Month: April 2012

Democratic Intelligence

by David Atkins

John Cole at Balloon Juice has been on fire on West Virginia “Democrat” Joe Manchin’s equivocations on whether he’ll vote for President Obama. Cole notes that his “independent” anti-liberal (as if the President were some extreme liberal?) stance hasn’t reduced the incoming fire coming from the right wing:

Either Manchin has some very interesting polling internals that none of us are privy to, or his staff is just in over their heads and giving him bad advice. This is bush league stuff, and it has been since day one, when he told us that he needed to tour the state to find out what his constituents think about DADT. Apparently there was not ample time in the two terms he served as Governor to learn that. Once he had his listening tour and learned what his constituents thought, he promptly skipped the vote on DADT and the Dream Act and went partying in the country with his grandchildren. WHO IS ADVISING THIS GUY? Then later on, he advances the Blunt amendment, allegedly to promote religious freedom, while blissfully unaware that the Amendment wouldn’t advance religious freedom, it was a backdoor attempt at gutting ACA by allowing employers to deny coverage of anything they didn’t like for any reason whatsoever. Fortunately, the rest of the Democratic caucus is not brain-dead, so that amendment failed.

Then we get to this latest idiocy, which is yet another self-inflicted wound. It was obvious to anyone with an IQ over room temperature that the remarks about Obama would be used as a cudgel against both Manchin and Obama. This is a GOP strategists wet dream. And then to state that politics isn’t a team sport. He probably thought it made him sound independent and mavericky, but it just made him look stupid and like he doesn’t understand how politics works. Even better, he set himself up for another beating by the GOP. If I were the Republican candidate, the very first thing I would do is release and ad stating “Joe Manchin says politics isn’t a team sport. So why is he accepting money from the DNC and the DSCC to run negative ads about John Raese.” Or some variation.

And I know none of you are going to believe this, but Manchin really is, in person, a nice guy. He’s affable, friendly, my father worked with him on a number of issues and found him to be reliable and trustworthy and honest. I just don’t understand why he is doing so many stupid things. At this point, I don’t even know what parts of the Democratic party platform he agrees with.

This ties in with Digby’s excellent coverage of national Democrats being apparently willing to cut successful programs and basic social services if only Republicans would let them–as if that is somehow going to endear them to a largely mythical fiscally conservative, socially liberal constituency that likes Planned Parenthood, cuts to Social Security, gay marriage, and low taxes on corporations. These people just don’t exist in significant numbers, the Thomas Friedmans and Linda Parks of the world notwithstanding.

Every Democrat tempted into this Third Way foolishness needs to remember: The hardcore conservatives will hate you, anyway. They’ll despise President Obama just as much as if he were President Kucinich. There’s nothing to be gained with that crowd.

And the so-called independents? They don’t care much, either. They don’t pay too much attention to politics, by and large, they don’t want to think of themselves as nasty partisans, and they’re just upset that American government seems to be dysfunctional. You can try to be as reasonable as you want, but as long as the conservatives keep making the government dysfunctional, you’re not going to get credit for being reasonable. That’s because the dysfunction itself is automatically attributed to both sides being unreasonable, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.

Meanwhile, all this “reasonable moderation” makes you look weak and unprincipled to everyone. It infuriates and depresses the progressive base which not only is the majority of your volunteer base but also deserves some representation, after all. And it’s bad policy.

This should be obvious by now. If intelligence is the ability to learn from one’s mistakes, it doesn’t say much for the smarts of the people in charge.

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“Check this out, bodyguard”

by digby

This person could have been a heartbeat away from the presidency:

“Well, this agent who was kind of ridiculous there in posting pictures and comments about checking someone out,” Palin told Greta van Susteren on her FOX News program. “Well check this out, bodyguard — you’re fired. And I hope his wife sends him to the doghouse. As long as he’s not eating the dog, along with his former boss. Greta, you know, a lot of people will just, I guess say that this is boys being boys. And boys will be boys, but they shouldn’t be in positions of authority.”

“It’s a symptom of government run amok, though, Greta. Who is minding the store here? And when it comes to this particular issue of Secret Service, again, playing with the taxpayer’s dime and playing with prostitutes and checking out those whom they are guarding….”

If you don’t know the context, apparently one of the SS agents who was fired had been on the Palin detail and said he’d “checked her out.” He sounds like a jerk. But not as big a jerk as Palin, who as far as anyone can tell, does absolutely nothing with her time.

A sidenote: I heard some people yesterday talking about this scandal who pointed out that the Secret Service had become a much less professional organization since it was removed from the Treasury Department and moved into the behemoth Department of Homeland Security. Shocking, I know.

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Defenders of the people

by digby

One more time with feeling:

“President Obama was in agreement with the grand bargain that the two of them negotiated last summer,” Pelosi said. “He knew where he was on it, but I think it was important for him to know that we were with him, as we had said all along we are for a grand bargain. You can do many things and the difficult choices that are there if you also have revenue. And I know that the president agreed with that, and that the Republicans walked away. They are trying to revise history now, but it just ain’t so. … It is cute, but it isn’t true.”

I’m not sure why the Democrats think it’s such a great idea to say over and over again that the Republicans refused to sign off on a plan to cut the hell out of the most popular programs in America while the Democrats were downright eager to do it, but apparently they continue to believe this is a big winner for them.

I’ve been thinking up to this point that our great hope was that the Tea Partiers would continue to be completely unreasonable, even if it meant losing the best chance they’ve ever had to destroy the New Deal and blame the Democrats for the suffering that follows. Now I’m seriously wondering if they knew they could get the Democrats to totally enact their unpopular agenda if they just held out long enough. After all, the leaders of the Democratic Party are constantly touting their willingness to slash the government to the bone, even today. They say they were “with the president” on all of it and the Republicans balked simply because they didn’t want to give the president a “win.”

If new negotiations begin with the Democrats already agreeing to the bargain the President and Speaker Boehner reached, the only thing that can happen is that the Dems give up their symbolic tax increase. But that’s ok now. They have set it up so that they can call the Grand Bargain a huge win for the Democrats no matter what’s in it. After all, the main issue is that the Democrats are the “reasonable” Party who were for this all along — and they will have “forced” the Republicans to come around to something they didn’t want to do. Vic-to-ry.

And that’s if President Obama wins re-election. If history is any guide, if Romney wins, the Dems will be lining up not only to sign off on the Grand Bargain, but there will be more than a few who’ll vote for the Ryan budget and probably any social issue the GOP wants to throw on the table. Unlike the Republicans, when they lose big elections they don’t double down. They immediately surrender.

The best hope remains for Tea Partiers to be so insane that they vote against anything the the Democrats are for even if it’s their own agenda. It’s the best case scenario. Pray for crazy.

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Dispatch from torture nation: no country for old men edition

by digby

This is the most horrible story about torture in America you will read this week. Unfortunately, it’s not the only one:

On the world stage, Guantanamo may well stand as the epitome of American human rights abuses. But when it comes to torture on US soil, that grim distinction is held by two aging African American men. As of today, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have spent 40 years in near-continuous solitary confinement in the bowels of the Louisiana prison system. Most of those years were spent at the notorious Angola Prison, which is why Wallace and Woodfox are still known as members of the Angola 3. The third man, Robert King, was released in 2001; his conviction was overturned after he’d spent 29 years in solitary.

Wallace and Woodfox were first thrown into the hole on April 17, 1972, following the killing of Brent Miller, a young prison guard. The men contend that they were targeted by prison authorities and convicted of murder not based on the actual evidence—which was dubious at best—but because they were members of the Black Panther Party’s prison chapter, which was organizing against horrendous conditions at Angola. This political affiliation, they say, also accounted for their seemingly permanent stay in solitary.

For four decades, the men have spent at least 23 hours a day in cells measuring 6 feet by 9 feet. These days, they are allowed out one hour a day to take a shower or a stroll along the cellblock. Three days a week, they may use that hour to exercise alone in a fenced yard. Wallace is now 70; Woodfox is 65. Their lawyers argue that both have endured physical injury and “severe mental anguish and other psychological damage” from living most of their adult lives in lockdown. According to medical reports submitted to the court, the men suffer from arthritis, hypertension, and kidney failure, as well as memory impairment, insomnia, claustrophobia, anxiety, and depression. Even the psychologist brought in by the state confirmed these findings.

There have been documentaries made about this case and books written. And nothing will change the outcome. And this is mainly because the United States (or rather the “states” which we are all supposed to worship as if they were ordained by God)tolerates institutions run by psychopaths and barbarians.

Case in point:

Burl Cain, the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—profiled here—holds power over the lives of more than 5,100 men living at the notorious plantation prison, which occupies a piece of land the size of Manhattan. Widely celebrated in Christian evangelical circles for having brought thousands of incarcerated sinners to Jesus, Cain has stated that he believes the only true path to rehabilitation is Christian redemption. Those who follow his lead and become born again see their freedoms and opportunities expand at Angola, while those who defy him are dealt with harshly.

In a 2008 deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain, “Let’s just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller.” Cain responded, “Okay, I would still keep him in CCR [solitary]…I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them…He has to stay in a cell while he’s at Angola.”

The good news is that racism is dead in America so we don’t have to worry about it anymore. Well, except for the current “Black panther” scare that’s sweeping the feverswamps of the right wing.

Just remember, they hate us for our freedoms.

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Sign up or else (Don’t worry we won’t tell anyone..)

by digby

Via Gawker, I find that Mitt Romney is now demanding loyalty oaths.Or, at least, he’s making delegates sign pledges of support at the convention in order to attend a reception and get their pictures taken with him.

However, knowing that many Republicans don’t want to be publicly associated with their nominee, they helpfully provided an option for people to keep their loyalty pledge a secret.

Some of them weren’t buying:

All three members of Iowa’s conservative RNC delegation – party chairman A.J. Spiker and committee members Steve Scheffler and Kim Lehman – attempted to enter the reception but were rebuffed after refusing to sign the delegate pledge.

The dispute became heated in the hallway outside, with the Iowans demanding to know why they had to sign a form to get their picture taken with the former Massachusetts governor.

Several of Romney’s deputies on the committee assured the trio that they could keep their support a secret by checking the appropriate box, but they refused to do so.

“They don’t trust us,” a frustrated Scheffler said after the argument. “I have said I will support the nominee when we have a nominee, no ifs, ands or buts.”

Well, obviously. But they seem to want to pull the wool over the eyes of GOP voters as well. Why else would they allow their delegates to pretend not to be their delegates in public while secretly requiring them to sign loyalty pledges?

But then, this is Romney we’re talking about, to whom I suspect we are being much too kind when we say he is a flip-flopper or has no center. He’s actually a sneaky liar, which is altogether different.

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Partisan deficits

by David Atkins

Your Saturday morning picture of the day:

Isn’t it amazing how important deficit reduction becomes, but only during Democratic administrations? It’s almost as if there were some some set of forces out there conspiring to make sure that money only gets spent on Republican priorities, but not Democratic ones.

Since both sides are obviously to blame for ignoring the deficit, I’m going to chalk it up to hyperpartisanship. Wouldn’t want to divide the country by engaging in class warfare, after all.

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Existential Kitty Crisis

More here

Video ‘O the Week

by digby

No, it’s not a cute baby animal. It’s not cute at all:

There is an intense power struggle going on in the House Republican caucus. But I think most people thought that Cantor was the rightwing usurper. In light of that, this is very strange indeed. Of course, one thing that establishment Republicans and Tea Party Republicans share is their taste for blood. Live by the sword die by the sword.

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Americans Elect Whom?

by David Atkins

It looks like third party organization Americans Elect is having trouble finding candidates:

Last July, a well-funded nonprofit group called Americans Elect announced it had found a new and more honorable path to the White House. It would bypass the primaries, the founders said, via the Internet.

By empowering Web-izens, the group would skip early-state hucksterism and favor-seeking donors. Using viral marketing savvy, the organizers would advance a third-party “unity” ticket without the usual cynicism, circus acts and, it turns out, scrutiny. They aimed, in short, to take the politics out of politics….

Last week was supposed to be the first week of online voting on the Americans Elect site, when anyone anywhere could click to endorse practiced politicians or to draft neophytes. But the candidate choices have remained decidedly low-profile, and traffic is meager on the site, which cost $9 million to construct. Scrambling to avert failure, Americans Elect has postponed online voting for a month.

Third-party groups often form around a personality or a set of ideas. Ross Perot inspired independents by talking about debt reform in 1992. There was the Green Party crusade of Ralph Nader in 2000 and Unity08’s effort to transform New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg into an independent. Americans Elect, by contrast, offers an organizational framework to a possible presidential candidate who doesn’t need to tap private funds or enlist single-issue radicals.

The group is still on the lookout for a Goliath-toppling personality. “There’s a short ­list,” said chief executive Kahlil Byrd, without sharing names. How many? “Negative eight,” he said, and his spokeswoman repeated the cryptic tally. As in less than zero? Byrd would only clarify: “More than four.”

Without a candidate’s strengths to promote, Americans Elect’s weaknesses have become more apparent.

And therein lies part of the big problem. Voters with memories will recall that this sort of idea isn’t inherently new: Ross Perot tried to do the same thing with the Reform Party.

As it turns out, if you want to engage in presidential politics, you have to do one of two things: 1) have an ideological basis for existence, or 2) be a rich vanity candidate.

Having an ideological basis for existence leads mostly to irrelevance or spoiler status in a winner-takes-all system, with Greens and Peace & Freedoms kneecapping Dems at times, and Libertarians and Constitution Party types kneecapping Republicans at times. Instant runoff voting might help that problem to a certain degree, but it’s unlikely to change much absent a massive parliamentary sort of reform. Also, the nice thing about having an ideological basis for existence is that it brings third parties back to the table of politics, where it turns out that achieving consensus is pretty damn difficult because it turns out that Americans have very significant disagreements with each other.

But the most laughable third party approaches are the process-oriented ones that don’t have an ideological core. That’s what the Reform Party became, and that’s what Americans Elect is. They’re the people who believe (or pretend to believe) that what ails the country isn’t that we the wrong policies, so much as that we just have spoiled children in our government who won’t “work together to find solutions,” as if the “right” solutions were just there for the taking if only the partisans would get out of the way. They ignore the fact that the worst policies tend to be the ones with broad bipartisan support. Or they’re the people like Thomas Friedman who have a socially liberally, economically conservative worldview that they just know is the right approach and would have a lot of support if only those stupid voters would get out of the way and let the technocrats implement it. They know they’re a small constituency who couldn’t get elected as dogcatchers, but they can’t say that, so they pretend the only reason they don’t succeed is because the process is broken. Yes, the process may be broken, but it’s not broken by partisanship. Rather, anyone who pays attention knows that the process isn’t broken by fealty to party interests, but rather by fealty to the interests of the wealthy.

Which is exactly why process-oriented third parties embarrass themselves by turning to wealthy vanity candidates. They’ve got nowhere else to go.

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Norman Solomon: a leader who knows how progressive power works

by digby

Following up on David’s post below about the primaries, I thought I would ask you to watch this video by Norman Solomon, running for congress in California in the seat Lynn Woolsey vacated. If you want to know the theory that Blue America and other groups doing progressive electoral activism are working from, Norman spells it out better than anyone:

More at The Real News

Glenn Greenwald had this to say about Norman:

The long-time anti-war activist, co-founder of the great media criticism group FAIR, and author of “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” – a critique of America’s decades of militarism and the role which its media plays in perpetuating it — is about as close to a perfect Congressional candidate as it gets. He’s written 11 other books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death”: the title speaks for itself. He’s running in the heavily Democratic California district being vacated by the retiring Rep. Lynn Woolsey. A newly released poll from an independent Democratic pollster shows him with a serious chance to win (there is an open primary in June, and the top two candidates, regardless of party affiliation, will then face each other in a November run-off).
In 2002 and 2003, Solomon led three trips to Iraq to try to avert the war (trips that included former and current members of Congress), and was one of the most widely featured media voices during that period opposing the attack on moral, legal and prudential grounds. Though he was an Obama delegate to the 2008 DNC convention, here’s what he told us about President Obama’s civil liberties record, including the Awlaki assassination and the President’s signing of the indefinite detention bill (NDAA):

I am opposed to the expansion of White House authority to detain without charge or assassinate on presidential order. Here we have President Obama extending presidential power even beyond Bush. Many had expected Obama – a constitutional law professor – to rein in presidential authority, but that hasn’t happened. This is not the country we believe in. I would have voted no on NDAA, vehemently explaining my vote in a wide range of public venues. As for the Holder speech, it was deservedly mocked by Stephen Colbert: That “due process” doesn’t have to be a “judicial process” —  just any “process that you do.”

Regarding the Obama war on whistleblowers, WikiLeaks and the treatment of Bradley Manning, Solomon proudly touted the vigorous support he’s received from Manning supporter Daniel Ellsberg, who lives in his district, telling us: “The Obama administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers than all previous presidents combined. That is sad.” […]

When it comes to Congressional candidates, it just doesn’t get any better than Norman Solomon. If you have any residual doubt, just look at this remarkable 2007 TV appearance he did on CNN with Glenn Beck, which he wrote about here, when he used the opportunity to detail and denounce the effect of corporate ownership of America’s establishment media (including CNN). He’s been doing this for 30 years and there’s zero chance he will change or compromise any of it if he wins. I can’t even imagine what it’d be like to have Norman Solomon in Congress, but I’d certainly like to see it. 

I think we can all agree that Glenn Greenwald isn’t a Democratic toady. And he is skeptical of electoral politics. But, as he explained in his post, he knows that having members of congress with progressive values is worthwhile.

As Norman explains in the video, referencing the rise of the left in Latin America, state power matters.  Certainly it is foolish in the extreme to simply walk away and leave it all to the corporatists and the social conservatives. It just seems short-sighted.  As Norman says, nothing can change without a social movement demanding change, but it’s unwise to leave any avenue of possible implementation unattended.  Electoral politics commands attention and it’s useful to have people like Norman out there making the case.

This is a very liberal district and a “liberal” of one kind or another will be elected in November. There are several running. But let’s just say it doesn’t suit the party’s interests to have that liberal be an independent, progressive movement leader like Norman Solomon. All the wealthy San Francisco donors are getting out their checkbooks and rolodexes for their pals, following the instructions of the establishment Democrats in Washington. For obvious reasons, Norman isn’t one of them. Nonetheless, he’s managed to raise a lot of money from small donors and has an ecstatically enthusiastic grassroots campaign ready to knock on every door in the district for him.

This district is deep blue — one of those places where we don’t have to worry about a bunch of wingnuts demanding “moderation.” It’s a seat that rightfully belongs to the left wing of the Party. I know it’s heresy to even broach this subject, but true blue liberals have a right to representation in the US congress too.

Norman’s in a tough race. He’s doing well, but it’s no shoo-in. He needs to at least come in second in the primary in order to make it to the general election. If you can help with a donation, go here and drop a couple of bucks toward his campaign. If you have some time and you’d like to volunteer, sign up here.

Norman Solomon is a progressive movement leader with a deep understanding of how power works and how to apply it from the left. As Glenn said, they just don’t come any better than him.

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