensed with ASAP. They don’t blame the money people at all.

88% of them think the government’s stimulus program has either had no impact on the economy or made it worse.

Their biggest concerns are government spending, health care and “government not representing the people.” Twice as many of them say they have heard “a lot” about the devil deficit as the rest of the country and 76% of them believe the government should reduce the deficit rather than help create jobs. If forced to choose between cutting taxes and reducing the deficit, they choose cutting taxes 49% to 42%. Only 6% hold the Bush administration responsible for the deficit while 25% hold Obama responsible and 37% blame congress. (The rest think it was a combination.)

74% think the economy would have improved just fine without any government interference.(Since they think the economy sucks, this reinforces the idea that they blame the government for the bad economy.)

They say the don’t like the GOP 54% to 43%. But 92% of them despise the Democrats.

Only 37% don’t like McCain which is sort of surprising (31% like him and the rest don’t have an opinion.) A whopping 57% like GWB. Most of them don’t know much about Ron Paul. He only gets about 20% approval. They love Glenn Beck (59%) which I think tells you everything you need to know about this group. But it’s Sister Sarah they truly love: 66%, although only 40% think “she would be able to be an effective president” which indicates some sexism underlying her appeal for the majority of teabaggers who are older white men. (I would bet anything that that 40% is mostly women.)

73% think Obama doesn’t understand their needs and problem and 75% think he does not share the values most people live by. That’s in contrast to 39% and 37% of everyone else who feels that way.

49% of the country thinks Obama is somewhat or very liberal, while 86% of teabaggers

Here’s a shocker: Only 58% of Americans think Obama was born in the US as opposed to 41% of teabaggers. The rest either think he was born in another country or don’t know. (It’s possible that some of these people don’t understand the significance and simply heard something about Indonesia — or think Hawaii is a foreign country.)

64% of these fools believe their taxes have been raised.

80% think you shouldn’t raise taxes on people who make over 250k a year in order to help pay for health care. (That’s opposed to only 39% of the public as a whole.)

They really don’t like poor people. 73% of them think that government benefits encourage people to remain poor (73%) while only 33% of the country as a whole believe that.

They track closely with the rest of the country on legal immigration but a lot more of them think that illegal immigration is a huge problem (82%).

They are full on global warming deniers. 66% either think it doesn’t exist or won’t have an impact.

41% believe in civil unions and 40% think there should be no recognition for gay couples at all. Far fewer believe in gay marriage than the country at large.

A higher number of teabaggers than the public as a whole believe that abortion should be illegal and more of them than the rest of us think it should be more strictly proscribed. Only 20% think it should be generally available.

They like guns quite a bit more than most people.

25% of them think that violent action against the government is justified.

Among the public at large, 58% think Roe vs Wade is a good thing and only 34% think it was a bad thing. Only 40% of teabaggers think it was a good thing while 53% think it was a bad thing.

Here’s the corker:

Regardless of your overall opinion, do you think the views of the people in the tea party movement generally reflect the views of most Americans? 84% of the self-identified teabaggers said yes. Only 25% of the general public agreed.

78% of them said they hadn’t donated or attended a rally. 68% haven’t even visited a web site.

Where are they getting their information? 63% of them get their TV news from FOX. 53% believe that Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are news shows.

They are less concerned with their personal economic situation than the rest of the country. Far more identify as upper middle and middle class than the rest of the country. Way more of them are retired and on on social security and medicare. (Interestingly, more are on social security than medicare, so there seem to be a fair number of them on disability.)

There are a significantly higher percentage among them of married, church going, born again Christians than in the public at large.

75% are over 45 and almost all of them are more educated than the public at large. 89% are white (1% black, 1% Asian, 3% Hispanic, 6% “other”.) 56% say they make over 50k a year. 12% say they make over 250k a year.

59% are male.

66% say they always or usually vote Republican. The rest are lying.

I just don’t know what to say about this:

And nearly three-quarters of those who favor smaller government said they would prefer it even if it meant spending on domestic programs would be cut.

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

The most charitable thing to say about this is that at least some of these people are just looking for some meaning in their lives and this movement is giving it to them. (I would guess that there are a few on our side who were drawn to the progressive movement for the same reasons.) They pick the teabaggers because it’s their natural tribe. It’s like my sister-in-law once explained to me: “being a Democrat would be as if I were a cat having my fur rubbed backwards.” So I get that.

There’s nothing particularly surprising about the rest of them either. These people are nothing new. They have different iterations, but when you get right down to it they are, quite simply, the far right. They hate poor people (especially blacks) and they hate government that helps poor people (especially blacks.) They are deluded about taxes and spending and are paranoid about the government being infiltrated by “the other.” They believe they are the only “true” Americans and alternate between insisting that their “traditional values” are best represented by the Bible or the Constitution, both of which they believe they are ordained by God to properly interpret. And they do not really believe in democracy which is really why they hate the government.

When they lose they stage a national hissy fit of epic proportions and persuade the Village (where they are perceived as the personification of the heartland of America) that they are something very important. Now that they have their very own TV and radio networks featuring crazed right wing demagogues 24/7, they are more successful on those terms than ever. But they are nothing new, nothing new at all. They are mostly a bunch of cranky, white men with money who are trying desperately to hang on to their privileges. Same as it ever was.

They are what we have called “Republicans” for at least the last 30 years.

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by digby

The right is breathlessly working up a kerning scandal over the president’s unannounced trip to Malia’s soccer game the other day. We don’t know what he’s supposed to have done instead, but it seems they think the game never happened and he was sneaking out to do something nefarious to do with … well, who knows?

Something is most definitely wrong. The President of the United States venturing out to a soccer game that didn’t exist in a high-crime area. The Politico is also reporting that Obama acknowledged the problem with his actions:

Prior to Obama’s bilateral meeting with Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, Obama told his colleague, “Apparently I caused quite a problem,” adding something about his secretary not telling the Secret Service, according to, ironically enough, the pool report.

What’s more concerning is that no one can confirm if the Secret Service even accompanied Obama on his adventure. Furthermore, let’s look at the elapsed time. If the president left the White House at 9:20AM as reported, according to Mapquest, it takes about sixteen minutes to get from the White House to 40th and Chesapeake NW, bringing his arrival time to the field at 9:36AM or so. But then he would have had to leave the field at the latest at 10:00AM to return to the White House at the documented time of 10:17AM. So he spent about twenty minutes at the game? When did the game end? That time is vague as well.

With all of the technology that people have — iPhones, Blackberries — not one person took a photo of Obama? And the press didn’t get a shot of him getting into his vehicle? Obama loves the cameras, and this is what he looks like at his daughter’s soccer game.

Even three days later, there are still no pictures of the president from Saturday’s game. The USA just disarmed to Russia, Poland’s president and 95 others were killed hours before, and there were many international leaders in Washington, D.C. for the nuclear summit set to begin on Monday, April 12.

And we shouldn’t raise even more questions on his whereabouts? According to the MSM, the answer is yes.

There were plenty of people there according to numerous sources. Duh.

Silly stuff, especially considering the real conspiracy nuts — the militia weirdos — don’t seem to raise much interest among the right. In fact, they defend people like this:

Federal agents investigating what they describe as a Christian militia bent on violence against police seized suspected crack cocaine and steroids, weapons, gas masks and a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches during raids of members’ homes last month, according to search-warrant records.

[…]

Federal prosecutors say Stone and eight other members of the militia plotted the mass killings of police officers in the hope of sparking an anti-government revolution. They are charged with seditious conspiracy, or plotting to levy war against the U.S., and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction.

Some of the items seized include:

• Several cardboard tubes including two “with green/cannon fuse”; a 6- by 3/4-inch gallon nipple with end caps; a two-page document about a “funnel shape charge”; a 2005 daily planner book; a grenade holder; a Hutaree flag; three DVDs labeled “Waco”; a notebook detailing the doctrine and ranks of the Hutaree; and gas masks — at Stone’s trailer home in Lenawee County’s Dover Township.

• Substances believed to be crack cocaine and steroids and a lock-pick set — at the mobile home of suspected Hutaree member Kristopher Sickles in Sandusky, Ohio.

• A copy of “My New Order” by Hitler; audio of “The Turner Diaries,” a novel that is popular with white supremacists; a samurai sword; a jeweled dagger; a ballistic helmet; an intrusion-detection machine; and a CD titled “Explosives, Ordnance and Demolition” — at the two-story home of suspected Hutaree member Thomas Piatek in Whiting, Ind.

Nothing to see there, of course. But the fact that the president wanted to see his kid’s soccer game in private is cause for alarm. Of course he is a communist usurper — and commies were crawling all over the place at the time — so you do have to keep an eye on him.

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Scofflaws

by digby

I’ve been listening to wingnuts on TV all day long whine and complain that the poor aren’t paying their fair share of income tax. As someone who just filed a tax return and paid quite a chunk of federal income tax on a fairly low income, I’m assuming this is BS. Many of those who aren’t paying must be extremely wealthy types who are paying accountants to protect their assets through loopholes or working poor people with kids who are barely able to keep food on the table.

Here’s an example:

The McCourts, who own the Los Angeles Dodgers (so she says; he says he’s the owner and she’s not), jointly pocketed income totaling $108 million from 2004 through 2009, according to documents Jamie McCourt recently filed in the couple’s divorce case in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

On that sum, they paid zero federal and state income tax. Jamie suggests that some tax breaks will apply this year too.

This reminds me of the old line about how true scandal lies not in what’s illegal, but what’s legal. It’s certainly an edifying window into the lengths some people will go to avoid paying taxes.

The court papers indicate that the McCourts deliberately structured their business at least partially to allow them to live tax-free.

Frank McCourt’s lawyer, Marc Seltzer, didn’t directly dispute Jamie’s characterizations of the couple’s tax planning or the details of their finances. He did, however, call her document filings “selective” and complained by e-mail that she made public “information which most people would respect as private.”

According to Jamie, the McCourts employed two mechanisms to live tax-free. One was to claim enormous tax losses from their business, which was mostly commercial real estate before they bought the Dodgers. These could be carried forward, offsetting income year after year until they were finally netted out. Jamie’s documents say that in 2008 the net loss carry-forward from previous years was $109 million — in other words, the McCourts could have earned that much without paying a penny of income tax.

A year later, the loss carry-forward had increased to $135 million, which makes it sound as if 2008 was one horrible year. Yet according to another document Jamie filed in court, one of Frank’s partnerships paid him $23 million that year.

Did the McCourts really lose $135 million in the years before 2009? Probably not in the sense that you or I suffer a loss when a dollar bill slips through a hole in our jeans, or even when we sell that stock our brother-in-law described as “a slam dunk” for less than we paid for it.

“They’re tax losses. I don’t mean real losses,” Jamie’s lawyer, Bert Fields, told me.

But these wingnut screamers aren’t talking about poor McCourt and his “tax losses.” They think he’s taxed too much. (Perhaps we can pass an earned income tax credit for the poor man.) They are targeting the working poor and middle class who pay plenty in taxes but through various mechanisms don’t have to pay taxes on their meager incomes. Those are the freeloaders not the multimillionaire McCourt who hasn’t paid a penny since 2003. Make sense?

Jon Stewart had the last word on that last night:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
That’s Tariffic
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

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Peterson Punk

by digby

I was busy this week-end and didn’t get a chance to watch the new Pete Peterson IOUSA propaganda documentary on CNN, but Bill Sher did and gives you the rundown. And it’s not pretty:

If you watched the “I.O.U.S.A. Solutions” program, you would have simply become stupider.

Allow me to give you the lowlights: 1. We reduced World War II debt levels, but we won’t tell you how! In their attempt to offer a history of U.S. debt levels, CNN and Pete Peterson sometimes referenced the fact that America had a higher amount of debt relative to the size of our economy after World War II than we do today. Yet they saw no reason to mention that not only did our earlier debt fail to destroy the lives of the Greatest Generation’s grandchildren, but that our debt levels were reduced — not by painful austerity — but by investing in our futures. The Peterson-financed “I.O.U.S.A. Solutions” movie, which anchored CNN’s segment, begins on that incoherent note. The narrator fails to reconcile our previously higher debt levels and the lack of any debt-fueled economic crisis:

Since 1789, the year our federal government was formed, we’ve had our ups and downs with the national debt. Wars and the Great Depression created high debt levels, but we’ve always been able to bring that back down to manageable levels, even after World War II, which is when our debt to GDP was at its highest point ever. Then, beginning of the 1980s, the national debt began growing quickly, despite the fact that our country experience relative peace and prosperity throughout that time. Except for a period in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when our government was running budget surpluses, our federal budget has consistently been in the red, and the national debt has been on an upward path as a result. At the rate we are going, we will pass the debt levels we saw at the end of World War II in just 10 years.

The fact that debt levels go “up and down” over the course of our history does not seem to make the hysterics pause. They could have tried to illuminate what we did back in the 1940s and 1950s that made sure there was a down after the up. Instead, Peterson intentionally tried to confuse viewers about post-World War II history. Peterson spent most of his time scapegoating Social Security and Medicare, then manages to cite the great investments of the 20th century, without bothering to connect the dots between investing, growth and reducing debt. His main point was you have to cut “entitlements,” namely Social Security and Medicare.

It’s hard to avoid the entitlements if you do simple math. If you got rid of all the Bush tax cuts, which not many people are proposing, if you got rid of all the earmarks that people keep talking about, if you got out of both wars, you would only solve somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of the problem. So it is absolutely essential you get where the money is. It’s very important on the entitlement.

Then at the end of the segment, Peterson has the moxie to laud the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan and the national highway system:

I remind you of what happened after the Second World War. Our public debt was twice as it is now, 122 percent of the GDP. The American people … were told the truth. There was great leadership. And what did the American people do? They reduced the debt to something like 20 percent, 25 percent of the GDP by the ’80s. They paid for the biggest infrastructure program in history — highways. They paid for the Marshall Plan. They paid for the G.I. bill. Why? Because they understood … by virtue of the leadership what the truth was.

But of course, Peterson doesn’t connect the dots and tell the truth himself. Those investments did not slash the budget. They grew the economy. As Paul Krugman said on Friday:

…in 1946, the United States, having just emerged from World War II, had federal debt equal to 122 percent of G.D.P … how did the U.S. government manage to pay off its wartime debt? Actually, it didn’t. At the end of 1946, the federal government owed $271 billion; by the end of 1956 that figure had risen slightly, to $274 billion. The ratio of debt to G.D.P. fell not because debt went down, but because G.D.P. went up…

But on CNN this weekend, you never heard that explanation from the nation’s most famous economist, or anyone else for that matter.

Read on if you can stomach it.

Get ready. This is heating up. And if the Democrats don’t get their act together it’s going to burn us all very badly.

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Muscle Skirts

by digby

Glenn Beck is taking a vote at his site to pick the best cover for his new book “The Overton Window.” Here’s one of them:

No, that is not a joke. Go here if you don’t believe me.

I know. There’s just something about a muscle man in a mini-skirt that these wingnuts can’t resist.

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Down Cujo

by digby

You may have heard that the Blue Dogs of the Democratic party are officially joining up with K Street. Apparently, they feel that their “ideas” aren’t getting enough airtime.

In a letter to Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.), who co-chairs the Blue Dog Coalition, Cramer and Stenholm wrote that they were establishing the organization to “ensure there will always be a forum in Washington to mark that middle ground when it comes to issues affecting the country’s fiscal health.”

The group’s goal is to be an incubator for policy ideas affecting the economy, such as energy, health care, tax policy, national defense and entitlements.

The research forum takes its name from the 54 fiscally conservative Democratic Members who have emerged as a powerful voting bloc on major legislation, but no current lawmaker has been involved in setting it up, according to Cramer, an original Blue Dog and president of the new research forum.

“They actually legally cannot dictate control or dominate what happens here,” Cramer said. “We can involve them. We can involve any Member in the policy forums we will carry forward, and we hope to be able to do that.”

However, as the lobbyists quietly set up the organization over the past several months, they have kept Blue Dog leadership generally informed. And Cramer, who now lobbies at Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates, said the Members have been supportive so far.

In addition to Stenholm– who works at Olsson, Frank & Weeda– and Cramer, the board of directors for the new venture includes Jeff Murray of the C2 Group, Vickie Walling of Prime Policy Group, Stacey Alexander of Elmendorf Strategies and Libby Greer of Cauthen, Forbes & Williams.

Murray, who serves as the forum’s treasurer, said he expects to send out solicitations in the near future asking potential corporate, union and other donors for pledges worth about $10,000 each to participate… “A lot of ideas don’t get to see the light of day,” said Greer, former chief of staff to Blue Dog Rep. Allen Boyd (Fla.). “We want to give them a place to breathe.”

Isn’t that special? As if they don’t already dominate the Democratic Caucus. As Howie writes:

Blue Dogs do even more damage than just by voting with the Republicans against working families and against equality and liberty. The worst damage they do is within the Democratic caucus, where they constantly work to pull caucus positions ever rightward, farther and farther away from the Democratic base. In committees you constantly have corporate shills– which, in the end, is what all Blue Dogs are– undercutting all attempts to work on behalf of regular American families.

I spoke to two DCCC-endorsed candidates yesterday who told me that when they got to Washington for briefings they were forced to listen to warmongering Blue Dog Jane Harman– perhaps best known for her quote, “I am proud to be introduced as the best Republican in the Democratic Party,” a distinction she shares with Joe Lieberman— on, what else, foreign policy. One candidate told me that he was sickened to hear her reciting talking points he’s heard over and over again repeated on Fox News. She and Lieberman were on the radio this week telling an NPR audience that what the U.S. ought to do is expand military operations into Yemen.

Blue America has a fundraising campaign devoted to ousting these Bad Dogs and Howie has made an offer you can’t refuse:

Today, in honor of the attempt by some of the shadiest lobbyists on K Street starting a new Blue Dog think tank to push the Democratic House caucus even further right and to divorce it entirely from the interests of ordinary working families, Blue America is going to give away a genuine RIAA-certified double platinum record award for “Who Let The Dogs Out?” The award, which of course, can’t be purchased, was given to a Baha Men supporter who gifted it to the Blue America PAC to be used to help raise funds to rid America of the scourge of corporate-oriented conservatism inside the Democratic Party. “We already have a Republican Party for that,” explained a Blue America spokesperson. “Shouldn’t the Democratic Party represent regular working families who don’t hire lobbyists and spend millions of dollars to shape legislation to rip the rest of us off?” Blue America answers, double yes on that rhetorical question and is offering the double platinum award today. Actually tomorrow morning there will be a drawing among all donors to the Blue America Bad Dogs page on ActBlue. To qualify all you have to donate is $1.00 at this website The contributions can go directly to progressive candidates Regina Thomas, Marcy Winograd or Doug Tudor, all fighting recationary Blue Dogs– respectively John Barrow, Jane Harman and Lori Edwards– with strong ties to unsavory corporate lobbyists. Or the donations can go into the Blue America PAC where it will be used in efforts to defeat Blue Dogs in primary elections.

You can join the drawing here.

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