Just There For The Buffet
by digby
In case you missed it:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Larger Truths
by digby
Another AG says no criminal wrongdoing:
California Attorney General Jerry Brown determined Thursday that ACORN broke no criminal laws, after reviewing videotapes that sparked a recent political firestorm.
Brown’s office said it would not pursue charges against the now-defunct community organizing group. But it said ACORN engaged in inappropriate behavior that may prompt other state agencies to take a look, such as dumping 500 pages of confidential records into the trash and failing to file a state tax return.
“A few ACORN members exhibited terrible judgment and highly inappropriate behavior in videotapes obtained in the investigation,” Brown said in a statement. “But they didn’t commit prosecutable crimes in California.”
[…]
Rather than give advice on prostituting underage girls, human trafficking and cheating on taxes, the attorney general’s office found ACORN members at times caught on to the scheme and called the police in the portions of the videos that were cut.
“Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor,” Brown said.
To obtain the full tapes, Brown’s office agreed not to prosecute conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the pimp and prostitute in the video, even though the report found they likely violated state privacy laws.
First of all, we know that O’Keefe didn’t always “pose as a pimp,” so the story perpetuates this false claim, which most people undoubtedly thinks means he was in those offices dressed in that ridiculous get-up — which makes the workers look even stupider.
And by editing the tapes to only show those who went along with the ruse or simply gave dumb advice, they gave the impression that this must have been an organizational policy. If they had shown those who called the cops or tossed the two of them out of the office, it would have put the foolish ones in perspective, right? Wouldn’t want to do that.
This whole episode makes me sick. It was drenched in racist stereotypes from conception and the reaction from the media and the politicians revealed more about this country than those tapes revealed about ACORN.
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Keeping The GOP Well Funded
by digby
Someone sent an email asking why in the hell Orrin Hatch’s absurd abstinence only program is still in a bill that got not one Republican vote. It’s a good question:
A little-noticed provision of the health legislation has rescued federal support for a controversial form of sex education: teaching youths to remain virgins until marriage.
The bill restores $250 million over five years for states to sponsor programs aimed at preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases by focusing exclusively on encouraging children and adolescents to avoid sex. The funding provides at least a partial reprieve for the approach, which faced losing all federal support under President Obama’s first two budgets.
“We’re very happy to see that funding will continue so the important sexual health message of risk avoidance will reach American teens,” said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based lobbying group. “What better place to see such an important health issue addressed than in the health legislation?”
But the funding was condemned by critics, who were stupefied by the eleventh-hour rescue.
“To spend a quarter-billion dollars on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that have already been proven to fail is reckless and irresponsible,” said James Wagoner of the Washington group Advocates for Youth. “When on top of that you add the fact that this puts the health and lives of young people at risk, this becomes outrageous.”
250 million dollars is not chump change and it goes to support some of the most backward, useless conservative programs in the country. They might as well have funded creationism.
Somebody did this, but nobody wants their fingerprints on it.
But the effort came under mounting criticism when independent evaluations concluded that the approach was ineffective, and evidence began to emerge that the long decline in teen pregnancies was reversing.
As part of Obama’s first budget, Congress approved a request for more than $110 million for a new “teenage pregnancy prevention” initiative that would fund only programs that have been “proven effective through rigorous evaluation,” effectively excluding abstinence programs.
The initiative includes $25 million for new, innovative programs that could potentially embrace those encouraging abstinence. A University of Pennsylvania researcher reported last month that a carefully designed, morally neutral abstinence-focused approach can work. But the program does not earmark funding for programs focused on maintaining virginity.
During the health legislation debate in the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) added $50 million in annual funding for five years to states for abstinence programs — a provision that survived the tumultuous process that ensued.
[…]
Critics, however, maintained that there was no reason to continue funding any programs, given the lack of evidence of their effectiveness and speculated that the money survived as part of the effort to win conservative Democratic support for the legislation.
Who was holding out for abstinence only funding? And why aren’t they loudly crowing about their success? More pertinently perhaps, to whom are they quietly crowing?
This is yet another example of using uteruses as a bargaining chip. Abstinence only education is a total waste of money — money that could be used to fund contraception for poor people, provide training for doctors to learn how to do abortions (which many medical schools don’t even teach anymore) or to fund family planning clinics. It’s not as if there wasn’t a better use for the money.
And on a political level it’s so stupid I can’t even fathom what they were thinking. The “abstinence-only” industry is part of the GOP patronage machine, designed to funnel money into the hands of supporters. It’s bad enough that both parties are crawling over each other to get a piece of the Wall Street/defense contractor money. That the Democrats are now voting to defund groups like ACORN and funding Republicans patronage is just frosting on the cake.
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Magic At The Bowl
by digby
The mister and I were lucky enough to have a transcendent boomer experience last night seeing McCartney at the Hollywood Bowl. The old boy’s still got it — three hours without a break or even a sip of water. This was the second encore.
(Warning: fairly decent youtube — not mine — but as bad as cell phone recordings usually are. But if you like Sir Paul you’ll get a good sense of how much fun it was to spend a warm spring night at the bowl in his company.)
He sang the soundtrack to my life. Lot’s of songs on that album.
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The Best Political Bozo On Television
by digby
ERICKSON: This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.
Fine. And when your water mains are inadequate and your roads are overcrowded you can dive into the sewage and swim to work, you moron.
h/t to bb
Intrinsic Moral Evil?
by digby
Katha Pollitt on the Catholic scandal:
The moral authority granted the Catholic Church in the secular world is for me the most repellent aspect of the current crisis. In the succinct words of Jodi Jacobson, editor of RHRealityCheck.org, “Why is a pedophilia-ridden, pedophilia-hiding, child-abusing Church allowed to write laws controlling women’s rights?” To which one might add: what gives a church in which celibacy is equated with holiness, in which males have almost all the power, the right to a place at the table where laws are made about women’s bodies? The same institution that has dealt so indulgently with its ordained pedophiles had no problem excommunicating a Brazilian mother who sought an abortion for her 9-year-old daughter, raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather, or pushing for laws in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chile banning abortion even to save the woman’s life.
[…]
There isn’t much that non-Catholics can do to force the church to abandon its 2,000-year-old misogynistic ways. We can’t force it to ordain women and married men, or value a woman’s life over a fertilized egg, or see homosexuality as something other than, in Pope John Paul II’s memorable words, “intrinsic moral evil.” Catholics themselves will have to do that, whether by leaving the church in numbers large enough to get the bishops’ attention or by organizing within it, like Catholics for Choice, Women-Church Convergence or the international group We Are Church. But certainly the rest of us can demand that the Obama administration, Congress and government generally stop catering to the Vatican. The bishops can’t even make their own flock obey their outmoded and cruel rules and regulations, so why should they exercise power over the entire country? The United States should not have an ambassador to the Holy See in Rome any more than it has an ambassador to the Diocese of Canterbury or the Satmars of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And if the church wants to interfere with the making of laws, it should lose its tax-exempt status.
Yep.
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I Gotcher Populism Fer Ye
by digby
[Limbaugh] devoted the remainder of the show to expressing outrage at Congressman Henry Waxman’s committee hearing looking into corporations’ claims about the detrimental effect health care reform will have on them. Deviating only to remark that seeing a brunette on the Fox News Channel must be an “April Fools,” Limbaugh repeatedly warned that this hearing is just the beginning of “statism,” that we are now “watching” “Stalinist[s]” at work, and that Castro and Obama are the “same thing.” He advised the CEOs attending this hearing to “fire back with both barrels.”
You’ll notice that our sweet little teabagger lady also thinks we’ve “demonized” business and that they are regulated too much. The current wingnut “populism” holds that the government has been infilitrated by a foreign communist — a Stalinesque figure who happens to be black and is taking over the private sector in order to enslave the God Fearing Real Americans. They used to be known as Birchers, but Teabagger is so much more modern and sexy.
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Is it Worth It?
by digby
Chris Hayes has written an excellent primer on the state of the financial reform bill that everyone should read before the sausage is fully prepared. I fully concur with this conclusion:
Progressive critics of the healthcare reform bill like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich voted for it because they were persuaded that the bill moved things in the right direction and would provide immense relief and security to millions of Americans. With financial regulation, the banks aren’t holding 30 million uninsured Americans hostage. And a bill that passes but doesn’t reconfigure the political economy of the financial sector stands a good chance of making things worse, allowing Washington and Wall Street to go back to the status quo with a false sense of security that the problem has been solved. At this point, I think the House bill with stronger derivatives language would clear the bar. But throughout the next few months, the most important part of the fight to watch is how the banks react as the legislation develops. If the banks aren’t fighting and squealing like hell, you’ll know the reform isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. And if you see the main industry groups actually endorsing the final product, as, say, AHIP and PhRMA did with healthcare reform, then it’s time to bring those “kill the bill” chants out of retirement.
I have no problem with that if it happens. This thing is looking like it could turn out to be a real stinker that offers very little in return for ignoring the systemic problem of Too Big To Fail.I like Barney Frank and I don’t doubt that he did the best he could, but it was actually the very least that anyone in good conscience could expect. If the Senate is further watering it down to near uselessness, it’s hard to see why any liberal wouldn’t walk away and come back with something better until it passes. I’d say the odds of a vote for this bill ending up being another Iraq war albatross around their necks are 50/50 at best.
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Armageddon Patriots
by digby
I’ve been wondering about this:
As the son of well known evangelicals and far right leader Francis Schaeffer I was in the middle of the chain of events that led to the arrests of men prepared to kill cops for Jesus. The rhetoric we in the early pro-life movement unleashed combined, with the apocalyptic fantasies of the fundamentalist evangelicals, is a deadly brew.
As I describe in detail in my books Crazy For God and Patience With God this movement has a deep evangelical background. In fact I’ve been predicting violence from these people for years now, something I talk about in detail in Patience With God (from which I drew material for this article since I have a whole chapter there about the “Left Behind” cult).
My warnings have been largely ignored by the mainstream media who haven’t a clue as to the sort of religious paranoia boiling in the Tea Party and other movements.
Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!) represents everything that is most deranged about religion. What happened with this militia group is that their paranoid, deranged fantasy jumped from the page into sick brains and was turned into action.
The Left Behind novels have sold 70 million of copies while spawning an “End Times” cult, or rather egging it on. People like Jack Van Impe have built whole TV empires pushing this cult. Combined with the Fox News fantasy take on Obama and the fact he is black, the pot just boiled over in Michigan.
Such products as Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children’s books, and video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, adopting “Christ-centered” home school curricula, fearing higher education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the “other,” as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum. And now we have a cult/militia dedicated to the same idea.
Read the whole article. I didn’t know this stuff about Armageddon patriot cults. Life may not imitate art, but it often imitates trashy pulp novels.
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Radical Auntie
by digby
I don’t know if you happened to catch Letterman night before last, but if you didn’t you missed an extremely interesting segment in which he interviewed Pam Stout, the 66 year old Idaho woman who was featured in the recent NY Times piece on the Tea Party. She was pretty amazing.
Letterman invited her on to ask about the movement and whether it aimed to become a “third party.” She said, “I don’t think it will become a third party,” but that its voice “can be pretty decisive” in some elections, and that locally, she wanted the Tea Party to “take over the Republican Party… [and] go back to the old ideas.”
Those “old ideas” included “letting [some] businesses fail.” Letterman asked, “You mean like car companies and banks?” Stout agreed: “Then other businesses will step up… there’ll always be a demand.” Stout also said she disliked the way “we demonize business” and condemned “one of the highest tax structures” in the world.
Actually, “condemn” may give the wrong impression. Stout was the mildest of souls, calm and remarkably composed for someone probably not used to the glare of network TV cameras. And Letterman loves this sort of person — a Midwestern citizen, a non-celeb; while raising serious points, he made a point of keeping things light .
When he asked her what a Tea Party presidential ticket might look like, Stout said, “Oh, that’s an interesting question.”
“That’s why I’m here, honey!” Dave said, grinning. He also asked whether at Tea Party gatherings, “tea is actually served?” Stout said no, but seemed open to the idea.
After a while, some of Stout’s positions became more clear. She expressed great admiration, twice, for South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, one of the most conservative members of government. (DeMint is the author of a 2009 book called Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism.)
Letterman also gave Stout plenty of room to distance herself from what he called “a bonehead like Glenn Beck” and the birther movement. But Stout said Beck had “made me think and re-think” her positions on various issues. Ever the sensible fellow, Letterman said, “Well, anyone who makes you think is good.” But more troublingly, her response to Dave’s observation that “some people in the Tea Party think the President wasn’t born in this country” was, “He spent a lot to cover up his documentation.”
Watch the videos here if you have the time. She was the best tea party representative I’ve ever seen — a perfect face for the angry Bircher club to which she also belongs, the Friends of Liberty:
I was blown away by this interview and frankly, a little bit chilled. She’s mild-mannered, reasonable, utterly sincere, decent and true. Yet, she watches Beck because he “makes her think” and she reveres Jim DeMint, the most radical of all the rightwing Senators. This lovely woman believes in the raw, violent politics of the Hobbesian jungle in which it’s every man for himself. I’m sure she doesn’t see it that way. Her politics aren’t grounded in real life but in abstract concepts. She certainly doesn’t seem defensive or even aware that her political heroes are considered radical extremists. But then if you only watch Fox news, listen to talk radio and live in the town known for its proximity to Ruby Ridge and the Aryan Nations compound you probably don’t realize that your views are not held by the majority of Americans.
Stout is finding great meaning in her life with her politics and that’s great. But I think she is a perfect example of the danger of the right wing noise machine and its amazing ability to speak to that need. She belongs to something. She’s connecting with people. It’s giving her life purpose. And because she’s living in that media/movement cocoon she truly believes that almost agrees with her. It’s very powerful stuff. And considering what it is that’s giving her so much meaning, it’s pretty frightening as well.,
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