Month: November 2010

Debt Stalkers

by digby

I have been wondering for some time when reports of this kind of behavior were going to burble to the surface. At a time when the mortgage companies are behaving like con men, you just know that the bottom feeders in the debt collection business are doing far worse:

The relentless phone calls were one thing, the Facebook messages were another.

Melanie Beacham, of St. Petersburg, Fla., said she fell behind in her car payments after falling ill, and she contacted MarkOne Financial to say she would make a payment when she could.

Still, she kept getting up to 20 phone calls a day from the lender and said it contacted her sister in Georgia and other relatives via Facebook.

Beacham contacted a lawyer, Billy Howard, who filed a lawsuit against MarkOne, asking a judge to ban the company from using social networking sites like Facebook to contact Beacham’s friends about her debt, according to WTSP.com.

“Now Facebook does a debt collector’s work for them,” Howard said. “Now it’s not only family members, it’s all of your associates. It’s a very powerful tool for debt collectors to use.”

You can make them stop if you hire a lawyer and refer all calls to him or her. Unfortunately, lawyers cost money.

The law allows these debt collectors to contact your friends, family and neighbors to try to “find” you, but the purpose is to embarrass you publicly and force you to pay to make it stop. I would imagine there’s a whole lot of that going around right now. Of course, with so many people going bankrupt and broke these days, there isn’t the stigma there used to be either. I don’t think that’s as effective as it used to be. But it’s creepy.

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Only True Christians Need Apply

by digby

Say it isn’t so:

In Texas, a leadership battle is brewing over the election of the next state Speaker of the House. State Rep. Joe Straus (R-TX) appears to have the votes to win, but a coalition of Tea Party and right-wing Republican groups — including the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Austin Tea Party Patriots, the Texas Pastor Council, and Texas Eagle Forum — are staging an effort to elect a more radical right Speaker. This morning, the Dallas Morning News reported that several of the Tea Party activists in the aforementioned coalition have been circulating e-mails with anti-Semitic messages against Strauss, who is Jewish:

– “Straus is going down in Jesus’ name,” said one e-mail, whose origins were unclear. – Straus “clearly lacks the moral compass to be speaker,” said another, written by Southeast Texas conservative activist Peter Morrison. A Morrison e-mail said that Straus’ rabbi sits on a Planned Parenthood board and then pointed out that Straus’ opponents in the Speaker’s race “are Christians and true conservatives.” Morrison is a contributor to the white supremacy website VDARE. – The Tea Party-backed groups are now running anti-Straus robo-calls and e-mails demanding a “true Christian speaker,” reports News 8 Austin. – The Quorum Report, an online newsletter, reported extensively late Monday on e-mails that mentioned Straus’ Judaism, his rabbi and the Christian faith of his House critics, who include Rep. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola. – Patrick Brendel reported that David Barton, leader of the group WallBuilders, has helped organize much of the anti-Straus campaign. Barton is a frequent contributor to the Glenn Beck program. – Kaufman County Tea Party Chairman Ray Myers sent an e-mail last week praising a Straus opponent as “a Christian Conservative who decided not to be pushed around by the Joe Straus thugs.”

These Tea Party groups work within the larger mainstream conservative movement. Myers, Morrison, and others have signed letters and worked in conjunction with major right-wing and Republican groups, like Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity, funded and financed by billionaires David and Charles Koch, is one of the most prominent conservative organizations in the country. Its leader, Tim Phillips, ran a similarly anti-Semitic campaign before being asked by David Koch to manage Americans for Prosperity.

Far be it for me to assume that the Tea Partiers are anything but fine upstanding Real Americans who only care about low taxes and the constitution. This is all a terrible smear and it’s wrong of me to even pass it on.

Let’s just call this yet another example of my intemperate leftism and move along, shall we?

Update: Good God. Are people really this unaware?

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Oppression Mirror

by digby

Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones has dug into the latest survey on the tea party and come up with some interesting data:

So another pollster has attempted to address the question of just how racist the tea party movement really is. OK, that’s not exactly what the new Public Religion Research Institute survey set out to do, but that’s basically one of the most interesting take-aways. In a report published today on the role of religion in the 2010 elections, the institute released its findings from a 2010 post-election “American values survey” that asked, among other things, whether respondents believe that white people face significant discrimination. It’s sort of a loaded question, but still a less direct way of asking people about their views on race.

Tea party critics won’t be surprised to hear that 61 percent of people who identify with the movement said discrimination against whites “is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” (White evangelicals also saw doors slamming in the faces of white people, with 57 percent agreeing that discrimination against people like themselves was equal to that against minorities.) That view was shared by only 28 percent of Democrats and about half of independents. Republicans were closer to the tea party on that question, with 56 percent agreeing that discrimination against whites is a big problem.

Just as tea partiers think claims of discrimination against minorities are overrated, they also believe by a 6 in 10 margin that the government has paid too much attention to them—and to women’s problems, too. While most Americans, according to the survey, believe that discrimination is still a significant problem for women, more than 58 percent of tea partiers think that women no longer face discrimination in the US.

I think it would be interesting to ask them what they consider discrimination. I would guess that some of them think Affirmative Action is discrimination, and that’s not an intellectually incoherent view. Liberals take the position that past discrimination makes it necessary to tilt the playing field to racial minorities and women for them to get an even break, but it’s not unreasonable to take to the opposite view. However, I’m not sure that’s the main thrust of their complaint. I think they see that taxation is discrimination because the government redistributes money to people they don’t believe deserve it.

And certainly conservative Christians believe they are discriminated against by the first amendment’s prohibition against establishment of religion. They really do believe that America is a “Christian nation” and that the government should be proselytizing on behalf of Christianity.

Mencimer rightly points out that the tea partiers seem to have a much rosier view of the state of American equality, at least for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Indeed, they think that those people are now on top and are actively discriminating against whites, particularly white men. Considering the numbers of women and minorities in positions of power, that’s fairly ridiculous, but I suspect they really do believe it.

This lastfinding was rather startling when I first read it, but after thinking about it for a while, I can see how this works:

Three-quarters of them also believe that their God has granted the U.S. a special role in the world, a view that makes them much more inclined than other Americans to say that torture is justified in some cases.

If our country is literally guided by God, then by definition, anything we do is right, including torture. And this is particularly true when the tortured are Muslims, who the Tea Partiers see as enemies of Christianity and America. In fact, looking back on it, I think the bizarre locution that Bush used whenever asked about this — “America doesn’t torture” — might have been heard as a dogwhistle. We don’t “torture” because torture is wrong and America, being God’s chosen country, cannot be wrong. Therefore, nothing our government does can be considered torture.

The whole report is here and it’s fascinating.

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The Healthcare Is Too Damned High

by digby

More deficit fever from the new CNN poll:

Forty-nine percent of people questioned in the poll say the tax cuts should be extended for families making less than $250,000 a year, with another 15 percent saying the cuts should not be extended for anyone. That leaves 35 percent who favor an extension of the tax cuts for all Americans regardless of how much money they make…

“Among the general public, Republicans and Democrats agree that the tax cuts should be extended, but they differ on who should benefit,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Two-thirds of Democrats think that the tax cuts should be limited to families making less than $250,000. Fifty percent of Republicans think the tax cuts should be extended regardless of income.”

So, it’s clear that if the Democrat capitulate on this, it will prove that they are servants of the top 2% and the Tea Party. That’s our new governing coalition regardless of the fact that only the House is in GOP hands. It’s a very instructive number.

But here’s where movement conservatism’s incoherence really pays off for the right:

The survey also indicates that 56 percent say that tax cuts and deficit reduction can be accomplished at the same time, with just over four in ten saying they disagree.

“Deficit reduction is important to many legislators, but most Americans probably think it should not stand in the way of lower taxes,” adds Holland.

I’m guessing that a fair number of those 56% believe that “deficit” is a code word for “spending on stuff I don’t like”, they’ve heard a lot of Very Serious People saying for years that if you lower taxes it means the government gets more revenue or they have bought into the notion that rich people are the “producers” and they can’t create any jobs if they have to pay personal income tax. And I think a lot of people have just come to believe the word “deficit” stands for bad economy and unemployment, another triumph of right wing messaging because as we know, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” — they just want to cut taxes and the safety net.

And then there’s this one:

Another battle on Capitol Hill concerns the “don’t ask, don’t tell”law, which bans openly gay troops for serving in the military. A possible vote on repealing the measure is being debated by lawmakers.

According to the poll, more than seven in ten Americans think that people who are openly gay or lesbian should be allowed to serve in the military, with 23 percent opposed.

If the Tea Party isn’t running the country there is no reason that this shouldn’t pass. Health care repeal too:

Health care is unlikely to re-emerge while the Democrats control both sides of Capitol Hill, but it will probably do so next year, when the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives and reduce the Democrats’ majority in the Senate.

The poll indicates the public continues to be split right down the middle on whether the health care bill passed into law earlier this year should be repealed: Forty-nine percent say it should; 48 percent say no. Of that 48 percent, 24 percent think that Congress should make additional changes to increase the government’s involvement in the nation’s health care system; 24 percent just want to leave well enough alone.

If there’s an even split, with the Democrats holding one House of congress and the presidency, it shouldn’t even make it on to the agenda right now because presumably the president would veto any bill that didn’t at least maintain the status quo. We’ll see how that goes over the next two years. If it becomes a huge battle, we’ll know the Tea Party is in the driver’s seat.

These three issues are only on the agenda because about 30% of the country — the far right — are putting it there. These are, by the way, the same people who insisted that Obama, who won with an outright majority and a mandate, was governing “against the will of the people” for the past two years.

The Tea Party believes that they represent a majority of the people in America. And from what I can gather, despite the polling, the Villagers all believe it to. I’m guessing it’s because they look like what these Villagers see as being Real Americans as opposed to the scruffy coalition of lefty white urban dwellers, African Americans and Hispanics, hipsters and small town/suburban liberals who go against the grain. That coalition wasn’t featured in the Leave It To Beaver imaginations of TV shows of the past, so it can’t be considered the true representation of the majority. Except it is.

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Jobs=Deficit Reduction

by digby

It’s good to start the morning with a laugh, isn’t it? Sometimes it can carry you through the whole day in a lighter mood. Of course, there’s also the cynical, “you’ve got to be kidding me” chuckle, which sets a slightly different tone. The second is what I felt a few minutes ago when I opened my NY Times and saw this headline, one I’ve been waiting to see from someone for months:

One Way to Trim Deficit: Cultivate Growth
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Economic growth, if it is not cut, would go a long way toward reducing the deficit.

Well, no kidding. I especially like the “if it’s not cut” part. From someone who has recently been pounding the austerity drum, this is quite a breakthrough.

Why Democrats haven’t been saying jobs=deficit reduction on a loop, I don’t know. I guess they figure it’s just too complicated to explain that when people aren’t working they aren’t paying taxes so the government doesn’t have as much money. If government spends money to help people get back to work, it will be paid back when those people get jobs and pay their taxes. Et voila, deficit reduction. (See: “the 1990s”)

Obviously, health care costs need to be controlled long term, and who knows if it’s possible to get that level of growth again. But this current so-called crisis is a growth problem, first and foremost, and if the government would do the virtuous job of stimulating the economy to create jobs, they would also be creating policies to reduce the deficit. As Sarah Palin would say, it’s just “common sense.”

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This Is What they Do

by digby

It is clear to me that most people in journalism and (non-right wing) blogging do not listen to right wing talk radio very often and simply cannot believe it when critics report what they are saying. For instance, Andrew Sullivan seems to think this comment by Limbaugh is beyond the pale. It is. But it is so commonplace as to nearly be unworthy of mention by people who listen to his show regularly. Indeed, the idea that it’s particularly shocking because it’s “self-conscious” is laughable. That’s his whole schtick. Just this week he’s been winking and chuckling about this “Driving Miss Nancy” theme, sarcastically pretending that he’s sticking up for the African American Clyburn, when it’s quite obvious he’s playing to his bigoted and sexist listeners.

I realize that it’s hard to believe that Americans are this obnoxious. It’s probably even harder to believe they are paid hundreds of millions of dollars to promote this bigotry on the radio to millions of other Americans, but they are — they are speaking the language of eliminationism and hate day after day after day. If it soothes you to believe that those who are alarmed by that are the intemperate ones so be it, but it doesn’t change what they are doing or the effect it’s had on our politics.

Update: Here’s another example. Joe Barton, Glenn Beck’s black robed regiment pastor and talk show host said this just today:

Barton: If there’s a group in America that is hypersensitive, it is homosexuals. I mean, they got a short fuse on everything. You’re a homophobe, you’re a whatever and anything you say or do, they interpret as coming after them.

And so they really have a short fuse and a great example is, remember back a few weeks ago we had Pastor Hutcherson on and remember that article he did in Townhall and WorldNetDaily – “Transexual, Transgender, and Transfats” – and he’s talking about how the government thinks it should regulate that bad for our health. Well it needs to read its own website and look what it says about homosexuality and how bad that is for health and yet they encourage that, they don’t regulate it.

Well I now found out that we have a number of people who listen to “Wallbuilders Live” who I didn’t know about: Alan Colmes and Keith Olbermann and MSNBC and all these folks. Because when we said that, they came after me in unbelievable ways.

MSNBC called and they had me posted on the front page and they were doing programs on what I said – I’m repeating Hutcherson, you know, I’m just reading an article. But it was so funny. They wanted me to come on NBC and appear on … but I didn’t want to talk to their twelve viewers so I left that.

You just make a comment like that, you just repeat an article that Pastor Hutcherson did and, man, they have come after me and the death threats, you know I got all of these death threats.

These guys are wacky. They are absolutely wacky and it’s like they look for ways to get rejected so they can so “you did that because I’m homosexual.” No, I did that because you’re a jerk. And literally, if you get this kick me mentality, it’s like you wear a sign that says “kick me” and you behave in such a way that people want to kick you.

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Making it Work

by digby

Yglesias, Atrios and DeLong all take Obama to task for his somewhat bizarre statement that he lost altitude because they were so obsessively focused on policy that they didn’t do the politics well or communicate successfully to the public. It should be fairly obvious that regardless of the politics, if your policies don’t succeed you’ve got trouble.

Yglesias:

[P]olitical success and policy success are deeply intertwined in a recession, and a White House that thinks “too much policy focus” has been its big sin is unlikely to turn things around.

I would also take issue with the premise itself. If the administration was obsessed with policy –particularly economic policy — in the early months it didn’t seem that way on the outside. In fact, it seemed as if they were all over the place, deciding to take on every possible issue all at once, holding summits and wading into controversies one after the other. There was an ADHD quality to it, and I didn’t get the sense (although that may not have been correct) that they were deeply engaged, even on health care, which was mired in the congress. I’m not necessarily faulting them for that, but I do remember thinking at one point during the hysterical Tea Party summer of 2009 when I saw that the president had done a commercial for the new TNT late night talk show with George Lopez, that they might want to tighten their focus a little bit. It seemed like he was everywhere but it all was vague and unformed even though Democrats were insisting that he was the most accomplished president the country had ever seen.

But then, I’m not sure that he was really saying that they shouldn’t have been hunkered down in the White house for two years. He may have been saying that they did a poor job explaining their policies. But that problem goes back to the campaign when Obama was remarkably unwilling to admit to any ideology and insisted that he was a pragmatic “technocrat” who just believed in “what worked.” When you sell yourself like that, I don’t think talking is going to get the job done or give people any sense of patience or investment in what you’re trying to do. If you’re just a mechanic, they don’t want to hear about your problems, they just want you to fix the damned thing.

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Every Little Bit Helps

by tristero

Like many of you, I my desire to see the the Bush administration brought to justice – very high – is in inverse proportion to my sense that it will happen – very low.

Still, this can only help.

Giving Away Democracy

by digby

A Tennessee lawmaker apologized after coming under fire for calling pregnant immigrants “rats” who go out and multiply because he was told that the federal government requires that pre-natal care be given to fetuses on American soil. This was incorrect information. Undocumented immigrants, the “rats” in which the “anchor babies” live before they are “dropped,” are not allowed to have federally funded pre-natal care. (Where are the “life begins at conception” folks on this one, I wonder?)

Evidently, it took him a while and he initially refused, but eventually he was pressured into issuing a statement in which he said he was “truly sorry.” But one of the comments to the story was interesting because I think it really crystallizes the underlying belief system of the Tea partiers:

Maybe he should have said “breed like bunnies”, therefore implying all the cute and fuzzy wholesomeness that is associated with illegal immigration. Yes, this country was built on immigrants’ backs, but not all of them were let in. The ones that were allowed in came in legally, contributed to society, paid taxes, LEARNED ENGLISH, and made the USA a great place to live. To start your journey here with an illegal act simply sets you up to continue illegal acts, such as working illegally and taking a job away from someone who is here legally, not paying taxes, not paying for food, housing, or medical care, and pumping out as many new citizens as possible so that they can support you in your old age. And I for one am tired of not having what I earned because it is being given away to those who have not earned what they have, but they are certainly glad to put out their hand to take it.

ALL illegal aliens need to go, not just any one ethnic group. And having the rule that says being born here makes you a citizen is a loophole within a loophole, nothing else. That needs to be repealed, first and foremost. What happened to taking a test, and proving your allegiance and loyalty before you became a citizen, and then being given all the rights and priveleges that come with it? Democracy is earned, not granted. and I find it totally ironic that it is the Democrats who are trying to give it away……

Apparently, there is only so much democracy and freedom to go around and those damned Democrats are taking it away from the one’s who’ve earned it by being born here and giving it to those who don’t deserve it.

This is the central gripe of the American conservative tribe. What’s sad is that these fine folk who are looking down on the “illegals” and blaming them for taking their hard earned money aren’t completely deluded, it’s just that they’re looking in the wrong direction. It isn’t the “illegals” coming here to work for shit money at shitty jobs who are screwing them over. It’s the wealthy robber barons who are shipping their jobs overseas and buying up politicians by the roomful to help them steal Americans’ property right out from under them.

But that’s an old story. And there’s no telling these folks that they are blaming the wrong people because everything in them says that people who speak a different language or have a different color skin are the ones to fear. A certain number of Americans just can’t get past that. Thankfully that number is shrinking — but it’s shrinking more slowly than an awful lot of people want to admit.

h/t to bb

Tribal Dancing With The Stars

by digby

Yes, this, from Amanda Marcotte:

For anyone who has any doubts that the main engine of the vicousness of the American political landscape is a pure culture war, I give to you the case of Bristol Palin hanging in on Dancing With the Stars. Palin is making a career out of conservative America using her to demonstrate that what matters most to them is that you’re a member of their tribe. You can break their strict sexual rules, and they’ll embrace you. You can have no talent whatsoever, and they’ll promote you. Just so long as you’re in the tribe. It’s how George W. Bush got to be president, so this shouldn’t be so shocking. Especially when you consider that cheeseball fare like Dancing With The Stars draws more Republican viewers than Democratic ones.

Tribal/cultural war is the only explanation. If this was actually about politics, it would only be about politics. Who wins on Dancing With the Stars has exactly zero impact on policy decision-making in Washington. It has nothing to do with those things that we keep hearing motivate the Tea Party–tax rates, “fiscal conservatism,” the auto bailout. But it has everything to do with scoring points in the ongoing war of sticking it to those latte-drinking liberals, who sneeringly believe the spawn of the martyred Sarah Palin shouldn’t win because she’s not good enough. The nerve!

Consider that the folks who are organizing to keep Bristol Palin on the show are easy to set off on rants about the evils of affirmative action, and much of what defines the current political landscape will become all too clear.

It’s been clear to me for some time that most of American politics is tribal and this is a perfect example of the phenomenon. And frankly, I’m fairly sure that liberals would rally around Sasha or Malia the same way although liberals wouldn’t simultaneously rail against affirmative action and take huge amounts of pride in their rugged individualism and ability to make it without any communal support and it’s doubtful they would see it as a perfect rebuke to conservative conspiracy that’s ruining America (although they probably should.)Liberals would root for the girls because they like them.

The big difference is that the conservatives would be staging a monumental hissy fit saying the voting is rigged and that Dancing With The Stars is a socialist, Soros funded conspiracy to ruin the competitive spirit of American youth. They know how to translate these tribal events into angry politics and liberals don’t.

But yeah, it’s tribal. What else is new?

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