Month: March 2011

Alert the media

by digby

Americans have decided that Fox News isn’t a reliable source:

In the space of one year, Fox News has lost its perch as the most trusted TV news network in the US and is now average at best, a new survey has found.

A poll gauging public trust in TV news has found that PBS is the most trusted name in news, while trust in Fox News has dropped significantly.

According to a survey from Public Policy Polling, “a year ago a plurality of Americans said they trusted Fox News. Now a plurality of them don’t.”

In a survey taken a year ago, PPP found that Fox was the most trusted news network, with 49 percent saying they trusted the network, and 37 percent saying they did not. In the new poll, 42 percent said they trusted the network while 46 percent disagreed.

PPP notes that trust in the network declined only marginally among conservatives, from 75 percent to 72 percent. “But moderates and liberals have both had a strong increase in their level of distrust for the network — a 12-point gain from 48 percent to 60 percent for moderates and a 16-point gain from 66 percent to 82 percent for liberals,” the institute reported.

What was the tip off, do you suppose?

I know who this guy (Van Jones) is. He’s a communist revolutionary. A guy who pined for the days of Stalin, the Iron Curtain went down. Something is wrong there.

Well, it really bothered me until recently when I started looking into all the George Soros connections and the size and the scope of his reach.

And let me tell you something — I said to you, read up on George Soros. There is plenty of ways to read about him. These are all books about George Soros, many of them written by him. So, there is no shortage of information. Read them. Read them.

The comment doesn’t bother me anymore, I understand what it means. And that’s why that comment now frightens me. And I will put it in perspective tonight and tomorrow. Pull back the curtain and reveal what that actually means and it will terrify you.

There are a couple of other things that you’ll understand. First of all, in 2003, Soros and a partner funded the new $5 million liberal group MoveOn.org. Well, MoveOn.org, what exactly is that?

Well, you remember it. This is the group that originally called General Petraeus, “General Betray Us.” It was despicable.

Well, who had they tapped for the executive director of MoveOn.org? This guy, Zack Exley. I’ve never heard of him before. Do you know who he is?

Well, he previously had trained activists for the anarchist group, the Raucous Society. These are the riots in Seattle helped orchestrated by this guy — more on that in just a minute.

Oh, by the way, he’s also a blogger for The Huffington Post, which is interesting because The Huffington Post gets money from George Soros. Oh, and he’s also a fellow with the George Soros Open Society Institute.

Violent radicals. Oh, and by the way, it’s just not that phrase that came — George Soros has been following him as he originally funded the Ella Baker Society, or the Center for Human Rights. And then, of course, he was on the Apollo Alliance. And then, when he got fired from the White House, he went to Center for American Progress, which is also funded by George Soros. Radicals. Radicals.

(And who the hell are the moderates and liberals who didn’t know Fox News was nuts until this year?)

.

Corporations Need Tax Relief

by digby

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
I Give Up – Pay Anything…
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

If you follow their logic, you will see that corporations are aiming for a zero tax rate. Or should I say blackmailing?

“I think when people hear that all these companies are moving overseas because of taxes, they think that doesn’t smell right,” Stahl said to Swiss tax attorney Thierry Boitelle.

“Yeah, the question is, ‘Does a company have a moral obligation to pay its fair share?'” he replied.

“I think many companies in the U.S. would like to keep the jobs in the U.S. if they could, but they also need to keep their shareholders happy. And they are in the U.S. in a corporate tax nightmare because it’s the highest tax rate in the world,” Boitelle explained.

There you have it. And in case you are looking for a solution:

“We can’t write a law their lawyers can’t get around. That’s the whole problem here,” Doggett explained.

“You’re in Congress. Why did Congress write these laws that allowed this to happen?” Stahl asked.

“There’s been a lot of arm twisting, a lot of effective lobbying here, and some really smart tax lawyers figuring out how to game the system with one shenanigan after the other,” the congressman replied.

“But are they shenanigans or is it the law?” Stahl asked.

“I think it was a shenanigan when some of these companies felt so strongly about America that they renounced their American citizenship and began saluting a foreign flag. They exploited a provision in our tax laws and moved offshore,” Doggett said.

Congress tried to put a stop to that with a law passed in 2004, mandating that any company that wanted to move offshore would still have to pay the 35 percent. But because of loopholes in the tax code, companies can substantially lower their taxes by moving chunks of their businesses to their foreign subsidiaries.

.

The Ten Commandments of The Constitution

by digby

From the “we are all teabaggers now” file:

Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice whhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifo lost his job after erecting a monument of the Ten Commandments outside the state’s courthouse, plans to announce in mid-April that he is setting up a presidential exploratory committee, an aide told CBS News.

The aide, Zachery Michael, said Moore’s platform will be focused on repealing the health care overhaul law, replacing the progressive income tax with a flat tax and bringing “commonsense solutions” on immigration and border control.

Michael said Moore is entering the fray because “we’re just seeing the same type of politicians run for president.” He said Moore is someone “who can connect with over 300 million Americans across the country, which is something we’ve been lacking with today’s leaders across society.”

Michael said Moore should not be thought of simply as a culture warrior, arguing that he has been a strong advocate for limited government.

“He not only stood up for his faith, he stood up against the tyranny of government,” he said.

He’s going to have to fight off Bachman, Huck, Santorum, Gingrich and the all new PawlentyRomney for the Tea for Jesus vote, but I think he can do it. He’s got major cred among the social conservatives — and he was a judge!

.

Value Betrayal

by digby

Mark Goldberg at UN Dispatch shares this letter from Cote D’Ivoire:

Over the last few days, we have received increasingly dire reports from our colleagues. They describe the situation in Abidjan as “pre-genocidal.” Several neighborhoods of the capital and outlying areas that are loyal to President-Elect Alassane Ouattara have now been fenced in by troops supporting ex-President Laurent Gbagbo. Civilians attempting to cross checkpoints have been robbed and killed. Gangs of militiamen conduct regular sweeps through neighborhood houses, ostensibly to maintain order but, in reality, to intimidate. Civilians in these neighborhoods are trapped, threatened in their own homes, terrified to leave, and not knowing where to turn for safety. For people with chronic conditions like HIV – dependent on access to medications for their own health – an already life-threatening situation is made even worse by the growing national drug shortage and the real danger of leaving one’s home just to fill a prescription or to keep a medical appointment.

The political-military situation in Côte d’Ivoire was front-and-center in people’s minds a few short weeks ago. But events in Egypt, in Libya, and in Japan have overtaken the headlines. Gbagbo has capitalized on our collective inattention to secure his illegal position and to terrorize the people. The UN needs to fulfill its mandate to protect civilians in Côte d’Ivoire. More than 400 people have been killed and some 400,000 persons displaced while UN troops have been on the ground. Specific steps that can be taken immediately include: opening UN and French military bases to civilian refugees; establishing a humanitarian corridor to permit civilians to escape the violence and reach these bases; and jamming the state broadcasting system so that it can no longer incite violence.

He adds:

The UN reports that 1 million people have fled Abidjan. At least 462 people have been killed since the crisis began in December, not least of whom were six women gunned down by Gbagbo supporters during a peaceful demonstration three weeks ago. If heavy fighting spreads from the strategic town of Duekoue, an untold number will be killed.

Genocide is not out of the realm of possibility. There are already reports of mass graves in Abidjan. At the very least, the country seems to be inching ever closer toward an ethnic based mass atrocity event.

This is the problem with making the argument that doing nothing in Libya is “a betrayal of who we are,” and saying that “some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries but the United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.” The plight of Ivory Coast proves that we “betray ourselves” every day and brings the whole concept of our alleged values into sharp relief.

There are reasons to be in Libya. But the idea that we couldn’t live with ourselves if a massacre unfolded clearly isn’t one of them. So the the question remains, why Libya?

.

Tomorrow Today

by digby

Now this is what I call winning the future. Tom Tomorrow will be moving to Daily Kos — and doing something new:

I’ve had an extraordinary run at Salon, and it has been a fantastic platform, which I have been privileged to share with many talented contributors over the years. But as Blinky notes in this week’s farewell cartoon, I’ve been there for about a million years in internet time. My contract was up for renewal at the end this month, and I was feeling vaguely ready for a change, when I was approached by Markos Moulitsas with an intriguing offer — the chance to not only publish my own work on the Daily Kos, but to serve as the site’s Comics Editor, to help create an entirely new space online for political cartoons.

I’ve been quietly agitating for something like this for quite a while. These are difficult times for cartoonists, particularly those of us working in the subgenre of altweekly cartooning. The papers are still vital to my survival, and I’m grateful beyond measure to the many editors who continue to run my work in print each week — but the larger trend over the past few years has not exactly been encouraging. Too many papers have decided that they no longer have any use for this art form which grew in their stead, adapting itself entirely to their rhythms, and as that market contracts, there’s been no simultaneous expansion online. The niche that editorial cartoons filled in newspapers is almost entirely occupied by Daily Show clips online.

I consider political cartooning to be intrinsic to political dialog and the weird way its been marginalized online has always puzzled me. It’s always seemed like a perfect fit for what we do, the same way cartoons have always appeared on the editorial pages. Let’s hope this experiment is big success.

.

Time To Raise Hell

by digby

This is important guys. As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, despite what many people insist isn’t true and what vast majorities of the public want, Social security is on the chopping block in this congress. The first salvo was the failed deficit commission. The next is coming up in the budget negotiations. We’ve got people on both sides of the aisle desperate to do this thing to “prove” they are able to harshly cut spending — 30 years from now — in some quixotic attempt to make the markets magically fix everything that’s wrong with the economy. It’s a form of mass delusion, but it has become a matter of conventional wisdom among our ruling elite.

But they aren’t unopposed. StrengthenSocialSecurity.org is organizing to push back and they are asking for your help.

Call Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday!

We need you to call your Senators and demand that they vote for the Sanders/Reid Social Security Protection Amendment.

Senator Sanders and Majority Leader Reid are leading the fight in the Senate to protect Social Security from drastic cuts.

Their amendment simply says:

Social Security benefits for current and future beneficiaries should not be cut and Social Security should not be privatized as part of any legislation to reduce the Federal deficit.

Call your Senators at 866-251-4044. You’ll be given a choice of which of your state’s two senators to be connected with. Call BOTH if you have the time. It only takes a minute each.

Tell the person who answers the phone:

I am a voter/constituent living in [your state]. I am calling to tell the Senator:
I oppose all cuts to Social Security and
I urge them to vote yes on the Sanders/Reid Social Security Protection Amendment.

Please take the time for this very important effort. This is for all of us who depend on Social Security.

Call Tuesday and Wednesday: 866-251-4044.

AFTER YOU CALL:

Stay involved, the threat to Social Security continues. Please click to stay involved in the fight.

This sort of thing can work. Remember that right wing radio single handedly stopped comprehensive immigration reform by mobilizing their listeners to call Washington and raise hell.

Liberals can raise hell too.

* Numbers fixed
.

The Same Old, Same Old

by digby

This has a ring to it:

As Rep. Michele Bachmann put it in a speech here Saturday: “Social conservatism is fiscal conservatism.”

The Minnesota congresswoman’s line, though an over-simplification, was echoed by numerous social conservatives in conversations with The Huffington Post over the weekend. Their argument is that many of the outcomes that have produced the nation’s economic crisis are, at their core, driven by moral deficiencies: greed, dishonesty, selfishness, cowardice, and the like.

“Go back to Jefferson and Washington. They said, ‘If you want this country to be great, you better first be good,’” said Bob Vander Plaats, the man who has led the charge in Iowa against same-sex marriage. “And so that’s where we’re at saying, ‘You know what, if you think all it is is over here on the economic side while youhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif want all this other stuff to erode, you’re dealing with a house of cards.’”

Sure, why not. There’s no reason you can’t wear a tri-corner hat and a cross at the same time. (Or, as Sinclair Lewis put it much more colorfully back in the day when one was allowed to speak the obvious.)

Update: Must read this analysis of the current abortion wars by Amanda Marcotte. These people are very savvy, very seasoned campaigners. There’s simply no way the GOP could ever do without them. But they won’t have to.

.

Lying and Cheating for Jesus

by digby

This, from Alternet, is disgusting, especially coming from people who claim to care about the mental health of the people they are allegedly counseling:

What will happen when a woman who wants an abortion is counseled at a Fake Clinic? The monstrous deception that occurs in the Fake Clinics has been exposed in films such as the HBO Special 12th and Delaware. Because the Fakes have a well-hidden agenda, everything they do is designed to frighten and shame a woman who knows it is not the right time for her to have a baby. This fraudulence is clearly set out in the instructions given by the diabolical Robert Pearson, who came up with this brilliant and evil plan way back in 1967 when abortion was first legal in Hawaii. Pearson himself acknowledged and defended the deception in a 1994 speech: “obviously, we’re fighting Satan… A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby. Therefore, when she calls and says, ‘Do you do abortions?’ we do not tell her, No, we don’t do abortions.” The volunteers in his centers and others like them don’t mind tricking women because they think they are following some ‘higher law’. They don’t mind lying and misrepresenting things like the specious breast cancer-abortion link, the dangers of abortion, and most cruel of all, the help available to a woman who realizes that she honestly cannot support a child financially. The original Pearson manual includes: “[o]ur name of the game is to get the woman to come in as do the abortion chambers. Be put off by nothing… Let nothing stop you. The stakes are life or death.” In 12th and Delaware we witnessed a young woman who came to a Fake and was so terrified by what they told her about abortion that she went home and months later knew with great anguish that she was still in no position to have and support a child. But by then she had little choice.

I remember in my own clinic years that when a woman came to our front desk crying and shaking I always knew she had been waylaid by the Fake Clinic directly across the hall from us–the Fake Clinic that advertised Free Pregnancy Testing and Financial Assistance. There was no financial assistance for abortion in Dallas, Texas. We did everything we knew to alert women to its existence including telling everyone who called us that the Fake Clinic was next door. But women who were poor, didn’t speak English, and had the very fewest resources went to the Fake Clinic because they believed they would be able to get a free abortion. During one of the most stressful days of their lives, some of our patients still got confused and went in the wrong door. Sometimes the Fake Clinic would actually send their white-coated volunteers out into the parking lot to take our unwitting patients into their facility–like spiders luring flies to their doom.

We always spent extra time with patients who had been to the Fake Clinic because we knew they hadn’t been told the truth. But I was shocked to really GET how powerful the lies were. I counseled with a patient who had been to the Fake. She said she didn’t feel like she could get up and leave even though she knew it wasn’t the right place, because the woman reminded her of her grandmother and she didn’t want to be rude. In counseling she seemed resolved about her choice, so we did all the usual paperwork and lab work. She was early in pregnancy so an abortion was many times safer than continuing a pregnancy. I went through her abortion with her. After the five-minute procedure she burst into tears and said, “I can’t believe I lived”.

Meanwhile:

The elimination one year ago of Medicaid funding for prenatal care for about 1,600 low-income women has had dramatic effects, doctors and health clinic administrators reported Wednesday. At least five babies have died. Women are traveling 155 miles to get prenatal care. Babies have been delivered at clinics, in ambulances and hospital emergency rooms. […]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Andrea Skolkin, chief executive officer of One World Community Health Centers in Omaha, said that in the past year, only about half of uninsured women are receiving any prenatal care. The health center has more premature births to uninsured women, compared to insured women. Uninsured mothers were twice as likely to delhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifiver through cesarean section, which is more expensive. […] Four infants died in utero at the Columbus health center, she said. In the previous seven years, the clinic had never had an in utero death.

Evidently some forced childbirth advocates are having second thoughts, but when push comes to shove many conservatives are more concerned about the skin color of the fetus than they are about its well being. Meanwhile they are torturing others into giving birth to dying babies out of ideological rigidity.

Let’s just say they are a bit confused. It’s not surprising after all that lying to pregnant women. That kind of deceit tends to take on a life of its own after a while.

.

DeMint’s Rules Of Democracy

by digby

Think Progress has an exclusive from conservative leader Jim DeMint:

KEYES: Senator, would you like to see some of these bills that we see at a state level curbing the collective bargaining rights of public employees’ unions, would you like to see those on a federal level?

DeMINT: I don’t believe collective bargaining has any place in government.

KEYES: Including at a federal level?

DeMINT: Including at the federal level. That’s what elections are, collective bargaining, for people who are [inaudible]. I think it just doesn’t make sense. When we’re elected as representatives, to determine the fiscal condition of the government, then to have an unelected third party bargaining at the table with monopoly power, it just doesn’t make any sense.

It’s an interesting view, especially considering the fact that DeMint’s primary method of governance is to use undemocratic means (the filibuster) in an undemocratic institution (the Senate) to prevent the majority from enacting its agenda.

Aside from the nonsensical view that government workers could get a fair shake through a legislative process that’s financed and dominated by people who’s life mission it is to drown government in the bathtub, it’s particularly absurd in the sense of federal workers in DC. After all, it’s the Republicans who refuse to allow the district to have any representation in the congress. Talk about a catch-22.

But then democracy isn’t really a fundamental principle for Republicans so this has a certain logic to it, doesn’t it?

.

Gunning for AARP

by digby

I sure hope someone warned AARP about a skinny white guy in a pimp costume:

Newly empowered House Republicans are getting ready to renew their attacks against AARP over its support for the healthcare reform law, The Hill has learned.

The Ways and Means health and oversight subcommittees are hauling in the seniors lobby’s executives before the panel for an April 1 hearing on how the group stands to benefit from the law, among other topics. Republicans say AARhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifP supported the law’s $200 billion in cuts to the Medicare Advantage program because it stands to gain financially as seniors replace their MA plans with Medicare supplemental insurance — or Medigap — policies endorsed by the association.

The hearing will cover not only Medigap but “AARP’s organizational structure, management, and financial growth over the last decade.”

The Republicans have only one growing demographic: the elderly. And they are going to have to decouple them from any trusted institution that might challenge their propaganda. We saw the beginning of this during the health care debate in which they convinced a number of senior citizens to give up their membership due to the AARP’s debunking of the “death panel” lie. And they’ve been slowly building up alternatives that present themselves as independent advocacy groups like 60Plus.

Here’s a little example of their work:

The Republicans are obviously operating on a Shock Doctrine blueprint, moving aggressively to put liberal advocacy groups and organizations on the defensive, defunding where they can, certainly calling their credibility into question everywhere. And they have had quite a bit of success.

Like I said, watch out for that skinny guy in a pimp costume.

.