Month: February 2012

Don’t Forget Who’s on Romney’s Side

by David Atkins

Jane Mayer in the New Yorker reminds everyone this week of the evil genius behind Romney’s SuperPAC:

Romney, unlike the remaining Republican candidates, has served no time in Washington. Yet he’s relying on a media offensive managed by operatives who have long been at the heart of Washington’s Republican attack machine. One of the leaders of this advertising war is Larry McCarthy, a veteran media consultant best known for creating the racially charged “Willie Horton ad,” which, in 1988, helped sink Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for President.

McCarthy, who is fifty-nine, helps direct the pro-Romney group Restore Our Future, one of the hundreds of new Super PACs—technically independent political-action committees set up by supporters of the candidates—that are dramatically reshaping the Presidential election. PACs have existed since the nineteen-forties, but for decades an individual donation was limited to five thousand dollars. The power of PACs increased exponentially in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals could spend without limit—and pool their money in PACs—to influence elections, as long as they didn’t fund candidates directly. Super PACs have already injected fifty-six million dollars into the 2012 race, most of it going to negative advertising. Restore Our Future has spent seventeen million dollars—more than any other PAC—and fifteen million of that has gone to producing and airing ads made by McCarthy’s firm, McCarthy Hennings Media. By contrast, Romney’s official campaign has spent only eleven million on ads. The Super PAC is technically fighting a proxy battle on behalf of Romney, but in practice it has become the head warrior…

For all the effort that goes into calibrating the scripts, McCarthy’s ads often have the crude look of a hastily assembled PowerPoint presentation. They feature hokey graphics—key criticisms are highlighted with neon-yellow stripes—and a heavy-handed use of black-and-white to lend a sinister cast to images. The ads are the political equivalent of a supermarket tabloid, emphasizing the personal and the sensational. But when they hit their mark they are dazzlingly effective.

McCarthy has been at this game for a long time, and is one of the most immoral players in the business. Consider this:

In the summer of 2010, the American Future Fund aired an ad, created by McCarthy, that Geoff Garin describes as perhaps “the most egregious” of the year. The ad accused Representative Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat and a lawyer, of supporting a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, which it called a “mosque at Ground Zero.” As footage of the destroyed World Trade Center rolled, a narrator said, “For centuries, Muslims built mosques where they won military victories.” Now a mosque celebrating 9/11 was to be built on the very spot “where Islamic terrorists killed three thousand Americans”—it was, the narrator suggested, as if the Japanese were to build a triumphal monument at Pearl Harbor. The ad then accused Braley of supporting the mosque.

And he’s been profiting quite handsomely from the unregulated money as a result of Citizens United:

This time, Romney doesn’t need to put his name on McCarthy’s ads. The Super PACs are free to operate as designated hitters. Most experts expect that the unusually nasty Republican primary clashes this year are warmups for the general election.

“It’s not just tougher out there,” Hart, the Democratic pollster, says. “It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together. The people in the game now just think to the first Tuesday in November, and not a day beyond it.”

Hart contends, “2012 is worse than 1972 for democracy. That was the height of Watergate, when people were collecting thousands of dollars in black bags. At least, at that stage, it was on behalf of a candidate who had to advertise in his own name. Now you can hide behind Super PACs that have no future responsibility to govern.” Hart says of McCarthy’s behind-the-scenes role, “If you want an assassination, you hire one of the best marksmen in history.”

Floyd Brown, the Republican operative, agrees. McCarthy “is a wonderful secret weapon,” he says. “And I’m glad Romney’s got him.”

So far McCarthy’s hit on Santorum has been underwhelming. But have no fear. This guy would smear his own grandmother no compunction just to win a race. He’s an exemplary specimen of Republican character and ethics.

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Winning, austerity style

by digby

Can I just how how awesome it is that progressives are now thought to be “winning” issues by cutting taxes, cutting unemployment benefits, cutting federal pensions, cutting health programs and agreeing to mandatory drug testing? If we keep this up we’ll put Republicans out of business in no time. They will be superfluous:

Congressional negotiators reached a final deal to extend the popular payroll tax cut for the rest of the year, with Republicans agreeing to tack the $100 billion cost onto the deficit and Democrats accepting diminished jobless benefits as well as some drug testing for the unemployed.

The costliest part of the measure extends the current 2 percent payroll tax holiday enjoyed by some 160 million workers through the end of the year, saving the average family about $1,000.

It also prevents a cut in doctor payments under Medicare, and funds extended unemployment benefits, even as it starts to cut their duration from 99 weeks to 73 weeks.

While the payroll tax break is paid for with borrowed money — a major concession for GOP leaders who had adamantly opposed new deficit spending — Democrats gave up their traditional stance that emergency unemployment benefits should be offset with cuts elsewhere. They also agreed to quicker cuts in the duration, and to allow drug-testing of unemployed people who had tested positive before or who were seeking work in certain jobs.

Republicans relented on other restrictions they had hoped to place on people looking for work, including requiring them to enroll in GED programs.

The $52 billion cost of the unemployment extension and Medicare “doc fix” will be funded in part by forcing federal workers to contribute more to their pensions and by auctioning off unused sectors of the broadcast spectrum. Precise estimates of that revenue were being reviewed by the Congressional Budget Office Wednesday night. Federal workers would pay for about $15 billion of the unemployment extension by having their pension contribution raised from 0.8 percent to 1.55 percent. Spectrum auctions would provide about $15 billion, according to preliminary estimates.

To pay for the $22 billion “doc fix,” negotiators agreed to cut about $7 billion that goes to hospitals to cover debts. Another $5 billion would be cut from the health care law’s prevention fund, created to curb things like childhood diabetes and smoking. The rest comes from altering payment formulas for hospital aid to certain states, cutting some Medicaid assistance to Louisiana that was boosted after Hurricane Katrina and trimming payments to clinical labs.

This is the part that cracks me up:

The negotiations came together relatively quickly after Republicans caved Monday on their insistance that the payroll tax cut be paid for.

“When you’re dealing with people whose only interest is in the next election, you gotta find some way to break the impasse,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “I think everybody understands this is the president’s favorite stick to beat opponents with, and I think part of the strategy of the House Republicans is let’s get the sharp sticks and the big sticks off the table.”

Yeah, Republicans “caved” by agreeing to unpaid for tax cuts. There’s nothing they hate more than that.

If one were to have asked me three years ago if we’d be cutting unemployment benefits with 8.4% unemployed, I’d have laughed in their face. But that was before austerity became our new motto. Now, it’s a reasonable compromise for tax cuts. What a world.

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Here’s a fascinating interview by Mike Konczal with one of the writers of the Occupy SEC comment letter that’s been getting so much praise. I think it’s significant for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s clear they came up with a process that worked for getting a consensus document addressing a particular issue, which is a good thing. But more importantly, this document came from Occupy Wall Street, the heart of the movement and ground zero for the 99% vs the 1% claim. Beyond the specifics, which have been received as substantive, serious and important, the significance of a successful collaboration to reform a flaw in the financial system from OWS cannot be understated. As Joe Biden would say, this is a big fucking deal.

Read the whole interview and if you haven’t familiarized yourself with the document, you can read these posts by DDay, Felix Salmon, Matt Yglesias, Swampland, The Nation. It’s pretty great.

The Man Show

by digby

“Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit can who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.” — The Handmaid’s Tale

Here’s today’s hearing on religious objections to birth control:

Ranking committee member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) had asked Issa to include a female witness at the hearing, but the Chairman refused, arguing that “As the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience, he believes that Ms. Fluke is not an appropriate witness.”

And so Cummings, along with the Democratic women on the panel, took their request to the hearing room, demanding that Issa consider the testimony of a female college student. But the California congressman insisted that the hearing should focus on the rules’ alleged infringement on “religious liberty,” not contraception coverage, and denied the request. Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) walked out of the hearing in protest of his decision, citing frustration over the fact that the first panel of witnesses consisted only of male religious leaders against the rule.

Not to worry. Issa will have no trouble finding women who will testify that they agree with every little thing those important men had to say. And when these religious men decide to do civil disobedience as they promised to do in the Manhattan Declaration, they’ll happily be the “chicks up front.”

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Keeping it real

by digby

Ben Adler has a good piece in CJR about the discipline of the conservative message machine. I had been thinking they were exerting more influence before and this article confirms it. He details a series of backtracks and clarifications once the Limbaugh and Fox News corner exerts themselves:

[T]he power of partisan message enforcement only works in one direction—rightward. Consider Rick Perry’s assertion that it would be “almost treasonous” for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, originally an appointee of George W. Bush, to attempt monetary stimulus a mere 16 months before an election, coupled with a vague threat of mob violence should Bernanke visit Texas. Most conservative pundits gave Perry a pass. Karl Rove, who has a longstanding personal grudge with Perry, took issue with the comments on Fox News. But the rest of the conservative choir stayed mostly silent; Perry was not forced to backtrack to appease outraged talk radio hosts. He never apologized.
[…]
Leftward deviations from the party line, on the other hand, are swiftly punished. The issue of immigration provides a perfect case study in the contrast. Just two weeks before the Cain episode, when Perry said that those who disagree with his decision to let illegal immigrants brought to America as children attend Texas public universities at in-state rates “don’t have a heart,” the condemnation in the conservative media was swift and furious. “This isn’t even an immigration issue any more,” wrote Mark Krikorian in a typical blog post for National Review. “This is the same ‘kinder, gentler,’ ‘compassionate conservatism’ contempt for the grassroots that animates much of the Republican party establishment. Perry can shoot coyotes from now till doomsday and he’s never going to live this down.” When Perry inevitably retreated, telling the conservative website Newsmax.com that he had been “over-passionate” in his word choice, blogger Michelle Malkin complained that Perry did not actually use the word “sorry.”

Meanwhile, the speed with which conservative pundits can force a candidate to reverse himself on a relatively moderate view continues to accelerate. On the morning of October 25, while campaigning in Ohio, Romney was asked whether he supported Gov. John Kasich’s anti-union referendum. Not wanting to alienate any voters in a general election swing state, Romney punted. “I am not speaking about the particular ballot issues,” Romney said. “Those are up to the people of Ohio.”

By early afternoon the conservative press was apoplectic. “If Romney can’t endorse this common sense reform at the state level, why should conservatives believe he will fight against government unions at the federal level,” wrote Conn Carroll of The Washington Examiner. “This is a huge freaking deal,” wrote Erickson, adding a warning to Romney: “Typically, when a politician stands for nothing except his own election, he winds up not getting elected.” For the rest of the day Romney’s campaign tried to stay away from the issue. “Gov. Romney believes that the citizens of states should be able to make decisions about important matters of policy that affect their states on their own,” his campaign spokesman told National Review.

But by the next day it was clear this evasion wouldn’t fly. At a rally in Virginia, Romney abjectly apologized for straying from his partisan marching orders. “I’m sorry if I created any confusion in that regard,” he said. “I fully support Gov. Kasich, I think it’s called Question 2, in Ohio. Fully support that.” Limbaugh boasted, with reason, that he and his friends were responsible for this turn of events.

Remember after the 2008 rout when Limbaugh showed up at CPAC and made his kooky speech saying that he wanted Obama to fail and all the Villagers said he was a has-been and nobody would ever listen to him again? Yeah, me too.

I think we need to start thinking about Limbaugh and Fox and the rightwing noise machine differently. They aren’t an adjunct of the Republican establishment. They are the Republican establishment.(Or, as David Atkins puts it,”Fox News is no longer the propaganda arm for the GOP. The GOP is the legislative arm of the conservative media empire.”)

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Climate Hacking Hypocrisy

by David Atkins

The laughably named Heartland Institute is shocked, shocked that anyone would use surreptitiously acquired documents to expose their lying climate denier activities:

The free-market Heartland Institute has moved to contain the damage from explosive revelations about its efforts to discredit climate change and alter the teaching of science in schools, claiming on Wednesday it was the victim of theft and forgery.

In its first detailed response to Tuesday’s leak of documents purporting to show a well-organised campaign to cast doubt on climate change, the institute warned in a statement posted on its website: “Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.”

However, the statement from Heartland communications director, Jim Lakely, identifies only one of the eight documents posted online on Tuesday night by the DeSmogBlog website as a “total fake”. That document, two pages headlined “Confidential Memo: Heartland Climate Strategy”, largely duplicates information contained in the other documents.

Those documents – containing details on future projects such as a $100,000 campaign to “dissuade teachers from teaching science”, as well as fundraising efforts – have been confirmed, in part, by Heartland itself, corporate donors such as Microsoft, and climate sceptic blogger Anthony Watts, who hoped to benefit from Heartland fundraising this year.

Ummmm…wasn’t this the same organization that eagerly promoted the so-called “Climategate” non-story based on misleading, selectively quoted, stolen emails?

Why, yes it was.

Karma is a glorious thing. The Heartland Institute is one of the most pernicious organizations in the country, crafting meticulously detailed booklets of ready-made policies and talking points made available for free to candidates of both parties for races as minor as State Assembly.

If you’re a free-market Objectivist Republican, there’s no need whatsoever to have any independent thoughts about even the smallest matter of public policy. The Heartland Institute will do it all for you, all while spending millions to influence school curricula toward more corporate-friendly rewriting of science and history.

And despite doing their best to ensure a hellish future and possible extinction for the human and millions of other species on this planet just to further enrich a few fat cats, Heartland is threatening to sue anyone who quotes their internal memos. Yeah, good luck with that, buckos. I suspect this is just the beginning.

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The two faces of Alabama

by digby

Is actually the two faces of America ….

That video is part of a Center for American Progress event in DC called “Is This Alabama? Hollywood Turns the Camera on Alabama” featuring the filmmaker himself, Chris Weitz, Jose Antonio Vargas of Define American, and Tom Baxter, who is a journalist and the author of a CAP report called “Alabama’s Immigration Disaster: The Harshest Law in the Land Harms the State’s Economy and Society.”

Meanwhile, there’s this:

At Valentine’s Day Rally to Repeal HB 56, Latino Protestors Refused Entry to Alabama State House

A spirited Valentine’s Day rally to repeal Alabama’s anti-immigrant law, HB 56, turned into a commentary on race and immigrant relations yesterday when hundreds of Alabamians showed up at the State House to protest, only to be largely turned away and prohibited from speaking to their legislators inside.

Alabamians from civil rights organizations, immigrant groups, faith communities, the labor movement, and other walks of life came out in force in Montgomery, carrying Valentine’s Day cards and signs professing messages of love for their home state. Their intention: to visit their legislators in the State House and ask them to reconsider a repeal of Alabama’s monstrous anti-immigrant law, HB 56.

In a disturbing turn of events, however, many of the protestors were never able to make it inside: some white protestors were allowed to enter the State House, while their Latino counterparts were turned away. In addition, access to legislators and even the galleries of the State House were severely restricted to the entire group due to new rules – agreed to just this morning – from officials designed to keep the people from their government.

“People don’t think this kind of thing happens anymore,” Joe Sudbay, a blogger who writes for AmericaBlog. But apparently it does.

Jose, shaken by their encounter, said afterward, “After hearing the very personal stories of suffering her expression hardened and she just said “illegal is illegal.” I may only be 15 years old, but I know that in the eyes of God I am her brother and deserve better than that.”

“Illegal is illegal.” That sound like “Illegitimate is illegitimate”, the earlier iteration of children paying for the sins of their parents.

How anyone could hear that story from that amazing boy and not have it penetrate is beyond me. There is something missing in these people.

SuperPac recoil

by digby

If this bucket of lukewarm spit is the best Restore Our Future can come up with, Romney’s got a real race on his hands:

Compare this to the spot they pushed against Newtie:

Granted, Newtie is particularly loathesome, but still. Santorum earmarks? Zzzzzzz.

And Santorum’s response ad is pretty good:

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So…which is it?

by David Atkins

Jon Stewart and team make a brilliant point:

Santorum thinks women shouldn’t be on the front lines because men will be irrational in protecting them. Liz Trotta thinks military rape is inevitable if military men and women are in close quarters.

So….which is it? Protect or exploit? So hard to choose.

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Snowe and Collins hedge fun

I don’t know about you, but I’m shocked, simply shocked by this:

After indicating that they were placated by President Obama’s tweaked birth control regulation, Maine Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins appear to be hedging on it, speaking late Tuesday to Jonathan Riskind of the home-state Portland Press Herald.

They appeared to dance around the issue, not taking a stance but saying they aren’t fully with Obama.

Snowe:

Snowe said today that the White House “certainly has made some critical adjustments, but we haven’t seen the final rule so I think it is important to see the final rule to make sure that we understand exactly what it will do. I see there are still some concerns within the Catholic Church, and hopefully the president can continue to work through those issues.”
Collins:

“I thought that the president’s announcement on Friday was a step in the right direction, but as I indicated at that time, I needed more information about the details,” Collins said today. “A very important issue is how the administration would treat self-insured Catholic institutions. And I haven’t been able to get an answer from the administration on that issue. They have ducked the issue and said that it remains to be seen, that they are working on it and that it could take as long as a year to come up with an answer. That’s very disappointing and undermines what I thought was a sincere attempt initially to deal with the issues that have been raised not only by the Catholic Church but by other faith-based organizations.”

The two senators told Riskind they support the bill by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) that would permit any employer to deny contraceptive services in their health plans, but neither are backing the measure by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) that would let any employer deny any service they morally object to.

Give them an inch … Big of them not to support Blunt, though. I wonder how many other “moderates” of both parties will take the Rubio “compromise.”

Meanwhile, the circus is coming to town:

Republican Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will convene a hearing tomorrow, “Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?”

The lead witness is the Most Reverend William E. Lori, Roman Catholic Bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty. Judging from Lori and the rest of the witness list, it’s obvious that Issa has posed what he considers to be a rhetorical question and lined up nine like-minded rhetoricians to answer it anyway. None of the religious groups supportive of the Obama administration will be heard from.

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