Mitt Romney, liar
by David Atkins
The DNC comes out swinging and lands a punch:
I would applaud–and this is quite well done–but Mitt makes it just a bit too easy. It’s hard to believe the Republicans thought this was their most viable candidate.
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Pandering to the Tea Party
by digby
These politicians really need to stop watching Fox News:
Already down almost 10 points in the PollTracker Average, Tommy Thompson has now shown up in a video from a Tea Party meeting in June bragging that who better than him to “do away with the Medicare and Medicaid”.
The good news is that if he’s defeated (and it looks good) we will have a true blue progressive in the Senate in Tammy Baldwin. She will also be the first openly gay Senator (unless one of the closeted ones decide to beat her to the punch.)
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The most successful “rights ” movement in America
by digby
Not that this information will cause even the slightest change in policy, but it’s interesting nonetheless:
In the fierce debate that always follows the latest mass shooting, it’s an argument you hear frequently from gun rights promoters: If only more people were armed, there would be a better chance of stopping these terrible events. This has plausibility problems—what are the odds that, say, a moviegoer with a pack of Twizzlers in one pocket and a Glock in the other would be mentally prepared, properly positioned, and skilled enough to take out a body-armored assailant in a smoke- and panic-filled theater? But whether you believe that would happen is ultimately a matter of theory and speculation. Instead, let’s look at some facts gathered in a two-month investigation by Mother Jones.
In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 60 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. Moreover, we found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent years—at a time when America has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than ever to carry them in public. And in recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed.
This has become a taboo subject in America. Mass shootings are now considered an act of God and there’s just nothing we can do about it but hope to hell we aren’t caught in the crossfire.
People are always studying successful political movements in America hoping to learn how to make it happen for their own cause. For my money, there is nobody who has done it better than the NRA. They’ve made mass murder as common as the weather and they’re so powerful they’ve completely dismantled any opposition. Who else can claim such success?
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Conning Mr Moneybags
by digby
Politico did a profile of Mr Moneybags Sheldon Adelson the other day and it’s a real doozy. For the first time, Adelson talked in detail about his top five reasons for spending millions to defeat Obama:
1) Self-defense: Adelson said a second Obama term would bring government “vilification of people that were against him.” He thinks he would be at the top of that list and contends that he already has been targeted for his political activity.
Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. is being scrutinized by federal investigators looking into possible money-laundering in Vegas, and possible violation of bribery laws by the company’s ventures in China, including four casinos in the gambling mecca of Macau. (Amazingly, 90 percent of the corporation’s revenue is now from Asia, including properties in Macau and Singapore.)
The country’s leading megadonor is irritated by the leaks. “When I see what’s happening to me and this company, about accusations that are unfounded, that kind of behavior … has to stop,” he said.
Adelson gave the interview in part to signal that he intends to fight back in increasingly visible ways. Articles about the investigations appeared last month on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He maintains that after his family became heavily involved in the election, the government began leaking information about federal inquiries that involve old events, and with which the company has been cooperating.
The aim of the leaks, he argued, is “making me toxic so that they can make the argument to the Republicans, ‘This guy is toxic. Don’t do business with him. Don’t take his money.’ Not all government employees are leakers, but most of the leakers are government employees.”
Asked to response to Adelson’s comments, the Justice Department said it does not comment on, or confirm, investigations.
So, he’s openly trying to buy himself out of a legal jam. But that’s not the only reason. He loves Israel, of course. We knew that. But he also hates unions:
2) Friends in high places: If Romney were elected, Adelson would have a powerful ally on the two issues he cares most about: the security and prosperity of Israel, and opposition to unions, including the so-called card-check proposal that would make it easier for workers to organize. Adelson runs the only nonunion casino on the Strip – a status he says he has retained by lavishing workers with benefits, including subsidized child care.
Like all other painfully misinformed wingnuts he watches too much Fox News:
3) Loathes Obama: For all his wealth and worldliness (models of each of his personal airplanes hang from his office ceiling), Adelson is driven in part by the concerns of everyday conservatives. He recently read “The Amateur,” the anti-Obama bestseller by Edward Klein. And Adelson complained about Obama’s “czars,” a conservative preoccupation early in Obama’s term.
And he’s very, very sensitive:
Like many other businesspeople who depend on tourism, Adelson holds a grudge from just three weeks after Obama’s inauguration, when the new president said financiers receiving bailouts shouldn’t “go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime.”
“From that point on, Vegas started to go down,” Adelson said. “And he’s got the nerve, the chutzpah, to come here and raise money here. He should follow his own advice and not come to Vegas. He hurt me. He hurt 200,000 people working in the hospitality industry in this town.”
If that’s the level of analysis this man uses to understand economic issues, it proves that all you need to become a zillionaire is luck and timing.
He also says he prefers the efficiency of the right because he doesn’t want to see his money wasted. (Says the man who spent over 10 million on Newt Gingrich’s campaign …) And then, for some reason, he’s supposed to care about small business because he started out with nothing.
The portrait of Adelson is of a flinty, myopic, defensive multi-billionaire who spends far too much time listening to the cranks and the clowns of the far right. The only rational reason he has for supporting Romney is the first — he’s trying to buy himself a get out of jail free card.
It’s almost sad that he doesn’t realize that Romney is not going to protect him if he wins. Even sadder that he doesn’t realize that nobody would. When you’re out on a limb as shaky as his is, all politicians will saw it off in a heartbeat rather than go down with it. But it’s not that sad. He’s got more money than God and he could use it to do good. Instead he’s listening to Glenn Beck and fulminating about Obama and his “Czars.”
But hey, Karl Rove and Haley Barbour and all the other right wing con men are getting very, very rich off his money so there’s that.
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Demonizing the poor: it’s what’s for dinner
by digby
This is awful, but I expect it happens every day and is only getting worse with the GOP assault on the “parasites”:
Cindy Nerger of Warner Robins, Ga., said she and her husband aren’t proud when they use their food stamp debit card to buy groceries. “I felt shy when I used them and my husband does, too,” Nerger, 28, told The Huffington Post. “I would try to hide the card.”
But Nerger said she never expected to be deliberately humiliated. That’s what she said happened last week after she argued with a manager over her bill at a Kroger grocery store. The cashier told her she owed $10, which Nerger said could not be possible because she knew food stamps covered the items in her cart. A manager eventually let her go, but not before giving Nerger a piece of his mind. “He finally just said, ‘Okay, just give it to her.’ I said, ‘See, I told you it was covered by food stamps,’ and he said, ‘Excuse me for working for a living and not relying on food stamps!'”
By that time, Nerger said, several people had been waiting in line behind her, and other customers had started watching the exchange. It was too much. “I turned around and saw everyone beyond me and I just burst into tears,” she said.
I’ve seen some incidents at the store, usually it’s over some item that isn’t “allowed” which sparks a conversation in the line about why the state allows poor people to buy steak when they should be forced to hamburger or some such creepy judgement. But, as I said, this is only going to get worse.
And, by the way, it’s not because the president is being “divisive” by calling some Wall Street billionaire a “fat cat.” It’s because people like Erick Ericksson and Mitt Romney are going out of their way to demonize the most vulnerable people in our society as lazy “takers.”
People like this:
Nerger said she started receiving food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, when she became eligible for Medicare and Social Security Supplemental Income because of kidney failure in 2008. While she waits for a kidney transplant, she cannot work because of daily 12-hour dialysis treatments. Her husband runs a carpentry business. “If he doesn’t get a call [for a job] we don’t have any extra money for the month,” she said.
If they had their way she wouldn’t have health care either. But I’m sure we can count on the billionaires to be generous and give more than enough money to hospitals for the poor to adequately care for them. And gruel. I’m sure there would be gruel.
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It’s only 100 million dead people. No big deal.
by David Atkins
Yes, the world is still burning. And yes, catastrophic impacts will be felt in our lifetimes:
More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.
As global average temperatures rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA.
It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.
More than 90 percent of those deaths will occur in developing countries, said the report that calculated the human and economic impact of climate change on 184 countries in 2010 and 2030. It was commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of 20 developing countries threatened by climate change.
No big deal, though. It’s mostly just the irrelevant people in developing countries. Nothing Americans need to worry about for now. Unless, of course, there’s instability leading to nuclear weapons falling into the wrong heads, or mass migrations causing riots and economic collapse, or famines and droughts that threaten the food and water supply. Those sorts of things.
But nothing to worry about here. Minor alterations to our tax code, protests against drone strikes, and implementation of punitive nation-state tariffs will totally solve the biggest collective moral crisis facing the human species in centuries. I’m sure of it.
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Makers, takers and delusions of individualism
by digby
Political scientists Suzanne Mettler and John Sides blow the lid off the conceit of the hard working, individualistic 53%:
What the data reveal is striking: nearly all Americans — 96 percent — have relied on the federal government to assist them. Young adults, who are not yet eligible for many policies, account for most of the remaining 4 percent.
On average, people reported that they had used five social policies at some point in their lives. An individual typically had received two direct social benefits in the form of checks, goods or services paid for by government, like Social Security or unemployment insurance. Most had also benefited from three policies in which government’s role was “submerged,” meaning that it was channeled through the tax code or private organizations, like the home mortgage-interest deduction and the tax-free status of the employer contribution to employees’ health insurance. The design of these policies camouflages the fact that they are social benefits, too, just like the direct benefits that help Americans pay for housing, health care, retirement and college.
The use of government social policies cuts across partisan divides. Some policies were used more often by members of one party or the other. Republicans were more likely to have used the G.I. Bill and Social Security retirement and survivors’ benefits, while more Democrats had taken advantage of Medicaid and unemployment insurance. Overall, 82 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans acknowledged receipt of at least one direct social benefit. More Republicans (92 percent) than Democrats (86 percent) had taken advantage of submerged policies. Once we take both types of policies into account, the seeming distinction between makers and takers vanishes: 97 percent of Republicans and 98 percent of Democrats report that they have used at least one government social policy.
The majority of individuals from households at every income level have used at least one direct social policy. Low-income people have used more of the direct policies than have the affluent: the average household with income under $10,000 per year used four of them, compared to only one by the households at $150,000 and above. But the proportions were reversed in the case of the submerged policies: wealthy families had typically used three of them, and the poor just one.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans are far more likely to insist that they have never taken one thin dime from the government and all they do is give and give and give. But that doesn’t make it true. As David points out in his earlier post, we have a culture that has always been divided along pretty strong fault lines. It has far more to do with social status than money and it’s infected with white privilege and the myth of American individualism. That’s what animates this huge disagreement, not any reality based assessment of who gets what. We all make and we all take.
Mettler and Sides conclude their piece with this:
Mr. Romney’s remarks may resonate with those who think of themselves as “producers” rather than “moochers” — to use Ayn Rand’s distinction. But this distinction fails to capture the way Americans really experience government. Instead of dividing us, our experiences as both makers and takers ought to bind us in a community of shared sacrifice and mutual support.
Isn’t it pretty to think so? And yet, with the exception of wartime, it almost never happens.
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Let them eat garbage
by digby
Spain erupted today. And this is why:
On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night.
At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day’s trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozen aging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby.
“When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there is.”
The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet.
Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash bins as a public health precaution.
A report this year by a Catholic charity, Caritas, said that it had fed nearly one million hungry Spaniards in 2010, more than twice as many as in 2007. That number rose again in 2011 by 65,000.
As Spain tries desperately to meet its budget targets, it has been forced to embark on the same path as Greece, introducing one austerity measure after another, cutting jobs, salaries, pensions and benefits, even as the economy continues to shrink.
Most recently, the government raised the value-added tax three percentage points, to 21 percent, on most goods, and two percentage points on many food items, making life just that much harder for those on the edge. Little relief is in sight as the country’s regional governments, facing their own budget crisis, are chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school lunches for low-income families.
For a growing number, the food in garbage bins helps make ends meet.
At the huge wholesale fruit and vegetable market on the outskirts of this city recently, workers bustled, loading crates onto trucks. But in virtually every bay, there were men and women furtively collecting items that had rolled into the gutter.
“It’s against the dignity of these people to have to look for food in this manner,” said Eduardo Berloso, an official in Girona, the city that padlocked its supermarket trash bins.
Mr. Berloso proposed the measure last month after hearing from social workers and seeing for himself one evening “the humiliating gesture of a mother with children looking around before digging into the bins.”
The Caritas report also found that 22 percent of Spanish households were living in poverty and that about 600,000 had no income whatsoever. All these numbers are expected to continue to get worse in the coming months.
Now the plutocrats will all insist that this is because all these people have been living high on the hog for far too long and it’s time for them to pay the piper. But that isn’t true. (Certainly Americans shouldn’t feel that when politicians say they are the hardest workers in the world that it means this won’t happen to them. These Europeans work too — when there’s work to be had.)
Police used batons to push back some protesters at the front of the march as tempers flared.
The demonstration, organized with an “Occupy Congress” slogan, drew protesters weary of nine straight months of painful measures imposed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Thousands of angry marchers yelled toward parliament, 250 meters (yards) away, “Get out!, Get out! They don’t represent us! Fire them!”
“The only solution is that we should put everyone in Parliament out on the street so they know what it’s like,” said one of the protesters, civil servant Maria Pilar Lopez.Lopez and others are calling for fresh elections, claiming the government’s hard-hitting austerity measures are proof that the ruling Popular Party misled voters to get elected last November.
While Rajoy has said he has no plans to cut pensions for Spaniards, Lopez fears her retirement age could be raised from 65 to as much as 70. Three of her seven nieces and nephews have been laid off since Rajoy took office, and she said the prospect of them finding jobs “is very bleak.”
The US has escaped this level of desperation but only because of its different circumstances. You can be sure that if we were in the same position our rulers would have made the same decisions. In fact, if they have it their way, they will do their best to make sure that we get ourselves a good taste of it. The 47% is getting just a little bit too uppity.
I think this spells out what’s happening quite succinctly:
Mr. Rajoy has been debating whether to tap into a new bond-buying program proposed by the European Central Bank on Sept. 6. While such additional European help would considerably alleviate Spain’s debt financing problems, Mr. Rajoy finds himself in an increasingly tight bind between Spanish voters who oppose further austerity cuts and investors and European finance officials demanding reassurance that Spain can meet budget deficit targets.
Is it the media, or is that which shall not be named?
by David Atkins
There’s an interesting story out today showing a dramatic increase in the number of Americans who don’t want their children marrying a member of the opposite political party:
A pair of surveys asked Americans a more concrete question: in 1960, whether they would be “displeased” if their child married someone outside their political party, and, in 2010, would be “upset” if their child married someone of the other party. In 1960, about 5 percent of Americans expressed a negative reaction to party intermarriage; in 2010, about 40 percent did (Republicans about 50 percent, Democrats about 30 percent).
A note of caution: This party animosity is not historically new, just new to last several decades. At least partisans today are not brawling with and killing one another, as was true in the 19th century. But something seems to have changed since the less polarized era of the mid-20th century.
This isn’t surprising. I’d certainly be appalled if any child of mine married a Republican. But when pressed for the causes, the researchers jump to the conclusion that since American stances on the issues haven’t changed much in the last 50 years, and since many Americans cannot reliably state which Party holds what positions on issues, that the entire problem lies with a fragmented media environment and negative advertising.
But that would be vastly underselling the cultural dynamics at play. There was something crucial that changed all of American politics after 1960: the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement and its aftershocks had a dramatic impact on the country that would not be reflected in most issues polling. One of those impacts was on political partisanship. I’ve noted in the past that it was largely the impact of the Civil Rights Movement (combined with the power of big money to lobby the racist vote) that gradually killed bipartisanship in the United States:
But by far the biggest is that the bipartisanship of the mid-20th century was a special artifact of the uneasy alliance between traditional urban liberal tribes and religious Dixiecratic populists in the South and Midwest. As I’ve written before, FDR was quite able to aggressively take on the financial and corporate interests of his time with a broad coalition. But he couldn’t pass an anti-lynching law without destroying his support base, and he was all too willing to institute the Japanese internment camps. In other words, FDR could take on the power of big money with ease, but he couldn’t take on the power of Big Racism.
The result of this dynamic was an uneasy bipartisanship between otherwise competing interests. Men like Strom Thurmond would vote for “socialist” policies as long as only whites got the benefits.
The advent of the Civil Rights movement marked the beginning of the end of bipartisanship. As tax dollars were increasingly seen as going toward non-whites, Dixiecrats became Republicans and allies of big business interests. Similar dynamics occurred with anti-Hispanic sentiment in the West. All the religious fervor that had been reserved for progressive social justice issues by the “Progressive” movement in the late 19th century (which included, by the way, quite conservative ideas like the prohibition of alcohol: late 19th century progressives would have strongly opposed modern liberals on issues like marijuana legalization alone…) flipped to socially conservative issues. The women’s equality movement only added further fuel to the socially conservative patriarchal fire.
At this point it was easy and natural for the racist culture warriors to align completely with the corporatists. The need for uneasy alliances disappeared. The rationale for men like Strom Thurmond to support New Deal policies and chat about them at cozy cocktail parties disappeared. The battle lines were set.
I’m sure the fractured media environment is partly to blame for the increased partisan fervor. But that’s not all. It’s also a largely cultural phenomenon driven by a difference between the legacy of those who favor expanded rights for women and minorities, and those who don’t. That in turn affects cultural issues of urbanism versus suburbanism and a host of other touchstones that are merely reflections of that same divide, but wouldn’t show up on most issues-based polling that is the bread and butter of political scientists and media analysts.
Increased partisan fervor, in other words, is a real cultural phenomenon, not a media-driven tribal epiphenomenon. But to call out why that is would be hurtful to some people’s feelings and cultural heritage, and thus cannot be said in polite discourse.
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Back to Ohio
by digby
I recall getting a little bit agitated over the Corey Booker and Bill Clinton “gaffes” about private equity and asking someone I knew would know if the Obama campaign was going to back off its clearly effective Bain line. I was told in no uncertain terms that they were not. All the data showed it was a devastating attack.
And it worked, in Ohio at least:
This article in TNR goes into all the other factors, which include a fired up Democratic base in the wake of the oddball John Kasich’s missteps with unions and the auto bailout among other things. But I have to believe this non-stop attack on Romney’s Bain background was the real put away.
And the right wingers really can’t complain. They’ve spend decades trying to pry the white working class away from the Democrats and largely succeeded using cultural wedge issues. But this time they blew it. They nominated the little man on the Monopoly box for president at a time of serious economic angst. I still can’t believe they did it.
Apparently they forgot that these guys may not like hippies and feminazis (and a lot of them don’t much care for blacks either) but if there’s one type they really, really don’t like it’s the wealthy owner who looks down on them. And that’s Mitt. He oozes it. After years and years of those guys coming to town and shutting down the plant and the factory and the warehouse and shipping the jobs overseas, there’s just no way they’re going to vote for one.
It’s not as if the Republicans had a lot to choose from, to be sure. But picking a vulture capitalist and expecting white working class voters to enthusiastically vote for him was plain old hubris.
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