Month: March 2011

Blue America Chat

by digby

Come on over to Crooks and Liars at 11:00 (2EDT) to chat with our very special guest Jeff Gardner from New Jersey. I’ll let Howie make the introductions:

Blue America rarely reaches out to help candidates raise money in local legislative races. We make exceptions for exceptional candidates and I asked one such candidate, Jeff Gardner of New Jersey, to write a guest post today. Although Republicans always have high hopes for winning in New Jersey, Obama won with 57%, Kerry held Bush to 46% and Gore kept him down at 40%. The problem for Democrats in New Jersey is a weak bench and a corrupt and crumbling political machine. Jeff is a breath of fresh air and his primary challenge to one of the most powerful and corrupt political hacks in the state– a challenge that is emblematic of the Democrats’ dilemma in the Garden State.

Senator John Girgenti, the Majority Whip, is probably best known as the New Jersey legislator who killed marriage equality. It was something the Republicans alone couldn’t do. But with vicious homophobes like Girgenti leading the Democrats… who needs Republicans!

Jeff Gardner made a name for himself as an advocate for marriage equality, and he’s much more than that. As a fourteen-year veteran attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, he’s been fighting to protect workers, making sure union members are guaranteed their rights in the workplace. As an early organizer for Democracy for America, he pushed Democratic candidates up and down the ballot to champion progressive policies and push for common sense solutions. He is a real Democrat who will fight for the issues important to all of us. Whether it’s protecting women’s access to family planning services or fighting for marriage equality, Jeff will never back down from a fight. He’s going to stand up for what he believes in, which means standing behind progressive policies that too many Democrats run away from.

We need to support the very best Democrats at every level of government, not just in Washington. The battles in Wisconsin and Ohio highlight the need for strong progressive leaders in traditionally Democratic-leaning state governments. We can’t afford to put collective bargaining rights at risk. We can’t let the radical right take away a woman’s right to choose. Most importantly, we need Democrats who are going to fight for us. I hope you can join us in making sure Jeff has all the resources necessary to take down this entrenched incumbent in the Democratic primary in June.

He’s definitely one of us. As Howie says:

Corporations and career politicians aren’t going to bring us better government and aren’t going to represent ordinary working families. It’s something we have to do ourselves. If you can, please consider helping Jeff compete against the very worst kind of Democrat– here through ActBlue.

Legacies

by digby

…one good, one bad:

Elizabeth Taylor was a tireless crusader in fighting HIV/AIDS, especially in the early years of its spread. It’s estimated that she helped raise more than $100 million.

VIEW one particular episode in her battle where Taylor took on a big challenge: To get President Reagan to deliver a major speech on the crisis. It was 1987. The actress, who was serving as the national chairman of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), wrote a letter to her old Hollywood friend and colleague, and his wife Nancy, asking him to talk about AIDS at amfAR’s fundraising dinner. Her letter was from the heart, and it was persuasive.

“It was her personal appeal that got the president there,” says Landon Parvin, who wrote the speech…

Throughout his presidency Reagan had distanced himself from the AIDS issue. Two years earlier his staff prepared a briefing paper suggesting he deliver a statement expressing sympathy with parents who were worried about sending their children to school with a child who has AIDS and emphasizing there was no danger from casual or routine contact.

But John Roberts, a young White House lawyer — and future Supreme Court chief justice — reviewed the paper and advised: “I would not like to see the president reassuring the public on this point. … We should assume that AIDS can be transmitted through casual or routine contact until it’s demonstrated that it definitely cannot be.”

By 1987, when Reagan gave the speech, 40,000 Americans already had died of AIDS and by 1990 as many as a million had been infected.

Watch the FRONTLINE video, here.

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“Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right”

by digby

Mark Twain has lately come under fire for failing to be a politically correct member of the 21st century, but he’s still worth reading. This essay, written on the occasion of the American adventures in Cuba and the Philippines is always worth reading after watching the fatuous gasbags and Very Serious People blather on excitedly at the prospect of another war to bring the downtrodden a whiff ‘o freedom.

To the Person Sitting in Darkness

by
Mark Twain

Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole; and there is money in it yet, if carefully worked – but not enough, in my judgement, to make any considerable risk advisable. The People that Sit in Darkness are getting to be too scarce ­– too scarce and too shy. And such darkness as is now left is really of but an indifferent quality, and not dark enough for the game. The most of those People that Sit in Darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious.

The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it – they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization. More – they have begun to examine them. This is not well. The Blessings of Civilization are all right, and a good commercial property; there could not be a better, in a dim light. In the right kind of a light, and at a proper distance, with the goods a little out of focus, they furnish this desirable exhibit to the Gentlemen who Sit in Darkness:

LOVE, LAW AND ORDER,JUSTICE,LIBERTY, GENTLENESS, EQUALITY, CHRISTIANITY, HONORABLE DEALING, PROTECTION TO THE WEAK, MERCY,TEMPERANCE, EDUCATION,

– and so on.

There. Is it good? Sir, it is pie. It will bring into camp any idiot that sits in darkness anywhere. But not if we adulterate it. It is proper to be emphatic upon that point. This brand is strictly for Export – apparently. Apparently. Privately and confidentially, it is nothing of the kind. Privately and confidentially, it is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and attractive, displaying the special patterns of our Civilization which we reserve for Home Consumption, while inside the bale is the Actual Thing that the Customer Sitting in Darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty. That Actual Thing is, indeed, Civilization, but it is only for Export. Is there a difference between the two brands? In some of the details, yes.

Read on, read it all. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…

There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn’t it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty; we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit’s work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best. We know this. The Head of every State and Sovereignty in Christendom and ninety per cent of every legislative body in Christendom, including our Congress and our fifty State Legislatures, are members not only of the church, but also of the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice, cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right.”

Now then, that will convince the Person. You will see. It will restore the Business. Also, it will elect the Master of the Game to the vacant place in the Trinity of our national gods; and there on their high thrones the Three will sit, age after age, in the people’s sight, each bearing the Emblem of his service: Washington, the Sword of the Liberator; Lincoln, the Slave’s Broken Chains; the Master, the Chains Repaired.

It will give the Business a splendid new start. You will see.

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Color us Exceptional

by digby

The State of White America
Bradley Lecture by Charles Murray

Monday, April 4, 2011, 5:30-7:00 p.m.
AEI, Twelfth Floor
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
(Two blocks from Farragut North Metro)

Over the last half century, America has developed a new lower class and a new upper class that are different in kind from anything it has ever known. These developments are not linked to America’s evolving ethnic composition, but to the erosion of deeper sources of American exceptionalism. Charles Murray, the W. H. Brady Scholar at AEI, will describe the evidence for these claims in terms of America’s non-Latino white population from 1960 to 2010.

5:15 p.m.
Registration

5:30
Introduction:
ARTHUR C. BROOKS, AEI

Lecture:
CHARLES MURRAY, AEI

Question and Answer

7:00
Adjournment and Wine and Cheese Reception

I have absolutely no idea what the hell that means, but my interest is certainly piqued.

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Korean Tea

by digby

So the new Maine Tea Party Governor has directed that the state department of labor take down a mural depicting the labor movement in the state. TPM reports:

Defending his decision to take down a mural at the Department of Labor building and change the name of conference rooms considered too pro-labor, a spokeswoman for Gov. Paul LePage released a faxed complaint comparing the art to North Korean propaganda. “In this mural I observed a figure which closely resembles the former commissioner of labor,” an anonymous fax given to the Portland Press Herald reads. “In studying the mural I also observed that this mural is nothing but propaganda to further the agenda of the Union movement. I felt for a moment that I was in communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.”

So obviously, they must be airbrushed. Can we see the little problem here? I knew that you could.

Here are some panels from the offensive brainwashing propaganda:

It’s almost impossible to tell the difference between that and this:

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Statues in Gilead

by digby

The “modern day abolitionists” see a day when they will erect monuments to the success of forced childbirth:

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Pro-Forma approval: the Senate exerts it prerogatives after the fact

by digby

According to dday, Dick Durbin said on a conference call today that he thought that congressional approval was important for the Libyan operation and Jack Reed said that Senate leaders had been consulted. Carl Levin said it has bipartisan support. They expect that the operation will be limited and didn’t anticipate any votes on funding.

So, it’s possible that there will be a vote when congress reconvenes. The outcome is obvious, as it always was.

Then what?

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Tom Friedman says we need to kill grandma to save junior

by digby

Trudy Lieberman and CJR has a typically sharp take on the latest from Tom Friedman, catching something quite appalling from the extremely wealthy so-called opinion leader. First he glibly goes on about the need for deficit reduction and chastises both parties for failing to enact the needed cuts to the budget. But then there was this:

Friedman slapped the GOP because they have called for cuts in things we need to invest more in, such as education and infrastructure, “while leaving largely untouched things we need to reduce, like entitlements and defense spending.” The subtext seems to be that he wants to cut Social Security benefits, but instead he attacked the almost 1.7 million elderly in nursing homes—some of the frailest, neediest people in America. Friedman argues:

A country that invests more in its elderly than its youth, more in nursing homes than schools, will neither invent the future nor own it.

That stopped me cold. For one thing, the U.S. spends more on elementary and secondary education than it does on nursing homes. A spokesman for the Department of Education told me the amount spent on elementary and secondary education for the 2007-2008 school year was $495 billion; for nursing homes, national expenditures in 2008 totaled $138 billion, according to a document called “Health United States, 2010” from the CDC. That’s not even close. Here’s a more important question the press and the public should ask: What will happen to the elderly if we reduce spending on nursing homes, as Friedman hints is necessary?

Well, mostly they’re moving in with family and someone (mom probably) will have to quit work and stay home to do 24 hr nursing duties rather than pay for the kids’ college or save for retirement. Or, we could just let these people die.

The elderly who find themselves in nursing homes aren’t getting a luxury vacation. Believe me they aren’t aren’t like the nice hotels that Friedman stays in and most of the inhabitants aren’t exactly thrilled to be there. But they need skilled nursing care on a level that the average family simply doesn’t have the resources to provide. And they are already grossly, hideously inadequate. The idea of cutting funding for them so that we can pay for their grandkids’ future in a country that boasts millionaires paying tax rates that are lower than they’ve been since the 50s makes me literally sick to my stomach. Not everyone was wily enough to marry a multi-millionaire as Friedman was so these questions are just a little bit less abstract to most of them.

Lieberman draws a picture of what the youth of today might just be facing down the road if all these people who think that “sending messages” to markets by cutting basic services is a responsible way to run an economy have their way:

Imagine a jobless sixty-nine-year-old waiting for a full Social Security benefit at age seventy while digging into his pocket to pay for his ninety-two-year-old mother in a nursing home—plus a large share of his own medical expenses if Medicare morphs into a voucher plan…Nearly fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy sent a message to Congress, quoting the historian Arnold Toynbee: “A Society’s quality and durability can best be measured ‘by the respect and care given its elderly citizens.’” Tom Friedman seems to argue otherwise.

And by the way, it’s not like all these deficit hawks are exactly helping the young either.

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Raising fears of the yellow peril

by digby

I don’t know if this xenophobic piece of propaganda is showing every five minutes all over the country, but I’ve seen it at least six times in the last 24 hours here in LA:

“Citizens Against Government Waste” has been around for quite a while, apparently. It’s a typical conservative wingnut welfare outfit, funded by all the usual suspects. Alan Keyes was its president back in the late 80s. I guess like all the other wealthy conservative organizations they figure they need to make their move.

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Battling messages: the Democrats need to enter the fray

by digby

New polling with the same results:

As President Obama and Democrats in Congress prepare to square off at least one more time with Republicans over the federal budget, about eight in 10 Americans would like to see both sides strike a compromise rather than let the federal government shut down, according to the latest CBS News poll.

More than nine in 10 Americans call the federal budget deficit a serious problem, the poll shows – as many as seven in 10 call it very serious. However, just 7 percent named the deficit as the most important problem facing the country today. Most Americans, 51 percent, called the economy and jobs the most important problem, and most Americans agree Washington is not doing enough to create jobs.

I think what this comes down to is a messaging battle between the two parties. The Republicans need to convince the people that the way boost the economy and create jobs is to eliminate the deficit. The Democrats need to convince people that the way to eliminate the deficit is to create jobs and boost the economy.

It would probably be a good idea for the Democrats to actually make theirs if they hope to prevail. It’s not too late.

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