Month: April 2010

Number One Priority

by digby

I was talking about politics with a bunch of highly informed people recently who all thought that health care wouldn’t be much of an issue in the fall. (Jobs, jobs, jobs.) I agree that the economy is going to be a huge issue, but I’ll be very surprised if health care isn’t at the very center of the election. I think it’s obviously going to be at the center if the right is driving the agenda:

Repealing healthcare reform will be Republicans’ “No. 1 priority,” their House leader said Monday.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said that repealing the healthcare legislation passed in Congress last month and signed into law by President Barack Obama would be the GOP’s top priority if it wins back control of Congress this fall.

“They got everything else in the entire bureaucracy that they need to control our healthcare system … with the signing of this bill,” Boehner said during an interview on WFLA’s “Bud Hedinger Show.” “That’s why repealing this bill has to be our No. 1 priority.”

The Democrats may be able to control the narrative of this election but I see no evidence that they are going to do it. It’s possible that the court fight and financial reform might provide some ground to fight on Democratic turf and perhaps an improving economy will help them out but it doesn’t seem likely — it takes about 18 months for economic CW in the country to really take, even if the numbers are unequivocally positive, which they aren’t. Maybe by 2012 but it’s already too late for 2010. I think the Republicans are going to take the lead and run it as a referendum on health care, which will serve as a proxy for the illegitimate takeover of the government by the socialists.

We’ll see what happens and maybe it’s true that this will all be old news by then. But I hope the Dems are playing it safe anyway and are preparing talking points to defend their health care votes because I think they’re going to need them.

On the other hand, if the Republicans give them gifts like this, they may be able to simply let them hoist themselves by their own petard:

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Inspiration

by digby

I’m sure others have seen this before but I hadn’t made the connection until my pal Gloria mentioned it this week-end

Beck:

Dr Gene Scott:

Perhaps you might better recognize him here

:

The difference between Beck and Scott is that Scott merely confused his followers and bilked them out of their money with ridiculous gibberish for his own enrichment. Beck is doing the same thing, but a whole lot of people are taking him seriously as a secular, political force. He’s not just affecting the people who choose to follow him. He’s affecting the rest of us as well.

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Woof!

by

Seriously, what is it about extreme rightwing Republicans and their dog/sex obsession?bestiality, especially involving dogs?

“Children are not puppies,” [Michael Huckabee] said. “This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work?”

I’m beginning to think there are some really weird people running around this great country of ours.

Oh my God! Maybe…no…it couldn’t be…maybe it’s something in the water!

“Get ‘Em On The Grid”

by digby

That’s what my friend Lisa has been saying for years whenever we talk politics, specifically the issue of the deficit. She’s talking about immigrants.

She says “get ’em on the grid” because she works with retirement planning and has to game out the effects of “entitlement” reform for her clients. Just looking at the numbers it has seemed clear to her for years that if immigrants are paying into social security and medicare, it would go a long way toward balancing those books as the baby boom goes through retirement and beyond.

As a Californian she also sees first hand that not only are immigrants tremendously hard working and willing to pay into the system, if they become Americans they contribute to the next generation of workers as well.

Robert Reich agrees:

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke this week listed the choices. “To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, “the nation must choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.”

Bernanke is almost certainly right about “some combination,” but he leaves out one other possible remedy that should be included in that combination: Immigration.

You see, the biggest reason Social Security is in trouble, and Medicare as well, is because America is aging so fast. It’s not just that so many boomers are retiring. It’s also that seniors are living longer. And families are having fewer children.

Add it all up and the number of people who are working relative to the number who are retired keeps shrinking.

Forty years ago there were five workers for every retiree. Now there are three. Within a couple of decades, there will be only two workers per retiree. There’s no way just two workers will be able or willing to pay enough payroll taxes to keep benefits flowing to every retiree.

This is where immigration comes in. Most immigrants are young because the impoverished countries they come from are demographically the opposite of rich countries. Rather than aging populations, their populations are bursting with young people.

Yes, I know: There aren’t enough jobs right now even for Americans who want and need them. But once the American economy recovers, there will be. Take a long-term view and most new immigrants to the U.S. will be working for many decades.

Get it? One logical way to deal with the crisis of funding Social Security and Medicare is to have more workers per retiree, and the simplest way to do that is to allow more immigrants into the United States.

Immigration reform and entitlement reform have a lot to do with one another.

This is about arithmetic, not economics. Anyone should be able to understand it.

Update: Kos fills out the political case for putting them on grid, which should be self-evident.

A Stopped Clock Gets It Right

by tristero

Among the so-called New Atheists, I definitely am not a fan of Christopher Hitchens.* Nevertheless, about thisHitchens is absolutely, 100% right:

“This man [Pope Benedict XVI] is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.”

Yep.

Now, if only Hitchens would turn that same uncompromising attitude towards international law on the cynical murderers and torturers who sexed up bogus data to justify the invasion of Iraq. And then, Hitchens can arrest himself for so disgracefully aiding and abetting these criminals.

—

* Nor do I like Sam Harris. But I do like the third member of the Unholy Trinity, Richard Dawkins, although I think there are better pop sci writers who cover evolution, eg, Sean Carroll, Olivia Judson and PZ Myers.

Papa’s Got A Brand New Tea Bag

by digby

Well at least they aren’t racist:

An online news outlet in New York state has obtained dozens of emails, many of them racist and sexually graphic, which it reports were sent by Carl Paladino, the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York, to a long list of political and business associates. One email shows a video of an African tribal dance, entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal,” while another depicts hardcore bestiality. Paladino’s campaign manager, Michael Caputo, would not comment on specific emails, but acknowledged to TPMmuckraker that Paladino had sent emails that were “off-color” and “politically incorrect,” saying that few such emails represented the candidate’s own opinion. Caputo accused Democrats of wanting to change the subject from substantive issues to “having sex with horses.”

(There’s something about conservatives and bestiality that I just don’t want to think about.)

Here’s a tame example of what this wealthy teabagger send around to his friends and associates:

Meanwhile, some of the teabag leaders have decided to try to ixnay some of the extremism, which they seem to have tolerated well so far:

The battle for health care reform brought out both the best and the worst in the tea party movement, according to activists. On the plus side, the conservative insurgency showed it could dominate the political dialogue and influence decision-making on both sides of the aisle. Activists say that shows tea partiers are becoming wiser and more seasoned politically.

But the health care debate also exposed rifts and deep vulnerabilities with in the tea party movement that could stop its path toward mainstream acceptance. Violent rhetoric and racial overtones in protests spilled over into actual death threats, property damage and the hurling of slurs. Whether or not the suspects in those incidents are actually tea partiers, movement leaders seem worried that they play into progressive arguments that the tea parties are just a new wrapping on right-wing extremism.

They are. More than anything, though, they are a reflection of a deep strain in American political life which simply doesn’t understand or respect democracy. It’s well illustrated here:

He said he expects more people to turn out at the April 15 protests around the country than ever before. Despite all the changes to rhetoric and self-awareness, McClellan said the core beliefs of the tea party haven’t changed.

“It’s a pretty simple concept,” he told me. “The people we elect to office should listen to us.”

He simply fails to understand that the people he voted into office are listening to him. They are called Republicans and, unfortunately for him, they are in the minority. There are more people who voted the Democrats into office and these Democrats have a responsibility to listen to their constituents — us. I know it’s inconvenient when the majority doesn’t agree with you and frustrating when its representatives pass laws you don’t like, but it’s the way democracy is organized. All this screaming about how the government isn’t “listening to the people” is really about how it isn’t doing what they want and yet their representatives, the Republicans, are doing everything they can to obstruct the Democrats’ agenda. Sadly for the teabaggers, there just aren’t enough of them. They just refuse to accept this. Any government that fails to do their bidding isn’t just wrong. It is illegitimate.

I’m glad some of them understand how obnoxious and dangerous the racist, extremist rhetoric among some of their adherents is. But I would suggest that their fundamental misunderstanding of democracy is what’s most troubling. Every time someone they didn’t vote for becomes president or the Democrats take a majority, they refuse to accept it and resort to impeachment, throwing it to the Supreme Court or violent threats. They can downplay the racism and try to hide their extremism, but this is the real problem and it’s not changing. They really do believe it’s their country and the rest of us have no say in it.

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Guest Post

Kathy G is taking a sabbatical from blogging but has been closely following the Catholic Church scandal and keeping interested people informed via email. She kindly allowed me to post this latest as a service to my readers who aren’t able to keep up with the massive number of revelations, allegations and excuses.

Pedophile Round-up

by Kathy G.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get more sordid . . .

The most significant event this week appears to be the AP story which implicates Pope Benedict more deeply than ever before. It seems that Benedict, back when he was known as Cardinal Ratzinger, is personally responsible for refusing for six long years to defrock a priest who’d raped several kids. This *in spite of* the fact that the priest himself had requested that Ratzinger defrock him!

Worse, as Andrew Sullivan notes here: this same priest “was subsequently allowed back into the parish where he *tied up and raped* children seven years later as a volunteer youth minister. Even after his eventual defrocking, in 1987, he continued to work with children at the parish for another year.” (Emphasis mine).

Ratzie’s fingerprints are all over this case. He himself signed the letter refusing to defrock the guy. How the Church can retain a shred of credibility or respectability after these revelations is beyond me.

But wait, there’s more!

One of the best investigative reporters into the Catholic sexual assault scandals has been Jason Berry. For years now he’s been reporting on Marcial Maciel, the ultraconservative Mexican priest who founded the influential Legion of Christ cult, and who was a world class liar, drug addict, and bigamist who sexually assaulted at least 20 boys and young men. Maciel and his cult were beloved by John Paul and other top Vatican officials, and it’s always been something of a puzzle as to why he’d been able to get away with his crimes for so long. There were Church investigations of him and his cult going back to the 1950s, and quite a few of the men he’d sexually assaulted went on the record about what he’d done to them, a number of them going so far as to submit signed depositions detailing the abuse.

In this important article in the current issue of the National Catholic Reporter, Berry lays out the story of how Maciel became untouchable in greater detail than I’d seen before.

Basically, it comes down to money. When it came to spreading the cash around, Maciel and his minions were quite generous. They were quite fond of passing fat envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash.

According to the article, Ratzinger was one of the few high-level Vatican officials who refused to pocket Maciel’s money. That’s about the only good news he’s had this week, I think.

Btw, though the article doesn’t go into this in depth, Maciel was an extremely talented fundraiser. He cultivated rich wingnuts in Latin America and elsewhere. He flattered them by basically telling them that God loved them more than He loves the poor.

Apparently, they really liked to hear that.

A few more things:

— As I’ve pointed out before, the biggest defenders of the Church’s actions in these sexual abuse cases have invariably been the right- wing Catholics. The National Catholic Reporter piece I linked to above names the following people as have been among Maciel’s biggest fans and most diehard defenders: William Donohue, William Bennett, Rick Santorum, right-to-life Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, Jeb Bush, Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, a guy who produced Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, John Paul II hagiographer George Weigel, and the late Father Richard John Neuhaus (of First Things).

Oh, and Fox News’ resident priest is a member of Maciel’s Legion of Christ. As is a dude who’s been a rent-a-priest for CBS and NBC.

Theocons all.

— Speaking of defenders of the Church: it looks like Kaplan Test Prep Daily’s Michael Gerson picked a bad week to write about what a peachy job Benedict is doing in dealing with the sexual abuse scandals:

— It wasn’t a particularly swell week, either, for the National Review to run a piece lauding the legacy of Pope John Paul. For extra special totes awesomeness, the National Review piece was written by — wait for it! — Newt *and* Callista Gingrich! ‘Cause there aren’t any two people I want to take my moral and theological instruction from more than I do from that pair!

— Andrew Sullivan has put a few good posts that show you what a church (in this case, the Episcopalians) which actually gives a shit about protecting its flock and securing justice for rape victims will do, when confronted with evidence that members of its clergy are sexually assaulting its members.

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Five Dollar Friday

by digby

I love this idea so much.

From Jonathan at ATR:

Starting today, every Friday I’m going to give five dollars to someone who’s produced something funny/interesting/worthwhile and is giving it away on the internet(s). Obviously the internet is the greatest distribution technology ever created for music and writing and video and journalism. But it’s also obvious it generally makes it more difficult for people producing such things to earn a living. So I have three goals with this: 1. Finally start paying some of the people who’ve created wonderful things I’ve enjoyed. 2. If possible, get lots of other people online to start doing this as well. It would be a beautiful thing if it grew and grew, and three years from now 10,000 people were giving away $50,000 to artists every week. To help get things rolling, I’ve created the twitter hashtag #5DF. Every week I’ll link to the recipient of my five dollars on twitter with that tag, and if you start doing it I encourage you to do the same. (I’ll also archive all my recipients here.) 3. In my most grandiose dreams, this idea would—in the process of becoming popular—make people realize that we need a new way to fund all kinds of art. In theory the internet should be a dream come true for artists and people generally, but it will never fulfill its potential if everyone is trying to eke out a living from advertising or just what other people are willing to cough up on the spur of the moment. I’m convinced the answer is something like Dean Baker’s Artistic Freedom Vouchers. Baker’s proposal is that the government give every adult a $100 voucher each year that they could in turn give to anyone producing anything creative.

Please go over and read the rest of the post, which includes his first purchase and the thanks he got from the artist who made it.

I’m a big believer in this kind of voluntary payment system. It’s currently what supports me and it’s the most free form of work I’ve ever had. I work more constantly than I ever have before and I love (almost) every minute of it.

This is a nice way of institutionalizing it in a small way for each of us.

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Self-Service

by digby

According to this article, if you just remove the poor blacks from the equation it would be clear to everyone that America doesn’t like Obama. Now, this isn’t about race, mind you, not at all. It’s about resistance to all these lazy blacks living off the dole which their black socialist President is funding by stealing money from hardworking whites. Why everyone has to bring race into it all the time is beyond me.

You have to understand that African Americans aren’t loyal to Obama because of his history making role as the first black president in a country that had to fight a bloody civil war to end slavery and maintained apartheid for nearly a hundred years. It’s because he’s handing out great gobs of cash to them at the expense of the people who really deserve it. That’s just the way those people are.

Moreover, the reason why you don’t see black and brown people at the tea party rallies isn’t because many in the crowd seem to hold racist attitudes, but because African Americans know that these folks are enemies of their chosen lifestyle — living off the backs of the people who really contribute. The tea partiers, you see, are all hardscrabble workers who live by dint of their own efforts and are tired of supporting this underclass. Race doesn’t come into it for them at all. Just like Steven Colbert, they are all so color blind they don’t even know what color they are themselves.

(And for those of you who still insist that race has anything to do with any of this, I would just suggest that you keep in mind that Obama couldn’t have become president if a “substantial” number of whites hadn’t supported him. Game, set, match.)

Here. Read it for yourself:

There were three interesting developments within the past couple weeks that, taken together, cast some light on the intersection of race and politics in America.

First came news reports predicting that the number of children born to minority parents will surpass the number born to white parents within the next two years. If so, whites will become a minority of the American population even sooner than originally thought.

Second came a column by Frank Rich in The New York Times arguing that opposition to Obamacare flowed from the racial insecurities produced by such trends. He declared that whites are “a dwindling and threatened minority” whose “anxieties about a rapidly changing America” have been brought to the surface by a black president.

Third was a Gallup Poll showing that more people disapproved than approved of Barack Obama. The overall decline in his approval rating from more than 70 percent a year ago to 46 percent is virtually unprecedented for a president so early in his term.

What tied these three developments together was an article in the Weekly Standard magazine by senior writer Jonathan Last. Dissecting Obama’s sinking poll numbers, Last found a remarkable incongruity-that although he had lost ground with every other demographic group, the president was more popular than ever with black voters.

With a Rasmussen survey showing his approval among blacks at 96 percent, it is possible that the creature most difficult to find in Americanpolitics is a black man or woman opposed to Obama. It doesn’t take much dicing of the numbers to realize that if his overall numbers have tanked while his support among blacks has actually gone up, his support among the majority white population has largely evaporated. There is an increasing scarcity outside the ranks of the “chattering classes” of white Democrats-the media, academe, Hollywood-most especially white males.

The Democratic Party is becoming ever more the party of American minorities while the Republican Party is, more than ever, the party of white America. There is a reason, then, why there are so few black or Hispanic faces at tea-party rallies. The problem is that it isn’t the reason that Rich and other liberal race-mongers suggest. Indeed, any theory positing race as an explanation for opposition to Obama founders on the fact that he only became president in the first place because of substantial white support.

While blacks obviously support him because he is black, minorities in general have long supported the Democratic Party because it is the party of government and minorities, disproportionately located near the lower ends of the socio-economic ladder, are disproportionately dependent upon government. They share the collectivist, welfare-state vision of Obama because they are net recipients from rather than contributors to welfare state programs.

In marked contrast, middle-class whites suspect that they are the ones who will end up paying for Obama’s governmental largesse. They believe that they put more into the public treasury than they get out, and that this disadvantageous ratio is likely to shift even more against them in the future as Obama’s goal of growing government continues.

It isn’t racism, but ideology and the differing views of the role of government that ideology produces that is at play here. America is a center-right nation because it has an increasingly right-leaning if demographically dwindling white majority. Conversely, the most loyal component of the Democratic coalition is blacks because blacks are both the most left-leaning group in American politics and the group most dependent upon the welfare state.

America is sharply divided politically on the basis of race, but it is the different ideological leanings of the different races, not their pigmentation per se, that has produced this. How strange that the man whom many voted for because they wished to “transcend” America’s racial divide has in some ways made it worse, not because he is black but because he has chosen to govern from the radical left.

What’s the difference? If African Americans support Obama because they are lazy, conniving commies, it’s kind of a chicken or the egg proposition, isn’t it?

Seriously, if the shiftless welfare queens would just stop stealing all this money from hardworking white people, we wouldn’t have all these problems. I don’t see why all everyone always jumps to the conclusion that it has anything to do with race.

h/t to GL

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Oil Spill

by digby

I did an interview with the blogometer recently in which they asked me who was my least favorite politician. I said it was Mike Pence, for his unctuous, skin crawling sanctimony. Heather at C&L caught a perfect example of his oleaginous creepiness:

“You know I believe that ending an innocent human life is morally wrong, but it’s also morally wrong to take the tax payer dollars of millions of pro-life Americans and use it to promote abortion at home and abroad. This administration has opened the flood gates to providing and promoting support for abortion overseas and let me say from my heart, the largest abortion provider in America should not be the largest recipient of federal funding under Title Ten. The time has come to deny any and all federal funding to Planned Parenthood of America!”

Excuse me for a moment. I need to try to wash the greasy residue from my brain.

Heather smartly retorted:

What was it that Al Franken used to say about Republicans? They believe life begins at conception and ends at birth. Sounds about right here too. Hey Mike, can I deny having my tax dollars to go to killing innocent people overseas with these useless wars your party’s dear leader Dubya decided to start? How about that as a pro-life position?

Pence is one of those Republicans who came out of wingnut hate radio but adopted an oh-so-sincere, “family values” brand of conservatism that is belied by the deadness you see behind his reptilian eyes. He’s the kind of guy who whispers “Jesus loves you” in your ear as he sticks in the shiv.

He’s a perfect “mainstream” GOP candidate. And he may very well run for president.

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