Month: July 2011

What revolution?

by digby

This is just sad:

According to a new poll by Marist, more than a quarter of Americans couldn’t correctly identify the country from which the United States declared its independence. While 74 percent correctly named Great Britain, 20 percent said they weren’t sure and six percent named other countries. In the South, 32 percent of respondents either responded incorrectly or weren’t sure.

Quick, check the American Revolution page on Wikipedia. By now somebody’s bound to have “fixed” it to show that the North declared its independence from the Confederacy. At Guadalcanal.

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Progress and Retreat

by digby

I was thinking the other day that as much as our politics remain in this conservative era, the march for gay equality and what seems to be a loosening of the absurd prohibition against marijuana indicates that social progress is still made. It’s reassuring to know that culturally, at least, we aren’t going back into the dark ages.

And then I read things like this and realize that when it comes to women’s rights, the news is not so good. Without the right to control her reproduction, a woman simply isn’t an autonomous being and we are losing ground very quickly. It’s not just abortion, it’s birth control. And it gets worse than that. Think Progress reports on yet another assault, this time it comes in the form of “homicide” convictions for fetal death:

A common tactic by prosecutors is singling out a group of women who are unlikely to draw public sympathy — women who may have used drugs while pregnant — to blur the line between abortion and homicide. Rennie Gibbs, for example, was 15 when she became pregnant and lost her baby in a stillbirth. Prosecutors charged her with a “depraved heart murder” after they discovered she had used cocaine, although there was “no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death.” She now faces life in prison in Mississippi.

That’s real life Handmaids Tale stuff and it should scare the hell out of women everywhere. Sure, console yourself that it’s only those “bad girls” who use drugs. But once you start criminalizing stillbirths and miscarriages, it leads in only one direction: women having to justify to the state one of nature’s most common and personal events. And who gets to define what’s criminal and what isn’t? If this fetishization of the “humanity” of the fetus over the humanity of the vessel in which its incubated (i.e. a “woman”) is allowed to continue, every person who has undergone a miscarriage or stillbirth must understand that they could be questioned about everything they did during pregnancy, not just drug use. After all, perhaps they didn’t “eat right” or stayed out too late or fell down — who knows what kind of “negligence” caused the miscarriage? Certainly, depending on the law to use common sense in these situations is foolish because the very fact they are doing this much proves their malevolent intent.

This is a new thing. Even in the barbaric past, it was accepted that miscarriage it was a natural act. Nobody knows what causes them — they happen to the cleanest living people and some of the most degenerate carry their pregnancies to term. Some things just happen in life and this is one of them.

We are making progress in many ways. I couldn’t be happier for my gay brothers and sisters for making such a huge step forward in civil rights as they are in more and more states across the country. And it isn’t over until every gay American has a right to marry. But this ongoing, systematic assault on women’s rights should make everyone pay attention: these rights may be guaranteed by the constitution or by democratic decision, but they must be vigilantly defended. The enemies of freedom and equality never quit.

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Defining liberalism down

by digby

Today’s LA Times:

Even as the political battle mounts over federal spending, the end result for federal policy is already visible — and clearly favors Republican goals of deep spending cuts and drastically fewer government services.

President Obama entered the fray last week to insist that federal deficits can’t be reduced through spending reductions alone. Federal tax revenue also must rise as part of whatever deficit reduction package Congress approves this summer, he said. Obama has been pushing to end a series of what he calls tax loopholes and tax breaks for the rich.

But even if Obama were to gain all the tax-law changes he wants, new revenue would make up only about 15 cents of each dollar in deficit reduction in the package. An agreement by the Republicans to accept new revenue would be a political victory for Obama because “no new taxes” has been such an article of faith for the GOP.

I feel fairly confident that they are happy with that outcome. After all, the GOP blatantly telegraphed what it was going to do from the beginning (and also signaled that they would raise the debt ceiling in the end) so it’s not as if the White House can possibly be surprised. This then, must be the preferred outcome. Huge spending cuts on one side with a few small face-saving loophole closing on the other. indeed, with the way the Democrats are talking, I’m not sure they’re even all that invested in that — Harry Reid said

It makes no economic sense (cutting spending will not help the economy, and as a result the deficit is unlikely to come down either) so I’m guessing that they think there will be a big political payoff for being “fiscally responsible” and that the GOP will adhere to some private agreement to take “deficit reduction” off the table. And there’s the magical thinking that the confidence fairy will set everything right. Unfortunately, it’s almost inevitable that we are going to see yet another round of brinksmanship with the FY 2012 budget and if the administration thinks this is the path to victory, it’s hard to see how we won’t see even further cuts. After all, the White House has proposed 4 trillion in cuts on its own. But even if this is the end of it, it’s quite an accomplishment. As Dday writes:

The entire concept of trading an increase in the debt limit, a routine bill that usually passes with grumbling but little else, for a transformation of government, is Grover Norquist’s most long-hoped dream realized.First of all, the LAT writes that this would be the third major GOP victory in less than a year, the extension of the Bush tax cuts and the 2011 appropriations bill being the other two. Second, it confirms once again that $200 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid have been agreed to by the White House, although we still don’t know what those cuts signify. And third, it clarifies the numbers I laid out yesterday, with the Administration having reduced their revenue demands from the already-small number.

But the small numbers of “revenue enhancement” aren’t really the point. The point is that the government is fiddling while Rome burns — we officially have 9.1% protracted unemployment and it’s not getting better. And sadly, not only is all this likely to result in a continued joblessness and poor growth, it is killing liberalism itself. When the conservatives hang this lifeless economy around the Democrats’ necks as a left wing failure, the only reply we will have is that tired old trope “but liberalism was never tried!” — at which point they will point and laugh and remind us that Barack Obama was the most liberal president in history.

Update:

Imagine all the morons

by digby

So John Lennon was supposedly a closet Reagan fan. Sure he was.

A guy named Fred Seaman is all over the conservative blogs today for a new documentary in which he claims that John Lennon was “a closet Republican” at the time he was shot. This seems unlikely.

First of all, who is Fred Seaman? He’d been a personal assistant to John and Yoko at the Dakota in the late seventies, but he’s also a convicted criminal. He was found guilty of stealing John Lennon’s personal belongings, including his diaries, after Lennon had been killed. He was sentenced to five years probation.

You might say that weakens his credibility.

What exactly were Lennon’s political views at the end of 1980? Late that November, Lennon spoke out on behalf of striking workers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. (The story is told in my book Come Together: John Lennon in His Time.) The strike was against Japan Foods Corporation, a subsidiary of the Japanese multinational Kikkoman, best known for its soy sauce. The US workers, primarily Japanese, were members of the Teamsters. In LA and San Francisco, they went on strike for higher wages. The shop steward of the LA local, Shinya Ono, persuaded John and Yoko to make a public statement addressed to the striking workers:

“We are with you in spirit.… In this beautiful country where democracy is the very foundation of its constitution, it is sad that we have to still fight for equal rights and equal pay for the citizens. Boycott it must be, if it is the only way to bring justice and restore the dignity of the constitution for the sake of all citizens of the US and their children.

“Peace and love, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York City, December, 1980.”

That was Lennon’s last written political statement. It doesn’t seem to be the work of a “closet Republican.”

Well who knows? It’s certainly believable that the man who wrote “Give Peace a Chance” would have been enamored of the man who called the Soviet Union an evil empire.

But perhaps this is a good time to reveal that I have it on excellent authority that Ronald Reagan and Michael Deaver were lovers for more than 40 years. They aren’t around anymore to dispute it but you can believe me because a friend of a friend told me about it.

See how easy that is?

What’s truly pathetic is how desperate these sad people are to have some rock icon other than Ted Nugent as their own. Maybe they should see if David Mamet plays the banjo.

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FCB (Friday Cat Blogging): Rhubarb

by digby

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Friday Night Read

by digby

DR: Finally, how many CAPTUSes — people you believe to be innocent men swept up in the CIA “enhanced interrogation” system — are there?

GC: I do not know.

Wow, what a story. Spencer Ackerman interviews a former CIA officer who has written a book on the Black sites and the “enhanced interrogation” regime. He relates the story of how he came to believe that the man he was trying to “break” was, in fact, innocent and how the bureaucracy wouldn’t not allow that possibility. When people called this thing Kafkaesque, they weren’t being hyperbolic.

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Tweeting For Liberty (and cold hard cash)

by digby

Remember that bizarro Lindsay Lohan tweet about the horrors of inflation? Well, it turns out it’s the brainschild of a future Galtian overlord. Annie Lowrey reports:

The National Inflation Association is a limited liability company, a private, for-profit business. It is the brainchild of professional stock hawkers, one of whom happens to be the youngest-ever person charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is devoted to educating Americans about our perilous monetary policy. But it is also devoted to recommending investments—including penny stocks—supposedly able to hold value in the supposedly imminent hyperinflationary period.
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Its president is Gerard Adams, a young libertarian and the head of Wall Street Grand, “the Number One investor relations and investor awareness consulting company today.” What is “awareness consulting,” you ask? Merely advertising. Publicly traded companies, generally ones with penny stocks, pay Wall Street Grand fees to promote them in videos, on its site, and in newsletters. The company also runs a “penny stock investor membership club” and offers up stocks as “investment opportunities” on its site.
[…]
The NIA’s other guiding light has a longer, more checkered history as a promoter of penny stocks. Jonathan Lebed, also 26, has the distinction of being the youngest-ever person and first-ever minor charged with running a so-called “pump and dump” scheme by the SEC. Armed with nothing more than a few email addresses, an E-Trade account, and understanding parents, Lebed started buying penny stocks, hyping them on Internet forums, and then selling high. In 2000, when he was 15, he paid a $285,000 fine to the SEC without admitting any wrongdoing.

In a long profile by Michael Lewis in the New York Times Magazine, Lebed evinced little shame. If Wall Street analysts and cable-TV commentators and everyone else were making money talking their books, why shouldn’t he? “Whether it is analysts, brokers, advisors, Internet traders, or the companies, everybody is manipulating the market,” he told Lewis. “If it wasn’t for everybody manipulating the market, there wouldn’t be a stock market at all.”

That’s another of those “producers” we keep hearing about. Addin’ value. Makin’ this country great.

Who says the American Dream is dead?

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Martians and The Man Called Petraeus

by digby

This is a subject that doesn’t get enough attention, so it’s good to see a well-written, entertaining article discussing the fact that our fetishizing of the military has taken us to a place that we should be very cautious about going:

A Martian who dropped in to visit us could be forgiven for imagining that our nation is ruled from Virginia, while a president supported by a small staff in Washington merely advises the Pentagon on the views of the citizenry. One of the more pragmatic Republican policy wonks I know let his enthusiasm for Petraeus run so far away with him as to write: “The appointment of David Petraeus as CIA Director amounts to a demotion with honor … his immense stature and strong views were too much for the President to handle.”

So now membership in the president’s cabinet is a “demotion,” and managing your generals’ career paths is a manhood test for the commander in chief?

Petraeus, to his credit, explain to the Republicans in his CIA confirmation hearings that it was his job as a general to execute the decision of the civilian leadership not make it. but I don’t think most people, not just Republicans, really understand that anymore. And The Man Called Petraeus is one of the people who has perpetrated that misunderstanding.

This move to CIA was a very savvy decision on the part of the president. It not only takes Petraeus our of the running as a possible dark horse (or maybe white horse) candidate in 2012. It probably takes him out of GOP politics altogether. And that means that if he wants to run for president, which I still think is possible, he will have to run as a Democrat. In the end that may have been the biggest favor that barack Obama has done for the future of his party.

Read the whole article. It’s interesting and important. There’s something very wrong with the way Americans look at the military these days. It wasn’t like this when I was a kid, even before Vietnam. I’m not sure you could even do a TV comedy like Sgt Bilko today, it’s so “disrespectful” of the Army. Hell, maybe not even South Pacific or Mr Rogers. It’s become more of a religious order rather than a civil organization. Somehow, I doubt that the soldiers agree, but then they are only props in this ritualized military worship anyway.

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Comedy Gold

by digby

Yesterday a bunch of us were joking about Jamie Dimon becoming the new treasury secretary when Timothy Geithner departs. It was a lot of fun. Hahaha, how ridiculous would that be?

And then today, this, from Politico:

Possible replacements to be President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, according to a senior administration official, include Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and Roger Altman, a prominent investment banker and former deputy Treasury secretary.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, is considered a strong dark-horse candidate.Dimon has said he is not interested in public office but many on Wall Street believe he would accept the job if asked by Obama. But the White House will have to decide whether Dimon, who leads the most successful bank in the U.S., is too closely aligned with Wall Street.

Now that’s funny.

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Speaking of civil liberties