Month: November 2011

Macho maidens

by digby

The boys at Powerline have always been very tough dudes who are nonetheless nearly paralyzed with fear of hippies. It’s one of the more fascinating sideshows in the blogosphere. They rarely disappoint:

FASCIST OCCUPIERS TRY TO SHOUT DOWN GOVERNOR WALKER

The Occupiers’ outrages are piling up so rapidly it is hard to keep up with them. This one happened Thursday morning, but I first learned of it this afternoon via Ann Althouse. Governor Scott Walker spoke at a breakfast at the Union League Club in Chicago. The event was infiltrated by a group of around 50 Occupy Chicago protesters whom the Chicago Tribune describes as “union-backed.” Just after Governor Walker began speaking, the Occupiers stood up and started reading–screaming, actually–in unison from scripts they carried in their hands. The effect was truly creepy.

The sickos succeeded in delaying Governor Walker’s speech by around six minutes before they were escorted from the room. Althouse says:

The rudeness is sickening. I don’t understand how the protesters imagine that they will win support from anyone that way. … It only makes him look better.

That’s true, of course. The more people see of the Occupiers, the less they like them. This episode was interesting in that the Occupiers’ fascist tendencies were in sharp relief as they tried to bully the audience by yelling their script in unison. I can’t imagine that more than one percent of the population would want to be governed by such misfits.

Yes, that’s just awful. I wonder if they were following these instructions?

– Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

– Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

– Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous,stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

Oh wait. That was a Freedomworks instruction manual for the Health Care townhalls in 2009. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s not fascism either, it’s democracy. But then some rightwingers have always confused the two.

But get ready for more of this. The shape shifting right can switch from swashbuckling macho superheroes to fainting Aunt Pittypats trembling in fear for their lives without even stopping to switch undies. It’s their special gift.

h/t to @FrankLynchBkln

Keeping Libraries Public
by David Atkins

An editorial by yours truly is appearing in this morning’s Ventura County Star:

Keep Our Libraries Out of Corporate Hands

When Benjamin Franklin founded America’s first public library and Thomas Jefferson sold his entire private library for the use of the people’s representatives in Congress, they could scarcely have foreseen the day their descendants would send into reverse the process they proudly set in motion.

Following the Founding Fathers’ examples, private citizens began to bequeath their collections and their fortunes to establish public libraries across America. That tradition of publicly held access to information, made available by the people and for the people, continued unabated until very recent history.

Today, sadly, many American cities are abandoning the proud tradition begun by Franklin and Jefferson in a paroxysm of radical pro-privatization ideology. They are placing public libraries in corporate hands, despite strong community backlashes against doing so.

These cities are bowing to an ideology so radical that it cannot properly be called “conservative,” unless by “conservative” one means hearkening back to the days of debtors’ prisons and the absence of flush toilets.

Read on for the whole thing. Several cities in Ventura County have already privatized their libraries, and at least two others are considering doing so. Library privatization is a quiet scourge that is happening under the radar of a national-issues-obsessed public. Citizens need to find out if this sort of thing is happening in their own backyards, and agitate against it if need be.

The City of Ventura’s library hangs in the balance, with a City Council divided among 3 Democrats, 3 Republicans and 1 conservative-leaning Decline-to-State. With three seats up for grabs in a crucial City Council election happening in just a few days, the balance of power could shift dramatically. Despite the voices who insist that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, a Republican shift in the City Council will likely mean a privatized library. A Democratic shift will mean it stays in public hands. If nothing changes, the fate of the library is uncertain.

Elections have consequences, and it does matter which party takes office–even in officially “non-partisan” races.

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Chalkhills and children
By Dennis Hartley















During the peak of its imperialistic forays, it was oft-stated that the “sun never sets” on the British Empire. While that may have been an accurate cartographic assessment, there was a time or two along the way when His Majesty’s Government suffered a total eclipse…of the heart. In February 2010, British PM Gordon Brown issued an official apology for one of these little hiccups, a child migration policy that had been implemented in one form or another from the 19th century through the late 1960s. It is estimated that more than 130,000 children were affected. According to a CNN article from last year, the group who represents the tail end of this shameful chapter is known as the “Forgotten Australians”, who were shipped off starting just after the end of WW II:

The so-called “Forgotten Australians” were British children brought up by impoverished families or living in care homes who were shipped to Australia with the promise of a better life.But many ended up in institutions and orphanages, suffering abuse and forced labor. They later told of being kept in brutal conditions, being physically abused and being forced to work on farms. Many were wrongly told they were orphans, with brothers and sisters separated at dock side and sent to different parts of the country.

It’s hard to believe that this Dickensian scenario continued to flourish under the auspices of the British government until 1970, which was when the final “shipment” arrived in Oz (the Australian government has since apologized as well for its part in the three decade-long collusion; whether or not all of the various church and charity organizations involved at the grass roots level have admitted as such is anyone’s guess). However, as some of these children might have recited at one time or another, “For every evil under the sun, there is a remedy or there is none.” In this case, the remedy (or at least a salve) arrived in the person of a British social worker named Margaret Humphreys, who, beginning in the mid-1980s, almost single-handedly brought this purloined period of systemic social injustice to world-wide attention, as well as reuniting hundreds of these “forgotten” children (adults by then) with their surviving parents in England. Humphreys wrote a book about how this all led to the founding of her Child Migrants Trust, which has now been adapted into the new film Oranges and Sunshine, directed by Jim Loach.
The story opens in 1986, in Nottingham. Initially, Margaret (Emily Watson) seems an unlikely candidate for facilitating long-overdue family reunions; in the opening scene, she is in fact doing exactly the opposite-taking custody of an infant from its pleading and obviously distraught mother, while the police stand by as dispassionate observers. Margaret keeps her professional cool, but her eyes telegraph a pained resignation to the fact that it is one of those necessary evils that real nitty-gritty social work entails at times.
One night, as she is leaving her office, Margaret is approached by an Australian woman who tells her she was born in Nottingham, but had been placed into government care as an infant and shipped off to an Australian children’s home. Although she had grown up under the impression that she was an orphan, the woman now has reason to believe that she may have been lied to all those years. She pleads with Margaret to help her find her family roots. Margaret reluctantly promises to investigate, if she can find the time. However, after another woman (Lorraine Ashbourne) in one of her counseling groups recounts an unusual story about how she was reunited in adult life with a long-lost brother (Hugo Weaving) who had also apparently been sent off to Australia not long after the siblings had been put into government care, Margaret becomes intrigued to dig deeper. Before too long, she connects the dots and a disturbing historical pattern emerges.
This is the directorial debut for Loach (son of Ken), who seems to have inherited his father’s penchant for telling a straightforward story, informed by a righteous social conscience and peopled by wholly believable flesh-and-blood characters. He doesn’t try to dazzle us with showy visuals; he’s wise enough to know that when you’ve got an intelligent script (Rona Munro adapted from Humphreys’ book, Empty Cradles) and a skilled ensemble, any extra bells and whistles would only serve to detract from the humanity at the core of the story. Watson never hits a false note; she doesn’t overplay Margaret as a saintly heroine, but rather as an ordinary person who made an extraordinary difference (even if giving up some of her nervous system along the way).

Don’t expect a Rocky-like third act (or buildup, for that matter), which is what I suspect a Hollywood production would have tacked on. While elements of this story are inherently inspiring, it also has a very sad and bittersweet undercurrent. After all, these people were not only essentially robbed of their childhoods, but denied foreknowledge of their true identity, the very essence of what defines each of us as a unique individual. As Margaret herself says in frustration at the film’s denouement to one of the now-adult migrant children (an excellent David Denham), after he has taken her to visit the Christian Brothers’ mission where he and many others were physically and sexually abused: “Everybody always thinks there’s going to be this one big cathartic moment when all the wrongs are righted and all the wounds are healed…but it’s not going to happen. I can’t give you back what you’ve lost.” Neither can a film; but like Margaret, it assures us that there is some compassion left in this fucked-up world. And that’s a comforting thought.
Previous posts with similar themes:Marwencol
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Forbes gets scared
by David Atkins

Forbes is starting to get a little desperate, if their website is any indication. Two pieces today, one a frustrated op-ed and the other a strained attempt at faint praise, are trying to rally conservatives to the Romney bandwagon. But it’s a tough sell.

The faint praise:

Mitt Romney’s Vaguely Promising Plan for Entitlement Reform

Yesterday, at a speech before the Americans for Prosperity in Washington, Mitt Romney delivered a significant address on fiscal issues. In the speech, Romney outlined his plans for reforming Social Security, Medicaid, and—most importantly—Medicare. Romney’s Medicare plan is vaguely to the left of Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, both for good and for ill. Critical details are still missing. But politically, the plan allows Romney to justly claim that he is helping to lead the fight against runaway health-care spending. And that, in turn, may help Romney get a second look from the skeptical Republican base.

Sure it will, guys. Sure it will. Especially when the Mittster is saddled with this, from later in the same article.

Romney’s Medicare plan can be simplistically described as the “Ryan plan with a public option.” And that’s both its strength and its weakness.

That will be endearing to the rabid base. But not as endearing, I suppose, as this bit of enraged hectoring:

The Republicans- Party Of Old Money- Are Destroying Their Chances in 2012

I watch dumbfounded as Cain and Ron Paul and Gingrich and Perry– as well as the cackling former Gov. of Alaska– show their lack of character to be President of the US– try to railroad the terrified populace into thinking they have answers for the troubled American economy. They are doing the Democrats job for them– underscoring that the Republicans stand only to destroy Barack Obama and many of the safety net reforms that have been in place for many decades. What’s more, their fierce and strident attacks on Mitt Romney are spoiling his chances in a general election as he ducks and weaves from the bruises and charges.

Romney, just barely, fills the potential bill for a national leader, if he surrounds himself with wise experts on foreign policy, national defense, the threat of terrorism. By next summer, what will the nation decided after seeing these politicians, some of them just clowns pushing extreme positions they could not ably defend in debate. Will America really want to take a chance on them.

Do any of them measure up to Dwight David Eisenhower, or Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan or Teddy Roosevelt? Hardly. Do you think you really understand how the economy will function if any of them become President? Well, you don’t.

Cain not knowing the Chinese have had nuclear weapons for decades, Perry promising an electric fence to keep Mexicans out, Ron Paul promising to get rid of Social Security in its entirety and privatizing it– making it subject to the whims of the financial markets. What enlightened wisdom on economics. I haven’t heard any wisdom from these candidates on how to unfreeze the housing jam, or realistically balance the budget

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Romney’s promising them. But, I have a hunch, the 9.1% that just became 9%, is going to become 8.9%- and then we’ll see. And the other great irony is thsat America’s blue chip household name corporations, whose cash dividends give a higher return than 10 year Treasuries– are increasing their profits. Have a look at Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, Caterpillar, IBM, Colgate Palmolive, UPS- and many others.

I’m not even going to argue the actual policy details with the hacks at Forbes. No, Mitt Romney’s plan doesn’t have a realistic public option, and no, “entitlement reform” is not a good thing. And no, it’s not ironic that blue chip companies are doing well even as unemployment rises. Unemployment is a feature of profitable American companies shipping joes overseas, not a bug.

What’s more important here is the whiff of desperation from the big money base. They want to love Romney. They want the base to love Romney. But not even they can pull off with the accolades necessary to do it effectively. Not that the base would listen anyway.

Romney’s only saving grace is that he has a solid 25% of the Republicans behind him. Unless enough of the rest of the GOP really unites behind Herman Cain, that means that the GOP nomination is still Romney’s to lose.

And that means four more years of an even more embittered conservative base and even more whackadoo Tea Party protests. If Romney is the nominee, Obama will win re-election partly due to the depression of the GOP base, which will blame its 2012 defeat on not selecting a conservative enough nominee. Watch for a GOP candidate to the right of Genghis Khan rise to try to seize the White House in 2016, because all the momentum in the GOP is going to tend ever rightward.

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Historical interlude for a Saturday afternoon

Abramoff’s out of jail now, and is out on a rehabilitation tour. Reed’s making a strong comeback. Norquist is one of the most powerful men in American politics. And a whole new generation, weaned on their lunacy, has grown up around them.

Dave Weigel translates:

The Republicans who put their names on that letter didn’t say they were endorsing tax hikes. “I specifically asked about that in the meeting,” said Rep. Lee Terry, a conservative Republican from Nebraska who has never voted for tax increases. “I said, does this commit me to raising taxes? And Stephen LaTourette (of Ohio, one of the brains behind the letter) said, ‘No. This just says revenues.’ That could mean spectrum fees, or something like that. It doesn’t commit me to raising taxes.”
[…]
So what do the doubting Republicans actually want? Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican with spotless conservative cred, signed on to the letter, too. He meant it as a suggestion: Guys, be serious and do tax reform.

“I believe we need to get rid of the underbrush,” he said. “Some of these loopholes. The best way to do that it with a tax code that’s half an inch deep and miles and miles wide. We want clarity in it, and we want equity.”

What kind of equity? “It galls me when I hear about a major corporation or a very wealthy individual not paying taxes,” he said. “But at the same time, when you hear about 50 percent of the population not paying taxes, that galls me also.”

That’s your “equity” for you, conservative style. People who are so poor that after their meager income is chopped up by basic necessities, sales taxes, state taxes and payroll taxes they have so little money left that they are exempt from federal taxes is as “galling” as a hugely profitable billion dollar corporation paying no federal taxes. I’m guessing even more galling. After all, the corporations are jaaahb creators.

Once again, if you’re a praying sort, pray for gridlock. I don’t know if the election or Occupy Wall Street or some act of God will intervene to stop this runaway train but all we can do right now is hope the Republicans live up to their obstructionist impulses and throw a bunch of obstacles in its way.

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C’est succès. C’est prospérité!

by digby

Here’s Adele Stan with a run down of the events at the Americans for Prosperity last night. It’s rare that you see people this lacking in self-awareness — these people are taking it to new levels.

Back in the hall. AFP Foundation Executive Vice President Tracy Henke introduced David Koch to the crowd, where he received a standing ovation. Along with the other dignitaries present from the AFP Foundation board, she also got a warm round of applause for her shout-out to Art Pope, chairman of the foundation’s sibling organization, simply known as Americans For Prosperity. Pope is the North Carolina political powerhouse who is behind the attempts to re-segregate the public schools of Wake County.

Then Henke warned the audience that if they left the building during the program, they would not be able to return, because of the Occupiers.

“We are so incredibly successful at what we do,” she said, “[that] there are 500 protesters that have set up outside.” She then directed the audience to look at the video giant video screens used to magnify the speakers. Photos flashed of the view of the protesters that David Koch took in from the south-facing window from which he had looked out at the crowd. “That’s success,” she added. “That’s prosperity.”

Here’s a picture of the event:

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Goldilocks gets a bad case of salmonella

by digby

Everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the Village press and out politics is in this paragraph:

“I spent a couple of days last week talking to Social Security experts across the ideological spectrum. Some, mainly those on the left, didn’t like the story, while those on the right did. But some in the middle, like Jonathan Cowan of the Third Way, declared it realistic and on point.”

That’s the ombudsman of the Washinton Post explaining why their egregious story about the Social Security trust fund last week-end was correct.

For the record, Third Way is not “in the middle” just because it’s a centrist organization. It represents elite interests within the Democratic Party. But their function in the Village is to create the illusion of a moderate, “middle” position for the Democrats which constantly moves the debate further to the right. It’s rare that you see it demonstrated so clearly.

In the case of Social Security their “analysis” dovetails nicely with the conservative position, as it always does.

Dean Baker responds and tartly concludes with this:

One need not have a PhD in a policy field to take part in public debate, but being in the middle of the political spectrum (by the Post’s standards) does not make one expert on an issue.

And in fact, there are many situations where the truth most definitely does not lie in the middle (e.g. the Civil War). The Post’s ombudsman has substituted finding the middle ground for finding the truth. This might be the way the Post conducts itself, but it is not the way a serious newspaper carries through its business.

And again, just because it calls itself “third way” doesn’t mean it’s in the middle. But it’s clever marketing, you have to give it credit for that. But being the servants of Big Business and Wall Street as it is, one would expect them to be very good at “branding.”

Update: And the beat goes on. The Washington Post vomits up an editorial this week-end calling AARP “thuggish” for defending its memebrship from this wrecking crew. Dean Baker responds and concludes with this:

[T]he Post wants to use the deficits created by the mismanagement of its friends and associates as a pretext to take away a substantial chunk of the Social Security benefits. (The preferred cut du jour is a 0.3 percent reduction in the annual cost of living adjustment. This would be cumulative so that a retiree would see their benefits fall by roughly 3 percent after 10 years, 6 percent after 20 years and 9 percent after 30 years. It would be a much larger hit to the income of the typical retiree than ending the Bush tax cuts would be to the typical person affected.) Given that most retirees and near retirees have just seen their wealth devastated by the collapse of the housing bubble, leaving them little other than their Social Security, this seems a particularly cruel one-two punch.

Just to be clear, this is the deal the Democrats have reportedly put on the table, which is being backed up by the Washington Post’s ongoing misinformation. Apparently a bunch of 90 year old women (it will be mostly women) getting progressively poorer is just fine with these people. I guess they figure the old bags can always get a job to supplement their incomes.

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Three Stories

Three stories for a Saturday morning, in no particular order. Story #1:

Tunisian electoral officials confirmed the Islamist Ennahda party as winner of the North African country’s election, setting it up to form the first Islamist-led government in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings.

But the election, which has so far confounded predictions it would tip the country into crisis, turned violent when protesters angry their fourth-placed party was eliminated from the poll set fire to the mayor’s office in a provincial town.

Ennahda has tried to reassure secularists nervous about the prospect of Islamist rule in one of the Arab world’s most liberal countries by saying it will respect women’s rights and not try to impose a Muslim moral code on society.

Story #2:

A firebomb attack gutted the headquarters of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday after it put an image of the Prophet Mohammad on its cover.

This week’s edition shows a cartoon of Mohammad and a speech bubble with the words: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.” It has the headline “Charia Hebdo,” in a reference to Muslim sharia law, and says Mohammad guest-edited the issue.

Charlie Hebdo’s website on Wednesday appeared to have been hacked and briefly showed images of a mosque with the message “no God but Allah,” after which the site was blanked.

Many Muslims object to any representation of Allah or Mohammad, or to irreverent treatment of the Koran, and such incidents have inflamed protests in the past, sometimes violent.

Story #3:

The threat of radical Islamic extremists coming to power in Libya was a spectre repeatedly invoked by Muammar Gaddafi and his supporters in order to delegitimise the Libyan revolution.

It was an argument that largely failed to convince the major international powers, who extended significant military and economic assistance to the Libyan opposition and ultimately helped bring them to power.

But recent statements by National Transitional Council (NTC) leaders on Islam being the principal basis for legislation in the new Libya, coupled with the increased prominence of former jihadist figures, have led some to believe that Libya’s new political reality may be decidedly less liberal and closer to Gaddafi’s scenario than initially anticipated.

It may well be that after decades of dictatorship often backed by Western governments, religious fundamentalists are the only people with enough organizational and moral authority in that part of the world to take up the reins after the dictator’s removal. Decades of lack of investment in education or a middle-class tax base (often not needed due to oil revenue) compound the ease with which theocracy can quickly develop.

And so it may be that in North African and Middle East, theocracy is a necessary historical transition between colonialist or Nasserist dictatorship, and a more vibrant social democracy. Maybe. That would be the experience of Iran to date: after the West instituted a coup against Mossadegh who threatened to use oil revenues for the people of Iran rather than the profit margins of British Petroleum, the people of Iran were burdened with the corrupt and dictatorial Shah. The proud Iranian people quickly removed the Shah–but put a theocratic regime in its place that, while certainly not subservient to Western corporate interests, has made a hellhole of Iran far worse than the Shah ever did. Even so, the internal contradictions of the Iranian Mullahcracy will spell its internal downfall eventually, and a freer Iranian society should be able to form in its place: one that protects Iranian economic interests from global corporate predation, but also respects the social rights of its people, including women and ethnic and religious minorities.

But that’s a long-term gamble. In the short term, the world will become more unstable, more dangerous, less friendly to women, more fundamentalist, and less secular. That’s a bad thing, whether it’s in Egypt or in Mississippi.

Islamist fundamentalists who firebomb French presses for daring to publish a picture won’t be content to keep their theocratic violent dogmas within their own borders any more than the people of Mississippi will settle for making women breeding receptacles within their own borders, or the people of Kansas will shoot abortion doctors only within state lines.

Fundamentalism acts like fundamentalism wherever it rears its ugly head, here or abroad. It expands wherever it can, and it won’t leave free people alone if they leave it alone. The ideological battle against it is a global one among free and secular societies everywhere.

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