Month: June 2012

Empowerment Kitsch

I’m sorry, there’s something terribly wrong with him

by digby

Via Jezebel, I heard that the Romney boys were on Conan talking about their dad’s hilarious “pranks.”

The Romney sons were alarmingly blithe about their dad’s physical intimidation-based sense of humor last night, recalling with affection how he loves shoving their faces into food under the guise that they should smell it and the one time that their dad, the Presidential hopeful, wrote “HELP” on the bottom of his friend’s shoes before the friend got married so that when the friend kneeled in front of the church, the whole congregation saw the word HELP on his shoes oh my god I’m wiping tears of joy and hilarity from my eyes. The most hilarious part is that Mitt is no longer friends with that guy! You know a prank’s good when it causes a friendship to end.

Although Mittens loves dishing it out, as you could probably guess, he’s not excellent at taking it. When his son Josh attempted to prank his dad by grabbing his arm as he reached for a light switch leading into a dark and scary basement, the former Massachusetts governor tackled his son and asked, repeatedly, “Was it worth it? Was it worth it?!”

Ick.

Why do I have the feeling that Mitt’s first order of business will be a full reinstatement of the torture regime?

When IUD means Heil Hitler

by digby

Just the other day Ross Douthat strongly implied that progressives were Nazi eugenecists at heart. (As Ed Kilgore quipped, “[Douthat proposes that] the ‘progressive’ interest in genetic engineering, bred into the DNA of Planned Parenthood, loaded with racism and other hateful assumptions, was chased into the shadows by association with Nazism—but now it’s time has come!”)

The Twilight of David Brooks

by David Atkins

Via Crooked Timber, this deeply ironic column last week from David Brooks displays the singular lack of self-awareness for which Brooks has become legendary:

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.

In his memoir, “At Ease,” Eisenhower delivered the following advice: “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” Ike slowly mastered the art of leadership by becoming a superb apprentice.

To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. Those skills are required for good monument building, too.

Chris Hayes might have something to say about why we have lost faith in those institutional elites.

The fact that Brooks has been horribly, astonishingly, unequivocally and ludicrously wrong about almost every major issue of the decade and still manages to keep a job as New York Times columnist is precisely why few people trust institutions like the New York Times. If a political analyst and prognosticator were as consistently wrong as Brooks in earlier eras, there would usually have been accountability for it.

Leaders are only worth following when they get things right. Unfortunately, few of the people who actually get things right are in positions of leadership today.

If Brooks wants a nation where people trust institutional authority again, perhaps the first and easiest thing he should do is resign, put down the pen, and do some genuine soul searching about why he’s been so wrong over the years, and why the Times still saw fit to pay him for his scribblings.

Update: See also driftglass‘ excellent take on the same Brooks column.

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Friday Duck Blogging

by digby

Via Grist:

Taizhou lies 190 miles south of Shanghai and has 6 million people, putting its size at “somewhere in between Los Angeles and New York City” on a U.S. scale and “just some town” on a Chinese one. One day recently, though, the streets were filled not with cars, scooters, or pedestrians, but with ducks. Thousands upon thousands of ducks:

I hope they’re a long way from Beijing (if you know what I mean …)

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Whatever happened to “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?”

by digby

I haven’t followed the Fast and Furious pseudo scandal all that closely because it seemed so unlikely to me that it could be the one to metastasize into a Village feeding frenzy. Why? Well, here’s a concise description of the case:

Fast and Furious, which started in 2009, was the misbegotten gun-trafficking operation in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed weapons to “walk,” or flow to Mexican drug cartels in the hopes of busting higher-ups in the organization. As many as 2,000 guns were lost in the botched sting and two of them turned up at the sight of a shootout that cost the life of a U.S. border agent. The operation was run out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Phoenix.

It honestly never occurred to me that the right could turn this one into a cause celebre. After all, haven’t we been told for decades that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?” Of all the hissy fits they might stage, freaking out over the origin of some guns just slays me. This has to be the only crime in history in which these right wing gun fetishists give a damn about the fact that guns got in the hands of criminals and someone was killed.

These are the same people who cheered this, after all:

Ashcroft ordered that all government lists — including voter registration, immigration and driver’s license lists — be checked for links to terrorists. But there was one list Ashcroft did not want used – the gun purchasers background check.

Every person who buys a gun from a dealer must pass an instant criminal background check. It’s called the National Instant Criminal Background check system or NICS. The records of those checks are kept by the FBI. After September 11th, the ATF wanted to review those records to see if any suspected terrorists had bought guns.

They wanted to know whether any of them had slipped through the system. The Department of Justice stepped in and stopped the FBI in their tracks. The Department of Justice said no, you can’t do that. You can’t use the records of approved gun purchasers in connection with a criminal investigation.

Attorney General John Ashcroft told the FBI to stop checking the NICS list…That mirrors the position of the National Rifle Association, which insists that the data collected when people buy guns is an invasion of privacy.

Even in the immediate wake of 9/11,
the thought of terrorists getting their hands on guns didn’t bother them. These are not people who normally lose sleep over gun violence of any kind.

Now, they have floated a rationale for their extremely unusual exception to the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people rule” but it’s so stupid it’s hard to imagine that even Darrell Issa would believe it:

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Now let me tell you what’s going on here. You know the purpose of Fast and Furious, one of the purposes was, to get those guns across the border in the hands of Mexican drug cartels, have crimes committed, and then say we gotta do something about the Second Amendment. How do American guns get to Mexico? Well we got them there because we gave them. That was never supposed to be discovered.

Now the Second Amendment argument or rationale here goes to the motive for doing what Holder and the [Department of Justice] did. They wanted controversy around guns, they wanted American guns in Mexico. But the problem, they engaged in reckless tactics.

And the pretext for allowing the guns to walk across the border was to be able later to trace them to crime scenes and then build a case against the Mexican drug cartels. And all experienced agents who looked at this thought that it was insane, because, a) there wouldn’t be crime scenes unless we walked the guns across the border, and used in crimes, so we created the crimes by making the guns available, therefore were contributing to violent criminality.

And even if you traced the guns to the crime scenes that you create you wouldn’t cinch the case against these particular cartels because you wouldn’t know for sure enough information to nail them. This was a disaster. And now that people are trying to get to the bottom of it, a stonewall is taking place. And this is just part of it that you heard sound bites from yesterday between Holder and Chaffetz and Darrell Issa.

That’s right. Allowing drug cartels to get their hands on American weapons was an elaborate scheme to confiscate Americans’ guns.

Meanwhile, in the congress you’ve got the nation’s greatest braintrusts on the case:

Issa’s close colleague, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who has been equally zealous on Fast and Furious, was blunt about his goal. “The only think I want out of this is somebody’s scalp that approved this,” Grassley said on Fox News earlier this month. “They should just have to get out of government and be held responsible . . . because their decisions led to the death of Terry.”

I’ll be looking forward to Grassley’s call for the heads of those who provided the guns to the next campus or workplace mass killer.

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Citizens United is just the beginning

by David Atkins

John Harwood at the New York Times reminds us that the insane and demoralizing amount of money being spent in this presidential cycle is only partly the result of the Citizens United decision:

Citizens United “is an effective rhetorical tool” for opponents of the decision, said Robert Bauer, Mr. Obama’s former White House Counsel. But he plays down its importance in the creation of Super PACs that followed the SpeechNow.org decision.

“People have lumped a lot of issues together under the banner of Citizens United,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who is active on campaign finance issues. Still, he argues that the 2010 decision “changed the psychology” of campaign finance to produce an “anything-goes atmosphere.”

But the largest sums have been raised through the regulated system that now drives the campaign schedules of Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, as well as those of candidates for the House and Senate. Mr. Obama set the standard with the $745 million he raised in 2008 after opting not to participate in the post-Watergate public financing system, under which candidates received taxpayer funds in return for accepting limits on their spending.

Because he remained within that system, Mr. Obama’s 2008 opponent John McCain could spend only the $84 million allocated by the system during the general election. Mr. Obama raised $179 million, or more than twice that amount, for the same period, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The public financing system had already eroded amid reluctance of taxpayers to contribute and the increasing ability of candidates to raise large sums through the Internet and other means. But Mr. Obama’s success signals that Mr. McCain will probably prove to have been the last major party nominee who remained within the system…

Some effects of the Supreme Court’s recent rulings may become apparent later. In combination, the Citizens United and SpeechNow cases permitted corporations as well as individuals to donate to Super PACs. Disclosures so far indicate that, while privately held corporations have taken advantage of this, publicly traded companies have not.

“Super PACs have not spent a nickel of Fortune 500 money because they haven’t gotten any,” said Jan Baran, a Republican campaign finance lawyer. Wary of offending shareholders, he explained, executives of those companies have “an overwhelming sense of caution about funding this type of advertising.”

But he noted that might change by November.

In addition to blaming Citizens United for the current shape of campaign finance, Mr. Wertheimer blames Mr. Obama, because he has not pushed for an overhaul of the system.

“However anyone thinks we got here, we now have a system that is going to result in the same kind of widespread, destructive government corruption” that Watergate produced, Mr. Wertheimer said. “The only test for a federal officeholder or candidate is what they are really prepared to do to end this corrupt campaign finance system.”

Another in a series of missed opportunities.

One would think that politicians would want to change this system. Even for those of minimal moral fiber who are advantaged by the system, it’s an awful way to live for most normal people. Politicians from assemblymembers on up spend at least half of every single working day fundraising, whether on the phone or at rubber chicken dinners. Part of why so many politicians seem so ignorant of so much on the policy front is that they quite literally don’t have time to investigate policy as deeply as they should, because so much of every day is spent trying to raise money. I suppose that works for some people, but it means that only people of a certain personality type willing and able to thrive in that environment can do it. Many of them are good people, but the very nature of the job makes putting good people into office that much harder. I sure as heck don’t want to do it. While I would love to craft and debate policy and meet with voters and advocacy groups , I would bristle at the fundraiser circuit and the hours spent on the phone with donors.

People who look at politics from the outside often have this vision of sleazy politicians taking big payoffs and living high on the hog from corporate and interest money, taking cushy lobbyist jobs when they retire. While there is some of that, those of us who work closely with them know that most of the time politicians lead pretty miserable lives, constantly traveling from their home district to the state or national capital, never having time for their families or friends, and constantly under lobbying pressure from all sides. They tend to want to stay elected once they get elected, even trying to hold their seats until they die–which means that the motivation for getting elected is not exactly about the cushy lobbying job on the other side. Many politicians really are in it for the right reasons, or for ego, or as a way of helping to do favors for their friends or favored industries.

None of which means that they shouldn’t want to do something to make their own lives a little easier. But the problem is that once politicians get elected, they feel comfortable with the system that got them there. They’re nervous and loathe to change it.

The Citizens United ruling gives us the opportunity to tackle not just the problems with undisclosed Super PACs but also the entire mess of campaign finance law. It may take a Constitutional Amendment to get it done, which would be difficult but not necessarily impossible.

It’s just a matter of political will–including from the politicians who have to put up with this system in the first place.

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So, the allegedly liberal, “pro-fatherhood”, anti- marriage equality David Blankenhorn has decided that gay marriage is a-ok now. In fact, he now wants to recruit gay people to his first principle: stigmatizing single mothers and slut-shaming women:

Instead of fighting gay marriage, I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same. For example, once we accept gay marriage, might we also agree that marrying before having children is a vital cultural value that all of us should do more to embrace? Can we agree that, for all lovers who want their love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation? Can we discuss whether both gays and straight people should think twice before denying children born through artificial reproductive technology the right to know and be known by their biological parents?

Will this strategy work? I don’t know. But I hope to find out.

Let’s hope it doesn’t.

Since marriage is essentially a conservative institution originally designed to protect property rights and keep women in their proper place, I always figured that at least a few members of the right wing would ultimately wake up and realize that gay marriage could be used to their advantage. Blankenhorn is nicely providing that opening.

Here’s Corey Robin once more on that subject:

Historically, the conservative has sought to forestall the march of democracy in both the public and the private spheres, on the assumption that advances in the one necessarily spur advances in the other. Still, the more profound and prophetic stance on the right has been to cede the field of the public, if he must, but stand fast in the private. Allow men and women to become democratic citizens of the state; make sure they remain feudal subjects in the family, the factory, and the field.

And nobody should be all that surprised about this coming from him. He’s always thought that the real problem is the selfish women who insist they know how to raise kids. He was only worried about gay marriage making that situation worse. Now he can get back to the real business at hand.

Basically, we’re fucked

This is yet another example of the right being so overwhelmingly myopic that you just feel paralyzed. Which is the point I guess.

Resistance is futile

by digby

I think Seth Michaels is on to something here:

Yesterday, a perceptive piece by Buzzfeed political reporters McKay Coppins and Zeke Miller laid bare a breathtakingly cynical strategy by the Romney campaign and top Republican-leaning superPACs: to win the election by a sheer, exhausting flood of money.

“There’s no way they’ll be able to keep up. Our SuperPACs are our Star Wars, if you will,” said a Republican operative close to the Romney campaign…In fact, on Wednesday Obama officials told reporters that all-in, they expected to be outspent three-to-one by Romney and his Republican allies by Election Day.

Coppins and Miller call this the “Cold War strategy,” a reference to how the arms race of the 1980s crippled the Soviet Union. It’s a sharply observed piece, and it’s hard to argue that this isn’t the intended strategy, especially after a quick look at the actual money involved. We’re seeing multi-million-dollar fundraising commitments from billionaire donors like Harold Simmons, Sheldon Adelson, and David Koch as well as from major corporate groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And, of course, some of the money going into this strategy is anonymous and untraceable.

So that raises another question: if this is really the strategy Romney and his allies are going with, why would they tip their hand and explain it? It could be that they think the story won’t get much public attention, or it could be that they feel confident that it’s hard to counter. But there’s a deeper reason, and it’s a kind of deliberate psychological warfare. They want people to know their strategy because they want to discourage and demoralize their opponents. The shameless, arrogant insistence that they can and will buy the election is kind of the point.

That deep strategy is going to be something you’ll see all year. Whether it’s aimed at people who work in progressive politics, at activists, or at voters themselves, the ethically-loathsome goal is the same: to make people feel hopeless and powerless, like they can’t make a difference and shouldn’t bother trying. Read between the lines of op-eds and TV ads from Karl Rove and his allies and you’ll see the real message: your participation isn’t going to do any good. And the number of ads you’re going to see is going to be a tactic in and of itself: the kind of money we’re talking about is enough to completely flood the airwaves, and the effect of seeing an exhausting number of negative, misleading ads is going to be downright numbing—in a way that will make the political process seem just awful.

It’s also an extension of the “we’re winning so why bother even voting” strategy that was a favorite of Karl Rove’s during the Bush campaigns (which is itself an attempt to force the bandwagon effect.)

I believe that Michaels is right, that they are telegraphing their intention to smother the Democrats with millions of dollars. And if what I hear in activist circles is correct, it’s working out just great already. People are very depressed and disillusioned anyway, the economy sucks and the big money is the knock out punch. Of course it isn’t just the money, it’s the press disseminating storylines that imply that progressives are sunk and writing columns that are factually incorrect. They’re helping spin the threat.

This election is in some ways a grand experiment in the power of big bucks. The good news is that progressives have managed to pull out some primary wins so far despite being outspent by establishment Dems and their well-heeled friends. That proves nothing, of course. The Big Money Boys are putting most of their golden eggs in the GOP basket. It’s hard to see that how it won’t just be overkill in the presidential election, since the president will have plenty of money to fight back. (There are only so many ads you can see in a day.) But in the down-ticket races it’s going to be interesting to see if they can just overwhelm the congressional Democrats. On the other hand, if all politics is local, it’s just possible they may overplay their hand. We’ll know in November.

The worst part of all this is the further inculcation of conservative propaganda with this bombardment of right wing messaging. It’s one thing to lose elections. It’s quite another to have the entire population brainwashed more quickly and efficiently than they’ve ever been before. You have to wonder if people will even get a chance to hear the other side — or, worse, if the other side will simply capitulate and ride the storyline the Big Money Boys are selling.

Here’s a little factoid: The Camber of Commerce is only playing in one congressional election so far — Alan Grayson in Florida. I’m sure it won’t be the last, but it’s fairly clear who they think is their most important target.

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