Month: June 2013

The Jersey bully excites certain Democratic men

by digby

The “loyal” opposition:

Gov. Chris Christie is cashing in donations from top Democratic fundraisers and other traditionally liberal donors across the country, even nabbing the support of a handful of rainmakers aligned with President Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Star-Ledger review of state and federal records shows.

The checks are flying into the Republican governor’s war chest from all sorts of unlikely places — the hedge fund run by liberal billionaire George Soros, for example, and the politically progressive halls of the University of California, Berkeley.

The nascent support from Democratic donors is an early sign of Christie’s fundraising prowess in a potential run for the White House in 2016, experts and Democratic donors said, and dovetails with recent polls showing him gaining popularity nationally among Democrats and independents.

Christie’s partnership with New Jersey Democratic leaders and his warm relationship with Obama after Hurricane Sandy could be enticing donors who don’t often give to GOP candidates, even if they are closer ideologically to Democrat Barbara Buono, Christie’s lesser-known challenger, political scientists and Democratic fundraisers say.

“While I do not agree with his stance on every issue, he is one of the best political leaders I have talked to in a long time,” said Ken Rosen, a UC-Berkeley professor who cut a $3,800 check to Christie after chatting with him at two events. “He is willing to take on tough issues such as pension reform, education reform, mental-health issues, even if his views are not politically correct.”

Can someone please explain to me why the CW in Democratic beltway circles is that Christie can’t possibly win the presidency? The far right is unhappy with his friendliness toward Obama when it came to Hurricane Sandy, but he seems to be quite popular with everyone else. Even (maybe especially) with Democrats.

If Christie can get past the Tea Partiers, I’m going to guess that a race between Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie would be as much about boys against the girls as about Democrats vs Republicans. Virtually every civilian man I talk to really likes the guy, even hard core liberal types. He’s a “tough” guy, which apparently means that no matter what he believes in, he’s awesome because he’ll get ‘er done. And his “political incorrectness” means he won’t care about all that woman and gay junk that keeps getting in the way of “pragmatic solutions to real problems.”

I find him to be a repulsive political figure, mostly for crap like this, which can be quickly summed up as the central problem with the human species:

Yuck. There are apparently a ton of people who get really turned on by that behavior and it’s very creepy.

Even though a bunch of Democratic dudes are sniffing around Christie, Howie at Down with Tyranny endorsed Barbara Buono his sadly neglected Democratic opponent for Governor. You can donate to her here. If you don’t think bullies make the best presidents it would be nice to take a bite out of him next fall before he gets the chance to pollute our politics with more of this macho garbage.

Update:

How about this one?

And he’s the one accusing other people of “putting on a show.” What a jerk.

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All American gun culture

by digby

When gun nuts get mad at each other anything can happen:

They made fun of him for misfiring his gun — so a Florida bouncer shot and killed three of his colleagues, police say.

The senseless shooting Sunday stemmed from a filmed incident, a prank that caused the killer to harbor “ill will towards the three since this had occurred,” police said in a statement.

After being “punked” by his co-workers, Andrew Joseph “Punchy” Lobban, 31, was allegedly so upset that he shot Josue “Sway” Santiago, 25, Benjamin Larz Howard, 23, and Jerry Lamar Bynes Jr., 20, outside an Ocala nightclub early Sunday morning.

The men weren’t working at the time and reportedly were friends. But the incident at a shooting range, when Lobban misfired his gun, was caught on tape and apparently humiliated the accused murderer, Ocala Police Department spokeswoman Sgt. Angy Scroble told the Ocala Star Banner. The slay victims reportedly teased the hulking accused killer about the incident.

I’m not sure what lesson we can take from any of this except that in America it’s clear that making fun of someone with a gun can be a capital offense.

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Frightening Factoid of the day

by digby

According to the NY Times,  Mumbai is becoming a cosmopolitan city along the lines of New York and Moscow, replete with American consumer culture and lots of excellent entertainment.  It sounds great.

Well, except for one little thing they just mention in passing:

At night, a yellowish corona of light hangs over the city, a cocoon of pollution from open cooking fires mingling with the soot from auto-rickshaws, diesel buses and coal-fired factories. On a bad day, Mehta reports in his book, breathing Mumbai’s inversion-trapped air is the equivalent of smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes.

I guess as long as there are lots of restaurants and boutiques there’s nothing to worry about …

What are these corporate wrongdoing and financial crimes prosecutions you speak of?

by digby

Huh?

The president is also said to appreciate Mr. Holder’s integrity and his positions during some of the big debates over antiterrorism policies and other volatile issues. The White House also points to his department’s successful defense of the president’s health care program before the Supreme Court and prosecutions in high-profile terrorism, financial crimes and corporate wrongdoing cases.

I think that paragraph must have lost a couple of words in the editing process. It should read:

The president is also said to appreciate Mr. Holder’s integrity and his positions during some of the big debates over antiterrorism policies and other volatile issues. The White House also points to his department’s successful defense of the president’s health care program before the Supreme Court, prosecutions in high-profile terrorism cases and lack of prosecutions in financial crimes and corporate wrongdoing cases.

This comes from an article in the NY Times which has unnamed Democrats kvetching about Holder and agitating for his removal. Apparently, they are unhappy about the IRS and AP/Fox scandals which, as Josh Gerstein points out here, is unlikely to result in dismissal since only the Fox case can be directly tied to him.

So, why the anonymous backbiting? Gerstein thinks these scandals are hitting close to home for some players in the White House so they are looking for a scapegoat.  Maybe that’s so,  I have no idea. But there are some legitimate reasons to be unhappy with Holder’s performance, the most glaring is the fact that the DOJ simply dropped the ball on pursuing justice for the financial crimes of the past few years. There are very few high profile prosecutions of major financial players because Holder doesn’t even think such crimes are prosecutable. Too big to jail and all that. The administration evidently agrees since according to the NY Times, they are pointing to his record in that area as a success.

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A good laugh on a Monday morning

by digby

Just watch it.  You’ll thank me:

Via James Fallows, who said:

I’ve always wondered how exactly to describe the temperament, the broadmindedness, the analytical subtlety, the Id that through the decades have shaped the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Conveniently, the Journal has filled that need, via this video interview with one of its editorial board members.

Not that we needed to be reminded of Dorothy Rabinowitz’s unique brand of wingnuttery. Recall this piece from a few years back by Eric Alterman regarding the Rabinowitz’s role in the Juanita Broadrick matter:

The story ultimately broke on February 19, when the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal joined its erstwhile political and journalistic comrade Drudge. Deploying tear-jerking prose, right-wing ideologue Dorothy Rabinowitz accepted Broaddrick’s claims at face value. She wrote, “To encounter this woman, to hear the details of her story and the statements of the corroborating witnesses, was to understand that this was in fact an event that took place.”

The trusting editorial writer–“I am not a hard news reporter,” she has explained–asked Broaddrick no uncomfortable questions and turned up no contemporaneous evidence. Nor did she raise the issue of a voluntary polygraph. Woman-to-woman, Rabinowitz simply decided that Broaddrick’s twenty-one-year-old claims were true, and the massive news-disseminating resources of the Dow Jones Company were marshaled behind a story that its news division wouldn’t touch. Following this act of journalistic recklessness, the paper’s editors chided NBC for its commitment to ethical standards and even compared their own work to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

Or this, my absolute favorite quote from a Wall Street Editorial board member:

“You have major criminality, excused as nothing. You can do anything you want, as long as you’re poor.”

Rabinowitz will never let you down.

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Meanwhile, the crime that is U.S. healthcare continues

by David Atkins

Elizabeth Rosenthal at the New York Times takes another distressing look at what passes for the United States healthcare system. Here’s a chart:

And here’s one particularly poignant bit from Rosenthal’s piece:

Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system. They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin.

Americans pay, on average, about four times as much for a hip replacement as patients in Switzerland or France and more than three times as much for a Caesarean section as those in New Zealand or Britain. The average price for Nasonex, a common nasal spray for allergies, is $108 in the United States compared with $21 in Spain. The costs of hospital stays here are about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that studies health policy.

While the United States medical system is famous for drugs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and heroic care at the end of life, it turns out that a more significant factor in the nation’s $2.7 trillion annual health care bill may not be the use of extraordinary services, but the high price tag of ordinary ones. “The U.S. just pays providers of health care much more for everything,” said Tom Sackville, chief executive of the health plans federation and a former British health minister.

Why?

A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing, aside from setting payment rates for Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for older people and the poor. Many other countries deliver health care on a private fee-for-service basis, as does much of the American health care system, but they set rates as if health care were a public utility or negotiate fees with providers and insurers nationwide, for example.

“In the U.S., we like to consider health care a free market,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund and a former adviser to President Obama. ”But it is a very weird market, riddled with market failures.”

There is no such thing a free market in healthcare. It’s a service that everyone needs at some point, that no one can do without, that has a dramatic impact on society’s collective well-being, that is almost impossible to “shop around” for, and that has opaque pricing. The notion that there could ever even in a libertarian dystopia be anything like a free market in healthcare is ludicrous.

The Affordable Care Act has made some improvements to the system, but it’s still barbaric. But try telling that to all the Americans who have never spent any time outside the U.S. and believe Jesus Christ wrote the Constitution. To them and the people they send to Congress, we’re still #1 in everything and the “liberal New York Times” won’t do a thing to change their minds.

The only way out of this mess is for states where such provincial people are heavily outnumbered to create single-payer systems and show the rest of the country it can be done here, too.

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Pop-tarts and vigilantes

by digby

Ugh:

So now it’s not a matter of the cops not getting there in time to do their jobs.  They don’t even bother with them. I wouldn’t want to live near anyone who wore a shirt like this.  Let’s just say I don’t think they’re responsible enough not to shoot up the neighborhood by accident.

Meanwhile:

A Maryland Republican group awarded a lifetime National Rifle Asscoiation membership to a boy who was suspended from school in March for chewing a Pop Tart into what his teacher thought was the shape of a gun.

The Anne Arundel County Republicans presented 8-year-old Josh Welch with the membership at a fundraiser on Thursday. Welch was suspended from Park Elementary School for two days because of the incident, and a lawyer has filed an appeal to remove the suspension from the boy’s record.

In an interview with Fox News, Welch has said he was trying to “turn it into a mountain but, it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun [kind of].”

There’s so much stupid coming from all directions in that silly story I don’t even know where to begin. In fact, the only one with any brains seems to be the kid.

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“Our track record is dismal”

by digby

Via Kevin Drum I find that John McCain went and got himself photographed with a bunch of Syrian rebels who had apparently kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims. Considering McCain’s belief that he can put people together in a room and tell them to cut the shit, this might be funny except for the fact that it illustrates so perfectly why we must fight the American hubris that says we have the ability to sort out this conflict from afar.

Kevin quotes Joe Klein, who is right in this instance:

I don’t blame McCain for this. It’s hard to advance a trip into rebel territory….The point is: We just don’t know these places well enough to go over and draw grand conclusions about policy. In a way, McCain’s trip is a perfect metaphor for the problem of involving ourselves with the Syrian rebels. We may be siding with the greater evil. We may be throwing fuel on a fire that could consume the region. Our track record when it comes to such things is dismal.

That’s right. And this shows a rather amazing evolution by the Joe Kleins of the world. He used to be a lot more sure of America’s ability to get on the “right side” of everything. Very sure:

Klein: And, by the way, we’re very much well liked among the young, educated Iranians. But this is not Iraq we’re dealing with here. This is an ancient country, a very strong country, and a very proud country. And so, yeah, by all means, we should talk to them, but, on the other hand, we should not take any option, including the use of nuclea-….tactical nuclear weapons off the table.

Stephanopoulos: Keep that on the table?

Klein: It’s absolutely stupid not to.

Stephanopoulos: That’s insane.

Klein: Well I don’t think we should ever use tac-…I think that…

Stephanopoulos: Well, then why should they be on the table?

Klein: Why?

Stephanopoulos: Why do we want that specter of crossing that line?

Klein: Because we don’t know what the options on the other side…what their options are on the table.

That post contains the full Joe Klein treatment, circa 2006. It’s very interesting to see how much he’s changed his tune. That was a very creepy time. (It should be noted that he did later withdraw that statement and sort of apologized.)

Our (mis)adventures in the middle east, including the ongoing problems in Iraq and Libya, are proof that we are not particularly good at this sort of thing. It’s horrible to watch people suffering and do nothing, but unless one is very sure that intervention will make things better it’s best to be humble and accept that a country as powerful as we are is more often than not a bull in a China shop. It’s good to see that some of the “moderates” who were once inclined to see America as always being a benevolent and positive force for good finally realize that good intentions aren’t enough.

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Of purses and cunnilingus

by digby

Shoot me now:

The Congress of yore might conjure images of spittoons and old male politicians with briefcases, but the 113th has ushered in a historic number of women — 20 in the Senate, and 81 in the House — and with them a historic number of handbags. In some ways, the female legislator’s purse or bag has become one of the most outwardly physical manifestations of the nation’s changing deliberative body.

“What a woman senator slings over her shoulder is the next tangible and Technicolor proof of how the esteemed body has changed and is changing,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist. “Today’s purses and bags are as new and interesting of a visual as the red power suit once was. They pop on the C-Span cameras, they serve a purpose and — intentionally or not — they make a statement.”

Or, as Bethany Lesser, a press secretary to Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, pointed out, “The cloakroom is no longer just for coats.”[…]

“Historically, bags were, quite literally, unwanted baggage in the halls of Congress and Parliament,” Robb Young, the author of “Power Dressing: First Ladies, Women Politicians and Fashion,” wrote by e-mail.

If you can believe it, this story actually goes on and on — and on culminating in a supposedly hilarious exposé of the femme pols who make their “purse-boys” carry their bags. (Because manly men carry everything in their pants pockets, apparently and never have an aide haul their stuff around for them.)

The main upshot here seems to be that women carry purses. And those purses make a statement. The statement is that they are being carried by women. Which means something, I don’t know what. I can hardly wait for the NY Times to blow the lid off of sensible pumps and nude panty hose. These times they are a changin.’

I guess I should go easier on this story on the day that Micheal Douglas revealed that going down on a woman will give you cancer — which comes as a huge relief to any number of men who had run out of excuses, I’m sure.

Are we really sure this country is ready to elect a woman president? I honestly remain unconvinced.

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Go Tammy

by digby

I don’t know if it’s a “movement” but it’s good to see it anyway:

When Tammy Baldwin delivered her first floor speech on the Senate floor late last month, she did not expect to create a national stir—let alone a movement.

But Baldwin’s progressive-populist call for a refocusing of Congress on issues of wealth and poverty struck a chord that is echoing across the country, as thousands of Americans sign on daily to an “I Stand With Tammy Baldwin” petition that has become a social-media sensation.

What resonated from Baldwin’s speech was the newly elected senator from Wisconsin’s absolute rejection of the narrow Washington consensus on economic issues. Dismissing the empty rhetoric of austerity of the Republicans and of the Democrats who compromise with them, Baldwin explained that America was having a different conversation altogether.

Recalling recent travels in her home state, the senator said, “Wisconsinites have told me that the powerful and well-connected still seem to get to write their own rules, while the concerns and struggles of middle-class families go unnoticed here in Washington.”

Speaking for those Wisconsinites, Baldwin told the Senate:

• “They see Washington happy to let Wall Street write their own rules, but unable to help students pull themselves out of debt.”

• “They see Washington working to protect big tax breaks for powerful corporations, but unwilling to protect small manufacturers from getting ripped off by China’s cheating.”

• “They see Washington bouncing from one manufactured fiscal crisis to the next, but never addressing the real and ongoing crisis of our disappearing middle class.”

The senator correctly diagnosed an old disease: “The truth is, while you hear a lot about the wide distance between Democrats and Republicans, the widest and most important distance in our political system is between the content of the debate here in Washington and the concerns of working families in places like Wisconsin. That distance parallels the large and growing gaps between the rich and the poor…between rising costs and stagnant incomes…between our nation and our competitors when it comes to education and innovation. And it’s really hurting people.”

As @billmon1 pointed out on twitter, it’s still a fact that the Democratic Party strategists are afraid to embrace populist issues, believing their future coalition lies with “identity politics”. Whether it’s because they are answering to the donor class or are trying to hang on to the vestige of the white middle class that is still leery of “redistributional” policies after 30 years of right wing propaganda (or both) is the question.

But let’s just say that if anyone can transcend those cultural boundaries and possibly make a breakthrough, it’s Baldwin. She is the first openly gay Senator, a woman and a populist. Let’s see where that takes us.

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