The Moment
by digby
Verklempt, I admit it:
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"what digby sez..."
Month: July 2010
Incenting Businesses
by digby
If he’s saying what he seems to be saying, I’m fairly sure it’s a good thing:
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says the Obama administration will push for letting tax cuts for wealthy Americans expire while extending them for the rest of the nation.
In interviews broadcast Sunday on ABC and NBC, Geithner said the administration also favors protecting businesses from having some taxes restored to higher levels.
The administration wants to “leave in place tax cuts that are very important to incent businesses to hire new employees and to invest and expand in output,” Geithner said on the ABC program “This Week.”
Asked on the ABC show if letting any tax cuts expire would harm the recovery, Geithner said: “I do not believe it will have a negative effect on growth.”
“We think that’s the responsible thing to do,” Geithner said. “We need to make sure we can show the world that we’re willing as a country now to start to make some progress bringing down our long-term deficits.”
Frankly, I don’t think “the world” gives a damn, but obviously “Geithner’s world” does — or pretends to for its own reasons. If he’s saying that they can be appeased by reinstating the tax cuts, then I couldn’t be happier. Perhaps they can even be “incented” not to chase phantom bond vigilantes and confidence fairies.
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Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Needy Wealthy?
by batocchio
Republican Senator Jim DeMint recently introduced an amendment to repeal the Estate Tax permanently. Not adjust it or improve it – repeal it entirely. Never mind that there’s staggering wealth inequity in America. The amendment failed, but the GOP and some of the Blue Dogs voted for it. Like the Republicans, Blue Dogs Kent Conrad and Evan Bayh want to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, despite the ineffectiveness of those cuts at creating jobs (and even though they don’t affect more than 2% of family farms and small businesses). Needless to say, these are the same people who vote against unemployment benefits, fought for a smaller stimulus bill, and often oppose jobs programs. Their only goal seems to be to give more money to the wealthiest Americans, and everything else is secondary. As Paul Krugman points out, “The truth… is that the only problem Republicans ever had with George W. Bush was his low approval rating. They always loved his policies and his governing style — and they want them back.”
Senator Bernie Sanders has been speaking out against this, and Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars passes on a short video and Sanders op-ed. Here’s DeMint, followed by Sanders:
And here’s part of Sanders’ op-ed in The Nation, “No to Oligarchy”:
The American people are hurting. As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, homes, life savings and their ability to get a higher education. Today, some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and millions more have become dependent on food stamps for their food.
And while the Great Wall Street Recession has devastated the middle class, the truth is that working families have been experiencing a decline for decades. During the Bush years alone, from 2000-2008, median family income dropped by nearly $2,200 and millions lost their health insurance. Today, because of stagnating wages and higher costs for basic necessities, the average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. The average American today is underpaid, overworked and stressed out as to what the future will bring for his or her children. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.
But, not everybody is hurting. While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.
The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth. Four hundred families! During the last fifteen years, while these enormously rich people became much richer their effective tax rates were slashed almost in half. While the highest-paid 400 Americans had an average income of $345 million in 2007, as a result of Bush tax policy they now pay an effective tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest on record.
Sanders gave a Senate speech on the same subject earlier in the week, which you can read or watch here, or watch below:
It’s too bad Bernie Sanders isn’t the norm rather than the exception, but it’s refreshing to hear him speak. As Bill Moyers says, “Plutocracy and democracy don’t mix.”
Saturday Night At The Movies
Who are the brain police?
By Dennis Hartley
Somnambulance chasers: DiCaprio and Page in Inception
So-how do I best describe Christopher Nolan’s boardroom thriller/sci-fi mindbender, Inception, without sounding like I’m off my meds? Executive Suite
Think a heist film-in reverse. Reverse, forward, up, down-it’s just another day punching the clock and free-falling through the looking glass, for professional “extractor” Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). Because you see, his “job” is not necessarily grounded in everyday reality (kind of like a movie critic). You know how some people are so adept at what they do that we say that they could do their job in their sleep? That’s the only way Cobb can do his job-in his sleep. He extracts secrets from dreams. Other people’s dreams.
I’m a spy, in the house of love
I know the dream that you’re dreamin’ of
I know the word that you long to hear
I know your deepest, secret fear -The Doors
What Jim Morrison said. Except “love” rarely enters the picture (alright, sometimes it does-but no spoilers). For the most part, Cobb is usually working for some evil corporate bastard, who wants to steal information from some other evil corporate bastard. He gets a lot of these gigs, because he’s tops in his field (of dreams). This is a shadowy world to work in, literally and figuratively, and it has caught up with him. He’s still for hire, but he’s also on the lam, so he has to choose his employers very carefully. When a tycoon (Ken Watanabe) offers him a unique challenge (to plant a thought, as opposed to stealing one) he can’t resist the allure of pulling off the perfect “inception”. Like any heist movie worth its salt, the protagonist must now of course assemble a crack team of specialists (aren’t you glad I didn’t say, “dream team”?). In addition to his long time partner in crime (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Cobb enlists a newbie (Ellen Page) to be the “architect”. Her job is to design the dream world that the team will need to navigate in order to plant the thought into the subconscious of their target (Cillian Murphy) without arousing the “suspicions” of his, erm, subconscious self. Suffice it to say, much cerebral copulation ensues, with enough conundrums to start a fistfight in heaven between Freud, Jung, Adler and Perls. Not to mention our hero sorting through gestalt issues regarding his late wife (Marion Cotillard) while still on the clock (much to the chagrin of fellow team members).
Nolan (who wrote as well as directed) has proven in the past to be a consistently intelligent, imaginative and inventive filmmaker; whether working with a modest budget (Following
Yes, you’re still dreaming! Mr. Nolan is certainly not the first filmmaker to toy around with the idea of reality literally invading dreams (or vice versa). Here are five more picks:
Dark City-I know I’m setting myself up for a fan boy jihad by admitting this in public, but The Matrix
Dreamscape
The Lathe of Heaven
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Paprika
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Real Millionaire Crybabies Of The Airwaves
by digby
Greenwald reports that John Roberts and Kyra Phillips had a little hissy fit about anonymous “cowards” on the internet, who presumably should be jailed or fined for saying mean things about them:
CNN’s Kyra Phillips and John Roberts spent a good five minutes yesterday expressing serious concern over what they called “the dark side” of the Internet: the plague of “anonymous bloggers” who are “a bunch of cowards” for not putting their names on what they say, and who use this anonymity to spread “conspiracy,” “lunacy,” “extremism” and false accusations (video below). The segment included excerpts from an interview with Andrew Keene, author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, who explained that the Real Media must serve as “gatekeepers” to safeguard the public against the dangers of anonymity on the Internet. Roberts demanded that bloggers should “have the courage at the very least to put your name on it,” while Phillips announced: “something is going to have to be done legally. . . . these people have to be held accountable, they’re a bunch of cowards.”
As Greenwald points out, these same journalists who are so upset about anonymity are the same people who commonly use anonymous sources in their reporting. Evidently anonymity is perfectly fine when it’s inside the club.
Everyone knows Roberts and Phillips are engaged right? So this conversation presumably reflects something they’ve both spent some time together ruminating about together on the golf course. Fine, they have a perfect right to be upset about the mean things people say about them. What’s insidious is the fact that they want to “do something about it.” Think about that. These two people are supposed to be journalists. They aren’t government officials or powerful corporate titans who one might assume to be interested in suppressing free speech. These are members of the press advocating censorship and punishment for anonymous speech.
But perhaps it’s most useful to recall some of Roberts’ and Phillips’ greatest hits to illustrate why they are so upset by anonymous bloggers. This is personal for them. I had occasion to to criticize Roberts and he was upset enough about it to me and complain so I suppose I’m one of those he would like to have officially silenced in some way. (Although it would be easy enough to find out my real name simply by googling, I think that may exceed the limits of his investigative skills.)
This was one of the items I wrote about Roberts that had him so upset:
TIME magazine picked up the [Graeme]Foster story and got the story pretty much right, as far as it went. What it didn’t get into was how the entire right wing noise machine cranked up the swiftboats to get it going. The article seems to imply that this story was confined to the blogosphere (without the requisite distinction between who did what) and neglects to properly indict the worst perpetrators. Still, it’s not bad compared to this. CNN’s John Roberts reported:
I think in this instance what happened was the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting as they could have done on this young man, his situation, his family. […]
Right. It’s the fault of the Democrats, of course, who according to John Roberts didn’t “vet” this family. Except, of course, they did, as has been incessantly disseminated by the progressive blogosphere and the mainstream media over the course of four days.
So why did Roberts say that the family hadn’t been properly vetted?
ABC News reported earlier in the week that an e-mail sent to reporters by “a Senate Republican leadership aide” in McConnell’s office suggested that “GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about the Frosts.” A McConnell spokesman refused to deny the office’s involvement in the affair. ThinkProgress has obtained an email that congressional sources tell us was sent to reporters by Sen. McConnell’s communications director Don Stewart. On Monday morning, Don Stewart sent an email with the following text to reporters:
Seen the latest blogswarm? Apparently, there’s more to the story on the kid (Graeme Frost) that did the Dems’ radio response on SCHIP. Bloggers have done a little digging and turned up that the Dad owns his own business (and the building it’s in), seems to have some commercial rental income and Graeme and a sister go to a private school that, according to its website, costs about $20k a year ‹for each kid‹ despite the news profiles reporting a family income of only $45k for the Frosts. Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?
In the email, Stewart attacks Democrats for allegedly doing a bad job “vetting this family.” That effort to blame Democrats for the smear campaign seems to have swayed some reporters, as CNN this morning claimed that the real story is that “the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting as they could have done.”
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Roberts used exactly the same language and then chalks it up to some sort of tepid “they all do it” sort of thing.
Aside from the almost comic illustration of journalistic malpractice this shows, it also proves what many of us have been saying for years: the press parrots right wing talking points, in this case verbatim. It’s rare that we actually can see a copy of the memos they send out,because the press “protects its sources” but it’s right there in this case. Does anyone think this is unique? I suspect that if it hadn’t been for liberal bloggers relentlessly speaking out in horror over the course of many days, this nasty little smear would have been passed along by everyone else exactly as John Roberts passed it along, implying that the Frosts were con artists.
Nice work CNN. How much are you paying this guy?
Ok, that last line was a bit gratuitous. But that story was handled egregiously by the mainstream media, Roberts in particular, so it’s at least a little bit justified.
As for Phillips, well she lost all credibility with this interview with the doctor who was treating a little boy who’d been badly burned and lost his entire family in the invasion of Iraq:
PHILLIPS: Doctor — what has he been saying to you, Doctor? Is he asking anything of you? Is he thanking you? Is he wanting to know about family? Tell us what this little boy has been saying to you.
AL-NAJADA: Actually, today he was in good condition after the operation and started speaking with a journalist and answering all their questions. The thing which he was — they asking about — the journalists, especially the broadcasting, what the message he wants to reflect from the war. He said, first of all, thank you for the attention they’re giving to him, but he hopes nobody from the children in the war they will suffer like what he suffer.
PHILLIPS: Does he understand why…
AL-NAJADA: Kyra.
PHILLIPS: Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning? Does he understand it?
AL-NAJADA: Actually, we don’t discuss this issue with him because he is — the burn cases, and the type of injury, he’s in very bad psychological trauma. We would like to pass this stage and then we can discuss this issue. But we discussed this issue with his uncle, and the message we get from his family, they said they are living far away from the American troops — from the military of Saddam of Fedayeen by five kilometers, and they don’t know how they hit them by the missiles.
And her reporting didn’t get any better.
I understand that journalists are human and they don’t enjoy being called out for their work by mere anonymous bloggers. But it’s part of their job, something for which the decades of right wing liberal media bashing should have prepared them but instead made them absorb as the natural order of things. As human beings they have every right to have hurt feelings. As journalists they have a responsibility to suck it up.
It’s hard to imagine, I know, that bloggers could actually be more professional and more mature than highly paid celebrity journalists. But when it comes to this they are. They harshly criticize the whole political and media establishment and are harshly criticized in return. And while they complain, none of them are calling for censorship or legal sanctions for insults, as far as I know. It’s a rough and tumble business and the latest CNN power couple had probably better adjust to the fact that just because they’ve agreed to be polite to Republicans doesn’t mean they are off the hook.
Oh, and just because the criticism comes from someone you don’t know doesn’t mean it isn’t correct. Killing the messenger won’t change that.
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Says It All
by digby
As for Boehner… don’t take his heartless agenda– limitless war, limitless tax breaks for the wealthy, no breaks for the middle class– personally. His sister, Lynda Meineke, says Boehner has two brothers and two brothers-in-law back in Ohio who are out of work. He told reporters after he voted against unemployment insurance last week that three brothers had lost jobs during the recession and he wasn’t sure which if any had found work. He did remember that one is named Bob Boehner though.
I think that says it all.
The Build A Boehner Billboard Contest ends tonight. If you haven’t voted yet, go to the link. It looks like we’ve managed to raise enough money along with our friends at the AFL-CIO and People for the American Way, to run these billboards until the election.
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You’re out of excuses Mr. Breitbart
by digby
If only the cowardly mainstream media would simply do what Slate did. The analyzed what breitbart said and compared it to reality:
First Breitbart and his acolytes falsely accused Sherrod of discriminating against whites as a federal employee, despite having no evidence for this charge in the original video excerpt. Strike one.
Then they misrepresented Sherrod’s story as an embrace of racism, when in fact she was repudiating racism. They later pleaded ignorance of this fact because they didn’t have the full video. Strike two.
Now, with the full video in hand and posted on their Web site, they’re lying about the reaction of the NAACP audience.
The excuses are all used up, Mr. Breitbart.
This isn’t hard. Breitbart is a liar. And, as they do in this article, it’s easily provable. And yet, the media continue to do the he said/she said with him allowing him to claim that what he clearly did isn’t clearly what he did.
That means that he is even more formidable than he was before and a clear asset to the right wing noise machine. After all, he managed to hijack the national media for a week and that’s pure gold for their cause.
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Geeks 1, Homophobes 0
by batocchio
Actually, “homophobes” is too tame a word for Fred Phelps and the hate-filled gang of the Westboro Baptist Church. But when they showed up to protest at Comic-Con, they were met by some counter-protesters:
Unbeknownst to the dastardly fanatics of the Westboro Baptist Church, the good folks of San Diego’s Comic-Con were prepared for their arrival with their own special brand of superhuman counter protesting chanting “WHAT DO WE WANT” “GAY SEX” “WHEN DO WE WANT IT” “NOW!” while brandishing ironic (and some sincere) signs.
The Phelps crowd might think they have God on their side, but do they really want to get into a stamina war with folks who can wait hours in line for a sneak peek at The Green Hornet or an autograph from Stan Lee or Ray Bradbury? Mess with fanboys and fangirls on Star Wars Day and the Force will not be with you.
Major style points to the counter-protesters on this one. There’s a short video and more photos at the first link. (Via.)
Fox News immediately announced an investigation – where is the liberal media on robot-on-human violence? Why the double-standard?
Daniel Schorr Remembered
by batocchio
NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr has died at the age of 93 after a lifetime in journalism. NPR has put together several pieces on him, including a 3 minute one, a 12 minute one, and a 55 minute memorial special. His stints in Moscow and Germany yield some interesting tales, and I found the Nixon and 70s era stories particularly fascinating. Here’s one:
In 1975, Schorr reported on assassinations that had been carried out by the CIA. “The anger of the administration can be gauged from Richard Helms’ denunciation of Schorr,” historian Garry Wills recounts in his 2010 book, Bomb Power.
Helms, then the CIA director, confronted Schorr in the presence of other reporters at the White House, calling him names such as “son of a bitch” and “killer.”
“Killer Schorr: That’s what they ought to call you,” Helms said.
In 1976, Schorr reported on the findings of the Pike Committee, which had investigated illegal CIA and FBI activities. The committee had voted to keep its final report secret, but Schorr leaked a copy to the Village Voice, which published it.
Schorr was threatened with a $100,000 fine and jail time for contempt of Congress. But during congressional testimony, Schorr refused to identify his source, citing First Amendment protections. The House ethics committee voted 6 to 5 against a contempt citation.
But CBS had already taken Schorr off the air. He ultimately resigned from the network that year.
“CBS found that, like other big corporations, it did not like to offend the Congress,” Mudd said. “He broke his ties to CBS and before they could fire him, he resigned.”
That’s pretty gutsy. In the NPR pieces, Schorr’s recent and past colleagues speak with him and about him with admiration and affection. And if one is also judged by the quality of one’s enemies, Schorr did quite well:
Schorr was surprised to find himself on the so-called Enemies List that had been drawn up by Richard Nixon’s White House when he read it on the air. The list — naming hundreds of political opponents, entertainers and publications considered hostile to the administration — became the basis for one of the charges of impeachment against Nixon.
Schorr, along with some other members of the list, counted his inclusion on it as his greatest achievement.
Update: Gordonskene at C&L has posted the audio of a piece by Schorr – the “CBS Reports documentary Berlin: Wall of Shame, which aired on January 4, 1962. A vivid picture of just how bad relations had become between East and West.”
Impeachment? Yes They can!
by digby
I think Steve Benen is right and that every Republican should be asked if they support the growing call for Obama’s impeachment from the right wing. People need to know whether a new GOP majority will continue to waste the nation’s time during this period of economic turmoil with a vanity project, once again try to usurp the people’s will to remove a duly elected president. It needs to be factored into their decision in November.
My guess is that they will all say they will support it if there is evidence, which they will leave undefined. It’s unlikely they will “take it off the table” as the Democrats did because they would sorely like to do some damaging hearings and if something “impeachable” comes up they’ll be happy to use it to make sure we have president Gingrich (or something equally heinous) come 2013.
Here’s the agenda according to Michelle Bachman:
“Oh, I think that’s all we should do,” Bachmann said. “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another. And expose all the nonsense that is going on.”
People thought Bob Barr and Dan Burton were nuts too. Until they got it done. And both of them are considered perfectly respectable people today.
The lesson for Republicans if they win this November will be that there is no downside to crazy.
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