Month: January 2014

When you’ve lost Fournier …

by digby

The DNC sent this out which clearly indicates the “even the conservative Ron Fournier says …” nature of it:

A year ago, I wrote: “The smartest move in politics today is to move against Washington and the two major parties. And the smartest man in politics may be Chris Christie.” I take it back.

At the time, the New Jersey governor had channeled the public’s disgust with political dysfunction, chastising House Republican leaders for refusing to allow a vote on a Hurricane Sandy relief bill. Christie said the game-playing that derailed the relief bill showed “why the American people hate Congress.” He accused his own party’s leadership for “selfishness,” “duplicity,” and moral failure.

His approval rating topped 70 percent.

Now his numbers are dropping, because he wasn’t so smart. Rather than stay true to his post-partisan image, Christie ran a hyper-political governor’s office that focused relentlessly on a big re-election win to position him for a 2016 presidential race. In this zero-sum gain culture, Christie enabled (if not directly ordered) an infamous abuse of power: the closure of traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge in a fit of political retribution.

If not criminal, it was pretty damn stupid. His reputation is in tatters. Reporting a poll conducted jointly with ABC News, Philip Rucker and Scott Clement of the Washington Post wrote:

Christie has benefited from the perception that he has unique appeal among independents and some Democrats, a reputation the governor burnished with his 2013 reelection in his strongly Democratic state.

But that image has been tarnished, the survey finds. More Democrats now view Christie unfavorably than favorably, with independents divided. Republicans, meanwhile, have a lukewarm opinion, with 43 percent viewing him favorably and 33 percent unfavorably. Overall, 35 percent of Americans see him favorably and 40 percent unfavorably

Christie has fallen from first to third among potential GOP presidential candidates, according to the Washington Post-ABC News poll, behind Rep. Paul Ryan and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

A plurality of respondents said the bridge episode represents a pattern of abuse in Christie’s office. While most Republicans give him the benefit of the doubt, 60 percent of Democrats and half of all independents don’t think it was an isolated incident. There is good reason for the suspicion.

First, the governor is deeply engaged in the minutia of his office, an operation that doesn’t discriminate between politics and policy. As the New York Times reported this week in a must-read analysis:

Mr. Christie has said that he had not been aware of his office’s involvement in the maneuver, and nothing has directly tied to him to it. But a close look at his operation and how intimately he was involved in it, described in interviews with dozens of people — Republican and Democrat, including current and former Christie administration officials, elected leaders and legislative aides — gives credence to the puzzlement expressed by some Republicans and many Democrats in the state, who question how a detail-obsessed governor could have been unaware of the closings or the effort over months to cover up the political motive.

In other words, how stupid do you think we are, governor? Christie either knew or should have known that his administration was snarling Fort Lee in traffic and endangering lives.

Yeah, no kidding. I think that last point is what’s sinking him. Control freaks can’t get away with saying they were out of the loop.

It’s still early enough that Christie could recover some of his lustre but it’s looking as though he just has too many enemies. He’s not like a Bill Clinton who had preturnatural survival gifts and the ability to charm his enemies even as they hated his guts. Christie was all about his image as a no-nonsense, get the job done guy. It’s not as if he has some great vision for America or is inspiring to young people or can relate to the average Joe. If he used his office for petty partisan revenge, then he’s blown up his image as a no-nonsense guy. If he didn’t know what was going on, his tough guy image is obviously phony. Either way, there’s no good argument for him at this point.

Fournier says it’s now all about Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush. Feel the magic.

Update: And then there’s the corruption.

The War between the Tea Partiers

by digby

Right Wing Watch caught a recent South Sarolina GOP Senate debate

Over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend, the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition held a convention that included a lively debate between Bright and his three fellow Tea Party candidates vying for the chance to face Graham in a runoff.

Perhaps the most memorable candidate at the debate was Bill Connor, an Army veteran and former lieutenant governor candidate, who spent the whole debate waving a pocket copy of the Constitution.

We put together a highlight reel of Connor’s commentary during the debate, including his assertions that the Europeans he fought alongside in Afghanistan were less hard-working and ingenious than American soldiers because “Europe had gone socialist” and “post-Christian”; that Congress should impeach President Obama over his executive order implementing part of the DREAM Act; that the separation of church and state has led “atheism to be our national religion”; and that Congress should disband federal appeals courts that enforce church-state separation because “if you’re being biblical, you’re doing your job as a judge.”

Watch it:

Keep that in mind the next time some lazy Villager frames the right and the left of the two parties as equivalent. Unless a liberal congressional challenger starts demanding the nationalization of all business, mandatory abortion and boldly declares that all religion should be outlawed by the state, I think they’ve got a long way to go before they can be considered equally radical.

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Oh, the tyranny!

by David Atkins

If this isn’t the face of an Imperial tyrannical Presidency one step short of Hitler, I don’t know what is:

I mock, of course, but looking at this chart one thing is fairly obvious: FDR still has Republicans spooked. They know we’re just one more FDR away from blowing their little greed-soaked Objectivist world right out of the water, and it scares them half to death.

Good. They should be scared, particularly once the 2020 census comes knocking. But not by this President. Not today.

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Fuzzy delight

by digby

This is what it looks like when a baby polar bear sees snow for the first time.

The cub, named Remy, was born in November and is the sole survivor of three cubs. Zoo staff have been raising the cub indoors, nursing it by hand and shooting plenty of adorable videos.

We’re not sure how Remy feels about the snow and the so-called ‘polar vortex,’ but seeing as how he’s a polar bear, we’re pretty sure those are oh-so-cute squeaks of joy.

I’ve watched that five times in a row. I needed to. It’s been that kind of day.

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Elizabeth Warren is madder than hell

by digby

Mike Lux of American Family Voices writes about a recent event in New York featuring Warren as the main speaker. It’s quite a speech:

Lux writes:

The kind of politics Elizabeth Warren represents is at its heart a moral kind of politics. She doesn’t worry about party politics, as she has always taken on the powers-that-be of both political parties. She doesn’t shy away from a tough fight, instead she has always been willing to push for what is right no matter how powerful the lobbyists on the other side are. And it was fitting that the event we did with her was in a church, because the politics she preaches are deeply moral – the politics not of right and left, but of right and wrong.

She has become an icon for an important new kind of politics, a political movement focused less on the size of government than on, as she talks about in her speech, which side is our government on, everyday people or the rich and powerful. Her willingness to hold both big business and government officials accountable when the playing field is tilted in favor of wealthy special interests is something that has been all too rare in modern American politics, and it is the reason so many people are responding to her the way the crowd in that New York City church was.

And it isn’t just activists who are responding: she is remarkably effective, especially for a first year Senator. It is clear that her calls for tougher Wall Street prosecution drove the bigger, tougher settlements JP Morgan and other bankers have had to agree to in the last year. Larry Summers would be the Fed Chair if it wasn’t for her. Her speech on Social Security was a major factor in taking discussion of Social Security cuts off the table for the time being. And her passionate pursuit of a higher minimum wage have helped create the atmosphere that led to President Obama’s executive order and focus on the issue in his SOTU.

What AFV is seeking to build is a broad national movement around this brand of politics. We want to help Elizabeth Warren and other progressive allies take on the powers that be and fight the good fight for the American people no matter who is on the other side. When she said that “our time has come”, I believe she was right, but only if we join her in the battle. When she said “we have found our voice”, she wasn’t talking about her being the voice of progressives, she was saying we all have to find our voice and join this movement. Join is in that fight by signing up on our website, and enjoy watching Elizabeth Warren at her best.

I post these stories and videos featuring Senator Warren and always feel as if there’s nothing left to say. She says it all. And she says it perfectly. All I can do is say, “what she said.”

Warren is one of the very few elected officials who is explicitly aligning herself with the progressive movement and is totally unafraid to make that known. That takes guts. She will not be rewarded by the Party apparatus for doing this. But then, she has us.

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How the private sphere coalesced with the public sector to destroy lives with the anti-communist blacklist

by digby

I excerpted a piece of the Pete Seeger testimony before the HUAC yesterday and sarcastically commented that we can feel confident this could never happen again because well … humans are different now. Especially Americans. We’re good, they’re evil yadda, yadda, yadda.

Corey Robin gives this subject a proper historical treatment and it’s vitally important to understand the real dynamics at work:

While Seeger’s HUAC appearance, and its legal aftermath, is making the rounds of his eulogists, it’s important to remember that HUAC was probably not the most difficult of his tribulations during the McCarthy era. Far more toxic for most leftists was the blacklist itself. From the early 1950s to the mid-1960s (the dates are fuzzy, and it depends on which particular medium we’re talking about), Seeger was prevented from performing on a great many stages and venues. First with The Weavers, and then on his own.

The blacklist did not work independently of the state. It was the transmission belt of the state, both a feeder to, and an enforcement mechanism of, the government. Men and women who didn’t cooperate with the government were subject to the blacklist, so it was a useful means of securing cooperation and providing information. The secret enforcers of the blacklist were often ex-FBI men or ex-HUAC staffers, and the FBI and HUAC supplied critical information to industry executives and their underlings. Who then used it for either political or narrower self-interested purposes.

That said, the blacklist, and the more general specter of private penalties, touched more people than did HUAC or the state. For most men and women during the McCarthy years, the immediate point of contact with political repression and coercion was their employer, their teacher, their therapist, their lawyer, their supervisor, their co-worker.

And that raises a larger question. It is easy today to look back on that time, to read the transcripts and case histories, and tut-tut at all the nastiness or laugh at all the foolishness of the blacklist. With everyone from President Obama to the New York Times delivering warm encomia for Seeger, we forget that the blacklist only worked because so many people like President Obama, like the editors of the New York Times—who refused during the McCarthy years to hire anyone who was a member of the Communist Party—worked together to make it work.

To be sure, there were many hard-right ideologues behind the blacklist: the writers at Red Channels, an anticommunist handbook that named names in the entertainment industry, were conservative propagandists of the first order, anatomized to brilliant effect by a young researcher by the name of Michael Harrington.

But the blacklist would never have had the reach it did—not merely in Hollywood or the academy, but throughout virtually every industry in the United States—had it not attracted a wide range of men and women to its cause. The blacklist was also the work of liberal pamphleteers, executives in the culture industries, influential politicians in and around the Democratic Party, and most prominent of all, J. Edgar Hoover, about whom Arthur Schlesinger wrote:

All Americans must bear in mind J. Edgar Hoover’s warning that counter-espionage is no field for amateurs. We need the best professional counterespionage agency we can get to protect our national security.

Far from being the object of liberal derision that he is today, Hoover was, in his time, thought to be the consummate rational bureaucrat, a professional of the first order who needed, said the liberals, more money, more resources, more power, not less. As Hubert Humphrey declared:

If the FBI does not have enough trained manpower to do this job, then, for goodness sake, let us give the FBI the necessary funds for recruiting the manpower it needs….This is a job that must be done by experts.

For liberals, Hoover, the ultimate impresario of the blacklist, was someone to collaborate with, not contend against.

He goes on to explain, in rather chilling detail, how the private sphere and the public sphere came together around the blacklist, crossing all of the normal ideological barriers and cultural boundaries. I certainly feel reverberations of that dynamic in our current discussions about the surveillance state.

I urge you to read the whole thing.

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The public is clear: solve inequality by taxing the obscenely rich

by David Atkins

America is often described as a divided nation, and in many ways we are. A person from suburban Kentucky and an urbanite in California don’t see eye to eye on most issues.

But when it comes fixing the unfair rewards of our economic system, Americans unequivocally agree on a few things. Among them are:

1. Taxing the rich won’t hurt the economy. Pundits like to pretend that the nation is evenly divided between demand-side and supply-side thinking on economics. That’s not actually true. An overwhelming majority of Americans are clearly Keynesians who believe in progressive taxation. A recent Pew poll asked:

“In your view, what would do more to reduce poverty: raising taxes on wealthy people and corporations in order to expand programs for the poor, OR, lowering taxes on wealthy people and corporations in order to encourage more investment and economic growth?”

54% said that raising taxes would help, only 35% said lowering them would, and 11% were unsure. Supply-siders are a rump minority.

2. Even a sizable number of Republicans think economic rewards should be distributed more fairly. A recent CBS News poll asked:

“Do you feel that the distribution of money and wealth in this country is fair, or do you feel that the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed among more people?”

While 60% of Americans overall said it should be more even, so did many Republicans–34% of them, in fact.

3. Almost half of Americans don’t think it’s possible people to get ahead through their own effort. The question was asked this way:

“Which comes closer to your view? In today’s economy, everyone has a fair chance to get ahead in the long run. OR, In today’s economy, it’s mainly just a few people at the top who have a chance to get ahead.”

Only 52% of Americans said that everyone has a fair chance to get ahead.

4. Most Americans feel the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy. 60% of them, in fact.

The devil is in the details, of course: there are a lot of voters who interpret the question of hand-outs versus hand-ups differently based on their experiences or prejudices.

But there’s little doubt that people believe the American dream is dying, that inequality is a problem, that it’s getting worse, and that taxing the obscenely wealthy is the right way to fix it. Even a sizable chunk of Republicans agree.

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What the Republicans oppose

by digby

This little list from Jed Lewison is very instructive:

When President Obama said these things…

That it’s a good thing that after 12 long years the war in Afghanistan is finally coming to an end

That Congress shouldn’t shut down government or threaten the full faith and credit of the United States

That Congress should pass legislation to put more Americans to work in the tech manufacturing sector

That he’ll protect natural lands with his executive power

That Congress should repeal tax breaks for Big Oil

That Congress should restore unemployment insurance that it let expire at the end of the year 

That women deserve equal pay for equal work

That nobody who works full time should have to raise a family in poverty, so Congress should raise the minimum wage to $10.10

That Congress shouldn’t have another 40+ votes to repeal Obamacare

That votes, not money, should drive democracy

That he’ll work to prevent more tragedies like Sandy Hook

…Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to applaud.

Someone should put that into a video and make an advertisement of it.

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Backing off lunacy

by digby

Some Democratic senators are coming to their senses on this Iran sanctions bill. Thank goodness.

When asked to respond to Obama’s veto threat after the speech, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) — who signed on to co-sponsor the new Senate Iran sanctions bill in December — said he only lent his support for the bill to help the president, but now he thinks it should be shelved.

“I did not sign it with the intention that it would ever be voted upon or used upon while we’re negotiating,” he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “I signed it because I wanted to make sure the president had a hammer if he needed it and showed him how determined we were to do it and use it if we had to. But with that being said we’ve got to give peace a chance here and we’ve got to support this process.”

I don’t know who told him that it was a good idea to “help” the president this way, but I doubt it was the White House simply because it’s such a daft thing to do at such a delicate moment. (I’m looking forward to some reporting that explains just how that whole thing came down.)

I think everyone should keep this little gambit in the back of their minds as some of these Senators look toward higher office. Signing on to that ridiculous bill is a tell. A big one. We should pay attention.

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Ted talk. (Cruz on the SOTU)

by digby

This man is pathological:

There’s something so confident about this loon that it still makes me nervous. It’s easy to dismiss him because he’s positioned himself (and as far as I can tell is a true believer) with the far right crazies.That would seem to make him unelectable to higher office. But there are some fairly vivid historical examples of other people with crazy right wing views who were similarly dismissed.

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