Month: October 2010

Tea Party Hoax and Hokum

by digby

Breitbart protege Dana Loesch is quickly becoming one of the new darlings of the cable news universe. She’s quite well-spoken and confident, but like Sarah Palin, she speaks gibberish. Bill Maher was unable to disarm her on his show last week because she threw out some double entendres which distracted him and rendered her nonsense charmingly sexy.

Elliot Spitzer is the first one I’ve seen to actually call her out:

SPITZER: Well, let me ask one more question. Do you want to repeal the provision that permits people with pre-existing conditions to get health insurance?

LOESCH: Do I want to repeal pre-existing conditions? Well, I think you have to look at health insurance, too, in this way, it’s a policy against catastrophic situations. It’s like, you don’t go out and get homeowners insurance after your house is already on fire. So, you have to look at it in a proper perspective. But I do want to say that the separation of church and state wasn’t in the Constitution. It was a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of Danbury Baptists.

SPITZER: Say that again. Wait a minute, there is this thing called the First Amendment in the Constitution. But so you do want to repeal pre-existing conditions? I just want to make sure the public understands this.

LOESCH: Well, no. You’re trying to frame it that I hate anyone that would have any kind of problems of getting health insurance coverage and that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is that there are — children, right now, the way the health control law is written, children are even exempt. There are massive loopholes in this health insurance that already discriminates against people that have pre-existing conditions, but that was one of the things that we didn’t find out until we passed it, like Nancy Pelosi said.

Waaaah? That’s just 100% bullshit. But you have to admit that “the health control law” is pretty good stuff. I have a feeling that one might catch on.

SPITZER: OK, can we go back to your other priorities? Are you going to also try to defund or repeal the financial re-regulation bill, Dodd-Frank is the technical name, you going to try to repeal that so we go back to the Wild West of Wall Street craziness?

LOESCH: Well, I don’t know. Are Democrats going to try to keep control of Social Security and deny people the choice of investing their own money and growing their own nest egg? I mean, we can do that.

That’s going to come as something of a surprise to retirement planners all over the country who think they are quite legally investing people’s own money and grwoing their own nest eggs every single day. But it always sounds good to say that people are ebing “denied” something when they are actually being guaranteed a benefit.

SPITZER: Whoa, whoa, if you’re saying are we going to try to protect our seniors and not privatize which would have sent tens of millions of seniors into poverty, you bet we are, and I think anybody today…

LOESCH: Oh, it would have not have. There isn’t any Social Security money, anyway. You’re going off the presupposition that there’s money in Social Security.

SPITZER: You guys don’t know how to read a table. You don’t know how to read an actuarial table.

LOESCH: It’s already broke. Medicare’s broke. The president even proposed to cut more from Medicare. There are cuts already in this law.

She says it so it must be true.

SPITZER: Answer the question. Are you going to try to repeal the financial regulation bill that imposed constraints on what the bank finally can do? Are you going to repeal that one, also.

LOESCH: I am not for any legislation where the government attempts to regulate the private sector because the government is horrible at stimulating jobs, that’s not one of the enumerated powers of the Constitution.

Spitzer then brought up Rand Paul and said she must agree with him that the civil rights laws should be repealed. Like the Brietbartian she is, she launched into an aggressive, hostile denial, saying he was calling her a racist. It ended like this:

LOESCH: Rand Paul wasn’t talking about the repeal of the civil rights — Rand Paul was making an example of the government exceeding 10th Amendment rights and how certain things needed to be dealt with an a state level.

SPITZER: That is why he said he’d repeal…

LOESCH: If you want to be ignorant about the topics and completely gloss over that and say that, well, that’s somebody’s being a racist, then they are completely misunderstanding A, argument and B, the 10th Amendment practice and the context of that conversation.

See, she’s better at obfuscation than Palin, but it’s just as nonsensical. (And saying Spitzer the former Attorney general of New York is “ignorant about the topics” is fairly amusing.)

PARKER: All right, Dana, I want to ask you, what I’m hearing in Washington is that what happens on November 3, that is once these Tea Party candidates move into Congress, what happens then depends on what President Obama does. And so, I wanted to ask you what would you like to see him do on November 3?

LOESCH: Oh gosh, the very first thing that I would like to see is an extension of the Bush tax cuts. Because we’re going into a new year and businesses, middle class Americans have no idea what’s happening with their finances, because we don’t know what’s going to be coming down the track with this. I mean, this is going to be a huge tax hike by way of repeal of tax cuts, so that’s something that has everyone really terrified. And I don’t know if we have ever post election, have ever entered a period where we just honestly didn’t know what’s going to happen. That’s really bad for business.

SPITZER: Well, let’s get rid of this bogeyman. The Republicans are holding up the extension of the middle class tax cuts to protect the rich who don’t need it. This is going to add $1 trillion to our deficit every year. So, where are you going to fund that trillion dollars? Tell me right now, where will you cut the budget? Where you going to cut?

I think her conflation of the Wall Street “uncertainly” trope with the middle class is quite clever. She’s saying that the middle class’s financial terror is because they aren’t sure if their taxes are going up next year, which is absurd. Their financial angst is because we have 10% unemployment and they are all stuck in overvalued houses and nowhere jobs with little chance of escape.

But it’s a good line. She’s got a lot of them.

LOESCH: Well, we’ll cut stimulus and repeal…

SPITZER: That’s not moneys in the budget. That’s not money in the budget, Dana.

LOESCH: No, here’s the thing…

PARKER: Let her talk, Eliot.

LOESCH: You’re framing the argument in a crazy way, you’re saying that they are trying to protect the rich with tax cuts. Do you not understand that when you heavily tax corporations that this ends up where you have higher unemployment than the unemployment that you originally had…

Here she’s conflating the corporate tax rates with the income tax rates for people who make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year. At this point, I’m not sure if she’s doing it on purpose in order to obscure the fact that she advocating for trickle down economics or whether she’s just talking as fast as she can to get out of the hole.

Spitzer is done:

SPITZER: Dana, your economics is worse than voodoo economics. You’re numbers don’t add…

LOESCH: It’s basic economics 101. I’m not talking about (INAUDIBLE)…

SPITZER: No it isn’t. You’re negative 101. Dana, answer this question. Answer this question: Where will you cut $1 trillion, every year, from the budget, to fund those tax cut extensions? What are you going to do?

LOESCH: I would cut out any excessive egregious spending that is unrelated to the enumerated powers that our government has in the Constitution…

SPITZER: That’s gibberish, Dana, gibberish. It means nothing. I’m sorry.

LOESCH: That’s not gibberish.

SPITZER: Means absolutely nothing.

LOESCH: Do you not know what government is allowed to do according to the Constitution?

SPITZER: OK, there it is, hoax and hokum from the Tea Party.

Indeed, it is.

But this is how they get over. They’re talking about issues that make most people’s eyes glaze over — economics, tax policy, “enumerated powers in the constitution.” And she is very confident, very strong and most importantly she speaks in cadences that sound as if they make sense even if they don’t. She’s attractive and she smiles a lot when she’s talking. But she is one of the worst Tea party liars I’ve ever seen. On every show she’s been on, she simply makes things up out of whole cloth and throws it out there daring someone to get into an argument over specifics. It’s quite a schtick.

I think Spitzer did the best thing — just call it gibberish, hokum and a hoax, which it is. If you grant this crap any validity at all, you’ve already lost the argument.

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Exceptional Americans

by digby

Alternet:

Last night’s Rachel Maddow Show reported that “wanted” posters targeting several abortion providers were distributed by anti-abortion extremists … just before those abortion providers were assassinated…Now, new posters are being distributed for three abortion providers in the Charlotte, North Carolina, region, effectively putting a bounty on those doctors’ heads.

I am told that they cannot be compared to fundamentalist Muslims like the Taliban because they’ve only killed a few doctors and they use the more civilized form of assassination — a gun. But the fact is that the differences between them are a matter of scale, not degree.

Update: Nothing to see here at all.

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Tea Party Patriots Keeping It Real

by digby

Following up on the vote suppression scandal down in Texas, TPM obtained copies of some of the emails received by the registration group being targeted by the Texas Tea Party group King Street Patriots “True The Vote” :

“i hope everyone of you American hating A-holes are thrown in prison for cheating our country and trying to assure socialism.GO TO HELL.”

“I see you’re all into fraud. Why do you want to change Texas? You want it to be like a third-world nation? Texas is great – and you want to change it into a third world state. No thank you. Your fraud won’t work. You were caught red handed. Live with it. We know all about it.”

“Citizen’s from all over Texas will be coming to Houston to watch you fraudulent Marxist pigs. Be forewarned, you will be watched at every turn, and your corrupt Marxist organization will be targeted!”

“You liberial scumbags should be hung by the neck in public ! We are on to your voter fraud. Keep it up you MOTHER FUCKERS and you will soon be put down for a long dirt nap! Your nothing but a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NI**ERS and greasy mexican sp*cs! The WAR is comming and we are going to dispose of each and every one of you while we take OUR (White) nation back.”

And lest we think this is just some unaffiliated cranks:

King Street Patriots leader Catherine Engelbrecht even went as far to as to accuse the group of being the headquarters of the New Black Panther Party.

The good news is that the Tea partiers don’t have a racist bone in their bodies. Just ask them They’ll tell you so. (It’s just the “bad ones” they don’t like.)

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Getting The Incentives Wrong

by digby

Atrios, in his inimitable pithy style, gets to the heart of the foreclosure fraud scandal:

We’re really at the point where no sane person should get a mortgage given the kind of fraud and theft that’s out there... Once we came to a point where servicers could make more money by foreclosing than not foreclosing, the game was over.

Seriously, while the powers that be may consider the number of people who’ve lost their homes and credit rating due to fraudulent foreclosures is nothing more than collateral damage, it’s actually a massive and horrible injustice. Anyone who trusts the system at this point is taking a much bigger risk with their financial well being than the purchase of the house itself.

*Sigh* — just read this by Mike at Rortybomb. Oy:

Finally the administration is talking about the foreclosure fraud crisis. And their approach is that only BP knows how to foreclosure on people with improper documents 5,000 feet below the sea only Bank of America, GMAC and the other largest servicers and banks can figure out how to solve this problem internally, that “This is a problem for the banks and servicers to fix. They can fix it as fast as they feel like it.” Here are Shahien Nasiripour and Arthur Delaney on Obama Team On Furor Over Foreclosures: ‘Problem For The Banks and Servicers To Fix.’ What if the adminstration came out with something half as strong as this ruling by Judge Christopher A. Boyko of Federal District Court in Cleveland (my bold, though seriously read it all)

So read it all. This Judge evidently believes in some archaic concept called “the rule of law.” It’s quite unusual.

The administration’s view that “only the banks” can unravel the criminal enterprise they’ve created is eerily reminiscent of their position on the AIG scandal. Recall that we were all told that if the executives were fired (or even denied their full bonuses) then there would be no one with the requisite “skills” available to make sure the whole economy didn’t come crashing down. (Remember, these banksters are “superstars” and can’t be held to the same prosaic notions of law and order that apply to the rubes because they are so special.)

Remember this one?

Feinberg’s push for long-term accountability was met with what Feinberg calls “intense pressure” from officials at the Treasury Department and from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which had provided most of the A.I.G. bailout, to make accommodations for the firms whose perceived extravagance had created his job in the first place. First, there were those cash retention bonuses, which 8 of the 12 A.I.G. executives now under Feinberg’s purview received in 2009. Feinberg pushed to have the executives return the money and replace it with salarized stock. They all refused, even those who had pledged to give the bonuses back altogether. Among those who insisted on keeping the cash was David Herzog, A.I.G.’s chief financial officer, whose bonus was $1.5 million. He and the others told Feinberg, through A.I.G.’s vice chairman Anastasia Kelly, that if they didn’t get to keep that bonus, plus get additional bonuses for work in 2009, they would leave, which would grievously imperil the company. No one at A.I.G. seemed to be embarrassed to argue that the chief financial officer of Wall Street’s Titanic was irreplaceable.

My experience in corporate life over the years had led me to believe that these people are extremely overvalued in general. But regardless of that, it’s always a bad idea to deal with terrorists (which they are) by coming right out of the box bowing and scraping. It rarely works out well.

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Huckabee Takes A Step In the Right Direction

by tristero

For once in his sorry-ass life, Michael Huckabee has done the right thing. He has flatly refused to appear on a major media outlet. Because of his decision, the world is now a far better place.

I fully agree with Huckabee’s voluntary decision not to appear on NPR, whatever his reasons might be. And whatever he says they are they’re certainly bogus: Michael a notorious liar, so there’s no reason to argue over some bullshit reasons he just made up. We should just celebrate his good common sense of patriotism for choosing, at least in one place, to keep his trap shut.

But when you’re on a roll, why stop there? Huckabee should also voluntarily refuse to appear on network television, and also any cable show. He should refuse to give interviews to the Times, to the Post – in fact, to any print paper. Facebook? Not good enough for Michael Huckabee- boycott it! Hell, boycott the entire pornographic intertubes while you’re at it, Mr. H!

As for public appearances, it’s his choice and I hope the choice is not to go there, either. Ditto any private gatherings for politics – say no, my friend!

Hey, man, it’s a free country. Why don’t you just voluntarily choose to, you know, go back to WhereverTheFuckYouCameFrom, Arkansas and, to coin a phrase, focus on your family? You could set an example for all your pals – Limbaugh, Beck, Gingrich, Palin, the Whole Sick Crew. A genuinely refreshing new trend among wingnuts, one even liberals will welcome:

Just Choose Silence.

Strict Constructionists

by digby

Just remember, the constitution was meant to protect Christian conservatives from people they disagree with. Therefore, they are justified in doing whatever it takes to get their way:

CONSTITUENT: Keith, I have a question concerning the courts. It seems that the courts are having the final say on these matters, the Supreme Court. But isn’t it the Congress that can ultimately override the Supreme Court, the checks and balances? ROTHFUS: Yeah, there are different checks and balances you can do. Congress’s ultimate weapon is funding. If the Supreme Court rules you have to do something, we’ll just take away funding for it.

Then he said that they need to pass constitutional amendments preventing the court from taking international law into account. (Presumably, this would also require polygraphs to determine if the justices are taking it into account in their minds …)

These people simply don’t believe in democracy and they refuse to accept that they have to share the governance of the country with people they don’t agree with.

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Christine O’Donnell really is a typical American

by digby

The poor lady is taking a lot of heat for not knowing that the constitution expressly forbids an establishment of religion. But the truth is that she’s mainstream on this one:

While America continues to become more religiously diverse, the belief that America is a Christian nation is growing more intense, according to research from Purdue University. “America is still predominantly Christian, but it is more diverse than ever,” said Jeremy Brooke Straughn, an assistant professor of sociology who studies national identity. “At the same time, many people feel even more strongly that America is a Christian country than they did before the turn of the century. This is especially true for Americans who say they are Christians and who attend religious services at least once a week.” The fact that these beliefs have intensified since the mid-1990s suggests a connection to events such as the Sept. 11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Straughn said. “We suspect that these events accentuated the connection between Christianity and American identity by reinforcing boundaries against non-Christians and people of foreign origin,” he said. “Although we can’t be certain of the underlying causes, our data clearly show diverging attitudes between American Christians and their non-Christian counterparts here in the United States. Those who express these views might say the belief is rooted in love of country and religion and is not about hating or discouraging others. But voicing these beliefs may cause others to feel that they do not belong and to withdraw from participating in public life.”

[…]

“Religious boundaries can be politically divisive,” Straughn said. “And this is important to take note of as we approach the November elections. Religion and national identity continue to be in the news, from questions about President Barack Obama’s religion to the recent controversy about an Islamic center near the Sept. 11 site. “Even when voters seem focused on problems like the economy and unemployment, the issue of religion and national identity could make a difference at the margins. Especially in close races, the advantage may go to candidates seen as committed to the values of American Christians.”

I think it’s fascinating that these scholars didn’t consider the fact that we have a political movement in America which is bankrolled by extremely wealthy people who spend tens of millions of dollars pushing this notion for political gain. But perhaps that would be religiously incorrect.

All I can say is that I fully expect that this guy will soon be thrown out of the pantheon:

So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: “Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor’s religion is.” Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.
– Mark Twain, a Biography

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“He Made The Earth For Us To Utilize”

by digby

When Baron Hill is booed for being too liberal, you know the world has gone mad:

At a candidate forum here last week, Representative Baron P. Hill, a threatened Democratic incumbent in a largely conservative southern Indiana district, was endeavoring to explain his unpopular vote for the House cap-and-trade energy bill. It will create jobs in Indiana, reduce foreign oil imports and address global warming, Mr. Hill said at a debate with Todd Young, a novice Republican candidate who is supported by an array of Indiana Tea Party groups and is a climate change skeptic. “Climate change is real, and man is causing it,” Mr. Hill said, echoing most climate scientists. “That is indisputable. And we have to do something about it.” A rain of boos showered Mr. Hill, including a hearty growl from Norman Dennison, a 50-year-old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party. “It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”

Those Big Oil bucks were well spent weren’t they?

Skepticism and outright denial of global warming are among the articles of faith of the Tea Party movement, here in Indiana and across the country. For some, it is a matter of religious conviction; for others, it is driven by distrust of those they call the elites. And for others still, efforts to address climate change are seen as a conspiracy to impose world government and a sweeping redistribution of wealth. But all are wary of the Obama administration’s plans to regulate carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous gas, which will require the expansion of government authority into nearly every corner of the economy. “This so-called climate science is just ridiculous,” said Kelly Khuri, founder of the Clark County Tea Party Patriots. “I think it’s all cyclical.” “Carbon regulation, cap and trade, it’s all just a money-control avenue,” Ms. Khuri added. “Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.”
[…] Those who support the Tea Party movement are considerably more dubious about the existence and effects of global warming than the American public at large, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted this month. The survey found that only 14 percent of Tea Party supporters said that global warming is an environmental problem that is having an effect now, while 49 percent of the rest of the public believes that it is. More than half of Tea Party supporters said that global warming would have no serious effect at any time in the future, while only 15 percent of other Americans share that view, the poll found. And 8 percent of Tea Party adherents volunteered that they did not believe global warming exists at all, while only 1 percent of other respondents agreed. Those views in general align with those of the fossil fuel industries, which have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it.

I once mused about why these people are so adamant about this and got some interesting comments. (I downplayed the religious angle at the time, but now I think it’s huge.)

I think Ann Coulter put it best:

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars — that’s the Biblical view.

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The Dog That Didn’t Bark

by tristero

Interesting: An entire article about how teabaggers deny climate change. The reporter does a pretty good job of tracing the amount of oil and energy industry money that’s being used to fund the fake grass roots advocacy groups. But there’s one dog that doesn’t bark throughout the entire article.

That’s right, you guessed it, give yourself a kewpie doll! Despite the fact that the question of whether climate change exists is a scientific issue by definition, not a single scientist was given an opportunity to weigh in. There wasn’t a single allusion to the simple facts that, according to all reputable experts, climate change is unequivocally real and is driven today by human mass consumption of fossil fuels, among other things.

Facts don’t matter to the ‘baggers. When it comes to science at least, they don’t matter to the Times, either, if it’s a right wing cause celebre. This is exactly, exactly what happened before the Kitzmiller decision, when creationist con men – some with rap sheets as long as your arm – were given front page Times treatment to opine on how Darwin was wrong – with nary a peep reported from anyone honest and/or grounded in consensual reality.

Sigh.

Let’s Not Look At the Burning Carnage In The Rearview Mirror

by digby

Because this has worked out so well for us so far:

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said Wednesday that the Obama administration will attempt to protect homeowners and police the kind of paperwork fraud that led the nation’s largest banks to temporarily halt foreclosures this month, but added that the administration had yet to find anything fundamentally flawed in how large banks securitized home loans or how they foreclosed on them.

“Where any homeowner has been defrauded or denied the basic protections or rights they have under law, we will take actions to make sure the banks make them whole, and their rights will be protected and defended,” Donovan said at a Washington press briefing. “First and foremost, we are committed to accountability, so that everyone in the mortgage process — banks, mortgage servicers and other institutions — is following the law. If they have not followed the law, it’s our responsibility to make sure they’re held accountable.”

He added, however, that the administration is focused on ensuring future compliance, rather than on looking back to make sure homeowners and investors weren’t harmed during the reckless boom years. The administration is “committed to forcing institutions to change the way that they conduct business,” Obama’s top housing official said, “to make sure these problems don’t happen again.”

Well that’s a big relief. And I’m sure they won’t. And anyway, to get all prissy legal beagle on the finance people would end up threatening the system and that would be bad for all of us (especially the people who run it.) Of course, if anyone should suggest that some of the individuals who caused all this carnage might be required to pay a price for what they did just as a sort of warning for the future … well then, all bets are off. In fact, there are no bets. The financial firms are to be allowed to do whatever they choose or they’ll blow this whole place to smithereens. (That’s the “free enterprise” the Koch brothers and our other wealthy overlords are working overtime to protect.)

The deadbeat citizens, however, must be held accountable lest the country creates a monstrous moral hazard. Believe me, it’s not something that our dear leaders want to do. It’s just that no functioning society can allow average people to believe that they are more important than the wealthy owners who need to risk other people’s money for the good of the country. It’s tough love. We should be grateful for it.

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