Month: February 2011

Packing For The Protests

by digby

Columnist Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:

This has been posted on the far-right Free Republic site, under the headline:
“Atlanta Tea Party and Many Other Groups, Facing Off the SEIU Thugs Wednesday”

“Members of the various Tea Party, 9/12, and other freedom-oriented folks in the Atlanta area will be assembling in the vicinity of Georgia State Capitol this coming Wednesday afternoon at 4 pm. We’ll be providing balance to the ravings of the passengers aboard the SEIU Thugbus, which is scheduled to vomit forth its stooges at that same place and time. If you are within three hours drive of ATL, come join us. Dan and others from RTC will be there, with the usual accoutrements. As always, each participant is responsible for compliance with all applicable local laws. Rally point will be the corner of Trinity and Washington Streets in front of the Trinity United Methodist Church. Guide on the Gadsden flags. Rendezvous time no later than 3:45 pm local. There appears to be some regulations re armed protests on the Washington Street side of the Capitol, so attendees are requested to be flexible in your attire. We will attempt (but no promises) to get some additional clarity regarding the situation and post it here prior to the show. Take a stand. Join us in Atlanta on Wednesday.”

The advice that “attendees are requested to be flexible in your attire” is apparently a suggestion to keep firearms concealed. The original author goes on to claim that “the lefties are idiots who are very good at running their mouths… and also very good at keeping their distance from an armed American”.

I honestly don’t think these protests have anything to do with RTC (“Right to Carry”) so there’s really no reason to show up with guns to this rally. In fact, it’s intentionally provocative.

This is exactly what we were talking about when the Tea Partiers started packing heat at the Townhall meetings. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with protesting or counter-protesting, even in a (dare I say it?) “uncivil” way. But when you bring guns, it’s violent intimidation. I think this fellow makes that very clear.

He’s right about one thing. It’s probably a good idea to at least keep your kids’ distance from these “armed Americans”. These people aren’t all that bright and things could easily go sideways if some kindergarten teacher says something they could construe as “threatening.”

On the other hand, this could work wonders to end all these silly 60s style lefty protests if it catches on. I’m sure that would be a great relief to many people who find this sort of thing to be vastly unpleasant. But we might also have to really start questioning just how different from certain foreign countries we really are.

In a democracy there is no more inappropriate place to being a gun than a political rally. If this becomes common in our country, we’ll have devolved one more level into plutocracy — defended by a violent mob. Free societies just don’t have citizens packing heat to political rallies to intimidate their political opponents. Even by our own worst standards, this is not the American way.

h/t to bb

Are MSNBC and CNN afraid of the Koch Brothers?

by digby

I really have to wonder why the national political press is so unwilling to engage on this Walker/Koch story. Both MSNBC and CNN allowed Walker to give his prepared statement (which included an absurd statement that his budget will save workers’ money because they won’t have to pay union dues!) — and then cut away from the Q and A when the Wisconsin press tried to ask him about his statements in that prank call today. Have they been scared away from this story by Republicans calling it a “Breitbart” hoax? Or is it that the evocation of the Big Money Koch brothers makes them squeamish. (After all, going after ACORN and Planned Parenthood only affect a bunch of low income women, so who cares?)

I don’t know about that but the Wisconsin press is very, very interested. TPM reports:

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) held a tense press conference Wednesday afternoon, following the revelation that he had a 20-minute phone conversation with a prank caller pretending to be Republican financier David Koch, a call in which Walker and “Koch” discussed possible ways to disrupt the protests against his budget bill, and to bring the Democrats back to the Capitol.
[…]
The first questioner asked Walker whether he could be trusted to negotiate in good faith, given he had discussed with “Koch” methods of tricking the Democrats into coming back to the Capitol building, and after he alluded to having considered bringing “troublemakers” into the crowds.

“For us I think it’s real simple. First I want to say I take phone calls all the time,” Walker said, before being interrupted by a reporter in the crowd who yelled, “Not mine!.” Walker continued: “I’ve talked to individual taxpayers across the state. As I said last night I’ve listened to people both pro and con in terms of the e-mails I’ve received. But bottom line, the things I’ve said privately are the same things I’ve said all along.” Regarding the idea of planting agitators in the crowds, Walker said: “We’ve had all sorts of options brought to us by staff and lawmakers and people across the state, but as you heard we dismissed them.” Regarding the idea of bringing the Democrats into the Capitol to talk, only to have the Republicans use their presence in the building to declare the Senate in session for the budget — as Walker said, “I’m not negotiating” — Walker said: “I’m willing to talk, but ultimately I think it has to lead to a vote. I don’t think that’s a trick.”

Uhm, yes that’s a trick. It’s not illegitimate. They can fool the Democrats into coming back and the stab them in the back if they want to. But it’s definitely a trick — which has now been revealed because of his loose lips.

The bigger question Walker has to answer now is why he’s taking calls from millionaire out-of-state donors and coordinating strategy with him. Even if it’s not illegal, his constituents might not find it quite as benign as the jaded cable news networks.

And then there’s the fact that he admitted that his goal wasn’t to balance the budget but to break the unions. You’d think that would be newsworthy.

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This is why I love Stephen Colbert

by digby

“A rising tide lifts all boats and when the tide goes out I want to drag you down with me”

Funny, factual, informative political satire … and shockingly one-sided. Oh dear.

Now if conservatives had any sense of humor (besides laughing at cruelty) much less a gift for clever satire, they could come up with something similar to skewer liberals. But they don’t. And that’s their problem, not ours.

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Chutzpah with a tan

by digby

Greg Sargent’s just tweeted this:

Boehner spox on DOMA: Prez shld explain why “now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation.”

Sometimes you just have to love these guys, don’t you? We have Republicans voting to defund Planned Parenthood just last week and their jihad continues apace. They are very seriously threatening to shut down the government in the next week. And GOP Governors across the nation are engaged in a coordinate union breaking movement that has people in the streets as we speak.

And Boehner is lecturing the president about “stirring up controversial issues?”

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For The Right It Just Comes Naturally

by digby

I know that the left and right are equally silly and stupid with their embarrassing 60s style protesting and all, but I’d be curious to know when the last time liberal officials and operatives publicly said stuff like this:

On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn’t end up happening—one Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: “Use live ammunition.” From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were “political enemies” and “thugs” who were “physically threatening legally elected officials.” In response to such behavior, he said, “You’re damned right I advocate deadly force.” He later called me a “typical leftist,” adding, “liberals hate police.” Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.As one of 144 attorneys in that office, Jeff Cox has represented the people of his state for 10 years. And for much of that time, it turns out, he’s vented similar feelings on Twitter and on his blog, Pro Cynic. In his nonpolitical tweets and blog posts, Cox displays a keen litigator’s mind, writing sharply and often wittily on military history and professional basketball. But he evinces contempt for political opponents—from labeling President Obama an “incompetent and treasonous” enemy of the nation to comparing “enviro-Nazis” to Osama bin Laden, likening ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Service Employees International Union members to Nazi “brownshirts” on multiple occasions, and referring to an Indianapolis teen as “a black teenage thug who was (deservedly) beaten up” by local police. A “sensible policy for handling Afghanistan,” he offered, could be summed up as: “KILL! KILL! ANNIHILATE!“

Here’s famed GOP operative Roger Stone:

With Tea Party legions now confronting the Public employee crowds at the State Capitol I offer Stone’s Rule # 37 as follows:

“Always mount your protest or picket sign on a good solid piece of wood. Comes in handy as a bat if some union goons wanna scuffle.”

Yeah, those kindergarten teachers are real thugs.

Governor Walker made a joke about having a baseball bat in his call with “David Koch” too, but I don’t think he meant it literally. He did mean this, however:

FAKE KOCH: What we were thinking about the crowds was, planting some troublemakers.

WALKER: We thought about that. My only gut reaction to that would be, right now, the lawmakers I talk to have just completely had it with them. The public is not really fond of this.The teachers union did some polling and focus groups.

As Greg Sargent wrote:

It’s unclear what Walker means when he says he “thought” about planting some troublemakers, but it seems fair to ask him for clarification.

Keep in mind that these are not hot-headed Tea Partiers mouthing off at Townhall meetings. These are elected officials and top level operatives. I have no doubt that liberals speak this way from time to time as well. But they certainly don’t seem to take the kind of pride in it that these people on the right do.

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Walker has a Koch and an aspirin

by digby

If these tapes of Governor David Walker aren’t real it’s a pretty good hoax. Not because it’s hard to fake a phone call. But because of this passage in which he allegedly says this:

WALKER: You’ve got a few of the radical ones — unfortunately, one of them’s the minority leader — but most of the rest of them are just looking for a way to get out of this. They’re scared out of their minds. They don’t know what it means. There’s a bunch of recalls up against them. They’d really like to just get back up here and get it over with. So the paycheck thing, some of the other things threatening them, I think collectively there’s enough going on, and as long as they don’t think I’m going to cave, which again we have no interest in. An interesting idea that was brought up to me by my chief of staff, we won’t do it until tomorrow, is putting out an appeal to the Democratic leader. I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly. They can recess it… the reason for that, we’re verifying it this afternoon, legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum because it’s turned out that way. So we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capitol with all 14 of them. My sense is, hell. I’ll talk. If they want to yell at me for an hour, I’m used to that. I can deal with that. But I’m not negotiating.

Any hoaxster who can come up with that level of detail deserves some kind of award. If it’s real, Walker just admitted that he was luring Democrats into talks so that he could get a quick quorum and then stab them in the back. I’d think he was pretty wily if he wasn’t spilling the beans to a phone prankster.The rest of the call is worth listening to. Governor Walker sounds like a very confident fellow who doesn’t seem to realize just how deeply he’s gone over the edge. Nobody’s going to mistake him for a statesman, that’s for sure. But he does have a rather lugubrious Nixonian air about him which should stand him in good stead in GOP politics. You can hear the call here.*In case you didn’t know about The Buffalo Beast, it was founded by Matt Taibbi and friends. It’s a gonzo alternative paper (which I hadn’t heard of either, but will certainly be a regular stop from now on.)
Update: The Governor admits he had the conversation and that the tape of the call is accurate.
Update II: And no, this is not like the ACORN videos. First, and most important, they were edited in ways that made them misleading. The Governor admits the tapes are real. (And the Buffalo Beast says that they would have made it much funnier if it were a joke — which I suspect is true.)
Second, this is a high level public figure whose words reflect actual policy and strategy, not some low level clerk acting on his or her own.
Third, this is someone one could expect to verify who he’s talking to, and guard his words in the middle of a national controversy.Fourth, it’s damning that Walker would take a call from “David Koch” and be this forthcoming but it has little in common with the cartoon racist subtext of the ACORN stuff.

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Bubbles, balloons, Beck and Bachman

by digby

This woman just has to run for president. She was in Iowa recently and just this week spoke to a group of super fans in South Carolina:

Bachmann spoke to a group of about 200 Spartanburg Republicans on Saturday evening. She was in Columbia earlier in the day and had to cancel a Friday visit with Rock Hill Republicans due to a late-night vote in the House. “We are looking at a time of bubbles,” Bachmann said, referring to the housing and tech bubbles. She said that Americans are witnessing a “government bubble.” “If Obama is allowed to continue what I call his ‘reign of error’ for another second term, we will be at $21 trillion in debt,” she said. “We are talking Greece territory in the greatest country in the world. We are talking Greece.” She added, “When you add it all up — I’m a former federal tax lawyer — when you add up the tax burden on today’s kids — and I believe this is a low estimate — they are looking at in their peak years, at having 70 percent of their income to pay their tax bill.” That’s a claim that Bachmann made at CPAC earlier this month when she claimed an even higher number — 75 percent, and according to the Washington Post, it simply isn’t true. “The bottom line, when you ‘get out your calculator’ and add all this up: total taxes of about 25 percent, rather than the 75 percent in Bachmann’s telling,” wrote the Washington Post, which used tax experts to assist in its calculations of federal, state and local taxes. “We presented this math to Bachmann’s spokesman and are still waiting for a response.” Bachmann blasted entitlement spending and urged reform in Social Security. “The problem is our health care welfare spending which is out of control,” she said. “The good news is we can solve this problem. It needs to be a market based approach.” She offered up a somewhat non-traditional solution: “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.”

The most shocking thing in all that is the part where she says she is a former federal tax lawyer!

She wasn’t finished:

She also said that the rich pay the most in taxes. “Don’t let people tell you that those dirty rich people don’t pay their taxes: The top 1 percent pay 40 percentof all income taxes, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent, the top 10 percent pay 80 percent,” she said. “So we need a radically new system.” In addition to the government bubble and the business bubble, Bachmann spoke of the education bubble, decrying $44 billion in Pell grants for low-income students. She also talked about the “family bubble.” “The family is on a bubble right now. The rate of cohabitating couples in one year increased 13 percent,” she said. “The family is the ultimate first form and first unit in government and society.” She added, “The bureaucrats now hate our values; there’s a war on marriage, a war on family, a war on fertility all while funding and promoting abortion.” Bachmann continued, “We don’t need political correctness because most fundamentally I believe the building block of the family is what the government needs to do right now and support two-parent families as the foundation of our economic and social policy.” She said for that reason, social issues need to be a priority. “We can’t put the so called social issues on the back burner while we are solving our economic challenges because the family is the solution to those challenges.”

All this talk about bubbles is sort of funny in light of Chris Matthews’ recent silly outburst that Bachman is a “balloon-head” and Beck’s subsequent rousing defense of her.

She went on to say that Obama is a wimp who makes Jimmy Carter look like Rambo and that the school boards in Wisconsin should fire all the teachers, before winding up with this

“So it is our time and it’s about 2012 and I’m in, and so I ask you tonight, are you in for 2012?”

Let’s hope Bachman really is all in for 2012 and plans to run. The whole country needs to hear her message.

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Wisconsin is the new land of fruits and nuts

by digby

While the protests were being waged, Governor Walker and his pals just turned Wisconsin into a permanent gridlocked state. Dday reports:

I got a sense from Sen. Chris Larson and some others in Wisconsin that the Governor and his Republican allies had run amok in the Capitol before attention was paid to their machinations due to the assault on public workers. But I didn’t realize how bad it was until I saw this come across the transom:

Madison – Today, Governor Scott Walker signed Special Session Assembly Bill 5 which requires a 2/3s vote to pass tax rate increases on the income, sales or franchise taxes. “I went to work today, met with my cabinet, and signed legislation that will help government operate within its means,” Governor Scott Walker said. “Wisconsinites can’t turn to raising taxes to balance their own family budgets when times get tough. This bill will ensure that we don’t kick the can down the road for a quick budget fix only to slap a long-term tax hike on the backs of Wisconsin taxpayers. I thank Senator Leah Vukmir and Representative Tyler August for their leadership on this issue.”

That’s hilarious framing on that one, that the bill makes sure that long-term solutions aren’t ushered in under the guise of a short-term budget fix. Wherever have I heard that one before? This permanent restriction on revenues was put through in a special session on the budget, not the regular legislative cycle.

Welcome to California, Wisconsin! Now you are going to find out what truly dysfunctional government is like.

Dday says “Good lord”:

This is really depressing. The fight is still ongoing over public employee union rights, but without the ability to obtain needed revenue, I don’t see how they’ll matter a whole lot. The state government will say their hands are tied and that they must have concessions, and either the workers will suffer, or the recipients of their services. Revenues, half of what a budget comprises, have now been walled off.

Let’s go back to that wonderful metaphor employed by Republicans and the president alike: if this were a family budget, what the governor has just done is made it a rule that Dad is going to only work part time and mom isn’t allowed to work at all even though the family needs to pay for housing, education and food while also servicing a large debt. Apparently, the idea of shared sacrifice only applies to the kids who have to cut back on food and school supplies because mom and dad refuse to increase the family income.

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Hyding In Plain Sight

by digby

Ed Kilgore wrote a piece in TNR that I hope did not escape the notice of the Villagers — he makes clear that this continuing misconception that the Tea Party is all about fiscal issues has blinded everyone to the fact that they are simply far right ideologues of the most predictable kind. And therefore, no one should have been surprised when they took a machete to abortion rights immediately after taking office.

Now we are all hoping against hope that dynamics in the Senate are such that none of these laws will make it into law or the if they do, president Obama will sign whatever the “compromise” is. But Kilgore outlines the real and present danger — in the states:

At the state level, newly empowered Republicans are also promoting anti-abortion measures. In Texas, Governor Rick Perry has designated a bill to require pre-abortion sonograms an “emergency” measure, giving it legislative priority. In South Carolina, a bill is moving toward passage that would create an unusually broad “conscience clause” to protect health care workers and pharmacists from disciplinary actions prompted by a refusal to administer birth control or emergency contraception, to take part in medical research that destroys an in vitro human embryo, or to halt care of a dying person in a hospital. In Ohio, Republican legislators are pushing a blizzard of anti-abortion bills, including one that would fine doctors for performing abortions when a fetal heartbeat is discerned. A South Dakota legislator just made national headlines by introducing a bill that would classify as “justifiable homicide” a death caused with the aim of protecting the unborn. He withdrew it after critics called it a license to kill abortion providers, but a separate bill in the same state, headed for a floor vote, would require women to attend a lecture at a crisis pregnancy center (code for an anti-abortion advocacy office) before getting an abortion. Even Mr. Focus-on-the-Fiscal-Crisis, Chris Christie, opted to eliminate state contraceptive services in the interest of “fiscal restraint,” and made the cuts stick with a gubernatorial veto. One could go on and on; there’s clearly no “truce” in the state legislatures.

(Amanda Marcotte deftly handles the contraception question here. Yes, they want to outlaw birth control too. Let’s not be naive, Kay.)

Kilgore goes on to show just how important this is in the presidential race coming up as well. There is obviously not going to be any “truce” anywhere. But why should that surprise us? The social conservatives are a huge faction in the GOP and abortion is their organizing issue:

[T]he main reason for the GOP’s focus on restricting and ultimately outlawing abortion is simply that the Right-to-Life movement has worked very hard for many years to make itself perhaps the most impossible-to-ignore, dangerous-to-diss faction in Republican politics, particularly at the presidential level. Its strength was most recently illustrated when it stopped John McCain from choosing Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge as his 2008 running mate, and had its poster pol, Sarah Palin, placed on the ticket instead. That’s power. By failing to note these dynamics, Washington types have been ignoring what is right in front of their eyes. Whether it’s the economic crisis—which has raised the relative volume of debate over fiscal issues—or the alluring media focus on seemingly “libertarian” legislators like Rand and Ron Paul (both of whom, by the way, are anti-choice), or the ever-present longing for a mature, bipartisan consensus, the punditocracy has convinced itself that Tea Party Republicans aren’t interested in going to war over abortion. As I’ve written in this magazine before, in fact they’d love to. Why are we acting so surprised?

I’m certainly not. They are as powerful as the NRA — and they are on a crusade to end women’s reproductive rights. It isn’t a fad or a fashion. It is fundamental to the conservative movement and unless Democrats stop pretending like its going to go away or that there’s some kind of “common ground” that we can all agree upon and then everyone will be happy, they are going to prevail. They have power and they use it.

And don’t think they don’t have a chance to do it on the federal level too. As Debcoop lays out in this post at C&L, they put their plans right on the table during last week’s hearings:

All the weapons they need are there, and we left them there for the right to pick up and use to beat us up. The visible weapons are

THE HYDE AMENDMENT.
LEGISLATION REMOVING FEDERAL FUNDS.

The “hiding in plain sight” weapons are

THE “LET WOMEN DIE” PROVISIONS;
THE ENFORCEMENT MECHANISMS;
LAWSUITS;
INJUNCTIONS STOPPING ANY AND ALL FEDERAL FUNDS TO ANY AND ALL STATES, CITIES PROGRAMS OR AGENCIES.

What are they hiding in plain sight? How they plan to use the enforcement mechanisms in these bills and any future bills to destroy women’s reproductive freedom. They will attempt to first eliminate every women’s access to abortion while also beginning their assault on all Americans’ access to birth control. Yes indeedy, birth control is now in the crosshairs!! Certainly, that is what the Pence bill defunding Planned Parenthood is all about. Title X funding disburses money for women’s health in general – pap smears, mammograms. And yes, that includes birth control or family planning, something that is now bizarrely controversial. Basically, health care for millions and millions of women. But they do not plan on stopping there. The theory is throw as many bills against the wall as possible, with a lot of similar and dangerous elements. Then watch which elements they attach to which bill as they try through a variety of legislative maneuvers to paint the Senate into a corner, while the President keeps silent. To these extremists Republicans, his present silence means consent. That is certainly how they will propagandize it.

And, by the way, it’s really not smart. Polling continues to show that a large majority of the Democratic Party is female. They can keep telling them to “wait” or “sacrifice” for the greater good. But at some point this is going to backfire on them. You simply cannot sell out your largest demographic indefinitely before something very important breaks down.

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Tide Turning?

by digby

I don’t want to jinx this, but I’m starting to feel a little bit positive:

Gov. Mitch Daniels signaled this afternoon that Republicans should to drop the right-to-work bill that has brought the Indiana House to a standstill for two days and imperiled other measures.Daniels told reporters this afternoon that he expects House Democrats will return to work if the bill dies. It would be unfortunate if other bills are caught up in the turmoil, he said.He will not send out state police to corral the Democrats, the Republican governor said.The Democrat minority has right to express its views, he added.The governor clung to his view that this is not the year to tackle right to work.

And now this:

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) is now to the right of Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) on the question of allowing public sector workers to unionize…

“My belief is as long as people know what they’re doing, collective bargaining is fine,” Scott said in an interview with Tallahassee’s WFLA FM radio station. But as long as state workers are agreeing to pony up, Scott says the workers should be allowed to organize. Walker’s drawn a bright line on that issue. Which is saying something — the tea party favorite Scott is definitely no RINO.

No he definitely isn’t.

It will be interesting to see how the tea party supporters take this. This is an interesting fight for them because it isn’t explicitly against Obama (although the Beckies have created a whole narrative about how he’s part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot.) This is a fight against working people, and although they are more than happy to rail against them if that’s the sanctioned Tea Party view, their leaders may be deciding that’s not going to help them get elected.

This isn’t about fighting the “San Francisco liberals” or the Hollywood Elite. These are their Real Americans. The politicians seem cognizant of that fact anyway.

Update: I think this may explain it:

The poll found that 61% would oppose a law in their state similar to one being considered in Wisconsin, compared with 33% who would favor such a law. Ohio and several other states that have new Republican governors and legislative majorities are considering laws that would reduce the power of government employee unions to bargain over benefits and work rules. Wisconsin is the first state to consider the limits, prompting protests that have closed schools and drawn tens of thousands of protesters to the state Capitol in Madison.