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Month: May 2010

Republicans hurling accusations of voter fraud and vote suppression. At each other. Hahahaha …

How Do You Like it Now?

by digby

In case you wondered if Rand Paul’s campaign could let loose with a patented GOP hissy fit, wonder no more. His campaign issued a statement in response to the accusations that his supporters have been intimidating voters with their “vigilance” against “voter fraud.” Dave Weigel reports that they issued a statement which:

… mocks “Charles Merwin Grayson III” and accuses him of “lies and distortions,” including willful misreading of election law. One Paul source tells me that the sense in their camp is that Grayson has “lost it.”
Charles Merwin Grayson III, in this, his Last Stand, has escalated his campaign of lies and distortions about the Paul campaign. Grayson, who is the Secretary of State and Chair of the Kentucky Board of Elections, and therefore charged with the monitoring of the election laws, has obviously attempted to signal poll workers who work under his authority to prevent the Paul campaign from engaging in legal and constitutionally protected activities to assure a fair and free election. – a task Grayson should applaud…

It goes on about the law and interpreting the law and rises in tone to a fever pitch of nearly hysterical outrage that anyone, anywhere, could possibly accuse them of doing anything untoward. Textbook hissy fit.

For those uninitiated in the GOP’s vote suppression tactics, here’s a lovely little story about a man in Arizona, a few decades ago.

(I have to admit that I’m quite enjoying watching the Republicans use their playbook on each other. How do you like it now, McConnell?)

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Fin-reg looks like it will end with a whimper, not a bang. Surprise.

Fin-Reg Finis

by digby

Apparently, improvements to the Financial Reform bill have come to a crashing halt today. Tom Carper’s “compromise” amendment to the Consumer Financial Protection bureau passed, thus weakening the bill. This was a win for the banks.

And now comes the news that the Republicans have thrown up a brick wall against Merkeley-Levin, (the Volcker rule amendment) thus ending our short-lived bipartisan spring.

They will, however, be able to go to the electorate and say they helped pass financial reform so that’s good.

Dday writes, “people can stop saying ‘it’s just getting better and better in the Senate’ right about now.” And so I have.

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Silver linings — Trey Grayson’s supporters loathe Paul. Ky could be Dem p/u in the fall. Let’s hope Conway wins.

Pushing People Back To the Middle

By digby

Amid reports that Rand Paul teabaggers are intimidating voters in Kentucky (surprise!), this makes pretty good sense:

The likely Rand Paul victory in the Kentucky Republican primary today should give Democrats a very good chance of winning in the fall because supporters of Trey Grayson, Paul’s main opponent, really don’t like him.

Some primaries play out in such a way that party loyalists view several of the candidates favorably and just choose the one they like best. That was very much the case with the recent Democratic contest in North Carolina. But in Kentucky we find that Paul’s supporters hate Grayson, and that even more Grayson’s supporters hate Paul.

53% of likely Grayson voters for today have an unfavorable opinion of Paul to only 23% with a positive opinion of him. More importantly though just 40% of Grayson voters say they’ll support Paul in the general election if he wins the Republican nomination with 43% explicitly saying they will not.

There’s another Kentucky primary today in the Democratic Party between a Blue Dog reactionary and a good candidate named Jack Conway who, if he wins, could be the beneficiary of this Paulite teabagger overreach. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. Kentucky could be a pick-up in November.

Update: there’s also this crazy crap. I guess they figure ACORN’s working for Mitch McConnell.

Crippling delusion — nobody should underestimate the extremism of Ran Paul

Crippling Delusion

by digby

Here are a couple of fun facts on the Republican Party’s probable Senate nominee from Kentucky. Like all right wing libertarians, property rights trump individual rights, and money is everything, so Ran Paul naturally doesn’t believe in the Americans With Disabilities Act:

Part of Paul’s appeal has been his supposed support of individuals over large interests, like the government. But Paul appeared to reveal his true priorities during an interview with the candidate in Lexington over the weekend. Paul was asked whether he supports the Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark 1990 legislation that established a prohibition of discrimination on the basis of disability. Paul said he advocates local governments to decide whether disabled individuals deserve rights. Requiring businesses to provide access to disabled people, Paul argued, isn’t “fair to the business owner.” …
PAUL: You know a lot of things on employment ought to be done locally. You know, people finding out right or wrong locally. You know, some of the things, for example we can come up with common sense solutions — like for example if you have a three story building and you have someone apply for a job, you get them a job on the first floor if they’re in a wheelchair as supposed to making the person who owns the business put an elevator in, you know what I mean? So things like that aren’t fair to the business owner.

Another “common sense” solution is that they won’t hire people with disabilities and those who want to do business with them aren’t able to. But, you know, too bad. Anything that requires a business owner to do anything is against libertarian principles. So the idea that this guy is going to be some sort of stalwart anti-corporatist is simply bizarre.

BTW: He also calls militia members his “private security detail.” Here are some of them:

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Tristero — And they sound so persuasive

And They Sound So Persuasive

by tristero

Here’s a little video by Republican Mark Souder, Representative from Indiana, about how abstinence education isn’t being given a fair shake by Democrats. He makes an impassioned case, if you ask me.

Oh, by the way, the interviewer? That’s his mistress, according to TPM. I suppose his wife just wasn’t available the day of the shoot.

Bad and getting worse — the spill hits the Florida Keys

Not Good

by digby

I keep seeing scientists on TV with that “hair on fire” look about them, nearly frantic, trying to get people to understand how serious the spill is. They are followed by oil company flacks saying it’s no big deal and politicians turning it into he-said/she-said. It’s the strangest disaster coverage I’ve ever witnessed. but it doesn’t change the fact that this thing is bad and getting worse. Think Progress reports:

Even as some government and BP officials downplay the extent of the growing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a terrible threshold has been crossed: the slick has been captured by the Loop Current, which draws water from the Gulf through the Florida Keys and into the Gulf Stream along the Atlantic coast. SkyTruth president John Amos, one of the first independent experts to warn the official estimates of the leak were radically too small, calls Monday’s satellite imagery “disturbing“:

Today’s MODIS / Terra satellite image is the most cloud-free we’ve seen in many days, and what it reveals is disturbing: part of the still-massive Gulf oil slick has apparently been entrained in the strong Loop Current, and is rapidly being transported to the southeast toward Florida. The total area covered by slick and sheen, at 10,170 square miles (26,341 km2), is nearly double what it appeared to be on the May 14 radar satellite image, and is bigger than the state of Maryland.

Update: Tar balls have washed up on Key West beaches. If they are from the leading edge of the oil gusher, that would mean that some oil already has been entrained in the Loop Current for several days.

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Conspiracy A Go Go — Jonah Goldberg, the li’lest intellectual

Conspiracy A-Dough Dough

by digby

Could someone explain to me again how Jonah Goldberg became a valued intellectual in American political life? (Oh that’s right, it’s because his mother was a professional character assassin who befriended a horrible harpy named Linda Tripp. )

Here’s Jonah’s latest:

As I wrote last year, I find it amazing that the “Birthers” are considered more dangerous and evil than the “Truthers.” The Birthers believe that an ambitious man who travelled a lot as a kid has concealed the circumstances of his birth so he could be eligible for the presidency. I don’t think they’ve made their case. And, frankly, I’m not sure I’d want them to at this point. Aside from the horror of a Biden presidency, I for one don’t yearn for a constitutional crisis. And while I am sure there are more elaborate and crazier versions of Birtherism, the basic allegation isn’t that crazy, at least in the abstract.

Ok. I don’t think I need to explain why Jonah is a blithering idiot in that statement. But he’s a big intellectual and I’m just a lowly DFH so you can draw your own conclusions.

But this is really amazing:

Now, Trutherism, on the other hand, is a really insidious and evil claim: that the White House was “in” on 9/11 and that it either passively or actively aided and abetted the murder of 3,000 Americans and the attempted murder of tens of thousands more (surely the hijackers hoped to kill far more people inside the World Trade Towers). Indeed, the upshot of Trutherism is that “the government” sought to kill countless congressmen and effectively incapacitate the legislative branch and our military leadership indefinitely. Depending on which version of Trutherism you buy into, you’d have to believe dozens or even thousands of government agents were in on the whole thing, too. Moreover, if this had been proven true, the only moral, legal, or rational response would have been not just impeachment and criminal prosecution, but literally the formal executions of the president, the vice president, and much of the national-security establishment. They’d all have to hang.And yet, “Birtherism” is dangerous and paranoid and “Trutherism” is quirky and no big deal, according to liberals.

First of all, I don’t know that liberals think “Truthers” are quirky and no big deal, while we consider “Birthers” dangerous and paranoid. I think both groups are nutty as fruitcakes. But what I do find fairly dangerous is the fact that Republican elected politicians and conservative “intellectuals” can entertain such a silly crackpot notion that it would even matter if the president were born outside the US (which he wasn’t.) In order for this to be meaningful in any way you have to believe in some kind of long term Manchurian candidate nonsense that takes this one into the realm of the super kooky, alien abduction style of conspiracy mongering.

On the other hand, “Truthers” are part of American conspiracy lore going way back. For instance, one of Jonah’s intellectual forbears, Robert Welch, made his bones claiming that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor and purposefully did nothing to stop it. In fact, that has been an article of faith among a segment on the right for many decades:

In May 1999, the 10 World War II veterans in the U.S. Senate were arguing about who was to blame for the fateful American unpreparedness of Dec. 7, 1941. Specifically, they were debating an amendment to a military spending bill that would clear the names of the Pacific commanders, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short—both long since dead, demoted, and disgraced for sleeping at the watch at Pearl Harbor. Veterans Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and William Roth favored clemency; veterans John Warner, John Chafee, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan did not. Ultimately, the amendment, introduced at the behest of Kimmel’s son Edward (a constituent of Roth’s), passed, 52-47. Afterward, Sen. Roth announced, a bit defensively, “We’re not rewriting history. We’re just correcting the record.”

Roth was right about this much: No history book will be altered because of the Senate’s gesture. Nor, surely, have we heard the last from those who maintain the innocence of Kimmel and Short. After all, the debate over their culpability—and its more important flip side, the debate over President Franklin Roosevelt’s role—has been swirling for 59 years. Even today, as another Pearl Harbor anniversary passes, military hobbyists and crusty Roosevelt-haters are propounding far-flung theories about presidential treachery while historians wearily rebut them.

Like a pesky kid brother, devotees of the who-lost-Pearl Harbor “controversy” are always hanging around when the big-boy historians want to discuss the Pacific War, demanding attention and making a fuss if they don’t get their away. Some years ago, historian Donald Goldstein was on the circuit promoting Gordon Prange’s much-praised book about Pearl Harbor (At Dawn We Slept), which Goldstein had helped edit for publication after Prange’s death. Goldstein found his audiences so monomaniacally fixated on the blame issue that he returned to Prange’s original overlong manuscript to extract a second book (Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History) to satisfy the enthusiasts.

Indeed, the question of who lost Pearl Harbor is the Kennedy assassination for the GI Generation, a favorite of amateurs, conspiracy theorists, and military buffs. And like the Kennedy assassination, the Pearl Harbor debate is interesting more as historiography than as history—more for what it says about the different camps and their worldviews than about the actual events of Dec. 7, 1941.

Goldberg’s wide-eyed wonder that anyone could possibly think that an American president could commit such a horrible act clearly indicates that he isn’t aware of the rich conspiratorial history of his own conservative ancestors.

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Where Was The Decider?

Where Was The Decider?

by digby

Greg Sargent makes a fascinating observation after reading Jonathan Alter’s new book on the first year of the Obama White House. After rightly noting that some liberals have been pounding their fists on this subject for a long, long time he notes that according to Alter, the White House knew fairly early on that bipartisanship was going nowhere:

Alter writes that top Obama aides concluded early that the pursuit for Chuck Grassley’s support in particular was not going to pay off. Senior Obama adviser Jim Messina, for instance, pleaded with Senator Max Baucus, who at the time was trying to cut an awesomely bipartisan deal with Senate Republicans, to forget about Grassley. Rahm Emanuel agreed with Messina that Grassley was a non-starter. “They thought the president was wasting his time by having Grassley over to the White House half a dozen times,” Alter writes. Harry Reid, too, had concluded early on that bipartisan support for health reform would never materialize — but he let Baucus continue pursuing it, anway.[…]

These players, of course, have their own reasons for leaking this account now. But it seems feasible. After all, a five year old could see at the time that Senate Republicans were playing for time, in order to drag the process on for as long as possible and sour the public on it. Depressing.
var entrycat = ‘Health reform, Senate Dems, Senate Republicans’

I haven’t read the book, so perhaps the question is answered within, but I’m genuinely curious as to where the president was on all this. It’s a little bit hard for me to believe that Rahm and Messina and Reid were the only ones with a say in this. Was Obama without an opinion?

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Obama backed the bipartisan approach because I think he really believes (or believed) in his ability to get everyone to agree. It’s been a huge part of his mystique (and I think it’s fairly common that successful politicians overrate their gifts in this particular area.)

It’s really no more than a curiosity at this point. More important is what lessons he took from all that.

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A Tale of Two Speeches — One sane, one … Beck

Stepping On The Neck of Your Community

by digby

Yesterday I wrote about Glenn Beck’s surreal commencement speech at Falwell’s Liberty U in which he cried, giggled inappropriately and said things like “cabs smell bad in the summer.” It was awe-inspiring in its own freakish way. Certainly memorable.

Contrast that with a sane political TV broadcaster:

“Gunning not just for personal triumph for yourself but for durable achievement to be proud of for life is the difference between winning things and leadership. It is the difference between nationalism and patriotism. It is the difference between running for office and devoting yourself to public service. It’s agreeing that you are part of something, taking as your baseline that you will not seek to reach your own goals by stepping on the neck of your community.”

Beck did offer the sage advice “shoot to kill” so he’s no slouch in the “words of wisdom” department. But ironically, the Smith graduates seemed to have received the more Christian message. (And from a lesbian!)

Update: LOL

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