Month: August 2012

Flying their wealth flag proudly

by digby

Ok, this is just getting ridiculous now:

Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign toasted its top donors Wednesday aboard a 150-foot yacht flying the flag of the Cayman Islands.

The exclusive event, hosted by a Florida developer on his yacht “Cracker Bay,” was one of a dozen exclusive events meant to nurture those who have raised more than $1 million for Romney’s bid.

“I think it’s ironic they do this aboard a yacht that doesn’t even pay its taxes,” said a woman who lives aboard a much smaller boat moored at the St. Petersburg Municipal Marina.

Romney’s Cayman-based investments have come under fire during the campaign.
[…]
The Cracker Bay is owned by Gary Morse, developer of the Villages retirement community. Companies controlled by Morse gave nearly $1 million to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future superPAC. Registered in the Caymans, the Cracker Bay has an impressive art collection and can seat 30 for dinner.

Romney to date has declined to identify the names of his top “bundlers” — those who gather checks from scores of donors on the candidate’s behalf.

“He is the first nominee in 12 years to withhold these names,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political money on the website opensecrets.org.

“These are the most important insiders,” she said. “The public needs to know who these people are because thy are the one’s who stand to gain the most from a Romney presidency.”

Her group and others have gathered more than 20,000 signatures from people calling on Romney to name his top bundlers.

Campaign officials at the event declined comment.”I think Gov. Romney is going to do what he has to to follow the law,” Gov. McDonnell told ABC News.

Among those attending was Mel Sembler, a former top supporter of President George W. Bush and Charlie Moncrief, an oil executive from Texas, and his wife Kit. Other guests covered up their nametags as they exited for waiting busses and SUVs to take them to their next event.

This is shaping up to be one of the most astonishing candidacies we’ve seen in a very long time. The 1% had managed to get one of their own nominated to be the president and he’s not really trying to hide it. Not that it was necessary. Most candidates would do their bidding. But in their current arrogant delusion, having power isn’t enough. Neither is it enough for them to have all they need to gather more and more of the world’s wealth for themselves. They want to be validated. So they are pulling out all the stops for their own Galtish Batman and his Randian Robin.

For the best article you’re going to read on just what a scam — a full blown con game — the Romney candidacy is, read this latest from Taibbi:

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.

Yes he is.

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Paul Ryan: “Yes”, progressivism is a cancer

by digby

Today is Paul Ryan day at the RNC and it’s oh so exciting. The Republican dreamboat’s big national debut is bound to make the Villagers all breathless. And thecorwd is going to go wild:

Here’s my personal favorite Ryan post, which I think says a lot about the man, the company he keeps

some people think he’s brilliant, no doubt about it:

GLENN BECK: Nice to meet you, sir. Tell me, tell me your thoughts on progressivism.

PAUL RYAN: Right. What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in there on Primus Magazine, you can get them on my Facebook page, what I’ve been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it’s really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.

GLENN: I love you.

PAUL RYAN: So people can actually see what this ideology means and where it’s going to lead us and how it attacks the American idea.

GLENN: Okay. Hang on just a second. I ‑‑ did you see my speech at CPAC?

PAUL RYAN: I’ve read it. I didn’t see it. I’ve read it, a transcript of it.

GLENN: And I think we’re saying the same thing. I call it ‑‑

PAUL RYAN: We are saying the same thing.

GLENN: It’s a cancer.

PAUL RYAN: Exactly. Look, I come from ‑‑ I’m calling you from Janesville, Wisconsin where I’m born and raised.

GLENN: Holy cow.

PAUL RYAN: Where we raise our family, 35 miles from Madison. I grew up hearing about this stuff. This stuff came from these German intellectuals to Madison‑University of Wisconsin and sort of out there from the beginning of the last century. So this is something we are familiar with where I come from. It never sat right with me.

And as I grew up, I learned more about the founders and reading the Austrians and others that this is really a cancer because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature and turns it on its head and says, no, no, no, no, no, they come from government, and we here in government are here to give you your rights and therefore ration, redistribute and regulate your rights. It’s a complete affront of the whole idea of this country and that is to me what we as conservatives, or classical liberals if you want to get technical.

GLENN: Thank you.

“If you want to get technical.” He’s real smart, huh? Just like the other randroids I met when I was freshman in college and ran into again later when I first started writing about politics online. They were the same people, they’d just never intellectually progressed beyond their first big insight, which was that being selfish was a virtue.

Here’s a little intro from the Obama campaign:

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Don’t Get Mad. Get Even.

by David Atkins

I have to admit that I have nothing to say about the goings on at the GOP’s big fluffy convention. That’s because I haven’t seen any part of it or read much about it. As I type this, I just finished chairing a 5-hour meeting of Ventura Democrats figuring out, among other things, how to spend our money and resources to help win victories in elections including a House seat pickup in CA26, and two State Senate pickups that would give Democrats a crucial 2/3 supermajority in that chamber.

Four or eight years ago I would have been spending tonight sitting on my couch, avoiding the urge to throw things at the television as I watched a parade of soulless hucksters lie and preen for an audience of moral cretins.

Now I don’t get mad. I get even. And it feels much, much more satisfying.

I’m sure I’ll get lots of feedback from the holier-than-thous insisting that all politics is a sham, that the parties are broken, and that they never watched a moment of the GOP convention and haven’t watched it in decades. Or from the people who insist that they’re morally superior for not owning a television. And so be it.

But for the rest of you out there, may I offer a piece of simple advice: don’t get mad. Get even. These people want to hand over our democracy to the ultra-wealthy and play to the basest instincts of the basest people. We can stop them.

If you have a contested race in your neighborhood, volunteer. Turn off the TV and head out to the campaign or local Dem field office.

And if you don’t have a contested race in your neighborhood, contact the campaign of your favorite progressive legislator from outside your district. Barack Obama is always seeking organizers, of course, but if the President is too conservative for your tastes there are always more progressive options. See if the Elizabeth Warren campaign needs help. If you want to limit the role of money in politics, you could help Julia Brownley, who authored the DISCLOSE/Clean Money act to force big donors to disclose themselves at the end of political ads, and who is up against a hard-right Tea Partier named Tony Strickland. Give Chris Murphy a hand against the odious Linda McMahon.

And that says nothing of the full slate of retrograde ballot propositions all over the map, from 2/3 revenue requirements in Michigan to anti-labor initiatives in California and elsewhere.

There are literally hundreds of races out there desperate for people to help them. Most people always assume that there are other people who will do these things. But when you get up and close to it, it’s increasingly obvious how limited the manpower to fight these battles really is. Every single person willing to step up to the plate and actually talk to voters can make a huge difference. And it’s really, really satisfying.

So this year, don’t listen to the lies and get angry. Get even. Get out there and beat these people who so richly deserve it. And then hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire to stop them from backsliding every single day after November 6th.

But first, please do get out there and get even. You’ll feel better when you do.

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“We were robbed”

by digby

Oh my:

The Paul delegates were blocked in an unusual set of challenges during earlier party proceedings, and Tuesday they tried to reverse the decision on the convention floor. When they failed despite what sounded like fierce support from many other delegates, they erupted. “We were robbed,” they chanted, among other high-volume protests.

As Paul’s Maine supporters left — many emotional and visibly upset — they made it clear they felt betrayed.

These people should have realized long before now that the RNC does not allow men in ponytails inside their Big Tent.

The truth is that they gamed the system and the system gamed them right back, neither side giving a moment’s thought to the spirit of democracy. This disrespect for the democratic principle of one person one vote pretty much defines all factions of the Republican Party.

Update:

Oh Jesus.

The RonPaulites, whose furious devotion to a single idea have made them the Ellen Jamesians of the right, were protesting a decision by RNC officials not to seat members of the Maine delegation, which was split between Paul and Romney supporters following rule changes made just prior to the convention. There were energetic shouts of “Aye!” and “Nay!” as a Puerto Rican party functionary—Zoraida Fonalledas, the chairwoman of the Committee on Permanent Organization—took her turn at the main-stage lectern. As she began speaking in her accented English, some in the crowd started shouting “USA! USA!”

The chanting carried on for nearly a minute while most of the other delegates and the media stood by in stunned silence. The Puerto Rican correspondent turned to me and asked, “Is this happening?” I said I honestly didn’t know what was happening—it was astonishing to see all the brittle work of narrative construction that is a modern political convention suddenly crack before our eyes. None of us could quite believe what we were seeing: A sea of twentysomething bowties and cowboy hats morphing into frat bros apparently shrieking over (or at) a Latina. RNC chairman Reince Priebus quickly stepped up and asked for order and respect for the speaker, suggesting that, yeah, what we had just seen might well have been an ugly outburst of nativism.

The Id has been unleashed. And it isn’t pretty.

QOTD: Rush Limbaugh

by digby

From Media Matters:

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?

It’s been a while since a racist wingnut with a platform came right out and suggested sending black voters to their deaths, but it was only a matter of time.

And yes, I understand that it’s supposed to be a jokes. But jokes are also supposed to be funny.

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Drugs ‘n terrorism: it’s all good

by digby

This is more or less already happening, but the Republicans are the first Party, I believe, to make it explicit. From the 2012 GOP Platform:

The war on drugs and the war on terror have become a single enterprise. We salute our allies in this fight, especially the people of Mexico and Colombia. We propose a unified effort on crime and terrorism to coordinate intelligence and enforcement among our regional allies, as well as military-to-military training and intelligence sharing with Mexico, whose people are bearing the brunt of the drug cartels’ savage assault.

Sadly, as I said, it’s already happening. The New York Times wrote about this last month:

The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

In both regions, American officials are responding to fears that crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling — like Mexico and Spain — have prompted traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further corrupting and destabilizing them.

The aggressive response by the United States is also a sign of how greater attention and resources have turned to efforts to fight drugs as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down.

“We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and counternarcotics issues,” said Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of the D.E.A.’s Europe, Asia and Africa section. “It’s a place that we need to get ahead of — we’re already behind the curve in some ways, and we need to catch up.”

That could have come right out of the RNC Platform.

Does any of this sound like a good idea to you? One’s imagination runs wild. After all, since 9/11 we have constructed a massive counter-terrorism apparatus, both at home and abroad. Imagine the implications of using it for the drug war.

When all this was happening over the last decade, there were a few of us asking what in the hell was going to keep the government from using its new police powers (and constitutional abuses) in the realm of ordinary criminal behavior. It would appear that the answer is nothing. They’re just doing it.

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Going straight for the base, auto emissions edition

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent digs up an interesting tidbit:

The other big news of the day is the Obama administration’s announcement of new fuel efficiency standards designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce our dependence on foreign oil:

The Obama administration announced strict new fuel-efficiency vehicle standards Tuesday, requiring the U.S. auto fleet to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

The new policy has the support of the auto industry and environmentalists alike — auto executives are claiming their customers want these standards. But Mitt Romney’s campaign is denouncing the new move as “extreme,” arguing that any savings at the pump will be offset by the costs of the new technology to consumers.

I’m not sure what the Romney campaign thinks is “extreme” about these new standards, so it isn’t easy to gauge whether the public agrees. But as luck would have it, the Post did a big poll with Kaiser not long ago that dug deeply into Americans’ attitudes towards government. And the question on this topic is instructive:

Do you think the federal government should or should not regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to reduce global warming?

Should be regulated: 73

Should not be regulated: 22

Independents favor regulation by 73-22; even Republicans favor it, 61-35. This gets even more interesting when you break this down into what the Post calls “political party clusters,” a more fine-grained way to look at opinion than the usual party I.D. breakdown offers. (This was possible because of the study’s unusually large sample size.)

It turns out that literally every ideological group, even within the GOP, favors this sort of regulation in large numbers, except for one: Tea Partyers.

Remember how Mitt was supposed to the be the “moderate” candidate? The one Tea Partiers didn’t like? Right.

The Republicans are a political party completely in hock to the plutocrats, racist misogynists, and the sorts of authoritarian jerks who are happy to pay through the nose for gas guzzling vehicles whose capabilities they don’t use, but that help them compensate for the decline they feel in their manhood due to all the uppity “others” all around them.

It doesn’t matter which figurehead gets stuck at the top at that fetid mess. The result will always be rotten.

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More kooks with guns

by digby

…this time trained and paid by the taxpayers:

Four Army soldiers based in southeast Georgia killed a former comrade and his girlfriend to protect an anarchist militia group they formed that stockpiled assault weapons and plotted a range of anti-government attacks, prosecutors told a judge Monday.

Prosecutors in rural Long County, near the sprawling Army post Fort Stewart, said the militia group of active and former U.S. military members spent at least $87,000 buying guns and bomb components. They allege the group was serious enough to kill two people – former soldier Michael Roark and his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany York – by shooting them in the woods last December in order to keep its plans secret.

I don’t know what their politics were, but let’s just say it’s unlikely they were left wing anarchists.

If there is no evidence of voter fraud, they’ll just have to manufacture some

by digby

Considering my earlier post about post-truth politics and the culture of mendacity, here’s a report to curl your hair from Think Progress:

As it is more likely that a person will be struck by lightning than that they will commit in-person voter fraud, proponents of voter ID laws have had trouble coming up with enough fraud examples to justify potentially disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of low-income and minority voters. True the Vote is hoping to change that by policing elections with untrained poll watchers heavily recruited from Tea Party events. These poll watchers will record common irregularities like mismatched addresses, typos, or dual registration errors as “fraud” to create the false impression that voting restrictions are justified:

As one strategy, the group buys voter rolls from states and counties, then disseminates the lists to thousands of largely unsupervised volunteers, who are urged to submit to election officials names from the rolls that may be improperly registered.[…] True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as [elections coordinator] Ouren told a gathering in Houston.

In 2010, the group was able to get a list of voter registration data from Republican Harris County registrar Leo Vasquez, who reportedly refused the same to the Democratic Party, for which the party sued. When the King Street Patriots submitted to him their list of fraudulent actions they claimed to see at the polls, Vasquez accepted them without verification and held a press conference with Engelbrecht asserting Harris County polls were “under a systemic and organized attack.”

As ThinkProgress has documented, these purge lists are often riddled with errors and frequently disenfranchise legitimate voters. But volunteer voter purges are just one part of the multi-pronged strategy True the Vote will use, in the courts and at the polls, to influence the November election — and, if they can, every election to come.

It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation wrote this in January of 2011:

The second thing that must be a Tea Party priority is stopping voter fraud. Liberal hero and man voted most likely to be an ACLU board member, Joseph Stalin, once said, “it’s not who votes that counts, it is who counts the votes.”

In this past election, the left made a concerted effort at voter fraud. This fraud effected elections. Now, in many areas, for a conservative to win, not only do they have to have a majority, they have to have a fraud proof majority.

At Tea Party Nation we have received a lot of information about what happened and will be making some of the news public in the next few weeks. What is very disturbing was a pattern of “test marketing” certain types of fraud. Certain types of voter fraud that we saw in limited amounts in 2010, we will see across the country in 2012.

The Tea Party movement must united across the country and work to eliminate voter fraud. In some states it will be easy. In socialist states like California or corrupt, I mean Democrat controlled states, like Illinois, it will be very tough. If we are going to win, we must. If we do not eliminate liberal voter fraud, our votes won’t matter because they will not be counted.

Stopping voter fraud is going to be a major project for Tea Party Nation this year.

In Texas, there is a group that is doing an outstanding job of fighting voter fraud. The group is called True the Vote. What they do can be taken and duplicated in almost any state or locality. On January 15th, they are going to have a conference in Houston, TX. They are going to talk about what they did and how you can work in your community to prevent voter fraud. The cost is $50. If want more information, visit their website, Kingstreetpatriots.org.

Stopping voter fraud must be a top priority for us this year. The left knows it cannot win free and fair elections. They can only win by cheating. We must stop them now or Chicago style elections will become the norm for the United States. We must stop this fraud, while we still can.

These people did a test run in Wisconsin and it was fruitful:

Wisconsin’s election to recall Gov. Scott Walker (R) was the most recent test drive for True the Vote’s vote suppression project. During the June recall election, a voting hotline received numerous calls from college students claiming True the Vote “poll observers” challenged their right to vote. These poll observers exploited a provision in the state’s new GOP-sponsored voter ID law to claim it was illegal for students home for the summer to vote in local precincts if they had been home for less than 28 days. Others were hassled for proof of residency.

Minority voters in Wisconsin also reported harassment by True the Vote’s white poll watchers, who took notes and watched as the predominantly black line of voters cast their ballots. When Walker survived the recall election, True the Vote congratulated their poll watchers on “a victory of their own making.”

Yes, these people do live in an alternate universe, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of doing what they set out to do, which is disrupt voting and possibly construct a false narrative of voter fraud with the help of compliant election officials.

Hopefully they are more bluster than anything else, but keep in mind that all these groups have friends in very high places.

Genuflecting to the ones who hate you

by digby

I guess Rick Warren is no longer a member of the Democratic club, but luckily they found someone just as horrifying. They picked this guy to give the closing prayer at the DNC. The man who just recently said this:

Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York took his case against the Affordable Care Act’s new rule requiring insurers and employers to provide preventive care services — including contraception — at no additional cost to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. The Catholic Church is fighting the requirement against the tide of public opinion and despite being specifically exempt from providing birth control to its members.

Dolan pulled no punches, however, going so far as to imply that the requirement would undermine the “American enterprise” and spread “secularism” throughout the nation:

DOLAN: You’re a better historian than I am Bill, you know that every great movement in — in American history has been driven by people of religious conviction. And if we duct tape the churches — I’m just not talking about the Catholic Church — if we duct tape the role of religion and the churches and morally convince people in the marketplace that’s going to lead to a huge deficit a huge void.

And there are many people who want to fill it up, namely a new religion called secularism, ok, which — which would be as doctrinaire and would consider itself as infallible as they caricature the other religions doing.

So to — to see — to see that morally-driven religiously-convinced people want to exercise their political responsibility, I think that is not only at the heart of biblical religion, it is at the heart of American enterprise.

Unsurprisingly, he will deliver the closing prayer at the RNC as well, perfectly symbolizing the fact that conservative religious attitudes hold sway over American politics in both parties.

Seriously, Democrats have many fine priests, ministers, pastors, rabbis etc who actually share the rank and file’s values. Why they consistently need to stab their own followers in the back by promoting these theocratic reprobates is beyond me. I do not believe it has ever gotten them one vote or the tiniest bit of help passing legislation.

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