Month: June 2012

It is time for you to stop all of your sobbing

by digby

I love it when a politician just lets it all hang out and says what he really believes:

During the Q&A portion of the event, [Senate candidate]Hovde expressed his support for lowering the corporate tax rate, tackling the country’s spending problems and lowering the national debt.

Then, pointing to a reporter in the audience, Hovde said he would love to see the press stop covering sad stories about low-income individuals who can’t get benefits and start covering issues like the deficit more frequently.

“I see a reporter here,” he said. “I just pray that you start writing about these issues. I just pray. Stop always writing about, ‘Oh, the person couldn’t get, you know, their food stamps or this or that.’ You know, I saw something the other day — it’s like, another sob story, and I’m like, ‘But what about what’s happening to the country and the country as a whole?’ That’s going to devastate everybody.”

Yeah, what a bunch of whiners worrying about food when they should be worried about bondholders and their potential profits. It’s Un-American, I tells you. Why it’s downright class war!

(Needless to say, the press is doing the opposite pf what he claims, writing far more fear mongering tales about the deficit boogeyman than individual stories of the depression. But this fellow surely wants all of them stopped.)

Meanwhile, here’s The Kinks. I’m dedicating it to the Wall Street bankers. Nobody sobs harder than they do:

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Romney’s “secret plan to balance the budget” tests press objectivity

by David Atkins

Via Greg Sargent at the Plum Line, behold the mendacity of Mitt Romney in an interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS defending his proposed $5 trillion in tax cuts:

SCHIEFFER: You haven’t been bashful about telling us you want to cut taxes. When are you going to tell us where you’re going to get the revenue? Which of the deductions are you going to be willing to eliminate? Which of the tax credits are you going to — when are you going to be able to tell us that?

ROMNEY: Well, we’ll go through that process with Congress as to which of all the different deductions and the exemptions —

SCHIEFFER: But do you have an ideas now, like the home mortgage interest deduction, you know, the various ones?

ROMNEY: Well Simpson Bowles went though a process of saying how they would be able to reach a setting where they had actually under their proposal even more revenue, with lower rates. So, mathematically it’s been proved to be possible: We can have lower rates, as I propose, that creates more growth, and we can limit deductions and exemptions.

A few questions. Is Mitt lying about his intended policies, saying whatever it takes to secure the support of his economic libertarian base and donors while knowing well that his budget has little chance of getting through the Senate? Does he really believe that $5 trillion in tax cuts combined with austerity and eliminating unnamed exemptions will spur economic growth? Or does he know how much damage it will cause, and simply doesn’t care so long as the obscenely wealthy get an even greater share of the pie?

As Sargent says:

Romney went on to pledge, as he has in the past, that under his plan, the wealthy would continue to pay the same share of the tax burden as they do now. “I’m not looking to reduce the burden paid by the wealthiest,” he said. In other words, the disproportionally larger tax cut the wealthy would get from the across-the-board cut in rates he’s proposing would be offset by closing deductions and loopholes the rich currently enjoy. But asked twice by Schieffer how exactly he would do this, Romney refused to say, beyond noting that this has been mathematically proven to be possible. And in his first reply above, he confirmed that the details would be worked out with Congress when he is president — which is to say, not during the campaign.

As you may recall, Romney made big news when he was overheard at a private fundraiser revealing to donors a few of the specific ways he’d pay for his massive tax cuts. Since then, details have been in short supply. And today, Romney seemed to confirm that he sees no need to reveal those details until he becomes president.

The message, in a nutshell: No, the rich won’t make out better than everyone else under my plan. No need to say how this would work in practice. Just trust me!

The Romney 2012 campaign will be a big test for the national news media. Is it possible to stonewall and lie shamelessly throughout an entire presidential election campaign without being called on it in a significantly damaging way? It’s the “secret plan to end the war”, but with $5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich offset by a secret plan to balance the budget.

The Obama campaign has responded:

Mitt Romney has made clear that — for political reasons — he’s not going to disclose how he would pay for his $5 trillion tax cuts. So he’s either secretly raising taxes on a whole segment of the population he won’t disclose, making even more devastating cuts to programs essential to the middle class like education or exploding the deficit by 5 trillion dollars.

Nice. But the Obama campaign shouldn’t have to say that as if it were a partisan attack. It’s an observable fact that should be reported as an uncontroversial truth by an objective press.

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What’s good for everything that ails you? Firepower

by digby

What most depressing about this dishonest drivel is the fact that a whole lot of people believe it. In fact, it’s been a huge talking point on the right for a very long time.

It is, of course, nonsense.The gun control laws existed before the Nazis and the Nazis simply exempted themselves from the laws. Perhaps Joe the plumber doesn’t know that the Nazis were popular and most of the people who would have had guns would have been on their side. (Plus the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the Luftwaffe were very well armed, as you probably know.) But then neither did Condoleeza Rice who famously said that the US had liberated the Germans from Hitler.

But hey, if only the European Jews had privately owned some airplanes and bombs and tanks and such, they could have fought them all off, I’m sure. We should all start stocking up.

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Loving the Daddy State

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

This afternoon the House of Representatives is considering H.R. 2578, a package of public lands bills that contains a provision from Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) giving U.S. Customs and Border Protection authority to shut down any economic or recreational activity within 100 miles of the northern and southern U.S. borders if deemed necessary for securing them.

The section also rolls back more than 30 environmental and public health laws within the 100-mile zone including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Park Service Organic Act that helps protect and preserve national parks (see full list here).

Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) dubbed the provision a “drone zone” bill and explained at a press conference today that:

It essentially will be a national sacrifice zone where our rights, our liberties, and our environment can be sacrificed for the sake of an ideological anti-immigrant, anti-environment agenda. Make no mistake, this isn’t a bill that actually addresses immigration issues.

Uhm, have these people ever heard of places named Seattle, San Diego, El Paso, Laredo, Niagra Falls and hundreds of other towns and cities within a hundred miles of the border? WTF?

It’s always interesting to see these people who hate the federal “nanny” state forcing things like health care “down their throats” but then reveal themselves to be the “daddy” state which seeks to exert central control through police and military power.

But hey, I’m sure we don’t have to worry. As long as everyone within 100 miles of the US border behaves, they have nothing to worry about. They’re only after the bad people, not Real Americans. Nothing to see here …

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Blue America chat: help 50 million Americans come out of the closet

by digby

Every once in a while a righteous cause rises to the surface of our political consciousness at the very moment the right politician is ready to lead it. It doesn’t happen very often, but it’s happening right now. That cause is the fight against the national right wing assault on women, and the leader is Darcy Burner, running for congress in the newly drawn WA-01.

A week ago, at the Netroots Nation, Darcy gave a rousing Keynote speech to several thousand attendees. She presented them with a plan for progressive power and asked that women, in particular, empower themselves and inspire those around them to do the same. She reminded the crowd that 1/3 of all adult women will have an abortion in their lifetimes.

Then she asked all the women in the audience who’d had abortions to stand. And they did. One by one at first, and finally all at once, women throughout that huge crowd stood up. That’s not an easy thing to do in this culture, even among friends. The right has made it a dishonorable, solitary act, borne in silence, subject to fear and social stigma.

So Darcy took the next step: she asked all of those who supported those women to stand up. Everyone in the room came to their feet. There was no sustained applause and no celebration, just a simple public acknowledgement of solidarity and sincere support for the women in all of our lives who have made this choice. I’ve never seen anything like that.

To me is the essence of leadership — a candidate for office taking a stand on one of the most contentious issues of our time, reminding the people of what they have in common, empowering those who need to be empowered and asking for solidarity from their friends and neighbors. That’s what Darcy does. That’s why we need her fighting for us in Congress.

Naturally, she is being vilified for it, which I’m sure she expected from the retrograde right wing. But I doubt that she expected it from her so-called progressive primary opponents who are staging a whisper campaign in the district as well, alleging that she led “cheers” for abortion and portraying her as an extremist for illustrating that abortion is not a disgraceful choice made by a small number of irresponsible women but rather a common, everyday part of the lives of our mothers, daughters, friends and wives. The local press is eating it up.

Darcy is a leader on many issues, from the war in Afghanistan to economic fairness. But on this, she has done something that no other Democrat has done — she has attempted to redefine the battle lines on women’s reproductive rights. And until the Democratic Party follows her lead, women’s rights will continue to be whittled away in bits and pieces all over the country until one day we will find that more than 50 million of our people will have been denied the right to decide their own futures, take care of their families and otherwise be full and equal citizens.

Please join us at Crooks and Liars for a live chat with Darcy about this issue, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. And please donate what you can to her campaign.

If we let them destroy her, it will send a message to all other progressive politicians that they must not challenge the prevailing, cowardly orthodoxy on abortion rights.

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A new invasion from the east

by digby

Uh oh. A new invasion:

For the first time, the influx of Asians moving to the U.S. has surpassed that of Hispanics, reflecting a slowdown in illegal immigration while American employers increase their demand for high-skilled workers.

An expansive study by the Pew Research Center details what it describes as “the rise of Asian-Americans,” a highly diverse and fast-growing group making up nearly 6 percent of the U.S. population. Mostly foreign-born and naturalized citizens, their numbers have been boosted by increases in visas granted to specialized workers and to wealthy investors as the U.S. economy becomes driven less by manufacturing and more by technology.

“Too often the policy debates on immigration fixate on just one part – illegal immigration,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California-Riverside and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “U.S. immigration is more diverse and broader than that, with policy that needs to focus also on high-skilled workers.”

“With net migration from Mexico now at zero, the role of Asian-Americans has become more important,” he said.

Somehow, I don’t get the feeling that the usual xenophobes will any problem switching their attention from the “illegals” to the job stealing “yellow peril”. China bashing is already in vogue and as we’ve seen from their resurrection of the words “socialist and communist” I just have a feeling that they’ll have no trouble accessing all kinds of racist canards from the past.

Keep a couple of things in mind as you watch this unfold. It was only 15 years or so ago that they managed to create a yellow-peril scandal out of whole cloth. (A scandal, by the way, that destroyed an innocent scientist’s career.) And also remember that the neocon view on China has always been well … war. Obviously, there are major economic considerations but they tend to take the long view of such things and have no problem ginning up the kind of crisis needed to make people support all kinds of self-destructive actions. I think they probably believe they could make this work.

Anyway, I’ve long thought that the only way they could get out of the electoral bind they’ve put themselves in with Hispanics is by finding someone else for their neanderthals to hate. This could fit the bill.

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Sympathy for the devil

by digby

I suppose I expect this sort of rationalization from the more fundamentalist religious types but I have to confess (no pun intended)that this surprised me:

In a rare interview with the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, accused the media of “intentionally ignoring” the good things the Church does while dwelling on scandals.

“Many journalists are playing the game of trying to imitate Dan Brown,” said Bertone, referring to the best-selling author of novels such as “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons”.

“They (journalists) continue to invent fairytales and repeat legends,” he said.

The scandal involves the leak of sensitive documents, including letters written to Pope Benedict whose butler, Paolo Gabriel, was arrested last month after a large number of stolen documents were found in his home.

Bertone said the media were full of “pettiness and lies spread in these days,” adding that “outside Italy people have a hard time trying to understand the vehemence of some Italian newspapers”.

He said the Church was “an unequivocal reference point for countless people and institutions around the world” and added: “This is why there is an attempt to destabilize it”.

Bertone branded as false the image of the Vatican as a place of intrigue and power struggles, saying: “The truth is that there is an attempt to sow division that comes from the Devil”.

The Vatican as a place of intrigue and power struggles? Where in the world would anyone come up with something like that? It’s all fiction, written by … Satan. There’s no other possible explanation.

I’ve never followed this sort of thing all that closely, but I guess I thought the Catholic hierarchy was more … worldly? I honestly didn’t realize they were still flogging the Devil as the cause of all their woes. My bad. It does explain a lot though, I must admit.

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Alberto the Quaint suddenly thinks that presidents have limits

by digby

You know, sometimes I think Graydon Carter’s fatuous post 9/11 declaration was right — irony is dead. It must be. And it’s come back in the bodies of Republican zombies:

Following President Obama‘s new immigration policy announcement, former George W. Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales voiced some concern about the means through which the president accomplished his goal. In issuing an executive order, he said, Obama may have violated his oath of office.

“To halt through executive order the deportation of some undocumented immigrants looks like a political calculation to win Hispanic votes,” Gonzales said at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference on Saturday, “and subjects him to criticism that he is violating his oath of office by selectively failing to enforce the law.”

I’m sure I don’t have to remind anyone of Alberto Gonzales’ opinions on presidential power when he was working for George W. Bush. Let’s just say he didn’t see a lot of limits.

But you have to admit that it takes a lot of guts for a guy who condoned torture and indefinite detention and was forced to resign from office for trying to rig votes for the GOP to come forward with an opinion as to executive power. He’s just the little engine that could, I guess.

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Why bipartisanship is dead

by David Atkins

Much derision has already been piled on Sally Quinn’s laughable essay decrying the diminished influence of the Georgetown cocktail party circuit as the reason for the decline of bipartisanship in Washington. My brother Dante Atkins and Jonathan Chait both have elegant critiques of her piece. Here’s Chait:

The bipartisanship cargo cult in Washington is a rather sad tribe of people that laments the decline of bipartisanship, fails to grasp the larger historic forces that made bipartisanship appear and then disappear, and concludes that the problem is the lack of dinner parties. This is, believe it or not, an extremely common belief in our capital city. Seriously. Hardly a week goes by without somebody blaming partisan polarization on the lack of proper dinner parties or, in an occasional twist, lunch.

Quinn’s essay follows the general contours of this genre, but she adds her own uniquely mortifying touches. Her mourning of the decline of the Georgetown dinner party sweeps together such disparate trends as the appearance of a Kardashian at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Citizens United, hard times at newspapers, and the appearance on the scene of “25-year-old bloggers.” The result of all these baffling developments is that Quinn now has to have dinner with actual friends and not just people using each other for access to power:

It’s hard to understand why the issue of disappearing bipartisanship is so baffling for most people. There are many structural reasons for it including increased transparency, coordination of interest groups, communications technology that allows for more effective and aggressive lobbying, and an ever-increasing influence of money in politics.

But by far the biggest is that the bipartisanship of the mid-20th century was a special artifact of the uneasy alliance between traditional urban liberal tribes and religious Dixiecratic populists in the South and Midwest. As I’ve written before, FDR was quite able to aggressively take on the financial and corporate interests of his time with a broad coalition. But he couldn’t pass an anti-lynching law without destroying his support base, and he was all too willing to institute the Japanese internment camps. In other words, FDR could take on the power of big money with ease, but he couldn’t take on the power of Big Racism.

The result of this dynamic was an uneasy bipartisanship between otherwise competing interests. Men like Strom Thurmond would vote for “socialist” policies as long as only whites got the benefits.

The advent of the Civil Rights movement marked the beginning of the end of bipartisanship. As tax dollars were increasingly seen as going toward non-whites, Dixiecrats became Republicans and allies of big business interests. Similar dynamics occurred with anti-Hispanic sentiment in the West. All the religious fervor that had been reserved for progressive social justice issues by the “Progressive” movement in the late 19th century (which included, by the way, quite conservative ideas like the prohibition of alcohol: late 19th century progressives would have strongly opposed modern liberals on issues like marijuana legalization alone…) flipped to socially conservative issues. The women’s equality movement only added further fuel to the socially conservative patriarchal fire.

At this point it was easy and natural for the racist culture warriors to align completely with the corporatists. The need for uneasy alliances disappeared. The rationale for men like Strom Thurmond to support New Deal policies and chat about them at cozy cocktail parties disappeared. The battle lines were set. The competing interest groups became neatly and sharply aligned, with only Ron Paul style libertarians having issues that cross party lines. If there’s any hope for bipartisan coalitions, it lies in Ron Paul voters. But there’s frankly not enough of them, and their ideas make the Washington cocktail crowd deeply uncomfortable.

Ironically, insofar as “bipartisanship” exists, it lies within the Democratic coalition itself. With the entire South and much of the Midwest lost for generations, Democrats were forced to turn to the traditional Republican base of financial elites like the Rockefellers in New York. Neither FDR nor Obama Democrats have been able to stand up to Wall Street money and the racist South simultaneously. FDR’s choice was to hold the South while taking on the power of big money. With America making the proper moral choice to begin the end of racial and sex-based discrimination in the 1960s Democrats lost the racist and sexist vote, leaving them little choice but to stand up to the racists while creating a compromise coalition with the power of big money (particularly in a post-Powell Memo world.)

Nowadays, “bipartisanship” has come to mean in media parlance the small group of technocratic neoliberal elites who come to agreement on pro-austerity policies that misguidedly cut wages and social services in the interest of reinflating asset bubbles. It’s the Simpson-Bowles “consensus.” The problem is that while those ideas are quite popular among comfortable elites in Washington and newspaper pundits making six-figure salaries, they’re distinctly unpopular with most Americans. They also don’t work to do anything but destroy economies, as the failed austerity experiments in Europe are showing. Which means that “bipartisanship” on that front is both a fool’s errand and a deeply destructive feature to be avoided.

Bipartisanship is frankly dead. And there’s nothing that Sally Quinn, Tom Friedman, Linda Parks or any of the other bipartisan fetishists out there can do about it now. It will only come back when society has made enough progress against racism and sexism to allow it to return.

There’s been a lot written about Wisconsin, the death (or rebirth) of the union movement, locals vs nationals and the general problem with recalls as a political tool. But Rick Perlstein’s analysis strikes me as the one that gets right to the heart of what went wrong. Guess what? It’s the same thing that always goes wrong: