Dirty, dirty
by digby
Does anyone remember Stephanie Miller’s Linda Tripp impression, described here as “a ghastly riff on the Tasmanian Devil, growling and spurting the words ‘dirty, dirty, dirty’ as she lambastes the morals of those around her”?
After watching cable news all day it’s all I can think of.
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Limbaugh Admits the Media is Conservative
Diarist JohnKWilson at DailyKos makes a great find: Rush Limbaugh making the admission that liberal voices in the news are hard to find. The transcript from Rush’s own website:
if it weren’t for MSNBC we wouldn’t have any liberal sound bites. I’ve told Cookie I’m sick of it, ban MSNBC, and we can’t, ’cause there’s no other place to get liberal sound bites. There isn’t any other place. I mean CNN is just insane over there. They emphasize their hosts, they have guests, but just roll tape on ’em and it’s so boring. It’s not worth putting anything from CNN on the air.
If it weren’t for MSNBC there wouldn’t be any liberal sound bites. Now, that has to mean something. That has to mean that they’re rare, that they’re not everywhere. They may be everywhere in print, but, you know, left-wingers on the radio, genuine cuckoo’s nest. You wouldn’t even want to go there. I wouldn’t play that stuff. MSNBC’s it, and it’s two shows or three shows. It’s it is morning thing with Scarborough, it’s the Larry O’Donnell show at night, and maybe occasionally something from Reverend Sharpton. (interruption) Well, yeah, sometimes Sergeant Schultz. Sergeant Schultz is out there walking amongst abandoned railroad cars looking for the future of America. I know there’s Algore’s channel, but that’s nothing worth highlighting. It really says something. MSNBC is the only place in the media to get these liberals.
When leading conservatives use the phrase “liberal media,” they know they’re lying. The politicians know it, the conservative media figures themselves know it, and everyone down the chain knows it as well except for the base voters that lap it all up.
To be fair, when the rubes hear the phrase “liberal media,” it’s more of a culture war thing they’re dealing with. When NPR hosts talk about ants and balanced viewpoints in that quiet, trademarked, slightly condescending tone NPR has become famous for, that in and of itself is seen as culturally liberal. By contrast, when Limbaugh and Hannity use that growling, all-American aggressive tone of voice to say anything, it comes across as less liberal, regardless of the actual content of their words. That’s why Ed Schultz sounds like a conservative and has appeal with more demographically conservative segments, even though what he actually says is very liberal. The New York Times style section alone is enough to give many conservatives shivers without even delving into the newspaper’s actual politics. Culture wars have been intrinsically grafted onto political wars–and in very many wars are legitimate parts of political wars–such that large numbers of people can view the media as “liberal” without there actually being any politically liberal viewpoints in it.
Still, when even Limbaugh admits that there aren’t any legitimately liberal voices on the air outside of MSNBC, that’s just the great Wizard of Oz peeking out behind his little curtain to reveal the reality of the situation.
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Constituent disservice
by digby
“What created this mess,” Walsh said, leaning forward and jabbing a finger at his constituent, “is your government, which has demanded for years that everybody be in a home, and we’ve made it as easy as possible for people to be in homes. All the marketplace does is respond to what the government does. The government sets the rules. Don’t blame banks and don’t blame the marketplace for the mess we’re in right now. I am tired of hearing that crap! I am tired of hearing that crap!”
Having raised his voice to a shout, Walsh didn’t really have anywhere left to go when another constituent started to ask him about banks “exploiting the situation” through predatory lending and derivatives trading. Just plain yelling while his employers heard him out hadn’t worked, so he stepped closer to her, cranked the volume knob to 11, and cut her off mid-sentence “because this pisses me off!”
Most politicians are able to finesse these unfortunate little disagreements a bit better than the crude Mr Walsh. But make no mistake: he is expressing what most right wing ideologues truly believe: the problem was caused by the government making banks loan money to the wrong people. (And I think you know who those people are…)
This is probably as good a juncture as any to reprint this little piece from Chip Berlet on some of the characteristics of Right wing populism:
One of the staples of repressive and right-wing populist ideology has been producerism, a doctrine that champions the so-called producers in society against both “unproductive” elites and subordinate groups defined as lazy or immoral.
Kazin points out that as it developed in the nineteenth century,
…the romance of producerism had a cultural blind spot; it left unchallenged strong prejudices toward not just African-Americans but also toward recent immigrants who had not learned or would not employ the language and rituals of this variant of the civic religion. . . . Even those native-born activists who reached out to immigrant laborers assumed that men of Anglo-American origins had invented political democracy, prideful work habits, and well-governed communities of the middling classes.
In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews. Producerism, with its baggage of prejudice, remains today the most common populist narrative on the right, and it facilitates the use of demonization and scapegoating as political tools.
Walsh isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and didn’t realize he had a “teachable moment.” But I’m sure others, faced with similar questions, are handling it more smoothly.
Update: Walsh “exasperates” the problem.
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Disturbin’ Durbin
by digby
Oh Jayzuz we are so screwed:
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) diverged from Democratic colleagues Wednesday and applauded the Republican offer to raise $300 billion in new taxes as part of a deficit-reduction deal.
Democratic members of the supercommittee on Tuesday had panned the GOP offer as insufficient.
Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democratic leader, chose to focus on the positive and hailed the latest development as a “breakthrough.” He was worked on a massive deficit-reduction package for more than a year as a member of the Simpson-Bowles commission and the Senate’s Gang of Six.
“The fact that some Republicans have stepped forward to talk about revenue, I think, is an invitation for Democrats to step forward and talk about entitlement reform as well as spending cuts. Therein lies the core of an agreement,” Durbin said.
Since the Democrats have already put Medicare and Medicaid on the table, I’m guessing he’s talking about Social Security.
Durbin,being from Illinois and a very close personally ally oft he president is usually seen as signaling the White House position in such negotiations.
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Power mad, subhuman geeks
by digby
I haven’t read Powerline in years but they keep coming up in various feeds as primary purveyors of the dehumanization of Occupy theme, so I have been checking in and they don’t disappoint. (The New York Post wins first prize, though.)
This shouldn’t come as a big surprise. John Hindrocket’s visceral revulsion toward liberals has long been evident. Even back in 2005, he appeared to be getting ready to pack up some survival gear and head for the hills in the face of the threat:
By “the left” I’m including almost the entire Democratic Party, you can count the exceptions on your fingers, you can name them, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman…The whole mainstream of the party is engaged in an effort that is a betrayal of America, what they care about is not winning the war on terror…I don’t think they care about the danger to us as Americans or the danger to people in other countries. They care about power.
Those were the good old days. Now, the Democratic Party has devolved into untermenschen who openly masturbate in public, defecate in the streets and throw blood and urine around to intimidate their enemies, the small businessman:
THE OCCUPIERS: HOW DISGUSTING CAN THEY GET?
One thing we can say for sure is that you do not want to be in the food service business anywhere near the Occupiers. In New York, they have driven the owner of a shop called Panini & Co. Breads, which has the misfortune of being located across the street from Zuccotti Park, to distraction. And she tried to be nice to them:
A business owner near the Occupy Wall Street encampment claims she has been repeatedly harassed and threatened with bodily harm by protesters after she and her employees refused to give in to their outlandish demands.
“I’ve been told, ‘Watch your back!’ 10 times,” Stacey Tzortzatos, owner of Panini & Co. Breads, located across from Zuccotti Park, told The Post yesterday.
She and her employees are terrified by the constant threats, which she said began after she demanded the protesters stop using her shop’s restroom as a place to bathe every day.
The final straw came about two weeks ago, when the demonstrators broke a bathroom sink, flooding the shop, and clogged the toilet — setting her back $3,000 in damages.
“I have the police in here 10 times a day, [and] I’m the bouncer. I’ve been called the spawn of the devil. “It’s unbelievable what goes on in here every day, ” Tzortzatos said.
And on Friday, she said, a crazed squatter burst into the shop and demanded that workers fill a 10-gallon container of water.
When they refused, “he banged it on the ground and started yelling” and threatened the staff, she said. “He said he was entitled to have it for free.”
The Occupier philosophy!
Tzortzatos said the unsafe conditions begin at around 5 p.m. every day, when “they come from the park drunk, under the influence of something.
“They use one of our doorways as a bathroom, and we have to scrub it down every morning.
“I’ve had people come in here and yell, ‘Boycott! Boycott!’
“They unplugged my ATM machine and plugged in their computers,” Tzortzatos said.
Hey, they may be disgusting in every possible way, but at least they have laptops.
A similarly appalling story comes from across the country, in San Diego:
A pair of Southland street cart vendors who were forced to shut down their businesses after “Occupy” protesters vandalized their carts are hoping to get some help from local residents. …
Coffee cart owner Linda Jenson and hot dog cart operators Letty and Pete Soto said they initially provided free food and drink to demonstrators, but when they stopped, the protesters became violent.
And according to one city councilman, bodily fluids were used in the attacks.
“Both carts have had items stolen, have had their covers vandalized with markings and graffiti, as well as one of the carts had urine and blood splattered on it,” said Councilman Carl DeMaio. …
In addition to the attacks, the vendors also said they recently received death threats.
Feed us for free or we’ll kill you! The Occupiers really are the living embodiment of the Democratic Party.
And can you believe it, they want free water too!
If you put Hindrocket’s thesis together you find that he believes the Democratic Party (the Democratic party!) consists of a bunch of technically skilled, power mad, bloodthirsty, subhuman beasts. I guess if I believed that I’d be frightened too.
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Personhood, goalposts and subversive voting
by digby
As David wrote below, it was a good election night for sane people. All across the country people came out to the polls and reversed or rejected right wing extremism and manipulation. Huzzah.
It was interesting, however, to see how different the polls were from the final tally. Amanda Marcotte observed in this piece that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen such a disparity between polling and results in abortion cases. It happened in South Dakota, ground zero for extreme forced childbirth legislation, as well. She points out that many people who call themselves pro-life are, in practice, pro-choice, they simply don’t want to identify as such. There’s a scale of belief on this complicated issue and most people fall somewhere other than the two extremes.
She surmises from these votes, and I agree, that there are quite a few professed “pro-life” women who tell pollsters they will vote for an extreme bill (or are undecided) but when they are alone in the voting booth will vote against it. Many “traditional” women have been doing this sort of subversive voting forever, one of the reasons men didn’t want to give women the vote in the first place. (My own conservative mother told me she voted for Gene McCarthy and begged me not to tell my military father. She had a draft age son.)
Irin Carmon wraps up her great coverage in Salon by asking an important question about all this, however. Have the goalposts just been moved again?
It helped that it was true to say, as they did over and over again, that it wasn’t “just about abortion” — Initiative 26, at least judging by the intentions of its supporters, was also about banning common forms of birth control, making IVF impossible, and hampering doctors trying to save women with life-threatening pregnancies. But it was also manifestly about abortion. Initiative 26 may have gone down, but Mississippi is still a state with a single abortion clinic, staffed with a doctor flown in from out of state a couple days a week, and with abysmal rates of teen pregnancy and infant mortality. Will any of that change now that even “pro-lifers” have made common cause with the state’s small pro-choice contingent? Or is this just a temporary redrawing of the lines around the reproductive rights most palatable to conservatives, like rape exceptions, just to play defense against increasingly audacious Republican threats?
Most “pro-life” people still believe that abortion should available in the case of rape and incest. If you stop and think about it even for a minute, you simply have to understand why it is so cruel to force women to give birth to their own sibling or be reminded of the violent assault they suffered every day of their lives. Life is complicated and even the most stalwart anti-abortion crusaders used to recoil a little bit when confronted with the reality of such pregnancies. But it’s becoming increasingly common for mainstream conservatives to deviate from that and say “no exceptions.” The goalpost is moving toward “saving the life of the mother” being the only exception (and even that is being challenged.)
This is standard Overton Window stuff and I think it’s probably working at least to some extent. The good news is this:
On the No on 26 Facebook page, people who seem to have been previously unengaged have been excitedly talking for days about continuing their work after the election.
“It’s so helpful to know that you’re not alone,” Hemmins told me just before the election. “There’s been some talk of staying together after the vote as a group, I’m not sure for what purpose or to what extent… The religious right seems to be coming at women from so many different directions. Unfortunately, I can see us needing to rally the forces in the future.”
Indeed. On the Personhood Mississippi page, they’re already talking about taking the cause to the legislature.
We seem to be entering a new age of civic and social engagement and these battles are training activists for the demands of citizenship. Even in Mississippi. That’s unequivocally a good thing.
Update: Pema Levy at TAP also asks if there’s a Bradley Effect for abortion here.
Election Update
by David Atkins
A brief roundup of the mostly good news from last night:
First off, in non-election-specific news, it looks like the Texas Republican gerrymandering overreach will cost them: the courts will be redrawing the map, which will likely mean three more Dem House seats in 2012.
In election news, Mississippi’s personhood amendment was defeated in a 55-45 landslide. That’s a great result. What’s not so great is that this thing was so extreme that even a bunch of Freepers voted against it. That doesn’t bode well for the fact that 45% of Mississippians voted for a law that, beyond its misogyny, would have insane unintended consequences for in-vitro fertilization, birth control and other basic reproductive issues. Still, a victory is a victory, especially on an issue that up until recently had been polling dead even. Unfortunately, Mississippi did pass a stringent new voter ID law and the MS GOP may have taken control of the statehouse for the first time since reconstruction.
In Arizona, the recall of white supremacist, Arizona Senate President and SB1070 architect Russell Pearce was a resounding success. Russell has been replaced by more moderate Republican Jerry Lewis. It’s a conservative Arizona Senate district that’s unwinnable for even a blue doggy Dem (after all, it elected Pearce six times), so the backlash against Pearce and for common decency is a beautiful thing to see. For more, see here.
The Ohio union-busting bill was crushed in a huge victory for the middle-class and a defeat for Republican governor Kasich there. The Ohio result was coupled with a rejection of the state to be required to participate in the still unpopular ACA. That was mostly a symbolic vote without real consequences, though.
In Maine, voters chose to keep same-day voter registration even after the Maine GOP tried to accuse gays of subverting the election process. No joke.
In North Carolina, Dems retook the contentious Wake County School Board, which has been a subject of national attention since a teabagger takeover there.
In Iowa, Dem Liz Mathis easily won election in what was supposed to be a close race, keeping the State Senate narrowly in Democratic hands. Had the race gone the other way, marriage equality in Iowa could have been threatened.
In Kentucky, Democratic governor Beshear easily won re-election.
Locally in my backyard, two good endorsed Dems Heitmann and Morehouse took first and second place in the Ventura City Council race, while an increasingly conservative-leaning incumbent Decline-to-State Weir, who was the top vote getter by far in her previous run, rounded out the winning circle in third place. Tea Party leader Carla Bonney was resoundingly defeated despite raising massive amounts of money, coming in behind locally endorsed Democrat Danny Carrillo. In Santa Barbara, progressive Cathy Murillo defeated conservative Michael Self to take one of the city council seats.
In bad news, there were some Dem losses in the Virginia statehouse.
But all in all, the key theme for the night was Republican overreach. Republicans thought they had a big mandate in 2010, and they went for broke. Voters across the country gave conservative utopians a wake-up all, and the media is taking note.
All in all, last night was a very good night for progressives and bodes well for 2012. It’s also a reminder that as much obsession as there is over the endless “Obama Wars”, there are a lot of other elections and races that matter out there for a lot of people’s lives. The chessboard is grand–and the President, while the most important, is just one piece on the board.
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Fever dreams of men and guns
by digby
Let’s talk about one of the other flaky GOP weirdos running for president shall we?
At a campaign event earlier this year, Elizabeth Warren told supporters that there is “nobody in this country who got rich on his own.”
“You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory,” she said.
ABC News’s Terry Moran asked Ron Paul why Warren was wrong.
“Because she’s a socialist,” Paul replied. “She wants the government to do all this.”
“Educating children is socialism?” Moran wondered.
“That is a socialist idea, that it should be collective,” Paul explained. “I preach home schooling, and private schooling and competition in schools. But what she forgets — she’s right. You know, by the use of force, the government comes with a gun and they take money and they build a highway that, incidentally, you can use because you don’t have any other choices.”
“So in Ron Paul’s ideal America, there would be no public highways, no public education?” Moran pressed. “There’d be no public air traffic control system? There’d be no public protection for workers in coal mines?”
“That’s an overstatement because it might be a lot better,” Paul said. “I think France has a private air traffic controllers.”
(I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I think they are public servants who are allowed to retire at the age of 50. Quelle horreur!)
So when’s the last time someone from the government came to you with a gun and forced you to pay for a road? Yeah, I know it’s the libertarian way of saying that the government forces you to pay taxes under the threat of jail. But really, he sounds like a nut when he says that. And it’s very misleading, reducing the argument to the “men with guns” coming to get you for not paying taxes when the threat of “greedy men with pinkslips” and “rich men with monopolies” is a far graver threat to the average person’s daily tangible freedom than the abstract horror of having to pay taxes for services from which you might or might not personally reap the benefit.
Honestly, sometimes I think that these libertarians must live in some alternate universe where they never have to live under the boot of the real people with real power in most people’s lives. Most of life isn’t a democracy.
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They’re Equivalent
by David Atkins
Jon Stewart takes on the mirror “equivalence” between NPR and conservative talk radio:
This stuff is so obvious, but only progressive pundits on a 3rd-rank news channel, or comedians airing at 11pm on a comedy channel have the guts to come out and say it.
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Big Lie bullet points
by digby
Here’s an interesting primer on the financial crisis by Barry Ritholz in last week-end’s Washington Post. He discussed how the “big lie” about how this whole mess happened has taken hold (lately espoused by everyone’s favorite oligarch Mike Bloomberg) and then lays out the basic truth as follows:
What caused the crisis? Look
●Fed Chair Alan Greenspan dropped rates to 1 percent — levels not seen for half a century — and kept them there for an unprecedentedly long period. This caused a spiral in anything priced in dollars (i.e., oil, gold) or credit (i.e., housing) or liquidity driven (i.e., stocks).
●Low rates meant asset managers could no longer get decent yields from municipal bonds or Treasurys. Instead, they turned to high-yield mortgage-backed securities. Nearly all of them failed to do adequate due diligence before buying them, did not understand these instruments or the risk involved. They violated one of the most important rules of investing: Know what you own.●Fund managers made this error because they relied on the credit ratings agencies — Moody’s, S&P and Fitch. They had placed an AAA rating on these junk securities, claiming they were as safe as U.S. Treasurys.4. Derivatives had become a uniquely unregulated financial instrument. They are exempt from all oversight, counter-party disclosure, exchange listing requirements, state insurance supervision and, most important, reserve requirements. This allowed AIG to write $3 trillion in derivatives while reserving precisely zero dollars against future claims.5 The Securities and Exchange Commission changed the leverage rules for just five Wall Street banks in 2004. The “Bear Stearns exemption” replaced the 1977 net capitalization rule’s 12-to-1 leverage limit. In its place, it allowed unlimited leverage for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. These banks ramped leverage to 20-, 30-, even 40-to-1. Extreme leverage leaves very little room for error.6 Wall Street’s compensation system was skewed toward short-term performance. It gives traders lots of upside and none of the downside. This creates incentives to take excessive risks.7 The demand for higher-yielding paper led Wall Street to begin bundling mortgages. The highest yielding were subprime mortgages. This market was dominated by non-bank originators exempt from most regulations. The Fed could have supervised them, but Greenspan did not.8 These mortgage originators’ lend-to-sell-to-securitizers model had them holding mortgages for a very short period. This allowed them to get creative with underwriting standards, abdicating traditional lending metrics such as income, credit rating, debt-service history and loan-to-value.9 “Innovative” mortgage products were developed to reach more subprime borrowers. These include 2/28 adjustable-rate mortgages, interest-only loans, piggy-bank mortgages (simultaneous underlying mortgage and home-equity lines) and the notorious negative amortization loans (borrower’s indebtedness goes up each month). These mortgages defaulted in vastly disproportionate numbers to traditional 30-year fixed mortgages.●To keep up with these newfangled originators, traditional banks developed automated underwriting systems. The software was gamed by employees paid on loan volume, not quality.●Glass-Steagall legislation, which kept Wall Street and Main Street banks walled off from each other, was repealed in 1998. This allowed FDIC-insured banks, whose deposits were guaranteed by the government, to engage in highly risky business. It also allowed the banks to bulk up, becoming bigger, more complex and unwieldy.●Many states had anti-predatory lending laws on their books (along with lower defaults and foreclosure rates). In 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency federally preempted state laws regulating mortgage credit and national banks. Following this change, national lenders sold increasingly risky loan products in those states. Shortly after, their default and foreclosure rates skyrocketed.
Bloomberg was partially correct: Congress did radically deregulate the financial sector, doing away with many of the protections that had worked for decades. Congress allowed Wall Street to self-regulate, and the Fed the turned a blind eye to bank abuses.The previous Big Lie — the discredited belief that free markets require no adult supervision — is the reason people have created a new false narrative.
There’s more to this, of course, starting with the government deregulation obsession that started back in the 1980s all the way through the Clinton years. Also tax policy, globalization, etc, etc… But this, in a nutshell, is how the financial sector screwed the pooch for the American people and benefited from it.
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