Month: February 2011

A Day That Will Live In Infamy

by digby

This is a big week-end. Obviously, it’s the Super Bowl. And Ronnie Reagan’s birthday has the entire political class in an orgasmic swoon. But one anniversary was strangely overlooked.

Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution remembered:

Colin Powell made his Iraq presentation at the UN five years ago, on February 5, 2003. As much criticism as Powell has received for this—he calls it “painful” and something that will “always be a part of my record”—it hasn’t been close to what’s justified. Powell was far more than just horribly mistaken: the evidence is conclusive that he fabricated evidence and ignored repeated warnings that what he was saying was false. Unfortunately, Congress has never investigated Powell’s use of the intelligence he was given. Even so, what’s already in the public record is extremely damning. So while the corporate media has never taken a close look at this record, we can go through Powell’s presentation line by line to demonstrate the chasm between what he knew, and what he told the world. As you’ll see, there’s quite a lot to say about it. Powell’s speech can be found on the State Department website here. All other sources are linked below. PUBLIC CERTAINTY, PRIVATE DOUBT On that February 5 in front of the UN Security Council, was Colin Powell certain what he was saying was accurate? He certainly was:

POWELL: My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

Later, regarding whether Iraq had reconstituted a nuclear weapons program, he said:

POWELL: [T]here is no doubt in my mind…

That’s in public. What about in private? According to Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, here’s what Powell was thinking at the time:

WILKERSON: [Powell] had walked into my office musing and he said words to the effect of, I wonder how we’ll all feel if we put half a million troops in Iraq and march from one end of the country to the other and find nothing.

Read on for the list of lies he told that day.

I don’t think it can be overstated just how significant this UN speech was. I happened to watch the speech with a group of people I worked with and the reaction was electric. People who had been skeptical were converted instantly. Every bit of the man’s reputation and stature was put in service of these lies and he was very, very convincing. I found myself alone arguing that the evidence was thin and that just because he said it didn’t make it true. The damage was done.

The fact that he is still considered a serious person, worthy of great respect as an elder statesman is yet another example of the American elite class being completely unaccountable legally, professionally and socially. There is, apparently, nothing they can do that will lose them their exalted place in our culture.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Facebookopalypse Now

By Dennis Hartley

Soothing image #473: Summer Wars

Don’t be misled by the cartoonish title of Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars-this could be the Gone with the Wind of Japanese anime. OK…that’s a tad hyperbolic. But it does have drama, romance, comedy, and war-centering around a bucolic family estate. Maybe- Tokyo Story meets War Games ? At any rate, it’s one of the better animes of recent years.

The film opens with echoes of Weird Science, as we are introduced to a couple of nerdy teenagers, geeking out in the virtual world of “Oz”, a global cyber network where all users (from individuals to governments) communicate and conduct business via avatars. Kenji (voiced by Michael Sinterniklass) and his pal have part time jobs working for the network (something techie…it’s all big magic to me). Anyway, the boys are pretty sharp at what they do; Kenji is also a math whiz. When it comes to relating to the opposite sex, however, they are relatively clueless. Kenji has a crush on of their classmates, Natsuki (Brina Palencia), but has no idea as to where to take it from there. Imagine his surprise when Natsuki invites him along on a visit to see grandma out at her family’s sprawling country estate, where the clan is gathering to celebrate the spry matriarch’s 90th birthday.

Kenji is hit with an even bigger surprise when Natsuki introduces him to her family as her “fiancée”. Flustered at first, Kenji decides (correctly) that he should probably play along. After apologizing for springing this on him, Naksuki begs Kenji to go along with the ruse for the duration of their visit; she just wants to avoid getting hounded by nosy relatives on the subject of matrimony. This actually gives the shy and socially awkward Kenji an instant entre with the noisy, eccentric but loving clan. He has some consternation when Natsuki’s “first crush” suddenly shows up-her brooding, James Dean-ish uncle (J. Michael Tatum), who is the long-estranged black sheep of the family.

Late one evening, Kenji receives a cryptic text message, challenging him to crack a super-complex equation (which, as we know, is like catnip to a math nerd). After pulling an all-nighter, he solves it. Unfortunately, he soon discovers that he has been duped; by solving the math problem, he has unwittingly enabled a malicious AI program to hack into the Oz network-and sees his photo plastered all over the TV news as a wanted cyber-criminal (much to his newly adopted family’s chagrin). As the virus begins to methodically assimilate the avatars belonging to hundreds of millions of users, it exponentially gains more control over the grid, wreaking increasingly insidious infrastructural havoc worldwide as its power grows. Soon the stakes become even higher-and in true anime tradition, the mantle of saving the earth falls on upon the diminutive shoulders of our geeky hero and his friends (with unexpected help from grandma, who proves that in times of crisis, it’s the ol’ skool social networking skills that really count).

Although a number of the narrative devices in Satoko Ohuder’s screenplay will feel somewhat familiar to anime fans (particularly when it comes to the more bombastic “cyber-punk” elements of the story), it’s the humanistic touches and subtle social observations (quite reminiscent of the films by the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu) that make this such a worthwhile and satisfying entertainment. Director Hosoda began his career in the genre back in the early 90s, working at Japan’s highly respected Toei Animation studio as an animator. This is only the second feature-length anime he has helmed; his first was the outstanding 2007 fantasy-adventure, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Judging by these two films, he has a very promising career ahead of him.

Previous posts with related themes:

Paprika

Inception

Top 10 End of the World Movies

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He Meant It

by digby

NPR’s Mara Liasson featured a long piece yesterday all about Obama’s obsessive intrest in being just like Ronald Reagan. Feel the magic:

President Ronald Reagan, who would have turned 100 on Sunday, has long been a hero without equal among Republicans. But the 40th president has more recently been adopted as a kind of patron saint by the country’s leading Democrat.

President Obama has immersed himself in Reaganalia: He’s written a USA Today op-ed praising Reagan for understanding the American people’s hunger for change. He read Lou Cannon’s biography of Reagan over Christmas break. And on Jan. 25 he gave a State of the Union address that many thought echoed the optimistic vision of the Great Communicator himself…

Obama’s interest in Reagan isn’t new.

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama said: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did.”

While Obama might seem like the polar opposite of Reagan ideologically, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, he agreed with one of Reagan’s basic arguments.

“The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s central insight — that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policymakers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie — contained a good deal of truth,” he wrote.

Since the Democrats’ defeat in the 2010 elections, Obama has come up against another enduring aspect of Reagan’s legacy — one he also acknowledged back in 2006. “He fundamentally changed the terms of the political debate. The middle-class tax revolt became a permanent fixture in national politics and placed a ceiling on how much government could expand.”

As it turns out, Ronald Reagan was the one we’ve been waiting for.

Except,you know, all that hagiography about Ronnie’s optimism and happiness is bullshit. He had a smile on his face all right. But it was because he’d just unleashed a nasty zinger at the expense of his political enemies. And a whole lot of people love that kind of thing.

The Onion got this right way back when:

Now, we all know that Obama has been governing like a Marxist revolutionary for the first two years, but luckily he’s coming back to reality.

[N]ow that he’s dealing with divided government, he has a keener interest in how Reagan dealt with an opposition Congress, says former Reagan Chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein, who has also consulted with the president about his former boss.

“One of the things that I think has impressed President Obama is that Ronald Reagan fundamentally understood that to govern you need to build consensus in America and not simply consensus in Washington,” Duberstein says.

And that means telling and retelling a clear story about where you want to take the country. The president started doing that in his State of the Union address, a speech White House aides described as upbeat, forward-looking and self-consciously optimistic — the definition of Reaganesque.

“As contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth,” Obama said in the speech. If that sounds like Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill,” it’s no accident.

Right. Winning The Future. Sounds great. There might be one little hitch, however:

Cannon, Reagan’s biographer, remembers that the unemployment rate in 1983 was high, not unlike what Obama faces today. But in the following two years, Cannon says, the economy didn’t just improve — it came roaring back, with growth rates of 7 percent.

“The American people aren’t fools,” Cannon says. “Reagan was able to run on ‘Morning in America’ because for … millions of Americans, it was morning in America.”

Now, he says, “the most optimistic forecast I’ve heard for 2011 is 4 percent, and a lot of economists are way below that.”

So “Obama needs probably more help there than he’s going to get,” Cannon says.

Uhm, yeah:

Plus, he’s dealing with Republicans of 2011, not the Democrats of 1983. Very different animals. He might get lucky, however, and the GOP will nominate the wingnut equivalent of Walter Mondale.

Pawlenty/Bachman? I like it.

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North and South Poles

by digby

This is a fascinating little factoid, but I’m not sure it means what people think it means:

President Barack Obama’s job approval ratings were even more polarized during his second year in office than during his first, when he registered the most polarized ratings for a first-year president. An average of 81% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans approved of the job Obama was doing as president during his second year. That 68-point gap in party ratings is up from 65 points in his first year and is easily the most polarized second year for a president since Dwight Eisenhower.

It’s not that the president is “polarizing.” It’s that the American people are polarized. There’s always been this tribal difference, but during the long middle period of the 20th century, we because a little bit less polarized and I think it may have been because of mass media. With the advent of an explicitly political right wing news media on a mass scale, it’s bifurcated again.

In any case, Obama isn’t really doing anything particularly polarizing. His most contentious action was passing an industry friendly health insurance reform. But the country is so polarized that it doesn’t even see reality in the same way and that’s not his fault. No one man could fix that problem, particularly with the malefactors of great wealth pulling strings to keep it that way. (This works well for them — it means government can’t function very well.)

And well, he is the first black president. I’m fairly sure that was always going to cause some dissonance among those for whom such things are important.

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Hyde and Shriek

by digby

It looks like the forced birth childbirth zealots are going to keep the pro-choice groups scrambling from one atrocity to the other in this new offensive in the war against women. Maybe they are counting on sheer exhaustion forcing the choicers surrender unconditionally on Hyde.

Here’s the latest:

Pitts’ new bill would free hospitals from any abortion requirement under EMTALA, meaning that medical providers who aren’t willing to terminate pregnancies wouldn’t have to — nor would they have to facilitate a transfer. The hospital could literally do nothing at all, pro-choice critics of Pitts’ bill say. “This is really out there,” Donna Crane, policy director at NARAL Pro-Choice America told TPM. “I haven’t seen this before.” Crane said she’s been a pro-choice advocate “for a long time,” yet she’s never seen anti-abortion bill as brazenly attacking the health of the mother exemption as Pitts’ bill has. NARAL has fired up its lobbying machinery and intends to make the emergency abortion language a key part of its fight against the Pitts bill when it goes before subcommittee in the House next week.

Yeah. And guess what will happen? Another reluctant “compromise” on principle by the right wing — resulting in another chit to be called in if the Democrats in the Senate and the President decide to entertain this bill as a post-partisan reach around.And I would again point out the use of the “tradition” or “existing law” language by Republicans trying to draw upon President Obama’s unfortunate statements about Hyde and the pro-choice groups’ huge strategic error during the Stupak battle. Here’s Joan McCarter:

Pitts’ staff responded to critics by saying that “this bill is only preserving the same rights that medical professionals have had for decades.” That’s not true, according to the legal experts who’ve read the language–it exempts anti-choice hospitals or providers from providing potentially life-saving care, or ensuring that the patient receive it. Life-saving care, by the way, which is perfectly and absolutely legal.

Here’s the question. There’s little doubt that a “compromise” version of this bill will pass the House and everyone seems to think it will die in the Senate. But there’s no assurance that it will. If this ends up being seen as merely codifying existing law (after the Republicans generously remove these few little atrocities that seem to have come out of nowhere) can we be sure that it won’t reach 60 votes? And furthermore, can we be sure the President will veto such a bipartisan hot potato?

I don’t know. But I do know that the President and his spokespeople haven’t taken it off the menu and until they do I don’t think anyone can be sure.

This is his view on Hyde as of the health care debate:

As you know, I’m pro choice. But I think we also have a tradition of, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded health care. Rather than wade into that issue at this point, I think that it’s appropriate for us to figure out how to just deliver on the cost savings, and not get distracted by the abortion debate at this station.

And here’s the executive order:

According to White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer, the executive order will provide “additional safeguards to ensure the status quo is upheld and enforced, and that the health-care legislation’s restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.”The text of the pending executive order follows:

Executive Order ensuring enforcement and implementation of abortion restrictions in the patient protection and affordable care act

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (approved March ­­__, 2010), I hereby order as follows:

Section 1. Policy.
Following the recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“the Act”), it is necessary to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered), consistent with a longstanding Federal statutory restriction that is commonly known as the Hyde Amendment. The purpose of this Executive Order is to establish a comprehensive, government-wide set of policies and procedures to achieve this goal and to make certain that all relevant actors–Federal officials, state officials (including insurance regulators) and health care providers–are aware of their responsibilities, new and old.

The Act maintains current Hyde Amendment restrictions governing abortion policy and extends those restrictions to the newly-created health insurance exchanges. Under the Act, longstanding Federal laws to protect conscience (such as the Church Amendment, 42 U.S.C. §300a-7, and the Weldon Amendment, Pub. L. No. 111-8, §508(d)(1) (2009)) remain intact and new protections prohibit discrimination against health care facilities and health care providers because of an unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions. Numerous executive agencies have a role in ensuring that these restrictions are enforced, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Section 2. Strict Compliance with Prohibitions on Abortion Funding in Health Insurance Exchanges.
The Act specifically prohibits the use of tax credits and cost-sharing reduction payments to pay for abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) in the health insurance exchanges that will be operational in 2014. The Act also imposes strict payment and accounting requirements to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services in exchange plans (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) and requires state health insurance commissioners to ensure that exchange plan funds are segregated by insurance companies in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, OMB funds management circulars, and accounting guidance provided by the Government Accountability Office.

I hereby direct the Director of OMB and the Secretary of HHS to develop, within 180 days of the date of this Executive Order, a model set of segregation guidelines for state health insurance commissioners to use when determining whether exchange plans are complying with the Act’s segregation requirements, established in Section 1303 of the Act, for enrollees receiving Federal financial assistance. The guidelines shall also offer technical information that states should follow to conduct independent regular audits of insurance companies that participate in the health insurance exchanges. In developing these model guidelines, the Director of OMB and the Secretary of HHS shall consult with executive agencies and offices that have relevant expertise in accounting principles, including, but not limited to, the Department of the Treasury, and with the Government Accountability Office. Upon completion of those model guidelines, the Secretary of HHS should promptly initiate a rulemaking to issue regulations, which will have the force of law, to interpret the Act’s segregation requirements, and shall provide guidance to state health insurance commissioners on how to comply with the model guidelines.

Section 3. Community Health Center Program.
The Act establishes a new Community Health Center (CHC) Fund within HHS, which provides additional Federal funds for the community health center program. Existing law prohibits these centers from using federal funds to provide abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered), as a result of both the Hyde Amendment and longstanding regulations containing the Hyde language. Under the Act, the Hyde language shall apply to the authorization and appropriations of funds for Community Health Centers under section 10503 and all other relevant provisions. I hereby direct the Secretary of HHS to ensure that program administrators and recipients of Federal funds are aware of and comply with the limitations on abortion services imposed on CHCs by existing law. Such actions should include, but are not limited to, updating Grant Policy Statements that accompany CHC grants and issuing new interpretive rules.

Section 4. General Provisions.
(a) Nothing in this Executive Order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect: (i) authority granted by law or presidential directive to an agency, or the head thereof; or (ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This Executive Order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This Executive Order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity against the United States, its departments, agencies, entities, officers, employees or agents, or any other person.

Can we really feel confident that the Senate and the President won’t sign a bill that codifies what he’s already agreed to do? I honestly don’t know why they wouldn’t do it, particularly as they go into an election year desperately seeking more of that love they get for bipartisan successes.
Republicans, of course, would end up winning a very long and ugly 35 year battle, but who’s counting?

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Blue America Chat

by digby

I think most of us have come to realize that something has gone terribly wrong. The rampant cronyism, corporatism, demagoguery and sheer irrationality of our politics is almost impossible to wrap our minds around and I worry that we are losing our ability to see clearly. These are confusing, frustrating times with pressures from major social change and global transition bearing down and leaving us disoriented and off-kilter.

But all is not lost. The world has seen big changes before and this country has faced greater challenges. It does require, however, that we seek out and support new political leadership. The system is no longer functioning on behalf of the people and it’s going to take smart, creative, energetic people with fresh ideas and a different perspective to turn it around.

We at Blue America believe that Nicholas Ruiz III is one of those leaders. Howie introduced him to his readers like this:

Over the course of the next few months, Blue America plans to help you get to know another courageous, fighting progressive from central Florida, Nicholas Ruiz III. A young father and university professor, Nicholas ran for Congress on the Green Party platform in 2010 and has since re-registered as a Democrat. He’s already challenging extreme right-wing Republican freshman Sandy Adams for the right to represent FL-24, folks in Orange, Seminole, Volusia and Brevard counties who dumped one-term conservative Democrat Suzanne Kosmas in November. Kosmas was one of 39 Democrats to join with the Republicans voting against the historic Affordable Health Care for America Act on November 7, 2009. She and Sandy Adams saw eye to eye on that one– tax-payer subsidized health care for them and their families– but no health care reform for the people of Central Florida…Last November Democrats didn’t have much of a choice. Kosmas was against health care reform and Adams was even more against it!

Here’s Ruiz, the progressive alternative:

We must decide, once and for all, what sort of society defines America. We have already decided that law enforcement (i.e. the police department) is a guaranteed service for all, regardless of social or economic status. We have also decided that the fire department is a guaranteed service. Our society, rightfully so, honors both of these public features. They are freely available to all, regardless of the size of one’s wallet.

Why should healthcare be any different?

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard anyone making that sort of argument on the stump. They talk about “cost curves” and issue ten point plans and explain about how the most important part of anything is free markets and “consumer choice.” They are making their arguments almost entirely on conservative terms and in the process they fail to give people a way to understand why government makes sense. Voters are adrift, knowing that their lives are insecure and that they pay taxes and that government plays a role but they don’t have a way of thinking about it anymore outside of rightwing cant and some vague moral notions that aren’t well articulated.

We need politicians who can make the progressive case for political action and empower the people to make reasoned decisions and Nicholas Ruiz is one of them He is a dynamic, creative thinker who isn’t bound by the artificial parameters of the stale political debate. He’s pressing against them, offering up ideas that should be part of the dialog if only our leadership were willing to build a rationale for real progressivism.

Like this, for instance:

That’s not something you hear every day, but it should be. This is how we widen the terms of the debate and begin to get progressive ideas back into American politics.

Click over to Crooks and Liars at 11AM to meet Nicholas and join the chat.

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Jamie’s Crying

by digby

Again…

At last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive once again lambasted the media and politicians for portraying all bankers as greedy evil-doers.It was at least the 12th time since the start of the financial crisis that Dimon has complained about Wall Street critics painting all bankers as cut from the same cloth. But the timing of his latest outburst seemed odd.In December, as part of President Barack Obama’s bid to make nice with U.S. business leaders, Dimon was invited to a private Oval Office one-on-one with the president to discuss the economy. Dimon and his wife Judy were also guests at the state dinner the White House arranged for Chinese President Hu Jintao last month. And one of Dimon’s top executives, Bill Daley, was tapped by the president as chief of staff.By most objective standards that’s a lot of love Obama has showered on Dimon, even though JPMorgan spent more money than any other Wall Street firm to lobby against key parts of last year’s financial regulatory reform law.If Dimon seems unusually thin-skinned, many industry insiders say, it is an indication of the importance the 54-year-old Queens, New York native places on his legacy — and how that will affect his ability to forge a life beyond finance.Dimon has worked hard over the years to sell investors and analysts on the notion that JPMorgan doesn’t play by the same set of brass-knuckled rules as Goldman Sachs Group, Citigroup or even Bear Stearns — which Dimon acquired with a healthy dollop of taxpayer help in the early days of the crisis.He also likes to portray himself as a regular guy, who just happens to run a banking colossus.But there’s another side to the popular narrative about Dimon the Good and how he outperformed his peers by steering clear of things like subprime-backed mortgage securities. In reality, the main reason JPMorgan didn’t load up on subprime debt as much as other banks was because it was slow to enter the market, critics say.Critics point out that JPMorgan, even if it wasn’t a leader in churning out collateralized debt obligations, provided some of the building blocks for these toxic securities through all the home loans and second mortgages it sold.And despite his good-guy image, Dimon is just as aggressive as any banker when it comes to looking for ways to generate fees from credit cards and other staple consumer banking products.Indeed, JPMorgan under Dimon tried to make the most of its long relationship with convicted Ponzi king Bernard Madoff.In a lawsuit unsealed on Thursday, the Madoff trustee alleges that the bank began drawing up plans in 2006 to sell structured notes tied to the returns of the many so-called feeder funds that funneled money to Madoff. The trustee, Irving Picard, said that JPMorgan went ahead with its structured note sales despite red flags — because the “potential upside reward for investing through Madoff was simply too good to pass up even if there was a fraud.”In some ways what bugs Dimon when he gets tarred with the label of being just another banker is that it invites critics to take a fresh look at his stewardship — not just of JPMorgan but of Bank One before it.For his part, he says the media has made too much of a falling out with the Obama administration. “I don’t have hurt feelings,” he said during an hour-long interview late last year in his office at JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters. “Whether they take my counsel, that’s up to them. I never stopped talking to them.”Yet try as he might to appear nonchalant about it, people who know Dimon say he cares deeply about what the political class thinks. They say he prides himself on having the ear of those in power.People close to him say the criticism is especially painful because he sees himself as a financier/statesman along the lines of a Warren Buffett or Henry Paulson. If not quite doing God’s work, what Dimon is doing, at least in his mind, is the next best thing. He is a corporate executive who plays on the world stage and at the highest political level.The financial crisis allowed Dimon to step out from the shadow of his former mentor Sandy Weill, the architect of Citigroup and the so-called supermarket bank. As the self-styled heir to John Pierpont Morgan’s legacy, Dimon rescued Bear Stearns from bankruptcy and, along with the Federal Reserve, emerged as one of the lenders of last resort during the later stages of the crisis.In fact, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke came to believe that JPMorgan was the only one of 13 large financial institutions that was not at risk of failure in the fall of 2008, the Wall Street Journal wrote last week.At times Dimon speaks as if he is running JPMorgan, where shares have risen just 14 percent since he became CEO in January 2006, for the betterment of the country and not just the interest of the second-largest U.S. bank’s shareholders.”I’m not as worried about JPMorgan as I am about our industry and our country,” he told Reuters.

Read on if you can stomach it.
I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t say that he’s doing God’s work, but it’s pretty clear he thinks he is. What with its adolescent Randian worship of rich men in suits, I suppose this is the natural consequence of the right’s domination over the past few years. But it’s still a little bit surprising to find out just what whining little twits these Masters of the Universe really are.And the fact that Jamie’s just turning his late entry into the sub-prime market lemon into lemonade is just precious. They don’t miss a trick.

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Rush Owww

by digby

Mike Stark is just brilliant. He thoroughly flummoxed Limbaugh today, in just the right way. This is just a piece of the conversation. You really have to listen to the whole thing.

STARK: Why is Reagan a hero to conservatives? RUSH: “Why is Reagan a hero to conservatives?” I don’t think you… Given what you’ve said, and I’m not trying to avoid the question, I don’t think you’d ever understand it. STARK: Well, he’s a tax raiser, an amnesty giver, a cut-and-runner, and he negotiated with terrorists. Why is he a hero to conservatives? I don’t think you understand it. RUSH: No, I do. Most assuredly I do. I just don’t think that you would understand it. Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes on Social Security? What websites do you read? Where did you pick that up? STARK: Look up the Greenspan Commission. It’s not too hard to find. I mean, it’s a matter of history. RUSH: Where did you get it? I mean, you’re asking me questions. I’m just reversing one on you here. STARK: I’m sorry. It’s just general knowledge. It’s something I’ve known for a long time. I can’t remember where I got it from. RUSH: You can’t remember? You’ve never heard of a website called Media Matters which highlighted it yesterday? STARK: (static) Oh, no. I know Media Matters very well but that’s not where I got it. RUSH: Oh, not where you got it. It’s an amazing coincidence. STARK: (static) I mean, I’m a liberal. Of course I know Media Matters. RUSH: Amazing coincidence out there. STARK: They’re a fantastic website. But why are you dodging the question? I want to know why a tax-raising, amnesty-giving, cut-and-running, negotiating-with-terrorists guy is a hero to the conservative movement. RUSH: Well, because you understand Reagan in a way that is flawed. You – Your call is actually kinda interesting because you represent the impossibility of “bridging the gap.” Somebody like you just has to be defeated. There’s no crossing the aisle and finding common ground with you. You’re free to be who you are, don’t misunderstand. I’m not trying to insulting. I’m just saying, you are unreachable. You don’t want to be reached. T his picture of Reagan, you’ve just described somebody you should love, and you hate him! You just described somebody you should absolutely love, all these things. He’s an anti-conservative, as you say, but you don’t love him. You’re having trouble understanding why he’s viewed as heroic to a lot of people. I could talk to you about anti-communism. I could. You want to talk about amnesty? Yeah, that was Simpson-Mazzoli, and that was one-and-a-half, two million illegals; and he was told, “Okay, if we’re gonna do this, this is it, then. We’re gonna secure the borders and that’s it.” It’s the same thing with every tax increase he signed. It was also accompanied by promises to cut spending, and it never happened. Reagan’s not perfect. Nobody is. But I think the proof of Reagan is the fact that when your guys get in trouble, who do they seek to associate themselves with? Remember, Obama and these people are all about getting votes.

He sounds almost as addled as Beck.

This is how you talk about Reagan — you turn him into a liberal. The wingnuts don’t know what to do about it and liberals get credit for the things he did that we like.

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Tweaking Ryan

by digby

Howie sez:

I hope you saw John Amato’s post about Paul Ryan and the Green Bay Packers at Crooks and Liars yesterday. If you’re interested in the sports angle on this story, you won’t find something better. Meanwhile though… a development. Since John posted. This morning 1290 WMCS — the Milwaukee Community Station owned by former Packer Willie Davis has started running this ad:

It turns out that other radio stations in the district are refusing to run the ad because it’s “inappropriate.” Whatever that means. I suspect it has something to do with “civility” but I don’t know. As Howie points out:

Blue America gets a lot of that. I bet Karl Rove’s multimillion dollar PAC, the Republican Party front group American Crossroads, never gets letters from radio stations telling them they won’t run their ads. And ours isn’t even advocating a candidate. In fact, there is no candidate running against Ryan. (The DCCC always makes sure of that.) It’s just an issue advocacy ad.

I can’t help but think of this ad whenever I see one of these notices that our ads are uncivil and inappropriate:

I saw that one on CNN.

Luckily, WMCS is running the ad through Super Bowl week-end. Go Packers.

Update:

Here’s Cenk at The Young Turks talking about the ad:

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Job Flatlining

by digby

There are many ways to measure unemployment out there, but this Gallup poll tells a rather startling story:

Gallup’s U.S. employment measures report the percentage of U.S. adults in the workforce, ages 18 and older, who are underemployed and unemployed, without seasonal adjustment. “Underemployed” respondents are employed part time, but want to work full time, or they are unemployed. “Unemployed” respondents are those within the underemployed group who are not employed, even for one hour a week, but are available and looking for work. Results for each 30-day rolling average are based on telephone interviews with approximately 30,000 adults. Because results are not seasonally adjusted, they are not directly comparable to numbers reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which are based on workers 16 and older. Margin of error is ± 0.7 percentage points.

The new normal?

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