Month: August 2011

Earthquakes and cracked conspiracy theories

by digby

I’ve been through a few earthquakes. Even if you’re accustomed to them, they’re always a little bit scary. This one in Virginia seems to have been a very good jolt and shallow, which means a lot of movement. So far, it appears there were no casualties and the damage is minimal, so that’s good.

If you build it, they will use it Part XXIV

by digby

Mother Jones has published an investigative series on the FBI that is just mind-blowing.

The Informants

The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?– Trevor Aaronson

Locked Up Abroad—for the FBI

How our government enlists foreign regimes to detain and interrogate American citizens. —Nick Baumann

Radical Leftist or Feds’ BFF?

To many on the left, Brandon Darby was a hero. To federal agents consumed with busting anarchist terror cells, he was the perfect snitch. —Josh Harkinson

There’s more at the link. It’s all good, but I found the story of the leftist turned informant to be most interesting. It’s a fascinating look into what little exists of the radical left in America and it’s not particularly inspiring. But then we see this sort of personality on all levels of life (more so in politics than elsewhere, I’ve found) as certain charismatic but immature personalities flit from one insight to the next and reinvent the wheel over and over again. (Also, too, they are susceptible to bullshitters and con artists.)

This article is about a radical who apparently became impatient with his leftist comrades and so became and FBI informant. That trip from radical to snitch is a fascinating one.

There’s also a movie about the case. Here’s the trailer:

All the articles illustrate exactly how creeping authoritarianism overtakes a free nation. All it takes is a boogeyman and government sanction to build the institutions and create the processes that over time become the norm.

In all this discussion of budget cutting and “shared sacrifice”, I’ve seen no talk of taking a look at the Homeland Security — an entirely new bureaucracy that has had virtually no scrutiny — and FBI budgets, swollen after 9/11 to previously unimaginable numbers. This has become another sacrosanct area that cannot be touched or questioned.

Living Life

by digby

Years ago I used to think that raising the retirement age wouldn’t be that big a deal. Everyone’s living longer, right?

Wrong:

And those in the bottom 50% are the most likely to really, really need to retire at 67, which is already pretty old by the standards of the rest of the industrialized world.

Kevin Drum answers the inevitable question:

So why does this zombie idea continually resurface with such clocklike predictability? Two reasons, I’d guess. First, it’s a perfect sound bite. “Raise the retirement age” is a whole lot easier to understand than “Change the AIME bend points, reduce the top two PIA factors, and raise the taxable maximum to cover 90% of earnings.” So that’s what we get.

Second, all the loudest voices come from highly educated, white-collar folks who write and talk for a living. They belong to, and speak for, a class that has interesting jobs that don’t tax their bodies, probably aren’t planning to retire at 65 anyway, and in any case, get paid well enough that they can retire early on their investments if they want to, regardless of Uncle Sam’s official retirement age. So it just slips their mind that a higher retirement age would be a way bigger deal to other people than it is to them. Basically, they need to get out more.

I think there’s another motive. There are a whole lot of elites out there who just want to nibble away at it in painful ways because they think it’s making the serfs lazy. At the very least a whole lot of them simply can’t imagine that anyone would actually need that pittance of money to live.

Whatever the motives, it’s a very bad idea. I may be lucky enough to have a longer life expectancy because I am a desk worker but half of my fellow Americans aren’t. 67 is old enough.

Oh, and let’s think twice about continually using SS payroll tax cuts for temporary, lousy stimulus too. It’s going to wind up making the shortfall happen even sooner which will give the “reformers” yet another excuse to cut benefits. If tax cuts are the only possible thing this government can bring itself to do, find another source.

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Democrats doing the right thing

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

There is a growing faction of progressives who have indicated that they will not support Barack Obama’s re-election, and refuse to vote for him come election day 2012.

If for no other reason than control of the Supreme Court, I believe that stance is seriously misguided. And I suspect that many who hold that position today may soften as the reality of the danger the Republican nominee poses comes into clearer focus in the fall of next year.

But even those who cannot bring themselves to vote for President are making a mistake to throw the entire Democratic Party overboard. Case in point: my own amazing local Assemblymember Das Williams in California’s 35th (actually, now the 37th due to redistricting) Assembly District representing parts of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. Das went through a bruising primary battle and a swath of conservative special interest money to win election in 2010, and has been a tour de force in Sacramento ever since. One of his biggest accomplishments to date has been an anti-privatization of libraries bill, which is rapidly gaining steam despite strident opposition from various interest groups:

Dozens of librarians from across the state went to the Capitol on Monday to support a bill that would make it more difficult for local governments to contract with private firms to run libraries.

They rallied as only librarians might, concluding the event with the reading of a homemade, hand-illustrated children’s storybook titled “The Privatization Beast Comes to Our Town” and the appearance of a person dressed in a bright yellow costume playing the role of the fictional beast.

“We have an undeserved reputation for saying, ‘Shhhh!’ all the time,” said Gina Quesenberry, a librarian at the El Monte Library in Los Angeles County. “People don’t know that we’re fine with a little noise and hubbub.”

The noise they were making was in support of Assembly Bill 438 by Assemblyman Das Williams, D-Santa Barbara, whose district includes Ventura and much of Oxnard.

The measure, awaiting a vote in the Senate, would place strict conditions on cities contemplating contracting out for library services, including requirements for multiple advance notices of a public hearing, the completion of a study enumerating anticipated savings, open bidding and an assurance that no existing library employees would lose their pay and benefits.

The bill is strongly opposed by local government officials, who say the proposed restrictions are so severe that the bill would effectively eliminate the option of contracting out.

Click here to see an awesome photo of Das fighting the “privatization beast”. This is the sort of thing, replete with effective political theater, that great local Democrats are doing all across this country to far too little fanfare.

The context for this effort is the a nationwide push to privatize libraries nationwide, particularly by one major private library firm called LSSI:

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.

A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.

Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”

Yes, somehow the public tends to think that public libraries should remain…well, public. Amazing.

Why privatize libraries? Because local city councils strapped for cash have to make ends meet somehow, and it’s easier to hand over the libraries to LSSI to fire all the workers and rehire them at substandard wages, than it is to make the deeply unpopular and difficult move to screw over librarians at the collective bargaining table. Privatizing libraries is incredibly unpopular, and city councils would like to be able to do it with as little fanfare as possible.

Cities across California, especially those managed by conservative city councils, have been quietly privatizing their libraries through LSSI at a rapid clip. My own city of Ventura is considering doing just that. As a member of the city of Ventura’s Library Steering Committee, I’m part of a group that will make a recommendation to the city on what to do with its library. Das Williams’ bill may or may not pass, and it may or may not pass in time for to affect the decision of Ventura’s city council. But if passed, it will help ensure that the views of citizens and rights of library workers will be better protected from the national wave of austerity.

And speaking of the city council, partisan control of the council hangs on a razor’s edge; depending on the outcome of elections this November, it could well swing into conservative hands, making privatization of the libraries that much likelier.

The local county party of which I’m vice-chair and field operations chair will be doing what we can to ensure that that doesn’t happen. We have also put pressure on Sacramento to support Das Williams’ bill, just as we worked hard and spent good money to ensure that great Democrats like Mr. Williams got elected in the first place. It’s hard work, and takes countless hours of volunteer time and money to make these sorts of positive outcomes happen.

Those who advocate throwing the entire Democratic Party under the bus out of frustration with what’s happening in Washington, D.C. might want to look closer to home, and to nearby battles worth winning on a more local level. Chances are, your local and state Democratic Party is fighting to make the right thing happen, as is your local Democratic legislator. A lot of good people are working hard to make a real difference. Not all of them are as fantastic and progressive as Mr. Williams, but many of them are. And if they aren’t, then find someone who is and help get them elected instead. And then try to make sure those progressives are promoted to higher and higher levels of elected office.

That (in addition to building a progressive think tank and messaging infrastructure to support our candidates) is part of how we’ll take this country back from the neoliberal and conservative establishment. One city, one county, and one state at a time.

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“God’s work” under criminal investigation

by digby

Oh my:

Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein has hired high-profile Washington defense attorney Reid Weingarten, according to a government source, as the Justice Department continues to investigate the bank.

Blankfein, 56, is in his sixth year at the helm of the largest U.S. investment bank, which has spent two years fending off accusations of conflicts of interest and fraud.

The move to retain Weingarten comes as investigations of Goldman and its role in the 2007-2009 financial crisis continue.

The news spooked already jittery investors. Goldman shares fell sharply in the final minutes of regular trading after Reuters reporting the hiring, finishing down 4.7 percent at $106.51, their lowest level since March 2009.

They slipped further in after-hours trade to $105.45.

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) in April released a scathing report that criticized Goldman for “exploiting” clients by unloading subprime loan exposure onto unsuspecting clients in 2006 and 2007, and concluded that its top executives misled Congress during testimony in 2010.

Goldman has said it disagreed with many of the report’s conclusions, but took seriously the issues addressed. The Justice Department launched its investigation in late April.

On Monday, Goldman said: “As is common in such situations, Mr. Blankfein and other individuals who were expected to be interviewed in connection with the Justice Department’s inquiry into certain matters raised in the PSI report hired counsel at the outset.”

Blankfein has not been charged in any civil or criminal case.

“Why do you bring in someone like that?” said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, about Weingarten. “It says one thing: that they’re taking it seriously.”

It may mean nothing — after all, we don’t want to look in the rearview mirror because it means we’re going to run off the road. Or something. But if they are seriously investigating, Blankfein should be worried.

Update: Oh, and speaking of God’s work:

Western nations — especially the NATO countries that provided crucial air support to the rebels — want to make sure their companies are in prime position to pump the Libyan crude.

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy said on state television on Monday that the Italian oil company Eni “will have a No. 1 role in the future” in the North African country. Mr. Frattini even reported that Eni technicians were already on their way to eastern Libya to restart production. (Eni quickly denied that it had sent any personnel to the still-unsettled region, which is Italy’s largest source of imported oil.)

Libyan production has been largely shut down during the long conflict between rebel forces and troops loyal to Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Eni, with BP of Britain, Total of France, Repsol YPF of Spain and OMV of Austria, were all big producers in Libya before the fighting broke out, and they stand to gain the most once the conflict ends. American companies like Hess, ConocoPhillips and Marathon also made deals with the Qaddafi regime, although the United States relies on Libya for less than 1 percent of its imports.

Multi-nationals stick together.

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The solid rock of human dignity

by digby

With all the hoopla around the new MLK monument in DC, it seems as thought this would be a good time to reprint this passage from Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Read on. The words reverberate today in ways he couldn’t have anticipated.

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That Worked Well

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Gallup is out with its first head to head presidential poll. The results are worrisome:

President Barack Obama is closely matched against each of four possible Republican opponents when registered voters are asked whom they would support if the 2012 presidential election were held today. Mitt Romney leads Obama by two percentage points, 48% to 46%, Rick Perry and Obama are tied at 47%, and Obama edges out Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann by two and four points, respectively.

Worth noting in particular are the numbers among independents:

Obama: 44%

Romney: 47%

Obama: 44%

Perry: 46%

Obama: 43%

Ron Paul: 46%

Obama: 48%

Bachmann: 42%

Two things are worth pointing out here. First, if the President thought that embracing austerity would work to secure support among independents, he and his team were clearly mistaken. The data has been showing that for weeks. Even as a purely political calculation for electoral advantage, embracing austerity was a dumb move.

Second, the only thing that really separates Romney, Paul, and Perry from Bachmann is that the media hasn’t decided to call them out as deranged lunatics like they have with Bachmann. The media has admittedly been appropriately harsh on Bachmann. There may be a gender effect as well, but it mostly has to do with media scrutiny.

If the President is counting on the support of independents for his austerity cutbacks and a friendly media environment going into November 2012, his campaign is going to be in for a world of hurt. It might be time to rethink the status quo strategy.

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Wonks are from Mars, bloggers are from Venus

by digby

I have been confused by the insistence on the part of many liberal wonks and pundits that speeches and political rhetoric are politically useless and the only thing that ever matters is the application of power. While I see application of power as intrinsic to successful governance as well, I have always believed strongly in the power of persuasion and rhetoric to obtain the necessary political power, whether it be from the people (most important in a democracy) or from those who interpret and dispense the analysis of our leaders — the press, academics and influential insiders.

To my mind, the most highly skilled presidents, with their high national profile and easy access to the people, competently work the levers of power in the government and fuel their own by persuading the people to back his agenda. This is done by describing what the problems are and how he (and presumably his party) seek to solve them. Unless one accepts the proposition that voters are simply window dressing and good governance must be accomplished through backroom deal making among the elite, then a president has a unique ability and responsibility to rally the people to his cause. And I think the people do matter — ask any Hill staffer if they are concerned when their polling looks bad or their local press criticizes them. The President is the only national political figure with the kind of clout to command the people’s attention for any sustained period of time, to frame the problems and answer their questions.

And yet, the bully pulpit is described by many commentators as a waste of time, a useless endeavor that has no influence and therefore needn’t even be discussed. Well, I think I may have finally figured out one reason why I disagree with so many (not all by any means) of these very smart wonks and pundits:

“For years, popular psychologists have insisted that boys and men would like to talk about their problems but are held back by fears of embarrassment or appearing weak,” said Amanda J. Rose, associate professor of psychological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. “However, when we asked young people how talking about their problems would make them feel, boys didn’t express angst or distress about discussing problems any more than girls. Instead, boys’ responses suggest that they just don’t see talking about problems to be a particularly useful activity.”

Rose and her colleagues conducted four different studies that included surveys and observations of nearly 2,000 children and adolescents. The researchers found that girls had positive expectations for how talking about problems would make them feel, such as expecting to feel cared for, understood and less alone. On the other hand, boys did not endorse some negative expectations more than girls, such as expecting to feel embarrassed, worried about being teased, or bad about not taking care of the problems themselves. Instead, boys reported that talking about problems would make them feel “weird” and like they were “wasting time.”

Wonks are from Mars, activists are from Venus? Who knows? But I have long been puzzled as to why there was such resistance among some of DC’s smartest liberal commentators to what seems to me to be the obvious reality that Presidents have substantial power in their words as well as their actions. Perhaps this explains it a bit. A lot of them probably just think talking about problems in any situation, including politics, is a waste of time.

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Doubtless Thomas

by digby

This piece by Jeffrey Toobin on the influence of Clarence Thomas on the future of the United States of America is downright chilling. A man who was once an extreme conservative outlier has become a mainstream Justice, leading the court more often than not. Really:

In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.

The conventional view of Thomas takes his lack of participation at oral argument as a kind of metaphor. The silent Justice is said to be an intellectual nonentity, a cipher for his similarly conservative colleague, Antonin Scalia. But those who follow the Court closely find this stereotype wrong in every particular. Thomas has long been a favorite of conservatives, but they admire the Justice for how he gives voice to their cause, not just because he votes their way. “Of the nine Justices presently on the Court, he is the one whose opinions I enjoy reading the most,” Steve Calabresi, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and a co-founder of the Federalist Society, said. “They are very scholarly, with lots of historical sources, and his views are the most principled, even among the conservatives. He has staked out some bold positions, and then the Court has set out and moved in his direction.”

This judicial move to the right has been influenced by more than just Thomas, of course. The whole federalist Society project is a methodical strategy to do just that. But the fact that Thomas no longer holds a marginal position on the court is alarming — he is more than an average wingnut.

The article discusses his wife’s position as a major DC player in the tea party as further evidence of his far right political views. Their treatment of the constitution as a sacred text passed down by God is validated by his own views.

(I would have to say this is the real proof and it’s been out there for a long time:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who recently officiated at Limbaugh’s wedding, says he tapes Limbaugh’s radio show and listens to it as he works out (USA Today, 5/13/94).

)

Toobin characterizes those views this way:

The implications of Thomas’s leadership for the Court, and for the country, are profound. Thomas is probably the most conservative Justice to serve on the Court since the nineteen-thirties. More than virtually any of his colleagues, he has a fully wrought judicial philosophy that, if realized, would transform much of American government and society. Thomas’s views both reflect and inspire the Tea Party movement, which his wife has helped lead almost since its inception. The Tea Party is a diffuse operation, and it can be difficult to pin down its stand on any given issue. Still, the Tea Party is unusual among American political movements in its commitment to a specific view of the Constitution—one that accords, with great precision, with Thomas’s own approach. For decades, various branches of the conservative movement have called for a reduction in the size of the federal government, but for the Tea Party, and for Thomas, small government is a constitutional command.

In his jurisprudence, Thomas may be best known for his belief in a “color-blind Constitution”; that is, one that forbids any form of racial preference or affirmative action. But color blind, for Thomas, is not blind to race. Thomas finds a racial angle on a broad array of issues, including those which appear to be scarcely related to traditional civil rights, like campaign finance or gun control. In Thomas’s view, the Constitution imposes an ideal of racial self-sufficiency, an extreme version of the philosophy associated with Booker T. Washington, whose portrait hangs in his chambers. (This personal gallery also includes Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.)

He’s a constitutional fundamentalist:

From the moment Thomas arrived on the Court, he has been a committed originalist; he believes the Constitution should be interpreted as the words were understood by the men who wrote it. “When faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution’s original meaning,” Thomas wrote in an opinion from 2005. Scalia is the figure most often associated with this school of thought, but he refers to himself as a “fainthearted originalist.” Scalia means that other factors besides his own understanding of the intent of the framers, most especially the long-established precedents of the Court, influence his judgment on the resolution of constitutional disputes. “If a constitutional line of authority is wrong, he”—Thomas—“would say let’s get it right,” Scalia told a reporter in 2004. “I wouldn’t do that. He does not believe in stare decisis period.” In other words, there is nothing fainthearted about Thomas’s convictions about the meaning of the Constitution.

“When interpreting a constitutional provision,” Thomas wrote earlier this year, “the goal is to discern the most likely public understanding of that provision at the time it was adopted.” To that end, he plumbs the words of the framers and the eighteenth-century (and earlier) thinkers who influenced Jefferson, Madison, and their contemporaries. No other Justice, not even Scalia, studies the historical record with as much care, and enthusiasm, as Thomas. In June, Thomas dissented from Scalia’s opinion holding unconstitutional the California law limiting the sale of violent video games to children. “A complete understanding of the founding generation’s views on children and the parent-child relationship must therefore begin roughly a century earlier, in colonial New England,” Thomas wrote. Following a survey of child-rearing in the eighteenth century, Thomas concluded that the “founding generation would not have considered it an abridgment of ‘the freedom of speech’ to support parental authority by restricting speech that bypasses minors’ parents.” In legal academia, Thomas’s rigor has won respect across the political spectrum. According to Sanford Levinson, a left-leaning professor at the University of Texas School of Law, “Scalia is far more influential, because he has spent much of the last two decades campaigning around the nation for his views, but it would not surprise me if future historians find Thomas to be the more intellectually serious of the two.”

More intellectually serious perhaps. But fundamentalist and ultra-orthodox nonetheless. The idea that the founders, so inspired by the Enlightenment they were spurred to revolution, would have ever dreamed that the America of the future would be in thrall to those who would lock its society and government in the manners and mores of the 18th century is just daft. (Not that it matters. We are alive, they are dead. And I don’t believe they are waiting up in heaven, alongside Jesus and Abraham Lincoln, to pass judgment on our adherence to the constitution.)

Read the whole thing if you have the time. It’s fascinating and alarming. This is a very, very angry and resentful person who is most properly understood from a psychological perspective, but whose extreme ideology and legal philosophy is becoming mainstream. This is a further sign that the Resentment Tribe is going to continue to be dominant for some time to come.

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The Blowback

by digby

This story in the NY Times about the change in tone from the slash and burn governors of Wisconsin and Ohio is fascinating. Apparently, they are both making conciliatory noises now — after they managed to ram through their extreme austerity and union busting programs, to the horror of at last half of their states’ voters.

In the months after a flurry of Republican wins of governors’ offices and state legislatures in 2010, perhaps nowhere was the partisan rancor more pronounced than in the nation’s middle — places like Wisconsin and Ohio, where fights over labor unions exploded. But now, at least in those states, there are signs that the same Republicans see a need to show, at least publicly, a desire to play well with others.

[…]

In Columbus, Democrats and union leaders were enraged this year when Gov. John R. Kasich, another first-term Republican governor, and the Republicans who now control both chambers of the legislature pushed through — mostly along partisan lines— a law that would limit the rights of public workers to bargain collectively.

Republicans in Ohio advocated for the measure as the logical response to shrunken budgets in towns, cities and counties. But union leaders and Democrats — and a group calling itself We Are Ohio — spent months collecting more than 900,000 valid signatures (hundreds of thousands more than needed) to put the law to a vote in a statewide referendum in November. A campaign, which is expected to draw significant interest and spending from political groups in Ohio and nationwide, is likely to begin in earnest soon.

Last week, Mr. Kasich and Republican leaders sent a letter to the union organizers, calling for a meeting to discuss a compromise. The leaders said they still believed in the law they had passed, and a spokesman for Mr. Kasich would not say precisely what areas the Republicans were willing to give in on. “We are prepared to move forward immediately with legislative action to implement any agreement on changes we are able to reach together,” the letter read.

“We ought to get to the table and we ought to talk about it,” Mr. Kasich told reporters on Friday, meeting with them in a room full of empty seats and placards for the absent organizers, although the organizers said they had turned down the invitation. “Is it too late?” Mr. Kasich asked. “It’s never too late.”

[…]

In the weeks after Mr. Walker proposed the limits in February, state lawmakers, newly dominated by Republicans in the Capitol, split in two. The minority Senate Democrats fled the state to try to block a vote on the measure. The Republicans issued the lawmaking equivalent of warrants against them, and at one point, threatened that the Democrats had to collect their paychecks in person — or not get them at all. And, as protesters screamed outside his closed office door, Mr. Walker firmly defended the bargaining cuts and said his administration was “certainly looking at all legal options” against the other party.

But after a summer of expensive, brutal recall election efforts against nine state senators — Democrats for having fled the state, and Republicans for having supported the bargaining cuts — Mr. Walker seemed to be sounding a different, softer note. He said he had called Democratic leaders in the Legislature even before the polls closed in some of this month’s recalls, which, in the end, maintained the Republican majorities in both legislative chambers, though by a slimmer margin of 17 to 16 in the Senate.

The question the article asks is whether this is a reaction to voter backlash or simply a move to the middle after having accomplished much of what they set out to do.

I don’t know the answer to that, but I would suggest that Democrats keep pushing regardless, as hard as they can. The GOP’s strategy is probably a little bit of both things — a sense of success at getting what they wanted, and a substantial fear that they went too far, too fast and will pay a political price for having done it. They must pay that price or it’s hard to imagine how far these nuts will go in the future.

It doesn’t matter whether they fear the backlash or whether they are just relaxing after a job well done. Sadly, the states are not likely headed for a robust recovery. The bright side is that these political extremists will have to shoulder much of the blame for that. It’s vitally important that they do.

Update: Speaking of states,

C&L is bringing back the 50 State blog round-up just in time for the election:

The 50-state blog round-up has existed over the years in various forms. The idea is to take a look at state and local blogs in order to see what important things are going on in state politics and campaigns, to get a preview of what’s coming to the national stage and to recognize the work of great state and local bloggers.

Last time out local blogs proved invaluable when the Republican nominee chose an obscure, looney Governor from Alaska. This time perhaps we can all be a little bit more systematic in tracking this stuff on the ground everywhere.

Good for Kenneth Quinnell at C&L for making it happen.Click here for the latest blog posting from around the country.

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