Month: December 2011

Newtie “arouses passions” in people

Here’s the true intellectual backbone of the Republican party:

Narrative building for dummies

by digby

Facts, spin and journalistic malpractice:

This is the problem.

It looks like the big boys are telling the girl that it’s time for her to step aside for the good of the cause:

Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats called Michele Bachmann and urged her to drop out of the race and endorse Rick Santorum, a source with knowledge of the conversation told POLITICO Tuesday.

I’ve been chronicling the whining and sniveling from the Masters of the Universe since the beginning of the economic crisis. It struck me from the start as a particularly stupid approach — Marie Antoinette level stupid. Not only have they sounded like petulant children, they’ve been defending the practices that could end up killing their own golden goose. At some point, this greed and avarice will not only bring this house of cards down it will lose a whole bunch of these morons their own fortunes. It’s self-destructive, which is why I keep thinking of these fools as gamblers rather than investors. This is a moment to be smart, lay low, accept some restrictions and live to fight another day.

Fixing it in conference

by digby

Dday explains in depth what the Republicans think they are doing with their ridiculous hostage taking over the payroll tax and UI extensions. But this short excerpt is all you really need to know:

When their members are confronted over this vote, they can have this exchange:

Democrat: You voted to increase taxes on the middle class.
Republican: No I didn’t, I voted to send our bill to conference. It’s not my fault that the Senate didn’t show up! (flash toothy grin)

It’s not enough that the Tea Partiers are insisting on stopping the extensions, the rest of the Republicans are determined to escape responsibility for their miscreant deeds.

And, to top it all off, it appears that somebody’s trying to blame the Democrats for it by pushing out a straight up lie. According to Greg Sargent

Wow. Getting emails from angry right wing readers who are demanding to know why Dems won’t agree to compromise that includes Keystone.

I’m guessing somebody on Fox said this, but who knows? (Maybe Politifact.)

I am a little bit curious as to what this is about, though. Yesterday some oil drenched Dems in the Senate sent out a very weird letter considering that the White House has been saying that the pipeline will be dead if this passes because the State Department will not have time to do a proper study:

Dear Mr. Speaker:

On Saturday, December 17, the Senate passed the bipartisan Temporary Payroll Tax Cut Continuation Act of 2011, the Reid-McConnell substitute amendment to H.R. 3630. The bipartisan bill, which passed with 89 votes, will move the Keystone XL pipeline forward. The Keystone XL project is critical to the nation’s energy security–it will reduce our dependence on oil from hostile regimes–and it will put thousands of Americans back to work.

This important bill will require the President to make a decision on the pipeline’s future within 60 days. It will also protect private property rights and establish a procedure for re-routing the pipeline around sensitive land within the state of Nebraska. Delays or changes to the bill may jeopardize the important shared goal of moving the project forward.

In the interest of America’s energy security and economic recovery, we urge the House of Representatives to take up this bill and pass it as soon as possible. Thank you for your consideration.

Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Mark Begich (D-Alaska).

I don’t know what these Senators know that we don’t know, but I find it hard to believe that they’d put their names to this if they thought that Keystone was really dead. It’s possible they are just being good partisans and are using their oily credibility to get the payroll tax cut extension. But it would be highly unusual. There’s something odd going on there.

Paul Ryan stuffed the ballot box

by digby

It’s adorable that Politifact’s “lie of the year” is being touted as some kind of overwhelming proof that the Republicans didn’t vote to end Medicare when they all voted to replace it with an inadequate voucher program. Does everyone know that the Republicans stuffed the ballot box in their online poll?

It was, incidentally, the only Democratic “lie” on the list of finalists.

I certainly hope the rigid literalists who work for Politifact don’t ever have to make any decisions about anything important. They obviously don’t do nuance. And they don’t know how the internet works either.

Unfortunately, the Villagers will be gleefully using this as proof that their dreamy young idol Paul Ryan is a good guy after all but it’s probably a good idea to demand another source for anyone who cites Politifact on the veracity of any claim going forward. This will make it easier on the Republicans in the beginning, since they actually make a profit at their lying, but in the long run it will be for good. Clearly Politifact can’t tell the difference between a lie and and a fact and is subject to the most obvious right wing manipulation.

Repealing Proposition 8 in California

by David Atkins

One of the few bitter disappointments on election night in 2008 was the passage of Proposition 8 in California, enshrining legal discrimination against minorities in the California Constitution. It was an issue my brother, my fiancee and I had done a lot of work on: we wrote and produced an anti-Prop 8 ad that, after much ado, was aired by the Courage Campaign in a few markets on election day. To this day, I believe that had the ad played earlier, it would have caused a big firestorm, but the conversation would have changed from the bogus issue of teaching about gay sex in schools to the real issue, which was the intrusion of an outside religious organization into the lives of Californians. And I believe that that change of conversation would have doomed the proposition to defeat. Here’s the ad:

Anyway, the legal challenge to Proposition 8 is successful so far, but appeals are still winding their way through the courts. Still, the best and sweetest rejection should ultimately come from the voters themselves. And there’s a group trying to do just that:

A gay rights group was cleared by the California Secretary of State to begin collecting signatures for a repeal of Proposition 8, the state’s constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

The group Love Honor Cherish has to collect 807,615 voter signatures by May 14th in order to qualify for a ballot measure in the November elections, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

If passed, the initiative would change Proposition 8 to say “that marriage is between only two persons and shall not be restricted on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.”

“This is severely impacting people, loving couples who cannot get married. It has severely impacted me not being able to get married,” Tom Watson of Love Honor Cherish said. “It’s been more than three years since Prop 8, and a majority of California residents have realized that it is a mistake to deny loving same-sex couples the right to marry and are ready to reverse the mistake that was made at the ballot box. We should give them that opportunity.”

Here’s hoping the effort is successful. Human rights and love are universal.

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You say you want a Velvet Revolution

by digby

This is a lovely piece by RJ Eskow about Václav Havel, a true man of the ideas:

On a warm evening in 1991, a colleague and I found an out-of-the-way café in the old part of Prague. Two men with blank expressions stood outside. The interior was dim and close, with room for only eight or nine tables. The place was almost empty. Just a sleepy waitress, a bartender polishing glasses, and a single patron who sat alone drinking wine and chain-smoking cigarettes.

The President of Czechoslovakia wasn’t reviewing official papers. He was reading a book, a startlingly un-Presidential act to our American eyes. My companion, a neoconservative State Department official, already admired him for defying and defeating a Communist state. He’d impressed me by bringing a writer’s sensibility and an affinity for true underground culture to his role as head of state.

Václav Havel even tried to appoint Frank Zappa as his Minister of Culture. “We’re not rock musicians,” Zappa told a reporter back in the sixties. “We’re electronic social workers.” The State Department wouldn’t let Zappa assume the post, but Havel had made his point to the Czech public by offering this apparatchik’s position to the composer of songs like “What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?” (“Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it’s your mind.”)

We never spoke to Havel that night. It didn’t seem polite to offer anything more than the curt nod of acknowledgement any café patron gives another at that hour. But Havel spoke to us, to all of us. And on the occasion of his death, the real lessons of his life’s work are in danger of being lost.

Today we’re told that the Occupy movement is too idealistic, too naïve. Naïve? Try Havel’s words if you want naïve: “May truth and love triumph over lies and hatred.”

Think of that as the Velvet Revolution’s “one demand.”

Read the whole thing. Eskow draws a very interesting parallel between Havel’s critique of the ossified communist system he helped topple — and the greed and decadence of today’s 1%. I wouldn’t have seen it quite that way and it’s very thought provoking, (particularly in light of the discussions around the sphere and here by David, about the future of the Occupy movement.)

Havel was something special, an artist and writer who put himself on the line and joined the fray as a politician. That’s brave and unusual. Eskow points out his later errors and failures of nerve, but rightly, in my mind, observes:

Havel seemed unhappy in the role of leader. It’s possible than he lost sight of his deepest insights, his truest gifts. It was the outsider Havel, the dreamer of the impossible, the surrealist and absurdist, we should remember. That’s the Havel who can and should inspire dissidents everywhere.

“Is the human word truly powerful enough to change the world and influence history?” he once asked. With his life and his words, Václav Havel gave us his answer. He showed us the power in each individual and the responsibility that accompanies that power.

That legacy seems especially instructive right now.

Paul fever: entering our precious bodily fluids and corrupting our purity of essence

by digby

Oh look, here’s Ron Paul speaking at the 50th Anniversary of the John Birch Society in 2008. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s the John Birch Society’s statement of principles:

Mission

To bring about less government, more responsibility, and — with God’s help — a better world by providing leadership, education, and organized volunteer action in accordance with moral and Constitutional principles.

Preserving Individual Rights & National Independence

“These United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States … We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

— Declaration of Independence, 1776
The Declaration of Independence established the independence of both the original 13 American colonies and the United States of America that they together formed a decade later.

The Declaration proclaimed that our personal rights come from God, not from government.

The John Birch Society endorses the timeless principles of the Declaration of Independence. The Society also labors to warn against and expose the forces that seek to abolish U.S. independence, build a world government, or otherwise undermine our personal liberties and national independence.

Restoring the Constitution

“That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” — Declaration of Independence, 1776
The Constitution of the United States of America instituted the government that secures our God-given rights.

The John Birch Society endorses the U.S. Constitution as the foundation of our national government, and works toward educating and activating Americans to abide by the original intent of the Founding Fathers. We seek to awaken a sleeping and apathetic people concerning the designs of those who are working to destroy our constitutional Republic.

The ones who are working to destroy our constitution? That would be you.

Adele Stan has this on Paul’s relationship with the JBS:

The year 2008 was a telling one in the annals of Ron Paul’s ideology. For starters, it was the year in which he delivered the keynote address at the 50th anniversary gala of the John Birch Society, the famous anti-communist, anti-civil-rights organization hatched in the 1950s by North Carolina candy magnate Robert Welch, with the help of Fred Koch, founder of what is now Koch Industries, and a handful of well-heeled friends. The JBS is also remembered for its role in helping to launch the 1964 presidential candidacy of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and for later backing the segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace in his 1968 third-party presidential bid.

The semi-secular ideology of the John Birch Society — libertarian market and fiscal theory laced with flourishes of cultural supremacy — finds its religious counterpart, as Fred Clarkson noted, in the theonomy of Christian Reconstructionism, the right-wing religious-political school of thought founded by Rousas John Rushdoony. The ultimate goal of Christian Reconstructionists is to reconstitute the law of the Hebrew Bible — which calls for the execution of adulterers and men who have sex with other men — as the law of the land. The Constitution Party constitutes the political wing of Reconstructionism, and the CP has found a good friend in Ron Paul.

When Paul launched his second presidential quest in 2008, he won the endorsement of Rev. Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist pastor who travels in Christian Reconstructionist circles, though he is not precisely a Reconstructionist himself (for reasons having to do with his interpretation of how the end times will go down). When Paul dropped out of the race, instead of endorsing Republican nominee John McCain, or even Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Paul endorsed Constitution Party presidential nominee Chuck Baldwin (who promised, in his acceptance speech, to uphold the Constitution Party platform, which looks curiously similar to the Ron Paul agenda, right down to the no-exceptions abortion proscription and ending the Fed).

At his shadow rally that year in Minneapolis, held on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Paul invited Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist, to address the crowd of end-the-Fed-cheering post-pubescents. (In his early congressional career, Julie Ingersoll writes in Religion Dispatches, Paul hired as a staffer Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist leader and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.)

At a “Pastor’s Forum” at Baldwin’s Baptist church in Pensacola, Florida, Paul was asked by a congregant about his lack of support for Israel, which many right-wing Christians support because of the role Israel plays in what is known as premillennialist end-times theology. “Premillennialist” refers to the belief that after Jesus returns, according to conditions on the ground in Israel, the righteous will rule. But Christian Reconstructionists have a different view, believing the righteous must first rule for 1,000 years before Jesus will return.

They also believe, according to Clarkson, “that ‘the Christians’ are the ‘new chosen people of God,’ commanded to do what ‘Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan failed to do…create the society that God requires.’ Further, Jews, once the ‘chosen people,’ failed to live up to God’s covenant and therefore are no longer God’s chosen. Christians, of the correct sort, now are.”

Responding to Baldwin’s congregant, Paul explained, “I may see it slightly differently than others because I think of the Israeli government as different than what I read about in the Bible. I mean, the Israeli government doesn’t happen to be reflecting God’s views. Some of them are atheist, and their form of government is not what I would support… And there are some people who interpret the chosen people as not being so narrowly defined as only the Jews — that maybe there’s a broader definition of that.”

At the John Birch Society 50th anniversary gala, Ron Paul spoke to another favorite theme of the Reconstructionists and others in the religious right: that of the “remnant” left behind after evil has swept the land. (Gary North’s publication is called The Remnant Review.) In a dispatch on Paul’s keynote address, The New American, the publication of the John Birch Society, explained, “He claimed that the important role the JBS has played was to nurture that remnant and added, ‘The remnant holds the truth together, both the religious truth and the political truth.'”

I wonder how many progressives will be cheering on his very possible win in Iowa because of his views on national security and hatred for the Fed? Those are fine positions and the world would be better off if the bloodthirsty element in our foreign policy were at least diluted. But I sure hope Paul fever doesn’t get out of hand.

Occupying the Progressive Movement

by David Atkins

Robert Cruickshank wrote a tremendous post yesterday about the future of the progressive movement, that dovetails nicely with my earlier post about the future of liberalism. It’s far too long and well-argued to neatly summarize here, but below are a few excerpts:

America was a tinder-dry land of California brush awaiting a spark – and the hot winds were already blowing. But it took the anarchist activists of OWS to actually get things started in the streets. Almost immediately the public conversation around economic policy was changed, as it finally became acceptable for everyone to admit what we already knew: our nation, our households, and our economy had been robbed blind by the wealthy elite, and it was time to do something about it.

The progressive movement hasn’t been the same since. That movement, born around 2003 out of deep anger at the Democratic Party’s enthusiastic embrace of the Bush Administration’s warmongering policies as well as growing unease about the direction of the nation’s economy, had by 2011 started to spin its wheels. The arguments over Obama were, in large part, an argument about the future of the movement.

A lot of work had been done since 2003 to build a functioning left in the United States. It began online, but quickly moved offline. The Dean campaign was one early example. By 2006 the movement was in full flower, with the first national convention (then called “YearlyKos”) held amidst a national political campaign to retake Congress from the Republicans. Progressive activists provided the money and the ground troops to wrest control of both the House and Senate back from the right.

Two years later, the Obama campaign seemed to vindicate the movement. Obama’s campaign style was in the new progressive mold. It was “people-powered.” It challenged the establishment Democratic Party with an inspirational message of hope and change. It perfected the Internet-based organizing strategies the netroots had pioneered. It mobilized the masses and generated higher turnout than had been seen in years.

But by 2009, it became clear that nothing had really changed. Obama immediately brought on board all the old Clinton Administration hands and showed his desire to govern as if the 1990s had never ended. Obama began rapidly abandoning the agenda he championed in 2008 and it became clear to progressives that their hopes for change were going to be dashed. The movement began to sputter. Momentum from 2006 and 2008 wasn’t sustained and as the right became more energized, progressives and Democrats more broadly went down to defeat (with California being an important exception) in 2010.

This was the landscape onto which Occupy Wall Street burst in September and October of 2011. What OWS did was expose the failure of a core assumption of the progressive movement dating back to 2003 – that if the movement focused on winning elections, change would follow. The progressive movement was always more diverse than that, and had interesting cultural forms, intellectual developments, and a clear desire to do mass organizing. But since at least 2004 electoral organizing had been the top focus of the movement.

Robert goes on to argue that Occupy has opened a door progressive activists had failed to open by focusing too much on elections, but that the Occupy approach has its own blind spots as well:

It was time for a correction anyway. What we have learned is that winning elections isn’t on its own enough to produce change. What’s needed is a clear policy agenda and a strong external movement that can help progressives in power implement that agenda – and stop others in power from implementing a bad one. That requires a movement in which electoral organizing is just one piece. In other words, the progressive movement needs to grow not only in numbers but in the diversity of what it does.

That isn’t what drives most Occupiers, however. Occupy is also a rebuke of organized politics. They’re in the streets because they believe it’s the only way change can be produced. What it has revealed is that distrust of government is now rampant on the left as well as the right. To most Occupiers, government is the enemy. And their confrontations with local governments showed this. Even though the vast majority of local electeds in the big cities are sympathetic to the Occupy movement and are no friend to the 1% (with Bloomberg being a notable exception), Occupy’s choice of tactics reflected their belief that anyone in government was either incapable of helping or was determined to break the protest. And Occupy has brought a new group of people into political activism. New voices are popping up online, new leaders are emerging, and they are much less interested in the more incremental changes that the progressive movement had unfortunately become accustomed to accepting.

Occupiers are openly advocating revolutionary change from the streets. But here is where I think the progressive movement’s love affair with OWS should find its limits. Occupy alone won’t produce the changes we need in this country. By focusing on physical occupation of public space, they’ve muddled their early message and have alienated potential allies. On the other hand, they have succeeded in kicking a door open. The public wants action on inequality and wants to go after the 1%. Progressives should walk through the door that Occupy opened – and they should be willing to work with anyone, Occupiers or not, who are interested in providing the leadership that is needed to make lasting change happen.

The goal of progressives should be to build a broader, long-term, mass movement to achieve a democratic economy, an equal society, and a peaceful planet. Taking to the streets is a tactic to help get us toward that goal. But it is those who are best organized who will prevail even if street action leads to major political change.

Click over and read the entirety of Robert’s post. It’s great food for thought.

The key question is how and around what particular issues and strategies to organize. But then, that’s always the problem, isn’t it?

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