Month: May 2012

They have Nugent, we have Madonna

by digby

Hey, look what the Detroit News is reporting:

Hoping to drive interest in his congressional campaign, Trevor Thomas is appealing to Michigan pride.

Donors to Thomas’ West Michigan campaign to win the Democratic nomination to face incumbent Justin Amash , R-Cascade Township, in November have a chance to win Madonna memorabilia.

Not just any trinket, though, but “the original and rare RIAA-certified Double Platinum Award Record” for “Vogue,” Madonna’s super smash hit.

Rochester native Madonna gave the record to Howie Klein, a former bigwig at her label, Sire Records. Klein is the founder of Blue America PAC that backs progressive candidates around the country.

Blue America endorsed Thomas and Klein thought Madonna’s Michigan connection would be a good way to raise money.

“Trevor is the example of the inclusive spirit of what ‘Vogue’ was all about in the ’90s and today,” Klein said in a campaign press release. “He’s trying to change the dynamic of politics.”

The drawing runs through June. The winner will be chosen at random.

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The rich can’t handle the glare of the spotlight

by David Atkins

This is rich:

All they wanted was to get involved.

But to hear some of the biggest donors of 2012 tell it, their six- and seven-figure contributions have instead bought them nothing but grief.

Their personal lives are fodder for news stories. President Barack Obama and his allies have singled out conservative mega-donors as greedy tax cheats, or worse. And a conservative website has launched a counteroffensive targeting big-money liberals.

This is definitely not what they had in mind. In their view, cutting a million-dollar check to try to sway the presidential race should be just another way to do their part for democracy, not a fast-track to the front page.

And now some are pushing back hard against the attention, asking: Why us?

“This idea of giving public beatings has been around for a long time,” said Frank VanderSloot, a wealthy Idaho businessman who donated $1 million in corporate cash to the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney and says he’s raised between $2 million and $5 million for the Romney campaign.

VanderSloot, who is also a national finance co-chairman for Romney, was among eight major Romney donors singled out on an Obama campaign website last month as having “less-than-reputable records,” and he thinks the purpose is clear – intimidation.

“You go back to the Dark Ages when they put these people in the stocks or whatever they did, or publicly humiliated them as a deterrent to everybody else – watch this – watch what we do to the guy who did this.”

Yes, heaven forbid that anyone shine a spotlight these people who want to buy the country’s democratic system outright. If we don’t give them the ability to buy a President in secret, it’s the same as torture in the Middle Ages.

In the absence of real campaign finance reform, disclosure of who is spending the money to buy our elections is the next-best thing. I’ve always been a little skeptical of that approach because the message gets through regardless of whether the messenger is exposed.

But it’s been eye-opening and amusing to see how very sensitive the Masters of the Universe are to exposure and criticism. One would think that people with the ability to buy anything in life wouldn’t care so much about their precious feelings and reputations, but they do. Immensely. It’s said that politicians are vain and egocentric, but that’s not entirely true: it takes a thick skin and high tolerance for abuse to go into public office. It’s not a pleasant place to be for those who constantly crave praise.

No, it seems that the people with the thinnest skins and most bloviated egos lie not at the top of the political chain, but at the top of the financial pecking order. It’s about time they took a little more heat and were exposed to a little more sunlight.

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Challenging the real greedy geezer

by digby

I have always loathed Alan Simpson going all the way back to the 80s. His pro-choice and LGBT rights record always gave him cover as a “moderate” and everyone enjoys his colorful language. But he’s a hardcore fiscal conservative who thinks that everyone can make it in America by just pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Like he did. Of course he had a teensy bit of help from his daddy, former Governor and Senator Milward L. Simpson.

He also doesn’t know what he’s talking about and never has. His folksy speech masks his ignorance but the Villagers are so enthralled by it that they never pin him down on the details. So someone else has stepped up to do it:

It’s nice to see young people challenging the hideous generational taunts that the Pete Peterson acolytes all throw around. They understand very well that we all rise and fall together. Apparently the only thing these elderly millionaires want to do before they shuffle off their mortal coils is wreck that compact.

On Wisconsin

by digby

More Mojo from moi, on Wisconsin:

Others have written much more eloquently about the recall story in Wisconsin than I ever could. Rick Perlstein, for instance, a homeboy who wrote this epic piece just before the primary election in which he made the case for why we should all care about the governor’s race:

Here’s why: the voting in Wisconsin this spring “will be the first national test of the possibility of democracy in the Citizens United era,” writes Ruth Conniff of the Madison-based magazine The Progressive, referring to the historic Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited spending on polticial campaigns. If conservatives succeed in breaking public unions in Wisconsin, they will try the same thing everywhere, with mind-blowing seriousness. Already by this February, Walker, taking advantage of a loophole that allows donors to recall targets to blow through the state’s $10,000 contribution cap, had raised an astonishing $12.2 million dollars; then, by April, he had added $13.2 million more. […] So, $25 per vote from reactionary out-of-state donors versus three bucks and one million petition signatures from regular old Wisconsinites: which one of them will prevail in June will tell us what American democracy will look like – if it will look like democracy at all. It’s like one of those posters I saw in Madison last year said. It quoted the Gettysburg Address: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived or so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.” The picket sign added: “MADISON is that battlefield.”

And E.J. Dionne went right to the heart of the matter with this piece on Wednesday:

Walker is being challenged not because he pursued conservative policies but because Wisconsin has become the most glaring example of a new and genuinely alarming approach to politics on the right. It seeks to use incumbency to alter the rules and tilt the legal and electoral playing field decisively toward the interests of those in power.

It’s hard to understate just how important this race is to progressives. The polls this week range from a dead heat to Walker leading by up to six points. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

But in looking at the Marquette University poll just out yesterday, I couldn’t help but be somewhat surprised by this:

Read on.It’s not good. But it’s not bad either.

Blue America has dubbed June 5th Progressive Super Tuesday and we’re hoping like hell that our candidates all do well. (You can help, here.) And Wisconsin is the leading edge, the place where the latest progressive uprising began and where we’ve poured so much idealism and energy (while the other side has poured buckets of thousand dollar bills.) Keep your fingers crossed.

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The White Horse Prophesy

by digby

So the old GOP foreign policy guard is once more ineffectually mewling about the neocon influence on the party:

Colin Powell, who preceded Ms. Rice as Mr. Bush’s secretary of state but backed Mr. Obama in 2008, has expressed concerns about neoconservative sway within the Romney camp. Some foreign policy advisers for Mr. Romney, he said, “are quite far to the right.” He has also taken strong issue with Mr. Romney’s statement that Russia is our “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

“Come on, Mitt — think. It isn’t the case,” Mr. Powell said last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” adding that Mr. Romney’s comments had caught “a lot of heck from the more regular G.O.P. foreign affairs community.”

Oh really … (Ok, I know there’s nothing to this, but still, it kind of creeps you out a little bit…)

It’s Mormon lore, a story passed along by some old-timers about the importance of their faith and their country.

In the latter days, the story goes, the U.S. Constitution will hang by a thread and a Mormon will ride in on a metaphorical white horse to save it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says it does not accept the legend – commonly referred to as the “White Horse Prophecy” – as doctrine.
[…]
“You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed,” the diary entry quotes Smith as saying. “It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber.”

Not only will the Mormons save the Constitution, under the prediction, but the prophecy goes further, insinuating that Mormons will control the government.

“Power will be given to the White Horse to rebuke the nations afar off, and you obey it, for the laws go forth from Zion,” the prophecy says.

Here’s Wikipedia on the prophesy:

Smith reportedly said that “You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber…. I love the Constitution; it was made by the inspiration of God; and it will be preserved and saved by the efforts of the White Horse, and by the Red Horse who will combine in its defense.”

Smith additionally said, according to the diary, that the Mormons would send missionaries to “gather the honest in heart from among the Pale Horse, or people of the United States, to stand by the Constitution of the United States as it was given by the inspiration of God.” Roberts’ account quotes Smith as predicting numerous wars involving Great Britain, France, Russia, China, and other countries, and saying that the European nobility “knows that [Mormonism] is true, but it has not pomp enough, and grandeur and influence for them to yet embrace it.”

It must be noted that when Mitt was asked about this in 2007 he replied:

“I haven’t heard my name associated with it or anything of that nature,” Mitt Romney told The Salt Lake Tribune during an interview earlier this year. “That’s not official church doctrine. There are a lot of things that are speculation and discussion by church members and even church leaders that aren’t official church doctrine. I don’t put that at the heart of my religious belief.”

Well that’s certainly reassuring. Keep in mind that George W. Bush reportedly believed that he was called by God, so it’s not like it would be unprecedented.

Say, does anyone know where Glenn Beck stands on this?

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The biggest money problem of all

by digby

Here’s my latest primal scream, posted over at MoJo:

Sometimes I wonder if amidst all of our world-weary cynicism we are even cynical enough. It’s hard to wrap your mind around the immensity of the problem of money in politics, but it’s this part of it that still shocks and depresses me. Thomas Edsall wrote this column earlier this week:

Four years after the 2008 collapse, the finance industry has regained its dominant position in American politics. Perhaps the development of deepest significance is an absence: the failure of a powerful anti-Wall Street faction to emerge in either the House or the Senate. This is in contrast to the response to previous financial crises, when Congress enacted tough legislation—after the Savings and Loan implosion of the 1980s, for example, and more recently after the bankruptcy of Enron and WorldCom in the early 2000s.

Look at the current political environment this way: if Mitt Romney’s campaign and the Romney-supporting super PAC Restore Our Future were a public company, the financial services industry would have a controlling interest. President Obama, in turn, has been noticeably cautious in his critique of Wall Street, trying instead to focus on Romney’s former company, Bain Capital. Obama’s ambivalence about speaking out is a tacit victory for the industry.

Indeed it is. And you can see the results of such far-reaching influence when you read this amazing piece by Matt Taibbi.

Read on …

It goes on to discuss the Grand Bargain, “tax reform” and the inevitability of average Americans getting screwed if they do it.Very uplifting. It’ll brighten your day.

Here’s Taibbi on Spitzer’s show last night:

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White hot Koch intensity

by David Atkins

From the Politico article detailing conservative super PACs’ plans to spend over $1 billion to defeat Barack Obama comes this little nugget.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, proved its potency by spending nearly $50 million in the primaries. Now able to entice big donors with a neck-and-neck general election, the group is likely to meet its new goal of spending $100 million more.

And American Crossroads and the affiliated Crossroads GPS, the groups that Rove and Ed Gillespie helped conceive and raise cash for, are expected to ante up $300 million, giving the two-year-old organization one of the election’s loudest voices.

“The intensity on the right is white-hot,” said Steven Law, president of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. “We just can’t leave anything in the locker room. And there is a greater willingness to cooperate and share information among outside groups on the center-right.”

In targeted states, the groups’ activities will include TV, radio and digital advertising; voter-turnout work; mail and phone appeals; and absentee- and early-ballot drives.

Somebody is clearly being played for a fool here. If President Obama is just as good for the corporatist rich as Mitt Romney, then there’s an awful lot of misplaced white-hot anger out there, and a lot of wasted billionaire money. Or the alternative is also possible that there’s a great deal of difference between the two of them, and that America’s biggest billionaires aren’t exactly idiots.

Either way, it’s quite interesting. The anger of the GOP’s racist and misogynist base is understandable: they feel their world slipping away from them year by year, and the election of a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama frightens them terribly. They’re faced with cultural and demographic marginalization after centuries of dominance. That they would be white hot with anger is not surprising.

But the fury of the super rich conservatives is a little more baffling. After all, the stock market is doing well. Corporations are making record profits. Income inequality is at record highs, which is great for the luxury yacht crowd. It’s not as if the elite wealthy are suffering under Barack Obama. Even assuming that Mitt Romney would give them even more goodies, that should be a choice between two positives, not a situation demanding no-holds-barred warfare and intense existential rage.

The rage of the Left against the Bush Administration was understandable: with at least one trumped-up war on false pretexts, unprecedented politicization of government offices, rampant lawbreaking, massive new impositions on civil liberties, rollbacks of protections for the environment, women’s rights and the social safety net, the drowning of an entire American city, the attempt to privatize social security, and finally the deregulation-induced crashing of the world’s economy, it’s no surprise the Left felt its back was up against the wall. But the same can’t be said of Obama and the moneyed Right.

What is it, after all, that the Koch brothers could buy under a Romney regime that they can’t buy under an Obama presidency? What threat to them and their purchasing is the ability of teachers to collectively bargain in Wisconsin? Whence this fury?

The social scientist who can answer that question will have gone a long way toward solving what is wrong not with America, but with the inherent ugliness of human nature as well. My theory? Their preposterous wealth has given them all a real-world Gyges’ ring. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

They’re not necessarily inherently bad people. But I postulate that this is what will always happen when human beings are given far more power and privilege than any person’s inner morality can long resist.

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Rules!

by digby

I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I second that emotion:

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Fairnbalanced and unafraid — to shamelessly shill for Mitt Romney

by digby

Take a look at the new Mitt Romney ad:

Oh wait. The “I approved this message” is missing, isn’t it? That’s because it’s a Fox News clip, not a Romney ad:

It was a segment produced by a show on a network that bills itself as “fair and balanced.” The network has continued to push the limits of its outright promotion of conservative politicians and policies, and Fox & Friends has been at the forefront. The show regularly acts as the communications arm of the GOP, attacking Democrats, promoting Republicans, and broadcasting GOP talking points, sometimes word for word. Co-host Gretchen Carlson has repeatedly advised GOP candidates how to promote their ideas in order to defeat their Democrat opponents…

On the morning after Mitt Romney clinched enough delegates to officially claim the Republican presidential nomination, Fox has launched its first anti-Obama attack ad of the presidential campaign.

Too little too late

by digby

Here’s another Mojo offering:

This article in The New Yorker sounds the alarm about the economy not working in Obama’s favor for the November election. I really doubt the economy will have any beneficial effect for the president unless something dramatic happens. It’s been my personal observation that most people are about a year to 18 months behind the reality of economic performance—at least on an emotional level. (There is a lot of varying data and analysis on this, so take it for what it is.) But it’s getting late, and even if the economy were to dramatically improve in the next few months I doubt very seriously that anyone is going to be persuaded or change his or her vote because of it. This has been a painful slog and people have seen too many “green shoots” that turned brown to have any trust in numbers at this point.

Read on for the rest of the story.

I point out in the piece that this isn’t Morning in America, which I think may be the biggest surprise of all to the Obama campaign. Going back to the beginning, I think they were running a Reagan first term strategy — and it didn’t work.

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