Month: April 2010

Becku You

by digby

Those of you have a talent for haiku might like to join in this little bit of social networking fun:

Beginning at 9 a.m. this morning, Jewish Funds for Justice has been driving activists to “tweet the heck out of Glenn Beck,” as the Washington Post puts it. The group is sending one haiku a minute directly to @glennbeck (accompanied by hashtag #becku) for 24 straight hours to raise awareness of the Fox News host’s recent remarks mocking the faith-based idea of “social justice.”

So far, JFSJ has amassed more than 1,500 haikus mocking Beck (you can check out http://haikuglennbeck.com for more or to send one yourself).

Here’s a sample:

Give me your fearful
Your easily influenced
Oh- and a chalkboard

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Odysseus In PInstripes

by digby

If you ever wondered if it really is all about money, this should clear it up. It’s about money all right, but that isn’t enough. Not nearly enough. These people want to be loved. And they demand that everyone believe they are right:

Here’s an abbreviated version of the eight-page letter to shareholders included in Goldman Sachs’ 2009 Annual Report: Goldman didn’t bet against its own clients, did nothing wrong with respect to AIG, took steps to limit compensation for its top executives, and “embraced new realities pertaining to regulation.”

Oh, and “Goldman Sachs is grateful for the indispensable role governments played and we recognize that our firm and our shareholders benefited from it.” You are welcome! The American taxpayer is glad to be of service! Well, not actually. The American taxpayer is still steaming mad at the contradiction between the pathetic state of the economy and the fact that Goldman had a terrific year in 2009, thanks to a wide range of drastic efforts taken by the U.S. government to stabilize financial markets and keep all of Wall Street’s blue-chip financial institutions from swirling down the drain after Lehman and Bear Stearns. But if you’re looking for contrition from Goldman Sachs, you won’t find it in the company’s Annual Report.

To me, the biggest proof that these MOUs aren’t as smart as they think they are is their inability to resist the urge to strut and preen and brag publicly about how great they are at a time of great financial stress among the the public at large. It’s not enough for them to have made huge sums of money while the rest of the country is digging out from their catastrophic decisions of the last decade. They must be celebrated for having made huge sums of money while the rest of the country is digging out from their catastrophic decisions of the last decade.

It’s called hubris and it’s a fatal flaw.

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Between A Rock And A Teabag

by digby

Old Bart is getting hit from all sides and apparently is considering whether it’s all worth it now that he’s taking fire from both sides for being an incomprehensible turncoat:

Amidst growing speculation he might retire, Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) office declined to rule it out on Wednesday.

Spokeswoman Michelle Begnoche said the congressman is evaluating his options, but that he’s ready to run again if he decides to…

The nine-term congressman became a target of the left after he held out on voting for the healthcare bill until he had a guarantee of tougher language to prevent any federal subsidies from being used for abortion services.

Stupak faces a primary with former Charlevoix County Commissioner Connie Saltonstall, who has the support of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women (NOW).

Never fear, though. He’s getting lot’s of love from the Democrats who apparently enjoy being blackmailed and are hoping to send the message that they want it to happen again:

First Read reported Wednesday morning that Democratic strategists are urging Stupak to stick around, because his seat would be difficult for the party to hold. That task was made tougher, it said, because of the what Stupak went through when he held out for abortion language in the healthcare bill. In an interview with The Hill, Stupak described it as a “living hell.”

So we’re the ones who are making poor Bart’s life “a living hell” even though his friends in the “pro-life” movement are the ones issuing death threats. And Democratic strategists are giving him sympathy for all the “hell” he went through and begging him to stay on. Good to know.

The Democrats are going to lose seats this fall, no matter what. So they might as well send a little message to their members that there’s a price to pay for trying to destroy the party’s signature legislation and the president’s legacy at the expense of the majority of the party. Letting Stupak twist in the wind would be one way to do that. Instead, they appear to be rewarding him.

At some point, the Democratic party is going to have to recognize that it is a majority female party and learn to be a little bit more respectful.

Help Connie Saltonstall send them a little message they can understand on behalf Democratic women everywhere. This is insulting.

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What Is This Tea Party You Speak Of?

by digby

Rupert Murdoch appeared before the National Press Club yesterday and Seth Michaels Ari Rabin-Havt asked him if he thought it was appropriate for a news network to be promoting the tea party.

Of course Murdoch said he didn’t think they should be promoting the tea party “or any other party,” so we know he’s full of it right there. FOX is the propaganda arm of the GO after all. (Believe me, ratings are the frosting on the cake, not the raison d’etre.)

However, I would guess that he, like Rove and some others, are getting increasingly nervous about the teabaggers going rogue on them and voting third party. They would likely only do it once(they’ll come back to the fold in a presidential year unless a wealthy Perot type turns up)but once would be all it takes to thwart the GOP’s plans to take back the congress in the fall and it would lay waste to the claim that Real Americans are taking back their country from the socialist usurpers.

Fox helped create this monster (with the help of other major funders) but it’s not completely trained. The last thing Murdoch wanted was for the Republicans to lose voters, even for just one cycle. Nothing they can do about that now.

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HCR Redux

by digby

Michael Hirsh wonders why Obama is not working to get a strong financial reform bill passed before the election. Evidently, he’s left it up to the retiring Chris Dodd to get some old thing passed and then he’ll swoop in at the last minute and twist some arms. It would appear that they really do believe the their strategy on health care was a big success.

It did pass. But one would still expect them to have assessed how that particular legislative strategy may have not been a perfect model since it was barely resurrected from the dead by dint of sheer stubbornness by Nancy Pelosi and a few others. And since most people think it nearly died because the White House left everything (but their own deals with industry) in the hands of congress to bargain away in small bits to salve every ego in Washington, one might think it would be a good idea not to rely on that particular strategy again. One would be wrong:

What’s most disturbing, however, is the president’s on-again, off-again focus on financial reform. Despite its arcane nature, the issue is still a politically hot topic as we head into a fall election with the economy still rocky and Wall Street apparently still unrepentant and unrestrained. “Everybody’s just deferring to Summers and Geithner. Doesn’t the president realize he’s got a big flank exposed here?” says one Democratic staffer who is pushing for tougher restrictions on Wall Street. “We get through health care, we finally have the opportunity to do something positive on Wall Street reform and we just go ahead and focus on nuclear disarmament and climate change?” The bottom line is that apart from a new “resolution authority” used to take over and liquidate failing nonbanks—a power that is likely to affect what happens only after the next crisis hits—the Dodd bill is fast turning into a nonevent. And that may become more likely if the Connecticut senator seeks yet again to compromise with Republicans, watering down the bill further (for example, by stripping the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which Dodd has already housed at the Fed in deference to the GOP, of some of its independent powers). Compromise will become the easier path as the economy gradually improves, the memory of the Wall Street–engendered crash recedes and Dodd approaches his retirement desperate for a legacy. “We’re gonna wake up one day, tomorrow or two weeks from tomorrow, and there’s going to be a deal between Dodd and the Banking Committee Republicans,” the Democratic staffer says. And that will be the end of reform. One can only hope the president realizes what’s at stake.

It’s a miracle they pulled off any kind of health care bill considering their ham handed strategy and we’ll soon find out how much political damage they caused by allowing months and months of chipping away at a delicate system with many moving parts. That strategy cannot be seen, by any stretch, as successful on its own terms.

In any case, financial reform is not health care reform. It’s very important, but it doesn’t directly affect many average citizens’ lives and does not carry the moral imperative that HCR does, certainly among the liberals. Passing something lame is not “laying the groundwork” for something better, it’s just passing something lame. It’s not creating a huge new program or establishing something important that can be built upon later. This is a fairly simple set of regulations and new regulatory structures which have a targeted job — eliminate or reduce the systemic risk that caused the meltdown of the global financial system in the fall of 2008. They need to do this right.

I’m sure the White House would love to have a lovely bipartisan bill symbolizing a new day of peace, love and understanding. And maybe they’ll get it. But they’d better watch out. There are Democrats on the left who feel zero obligation to play ball on a bill that benefits big banks and whose loyalty to the White House was badly frayed during the last year. And there may be some Republicans on the right who refuse to play ball for any number of reasons, not the least of which is to deny Obama any kind of bipartisan victory. So Obama will likely have to stitch together a coalition of his favorite “centrists” from both parties to put this thing together and hope that he can beat a filibuster in the Senate. (How many of those are there?)It seems to me that if it’s going to be that kind of a dog fight he might as well get a decent bill. So far, it doesn’t look as if he particularly wants one.

Why the White House doesn’t want the Democrats to have even one issue that speaks to the electorate’s populist fervor this fall is a question for the age.

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He’s So Like Boooring

by digby

OMG! Obama is like making us, like, sit and listen to rilly, rilly, like, boring junk about health care and noooobody caares! He talked for 17 whole minutes and I so like just wanted to diiie.

No way is he going to be my bff anymore.

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Working Themselves Into A Frenzy

by digby

You’ve probably already heard about the arrest in Washington of a person who threatened to kill Senator Patty Murray for her vote on Health Care Reform:

According to the criminal complaint, between March 22 and April 4, 2010, WILSON called Senator Patty Murray’s office on multiple occasions leaving expletive laden threatening messages. WILSON stated that Senator Murray “had a target on her back.” WILSON stated, “I want to (expletive) kill you.” WILSON discussed assisting others in an attempt to kill the senator. WILSON’s threats were in response to the passage of the Health Care Reform Act.

WILSON allegedly made the calls from a telephone line with a ‘blocked’ phone number. However, federally subpoenaed telephone records revealed the calls came from his home phone line. FBI agents were able to further confirm WILSON was the caller. WILSON told undercover FBI agents that he regularly carries a firearm with a concealed weapons permit. He also stated that he was extremely angry about the passage of the health care reform legislation

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Don’t tell me that hate radio and Fox didn’t have a hand in working this nut up. nobody in their right mind would normally want to kill someone over a health care bill.

People have been driven mad. You probably haven’t heard the hideous racist telephone message aimed at John Lewis that was also released today.(I couldn’t find it online anyway. Chris Matthews played it on the air:

Yes, Bill Ves, calling from (inaudible) I ain’t gonna get no health insurance, tell that son of a bitch that, I ain’t getting the damned health insurance. That goddamned ni**er, don’t tell me I gotta get some goddamned health insurance. I ain’t paying no goddamned fine. Tell that ni**er he can come put my ass in jail if he don’t like it. Goddamn worthless ni**er, and all them other ni**ers that voted for him. That ni**er Obama and them white trash honkies that voted for that damned communist, socialist stuff. Dumb motherfuckers, Goddamn! I ain’t getting the goddamned mandatory health insurance from some bitch motherfuckers! Goddamn bunch of ni**er,white trash honkies, son of a bitch communist who voted for this shit. I didn’t go fight in no goddamned wart so I could be forced to do something I don'[t want to do. So fuck all y’all ni**ers. Fuck you John Lewis, you goddamned worthless, communist ni**er.

What an impressive fellow. According to Republican legislators and conservative leaders, Lewis has no one to blame but himself for this. If he hadn’t voted for health care, he wouldn’t have made this man mad and then this wouldn’t have happened.These Democraats need to understand that when they vote for thing Republicans don’t like they will be subject to violence. That’s how democracy works. (Of course, it’s also true the John Lewis made it all up.)

This isn’t the end of it. The wingnuts are working overtime to keep this at a high boil. Check this out:

Now that might be benign under some circumstances. It only sort of looks like a target. But it happened at a Florida gun show.

“A year ago, you could have described the mood as one of hysteria.”

A year later, Burns said, a lot of gun owners are still waiting to see if the Obama administration decides to make it harder for them to keep the guns that they lawfully own. It’s one reason, he said, why people who support the right to bear arms come to an event like this one: out of concern that their freedom to buy another gun might get challenged in the future.

“You’ve got common people out here, concerned about their gun rights,” he said. “Some people think we’re all just a bunch of militants and survivalists. We’re not. These are people watching our rights being taken away by the folks in Washington.”

I guess he must be talking about his right to have other people pay for his emergency room visit if he doesn’t have health insurance, because nobody’s taking away his right to bear arms. In fact, Obama signed a law allowing these yahoos to carry guns in national parks.

When I see that stuff, I get worried for Grayson. He is a target for a lot of reasons. I hope he has protection. There are plenty of nuts like that one who left the message on Murray’s and Lewis’s answering machines out there. One of them could easily take it in their heads to take it to the next level.

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Teabag Plutocrat

by digby

Well, well, well … looks like our Mining CEO is a teabagger. Karoli at C&L writes:

Meet Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy Company. Blankenship is also on the Board of Directors of the US Chamber of Commerce. In this speech above, he denies climate change, derisively refers to Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, and others as “greeniacs”, and calls them all crazy. Watch the speech, you’ll see. In his mind, “the greeniacs are taking over the world.” Massey Energy Company, Blankenship’s highly successful strip-mining and mountaintop removal operation is the parent company of Performance Coal Co, where a tragic explosion occurred on April 5th. As of this writing, 25 miners have died and 4 more are still missing. Twenty-five families are without a loved one. Four more may discover they have lost someone they love too. 29 families in all, forever changed by one single, violent event in a coal mine. One single violent event in a coal mine run by a company so obsessed with profit it runs roughshod over employees’ and neighbors’ health and safety.

Here’s something else about Don Blankenship and Massey Energy Company: Blankenship spent over $1 million dollars along with other US Chamber buddies like Verizon to sponsor last year’s Labor Day Tea Party, also known as the “Friends of America Rally.” Here’s Massey’s pitch. Note how he makes it sound like he isn’t one of the corporate enemies of America. The Friends of America Rally featured such notables as Sean Hannity, Ted Nugent, and Hank Williams, Jr., and was graced by Blankenship himself going off on a diatribe that seemed strange at the time, but has come to be commonplace these days. It concerned President Obama, Democrats, and any one who doesn’t salute God, coal, and apple pie. Oh, and we’re also going to ‘steal their jobs,’ if Hannity is to be believed. Blankenship and Massey Energy spend millions to defend unsafe workplaces

This guy is a perfect phony populist. Laughably, he pretends that he speaks for labor and even talks about “bad corporations” and Republicans along with his indictment of government, environmentalists, Democrats, global warming, immigrants and unions. He’s quite the piece of work:

For every kernel of truth contained within his speech about the loss of jobs and the failure of government to look out for American workers, there is a a pile of garbage as high as Everest. I don’t have the energy to unpack it all right now, but virtually everything he says is a contradiction, a lie or a distortion. It makes my head hurt to even try.

Here’s the result of Blankenship’s worker friendly populism:

The Upper Big Branch Mine that suffered the most serious mining disaster since 1984 on Monday has received the most serious citations from the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in 2009 of all Massey Energy-owned mines in West Virginia. Data collected from MSHA shows that over the course of the last year, the Upper Big Branch Mine received 48 “unwarrantable failure orders,” far exceeding Massey Energy’s number two recipient of serious citations in West Virginia.

On Monday, 25 miners were killed and left four others trapped underground at the Upper Big Branch Mine. It is the worst mining disaster in the United States since 1984 and, if the four trapped miners are not rescued, would become the worst since 1970. The Washington Post reports, “[t]he cause of Monday’s explosion has not been determined, but a buildup of methane or coal dust was considered the likeliest culprit.”

The Upper Big Branch mine received 39 violations in 2009 citing a failure to plan for ventilation to extract methane and other chemicals. Fifteen of these were considered “significant and substantial.” In July of 2009, the mine received its largest monetary fine of the year ($66,142) for allowing the accumulation of combustible materials in working spaces. Upper Big Branch received 34 similar violations citing accumulation of combustible materials, 20 of which were determined to be “significant and substantial.”

Massey Energy has contested nearly all major citations issued against the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2009 and has paid less than 20% of the fines levied against them. Of the top 100 fines levied against the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2009, Massey Energy has contested or are delinquent in paying 85% of them. Upper Big Branch was also cited for 202 violations that were considered “significant and substantial.” Seventy-six percent of those have either been contested or Massey Energy is delinquent in paying them.

I’m sure those people cheering every insane thing he said at that rally will blame the government for failing to stop him, thus proving once again that it can’t do anything right. That’s what happens when a good portion of the American people go down the rabbit hole.

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Controversy

by digby

Via Dante Atkins at DKos, I see that the GOPs war on women continues apace. Here’s the Minority Leader’s latest statement:

Remember when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said last month “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it?” Tucked away inside President Obama’s new health care law is a controversial provision dramatically expanding taxpayer funding of contraceptives and the abortion industry. Washington Democrats actually tried to insert this legislative language in the original trillion-dollar ‘stimulus,’ but were forced to remove it under pressure from Republicans and the American people. No matter: Democrats just hid it in their government takeover of health care instead. After all, no liberal special interest giveaway could be spared in order to force this job-killing monstrosity through Congress over the objection of the American people.

Specifically, all states are now free to offer Medicaid “family planning” services – even for those who are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid – without receiving approval from the federal government. This will pave the way for more taxpayer dollars to go to clinics that undercut parents and promote abortions. Inside Health Policy has the details:

“Tucked into the health reform legislation is a controversial provision allowing states to expand coverage for family planning services under Medicaid without a waiver from the federal government. Democrats had tried to insert the language into the Recovery Act in January 2009, but pulled back after it became a lightning rod for GOP attacks … Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) championed the provision in the Senate, adding it to the Senate Finance Committee version of the legislation during mark-up, sources said, and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) pushed for it in the House. … ‘How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?’ House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said of the provision, according to Reuters.”

Boehner is such a slimy little worm. The original brouhaha was about the fact that family planning didn’t “create jobs” which was the intent of the stimulus package. It became a big joke (“hehehe, he said stimulate…”) and so the Democrats removed it from the bill to shut up the stupid Republicans.

Now they’re implying that it was removed because of moral objections on the part of “America” which doesn’t want the government paying for birth control and “the abortion industry,” which I’m assuming is Planned Parenthood. (That was, of course, ridiculous because contraceptives are a product like anything else which requires humans to manufacture and distribute them.)

Boehner concludes:

Now we learn that Washington Democrats’ government takeover of health care dramatically expands taxpayer funding of contraceptives and the abortion industry. First Democrats removed this controversial provision from the ‘stimulus’ and then they hid it in their government takeover of health care, hoping the American people wouldn’t notice.

If anyone ever wondered whether the right is sincere in its concern for fetuses as opposed to the sexual behavior of women, this would seem to spell it out pretty clearly. Boehner is calling provisions for birth control “controversial” and the only thing he can mean by this in this context is that he thinks Americans believe women shouldn’t have sex if they don’t want to bear children. (“Just keep your legs closed, girl, and you won’t have a problem.”)Otherwise, it would be “uncontroversial” that a health care bill would provide for family planning and those who care about preventing abortion would be supportive since it would result in fewer unplanned pregnancies. (But then we know that isn’t what the religion industrial complex is all about, don’t we?)

It is only a matter of time before we start hearing about a new conscience clause for people who don’t believe in paying for other people’s contraception.

Dante says it well:

There are two major sources of concern here. First, the fact that Leader Boehner is attacking birth control funding just goes to show that the forced birth cult wing of the Republican Party isn’t really interested in snowflake babies. After all, it would stand to reason that making contraception readily available would make a significant dent in the number of unplanned pregnancies. Rather, they are far more concerned with making sure that women–especially poor women–suffer consequences for daring to have sex unless they make sure to do it with a strong, powerful man who they know can provide for them–in other words, the medieval model of gender relations.

But even more alarming is the fact that Boehner and the GOP are now so bold as to think that attacking the pill is a sound political idea. Either Boehner and the GOP are just that out of touch with political reality, or we will have a fierce battle ahead to protect the freedoms we all take for granted.

They’re moving the goalposts, as they always do. And if history is any guide, the Democrats will give in over time. There’s going to be a battle, but I doubt it will be waged by the Democratic party.

Here’s one way to make sure they are at least passive allies and cease using women’s rights as a negotiating chip: donate a couple of bucks to Connie Saltonstall’s campaign against Bart Stupak, the “pro-life” Democrat who almost took down the health care bill and enabled the right wing to degrade women’s reproductive rights yet again. I see no hope of changing this until the Party establishment understands that women’s rights are human rights, as embedded in our values as civil rights for racial minorities.

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The Dumping Ground For Abusive Priests

by tristero

Horrible.

h/t, PZ Myers. There is no organization, except a religious one, that could evade the charge that the sheer number of cases of abuse, cover-up, and reassignment point to a systematic, organized policy approved at the highest levels of authority within the group.

Put another way, it is not those who expose the foul sins of the Catholic Church that heap shame on it. Only the sick priests and the Church’s leadership are to blame.

The Church simply must stop their lame-brained, repellent media strategy of blaming the victims and the whistleblowers.