Month: February 2011

Maybe If They’d Brought Some Big Puppets

by digby

Not that you would know it by the cable news networks, but there were some rallies today, a particularly big one in Madison. Dday’s reporting from there with video:

Madison Police confirms that the crowd is between 70-100K, and that there have been no arrests today. Keep in mind that there’s a snowstorm outside.
comment on this

The funny thing is that all these people look like Real Americans to me. Real Americans protesting outside in a snowstorm. Hello? Anyone care?

I guess not. But then they don’t have their own network setting the news agenda for the country. Too bad.
I am glad to report, however, that CNN’s repeating their blockbuster interview with Iman so if you are desperate to find out what’s happening in the dirty underbelly of the world of super-models, you won’t be disappointed.

Update: I do have to point out just how well phrased and nicely lettered the signs all are. I guess that’s to be expected since so many of the “union thugs” are teachers.

When he was young and foolish

by digby

Here’s something about which I haven’t noticed much discussion, but apparently Governor Walker’s voice on tape isn’t the only thing he has in common with Richard Nixon.

It’s from the Marquette University paper during last fall’s campaign:

Nice play is far away and forgotten, as the Wisconsin gubernatorial race between candidates Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker (R) and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D) has turned from agreeable to negative.

Both candidates have gotten their shots in. A recent commercial produced by Barrett targeted Walker’s “mismanagement” of Milwaukee County and blamed him for its current economic state. On the other side, Walker coined Barrett as a “radical environmentalist” and a “polluter” due to problems with the Milwaukee sewage system.

But for Walker, a questionable campaigning strategy is apparently nothing new.

Walker attended Marquette from 1986 t0 1990, but never attained a degree (see page 5). His sophomore year, Walker ran for president of the Associated Students of Marquette University (ASMU, the former title for Marquette Student Government). He was accused of violating campaign guidelines on multiple occasions.

The Tribune reported then that he was found guilty of illegal campaigning two weeks before his candidacy became official. Later, a Walker campaign worker was seen placing brochures under doors at the YMCA. Door-to-door campaigning was strictly prohibited.

Walker initially denied this but later admitted to the violation, which resulted in lost campaign privileges at the YMCA.

In the run-up to election day, the Tribune’s editorial board endorsed Walker’s opponent John Quigley, but said either candidate had the potential to serve effectively.

However, the Tribune revised its editorial the following day, calling Walker “unfit for presidency.” The column cited Walker’s distribution of a mudslinging brochure about Quigley that featured statements such as “constantly shouting about fighting the administration” and “trying to lead several ineffective protests of his own.”

The revision also expressed disappointment in Walker’s campaign workers reportedly throwing away issues of the Tribune after the endorsement was initially made.

Walker dismissed this, saying he had no knowledge of what his supporters did, according to a Tribune article from February 25, 1988.

In a Tribune article dated April 25, 2002, Walker recalled the election, saying he regretted the approach he took to campaigning.

“I didn’t achieve office because I focused on personalities and egos,” Walker said in the article.

He also blamed Quigley for the negative path the race took, saying he made the election into a partisan one.

Walker has said Barrett is responsible for the negative direction the current gubernatorial race has taken, using attack ads to compensate for his trailing position in polls.

Graeme Zielinski, communications director for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said he believes Walker will do anything to win the election.

“He practiced dirty tricks and mudslinging back then,” Zielinski said. “He’s still doing the same thing today … the ‘say anything, do anything’ campaign.”

Zielinski also said Walker “shamed himself by the way he acted at Marquette” and that his campaign was one of the dirtiest in school history.

The office of Friends of Scott Walker had not responded to multiple interview requests as of press time.

Stephanie Marecki, a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences and president of Students for Walker, said they will continue their support regardless of past indiscretions.

“I would look at these violations as something that represent a college experience, and not something that should define Mr. Walker or his current campaign,” Marecki said. “Anything that happened, he undoubtedly learned a lot from it.”

Looks like it.

h/t to RP

Lot’s happening only some of it real

by digby

These are the stories at the top of my newsfeed.

Republicans:

Tea party supporters packed a Phoenix convention center Saturday to hear from two possible contenders for next year’s Republican presidential nomination — an election the conservative populist movement is determined to help shape after its success helping the GOP in the midterm elections.

The weekend summit, which was organized by the Tea Party Patriots group and had more than 2,000 registered attendees, gave potential candidates a chance to connect directly with a segment of voters who have shown that they get to the polls on Election Day but are skeptical of the political establishment.

Democrats:

White House chief of staff Bill Daley has told Democratic activists to “keep up the fight” and not lose faith despite continued hard economic times.

Daley recalled the days after the November elections, when Republicans won the House and increased their ranks in the Senate.

He said the conventional wisdom was that President Barack Obama’s agenda had stalled. But by year’s end, Obama had a tax-cut deal with Republicans, the Senate ratified a nuclear arms treaty with Russia and Congress approved the long-stalled repeal of a ban on openly gay military service.

Embarrassing, isn’t it?

However, while reading those two article together makes it seem that the allegedly populist Tea Party is an up from the bottom movement of ordinary Americans while the “activist” Democrats being addressed by a corporate centrist are driven from the top down, both parties are answering to the same powerful forces. The Tea Partiers are carrying out their agenda the same way that Daley’s activist at the DNC are, even if they don’t realize it. Nothing the Tea Partiers are doing in any way truly threatens the goals of the oligarchs — Koch and Murdoch wouldn’t be backing them so strongly if it did. The main economic differences between the parties at the moment are between the free market neo-liberals in the Democratic Party and the crude Randian market fundamentalists in the GOP. “Populism” isn’t really at play in either of those stories.

But there is something else happening that really does threaten the status quo. Here’s Mike Elk, reporting from Madison:

“My father always said during a strike is when we would rebuild the labor movement,” said Sadlowski, a veteran organizer whose father famously vied to head the United Steelworkers of America in the late ’70s. “We are proving it right here.”

Older union organizers have been sharing their experiences organizing in the workplace with students who have never engaged with the labor movement before. Some youngsters have been so inspired that they are talking about dedicating their lives to it.

“Everyday I come down here I just feel like we are winning,” said Andrew Cole, who is in his twenties. “We are just a bunch of people standing around a Capitol talking together and singing songs, but through this collective voice we have been able to define the national debate about unions.”

Likewise, young and optimistic organizers have been giving older ones, beaten down by years of anti-union actions, new ideas — and new hope that it might be possible to rebuild the much-decimated labor movement.

Sadlowski has served as a bridge between the two groups, often coordinating communication among protesters occupying the Capitol. “I think what we created here is the first true labor temple” he said. “Coming down to the Capitol is a lot like coming to church. It’s rejuvenating; it’s a spiritual experience for a lot of people.”

But unlike a church, where people go home at night, hundreds of protesters have turned the Capitol into their temporary home. People have been sleeping there overnight since Tuesday Feb. 15. They eat meals there, and go to nearby houses and dormitories to take showers.

In the early days, the Capitol occupation was almost entirely coordinated by the Teaching Assistant’s Association, the union of teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. But other unions have become more involved in occupying the Capitol since, organizing groups to clean the building and provide food and supplies for people camping out there. Local pizza businesses have been experiencing a mini-boom as people from all over the country and even the world have called in delivery orders for the protesters, while Midwestern grandmothers with thick Wisconsin accents stop by to deliver trays of food cooked at home. In one back hallway, you can find tables full of food as well as boxes of donated supplies like toilet paper, water, toothbrushes, soap, spare hats, scarves, and gloves that are free to take. This level of organization is what has made it sustainable for hundreds of people to more or less live in the capitol building of a major Midwestern state.

And then there’s this:

Anonymous, the notorious collective of unnamed Internet activists, is declaring war on the controversial Koch brothers. In a press release this weekend Anonymous accuses the brothers and their financial empire of attempting “to usurp American Democracy,” and call for a “boycott all Koch Industries’ paper products.” Anonymous accuses the Koch brothers of taking “actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin.”

David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries are billionaire brothers responsible for financing numerous conservative causes and Tea Party activities. In their press release Anonymous claims:

The Koch brothers have made a science of fabricating ‘grassroots’ organizations and advertising campaigns to support them in an attempt to sway voters based on their falsehoods. Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United are just a few of these organizations. In a world where corporate money has become the lifeblood of political influence, the labor unions are one of the few ways citizens have to fight against corporate greed. Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system. For these reasons, we feel that the Koch brothers threaten the United States democratic system and, by extension, all freedom-loving individuals everywhere. As such, we have no choice but to spread the word of the Koch brothers’ political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness.

Things are happening that threaten the elites of the current gilded age. But not at that dog and pony show in Arizona (even though the sincere believers among the Tea Partiers think it is) and certainly not at the DNC meeting featuring a pep talk by Bill “JP Morgan” Daley.

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Face To Face With The Folks

by digby

It’s hard out here for a Governor:

[A tavern] in Madison, WI confirms that on Friday night, Patrick Sweeney (one of the owners) politely asked Scott Walker to leave the establishment when other customers began boo-ing him. A bartender at The Merchant said that, “his presence was causing a disturbance to the other customers and management asked him to leave.“

Gott Laff explains:

I won’t link directly to the restaurant because, along with enthusiastic support, it is also getting threats. I’m sure those are from the very wealthy, lazy, hammock-swinging, resort-lollygagging, ungrateful union thugs who utterly resent all the anti-Walker passion

This is very uncivil, I’m sure, but it shouldn’t result in threats to the restaurant owner fergawdsakes. It’s a part of being a politician, although I don’t think most modern politicians have experienced this as much as those in the past may have. It’s becoming more common. Recall this incident, from the other side:

Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson and his wife were leaving dinner at a new pizza joint near their home in Omaha one night last week when a patron began complaining about Nelson’s decisive vote in favor of the Senate’s health care bill.

Other customers started booing. A woman yelled, “Get him the hell out of here!” And the Nelsons and their dining companions beat a hasty retreat.

I think it’s probably not such a bad thing for our politicians to experience some authentic, spontaneous derision from their constituents outside the ritualized forms we’ve created like Townhalls and talk radio. Governors and Senators especially are usually treated with such deference in their daily lives that I expect experiencing something else in the course of daily living might bring it home to them more viscerally than it otherwise would.

Obviously, no one wants this sort of anger to get out of hand. We know where that can lead. But these people aren’t royals and a little righteous verbal feedback in a democracy is a healthy thing.

Update: Evidently, there is reason to believe this didn’t happen to Walker. The point still stands, however.

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Keeping Them In their Place

by digby

I’m really enjoying watching fabulously compensated TV celebrities on CNN this morning kvetch and moan about how much more union workers make than your average worker and why they need to give up their fat salaries and benefits for the greater good. According to the graphic they put up on the screen the average public employee makes 917 bucks a week compared to 717 bucks a week for the non-union workers. Who do these greedy bastards think they are? TV hosts?

In other words, what I’m being told right now by these wealthy spokesmodels and fatuous gasbags is that these college educated teachers and urban planners and blue collar workers like road and sewage workers need to bring their salaries down below 40k a year because they are living way too high off the hog.

Adele Stan connects some dots:

In the week-long battle taking place in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip state workers of their collective bargaining rights, you’d expect Fox News to be doing what it’s done: misreporting the story, mistakenly characterizing a poll supporting public workers to mean its opposite, featuring Glenn Beck painting the protests of union workers as something cooked up by Stalinists. And you might be tempted to think, well, that’s just Fox playing to its base of frightened Tea Partiers who prefer a fact-free zone to the more challenging territory of actual news, where the answers are never pat, and the world is a bit more complicated than it seems in the realm of Fox Nation. You might think it’s all about what brings in the advertising dollars for Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox’s parent company, News Corporation. But it runs much deeper than that, involving key players at the Wall Street Journal, News Corp.’s crown jewel. The informal partnership between billionaire David Koch, whose campaign dollars and astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity, have fomented the Wisconsin crisis, and billionaire Rupert Murdoch, is profoundly ideological — the ideology being the exponential enrichment of the two men’s heirs, all dressed up in the language of libertarianism and free enterprise. Together with his brother, Charles — also a big donor to right-wing causes –David Koch runs Koch Industries, the conglomerate that sprang from the oil and gas company founded by his father.

Read on for the the details. She is absolutely correct. And it reminds me of this piece again:

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use “social issues” as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats.

More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy.

In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats of the United States are appointing their children to positions in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote conservative theories.

read on, there’s much more …

I would just add this:

“Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.” — Thomas Paine

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Movement Players In Concert

by digby

Ryan Grim connects some of the dots on the assault against Planned Parenthood and it just shows how well organized and disciplined the conservatives can be around issues upon which they all agree:

The House Republican move to strip federal funds from the nation’s most well-known reproductive health care provider as part of its budget last week was the culmination of a multi-year effort that involved parallel action by top Republicans and conservative media operatives playing up the work of a California college student who has been creating surreptitious videos of Planned Parenthood employees for years. The student, Lila Rose, is the president of an organization called Live Action that pays actors to walk into Planned Parenthood offices with hidden cameras, much as James O’Keefe did to undermine the community-organizing group ACORN. The Live Action stars pretend to be a pimp and a prostitute engaged in human trafficking and looking for birth control, STD testing and abortions. The videos that the organization puts out can be convincing and disturbing — and in at least two cases were found by Planned Parenthood to be legitimate cause for dismissals — but thorough, frame-by-frame reviews of the full-length videos show that what is posted on YouTube often bears little relation to what happened in reality, due to heavy editing that alters the meaning of conversations.

Last Friday, the day the House moved to defund Planned Parenthood, Glenn Beck devoted the entirety of his hourlong Fox News show to the organization and brought Rose into the studio to narrate some of her videos — clips that were spliced to create conversations that never happened. Along with Fox News, the conservative blog Big Government, which played a leading role in promoting the ACORN videos, has been pushing Rose’s productions. In a column written for Big Government less than a week before the funding vote, Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, laid out the case against Planned Parenthood.

Grim also makes the important point that groups like ACORN and Planned Parenthood are also seen as institutions that benefit Democrats, which puts them in the cross hairs of the “defund the left” strategy. The right understands how important that is, particularly now in the age of Citizens United. If they can simultaneously dry up the funding and delegitimize government functions among the people who need them, it is going to be increasingly difficult for progressives to compete. It’s a smart move.

Update: And in other news, here’s a Koch front group Americans for Prosperity spokesman spelling it all out:

Speaking at CPAC’s “Panel for Labor Policy,” Hagerstrom said that AFP really wants to do is to “take the unions out at the knees”:

HAGERSTROM: It’s easy to go out there and fight taxes and increased regulation, you know we send out an action alert on taxes to AFP and we get thousands of people to respond. You send out one on a more complicated issue and it just doesn’t quite resonate…We fight these battles on taxes and regulation but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.

Because It Worked So Well The First Time

by digby

Well, it’s not quite as sexy as presidential blowjobs but perhaps it will do in a pinch:

“I believe the Republicans next week should pass a resolution instructing the president to enforce the law and to obey his own constitutional oath, and they should say if he fails to do so that they will zero out [defund] the office of attorney general and take other steps as necessary until the president agrees to do his job,” said Gingrich. “His job is to enforce the rule of law and for us to start replacing the rule of law with the rule of Obama is a very dangerous precedent.” He didn’t call for immediate impeachment hearings, but didn’t rule them out if Obama balks at any congressional demands to enforce the law.

And shutting down the government was huge success that the Republicans should repeat if at all possible. Here’s Newt in this week-end’s WaPo:

The Washington establishment believes that the government shutdown of 1995 was a disastrous mistake that accomplished little and cost House Republicans politically.

While the shutdown produced some short-term pain, it set the stage for a budget deal in 1996 that led to the largest drop in federal discretionary spending since 1969. The discipline imposed by this budget – overall spending grew at an average of 2.9 percent a year while I was speaker of the House, the slowest rate in decades – allowed us to reach a balanced-budget deal in 1997. This would all have been impossible had Republicans not stood firm in 1995 and shown the American people (and the White House) that we were serious about reducing spending. This historic success was not an achievement of the Clinton administration. In the summer of 1995, administration officials publicly expressed doubt that our aggressive timeline for a balanced budget was even possible. Instead, the balanced budget was an outcome driven by House Republicans with limited support from skeptical Senate Republicans.

Yeah, right. That’s how it happened. Gingrich was a real hero:

I won’t be surprised if they follow Newtie’s advice and rush right over that cliff again. Unfortunately, they don’t have the luxury of a once in a generation technology bubble making their antics entertaining to the masses who were making money hand over fist. They might not find it quite as fun this time.

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Rich Man Poor Man

by digby

One would think this would be an obvious point, but it isn’t:

When it comes to improving public understanding of tax policy, nothing has been more troubling than the deeply flawed coverage of the Wisconsin state employees’ fight over collective bargaining.

Economic nonsense is being reported as fact in most of the news reports on the Wisconsin dispute, the product of a breakdown of skepticism among journalists multiplied by their lack of understanding of basic economic principles.

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to “contribute more” to their pension and health insurance plans.

Accepting Gov. Walker’ s assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin’ s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

How can that be? Because the “contributions” consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.

Thus, state workers are not being asked to simply “contribute more” to Wisconsin’ s retirement system (or as the argument goes, “pay their fair share” of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin’ s private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin.

This is right up there with the logic that says because Social Security will likely have a 10% shortfall 30 years from now we need to cut 20% right now.

But there is some good news on this front from Greg Sargent:

I’ve got some new polling from Gallup that underscores this point: It turns out that the only income group that favors Governor Scott Walker’s proposal to roll back public employee bargaining rights are those who make over $90,000. As you know, Gallup released a poll earlier this week finding that 61 percent of Americans oppose Walker’s plan, versus only 33 percent who are in favor. It turns out Gallup has crosstabs which give us an income breakdown of that finding, which the firm sent my way:

* Among those who make less than $24,000 annually, 74 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 14 percent who favor it. * Among those who make $24,000 to $59,000, 63 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 33 percent who favor it. * Among those who make $60,000 to $89,000, 53 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 41 percent who favor it. * Among those who make $90,000 and up, 50 percent favor the proposal, versus 47 percent who oppose it.

Only the last, highest-income category favors the proposal; working and low-to-middle class folks all oppose it. Now, as Mark Blumenthal notes, we need to proceed with caution, because there’s not a lot of data available on this topic. But I think it’s fair to speculate that the focus of Walker’s proposal on rolling back long-accepted bargaining rights, and the massive amount of media attention to it, may have reframed the debate and refocused the public’s attention in a way that is undermining the right’s previous advantage on questions involving public employees.

I think when people focus on the fact that the Republicans are slamming their friends and neighbors, the war on workers becomes a little bit less abstract. It’s called class solidarity.
Which brings me to this fatuous blog post asking why liberals don’t hate the wealthy donors who support Common Cause? Well, he answers the question himself:

What Common Cause is is a bunch of millionaires and billionaires trying to prevent other millionaires and billionaires from participating in the political process the same way they do. In other words, they are hypocrites. The Times could write a story headlined Billionaires’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute and have the article be about not the Koch brothers but about the funders of Common Cause. But the left-wing interest groups rarely get that kind of treatment in the Times, where these left-wing interest groups are more commonly quoted approvingly as expert sources rather than scrutinized skeptically or suspiciously as targets.

If a bunch of millionaires and billionaires believe in egalitarianism and democracy and devote some of their resources to ensuring that America is something other than a crude banana republic, that’s great. Whether public employees have pensions or not, millionaires and billionaires have many huge advantages, from better health to longer lives to more material comfort. The rich don’t need class solidarity. They have the all the money.

Wealthy individuals who are evolved enough to see that our shared world is a more secure place if everyone has an equal chance and that a solid middle class society is not only more enlightened but more stable (ask the Libyans…) are not only decent and compassionate, they are smart enough to know what their self-interest really is. It’s the same as everyone else’s.

The left wing commie General Dwight Eisenhower once said:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Americans used to have solidarity simply as Americans. But these people are killing that tradition, pulling the rug out from under the middle class by insisting on a harsh, Hobbesian law of the jungle in which the middle class American Dream is turning into a nightmare.

It’s true that their numbers are negligible and they are stupid. But 40 years later they have seized the Republican Party and brainwashed a legion of souls into voting against their own self-interest and do their dirty work for them. One can only hope that Eisenhower’s prediction about the outcome of such an experiment is true or we’re all going down with the ship together.

h/t to jh

Beck With A Bouffant

by digby

These poor, confused people:

As Sarah Palin wonders whether to run for president, she might want to talk to people in places such as South Carolina.

She’d find her star fading, and her prospects daunting.

Republicans still like her, but now they openly question whether she could or should be nominated for president, let alone elected.

At a recent gathering in South Carolina, the site of a crucial early presidential primary next year, party activists said the former Alaska governor didn’t have the experience, the knowledge of issues or the ability to get beyond folksy slang and bumper-sticker generalities that they think is needed to win and govern.

Many are shopping for someone else. They’re looking at Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., for example, and seeing what they call a smarter, more experienced candidate who’s equally as conservative.

“Sarah Palin with a brain,” said Gail Moore, a Republican from Columbia.

Palin, Bachman, Angle, O’Donnell — the choices these Tea Partiers have for female leadership is pathetic. None of them are exactly intellectual giants. Or even average, frankly. But of all of them, Palin seems to me to have the most charisma and highly developed political skills, such as they are. (She’s got a certain cheery Reaganesque form of nastiness that makes her a more formidable politician.) If she’d stayed off Facebook and twitter she might have kept some of her mystique. But Bachman is a politician only a true believer could love. Seriously:

“We need to simply tell people the facts, like Glenn Beck, with that chalkboard, that man can explain anything. I think if we give Glenn Beck the numbers, he can solve this.”

If you think it can’t get worse …

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Shock Doctrine FTW

by digby

This is working out awfully well:

Britain’s economy shrank by 0.6% in the final quarter of last year, a sharper fall than previously thought.

The surprise downward revision, from a 0.5% quarterly drop reported last month, was blamed on industry and service sector firms whose performance was worse than originally estimated. Consumer spending also slipped and the economy was kept afloat by higher government spending, which will see sharp cuts in coming months.

The Office for National Statistics stuck to its view that the harsh winter weather in December – the coldest December on record – contributed 0.5 percentage points to the decline, so without the snow GDP would still have shown a slight fall.

Meanwhile the US economy grew more slowly than initially estimated in the fourth quarter as government spending contracted at a sharper rate and consumer spending was less robust than first thought. US GDP rose at an annualised rate of 2.8%, revised down from 3.2%.

Output from the UK service industries fell by 0.7% between October and December from the previous quarter, rather than 0.5% – led by a 1.1% drop in finance and business services – while industrial production was also revised lower to show growth of 0.7% compared with the earlier estimate of 0.9%. Construction slumped by 2.5%.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “The government’s hope of an upwards revision of growth has been dashed. It’s time to wake up and smell an economy in big trouble. We need a plan B that doesn’t send it over the edge with deep rapid spending cuts.”

What was that saying about those who forget history are doomed …?

Krugman a has written a provocative column on GOP Shock Doctrine economics that I’m sure has sent the shrieking harpies into hysteria. And he draws the analogy between the Republicans and the Coalition Provisions Authority in Iraq, which I hadn’t thought of. When you think about it, it makes sense, particularly since the GOP Viceroy John Boehner appears to be just as inept — and tan — as Paul Bremer was:

As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display.

Krugman goes on to outline how this is taking place, and I think he’s absolutely correct. Indeed, Walker himself admitted it in his little chit-chat with the fake David Koch:

Walker: … This is — you know, I told my cabinet, I had a dinner the Sunday, or excuse me, the Monday right after the 6th. Came home from the Super Bowl where the Packers won, and that Monday night I had all of my cabinet over to the residence for dinner. Talked about what we were gonna do, how we were gonna do it. We’d already kinda built plans up, but it was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb. And I stood up and I pulled out a picture of Ronald Reagan, and I said, you know, this may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan, whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before, had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air-traffic controllers. And, uh, I said, to me that moment was more important than just for labor relations or even the federal budget, that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communism because from that point forward, the Soviets and the Communists knew that Ronald Reagan wasn’t a pushover. And, uh, I said this may not have as broad of world implications, but in Wisconsin’s history — little did I know how big it would be nationally — in Wisconsin’s history, I said this is our moment, this is our time to change the course of history. And this is why it’s so important that they were all there. I had a cabinet meeting this morning and I reminded them of that and I said for those of you who thought I was being melodramatic you now know it was purely putting it in the right context.

Mike Konzcal put together a handy little graphic that shows exactly what the bomb looks like:

There’s a three-prong approach in Governor Walker’s plan that highlights a blueprint for conservative governorship after the 2010 election. The first is breaking public sector unions and public sector workers generally. The second is streamlining benefits away from legislative authority, especially for health care and in fighting the Health Care Reform Act. The third is the selling of public assets to private interests under firesale and crony capitalist situations.

This wasn’t clear to me at first. I thought this was about a narrow disagreement over teacher’s unions. Depending on what you read, you may have only seen a few of these parts, and you may have not seen them put together as a coherent whole. This will be the framework that other conservative governors, and even a few Democratic ones, will use in their state, so it is good to get a working model in place.

The well-researched article is worth reading in its entirehey haven’t exactly been discrete in describing their plans.

They’re well on their way in the UK. And it’s not working out very well. Their economy is shrinking again. And growth here in the last quarter was an anemic 2.8%. Maybe the economy will come roaring back and make these draconian Shock Therapy measures seem unnecessary, but it’s not looking good. Indeed, the whole point of the shock doctrine is to keep people under enough stress that they will not fight it.

Wisconsin is showing that it might not be as easy as they thought it would be, but as ex-SEIU leader Andy Stern says in this interview, “It may not end beautifully.” He’s not saying that the workers will lose, but that they could lose “the spin” which equals the same thing. I share that concern. Spin is the lifeblood of the Shock Doctrine.

Update: Read this and see if it sounds familiar at all.

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