Month: March 2014

Saturday Night at the Movies

Fear of fly fishing

By Dennis Hartley

Baiting the hook: Nymph()maniac, Vol. 1

QOTD: Eleanor Clift

by digby

This is why I’ve always been skeptical that eliminating the filibuster was a panacea:

Democrats thought they would win confirmation for more of President Obama’s nominees by waiving the 60-vote filibuster hurdle for executive branch appointments, but they didn’t factor in nervous red-state senators afraid of taking tough votes that could sink their reelection in November.

Even getting to 50 votes and with so many Senators who represent more cows than people is always a problem. And that’s not even factoring in the immense egos of certain Democratic Senators who will do this simply for the fun of it. The problem isn’t just the Senate rules — it’s the Senate.

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GOP Hipsters

by digby

Here is the RNC “outreach” to millenials:

 Here’s John Oliver’s take:

Part II:

Oliver:

Lulz…

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Renouncing all of his allures

by digby

I somehow missed the latest round of the Denunciation Tango, but it’s a pip.(You’ll recall that last week Tom Ricks of the Washington Post first took to the floor to demand that Glenn Greenwald denounce Vladimir Putin or prove that he is a Russian agent — or something.)

Some guy from The Daily Banter really, really doesn’t like Glenn Greenwald and apparently he thinks that Glenn wants to elect Republicans and is engaged in a plot to suppress the Democratic base or some such nonsense and that’s why everyone should be skeptical of his reporting. (That’s going to come as a big surprise to these three candidates who were under the impression they were very liberal Democrats. This guy too.) Anyway, it’s the usual pile of contradictory blather about how it’s very important that Snowden revealed what he revealed but he’s still terrible and almost as bad as Glenn Greenwald… etc, etc, etc. But what makes this amusing is that it’s all couched in a demand that Charles Pierce denounce Glenn Greenwald. Unfortunately for this fine fellow, Pierce is probably the last person you’d want to engage with on something like this:

The sum total of the rest of this whole thing is a bunch of ad hominem on Greenwald and Snowden, some bullshit about a near war between Australia and Indonesia, and a litany which apparently must be chanted, like baptismal vows (“Do you renounce Greenwald?” I do renounce him. “And all his works?” I do renounce them. “And all his allures?” I do renounce them.), before one can comment on the dangers of the surveillance state. Anyway, on the list of causes of why the Democratic base fails to turn out for midterm elections, which was the whole fking point of the post in the first place, Glenn Greenwald’s opinion of the party ranks somewhere below the rain and unbreakable dental appointments. Anyone who believes otherwise should put down the cereal bowl and get out more.

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Sorry Rand, a “muscular” foreign policy is the essence of the modern GOP

by digby

Speaking of the Tea Party, this description of Rand Paul’s strange mishmash of views on foreign policy is on target. It starts with a recitation of what most of us think of as Paul’s general libertarian views on the matter and then discusses his recent meanderings:

Recently, … as his presidential star has risen—Paul won the CPAC straw poll handily earlier this month, and he is leading most of his rivals in Iowa—he appears to be trimming his sails with an eye to the 2016 nomination. Despite his antipathy to foreign aid, which he likens to “welfare,” Paul has warmed noticeably to Israel, a position popular with social conservatives. (“When I look at it and say, ‘Well, who would I cut [foreign aid from] first?’ Well, maybe the people who are burning our flag, maybe the people who are chanting, ‘Death to America,’” he said last year. “And one of the comments I made in Israel was, ‘I don’t see anybody here, nor do I imagine an Israeli burning an American flag.’”) Now, faced with the need to say something suitably “presidential” about the renewed threat of Russian expansionism, he appears to be trying to square his anti-interventionist doctrine with his party’s tradition of muscular and unapologetic nationalism. In this, he has not succeeded.

Consider Paul’s ideas for punishing Russia, which are so inconsistent they sometimes cancel each other out: Paul the geopolitical hardliner calls for restarting work on American missile defense systems in Eastern Europe that were suspended as part of Obama’s unsuccessful “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations. But Paul the skinflint insists that “the Europeans pay for it”—which means the missile shields probably won’t go up. In one breath, Paul calls for more vigorous U.S. action to punish Russia for its rogue behavior; in the next he bemoans the fact that America is “broke” and can’t be the world’s ATM or policeman. This puzzling logic sometimes sound like a Zen koan: “Like Dwight Eisenhower, I believe the U.S. can actually be stronger by doing less,” he wrote in Time.

While insisting that he stands with Ukraine against Moscow’s attempts to dismember the country, Paul also ruled out U.S. economic aid to Ukraine because it might go to Russia to pay Kyiv’s enormous gas bills. In Paul’s view, energy isn’t just a cudgel Putin uses to intimidate neighboring countries—it’s also the main weapon America has to wean Europeans from dependence on Russian gas and oil. In contrast to Obama’s supposed dithering on energy, Paul calls for aggressively exporting U.S. natural gas to Europe and demands, weirdly, “immediate construction of the Keystone Pipeline.”

That ain’t his father’s foreign policy, that’s for sure. But it isn’t different enough for the hawkish Will Marshall, the author of that piece, whose withering disdain for Paul’s civil libertarian and isolationist proclivities is obvious.  The problem is that in order to be a nationally viable Republican, you simply cannot be an isolationist. It’s as if a Democrat running for president in 2016 ran on a segregationist platform. It’s simply so far out of the mainstream of his own party (and half of the the opposing Party as well, as Marshall demonstrates) that it’s impossible that he can influence his war loving party in even the smallest way. Yes, the Tea Party is rabidly anti-government — with one huge exception: they worship the military and avidly support a “muscular” foreign policy. And I think you all know what that means:

Good luck to Rand and all his libertarian bros trying to change that. That’s the very essence of the modern Republican party from which everything else flows. Unlike Paul, it’s something Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio understand very well:

Sen. Ted Cruz[‘s] zeal to eviscerate the federal government apparently stops at the water’s edge. Cruz, who agrees with Paul on staying out of Syria but sides with McCain’s more aggressive stance on Iran, said on ABC earlier this month that the United States must play a “vital role” abroad, where we have a “responsibility to defend our values.”

As Paul struggles to synthesize neo-isolationism and Scowcroftian realpolitik, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has moved deftly to identify himself with Reagan’s expansive and optimistic view of America as a liberating force in world politics. Rubio has been traveling extensively abroad to burnish his internationalist credentials, and in a series of well-regarded recent speeches has endorsed both the strategic necessity of strong U.S. global leadership and America’s moral commitment to defending liberty and human rights. A Rubio-Paul showdown for the GOP nomination would force Republicans to choose between the party’s post-1945 policy of international engagement and a recrudescence of its discredited “America First” past.

Paul will lose. When it comes to fighting wars and global military power, it’s always a blank check with these people. Refusing to spend money on “inner city” citizens, on the other hand, is something they do have in common but it’s hard to see why they’d choose him over someone like Cruz or Rubio  both of whom have the whole package.

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Wall Street and Tea

by digby

This piece by Mike Konczal should be read by every liberal who is convinced that we make common cause with the Tea party on economics and everyone will live happily ever after:

There seems to be some confusion about the relationship between the Tea Party and Wall Street. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait says the two “are friends after all,” while the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney insists that the Tea Party has loosened the business lobby’s “grip on the GOP.” So let’s make this clear: The Tea Party agenda is currently aligned with the Wall Street agenda.

The Tea Party’s theory of the financial crisis has absolved Wall Street completely. Instead, the crisis is interpreted according to two pillars of reactionary thought: that the government is a fundamentally corrupt enterprise trying to give undeserving people free stuff, and that hard money should rule the day. This will have major consequences for the future of reform, should the GOP take the Senate this fall.

On the Hill, it’s hard to find where the Tea Party and Wall Street disagree. Tea Party senators like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, plus conservative senators like David Vitter, have rallied around a one-line bill repealing the entirety of Dodd-Frank and replacing it with nothing. In the House, Republicans are attacking new derivatives regulations, all the activities of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the existence of the Volcker Rule, and the ability of the FDIC to wind down a major financial institution, while relentlessly attacking strong regulators and cutting regulatory funding. This is Wall Street’s wet dream of a policy agenda.

Note the lack of any Republican counter-proposal or framework. The few that have been suggested, such as David Camp’s bank tax or Vitter’s higher capital requirements have gotten no additional support from the right. House Republicans attacked Camp’s plan publicly, and Vitter’s bill lost one of its only two other Republican supporters immediately after it was announced. So why is there a lack of an agenda? Because the Tea Party thinks that Wall Street has done nothing wrong.

That’s exactly right. As Konczal explains, their version of events is that the government forced banks to make shoddy loans to undeserving people and that the way to fix this problem is to eliminate all the regulations that are keeping the banks and Wall Street from being the upstanding citizens they wish to be.

Right wing populism does not blame moneyed interests for our economic ills. Right wing populism blames “the other” — and government regulations or laws that they believe unfairly benefits that “other” at their expense. That’s not a recipe for forming a coalition with progressives, many of whom are the very “others” these right wing populists hold responsible for society’s ills.

Obviously, on discrete issues there’s always hope for creating a temporary coalition from several different factions, each of whom has their own (sometimes competing) goals. But a broad movement consisting of right and left populists? Let’s just say I think there’s a better chance of my winning the gold medal in ice dancing in 2018.

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Good old days


by digby

Krugman discusses Thomas Piketty’s new book on capitalism in his blog post today (apparently in anticipation of a much longer review) and concludes with this interesting chart:

[T]he GOP is more and more a party that consistently, indeed reflexively, supports the interests of capital over those of labor. But why?

Well, one thing you might imagine would be that the party was responding to a change in society — aren’t more and more Americans asset owners, for example through their retirement accounts?

And the answer is no. In fact, the concentration of income from capital in a few hands has risen sharply. Tucked deep inside the CBO report on trends in the US distribution of income are data on the concentration of various types of income; here’s the one percent’s share of capital income:

The promise of the 401k just has not materialized for the vast majority of Americans who just don’t have the kind of money that makes investing in the markets worthwhile. I’m sure there are some people who start very young and manage to make it work for them and others who make good wages and have job security might be able to accumulate enough wealth to allow their money to grow for them.  But for the most part, this just isn’t a very practical plan for average people.

But if you have money, these are the good old days.

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Or you could just call them lazy like Paul Ryan, and absolve yourself of guilt

by David Atkins

Color me shocked:

Two-fifths of the nation’s public school districts offer no preschool programs, and most of those that do offer only part-day programs. Black students account for less than a fifth of those in preschool across the nation but make up almost half of the students who are suspended from preschool multiple times.

Those results from the first comprehensive survey in nearly 15 years of civil rights data from the 97,000 U.S. public schools show they remain marked by inequities. The report released Friday by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which includes data from the 2011-12 school year, offers no explanation for the stark differences.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., who unveiled the report at J.O. Wilson Elementary School here, urged states and school districts to take steps to eliminate the disparities.

Duncan denounced the inequities as “socially divisive, educationally unsound, morally bankrupt and economically self-destructive.” He said the report “paints a stark portrait of inequity,” adding that “this must compel us to act.”
The report found that black students were three times more likely to be suspended and expelled than white students.
Holder said these results confirmed that the “school-to-prison pipeline” is a reality for boys of color. “A routine school discipline infraction should land a student in the principal’s office,” Holder said, “not in a police precinct.”
But he also said there were no plans to modify security measures in schools. “We want to support schools and make sure that we keep these schools safe,” while being mindful not to contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, he said.

In January, the Education and Justice departments unveiled new guidelines urging schools to implement alternative discipline solutions and avoid discriminatory practices.

Friday’s report also highlighted racial inequities in access to education. For example, a quarter of the high schools with high percentages of black and Latino students do not offer Algebra II.

Minority students were more likely to be taught by first-year teachers, and in many districts schools with high proportions of black and Latino students paid their teachers less than schools with lower minority populations.

It’s almost as if resources and good teachers are being distributed unfairly in the system, and the lack of care and attention in these schools is being made up for by sending these kids to jail. But Paul Ryan knows better, right?

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Protesting too much


by digby

I don’t know if he’s lying or deluded, but either way, Paul Ryan is making as ass of himself:

“You said what you meant,” Alfonso Gardner, a 61-year-old African American man from Racine, told Ryan at a town hall meeting. “[Inner city is] a code word for black.”

Ryan remained defiant though. “There is nothing whatsoever about race in my comments at all,” he said. He admonished Gardner for drawing a connection between his “inner city” remarks and race. “I think when we throw these charges around, it should be based on something.”

It’s just ludicrous to deny that these are code words. Everyone knows it, even foreigners. In a former life I used to sell movies in overseas markets and the company I worked for distributed quite a few films written and directed by African Americans. And it was common for foreign distributors to slyly inform us that they had no audience for “urban” and “inner city” films. Those were the terms they used. And when informed that the films didn’t necessarily take place in a city they would shrug and say, “you know what I mean.” Everybody knows what Paul Ryan was saying — Republicans have been harping on this for 40 years.

This disgusting racist nonsense about lazy black men goes waaay back:

Friday Cat Blogging (hissing fat cat edition)

by digby

Mike Lux has more here.

One of my earliest posts on this blog more than a decade ago, ended with these words:

[S]eeing paunchy millionaires whine about their supposed victimhood just makes my gorge rise.

Some thing never change.

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