Month: August 2012

According to Chuck Todd, the Dems are jealous of the GOP’s diversity

by digby

What the hell?

That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. They had to go to red state to find a Hispanic mayor? Really? Did they forget about the mayor of the second largest city in the US, in the heart of the biggest Blue State in the US, Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles?

Here’s a partial list of high profile Democratic Hispanic officials:

Joe Baca (U.S. Representative from California)

Xavier Becerra (U.S. Representative from California, former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Albert Bustamante (former U.S. Representative from Texas, former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Cruz Bustamante (former Lieutenant Governor of California and Speaker of the California State Assembly)

Linda Chavez-Thompson (former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, 2010 Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Texas)

Gery Chico (chairman of the Illinois State Board of Education)

Edward D. Garza (former mayor of San Antonio, TX)

Ron Gonzales (former mayor of San Jose, CA)

Charlie Gonzalez (U.S. Representative from Texas, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Raúl Grijalva (U.S. Representative from Arizona)

Luis Gutiérrez (U.S. Representative from Illinois)

Rubén Hinojosa (U.S. Representative from Texas)

Bob Menendez (U.S. Senator and former U.S. Representative from New Jersey, former chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and House Democratic Caucus)

Gloria Molina (chairwoman of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority)

Grace Napolitano (U.S. Representative from California, former chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Ed Pastor (U.S. Representative from Arizona, former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Silvestre Reyes (U.S. Representative from Texas, former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Bill Richardson (former Governor of New Mexico, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. Secretary of Energy, former U.S. Representative and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Lucille Roybal-Allard (U.S. Representative from California, former chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Ken Salazar (U.S. Secretary of the Interior, former U.S. Senator from Colorado, former Attorney General of Colorado)

Linda Sánchez (U.S. Representative from California)

Loretta Sánchez (U.S. Representative from California)

José Enrique Serrano (U.S. Representative from New York, former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Hilda Solis (U.S. Secretary of Labor, former U.S. Representative from California)

Esteban Edward Torres (former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, former U.S. Representative from California, former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus)

Nydia Velázquez (U.S. Representative from New York, former chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, first Puerto Rican woman to be elected to Congress)

Antonio Villaraigosa (Mayor of Los Angeles, former Speaker of the California State Assembly)

You’ll note that the Secretary of Labor is an Hispanic woman. The Secretary of the interior is an Hispanic man. Senator Bob Menendez is just as much an Hispanic Senator as Marco Rubio. What’s he talking about?

I have little doubt that they wanted a young Hispanic mayor from a Red State for all kinds of reasons. But it’s not because the Democrats couldn’t find any Hispanics from a Blue State to speak. That’s absurd.

Also too, diversity? There are no black elected Democratic officials? Perhaps we should introduce them to the Congressional black caucus or Governor Deval Patrick. Not to mention that guy in the White House.

And 12 of 17 women Senators are Democrats, 54 of the House’s 76 women are Democrats. Governors Beverly Purdue and Christine Gregoire are both Democrats.

Now it’s true that nearly every single Hispanic and African American Republican is an elected official or a member of the media. But there are certainly more elected minorities and women in the Democratic Party. I think Chuck may need a nap.

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Must see TV: Samantha Bee at the RNC

>Watch the delegates defend Mitt Romney’s right to choose. It’s a doozy:

This is exactly what I think of every time I hear these people drone on about freedom and liberty.

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“I’m not going to slash Medicaid to the point where disabled kids or seniors who are in nursing homes are basically uncared for.”

by digby

I wrote below about how the Republicans have decided this is a base election and they are saying whatever it takes to get their voters to the polls. The Obama campaign isn’t going that way. They have apparently decided that the road to victory can assume that the Democratic base has totally accepted austerity but is worried that the other side won’t ask millionaires to “pay a little bit more in taxes” to help mute the pain.

In any case, if you were expecting a spirited defense of the safety net in the face of the dystopian hellscape of the Romney-Ryan plan, think again:

In 2011, as part of the grand bargain that didn’t work, you put a lot on the table that was uncomfortable for Democrats — changes to Medicare, changes to Social Security, cuts to Medicaid. For your Democrats who are supporting you now, should they expect you to go no further than that in the second term? What is your message to them about what you’re willing to put on the table to get a deal with Republicans on entitlements?

My message to Democrats is the same message I’ve got to Republicans and independents, and that is, I want a balanced approach to deficit reduction that combines additional revenue, particularly from folks like me who can afford it, with prudent cuts on both the discretionary side and the mandatory side but that still allows us to make investments in the things we need to grow.

And that means I’m prepared to look at reforms in Medicaid. I’m prepared to look at smart reforms on Medicare. But there are things I won’t do, and this is part of the debate we’re having in this election. I do not think it is a good idea to set up Medicare as a voucher system in which seniors are spending up to $6,000 more out of pocket. That was the original proposal Congressman Ryan put forward. And there is still a strong impulse I think among some Republicans for that kind of approach.

I’m not going to slash Medicaid to the point where disabled kids or seniors who are in nursing homes are basically uncared for. We’re not going to violate the basic bargain that Social Security represents.

Now, the good news is, if you’re willing to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, then you can make modest reforms on entitlements, reduce some additional discretionary spending, achieve deficit reduction and still preserve Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid in ways that people can count on. The only reason that you would have to go further than that is if there’s no revenue whatsoever. And that’s a major argument that we’re having with the Republicans.

Well hell. I’m sure glad he isn’t willing to cut Medicaid to where the disabled aren’t “basically” cared for. And, you know, it’s good that he’s not going to violate the “basic bargain” that social security “represents.” Big relief.

Vote Obama/Biden 2012 — We won’t cut your benefits quite as much as the other guys.

If you want to know how we got here, this piece by Corey Robin is a must-read. I confess that I didn’t know a lot of this history of the deficit fetish and the tensions among the hawks about how to shrink government. It’s a fascinating piece, featuring a long analysis of the GOPs internal evolution from balanced budgets to “no new taxes” by Bruce Bartlett.

I’ll just excerpt this bit of it to illustrate the above point:

[T]hough Bartlett’s piece is about the GOP, it’s hard not to see how the Democrats have come to play the same role in the contemporary political order that Republicans once played under the New Deal.

Starting with Walter Mondale’s famous pledge in 1984 to raise taxes in order to bring down the deficit—one of Barlett’s footnotes reveals this delicious and disturbing anecdote: just after announcing his tax pledge at the DNC convention to wild applause, Mondale turned to Dan Rostenkowski and said, “Look at ‘em. We’re going to tax their ass off.”—Democrats have become the party of austerity.

Like Republicans of yore, the Democrats have repeatedly sought to reduce the debt and deficits, only to find themselves held hostage to the other side’s designs of depriving the welfare state of much needed cash.

Consider the two major presidential cycles of the last three decades: Reagan/Bush-Clinton and Bush-Obama.

During the 1980s, the Republicans cut taxes and ran up huge deficits. Then Bill Clinton came into office and announced his intention to reduce deficits. Anxious to appease Robert Rubin and the bond market, he abandoned whatever pretense of a progressive economic agenda he had set out during the campaign. He and the Democrats raised taxes and allowed government spending to decline dramatically as a percentage of GDP. By the end of his second term, Clinton had managed to generate a surplus—with the explicit purpose of not only reducing the debt but also shoring up Social Security—only to have the Bush White House squander that surplus through massive tax cuts and increased military spending.

When Barack Obama assumed office in 2008, he faced a similar conundrum as Clinton. The Bush Republicans had run up massive deficits and debt. Though the financial crisis (and his overwhelming victory) seemed to give Obama the warrant to spend—remember when we were all Keynesians again?—he was constrained by congressional Republicans and conservative elements in his own party, including the Wall Streeters who had been among his earliest supporters and happened to have a disproportionate influence in the White House. All of these forces seemed to worry more about the deficit than they did about the recession. The result, of course, was a much smaller stimulus package than many progressives had hoped for.

Then came the health care bill, which also has to be understood in the context of—indeed cannot be separated from—the politics of deficits and debt reduction. Throughout the health care negotiations, Obama took great pains to stress that his bill would not increase the deficit (CBO scores became as important to the national conversation as health care itself). Incredibly, this was an entirely Democratic, and self-imposed, constraint, which made the passage of health care reform more difficult than it might have been. As Jonathan Chait pointed out in 2010:

“Paygo” was a reform imposed by the 1990 budget agreement that required Congress to offset the cost of any new entitlement program or tax cuts with entitlement cuts or tax hikes. It was a significant factor in the decline of the deficit through the 1990s. Republicans hated it because it required them to offset the cost of tax cuts with either spending cuts or increases in other taxes, thereby making the trade-offs of tax cuts explicit. When they took control of Congress in 2001, Republicans ended the Paygo rule, which allowed them to pass a series of tax cuts along with a Medicare prescription drug benefit without any offsetting measures. The structural deficit exploded.

When Democrats recaptured Congress, they re-imposed pay-go rules, leaving an exception for extension of the Bush tax cuts for income under $250,000. That’s one reason why the Affordable Care Act had to be offset with hundreds of billions of dollars in politically-painful Medicare cuts, rather than financed solely through borrowing like the Medicare prescription drug law. Naturally, this made the Affordable Care Act much harder to pass through Congress as well as less popular — bills that hide their cost pass more quickly and with less complaint than bills that make make explicit who is going to pay for their costs.

Just as the White House and Congress were wrapping up their negotiations on the health care bill in the early months of 2010, Obama announced that the great challenge of the age was debt reduction. Though it’s often argued that Obama was pushed into that position by the Republican takeover of the House in November 2010, the fact is that he created the Bowles-Simpson Commission in February 2010, with the declared purpose of balancing the budget by 2015 and reducing the debt. The committee’s membership, chosen by Obama, included on the Democratic side deficit hawks like Max Baucus and on the Republican side…Paul Ryan.

At every step, then, of the two major initiatives of his administration—the stimulus and health care bills—Obama shouldered the load of debt and deficits. Whether that was by default or design remains the subject of much debate. But what’s not in dispute is that the debt has become the Democrats’ burden and/or vocation, which the Republicans are free to flout at will.
[…]
So here we are, entering a campaign with Obama begging the media to recognize him and the Democrats as the party of austerity—for being willing to make difficult and deep cuts to Medicare and Social Security—and Republicans happily calling for a constitutional amendment requiring congressional super majorities for tax increases.

I urge you to read the whole post. It is an important piece of this puzzle of how we got to a point at which the basic political argument has shrunk to small differences over how much to cut.

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We’re still just studying what they do

by digby

There are tons of people doing fact checks on Paul Ryan’s unprecedented mendacity in a convention acceptance speech so I’m not going to bother. The Romney campaign has clearly decided that this is a base turnout election and the way to win is to throw red meat at their followers, regardless of the truth. They have their own media, after all, so it doesn’t really matter if the other half of the country is screaming about their lies. Their voters won’t hear it, and even if they do they won’t believe it.

Perhaps this still explains the Republican strategy better than anything else:

“When we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

That’s not all that different from this:

Romney pollster Neil Newhouse: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

On a more prosaic level, some of this is a function of the massive amounts of information out there and the nature of the two party system. All it takes is for one side to tell a lie and the other side to call them out, for many people to retreat to their partisan corners. They don’t feel capable of sorting out the truth so they rely on their tribal identification.

Recall this from the other day:

“We think that the fact that the work requirement has been taken out of welfare is the wrong thing to do,” said Peggy Testa, attending a Tuesday rally near Pittsburgh for Romney running mate Rep. Paul Ryan.

When told that’s not actually what had happened, Testa replied: “At this point, [I] don’t know exactly what is true and what isn’t, OK? But what I do know is I trust the Romney-Ryan ticket, and I do not trust Obama.”

Another Romney supporter at the Ryan rally said it’s really tough to know what’s true anymore.

“I think we always have to look at who the fact checkers are,” Ken Mohn said. “There’s lots of … groups that purport themselves to be neutral, nonpartisan, but often are [partisan].”

So, we have political leaders who have decided they no longer need to be moored to reality and followers who are too confused by the complex world we live in to sort out the truth from fiction. This campaign is the natural result.

And the joke’s on us, folks. Does anyone remember this?

Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, summarizes complaints about the cultural malady best thought of as relativism the belief that, in any situation, truthfulness derives from the political relationships perceived by specific ideologies.

In each of six chapters, Cheney considers a particular aspect of relativism and the damage it has done: so-called multiculturalism in primary and secondary education; political correctness in the universities; deconstructionism in the scholarship of the humanities; radical feminist legal theory in legal education and jurisprudence; politicized exaggeration and falsification in art, popular culture, and psychotherapy; and so-called new (i.e., politically slanted) news in the mainstream press.

She wrote that book in 1995. Just as they adopted the totalitarian methods of the communists they once loathed, they have adopted the post-modern relativism of the pointy-headed intellectuals they once accused of destroying Western civilization. The more they hate a thing, it seems, the more they actually admire it.

Update: You have to appreciate the way they are defending Paul Ryan’s lies today.

A libertarian can lead himself to water, but he can’t be forced to drink

by David Atkins

I suppose most people can read a story like this and feel sorry for this man. I can’t bring myself to do so:

Perhaps no one knows the story of Port Orange, Fla., better than Allen Green. He has lived in Port Orange, just south of Daytona Beach, for 73 years. And for many of those years, he has been the city’s mayor. Allen has a lot of memories of the Port Orange of his youth.

A few feet from the banks of the Halifax River, he says there was a cluster of buildings — many of them were oyster houses. “Oysters were everything. They built roadways out of them. There was a lot of shrimpers. There were fishermen. That type of people, working-class people,” he said.

Today, the population of Port Orange is 50 times bigger than it was when Green was a kid. And in many ways, it is emblematic of small cities across Florida that embraced growth and development over the last decade. In the case of Port Orange, much of its growth happened after a string of hurricanes hit the region in 2004 and 2005.

What were things like around here then?

“Before the rockets started falling? Everybody got greedy. After the hurricanes, everybody. You had that insurance money flowing. You had the economy flowing and they bought overpriced land, overpriced buildings, condominiums. Everybody had multiple homes,” said Green.

A big real estate bubble enabled by a focus on flash-in-the-pan asset growth, the elimination of Glass Steagall and other deregulatory moves happened, followed by the inevitable collapse. Big developments went belly up. The city got into fiscal straits.

But it’s not just the deregulated boom that hit this oyster town: it was anti-tax ideology, too.

“We’re one of the very few states in the country that does not have an income tax,” said Ken Small, technical services manager at the Florida League of Cities.

That means cities and counties pay their bills with taxes they collect on property. That worked well-enough when home values were high, but since the housing bubble burst, municipalities have been struggling. Nearly half of all homeowners in this county owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth.

“Cities and counties have gone through tremendous budget cutting,” said Small. “And many of those cities are showing their tax base is still shrinking.”

Last year, Port Orange collected a third less money in property taxes than it did five years earlier — $3.5 million less. Green says what has made the tax problem even worse are all the exemptions written into Florida law.

“Nothing against veterans, they get a veteran’s exemption,” said Green.

There’s also an exemption if your permanent residence in Florida, and if you’re a senior. And in this community, a quarter of the population qualifies. “If you do exemption, exemption, exemption, they’re not paying their way,” added Green.

Green estimates 35 percent of Port Orange pays no taxes to the city.

“That is not right. There is a cost associated with the quality of life, and you should pay your fair share of it,” he said.

So, deregulated boom combined with no taxes. A perfect libertarian storm. But wait, there’s more!

Like many other mayors in Florida, Green faces tough decisions — how to pay for city services, salaries for 400 full-time workers, etc. Green says he always wanted to see Port Orange grow, but nowhere near as fast as it did. He believes the town has lost its sense of community. Big boxes are coming in, he said, adding that he’s not a fan.

The changes remind Green of a song he likes by country singer Alan Jackson called “Little Man.” Some of the songs lyrics include: “And now the court square is just a set of streets. The people go around, but they don’t think about the little man that built this town, before the big money shut him down, and killed the little man.”

OK, let’s sum again: big deregulation bubble pops, leaves low-tax base town broke, with big business big boxes having driven out all the moms and pops. Sounds familiar. Sounds obvious. Sounds like a political problem that anyone with half a brain could figure out the answer to. And yet…

Might the upcoming presidential election help solve some of Port Orange’s economic woes? For Green, it’s not likley. He says the only election he cares about this year already happened — Green just won a fifth term. The last presidential candidate he voted for was Ronald Reagan. He backed Ron Paul in the primaries, and is not enthusiastic about either President Obama or Mitt Romney. In many ways, Green says development was the economy or Port Orange, and he doesn’t think either candidate can help the city find an alternative.

Oh, he’s right that neither candidate is likely to help his town. Obama won’t do much to rescue it. Romney would help destroy it utterly. But Ron Paul? He’d be worse, if that’s even possible, than Mitt Romney

So no. I can’t feel sorry for this guy. Not in the least. If even people who are looking the problems with modern American conservative economics squarely in the face, when that economic system has destroyed their home, their town and everything they’ve spent their life living for, there’s just no help for them. We just have to leave them behind, stop trying to even reach them and build a better future without them.

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The “Subsidization” Queen

by digby

You know, I have taken a boatload of shit over the past few years for suggesting that many Americans might still be harboring some racial animus and that the election of Obama was forcing it to the surface. I hate to say “I told you so” but I told you so.

This article by Ron Fournier — no friend to liberals — spells it out in minute detail. It starts off like this:

At Linda’s Place at 9 Mile Road and Harper, where $2.99 gets you two eggs, hash browns, bacon, and an honest conversation about racial politics, I chatted with Detroit firefighter Dave Miller and his pal, contractor Benson Brundage. As it turned out, that breakfast-table conversation helps explain why (and how) Mitt Romney is playing the race card with his patently false welfare ad.

“Let’s talk about your polling,” Benson said. He grabbed from my hand an Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey showing that middle-class blacks and Hispanics are far more optimistic about their children’s future than are whites of the same economic status. “What do you think the unemployment rate is among blacks? In Detroit, it’s probably 40 percent. If the unemployment rate is that high, why is it that they are so optimistic about their future and the future of their children?”

Benson paused, heard no reply, and answered his own question.

“Subsidization.”

There it is. The Macomb County buzz word for welfare, a synonym that rests on the tongues of the white middle class like sour milk. Men like Miller and Benson don’t use the N-word and they don’t hate (disclosure: I grew up with Miller, who now lives in Macomb County): For a five-figure salary and overtime, Miller risks his life fighting fires in a black neighborhood just south of 8 Mile Road. But Benson casually overestimated the black unemployment rate in Detroit by more than 10 percentage points, and both he and Miller will talk your ear off about welfare cheats.

“It’s a generational apathy,” Miller said, “and they keep getting more and more (apathetic) because they don’t have to work. If they sleep all day and free money …”

“ … Comes in the mail,” Benson said.

“… not in the mail anymore,” Miller said, “It’s in a magic card they can swipe.”
They poked at their egg yolks until Miller broke the silence. “I feel like a fool for not jumping on that shit and getting some (welfare) myself,” Miller said. “But I couldn’t sleep at night.”

And that attitude is exactly what the Romney campaign is exploiting with their welfare ad and that’s because their polling is showing that it works:

Before explaining why these tactics work (and why Romney’s team knows, or should know, they are playing the race card), let’s quickly deal with this fact: The ad is wrong. As countless impartial fact-checkers have noted, the Obama administration memo cited by the Romney team actually gives states flexibility to find better ways of getting welfare recipients into jobs.

Why ignore fact-checkers? First, internal GOP polling and focus groups offer convincing evidence that the welfare ad is hurting Obama. Second, the welfare issue, generally speaking, triggers anger in white blue-collar voters that is easily directed toward Democrats. This information comes from senior GOP strategists who have worked both for President Bush and Romney. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

Furthermore, a senior GOP pollster said he has shared with the Romney camp surveys showing that white working-class voters who backed Obama in 2008 have moved to Romney in recent weeks “almost certainly because of the welfare ad. We’re talking a (percentage) point or two, but that could be significant.”

I quoted Time’s Michael Scherer saying that the only way to stop these lies is for their own to call them out. Well, in many ways that’s what’s happened here. Fournier is a conservative journalist. The McCain campaign tried to hire him.

Never let it be said that Mitt Romney isn’t a real Republican. He has shown that he’s as willing as George W. Bush was when they staged their South Carolina whisper campaign against John McCain’s “black child” in 2000 and Bush Sr’s Willie Horton and Ronald Reagan’s Philadelphia Mississippi speech. Hell, he’s right up there with Jesse Helms’ famous “hands” ad.

But I am struck by how obvious it is. Lee Atwater wasn’t exactly correct when he made this famous prediction:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

Perhaps “subsidization” is more abstract than “ni**er, ni**er”, true. But Romney’s welfare trope has been around since Reagan’s day and we’re 30 years on. (Read the article to see its racism fully deconstructed.) Obviously, the election of the first black president has brought some of this back up to the surface, but the crudeness and the total abandonment of any adherence to the truth in the details wasn’t supposed to work after all this time.

But it’s clear that this bigotry still exists in the United States. It’s as American as apple pie.

h/t to Corey Robin

I urge you to read the whole Fournier article. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read by him.

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Mitt Romney’s Debt to Hypocrisy

by David Atkins

The incomparable Matt Taibbi gets to the heart of one of the most outrageous hypocrisies of the 2012 campaign:

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you’ll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It’s almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney’s gambit isn’t simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it’s dusted itself off, it’s had a shave and a shoeshine, and it’s back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street’s greed revolution. He’s not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He’s not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He’s been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let’s-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let’s-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of “creative destruction,” and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America’s rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation’s wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He’s Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we’ll all end up paying for the acquisition.

And that’s just a small section of a much lengthier and brilliant article. Click over and take a look. If Jon Stewart is the voice of a generation, Taibbi is its conscience: smart enough to know what’s wrong with the system, courageous enough to call it what is it no matter whose feelings get hurt, and savvy enough to know there’s still a big difference between electing the likes of Obama and Romney in spite of it all.

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No, Mitt didn’t say it. But the true head of the GOP did.

by digby

A truthful gaffe:

Yahoo News fired its Washington bureau chief on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after he was caught on an open microphone saying that Mitt Romney and his wife, at the GOP convention in Florida while a hurricane was approaching Louisiana, were “happy to have a party with black people drowning.”

Company spokeswoman Anne Espiritu said Wednesday that David Chalian’s remark was inappropriate and does not represent Yahoo’s views.

Ok. Except there are very prominent Republicans who are having a grand old time with the prospect:

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Okay, folks, it’s a moment of truth. We are mere hours away now from Tropical Storm Isaac, which everybody is desperately hoping becomes a hurricane. I can’t believe this. They are desperately hoping that it becomes a hurricane. It’s the Democrats’ wet dream that this thing hit New Orleans. So, you know me. My middle name is Solutions. I have some ideas for the Republicans. How to deal with the tropical storm, slash, hurricane hitting New Orleans.

The first thing we do is offer to send 500 bus drivers to New Orleans, paid for by us, to make sure that the buses that were not used by the Democrat mayor during Hurricane Katrina will be used to evacuate people should it become necessary. The second thing that I think the Republicans ought to do is send bags of money instead of sand. Bags full of money to shore up the levees in New Orleans. This would accomplish many things. A, it would show our compassion. B, we could have Romney’s five sons who CNN last night asked, “What’s it like to be rich as sin,” or whatever. They did. Piers Morgan asked Romney’s sons, (paraphrasing) “What’s it like to be stinking rich?” So we have Romney’s five sons deliver the bags of money to shore up the levees.

Now, this will accomplish much. It will show our compassion, and it will do something else. Once we publicize that we have sent 500 bags of money — well, whatever number of bags, bags filled with money to shore up the levees, what will happen? The poor of New Orleans will storm the levees and steal the bags, thereby putting themselves at risk for the eventual flooding that will happen once they remove the bags of money. And that way the Republicans can get rid of even more Democrats in Louisiana and shore up the state for themselves. How about those two ideas, folks? Am I not thinking or am I thinking?

Now, it’s true that Mitt and Rush aren’t the same and it’s wrong to convict Romney of guilt by association. Chalian has apologized and he’s been fired.

Too little too late?

A federal judge on Wednesday said he was prepared to grant a permanent injunction that would block controversial restrictions on voter registration groups passed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) last year.

Federal Judge Robert L. Hinkle had earlier put a temporary hold on the measure, declaring that it put “harsh and impractical” restrictions on civic groups focused on registering new voters. In his latest order, Hinkle stated that he intends to permanently block the law, pending the case’s dismissal from a Court of Appeals. The plaintiffs and the state of Florida have reportedly agreed not to appeal Hinkle’s ruling.

“This order is a decisive victory for Florida voters,” said Lee Rowland of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, one of the attorneys who argued the case for the plaintiffs, in a statement. “The Florida legislature has tried repeatedly to stifle access to voter registration opportunities, and once again a federal court has stopped them in their tracks. We are thrilled that voter registration groups can now get back to what they do best — expanding our democracy.”

Since a new set of state voting laws went into effect more than a year ago, the number of new Democrats registering in Florida has all but disappeared, according to a Times-Union review.

During the 13 months beginning July 1 the year before elections in 2004 and 2008, registered Democrats increased by an average of 209,425 voters. From 2011 to this year, that number was 11,365.

In Duval County alone there were about 13,000 new Democrats, meaning the rest of the state lost them.

Over that same time, the number of registered Republicans increased by 128,039, topping the average of 103,555 during the past two presidential cycles.

Overall, Democrats still hold a 445,794 statewide registration advantage.

On July 1, 2011, a sweeping election law overhaul passed by the Legislature put new restrictions on groups that hold voter registration drives. Among the changes, groups were required to file new voter registration applications with election officials within 48 hours, instead of the old 10 days, or face a penalty.

Groups said the new rules made it impossible to comply. As a result, many got out of the registration game until a federal judge ruled in their favor at the end of May, 11 months later.

“It has without a doubt hurt registration numbers,” said Deirdre Macnab, president of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Florida. “It really gummed up the works and made it harder for Floridians to get registered.”

Macnab said Democrats may have seen a bigger impact because registration groups often target areas that lean Democratic.

“We try to get to areas that don’t have easy access to traditional means of getting registered,” she said. “That’s places like college campuses, senior centers and low-income communities.”

Proponents argued the rules were needed to root out voter fraud.

“Increasing the accountability of those who collect voter registrations helps protect the rights of new voter registrants,” said Secretary of State Ken Detzner, even though local election officials say that hasn’t been a problem.

This was inevitable when the Democrats did nothing about electoral reform after the 200 debacle and then turned on their own during and after the 2008 election cycle by allowing voter registration efforts to be demonized with crude propaganda. Maybe they couldn’t have stopped it, but they didn’t make much of an effort to counter it and now the chickens have come home to roost. Failing to register virtually any new voters since 2010 in the state of Florida could prove to be a fatal error.

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CNN is fighting the perception of being biased against racist thugs

by digby

Greg Sargent reports on the bizarre fact that CNN is refusing to do any real reporting on the racial incident at the RNC yesterday involving one of its employees:

As you’ve surely heard by now, two GOP convention attendees were ejected from the festivities last night after throwing nuts at a black CNN camera-woman. The words “this is how we feed animals” were uttered.The incident was first tweeted by David Shuster and confirmed by TPM. The GOP put out a statement condemning the incident as “deplorable,” which is good. CNN put out its own terse statement last night confirming the bare minimum about the affair.

But as my Post colleague Erik Wemple noted last night, the question is whether CNN, which presumably knows all the details about the incident, will treat this as a news story, and report in full detail what happened.The answer, so far, appears to be No. CNN has since posted a brief item on the incident, but here’s what it does not tell you: The identity of the target of the nut attack or of the alleged nut hurlers. Whoever wrote the CNN item did not say whether it made any attempt to interview the target — or to identify the nut throwers.

As Greg goes on to point out, this is likely because CNN is afraid of appearing biased and it doesn’t want to be part of the story. And this is despite the context of Romney campaign’s Jesse helms level welfare strategy and vote suppression effort.

It is an act of cowardice on their part brought about, I presume, by the Republican hissy fits during the primary campaign against any news network that dared to bring up race. That sort of playing the refs has always been very successful — they’re so aggressive and hostile that it makes normal people naturally recoil. But CNN is a professional news network. If they won’t even tell a story about some Republican cretins who launched a racial attack on one of their own employees, they’re pretty worthless.

They probably would have cut to commercial when Dan Rather was punched in the stomach by Richard Daley’s goons at the 1968 Democratic convention. I certainly don’t think you’d hear Wolf Blitzer say, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan,” as Walter Cronkite did. That would be biased against the thugs.

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