Author: digby

The Da McCain Code

by dday

John McCain’s new flirtation with Twitter as a platform for his condensed and ill-considered crusade against earmarks is a perfect blend of form and function. The broadsides are as substance-free as the medium itself, which is why Maureen Dowd just ate it up. But Jonathan Chait actually cracked the code on this one (h/t Steve Benen). McCain has one go-to joke. He’s the Yakov Smirnov of the US Senate (“In my country, earmarks insert you!”):

McCain’s method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anything that sounds silly. He’s clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. Here is Dowd recording McCain’s twitter postings:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. …

$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” …

$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

I don’t know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it’s a boondoggle. I don’t know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there’s a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.

I do know that the tattoo-removal program is an effective anti-crime initiative — it allows rehabilitated former to reenter society shorn of visible markings that cut them off from middle-class culture. McCain and Dowd don’t know this, and they don’t care. What’s on display is the worst elements of political demagoguery meeting the worst elements of the instant-reaction internet culture. They think the very idea of trying to learn about something before you take a position on it is a joke.

Here’s where my knowledge of weird subsets of human experience comes into play. I worked on a show about Mormon crickets. They are a blight and can reproduce quickly. They are so relentless in their search for food that they will eat the cricket in front of them in the swarm, if they are lagging behind, providing an, er, incentive to keep moving forward. Swarms can last years and involve hundreds of millions of individual crickets. There’s a legend that in 1848, Mormon crickets destroyed the wheat crop of the first Utah settlers, causing a near-famine (they were saved by gulls who swooped in and ate the crickets, which Mormons elevated to a heroic moment). There is an expectation of a Mormon cricket infestation in Elko County, Nevada this year, which could get very bad for ranchers in the region.

This year’s infestation is expected to be similar to last year, when an estimated one million acres were infested with the insects, with “hot spots” around Tuscarora, Mountain City and Jarbidge in the northeastern Nevada county, state entomologist Jeff Knight said.

Though cricket numbers were down drastically from 2004 through 2006 when more than 10 million acres were infested, commissioners expressed frustration that the infestation remains more of a problem in Elko County than any other part of the state.

“To me, I think we dropped the ball. If you think I’m happy with what happened (last year), I’m not,” Commissioner John Ellison said.

Ellison noted wildfires in recent years have scorched two million acres in the county.

“We cannot lose any more grazing land up there because of crickets and that’s why we try to be highly aggressive … All we want from you guys is a promise you guys are going to be aggressive this year,” he told Knight.

Maybe some federal money to combat cricket swarms and reduce the prospect of total deforestation would be, I don’t know, an economic and societal good.

But it sounds so funny! “Mormon cricket control.” John McCain can spin a one-liner off that as fast as he can send a Twitter message! And insipid hacks like MoDo can parrot them. This is part of the insidious nature of the mismanaged use of social media by politicians, basically as electronic bumper stickers that have no context, no import, and seemingly no thought.

McCain didn’t get away with today’s tweet, chuckling like the kid in the back of the class he is about solar energy:

The Arizona Republican posted his first anti-pork list under the Twitter name @SenJohnMcCain late last week, calling attention to projects like $650,000 for beaver management and $1.7 million for pig odor research. He brought the Top 10 list “back by popular demand” the first two days of this week. The project in the No. 1 slot today: “$951,500 for the Oregon Solar Highway.”

That dishonor didn’t sit well with Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer, whose home state stands to benefit from the earmark. Tweeting as @repblumenauer, he mocked McCain.

“McCain wasn’t familiar with a Blackberry [during the 2008 presidential campaign], right?” tweeted Blumenauer, who quickly issued a press release celebrating earmarks for Oregon when the House passed its version of the spending bill last week. “How’s he supposed to understand a solar highway utilizing right-of-way to generate solar power?”

That’s a bit of Tweeting I can believe in.

McCain is a sad man, but as you can see he still can generate headlines among the fawning chattering class, even after his disgraceful Presidential campaign (which they seem to have all forgotten). Eventually, this nonsense about earmarks needs to be fought – because it’s really a way to cut all discretionary spending and label anything but more money for military fighter jets as a “waste” – and McCain called out for his ignorance.

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Better Than Hitler

by digby

TPM reports:

Bush allies are fighting hard to stymie Leahy’s idea [for a Truth Commission.]

Just now, the committee heard from David Rivkin, a lawyer who served in the Justice Department and the White House under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

Explaining why he opposed Leahy’s proposal, Rivkin declared:

Yes, mistakes were made. Yes, some bad things happened. But compared with the historical baseline of past wars, the conduct of the United States in the past eight years … has been exemplary.

Well, I feel better already, don’t you? We aren’t as bad as “the historical baseline” in past wars. The question is, is this “war” even something you can count in the historical baseline?

In my view, the overreaction of the Bush administration is made infinitely worse by two things. The first is the purely cynical nature of their “war,” which we know they had been hoping for a chance to wage in order to fully advance their dreams of American Empire. That’s sick in itself. But then they took what was a grievous violent political crime and behaved as if we just been invaded by aliens from outer space.

In the face of some primitive, religious fanatics who managed to take down some building and kill 3,000 people with box cutters, they decided the constitution allowed them to turn the American government into a military junta.

This event wasn’t an invasion. It wasn’t a World War. It wasn’t an internal revolution or rebellion, none of which would have justified this outrageous behavior either, but at least would have made some logical sense. No, the Bush administration completely lost its sense and behaved as if the country was in imminent danger of being taken over by Al Qaeda, which was complete nonsense.

What they did to the country, by scaring people out of their wits with bogus claims of drone planes filled with biological agents and dire warnings about the oceans not protecting us anymore was a crime against Americans. Instead of being steady leadership in a crisis they went out of their way to try to panic the country. They used this crime to justify their long held theory of executive governance.

These early constitutional abominations by the Justice Department are all the more egregious in light of that. There was simply no reason for them on the facts. We know that now. (We knew that then — they used box cutters!) That they went ahead an invaded an old nemesis which hadn’t participated in any way in the catalyzing event, and then used many of these awful unconstitutional orders on the Iraqis takes them to an even higher level of immorality.

Rivkin is one of the biggest torture apologists out there. In fact, in a normal world, his blase support for waterboarding alone would make decent people everywhere shun him.

This is from a post I wrote in 2007, which illustrated the complete moral bankruptcy of the man, particularly in contrast to a true hero of this era, former JAG lawyer Charlie Swift:

It’s just like Hell Week

… or maybe they just wanted to blow off some steam. And anyway, “bad guys always lie” so you have to torture them.

FOREMAN: On Friday, Michael Mukasey became attorney general of the United States despite his refusal to define an interrogation practice known as waterboarding, essentially convincing a person that he is drowning as torture. In a world where terrorists really are out there trying to kill us, where is the bright line between what must be done and what should be done? Retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Charlie Swift teaches, now teaches at Emery Law School in Atlanta and still represents one of the Guantanamo detainees. And with me in Washington, David Rivkin, an official at the Justice Department in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration. Professor, let me start with you. Where do we stand in this debate now. It seems now that we’ve gone through months of trying to decide what we think torture and what is not.

LT. COMDR. CHARLIE SWIFT, U.S. NAVY (RET.): Well, as far as waterboarding goes, it’s an unusual debate to begin with, because as far as the military was concerned with, that was decided back in 1890 during the Spanish-American war when General Crowder ruled that water boarding was always illegal and never justified and we tried Japanese soldiers who did it to our troops during World War II where again we said it was illegal. So, it would seem that the bright line is on the other side of waterboarding, at least historically.

FOREMAN: Listen to what John Edwards said at a town hall meeting on Tuesday about the debate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN EDWARDS (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIATE: Can you believe that we are having a debate in America about what kind of torture is tolerable? I will tell you what kind of torture is tolerable – no torture is tolerable. The United States of American should not be engaged in torture.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FOREMAN: Mr. Rivkin, a lot of Americans in the polls seem to have a similar-type view, why is it so hard, why can’t we agree on a definition and stick to it?

DAVID RIVKIN, MILITARY LAW EXPERT: Incidentally, it is not a debate about whether torture is permissible, at least in my mind, it’s what things amount to torture. And with all due respect to my friend Charlie, there are several forms of waterboarding. Waterboarding is a very capricious term, it connotes a bunch of things. There are clearly some forms of waterboarding [that are] torture and off the table. They may well be some waterboarding regimens that while tough and useful in extracting information are not torture. My problem with the critics is that they don’t want to have, contrary to what Senator Edwards said, we are ought to have a debate as a serious society about what stress techniques of interrogation and what to do with it. Let me point out one thing, we actually waterboard our own people. Are we torturing our own people?

FOREMAN: But we’re waterboarding our own people to give them an idea of what they would encounter if they were captured by somebody else.

RIVKIN: Well, forgive me, as a matter of law and ethics, if the given practice like slavery and prostitution is officially odious, you cannot use it no matter what our goals is, you cannot even use it to volunteers. So, if all forms of waterboarding are torture then we are torturing our own people, and the very same instructor who spoke before Congress the other day about how it’s torture, is guilty of practicing torture for decades. We as a society have to come up with the same baseline using (inaudible) in all spheres of public life instead of somehow singularizing this one thing, which is interrogation of combatants and we need to look at it in a broader way.

FOREMAN: Then, why don’t we Professor Swift, just in deference with what the American people believe in, I think, why don’t we just back away from anything that gets close to this line?

SWIFT: I think we should. To me, it is unfathomable that we are up against the line. You know, again, looking back at World War II, what history has taught us and what we found is that the reliable means of getting intelligence, at least in the context of a war, are using those things that build rapport with the person that they find out that you are not the ogre that they have been told. They begin to question the people who are leading them, and eventually, that leads to actionable intelligence and it is reliable, and you see, that is the real problem with anything that is coercive. When you force somebody to talk, you cannot count on what they tell you. It is going to – in that case, I think it is really an unreliable form of interrogation, and again, that is why we don’t use it in court, because it is not reliable data.

FOREMAN: I seem like I have heard this in a lot of places, the same comment, what’s your response to that?

RIVKIN: It is historically and practically not true for a very simple reason. First of all, the reason stress techniques were used if you look at it is because there are four building techniques of the FBI. This has been reported in the newspapers like “Washington Post” and the “New York Times.” In late 2001, early 2002, I’m not working. You are not able going to be able with Khalid Shaik Mohammed, because while they’re evil, they’re enormously committed to their ideology. They’re prepared to die for it. Point number one. Second, bad guys always lie. Why will you try to build a rapport with them, will interrogate them stressfully. If you have enough time, your biggest problem is they say nothing. If they start talking, you’re able to go back and, for example and you ask, where is your safe house? You go and you see if he told you the truth.

FOREMAN: These are borderline techniques you’re talking about. If they were done to you, would you consider them torture?

RIVKIN. No. I am not, by the way, I am not even propounding waterboarding. My problem is that there is a range of stress techniques including temperature manipulation, sensor manipulations and maybe sometimes waterboarding that are actually used. Look, when people go for basic training for hell week, they sleep little bits of time at a time, their diets. There’s lots of abuse, instructors yelling at (inaudible).

FOREMAN: I have to cut you for a moment for a last word, very quickly, from Professor Swift, are we any closer, briefly to coming to a conclusion as to where we’re going with this debate and it seems like it is going on forever, and it sill is lively as ever?

SWIFT: Well, the reason we can’t have the debates, to get down to particular techniques is that the administration won’t tell us exactly what they are doing and won’t tell Congress exactly what they are doing, so when one lies on the edge of these things, it is impossible to have a debate until Congress completely looks at the question and stops using general terms. Congress has tried general terms, general terms haven’t work but we’re going to have need a specific debate.

FOREMAN: I’m afraid, we have to go. Professor Swift, thanks so much. Mr. Rivkin as well.

I was on the Seder show earlier today and mentioned that broadcast(mangling the date Commander Swift mentioned, unfortunately.) It was in response to Sam’s question as to whether the US has truly gone over the cliff. I said it was a near thing, mostly because of people like our friend Professor Rivkin there.

This man claims that if an American trainee can endure something, it can’t legally be called torture. He shamefully goes even further to state that if we call it torture, it means that all of those who have trained our troops to withstand it are guilty of being torturers.

He neglects, of course, to admit that the recruits and trainees who are put though such exercises can quit at any time and they know very well that their instructors won’t actually kill them. The total lack of control in the hands of someone who believes you are an enemy is what what makes waterboarding torture, and people who do it voluntarily have control. That’s the difference, and it’s clear to anyone who isn’t an intellectual fraud as Rivkin is.

He and others (like Pat Buchanan) are now saying that we need to make waterboarding explicitly illegal if we have a problem with it — even though one would think that any torture that was used by the Spanish inquisition and Pol Pot would automatically come under the heading of “torture” which is illegal under at least five different statutes and treaties. They are trying to pretend that waterboarding isn’t already illegal, pretending that waterboarding is merely “controversial” so they are pushing for a “debate.”(Swift even admits that they’ve left us no choice between the weasel words, parsing and secrecy.)

There is good reason to surmise that one of the main reasons why they are pushing for this legislation is so that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld can’t be indicted for war crimes retroactively. (Kind of like their friends the Telcoms.) After all, that’s the real reason Mukasey was instructed to say that he didn’t know if waterboarding was illegal. If he had, he might have been required to arrest some very important people who we know approved it.

But Rivkin’s bobbing and weaving serves another purpose. He’s literally defining deviancy down. He submits that these “stress positions” and the “hot and cold” and the waterboarding and other things they’ve done (plus God only knows what we aren’t yet aware of) are necessary when you are dealing with “bad guys” who always lie. And anyway, if Army rangers can endure it in training then so can suspected terrorists (who’ve been blindfolded, stripped, sodomized repeatedly with “suppositories”, held in painful restraints for days, subjected to extreme cold while being splashed with water and denied sleep.) This is what the right wing has left of their principles: if our special forces guys can live through something during their training that means it’s ok for us to do it to others under much more terrifying circumstances.

There has been tragic a shift in our culture’s taboos, thanks to schmucks like Alan Dershowitz and others who put this on the menu in the days after 9/11 and normalized the idea that torture might be ok — as long as we’re the torturers. There are plenty of people who agree with that reflexively. After all, our president told them right after 9/11 that we are good:

[H]ow do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case.

So, if we are good (exceptionally good!) that means that whatever we do is good. But torture is bad. So, that means that no matter what we do it can’t, by definition, be torture. See how that works? (I wonder if he also thinks this is a useful way to “make our case” to the rest of the world that we are good.)

This is more right wing rabbit-hole logic, and it’s become a sick parody of itself now that they are openly using it to defend torture techniques from the Spanish Inquisition. You ask this man Rivkin if he would consider waterboarding torture if it were done to him and he said unequivocally, no. (He learned his lesson well. The last Republican lawyer who went out and had himself waterboarded was fired when he called it torture.) It’s actually just another tool that good people use to defeat “bad guys.” No biggie. It’s not even illegal.

I still just can’t fathom that we are going to let this stuff go. But hey,at least we weren’t as bad as Hitler or the Spanish Inquisition, so we have a lot to be proud of.

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No Job Search At The Arabian Horse Shows

by dday

President Obama today announced Craig Fugate as his head of FEMA, and he’s not a former college roommate, business partner, Bible-study group colleague, or friend of a friend. What’s more, he actually has a background in disaster relief as the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and he’s actually done a decent job in that capacity.

Will wonders never cease.

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It’s A Treat To Beat Your Sweet

by digby

I really hate to link to the Politico, but today they are featuring such a plethora of gushy, beltway blather today that it’s impossible to resist. Never let it be said that they don’t have a talent for link-trolling. (And I suppose that in this new media world, that’s probably a talent worth having.)

Today, they are featuring several articles with sort-of related themes. The first one is an “expose” of the media, including itself, on the subject of “Beat Sweeteners” which is a reporter’s shorthand for the fawning while house staffer profiles we’ve seen lately, the recent exaggerated paean to Rahm Emmanuel by Ryan Lizza being an excellent example. (He’s got the plum Woodward style “Bush At War” book contract.)

This is nothing new, of course. Courtiers have been flattering the King’s men to get close to the center of power for centuries. The problem, of course, is that we don’t have a monarchy but rather a democracy which requires a free and skeptical press to work properly. But then that’s only if you wish it to work properly for the people. If you are serving something else you obviously have a different agenda.

So the perennial question becomes whose interests are they really serving aside from their own professional advancement and social acceptance? Joe Sudbay writes today about one staffer, Adam Pace, who seems to have become a village favorite, garnering a swooning Politico profile which could have been written by a 14 year old fangirl about one of the Jonas Brothers. Here’s an excerpt:

When you’re a 20-something in Washington and you’re deemed wunderkind material, everyone wants to know where you’ll eventually end up. For Adam Pase, the answer may be “right where he is now.”

Pase is eight months into his reign as executive director of the New Democratic Coalition, a group of economically moderate House Democrats that is run out of the office of California Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher.

Vickie Walling, chief of staff for New Democratic Rep. John Tanner of Tennessee, says she doesn’t think there are “any limits” for Pase, whom she calls one of the “rising stars on Capitol Hill.”

But John Michael Gonzales, former chief of staff to Illinois Rep. Melissa L. Bean, a New Dem Coalition vice chairwoman, says Pase is “the right guy at the right time” right where he is now.

“What Adam has been able to do is see the potential for the group, realize what the group needs to reach that potential and get it executing. … If he wants to stay on the Hill, I think the future is pretty damn good where he is.”

Talk about getting your beat sweetened.

I’m sure Adam is a terrifically smart young fellow and that he’s got a big future. But there’s just a teeny problem. Young Adam, while being just as cute as Kevin, Joe and Nick, is a person who seems to be serving several masters. Sudbay fills in the gaps:

So, what made him a “wunderkind”? Pase worked the Twenty First Century Group, a lobbying firm started by Texas Rep. Jack Fields, a Republican who left Congress for K Street. During the time he was there, they represented the astroturf group the Coalition for Fair & Affordable Lending. In reality, that was a coalition of predatory lenders. Yes, even the predatory lenders had a lobbying group back in the heyday when no one in the banking industry was being regulated. In 2005, they were trying to pass a bill called, the Responsible Lending Act. That legislation, sponsored by Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH and now a convicted felon) and Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), was a really ugly piece of legislation. It would have removed all predatory lending laws, claiming that they were only trying to make it easier to get money to “low income and minority buyers.” It was vigorously opposed (and exposed for what it was) by civil rights leaders

Huffington’s article notes that Pase has a history of fighting against bankruptcy reform on the Hill, too:

In April 2005, he went back to Moore’s office as a legislative assistant, according to congressional records. A year and a half later, he was promoted to “senior legislative assistant.” From that perch, Pase led the Blue Dog effort at the staff level to kill bankruptcy reform after Democrats took control of Congress, said a congressional Democratic source involved in the fight at the time.

Only in the warped world of D.C. could that kind of work make someone a “wunderkind” in the eyes of Democrats. But, Pase is still on the Hill now and at the center of another effort to protect the banking industry. His primary boss, Ellen Tauscher, has been trying to weaken the bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to change the terms of mortgages. According to Huffington:

“[Pase] was the lead staffer on all this stuff,” said one Democratic opponent. “When he was with Moore, Moore was leading [the fight against bankruptcy reform]. When he went to Tauscher, then she became the lead.”

I’m sure he’ll go far. The Politico cultivates him, he cultivates them, and the agenda of the elites is advanced both on the hill and in the media. Voila — the aristocracy lives.

The idea that Democrats are still working on behalf of banks against ordinary people even at a time like this is profoundly depressing, but sadly unsurprising. Their continuing allegiance to the powers that that put this country in this awful place is the way they organize their world. They are so fully indoctrinated in market fundamentalism that their neural pathways have been re-set along conservative lines. (If you are wondering just how conservative that is, read this from Jane Hamsher on the latest developments with the “New Dem” betrayal of average American homeowners.)

Meanwhile, now that the Republicans are busy fighting over which decadent demagogue is their true leader, beltway house organs are turning to these people for the same reasons they have long sweetened their beat to the tune of Matt Drudge. Hence, this, in my mailbox, from Politico today:

Moderates Dems have “sticker shock” from Obama plan-EXCLUSIVE details on secret meeting by Dems who want to trim Obama’s ambitions.

Ooooh. A secret Democratic cabal forming against Obama’s radical, commie spending spree. (And not a minute too soon, I might add.) And Politico was on the scene exclusively! Imagine that.

Of course all of this is mutually reinforcing. Here is a sickening example of some high profile partisan Democrats publicly beating their own sweet all over the Politico:

The strategy took shape after Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville included Limbaugh’s name in an October poll and learned their longtime tormentor was deeply unpopular with many Americans, especially younger voters. Then the conservative talk-radio host emerged as an unapologetic critic of Barack Obama shortly before his inauguration, when even many Republicans were showering him with praise.

Soon it clicked: Democrats realized they could roll out a new GOP bogeyman for the post-Bush era by turning to an old one in Limbaugh, a polarizing figure since he rose to prominence in the 1990s.

I’m sure all their friends are toasting and high fiving the war room wunderkinds of yesteryear for their brilliant plan, but now it’s probably fatally damaged because they couldn’t resist taking public credit for it. The beltway worm is already turning. Here’s Michael Sherer at Swampland:

Team Obama’s Petty Limbaugh Strategy

The McCain campaign would much rather have the story about phony and foolish diversions than about the future. . . . We have real problems in this country right now and the American people are looking to us for answers, not distractions, no diversions, not manipulations. — Barack Obama, Norfolk, Va., September 10, 2008

President Obama won the presidency by promising to be a different, more substantive, less gimmicky leader. He said he would not waste our time on “phony outrage,” like fulminations on the meaning of “lipstick on a pig,” or silly characters like “Joe The Plumber,” a guy who was actually named Samuel and was not even a licensed plumber. No, Obama said he was going to solve problems instead. Now that he is in the White House, he still makes this case, almost every day. On Wednesday morning, during an address about contracting reforms, he referred dismissively to the “chatter on the cable stations.”

[…]

So why are we talking about Rush? According to Martin, the Rush “controversy” began as an idea last fall that followed a poll taken by Stanley Greenberg, who owns the house where White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel stays when he is in Washington. With his old Clinton Administration colleagues, Paul Begala and James Carville, Greenberg realized that Limbaugh was deeply unpopular among wide swaths of the American electorate. So, the strategists figured, why not turn the turn Republican Party into a Limbaughesque caricature? Limbaugh, a consummate publicity hound, was only too eager to help. Earlier this year, he said he hoped Obama “fails,” a reasonable claim in context, given that Limbaugh’s entire worldview is constructed around an opposition to the sorts of policies that Obama has proposed.

But echoed over the “chatter on the cable stations” thanks to Obama aides, including Emanuel and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Limbaugh’s comment took on a whiff of treason. Limbaugh’s rapid comebacks to the White House assault created what economists might call a “downward spiral” effect. “It’s great for us, great for him, great for the press,” Carville told the Politico, describing the White House and Limbaugh. “The only people he’s not good for are the actual Republicans in Congress.”

But here’s the rub: If you believed what Obama said during the campaign, then Carville is dead wrong. Republicans in Congress are not the only losers. The American people also lose. At a time of unprecedented threats to the United States, a time of financial collapse, bank failures and record layoffs, at a time when the credit crisis has not been solved, and the stock market is in free fall, at a time of stagnating wars, rising terrorism in Pakistan and growing nuclear potential in Iran, the White House has done the easy thing. It has asked the American people to focus their attention not on solving the problems, but on a big-mouthed entertainer in Florida. This may be smart politics. But it is also the same petty strategy that John McCain employed during the presidential campaign, the one that our new president promised to rise above.

Oh man, you just know that David Broder is beating sweetly as we speak. I’m quite sure the provincial villagers will be shocked, shocked I tell you, that politics is going on here. Why it’s downright unseemly and rude and so very, very disappointing. Cluck, cluck, cluck.

In fact, the whole beltway culture is one big frenzied, circular beat sweetener, which is why so many of us here on the outside looking in find so many of their protestations of “seriousness” and “duty” and “patriotism” so often laughable. Watching these people indulge themselves in repeated acts of onanistic exhibitionism in service of aristocrats and oligarchs leaves the rest of America with a vague feeling of embarrassment that we are witnessing something dirty and depraved that should never see the light of day. That’s certainly how I feel when I read the Politico, anyway.

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The Scolds Never Stop

by dday

John McCain had another “old man yells at cloud” moment yesterday, complaining about earmarks in last year’s spending bill, and trying to eliminate all of them. His effort lost on a bipartisan basis, probably because this is last year’s spending needed to keep the government running, a shutdown at this point would be completely counter to economic fiscal stimulus, earmarks are 2% of the total bill and half of them were inserted by Republicans, including $76 million from Thad Cochran (R-MS), the overall leader.

However, this hasn’t stopped the Democratic worry warts to fret about spending, at a time when there’s practically no other economic activity other than that coming from the federal government.

Moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate are starting to choke over the massive spending and tax increases in President Barack Obama’s budget plans and have begun plotting to increase their influence over the agenda of a president who is turning out to be much more liberal than they are.

A group of 14 Senate Democrats and one independent huddled behind closed doors on Tuesday, discussing how centrists in that chamber can assert more leverage on the major policy debates that will dominate this Congress […]

Asked when he’d reach his breaking point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, said: “Right now. I’m concerned about the amount that’s being offered in [Obama’s] budget.”

Another attendee, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), said she expected the newly formed caucus to shape Obama’s budget proposal as it moves through Congress.

“We want to give the president a chance, but our concern is going to be on the budget, looking forward,” Landrieu said. She added that she agrees with Obama that there needs to be “fundamental change” in fiscal policy, but she said “we do have to keep our eye on the long term, on intermediate and long-term fiscal responsibility.”

Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who assembled Tuesday’s skull session, added that he was “very concerned” about Washington’s level of spending, especially in a $410 billion “omnibus” spending bill to fund the government until the start of a new fiscal year in October.

As for the tax increases on high-income earners called for in Obama’s plan, Bayh said, “I do think that before we raise revenue, we first should look to see if there are ways we can cut back on spending.”

“The American people and businesses are tightening their belts,” Bayh added. “I think we need to show that the government can economize as well.”

Ladies an gentlemen, your almost-Vice President, Evan Bayh.

Once again, the path for a Democratic President must go through Democratic fiscal responsibility scolds. And this is coming in the middle of a Great Recession, where investment is non-existent, trade is stalled, and consumer spending isn’t going anywhere, meaning that ONLY GOVERNMENT IS SPENDING. Cutting that spending translates directly into losing thousands of jobs. That’s reality for the next year or so.

If anything, Obama is being modest in his plans. And he is paying for the big investments in his budget by making the tax code more progressive and fair. And that’s the reality of the fiscal scolds – they want to protect the status quo for their buddies and contributors. They would rather the 30-year cycle of radical conservative economic policy continues unabated. Obama’s budget is a a threat to the DC estabishment that is best represented by these “moderates.”

It was his boldest acknowledgment yet of what is slowly becoming clear to the rest of us: That his proposals represent such a dramatic reversal from the course the nation has been following over the last eight years — and even the last three decades — that they will inevitably face intense resistance from Washington’s traditional power centers […]

It’s worth revisiting Obama’s explanation of “how we arrived at this moment” from that joint address:

“The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy, yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for.

“And though all of these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before. In other words, we have lived through an era where too often short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity, where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.

“A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations… were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”

The inevitable conclusion here is that establishment Washington is complicit in what went wrong. That includes all the people in positions of power who accepted what was happening as simply politics as usual — even as the country was slowly but inevitably headed to that day of reckoning.

After all, since the Reagan era, even mainstream Democratic leaders have internalized the trickle-down, free-market, small-government mentality which Obama now blames for our woes. Few in the Democratic party — or the mainstream media — did much more than watch as the economic playing field tilted further and further to the advantage of the rich.

And yes, it’s true that many of Obama’s initiatives could well be described as pent-up Democratic goals. But you might also call them nearly-forgotten goals, as far as the current batch of Democratic leaders is concerned. Even when they controlled Congress, they failed to block budgets that turned out to be blueprints for disaster. And they either didn’t fight for their principles or flinched in a pinch. I described some of their capitulations to former president George W. Bush in this December 2007 column. These very same leaders may well be motivated to — at least — complicate or modify Obama’s proposals to validate their own previous inaction.

Exactly, I don’t remember Evan Bayh or Ben Nelson or any of these scolds raising an eyebrow to any of the radically destructive policies the Bush Administration trafficked in on a daily basis. It’s only with a Democratic President attempting to lead on Democratic principles that their spines stiffen.

Fortunately, Obama remains extremely popular, and he has shown an growing aptitude for this kind of conflict. However, his favorability is favored more than his policies at this point. I’m not sure if Republicans will get their act together to exploit this, but they can certainly get a boost from these “moderates” to revive their political fortunes.

…on the other hand, Obama’s procurement reform announcement today is a shot across the bow of these moderates, saying that he can find plenty of cuts in the budget – in the billions of waste passed on to military contractors in no-bid contracts. This is a good counter-move.

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The Smoking Wreckage Of Limbaugh Nation

by digby

Limbaugh is now calling people “butt boys.” This is on top of his adorable comments that Republicans are being asked to “bend over and grab their ankles” because Obama is black. I realize that the term “butt boy” is fairly common in junior high locker rooms as a synonym for sycophant, but when did it become ok to say this on radio? Does the FCC know that it literally means submissive, teenage anal sex (with a strong implication of coercion?)

I suppose this new frankness about gay sex could be seen as some sort of breakthrough for the right but I wonder what all the morality scolds have to say about it? In fact, someone should ask our new BFF Rick Warren what he thinks about the new Republican leadership. He was quite happily driving a wedge in the Democratic party recently, maybe he’d like to practice some bipartisanship and speak out against this crude piece of work on the conservative side. It would be quite revealing to know what he thinks.

I’ve written many posts about Rush over the years so all this new interest in him as a leader of the Republican Party is old news to me. I think this one, from 2006, may the most pertinent:

Notice how Limbaugh and the preachers pander to the depraved imagination? It’s not religious values these people are selling. They are selling a brutal, domineering, degenerate culture, making their listeners and viewers wallow in it, plumbing the depths of the subconscious, drawing forth Goyaesque images of bestiality and violence and death. That’s a feature of some religions, to be sure, but it’s not the nice upright Christian morality everybody’s pretending it is.

If the culture is careening into a crude, dog-eat-dog corrupt “Pottersville” it’s because the greedheads and the juvenile authoritarian thugs, whether in street gangs or talk radio or K Street, have taken it over. And it is hard for liberals to counter this because our bedrock values include tolerance, free expression and personal autonomy and that unwittingly enables this decadent turn in some ways. But let’s make no mistake, it is only on the right that purveyors of brutal, sadistic, depraved political discourse are welcomed into the houses, offices and beds of the nation’s political leadership…

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war — have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture…You know, if you look at — if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I’m — yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City — the movie. I mean, I don’t — it’s just me.

When Limbaugh came under fire for those vulgar comments, the leading lights of the Republican party quickly came to his defense.

Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her. For millions of us, David Brock is firing blanks against a bulletproof target.

— Kate O’Beirne is Washington Editor for National Review.

Figure out how to deal with that and we might be able to make some headway.

That was written three years ago and things have changed. And I think it’s pretty clear that it changed because people finally realized that this nihilistic, juvenile form of politics was incredibly destructive. After all, George W. Bush was the perfect Limbaugh president: a sophomoric, violently aggressive, anti-intellectual, macho, phony cowboy. He was the man Limbaugh always wished he could be and Ann Coulter always wished she could date: their angry, white male dreamboat. And he failed on an epic scale. The country could have chosen an older even more sarcastic and angry version of Bush in John McCain. They chose instead someone who appealed to their hopes instead of their hatred and spite.

The problem is that the Republican Party went all in with the conservative movement over the past 25 years. George W. Bush’s America was Limbaugh Nation and Limbaugh Nation was George W. Bush’s America — they have nothing else. They are nothing else.

Reagan was right just as George W. Bush is today, and I really believe that if Reagan had been able he would have put his hand on Bush’s shoulder and say to him, “Stay the course, George.” I really believe that. — Rush Limbaugh Reagan Tribute June 7, 2004

“Long after we’re all dead and gone, when historians who are not yet born begin to write about this era, they’re going to place George Bush in the upper echelon of presidents who had a great vision for America, who looked beyond our shores, who didn’t just restrict himself to domestic policy niceties.” — Rush Limbaugh, May 3, 2007

Media Matters has created a Rush web site for easy access to some of his greatest hits.

Update: Boy, that Limbaugh really is powerful. He’s even got Democrats apologizing now.

From Down With Tyranny:

Late this afternoon, in keeping with apologies to Rush Limbaugh from Georgia Republican Phil Gingrey and RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) issued the following statement:

“I’m sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I’m also sorry that he’s bent on seeing America fail. And I’m sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being.”

The Congressman then rejoined his Democratic colleagues in working on cleaning up George W. Bush’s mess.

Monster Chiller Horror Theater

by dday

Apparently, allowing workers making something approaching the minimum wage the ability to collectively bargain instead of having their rights trampled by management, their organizers fired, their workplaces shut down rather than stay a union shop, and their colleagues intimidated is the central threat to the very fabric of American life. Hearing these landed gentry talk using the language of end-times apocalypse is pretty nuts.

“Radical Islam and Employee Free Choice are the two fundamental threats to society” is my personal favorite.

Congress could take up this bill as early as next week, and clearly it’s going to provoke a lot of opposition. But the media-hyped language of “smackdown” and “nuclear war” and “Armageddon” obscures the point – all this act would do is enforce the violations to labor law made routinely by management, and give employees the choice to decide how to have an election for unionization rather than having one imposed upon them. It’s only “Armageddon” if you’re absurdly wealthy and you want to and you want to preserve the extreme inequality, that is partly to blame for this economic crisis, far into the future. It signals the end times, all right, but only for this new Gilded Age in which we live.

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Set It Aside

by dday

Norm Coleman thinks that we shouldn’t argue anymore about who beat who and just try again in the spirit of compromise:

For more than a month, Norm Coleman stressed flaws in Minnesota’s election system.

And on Monday, Coleman lawyer Jim Langdon wrote the three-judge panel to suggest the problems are so serious they may not be able to declare a winner.

“Some courts have held that when the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin between the candidates — and it cannot be determined for which candidate those illegal votes were cast — the most appropriate remedy is to set aside the election,” Langdon wrote in a letter to the court.

Coleman continued this line of reasoning in an interview today, saying that “there is a question whether this court can certify who got the most legally-cast ballots.”

This is basically an admission of defeat, as this DSCC spokesman said cleverly today (“I’m sure Senator John McCain would like to throw out the results of November 4, 2008 as well”), but even if it doesn’t succeed, it furthers the conservative project. There has been a simmering effort in conservative circles to delegitimize the election process – to characterize any poor or black voter as a potential fraudster, to accuse community groups like ACORN of stealing elections, to cast doubt on the process in general. This serves two purposes – 1) it sets the stage for increasingly draconian voter ID laws that intentionally suppress Democratic votes, and 2) it throws a shroud of suspicion over any Democrat who happens to get elected. Al Franken will never be seen as a legitimate Senator to the majority of the right – despite his going through the regular channels of the recount process, he will be painted as a thief, a usurper, an illegitimate pol who used the activist courts to take away Norm Coleman’s rightful place in the Senate.

And that’s the other part of this – to question the impartiality of judges and the legal process. The Minnesota Supreme Court made a few rulings during the recount process, but by and large the elections system was allowed to work on its own. But that doesn’t matter – if and when the court issues a final ruling, the Coleman camp will not only appeal but blast the legal system for handing the election to Al Franken. The more sinister prospect here is to further the depiction of judges as wild liberal activists who must be stopped. Related to that is Republicans’ new demand to the President, signed by every Senator in their ranks, to confirm George Bush’s judges or face filibusters:

President Barack Obama should fill vacant spots on the federal bench with former President Bush’s judicial nominees to help avoid another huge fight over the judiciary, all 41 Senate Republicans said Monday.

In a letter to the White House, the Republican senators said Obama would “change the tone in Washington” if he were to renominate Bush nominees like Peter Keisler, Glen Conrad and Paul Diamond. And they requested that Obama respect the Senate’s constitutional role in reviewing judicial nominees by seeking their consultation about potential nominees from their respective states.

“Regretfully, if we are not consulted on, and approve of, a nominee from our states, the Republican Conference will be unable to support moving forward on that nominee,” the letter warns. “And we will act to preserve this principle and the rights of our colleagues if it is not.”

In other words, Republicans are threatening a filibuster of judges if they’re not happy.

And thus we see how the conservative movement always moves forward, like a shark. I eagerly await the Republican Senator who says “Obama would rather deny these fine jurists and nominate people like the ones who stole the election for Al Franken in Minnesota.” The Coleman lawsuit is really a textbook example of how one issue is used to chip away at multiple other ones. I know that conservatives appear to be imploding at the moment, but under the radar they are always working to undermine American institutions.

Update from digby: Sorry to intrude, but I think this is so important.

dday writes:

And that’s the other part of this – to question the impartiality of judges and the legal process.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a very famous dissent in Bush vs Gore, a portion of which was widely misconstrued as being solely directed at the high court’s interference in the case when it was also speaking directly to the case at hand and that pernicious strategy that dday discusses.

When John Bolton rushed in to the room screaming “I’m here to stop the count!” the state was in the process of doing a statewide recount. But it wasn’t being done by the clerks and political actors who had been doing it before. The count they stopped was being done by judges, who were specifically chosen for that job because it’s their sworn duty to make impartial judgment about facts and the law every day. The Supreme Court basically ruled them a bunch of hacks when they said that their verdict couldn’t possibly be fair.

Stevens wrote:

“The [opinion] by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is pellucidly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

And it was. Coleman is playing on that cynicism today, and it won’t be the last time the Republicans (and possibly the Democrats) employ such methods to meddle in the Democratic process. It serves to undermine what little faith people have in the legitimacy of democracy and that always serves entrenched power in the end.

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Too Stupid To Fill My Teeth

by digby

It’s this kind of economic illiteracy that is going to allow some demagogic, fascist jackass to win a future election if things go wrong. Jamison Foser reports:

ABC News reports on “upper-income taxpayers” who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.

According to ABC, one attorney “plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.” According to the attorney: “We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00.” ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.

This is stunningly wrong.

The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate. If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.

But that isn’t actually how income tax works.

In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.

Apparently, even people who make over a quarter of a million dollars a year and are respected professionals don’t know the most rudimentary things about their own finances. That’s too dumb to be handling a dentist drill in my book.

This is a teachable moment, but the media gasbags are so stunningly uninformed themselves that they are incapable of doing it.Maybe somebody could get Oprah, Dr`Phil, Suze Orman, Flavor Flav —anyone who people actually respect to explain this to the American people?

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Keeping Up The Pressure

by digby

The deficit is a graver threat than a rogue nuclear bomb? That’s what the American people have been led to believe by wealthy con artists like Pete Peterson, who has now commissioned a poll (sadly, by a Democratic pollster) to validate his propaganda.

Peterson Foundation to Release National Survey Results Gauging

Americans’ Concerns about the Economy, Deficit and Debt

Strong Support for Bipartisan Task Force to Address U.S. Fiscal Challenges, Other Findings to Be Shared on Media Conference Call

NEW YORK (March 3, 2009) – Peter G. Peterson Foundation CEO and former US Comptroller General David M. Walker invites the media to join a conference call examining the results of the most comprehensive study of public attitudes toward America’s fiscal policies since the economic downturn.

Conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies, the survey shows that:

· Voters rank the need to address our budget challenges as a top priority for the Obama Administration, second only to the preeminent need to get the economy back on track and get Americans back to work.

· Americans see the threat to our future posed by our growing deficit and debt as more grave and significant than global warming, declines in education and manufacturing, and the prospect of a rogue nation developing a nuclear weapon.

· There is broad support for a bipartisan, beyond-the-Beltway approach to tackling these challenges in the form of a commission that would engage the public and make a series of recommendations on which Congress would be required to vote.

I’m not surprised. Wealthy oligarchs like Ross Perot and Pete Peterson have been haranguing the public for decades about the deficit. And yet, for some reason, when George W. Bush campaigned with the slogan “it’s your money” and vowed to give back the surplus (which a Democratic administration had been forced to create) to wealthy individuals, they were nowhere to be found. In fact, Alan Greenspan said that paying down the debt would be a danger to the economy!

The big story here is this desire to create a “beyond-the-beltway” commission, which is undemocratic and unnecessary. Despite their assertions that the American people are more afraid of deficits than terrorism and abject poverty, they know that if citizens knew what these people wanted to do they would object. This “plan” which huckleberry and Hoyer just love, must be rejected. It’s a very, very bad idea.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who lobbied for privatization of social security should be forced to march up and down Wall Street naked under sandwich boards that say “Don’t Listen To Me, I’ve Always Been Wrong About Everything.” And Pete Peterson should be at the head of the line.

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