Month: November 2010

Village Acid Trip: Broder edition

by digby

This may be the most absurd column David Broder has ever run. And that’s saying something. In fact think it may go beyond anything a pundit has ever written, diving headlong into a fiction so ridiculous you have to wonder if he’s joking — or insane:

What if Barack Obama is telling the truth about his own beliefs when he says that neither party by itself can realistically hope to solve the challenges facing the United States? Suppose he means it when he says that after the shellacking he and his fellow Democrats received in the midterm elections, he is ready and willing to hear the Republicans’ ideas for dealing with jobs, taxes, energy and even nuclear weapons control. I know that is supposing a lot – so much that it seems impossible. It’s more like the script for a Broadway musical than a plausible plotline for Washington. But nonetheless, suppose that he is serious when he says, over and over, as he did on Thanksgiving Day, that if we want to “accelerate this recovery” and attack the backlog of lost jobs, “we won’t do it as any one political party. We’ve got to do it as one people.” […]Suppose there is a chance that he is serious – that after two years of trying to govern through one party, a party that held commanding majorities in the House and Senate but now has lost them, two years with landmark accomplishments but ultimate frustration of his hopes to change Washington, he has reverted to his original philosophy of governing. What would Republicans do if they thought there was a chance of that being true? They would do what Ronald Reagan always recommended in dealing with the Russians: Trust but verify.

Evidently Broder really believes that it’s Obama who has been the obstinate partisan and the Republicans who have reason to mistrust his intentions when he says that he wants to work with them. The poor Republicans are once bitten twice shy and in order to carry out their mandate must take a leap of faith that he has changed.

Meanwhile, here on Planet Earth, this is what those poor put-upon Republicans are saying:

MCCONNELL: We need to be honest with the public. This election is about them, not us. And we need to treat this election as the first step in retaking the government. We need to say to everyone on Election Day, “Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job.” NATIONAL JOURNAL: What’s the job? MCCONNELL: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

A week later:

Over the past week, some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office, but the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill, to end the bailouts, cut spending and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things,” the Kentucky Republican will say. “We can hope the president will start listening to the electorate after Tuesday’s election. But we can’t plan on it.”

This seems pretty clear to me. Unless Obama agrees to repeal everything he did in the first two years and govern as a Tea Partier they will use any means necessary to ensure he doesn’t get a second term. Even some Republicans are startled by this:

“It’s not clear to me what it is,” said Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush who noted that this START treaty is not very different from previous ones negotiated and ratified under Republican presidents. “I’ve got to think that it’s the increasingly partisan nature and the desire for the president not to have a foreign policy victory.” In an attempt to rally bipartisan support for the treaty, the White House has enlisted the kind of GOP foreign policy wise men that Lugar exemplifies – among them former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James A. Baker. But they have had no success with members of their own party, and it has left them scratching their heads over the source of the GOP opposition.

You’d think Broder would at least be taken aback when “grown-ups” like Scowcroft lay the problem at the feet of Republicans. But in his world, it’s Obama who can’t be trusted.

We’ve seen up-is-downism before, in the run-up to Iraq. But this latest trip down the rabbit hole is one wild ride. Hardcore right wingers are now centrists, the pliable Democrats are the obstructionists, rich people are being oppressed as they get richer and richer, the economy is failing so we have to destroy it. I’m dizzy.

Update: John Danforth is dizzy too:

Not surprisingly, this insubordination has earned Lugar significant scorn within the Republican base, which now seems to value blind obedience over principled independent decision-making. In a New York Times profile of Lugar published today, former GOP Sen. John Danforth feared that the backlash against Lugar from his own party signals that the GOP has gone “far overboard” with no hope of turning back:

“If Dick Lugar,” said John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, “having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.” Mr. Danforth, who was first elected the same year as Mr. Lugar, added, “I’m glad Lugar’s there and I’m not.”

Danforth’s fears are not unfounded. Lugar, who is up for reelection in 2012, has already been targeted by tea party groups. “If I was Dick Lugar, I would certainly expect a challenge,” noted veteran political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. As Diane Hubbard, a spokeswoman for the Indianapolis Tea Party, told the Times, removing Lugar “will be a difficult challenge. But we do believe it’s doable, and we think the climate is right for it and we believe it is a must.” Indeed, asked about a potential tea party challenge motivated by his breaks with the GOP on START and other issues, Lugar suggested the party has drifted to the right while he has stayed steady, saying, “These are just areas where I’ve had stances for a long time.”

Drifted to the right? How’d that happen?
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Waiting For Prince Plutocrat

by digby

Oh dear, here comes another attempt at a Mushy Middle Party for people who only exist in the imaginations of extremely wealthy celebrities and political pundits. They’re calling it “No Labels” which I assumed at first was some sort of slumming trend for Fashionsitas. But no — it’s a bunch of people who just want everyone to be “sensible” (ensure that wealthy people are taken care of) without all the muss and fuss of dealing with the hoi polloi who actually give a damn about anything.

The most recent rumbling started a while back with noted bucket of lukewarm water Matt Miller, who I caught wistfully dreaming of a Billionaire Prince to come and save us from all this unpleasantness:

Here’s noted “centrist” Matt Miller:

MILLER: I would go for Mike Bloomberg and a billionaire to be named later because I think we need a kind of third force in this country. And I think once we get past November, the polarization and the sense of finger pointing and unproductiveness and sort of partisan pickiness is going to —

(CROSSTALK) SPITZER: But the notion that the plutocrats have not been represented — the threshold in that 100 million is clearly the billion dollar threshold.

MILLER: It would be nice if that wasn’t the case but in the system we have today, because of the lock the two parties have on ballot access and being able to actually get traction in the system, it would take somebody with a lot of money to try and get —

(CROSSTALK)

SAM SEDER, COMEDIAN: But what is a theory that somehow a third party president is going to be able to do more than any other president? I mean, what makes you think that the right is going to accept Bloomberg any more than they would accept Barack Obama?

MILLER: And I don’t know if they’re going to accept them yet. But right now, there’s such a vacuum in the debate because I think most of the country is not in the sort of 20 percent on each sides that both parties are locked into. And there’s such a wide open terrain for somebody who’s a common sense person who’s going to synthesize the best of liberal and conservative ideas. That finds no expression in public —

SPITZER: I think that’s the point as a matter of political analysis is right. There is a desperate need for somebody in the middle who can disregard either fringe that traditional politics would suggest. Sometimes —

SEDER: That’s not Barack Obama?

SPITZER: Look, I think that’s the debate. I think many of us think Barack Obama was trying to do that. But why would a third party candidate be able to get anything through Congress at all? That’s the real question.

MILLER: I think the first question is what would the campaign and the debate sound like? Because I think that would change the country. Perot in ’92 fundamentally changed the direction of the country because he showed there was a 20 percent constituency. And Bloomberg, look, I’m not counting for Bloomberg, but the idea of a candidate like that —

SPITZER: And Bloomberg who is a very popular mayor here in New York City, I think the problem he has is on many of the issues he is to much of the country way left, and frankly, to much of the country his views about Wall Street are far right. So I’m not sure if he actually brings that constituency the way you’re articulating it.

Now Miller’s little fantasy has become a “movement” among the chattering classes. Of course, it’s mostly conservative elites who are very uncomfortable with the prospect of Sarah and Todd Clampett coming to town and trashing the place. (And those tea people are just a touch crude, if you know what I mean.)But there are the inevitable third-party moneybags opportunists sniffing around, wondering if maybe this time they can buy themselves the White House.

Here’s Kathleen Parker, the Goldilocks of Georgetown, mooning over the possibilities:

When the porridge is either too hot or too cold, the moment for something in between is ripe. More Americans now self-identify as independent rather than Republican or Democrat, even though they may be forced by a lack of alternatives to vote in traditional ways. But what if there were an alternative? There’s little appealing about either party dominated by a base that bears little resemblance to who we are as a nation or the way most of us live our lives. [Don’t you love it when wealthy TV celebrities speak for the average American?] Yet moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans alike have been banished. Purged, really. Some of them have landed in the No Labels camp. Jun Choi, a Democratic former mayor of Edison, N.J., told the Wall Street Journal he lost because he wasn’t extreme enough. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire state senator, thinks she lost for being too moderate.

Right. The Tea Party successfully challenged numerous US Senators and dozens of House Members and a couple of low level unknown Democrats blame the hippies for their defeats. Therefore the two parties are equally nuts. This is Village thinking at its finest. The right wing has gone batshit insane, around the bend, fallen off a cliff — but the Democrats must be equally crazy or their world will be too topsy turvy to understand. How can it be possible that the right wingers are the radicals?

But this is where this silliness takes an ominous turn. She describes Congressman Bob Inglis’ forced departure at the hands of lunatic wingnuts and then holds up Lisa Murkowski’s successful challenge to Joe Miller as a potential answer to the problem:

She kept her seat by promoting ideas and solutions and by rebuking partisanship.

Alaskans are by nature independent and reliably rogue, as the nation has witnessed. Thus it may be too convenient to draw conclusions about a broader movement, but centrism has a place at the table by virtue of the sheer numbers of middle Americans, the depth of their disgust and the magnitude of our problems.

Ok, first of all, Murkowski rebuked “partisanship” for about a month because she needed Democratic votes to win. But she is a conservative to the core. So is Inglis (who had a 93.4 rating with the American Conservative Union.) They were both exceedingly loyal partisans, voting with the Party on all major initiatives, who were challenged by people who ran as outsiders with a whole different idea about what being “partisan” should mean. There’s a reason why the Tea Party gave itself its own name.

Unfortunately, instead of waking up the cognoscenti to the radical nature of the far right, these events have led them to take the easy way out and simply declare that hardcore conservatives are actually “centrists” now, further marginalizing liberalism. As you can see by that interview with Matt Miller, nobody except a hippie like Sam Sedar ever characterizes someone like Barack Obama as a centrist — even though that’s exactly what he is. The push is always, always to the right whenever anyone starts bellyaching about partisanship.

Bob Inglis may be a decent person compared to the right wing kooks of the Tea party, but he is as ideologically right wing as they come, despite what Parker says. (The fact that she uses his belief that climate change is real as a sign of his “centrism” should tell you everything you need to know about how far the goal posts have shifted.) Ideology in the political establishment is only relevant to the extent that it properly represents elite interests. (That can be from either Party, of course, although since the Democrats stand accused of electing a secret Muslim Socialist president, I’m guessing they are no longer considered reliable.)

What these people really seem to care about is temperament and style — an ability to fit in smoothly with the ruling class, to make it seem effortless, to make the rubes feel comfortable and make them feel good about being elites.(They really are the ones they’ve been waiting for.) They want someone who isn’t overly passionate, who doesn’t raise his voice, who takes care of business and move on to the next problem without a lot of political drama. What they want is a white version of Barack Obama and since, like Nixon going to China, only a conservative Republican can be that without provoking a backlash from conservative Republicans, a conservative Republican is what he must be.

Unfortunately, we live in a democracy and the rubes of all political stripes are up in arms. They want somebody whose going to fight for them. I don’t know who that’s going to be in 2012, but I’d be shocked if some plutocrat with a load of bull about “what works” catches fire any time soon. Nobody believes these people know “what works” anymore except a bunch of deluded Antoinettes babbling about centrism. They’ve never been more out of touch.

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Sisterhood Farcissism

by digby

Adele Stan makes a good point in this piece about Sarah Plain’s so-called feminism. It’s always irked me that she derides a movement that made it possible for her to become the success she is today, but there’s more to it than that. She picks and chooses from the things from which she has personally benefited and tosses aside all those from which she personally has no need —- like unfair pay and sexual violence. As Stan also points out, she isn’t operating as an empowered woman in a man’s world. She just a simple narcissist:

I have seen Palin derided in sexist terms, and called on progressives to cut the crap when I see it coming from our own. But I wouldn’t count on Palin to step up for a liberal feminist — unless Palin found a way to make it about Palin herself.

“There is a narcissism in our leaders in Washington today,” Palin writes in America By Heart (via the Huffington Post). “There’s a quasi-religious feeling to the message coming from them. They are trying to convince us that not only are they our saviors, but that we are our saviors… as candidate Obama proclaimed on Super Tuesday 2008, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.'”

Yet it’s Palin who has a so-called reality show, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” based around her own life in her home state. It’s hard to get more narcissistic than that. And it’s Palin who wants to reshape feminism in her own image — to hell with any woman who’s faced a different form of sexism than she has.

I cringe when I see some of the things people say about her too, and have also called out progressives for being jackasses. But that doesn’t make her a heroine either, especially when she’s so incredibly disrespectful and arrogant to her fellow females in similar situations.

Stan calls it “farcissism” which I think is just perfect.

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One Born Every Minute

by digby

Read the whole story here.

I’ve been caught out believing something stupid time or two. But the comments on this one are awesome. Its FOX. It’s what they do.

h/t to bb

Update: Fergawdsake. Did FOX Nation put the interns in charge over the week-end?

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The Polarization Era

by digby

John Judis on GOP triumphalism:

Has the rightward shift laid the groundwork for a new Republican majority?If the conservative trend among the electorate endures for a decade, yes, then Republicans will be back in the driving seat in American politics. But the conservative trend after 2008 was not the result of the gradual erosion of the liberal-moderate majority, but of the failure of the Obama administration to stem the downturn that began in 2008. If the economy revives, or if it doesn’t, and if a Republican president and Congress take office in 2012 and fail to revive it, then the trend toward conservatism will halt, and you may even see the kind of shift leftward that took place in 2006 and 2008. Of course, Cost could argue that the kind of programs that Republicans are proposing will revive the economy and enjoy the same kind of popularity as social security. I have my doubts that these programs, which mostly consist of turning back the Keynesian clock, will do the trick.

Cost argues that redistricting, which will be under Republican control in many states, could help to ensure a GOP majority in Congress. Certainly it’ll help, but the Democratic redistricting as a result of the 1990 elections didn’t prevent Republicans from capturing the House and the Senate in 1994. As I suggested in my post-election piece, the Obama administration’s failure to seize the political opportunity afforded by the Great Recession has not necessarily opened the way to a new Republican majority. More likely, it will lead to a period where the two parties exchange power, and where neither can establish a long-lasting majority.

I greatly suspect that will be the case. The nation (and the world) is in transition and the system and the elites who run it have proven to be craven or incompetent to navigate it. Until either circumstances change or one Party is able to make a lasting case for its philosophy (or both) we are going to be fighting this out election to election. Everybody just needs to fasten their seat belts and prepare for a bumpy flight.

So please, let’s not hear any more talk of “realignments.” I think it’s quite clear that we don’t know we’ve had a realignment until long after it’s taken place, so it’s just premature triumphalism on the part of both parties when they do it. And it leads to political errors, as we saw in 2009.

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Modestly Proposing Austerity

by digby

Damn Paul Krugman. I was halfway through what I imagines to be a dazzling riff on “A Modest Proposal” last night when I gave up (due to food stupor) and woke up this morning to his NY Times column on Ireland. Oh well, his is far more enlightening, as you might imagine:

The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians. The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.

Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.

Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, even as revenues plunged, the nation’s creditworthiness was put in doubt. So Ireland tried to reassure the markets with a harsh program of spending cuts.

Step back for a minute and think about that. These debts were incurred, not to pay for public programs, but by private wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit. Yet ordinary Irish citizens are now bearing the burden of those debts.

Or to be more accurate, they’re bearing a burden much larger than the debt — because those spending cuts have caused a severe recession so that in addition to taking on the banks’ debts, the Irish are suffering from plunging incomes and high unemployment.

But there is no alternative, say the serious people: all of this is necessary to restore confidence.

Read thewhole thing

I will just add this little side note, to outrage you even more:

George Osborne, the Chancellor, wants backing from EU finance ministers before imposing new bank bonus rules, in what is being seen as a further attempt to downplay the Government’s “tough on banks” stance in response to City pressure.

The move comes as it has emerged that officials are in talks with the banks over a contribution of around £1bn to a “Big Society bank”, that would go towards community projects in exchange for the Government quietly agreeing not to impose new rules without international agreement. Critics have reacted furiously, accusing the Government of “going soft”, despite pledging a “get tough” stance on banks in the run-up to the General Election.

Austerity is for the little people who must learn to take their medicine like good parasites. Bankers cannot be subjected to any restrictions whatsoever because then there will be “uncertainty.”

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Tea Bag Stalker

by digby

I am so grateful that I’m not out in the dating world if this is what you have to deal with:

State Rep. Tom Hackbarth was stopped by police earlier this month in the Planned Parenthood parking lot in Highland Park after he was spotted with gun near his waistband, according to a story in the Star Tribune.

Hackbarth, R-Cedar, was stopped by police on Nov. 16 after a security guard noticed his gun. Hackbarth was in the Planned Parenthood lot after hours. Police ordered him out of his car at gunpoint, handcuffed him and questioned him before taking his gun.

Hackbarth, who has a conceal and carry permit, told the Star Tribune that he is not familiar with the Highland Park area and he didn’t know he was at Planned Parenthood when he pulled into the empty lot.

“I didn’t even know it was Planned Parenthood,” he said. “I fully understand why they were upset.”

Hackbarth said he was in Highland Park to look for a woman he met online.

From the Star Tribune:

“Hackbarth said he had coffee with the woman on Nov. 15, and asked her to dinner the next night but she told him she couldn’t because of a commitment she had with a female friend in Highland Park. Hackbarth said he felt that she might have been seeing a man instead, so he parked his car and walked around the block looking for her car.”

“I was not a jealous boyfriend,” said Hackbarth, who is in the process of divorcing his wife of 25 years. “I was just trying to check up on her. It’s totally a misunderstanding.”

So he’s a right wing zealot who’s stalking a woman he’s just met with a loaded gun and lands in a Planned Parenthood parking lot? Sounds right.

Here’s a helpful hint for those of you doing computer dating: filter for Republican politicians. It could save you all kinds of problems.

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The Assassination Of Dr Tiller

by digby

If you didn’t get a chance to see Rachel Maddow’s documentary “The Assassination of Dr Tiller” last night, here it is, in three parts. Watch it and then tell me how it can possibly be that Barack Obama was smeared for his alleged association with an old and long ago retired 60s radical while virtually every member of the GOP has one degree of separation from these contemporary terrorists?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Thanks: Part III

by digby

Reader James Armstrong sent this in. I thought it was a nice way to think about this from a slightly different perspective:

The original American Thanksgivings were religious ceremonies most
likely derived from old-world harvest festivals, as the Pilgrims
gave thanks to their god for the abundance of food in the new world.

The harvest festival is a good festival, it celebrates man’s ability
to provide for itself. So, a modern atheist/socialist can still
celebrate a modern Thanksgiving. In that, I give thanks to:

I give thanks to the many workers, both documented and undocumented,
who harvest the fields that provide us our food from farms, that
keep us from starvation.

I give thanks to those farmers who dedicate themselves to sustainable
farming techniques, so this bounty will not just be mine, but will
be there for generations in the future.

I give thanks to people like Norman Borlaug, who won the 1970 Peace
Prize for advances in wheat harvests, and scientists like him,
who have helped make it easier to feed the world.

I give thanks to those who transport the food — the loaders,
truckers, train engineers and signalmen, and others — responsible
for getting fresh meat and produce to outlets throughout the world.

I also give thanks to those who are dedicated to the locavore
movement, where freshness is not dependent on anything but time
and speed to market, and where you know the plans are freshly picked.

I give thanks to those merchants who accept the deliveries and
who provide us the opportunity to buy from the cornupoia of the
American harvest.

I thank those few thankless food inspectors — too few and overworked
— who are straining to keep the food supply as safe as they can.

And, finally, I give thanks to those who prepare and serve the meals
we eat. If it is my own cooking, I thank those who came before
and taught me how to cook, and who derived the recipes I use.
When others cook, I thank them for the work they do for me.

It is for these workers, scholars, and ordinary people to whom I
am thankful on this day of Thanksgiving, 25 November, 2010.

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Thanks Part II

by digby

I watch a lot of cable news (so you don’t have to) and have heard so much conventional wisdom by now that I can recite entire exchanges without even turning the sound on. It’s always the same people, saying the same things.

That’s why today I’m thankful for Chris Hayes, who does consistently unexpected and interesting work both in print and on television. Filling in for Lawrence O’Donnell last night, he hosted a segment that made me come in from the kitchen while I was preparing dinner, sit down and pay attention. It was an extended analysis of the Obama administration from a perspective you rarely see fully aired on television(although those of us who read blogs are familiar with it.)

Here’s the segment:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thanks Chris, for the most interesting panel discussion I’ve seen on cable in quite some time.

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