Month: October 2012

The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming!

by digby

The stupidest “fraud” post you will see all year, courtesy of the valued member of the best political team on television, Erick Erickson:

The President has come under fire for the shoddy verification processing his campaign does for donations.

In light of this Newsweek story about the Illegal-Donor loophole with Team ObamaA while back, among conservatives, it was even a story that he was doing this shoddy credit card verification for overseas donors.

So, after talking with some lawyers about the process, etc. I donated to Barack Obama. Sort of.

It is rare that I do something where I feel the need to talk to lawyers first. But giving money to Barack Obama was one of those times.

I didn’t actually do it. I made up a name, made up a passport number, made up an address in Russia — hell I made everything up except my credit card number and expiration date.

Got that?

Everything was bull**** except the actual credit card number and expiration date. Everything.

Go try that with Target or Amazon or Apple or Mitt Romney’s campaign and see what happens. Here’s a hint: it’d get rejected.

When the zip code does not match, it would get rejected.

When the name on the card does not match, it will probably get rejected.

When nothing matches, it will get rejected.

Barack Obama’s campaign processed my very generous $5.00 donation.

It sounds bad, doesn’t it? The Obama campaign took a five dollar donation from some treacherous Russkie! Who knows how much he’s into these folks? Why, they might have collected 50 bucks or more.

But the story doesn’t end there:

For several days my bank listed it as processing. Then this is where the anti-climactic end to my story comes. The donation ultimately did not go through.

But don’t let that get in the way of your amazing tale of intrigue and suspense. Clearly, the Obama campaign is in league with the commies. I mean, we know that. It’s just a matter of smokin’ ’em out o their caves.

Sure, this may not prove anything. But I don’t think it passes the smell test anyway. The minute some foreigner tries to infiltrate America by trying to donate an illegal fiver through an online site, a drone plane ought to zap them with a laser beam where they sit. Why are we fooling around here?

Here’s hoping Erickson gets CNN to blow the lid off thing thing before the election.

Oh, and by the way, don’t worry your pretty little heads about all the shady Chinese mafia money billionaire Sheldon Adelson has funneled into Romney’s campaign, which he openly admits is to shield himself from prosecution.

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Moonstruck

by digby

Oh boy. Andrew Sullivan is really having a hard time dealing with his idol Obama being in a close election. His latest called, “Did Obama Just Throw The Entire Election Away?” is overwrought to say the least.

Here’s the advice I sent him on twitter and I’m sending it out to any of you who are similarly frantic.

Oh, and by the way, Sullivan thinks that the only thing that can save Obama is Simpson-Bowles. For real.

The Nanny State wins one

by digby

Keep in mind that we were trying to do this today, the right would be adamantly opposed and insist that the founders are turning over in their graves because the nanny state was trying to strangle human liberty:

Over the past 50 years, after scientists realized that even minute doses of lead can have harmful effects, policymakers have been steadily trying to eradicate the stuff from the environment. In the United States, no one uses lead-based paint or fills up their cars with leaded gasoline anymore—those were banned back in the 1970s and 1980s. Lead levels in the air have dropped 92 percent since that time.

By most accounts, this was a spectacularly savvy investment. There’s ample evidence that lead exposure is extremely damaging to young children. Kids with higher lead levels in their blood tend to behave more aggressively and perform worse at school. Economists have pegged the value of the phase-out in the billions or even trillions of dollars. Some criminologists have even argued that the phase-out of leaded paint and gasoline was a major factor in the steep plunge in U.S. crime during the 1990s.

I remember watching a documentary about lead back in the 70s or 80s and thinking to myself that it must have something to do with the low test scores and other pathologies that everyone was up in arms about during that time. I’ll never forget the sight of little toddlers eating chipped lead paint in a housing project. It was heartbreaking. The article above points out that recent studies have born that out.

Despite the improvements, there’s still a lot to be done and there’s quite a bit of resistance to it. I would guess that’s not just because of ideology, but because of money as well, but the anti-science forces have made great strides in the last several decades. In a sane world we’d do a WPA thing and put people to work getting the lead out once and for all, since it’s indisputable that it causes so much damage to our children. But we don’t live in a sane world, do we?

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Pew poll shows post-debate enthusiasm gap, but perhaps not much else

by David Atkins

The political world is buzzing over the latest Pew poll showing Romney up by four points after the debate. There will also apparently be a PPP poll coming out showing Romney with a national lead as well to confirm the trend (despite some interesting counter-evidence from Gallup showing Obama up by five, a shift back toward Obama from Rasmussen and a static nearly 4-point Obama lead from RAND.)

So the movement is real. But what does the movement tell us? Let’s look at the Pew internals for a moment.

First, the bad news: the sample is weighted slightly toward women with 56% of respondents being women. Which means that from that perspective, the numbers for the President should be even worse.

But looking down at the other categories we start to see some eye-popping numbers.

• For starters, a full two-thirds of the respondents were over 50 years old. Is that likely to be the shape of the electorate? Very likely not.
• A full 77% of the respondents were white. That is almost certainly not going to reflect the final electorate.
• A large preponderance of the respondents were from the South (449), with the next highest total from the Midwest (294), and only 219 from the Northeast and 239 from the West. There will not be twice as many voters from the South in the election as from the Northeast or the West.
• Finally, more respondents claimed to be Republicans than Democrats, which would destroy the President’s chances in November automatically. It’s possible for the final electorate to resemble that Party ID, but unlikely.

Does any of this mean the poll is inaccurate or “skewed”? Not necessarily–and certainly not when it comes to the fluid, enthusiasm-based Party ID number.

What it does seem to mean, however, is that enthusiasm can make a big difference in the polling picture. And that goes in both directions.

Most pollsters don’t get more than a 10-12% response rate on their polls, if that. Only the most interested people tend to answer the phone when a pollster calls. So the polling prior to the debate almost certainly overestimated Obama’s national lead as dejected conservatives refused to answer the phone, but would likely have trudged to the polling place or sent in their mail ballot regardless.

Similarly, conservative-leaning groups (mostly older, whiter Southerners) seem very excited to answer the phone now.

What all this means is that the election is likely quite close in reality–and always has been. What seems to change more than anything is enthusiasm.

And that in turn means that what matters most is simply turnout. If you’d like to prevent Mitt Romney from taking over the White House, if you want to keep McConnell out of Senate leadership, if you want to put the gavel back in Nancy Pelosi’s hands, and if you want to turn back the tide of Republican control of state legislatures across the country, there’s only one thing to do: get involved, get on the phones, knock on the doors, and help turn out the vote.

Yelling at the President in online comments isn’t going to do anything. Barack Obama is either going to perform well in the following debates or he isn’t. But regardless, enthusiasm is still what seems to matter most.

Update from digby:

I just wanted to add this analysis from the Guardian:

Conclusion: we can’t take too much from any one poll

There are reasons to believe the Pew poll is probably too pro-Romney. Still, with this normally Democratic-leaning poll, and the Daily Kos- and SEIU-sponsored Public Policy Polling national poll (coming out tomorrow) also having Romney in the lead, it’s fairly safe to assume that this is not down to some conservative push to call this race tied.

This is what makes living in a polarized country so invigorating.

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Reagan spawn coming of age

by digby

How droll:

“I’d rather be a lady of the evening than a feminist”

Well, it is traditional women’s work.

Long is Kristen Gillibrand’s opponent, a hardcore Phyllis Schlaffley wannabe:

Ms. Long eventually went to work for The Dartmouth Review, an association that Democrats now point out to portray her as an extreme ideologue. She served as an editor, and during that time, the paper published incendiary articles on issues like race, sexual orientation, affirmative action and what conservatives viewed as the liberal excesses of the day. Ms. Long did not write any of the articles, but she clearly found a home among the self-styled, conservative provocateurs there: “I’d rather be a lady of the evening than a feminist,” she was quoted as saying in an issue of the paper, displaying the satirical edge she has shown on the campaign trail these days…

In 1990, eight years after she graduated, Ms. Long made a trip to Hanover to deal with widespread student and faculty protests that had broken out after The Dartmouth Review printed lines from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” on the eve of Yom Kippur.

Ms. Long, then a trustee of the paper, arrived on campus with Dinesh D’Souza, one of the newspaper’s founders, to hold a news conference, in which they publicly apologized on the paper’s behalf and said that the lines had been slipped into the newspaper without the editors’ knowledge.

In the coming weeks, two of Ms. Long’s more famous classmates, Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio host, and Mr. D’Souza, who just completed a controversial film about President Obama, will hold a fund-raiser for her.

The hardcore right goes way back and this period — the Reagan years — was particularly fertile and spawned a great many wingnuts. Many of them are politically coming into their own.

Luckily, Long is not expected to win. It is New York, after all, and Gillibrand is popular. But this is the type of candidate they have on their bench, even in the northeast and far west. It’s a problem. For them.

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Tea Party compromise

by digby

My, my my, here’s a shocker for you:

Tea party activists are again supporting Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown this election, even though many aren’t thrilled with some of his votes over the past two years.

They say any disappointment with Brown is overshadowed by two bigger factors — the threat posed by Brown’s Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren and the desire to help Republicans seize control of the Senate.

“The bottom line is that he’s a Republican in the Senate,” said Ted Tripp of the Merrimack Valley Tea Party. “Republicans have to take control of the Senate so we can stop the liberal agenda and roll back the liberal policies that have been put in place over the past few years.”

When Brown staged his surprise win in the 2010 special election for the seat left vacant by the death of longtime U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, some of his earliest and most ardent backers were tea party activists.

Two years later not all tea party supporters are still enamored of Brown, but say they’re backing him as he seeks his first full six-year term.

And to think everyone told us that the Tea Partiers were libertarian iconoclasts who didn’t care about the Party and always acted on principle no matter what the consequences.

I get it. They look at Elizabeth Warren and think she’s the second coming of Josef Stalin so they’ll vote for the turncoat Scott Brown instead, if that’s the choice. But still, they were supposed to be the kind of voters who would rather have Stalin than some bipartisan squish. And yet, here they are.

It’s probably a good idea to examine the assumptions underlying the legislative positions of these hardcore wingnuts as well. Perhaps it’s not what everyone thinks it is.

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The afterlife in tabloids

by digby

When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible –a journey to the afterlife.

From what I hear, these sorts of cover stories sell big. And that’s fine. But I never find them persuasive. (I suppose that if years of Sunday School and the Bible didn’t do it, Tina Brown surely won’t.)

Whenever I see one of them, I can’t help but recall this quote from one of these “news stories” back in 2005:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

That just makes no sense to me whatsoever.

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Pragmatism and White Whales

by digby

Who is Ezra talking about here?

” ______ isn’t an ideological moderate. He’s a pragmatic executive. When he needs to govern from the center, he does. When he needs to lurch to the right, off he goes. So if you want to know how he’ll govern, don’t listen to what he says. Look at who he has reason to fear.

He’s talking about Romney but it struck me that he could have just as easily been talking about Obama. But Obama is very different in one important way. He did not run a flip flop campaign in 2008 as Mitt Romney is doing today. He said this explicitly before the inauguration:

“I don’t want to get bottled up in a lot of ideology and ‘Is this conservative or liberal?’ My interest is finding something that works.”

He’s always been honest about what he was. Romney, not so much. But when you have a rabid right wing and a tepid left wing, I’m afraid the dynamic remains the same, whether the “pragmatic executive” is a Republican or a Democrat, no?

When I read Ezra’s piece this morning I couldn’t help but be reminded of this wonderful piece by Chris Hayes back in December of 2008 (which I wrote about here) discussing Obama’s “pragmatism”:

The chief failure of Bushism, according to [Obama adviser Cass]Sunstein, is not its content but its form. Not the substance of ideology but the fact that he was too wedded to it, too rigid and dogmatic. It’s a view widely held in Washington. Many, like Sunstein, have drawn a lesson from the past eight years that is not about the failure of conservatism–neo or otherwise–or the dangers of the particularly toxic ideological disposition of the Bush administration, of larding public dollars on your cronies and friends, of exacerbating inequality while gutting regulatory oversight, of eviscerating centuries-old common law protections or of starting pre-emptive wars.

No, through a kind of collective category error, they have alighted on a far more general moral to the story: ideology, in any form, is dangerous. “Obama’s victory does not signal a shift in ideology in this country,” wrote Roger Simon in Politico. “It signals that the American public has grown weary of ideologies.” No less an ideologue than Pat Buchanan has come to this same understanding: “If there is a one root cause to the Bush failures,” he wrote, “it has been his fatal embrace of ideology.”

If “pragmatic” is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days, “ideological” is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.

He talked about the great liberal assumption that Obama was simply hiding his ideology for political purposes and asked an important question:

[T]here will be moments in the next four years when a principled fight will be required, and if there is an uneasiness rippling through the minds of some progressives, it arises from their doubts about just how willing Obama will be to fight those fights. When a friend of mine decided to run for office this year, someone suggested that he write down a list of positions he wouldn’t take, votes he wouldn’t cast, then put it in a safe and give someone the key. The idea was that by committing himself in writing to some basic skeletal list of principles, he’d be at least partially anchored against the slippery slope of compromise that so often leads elected officials to lose their way.

Does Obama have such a list? And if so, what’s on it?

After four years, do you know the answer to that question?

Hayes, made the point in his piece that ideology is really inevitable and it forms the basis for the decisions of even the most “pragmatic executive”. So, if I had to guess at this moment, I’d have to say that he does have a list and at the top of his list is what Matt Yglesias calls his “white whale” — the Grand Bargain. He’s certainly been pursuing it relentlessly since January of 2009. I don’t believe that it’s a matter of pragmatism — it’s ideology.

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What if Obama had done what Romney is doing?

by David Atkins

A brief thought experiment for a Monday morning:

What if President Obama had spent an entire year campaigning on a $5 trillion stimulus program comprised entirely of government spending? What if that spending were on programs as unpopular, say, as tax cuts for the rich?

And what if, when confronted about the notion that this plan might add to the federal deficit, the President answered that it was revenue neutral, because he promised to cut $5 trillion in other spending to make up for it, even though said spending doesn’t exist? What if the President refused to state any of the specifics of the spending that would be cut, even when asked about it directly on a friendly network like MSNBC?

And what would the reaction be if, during the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney called out the President on this spending plan, only to hear back that the President had never suggested any sort of plan like that in the first place? What if the moderator had then refused to interrupt and correct the record, allowing a “he-said-she-said” vacuous argument to take place for 20 minutes?

What would the reaction of the press establishment be? What sort of bias would the media be said to have? Would the President have been awarded a debate victory on the basis of that response?

We have a very, very broken media and political system in this country.

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Virtually Speaking at 6pdt with Joan McCarter and Me

by digby

Digby and Joan McCarter Virtually Speaking Sundays
by Jay Ackroyd Featured Host
in Politics Progressive
Sun, October 7, 2012 06:00PM/pdt

Call in to speak with the host
(646) 200-3440

Joan and digby will talk about the debates and about the future of our social insurance programs, in the wake of the debates.

Culture of Truth satirizes the Sunday Morning ‘news’ shows at the Bobblespeak Translations. Each week, he provides us with a pre-recorded segment: the most ridiculous moment from that Sunday.

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