Month: December 2010

Nixonian Hate Talk

by digby

When I was a kid, this kind of talk was common, everyday speech for many, many people. The fact that so many people are appalled today is a very big sign of progress.

But anyone who thinks that this kind of thinking has died out are kidding themselves. It is, after all, exactly how the recent Republican Tea Party candidate for New York state felt comfortable communicating with dozens of email correspondents. Here’s an example of the every day stuff he was sending around to his pals:

The explanations now are different and it’s morphed into a new aggrieved sense of oppression. Unlike Nixon who thought that black would have to “evolve” more before they could be considered equal to whites, Paladino thinks they’re overly sensitive and tribal and refuse to do what’s best for their kids. White people’s inability to challenge their power due to political incorrectness is “one of our society’s tragedies.” This is how he explained himself when called out for his racism:

Jim, i apologize to you everyone if that is offensive, to me it’s just humor. i’m not a racist and have never related obama’s color to my political distaste for him. i just feel he is a very liberal lightweight who will be unable to make the decisions that the challenges of the future will demand. i also feel that bush is an ass and will go down as the worst president in history.

i’m not sensitive to ethnic humor, dago spic, polack, whatever we hear humor every day. i think the oversensitivity to black/white is wrong and in itself demeaning. political correctness as people choose to define it is demeaning… one of our society’s tragedies is our reluctance to call out black leaders because of political correctness. i publicly stated that our school superintendent was selected because he was black. it was a fact and it was wrong for black leaders to put a weak totally dysfunctional person into a job that required the best person to help our inner city kids that dooms them from 1st grade to a shattered life. that’s exactly what’s wrong with the political correctness bullshit. Is it right or wrong that 96% of black voters for for the black guy rather than the most competent guy black or white?

respect for each other means we can laugh together no matter what the topic or issue. we can dump on each other or be self-deprecating but we should always be honest and real. I’m uninhibited and probably a little out of the box but mean no harm to anyone except the bad guys. truth, justice, apple pie, motherhood, the wheels on the bus go round and round

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You can call this guy a crackpot all you want. But he got the nomination of the Republican Party to be the Governor of the state. He lost but I think Nixon might have lost if his language and expressions were public knowledge. people didn’t particularly want their leaders to be crude racist scumbags even back then. But the idea that these people have disappeared is just wrong. They are still around and they are still in politics and some of them are in high office. Like Nixon before them, they are just keeping their mouths shut in public.

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Et tu, Holder?

by digby

Meanwhile, here in the states:

“Well the investigation that we have with regard to the WikiLeaks matter is something that is ongoing it’s an active very serious investigation,” Holder said in response to a question about the possible prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for violating the Espionage Act.

Because it is an ongoing investigation, Holder would not discuss specifics, saying only the main stream media that published much of the same information is not as culpable as WikiLeaks.

“They acted, I think, in a responsible way so I think that is at least one of the distinctions,” he said.

It is misleading, to say the least, that he didn’t make the distinctions between the early releases and this latest one that’s caused so much furor, since on these Wikileaks has worked in concert, every step of the way, with the mainstream media and have acted in every way as responsibly as any of the papers. Why this fact is being widely ignored by officials and the media even at this late date can only be attributed to a desire to hide the truth.(The example of TIME Magazine’s egregious “he said/she said” approach to this is one for the books.)

Now, perhaps Holder is talking about the fact that the NY Times has been running its stories past the White House for approval, which is rather unusual. However, it should be remembered that Wikileaks asked the government to help them redact documents and the government refused. (They don’t negotiate with terrorists dontcha know.)

It’s very, very disappointing to see the Attorney General of the United States distort reality this way by implying that Wikileaks is doing something that the papers are not. He sounds like those right wing politicians of yesteryear who insisted that the activists and civil rights workers of the day were all communists. It was bullshit, but it served its purpose at the time. History has not been kind to them, however.

And I cannot for the life of me understand why so many journalists are so complaisant about these threats against Wikileaks. Do they honestly think it can’t happen to them? Why?

In other Wikileaks news:

The Vatican refused to allow its officials to testify before an Irish commission investigating the clerical abuse of children and was angered when they were summoned from Rome, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks reveal.

Requests for information from the 2009 Murphy commission into sexual and physical abuse by clergy “offended many in the Vatican” who felt that the Irish government had “failed to respect and protect Vatican sovereignty during the investigations”, a cable says.

First of all, let’s contemplate secrets for a moment shall we? The kinds of secrets that powerful institutions keep to protect themselves from being exposed as the hypocritical, corrupt and depraved institutions they are. It sure seems as we’ve seen an awful lot of this lately, doesn’t it? Perhaps we should think a little bit less about how dangerous it is that these secrets are being revealed and a little bit more about how dangerous it is if they aren’t.

Second of all, can someone please explain to me why the catholic Church still has “sovereignty”? I realize that there was a time a few centuries back when this made some sense. But this just seems like a pedophile protection racket at this point. Why should anyone recognize a particular church’s “sovereignty” in this day and age?

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Activism 21st century style

by digby

Ken at Down With Tyranny writes:

The above clip of a 15-year-old British student fighting back is getting a lot of attention, and understandably so. I should add that it’s attracting a certain amount of backlash from people who dismiss him as a snotty young elitist, calling police “stupid.” It’s an accusation that seems to me made by people who are too lazy and/or senseless to watch what’s before their eyes. The speaker is talking about police who, at least in his view, are serving as mindlessly thuggish, violent enforcers of an authoritarian regime.

It helps that the U.S. is a country now in the throes of a hatred for knowledge, education, and the pursuit of understanding of the world around us, amounting to a worship of ignorance and imbecility, all of which handsomely serves the economic interests of the people who increasingly own us, or at least act as if they do.

read on ..

h/t to TS

The Next Hostages

by digby

I wrote the other day about the GOP congress’s stated goal to make the Hyde Amendment permanent. Now it appears they are going to try to amend the health care bill to exclude any subsidies from going to health plans that offer coverage for abortion (even though the plan already calls for women to pay for that coverage themselves.)

None of this should be surprising to anyone who has followed the Tea Party. They were culture warriors long before they because born again deficit hawks. But whyile these supposed enemies of debt aren’t exactly raising a fit about the millionaires tax cuts, they aren’t going to settle for nothing. After all, Reagan already proved “deficits don’t matter.” Culture war victories are their due.

I sure wish that I felt more confident that the administration would hold the line, but I suspect that even the Tea Baggers have learned that you can pretty much always package a deal in such a way that the president will sign on as long as liberals are the ones that don’t like it. And I’m guessing choice is one of those winning items. If they’re smart, they’ll put it together with something that helps sick kids so they can really twist Democrats into pretzels.

But make no mistake, it’s the culture war, wedge issues that really animate the Tea Party, not all that dreary old stuff about tax codes and deficits. And they’re going to want their due.

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God’s Work

by digby

James Fallows reacts to Peter Orszag going to work at Citi with shock and indignation — reactions which should be considered decent and obvious but in our twisted world are considered somewhat unsophisticated. And I think it’s the result of rampant Randism among the plutocrats and the political class that serves them. I suspect that Peter Orszag quite sincerely believes that working at Citi is serving the country. He will be doing just as much to spur the economy and bring Morning to America by working for a huge financial firm as for the government — bankers and CEOs are the heroes who must lead us out of this big mess:

“We’re very important,” he says, abandoning self-flagellation. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.” To drive home his point, he makes a remarkably bold claim. “We have a social purpose.”

[…]

Does Blankfein not acknowledge that it is maddening for most of us to watch Goldman gobble up so much cash while we struggle? Quite the opposite. He insists we should be celebrating his bank’s success, not condemning it. “Everybody should be, frankly, happy,” he says. Can he be serious? Deadly. Goldman’s performance, he argues, is the firmest indication of a nascent economic recovery that will benefit not just him and his firm but all of us. “The financial system led us into the crisis and it will lead us out.”

Blankfein goes on to say something equally audacious. We should welcome the return of titanic paydays at Goldman. Goldman is exempt from President Barack Obama’s cap on bonuses because it has paid back bail-out cash. Paying top dollar to recruit and retain the best bankers won’t sink the system, he claims, but save it. Performance-related pay is a guarantee of high-quality responsible banking…

Okay, forget bail-outs, forget bonuses, forget all the money stuff, if you can. Surely Blankfein cannot dodge the playwright David Hare? Through his latest work, The Power of Yes, which tackles the issue of the credit crunch, Hare argues that it is “blackmail” to say that there cannot be a recovery unless we let bankers get on with what they have always done and pay themselves squillions. It’s like what the miners did in the 1970s, only this time the National Union of Mineworkers is the City and Wall Street. Blankfein has no time for such soft talk. Bankers are not miners. “I’ve got news for you,” he shoots back, eyes narrowing. “If the financial system goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else’s is going down, too.” Like a patient who has survived a near-death experience, for Blankfein the credit crunch has rekindled his innate passion for moneymaking. Talking to him is like talking to a man who has greenbacks, not blood, running through his veins. He believes he’s good at what he does and what he does is good.

[…]

“Is it possible to have too much ambition? Is it possible to be too successful?” Blankfein shoots back. “I don’t want people in this firm to think that they have accomplished as much for themselves as they can and go on vacation. As the guardian of the interests of the shareholders and, by the way, for the purposes of society, I’d like them to continue to do what they are doing. I don’t want to put a cap on their ambition. It’s hard for me to argue for a cap on their compensation.”

So, it’s business as usual, then, regardless of whether it makes most people howl at the moon with rage? Goldman Sachs, this pillar of the free market, breeder of super-citizens, object of envy and awe will go on raking it in, getting richer than God? An impish grin spreads across Blankfein’s face. Call him a fat cat who mocks the public. Call him wicked. Call him what you will. He is, he says, just a banker “doing God’s work”

The Masters of the Universe and the Villagers alike have come to believe this Randian hype:

Sadly, I think that even those who recognize the absurdity of this don’t have the imagination or the guts to fight it, so they figure it’s better to just give these fellows what they want and hope they get lucky. It’s the Best and the Brightest syndrome all over again — the Achilles heel of meritocracy.

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“You’re Going To Get Tasered”

by digby

I don’t know the whole story here, but the fact that the victim was acquitted in a jury trial has to mean something:

A Hawthorn Woods man filed a lawsuit in federal courtvictim was acquitted in a jury trial Tuesday claiming Mundelein police used “excessive and unjustifiable violence” when they pulled him from a vehicle early New Year’s Day and shocked him multiple times with a Taser.

Steven Kotlinski was riding in the passenger seat when his wife, Jean, the designated driver for the night, was pulled over at approximately 2:30 a.m., according to the lawsuit.

During the traffic stop, which was recorded on the squad car’s video camera, Steven Kotlinski got out of the vehicle to check on his wife as police were performing sobriety tests on her, according to the lawsuit.

As one of the officers rushed toward the man while threatening to Taser him, Steven Kotlinski told the officer he had a heart condition and got back into his car, according to the lawsuit.

Jean Kotlinski told the officers “he’ll have a heart attack,” while her husband was already back in his vehicle. The officer’s response was “he’s gonna get Tasered,” according to the lawsuit.

The officer then approached the vehicle, unsuccessfully tried to pull Steven Kotlinski out of the vehicle, took a step back and fired the Taser into Kotlinski, according to the lawsuit. While on the ground both police officers continued to shock Kotlinski, the lawsuit said.

Steven Kotlinski was then arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated battery; he was later found not guilty during a jury trial.

Mundelein Police Deputy Chief Eric Guenther on Tuesday told NBC 5 Chicago he could not comment on the lawsuit because the department had not yet been formally served with the papers. He also would not confirm the employment status of officer Turek and Raciak.

Jean Kotlinski was handcuffed in the back of a squad car during the traffic stop, but tests showed her blood alcohol level was 0.00, according to the lawsuit.

This is just one of many, many similar incidents all around the country. We have somehow allowed police to believe that they are allowed to inflict this torture device on citizens for any reason they choose. And while I assume that most cops are more circumspect, there seem to be quite a few using them for coercive or punitive reasons. And people are dying all over the place. This guy was lucky.

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Everything Old is New Again

by digby

Sarah Posner has a blockbuster interview with one of the original wingnuts, David Noebel, who just a few short years ago sounded like something out of a 1950s scare documentary, and is suddenly relevant again with the rise of the Tea Party. I urge you to read it all because it’s a fascinating insight into the progression from cold war anti-communism to today’s Tea Baggers and everything in between. But this one little observation says it all:

If Noebel seems stuck in time with his fearmongering about a fifth column of “reds” aiming to take over America, his protégés continue to reinterpret his conspiratorial thinking in ways that reverberate throughout the conservative movement—despite the embarrassment over conspiracy theories from some conservative journalists. Noebel himself acknowledged the thread running from his activism to the Tea Party movement. “Most of them are evangelical Christian anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-statist… Michele Bachmann is one of their leaders and she certainly is a fine Christian gal and she’s got her feet in that camp big time.” And, he added, “I would say Ron Paul, for example, Ron Paul is more Christian than anything, to tell the truth.”

I think he’s right.

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Noblesse Oblige Has Its Privileges

by digby

YOUR HOUSE, WELL-MADE: The Glover Park Group celebrates its annual holiday party by flying down to New Orleans to take part in a group service event for the St. Bernard Project. www.stbernardproject.org Volunteers — including Joe Lockhart, Dee Dee Myers, Joel Johnson, Susan Brophy, Brian Gaston and Alex Mistri — installed insulation, hung drywall and painted homes in New Orleans and St. Bernard’s Parish on Thursday.

That’s nice. But after a long day of working for those who are less fortunate, one does need to cleanse the palate of all that … poverty:

Following the day of service, the group headed on a culinary tour that included Cochon, Brennan’s and Drago’s.

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More Journalistic Malpractice In Service Of The Powerful

by digby

Ali Velshi is supposed to be the smart “money guy” on CNN, but this morning he conflated a discussion of the cyber attacks on VISA and Mastercard with the fact that Wikileaks said that they have information “that could bring down a bank.” The implication was that that that they were threatening people’s checking and savings accounts. He even played a segment from the week-end with chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair to “reassure” listeners that Wikileaks wasn’t preparing to somehow steal their money and throw them into the streets.(Then they both scoffed at the silly notion that there could be any information out there that could hurt a bank.)

This is utter nonsense. Wikileaks says that they have documents from what is assumed to be Bank Of America which may show malfeasance, corruption and/or collusion. There is no threat to individual depositors, nor does anyone responsible think there is. This is cheap fear mongering from an alleged financial journalist who, like most of the rest of his profession, thinks his job is to protect his powerful friends and sources rather than get at the truth.

Update: Here’s the transcript:

VELSHI: Well, with all the talk about WikiLeaks’ related hacking and cyber security, a lot of you are asking if your money is safe. And, remember, a couple of years ago, Wiki — a couple of weeks ago, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said he’ll have some information in the new year that could take down a bank or two.

So I asked the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the woman really at the heart of regulating our banking system, what she thought about it. Here’s chairman Sheila Bair’s answer. A CNN exclusive for my weekend show, “YOUR $$$$$.”

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) VELSHI: One of the things that you’ve gained a lot of acclaim for through the worst of the financial crisis is when we didn’t think that everybody really had a handle on what was going on. You certainly had your finger on the pulse of banks in this country.

SHEILA BAIR, CHAIRMAN, FDIC: Right.

VELSHI: So I assume that you and your colleagues have the best sense of what’s going on in banks. Have you lost any sleep over Julian Assange and WikiLeaks talking about having enough information to bring down a bank or two?

BAIR: Oh. Well, yes. Well, you know, listen, I think it’s always important for everybody to understand deposit insurance and understand that if you’re fully insured at your bank you have nothing to worry about. And we have a special website, myfdicinsurance.gov, that explains our rules. The basic rule is $250,000 per depositor per bank, but you can get more than that through structuring your accounts. And our website will help people walk through that.

I think if you want to learn more about banks, there are reliable sources of information. Our website, our call reports have a lot of financial information about banks. There are credible analysts out there. So I would look for reliable information about the banking sector and understand that if you’re below our deposit insurance limit, you’re fully insured no matter what.

VELSHI: You think it’s likely that there’s information about banks that you don’t know?

BAIR: No, I don’t. And I said this before. I can’t imagine what could be out there that they think would have such a big impact. It sounds like it’s old information, whatever it is.

VELSHI: Right.

BAIR: So, you know, I’ve got to tell you, I just ignore that kind of thing. I think people are just trying to stir up trouble and scare people. That’s not particularly constructive. And so I ignore it and I would hope other people would do the same. Look for credible sources of information if you’re interested.

VELSHI: Sheila Bair, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for being with us.

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If Only Life Were Like This

by digby

I made this point earlier, several times, but with people still arguing that the payroll tax “holiday” is a great idea, it’s immensely edifying for Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson to write this piece explaining why the “temporary” Bush tax cuts were a fools game:

In our 2005 book Off Center, we summed up the Republican tax-cut strategy as follows: Republicans carefully calibrated their presentation of the tax cuts to circumvent hostile public opinion. Three strategies were central — each attuned to the tax cuts’ principal liabilities. First, unrealistic projections of federal surpluses and of the costs of the tax changes were used to justify the tax cuts and obscure their effects on competing priorities. Second, Republican leaders managed the legislative agenda to prevent consideration of the tax cuts’ specific effects on valued programs. And third, tax-cut advocates worked assiduously to make the cuts look far less tilted in favor of the rich and well connected than they really were… To respond to their base, Republicans misled most Americans. On an unprecedented scale, phase-ins, sunsets, and time bombs were used to give the tax cuts of 2001 the most attractive public face possible while systematically stacking the deck in favor of Republicans’ long-term aims. From top to bottom, Republicans larded the tax cuts with features that made sense only for the purposes of political manipulation. Most reporters have done a lousy job of reminding us of this background. Why were the tax cuts of 2001 scheduled to expire? Because the Bush administration could not convince enough Senators back then that they were affordable, even at a time of record budget surpluses. The GOP’s gamble was that when the tax cuts were due to expire, they would be extended because too many in Washington would be afraid to “raise taxes.” Many Democrats probably thought budgetary realities would make this hat trick hard to pull off. But the Democratic message, if you can call it that, is muddled and complex: one part fiscal rectitude, one part populism — and lacking any clear alternative vision for the hundreds of billions that Republicans want to give to the rich. And it’s made even less coherent by the non-trivial number of congressional Democrats who have basically accepted the GOP position. Republicans, by contrast, bet on the power of a simple, unified message no matter how divorced from economic reality: failing to extend tax cuts skewed to the rich was to “raise taxes” on “ordinary Americans.” And they bet that when the time came for a vote, nobody would remember how we got in this mess in the first place. For now, that bet has paid off — big time.

And it will pay off again two years from now when the payroll tax and millionaires’ tax cuts are scheduled to expire. They will spend the presidential campaign demagoguing the hell out of the pending “tax hikes” as they continue to rail about cutting spending because they have figured out that they can decouple taxes from deficits. It’s a trap.

The good news is that the president is intent upon “reforming”social security and the tax code. And th administration is meeting with his Catfood Commission (which failed to get the required votes but is nonetheless considered a big success) to brainstorm how to implement the new bipartisan baseline:

The commission failed to fully endorse the plan, which would shave $4 trillion in deficit spending over nine years, but 11 of 18 commissioners backed the plan last week. It needed 14 votes to get official backing.
“We believe the Fiscal Commission’s plan provides a serious and substantive starting point for the tough choices Washington cannot afford to put off any longer,” co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson said in a statement afterwards.
“We urge the President to build on these bipartisan ideas by putting forward his own plan in his State of the Union address and budget. We further call on him to bring key congressional leaders together with administration officials to negotiate and reach conclusion on a specific deficit reduction agreement that would be enacted.”
They added that they believe any agreement should be reached before Congress agrees to raise the nation’s $14 trillion debt limit. That borrowing limit is expected to be reached next spring.
“While no Commissioner supports every element of the Commission plan, the nation desperately needs a broad, bipartisan agreement on a plan that would get our debt under control and safeguard our economic future,” the chairmen stated.

What could go wrong?

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