Month: October 2010

This One Could Surprise People

by digby

The most appealing things about the Dean tenure’s 50 state strategy was the idea that you never know what might happen in any campaign so it was best to be prepared and at least nominally support candidates everywhere just in case the brilliant electoral prognosticators in DC might not always know ahead of time who is and isn’t “unelectable.” (I can’t help but think that if these people were so damned good at picking winners, we wouldn’t find ourselves on the brink of electoral disaster quite as often as we do.) So, it’s been left to the progressive netroots and grassroots to try to give some of these candidates a little support to make up for the fact that the party refuses to even spend a penny to help them out. (In fact, they pretend they’ve never heard of them when publicly asked about it.)

Aside from the important work of spreading the good word and building movement politics for the long term, sometimes, unexpected things happen. For instance, Blue America candidate Billy Kennedy, who is challenging the intellectually challenged Virginia Foxx in NC-05, may just pull this thing out, despite the fact that the DCCC has behaved as if the loony Republican is impossible to beat. In fact, the major newspaper of the district, the Winston-Salem Journal, which normally endorses Republicans, came out for Kennedy this past week-end and made a very good case for his election:

U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican from Watauga County, has not achieved any great accomplishments for the residents of the 5th Congressional District, and has angered and embarrassed many with her sometimes wild statements that seem designed to provoke. It’s time for a fresh, progressive voice in the 5th District. We believe that Democrat Billy Kennedy, a Watauga farmer and carpenter who says he’ll work to reverse the high rate of unemployment in the district, is that voice. He’s the best candidate in the Nov. 2 election for the 5th District.

“I’d like to make Congress work,” Kennedy, 52, recently told the Journal. “I believe with the bickering going on, they’re not solving problems.”

We endorsed Foxx, 67, in the Republican primary as she ran against an opponent less qualified than Kennedy. Her constituent service is strong, we noted, and we’ve occasionally praised her on this page, as when she sponsored a bill that tweaked the federal tax code so that troops stationed overseas can invest their income in individual retirement accounts.

While fiscal conservatism is good, Foxx, who is finishing her third term, has been too tight with the federal purse strings. For example, she does not support the Blue Ridge Parkway Protection Act, which would allocate $75 million over the next five years to preserve land along the parkway. Foxx has said she’d normally support such a measure, but not in the current economic times. But the parkway, a major cash cow of the state’s tourism industry, brings in more money in a single year– $2.1 billion dollars, through 17 million visitors– than the cost of the entire act. U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican who also touts fiscal conservatism, realized that when he crossed the aisle to sponsor the protection act with Sen. Kay Hagan.

Then there are Foxx’ statements, which reflect a viewpoint far to the right of many of her constituents. Foxx, a former college educator and graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and UNC Greensboro, said on the House floor in January that the federal government “should not be funding education.”

Last November, she said on the floor that “I believe that the greatest fear that we all should have … to our freedom comes from this room, this very room, and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax-increase bill masquerading as a health-care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.” (In July of 2009, she had said the Republican version of the health-care plan is “pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.”)

In April 2009, she suggested to students at North Surry High School that tobacco was no worse than Mountain Dew. That same month, she said on the House floor that it was a “hoax” that Matthew Shepard’s 1998 killing in Wyoming had anything to do with him being gay.

She issued a quasi-apology for the Shepard statement, and she and her spokesman have sought to explain the other statements by contextualizing them. But the fact remains that she has continued to make such statements, the worst of which was comparing the potential danger of the health-care bill to terrorism. She’s positioned herself so far to the right that, even if her party regains a majority in the House with this election, it’s doubtful that she’d gain any power.

That said, Foxx will be hard to beat. Her district, which stretches from the mountains to Winston-Salem, is heavily Republican. She has more than $1 million in campaign money. Kennedy, making his first run for office, has raised about $240,000
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But Kennedy, a graduate of what’s now Rhodes College in Memphis, says he has a good chance of beating Foxx. He’s getting his message out through canvassing and calling, supported by a small but dedicated core of volunteers working Facebook and Twitter. The 5th District has one of the highest rates of job losses of any district in the country, he said, and people want a candidate who will work hard to create jobs.

“I worry about the middle class getting squeezed. People are suffering,” he recently told the Journal. “They’re worried about losing their homes. People are hurting and they want solutions.”

Kennedy says he’s a good listener, a man who can work with Republicans to solve problems. He’s more even-tempered than Foxx. He says he wants to concentrate on creating jobs and improving education, rather than wedge issues such as gay rights. He wants to take away profit motives to ship jobs overseas by giving tax incentives to companies that hire and keep American workers. Tax incentives for new technology will help as well, he said, as will putting more money into alternative forms of energy. He realizes that money for efforts such as the Blue Ridge Parkway Protection Act is money well spent.

Kennedy said that he sees running for office “as a chance to serve others.”

The Journal endorses Billy Kennedy for the 5th District congressional seat.

Blue America has raised money this year to run some ads against Foxx and they’ve upset the poor delicate hate merchant so much she sent out a letter to her constituents to beg them for help:

[S]everal liberal organizations have coordinated with our opponent’s campaign to run some personal attack ads against Congresswoman Foxx. You may have seen these disgusting ads. Instead of condemning these ugly attacks, our opponent’s campaign praised them and said that Foxx supporters don’t have a brain or a heart. These types of attacks really cross the line.

That’s right, the woman who said on the floor of the House (in the presence of his mother) that the Matthew Shepard hate crime was a hoax is complaining that our ads “cross the line.”

Want to help us run some more?

Howie says:

So far our ad has only run in the suburbs of Winston-Salem. Help us raise the money we need to run it across the district between now and election day. Think of how sweet it would be on November 3 to wake up without Virginia Foxx’s brand of rancid hatemongering in Washington. And the DCCC will not lift a finger to help. Will you? Here. We can do this!

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No Soup For You!

by digby

Alan Grayson’s opponent Daniel Webster’s favorite radio show host, and Tea Party superstar Bryan Fischer just tore the lid off of the biggest scandal to hit these shores since Ted Haggard got caught in bed with a male prostitute:

Creeping Sharia has come to a grocery aisle near you. Campbell’s soups have come out with a line of 15 halal-certified soups which comply with the dietary regulations of the two percent of the American population that follows Islam. The soups have been certified by the Islamic Society of North America, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose cluster of 29 affiliated organizations – including ISNA – have a goal of “exterminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist-fund raising trial in history, the Holy Land Foundation trial. Well, nobody will be able to blame Campbell’s for not doing its part to cooperate with those who hate America and want to see her and her Constitution subverted and then wiped out altogether.

The next time you pop open a can of Campbell’s vegetarian soup, you’ll have the comfort of knowing that you are consuming jihadi-sanctified food.

To see where things are going with this whole halal business, look no further than the U.K., where grocers have gone whole-hog – pardon the expression – on offering halal meat but without telling anybody about it.

The largest supermarket chains in Britain are selling lamb and chicken which come from animals which have been slaughtered in the Islamic way. Even fast-food joints like Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Subway are using halal meat, but they aren’t telling their customers about it either. Domino’s, for instance, has been serving halal chicken for 10 years in 580 outlets across the fruited U.K. plan. Folks in hospitals, schools, and pubs across the U.K. have been eating food that has first been blessed in the name of the demon-god Allah but know nothing about it.

So this is how they are going to kill us all — by blessing our food in the name of the demon-god Allah and not telling us about it.

I can live with that.

By the way, Fischer, to whom Taliban Dan Webster went scurrying to complain about being unfairly compared to the Taliban, wrote this lovely little gem that isn’t quite as humorous as the soup scandal:

If we connect the dots here, the inescapable conclusion is that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism.

Every time an HIV-infected male has sex with another male, it’s essentially the same as plunging an infected heroin needle into his arm. He’s passing on a potential death sentence, just as the Taliban seeks to do on a foreign battlefield.

It is because of the risk of HIV transmission that the FDA will not allow a male homosexual to donate blood if he has had sex with another male even one single solitary time since 1977. The second riskiest behavior for HIV infection is injection drug use.

Now if gays are allowed into the military, they will inevitably be put in battlefield situations where donated blood from soldiers may be necessary to save the lives of wounded comrades. An HIV-infected American soldier whose blood is used in those circumstances may very well condemn his fellow soldier to death rather than save his life.

If open homosexuals are allowed into the United States military, the Taliban won’t need to plant dirty needles to infect our soldiers with HIV. Our own soldiers will take care of that for them.

You can see why these Tea Partiers flock to his radio show and speeches.

Sarah Posner has a great expose of Fischer’s group, the American Family Association, formerly run by right wing kook Donald Wildmon. I didn’t think it was possible, but Fischer has taken their patented lunacy to a whole new level:

In 2008, the organization donated $500,000 in support of Proposition 8 in California, twice the amount donated by Focus on the Family, and Jackson said it gave him money for his anti-gay marriage effort in the District of Columbia. It was one of the first religious right organizations to claim a role in the Tea Party movement.

“The American Family Association is one of the oldest, largest, and most radical religious right groups, and it has always played a major role in the right wing movement’s efforts to denigrate gay Americans and to convince conservative Christians that liberals are out to destroy religious liberty and silence people of faith,” said Michael Keegan, president of People For the American Way. “The AFA has also played an active role in driving the national right-wing agenda—at the so called Values Voter Summit this year, GOP leaders echoed the AFA’s talking points on gays and lesbians, Islam, and the supposed persecution of American Christians.”

And yet, while the AFA has long been known for its invective against the “homosexual agenda” and its boycotts of companies that fail to meet its standards of “decency,” Fischer—no policy wonk, despite being director of “Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy”—has taken the public rhetoric to a new, ugly level.

According to former employees of the AFA, the views represented by Fischer are not only tolerated within the organization, but any opposition to its anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant invective—including reliance on white nativist sources in the AFA’s media programs—is dismissed. What’s worse, former employees say, anyone questioning such attitudes as un-Christian is denigrated, and in some cases forced out.

Lovely fellow. I sure hope all those Orlando voters who plan to vote for Webster because he’s such a nice Christian man who should never be compared to the evil Muslims enjoy being governed by a good friend of Bryan Fischer.

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Cranking Up The Old Eagle Eye

by digby

GOP vote suppression 2010:

Republican Senate candidate Mark Kirk caught on tape discussing his plan to send “voter integrity” squads to four predominantly African-American Chicago neighborhoods on election day. Kirk calls them “vulnerable precincts … where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat.

Well, that’s not a big surprise is it? It’s how they roll.

This is a November 1,1966 Miami News story called “Vote Officials Warned. ‘Beware of foul-ups at the polls like 1964’:

“In the 1964 general election, Goldwater backers helped create the greatest foul-up in election history through the wholesale challenge of prospective voters. Effects of the slowdown were felt from Key West to Pensacola, especially in Dade County.

It was part of the GOP’s “Operation Eagle Eye” which the Democrats charged was an effort to cut the Democratic vote in big population centers.”…

“Operation Eagle Eye,” national Republican officials said, was to make sure that people not qualified or registered properly were not permitted to vote. The Democrats charged, however, that it was designed to intimidate minority voters.

Mrs Englander said today, “I’m told attempts will be made to confuse our Negro voters and other minority groups. This could materially affect the vote for Bob High (Democratic nominee for Governor) and all the other Democratic nominees.”

It’s embarrassing that Democrats have allowed this nonsense to continue all this time. It’s been out there and obvious for decades. And to make matters even worse, they have allowed the Republicans to not only engage in this methodical intimidation, they’ve enabled them to simultaneously gin up pseudo-scandals about “voter fraud” based upon sloppy voter rolls that has never been shown to result in any kind of systematic election fraud. It’s political malpractice at this point.

If you’re interested in the gazillion pieces I’ve written on this subject, you can look here.

h/t to Rick Perlstein

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Human Rights Are “Wedge” Issues

by digby

It has long been obvious to me that most anti-choice zealots think women who have abortions are whores, but I’ve rarely seen it demonstrated so clearly — and by a Republican Senate candidate no less — teabagger Ken Buck.

Yesterday I posted about the story McJoan at DKos put together in which his failure to pursue a rape case looks more and more like a belief that the woman had it coming. Today it appears that anti-choice fanatic Buck — who has expressed skepticism that even “saving the life of the mother” is necessarily a valid excuse for abortion — believed that the rape victim had had an abortion (which she denied) and thus had a motive for claiming her former boyfriend had raped her. The kicker here is that the accused rapist admitted the rape. The only way any of this craziness makes sense is if he figured that whatever happened, the baby killing whore deserved what she got.

This is a very twisted, fundamentalist misogynist — and he’s not the only one running for office as a Tea Party candidate. And while they may seem like outliers who don’t really have an impact on American life, it’s foolish to take that for granted. These people are mainstreaming ideas that up until recently were on the fringes of right wing discussion. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that the idea that women at least have a right not to bear their rapist father’s child was considered to be only common sense. A ban on all abortions, regardless of reason, is now on the mainstream menu.

Granted, only hysterical, unserious women who don’t understand the important issues seem to care about this, but it’s having an effect on serious “real” politics whether Democratic political consultants like it or not. Liberal women, especially young liberal women, are among the least enthusiastic voters among the electorate and yet they are essential to the Democratic vote this fall. Apparently, the strategists have belatedly figured out that it might be useful to stop using women’s bodies as bargaining chips (at least until the election.) You can’t blame women for feeling that this late concern isn’t exactly a profile in principled sincerity:

Republicans have won points with many voters by promising a conservative overhaul of taxes and spending, but Democrats are working hard in the closing weeks of the campaign to convince voters that a conservative social agenda is waiting in the wings, too, should Republicans be elected in large numbers.

Abortion rights is the flash point, being wielded by the left in hard-fought races from New York’s contest for governor, to Senate races in Florida and California, as Democratic candidates or groups try to rally their base and attract moderate Republican or independent women — a slice of the electorate that is even more coveted than in years past.

[…]

New York Times/CBS News national polls also say that the political divide between men and women — more men than women gravitating toward Republican candidates, a pattern dating back to Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 — is bigger than average heading into November. And between Mr. Bennet and Mr. Buck, that gender gap is immense. A CNN poll released in late September said that men were 15 percentage points more likely than women to support Mr. Buck, while women were 16 percentage points more likely than men to prefer Mr. Bennet.

“This isn’t a gap, it’s a canyon,” said Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, who said the average gender difference in presidential races was about seven or eight percentage points.

This new Tea Party GOP is going to be much more hardcore on women’s issues. And the more flaccid and overly compromising the Democrats are in return, the more they will turn off one of their largest voting blocs.

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Wingnut Hate a la carte

by digby

I imagine that most people have read Media Matters’ jailhouse interview with the Glenn Beck fanatic who planned a terrorist attack against a liberal foundation. It’s quite a story. But one of the things I think hasn’t been highlighted is the help of David Horowitz, Alex Jones and Michael Savage in forming this fellow’s lunatic philosophy. This lunatic demonstrates how you can order wingnut hate a la carte from all across the media landscape.

I posted this a while back because it’s such an awful message, but I’m not sure anyone noticed. It’s from David Horowitz and I first saw it on TV here in LA. He’s been raising money for the last few months to run it in various markets (but particularly here in Los Angeles for some reason):

Creepy stuff. Now the shooter was all upset about Soros, but I don’t know that he had any particular POV about Israel. However, it’s not really about specifics, it’s just creating this overriding sense that Obama is working on behalf of the enemy — whoever that may be today (gays, Muslims, liberals, feminazis, ACORN, immigrants whatever.) And then once they create it, their spokespeople come out and say this:

“I think some of this stuff is just a sign of how much fear and anxiety has built up,” Gingrich said, “but I think the president has an obligation to slow down and say, if you’re president of all the people, what is it the White House is doing that so frightens a third of the Republican Party that they don’t even believe something as simple and as obvious as his self-professed religious belief.”

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a combination of toxic worldview and cheap opportunism. And this environment is ripe for both.

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Held Hostage By John Galt

by digby

We’ve heard quite a few lectures from political and financial elites these last couple of years about “tough love” and sacrifice and “moral hazard.” The Tea Party movement itself was launched by a tirade from a CNBC celebrity spokesmodel ranting about irresponsible homeowners being “bailed out” by the government. The prevailing wisdom is that individuals must be held accountable for the failures; to do otherwise would encourage bad behavior in the future and otherwise weaken the moral fiber of our nation.

But oddly, when it’s revealed that financial institutions have behaved irresponsibly (and in some cases criminally) casting their own industry into disrepute, ruining countless lives and (further) destroying the economy, we are told that they cannot be held responsible, or even be required to stop their irresponsible and criminal behavior, because it will slow the recovery and the poor average worker will be hurt. We’ve been told for two years now, as wave after wave of financial wrongdoing and malfeasance has been revealed, that it is in our best interest and the best interest of the country that we allow the big banks and their various affiliates to continue on unmolested lest something even worse happens. (And anyway, the average Americans who will be caught in the crossfire need some lessons in tough love so it’s for the best.)

Here’s the latest:

The Securities Industry and Financial Association issued a brief statement Monday morning warning against growing calls to halt foreclosure nationwide.

Tim Ryan, CEO of SIFMA, said such an action would be catastrophic to the housing recovery. Furthermore, the damage will also extend to the the average American wage earner, he said.

“It must be recognized that the mortgage market, investors and the health of the economy are all inter-related,” he said. “Investors in the housing market — including American workers with pension funds, 401(k) plans, and mutual funds — would unjustly suffer losses in their savings from these actions.”

Recently, several state attorneys general started calling for a moratorium on foreclosure. Several large servicers are voluntarily suspending foreclosures, as well, citing the need to review documents. Allegations have surfaced that foreclosure filings may be going through the system without adequate review. Despite the pressure to join the chorus, so far the Obama adminstration is resisting calls for a nationwide foreclosure moratoria.

The trend to slow the foreclosure process greatly is already weighing on senior bond holders in securitizations. This development is one of the several ways the entire situation is negatively impacting the nascent private-label securitization rebound.

You have to love the idea that average Americans should stand pat while the mortgage industry continues to defraud them so they can protect their alleged investments in mortgage securities. I guess there’s a sucker born every minute.

At some point one would hope that this racket would become obvious to the American people: they are being held hostage by financial elites who insist that they be allowed to get away with murder or they’ll blow the whole place up and take everyone down with them.

President Obama defined this well very early on:

“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

Update: While you’re shedding tears for the “senior bondholders in securitization” keep this in mind:

While the US unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.6 percent, pay on Wall Street is likely to rise another 4 percent.

To what? $144 billion, according to an estimate by the (paid restricted) Wall Street Journal published Tuesday…

“Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms,” the paper’s reporters wrote, with the total payouts leaping to $144 billion, “a 4% increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009.”

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The Panther Has Been Teased

by digby

If you haven’t been following Deeky’s review of Glenn Beck’s Overton Window at Shakesville, it’s probably because you have a slightly delicate stomach. It’s not easy to even read the excerpts. But today, he finally got to the “good part.” You know the one. Just for fun:

The faded jersey was much too big, of course, and she’d gathered the slack and tied it up, leaving a spellbinding glimpse of a taut, smooth waist above the northern border of a lucky pair of his own navy boxers.

Her hair was down, towel-dry and glistening, dark and curly and caressing her shoulders as she walked.

“I thought you were going to sleep in the other room.”

“Do you mind?”

“No, not a bit. It’s just like that time my aunt Beth took me to the candy store and then wouldn’t let me eat anything. I didn’t mind that, either.”

“I’ll go if you want.”

“No, stay, stay. I’m kidding. Kind of. Just try not to do anything sexy.”

She ran her hands through her hair and stretched again, wriggled herself under the covers, and rolled onto her side with one arm across him, the long, cool silkiness of her bare legs against his skin.

“Now see?” Noah said. “That’s what I just asked you not to do.”

“I’m only getting comfortable.” Her voice was already sleepy, and she shivered a bit. “My feet are cold.”

“Suit yourself, lady. I’m telling you right now, you made the rules, but you’re playing with fire here. I’ve got some rules, too, and rule number one is, don’t tease the panther.”

Hoo baby. Move over Aynie, there’s a new sizzling hot wingnut in the manly control freak hero school of selfish fiction.(you see, his strict words were enough to keep horny the little temptress under control. But just barely. She wanted him baaad.)

Beck is currently “out west” having some “tests” to see whether Walter Lippman poisoned him from the grave. But let’s hope he’s working on the sequel to this thing. Or at least the animated version.

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Psychopathic Tea Party Misogyny

by digby

I wrote before about creepy Tea Party candidate Ken Buck’s harsh views on abortion in case of rape or incest and his bizarre implication that “saving the life of the mother” is open to interpretation:

I am pro-life, and I’ll answer the next question. I don’t believe in the exceptions of rape or incest. I believe that the only exception, I guess, is life of the mother. And that is only if it’s truly life of the mother.

Hey, if a few sperm receptacles have to die, it’s a price that’s well worth paying to avoid even one fetus being aborted. Plenty more vessels where that came from.

He has a little problem with this sort of thing. (You’ll recall that during the primary he said “why should you vote for me? Because I do not wear high heels.”) But McJoan finds evidence today that this is just the tip of the misogynistic iceberg:

A 2005 rape case that Ken Buck refused to prosecute indicates that maybe his threshold for what is really rape makes him less pro-life than anti-woman.

When Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck refused to prosecute a rape case five years ago, he probably had no idea that anyone beyond a small circle of people would care. He learned otherwise quickly enough as the victim demanded a meeting with him (which she secretly – but legally – taped), organized a protest and made sure the media knew all about her plight….

The alleged rape victim is back and determined to be heard. She told her story to the Colorado Independent and provided the tape of their meeting, in which Buck appears to all but blame her for the rape and tells her that her case would never fly with a Weld County jury….

He said the facts in the case didn’t warrant prosecution. “A jury could very well conclude that this is a case of buyer’s remorse,” he told the Greeley Tribune in March 2006. He went on to publicly call the facts in the case “pitiful.”

[…]

“That comment made me feel horrible,” she told the Colorado Independent last week. “The offender admitted he did it, but Ken Buck said I was to blame. Had he (Buck) not attacked me, I might have let it go. But he put the blame on me, and I was furious. I still am furious,” she said.

It wasn’t just his public remarks that infuriated the woman. In the private meeting, which she recorded, he told her, “It appears to me … that you invited him over to have sex with him.”

He also said he thought she might have a motive to file rape charges as a way of retaliating against the man for some ill will left over from when they had been lovers more than a year earlier. Buck also comes off on this tape as being at least as concerned with the woman’s sexual history and alcohol consumption as he is with other facts of the case.

There’s more at the link. It’s really sickening. But with the ascension of Tea Party values, despite their affinity for certain right wing female politicians, this attitude is becoming more prevalent in mainstream political discourse. The Christian Reconstructionist teabagger Sharron Angle is on record against requiring maternity coverage and is pro-incest and rape forced childbirth. Rand Paul too. It’s part of their philosophy.

Not that this is particularly new but it’s getting a whole lot more acceptable to say it. Here’s Limbaugh today:

“Mammograms are the convenant, the sacred covenant of feminazism”

If mammograms are now considered a leftist plot and are on the menu for derision and ridicule, then basically they just don’t care if women die. I don’t see how else you can interpret this stuff.

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Downticket To The Future

by digby

If you haven’t donated to Progressive Kick’s matching fund campaign for down ticket races, then you should do it today. They have a little money left for matching funds but they’re almost all the way there. It’s really quite impressive:

Dozens of state legislatures are up for grabs this November, and with them, the power to redistrict dozens of U.S. House seats. That’s why Progressive Kick and its major donors have pledged to match dollar-for-dollar all contributions to select, progressive legislative and down-ballot statewide candidates, when given through our Win Big by Thinking Small ActBlue page between now and October 28, 2010. That’s at least $125,000 to spend now, that could save progressives tens of millions of dollars later:

“The average winner of a competitive House race in 2008 spent $2 million, while a noncompetitive seat can be defended for far less than half that amount. Moving, say, 20 districts from competitive to out-of-reach could save a party $100 million or more over the course of a decade.”
— GOP strategist, Karl Rove

Don’t trust Karl Rove? Read the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s dissertation on “The Economic$ of Redi$tricting,” and The New York Times on “How to Tilt an Election Through Redistricting.”

read on …

Foreclosure Strategy

by digby

Mike Lux takes up the idea that Democrats should fly their populist flags on this foreclosure issue and point out that they are the only people who seem to give a damn about the average homeowner in this mess:

From what candidates on the ground are telling me, though, it is still the business reporters who have been covering the issue, not the political reporters, and Democrats are not necessarily getting the political credit they deserve. Reporters are still trying to put the who-done-it pieces together on the scandal rather than being focused on which politicians are standing up to the bankers on the issue. We need to make sure voters understand who is fighting to make sure the banks and foreclosure mills are held accountable.

Democrats should not let this opportunity slip away from us: if we embrace this issue politically, telling a story about how we are the ones rooting out corporate corruption, we are the ones standing up to the banks when they try to defraud consumers, this could be very powerful, and it could strongly feed that broader frame around Democrats taking on special interests on behalf of the middle class. With this issue now front and center, Democrats should seize the initiative, put Republicans on the spot for why they are doing nothing to stand up to the banks. This could be one of the election dynamic turning things that upends the Republicans’ ability to make their closing argument about government being the root of all evil stick. The White House right now is sounding too wonky and even-handed on this issue: they need to make clear whose side they are on.
[…]

We have all seen last month breaking news and/or new frames shift electoral dynamics. The collapse of health care in the fall of ’94 drove Democratic base performance into the dirt, and turned a tough year into a route. The fundraising scandal that broke in Oct of ’96 changed the dynamics just enough to keep us from retaking Congress. The focus on impeachment in the fall of ’98, and our “it’s time to move on and deal with the issues that really matter” pushback turned a likely Democratic slaughter into a good year for us. The Foley scandal in Oct of 2006 stopped a potential Republican comeback dead in its tracks, and turned a close call into us easily retaking Congress. I think this foreclosure fraud crisis could be the same kind of deal. It allows us to take anti-special interest frame we have all been building for a while, and bring it to a whole different level. But we need to seize the issue, and take the credit we deserve for doing the right thing in fighting for consumers against the power of the big bank fraud. If we are willing to wholeheartedly take this mantle on, the election dynamic has the real potential for a last minute shift.

Read the whole thing.I think he makes a very persuasive case and obviously I agree with the idea that Democrats should be flogging this issue like crazy in the closing days of the campaign. It’s the only salient positive message they have, IMO and the negative message of pointing out the fact that the Teabaggers are bunch of dangerous crazy loons, doesn’t seem to be resonating. (If I had to guess the reality TV nature of our politics has led a lot of people to think they are an act and when they get into power will becom nice middle of the road grown-ups who will fix everything up. I don’t think these people pay close attention …)

If the Dems could come together with a coherent closing argument based on this issue, it’s possible that some of these close races could break their way. As Lux points out, it does happen and there’s always the possibility that they could at least contain some of the damage.

Update: Sadly, the administration isn’t on the same page. It appears they are still more worried about the banking industry than anything else.

And even worse, the elites are all circling the wagons to lay this off on average people. Sadly, the current wave is all about people who have lost jobs and income (and equity) and can no longer afford to pay for the home that was eminently affordable when they took out the loan just a few years ago. Sustained unemployment takes its toll.

But never let that stop a comfortable professional with a secure career from lecturing the plebes on moral hazard even as a bunch of multi-millionaires hold a metaphorical gun to the nation’s head, saying “nice little economy you’ve got here, a shame if anything happened to it.”

[I]f, as appears to be the case, the overwhelming majority of homeowners facing foreclosure have fallen far behind on their payments, then it is a good deal harder to summon up the same moral outrage over reports that the banks and loan service companies cut corners, failed to keep the right documents and engaged in shoddy and even fraudulent practices. Just because the banks and servicers have screwed up doesn’t mean they and their investors are no longer entitled to get their money back. Certainly banks and servicers should, at their own expense, be sent back to do things right. Those who engaged in fraud should be punished. And if there are legitimate questions about who owns a loan, those will need to be resolved before the proceeds of any foreclosure are distributed. But none of that changes the basic reality that there are millions of Americans who took out mortgages they could not support on houses they could not afford…

[T]hose who are cheerleading for a moratorium should realize they can only push things so far. It would not help the recovery of the economy, or the real estate market, if the foreclosure process became so hopelessly tangled that banks and investors effectively lose the ability to recoup the remaining value of their collateral. That would provide some immediate financial relief to households facing foreclosure, but it would encourage many more homeowners to begin shirking their mortgage payments in the belief that they would also be able to avoid the consequences. The long term consequences of that would be that mortgage rates would be higher and mortgage loans would be smaller and harder to get. Perhaps it is only natural for Americans to take some guilty pleasure in watching as the big banks and Wall Street wizards who created this flawed and complex mortgage machine are hoisted on their own petards. But be careful what you wish for. The financial system is still fragile enough that we may not be able to afford a full helping of revenge.

Seriously, how many times are they going to get away with this crap? Every time anybody suggests that the banks might have to pay for their criminality and malfeasance, everybody starts wringing their hands over how it will hurt the recovery and all those irresponsible workers will learn the wrong lessons. I don’t know how much more of this recovering the country can take. And the lessons workers are learning may not be what these people think it is.

Buy pitchfork stock.

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