Month: April 2012

When I was a kid …

by digby

This happened:

In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston marathon. After realizing that a woman was running, race organizer Jock Semple went after Switzer shouting, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers.” However, Switzer’s boyfriend and other male runners provided a protective shield during the entire marathon.The photographs taken of the incident made world headlines, and Kathrine later won the NYC marathon with a time of 3:07:29.

Eric Erickson this week:

“I don’t really care. I don’t care that The Masters are a male-dominated event,” he added. “I don’t care that women aren’t members of The Masters. Frankly, I kind of like the idea that women aren’t members of The Masters. Good Lord, I don’t want to be hanging out at some women’s event! Can’t men go anywhere and just be men? There are plenty of places where women can be women. …

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

.

Hatch the hippie

by digby

Via Political Animal I learn that Orrin Hatch has made something of a comeback and looks to be on track to defeat the Tea Party. And he’s not a happy warbler:

Here’s what he told NPR (I happened to hear this on the car radio yesterday, and nearly ran a stop sign):

“These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans,” Hatch angrily responds. “They’re radical libertarians and I’m doggone offended by it.”
Then Hatch, a former boxer, turns combative. “I despise these people, and I’m not the guy you come in and dump on without getting punched in the mouth.”

Like Kilgore, I’m old enough to remember when Hatch was totally on the wingnut fringe, Jesse Helms territory. Now he’s a RINO.

He’s also wrong about the Tea Party. They aren’t radical libertarians. They’re just radical right wingers. He’s behind the times.

I wonder how the Tea Partiers feel about him saying “I despise these people.” Don’t be surprised if they rally around him. The far right loves aggressive, dominant rhetoric. That might just make them fall in love all over again.

.

From the “dodged a bullet” files

Whew:

Iowa parents who receive child support on behalf of their kids would be required to submit to drug tests as frequently as every six months under a controversial amendment to a budget bill that was laughed at and ultimately withdrawn today in the Senate.

The proposal came from Sen. Mark Chelgren, R-Ottumwa who said he was pushing the idea on behalf of an unidentified constituent who believed his ex was using child support money for illegal drugs.

A person paying child support under Chelgren’s proposal could require the recipient to a drug test every six months as long as they pay the costs.
[…]
Sen. Jack Hatch, who is leading discussion on the state’s health and human services budget bill, told the Senate that he believes the proposal is anti-woman and could unfairly be used by vindictive spouses. He further expressed concerns that the proposal would clog the court system.

Chelgren rejected that argument but ultimately withdrew his amendment.

“We shouldn’t be ducking our head and running away every time there’s a difficult issue coming up,” Chelgren said.

Ok. The good news is that the other amendments to drug test unemployment recipients and outlaw all government funding for abortion failed too. But not without some strong words being exchanged:

Democrats said the measures were a “war on women” and antagonistic toward working families and the poor.

One of the most pointed moments came after Sen. Jack Hatch noted that one amendment if passed would prohibit state money being used in abortions even in cases of rape or when a mother’s life is in danger. That would cause the state to lose $1.5 billion in federal money, largely for Medicaid services, he said.

Sen. Kent Sorenson, R-Indianola, then asked: “Sen. Hatch, I’m just curious: How many babies are you willing to slaughter, dismember and throw in a garbage can for a billion dollars?”

Democrats throughout the chamber responded with screams of “point of order!” Senate President Jack Kibbie, D-Emmetsburg, called it a ridiculous question.

Sorenson replied, as the chamber erupted with another round of shouting by Democrats, “Mr. President, I think it’s ridiculous that we can’t save unborn babies for a billion dollars.”

Nothing fanatical about that.

.

Tea Party Tantrum

by digby

I love this story about the new Tea Party Senator from Wisconsin deciding that he doesn’t want to have anything do all that icky legislating and so he’s firing his staff in order to concentrate on “messaging.”

Steve Benen reports:

Running as a novice in 2010, [Ron]Johnson frequently struggled to offer any depth on any subject, declaring shortly before the election, “I don’t believe this election really is about details.” In one especially jarring example, Johnson chatted with the Green Bay Press Gazette’s editorial board, which pressed the Republican on economic policy. Johnson talked about “cutting spending,” and “getting the economy moving,” but simply couldn’t any questions with any substance at all. It was painful to watch.

Two years later, Roll Call reports that Johnson is poised to “purge nearly his entire Washington, D.C.-based legislative team,” in large part because they expect the senator to work on legislation — and he doesn’t want to.

He’s an interesting case study of someone who has talked more than he has listened, lectured more than he has developed relationships with his colleagues, and now he’s having a tough time because of that behavior in advancing his policy goals,” one senior GOP aide said. “It’s kind of like watching a temper tantrum by a 2-year-old in the middle of the grocery store.” […]

Sources indicated that when Johnson came to Washington, he put a staff together like “any other Senator” but quickly realized that the day-to-day grind of legislating was not his forte. Johnson said last week that he wanted more of his office’s focus to be on building an effective messaging operation.

Maybe he should have been a radio talk show host instead of a Senator. That’s where the real influence lies.

What else would she be?

by digby

Evidently, Drudge was suddenly very concerned about the fact that the President didn’t pay the same tax rate as his secretary. Why I don’t know — I thought the right wingers thought that was a-ok.

Anyway, he was so bothered by it that he featured it on the front page:

Guess what?

The picture Drudge has up of Obama’s “Secretary” is not Anita, the woman named in the ABC story. It’s his Senior Director for Russia.

Hey, what’s the difference? I’m sure she makes a helluva cup of coffee.

.

All Mobbed Up

by digby

This story about the potential merging of the Republican Super PACs is downright chilling:

Restore Our Future, the “super PAC” whose millions of dollars in negative advertising helped bury Mr. Romney’s Republican rivals, will also shift its focus to the general election, officials familiar with its plans said. The group, which raised more than $43 million through the end of February, is hoping to reach the $100 million mark by the end of the cycle.

The super PAC will also have help from Mr. Romney’s allies and backers: Jim Talent, the former United States senator and a key surrogate for Mr. Romney during the primaries, appeared at a Restore Our Future briefing for donors in New York on Wednesday.

And people involved with the group’s fund-raising have in recent days approached Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner whose family contributed over $16 million to a rival super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, to consider contributing to Restore Our Future. They have also approached Charles and David Koch, the wealthy conservative businessmen who founded Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.
Restore Our Future’s political director, Carl Forti, is also an official with American Crossroads, a pro-Republican super PAC that is planning to raise as much as $300 million to spend on the 2012 elections. Federal rules permit the two super PACs to coordinate directly with each other on raising and spending money, and Mr. Romney’s allies expect that Crossroads and other outside groups, like Americans for Prosperity, will spend up to $100 million against Mr. Obama.

Ed Kilgore quips:

I don’t know if these worthies will ever get together in a single place at a single time to discuss their common work, but if they did, it would probably feel like one of those legendary Cosa Nostra summits. We may never again see the likes of this particular combination of avarice, talent, malevolent focus and permissive laws.

I think these are all smart people with so much money that these amounts aren’t really that significant. I also think they know that Romney is a deeply flawed candidate who is unlikely to win and that Obama is not really a socialist usurper who is dedicated to destroying capitalism. So Kilgore may be on to something. It may very well be nothing more than a fancy extortion racket. I think it’s entirely possible that these fabulously wealthy billionaires are making sure the political establishment remembers who’s in charge: “Nice little political system you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Remember, the whole point of Super PACs is the threat that they will come after people who don’t toe the line. That sounds like mob behavior to me.

.

QOTD: Ailes

by digby

I always thought that if Limbaugh was the id of the conservative movement, Roger Ailes was the ego. Turns out he’s the id too:

Roger Ailes made a jaw-dropping comment about CNN’s Soledad O’Brien during a college lecture on Thursday night.

The Fox News chief was speaking to journalism students at the University of North Carolina. In the question-and-answer segment of the talk, he referred to O’Brien as “that girl that’s named after a prison.”

There are no “egos” (in the Freudian sense of the word) in the Conservative Movement anymore. Or true super-egos, for that matter. It’s all id.

.

Fracking Awesome

by digby

Already facing a test from within his own party, Pennsylvania’s longest-tenured congressman has a new set of voices challenging his bid for an 11th term. And they’re coming from far outside of the state.

Democrat Tim Holden, who is facing Lackawanna County attorney Matt Cartwright in the 17th District primary, is under attack from political action committees based in Texas and California.

The Campaign for Primary Accountability, a Dallas-based Super PAC, says it plans to spend six figures on “full spectrum warfare” again Holden. The PAC, which campaigns against incumbent congressmen on both sides of the aisle, aims to use radio, television, the Internet and direct mail to target Holden, spokesman Curtis Ellis said.

Holden, a conservative Democrat, is also facing scrutiny from Blue America, a smaller PAC created in 2005 by three liberal bloggers. Blue America launched a billboard campaign against Holden throughout the district, including a billboard on Route 33 near Palmer Township.

The new 17th District will cover part of Northampton County, including the Easton and Slate Belt regions as well as Nazareth, Bethlehem Township and a sliver of Bethlehem beginning in 2013. Some Democrats in the Easton area have already questioned whether Holden is liberal enough to represent the city.

With Holden trying to introduce himself to a district vastly changed under the state’s new congressional map, the negative advertisements could hurt his image with new voters, said Thomas Baldino, a political science professor at Wilkes University.

Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., a Scranton native, will campaign in the city with colleague Holden this weekend.

Holden’s campaign condemned the influence of Super PACs, political organizations that cannot make contributions to candidates, campaigns or parties and must spend contributions independently. Super PACs, which are allowed under a 2010 Supreme Court Decision, give corporations, unions and other organizations the ability to spend unlimited money in an effort to sway the outcome of elections.

“Tim Holden is firmly opposed to Super PACs and believes that voters are supposed to decide elections, not corporations from outside the 17th District,” campaign manager Eric Nagy said.

The Campaign for Primary Accountability’s television commercial airing in the Scranton and Wilkes Barre area denounces Holden for receiving campaign donations from ‘”Wall Street” and voting in 2000 to let corporations exclude foreign income from their gross income for tax purposes. It criticizes his past votes to increase congressional salaries and his vote in 2010 to extend formerPresident George W. Bush’s tax cuts.
[…]
The Campaign for Primary Accountability has already targeted two incumbents who were unseated in their primaries — Republicans Don Manzullo of Illinois and Jean Schmidt of Ohio. In Pennsylvania, the PAC is also campaigning against U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, R-18th District.

Blue America, on the other hand, is spending money to campaign against only two incumbents — Holden and U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., treasurer Howie Klein said. The House recently passed a Ryan budget that would restructure the tax code and cut domestic programs.

The PAC reported $19,000 on hand in its latest Federal Election Commission report and had spent $12,000 in the first quarter of 2012. Its billboard, which says “Fracking’s Got a Friend in Pennsylvania,” refers to Holden’s vote to remove some regulations on natural gas drilling. It’s just one issue in which the PAC disagrees with Holden, who has also been criticized by liberals for voting against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Holden says he did so because the law costs too much.

Holden has defended his voting record, saying conservative votes were a reflection of his former district, which had a Republican majority. Holden has long been a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, a fiscally conservative group of House Democrats. He is anti-abortion and opposes gun control.

Now there’s a man of deep integrity.

He doesn’t mention the millions of dollars he’s taken from various industries and special interests. Not to mention Steny Hoyer’s PAC, which he will continue to answer to. If he makes it in this time, the Democrats in his district will find they’re being represented by another Republican.

I hear the new polling isn’t positive for old Tim. I’m glad we could help.

Howie has the latest on this race, here.

If you’d like to replenish the kitty to help us defray the costs, you can do so here. Or you can contribute to Matt Cartwright directly.

It’s a rare day when you have a chance to replace a Blue Dog with a progressive. Nothing could be more disorienting to the Democratic establishment. It simply does not compute. It would be beautiful to pull it off.

.

Regional differences

by David Atkins

Interesting story on the death penalty in the New York Times:

There were references to being a “tipping point” and reflecting a “paradigm shift” in the use of capital punishment when the State House voted this week to make Connecticut the 17th state — the 5th in five years — to eliminate the death penalty in future prosecutions.

“It’s definitely part of a larger trend, certainly with other states including New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois abolishing executions through similar processes, and with a decline in executions around the country,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a national research group critical of the death penalty, said Thursday. “There’s less public support. So the trends are in the same direction.”

But even staunch death penalty opponents acknowledge that the vote was not indicative of a nationwide about-face. Rather, it was a reflection of capital punishment’s erosion in the Northeast, a trend toward fewer executions nationally and the intensification of the death penalty’s status as a phenomenon overwhelmingly rooted in the South.

The number of executions nationally dropped to 43 last year from 98 in 1998. Since executions resumed in 1976 after being halted by the Supreme Court, there have been 1,060 in the South, 150 in the Midwest, 75 in the West and 4 in the Northeast.

During that time, Connecticut had one execution, Michael Bruce Ross, a serial killer who was put to death in 2005.

It’s crucially important, though, that no one ever insult these fine citizens or make note of these peculiar regional differences. Wouldn’t want to offend those who might take umbrage at being insulted by the San Francisco values freaks in Taxachusetts and what not.

.

Newtie’s crazy billionaire

by digby

I watched this new show on cable last night called Magic City. It’s about a mob-connected Jewish hotel owner in Miami in 1959, on the eve of Cuba’s revolution. It seemed well done. I’ll be curious to see how it unfolds.

But as I was watching I couldn’t stop thinking about Rick Perlstein’s profile of Sheldon Adelson in this week’s Rolling Stone.

Right before the grand opening of the Venetian, in 1999, the Culinary Workers staged a demonstration on the public sidewalk out front. Adelson told the cops to start making arrests; the cops refused. Glen Arnodo, an official at the union at the time, relates what happened next: “I was standing on the sidewalk and they had two security guards say I was on private property, and if I didn’t move they’d have to put me under ‘citizen’s arrest.’ I ignored them.” The guards once again told the police to arrest Arnodo and again, he says, they refused. The Civil Rights hero Rep. John Lewis, in town to support the rally, said the whole thing reminded him of living in the South during Jim Crow.

Marvels Arnodo, “Here you have a sidewalk that 12 billion people walk down, [and] the only people who can’t use it are the union!” The Culinary Workers argued before the National Labor Relations Board that Adelson’s attempts to keep them from demonstrating violated federal labor law. Adelson’s lawyers countered that their client’s First Amendment rights were being violated – because his threats of arrests were an instance of “petitioning the government.” The union won the right to protest; Adelson refused to comply with the settlement, copies of which the union passed out on that very same sidewalk. That was “fraudulent use of the seal of a government agency,” the Venetian argued, further claiming that union workers had “impersonated” NLRB officials, and that the volunteer labor activists had been coerced. The great civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz got involved – on Adelson’s side. “The Venetian has no property rights to the sidewalk,” a federal appeals judge told them in 2007. Unmoved, Adelson tried, without success, to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. After all, Adelson told the Wall Street Journal, radical Islam and the right to more easily join a union were the two most “fundamental threats to society.”

You see, the show also featured a little “union problem” — that left the head of the union at the bottom of a quarry. I guess we should be grateful that these things have gotten more civilized. I’m guessing old Sheldon would have had the same level of hatred back in 59 for the Commies instead of the Islamists. And the unions. He’s always hated the unions.

Anyway, it’s a great read. This super-billionaire isn’t going anywhere. He’s ready to run the show.

.