Month: February 2014

Snickerdoodles scare me too

by digby

You can’t blame the guy:

A California man was taken into custody over the weekend after he allegedly pulled a gun on a young Girl Scout who was selling cookies.

A press release from the Riverside County Sheriff-Coroner’s office that the father of the girl, who is a minor, contacted authorities after he saw 59-year-old John Dodrill point the gun at his daughter while she was selling cookies door-to-door on Sunday.

His home is his castle and he doesn’t want some little girl forcing him to decline her offer to sell him some cookies on his own front porch. Because freedom. That’s the American way.

Also too, the cost of Taco Bell is too damned high. The only answer is to shoot up the stores.

Maybe if we armed the fast food workers and girl scouts we’d have a more polite society amirite?

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I’d like to buy the world a coke (as long as everyone speaks English)

by digby

When you’ve lost Erick Erickson …

People were really upset about the Coke advertisement? Seriously?
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 3, 2014

In case you haven’t heard about this latest right wing outragefest, click here.

“Then the words went from English to languages I didn’t recognize,” a troubled West wrote, calling it “a truly disturbing commercial.”

“If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing ‘American (sic) the Beautiful’ in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come — doggone we are on the road to perdition,” he wrote.

Update:

Glenn Beck explains the problem:

After Coca-Cola’s ad featuring “America the Beautiful” being sung in different languages caused a firestorm of racism on Twitter on Sunday, Beck said that someone had asked him to tweet his own response.

“And I said, ‘Why did you need that to divide us politically?’ Because that’s all this ad is,” Beck opined. “It’s in your face, and if you don’t like it, if you’re offended by it, you’re a racist. If you do like it, you’re for immigration. You’re for progress.”

“That’s all this is: To divide people,” he continued. “Remember when Coke used to do the thing on the top and they would all hold hands? Now it’s, have a Coke and we’ll divide you.”

It’s divisive to be inclusive. Everyone knows that.

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Join the vigil for the planet

by digby

This is happening tonight. You can click here to see where your local vigil is being held:

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment to send the message to President Obama that Keystone XL fails his climate test and he must reject it. On the evening of Monday, February 3rd, we’ll come together around the country to make our voices heard. RSVP for an event near you or host your own.

The No KXL protest vigils are organized by CREDO, Rainforest Action Network, and the Sierra Club, and supported by 350.org, The Other 98%, Center for Biological Diversity, Oil Change International, Bold Nebraska, Energy Action Coalition, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Hip Hop Caucus, Overpass Light Brigade, Environmental Action, League of Conservation Voters, Waterkeeper Alliance, Friends of the Earth, Forest Ethics, Forecast the Facts, and others.

President Obama is now beyond electoral politics and is looking to build his legacy. He seems to have realized that his preferred legacy of being a transformational “transpartisan” president who ushered in an era of consensus and good feeling didn’t work out. Now he needs liberals. There is leverage. And this a defining issue.

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Power grab talking points


by digby

It would seem that every Republican from the goofiest tea partier to presidential hopefuls are handwringing over the “presidential power grab.” Even VSP Paul Ryan called the administration an “increasingly lawless presidency” yesterday. They seem to be working themselves into a frenzy.

Why? Well, it could be the beginning of an impeachment campaign.  They are that nuts.  But they would have to do it without the years long investigation that preceded the Clinton impeachment or the scandals that preceded the vote to impeach Nixon in the House judiciary committee.  They are a long way from that although they are just looney enough to try to do it anyway.  (They certainly may not see a political downside since the last time they pulled this nonsense, the next election was close enough they were able to steal the presidency.)

But I doubt they’ll be able to get it together enough to do this. What they are definitely doing is riling up their rubes and playing the refs — trying to get the press to conflate the president using executive power to enforce regulations with using it to circumvent the Bill of Rights. And from what I can see, it’s working a bit. Which, if history is any guide,  means the administration will probably back way off. On the regulations anyway.

Greg Sargent has a piece up this morning about just how committed the Republicans remain to their new faith-based organizing principle: that Obamacare is on the verge of failing and they must do nothing to distract from that. And that may very well mean no compromise on immigration which could cause a tear in the wingnut matrix.

The unknown is whether GOP leaders will ultimately decide that embracing some form of legalization, or “probation” — before onerous security metrics are met — is too hard, given the politics inside the House GOP caucus. This is the context for understanding the real meaning of the “Obama can’t be trusted” talking point. 

Either Ryan knows he must say this to get mainstream conservatives to even listen to him about immigration — it’s a way to reassure them of his best intentions even as GOP leaders seriously grapple with how to get to some form of legalization. (Byron York floats a version of this theory here.) Or, if Republicans decide they can’t get to that point, it will become the excuse for killing reform: Obama can’t be trusted to enforce the law – executive orders Obamacare Benghazi etc. etc. — so we can’t embrace any form of legalization, until all of our security metrics are met. 

The simple truth is that we just don’t know where Republicans really are on this yet.

I will be very surprised if they are willing to enact immigration reform going into 2014.  They have visions of taking the Senate and expanding their majority in the House and I doubt they want to do anything to upset their base right now. And that’s because whether they like it or not, this is who they are:

“Part of it, I think — and I hate to say this, because these are my people — but I hate to say it, but it’s racial,” said the Southern Republican lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “If you go to town halls people say things like, ‘These people have different cultural customs than we do.’ And that’s code for race.”

I wouldn’t put it past these people to take a win in 2014 as a mandate for impeachment.  But it’s unlikely. But, in my opinion, it’s also unlikely they are at the point in their evolution where they can tolerate a compromise on something like immigration reform. They are still deep in the throes of their political primal scream and I see little evidence they are snapping out of it.  I just hope the Democrats don’t misjudge this moment and think they can safely finesse this by frontloading all the “security” and leaving the rest of it for another day. That will be a monumental failure.  I assume they know that. Right?

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A month in the Fox (News) hole

by digby

This is the sordid tale of a man who forced himself to watch no news aside from 3 hoursper day of Fox for a solid month. It’s quite amusing, but this is the important observation within it:

Now I was aware of Fox’s role as a purveyor, not only of right-wing information but of right-wing ignorance, and I began to examine my mind for things that I hadn’t gotten any information about in the past month. The most notable items that were missing, I realized, were people from other countries and poverty. Aside from the times when picturesque destruction video was available, there was essentially no coverage of foreign affairs. On the poverty side, programs like food stamps and welfare were generally referred to as handouts, and the only time poor people were mentioned was when they were a source of malfeasance. One prominent Fox & Friends story, for example, cited a woman who, because of a computer glitch, managed to buy $700 worth of food on a food stamp debit card with a balance of $.47.

The effect of this is interesting. Even in my short time watching Fox I found poverty fading from my mind as a problem. I was surprised one day when, during a discussion of deficit reduction (something that they talk about almost constantly), I found myself nodding in agreement that there was room to cut social programs that had already been radically slashed. Fox couldn’t convince me to care about the issues they are obsessed with (Obama’s treachery and the deficit, mostly), but by simply failing to mention a topic like income inequality, it managed to make me stop caring about the things it would prefer that I ignore.

That sounds about right to me. The omission of compassion is what makes them tick.

The writer also had a bit of an epiphany about his own addiction to outrage and came away a bit less likely to treat politics like a team sport:

Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” and I don’t regret the time I spent among the Foxians. I still believe that what the network does, and the way they do it is deeply damaging to our society—but I think I understand the Fox universe much more clearly. And if, as a result, I wind up being more skeptical of my own certainty and less apt to bore people with my anger, then it was time well spent.

I don’t think I could take a month of Fox news exclusively. But I’ll take the lesson.

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Putting the poor on a diet

by digby

Today’s the day the Senate is poised to pass the infamous Farm Bill and send it to the president. You remember the Farm Bill:

[Last] Wednesday morning, the House of Representatives passed the final version of the 2014 Farm Bill, which includes a cut of roughly $8.7 billion to food stamps, affecting 850,000 households across the country. Members of the House and Senate announced the deal on Monday evening, after months of negotiations over the legislation. In a joint statement, the lead negotiators stressed the bipartisan nature of the final bill, which sailed through the House by a margin of 251-166.

“This bill proves that by working across party lines we can reform programs to save taxpayer money while strengthening efforts to grow our economy,” said Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat. The Senate is expected to pass the legislation later in the week.

Households affected by the proposed $8.7 billion cut would lose an average of $90 per month in benefits. This latest reduction comes on top of November’s so-called “Hunger Cliff,” an automatic $5 billion across-the-board cut to every food stamp recipient’s benefits. The Farm Bill cuts would specifically target what critics have referred to as the “Heat and Eat” loophole, which allows certain classes of food stamp users to receive more in benefits.

Some states would be hit more than others. New York City alone could absorb up to 25% of the cuts, spread out across 190,000 households, according to the Food Bank for New York City. The staff of New York Democratc Senator Kirsten Gillibrand confirmed to msnbc that she would not be voting for the legislation.

“Only in Washington could a final bill that doubles the already egregious cuts to hungry families while somehow not creating any additional savings than originally proposed be called progress,” she said in a statement. “This bill will result in less food on the table for children, seniors and veterans who deserve better from this Congress while corporations continue to receive guaranteed federal handouts.”

Despite resistance from some corners of the Democratic Party, the Farm Bill cruised through the House and will likely face very little resistance in the Senate. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., both voted in favor of the legislation, along with 87 other Democrats.

Good thing we have a Democratic president with a veto pen:

President Obama has largely been silent on the subject of food stamp cuts. Though the White House has previously threatened to veto the $20.5 billion cut proposed in the House, Stabenow and House Agriculture Committee Chair Frank Lucas, an Oklahoma Republican, have both told the press that they expect the president to sign the bill including $8.7 billion in cuts.

Oh well.

You’ll notice that Democrats are spinning this as a needed “reform.” Whenever you hear that word coming from a DC politician these days, be sure to watch your back.

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Say yes to postal banking

by David Atkins

Hullabaloo vet Dave Dayen has a fantastic piece on postal banking that you should definitely read if you haven’t yet. Here’s an excerpt:

Letting the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) offer basic banking services to customers, like savings accounts, debit cards and even simple loans. The idea has been kicked around policy circles for years, but now it has a crucial new adherent: the USPS Inspector General, who endorsed the initiative in a comprehensive white paper.

The Inspector General, who conducted the study with the help of a team of experts in international postal banking as well as a former executive from Merrill Lynch, correctly frames the proposal not as a challenge to mega-banks, but as a way to deliver needed amenities to the nearly 68 million Americans—over one-quarter of U.S. households—who have limited or no access to financial services. Instead of banks, these mostly low-income individuals use check-cashing stores, pawnshops, payday lenders, and other unscrupulous financial services providers who gouged their customers to the tune of $89 billion in interest and fees in 2012, according to the IG report. Post offices could deliver the same services at a 90 percent discount, saving the average underserved household over $2,000 a year and still providing the USPS with $8.9 billion in new annual profits, significantly improving its troubled balance sheet. The report calls simple financial services “the single best new opportunity for the posts to earn additional revenue.”

As America becomes more of a cashless society, more reliant on some level of financial services (try renting a car without a credit card), the 68 million under-banked are essentially forced into working with predatory businesses, without the kind of low-cost alternative the post office could provide. Banks don’t want these customers; if they did, they would actually make a play for their business. Large banks have closed branches in the very low-income communities with the largest percentages of unbanked Americans. In fact, banks find it more profitable to fund payday lenders that charge junk fees and outrageous interest—currently the subject of a Justice Department investigation—than actually take market share away from them.

Instead of partnering with predatory lenders, banks could partner with the USPS on a public option, not beholden to shareholder demands, which would treat customers more fairly. As the report says, “the Postal Service could greatly complement banks’ offerings,” and in turn help drive out of business some of the most crooked companies in America, while promoting savings and expanding credit for the poor.

As Dayen notes, this is not a new idea. But it’s one that could improve the lives of millions, save the Post Office, and be accomplished entirely over the heads of the intransigent Republicans in Congress.

Let’s do it already.

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Too soon

By Dennis Hartley

Philip Seymour Hoffman 1967-2014

You know how I know Philip Seymour Hoffman was a great actor? Because he always made me cringe. You know what I mean? It’s that autonomic flush of empathic embarrassment that makes you cringe when a couple has a loud spat at the table next to you in a restaurant, or a drunken relative tells an off-color joke at Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a good sign when an actor makes me cringe, because that means he or she has left their social filter on the dressing room table, and shown up for work naked and unafraid. And Hoffman did so without fail, in role after role, naked and unafraid. I’m sad beyond words that such a giant talent has left us so soon. Here are 10 cringe-worthy highlights:

Almost Famous– Although it’s a relatively small role, this is one of my favorite Hoffman performances, playing the late great gonzo rock critic Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s auto-biographical comedy-drama about a teenage journalist who gets hired by Rolling Stone to tag along and write a “think piece” about a rock band on their concert tour.

Boogie Nights– While he wasn’t the star, this was Hoffman’s breakout performance. It’s a real testament to Hoffman’s genius that he managed to make such an impression on audiences and critics with his role as “Scotty J.” in P.T. Anderson’s 1997 opus about the porno film industry in the 1970s; especially when you consider that the cast was so huge.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead– Strongly recalling The King of Marvin Gardens, this nightmarish neo-noir-cum Greek tragedy, stars Hoffman as a stressed-out businessman with bad debts and very bad habits, which leads him to take desperate measures. He enlists his not-so-bright brother (Ethan Hawke) into helping him pull an extremely ill-advised heist that involves a business owned by their elderly parents (Rosemary Harris and Albert Finney). As frequently occurs in this genre, things go horribly wrong. Great work from the entire cast, and superbly directed by Sidney Lumet.

Capote– Undoubtedly the film he will be best remembered by, thanks to Hoffman’s well-deserved Oscar-winning Performance as Truman Capote. If you haven’t seen Bennett Miller’s 2005 film about the writer’s complex relationship with convicted killer Perry Smith while researching his true crime masterwork, In Cold Blood, you have no excuse not to now. Hoffman isn’t playing Truman Capote in this movie, he is Truman Capote.

Happiness– This 1998 Todd Solondz film features one of Hoffman’s more underappreciated turns. Admittedly, Solondz’s films are not everyone’s cup of tea (be prepared for a lot of that “cringe” factor I was talking about earlier) but if you’re OK with network narratives involving nothing but completely fucked-up individuals, this is your ticket. Brave performances all around in this merry-go-round of modern dysfunction.

I’m going to round off my recommendations with five more great Hoffman films I’ve covered on Hullabaloo in recent years; click on the links for original full-length reviews:

The Savages
Synecdoche NY
Ides of March
The Master
Pirate Radio

A couple of long reads for people who don’t care about football

by digby

If you aren’t watching the Super Bowl or otherwise caught up in mass cultural events this afternoon, you might want to take a minute to read a couple of really interesting think pieces.

The first by Ta-Nehisi Coates about President Obama’s relationship to the black community is amazing. I won’t characterize it, I couldn’t do it justice anyway.  I honestly don’t think anyone but Coates could to be honest:

What your country tells you it thinks of you has real meaning. If you see people around you acquiring college degrees and rising only to work as Pullman porters or in the Post Office, while in other communities men become rich, you take a certain message from this. If you see your father being ripped off in the sharecropping fields of Mississippi, you take a certain message about your own prospects. If the preponderance of men in your life are under the supervision of the state, you take some sense of how your country regards you. And if you see someone who is black like you, and was fatherless like you, and endures the barbs of American racism like you, and triumphs like no one you’ve ever known, that too sends a message.

And this messenger—who is Barack Obama—becomes something more to black people. He becomes a champion of black imagination, of black dreams and black possibilities. For liberals and Democrats, the prospect of an Obama defeat in 2012 meant the reversal of an agenda they favored. For black people, the fight was existential. “Please proceed, governor,” will always mean something more to us, something akin to Ali’s rope-a-dope, Louis over Schmeling, or Doug Williams over John Elway…

Read on to see where this goes. It goes deep and in unpredictable ways.

And this by Rich Yeselson on James Madison’s worst nightmare is just plain old interesting. He takes the supercilious Madison worshiper George Will to task for his hypocrisy (or intellectual inconsistency perhaps) and, among other things, brilliantly makes a point that I’ve often discussed on this blog over the years:

Modern conservatism continues to rely on certain antebellum-era arguments on behalf of states’ rights and, also, the intrastate rights of state majorities versus state minorities.

In the decades before the Civil War, the increasingly dominant Southern wing of the Democratic Party agreed about the broad questions of political and economic power. During the 1850s, the issue of slavery destroyed the Whig Party and brought forth the anti-slavery Republican Party (or, at the least, the party opposed to the expansion of slavery). These developments clarified the overwhelmingly pro-slavery position of the Southern Democrats, who argued only over the smartest tactics—whether to stay within or leave the federal union—that would preserve the pervasive privileges and hierarchies of slavery.

Antebellum Southern intellectuals sought to promote and defend their vision of American society by lodging the maximum power possible within the states. Calhoun, as sitting vice president during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, had worked, during the 1820s and early 1830s, on refining the doctrine of “nullification” in connection with South Carolina’s opposition to congressionally passed tariff laws. Calhoun disagreed that the federal government—whose power to trump the states is enshrined in the supremacy clause of the Constitution (strongly defended by Hamilton in Federalist No. 33)—subsumed, as the clause stated, “under the authority of the United States,” a state’s right to decide which federal laws (and treaties) are constitutional and which aren’t. Calhoun believed that the “mutual negative” of warring interests “forms the constitution.” Its essential purpose was to nullify, not ratify.

Read on, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Enjoy!

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Colbert’s halftime bowl speech

by digby

Stephen trained and worked out and was ultimately invited to play in the Puppy Bowl. This is his halftime pep talk:

*Click on image to see the video. Comedy Central videos are bloggered. 

Rooting for the Seahawks here. Go Seattle!

Here’s a behind the scenes story on the Puppy Bowl: