Month: April 2011

The Money Chase

by digby

I guess this was inevitabl but it still makes me queasy:

Democrats with ties to the Obama White House on Friday are launching a two-pronged fundraising effort aimed at countering deep-pocketed GOP groups in 2012 — and adopting some of the same policies on unlimited, secret donations that President Barack Obama himself has long opposed, the organizers tell POLITICO.

The two groups, Priorities USA and Priorities USA Action, aim to raise $100 million to defend Obama’s reelection bid from an expected onslaught of attack ads from similar Republican outside money organizations activated in the 2010 midterms, organizers say.
The Priorities companion committees will have one that discloses donors — and one that doesn’t, a practice Obama hammered during last year’s election cycle as undermining the democratic process.

The Priorities group also is jettisoning an Obama rule aimed at limiting the influence of special interests by welcoming unlimited contributions from lobbyists, labor unions, corporations and political action committees — sources that are still banned from giving to the president’s reelection campaign, organizers said.

“While we agree that fundamental campaign finance reforms are needed, Karl Rove and the Koch brothers cannot live by one set of rules as our values and our candidates are overrun with their hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Bill Burton, a former White House spokesman and co-founder of the organization.

“We will follow the rules as the Supreme Court has laid them out, but the days of a double standard are over,” he added.

Great. I don’t have an answer for this. The Republicans are marginally worse than the Democrats what with all the lunatic racism, sexism, homophobia and theocracy, so you have to be practical and not want them to gain power, particularly when they are intent upon totally dismantling our entire social contract as quickly as possible. But God help us, this is mutually assured destruction and this money race is going to make it all so much worse.

The time to have changed this trajectory was when the Democrats held the power to deny the wingnuts their preferred Supreme Court plutocrats and to ram through some serious campaign finance laws. You can be sure that if the Republicans were in their position they would have done that. But this is about money — and both sides are slavering to get their hands on it. Corruption knows no Party. In any case, the Party which represents labor, consumers and those who are dependent upon government services is never going to be the preferred Party of the Big Money Boyz, although they’ll spread enough money around to keep them trying. Democrats playing this just raises the ante. Until somebody figures out how to stop it our democracy is going to continue to be more of a pageant than a reality. Perhaps our money would be better spent on a monarchy, after all. At least they have gilt carriages and pretty palaces to show for it.

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Dred Scott And The Birthers

by tristero

As a sort of aside in a recent post, I noted that the “filth of the Dred Scott decision” is behind the questioning of Barack Obama’s birth and therefore his eligibility to be president. I don’t want to make this a history lesson, because Dred Scott was not only a despicable but a multi-layered case. If you are interested in all the particulars, Wikipedia’s articles are a pretty good place to start. But it is the following specific portion of Roger Taney’s infamous decision I had in mind:

The Court first had to decide whether it had jurisdiction. Article III, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution provides that “the judicial Power shall extend… to Controversies… between Citizens of different States….” The Court held that Scott was not a “citizen of a state” within the meaning of the United States Constitution, as that term was understood at the time the Constitution was adopted, and therefore not able to bring suit in federal court. Furthermore, whether a person is a citizen of a state, for Article III purposes, was a question to be decided by the federal courts irrespective of any state’s definition of “citizen” under its own law.

Thus, whether Missouri recognized Scott as a citizen was irrelevant. Taney summed up,

Consequently, no State, since the adoption of the Constitution, can by naturalizing an alien invest him with the rights and privileges secured to a citizen of a State under the Federal Government, although, so far as the State alone was concerned, he would undoubtedly be entitled to the rights of a citizen, and clothed with all the rights and immunities which the Constitution and laws of the State attached to that character.

This meant that

no State can, by any act or law of its own, passed since the adoption of the Constitution, introduce a new member into the political community created by the Constitution of the United States.

The only relevant question, therefore, was whether, at the time the Constitution was ratified, Scott could have been considered a citizen of any state within the meaning of Article III. According to the Court, the authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as

beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

The Court also presented a parade of horribles argument as to the feared results of granting Mr. Scott’s petition:

It would give to persons of the negro race, …the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, …the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.

In other words, the Dred Scott decision said, in part, that because blacks would never have been considered citizens of any state at the time that the Constitution was ratified, it was not possible ever to consider them citizens, even if individual states decided to make them citizens and accord them the rights of citizens. Note: Taney was talking about all blacks, not just slaves.

In the real world, of course, the court and the Congress reversed this shameful decision (although the Dred Scott decision was, technically, never overruled). Still, the general lesson of Dred Scott endures in the modern right wing: a very effective way to eliminate those you hate is to delegitimize them, deny them any justification to the claim of being a genuine American citizen and a voice in the public political discussion. The birther movement is simply one of the wedges used by racists, ethnocentrists, religious bigots, and homophobes to force the country to engage in an evil discourse: whether citizenship, including but not limited to the right to be president, should be culturally, if not legally, withheld from anyone they deem not sufficiently American. And in the case of Obama, the Supreme Court – via originalist arguments as specious as anything Scalia advances now – asserted it was simply impossible for blacks to become citizens and therefore it is impossible for Obama to be a legitimate president.

Birtherism may fail, but so what? The evil discourse remains: Who is truly American and who is truly not? That is the argument the right demands we address every time a Democrat is elected president. With Obama, the right has an ancient Supreme Court ruling on their side. It may be discredited legally, but culturally, the notion that any black man could ever be a legitimate president is simply unthinkable – especially a black who has thrown his hat in with the socialists of the Democrat party.

The path out of this evil discourse is simple: label it first as the disgraceful and malicious expression of racism it is. Refuse to engage the “substantive” arguments they advance. Crowd out the evil discourse with truly important discussions that the country simply needs to have.

Simple, yes, to conceptualize. Much harder to to do.

Real/Unreal

by digby

Kevin Drum says that the left has been broadcasting that it needs to protest the Ryan plan at Townhalls so nobody takes it seriously when people do it:

Ever since the Ryan plan has come out, I’ve been reading endless tweets and blog posts about how liberals need to create a ruckus at congressional town halls. Or, alternatively, complaining that liberals aren’t doing a good enough job of creating a ruckus at congressional town halls. Or wondering when liberals are going to rise up in wrath. Or something.

As a result, even I haven’t really taken any of these various ruckuses very seriously. They’re just too obviously contrived to be our equivalent of the tea party protests. And my guess is that the press is yawning for the same reason. You can’t make protest plans in public for a couple of weeks and then turn around and try to convince reporters that this is all a grass roots effort.

The left has always been pretty good at organizing large-scale marches and protests. But fake grass roots uprisings? Not so good. The right has us beat hollow on that kind of thing.

I guess I could buy that except for the fact that the Tea Party protests were as openly contrived as can possibly be. There was this, the instruction manual. There were the big astroturf internet organizing groups, Grassfire and Resistnet along with Freedomworks and others. There was the funding by the various big money groups. There was the drumbeat of talk radio and the full blown sponsorship by Fox News. None of that was secret. It’s just that nobody thought to cover it as “contrived” —or thought it was important.

Kevin is certainly right that people pretend that the Tea Party was solely a grassroots event, but that’s only because the mainstream media ignored the obvious. I suspect that’s because they were all middle aged and senior citizen white people who don’t look like the stereotypical protester. (Or it was because the novelty of a right wing protest made it a sexier story.) But none of that was due to the superior fakery of the right wing. The info was all out there. Nobody cared.

In any case, I’m not sure that because something is organized that means it’s manufactured. Those people who came out to protest health care reform really believed what they were saying and were entirely sincere in their outrage, even if the whole thing was contrived by a bunch of GOP scam artists, plutocrats and paid political operatives. And I think the protesters in Wisconsin and Ohio and at these current Townhalls are entirely sincere as well, even if bloggers, unions and Move-On are encouraging them to go out and make their voices heard. (And these protests sure aren’t being promoted with hours and hours of talk radio and Fox 24/7 every day, so in that respect it’s actually much more grassroots than the Tea Party protests.)

This looks real to me:

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Tiger Blood — or is it tiger teeth?

by digby

This is getting pathetic. The only thing surprising about this performance is that she didn’t pump her fist and say “winning!”

(Just a reminder: the Republican Party of the United States nominated this person to run as Vice President on a ticket with the oldest man to ever be nominated for the office. Why do they hate America so much?)

He’s just an old country aristocrat

by digby

David Swanson has posted a blockbuster piece about a panel he attended featuring Alan Simpson, David Walker, Larry Sabato and Dean Baker on the subject of the debt and the economy. He notes Sabato’s fuzzy-wuzzy affection toward Simpson, a common occurrence among Villagers — they love to portray his countrified aristocratic misanthropy as Real American folk wisdom and pretend that means that even the plebes agree that class warfare only runs one way:

There were more questions from the audience, but Simpson addressed himself to me when he explained what was wrong with taxing wealthy people. We have to get away from talking about the rich versus the poor, he said. For one thing, when you talk about who’s responsible for something, the commission you’re working on can’t come to any agreement. The Iraq Study Group, for example, had to set aside who was to blame in order to propose what should be done. (Of course, most of us don’t spend our lives serving on bipartisan commissions, and taxing the rich is as forward looking a concept as any other; blaming the rich was a straw man Simpson created.)

See, we can’t get anything done if wealthy and powerful people are held accountable for their crimes (unless it involves unsanctioned fellatio, of course.) He’s just being pragmatic. It’s just a plain fact that Very Important People will be Very Seriously Upset if they and theirs are forced to pay and that means they won’t let our allegedly democratic government do its job. Surely you can understand the problem.

Swanson got footage of the event and I highly recommend that you take a look at it when you get a chance. Apparently, Baker was there to give the others a break from their mutual snogging since nobody seemed to pay any attention to the fact that he vehemently disagreed with everything they were saying. (Village consensus means never having to listen to anyone who doesn’t validate your biases.) Everything he says is true and important.

Be sure to also click over to the link to read Swanson’s full account and see some classic footage of Simpson being an ass. He’s all for cutting defense — and by that he means cutting funding for the Veterans Administration. Seriously.

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Conspiracy Clerics

by digby

In case you thought that the lying documentary hoax was invented by James O’Keefe, here’s a reminder that it has been a thriving wingnut industry for years.(Remember The Clinton Chronicles?) Here’s a new one coming from the infamous Coral Ridge Ministries featuring a couple of alleged ex-employees from Planned Parenthood who say the clinics routinely give out defective condoms and weak birth control pills to girls so they can meet their abortion quota and become millionaires. Apparently, it’s something like selling Mary Kay or Tupperware.

CORAL RIDGE MINISTRIES NEWS

Ex-Planned Parenthood Clinic Director and Former Abortion Clinic Owner Expose Business of Abortion on Cross Examine TV

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL (April 27, 2011) – Two former abortion industry insiders talk candidly about the business of abortion this week on Cross Examine, a nationally aired television program featuring Dr. Del Tackett.

“If you want to keep the doors open, you better sell a lot of abortions,” says Abby Johnson, who left her post as executive director of a Texas Planned Parenthood clinic in 2009. “I was probably the best in my clinic. I sold abortions to girls as young as twelve.”

To view “The Business of Abortion” online now, please visit www.crossexamine.com. (After April 29, log in for free as a “Cross Examine Insider” to watch the show.)

Carol Everett, an owner of two abortion clinics in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the 1980s, wanted to become a millionaire. “And the way for me to be a millionaire was to sell 40,000 abortions a year.”

It was easy money. When she opened a new clinic, “In the first month that clinic would pay for itself, and the second month it would be a cash cow.”

Johnson charges on the program that Planned Parenthood, a $1 billion corporation which took in $363 million from government sources in 2008-2009, sets abortion targets for each clinic.

“Planned Parenthood absolutely has quotas that each center has to meet,” Johnson says about her former employer which performed 324,008 abortions in 2008.

“They have an abortion budget and they have a certain number of patients that you have to perform abortions on every month, and there’s a dollar amount attached to each woman.”

Everett’s business plan included outreach in schools with talks given to break down children’s natural modesty and promote Everett and her clinic associates as trusted authorities for all things sexual.

Everett wanted students to “come to us with their sexual questions so we could put them on a low dose birth control pill we knew they’d get pregnant on. Of course we passed out condoms but we never passed out high quality condoms; we always used seconds or defective condoms. Our goal was to get the kids pregnant.”

The target, Everett says, was “three to five abortions between the ages of 13 and 18 from every girl we could find.”

Cross Examine co-host Dr. Del Tackett said it is “shocking to realize that this industry actually attempts to increase the number of abortions, rather than a desire to make them rare as we are led to believe.”

Fox News is Walter Cronkite compared to these people. But they are all playing in the same fetid pool of conservative lies and propaganda.

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After-birthers running through the fever swamps

by digby

I’m so sick of this birther BS that I can hardly stand it. But since the right wingers seem to be ratcheting up the crazy on this, I guess it’s necessary to at least bring attention to the aggressively stupid nonsense that’s out there. Here’s Media Matters:

A lot of attention is being paid to last night’s Follow The Money on Fox Business Network, during which host Eric Bolling and crew had themselves an extended wallow in the birther swamp, in spite of the release of Obama’s birth certificate, and in spite of Fox News’ Shep Smith exhorting the media to “just freaking stop it.” Monica Crowley was on Bolling’s panel and she eschewed the spittle-flecked lunacy of co-panelist Pamela Geller, instead going for a more high-brow justification of birtherism, bringing up the question of whether Obama qualifies as a “natural-born citizen”.

Gateway pundit Jim Hoft is full-on on the kerning watch, with charts and graphs and Youtubes like this “proving” that the birth certificate is a fake:

And this “expert” opinion:

And he also flogs Monica Crowley’s nitwit garbage about Obama not being a “natural born citizen”:

Finally, also wanted to make the point that regardless of where Obama is born, he’s still not a Natural Born Citizen since both parents were not born on U.S. soil but I won’t hold my breath waiting for the media to educate the public on this fact.

This has been floating around the fever swamp since 2007, when the morons suddenly caught up with the fact that McCain was born in Panama, so he “must be born on American soil” part of their argument got dicey. So, they came up with a few other back-up theories to prove that Obama couldn’t possibly be legitimately elected to the White House.

The first was the “natural born parents” theory, which is obviously just made up fantasy since seven former presidents had parents of foreign birth, including one of the founders:

• Thomas Jefferson‘s mother was born in England
• Andrew Jackson‘s parents were both born in Ireland
• James Buchanan had an Irish father
• Chester A. Arthur had an Irish father
• Woodrow Wilson‘s mother was English
• Herbert Hoover had a Canadian-born mother

And needless to say, unless the 14th Amendment has been repealed when I wasn’t looking, this whole argument is utter nonsense since Obama was born in America.
US v. WONG KIM ARK (1898)– the 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to all persons born in the United States, regardless of their ethnic heritage

The foregoing considerations and authorities irresistibly lead us to these conclusions: The fourteenth amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes. The amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States. His allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case, 7 Coke, 6a, ‘strong enough to make a natural subject, for, if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject’; and his child, as said by Mr. Binney in his essay before quoted, ‘If born in the country, is as much a citizen as the natural-born child of a citizen, and by operation of the same principle.’

And:

To hold that the fourteenth amendment of the constitution excludes from citizenship the children born in the United States of citizens or subjects of other countries, would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage, who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.

Another stupid right wing trope is that Obama couldn’t possibly be an American because his mother was only 18 and therefore hadn’t fulfilled the citizenship requirements that would allow her to confer citizenship on her son if his father was another nationality. (Look it up — it’s too dumb to even try to explain.)

I’m sure there are other theories about the “usurpation” I haven’t run across. But the fact that there are so many proves that these people are determined to find a way to defend their primitive belief that this man is not a legally elected president. And that belief lies in their fundamental, bedrock definition of what constitutes a Real American — a white, Christian conservative. There’s no way they will ever be able to reconcile the idea that a black Democrat could legitimately represent a majority the American people. Clearly, they will rewrite history and the constitution if they have to in order to make that case.

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Prosperity

by digby

Gee, I can hardly wait for the austerity program to really kick in:

The advance estimate for Q1 GDP came in at 1.8% – a sharp decline from last quarter’s 3.1% but close to Briefing.com consensus of 1.7. The number was, however, well below the WSJ survey estimate average of 2.7. Here is an excerpt from the BEA announcement:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 1.8% in the first quarter of 2011 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter) according to the “advance” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 3.1%.

The increase in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), private inventory investment, exports, and non-residential fixed investment that were partly offset by negative contributions from federal government spending and state and local government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

The deceleration in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected a sharp upturn in imports, a deceleration in PCE, a larger decrease in federal government spending, and decelerations in non-residential fixed investment and in exports that were partly offset by a sharp upturn in private inventory investment. (More here).

I sure hope it’s temporary. But with the states rapidly contracting their spending and the Feds about to do the same, you can’t help but worry that unless personal consumption really picks up steam in a hurry this doesn’t look great.

This is an interesting experiment in disaster capitalism. Can you push through austerity measures in the face of what feels like a long, protracted crisis rather than an acute jolt? I think we’re about to see.

Dean Baker’s analysis here.

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How Quickly We Forget

by tristero

While this is a pretty good editorial, this paragraph:

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

is sloppy and misleading. Portraying Democratic presidents as the invidious “other” is what the extreme right always does. And it’s not only quote mainstream unquote Republican leaders who go along with it.

Some of us well remember this, for example:

“[Bill Clinton] came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”

I think that’s as fairly stark portrayal of a president as the insidious “other” as one can get.

And, oh yes, that wasn’t said by some bottom-feeding far right asshole but by the so-called dean of the Washington Press Corps. As far as Clinton goes, in fact, calling him white trash who didn’t know his place was pretty mild, almost a compliment. Rightwing Republican operatives slimed him as a sleazy land speculator, a drug dealer, a drug addict, and even a murderer. His wife, of course, was a… lesbian (which to them is something to be ashamed of, as per Cheney’s behavior when Kerry noted Mary Cheney’s sexual orientation during a debate with Bush).

True, questioning the American bona fides of an African-American president is unquestionably a deeply racist stunt: the filth of the Dred Scott decision sticks to it. But let’s not forget that there is a long, long history of the far right demonizing – not “portraying,” but demonizing– Democrats as Not Real Americans. And they do so by playing not only the race card, but the class card, the gender card, the foreigner card (“He looks French!”), the gay card, the elitist card, and every other card they can think of playing. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is off limits.

And the press goes right along. Merrily along.

The Man Called Petraeus Enters the Netherword

by digby

Obviously, I have no idea why the administration is moving the great military hero Petraeus out of the chain of command and into the CIA. For all I know, he’s got a great feel for Intelligence work and has dreamed of being a spook since he was a boy. But I can speculate on the politics side and I can’t think of a better place to put the only possible person who could present a real threat to his election if he were prevailed upon to run. He will be invisible. And, presumably, occupied running the various secret CIA wars which he won’t be able to take public credit for.

Say what you will about Obama but he’s one savvy pol when it comes to sidelining his most potent rivals. Maybe he should appoint the whole GOP field to his cabinet and run unopposed.

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