Month: May 2011

Newtie on the spit

by digby

Americablog did a partial round-up of the rough treatment Newt Gingrich is getting from his fellow Republicans:

Majority Leader Eric Cantor, via The Hill:

“There’s no question there was a misspeak here,” Cantor said on WLS radio in Chicago. “Just to sit here while all but three Hosue Republicans voted for the Ryan budget, to somehow portray that as a radical step, I believe, is a tremendous misspeak.”

Cantor advised Gingrich to explain his comments and “get back on board with what we’re trying to do.”

Tea Party leaders:

Gingrich’s spending call irritates his base
GOP hopeful urges more Alzheimer’s research

WSJ ed board:

Gingrich to House GOP: Drop Dead
Newt undermines his former comrades on Medicare.

GOP Voter in Iowa yesterday (VIDEO):

Voter: You’re an embarrassment to our party.

Gingrich: I’m sorry you feel that way.

Voter: Why don’t you get out before you make a bigger fool of yourself.

And now Nikki Haley, who rang up CNN’s Peter Hamby to let loose.

“What he said was absolutely unfortunate,” Haley told CNN in a phone interview. “Here you’ve got Representative Ryan trying to bring common sense to this world of insanity, and Newt absolutely cut him off at the knees.”

“When you have a conservative fighting for real change, the last thing we need is a presidential candidate cutting him off at the knees,” she added.

TPM has more:

Dick Armey, who had a legendarily tempestuous relationship with Gingrich when they were in the House leadership together and is now a Tea Party organizer, told Politico that Newt was “confused and conflicted” on policy. “We always say: Newt always has so many great ideas,” Armey said. “Well yeah, but then he shifts between them at such a rate it’s pretty hard to track it let alone keep up with it.” The conservative press wasn’t any kinder, as contributors to the National Review and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal unloaded on the former Speaker in a piece entitled “Gingrich to House GOP: Drop Dead.” “The episode reveals the Georgian’s weakness as a candidate, and especially as a potential President — to wit, his odd combination of partisan, divisive rhetoric and poll-driven policy timidity,” they wrote. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer told FOX News Gingrich’s remarks were a “capital offense” that ruled out any chance of winning the nomination. “This is a big deal,” he said. “He’s done.” Gingrich, for his part, has sought to walk back his comments a bit. But on the basic point — that the Ryan budget is “too big a jump” — he has stuck to his guns.

The funny thing is that Newtie’s right on this one. The smart GOP move is to distance yourself from Ryan’s disastrous budget. People really don’t like it and it’s going to be an albatross around the GOP’s neck. But it looks like they are all going to follow their fair haired boy over the cliff.

In the grand battle of the 90s, Clinton vs Gingrich, Newtie made the serious mistake of failing publicly and humiliating the people who once adored him. Clinton survived and went on to become a respected elder statesman and Gingrich was the one forced to resign, the fate they had designed for his rival. It looks like they aren’t going to forgive him for it. Indeed, I would guess that they always loathed his smug, new-age conservatism (who didn’t?) it’s just that he had a knack for pissing off liberals and they figured he might be on to something. Now his megalomania just grates.

Update: Evidently he likes to eat a very expensive breakfast at Tiffany’s too.

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Beckapalooza II

by digby

He’s getting the band back together:

Glenn Beck announced today that he will hold a rally in Jerusalem in August, called “Restoring Courage” — sticking with the theme of hihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs Washington, D.C., rally last August, “Restoring Honor.” On his radio show, Beck immediately started in on the hyperbole. After discussing the details of the event, Beck warned his followers that “the very gates of hell are gonna open up against us” and declared, “I believe we live in historic times. I believe historians will remember what we do and what we say.” Restoring Courage will be “the same kind of feel that you experienced” at Restoring Honor, Beck said, “except I will tell you: much more profound. This is a life-changing, life-altering event.” Beck even said that the rally would “define” its participants: “This will be a — I think, a pinnacle moment in your life. It will define you. In the end, this event will define you.” Beck continued the hyperbole on his TV show today, paraphrasing the Gettysburg Address to say that at his rally in Jerusalem, “possibly for the first time in man’s history, God will remember and make note of what we do there.”

It’s hard to imagine that there will be more than a couple dozen people at this thing, but you never know.

I think I’ve finally figured out where Beck is going with this thing. Remember this guy?

Younger readers probably don’t. He was another charismatic leader with a bizarre, apocalyptic vision. It didn’t end well.

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Conscience Cause

by digby

There’s always a lot of talk among the social conservatives about how their consciences won’t allow them to have their highly moral dollars touch the highly immoral dollars of highly immoral women who seek to exercise their right to decide whether or not to procreate.

Well, I don’t want my highly immoral dollars touching these highly immoral dollars. But I don’t think anyone cares:

In the two years since the OFBNP (Office of Faith Based Neighborhood Projects) launch, church-state separation and civil liberties advocates, acting individually and through the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) have repeatedly pushed Obama to stop funding organizations with discriminatory hiring practices, as well as ending the practice known as direct funding, which permits taxpayer money to flow directly to houses of worship, rather than requiring them to establish a separate nonprofit entity. Instead, on the hiring discrimination issue, Obama said the Department of Justice (DOJ) would review instances of alleged discrimination on a “case-by-case basis,” and has merely encouraged recipients to set up separate nonprofits. Using federal dollars to hire applicants chosen according to discriminatory practices is “a blatant violation of fairness and religious liberty, and the president knows this,” said Sean Faircloth, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, also a CARD member. In addition, “If religious organizations wish to help their community with US taxpayer dollars, we believe it’s only right that they be required to create a separate, non-religious entity for that purpose — one that would be open to government oversight…. Churches and other religious groups are free to do what they want with their own money, but once they receive federal funds, they should be required to operate by the same laws as any other charity.”

To be sure, the president did sign an executive order saying that they should not discriminate. But the implementation of this leaves quite a bit to be desired:

Through a spokes person, DuBois said that each agency would have its own process, and that this process was independent from the OFBNP. At the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as one example, the Administration on Children and Families (ACF) administers the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which includes grant recipients with explicitly faith-based — and often sectarian Christian — mission statements and approaches. According to the Initiative’s website, one Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grant recipient, Skillful Couples Vibrant Marriages, provides services “that transform families into ones that are spiritually alive: each person has a growing, personal relationship with Jesus Christ that impacts every aspect of their lives.” When asked about how the ACF is complying, or will comply with the executive order, a representative from HHS replied by e-mail, “As part of the executive order issued by the president, a working group was established to ensure uniform implementation across the federal government…
The question remains — how long is this all going to take? Meanwhile, all these organizations are providing services without the regulations in place. What’s more, while the executive order requires agencies to post a list of entities that “receive federal financial assistance for provision of social service programs,” it doesn’t require them to designate which recipients are faith-based groups. As a result, the taxpayer money flowing to religious groups remains, as it was during the Bush administration, difficult to track.

I have a feeling that the President will not get one vote he wouldn’t have gotten if he’d stopped this practice altogether. There’s no margin in funding the right’s electoral infrastructure, which is what this is. And the merits of these programs are dubious at best. With everyone constantly braying about the deficit and the need to slash programs, I vote to put this one on the table.

But it will go on despite the fact that it offends people like me who think that my tax dollars should not be spent on religious teaching or that people should not have to accept religious doctrine in return for social services. That’s just a given. In America morality is what the puritans and the scolds decide it is. Always has been.

Correction: the Executive Order does not deal with hiring discrimination(it deals with proselytizing and monitoring and accountability)which makes critics of the program even more anxious. There’s simply nothing being done to prevent this at all.

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Not just another pol

by digby

Greg Sargent has written a good analysis of President Obama’s negotiating strategy. Basically, it’s a re-election strategy — they are trying to recapture Independents who they believe have deserted them because they have failed to fulfil their promise to “change the ways of Washington.” Evidently they believe that Independents care nothing for the substance of policy but are deeply concerned about political atmospherics:

It seems clear that Obama and his advisers think laying down a firm marker — playing the game the way Republicans do — makes him sound like just another Washington politician. Saying “no,” as Krugman puts it, risks miring Obama in the same mud as all the rest of the partisan mud-slingers on both sides. The health care wars left Obama splattered with that mud. Signaling openness to compromise at the outset while articulating general principles as opposed to bottom lines — whatever it does for the Dems’ negotiating position — is central to Obama’s political identity and is the best way to recapture the aura that propelled him into the White House in the first place. It might be called “Beer Summit-ism” I’m not endorsing this view. I’m just reminding folks that there isn’t any big mystery here. This is who Obama is. var entrycat = ‘ ‘

Considering the field he’s facing, Obama will very likely win regardless of any of this so it will be impossible to disprove the theory. But color me skeptical that anyone, Independents included, judge a president running for re-election on something like this when the country is still so stressed by fundamental financial challenges and long term angst about rapid social and cultural change.

Moreover, I think the Republicans will make damned sure that nobody labors under the impression that Obama has brokered a truce in the partisan wars. As Greg has pointed out many times, when you promise to bind up the nation’s wounds but the other side keeps ripping off the bandage and rubbing salt in them, people don’t blame the rippers, they blame the person who failed to fulfill his promise.

I think Greg may be right about the campaign strategy. But at this point I think we also have to assume that the policy outcomes that are precipitated by the electoral strategy are also ones with which the president feels perfectly comfortable. But the political ramifications of it are fairly extreme for liberalism.

As I said, he’s very likely to win, and in America the winner gets the privilege of interpreting the meaning of his or her win. So I assume that this strategy will be validated with a Democratic win in 2012. Whether or not it would work in a different field will have to be tested by someone else.

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Dancin’ With The Political Stars

by digby

The Big Picture has a great post up on debt ceiling kabuki through the ages. It’s a long standing American tradition, right up there with baseball and game shows. Here’s one from the rockin’ 50s:

• The Federal Debt Ceiling (July 26, 1958) “A specter that has been putting in an appearance more or less regularly every year now since 1953 is again back to haunt the Administration. That is the problem of keeping the public dept within the dept ceiling – a problem that will be additionally complicated in the present fiscal year at least by the prospect of a very substantial budget deficit. The dept ceiling is a comparatively new instrument of fiscal control in this country. In 1938, with the dept then standing at what many regarded as the dangerously high level of $37 billion, Congress acted to discourage future reckless spending by setting a limit on the debt of $45 billion. During the ensuing eight years, most of which were marked by war or preparation for war, Congress had little choice but to revise this limited ceiling upward when such action was requested by the President. The ceiling was lifted five times in that period, until it reached $300 billion in 1945. A year later it was revised downward for the first time to its present level of $275 billion.”

And it immediately all went to hell in hand basket.

The post tracks the ritual dance through every decade, in good times and bad, up markets and down markets, under Republicans and Democrats. Why doesn’t the press ever mention this?

h/t to JS

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Grandma is a Welfare Queens

by digby

So Ryan gave a speech today:

Though billed as an effort to revamp his widely criticized budget, Ryan avoided describing his health care plans in specific detail, eschewing even the friendly terms he and other Republicans have used to explain it since he first unveiled it earlier this year. Instead, Ryan reframed the entitlement cuts in his budget as “strengthen[ing] welfare for those who need it,” and accused Democrats who have attacked his budget as engaging in class warfare.

The House budget would phase out the existing Medicare program and replace it with a new program to provide future retirees with private insurance subsidies, which would shrink in value over time relative to steeply rising health care costs. This stands in contrast to the fairly broad consensus among Democrats that health care costs are best reined in by altering provider incentives and placing some restrictions on government-financed health care services, while allowing Medicare to remain a single-payer program for all beneficiaries.

Ryan characterized this distinction differently.

“If I could sum up that disagreement in a couple of sentences, I would say this: Our plan is to give seniors the power to deny business to inefficient providers. Their plan is to give government the power to deny care to seniors,” he said, according to prepared remarks.

What an excellent idea. Let’s have elderly people with multiple illnesses and infirmities take on the responsibility to “deny business to inefficient providers.” It’s the least they can do for us before they die. And God knows, they will be better at it than some government bureaucrat. After all, they’re retired! They don’t have anything to do all day but research medical inefficiencies.

Ryan just keeps digging. If he think that calling Medicare “welfare” is going to endear him to senior citizens, I think he’s more than a little bit out of touch.

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Authoritarian Constitution

by digby

Just do what you’re told citizen and there won’t be any problem:

People have no right to resist if police officers illegally enter their home, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in a decision that overturns centuries of common law.

The court issued its 3-2 ruling on Thursday, contending that allowing residents to resist officers who enter their homes without any right would increase the risk of violent confrontation. If police enter a home illegally, the courts are the proper place to protest it, Justice Steven David said.

“We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”

Justices Robert Rucker and Brent Dickson strongly dissented, saying the ruling runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure, The Times of Munster reported.

See, if you resist the government’s illegal intrusion you “increase the risk of violent confrontation” so it’s really your fault.

I’m fairly sure the founders had no confusion about this. It’s foundational.

h/t to bb

What’s on the table

by digby

In case you were wondering what’s “on the table” in the phony baloney debt ceiling “negotiations” this is what the Wall Street Journal is reporting today. I would take it with a grain of salt — these kinds of leaks are almost surely self-serving:

People familiar with the negotiations led by Mr. Biden say they are looking at cuts to agriculture subsidies and federal retirement programs, stepped-up antifraud efforts, increased premiums for pension plans backed by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and the sale of wireless spectrum and government properties.

The talks are at an early stage and potential areas of agreement are preliminary, officials warn. But Democrats have not ruled out some thorny issues, according to people familiar with the negotiations, including reforms to the pension program for federal workers.

The areas being examined amount to a sliver of the $4 trillion goal officials have set for deficit reduction over the next 10 years.

And taxes remain a roadblock. Republican leaders say tax increases can’t be part of any deficit plan, but White House officials have said any plan must include revenue increases.

As I said, who knows what his means? It could be some Republican blowing smoke. But if the outlines are for real I’m trying hard to see what Republican “constituency” — if one defines a constituency as being made up of actual human beings who vote as opposed to donors — are being hurt here. Agribusiness, Telecoms and criminals could be hit (but they’re Democratic donors as well, so I don’t think that counts.) The only real people who are on that sacrificial alter are public employees. That would be bagging a very big Dem constituency for the GOP. Weakening them is one of their big goals for this cycle, so it will be quite a win if they pull it off. Let’s hope that’s just wishful thinking from the Republicans.

But remember — this entire negotiation is kabuki. Both parties know that there will be no default. This is just an exercise in budget cutting for the sake of budget cutting and nobody is “forced” to agree to anything.

Also important to recognize, as Krugman says in his column today, that this hostage taking pattern is only going to escalate. Since the debt ceiling was a phony threat to begin with it might have been a good place for the Democrats to take stand. They literally had nothing to lose.

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Onward Christian Soldier

by digby

According to today’s NY Times, Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, is contracting itself out as mercenaries to Arab countries. Yes, you read that right.

The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.

In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

Ya think?

Don’t worry, though. They aren’t all Americans so those middle eastern folks won’t ever figure it out. And there’s reason to suspect that they have the permission of the US Government, which is more than a little disconcerting.

But lest you worry that they don’t know who’s naughty and nice, the right wing evangelical uber-nut Erik Prince has made sure of it:

[F]ormer employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince’s subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims.

Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.

Read the whole article if you get a chance. It’s quite chilling. I don’t want to get all conspiratorial, but one can certainly see the outlines of an oil field protection strategy without all that silly democracy interfering with What Must Be Done. But do they think they have even the slightest degree of separation in the eyes of Muslims?

And using a fundamentalist, Christian, fascist crook? Wth? I feel like this is some Left Behind romance novel come to life. (Don’t tease that panther.)

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DREAM turns to Blue Dog Nightmare

by digby

Howie wrote a post the other day that’s well worth reading about the political dynamics surrounding the DREAM Act and the Hatch and Lugar races. oo far.

The DSCC has been tweeting up a storm for the past few days about what a “great candidate” Joe Donnelly is and, bizarrely the keep juxtaposing it with tweets about the shame of former DREAM Act co-sponsor Dick Lugar (R-IN) backing out of his support for the bill, which was just reintroduced in both Houses of Congress, by Obama-shill Dick Durbin in the Senate and by Howard Berman (who represents a newly Hispanic-majority L.A. district) in the House. Last time the bill came up it passed narrowly in the Democratic-controlled House, 216-198, only 8 Republicans voting for it (all but 3 no longer serving) and 38 conservative Democrats crossing the aisle in the other direction to vote against it. One of the anti-DREAM team was, of course, DSCC “great candidate” Joe Donnelly. Hold in your mind for a moment that another was Donnelly’s fellow Blue Dog, Jim Matheson [now running against Orrin Hatch]. read on …

This selective use of the DREAM act is cynical in the extreme. Nobody should be playing with these kids’ lives and the Party touting Democrats who use this issue to attack Republicans from the right is just sad. Lugar and Hatch whiffed on this issue mostly because of pressure from the right wing of their own party, to be sure. But it certainly didn’t help to have right wing Democrats pushing from the same direction and it will undoubtedly keep them from changing back if they win their primaries.

It’s very politically shortsighted. These DREAM kids are paying close attention and so is the Hispanic community. They don’t like what they see:

On Tuesday night, President Obama sent out a fundraising email about his immigration speech. In this email, the Obama campaign solicits for a contribution on their website and on Facebook using specifically the DREAM Act. Instead of choosing to end our pain, he has chosen to use our suffering to grow his campaign. We find this both disappointing and offensive and demand that the Obama campaign take this ad down immediately.

We are tired of politicians either bashing us or praising us without ending our pain. After the president’s speech we knew he was on campaign mode, but these ads just brought insult to our ever-growing pain of achieving the American Dream. Until Congress passes the DREAM Act, the President has the full authority to enable us to temporarily come out of the shadows, work and contribute to our country.

Let’s just say that calling anti-DREAM Democrat Joe Donnelly a “great candidate” in the same breath as you are criticizing his opponent for not supporting the DREAM act is certain to be noticed. Not smart.

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