Month: March 2011

Scrooge Was Just Sending A Message

by digby

I guess these people are looking to raise crime in their states because otherwise this just doesn’t make sense:

In Missouri — where the unemployment rate is currently 9.5 percent — Republican state senators are filibustering legislation that needs to pass today in order to prevent unemployed workers from losing their benefits:

With the aid of several conservative freshman senators, [Senator Jim] Lembke (R) managed to successfully hold up the debate on the bill, which funds unemployment benefits for those Missourian unemployed for between 79 and 99 weeks. The extension bill has already passed through the House and is expected to easily pass the Senate when it is called up for a vote. “Ninety-nine weeks is too much,” Lembke said. “It’s too long. Enough is enough.”

States need to affirmatively accept the final tier of extended jobless benefits from the federal government — which funds weeks 79 through 99 — by agreeing to certain guidelines regarding which workers qualify for benefits. Accepting the benefits does not cost Missouri anything, but Lembke said he is blocking them in order to send a message to Washington regarding federal spending habits. Even the Republican President Pro Tem of the state senate refused to back the filibuster, asking Lembke, “Is this the best method to get [your point] across to the federal government?”

I hate to wish ill on other people, but I think it may be the only way for certain ones to understand something as elementary as the fact that when the unemployment rate hovers at 10%, and the underemployment adds at least another 5%, it doesn’t mean that people are being lazy. If there were enough jobs to employ them, and nobody was filling those jobs, we’d be seeing a very different set of economic problems. There are no jobs. And people who stand up in public and declare that they want to teach other people lesson and “send messages” when they are so rankly ignorant is just embarrassing.

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“Stupid terrorists, go home, go home,go home.”

by digby

This makes me ashamed to be an American:

I especially like these wingnut creeps lecturing others about “women’s rights.” I guess if they mean they support the right for women to be as ignorant and racist as men, it makes sense. Otherwise, not so much.

That’s white Orange County, the last remnants of Reagan Country. I guess they gave up on the Mexicans — too many of them live there now.

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Stephen’s Gold

by digby

Colbert on income inequality:

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PR Bomb

by digby

There may be reasons for the administration to be cautious about their Libya policy right now, but when even Wolf Blitzer wakes up and wonders why they sound completely ridiculous, administration officials should probably think twice about their public relations strategy.

Blitzer: Here’s what was worrying, surprising to me, even shocking. yesterday both Gates and Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, they say they have no evidence that Qadaffi is using air power to go after his enemies, the rebels, the opposition. Today, we saw it on tape he launched air strikes against targets in Bengazi. We saw Ben Wedeman get out with his life, our own CNN crew.

Is that possible? There were so many eye-witnesses reports over these past two weeks that the Libyan air force, helicopter gunships were firing at people on the ground and Gates and Mullen say they don’t know anything about that?

The good news is that there was a good Pentagon embed on the set to defend them:

Pentagon Reporter Chris Lawrence: …eyewitness accounts but they aren’t US military assets.

Blitzer: The US doesn’t have military assets that can see that?

Chris Lawrence: They’re depending on a lot of the same reports that we’re getting. They’re seeing the reports from our reporters on the ground and uh, but what they’re saying is, Yes, we know the bombing is taking place. What they don’t know for a fact is that the bombing have directly targeted people, or directly targeted armament or…

Blitzer: it made Mullen and Gates look sort of ridiculous yesterday … that we have no evidence that they’re doing it after all these reports from eyewitnesses saying “we’re getting bombed.”

Yeah it did. And really? Are we supposed to believe that the US government is depending completly on CNN to tell them if bombs are being dropped and planes are strafing civilians? I’d say we’re spending just a tad too much money on all that fancy technology if that’s the best they can do. They don’t even have phones?

Borger steps up to pivot away:

Gloria Borger: I agree and I think the question is, do the Libyans fighting the regime want intervention and, if so, what kind of intervention, right? I mean, do we know what the people on the ground want?

Uhm, if the Pentagon says they don’t even have any evidence that people are getting strafed and bombed it’s fairly doubtful they’ve been able to take a poll. But hey, you never know …

It is even obvious to Wolf Blitzer that the administration is obfuscating and probably divided on how respond to this, which means it’s glaringly obvious to any sentient person. Pretending they just don’t know what’s going on isn’t working.

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Joe Miller Republicans

by digby

Rush Limbaugh says the Wisconsin protesters Are “Long-Haired, Maggot-Infested, Dope-Smoking FM Rock ‘N’ Roller Types. Seriously.And then he told them all to get off his lawn. Whatever.

This story in the Awl about Walker’s budget speech is masterfully done and it contains a wonderful little nugget that I haven’t heard anywhere else (h/t to boingboing)

Walker entered to thunderous applause, though not from the Democrats, who refused to rise. At least two-thirds of the East audience galley was loudly applauding but they had nothing on the West coast. It was now clear who the men in business attire were. Nearly without exception, the west gallery was all men in black suits and, when the governor said something meaningful, they all rose and applauded, and they did it with verve and volume. I’m not saying these guys were not from Wisconsin, but if you know Wisconsin, you know for a fact that even for most businessmen, black suits are not part of the wardrobe. In general, the only time one will see a large gathering of Wisconsin men in black suits is at a funeral, or, apparently at a Governor Walker budget address.

Reporter Kristin Knutsen found evidence that many of these ringers may have entered through the capitol’s access tunnels, noting the presence of the Division of Criminal Investigation—the same officers I saw upstairs outside the Assembly chambers following the address escorting unidentified men.

What evidence?

Meanwhile, rumors have been flying around for more than a day about the presence of tunnels leading east from the Capitol to the Risser Justice Center and the state office building at 1 W. Wilson St. The former is used regularly by Capitol staff, and the concern uttered by protesters addressed whether or not it might be used to provide a discreet and unencumbered access to the speech for Walker supporters to pack the gallery. (This was later denied by a spokesperson for the governor.) Before the speech, downtown Madison alder Byron Eagon stopped by the P2 level of the parking garage at the Risser building, witnessed dozens of law enforcement officers present, and snapped a photo of a few guarding a tunnel entrance. Stopping by the Risser building shortly before the speech, I encountered a trio of plainclothes agents with the Division of Criminal Investigation in the Wisconsin Department of Justice, guarding a door to a space they claimed was a storm shelter. Unlike the generally relaxed and personable law enforcement officers on duty during the last two-plus weeks of protests, their attitude was adversarial, with one attempting to seize my Capitol press pass and suggesting I could be a “terrorist,” before trying to dismiss the remark as a joke. More agents were guarding the Doty Street entrance to the building’s parking garage, along with several other law enforcement officers in suits. Stationed around the building for hours, these agents were from the Milwaukee bureau. While they are usually tasked with investigating a whole slew of serious crimes, from homicide and arson to drug trafficking and government corruption, as confirmed by one of the officers present, today they spent their time in a role dismissed as “palace guards” by Dane County Sheriff David Mahoney. A Department of Justice spokesperson confirmed that DCI agents were part of the police operations in Madison today.

Remember these guys?

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BFFs in Dirty Tricks

by digby

Emptywheel made a smart observation about the Issa spokesman flap today that I think is very likely to be right:

[T]he most important aspect of what Bardella might be sharing with the NYT, Lizza says, is the background to a Bardella quote he included in his profile on Issa’s publicity seeking.

[R]eporters e-mail me saying, “Hey, I’m writing this story on this thing. Do you think you guys might want to investigate it? If so, if you get some documents, can you give them to me?” I’m, like, “You guys are going to write that we’re the ones wanting to do all the investigating, but you guys are literally the ones trying to egg us on to do that!”

To me that last quote was one of the most important things Bardella told me. The rest of it—that offices clash over how to leak info and that bookers and reporters are competitive—is interesting but relatively well known, and not very relevant to a piece about Darrell Issa. But that Bardella accused reporters of offering to collaborate with Issa as he launches what will inevitably be partisan investigations of the Obama Administration seemed jaw-dropping.

Lizza suggests (though he doesn’t voice this explicitly) that Bardella may have shared evidence of this kind of collaboration between Politico and Issa’s staff with Leibovich.

Marcy found some Politico pieces that back up this suspicion and speculates that many of these investigations might be collaborations between Issa and Politico.

Let’s just say it wouldn’t be the first time:

[A] BBC documentary titled Digging the Dirt … was filmed during the 2000 campaign and never aired in the United States. The film centers on a team of Republican opposition researchers —a species that has existed in politics for eons but had recently undergone an evolutionary leap. From deep within the Republican National Committee headquarters the BBC tracked the efforts of this team, whose job it was to discredit and destroy Al Gore. Political campaigns always attempt to diminish their opponents, of course. What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.” Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.” Maligning an opponent, even with his own words and deeds, is a tricky business; voters take a dim view of “negative” politics, and are liable to punish the campaign carrying out the attacks rather than the intended target. Digging the Dirt provides a rare glimpse of how political operatives have learned to use the media to get around this problem, by creating a journalistic black market for damaging stories. During the first debate between Gore and Bush, in October of 2000, the BBC crew stationed itself inside the RNC’s war room, filming researchers as they operated with the manic intensity of day traders, combing through every one of Gore’s statements for possible misstatements or exaggerations. The researchers discovered two (Gore erroneously claimed never to have questioned Bush’s experience, and to have accompanied a federal official to the site of a Texas disaster), and immediately Tim Griffin tipped off the Associated Press. Soon the filmmakers would catch the team exulting as the AP took the story.

And it went both ways:

During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material.

If, as Marcy suspects, these emails show that Politico was tipping off Issa as well, then we have a new wrinkle, but it’s one that doesn’t really seem all that different from what’s gone before. They’ve long been in the business of scratching each other’s backs so it’s not a real stretch.

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His Southern Strategy Is Showing

by digby

Please tell me again how Haley Barbour isn’t pursuing a Southern Strategy:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour(R) said states should also be free, for instance, to compel Medicaid patients to pay for part of their medicine, saying, “We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can’t afford their co-payment.”

I’m sure you don’t need to know this, but it might be useful nonetheless:

The narrative (or storytelling) script for the welfare queen has two central features. First, it tells us that the majority of welfare recipients are women. Of course, the data show otherwise. The largest single group “on welfare” is children—about one in every four kids under the age of 18 receives welfare benefits. Nonetheless, given this script, most of the public connects welfare to gender. For instance, the “feminization of poverty” is a common explanation of American poverty rates.

This script then leads people to the next step in this association, what could be called a “gender narrative”—poor women choose to be on welfare because they fail to adhere to a set of core American values. From this perspective, single motherhood, divorce, desertion and a failure to hold the family unit together become the causes of their impoverished condition. In short, welfare dependency is a function of the moral failings of poor women. Their unwillingness to adhere to the principles of hard work, family values and sexual control thus deem them as undeserving.

The second key image that emerges from the welfare queen script is that most women on welfare are African-American. While African-American women do represent more than one-third of the women on welfare, in census data released in 1998 they accounted for only a bit more than 10 percent of the total number of welfare recipients.

This narrative script—skillfully locating the “intersection” of race and gender—was given its most public voice by then-candidate Reagan on the 1976 campaign trail. During that election Reagan often recited the story of a woman from Chicago’s South Side who was arrested for welfare fraud. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” David Zucchino, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, spent a year with two welfare mothers in Philadelphia and wrote “The Myth of the Welfare Queen.” According to Zucchino, “[T]he image of the big-spending, lavish-living, Cadillac-driving welfare queen was by then thoroughly embedded in American folklore.”

The implicit racial coding is readily apparent. The woman Reagan was talking about was African-American. Veiled references to African-American women, and African-Americans in general, were equally transparent. In other words, while poor women of all races get blamed for their impoverished condition, African-American women commit the most egregious violations of American values. This story line taps into stereotypes about both women (uncontrolled sexuality) and African-Americans (laziness).

He didn’t feminize it this time, but I have a feeling that’s already baked in the cake and he doesn’t need to.

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Blue America Endorsement: Debra Bowen

by digby

Please join us for a chat with Debra Bowen today at 11pst/2est at Crooks and Liars

As you may or may not know, Blue America is based in Los Angeles and as progressives nothing has stuck in Howie, John and my craws more than the fact that that Jane Harman was able to hang on her seat in California’s 36th district (John’s home district!) despite the fact that she was a Big Money Blue Dog who barely set foot in the area. When she announced her resignation from the congress we whooped for joy. Her retirement to the world of think tank advocacy has given us another opportunity to elect a real progressive to fill the seat.

Amazingly, we are blessed with two fine progressives who have thrown their hats into the ring: Marcy Winograd, who we endorsed in the two primaries she ran against Harman and Debra Bowen the current Secretary of State who we also endorsed in her two statewide runs. It’s an unusual and luxurious choice for progressives — it so rarely happens that we have more than one great candidate.

We are fond of Winograd and greatly admired her willingness to take on the Democratic establishment as she did at last year’s convention. That kind of pluck is in short supply. She is a stalwart progressive and a good friend and it was a privilege to support her in 2006 and 2010. However, after much deliberation we have decided to endorse Debra Bowen in this race. The reason is quite simple. We believe that all other things being equal, Bowen simply has the better chance to win.

Bowen is a hero to California progressives and you may know of her through her national leadership on election integrity and internet issues as California Secretary of State. Indeed, she decided to run for the office after the debacle of 2000 for reasons I imagine many of us can relate to:

“I became motivated to get it right before we had another horrible disaster for our whole democracy,” said Bowen. “We couldn’t afford another election where there was vast mistrust of the results.”

She ended up winning the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage award for her work on election integrity.

With her high profile as a reformer and advocate for government transparency as Secretary of State, she has been a member in good standing of the Progressive Movement from the beginning, speaking at Netroots Nation and identifying herself with our cause. What you may not know is that previous to holding statewide office, she represented 90% of CA 36 for 14 years in the state Assembly and Senate and that she has a stellar progressive track record as a legislator as well. She is very popular in the district to this day among moderates and progressives alike, who see her as “their” statewide candidate. It’s a big advantage and one that we think will propel her to victory over all the others in the race.

As a movement progressive, Bowen will naturally lend her strong voice to advocate for working families in congress and stand up for civil rights and civil liberties. Her record is clear on that. And with her reformer credentials, along with her dedication to green energy (her first foray into politics was working with Heal the Bay back in the 1980s) she is perfectly positioned to be a leader for us, for our time.

As a progressive netroots candidate, Bowen is naturally running a people powered campaign and we urge you to contribute to her cause. She will have a race on her hands with Winograd, LA Machine City Councilwoman Janice Hahn (Harman’s hand-picked successor) and wealthy well connected Republican Mike Ross running and she’ll needs our help. We have a real chance to elect a movement progressive to this seat. Please donate if you can.

And please join us over at Crooks and Liars at 11pst/2est to chat with Debra Bowen.

They Know Their Audience

by digby

… isn’t that bright.

What’s wrong with this picture?

If you guessed the snowless ground and palm trees in Wisconsin you win a big prize. Your sanity.

h/t to @JoshuaHolland

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Crazy like foxes?

by digby

or just crazy?:

A Christian pro-life group in Ohio is touting their plan to coordinate testimony of a nine-week old fetus — the “youngest to ever testify” — in favor of an anti-abortion bill. “For the first time in a committee hearing, legislators will be able to see and hear the beating heart of a baby in the womb–just like the ones the Heartbeat Bill will protect,” Janet (Folger) Porter, President of the group Faith2Action, said in a release. In February, Ohio state Rep. Lynn Wachtmann (R) introduced a piece of legislation that would forbid abortions in any case in which the fetus had a detectable heartbeat, a development that can come as early as 18 days into a pregnancy. “When a heartbeat of a baby is detected, that baby will be protected from abortion,” Wachtmann told the Hudson Hub Times last month. “It’s really as simple as that. … As technology improves in medicine, as it continually does, that protection will move closer and closer to conception, which is I think for many of us what our ultimate goal of protecting life is.”
[…]
The testimony, which is set to take place Wednesday, will consist of projecting an ultrasound image of the pregnant woman’s uterus onto a screen in the courtroom. The image would also show the fetus’ heartbeat in color.

What do you suppose the common ground with those folks will be? Agreeing that women should be allowed to vote?

Meanwhile, the Tea Party is flexing its muscle in Washington:

A boisterous first meeting of the House’s Tea Party Caucus on Monday night exposed two potential rifts — one between its members and state-level Tea Party activists, who have no appetite for compromise, and another between its members and Republican Party leaders, who will soon be asking them to do just that. Tea Party leaders from Virginia, Florida and Pennsylvania hotly demanded that the members of the caucus not settle for anything less than defunding the Obama health care law, even on a very short-term basis, attendees told the Huffington Post. They also scoffed at the new Republican target of $61 billion in budget cuts from the rest of this fiscal year, calling it insufficient. And they made it clear Republicans who don’t stand firm will face primary opponents in 2012. “The look on the faces of the members was just unbelievable,” said one attendee, who didn’t want to be identified by name. “I think those of us from the Tea Party movement were impassioned, but we weren’t yelling,” said one of the speakers, Jennifer Stefano, co-chair of the Loyal Opposition, a Tea Party group out of Pennsylvania. “We care deeply about what’s happening,” she explained. “Deeply.” Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), one of less than a dozen House freshmen to join the caucus, told The Hill that the Tea Party activists pushed members to stand firm on spending cuts and the debt limit. “They don’t want us to get pushed around, which is exactly what I believe in,” he told The Hill. “You’ve got to stand firm or you’re going to lose credibility.”

Sounds like they’re not budging.

And it’s working for them so far

House GOP Big Winner On Bill To Avert Government Shutdown

The House’s GOP leaders appear to be the big winners following passage Tuesday of legislation to temporarily fund the federal government for two weeks and cut $4 billion from current federal spending to boot.

That more than 100 Democrats joined Republicans in a whopping 335-91 vote for the stopgap spending bill was the kind of showing that would let Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) boast of a major bipartisan success and neutralize any Democratic charges of partisanship.

Republican leaders incorporated proposed spending cuts Obama had made in the two-week bill, making it easier to co-opt many of the House Democrats.

The win allowed House Republicans to stay on the offensive while forcing Senate Democrats and the White House to keep playing defense.

That’s NPR, by the way, not Fox.

And as I mentioned earlier, there really is a method to their madness:

Some House Republicans have indicated that they would support a series of short-term CR extensions each of which would include additional cuts. As a result, Senate Democrat leaders (with support from the White House) have considered proposing an alternative that extends the current CR until April 8. However, this idea appears to be losing traction as House Republican leaders have signaled that they would only agree to a two-week extension.

Therefore, with the March 4 deadline fast approaching, the House resisting an alternative to their two-week extension, and few in Congress wanting to cause a government shut down, the Senate will most likely agree to the House bill. And, the CR saga will continue.

I’m sure the congressional Tea Partiers, like the social conservatives in Ohio, believe that being theatrical and outrageous is working for them. After all, if you judge from the last election, it is. And from what we’re seeing so far — and it isn’t over by a long shot — they are doing quite well for themselves in the budget negotiations.

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