Month: August 2014

Still scamming Native Americans for fun and profit…

by digby

My Salon piece today covers yet another strange story out of Mississippi in which some documents recently came to light showing that a major GOP group was running the old Jack Abramoff scam:

If there’s one thing Republicans have learned over the years it’s to never let legalities stand in the way of a good fundraising scam. And one of their best cons ever was Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed’s brilliant scheme to con millions from Indian tribes to run a supposedly religious based anti-gambling campaign against the tribes rivals in order to gain exclusive gambling rights. And even better was the revelation that they were ripping off their own Christian clients as well. What’s not to like? Publicly appeasing religious conservatives at the expense of Indian tribes on behalf of other Indian tribes for whom they have nothing but contempt? It’s beautiful. Only Iran Contra comes to mind as a similarly elegant illegal scheme.

Unfortunately for them, the whole thing unraveled when other illegal behaviors involving Abramoff and his cohorts were revealed as part of an ongoing corruption probe by the Department of Justice …

Yesterday, Politico revealed that the latest GOP group of power brokers, the Republican State Leadership Committee best known for it’s hugely successful campaigns around the country to turn state houses into GOP majorities in order to redraw the congressional maps in their favor, has been running similar schemes as recently as 2010 in the state of Alabama.

Read on … They never quit …

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And now a word from the GOP’s leading strategist on immigration policy

by digby

The lunatic Steve King:

Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas, both members of the Dream Action Coalition, shook hands with the two lawmakers and introduced themselves as beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program — a program King pushed to end through legislation in the House. Paul was quickly whisked away from the table by an aide and even left his food behind as Andiola handed her DACA card to King and offered to let him rip it up.

The Dream Action Coalition posted video of the confrontation to YouTube.

Andiola then referenced King’s infamous “calves the size of cantaloupes” remarks, in which he said some DREAMers, or undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, smuggle drugs across the border.

“Stop a minute,” King said as he grabbed Andiola’s wrist. “You’re very good at English. You know what I’m saying.”

“I was raised in the United States,” Andiola said.

King continued to insist that Andiola was misunderstanding him.

“I spoke of drug smugglers. Now, you’re not going to tell me you’re one of them are you?” he asked.

“Do I look like a drug smuggler to you?” she said.

Andiola went on to explain to King that she and her mother came to the U.S. from Mexico to escape her mother’s abusive relationship. King showed no sympathy when Andiola explained that her mother was going through the lengthy process of applying to stay in the U.S. legally.

“I’m really sorry that you come from a lawless country,” King said. “I hope that you can have a happy life. But please, do not erode the rule of law in America.”

I sure hope Steve King never commits even the smallest legal infraction because if he does he’s going to have these statements hung around his neck so tight he’ll be speaking in tongues.

What a jerk:

I decided early in the conversation that I was not going to walk away,” he told reporters. “They’re here demanding that we change the laws…Why would you want to bring lawlessness to the United States of America? And that’s the question they cannot answer. Why would we want to turn America into a third world country?”

He’s talking about Rand Paul who’s in Iowa running as fast as he can from every piece of “libertarian” philosophy except low taxes and regulation. Paul was there and hightailed it out of the room as quickly as possible, presumably to preserve the fiction that he isn’t as xenophobic as Steve King. You know what they say about lying down with dogs …

As Dave Weigel reports in this entertaining piece on the altercation, Here’s Paul being introduced to the DREAMers:

He actually leaves the table after having taken a bite of what appears to be a hamburger, seems to almost do a spit-take, getting up from his seat midchew, and leaving behind the half-eaten sandwich

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On the 40th Anniversary of Watergate the dirty tricks continue

by digby

I’ll have more to say about this in a bit but for now, I’ll just echo Paul Krugman:

OK, this is grotesque. Rick Perlstein has a new book, continuing his awesomely informative history of the rise of movement conservatism — and he’s facing completely spurious charges of plagiarism.

How do we know that they’re spurious? The people making the charges — almost all of whom have, surprise, movement conservative connections — aren’t pointing to any actual passages that, you know, were lifted from some other book. Instead, they’re claiming that Perlstein paraphrased what other people said. Um, what? Unless there’s a very close match, telling more or less the same story someone else has told before is perfectly ordinary — in fact, it would be distressing if history books didn’t correspond on some things.
[…]
The thing to understand is that fake accusations of professional malpractice are a familiar tactic for these people. And this tactic should be punctured by the press, not given momentum with “opinions differ on shape of the planet” reporting.

He also points out that the same thing happened to him.

There are really only two things you need to know about this. First,  Perlstein has properly attributed all of his research. It’s highly detailed and extremely thorough. I’ve read the book.  The charges are total bullshit.

And second, the man making the charge is publicist for the author of the following books:

High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton 
Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)
Godless: The Church of Liberalism
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans
Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America
Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America
Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama
Never Trust a Liberal Over 3

Yes, he is Ann Coulter’s publicist.

I don’t really think anyone needs to know more than that do you?

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QOTD: an unnamed GOP operative

by digby

You have to love this:

“We are about to hold more House seats than we ever have. We will take the Senate,” said the GOP official, who asked not to be named to preserve his business options. “The future is bright for us. Shit, we may even take on the teachers unions with Obama campaign operatives-turned-lobbyists.”

See? These Republicans feel good. And why wouldn’t they? They have tons of money and don’t have to govern in order to get their agenda passed — with the help of former Obama operatives. That’s just sweet.

Read the rest of the story. It’s enough to make you scream.

I’d just like to point out to the Obama campaign lobbyist in question Robert Gibbs, in case he and the rest of these idiot so-called liberals don’t know it: the reason teachers have tenure is so that throwback neanderthals can’t fire them for teaching reality instead of superstitious nonsense. The idea that the Republicans are worried about “bad teachers” when they encourage the practice of kids being taught at home by parents who aren’t qualified to teach someone how to get up in the morning is a joke. They want to make sure that children are indoctrinated in their worldview.

Take this example of fine conservative education — one of the most popular homeschooling curriculums in the country for decades:

The worst thing about brainwashing is that you can’t see it for what it is. You never think you’re in a cult when you’re in a cult. Until the day you can’t deny the reality of what you’ve seen, what you lived. Until the day you speak out loud what your mind has known for a while, “I grew up in a cult.”

There’s barely a memory from the first twenty years of my life that isn’t run through by the thread of the cult.

We joined the Advanced Training Institute when I was in first grade. Bill Gothard’s materials were the foundation of my homeschooling curriculum for the next twelve years. The Institute’s books began to fill our shelves; their routine became part of our daily life.

As a child and then a teen, ATI/IBLP formed most of my peer group. In the summer we went to the camps and the conferences. I attended the seminars as a child, then as a teacher. After I graduated from high school, I spent the next two years living and volunteering at the one of the Training Centers.

My wife was exposed to the cult when she was growing up too, though not as deeply as I was. When we began our awkward courtship, we followed many of the rules and procedures prescribed by the cult. And in the years since then, I’ve found myself in the long, slow process of rooting out the remaining traces of the cult from my heart, reconstructing a faith brick by brick.

When I tell my story, people say “You should hate God by now. It’s a miracle you’re a Christian at all.

They’re right. It’s a miracle.

The man who ran that cult was very well connected with right wing politicians. He has followers in congress as we speak. He’s recently been exposed as a sexual predator (shocking, I know) but up until now he was widely considered to be a respectable “educator” in right wing circles.

So before any liberals get on the education “reform” bandwagon they really need to consider what these conservatives consider bad teaching. It likely isn’t what they think it is.

Robert Gibbs isn’t a liberal so it’s not surprising that he would join the anti-union movement. What remains depressing is the fact that Barack Obama would have ever considered such a person for his inner circle in the first place.

Dear Alabama and Mississippi Republicans: No, this is not your America. Sorry.

by David Atkins

Oh boy. Let’s take a moment to stand in awe of Alabama and Mississippi Republicans, shall we?

First, Mo Brooks of Alabama–this is a Congressman, mind–says that President Obama is “waging a war on whites“:

Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) doesn’t think that the hardline stance Republicans have taken on immigration could hurt the party’s standing with Hispanic voters. Instead, he thinks Democrats are hurting their prospects with white voters.

“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else,” he said during an interview Monday with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. “It’s part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”

Brooks was responding to comments made by National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday that “the fastest growing voting bloc in this country thinks the Republican Party hates them. This party, your party, cannot be the party of the future beyond November if you’re seen as the party of white people.”

Oof.

But it’s not just him tied up over race. Our good old friend Chris McDaniel is still on the warpath against Thad Cochran, and trying to figure out just how loudly he can complain about black Democrats:

Still refusing to concede, Chris McDaniel’s team issued a press release late last week saying that the Mississippi GOP is “prohibited from recognizing Thad Cochran as their nominee for U.S. Senate in accordance with the rules of the Republican National Committee” — because Democrats participated in his election.

But a first draft of that same release, obtained by The Daily Caller, twice called out “black Democrats” as the culprits.

While both references to “black” were stripped out of McDaniel’s public press release, the “1st Draft” refers to “black Democrats” and talks about Cochran campaign soliciting “black Democrat votes.”

“Thad Cochran lost Republican votes in the runoff, but made up the difference with black democrat votes,” the early version says.

And here’s the same line from the copy that went out: “Thad Cochran lost Republican votes in the runoff and made up the difference with Democrat voyour tes.”

But it’s all good. All that good ol’ boy bile will go down nicely with a dose of old-fashioned theocracy:

A Republican congressman recently sent a copy of the Holy Bible to every member of Congress “to help guide you in your decision-making,” according to a letter obtained by TPM.

Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) enclosed the Bible in his letter dated July 29 and sent to all House and Senate offices. The letter, written on an official letterhead in his capacity as assistant majority whip, was confirmed by Capitol Hill aides whose offices received it.

“On a daily basis, we contemplate policy decisions that impact America’s future. Our staffs provide us with policy memos, statistics, and recommendations that help us make informed decisions. However, I find that the best advice comes through meditating on God’s Word,” Palazzo wrote.

“Please find a copy of the Holy Bible to help guide you in your decision-making,” the congressman continued, saying the Bibles were donated by one of his constituents from South Mississippi named J.B. Atchison.

Let me break it to the Republicans of Alabama, Mississippi and the like: your culture and your worldview aren’t the majority culture and worldview in America. They aren’t even close to the majority. That’s why you lose. That’s why Barack Hussein Obama is President. That’s why he got re-elected President while you were busy unskewing the polls in fantasyland. And that’s why Americans cast millions more votes for Democratic congressmembers in 2012 than for your crowd. That’s why gerrymandering and low voter turnout are the only thing keeping your political skins in the game–at least until the 2022 census, which looms less than eight short years away.

Watching your angry howls of despair, kicking against the pricks in the knowledge that you have lost the culture war and are continuing to lose it, would be amusing except for all the damage that you are doing–both to yourselves and the country.

Absent a cataclysmic event of some sort, you have three, maybe five at the most more electoral cycles before the bell comes tolling and the bill finally comes due.

For all of our sakes, please don’t make it any harder than it has to be. This is not your America anymore, if it ever was. The Lost Cause is dead. Tara is gone and good riddance to it. Get over it and join the 21st century.

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Self-regulation doesn’t work, Part XVII

by David Atkins

Big fossil fuel producers are always going on about how they can regulate themselves, and that if any external regulations are enforced, they should be conducted by state and not federal government. No, they can’t:

Half the spills at Marcellus Shale well sites that resulted in fines weren’t spotted by gas companies, which are required by state law to look for and report spills of drilling-related fluids.

That is one of the main conclusions of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review of hundreds of thousands of state and company documents for every incident at a Marcellus well site that led to a fine against a driller through the end of 2012.

The documentation showing that companies often failed to detect spills on their own sites offers a look at self-regulation in the shale gas industry.

State regulation of the industry was the subject of a withering state auditor general review of the Department of Environmental Protection’s oversight issued July 22. The audit detailed the agency’s shortcomings, including failing to consistently issue enforcement orders to drilling companies after regulators determined that gas operations had damaged water supplies, even though the state’s oil and gas law requires it.

Fossil fuel corporations cannot regulate themselves. Self-regulation has never worked in the past, and it will never worked in the future. Until the use of fossil fuels becomes as antiquated as the use of whale oil, its extraction needs to be subject to strict governmental oversight, preferably at the federal level.

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QOTD: Milton Friedman’s grandson

by digby

I mentioned the Honduran coup in my Salon piece this morning and in the course of my research I came across this interesting tid bit called “libertarianism in Honduras” at Corey Robin’s blog in which he quotes Greg Grandin:

One of the stranger fallouts from the 2009 Honduran coup has been the scheme hatched by an NYU economist, Paul Romer, along with free-market libertarians—including Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri; you can’t make this shit up—to start a bunch of “year-zero” cities in the country, free-market utopias with their own laws, etc. It’s like Empire’s Workshop meets The Shock Doctrine meets Fordlandia (except Henry Ford at least had his year-zero city provide free health care). If they were to come to fruition, they would be little more than free-trade maquila zones, like the kind that run along the US-Mexican border, except more savage.

In any case, the plan has hit a snag in that a committee of the Honduran Supreme Court has declared them unconstitutional, though that ruling could be reversed by the full court. Recently, a lawyer who argued for their unconstitutionality was gunned down, joining the long list of decent people killed as a result of the US-endorsed coup.

By the way, related to the discussion Corey Robin had on his blog about whether Hayek’s and Friedman’s support for dictatorships were inherent to their thought or just situational, Patri Friedman has cleared that point up, saying, in relation to these kind of start-up cities, that “Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state.” Peter Thiel, founder of Paypall and bankroller of FB and another supporter of the Honduran scheme, wrote: “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Glad that particular contradiction has gotten resolved. Adelante.

I think he’s probably right about democracy being ill-suited for a libertarian state, actually. As for freedom and democracy being incompatible, I’m going to guess we have a different idea of what being “free” is.  Only the boss has real freedom in a libertarian paradise.

It’s interesting, however, that every time we get the chance the US seems to try these libertarian economic “experiments” in other countries.  (Hey, we’re even doing it in Kansas…) And they never work. Is there even one case of it working anywhere?

Hmmm.

Oh, and by the way, note the date: 2009.

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As the Village Turns

by digby

I like Chris Cilizza. He seems like a very nice guy and he does the job he’s assigned to do — share beltway rumor, gossip and conventional wisdom — very well.

But he is a creature of the Village and I think this illustrates its culture perfectly:

The live blog of the Bob McDonnell trial is like watching a soap opera. And I love it. http://t.co/tvbZtDBgNh
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) August 4, 2014

The reason I like him is because unlike all the rest of them,  he admits it: he loves politics as soap opera. The truth is that they all do.  But the rest of them like to pretend they are doing serious journalism. (And I’d guess many of them think they are much superior to Cilizza …)

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Tea Party vanquishes Cantor so he can become a Wall Street power broker

by digby

Poor, poor Eric Cantor. Losing was a terrible blow. It was so painful that he felt he couldn’t even serve out the rest of his term. So he resigned last week altogether.

I’d imagine this will help salve the hurt the just a little bit:

GOP insiders said Cantor has already been approached by a number of K Street lobby shops, companies and Wall Street firms, but has not engaged in any serious negotiations with any of these potential suitors at this point, according to several sources familiar with the conversations.

“He will have opportunities in the traditional Washington political world,” said Nels Olson, a top headhunter at Korn Ferry. “I think he could have Wall Street, investment banks or private equity firms interested given his relevant talents.”

While Cantor would be widely sought after in Washington, he is more seriously considering potential hedge fund, private equity or big bank opportunities, according to sources familiar with his post-Congress thinking.

Heads of law firms and lobbying outfits in Washington say they’ve received no signals that Cantor is heading their way.
“He’s not coming here. He’s done with this place,” said one firm head who has spoken to Cantor. Ivan Adler of McCormick Group said, “There are two famous streets in America that would be glad to employ him. Either Wall Street or K Street would pay him a pretty good chunk of change.”

The Virginia Republican has spent much of the summer months in the Hamptons, the wealthy Long Island enclave that becomes a playground for the rich and affluent each summer. His wife is fully immersed in corporate America — she serves on the boards of five corporations.

Cantor’s potential New York payday is a little harder to determine because it will depend on the structure of any firm he joined. Corporate headhunters said Cantor is likely to make well north of $1 million annually.

Poor, poor Eric Cantor. It just makes you want to cry.

The irony in all this, of course, is that he was beaten by someone considered to be hostile to the big banks and Wall Street.  I suspect that within a very short time Cantor will be laughing all the way to his Cayman off shore account. And David Brat will likely be focusing on more important matters — like “illegal” children stealing all of our good jobs and health care.

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Child zombies at the border

by digby

I’ve been noting my skepticism that the GOP was going to behave like decent people on the subject of immigration for a very long time. I’m afraid that this is in the DNA of the right wing — and goes to the heart of every one of their beefs. They cannot stand the idea that people they don’t like are getting any breaks from the government. In their simple zero sum world, anything someone they disapprove of gets comes at their expense. And that includes children.

So, this doesn’t surprise me in the least:

Greg Sargent points out:

The ad mirrors the broader GOP posture, which is to treat it as a self-evident fact that the migrant crisis shows a border in chaos. In reality, as the Associated Press has explained, the children crossing the border does not tell the broader story here, which is that various metrics suggest that illegal immigration is actually lower than in recent years.

Indeed, this Cotton ad approaches Grade A Ted Cruz/Steve King demagoguery on this issue. What makes this particularly interesting is that Cotton has been hailed as a candidate who unites the Tea Party with the “GOP establishment.” Yet he is now trafficking in rhetoric about immigration that is well outside the comfort level of many in the “GOP establishment” who favor reform.

Metrics? We don’t need no stinkin’ metrics.

But it’s more than that. In fact, all these Republicans hear on Fox or talk radio or on their Tea Party mailing lists is that the border is being overrun with diseased murderers who are coming to kill them all in the beds. They think it’s the zombie apocalypse.

Noam Chomsky had a very interesting explanation for this when he was asked about why the American culture seems obsessed with zombies at the moment:

I’ve never seen a real study, but my guess is that it’s a reflection of fear and desperation. It’s a very frightened country. The United States is an unusually frightened country. And in such circumstances, people concoct either for escape or maybe out of relief, fears that terrible things happen.

Actually, the fear of the United States is a pretty interesting cultural phenomenon. It actually goes back to the colonies. There are some good studies out there. A very interesting book by a regular literary critic, Bruce Franklin. It’s called War Stars. You might want to take a look at it. It’s a study of popular literature, the kind of literature that most people read from the earliest days to the present. When it gets to the present it switches to television, things like that. Just kind of popular culture.

There are a couple of themes that run through it that are pretty striking. For one thing, one major theme in popular literature is that we are about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy. And at the last minute we are saved by a superhero or a super weapon, or in recent years high school kids going to the hills to chase away the Russians, things like that. That’s one theme that runs through constantly. And there’s a sub-theme. It turns out this enemy, this horrible enemy that’s about to destroy us, is somebody we’re crushing.

So you go back to the early years, the terrible enemy was the Indians, who were going to destroy us. The colonists were, of course, invaders. They were invading the continent. Whatever you think about the Indians, they were defending their own territory. There’s a scene in the Declaration of Independence, people read it every July 4th, but not many people pay attention to what they’re reading. It’s kind of like a prayer book, you move on somewhere else. But if you read it and pay attention, there are some pretty remarkable passages. So one passage is a list of a bill of indictment against King George the Third of England explaining why the colonists were revolting. One of them is “He unleashed against us the merciless Indian savages, whose known way of warfare is torture and destruction” and so on. Well, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that and is a very great thinker of the Enlightenment, knew perfectly well that it was the merciless English savages whose known way of warfare was destruction and murder and were taking over the country and driving out or exterminating the natives. But it’s switched in the Declaration of Independence and nobody comments on it for years. That’s another sign of the same concern.

After that it became the slaves. There was going to be a slave revolt, a terrible slave revolt, and the slave population, the black population was going to rise up and kill all the men, rape all the women, destroy the country, something like that. Then it goes on through the centuries. It becomes modern times, Hispanic narco-traffickers are going to come in and destroy the society. One thing after another. And these are real fears.

That’s a lot of what lies behind the extremely unusual gun culture in the United States. It’s quite unique. Homicides, deaths by guns in the United States are way outside—there’s a kind of hysteria about having guns. A large part of the population believes they just have to have them to protect themselves. From who? From the United Nations. Or from the federal government. From aliens. Maybe from zombies. Whoever it is. We just have to have guns to protect ourselves. That’s not known elsewhere in the world. Maybe in, say, Syria, a country that’s warring you might find something like that. But in a country that’s not only at peace but has an unusual security and a great degree of freedom, that’s quite remarkable.

I suspect that what you’re bringing up is part of that. I think it’s, much of it is kind of just a recognition, at some level of the psyche, that if you’ve got your boot on somebody’s neck, there’s something wrong. And that the people you’re oppressing may rise up and defend themselves, and then you’re in trouble. And another is strange properties the country has always had of fear of invented dangers. There is a kind of paranoid streak in the culture that’s pretty unusual.

… It is kind of just a recognition, at some level of the psyche, that if you’ve got your boot on somebody’s neck, there’s something wrong. And that the people you’re oppressing may rise up and defend themselves, and then you’re in trouble.

Eeeeyup.

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