Month: December 2010

Positioning The Duck

by digby

Huffington Post wonders why the GOP voted against the public will in the lame duck session”

Republicans say they will follow “the people’s priorities” when they gain power on Capitol Hill next month. Yet when it came to tax cuts for the wealthy and other top issues that dominated the just concluded lame-duck Congress, the GOP either defied what most Americans want or followed their will only after grudging, drawn-out battles.

Relentlessly focused on the next election, politicians are usually loath to act against voter sentiment. Still, the post-election weeks of the 111th Congress saw battles in which Washington seemed oblivious to the direction most people wanted lawmakers to take, as measured by public opinion polls. These included:

_Congress’ approval of a compromise between President Barack Obama and congressional GOP leaders renewing expiring tax cuts for everyone, despite broad public opposition to including people earning over $250,000. An Associated Press-CNBC Poll in late November found only 34 percent wanted taxes reduced for the richest Americans.

It goes on to also discuss DADT, DREAM and START as more examples of issues the GOP was on the wrong side of.

I think it works like this: the success of the lame duck session is being widely attributed to the President and the Village is pushing that meme very hard. From the GOP perspective this works in their favor. They get to blame all the individual items the public doesn’t like on the Muslim communist usurper which is, at this point, all they care about. (Hence, “they ate our lunch.”) It’s very useful to have a Democratic president get credit for unpopular GOP proposals that aren’t going to work, like the tax cuts.

Of course, the president gets to take credit for the popular proposals as well, but these were all issues that either the public doesn’t care much about like START or are like the repeal of DADT, which despite its 77% public approval, Republicans are leery of supporting en masse because of the strong objections from part of their base. The one thing they defeated was a popular immigration bill that was very important to their base to defeat.

I think they’re happy to have a Democrat sign on Bush’s signature issue and especially happy to have the administration use their rationale for doing it. If the economy doesn’t improve, the Democrats will own the failure and can’t use it against them. If it does, it will be attributed to Republican voodoo economics working to create Morning in America. I think they now feel they have a good argument going into 2012 regardless of how it goes. They are good at using the levers of opposition to advance their own goals.

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Capra Was A Commie Simp

by digby

The other day I wrote an indignant post about Glenn Beck appropriating “It’s A Wonderful Life” for his bizarroworld capitalist philosophy, but I didn’t realize that the FBI had determined that the movie was a subversive Commie plot:

To: The Director

D.M. Ladd

COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY

(RUNNING MEMORANDUM)

There is submitted herewith the running memorandum concerning Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry which has been brought up to date as of May 26, 1947….

With regard to the picture “It’s a Wonderful Life”, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a “scrooge-type” so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.

In addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. [redacted] related that if he made this picture portraying the banker, he would have shown this individual to have been following the rules as laid down by the State Bank Examiner in connection with making loans. Further, [redacted] stated that the scene wouldn’t have “suffered at all” in portraying the banker as a man who was protecting funds put in his care by private individuals and adhering to the rules governing the loan of that money rather than portraying the part as it was shown. In summary, [redacted] stated that it was not necessary to make the banker such a mean character and “I would never have done it that way.”

[redacted] recalled that approximately 15 years ago, the picture entitled “The Letter” was made in Russia and was later shown in this country. He recalled that in this Russian picture, an individual who had lost his self-respect as well as that of his friends and neighbors because of drunkenness, was given one last chance to redeem himself by going to the bank to get some money to pay off a debt. The old man was a sympathetic character and was so pleased at his opportunity that he was extremely nervous, inferring he might lose the letter of credit or the money itself. In summary, the old man made the journey of several days duration to the bank and with no mishap until he fell asleep on the homeward journey because of his determination to succeed. On this occasion the package of money dropped out of his pocket. Upon arriving home, the old man was so chagrined he hung himself. The next day someone returned the package of money to his wife saying it had been found. [redacted] draws a parallel of this scene and that of the picture previously discussed, showing that Thomas Mitchell who played the part of the man losing the money in the Capra picture suffered the same consequences as the man in the Russian picture in that Mitchell was too old a man to go out and make money to pay off his debt to the banker.

I suppose this is common knowledge, but it escaped my notice until now. Some things never change.

h/t to @allisonkilkenny

Buying Credibility

by digby

President Obama was very disappointed in the failure of the DREAM Act and sounded as though he wanted to push it again in the next congress. The Republicans, however, don’t seem to be in a mood to cooperate:

Congressional Republicans are pronouncing President Obama’s proposal that the next Congress overhaul the country’s immigration laws as dead before arrival. […]

Congressional Republicans said in interviews Thursday that their concerns about the [DREAM Act] measure remain strong, and both House and Senate GOP leaders said they would fight any attempt to legalize any of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country before the administration secured the nation’s southern border with Mexico.

“It is pointless to talk about any new immigration bills that grant amnesty until we secure the border, since such bills will only encourage more illegal immigration,” incoming House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) said in a statement.

They seem pretty adamant. And they aren’t accepting any half way gestures, no matter how draconian:

Whenever Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and other immigrant-rights advocates asked President Obama how a Democratic administration could preside over the greatest number of deportations in any two-year period in the nation’s history, Obama’s answer was always the same.

Deporting almost 800,000 illegal immigrants might antagonize some Democrats and Latino voters, Obama’s skeptical supporters said the president told them, but stepped-up enforcement was the only way to buy credibility with Republicans and generate bipartisan support for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws.

I’m fairly sure that there is no amount of cruelty and heartlessness that will buy “credibility” among the right wingers on this, short of deportation of all undocumented workers and an electrified Berlin-style Wall across the entire southern border. And even then, there would still be work to do to ensure that all the people who “look” Hispanic (or middle eastern, why not?) are required to prove that they weren’t missed in the deportation sweeps.

Quite simply, it is impossible for anyone to “buy credibility” on issues of bigotry and xenophobia short of changing your position and becoming a bigot and xenophobe yourself. There was a time not long ago when Republican leaders tried to pretend that their right wing followers weren’t those things, but it was always absurd. It’s definitional.

So, we’re getting nowhere with this for some time. I expect things will ease up if the economy picks up. It usually does. But short of that, this will continue to be battleground — and the right is not going to meet the enemy in the middle of the field. This one’s far to important to their base and they know it.

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Apocalyptic Pain and Picasso

by digby

Tom Coburn put on quite a show today with Chris Wallace and everyone should pay attention:

Senate Republicans’ “Dr. No” spending hawk warned Sunday that America would experience “apocalyptic pain” with 15-18 percent unemployment and the “middle class destroyed” if it didn’t get its fiscal house in order.

“If we don’t fix the problems in front of us everybody’s going to pay a significant price,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Coburn warned of the United States ending up like Greece or Ireland if proper austerity measures aren’t taken, or like Spain, Italy or Japan, which are in danger of similar financial collapse.

In May, the IMF and EU agreed to extend a $145 billion bailout package to Greece. In November, a $113 billion bailout package was extended to keep Ireland afloat.

“Everyone else in the world that’s doing this today is getting punished,” he said of runaway spending.

Coburn said he didn’t believe the lame-duck Congress got the message from voters on reining in spending, and that this next Congress should chart a much different course.

“There’s well over $300 billion a year that I can lay out for you in detail that most Americans believe we should eliminate,” he said, though it “remains to be seen” how much the 112th Congress will slash.

“There will not be one American that will not be called to sacrifice,” Coburn said. “Those who are well-to-do will be called to sacrifice to a greater extent.”

I’m starting to get really nervous here. These people have finally made it happen: they have convinced themselves and God only knows how many others that the economic downturn is the result of government spending and the deficit. (We knew they were trying, but this is the best example I’ve seen of someone who just states it right out with no caveats or disclaimers.)

There was a good reason to play the blame game and look in the rear view mirror over the last two years, aside from the simple political calculus, which was to offer the country the real story of the meltdown and counter this ridiculous right wing theme. This may be the most pernicious effect of the huge money in politics at the moment — the ability to seduce or blackmail political leaders into weaving a disaster capitalist storyline in the wake of financial catastrophe. This is how it unfolds.

As for the notion that the well-off will be asked to sacrifice, we know that Coburn isn’t talking about taxing them. (That would be off limits because tax cuts don’t count.) So, I’m assuming we will be told that because they will receive the same cuts in services and social security and medicare that the rest of us will get, we all have the same “skin in the game.” And I expect that a whole lot of silly conservatives will buy that this is what makes us such a great country — our equality.

Meanwhile, however, we can at least take heart in the fact that the wealthy are busily creating jobs, which will soon bring us all back to prosperity:

Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust”, a 1932 work by Pablo Picasso, last night became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction:

“In an overflowing salesroom at Christie’s, six bidders vied for ‘Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,’ which depicts the artist’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, reclining naked. When the canvas last changed hands, in 1951, it sold for $19,800. But this time, ‘Nude, Green Leaves and Bust’ brought $106.5 million. For 8 minutes and 6 seconds, bidding rose steadily, with five people still competing at $80 million. Nicholas Hall, of Christie’s old master paintings department in New York, took the winning bid for an unidentified buyer.”

Hey, dead artists need work too.

Update: Also, Krugman.

The New York Times has an epiphany

by digby

It seems to have finally dawned on the paper of record that this Wikileaks Witch hunt might not be such a hot idea after all:

The whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks has not been convicted of a crime. The Justice Department has not even pressed charges over its disclosure of confidential State Department communications. Nonetheless, the financial industry is trying to shut it down.

Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced in the past few weeks that they would not process any transaction intended for WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, Bank of America decided to join the group, arguing that WikiLeaks may be doing things that are “inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.”

The Federal Reserve, the banking regulator, allows this. Like other companies, banks can choose whom they do business with. Refusing to open an account for some undesirable entity is seen as reasonable risk management. The government even requires banks to keep an eye out for some shady businesses — like drug dealing and money laundering — and refuse to do business with those who engage in them.

But a bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.

All correct and obvious. One would think that a news organization would have found that to be just a little bit troubling the instant it heard about it and raised the alarm. But better late than never.

But they aren’t all the way there yet:

The fact of the matter is that banks are not like any other business. They run the payments system. That is one of the main reasons that governments protect them from failure with explicit and implicit guarantees. This makes them look not too unlike other public utilities. A telecommunications company, for example, may not refuse phone or broadband service to an organization it dislikes, arguing that it amounts to risky business.

Let’s not be naive here. The government has enlisted every kind of institution to block communications and capital flow for years and these institutions have raised nary a peep. They always have good “reasons,” and there’s every reason to believe they’ll use their power to cover up their own secrets in the same way they use it on the government’s behalf. When it comes to this sort of thing they operate in exactly the same way. It’s nice that the NY Times is finally seeing the danger of granting this power willy nilly but it’s pretty late in the game.

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Christmas Night At The Movies

Somewhat naughty and not so nice

By Dennis Hartley

Not the Coca-Cola Santa: Rare Exports

It’s official. I now have a new favorite Christmas movie. John Carpenter’s The Thing meets Miracle on 34th St. in Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a wickedly clever Yule story that spices up the usual holiday family movie recipe by folding in generous dollops of sci-fi, horror, and Norse legend. The twist here is that our protagonist, a young boy named Pietari (Onni Tommila) not only believes that Santa Claus is, in fact, real, but that he is buried just beyond the back 40 of his dad’s reindeer ranch, where some American archeologists are excavating a mysterious promontory. After bizarre and troubling events begin to plague the sleepy hamlet where Pietari lives, it looks that Santa may have just been “resting”. And if this is the mythical Santa Pietari suspects, then he is more Balrog than eggnog…and is best left undisturbed.

The director also works a sly anti-consumerist polemic into his narrative. Pietra’s dad (Jorma Tommila) and his fellow reindeer hunters-who are more chagrinned that the saturnine Santa is threatening their livelihood by slaughtering all the reindeer than by the fact that he is also methodically kidnapping the village children and spiriting them away to an undisclosed location, manage to capture him, and then demand a “ransom” from the corporate weasel who, for his own nefarious reasons, is funding the archeological dig. In the meantime, a legion of Santa’s nasty little “helpers” are running amuck and wreaking havoc. Pietari, the only one keeping a cool head, just wants to enjoy a nice quiet Christmas with dad-even if he has to transform into a midget version of Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness to rescue the children (and save the farm, in a manner of speaking).

There’s nothing “cute” about this film, yet it’s by no means mean-spirited, either. It is an off-beat, darkly funny, and wholly original treat for moviegoers hungry for a fresh alternative to the 999th lifetime viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Speaking as someone who lived for many years within a day’s drive of the Arctic Circle, the film also perfectly captures the stark beauty of midwinter in the far Northern Hemisphere; especially that uniquely dichotomous sense of both soothing tranquility and alien desolation that it can bring to one’s soul. And for god’s sake-let Santa rest in peace.

Holiday dispirited: Bad Santa , Female Trouble, The Ref, The Lion in Winter, The Rocking Horse Winner, Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, Go , Trading Places, Nightmare Before Christmas, Christmas On Mars, The Matador, The French Connection, The Curse of the Cat People, Tokyo Godfathers, Less Than Zero, In Bruges , Roger & Me, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Gremlins , Elves , Scrooged, Jack Frost (1997),You Better Watch Out, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Black Christmas.

Previous posts with related themes:

What Would Jesus Buy?

…and one more thing

In the “spirit” of tonight’s post (and since I’m going straight to hell anyway), I thought I’d share my favorite holiday tune with you. So…happy Crimble and merry Rudolph!

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Merry Christmas, I Don’t Want To Fight

by digby

From the kings of family dysfunction on Christmas:

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Oh Holy Moley

by digby

Ok, this one’s going to hurt:

Christmas Eve Tradition

by digby

Hopefully Darlene Love will appear on Letterman to sing “Christmas (baby please come home)again tonight as is tradition, but just in case:

Annual Holiday Fundraiser going on right now. If you can help support the blog, I appreciate it. Cheers!

[Note: Newer posts below]

Those J-I-N-G-L-E Bells

by digby

Well, it’s that time of year again: the annual Christmas fundraiser. Each year I come to you in the dead of winter and ask that you drop a little change into the old Hullabaloo stocking if you have it to spare to keep this creaky old blog going. The donations I receive from you are what sustain me through the year far more than web ads or any other source of revenue.

Somebody described this as a dinosaur blog the other day and I replied that I prefer to think of it as a “classic.” It’s old school, to be sure. There are no bells and whistles and some of it isn’t working quite as well as it used to. But if you value the content and don’t mind getting your bloggy punditry in a plain yellow wrapper, it’s still chugging along with the rest of them. It even still shows well in little contests every now and then.

And my words grace the most important political best sellers in the land:

That’s the back cover of Glenn Beck’s new book “Broke“

My proudest moment of 2010.

It’s amazing to me that I’ve managed to keep this thing going for nearly eight years, but 15,000 rants later, here I am, still writing. But it’s all due to you, my readers and commenters, who have allowed me to keep the best job I’ve ever had by supporting me with your generous contributions. There aren’t as many blogs like this around as there used to be (although there are some great ones still doing it) but I think there’s still room for the Indy Blogger. It’s a different financial model than usual, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. Given that I’m not a person who responds well to arbitrary authority (I’m sure you haven’t noticed) and deeply value my freedom to say what I think without regard to financial repercussions or employer blacklash, this really is the best of all possible worlds for me (as long as I don’t aspire to be one of those wealthy upper 2 percenters…)

So, if you think of it, and think it’s worth it, I’d be grateful if you could throw a little change my way over this holiday so that I can keep the lights on here and keep doing what I do. It’s going to be one hell of a year and I’m guessing we’re all going to need plenty of sustenance and solidarity to get through it.

Happy Hollandaise to one and all!

cheers,

digby

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