Month: January 2012

I miss Rick Perry

by digby

“Live free or die. Victory or death. Bring it”

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It’s hard to believe this guy didn’t go farther. I miss him, I really do.

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The Brave New World of Citizens United

by David Atkins

In the old days (i.e., just a few years ago), this would have mattered:

The DCCC has outraised the NRCC by $6.9 M for the last session of Congress, while Republicans still hold more cash on hand, $15.24 M to the Dems’ $11.6 M.

With Citizens United, none of that matters. Corporations can dwarf those numbers on either side almost instantly.

On the other hand, given the DCCC’s track record of taking donations only to help the most conservative Democrats, and then not terribly effectively, maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.

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Go Elizabeth

by digby

This pretty much says it all:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

She’s awfully good.

This is an interesting article about Warren in the Boston Phoenix about the “Dr Phil years.” Warren has been working to educate and illuminate about this disappearing middle class for decades. In the last one she decided to take her case directly to the people. She is not and ordinary politician or an ordinary academic.

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Room to regroup

by digby

Rick Perlstein has a fantastic piece up today about Newtie, Perot and the Contract With America. It’s really helpful to have a historian of the modern conservative movement weigh in on recent history. The press is simply dismal in this regard. The whole article is great, but this is the gist:

Gingrich and Co. were able to get away with it because the plain facts of what the Contract actually was (a strategic erasure of Republican conservatism) almost entirely escaped the political press – at the time, and ever since. A 1996 New York magazine article by Jacob Weisberg, for instance, about how “Ross Perot is back, in all his self-aggrandizing, wacky splendor,” observed as evidence of said wackiness, “One minute Perot is making an important point about the unwillingness of the major parties to deal with the Social Security time bomb. The next he is off on a jag about how the Contract with America was actually his idea.” (Imagine!)

A 2004 history of conservatism stated baldly that the Contract “epitomized antigovernment conservatism.” The narrative was set: the Contract, and its consequence – the new Republican congressional majority – proved America was indisputably (to take the title of that 2004 history) a “right nation.” This supposed truism underwrites the defensive rhetoric of, say, Barack Obama, who felt compelled to say in his State of the Union this week, quoting Abraham Lincoln, that “government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.”

(Yeah. I just wilted like a dead petunia when I heard that one.)

The point he’s making about the GOP “co-option” of the Perot movement is truly important. When you look back at the context you will see that a big part of it was repudiation of failure (Daddy Bush) and the opportunistic ascendance of the conservative movement. It’s a similar dynamic to the ascendance of the Tea Party after Junior Bush’s failure. There’s a reaction among a certain subset of the American public to GOP failure that leads them to an “independent” reform movement concentrated on political corruption, low taxes and deficit education. (With a good dose of flag waving and military fetishism thrown in for flavor.)All of which fits very nicely back into the GOP fold once they make clear just how committed they are to all those things. It’s a nice scam — it gives both the party and voters a place to go after failure to regroup and then come back together to fight the liberals.

Just as Newtie led the Perotistas back into the fold in 1994, they all went back in 2010. Works like a charm. And just like clockwork, Even old Ross himself came around and endorsed George W. Bush in 2000. (If you see some crazy, take a look at that transcript.It’s really going to be hard to beat the 90s for sheer political lunacy.But they’ll keep trying.)

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All American Entrepreneur

by digby

So which is worse, being a closet racist or exploiting racism for money? It’s hard to tell the difference, frankly. I’d guess it’s possible that some slave ship owners were nice family men and had no personal beef with Africans — but they profited handsomely from their misery nonetheless. Is there a moral difference?

I’m talking about this article in the Washington Post quoting the president of the Cato Institute saying that he’d had a conversation with Ron Paul in the late 80s about how to attract more customers for his newsletters:

Ed Crane, the longtime president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said he met Paul for lunch during this period, and the two men discussed direct-mail solicitations, which Paul was sending out to interest people in his newsletters. They agreed that “people who have extreme views” are more likely than others to respond.

Crane said Paul reported getting his best response when he used a mailing list from the now-defunct newspaper Spotlight, which was widely considered anti-Semitic and racist.

Benton, Paul’s spokesman, said that Crane’s account “sounds odd” and that Paul did not recall the conversation.

At the time, Paul’s investment letter was languishing. According to the person involved with his businesses, Paul and others hit upon a solution: to “morph” the content to capi­tal­ize on a growing fear among some on the political right about the nation’s changing demographics and threats to economic liberty.

The investment letter became the Ron Paul Survival Report — a name designed to intrigue readers, the company secretary said. It cost subscribers about $100 a year. The tone of that and other Paul publications changed, becoming increasingly controversial. In 1992, for example, the Ron Paul Political Report defended chess champion Bobby Fischer, who became known as an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, for his stance on “Jewish questions.’’

I have long heard chatter about how the paleolibertarians consciously set out to build their faction by appealing to paranoid right wing racist elements. But this is the first I’ve heard that Paul’s racist newsletters were actually a personal financial strategy.

I suppose those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, especially considering Paul’s libertarian take on civil rights. He truly believes that states’ rights and property rights trump human rights in general so there’s no hypocrisy in profiting from racist tracts. He is a man of principle. (Well, except for the lying about his knowledge of the racism in his newsletter, which was never believable and is even less so now.)

Other than that, though, he has stuck to his stated principles. He’s a free market guy using racism to make a buck and build up his political career. What’s more All American than that?

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Elder Scam

by digby

What an ass:

“I think it’s unfortunate that they go to these elder statesmen of the parties at their stage in life and solicit things like that,” [Fred Thompson] said. “I have my own opinion, I disagree with Bob Dole even though I respect Bob Dole very much.”

Asked by TPM whether his reference to that “stage in life” suggested Dole was too infirm to render sound judgement, Thompson clarified that he took issue with the Romney campaign’s effort to court the former presidential nominee.

“He’s been in bad health, he’s had bad legs,” Thompson said. “I hate it when people irritate folks like that…you know they shouldn’t be bugged and dragged into all this, but if they want to they’re plenty capable of making their own decisions.”

I guess he’s an expert. After all, this is the guy who’s out there conning the elderly into taking out reverse mortgages, something many observers believe is the next sub-prime crisis:

Thompson’s new employer, however, has a troubled track record. Regulators in Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington State have cracked down on the firm for deceptive marketing and consumer fraud. In February, for instance, the Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, sued AAG and its president for direct-mail solicitations that Madigan described as “extremely misleading.” That same month, the state of Massachusetts temporarily banned the company from doing business in the state…

In AAG’s case, putting a celebrity face on its mortgage products is at the core of the company’s marketing strategy. Before hiring Thompson, the company used the late veteran actor Peter Graves as its spokesman. And in August 2009, AAG president and CEO Reza Jahangiri explained that a large part of the company’s national marketing campaign would revolve around a “celebrity spokesperson” who “adds that credibility and gets borrowers a little more comfortable with the company.”

Nice. Kindly old Arthur Branch vouches for it so it must be ok.

Read the whole article for the full dossier on Thompson’s employer’s deceptive practices (and Thompson’s history of shilling for con artists and elder scammers.) He really should be ashamed of himself. He can’t need money that badly.

Update: And, by the way, Bob Dole was able to vigorously run for president when he was 73 years old — and that was after a lifetime of dealing with war injuries suffered when he was mowed down by German machine gun fire in Italy in 1945. When Thompson ran in 2008 (at the age of 66) he couldn’t cross the Iowa County Fairgrounds without using a golf cart. Just saying. He’s an asshole.

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Cuts to Cheer About

by David Atkins

I’m sort of surprised that the planned Pentagon budget cuts haven’t gotten more attention in progressive circles. There are some things to dislike, but a great deal to like as well.

On the positive side, the cuts are designed to move away from large-scale ground invasion capabilities in the model of Iraq and Afghanistan, and more toward nimbler operations like the one that killed Osama Bin Laden. By cutting those capacities, the Pentagon and the Obama Administration are making it much harder for a future Republican president to attempt an Iraq-style ground war in Iran, which was perhaps the greatest fear progressives like myself had about a potential McCain Administration. The war machine will also have to make do with a few fewer shiny toys, which is a good thing:

Next year’s Pentagon budget is to be $525 billion, down from $531 billion this fiscal year. Even though the Defense Department has been called on to find $259 billion in cuts in the next five years — and $487 billion over the decade — its base budget (not counting the costs of Afghanistan or other wars) will rise to $567 billion by 2017. But when adjusted for inflation, the increases are small enough that they will amount to a slight cut of 1.6 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget over the next five years.

Nonetheless, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he was working with about $500 billion less than he had anticipated having on hand through 2017, meaning that the Pentagon had to trim personnel and favorite high-profile weapons programs. “This has been tough work,” Mr. Panetta said at an hourlong news conference.

He said that the Army would be reduced over five years to 490,000 troops, down from a peak of 570,000, and that the Marines would be cut to 182,000, down from 202,000. (Ground forces would still be slightly larger than they were before 9/11.) The Pentagon initially will buy fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighter stealth jets, which are not expected to be in service until at least 2017 and have the distinction of being one of the costliest weapons programs in history. In the Navy, 14 warships will be either retired early or built more slowly.

On the negative side, the cuts come at the expense of troop pay and retiree health benefits:

The Pentagon took the first major step toward shrinking its budget after a decade of war as it announced Thursday that it wanted to limit pay raises for troops, increase health insurance fees for military retirees and close bases in the United States.

Although the pay-raise limits were described as modest, and would not start until 2015, they are certain to ignite a political fight in Congress, which since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has almost always raised military salaries beyond what the Pentagon has recommended.

Increasing health insurance fees for retirees and closing bases are also fraught with political risk, particularly when Republican presidential candidates are charging that President Obama is debilitating the military.

That matters in areas with military bases, which provide a major stimulus boost to local economies. The Ventura County Star is already freaking out about potential local base closures here, and legislators as far apart as hardcore conservative Elton Gallegly and good progressive Lois Capps are united in attempting to prevent the base closures. Local Republican Buck McKeon, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, is on the drumbeat nationally. Politically, the proposed cuts make the job of electing Democrats in these difficult areas even harder, particularly in an environment where the eventual Republican nominee will be demagoguing the issue as much as he can. That is why Democrats like Carl Levin are opposing the closures of any domestic bases, preferring instead to focus on the no-brainer goal of bringing troops home from bases where hostile activity is less credibly expected:

There were already objections on Thursday morning, hours before Mr. Panetta made his public presentation. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that until the United States shut down some of its bases in Europe, “I’m not going to be able to support” closing bases in America.

Mr. Panetta has said that two armored Army brigades — as many as 10,000 troops — would come home from Europe over the next decade, leaving two brigades and some support troops behind.

All of which goes to underscore how important peacetime government stimulus is. The military-industrial complex is a huge source of government jobs. If progressives want to successfully make a dent in it, there will need to be credible “swords to ploughshares” programs to make up for the jobs that are lost.

Overall, however, the cuts are a positive development in shrinking the bloated defense budget, as well as moving away structurally from military operations designed to conduct long-term occupations in foreign lands, in a way that will tie the hands of Administrations to follow. That’s something to cheer about.

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Scary post of the day

by digby

Who said this?

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career.We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

That’s George Soros. Eeek.

Gaius Publius has even more:

Three short notes, then I’ll leave you to your thoughts:

■ We’ve been warning on these pages about the risk of deflation for a while. It’s likely that no one reading this has experienced such a world. To get a sense of life in a deflationary world, try this.

■ About the euro, is this why it bounced off of $1.26 and sits at $1.31 at the moment? (Euro chart here.)

■ About civil liberties and the mental “state of the nation,” I offer this thought experiment.

Imagine that there were a second big terrorist attack sometime during Bush II’s reign, in 2005 or 2006 for example. The response would have been to shut down the country even further. The experiment — how much further? If the “authorities” wanted to institute exit visas, for example, would the country have objected?

The point is this — the degree of loss of liberty we could experience is not a function of what the American people will tolerate. The American people tolerated Bush v Gore. It’s a function of how much loss of liberty the “authorities” (Our Betters) are interested in imposing.

So what is that extent? What’s the lower limit to the shutdown, in a world gone into the streets — Occupyers, homeless; browns and blacks; criminals, druggies, the terminally unemployed — in other words, all the Unpeople we have within us?

I’ll leave you to read the rest of his post and ponder that question. I’ll be hitting the tequila now. Enjoy.

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Hey Newtie — someone would like to have a word with you

by digby

When I was young, Bob Dole was known as the Prince of Darkness. Indeed, he was as mean as they came. By today’s GOP standards, he’s kindly old Kris Kringle.
Still, he’s always had a very wicked sense of humor and he showed it today:

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway…

Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall. He loved picking a fight with President Clinton because he knew this would get the attention of the press. This and a myriad of other specifics like shutting down the government helped to topple Gingrich in 1998.

In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year. Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it, and I’m not certain he knew either.

That made me laugh out loud.

*The bucket was an obscure symbol of outmoded congressional perks,referring to some patronage job to deliver ice well into the 90s. It was a typical cutsie Newtie gimmick and by the time Dole was running for President in 1996 it was already obscure and weird. Just like Newtie.

But then Newtie had been asking for some time if he “had to get into this thing” and nobody was saying yes. So I’d imagine he was more than a little miffed at old Bob for being chosen.

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Newtie’s riposte

by digby

I wrote about Romney’s attack ad against Newt this morning. Here’s one from Newt.

I have to give this one to Newt. But then nobody knows more about being vicious than he does.

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