We’ve had a number of disturbing reports these last couple of weeks about employers instructing their workers to vote for Romney or risk losing their jobs. It has a chilling effect on free speech, certainly, letting employees know that any public announcement of their support whether it be in conversation or a bumper sticker on their car would put them in danger of losing their job. It’s generally not illegal for an employer to fire workers based on their political views in this country. (And contrary to what everyone’s been saying, this is not due to Citizens United. They’ve always been able to do it, but until recently they still had some shame.) This is a form of intimidation, to be sure, designed to immobilize political activity for the Democrats, even in employees’ private lives.
I have been making the case that at least we have a secret ballot, which protects the vote of everyone, even if these GOP authoritarians are attempting to restrict their employees political activity. A reader wrote in to tell me that I am wrong about that. Get a load of this editorial from The Denver Post:
U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello shouldn’t have the last word on whether Colorado voters have a right to expect their ballots will be anonymous. It seems fairly clear to us that the state constitution protects such a right.
Arguello last week dismissed a lawsuit seeking to stop counties from printing ballots with identifying bar codes, saying she didn’t have jurisdiction and suggesting there is no right to a secret ballot. The lawsuit by Citizen Center insisted that such a right is protected by both federal and state constitutions.
I know much of the nation was shocked when Justice Antonin Scalia blithely announced that the constitution doesn’t guarantee a right to vote in Bush vs Gore. I think they would be equally shocked to find out that some judges don’t believe they have the right to a secret ballot either. And unfortunately, I’m guessing that if this issue makes its way to the Supreme Court, we might just have that question “clarified” in a way we don’t care for.
I don’t know where this will go, but I’d guess it’s just the latest in vote intimidation and suppression tactics. I can easily see some people opting out of voting rather than take the chance that some corrupt GOP election official decides to leak their name to their employer. (Again, there’s no law against firing workers for their political beliefs.) In a wage-slave economy, I think voters can be forgiven for being a little bit paranoid.
Without the secret ballot we don’t have a democracy, period.
Those Romney supporters would likely say that it’s ok because the Obama supporters got to give them water voluntarily.
But isn’t the point really that we all have an obligation as decent human beings to help people who need it if we can? Government is just one of the many vehicles we use to do it.
Not a word has been said in the presidential debates about what may be the most urgent and consequential issue in the world: climate change.
President Obama understands and accepts the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is trapping heat in the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic long-term effects. Mitt Romney’s view, as on many issues, is pure quicksilver — impossible to pin down — but when he was governor of Massachusetts, climate-change activists considered him enlightened and effective.
Yet neither has mentioned the subject in the debates. Instead, they have argued over who is more eager to extract ever-larger quantities of oil, natural gas and coal from beneath our purple mountains’ majesties and fruited plains…
If this is a contest to see who can pretend to be more ignorant of the environmental locomotive that’s barreling down the tracks toward us, Romney wins narrowly.
Obama does acknowledge that his administration has invested in alternative energy technologies, such as wind and solar, that do not emit carbon dioxide and thus do not contribute to atmospheric warming. But he never really says why, except to say he will not “cede those jobs of the future” to nations such as China and Germany.
The whole thing is a must-read, but I’ll just post his conclusion here.
Why does it matter that nobody is talking about climate change? Because if you accept that climate scientists are right about the warming of the atmosphere — as Obama does, and Romney basically seems to as well — then you understand that some big decisions will have to be made. You also understand that while there are some measures the United States could take unilaterally, carbon dioxide can never be controlled without the cooperation of other big emitters such as China, India and Brazil. You understand that this is an issue with complicated implications for global prosperity and security.
A presidential campaign offers an opportunity to educate and engage the American people in the decisions that climate change will force us to make. Unfortunately, Obama and Romney have chosen to see this more as an opportunity to pretend that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an approaching train.
Part of the problem is that oil, coal and auto-heavy swing states aren’t receptive to the climate change message. Part of the problem is that talking about cap-and-trade and carbon taxes is a losing message when gas prices are nearing $5 a gallon in many areas. And part of the problem is that in an environment in which your average undecided voter doesn’t even know to avoid the hot stove of Bush Administration policies just four years after the global economy sustained third-degree burns from them, talking about issues that will only have consequences decades down the road isn’t a big winner.
Climate change is a problem that presents a challenge on many levels to many structures: to free-market expansionist capitalism, to the nation-state model of organization, and even to traditional democracy itself. None of them are prepared to deal with the management of global non-immediate problems with devastating, irreversible long-term consequences.
The deficit hawks often lament a similar problem. The difference is, however, that the deficit hawks are trying to “fix” an irrelevant problem with “solutions” that will make it even worse. Climate change, on the other hand, is very real and it’s barreling down at us with the surety of a speeding train in a dark, narrow tunnel.
We all know that Scott Brown has spent the last four month haranguing Elizabeth Warren for allegedly misrepresenting her family background on a form back in the 1980s. You’d think he’d be a little bit more cautious:
The man who inspired Sen. Scott Brown to write a bill making it illegal to falsely claim military honors said he thinks the Massachusetts Republican is stretching the truth when he claims to have “served in Afghanistan.”
Brown made the Afghanistan declaration in his recent debate with his Democratic opponent for the Senate seat, Elizabeth Warren.
But Brown’s service in Afghanistan was not combat. It was part of his annual two-week stint with the National Guard, in which he requested, in a highly unusual move, to serve in Afghanistan.
“It sounds to me like we just got another Blumenthal Connecticut, Mark Kirk type things there,” said Vietnam veteran Doug Sterner, referring to exaggerated military claims two years ago by now-Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.)
“I thought it was seriously misleading,” said Sterner, whose website outing heroes was the basis for Brown’s “Stolen Valor” bill. Sterner’s criticism echoes a Boston Globe editorial published Thursday morning.
I heard him say it in the debate and a little alarm bell went off in my mind but I couldn’t remember what was wrong with it. It was that Brown asked to sent to Afghanistan for his two week National Guard service. I’m afraid you don’t get to refer to yourself as having “served in Afghanistan” when you do that. In fact, it makes you one of those “phony soldiers” to use Rush Limbaugh’s obnoxious phrase:
Sterner said it wasn’t that Brown’s service was with the National Guard that’s the problem. Scores of Guard members have been recipients of the Medal of Honor, he noted. Brown’s mistake, he said, was implying that his service in Afghanistan was a real tour of duty.
“I would be the last person to denigrate anybody’s National Guard service, but I thought the claim, putting himself on par with men and women who have done combat tours, often in excess of a year, 14 months, was a pretty cheesy thing to do,” Sterner said.
Seriously, if he “served in Afghanistan” so has two thirds of the US Congress who’ve gone over there on fact finding missions. It’s absurd.
On Thursday, President Barack Obama will attend the annual Al Smith fundraising dinner in New York City. Also in attendance will be Cardinal Dolan, setting the scene for a potential clash, say conservatives.
Obama’s new health care mandates, under Obamacare, have angered plenty of conservative Catholics, even leading Cardinal Dolan to sue the Obama administration in August.
According to The New York Post, many conservative Catholics will attend in anger. “They’re going in hopes that the cardinal’s going to slam him,” said state Sen. Marty Golden, a Brooklyn Republican attending the annual Al Smith Dinner. “It’s insulting that [Obama is] coming. What he’s doing to the Catholic Church — forcing them to do things against their beliefs — it’s reprehensible.”
A source close to Cardinal Dolan told the Post that, “The cardinal himself wonders whether he made the right decision” in inviting Obama. “He knows the president wants this for one reason, and that’s the photo.”
The Al Smith dinner, named for the late New York Democratic governor who in 1928 became the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party, is historically attended by presidential nominees. Mitt Romney will also be on hand at the black-tie, $2,500-a-plate affair.
Now, conservatives are concerned that Obama’s appearance at the Al Smith dinner this week could be interpreted as the Church endorsing his candidacy.
Nearly all presidential candidates have attended the annual dinner since 1945. However, in 1996, Cardinal John O’Connor didn’t invite President Bill Clinton, who had vetoed a partial-birth-abortion ban, nor his challenger Sen. Bob Dole; and in 2004, Edward Cardinal Egan passed over John Kerry, a Catholic who is pro-choice, as well as incumbent President George W. Bush.
I honestly can’t get over these Catholic conservatives complaining that someone is making laws that go against their beliefs. Too bad for the employee who doesn’t happen to hold with Catholic teachings. (And, by the way, even a vast majority of Catholics use birth control.) I guess if you take a job with a religious institution, you’ve signed on to its hierarchy’s orders. That’s what we call religious liberty in America today.
Here’s that great guy Dolan, ranting about exorcising Satan from the body politic. By Satan I mean secularism, of course:
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.
This is just utter wingnut sophistry and beneath the dignity of someone in his position.
Cardinal Dolan criticized a legislative proposal that would, for a year, drop the statute of limitations for filing civil claims for sexual offenses, allowing for lawsuits by people who say they were abused long ago. The cardinal said he was concerned that a flood of lawsuits over abuse by priests could drain the church of money it is using for charitable purposes.
“I think we bishops have been very contrite in admitting that the church did not handle this well at all in the past,” he said. “But we bristle sometimes in that the church doesn’t get the credit, now being in the vanguard of reform. It does bother us that the church continues to be a whipping boy.”
Let’s hear some more lectures about political responsibility from these people, shall we? Their credibility is so great.
It occurred to me that I should give everyone a little update on what Blue America is doing around the country as we hit the final weeks of the campaign. Thanks mostly to progressive campaign guru Howie Klein and his relentless energy, encyclopedic knowledge of House districts and proven nose for talent, the three partner blogs, Down with Tyranny, Crooks and Liars and this one, along with our dedicated progressive small donors, have managed to raise nearly half a million dollars for our candidates and campaigns this cycle — which ain’t half bad for three old country bloggers and a couple of good friends.
One of the most successful fundraising ideas we’ve had so far is the Rock and Roll Memorabilia drawings (again, thanks to Howie’s glittering career in the music business.) These have garnered attention far and wide and resulted in bringing in some big bucks for our candidates. Lucky donors have received a guitar signed by Joan Jett to benefit Paul Ryan’s opponent Rob Zerban in Wisconsin, signed platinum awards from BBKing and Eric Clapton for Patsy Keever in North Carolina and a signed B52s award on behalf of Zerban and Lee Rogers in California (which we did in partnership with Progressive Democrats of America.) Our current drawing is in concert with Peace Action Now — a Frank Sinatra platinum award to benefit Rogers.
Here’s Alan Grayson with House Democratic whip Jim Clyburn and the winner of a signed Green Day guitar, Judith Wilson:
It’s fun. The winners are chosen randomly without regard to size of the donation and as it happens they have all been people who donated 25 dollars or less. Mostly they just want to support the candidate. Winning a valuable award is just gravy.
Howie, John and I had quite the laugh the other day when the Romney campaign stole our idea and announced that they were holding a contest for a guitar signed by Kid Rock and Paul Ryan. Someone told me that Ryan suggested to Romney that they get their big celebrity endorser Lindsay Lohan to sign a pair of panties and Romney reminded him that she doesn’t wear any. How he knew that is anyone’s guess. (And I suppose my friend might have made the whole thing up …) But hey, they’ve always got The Nuge. And Taylor Hicks.
Right now we are running either Independent Expenditure campaigns or Blue America PAC campaigns in several districts.
Corrupt Republican Buck Mckeon isn’t *not* enjoying the radio ads we are sponsoring with the help of TheBuckStopsNow.org that are currently blanketing his district in both English and Spanish. And this traveling billboard that follows him all over the district has got him really irritated:
The song, by the way, is an oldtime Blue America jingle that we’ve re-purposed for this election. It’s one of the ads running on a loop on radio. You can hear all of them here.
Here’s the ad we’re running in the district. (If you can help us keep it going, the link to our Independent Expenditure committee is here.)
For some reason Republicans really hate these mobile billboards. Here’s another one we’re running in PA-16 for Aryanna Strader who’s challenging one of the most cretinous, anti-woman throwbacks in the House, Congressman Joe Pitts:
And voters in Paul Ryan’s district are seeing ads in all the local papers calling him a liar about Medicare:
Earlier we tweaked the DCCC a little bit for failing to mention Rob Zerban in their anti-Ryan billboard by putting up a very similar one with the information they’d “missed.”
And there’s more to come in these last few weeks.
The vast majority of the money we collect from you goes to the candidates we endorse and to whom you donate directly through our Act Blue page. Only about five percent of regular donations go to the PAC and we use that money for these campaigns in the districts. (There are a few larger donors who contributed to our IE, for which we’re extremely grateful.)
It’s a purely volunteer effort — we don’t have the money to employ anyone and we don’t take a penny for ourselves — so these are all shoestring campaigns. But we feel strongly about doing the best we can to support progressives who are out there doing the truly difficult work of campaigning and who need to know that there are people out here who support their causes even when the political professionals can’t be bothered.
There are campaigns out there that are winnable, if they had enough money to compete. The Party bigwigs are convinced of the conventional wisdom that progressives can never win and that “independent” automatically means “centrist” and so they ignore these races and put their money in quixotic campaigns where it’s right wing New Dem against Republican wingnut. They are going to lose those races and that money will have been thrown away.
But nonetheless, next month it’s very likely there are going to be some new (and returning) progressives in the House and in the Senate. And they all know who their friends are. You. Because when the chips were down and the Party panicked after 2010, these candidates turned to the grassroots and the Netroots to help them keep their campaigns alive long enough to get some traction.
In this polarized political world, the neanderthal Blue Dogs have gone extinct. The progressives, on the other hand, are getting stronger. (See how that works?) I don’t think the DC establishment has quite grokked this new development.
Anyway, that’s just a short update on what we’ve been up to. It’s been a lot of fun and hugely rewarding, even the painful losses. We are seeing progressive candidates coming together after primaries, both losing and winning, and working their networks on each others behalf for the very first time. Progressive incumbents are making themselves available for consultation and support. Netroots/grassroots groups are working together in many different ways. Little by little, this ship is turning.
Politics sucks for the most part, I know that. This is one of the ways you can feel good about being involved. Truly, even when we lose I feel better for having done this that I do when another corporate Dem goes to Washington.
One of the most cynical ploys in the November 2012 election cycle is California’s Proposition 32. Here’s what Ballotpedia says about it:
Proposition 32, the “Paycheck Protection” Initiative, is on the November 6, 2012 ballot in California as an initiated state statute.[1]
If approved, Proposition 32 will:
Ban both corporate and union contributions to state and local candidates.
Ban contributions by government contractors to the politicians who control contracts awarded to them.
Ban automatic deductions by corporations, unions, and government of employees’ wages to be used for politics.
Sounds pretty good, right? Except here’s the catch: it only bans contributions from organizations that take contributions from payroll deductions. Which essentially means that only labor unions would be denied the ability to contribute, while for-profit corporations would be almost completely unhindered.
It’s being funded by major conservative power players, but is being advertised as a progressive push to get money out of politics, riding on the anti-Citizens United wave. A particularly disgusting bit of cynicism. Sheila Kuehl explains:
Currently, employers are allowed or required to withhold money from an employee’s paycheck under limited circumstances, such as Social Security, income taxes, medical plans and charitable deductions authorized by the employee. In addition, about two and a half million California workers either pay dues or an amount called a “fair share” fee (paid by non-union members who are benefiting from a collective bargaining agreement) to unions. In many cases, employers automatically deduct these dues and fees from employees’ paychecks and pass them on to the union.
A number of unions use a portion of these dues and fees for political contributions and independent expenditures or to communicate about political races with their members. Non-members who pay fair share fees are allowed to opt out of this portion.
For the most part, corporations and businesses do not deduct money from their employees’ payroll to pay for political expenditures, but, rather, donate to candidates through political action committees and other means out of their profit or other corporate funds. Prop. 32 bans only the use of monies collected by payroll deduction, the primary way unions, but not others, aggregate political money, from being used for all “political purposes”, including direct contributions to candidates or measures, independent expenditure committees, member communications related to campaigns or other expenditures meant to influence voters.
If you live in California, don’t be fooled. There’s nothing progressive about Proposition 32. Vote no. And while most Hullabaloo readers in California probably know the progressive position on these initiatives, you can find the California Democratic Party’s endorsements on the initiatives here.
Hey girl: did you know that fair pay is a “left wing agenda”?
by digby
If so, I’d guess that oh, at least 70% of the nation is leftist.
That’s according to Mitt Romney surrogate, Barbara Comstock on Andrea Mitchell’s show this morning:
MITCHELL: A lot of young women whom I’ve heard from in the last 48 hours were offended by that, by that whole idea that you need flex time because you’ve got to be the little woman running home and cooking dinner.
COMSTOCK: No, the flex time, in fact, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Mitt Romney was a man who had young children and that flex time extended to them. And there was another – I mean, this is a family-friendly environment. What he did — this is a man —
MITCHELL: I’m just saying that’s not what he said that night.
COMSTOCK: Yeah, but I can tell you, having watched — when you watch how women reacted to that in realtime, which Lilly Ledbetter and these other women, who are trying – I mean, they have a left wing agenda that they’re trying to make an issue of a statement that women didn’t respond that way, and that I understand there may be partisans who respond that way but real women out there in the working world appreciate male and female bosses who accommodate their schedules and time.
If you aren’t familiar with Comstock, read all about here, here. Let’s just say that there are agendas and then there are “agendas.”
And I think we all know that the “right wing agenda” doesn’t include flex time for families. Seriously, it’s completely preposterous for this wingnut assassin to suggest it does.
Mitt Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout has haunted him on the campaign trail, especially in Rust Belt states like Ohio. There, in September, the Obama campaign launched television ads blasting Romney’s November 2008 New York Times op-ed, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” But Romney has done a good job of concealing, until now, the fact that he and his wife, Ann, personally gained at least $15.3 million from the bailout—and a few of Romney’s most important Wall Street donors made more than $4 billion. Their gains, and the Romneys’, were astronomical—more than 3,000 percent on their investment.
This happened through in investment in major Romney donor’s autoparts company, Delphi. Read the whole thing for the details. It’s an amazing tale.
Oh, and guess what else happened?
Romney has slammed the bailout as a payoff to the auto workers union. But that certainly wasn’t true for the bailout of Delphi. Once the hedge funders, including Singer—a deep-pocketed right-wing donor and activist who serves as chair of the conservative, anti-union Manhattan Institute—took control of the firm, they rid Delphi of every single one of its 25,200 unionized workers.
Of the twenty-nine Delphi plants operating in the United States when the hedge funders began buying up control, only four remain, with not a single union production worker. Romney’s “job creators” did create jobs—in China, where Delphi now produces the parts used by GM and other major automakers here and abroad. Delphi is now incorporated overseas, leaving the company with 5,000 employees in the United States (versus almost 100,000 abroad).
Between this and fetal tissue disposal and gaming his retirement fund, I’m beginning to think there isn’t one facet of American society that Mitt Romney condemns from which he hasn’t also made a huge profit. I guess everything he even breathes on just can’t help but make money.
