Month: February 2011

How Do You Like Your Poison Tea?

by digby

Regardless of how bizarrely incompetent their leaders in the congress are, the Teabaggers must be thrilled at their progress in the states. If you want to know what a nation led by the Tea party might look like, look no further than Florida’s Rick Scott, who is taking a hacksaw to social programs while giving huge payouts to corporations. Ed Kilgore has the details:

Scott is proposing $5 billion in state spending reductions (in absolute terms, not reductions from some sort of current-services budget). Many of these cuts seemed to be ideologically driven, such as the decimation of the state Department of Community Affairs, which runs growth-management programs hated by developers; and a (roughly) ten percent cut in K-12 education, part and parcel of the state GOP’s war with teachers and other state employees.

But the size of the cuts wouldn’t be nearly so high if Scott were not also insisting on major tax cuts, notably in corporate taxes (due to be phased out entirely in a few years) and in state-controlled property taxes that support public schools.

Moreoever, nestled in his budget proposal are spending increases that are designed to redistribute resources according to conservative ideological prescriptions. Most remarkable is his request for $800 million (over two years) for “economic development incentives,” which almost certainly means a gubernatorially-controlled slush fund to be used to bribe companies to relocate to Florida through tax abatements, free government services, and other subsidies. And even as he sought major cuts in public school funding (in a state already facing something of a school financing crisis), he managed to find room to propose $250 million in private-school vouchers.

Scott seems to be exulting in the radicalism of his budget, which he chose to announce not at the state capitol but at an actual, billed-as-such Tea Party rally at a Baptist Church (!).

That certainly tracks with the Tea Party’s economic program, although I’m not sure most of the rank and file understand what that means in practice. I’m sure that when they get their own services cut they will just see it as more evidence that government doesn’t work and demand more tax cuts and deregulation. That’s the method to the plutocrats’ madness and you have to give them credit for it. It’s very tough to beat, especially with politicians who are completely unwilling to challenge the propaganda, preferring to simply tweak it in small ways in order not to cause any dissonance.

But there is another strong element in the Tea Party philosophy that’s not quite as obvious, which Wisconsin Governor Rick Walker is handling in a very interesting way. The right wing purports to hate the government jackboot, arming themselves like crazy in the event the Army comes to take them away to FEMA camps. But unsurprisingly, they are more than willing to use the strong arm of the law — and the military — against their political opponents:

The proposal by Mr. Walker, a Republican who was elected in November after pledging that he would get public workers’ compensation “into line” with everyone else’s, is expected to receive support next week in the State Legislature, where Republicans also won control of both chambers in the fall.

The prospect left union leaders, state and local employees and some Democrats stunned over the plan’s scope and what it might signal for public-sector unions in the state. Union leaders began planning rallies in Madison and contacting lawmakers, pressing them to reject the idea.

Mr. Walker said Wisconsin was prepared for any fallout, noting in an interview that the National Guard was ready to step in to handle state duties, if need be.

Basically, he’s busting the public employee unions and deploying the state army in their places. This is not unprecedented in American life — during the heyday of the labor movement, it was sometimes done. But it’s been many, many decades since anyone’s tried such a thing and in a sane world, people would be somewhat stunned by the use of the armed forces by people who purport to believe in small government. But I’m not sensing any discomfort with this ploy. Indeed, the prospect of busting the public employee unions is so exhilarating, that I expect to see the allegedly libertarian Tea Partiers endorse the use of government violence against them if necessary.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives in DC is taking up the social conservative slack and are working diligently to destroy Planned Parenthood and further restrict a woman’s right to choose. The wingnuts are firing on all cylinders.

These are the three branches of the right wing Tea Party movement: the plutocrats, the authoritarians and the patriarchs. The plutocrats don’t give a damn about anything but maintaining their stranglehold on the nation’s wealth and privilege. The other two are basically the same people. And throughout the country they are getting busy.

It will be interesting to see whether Real Americans are as happy with the reality as they were with the fantasy. And it will be extremely interesting to see whether the Democrats can find the gumption to raise a decent protest. You’d think this would wake them up, but I’m not holding my breath. I have little doubt they are scrambling madly to find “common ground” and are busy drawing up loans to only fire 2/3rds of public employees, lower taxes on corporations to 5% and make women who want abortions wear a sandwich sign in front of the clinic proclaiming herself a slut before she can exercise her constitutional rights.

Let no one ever say that the left is as unreasonable as the right. And that’s what really matters.

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Atlas Buzzkill

by digby

Naturally, Pamela Atlas is upset about Egypt:

[A]round midday I caught up with Pamela Geller, who made a name for herself as the driving force behind the battle against the Park 51 Muslim community center in lower Manhattan, which critics dubbed the “Ground Zero mosque.” I asked Geller what she thought about Mubarak’s resignation and the fate of Egypt’s leadership. Her take was nothing short of apocalyptic, predicting “the rise of Islamic supremacism and the imposition of the Sharia” throughout the Middle East.

“We are witnessing a complete seismic shift in the direction of the world away from freedom,” Geller said. When I asked her about Glenn Beck’s theory that “uber-leftists” and Islamic extremists could be plotting to from a new Islamic caliphate, she told me that those “are justifiable fears. An earthquake has occurred in the Middle East.” She added, “These are catastrophic events over which we have no control.”

Geller said she was “thoroughly embarrassed and disgusted” that the US “would abandon an ally,” a reference to the Obama administration’s recent statements calling for a peaceful change in leadership in Egypt, which had been under Mubarak’s autocratic rule for nearly 30 years.

I guess she thought Mubarak was going to live forever.

I’m fairly sure that her discomfort with all this is purely based on the sight of a bunch of happy arabs dancing in the streets.

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Metaphors For Dummies

by digby

This is yet another fine contributor CNN has hired as part of their “best political team on television:

Loesch has been having a lot of fun in recent weeks with the idea that violent right wing political rhetoric has anything whatsoever to do with the spate of “isolated incidents” of real violence around the country. And for good reason. As you can see by that video she’s quite the bomb thrower and would be left without a career if society decided that they didn’t care much for her special brand of politics.

Her origins are in the St Louis Tea Party which is one of the more colorful of the genre. Bloggers at the St Louis Activist Hub has been following her for some time:

Loesch has started a cute movement on Twitter called No Metaphors, ostensively mocking the idea that nonstop right-wing extremist rhetoric might play a role in anti-government violence…Given Loesch’s new fascination with metaphors that I’m sure she’ll be pitching as she does her whine-to-the-media-about-how-the-tea-party-are-the-real-victims-here tour, I thought it might be worthwhile to go back to one of Loesch’s most interesting metaphors.

In the week before the health care reform bill finally passed, Loesch’s St. Louis tea party co-founder Bill Hennessy was openly writing about revolution:

Today, the House of Representatives voted 222-203 to dispense with yea and nay voting on the most important laws. That action effectively ends the contract between the United States and the People. “Screw you, America. We’re Congress. We’ll do whatever the hell we want. And you’ll gladly pay for it, you swine!”

But if Congress cut the ties to the contract WE wrote, aren’t we, the people, free from any obligations to the federal government? It would seem that we are citizens of our states and we owe no allegiance, legal or moral, to the government in Washington…Now, what do we do about it?

He then cites the Declaration of Independence, and specifically bolds the following:

it is their right,
it is their duty,
to throw off such Government,

Two more notable quotes from his post:

If Congress continues on its present course – to inflict socialized medicine on America by decree – the reaction from the people will be something that we have never seen before.

But if this bill passes, all bets are off. Every aspect of the government in Washington is fair game…

So then, on the day Congress was voting on the bill, the tea party holds a rally outside of Russ Carnahan’s office. As a “metaphor,” they had a picture of Russ Carnahan, which they beat with various objects:

And Dana? She was at the rally:

And her clever metaphor was to say, “I love the way a fire smells when it’s burning tyranny” while her tea party friends set the photo of Carnahan on fire:

There’s lots more at the link.

Loesch is the new breed, a Tea Party sex symbol in the mode of Sarah Palin but without the authentic life story. She’s cashing in and why not? It seems there’s an endless market for her hot brand of nastiness.

Poor Ann Coulter. She flew up and cracked the glass ceiling for shrieking right wing harpies everywhere and now she’s been tossed aside for a new generation of hateful wingnut welfare queens without any acknowledgment of her many years of service to the cause.

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Gary Aldrich’s Progeny

by digby

The right always seems to produce a few kooks like this who come out of government full of ridiculous Witch Hunt stories. Former Secret Service agent Gary Aldrich famously claimed that Hillary Clinton put dildos on the White house Christmas tree. This one really takes the cake:

Former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams just got done addressing a fairly miniscule crowd in the CPAC overflow room. Adams, of course, is the conservative “whistleblower” best known for his role in the New Black Panther Party case/Fox News cause célèbre.

The case has led at least one Bush era DOJ official to suggest that the Obama Administration is actually biased against white people, while many conservatives say at the very least the Obama Justice Department is an example of racial tolerance run amok.

Much has been written about this — much of it by TPM’s Ryan J. Reilly over at Muckraker. But today, Adams was able to sum up the feeling with one short, simple story about eating outside.

Obama’s Justice Department, Adams said, is afraid of the word “picnic.”

“The Housing section of the Civil Rights Division … they won’t even hold an office picnic, ok?” he told the audience, gathered for a panel called “Lawlessness, Racialism and Terror at Obama’s Department of Justice.”

“[They don’t use] the word ‘picnic,’ because it’s viewed as a racially insensitive word,” Adams said. “They don’t call it a ‘picnic,’ they call it an ‘outing,’ but that offends other people so they’re struggling with what to call it.”

Adams says that his former colleagues in the Obama DOJ were enamored of the false myth that the word ‘picnic’ gets its origins from lynchings in the American past. That rumor floated around the net for a while, before being debunked by sites like Snopes, which proved that the word is actually derived from 17th century French.

Now I realize that it’s very impolite these days to accuse people of having racist tendencies. But really, how else do you explain this? I suppose it’s possible that the justice Department is afraid of the word “picnic” but I’m guessing that the man who has been flogging the bogus Black panther story for months might just have a bit of an agenda.

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Who Is This Nobody?

by digby

OMG, I’m so totally excited. It’s finally here:

Edroso writes:

It’s got good production values and the jump-cuts-per-millisecond of a real trailer. And Michael Lerner is Barney Frank! Best of all, the makers know that story appeal isn’t as important to their intended audience as faithfulness to the Rand philosophy, so while it’s hard to figure out what or who exactly we should be rooting for — Two unpleasant people and their railroad? Capitalism?

Noooo, we are supposed to root for the two most hottest hotties making super charged love on a fast moving train full of money. That’s what Atlas Shrugged is really all about. They should have hired the people who wrote the Twilight series to really do it justice.

And I just can’t buleeeve that Brad Pitt didn’t fight for the role of a lifetime. Or anyone recognizable for that matter. What, Gary Sinese and Kelsey Grammer had scheduling difficulties? And I think Angie Harmon would have been fine as the toothsome Dagny if she could be spared from her obscure cable TV series. I guess the Hollywood liberal conspiracy runs so deep that they couldn’t even hire the handful of quasi-famous C-list conservative celebrities for the most important wingnut movie of all time. Sad.

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Monkey See

by digby

So Sarah Palin implied that Rick Santorum is a “knuckle dragging neanderthal” the other day, although she did it by saying that she wouldn’t call him that and would let his wife do it for her. (Ouch!)

Reader Sleon writes in to ask if this mean Palin believes in evolution. She says no in her autobiography Goin’ Rogue:

I didn’t believe in the theory that human beings – thinking, loving beings – originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea. Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys who eventually swung down from trees

Huh?

I’m guessing that she doesn’t know what the word neanderthal means. If she did she would probably have to take it personally if someone insulted them.

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Haley Barbour’s Fan Club

by digby

And speaking of Dixie …

During the Bosnian conflict I remember hearing many Americans snidely discussing their ancient grievances as if they were the obsessions of primitive tribes, something to which Americans, being so exceptional and all, aren’t subject. Who were these silly people who wouldn’t accept that they’d lost a war in the 1600s and still nursed their wounded pride centuries later? Why couldn’t they just let it go?

It turns out that we’re not so exceptional after all:

African-American leaders have reacted with shock at a plan to feature an early Ku Klux Klan leader on Mississippi license plates.

The proposal by the Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) asked that the state issue a series of license plates between now and 2015 to honor the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

A 2014 plate would feature Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who became an important leader of the Klan after the war.

Forrest was most known for directing a massacre of black Union soldiers who had already laid down their arms at Fort Pillow in April 1864.

“It is in connection with one of the most atrocious and cold-blooded massacres that ever disgraced civilized warfare that his name will for ever be inseparably associated,” according to an obituary published in The New York Times at his death in 1877.

“The garrison was seized with a panic: the men threw down their arms and sought safety in flight toward the river, in the neighboring ravine, behind logs, bushes, trees, and in fact everywhere where there was a chance for concealment. It was in vain. The captured fort and its vicinity became a human shambles.”

“The news of the massacre aroused the whole country to a paroxysm of horror and fury,” the Times added.

Following the war, Forrest worked to bring disparate Klan groups under a centralized authority. He was eventually elected Grand Wizard.

“Forrest probably did not object to the violence, per se, as a means of restoring the pre-war hierarchy, but as a military man, he deplored the lack of discipline and structure that defined the growing KKK,” according to a biography by PBS’ Antiques Roadshow.

“I am not an enemy of the negro,” Forrest was quoted as saying. “We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have.”

This is certainly a man to celebrate today and a Real American.

People often think I’m silly for saying that this war is central to American life and that it has been going on for over two centuries, but these cultural fault lines are still there, slightly buried, but always ready to break open if the right tremor hits.

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Austerity by the numbers

by digby

That’s via Krugman who quips:

The conclusion is inescapable: Republicans have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic.

This is the very essence of free-lunch conservatism, no taxes, no cuts — only foreigners need pay for our sins.

I suspect that this doesn’t present much of a problem to most Americans who don’t really pay attention to the details and would sit idly by while the poor are decimated, blaming them for failing to be properly “entrepreneurial.” But this change s when the middle class gets hit.

You’ve undoubtedly heard about UnCut, which is a very impressive populist protest happening all over the UK in response to Cameron’s draconian austerity measures. But this is where populism really starts to take hold among the bourgoisie:

Save Our Libraries Day: find your nearest protest

This Saturday, 5 February, libraries around the country will be playing host to read-ins, author appearances and story-telling events to protest at the threatened closure of 400 branches.

This isn’t a bunch of anarchists. These are middle class moms and elderly voters who are becoming activists for the first time in their lives:

One of the libraries slated to be closed is in a picturesque little town northwest of London called Stony Stratford. The library is right in the heart of town, on a street with brick homes and little shops.

Sarah Richardson was on her way to return a bag of books. But for her, this was not just any bag of books. It was her small part in a public uprising. The residents of Stony Stratford organized last month and, together, checked out all 16,000 books from the library. The bare shelves, they hoped, would send a message that the place had to stay.

Richardson, a single mom, says she relies on the library’s free computers. There’s no Internet at home. “We did have [it], and then me and my husband split up, so the computer went,” she says.

Officials in Milton Keynes, the region that includes Stony Stratford, will make their decision about the library on Feb. 22. A spokesman for the regional council said deep cuts in funding from London have put “unprecedented pressures” on elected officials, forcing painful decisions. Still, among all the austerity measures being proposed, this one seems to have generated the most widespread emotion.

Lauren Smith is helping to run a national campaign called Voices for the Library.
This is the message she says she hears from people: ” ‘I’ve never, ever campaigned against anything before; I’ve never gone out with placards; I’ve never marched; but do you know what — this, this is important, and this is what we need to stand up against, because this can’t happen.’ “

Smith said politicians in London don’t appreciate the role libraries play — as gathering spots for young children to read … “all the way to a 93-year-old lady whose husband had died, she only spoke to one person on a Tuesday, when she went to the library, and that was the person in the library branch, behind the counter.”

Austerity sounds very character building in the abstract. But people don’t really “want” it when they see what it means in their every day lives. And if these wealthy political celebrities and plutocrats keep talking about how “everyone” needs to sacrifice, they are likely to find out that most Americans don’t agree with that. They want the wealthiest to sacrifice first, something that hasn’t been on the table up to now.

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Blue America Chat

by digby

Join Howie and the rest of the Blue America gang today over at C&L at 1:30pst, 4:30est as he chats with Carol Mosely Braun, who is running for mayor of Chicago. Howie wrote this on Down with Tyranny earlier:

Blue America has had a running battle with Wall Street shill Rahm Emanuel for as long as we existed as a PAC. Our enthusiasm for Carol Moseley Braun is not about Rahm Emanuel though. Yes, electing him mayor is the worst thing that Chicago could possibly do to itself, but Carol Moseley Braun would be a formidable candidate no matter who the opposition was. Today she’s coming on to Crooks and Liars for a live blog session at 3:30pm (CST; 1:30 on the West Coast). When I spoke with her on the phone a few days ago and asked her about the sleazy, relentless and very effective way Emanuel has undermined her in the minds of so many voters, she was eager to talk about her own reasons for running, not about him. She did agree with me, however, and said she’s “had to deal with negative racial and gender narratives all through my career. They’re not about substance; just about slinging mud and hoping it sticks… In all my years in public service I have never leveraged my elected office or any political connections for private gain.” That, of course, is the exact polar opposite of the Rahm Emanuel model, an exemplar of a high level revolving door that has left him a multimillionaire many times over based on one thing and one thing alone: political access.

When Ambassador Braun left the Illinois House of Representatives, where she had been Assistant Majority Leader and an effective champion of progressive causes– even when it meant going up against powerful conservatives in her own party– she was dubbed “the conscience of the House.” In fact, when she ran for the U.S. Senate, the impetus was to hold conservative Democrat Alan Dixon accountable for an unconscionable and shortsighted vote to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. In beating Dixon, and going on to win the general election, she became the first woman to defeat an incumbent senator in an election, the first and only female Senator from Illinois and the only African-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate. Those are incredible achievements and she has had to fight with some heavily armed opponents every step of the way.

And let’s not forget that as the first — and only — female African American Senator, she had to put up with hideous behavior like this:

Soon after the Senate vote on the Confederate flag insignia, which opponents saw as an overt symbol of racism, Helms ran into Moseley Braun in an elevator. [Jesse] Helms turned to Senator Orrin Hatch and said, “Watch me make her cry. I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.” He then proceeded to sing the song about ‘the good life’ during slavery to Moseley Braun. In 1999, Helms attempted to block Moseley Braun’s nomination to be United States Ambassador to New Zealand.

She didn’t cry.

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“We Don’t have A Set Of Shared Values”

by digby

Unfortunately, I missed this call yesterday but I have to say that I couldn’t be prouder of Nancy Pelosi for what she said. Here’s Greg Sargent:

Nancy Pelosi’s extremely blunt assessments of the true motives of Republicans are why her supporters love her and her enemies hate her with equal passion, and on a conference call with bloggers just now, she unleashed a slashing attack on the House GOP’s new anti-abortion push that may churn up emotions on both sides.

Pelosi — who promised a huge fight against House Republicans over the issue in the days ahead — didn’t hold back one bit, claiming the new legislative push by Republicans “disrespects the judgment of American women.”

“I don’t know if they ever give that a thought,” she added.

Pelosi described the GOP push as the “most radical assault” on women’s reproductive rights “in our lifetimes.” And she was equally blunt in her assessment of right-wing assaults on family planning.

“They are at a different philosophical place,” she said, characterizing their view as: “all engagement has to result in a child.” Pelosi noted that contraception and family planning is “not consistent with their belief that it’s all about procreation.”

That’s right. And it’s why there is no “common ground” to be found on this issue. I know that’s uncomfortable for many good liberals who just want more than anything to not have a fight with Republicans on … well, anything. But it’s either fight or get rolled over.

I feel fairly confident that the progressive House Democrats are not going to falter on this. But the Senate is where this kind of deal making really happens and if it gets there, I’m not entirely sure that it won’t pass. So Pelosi is calling for liberals to man the barricades.

She has good reason to be worried. It’s going to be very difficult for the GOP to deliver the kind of government the Teabaggers are demanding. The Democrats are likely to cave, of course, on some things that we hold very dear. But Obama will not let them do too much damage to his signature health care plan and the planned cuts in social security won’t manifest themselves for some time. They need to give these people something they really, really want and I would guess that, as usual, female sacrifice will fit the bill. It’s not like it’s “important” and selling out women always sends a positive “signal” to all those independents and Villagers who must be appeased with a constant stream of nonsensical bullshit, that the Democrats are in tune with Real America.

More of this please:

Pelosi added that the unreconcilable philosophical differences between Republicans and Dems on abortion left Dems no choice but to adopt a scorched-earth approach to the war ahead. “We don’t have a set of shared values,” she said. “We have to fight this out in the public domain, so when we move to the Senate it has no popular support.”

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