Month: April 2012

Reactionary Mitt

by digby

It’s very hard to understand what makes the Romneybot run, but it occurred to me this morning that he’s given us some clues.

#1:

Mitt Romney said during the interview that the attacks surrounding his dog were the most “wounding” so far on the campaign trial.

Asked if he’d do it again, he replied, “Certainly not with the attention it’s received.”

#2:

“We went to the company and we said, look, you can’t have any illegals working on our property. I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake, I can’t have illegals.”

#3:

“The Department of Education: I will either consolidate with another agency, or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller. I’m not going to get rid of it entirely,” Romney said, explaining that part of his reasoning behind preserving the agency was to maintain a federal role in pushing back against teachers’ unions. Romney added that he learned in his 1994 campaign for Senate that proposing to eliminate the agency was politically volatile.

He’s a shape shifter, which we already knew. But he’s extremely reactive. Which means that the main question about how he’ll govern is who can bring the most pressure to bear on him. Anybody want to guess who that might be?

.

Gulf of deformities

by David Atkins

This is horrifying (h/t Siri at DailyKos):

New Orleans, LA – “The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.

Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

Eyeless shrimp

Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.

“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals…”

“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”

While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”.

“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.

Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.

Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.

The dispersants used in the Gulf of Mexico are widely known to have caustic properties. The people in the area have also been subject to burns and health problems. No one knows the long-term effects these chemicals will have on sea life in the Gulf, either.

And all of it done not for any particularly good reason except to make the biggest oil spill in history seem like less of a problem.

And yes, the Obama Administration aided and abetted this. Dear gods.

.

Study hard for your M.R.S., girls

by digby

SE Cupp modern woman:

[W]hile liberal women may praise Ann for (at least) getting herself an education, where is the praise for Ann’s best decision of all — to marry well?

Progressives like Hilary Rosen, who lambasted Ann Romney on economic issues for being a stay-at-home mom, would presumably prefer women to be dependent on the state for health care and housing .

But by marrying wealthy, Ann made a truly empowering decision that allowed her the freedom to do whatever she wanted. And she did it, by all accounts, without sacrificing the really important stuff, marrying someone she loved.

And what a catch she found in Mitt Romney, a good, churchgoing guy who worked hard to achieve huge success.

But don’t hold your breath for the choruses of “You go, girl!” from the feminists. Apparently, picking a good provider is only okay in political mates, not domestic ones.

But why is that? Women want safety and dependability, especially today, with such a volatile economy. And President Obama knows this, which is why his appeals to women include paternalistic language and fear-mongering about the Republicans.

If Democrats insist that women need Obama to take care of them, then why shouldn’t women also feel compelled to consider how their future husbands will take care of them? What’s the difference between the feminists’ political marriage to Obama and Ann’s marriage to Mitt? Both choices are predicated on who will be the better provider.

Because of whom she married, Ann was able to stay at home and raise her family the way she wanted. She was able to support her husband’s ambitions. She was able to afford lifesaving care when she was diagnosed with both multiple sclerosis and breast cancer. And she was able to devote her time to charity.

In fact, her excellent choice of a mate makes her uniquely qualified to talk about the most important economic issue that real women confront: How am I going to support myself and my future family?

The feminists may wish otherwise, but little girls want stability and security, not state-sponsored welfare. For choosing a life partner who could give her that, Ann Romney is a great role model.

Somebody’s been watching too much Mad Men, I’m afraid.

Seriously, it’s been a while since I read such retrograde drivel even from a right winger. She’s literally saying that if women want stability and security they should marry rich. Which is, I think we can all agree, nice work if you can get it. But the 1% is only 1% and unless we are going to require wealthy men to marry
more than one wife (which I’m sure ole Mitt wouldn’t be averse to either — his grandfather wasn’t anyway) we have a little math problem here.

But I have to say that I’m depressed by the notion that the only valid choices for a woman to gain security and stability is to be dependent on welfare or marriage is still in circulation anywhere. Presumably, Cupp is aware that the vast majority of women don’t depend on anyone for those things. Not even the conservative married ones. They work at jobs, just like she does. Are they irresponsible gadabouts for failing to properly secure a millionaire?

Evidently Cupp is looking for a wealthy, patriarchal throwback to take her away from all this and there are probably a few available. Sadly, being in her 30s she’s pretty much out of the running for anyone younger than 60 or so. (Rich male “providers” of all ages tend to prefer the younger ones.) She missed her “Romney window” a long time ago.

I will say this: Romney was lucky to have undertaken a long term strategic projection back when she was 18 and decided to marry a future president of America. It’s far less likely that a man on that path will trade you in for a newer model once you get to be SE Cupp’s age. It’s bad for business. That Ann Romney really did have it all figured out didn’t she?

Update: In case you missed it, there’s this too:

According to Schlafly, the word “liberal is a perjorative now since Michael Dukakis…no politician wants to be called a liberal anymore” and because it’s a perjorative, Schlafly thinks “that’s the way we should treat feminism.” She goes on to say women don’t want to be called feminists because it’s a bad word, and that “everything they stand for is bad and destructive.”

She’s right about the word liberal. And considering how easily the left abandoned it, we might as well start thinking of another word for feminism and get the jump on them. It’ll only take about 25 years for it to catch on.

.

Working for moms

by digby

Via @ddayen, I see that progressive Democrats have done something clever:

Today, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) introduced the Women’s Option to Raise Kids Act (WORK Act), which would recognize that all parents who stay home to raise young children are, in fact, doing important and legitimate work. Original cosponsors of the WORK Act include Reps. John Lewis (D-GA), Gwen Moore (D-WI), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jim McDermott (D-WA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Janice Schakowsky (D-IL), Rosa DeLauro (D-CA), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), and Laura Richardson (D-CA).

Rep. Stark: “Mitt Romney was for ObamaCare before he was against it. Then, he was for forcing low-income mothers into the workforce before he decided ‘all moms are working moms’.”

”I think we should take Mr. Romney at his most recent word and change our federal laws to recognize the importance and legitimacy of raising young children. That’s why I’ve introduced the WORK Act to provide low-income parents the option of staying home to raise young children without being pushed into poverty.”

Why we need the WORK Act:

Current law does not count low-income stay-at-home parents who are raising young children as meeting the necessary Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) work requirement. Current law also bans states from counting these individuals toward that state’s work participation rate, which can result in financial penalties if not met. This effectively bars low-income parents who choose to stay home to raise their young children from access to the financial support of TANF.

As reported by the New York Times and others, the TANF program has been particularly unresponsive during the economic downturn (see this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities). Today, TANF is only serving 27% of families living in poverty, compared to 68% when the program was enacted to great acclaim in 1996. The result is that more children are being pushed deeper into poverty and destitution. Congress needs to start fixing this problem to ensure that low-income families have access to needed assistance. The WORK Act is an important step in that direction.

What the WORK Act does:

The WORK Act would amend TANF law to recognize the critical job of raising children age three or younger as work. Under the legislation, low-income parents could work, receive job training, search for work, or raise their children until they are school-aged without fear of losing TANF support and being pushed deeper into poverty. This is the same option that wealthy families, such as the Romneys, enjoy.

Now, if only the Democratic Party would blitz this, it would be an effective political push back and expose conservative hypocrisy on this issue. Unfortunately, we likely won’t hear much about it because the Democratic Party is petrified at the prospect of being labeled the party of “welfare” again so even though they have a chance to turn the tables on the plutocratic Romneys, advocate for children and draw a contrast with the cruel Republican budget, they won’t do it.

And I wouldn’t even put it past some of the Republican down-ticket challengers to use Democrats’ failure to vote for the bill as evidence that they hate stay at home moms.

.

Your day in religion

by digby

When all else fails:

Authorities in Rowan County say a man held a double-barreled shotgun to a woman’s head and made her read her favorite scripture.

The Salisbury Post reports (http://bit.ly/HNmook ) that the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office said 20-year-old Jonathan Alan Morton was taken into custody when deputies arrived at his home shortly after midnight Sunday.

Investigators said Morton held 19-year-old Elizabeth Nichols against her will inside his bedroom, pressing a shotgun to her head and, at one point, a screwdriver against her throat. A report said Morton stood behind Nichols and held the gun to her head as she read.

Meanwhile, in Catholic Church news we have this:

Why a known-mobster like De Pedis is buried on the grounds of a Vatican church has been the object of much speculation since 1997, when a church maid revealed the tomb’s existence to an inquisitive journalist. The Vatican was always cagey about why the mobster was buried in one of its churches, and ultimately, the church’s silence spurred countless conspiracy theories. Now, thanks to shocking Vatican letters leaked in the Vatileaks scandal that is rocking the Holy See, the Italian police are less interested in why he’s buried there. Instead, they want to open the tomb to see if the remains of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi are interred with those of the mobster.

And this:

On the April 16 episode of “The Daily Show,” they showed a picture of a naked woman with her legs spread and a nativity scene ornament placed in between. Stewart said, “Maybe women could protect their reproductive organs from unwanted medical intrusions with vagina mangers.” The segment was done to mock Fox News for allegedly not covering stories on the so-called war on women.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue speaks to the media cover-up:
Reuters did a story on Monday’s edition of “The Daily Show” but never mentioned the vagina manger scene segment; it was picked up by the chicagotribune.com, msnbc.com, and Yahoo! Movies. Also reporting on this episode, but never citing the obscene segment were the following: the blog site of the latimes.com; gawker.com; huffingtonpost.com; theatlanticwire.com; talkingpointsmemo.com; thewrap.com; NBC-TV New York; and NBC-TV Chicago. Only mediaite.com and dailykos.com mentioned the offensive part.

The cover-up is revealing. This episode of “The Daily Show” was done to protest Fox’s alleged indifference to the “war on women,” and in doing so Stewart not only made a vulgar attack on Christians, he objectified women.

Yes, he really said “the cover-up is revealing.”

But lest you think it’s all bad (or weird), here’s a very heartening story:

At least six Catholic parishes in Washington state have ignored the Seattle Archbishop’s call to gather signatures for a referendum repealing the state’s recently-enacted marriage equality law, calling the effort “hurtful and seriously divisive in our community.” “Seattle’s Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church gave the Rev. Tim Clark a standing ovation Sunday” when he announced that the parish would not be participating in the anti-equality effort:

“I am happy to report that Our Lady of the Lake parish-oners have been overwhelmingly and, thus far, unanimously supportive of the decision I made NOT to gather signatures in support of this Referendum,” Clark wrote in response to an e-mail.

“The standing ovation experienced during one of the Masses says less about me and much more about the health of this parish. I only wished the archbishop could have experienced the sustained applause — the ‘sensus fidelium’ — of the people. He needs to listen to this ‘voice.’ That is my prayer.”

I’m thinking that some people believe they answer to a higher power than the Catholic Bishops — or Bill Donohue.

h/t to attaturk

The best investment any corporation will ever make

by digby

This is why I’m skeptical of the “lower the rates, flatten the base” comprehensive tax reform of which all the Village and the White House is so enamored. They always say that the key is to lower taxes at the same as we eliminate loopholes and get rid of all the “tax expenditures” and presto change-o we’ll end up with even more money. Isn’t that great? Like magic!

Well, that might work in theory, I suppose, but unless they institute the kind of lobbying reform that’s probably impossible in our cash soaked system, this is how it will work in the real world:

The top eight companies that spent the most on federal lobbying from 2007 to 2009 all saw their reported tax rates decrease from 2007 to 2010, according to a new analysis released Monday by the Sunlight Foundation.

The report notes that these top eight firms spent $540 million on lobbying from 2007 to 2009. They filed 332 lobbying reports that mentioned taxes and named 491 different tax bills in those reports.

The top eight companies that spent the most on lobbying were Exxon Mobil, Verizon Communications, General Electric, AT&T, Altria, Amgen, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. Exxon Mobil spent the most, some $81.92 million from 2007 to 2009.

AT&T recorded the largest tax reduction, with its tax rate falling from 34.0 percent to negative 6.4 percent from 2007 to 2010, or an estimated reduction of more than $7.3 billion. Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, had the smallest decline from 2007 to 2010, with its rate declining from 28.9 percent to 27.4 percent. Six of the top eight companies saw declines of at least 7 percentage points.

The report comes as both President Barack Obama and Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, have proposed lowering corporate tax rates. Obama has proposed lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent but eliminating loopholes and deductions. American manufacturers would get a bigger tax cut, having an effective rate of no more than 25 percent.

Romney has proposed cutting the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and repealing the corporate alternative minimum tax.

Comprehensive tax reform as currently constructed means lowering the rates. That’s all. The money these companies spend on lobbying is the cheapest investment they make. The returns are astronomical. They’ll keep spending it. Politicians will keep doing their bidding. And the deficit scolds will stay in business, ripping away at any program that benefits average citizens year after year.

Beware “comprehensive tax reform” in the era of Citizens United. It’s a scam.

Update: More detail on why this is a bad idea, here.
.

Some simple solutions

by David Atkins

In case you missed it, a reminder from CNN:

I’d like to know whether the following statement describes or does not describe the way you feel: “The present tax system benefits the rich and is unfair to the ordinary working man or woman.”

Describes: 68
Does not describe: 29

Do you consider the amount of federal income tax you have to pay as too high, about right, or too low?

Too high: 45
About right: 50
Too low: 3

Let’s be clear: there are only four things that keep Republicans alive, electorally speaking. They are:

1) A perception on the part of a lot of white people who believe that the tax system is unfair, that tax dollars are being spent on people who don’t look like them;

2) An unfair legislative system that gives undue weight to less populated, overwhelmingly conservative areas to block key reformist legislation;

3) Gobs of corporate money;

4) A pliant media that fails to call a spade a spade.

All of these issues can be solved with bolder progressivism. The first issue can be tackled by reaching out more credibly to younger, less racist demographics, and by having a broad, credible middle-class agenda that actually rescinds tax cuts for the wealthy while creating demonstrable results even for comfortable middle-class whites (such as with universal healthcare and education improvement.)

The second can be tackled by weakening the filibuster, instituting the National Popular Vote, and following through on a variety of reforms that crank back some of the conservative ratchet effect.

The third can be addressed via a coherent push for real campaign finance reform and a constitutional amendment against money as speech.

The fourth can be dealt with by being as forceful about unfair treatment in the press as conservatives have been for decades.

Funny how none of the answers for what ails us and enables conservatives, lie in moving more to the “center.”

.

Kerning revisited

by digby

Those of you who’ve been around the blogosphere for a while will greatly enjoy this new investigation of the Bush National Guard story.

[T]he CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and have always been, a red herring. The real story, assembled here for the first time in a single narrative, featuring new witnesses and never-reported details, is far more complex than what Rather and Mapes rushed onto the air in 2004. At the time, so much rancorous political gamesmanship surrounded Bush’s military history that it was impossible to report clearly (and Rather’s flawed report effectively ended further investigations). But with Bush out of office, this is no longer a problem. I’ve been reporting this story since it first broke, and today there is more cooperation and willingness to speak on the record than ever before. The picture that emerges is remarkable. Beyond the haze of elaborately revised fictions from both the political left and the political right is a bizarre account that has remained, until now, the great untold story of modern Texas politics. For 36 years, it made its way through the swamps of state government as it led up to the collision between two powerful Texans on the national stage.

While it doesn’t solve the mystery, there are tons of new details. As a blogger who was writing about this stuff in real time, I especially enjoyed this:

The first person to publicly question the memos was an Air Force officer in Montgomery named Paul Boley, who posted on the conservative online forum Free Republic under the handle TankerKC. Boley’s comment popped up while the program was still going on.

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn’t exist on typewriters of the early seventies.
A conspiracy theory has since arisen that Bartlett, knowing in advance that the documents were forgeries—and, in some fevered imaginations, knowing his boss Karl Rove was the source of them—tipped off right-wing surrogates to attack the documents.

When I asked Lloyd why Bartlett ignored his assessment, he said, “I guess he was trying to set Rather up for getting mauled.”

Bartlett told me that the online attacks began “before I started any outreach” to the press. He added that Bush himself didn’t learn of the Killian memos until after the segment had already aired, because Bartlett felt the documents didn’t show anything revelatory. He initially dismissed them as “old news.”

In any case, MacDougald’s arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, “It’s ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it’s really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn’t seem as though they would hold up.”

You don’t say …

It more or less comes back to the same conclusion: for some reason Bush became afraid to land his plane and so he quit flying and, like other privileged princes at the time, found a way to check out of his obligation early. And he seems to have been in some kind of other “trouble” at the time but nobody knows exactly what it was. What’s new is the dirty cover up in Texas political circles going back years. There are obviously people who know the truth. Certainly George W Bush does. But they’re not telling. Yet.

.

A nice distillation to send to your “bipartisan” friend

by David Atkins

Regular readers of progressive blogs won’t find anything in it that Digby, I and others haven’t been saying for years now, but this piece in The Prospect provides a nice, concise distillation of the argument that both sides aren’t in fact to blame for government gridlock, and that the Democratic Party has gone way out of its way to enact “centrist” policy. Also, the article is from a “respectable” source, so if you have a a bipartisan fetishist friend, it might have more credibility for them than some link from Hullabaloo, Greenwald or DailyKos. Here’s a taste:

For two years, President Barack Obama struggled to build a biparisan consensus around deficit reduction. The Affordable Care Act was built on conservative ideas, and pitched as a move toward fiscal sustainability. Independent projections bear that out—over the next decade, it’s projected to reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion, making it the largest deficit-reduction package since 1993, when Democrats under Bill Clinton passed a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts that began to bring the budget into balance.

In 2010, Republican opposition to tax hikes led Obama to extend the Bush tax cuts over liberals’ objections, and last year, Obama—with the support of top Democrats—tried desperately to reach a “grand bargain” over deficit reduction with House Maority Leader John Boehner and the rest of the Republican leadership. But GOP opposition to tax increases—Boehner refused to trade Medicare cuts for tax increases on the wealthy—meant that these talks were bound to fail.

The Democratic Party isn’t perfect—or even particularly good—but it’s unfair to say that the United States has “irresponsible” political leadership, or that the political class is lacking as a whole. Over the last three years, Democrats have passed bills to achieve universal health coverage, reform the financial sector, bring carbon emissions under control, and save the economy from a second Great Depression. Deficits have receded to the background, but it remains true that only Democrats have been behind partisan deficit reduction—in 1993 and 2010.

If there’s a problem in American politics, it’s the Republican Party, whose theological devotion to to tax cuts and “small government” has destroyed our finances—both Reagan and George W. Bush were responsible for huge explosions of debt—and made bipartisan cooperation impossible. Our government is dysfunctional, but the pox isn’t on both houses, and the media’s quest to ignore that fact has only exacerbated the problem.

I would argue that more and more of the political class is starting to wake up to this. The Murdoch media empire is reeling from its own lawbreaking with increasing numbers willing to call it out as severely problematic. NPR’s new ethics guidelines to pay more attention to truth than balance are a culmination of years of bitter progressive complaints.

But it’s still a long, slow road toward making opinion drivers see the obvious reality of the situation. One might argue that they do see it, and they’re all corrupt because their financial interests depend on it. Maybe, but that’s not the case with most of the bipartisan fetishists in politics that I know. The local media and political people I fight and struggle with routinely on this issue seem to believe that partisanship is evil and both sides are to blame almost as a religious principle, with no corruption at all (careerist Linda Parks excepted.) There are a lot of people out there who just don’t want to believe that one side is to blame, because then they would be awful tribal partisans. There is a holier-than-thou superiority complex that comes from taking a “principled” stand against partisanship.

So if you know people like that, send them the Prospect article. Post it up on your preferred social media. Keep chipping away at this meme until it finally sinks in.

.

Even crazier than you are