Month: August 2010

Trickle Down On The TARP

by digby

If intellectual consistency were a requirement in American political culture I would think this observation by Steve Benen could be a problem for the Republicans, but since it isn’t it’s just an amusing side note for political junkies. But it is amusing:

Early last year, as this clip helps make clear, the GOP saw the bailout of the auto industry as a policy that wouldn’t, and quite literally couldn’t, work. It was deemed wholly unacceptable for practical reasons (it would waste money and the industry would fail anyway) and for ideological reasons (it was “Marxism” in practice). Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) proclaimed Obama’s actions “truly breathtaking” and said the government ownership roles at Chrysler and GM “should send a chill through all Americans who believe in free enterprise.”

Now that this same policy has been deemed an unqualified success, most Republicans are biting their tongue, embarrassed about having been wrong once again. But some GOP officials are nevertheless still talking — and taking partial credit for the policy they perceived as the end of American capitalism.

“The ideas [Republicans] laid out there were followed through,” Corker told the Washington Post. “I take some pleasure out of helping make that contribution.”

Keep in mind that the right is not capable of keeping all this straight so when they say they hated the TARP or the bailouts, they have conflated all the government measures to ease the recession without knowing what was what. At the time of the auto-bailouts, it was considered the most heinous socialist takeover since Hitlerstalin and the TARP was fine. Now they think the TARP was part of the “stimulus:”

We had stimulus one, stimulus two, and then the health care bill just threw it on it’s… that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The whole TARP thing. And we’ve spent like 25% and it was this grandiose save the day or whatever. And then people started to say, what? Where is the money, where is it going? Million dollar TARP money spent for some study on frogs, stupid stuff. SO people started to realize that we got conned, and yet we are losing jobs.

The Dems can point to the auto industry as proof of their policy working, but since the opposition to the bailouts is based on erroneous information, it won’t make any difference.

As Howie points out in his post today, there is a way to make this work for Dems if they can find the brass to actually do it. He quotes from the recent Playboy article by an anonymous GOP operative working with the Tea Party:

…The mail you’ll see from me this fall won’t have much to say about gays or the unborn. We have new foils, such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Leveraging rage about a bailout for mega-millionaires and an $800 billion “stimulus” that has barely moved unemployment below double figures is a cinch compared with explaining why Bobby and Joey’s marriage is bad for America. Designing a thank-you note from an imaginary Wall Street executive to working-class taxpayers is so much more rewarding than most other messaging campaigns. With new variable-print technology, the postcard can be personalized and won’t look as though it was printed overnight at Kinko’s.

Dear [insert name],
I received my Troubled Asset Relief Program check from you and other taxpayers and wanted to personally thank you for your money. I will now be able to keep the third car and vacation home by [insert name of nearby vacation area].
I particularly want to thank [insert name of congressman] for ensuring billionaires like me do not have to worry about petty things like mortgage payments and retirement. [insert name of congressman] has been instrumental in making sure billionaires like me are protected.

Warm regards,
[name of Wall Street billionaire]

P.S. [insert name of our candidate] opposes runaway government spending. He will vote to protect taxpayers, not billionaires like me.

Now truthfully, I haven’t seen much teabagger angst about millionaires making out like bandits, so I don’t know how that particular play will work. Lately, they’ve all been talking about how bad it is that Obama’s attacking capitalism, so I suspect their leaders beck and Limbaugh are turning them in the right direction. But Democrats should certainly be able to make something out of this in individual races:

…keep in mind, of course that most Republican senators, 34 of them to be precise (including several who are up for reelection in November like Richard Burr in North Carolina, Chuck Grassley in Iowa, John McCain in Arizona, John Thune in South Dakota, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Tom Coburn in Oklahoma, and Johnny Isakson in Georgia) voted for Bush’s no-strings-attached Wall Street bailout (TARP). And, don’t forget that over in the House, where the TARP bailout was originally defeated 205-228 and passed a week later because Tea Party heroes like Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Roy Blunt, John Boozman, Joe “You Lie” Wilson, Mary Fallin, Gary Miller, Dan Lungren, John Campbell and, most of all, Randian Paul Ryan were able to “persuade” 26 corrupt Republicans– like Charlie Dent– to switch their votes and get onboard the Wall Street gravy train. Obviously that doesn’t matter to the people, like our author, who are pulling the teabaggers’ strings.

TARP was a policy designed to bail out one particular company, Goldman Sachs. And it was done by a former head of Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Democrats and Republicans alike signed on for the thing in the midst of a crisis and a heated presidential campaign without doing their duty to ensure that it made sense or that there were adequate strings attached. But the right has successfully conflated this giveaway with the stimulus and the auto bailouts so that their followers now believe TARP was an Obama initiative rather than a GOP plan pushed through by a Republican White house and whipped in the House by “Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Roy Blunt, John Boozman, Joe “You Lie” Wilson, Mary Fallin, Gary Miller, Dan Lungren, John Campbell and, most of all, Randian Paul Ryan.” There is no point in trying to sort it out at this point.

So, in the coming election, here’s an example of how you can make this work for Democrats in these individual races:

Yes, many Democrats will find it distasteful to be so hypocritical as to call out Republicans for a vote many Democrats took as well. But since “bail-outs” mean different things to different people, largely due to the constant stream of misinformation from rightwing media, there’s no margin in adhering to a reality that doesn’t exist. Democrats should go hard after the Republicans who voted for the TARP, in whatever way they can. It’s a weapon for both sides and there’s no reason why the Dems should lay theirs down when the Republicans are hammering them for hated bailouts they themselves supported — and if the article quoted above is any example, taking credit for the popular bailouts that have succeeded.

This is going to be such a horrible election …

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An Elegy For Strangers

by digby

I was going to write something on this LA Times op-ed, but my friend Tom Sullivan got right to the heart of it and I don’t have anything to add:

In the wake of the latest Breitbart “hucksterism,” National Review veteran, David Klinghoffer, weighs in with an elegy for conservatism in the Sunday L.A. Times:

Buckley’s National Review, where I was the literary editor through the 1990s, remains as vital and interesting as ever. But more characteristic of conservative leadership are figures on TV, radio and the Internet who make their money by stirring fears and resentments. With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of “neocons” versus “paleocons.” Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons.

It is a sad, elegant read….
Klinghoffer’s “elegy” cites Richard M. Weaver’s 1948 “Ideas Have Consequences,” a diagnosis of the “disease” that had led to “our demoralized, dispirited culture.” What American conservatives had to be demoralized and dispirited about in 1948 escapes me. With the Depression a memory and Roosevelt’s New Deal established, after America defeated the Axis and emerged as a military and economic superpower, and with the Baby Boom underway and an expanding middle class, conservatives like Weaver felt dispirited. Their world was going to hell in a handbasket. It suggests a more muted sense of victimhood of the kind expressed by evangelicals who see themselves beset on all sides, permanently at odds with the world — strangers in a strange land.

And regardless of how much power they actually have, it never goes away. At the height of the Imperial Cheney era, (and the lowest ebb of liberalism during this decade) here were the paranoid ramblings of TIME Magazine’s “blogger of the year”

By “the left” I’m including almost the entire Democratic Party, you can count the exceptions on your fingers, you can name them, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman…The whole mainstream of the party is engaged in an effort that is a betrayal of America, what they care about is not winning the war on terror…I don’t think they care about the danger to us as Americans or the danger to people in other countries. They care about power.

It’s in the DNA.

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Piping Hot Uni-Tea

by digby

There’s nothing to see here, nothing at all:

Typical supportive Youtube comment — Obama made him do it:

The Obama administration has done everything in its power to make a destructive separaton of ethnic, racial, and religious groups in this country. They revel in creating the anger exhibited on this video to prove to their own base that they are justified in election fraud, bully tactics, and shoving their agenda down the public’s throat. I ask the liberals on this thread, are you better off- now that his administration has put his country in debt to the tune of $10 trillion or more?
Nachum 1 hour ago

This lovely video is via kevin, who also documented where he found it:

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No Judgment

by digby

Here’s an excellent story in the St Petersburg Times about tasers. People are beginning to notice that the police are using these things willy nilly — and it’s killing people.

As I’ve said before, if a prescription drug were shown to have killed this many people the government would have withdrawn it from the market and class action lawsuits would be pending no matter how many people the drug had also helped. For some reason few people seem to think that all these deaths of innocent people by electrocution at the hands of police are cause for concern:

Late one night in October, a 17-year-old on a bike was chased by a police officer in a cruiser. When the boy refused to stop, the officer aimed his Taser out the driver’s window and fired. The boy fell off the bike and the cruiser ran over him, killing him.

Victor Steen was the fourth person who died in Florida in 2009 in an incident in which a Taser was used. It was the 57th such death since 2001, according to statistics compiled by Amnesty International and the St. Petersburg Times. At the time this placed Florida first in the nation as the state with the most fatalities related to Tasers, a weapon that delivers an incapacitating electrical jolt.

Number 54 was a mentally ill man in Fort Lauderdale who was hit with a Taser in April as he wandered in traffic, refusing to go with police. He had a heart attack and died at a hospital.

Number 55 occurred in Bradenton one week before Victor’s death. Police tried to stop him because he didn’t have a light on his bicycle. When he ran, police hit him with a Taser. He died within 35 minutes. The autopsy showed heart disease and a small amount of cocaine in his system.

Four days later, police in Panama City fired a Taser “at least twice” at a man who tried to conceal cocaine by swallowing it. He went into cardiac arrest and died.

Taser International, the maker of the weapon, denies that these deaths were caused by its product. Yet, these four unconnected cases illustrate a worrisome trend in Taser use.

There is no question that Tasers frequently save lives by offering law enforcement officers a nonlethal means of stopping people who present a threat to the officers, the public or themselves. But as the four fatal cases from 2009 show, Tasers are also being used to subdue people who appear to pose no threat.

Read on for the details.

This is truly a terrible problem. Thousands of people are dying now. It’s giving police officers a distorted sense of power and they are losing their good judgment. (Tasering a kid on a moving bike in traffic? What was he thinking?) And despite what Taser International says, people who knowing or unknowingly have heart conditions shouldn’t have to die because they don’t instantly comply with an police officer’s order. The mentally ill or those having an epileptic fit shouldn’t have to die because they can’t process those orders or physically comply with them. It’s a downright Orwellian excuse that because tasers often kill people who are sick or on drugs, they aren’t responsible for the deaths.

And that doesn’t even get into the civil liberties implications of this weapon which are horrific — shooting electricity into citizens to gain compliance used to be known as torture, but now is considered a law enforcement “tool” so benign that nobody blinks an eye when it’s used haphazardly against people who just happen to look at a cop sideways (which happens frequently.)The idea that in a free society the police are allowed to shoot people full of electricity for any reason is beyond bizarre.

Hopefully the press waking up to this at long last will create a groundswell for some changes although I don’t honestly know if it will. I first woke up to the horror of this weapon by reading an expose in the Miami Herald years ago.

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UnitTea Totals

by digby

TPM’s coverage of the UNI-TEA party, featuring racial healer Andrew Breitbart, is very droll:

Among those who did make it, for most of the time the numbers of non-white faces could be counted on two hands, and maybe a foot.

The same can’t be said for the group who went up on the event’s small stage. Organizers promised the most diverse cadre of speakers ever to grace a tea party rally, and they delivered. For the most part their message was the same: tea partiers are not racists and never were — but liberals are.

“The more liberals talk about race, the more they show who the real racists are,” right-wing blogger Andre Harper told the crowd. “It’s 2010. The tea party has officially moved on passed the race issue. The liberals can have it.”

Apparently, Uni-Tea wasn’t only bridging the racial gap. Brendan Kissam and Matt Hissey wandered into the event carrying signs that said “proud gay conservative” and “freedom is fabulous.” They said they were “the Gayborhood’s envoy to the tea party.”

The pair said the tea party is welcoming to their minority group, too. “The Tea Party is accepting of everybody,” said Hissey, adding that “Skin color diversity — that’s not real diversity. Everyone here has a different life experience.” Hissey recognized that the tea party “might be against gay marriage,” but that’s ok, he said, because he is too.

Uni-Tea reached out the hand of tea party acceptance to young people, too — in the form of white conservative rapper Hi-Caliber and a band of veterans called The Bangers. “This reaches out to the 18-34 year-olds,” organizer Jeffrey Weingarten said. It should be noted that Weingarten was successful in getting at least one 18-34 year-old to join him for the day: his son, Freedom Weingarten.

David Webb, an African American top official with Tea Party Federation and the man who shamed Mark Williams and the Tea Party Express for being racist a couple weeks ago, emceed the event and told the tea party crowd that it didn’t matter if only a few minorities joined the cause.

“I didn’t realize that any movement everywhere had a minimum daily requirement of black people to be legitimate,” he said.

In his speech, Andrew Breitbart, echoed the sentiment, blaming the liberal-media “cabal” evident in things like JournoList for suggesting that there have been moments that tea partiers have appeared to be less than 100% welcoming of blacks.

Most of the emphasis was on how not-racist the tea party is. But one speaker, African American conservative blogger Vanessa Jean Louis, offered some solutions for what conservatives can do to reach out to African Americans.

“Black people are very conservative,” she told TPM. “I think the problem is with the packaging of the message. So if we can talk about issues, instead of you know, left talking points and right – wing talking points, if we could talk about the issues, then that would really resonate.”

Louis said there was a simple explanation for why there aren’t more black tea partiers.

“Typically the conservative movement is predominantly white,” she said…

The long-term effect of what was essentially a small group of white tea partiers gathering to be told by minorities that they’re not racist is unclear. But organizers said they accomplished a lot at the event, and said that more Uni-Tea rallies are planned for the future.

Read the whole thing. Nearly every sentence is equally entertaining.

Update: Susie was there and came back with a great report.

The crowd was serenaded by The Bangers and their American Heroes and Patriots Tour™ (featuring appearances by Rita Cosby), a mediocre rock band with song lyrics like “Thank God for you/You protect us from terror.”

The lead singer urged people go up to any veterans at the rally “and give him a big hug.” Then he exhorted the crowd: “The left will never be right” and announced ear plugs would be distributed to the crowd “for the left ear only.” (Get it?)

read on

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Incident on Christopher Street: Stonewall Uprising

By Dennis Hartley

Si se puede: Stonewall rioters, 1969

It isn’t nice to block the doorway
It isn’t nice to go to jail
There are nicer ways to do it
But the nice ways always fail

-Malvina Reynolds

In the wee hours of June 28, 1969 the NYPD raided a Mafia-owned Greenwich Village dive called the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar on Christopher Street. As one of those policemen recalls in the new documentary, Stonewall Uprising, the officers were given “…no instructions except-put them out of business.” Hard as it might be for younger readers to fathom, despite the relative headway that had occurred in the civil rights movement for other American minorities by that time, the systemic persecution of sexual minorities was still par for the course as the 60s drew to a close. There were more laws against homosexuality than you could count. The LGBT community was well-accustomed to this type of roust; the police had no reason to believe that this wouldn’t be another ho-hum roundup of law-breaking deviants. This night, however, was to be different. As the policeman continues, “This time they said: ‘We’re not going, and that’s that.’ It was a war.” More than a war; it in fact proved to be the catalyst for a movement.

Exactly how this spontaneous act of civil disobedience transmogrified into a game-changer in the struggle for gay rights makes for a fascinating history lesson and an absorbing film. Filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner take an Errol Morris approach to their subject. Participants give an intimate recount of the event and how it changed their lives, while the several nights of rioting (from initial spark to escalation and immediate aftermath) are effectively recreated using a mixture of extant film footage and photographs (of which, unfortunately, very little exists) with dramatic reenactments.

Davis and Heilbroner also take a look back at how life was for the “homophile” community (as they were referred to in the media at the time). It was, shall we say, less than idyllic. In the pre-Stonewall days, gays and lesbians were, as one interviewee says, the “twilight” people; forced into the shadows by societal disdain and authoritarian persecution. As you watch the film, it becomes hard to believe that these folks were living in America (you, know, that whole land of the “free” thingie). The excerpts from a “CBS Reports” news special from 1967 (“The Homosexuals”) are particularly telling of the era. “2 out of 3 Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear,” a grim-faced Mike Wallace intones. From the same program, an “expert” posits that “Homosexuality is, in fact a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions.” (Hide the kids!) Prior to seeing this film, I had never heard of the goings-on in California’s Atascadero State Hospital in the 50s and 60s, where gay inmates were given “cures” straight out of A Clockwork Orange (or the Guantanamo handbook, for that matter). Lobotomies, sterilizations, and even castrations were involved (one interviewee refers to the facility as “The Dachau for Queers”). Gee, what do you suppose those Stonewall patrons were all so pissy about? Why didn’t they just go live in Russia?

Perhaps not so surprising are the recollections that the media wrote off the incident as an aberration; little more than a spirited melee between “Greenwich Village youths” and the cops (“Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad”, the N.Y. Sunday News headline chuckled the following day). The film culminates in the story of the first commemorative marches the following year, which were more furtive and politically charged affairs than the relatively festive and celebratory street parties that the pride parades have become (not that there’s anything wrong with that, to paraphrase Seinfeld).

I think this film is an important reminder that when it comes to civil rights, America is not out of the woods yet. Not just for the LGBT community (Prop 8 being an all-too-recent memory) but with Arizona’s SB 1070 darkening Ms Liberty’s doorstep as well. And do I need to remind you about teabagger-fueled vitriol? Stonewall might seem like ancient history, but its lessons are on today’s fresh sheet. The struggle goes on…and the moving closing comments by some of the documentary’s interviewees would seem to bear this out “It was the only time I was in a gladiatorial sport…where I stood up in,” says one participant, tears welling in his eyes, “…I was a man.” And there is no sugarcoating the means to the ends, either. A female interviewee confides, “As much as I don’t like to say it, there’s a place for violence. Because if you don’t have extremes, you don’t get any moderation.” Gladitorial sport? A place for violence? Standing up for what’s right? That is “so gay.” And as another interviewee points out, that’s so…American.

Note: The film is currently in limited release around the country, but I noticed that it is a PBS American Experience production, so you’ll want to keep an eye on your TV listings!

Previous posts with related themes:

Milk
Outrage
William Kuntsler: Disturbing the Universe

Reprieve

by digby

I didn’t cover the Al Gore “inappropriate sexual touching” allegations because between the National Enquirer and Talking Points Memo, I figured all of my readers had access to every juicy, lurid details they could possibly want. I tend to withhold judgment of these things until there’s more evidence. There’s reason to be skeptical of women who come forward late asking for money from publications but refuse to press charges and powerful men who can manipulate the legal system when they need to. I rarely feel confident making proclamations about guilt in these cases — they’re fraught with peril. Just as you can’t just take men’s word for it and you mu to take women seriously in these matters, it’s also a mistake to assume that men are always lying or that women who make inconsistent charges are simply traumatized. (I find that a little bit demeaning, actually. Some women may be traumatized, but to behave as if women don’t have agency and can’t be held to a legal standard for truthfulness is to treat them as children in my book.)

In any case, this one appears to be over. The prosecutor has closed the inquiry issuing the following reasons:

1. Ms. Hagerty, who has red hair, states she called Mr. Gore immediately following the alleged incident and told him to “dream of redheaded women” seemingly in contradiction to her assertions that she was terrified of Mr. Gore. Two days after the alleged incident Ms. Hagerty also sent an email to the Hotel Lucia stating that she appreciated the business referrals she received from the hotel. She did not mention any problem with Mr. Gore; 2. Witnesses at the hotel where the alleged incident occurred state they do not remember seeing or hearing anything unusual—directly contradicting Ms. Hagerty’s published claim in the July 12, 2010 of the National Enquirer that she was “shaking and in shock” and “rushed down the hall and to the lobby where the front desk clerk noticed she was upset was asked if she was OK”; 3. Forensic testing of pants retained by Ms. Hagerty as possible evidence are negative for the presence of seminal fluid; 4. Ms. Hagerty has not provided as repeatedly requested medical records she claims are
related to the case; 5. Ms. Hagerty has also failed to provide other records related to the case; 6. Ms. Hagerty failed a polygraph examination; 7. It appears Ms. Hagerty was paid by the National Enquirer for her story; and 8. Mr. Gore voluntarily met with detectives and denied all of the allegations.

I’m sure there will always be some people who believe he did it, unfortunately. But the mainstream press managed to more or less restrain themselves from forming a full fledged witch hunt so it never reached the sort of critical mass it might have. I’m curious as to why they managed to hold back this time. It’s not like they ever gave Gore a break in the past.

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