Month: August 2015

Rubio: It’s the media’s fault we have to take billionaire’s money 


by Spocko

#SignsYoureRightWing No matter how powerful or rich you are, you are the real victim.

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) August 4, 2015

All Things Considered did a story yesterday about a Koch event attended by GOP presidential candidates. It’s really stunning to listen to some of their quotes.

Here is the link. Here are two audio bits I highlighted in the transcript below:

From the story:

“The biggest contributor so far is hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer. He sent $11 million to a super PAC backing Ted Cruz. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told the Koch network the candidates really have no choice about raising money.”

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING at 1:48)

MARCO RUBIO: As long as newspapers and television stations keep charging people to speak out on politics, we’re going to have to keep raising money to pay for it.

Great narrative flip Marco! You are the real victim here. You had no choice but to accept the trucks of cash dumped on your doors! And besides, why should you have to pay for your “free speech?”  (Hey, does this mean he wants the fairness doctrine back? )

“And Carly Fiorina, a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, said the media isn’t nearly as critical of liberal donors and labor unions.”

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING at 2:01)

CARLY FIORINA: The point is the media doesn’t like one kind of money, but is OK with another kind of money. I think…
(APPLAUSE)
FIORINA: I think everybody ought to play by the same rules.

Notice how smoothly they shift the blame to the media. And the media is just going to sit there and take it.

Yes, the liberal media is to blame. She’s saying, “Why is the media always picking on rich conservatives? Why not pick on rich liberals or those damn Unions?! Let’s have some false equivalency here media!”

Why would anyone in the media ever want to stop big money in political campaigns? Why would they piss off the Kochs or other billionaires who might be buying ads? What’s in it for them, except loss of revenue? And really, where is the harm in letting it continue?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

TV media are not going to question any money coming into political campaigns. As long as the money keeps coming, they won’t even question the process too hard.

The billionaires are telling the media,

“Shut up and take my money.” 

And they do.

Even on the public media side they let someone else question the money and then put in a nice balancing quote from Jeb “Ice In the Belly” Bush.

JEB BUSH: “Money helps. I’m playing by the rules of the game, the way it was laid out. And if people don’t like it, that’s just tough luck.”

Fund raising has become so easy candidates would be stupid NOT to do it, if only for the future benefits. This is what we are seeing now.

The media want to maximize revenue during this post Citizen United time. They don’t want to rock any boats. But they will be happy to cover the people who do, and then provide “balance” to distance themselves from them in the eyes of advertisers.

This, my friends, is an opportunity.

This Thursday we will see just how acceptable extreme opinions are.

Will we see the crowd cheering for cops defending themselves from cigarette smoking women and agreeing about those raping Mexicans? Trump will be providing lots of great extreme opinions. Will others use his views to distance themselves from Trump’s remarks or try to top him?

It’s because of all the video

by digby

Not just police cameras but phones everywhere that document this stuff and put it on the internet:

But still:

[T]he poll’s findings show that despite the drop in satisfaction in the past two years, a majority (53 percent) of white Americans are satisfied with how black people are treated in the US. That stands in sharp contrast to black Americans, 33 percent of whom say they’re satisfied with how black people are treated. So there’s still a big gap in how people of different races view the treatment of black people.

Nonetheless, this change does mean that there’s a chance for reform. At long last.  Because we can see it happening with our own eyes.  It shouldn’t require that after everything we know about our history but there you have it.

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Notes from a confederate rally

by digby

They actually are lost causes:

They wore their history—in particular, their intergenerational defeat and ongoing public humiliation—on their faces. Fuck those absurdly wealthy and culturally hostile scalawags at the Southern Poverty Law Center — here was the true Southern poverty, the generations of want and suffering and being scapegoated and trying to scratch out an existence in a conquered land where their conquerors seek to scratch them out of existence.

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War ended, here was a perpetually maligned demographic that had witnessed almost everything, including their dignity, being stripped from them…

And then, finally, came what the party-crashers were looking for. A genetically challenged-looking ginger male in a pink baseball cap called a black girl a “greasy monkey ni**er bitch.” The black girl in question, who was wearing a shirt celebrating her “blackness,” began howling and screaming and clawing and swinging like a Jerry Springer guest before cops were able to restore order. Her friend, a portly black woman with a giant black leather earring in the shape of Mother Africa, shouted at someone in the crowd, “What if I called you a greasy inbred stringy-haired cracker?”

“I’d be offended,” they replied.

“But ‘cracker’ isn’t offensive!” she insisted.

“Shouldn’t that be for the crackers to decide?” I asked her. She either didn’t hear me or she didn’t want to answer the question. Maybe she simply assumed it was for her to decide what was offensive and what wasn’t.

This is what these people really believe — that neo-confederates suffer exactly the same kind of racism as African Americans.

I’m failing to find the dark humor in all this anymore. These people are just deeply depressing.

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Life Lessons

by digby

These, on the other hand, are persons:

Lindsey Graham and Clinton sexytime

by digby

While discussing threats to the United States at a candidate forum in New Hampshire, Graham said that Hillary Clinton is “the last person in the world you want to send into the arena with the Russians.”

“As to the Clintons, I’ve been dealing with this crowd for twenty years. I’m fluent in Clinton-speak,” he continued before pivoting to an attack on the Clintons’ integrity.

“When Bill says, ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman,’ he did,” Graham said. “When she tells us, ‘Trust me, you’ve got all the emails you need,’ we haven’t even scratched the surface.”

Yeah, Huckleberry went there.

I think it’s a good time to quote a little bit of House manager Graham’s testimony from the impeachment so everyone can recall just what he thought those “lies” were all about. This is from the floor of the US House of Representatives.

… God knows he’s a polarizing figure. God only knows what’s in his heart. I’m having to judge Bill Clinton based on evidence. And I would like to speak a few minutes to what I believe is the unshakable, undeniable truth. And much of it is about sex.

This idea that the President of the United States when he testified in Paula Jones’ deposition, a lady who brought a case against him for sexual harassment, that he gave testimony that was legally accurate is a total falsehood. The idea that the definition of sex did not include oral sex and they did not ask right questions and if they did he would have told the truth offends me. This idea of what “sex” meant came up after this blue dress, in my opinion.

Why I believe the definition of “sex” as being propounded by the president to this very day is a lie is based on the conduct he exhibited after the deposition. On January the 17th he would have us to believe they did not ask the right question and the definition excluded oral sex. I would suggest to you that’s a fabricated tale. Then on January the 24th we have a talking point paper from the White House telling people how to respond about the allegations against the president, and one of those questions was “Does sexual relations include oral sex?” The answer was yes…

What I believe is that his press accounts to Mr. Layer (sp) and to Roll Call indicate that improper relationships, there was no artificial definition, this is — oral sex is not included. I believe that’s a falsehood, that’s a fraud…

Should he be impeached? Very quickly; the hardest decision I think I will ever make. Learning that the president lied to the grand jury about sex, I still believe that every president of the United States, regardless of the matter they called to testify about before a grand jury should testify truthfully and if they don’t they should be subject to losing their job.

I believe that about Bill Clinton and I’ll believe that about the next president. If it had been a Republican, I would have still believed that and I would hope that if a Republican person had done all this that some of us would’ve went (sic) over and told him, You need to leave office. I understand that the dilemma that all of us are in about that. His fate is in his own hands.

Right quickly, Mr. Chairman. Thirty years from now they’re going to judge what we’ve done and how partisan it’s been and whether or not this made any sense. I just want you to know as you look back and look at these tapes and find out what we’re doing, there’s one member of Congress, there’s a lot of us here, believe the president has lied to us to this very day, that we can’t reconcile ourself with that, that it was in a lawsuit with an average, everyday citizen’s legal rights at stake.

And the most chilling of all things, to me, was the episode after he left the deposition, he told Mr. Blumenthal that the — Monica Lewinsky was basically coming on to him, he had to fight her off. He told Betty Currie, She wanted to have sex with me and I couldn’t do that. The most chilling thing was, for a period of time, the president was setting stories in motion that were lies. Those stories found themselves in the press to attack a young lady who could potentially be a witness against him.

To me, that is very much like Watergate. That shows character inconsistent with being president, and every member of Congress should look at that episode and decide, is this truly about sex? Is Bill Clinton doing the right thing by continuing to make us have to pursue this, have to prove to a legal certainty he lied? The president’s fate is in his own hands. Mr. President, you have one more chance. Don’t bite your lip; reconcile yourself with the law.

He had been one of a handful of Republicans who wanted to release some additional “evidence” to the public about whether or not Lewinsky orgasmed in the encounters so that the “definition” of sex, which included “intent to arouse” could be proven:

Sources said that the documents covered by the committee’s action included statements by Lewinsky to the FBI and grand jury, some of her letters and e-mail, Secret Service records relating to the president’s and Lewinsky’s movements on certain days, a chart detailing Lewinsky’s trips to the White House and public events, memos, telephone records, White House logs and news clippings.

Before convening the committee Thursday, Hyde and ranking Democrat John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) had agreed to 155 deletions in the printed material, under guidelines aimed at protecting the privacy of innocent third parties, removing redundant or irrelevant sexual references and striking material being used in ongoing criminal cases, and anything relating to official duties of the Secret Service.

But GOP members, who outnumber Democrats on the committee 21 to 16, rejected an attempt by the minority to delete 25 additional references, according to committee records. Among these were more explicit material relating to sexual interaction between Clinton and Lewinsky, the manner in which Clinton undressed her, and details about their telephone sex, according to sources in both parties.

Republicans on the committee approved, 20 to 16, a motion by Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) to restore three deleted references to a cigar in Lewinsky’s sworn testimony to the grand jury, according to information provided by the committee and other sources. One Republican, Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) joined the Democrats in opposing the Barr motions…

Republican sources said that material related, for example, to Lewinsky’s orgasms, was left in specifically to address the question of whether Clinton aimed to arouse Lewinsky — a key component of the definition of sexual relations at testimony by Clinton in the sexual harassment suit brought against him by Paula Jones.

One sign of GOP nervousness came after Judiciary Committee Republican Bob Inglis (S.C.) proposed that the generic description of one deleted item — which was not included in Starr’s published report — be changed to indicate more specifically the form of sexual contact that it dealt with. Only five other Republican members, Barr, Ed Bryant (Tenn.), Edward A. Pease (Ind.), James E. Rogan (Calif.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) joined Inglis in pushing for the disclosure. The tally defeating the motion was 28 to 6, according to the committee.

He was obsessed with the orgasms, couldn’t stop talking about them. His whole cornpone Hamlet act, which went on interminably, was based on the question of whether or not Clinton had actually had sex.

It was the most bizarre political theatre of my lifetime. Why it didn’t signal to the political establishment at the time that the Republicans had lost their minds is beyond me. Here we are, more than 15 years later and they’re just now figuring it out.

And Graham’s running for president. Hahaha.

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Today’s CW

by digby

Here’s “First Read” with what you need to interpret every establishment journalist’s lazy talking points for the day:

From the new NBC/WSJ poll we released last night: Almost everyone is in lousy shape. Hillary Clinton’s fav/unfav numbers dropped from 44%-40% (+4) in June to 37%-48% (-11) now — which gives her a worse popularity rating than President Obama has ever had during his presidency. Jeb Bush’s fav/unfav rating, at 26%-40% (-14) is even worse — and it’s worse than Mitt Romney ever had at any point in the 2012 race. And Donald Trump, who leads the GOP horserace, is at 26%-56% (-30). Ratings for other Republicans: Chris Christie (-13), Ted Cruz (-12), Rand Paul (-10), Mike Huckabee (-8), Scott Walker (-1), and Marco Rubio (+1). Even President Obama, who has enjoyed a renaissance in his poll numbers as of late, has seen his overall job-approval rating tick down three points to 45%. So the American public is down on almost every political figure and institution in our NBC/WSJ poll. The exceptions: Bernie Sanders (+5), John Kasich (+5), the NRA (+11), and Planned Parenthood (+15). We’ll have more on those Planned Parenthood and NRA numbers below.

Now you know why Hillary is up with new TV ads in August

As for Clinton, our poll and the crosstabs in it make it clear why she’s going up with TV ads in August: She has some work to do. Yet despite Hillary’s sinking favorability rating, she continues to lead the Democratic horserace by a wide margin. She’s the top choice of 59% of national Democratic primary voters, while 25% pick Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. They’re followed by former Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who are tied at 3% each. That margin, however, is smaller than her 60-point national advantage over Sanders a month ago, 75%-15%. What’s more, Clinton’s fav/unfav numbers among Democratic primary voters — 73% positive, 13% negative — remains strong.

The timing of our NBC/WSJ poll (conducted July 26-30) can possibly explain why Clinton’s numbers dropped so much in one month — it came right after the New York Times and other outlets (including NBC News) originally reported that she was facing the possibility of a criminal inquiry over her use of email while secretary of state. That particular storyline turned out to be incorrect. But the timing doesn’t explain why Jeb’s standing took a hit. In one month, he went from first to third in the GOP horserace; his fav/unfav ticked down from 27%-36% (-9) to 26%-40% (-14); his fav/unfav among GOP primary voters declined, too, from 53%-15% (+38) to 50%-23% (+27); and the drop was even sharper among those very conservative – from 61%-13% (+48) in June to 46%-29% (+17) now. Folks, these aren’t just tough numbers for Jeb; they’re hard-to-get-the-nomination numbers.

Also too, Marco Rubio has “tons” of potential. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you …)

So Clinton is unpopular with Republicans but she’s still hugely popular with Democrats which is seen as a major liability in the primary. They do admit that the drop in popularity among the general public may have had something to do with the New York Times erroneously splashing a lie about her being criminally investigated across their front page and every other major outlet running with it like Alexander Butterfield had just revealed the White House taping system. Nice of them to note “that storyline turned out to be incorrect” though.

There’s no need to even mention Bernie Sanders beyond a passing reference. The fact that he’s hugely popular with many liberals is irrelevant because well, liberals are irrelevant. Conservatives, on the other hand are Real Americans who must be reckoned with.

And they are shocked, I tell you, shocked that Jeb!, the boring Bush, isn’t running away with the field considering how much everyone in their circles yearn for a return to normal — meaning one of them in the White House (if you know what I mean…) Why anyone thought that the Republican base was similarly yearning to repeat the humiliations of Bush senior who failed to secure a second term, thus ending the assumed thousand year reign ushered in by St Ronnie and his idiot son who left office with a 25% approval rating just 7 years ago, is a mystery.

So, there you have it. Take it away Luke Russert …

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About Joe and that coffee guy

by digby

I wrote about that Modo Column for Salon today. I started off, however, with a little trip down memory lane to 2008 when the “bipartisan” wankers held a little confab to anoint Michael Bloomberg as our savior:

“We come together to appeal to all presidential candidates to tell us how they plan to bring us together: Hear our plea, bring us together.”

[E]ven as the mayor gathered on Monday with the seasoned Washington hands on the campus of the University of Oklahoma, the surging presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama seemed to steal energy from the event and set off worry elsewhere among Mr. Bloomberg’s supporters.“Obama is trying to reach out to independent voters, and that clearly would be the constituency that Mike Bloomberg would go after,” said Andrew MacRae, who heads the Washington chapter of Draft Mike Bloomberg for President 2008.

That’s right, Dowd didn’t just float Biden, she floated Starbucks’ Howard Schultz as well. Read on for an update on his contribution to our political culture…

*The headline has little to do with the column, btw. I don’t write ’em …

Which way to the revolt?
by Tom Sullivan

Robert Reich sees Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ rising popularity as evidence of a growing revolt against America’s ruling class. Go figure. When venture capitalist Tom Perkins last year compared Occupiers and progressives to Kristallnacht, then held up his watch on TV and bragged, “I could buy a 6-pack of Rolexes for this,” he was less than six degrees of Marie Antoinette. And just as clueless.

Reich writes:

We’ve witnessed self-dealing on a monumental scale – starting with the junk-bond takeovers of the 1980s, followed by the Savings and Loan crisis, the corporate scandals of the early 2000s (Enron, Adelphia, Global Crossing, Tyco, Worldcom), and culminating in the near meltdown of Wall Street in 2008 and the taxpayer-financed bailout.

Along the way, millions of Americans lost their jobs their savings, and their homes.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has opened the floodgates to big money in politics wider than ever. Taxes have been cut on top incomes, tax loopholes widened, government debt has grown, public services have been cut. And not a single Wall Street executive has gone to jail.

Reich continues:

In 1964, Americans agreed by 64% to 29% that government was run for the benefit of all the people. By 2012, the response had reversed, with voters saying by 79% to 19% that government was “run by a few big interests looking after themselves.”

The left wants to rebuild the system while the angry right (exemplified by the T-party) wants to burn it down, Reich writes. As American families saw their net worth plummet and lost jobs and homes in the Great Recession, the ruling class Hoovered up more of America’s wealth, even as it bitched about bonuses and taxes, and as hedge fund managers rallied to defend the carried interest loophole. Lynn Parramore explains that one at Naked Capitalism:

The carried interest loophole, as economist Dean Baker put it, is likely the worst of all the “sneaky and squirrelly ways that the rich use to escape their tax liability.” It goes down like this: Hedge fund managers brazenly claim they deserve to pay a special low tax rate on the money they earn overseeing the funds they manage because, um, it’s not guaranteed. So they pay 20 percent instead of the 39.6 percent they would pay if the money were taxed as ordinary income. They get very rich from this windfall, just ask Mitt Romney. But you know what? Lots of workers have no guarantee about the money they’ll earn, from people selling cars to the guy who just served you a burger. Do they get a special tax rate? No, they don’t. They pay full freight. In fact, almost nobody’s income is guaranteed. You could get a pay cut tomorrow. Or a pink slip. Do you still pay regular income tax? Yep, you do.

This unfair tax break basically allows hedge fund managers to screw their fellow Americans out of money that could do things the illustrious patrons of the Robin Hood Foundation claim are so dear to their hearts, like building schools and feeding the poor. According to a Congressional Research Service cited in the Hedge Clippers report, closing the carried interest loophole would generate $17 billion a year. How many hungry children in New York City could that feed? All of them.

In exposing the Robin Hood Foundation’s brand of billionaire philanthropy, the Hedge Clippers report shows that “for every dollar the Robin Hood Foundation hedge fund managers studied give to the organization’s antipoverty efforts, they soak up $44 from the public in the form of tax avoidance and anti-tax advocacy. The authors of the report believe that to be a conservative estimate,” writes Parramore.

That’s pretty revolting right there. And now, cake?

“I can’t read. I like to watch TV”

by digby

Chance the Gardner goes to New Hampshire:

@SabrinaSiddiqui @billmon1 here, adjusted the exposure for you pic.twitter.com/kHaQvzrNf1

— Tom Tomorrow (@tomtomorrow) August 3, 2015

That’s one of your top-tier candidates the billionaires auditioned this week-end. Here’s another one:

They both have people writing them million dollar checks.

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Those wacky zealots and their crazy ways

by digby

Brian Beutler very astutely sussed out a growing problem for the GOP around these Planned Parenthood videos. I thought they might be able to ACORN this, but it turns out that everybody’s a little less prone to panic over wingnut hoaxes than they used to be. And unfortunately for the Republicans, the activists are believing their own hype:

The emotional power of the Planned Parenthood videos lies in the images they evoke, but their political power stems from broad, intense conservative opposition to abortion generally—not to fetal tissue research per se. If these conservatives were foremost concerned with the ethics of fetal tissue donation, they could propose banning it outright, or at least tissue obtained from legal abortions. Instead, they are proposing to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. This non sequitur gives away the plot, and all of the cross-ideological sympathy they might have had at the outset.

If the videos genuinely exposed a criminal organ harvesting operation, eliminating its federal funding would be an on-point response. In reality, the effort to defund Planned Parenthood is completely unresponsive to the full content of the videos. In an admirably clear-eyed analysis of the Planned Parenthood controversy, Robert Tracinski of The Federalist (which has otherwise been a reliable outpost of rote anti-Planned Parenthood disinformation) admits, “The case wasn’t about what it seemed to be about based on the selected excerpts we had been offered.” The most plausible rationale for this is that conservatives, who have a permanent axe to grind with Planned Parenthood, are using deception to threaten its viability, and make it more difficult for women to obtain abortions as a consequence.

By attempting to capitalize on the videos in an unscrupulous way, conservatives have unleashed political forces Republicans can’t control. Anti-abortion zealots are now demanding that Republicans in Congress refuse to appropriate money for government operations unless Planned Parenthood’s funding is abolished—a new test of Republican pro-life bona fides. To force Congress’ hand, they’re admonishing Republican presidential candidates that the anti-abortion vote will only follow those who support the shutdown effort. The purpose of Erick Erickson’s above tweet, alerting the candidates to his question days in advance, is to eclipse the instinctual aversion many of them will have to promoting a government shutdown, and get as many of them on the same page as possible.

The House and Senate Republican conferences are famously undisciplined majority-party tacticians. And though you might expect party leaders to put down an insurgency like this at all costs, so that a government shutdown doesn’t become a central theme of the presidential election, there are mounting reasons to doubt that they can avoid it. Republican victories in the 2014 midterm election, one year after they shut down the government in an unthinking showcase of resistance to Obamacare, convinced party activists that maximalist confrontation carries little political risk. And with little to lose, most Republican presidential candidates will advocate precisely that strategy.

That’s right. Another government shutdown is likely. And not just for this reason.

Oh, and by the way by all accounts, the Koch billionaires just loved Ted Cruz. You know, the guy who wants to shut down the government every single year.

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