The new GOP obsession
by digby
After watching all the Sunday Morning gasbags shows today I can only conclude that Republicans are afflicted with a serious mass delusion. The following looks like a cartoon, an exaggeration but it really isn’t:
courtesy Tom Tomorrow at Daily Kos
Leader of the Fox Gang
by digby
This new book about Roger Ailes sounds like it’s going to give him some major heartburn. This excerpt is particularly telling:
Ailes said that if he were president, he would solve the immigration problem by sitting the president of Mexico down and giving him a stern talking-to: “Your country is corrupt. You can now only take thirty percent of what the people earn instead of seventy percent. If you don’t do that, I’ll send the CIA down there to kill you.”
He had been careful to moderate his immigration position in public. “If I’m going to risk my life to run over the fence to get into America, I want to win. I think Fox News will articulate that,” he told The New Republic a few months earlier. But Ailes told [Philipstown, NY supervisor Richard] Shea that as president he would send Navy SEAL trainees to the border as part of a certification program: “I would make it a requirement that you would have to personally kill an illegal immigrant coming into the country. They would have to bring home a dead body.” [The Loudest Voice in the Room, pg 392]
People have made the comparison between the conservative movement and the Mafia or criminal gangs like the Crips and the Bloods before but I always thought it was a little bit silly. I was wrong.
There are lots of other, similar excerpts at the link. How about this one:
About a year after the attacks, Bill Clinton went for lunch at News Corp with Murdoch and his top executives. Murdoch’s communications chief, Gary Ginsberg, who was a former lawyer in the Clinton White House and a key Murdoch emissary to powerful Democrats, brokered the meeting. Talk turned to Ground Zero and plans for reconstruction. The executives around the room offered ideas. When it was Ailes’s turn, the conversation halted. “Roger said this insane thing,” one person in the room recalled. “He was talking about rebuilding the towers and he said, ‘We should fill the last ten floors with Muslims so they never do it again.” [The Loudest Voice in the Room, pg 264-265]
He’s as kooky as Donald Trump.
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Show us the money
by digby
The other day I ran the transcript of Christie being an ass in his December press conference in which he snidely wondered why Ft Lee had these dedicated lanes to begin with, saying in quite nasty fashion that he’s been stuck in traffic and he doesn’t know why they should get special treatment. I’m not from New Jersey so I figured maybe I didn’t understand what the deal was but it did strike me as an odd thing to say.
Steve Kornacki has a very interesting theory as to why he said it. And it could lead to the money angle that should be at the heart of any scandal like this one:
Nice little development you’ve got there, yadda, yadda yadda …
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Democracy and the Christie phenomenon
by digby
This piece by Arun Gupta gets to something important about our American “democracy”:
[T]hese days Americans have as much familiarity with democracy as they do with homesteading on the frontier. We like to imagine ourselves as pioneering statesmen, hewing a sturdy nation from the simple tools democracy has bequeathed us – messaging, voting, debates, elections, law-making – but we are lost in the wilderness when it comes to discovering the essence of democracy.
Democracy is not the same as the perpetual-motion electoral machine. It’s both a means and end built on dialogue, respect, relationships and reason, and it’s everything Christie pummels into submission. But don’t blame the public for this sorry state of affairs. Our lives are bereft of democracy. Virtually all schools are authoritarian, as are churches. Families teeter between parental authority and youthful insubordination. Few believe consumerism is democratic (but our democracy is consumeristic). Say “workplace democracy” to anyone at the office and blank stares is the best reaction you can hope for.
Few people know how to engage in democratic discussion and dialogue. I’ve heard the same story from food-justice organizers in Brooklyn, anti-fracking activists in Ohio, warehouse workers in Chicago, and home-foreclosure defenders in Oakland. It’s back to basics. Organizing now means first building community through socializing such as potlucks, block parties and softball games, and teaching people how to collectively listen to and discuss ideas with mutual respect.
He is leading up to an explanation as to why people like the bullying tough guy types such as Chris Christie — they are looking for someone to “take charge” in a world in which they feel a loss of control.
Maybe. I agree that our connection with “democracy” is more tenuous than ever, for a lot of reasons. The promise of “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and “hope and change” giving way to the reality that the whole thing can be brought to a halt by a rump group of extremists alone has been very disillusioning to a great many people. But I actually think that thuggish guys like Christie always appeal to a fair number of Americans regardless of the conditions of the moment. The question is always whether that person can get a majority to vote for him.
I think he’s right about this:
Christie taps into something dark in the American political soul – a desire not just for order or efficiency, but pleasure in humiliating the weak. Is it surprising women are a frequent target of his abuse, who are pathologized in our society as weak?
Like every bully, Christie crossed the line, or a bridge in his instance. The silver lining is his presidential ambitions may drown in the brewing scandal so the whole nation doesn’t have to suffer him degrading women with blow-job jokes. But others like Christie will follow in his wake until we realize our society does not suffer from a lack of authoritarian bullies but a deficit of grassroots democracy.
Christie may recover from this scandal and go on to win the nomination. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. We do have a problem with our democracy, no doubt about that, and our work is cut out for us to turn that around. As Eric Boehlert illustrates here, one of the necessary first steps is to do something about the political press which has shown over and over again its propensity for immature storylines that explain nothing of importance and leave the people relating to their politics as a TV show. And boy did they love them some Chris Christie:
In the last month alone, TIME magazine has declared that Christie governed with “kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore.” MSNBC’s Morning Joe called the governor “different,” “fresh,” and “sort of a change from public people that you see coming out of Washington.” In a GQ profile, Christie was deemed “that most unlikely of pols: a happy warrior,” while National Journal described him as “the Republican governor with a can-do attitude” who “made it through 2013 largely unscathed. No scandals, no embarrassments or gaffes.” ABC’s Barbara Walters crowned Christie as one of her 10 Most Fascinating People, casting him as a “passionate and compassionate” politician who cannot lie.
Note that when Christie last year easily won re-election against a weak Democratic opponent (via record low voter turnout), the Beltway press treated the win as some sort of national coronation (“Chris Christie is a rock star” announced CNN’s Carol Costello), with endless cable coverage and a round of softball interviews on the Sunday political talk circuit.
Here’s Time from last November’s celebration: “He’s a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done.” That, of course, is indistinguishable from a Christie office press release. But it’s been that way for years.
The man acted like a thug and a jackass in public repeatedly, in ways that foreshadowed this scandal to a t, and yet this was how the media chose to portray him. No wonder our democracy’s in trouble.
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Trust ’em?
by digby
This New Yorker piece by Lawrence Wright is a must read if you want to understand just how fatuous are the government’s assertions of competence and necessity of the massive NSA surveillance programs.
On December 16th, Judge Richard J. Leon, in Washington, D.C., ruled that the indiscriminate hoarding violates the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and its prohibition of unreasonable searches. Two weeks later, in New York, Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that the metadata-collection program was lawful and effective.
Judge Pauley invoked the example of Khalid al-Mihdhar, a Saudi jihadist who worked for Al Qaeda. On 9/11, he was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. In early 2000, Mihdhar made seven calls from San Diego to an Al Qaeda safe house in Yemen. According to Pauley, the N.S.A. intercepted the calls, but couldn’t identify where Mihdhar was calling from. Relying on testimony by Robert Mueller, the former director of the F.B.I., Pauley concluded that metadata collection could have allowed the bureau to discover that the calls were being made from the U.S., in which case the bureau could have stopped 9/11.
If he is right, advocates of extensive monitoring by the government have a strong case. But the Mihdhar calls tell a different story about why the bureau failed to prevent the catastrophe. The C.I.A. withheld crucial intelligence from the F.B.I., which has the ultimate authority to investigate terrorism in the U.S. and attacks on Americans abroad.
Read on for the details which show not only that the reports Judge Pauley cited are lies, but that the very people we are supposed to be feel “confident” entrusting with this tremendous power are petty, incompetent bureaucrats who really should not be trusted to cross the street unattended.
The podcast discussion of the topic is here. It’s fascinating, important stuff.
QOTD: GOP Hack edition
by digby
It’s a tie between Karl Rove on Fox News this morning:
“I think he did himself a lot of good,” Rove said of Christie’s reaction to the scandal. “I think he did himself some good by contrasting with the normal, routine way of handing these things, which is to be evasive, to sort of trim on the edges.”
“You’ll notice we haven’t been hearing a lot from the Clinton camp about this,” he added. “Contrast both with Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Clinton’s handling of Benghazi.”
“There are reasons why conservatives had disagreements with Chris Christie, I don’t think that the tea party is going to seize upon Fort Lee and the George Washington Bridge as their defining difference with Christie,” Rove opined. “In fact, I think his handling of this, being straightforward, taking action — saying, ‘I’m responsible’ — firing the people probably gives him some street cred with some tea party Republicans, who say that’s what we want in a leader, somebody who steps up and takes responsibility.”
The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward noted that the media needed to uncoverthe mindset of Christie’s staff because the decision to close the bridge “came out of that office.”
“So did Benghazi, and so did IRS… come out of appointees of President Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton!” Rove shot back. “The amount of attention paid this week to Chris Christie makes the coverage of Benghazi at the same time and the coverage of the IRS pale in significance.”
And Rudy Giuliani on This Week:
RADDATZ: I want to go back to September. Four days, thousands of Ft. Lee residents are stuck on that bridge. Chris Christie is the chief executive of that state. I can’t imagine you as New York mayor not saying what the heck is going on over there, forget that traffic study. And yet Chris Christie didn’t do that.
GIULIANI: You know, Martha, that’s always kind of simplistic after some like this happens, you know, how could it happen, how could you not have known? How did President Obama not know about the IRS targeting right wing groups? You know, massive numbers of right wing groups…
RADDATZ: But this is traffic, this affects everybody. This seems very different.
GIULIANI: Well, that affects a lot of people. And the reality is, things go wrong in an administration. And frankly, you know, he was in campaign-mode at the time, during campaign-mode you miss a lot of things. You’re not paying as much attention. We see that with Benghazi.
As you can see, the word has gone forth that the best way to deal with the Christie scandal is to whine and blubber about the bogus IRS scandal and Benghazi!
Let’s just say that they don’t have a lot of practice being on the receiving end of these sorts of feeding frenzies. Their specialty is doing the feeding. So it’s not surprising that they don’t really know how to deal with it. This is pathetic.
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The great decoupling: another phrase for an end to 20th century capital economics
by David Atkins
Some of us have been pointing out for a while now that this economic downturn isn’t just a blip as we prepare for a return to prosperity, and that while much of the problem is attributable to economic decisions made to benefit the plutocratic class, the world really has changed such that neither liberal nor conservative 20th century answers will solve 21st century problems.
That’s a fairly radical concept, but it’s one that’s gaining steam among an increasing number of thinkers who see the obvious: a productive, technologically advanced society that simply doesn’t need enough workers to sustain healthy employment levels. While conservative “solutions” only exacerbate the problem, it’s also true that simply taxing the wealthy more won’t lead to more jobs if there simply aren’t enough jobs to do (unless you cut the work week in half, which itself is a fairly radical answer as well.)
It’s not just lefty bloggers screaming into the ether anymore. Yesterday saw two MIT Technology professors saying much the same thing in a New York Times op ed:
A WONDERFUL ride has come to an end. For several decades after World War II the economic statistics we care most about all rose together here in America as if they were tightly coupled. G.D.P. grew, and so did productivity — our ability to get more output from each worker. At the same time, we created millions of jobs, and many of these were the kinds of jobs that allowed the average American worker, who didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a college degree, to enjoy a high and rising standard of living.
Productivity growth slowed in the 1970s but revved up again in the 1990s and has stayed strong most years since. But as shown by the accompanying graph, which was first drawn by the economist Jared Bernstein, productivity growth and employment growth started to become decoupled from each other at the end of that decade. Bernstein calls the gap that’s opened up “the jaws of the snake.” They show no signs of closing.
We are creating jobs, but not enough of them. The employment-to-population ratio, or percentage of working-age people that have work, dropped over 5 points during the Great Recession, and has improved only half a point in the three and a half years since it ended.
As the jaws of the snake opened, wages suffered even more than job growth. Adjusted for inflation, the average U.S. household now has lower income than it did in 1997. Wages as a share of G.D.P. are now at an all-time low, even as corporate profits are at an all-time high. The implicit bargain that gave workers a steady share of the productivity gains has unraveled.
What’s going on? Why have job volumes and wages become decoupled from the rest of the train of economic progress? There are several explanations, including tax and policy changes and the effects of globalization and off-shoring. We agree that these matter but want to stress another driver of the “Great Decoupling” — the changing nature of technological progress.
They go on to point out what keen observers already know: the modern technological revolution is unlike other disruptive technological changes that have come before. When the horse-and-carriage industry was destroyed by the automobile industry, the new automotive industry and its ancillary fields were there to pick up the employment slack. But when Amazon kills the bookseller business, or when self-driving cars eliminate cab and truck drivers, or when self-order tablets replace restaurant servers, there is a drop in costs, loss of jobs and increase in productivity without producing a significant number of other jobs to replace those that are lost. As technology continues to improve via artificial intelligence and 3D printing, more and more industries will fall by the wayside without jobs to replace them.
What then?
The Great Decoupling is not going to reverse course, for the simple reason that advances in digital technologies are not about to stop. In fact, we’re convinced that they are accelerating. And this should be great news for society. Digital progress lowers prices, improves quality, and brings us into a world where abundance becomes the norm.
But there is no economic law that says digital progress will benefit everyone evenly. As technology races ahead it can leave a lot of workers behind. In the short run we can improve their prospects greatly by investing in infrastructure, reforming education at all levels and encouraging entrepreneurs to invent the new products, services and industries that will create jobs.
While we’re doing this, however, we also need to start preparing for a technology-fueled economy that’s ever-more productive, but that just might not need a great deal of human labor. Designing a healthy society to go along with such an economy will be the great challenge, and the great opportunity, of the next generation.
We have to acknowledge that the old ride of tightly coupled statistics has ended, and start thinking about what we want the new ride to look like.
What they’re talking about is no less than an end to 20th century capitalist economics. And they’re not crazy people or socialist bloggers.
In theory, assuming we can tackle the climate crisis and move to sustainable energy sources, this challenge is an opportunity to see the promise of technology bear fruit. In a world where people can live well cheaply and where human drudgery is no longer so greatly required to create the goods upon which modern life depends, we should see an increase in luxury and free time. The only reason for technology to increase human misery is if those who control all the wealth and the means of technological production choose to artificially restrict the labor and financial markets to benefit only those who own corporate stock or have among the few remaining employable skills. That’s not a recipe for economic or political stability in societies where the natural unemployment rate will begin to hover around 20%.
We’re going to need to rethink the economic system entirely. And it’s about time. It’s not as if the next generation is going to be able to count on another tripling of housing and stock valuations, nor will Generation Z be able to afford another doubling of tuition prices and student loan debt, nor can households throw third and fourth workers into the grinder to make ends meet. The current road is unsustainable for many reasons. We might as well start thinking about what an alternative future looks like today, before we need to make those decisions convulsing under duress.
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Just saying
by digby
It seems like a good day for some Mark Twain wisdom:
“How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better.”
Also too:
h/t to @Smith83k
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Freedom to lie
by digby
Gosh, I wonder why the Supreme Court thought this case was worth hearing:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday said it will hear a challenge to an Ohio law that forbids candidates and issue groups from making false campaign statements.
The case, involving an anti-abortion group’s claim that Ohio’s False Statement Law violates free speech, will likely be argued in April, with a ruling announced during the last months of the Supreme Court’s term in May or June.
“We are thrilled at the opportunity to have our arguments heard,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, said in a press release Friday. “The Ohio Election Commission statute demonstrates complete disregard for the Constitutional right of citizens to criticize their elected officials.”
During the 2010 election cycle, Susan B. Anthony List accused then-Rep. Steven Driehaus (D-Ohio), who was running for reelection against Republican Steve Chabot, of endorsing taxpayer-funded abortions by voting for President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Driehaus complained to the state election commission that the group’s proposed billboard ads saying, “Shame on Steve Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion,” were false, since federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer money for abortion funding. The state blocked the billboards.
Susan B. Anthony List and the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes responded with federal lawsuits arguing that Ohio’s False Statement Law violates the First Amendment. A federal court dismissed the lawsuits in 2011, and an appeals court upheld the decision last year.
I guess some members of the court are concerned that the anti-abortion zealots are being obstructed from lying. You can’t blame them. Blatant dishonesty is a big part of the forced childbirth movement strategy and at least a handful of justices are undoubtedly fully on board with that tactic. But I would have thought they’d use a case that didn’t point to it so specifically. If they were enabling a different kind of dishonest political ad they might have been able to keep the agenda under the radar.
I expect they will rule that lying in political ads is perfectly acceptable under the First Amendment. And maybe it is. Who really is the ultimate arbiter of truth anyway? But I think we all know who’s going to benefit from this. Politicians of all partisan stripes lie, but there is one group that makes a particular fetish of it. And they have an endless supply of money.
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