Here’s a fascinating tidbit of research. A pair of grad students surveyed 2,000 state legislators and asked them what they thought their constituents believed on several hot button issues. They then compared the results to actual estimates from each district derived from national surveys.
The chart on the right is typical of what they found: Everyone—both liberal and conservative legislators—thought their districts were more conservative than they really were. For example, in districts where 60 percent of the constituents supported universal health care, liberal legislators estimated the number at about 50 percent. Conservative legislators were even further off: they estimated the number at about 35 percent.
Here’s the chart:
Kevin wonders why this is so and speculates that it’s the Fox effect as well as the hard right nature of the modern GOP.
I think that’s true. But I would also guess that the mainstream media continuously saying “this is a conservative country” as if it’s self-evident has an effect too.
First they came for the Clintons and I did nothing …
by digby
Uh huh:
Roger Eugene Ailes (born May 15, 1940) is president of Fox News Channel, and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group. Ailes was a media consultant for Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush and for Rudy Giuliani’s first mayoral campaign (1989)…
Days after the 9/11 attacks, Ailes gave President George W. Bush political advice indicating that the American public would be patient as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible. The correspondence was revealed in Bob Woodward’s book Bush At War.
But, you know, he’s fair and balanced so it’s all good.
Speaking of Ailes you have to read this amazing interview in The Hollywood Reporter if you missed it a couple of weeks ago. There’s a ton of fascinating stuff in there but in keeping with the topic of this post:
As the country enters a presidential campaign season with dynastic implications, Ailes has a dilemma: How much oxygen does he give the fringe GOP candidates who could torment likely frontrunner Jeb Bush and potentially aid Hillary Clinton in the process. It’s not a question he answers directly. “I just don’t think I should weigh in on it, even in the press because people will think, ‘Well, that’s the way he’s making the network go.’ But it looks like Hillary is going to do whatever she wants,” he says, “and the press is going to vote for her.”
Asked if he thinks Ted Cruz, the intransigent Texas tea party candidate, has a chance of securing the GOP nomination, Ailes deflects: “Listen, we elected Warren G. Harding. Anybody has a chance. You don’t know who you’re going to be running against. If the other guy falls on his rear end, you could win.”
It’s not as if he’s hiding his agenda. In fact, it’s blithely assumed by the reporter and everyone else that he’s trying to help the Republican get elected. He makes no bones about it and any sentient being who watches Fox can see it.
And that’s perfectly fine. But Stephanopoulos, who also worked as a political operative and retired from that profession just five years after Ailes (about 20 years ago) is a whore because he gave some money to Clinton’s charity.
This has to be the most hypocritical right wing scandal to date. And it may just backfire. These smug jerks are going after Villagers by name now.
So everyone just noticed that Marco Rubio looks good on paper?
by digby
Apparently. This article in the New York Times has everyone all atwitter. Apparently everyone just noticed that Republicans need to attract at least a few Hispanics and that the Great Whitebread hope Scott Walker is unlikely to be that guy (and not just because he’s an obvious boob but because he’s actually come out against legal immigration.)
Anyway, I’ll just take this moment to reprise my Salon piece from months ago about why Rubio makes the most sense.
Recognizing his obvious presidential timber after he boldly led Senate Republicans to hold hands and jump over a cliff in his very first weeks in the Senate, the Arkansas GOP introduced a bill this week which would change existing law to allow Tom Cotton to run for the office in 2020. One might ask why they would wait so long for his leadership — and for all we know, the draft Cotton movement is already afoot for 2016 — but perhaps they recognize that it might be better if he has more than a couple of months of experience before he takes the reins of the most powerful government on earth. (It’s possible that they also recognize it’s going to take a while before people have forgotten that he boldly led Senate Republicans over a cliff in his very first weeks in office …)
But the urge for a fresh face among GOP strategists is palpable. After all, if they plan to run against Hillary the ancient mariner who’s been around politics since we were all sending notes to each other via post office, they have to have someone besides Jeb Bush who, if you squint your eyes when he comes on TV, looks and sounds an awful like Poppy, who’s been around since they were all sending notes via pony express. There’s a groundhog day aspect to the upcoming presidential race for a lot of reasons and while it may seem that Hillary Clinton is the one stands to lose the most from that, it remains a fact that she would be the first woman nominee of a major political party in our country’s history and you just don’t get any fresher than that. The Republicans, on the other hand, have a major problem with virtually every member of the US electorate except older white conservatives.
There are a lot of old white conservatives, to be sure. But not enough to win a national election. As I wrote in this piece from a couple of weeks ago, Republican pollsters and strategists have crunched the numbers and they realize that in order to win they have to do substantially better with Hispanics and other minorities than George W. Bush did in 2000. It’s possible that some of them believe that means Jeb is a logical choice to re-capture some of that Bush magic (although anyone who’s seen him on the stump would be hard pressed to believe that “magic” is a word that springs to mind.) Moreover, while he can certainly deploy his Mexican American wife and his children to speak for his openmindedness about immigration, the fact that the kids are grown and in office themselves will only show him to be just another older white, male politician. Jeb isn’t young. He is eligible for Social Security this year. Jeb Bush as the voice of the new generation of Republicans doesn’t exactly have the ring of authenticity to it.
And that brings us to Marco Rubio. The beltway wags have dubbed this current period in the presidential cycle the “donor primary” with the GOP candidates all rushing to kiss the rings of the big money boyz in the party. It’s widely assumed that Jeb Bush is their guy. (After all, brother Dubya may have screwed up the world in flamboyant fashion but he damned sure got those tax cuts for the rich passed first thing.) And for reasons that continue to be obscure, a lot of pundits think Scott Walker is a formidable force despite the fact that he can hardly go a day without saying something that further proves he’s anything but. And yet, for all the talk about these two being the billionaires’ favorite toys, it was Rubio who made the big splash at the Koch Summit a few weeks back.
The Koch brothers’ conservative network is still debating whether it will spend any of its massive $889 million budget in the Republican presidential primaries, but the prospect of choosing a GOP nominee loomed over the network’s just-concluded donor conference in the California desert. In an informal straw poll of some conference donors, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida came out ahead of four other would-be GOP presidential candidates who had been invited, according to an attendee familiar with the results. The poll was conducted by Frank Luntz, a veteran GOP pollster, during a break-out session of the conference, which wrapped up Tuesday after a long weekend of presentations and discussions at the Ritz-Carlton in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
The Koch network isn’t the only game in town, of course, but it’s certainly the biggest player. And they liked the Senator from Florida very much. Why? Because they want to win. And Rubio, as rough around the edges as he certainly is, is the one hopeful they can conceivably contrast with an older, white woman as a “first” of equal importance. He’s young, he’s Hispanic and he’s good looking. He’s the anti-Hillary whom they believe might be able to siphon off enough of those Latinos who are going to be necessary to get the GOP over the line.
Up until now the beltway handicappers have barely mentioned him. But he’s starting to make his move. National Review reports that the buzz is starting:
Jeb Bush’s announcement in December launched both a fundraising juggernaut and an aggressive hiring spree, and Scott Walker’s speech in Iowa the following month lifted Walker to the top of national polls. But a little more than a month later, says the operative, “The Jeb boom is over and people are having second thoughts about Walker.”
The beneficiary in terms of buzz is Marco Rubio, who now has many of the party’s top donors looking at him in a way they weren’t even a month ago. Though Rubio hasn’t made as much noise as his competitors as the 2016 campaign has gotten underway in earnest, his knowledgeable presentations and obvious political talent are nonetheless turning heads or, at least, enough of them. Rubio hasn’t made a big splash, neither building a “shock and awe” campaign like Bush nor delivering a marquee speech like Walker (who afterward seemed almost to be caught off guard by his rapid ascent). Instead, Rubio appears to be gambling on the idea that, in what is sure to be a long primary with a crowded field, a slow-and-steady approach will prevail.
The piece goes on to note that Florida billionaire Norman Braman announced that he is prepared to give Rubio substantial backing and that at the “American Enterprise Institute’s annual donor retreat in Sea Island, Ga., one attendee says Rubio got rave reviews from a crowd that included several billionaires.” He is likewise making a good impression on the intellectual wing of the party (which says more about the intellectual wing of the party than it does about him.)
It’s a long way to the Republican convention next year and speculation about the outcome is little more than a parlor game at this point. But Rubio is the potential nominee who makes the most sense on paper and it seems that a number of billionaires are willing to wager some of what amounts to tip money for them (and a vast fortune for the rest of us) on his campaign. If he can figure out the difference between ISIS and Iran before he has to debate someone who knows the answer, he could be the one they are waiting for.
In recent weeks, Adelson, who spent $100 million on the 2012 campaign and could easily match that figure in 2016, has told friends that he views the Florida senator, whose hawkish defense views and unwavering support for Israel align with his own, as a fresh face who is “the future of the Republican Party.” He has also said that Rubio’s Cuban heritage and youth would give the party a strong opportunity to expand its brand and win the White House…
Since entering the Senate in 2011, Rubio has met privately with the mogul on a half-dozen occasions. In recent months, he‘s been calling Adelson about once every two weeks, providing him with meticulous updates on his nascent campaign. During a recent trip to New York City, Rubio took time out of his busy schedule to speak by phone with the megadonor.
Rubio really is a GOP dreamboat, isn’t he? He even calls when he’s on the road!
I have no idea if he will win, obviously. This is all parlor game bullshit. but I find it amusing that it’s taken this long for people to recognize Rubio’s play and see that he is the best they can do.
What if there were something that simultaneously cut the unintended-pregnancy rate and the abortion rate, while saving a bundle of taxpayer money? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Turns out there is. In 2009, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation donated over $23 million to the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, a five-year experimental program that offered low-income teenage girls and young women in the state long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs)—IUDs or hormonal implants—at no cost. These devices, which require no further action once inserted and remain effective for years, are by far the best method of birth control available, with less than a 1 percent failure rate. (The real-use failure rate for the Pill is 10 times higher.) One reason more women don’t use LARCs is cost: While they save the patient money over time, the up-front price can be as high as $1,200. (Even when insurance covers them, many teens fear the claim forms sent to their parents would reveal they are sexually active.) Another reason is that women simply don’t know about LARCs and assume the cheaper pills available at clinics are their only option.
Given the opportunity to make an informed decision at no cost, around 30,000 participants in Colorado chose LARCs. The results were staggering: a 40 percent decline in teen births, and a 34 percent decline in teen abortions. And for every dollar spent on the program, the state saved $5.85 in short-term Medicaid costs, in addition to other cost reductions and the enormous social benefit of freeing low-income teens from unwanted pregnancies and what too often follows: dropping out of school, unready motherhood, and poverty.
That is an amazing success story. For once government works at achieving the goals it intended to achieve. Huzzah.
Well, think again:
As Republican State Senator Kevin Lundberg put it, using an IUD could mean “stopping a small child from implanting.” (Fun fact: Lundberg is the head of the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee.) That IUDs work by preventing the implantation of fertilized eggs is a cherished conviction of abortion opponents, who reject the massive amount of scientific evidence that the devices work by preventing fertilization. It is “theoretically possible” that IUDs can prevent implantation, Turok said, “but the chances are infinitesimally small.” And he noted that “every legitimate scientific organization defines pregnancy as implantation,” not fertilization. But to opponents, a woman with an IUD is like an abortion clinic on legs: Who knows how many “small children” she’s killing in there?
Besides, teenagers shouldn’t be having sex. “We’re providing this long-term birth control and telling girls, ‘You don’t have to worry. You’re covered,’” said Representative Kathleen Conti. “That does allow a lot of young ladies to go out there and look for love in all the wrong places.” (Because the fear of pregnancy has worked so well to keep girls virginal.) Other reasons to kill the program? IUDs cause breast cancer (unproved). Birth rates are down in two Colorado counties (so?). STD rates are up (no, they’re not; in fact, they’ve stayed the same, which strongly suggests LARCs don’t increase sexual activity).
I do want to thank the president for acting like America’s Dad circa 1957 and validating this idea with his comments about Plan B being inappropriate for teenagers. It didn’t help.
But this is really all on the social conservative fanatics. It’s typically anti-science and filled with lies. And it also, once again, shows that what they care about isn’t preventing babies from dying, but preventing girls from living.
IUDs are a terrific form of contraception for any woman, but particularly for younger people whose lives are fairly chaotic and their own sense of responsibility isn’t fully formed. They will have sex — that should go without saying. They always have, they always will. The question is whether you want to force women to give birth as a form of punishment for their “dirty” behavior and make the consequences of this natural behavior life changing.
Privacy advocates worry that military drones could soon be used to spy on Americans. An activist friend trying to get reporters to publicize how the military plans for its squadrons of Predators, Reapers, etc. to share the National Airspace System (NAS) with private and commercial aircraft is greeted with the kind of skepticism one might have gotten a few years ago for suggesting the NSA was bulk-collecting Americans’ phone records. Like that could happen.
Others have worried about hackers hijacking unmanned or commercial aircraft and, say, flying them into buildings. Like that could happen.
According to the FBI document, which was first made public by the Canadian news website APTN, Roberts was able to hack into the onboard entertainment systems — manufactured by companies such as Panasonic and Thales — of passenger planes such as the Boeing 737, the Boeing 757 and the Airbus A320. He did so a total of 15 to 20 times between 2011 and 2014. To do so, he hooked his laptop up to the Seat Electronic Box (SEB) — which are usually located under each passenger seat — using an Ethernet cable, which is unsettling enough.
But Roberts may also potentially have used the SEB to hack into sensitive systems that control the engines. In one case, he may even have been able to manipulate the engines during flight. He says that he was able to successfully enter the command “CLB,” which stands for “climb,” and the plane’s engines reacted accordingly, he told the FBI, according to the document.
Der Spiegel reports that two years ago a young Spaniard, Hugo Teso, briefed officials from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) on how hackers might exploit backdoors to gain control of aircraft systems remotely. You might not even need a computer, he explained, because he developed a smartphone app for that. EASA was not amused.
Esti Peshin, Israel Aerospace Industries cyber-programs director, told a recent security conference in Washington there is already a PDF “blueprint for hackers” available online, according to the blog Security Affairs:
It is important to point out the fact that there might be some relation between the hacking of drones made easily accessible on Google and the downing of a CIA drone caused by Iran. GPS hijacking has become a growing phenomenon that will most likely grow even further in the near future, as drones take over more responsibilities and are used in multiple situations. The estimated cost for getting what it takes to hack the drones varies from $2,000 to $3,000 and this is certainly an investment that hackers can spare.
Todd Humphrey, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Radio navigation Laboratory, believes that as well:
Humphrey demonstrated to Homeland Security agents that spending around $1,000 on equipment and designing an application able to send signals to the drone’s GPS receiver he is able to gain complete control of the vehicle.
Humphrey calls it “an Achilles heel for homeland security.” Which is no doubt why the Air Force and civilian developers are in such a hurry to introduce 30,000 drones into the national airspace in the next five to ten years. Just when you thought it was safe to stop ducking and covering.
Privacy concerns
John Horgan of National Geographic magazine wrote in 2013 about the privacy concerns with the technology:
During the last few years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, unmanned aircraft monitored Baghdad 24/7, turning the entire city into the equivalent of a convenience store crammed with security cameras. After a roadside bombing U.S. officials could run videos in reverse to track bombers back to their hideouts. This practice is called persistent surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) worries that as drones become cheaper and more reliable, law enforcement agencies may be tempted to carry out persistent surveillance of U.S. citizens. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” but it’s not clear how courts will apply that to drones.
What Jay Stanley of the ACLU calls his “nightmare scenario” begins with drones supporting “mostly unobjectionable” police raids and chases. Soon, however, networks of linked drones and computers “gain the ability to automatically track multiple vehicles and bodies as they move around a city,” much as the cell phone network hands calls from one tower to the next. The nightmare climaxes with authorities combining drone video and cell phone tracking to build up databases of people’s routine comings and goings—databases they can then mine for suspicious behavior. Stanley’s nightmare doesn’t even include the possibility that police drones might be armed.
Like that could happen:
But don’t worry. Drones don’t kill people. People do, right?
Liberal and conservative groups are uniting around the threat to both physical security and Fourth Amendment concerns posed by the technology and provisions in the Patriot Act the NSA has used to justify domestic surveillance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has joined 29 other groups in supporting the End Warrantless Surveillance of Americans Act (H.R. 2233) introduced by Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX) along with Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY). Speaking of backdoors, EFF writes:
H.R. 2233 has goals similar to last year’s Massie-Lofgren amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for FY 2015, which passed overwhelmingly with strong bipartisan support: 293 ayes, 123 nays, and 1 present. That legislation would have closed the so-called National Security Agency “backdoors”—security flaws engineered into products and services to enable or facilitate government access to, and warrantless searches of, the contents of Americans’ communications—by prohibiting NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency from using appropriated funds to mandate or request that companies build backdoors into products or services.
H.R. 2233 goes further, because the prohibition on mandating or requesting backdoors would apply to any federal agency. This change is especially important for U.S. companies, who have suffered reputational harm overseas, and even lost business, in the wake of revelations about the extent of NSA spying. H.R. 2233, like the Massie-Lofgren amendment, does have an exception for backdoors mandated by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a law that we’ve long had concerns about.
H.R. 2233 would also address the “backdoor search loophole” by prohibiting any officer or employee of the United States from searching through communications collected under Section 702 for communications of a particular U.S. person without a court order. This provision has exceptions for certain limited circumstances.
What’s new is that H.R. 2233—unlike last year’s Massie-Lofgren amendment—aims to prohibit backdoor searches for particular U.S. persons of communications collected under authorities other than Section 702—including, according to Rep. Lofgren, Executive Order 12333. While many people have never even heard of this presidential order, as the Washington Post pointed out in October, “Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has acknowledged that Congress conducts little oversight of intelligence-gathering under the presidential authority of Executive Order 12333 , which defines the basic powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies.”
The 30 groups “urge the Congress to move speedily to enact this legislation.” Like that could happen.
I have written repeatedly about the Midas cult, the obsession our culture has with turning everything it can imagine into gold, whether we should or not. Because it is somehow un-American not to. There is also a perversion of the American can-do ethos that says “if you can imagine it, you can do it.” And should, because it is somehow un-American not to. (Watch the video above.) But that aphorism popular with entrepreneurs also works for terrorists and rogue governments.
The Seattle International Film Festival is in full swing, so this week I am continuing to share a few highlights with you. SIFF is showing 263 films over 25 days. Navigating such an event is no easy task, even for a dedicated buff. Yet, I trudge on (cue the world’s tiniest violin). Hopefully, some of these films will be coming soon to a theater near you…
The Forecaster– There’s a conspiracy nut axiom that “everything is rigged”. Turns out it’s not just paranoia…it’s a fact (and cyclically predictable). At least that’s according to this absorbing documentary from German filmmaker Marcus Vetter, profiling economic “forecaster” Martin Armstrong. In the late 70s, Armstrong formulated a predictive algorithm (“The Economic Confidence Model”) that proved so spookily accurate at prophesying global financial crashes and armed conflicts (sometimes to the day), that a shadowy cabal of everyone from his Wall Street competitors to the CIA made Wile E. Coyote-worthy attempts for years to get their hands on that formula. And once Armstrong told the CIA to “fuck off”, he put himself on a path that culminated in serving a 12-year prison sentence for what the FBI called a “3 billion dollar Ponzi scheme”. Funny thing, no evidence was ever produced, nor was any judgement passed (most of the time he served was for “civil contempt”…for not giving up that coveted formula, which the FBI eventually snagged when they seized his assets). Another funny thing…Armstrong’s formula solidly backs up his contention that it’s the world’s governments who are really running the biggest Ponzi schemes…again and again, throughout history. An eye-opener!
Rating: ***½ (Plays May 25 and 29)
Beti and Amare– It’s an old story: In the midst of the Italo-Abyssinian War, teenage Ethiopian girl meets mute alien boy, who has hatched from an egg that has appeared out of nowhere next to a desert well. Girl brings boy to her uncle’s isolated home, where she is hiding out from Mussolini’s invading forces and marauding members of the local militia while her uncle is travelling. Romance ensues (how many times have we seen that tale on the silver screen?). German writer-director-DP-editor-producer Andy Siege has crafted a fairly impressive debut feature that is equal parts harrowing war drama, psychological thriller and sci-fi fantasy. I don’t know if these were conscious influences, but Siege’s film strongly recalls Roman Polanski’s 1965 psychodrama Repulsion, and 1970s-era Nicolas Roeg (more specifically, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Walkabout).
Rating: *** (Plays May 27 and 29)
Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy– French filmmaker Stephanie Valloatto’s globetrotting documentary profiles a dozen men and women who make their living drawing funny pictures about current events. I know what you’re thinking…beats digging ditches, right? Well, that depends. Some of these political cartoonists ply their trade under regimes that could be digging a “special” ditch, reserved just for them (if you know what I’m saying). The film can be confusing; in her attempt to give all 12 subjects equal face time, Valloatto’s frequent cross-cutting can make you lose track of which country you’re in (it’s mostly interior shots). That aside, she gets to the heart of what democracy is all about: speaking truth to power. It’s also timely; in one scene, an interviewee says, “Like a schoolchild, I told myself: I shouldn’t draw Muhammad.” Then, holding up a sketch of you-know-who, he concludes: “Drawing is the correct answer to the forbidden.”
Rating: *** (Plays May 27, 28 and 29)
The Price of Fame– Well, this one looked good on paper (I had anticipated something along the lines of Melvin and Howard), but after a promising start, writer-director Xavier Beauvois’ “true crime” dramedy about a pair of bumbling, would-be extortionists falls curiously flat, despite earnest performances from an affable cast. The story is based on a late ‘70s incident in Switzerland in which two down-on-their-luck pals (played in the film by Benoit Poelvoorde and Roschdy Zem) cooked up a bizarre and ill-advised plan to dig up the coffin of the recently interred Charlie Chaplin and then hit his family up for money to have the body returned. The caper itself takes a relative backseat to the main thrust of the film, which is ostensibly a character study. Therein lies the crux of the problem; these aren’t particularly interesting characters (at least as written). And the third act is nearly single-handedly destroyed by that most dreaded of movie archetypes: the Maudlin Circus Clown. Beauvois’ idea to use Chaplin’s compositions for the soundtrack is clever, but he overdoes it. Peter Coyote (!) does do an interesting turn as Chaplin’s longtime assistant.
Rating: ** (Plays May 27, 29 and June 5)
Diner– This slice-of-life dramedy marked writer-director Barry Levinson’s debut in 1982, and remains his best. A group of 20-something pals converge for Christmas week in 1959 Baltimore. One is recently married, another is about to get hitched, and the rest playing the field and deciding what to do with their lives. All are slogging fitfully toward adulthood. The most entertaining scenes take place at the group’s favorite diner, where the comfort food of choice is French fries with gravy. Levinson has a knack for writing sharp dialog, and it’s the little details that make the difference; like a cranky appliance store customer who refuses to upgrade to color TV because he saw Bonanza at a friend’s house, and decided that “…the Ponderosa looked fake”. This film was more influential than it gets credit for; Tarantino owes a debt of gratitude, as do the creators of Seinfeld. It’s hard to believe that Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Daniel Stern, Timothy Daly, Steve Guttenberg and Paul Reiser were all relative unknowns at the time!
Rating: **** (Special archival presentation; plays May 26)
I was going to write about this ridiculous Politico hit piece on Elizabeth Warren but decided to just let Dday have the floor:
I shouldn’t even bother to dignify this, but Politico is out tonight with what I assume someone would think is a SICK BURN on Elizabeth Warren, citing her for HYPOCRISY because she opposes investor-state dispute settlement, but one time 15 years ago she was paid to stop a corporation from winning an investor-state dispute settlement case. If you don’t follow, you’re not alone.
In 1999 and 2000, the Justice Department paid Warren between $200 to $400 an hour to serve as an expert witness against a Canadian funeral home operator called Loewen Group that was seeking $725 million from the U.S. under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Her role in the case, NAFTA’s first major test of the procedure known as investor-state dispute settlement, has gotten little public attention — even as Warren has made ISDS her main line of attack against the sprawling Asia-Pacific trade deal that Obama is seeking.
There’s a pretty good reason this has gotten little public attention: because it’s not contradictory to her current position in any way. She was a legal advisor in her area of expertise, bankruptcy law, paid for by the government to defend against the expropriation of money through a trade settlement by a corporation, precisely what she’s arguing shouldn’t be allowable in future trade deals. The logic here is that she should have told the Justice Department that she was too pure to involve herself with a trade settlement process she found abhorrent, and should have therefore denied the government her expertise and helped the corporation win.
A parallel hit piece would be something like, “Warren SAYS that she hates money in politics, so why did she RAISE money to run for Senate?!?!?”
Even this former Bush trade official sees nothing in this “revelation”:
“I really don’t see any connection between her provision of expert advice to the government in Loewen and her position on ISDS in her current capacity as a U.S. senator,” said (Ted) Posner, who is a partner at the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. “The advice she gave in Loewen was in her capacity as an expert on U.S. bankruptcy law. She was not acting as an expert on ISDS.”
There’s not even any reason for the Administration (I can’t pinpoint who planted this, but I can guess) to act this desperate. They secured cloture on fast track today in the Senate. Is the House vote this shaky that they need to launch a pathetic, laughable attack on Warren’s credibility?
This is pathetic, really. But hey, we’re learning new things every day. For instance, if you give money to a charity, it means you are corrupt. Or something:
“PBS NewsHour” co-anchor Judy Woodruff on Friday responded to a post from PBS ombudsman Michael Getler calling her donations to an initiative by the Clinton Foundation “a mistake.”
I’m a longtime admirer of your work, as a journalist and as ombudsman, but what you wrote was unfair. To lump what I did in 2010 under the simple heading of “Clinton” ignores the facts and the context. I gave $250 two days after the Haiti earthquake struck in 2010, to an emergency relief fund, and in response to one of the first appeals to cross my desk when we were witnessing wall-to-wall scenes of death and devastation. I am a journalist, but I also am a citizen who supports non-partisan, charitable causes when I feel so moved.
I will not be put in a position of defending the Clinton Foundation. But in early January 2010, less than one year into President Obama’s first term, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the tragedy hit and we were told by relief experts that the quickest way to get a contribution to the victims, was through the William J. Clinton Foundation. It had a longstanding involvement in Haiti before the quake. To repeat, my gift was made out to the Haiti Relief Fund, not the general Clinton Foundation.
On Thursday, Getler wrote a post that called into question Woodruff’s decision to make a donation to the Haiti Relief Fund shortly after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the country. He said she erred in making the donation, “even in a small amount and with to the Haiti Relief Fund shortly after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the country.
Woodruff’s donation to the Clinton Foundation charity — and contributions from several others in the media — came to light after it was revealed that ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation to fight AIDS and deforestation.
But it’s the appearance of impropriety that is so important, right? Sure Woodruff may have just been trying to help some earthquake victims but it looks bad because Clinton.
DR. CHARLIE ROSE’S WASHINGTON: Charlie Rose, the man who’s always working, got to just enjoy himself last night – tieless, and rocking sneakers. D.C. friends walked down a red carpet to the elegant terrace of the rarely seen estate of Franco Nuschese, owner of Café Milano, who was honoring Charlie with a dinner celebration and garden party after he delivered the Georgetown commencement address and received an honorary doctorate of humane letters.
Franco’s three and a half acres, in the Northwest D.C. neighborhood of Forest Hills, include a view down the same hill as the Italian ambassador’s residence. In a toast, Charlie said Franco is the best traveling companion in Italy – aside from two of the evening’s guests, CIA Director John Brennan and former deputy CIA director Michael Morell.
–SPOTTED: Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, Don Baer and Nancy Bard, Bret and Amy Baier, CIA Director John Brennan and Kathy Pokluda Brennan, Charlie Cook, Jan Crawford, Henry Davis, E.J. Dionne, Tom Donilon, Jim and Deb Fallows, Tom and Ann Friedman, Georgetown College Dean Chester Gillis, Tammy Haddad, Al Hunt and Judy Woodruff, Walter and Cathy Isaacson, Chris and Jennifer Isham, Vernon and Ann Jordan, Tommy Kaplan, Jonathan Karl, Katty Kay, Samantha Kulok, Jennifer Lawson of Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Margot McGinness, Frank Milwee, Michael Morell, Norah O’Donnell and Geoff Tracy, Roxanne Roberts, John F.W. Rogers, Sally Quinn, Hilary Rosen and Campbell Spencer, Chelsea Royal, David Sanger, Bob and Pat Schieffer, Justin Smith, Ellen Tauscher, George Tenet and Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, Yvette Vega, Chitra Wadhwani and more.
–WHAT FRANCO SERVES AT HOME: hand-carved prosciutto; eggplant parmesan; roasted sea scallops, eggplant and basil; buffalo mozzarella; pecorino cheeses; roasted veal in tuna sauce; assorted cold cuts; calamarata pasta, fresh oregano, tomatoes and zucchini; oysters; steamed shellfish with vegetables; mixed greens salad; octopus, peaches, green beans and mint salad; tuna, salmon and amberjack tartar; plus a bar and desserts.
You’ll recognize many of the media stars and government players. And then there’s the Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba from the United Arab Emirates; Don Baer worldwide chair and chief executive officer of the strategic communications firm Burson-Marsteller and chair of the research firm Penn Schoen Berland; John F.W. Rogers who “might be one of the most important people at Goldman Sachs.”
I sure hope nobody was hit up for a charitable contribution over their small plates of roasted sea scallops and amberjack tartar. One wouldn’t want to give the appearance of impropriety.
Suzy Khimm talked to some young Hillary Clinton supporters. It’s a fun piece. I thought this was interesting:
For Clinton’s younger supporters—many of whom, like Maeur, were Barack Obama campaign volunteers—their memories of the scandals and pseudo-scandals of the Clinton years are hazy at best, filtered through the soft focus of childhood. In sharper relief for them are the accomplishments that Hillary has racked up since then—U.S. senator, 2008 candidate, secretary of state—which her young Arlington supporters quickly rattled off when asked why they were backing her. “She’s going down in history whether people like it or not,” says Renzo Olivari, 19, a political science major at James Madison University who hopes to run for office one day. He was still in middle school during the 2008 campaign but remembers watching her speeches at age 12 and getting “emotionally invested” in the Clinton campaign even then.
In Clinton, young supporters see someone who’s risen up through the political establishment on her own merits: the ultimate Washington success story. What they missed earlier in the ‘90s was what Josh Marshall describes as the “Vince Foster moment” that the Clintons had to overcome first:
For those of you not familiar with Vince Foster, his tragic suicide or the years-long right-wing clown show it kicked off, it is probably best described as the ’90s version of Benghazi…It’s never enough for the Clintons’ perennial critics to be satisfied with potential conflicts of interest or arguably unseemly behavior. It’s got to be more. It always has to be more. There have to be high crimes, dead people, corrupt schemes. And if they don’t materialize, they need to be made up. Both because there is an organized partisan apparatus aimed at perpetuating them and because there is a right-wing audience that requires a constant diet of hyperventilating outrage from which to find nourishment.
Hillary’s older supporters remember those days all too well and are quick to point out the larger machinations of the anti-Clinton apparatus. “You think of all this dirt that gets thrown out at her every day. There are what, 30 organizations that have been founded to throw crap at her?” says Allida Black, 63, a historian and long-time Hillary supporter who co-founded the Ready for Hillary SuperPAC.
[…]
But like many of Hillary’s young supporters gathered in Arlington, Olivari doesn’t blame Republicans or a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Instead, he faults the media itself for driving the controversy over the Clinton Foundation, the Libya intervention, and Clinton’s use of her personal email at the State Department. (The New York Times broke the story on her personal email, going off a tip from an unidentified source.) “The media—they’re bringing these allegations and these scandals up to see if anyone else in the Democratic side will emerge as a strong candidate and they can go head to head,” says Olivari, who hopes to run for office one day. He adds: “That sells, if you put that out, it sells. It’s them trying to tailor the election to their own needs, rather than what the election is.”
These kids are smart. It is the media as much as the Republicans and they have no excuse. The Republicans are just being Republicans. They want to win and they’re willing to do anything. They put this garbage into the ether and the media just can’t seem to help running after it like a pack of slavering dogs. I don’t think people knew this back in the 90s. We were still laboring under the illusion that the press was unbiased and professional. It’s sad that they haven’t changed but at least the younger generation gets it.
I remember back when Alan Grayson was running for reelection in 2010 against the far right Christian Daniel Webster and it was revealed that Webster’s mentor and good friend was a man named Bill Gothard, a famous evangelical with a fanatical following who was considered the father of the Christian homeschooling movement. Everyone was appalled that Grayson’s campaign would bring this up because well, it’s so rude to point out that your opponent is a member of a cult. As it happens, it’s the same cult to which the Duggars belong.
And it bears remembering that it wasn’t long ago that the same Bill Gothard was exposed as a sexual harasser. Right Wing Watch had the whole sordid tale:
Another leader of the right-wing Quiverfull movement is now in danger of losing his post over a sex scandal. Homeschooling advocate Bill Gothard has been put on administrative leave from the organization he heads, the Institute in Basic Life Principles, in response to allegations from thirty-four different women that he engaged in sexual harassment and failed to notify Child Protective Services about abuse claims.
The allegations against Gothard are chronicled on the website Recovering Grace, which aims to expose the activist’s record of “emotional, spiritual, and sexual abuse.”
The revelations about Gothard’s alleged misconduct are another blow to the patriarchal, anti-birth control Quiverfull movement, which suffered a setback last year when Vision Forum head Doug Phillips resigned because of an extramarital affair.
Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles has been championed by conservative figures including Rick Perry and Sarah Palin, who attended one of the institute’s conferences and adopted its “Character Cities” program as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Mike Huckabee has provided an endorsement of the group for its website: “As a person who has actually been through the Basic Seminar, I am confident that these are some of the best programs available for instilling character into the lives of people.” GOP mega-donor Jim Leininger was once a member of the IBLP’s advisory board.
TLC’s Duggar family are also followers of Gothard’s teachings on homeschooling and Quiverfull families, which teaches that “the husband is the undisputed leader of the family.”
After Gothard’s close ties to Florida congressman Daniel Webster became an issue in a 2010 congressional election, Sarah Posner released an exposé on how the IBLP promotes marital submission and cult-like practices.
She quoted critics who said Gothard instilled a “culture of fear” and preached “the terrible picture of the chain of command in the family with the husband as the hammer, the wife as the chisel and the children as the gems in the rough… The ghastly picture is that he beats on her and she chips on them.” One woman who belonged to the movement said that Gothard taught that women “don’t have any rights.”
He also claimed that he had an “ability to heal ‘stress’ and cancer” and instructed men on how to guard against Satanic attacks on his family.
[…]This wouldn’t be the first scandal for the Gothard family either, as “Gothard’s own brother, who worked for IBLP, was dismissed from his organization after it was discovered that he was having sex with students.”
The Baptist website Ethics Daily reported on abuse allegations stemming from the institute’s “cult-like” and “abusive” practices back in 2007.
One woman who recounted her experience working for Gothard on Recovering Grace said that IBLP board members were well aware of complaints from girls as young as fifteen-years-old:
What I did not know was that in the Summer and Fall of 1997, after the San Jose conference and around the time I arrived at Headquarters, the father of one of the young men on the San Jose trip had approached the IBLP Board with a spectrum of concerns about Gothard’s conduct, particularly his penchant for taking young girls on road trips and conducting himself in a questionable manner with them while on those trips. I do not know what Gothard’s verbal or written response was to the Board when presented with these concerns, but I know firsthand that his conduct with me and other young women did not alter in the months after the Board asked him to change his behavior. The other girls and I were all between 15 and 24 years of age.
Marketplace Notices The Big Mo in Fight for $15 Movement
by Spocko
Good news everybody! The MSM have noticed the fight to raise the minimum wage and they think it’s working!
“I almost feel that the minimum wage movement is sort of where gay marriage was 8 months ago. There is just… there just feels to be this momentum.”
–Leigh Gallagher, Fortune on Marketplace. May 22, 2015 (audio link to segment. Full episode link)
I have friends in the Fight for $15 movement. I know how hard they have worked on multiple fronts. So when the popular business media acknowledges its momentum–that deserves some serious kudos. The acknowledgement of the Big Mo came not only on the super popular radio show Marketplace, which is:
“…the most widely heard program on business and the economy – radio or television, commercial or public broadcasting – in the country.”
Lots of people made that momentum that she is seeing and feeling. Take a bow folks.
On the show the two guests were talking about the minimum wage. One guest, Sudeep Reddy, from the Wall Street Journal needed to bring up possible gloom and doom from the movement, but even then he thinks it will be “only around the edges.”
Gallagher also talked about the innovations that LA is doing with the minimum wage, like publishing a list of employers with more than 100 employees on Medicaid. She notes that:
“The thing that hasn’t been talked about is how much employers have been relying on taxpayer money for public help for people who are not making a living wage.”
I almost had to laugh when I heard that. I’ve heard it talked about, but I run in dirty hippie circles. (Nice visual, eh?)
I’m glad she made that last comment because it represents a mind-shift taking place.
Corporations have figured out how to shift costs to the public without paying into the same public system for a long time.
Think about how much has shifted when the idea that that corporations should pay for the services they use, instead funneling the profits to a small group of people, seems radical. And health care for employees is just part of the shift, they also use roads, water, sewage, infrastructure, a court system, police and fire. They should pay for these, it’s pretty amazing PR work that they have convinced people they shouldn’t.
Soon you will be hearing the screaming of victim hood when these lists come out. They will bitch about having to report at all, talk about how they will go broke if they have to pay a living wage to everyone. They will also probably suddenly be very concerned about employee privacy.
They will compare themselves to small businesses, as if they had the same resources, “Small business don’t have to do this!!! Why are you picking on us for our success!”
They will threaten to move to Texas, China or some other third world country that does the crappy jobs with employees who don’t demand things like health care. Or who think safety regulations are for wimps. (“Texas welcomes your explosives business within our city limits.” )
Instead of raising the wages they will fire everyone who was on medicaid, just so they aren’t on the list again. “It’s not our fault the workers can’t manage their money, we were doing them a favor by hiring them! Not anymore, THIS is the thanks we get? Public humiliation and forced to pay more money to fewer people who might not manage their money well either!”
They will say it’s our fault, “Ya happy now Liberals, see what you made me do!? I had to fire the very people you wanted to help!”
Of course the real cost savings could be in outsourcing their own jobs, but that won’t happen. Yes, the Board of Director folks could find someone to do their jobs for less, but the real benefit the CEO whiners provide to their shareholders is their professional whining about regulations and committeemen to lobbying politicians for more tax breaks. Lobbying is where they want to do all their work, it has the best ROI.
But enough about my predicting gloomy futures! This comment and the work that inspired it is good news! Sure it was buried on a Friday before a Memorial Day weekend, but it’s there and it calls for some acknowledgement, optimism and celebration!
