Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Where On Earth Did They Get This Idea?

by digby

Chris Matthews was very confused about all this socialism talk today:

Chris Matthews: … These are sort of middle of the road solutions. Why is everybody calling it socialism?

Richard Wolfe: It has nothing to do with socialism. Any basic study of socialism will tell you this is way far away from that. This idea that the governments taking over everything is kind of a mushball of the auto situation and the banks and the recovery act. And as the president says, a third of that money went in to taxes which these folks ought to be supporting. This had been a very effective caricature, it’s been spread, as you know through the right wing echo chamber. But I don’t know that this has got anything to do with what this administration’s doing.

Let’s just put to rest once and for all this notion that the “socialist” meme has anything to do with auto-bailouts and stimulus packages. This mantra came from the Republican Party and it started long before Obama was elected.

Here’s a little blast from October of 2008:

“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.”

This was fairly typical:

KBYR talk radio host Eddie Burke admits he is a conservative and a “Palinista.”

But on Wednesday Burke resorted to name calling when he found out Alaska Women Reject Palin planned to host a Saturday rally.

“They’re a bunch of socialist maggots, that’s what I’m going to call them — socialist maggots, that’s what they are, a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots,” said Burke.

For some reason nobody seemed to have thought that stuff could possibly be taken seriously back in the campaign. It was a new dawn. But it was out there being flogged by the highest levels of the GOP.

In fact, you may recall this from 2004:

“John Kerry is a French-speaking Socialist from Massachusetts, who is more liberal than Ted Kennedy.” Senator Trent Lott at the Neshoba County Fair.

Or this, from four years before that:

During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:

Young woman: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?

McCain explained that he thought people had a obligation to give back a little if they did well, but that was in his “maverick” incarnation. He’d be drawn and quartered by the baggers for saying that today. But the question was asked. In fact, they’ve been throwing around the “s” word on the right for over a century and I would guess not 5% of them have ever had a clue about what it really means.

For some reason, progressives thought they were just being quaint when they said this stuff last fall. They really mean it. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Democratic party policies. This is a faith based tribal assumption that has no literal meaning. It’s just a primal war cry.

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Aaaaah

by digby

….now it all makes sense:

After the Security and Exchange Commission accused Goldman Sachs of fraud, numerous right-wing media figures have accused the Obama administration of attempting “to destroy Goldman Sachs” in order to “shift public opinion” in favor of financial reform. Simultaneously, conservative media have also falsely claimed that the financial reform legislation creates a “permanent bailout fund,” which is “the payoff” Wall Street “has been waiting for.”

Cognitive dissonance is a feature not a bug.

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Stand Against The Forces of Fear

by digby

President Clinton gave this speech in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. It was widely lauded at the time for helping to heal the nation:

Thank you very much. Governor Keating and Mrs. Keating, Reverend Graham, to the families of those who have been lost and wounded, to the people of Oklahoma City, who have endured so much, and the people of this wonderful state, to all of you who are here as our fellow Americans.

I am honored to be here today to represent the American people. But I have to tell you that Hillary and I also come as parents, as husband and wife, as people who were your neighbors for some of the best years of our lives.

Today our nation joins with you in grief. We mourn with you. We share your hope against hope that some may still survive. We thank all those who have worked so heroically to save lives and to solve this crime — those here in Oklahoma and those who are all across this great land, and many who left their own lives to come here to work hand in hand with you.

We pledge to do all we can to help you heal the injured, to rebuild this city, and to bring to justice those who did this evil.

This terrible sin took the lives of our American family, innocent children in that building, only because their parents were trying to be good parents as well as good workers; citizens in the building going about their daily business; and many there who served the rest of us — who worked to help the elderly and the disabled, who worked to support our farmers and our veterans, who worked to enforce our laws and to protect us. Let us say clearly, they served us well, and we are grateful.

But for so many of you they were also neighbors and friends. You saw them at church or the PTA meetings, at the civic clubs, at the ball park. You know them in ways that all the rest of America could not.

And to all the members of the families here present who have suffered loss, though we share your grief, your pain is unimaginable, and we know that. We cannot undo it. That is God’s work.

Our words seem small beside the loss you have endured. But I found a few I wanted to share today. I’ve received a lot of letters in these last terrible days. One stood out because it came from a young widow and a mother of three whose own husband was murdered with over 200 other Americans when Pan Am 103 was shot down. Here is what that woman said I should say to you today:

The anger you feel is valid, but you must not allow yourselves to be consumed by it. The hurt you feel must not be allowed to turn into hate, but instead into the search for justice. The loss you feel must not paralyze your own lives. Instead, you must try to pay tribute to your loved ones by continuing to do all the things they left undone, thus ensuring they did not die in vain.

Wise words from one who also knows.

You have lost too much, but you have not lost everything. And you have certainly not lost America, for we will stand with you for as many tomorrows as it takes.

If ever we needed evidence of that, I could only recall the words of Governor and Mrs. Keating. If anybody thinks that Americans are mostly mean and selfish, they ought to come to Oklahoma. If anybody thinks Americans have lost the capacity for love and caring and courage, they ought to come to Oklahoma.

To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life.

Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness. Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind. Justice will prevail.

Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear. When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, let us not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Yesterday Hillary and I had the privilege of speaking with some children of other federal employees –children like those who were lost here. And one little girl said something we will never forget. She said, we should all plant a tree in memory of the children. So this morning before we got on the plane to come here, at the White House, we planted tree in honor of the children of Oklahoma.

It was a dogwood with its wonderful spring flower and its deep, enduring roots. It embodies the lesson of the Psalms — that the life of a good person is like a tree whose leaf does not wither.

My fellow Americans, a tree takes a long time to grow, and wounds take a long time to heal. But we must begin. Those who are lost now belong to God. Some day we will be with them. But until that happens, their legacy must be our lives.

Thank you all, and God bless you.

Unfortunately, the same voices of hate still spew their bile, and have been joined by many more. There’s one in particular who hasn’t missed a beat.

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Hounding Huckleberry

by digby

The teabaggers really don’t like Huckleberry. And it’s not because of any rumors about his sexual orientation mind you — they’ll tell you they don’t care a whit about anyone’s private life. They hate him for selling out the country —- because he’s being blackmailed for being gay.

Regardless of the truth about Huck’s sexual orientation, it should be noted that this is a favorite rightwing trope — the closeted gay person being blackmailed by commies (inside and outside the government):

In the 1950s, more bombshells were to detonate in the overall offensive against the “Lavender Menace,” which had become a foil for the right-wing in the domestic Cold War.

In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two gay double-agents working in British intelligence, fled to the Soviet Union. This was grist for the mill, linking homosexuality with communist “treason.”

In 1952, worldwide publicity accompanied the entrapment and arrest of British mathematician and computer innovator Alan Turing. He was one of 1,686 men rounded up and charged with “gross indecency with males.” Turing had risen to fame during World War II after he deciphered a Nazi secret code.

Turing was sentenced to a year of hormonal treatments, which reportedly caused impotence and breast development, and became the target of British government scrutiny as a potential “subversive.” He killed himself two years later, at the age of 41.

In the U.S., transphobia also took center stage in 1952. When Christine Jorgensen’s plane touched down carrying her home from Denmark, where she’d sought hormonal and surgical help with sex reassignment, 300 reporters surged forward, shouting questions as flash bulbs popped.

She became the brunt of a dehumanizing and degrading campaign from the bully pulpits of radio, newspaper and television.

And that same year, even cold warrior Sen. Joseph McCarthy was publicly baited as a homosexual…

After the 1952 election, in which the Republicans won back Senate control, McCarthy took over as chair of the Investigations Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations. He hired 25-year-old attorney Roy Cohn as his chief counsel. Cohn in turn recruited David Schine, later rumored to be his lover, to become chief consultant.

Cohn had close contacts within the FBI. That was important for McCarthy, who reportedly worked hand-in-glove with J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau between 1950 and 1953.

One of Hoover’s agents, William Sullivan, later conceded, “We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using.”

This information sharing was covert and quite illegal. Although bound by law to share information only with the executive branch, the bureau had also reportedly leaked background checks to Congress.

Hoover was said to have recommended Roy Cohn for the post with McCarthy because he was impressed by the young attorney’s railroading of Communist Party members Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair on charges of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Hoover himself has been rumored to have had a long-term affair with an assistant, Clyde Tolson.

“As McCarthy’s henchman and chief counsel he [Cohn–LF] was responsible for grilling suspected communists on their own sexual tendencies and on whether other people had ‘homosexual tendencies.’ Cohn and McCarthy subpoenaed gay men in the arts and threatened to out them if they did not produce a list of ‘suspected Communists.’ (wikipedia.com)

McCarthy had made a name for himself as point man for a far right-wing current that attacked the Truman administration for the “loss” of China from imperialist exploitation after the monumental Communist-led revolution there.

But when McCarthy leveled his guns at the Eisenhower administration for not being “tough enough” on communism, he got his comeuppance. That was when he found himself in the cross-hairs of the anti-homosexual witch hunt.

In 1952, journalist Hank Greenspun wrote a column about the ambitious senator which could not have found its way into print without powerful support. It said that “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years. … He seldom dates girls and if he does he laughingly describes it as window dressing. It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous in the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities.” (Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 25, 1952)

There are lessons in that and they’re all bad.

This is something in the right wing DNA —- the guy who went after Graham in that video wasn’t even born when that was coming down. They just instinctively go there.

In this day and age it’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy for people like Graham if they are gay and voting against the interests of gay people. Even just being a Republican and gay makes them difficult to defend. But the fact is that if Graham is pretending to be Rahm’s bff, it’s not because he’s being blackmailed for being gay. It’s because he’s doing what he’s assigned to do: make the legislation as bad as he can make it.

They really should have a little more respect for Huck. He’s one of their most effective saboteurs.

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Bankster BFFs

by digby

Jonathan at ATR unearths a very interesting little tid-bit:

Do you noticed what Alan Greenspan left out here? It’s not just he “knows” most of the people who profited off this crisis. HE’S WORKING FOR THE RICHEST ONE. John Paulson made literally billions of dollars by betting against the housing bubble, and hired Greenspan in January, 2008 before everything completely collapsed. (And not just that: Paulson also took a fraction of his billions and endowed an Alan Greenspan Chair in Economics at NYU.)

In case you didn’t get the connection, that’s the same John Paulson involved in the SEC complaint against Goldman.

Do read the whole post for the context. It’s quite interesting. Could even be earth shattering.

Update: Here’s more on Uncle Alan and his shifting rationales from Chris Hayes.

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“Free Money”

by digby

Professional conservatives forget themselves surprisingly often and their first instincts often reveal that that they are nothing more than nasty little bullies:

What’s that about?

Yesterday, the AP reported that Marlene Griffith, a widow of William Griffith, one of the 29 men killed in last week’s explosion at a coal mine in West Virginia, is suing Massey Energy, the owner of the mine. Griffith filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Raleigh County Circuit Court, arguing that Massey’s handling of work conditions at the mine plus its history of safety violations amounted to aggravated conduct that rises above the level of ordinary negligence. Marlene and here husband were to celebrate their 33rd wedding anniversary weeks after the deadly blast on April 5.

Indeed, as the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has reported, the mine where William Griffith worked had been cited for over 3,000 safety violations. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who has mocked safety regulators as being “as silly as global warming,” had gummed up the safety regulations process by filing endless appeals instead of paying fines and fixing safety problems.

Responding to the lawsuit, Nathan Coffey, the Public Affairs Coordinator of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), took to Twitter yesterday to mock Marlene Griffith. Coffey posted a link to the AP story about Marlene Griffith, sarcastically commenting that “Everyone wants free money!”

ALEC is a wingnut welfare operation designed to help craft corporate friendly laws and it’s run was started by Paul Weyrich.

The operative has apologized, but I’m sure that’s just because some damage control consultants understood that this is bad for business at the moment, what with all the deaths and all. But his true feelings are obvious and I think they’re common. This is, after all, what all those Republicans who scream and clap wildly at the words “tort reform” at political rallies want: they want to deny people like Marlene Griffith “free money.”

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Suppression Of Speech

by tristero

Nothing says that the makers of electronic content devices can’t censor content. That doesn’t make it a good idea:

A while back, apparently Apple blocked a whole bunch of apps that were basically soft-core porn — girls in bikinis, that sort of thing — and I didn’t notice, because I’m not in the market for that stuff, and don’t favor that kind of exploitation of women anyway. But when we didn’t stop the censorship of soft-core girlie pictures, who knew the next stop would be the censorship of political satire?

(Interjection from the Department of Arrogant Know-It-Allism:

In the history of freedom of expression there is an …intimate relationship between pornography and free speech, especially political satire.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled discussion.)

While I would agree that this is pretty heinous behavior on Apple’s part, you can, on an iPhone at least, go to any website you like. It is not necessary to patronize Apple’s iStore – the only stuff I’ve paid for are professional music apps – in order to get a lot out of the gadget. I finally got a chance to try the iPad and – someone please correct me if I’m wrong – it appears that you can copy text from their e-books app into a word processor – in other words, do what you want with your books.

Apple’s app store policies, as bad as they undoubtedly are, in no way compare to Amazon’s now-infamous erasure of 1984 – of all books! – from its Kindles without informing people beforehand. That is simply unacceptable. Everything about the Kindle points in a very disturbing direction: the closed, limited architecture, the fact that you license books and don’t own them, copying of passages is restricted to use within the device, and Amazon can remotely manage and program the contents of every Kindle they sell. This means I will never own a Kindle or any reading device that manipulates and controls my access to information so aggressively. (True, you can upload your own pdfs to the Kindle, but I’m not sure that even they can’t be erased by Amazon.)

It’s not enough that Amazon apologized: their entire model business model for providing consumers with information on the Kindle is exceedingly dangerous for the future of free speech. We not only must be able to own our copies of our books, it must be physically impossible for the distributors of these devices, or anyone else except the user, to alter or remove our books (and by extension, all media).

Repeat: Apple’s behavior sucks bigtime. Amazon’s is simply way, way, way beyond the pale and goes into something else entirely.

UPDATE: My smart spouse informs me that Apple is re-evaluating Fiore’s app now that he won a Pulitzer. WTF? Does that mean you need to be famous or officially approved before you can say something political (or erotic) in an app? What if Digby wanted to make an app of this blog? She’s not allowed because she hasn’t won a Pulitzer (yet)?

IN some ways, this makes Apple’s behavior and attitude even worse. It’s a first-rate example of the fallacy of arguing from authority.

Set-Up

by tristero

The whole purpose of this case, the only reason the Christian Legal Society of Hastings College of the Law chose to discriminate proactively against certain people and not others, was to bring a case to the Supreme Court in order to get opinions from Scalia, Roberts, and Alito which would further establish, at the SCOTUS level, the notion that the US is a Christian Nation. They don’t necessarily expect to win – as a layperson, I can’t believe anyone with half a brain would buy their reasoning. They just want to get Supreme Court opinions, even in dissent, on record.

In other words, it’s a setup:

The Christian Legal Society has long had a Hastings chapter that was recognized as a registered student organization, but in 2004, the group affiliated with the national Christian Legal Society and changed its policy to exclude from membership homosexuals and those who advocate or participate in pre-marital sex.

“When we did that, the director of student services said that the statement of faith in our bylaws violated their rules against discrimination on the basis of religion and sexual orientation,” says Isaac Fong, a former chairman of the campus Christian Legal Society.

“In practice, this meant that CLS was rendered invisible on campus,” Fong adds. “CLS was denied the ability to communicate with students or to have a physical presence on campus, and that caused the members of CLS to diminish to the point that there are only a few students left now.”

And that is what’s technically called a fucking lie:

The law school counters that the Christian Legal Society’s membership actually doubled in the year after it was denied official status, that the group held meetings on campus, organized a lecture and held banquets. [Emphasis added]

Indeed, CLS did stipulate in court that the school does have an all-comers policy. So, the core of Monday’s case is whether religious beliefs can trump a neutral school policy that applies equally to everyone.

In other words, this case is about whether the CLS’s peculiar profession of Christian belief – and very peculiar it is – deserves special status in the United States. That is, whether CLS’s kind of Christianity – or any specific kind of religious belief, for that matter – is established as a state religion.

Totenberg’s article implies that the only people who can’t join CLS are those who fall in love with someone of the same gender (or fuck without official government approval). You can be an atheist and still join the CLS. You can be Jewish and join the CLS. Hell, you can even be someone, like Ben Domenech who enjoys being powdered and diapered by hookers – well, at least that’s what I heard, if you know what I mean – and join CLS, provided – WARNING!!! Gruesome Image Alert! – Ben doesn’t masturbate while they’re singing him to sleep.

Despicable as it is, CLS is entitled to do this. And, as a card-carrying member of ACLU, I defend CLS’s right to be despicable. What they are not entitled to is official approval from a school with an all-comers policy. Nor are they entitled to lie in court about how they are victims of discrimination, rather than advocates for it.

This is a set-up and only a set-up. No, I take that back. I’m wrong. It’s not only a set-up, it is also gratuitously cruel. It’s what genuine Christians used to call, somewhat chauvinistically, un-Christian behavior.

Defending Ourselves Against The Little Pleasures

by digby

Dennis Praeger has written one of typically whiny columns about “the left” ruining all his fun with their political correctness. He says that with the exception of sex and drugs, we are robbing Real Americans of the “little pleasures” in life like making fun of people with disabilities and taking away “virtually all kids games that can make a kid feel at all bad or get hurt; wood-burning fireplaces; cars; most jokes or any flirting in the workplace; incandescent light bulbs; cool homes in summer; and more.” Whatever. If he thinks those things are more fun than sex and drugs, well, he’s got some strange fetishes — and he’s welcome to them.

But this one bears looking at more closely:

One of life’s great little pleasures is tobacco. Just watch old war reportage to see the serenity and joy a cigarette brought to a wounded soldier. Though I do not smoke cigarettes, I have been smoking cigars and pipes since I was in college (my father still smokes cigars daily at age 91), and it would be difficult to overstate how much I enjoy both.

No one opposes educating the public about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Cigarette smoking shortens the lives of up to a third of smokers, often in terrible ways, and that is what public health organizations should be saying. But the battle against smoking and tobacco has become a religious crusade for anti-smoking zealots, who are almost invariably on the Left. If the Left hated Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro as much as it hates “Big Tobacco,” the world would be a better place.

But because the Left hates the fact that people smoke (tobacco, not marijuana, which the Left defends) it uses totalitarian (I use that term with no exaggeration) tactics to eliminate it. Just as the Soviets removed Trotsky from old photos, anti-smoking zealots have forced the removal of cigarettes from old photos — from photos of FDR, from the famous Beatles photo — and from movies whenever possible. Torture and murder are ubiquitous in films, but smoking is all but banned — even cigars are now banned from James Bond films.

Smoking has been banned in entire cities, outdoors as well as in. In Pasadena, Calif., one cannot even smoke in a cigar store. That the Left has contempt for Prohibition reveals a lack of self-awareness that is quite remarkable.

I think it’s about what you want to prohibit and why. Why someone would think that limiting someone’s right to smoke is more totalitarian than forcing someone to undergo childbirth against her will, but I guess your mileage may vary.

I didn’t know about the Soviet-style removal of all signs of smoking from photographs and movies, but somebody forgot to check HBO — I just saw a couple of episodes of The Pacific last night and it depicts the soldiers smoking obsessively — and talking about smoking constantly. This seemed to me to be very accurate, since smoking is one of the most addictive drugs known to man. I know this because I used to smoke and quitting was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. And I’ll be living with the greater risk of developing cancer from that addiction for the rest of my life. Maybe Prager thinks that’s a pleasure, but I find it a curse.

I am ambivalent about anti-smoking ordinances that are purely punitive. Telling people they can’t smoke outdoors where they cannot affect anyone else’s right to smoke clean air seems a bit much. But I have to admit that quitting the final time was made much easier by the fact that I wasn’t confronted with smoking everywhere I went. And the relief of being in a confined space like a nightclub or bar without people smoking all around has been huge — those cues were very hard for me to resist. Even last night watching those soldiers smoke like chimneys for a couple of hours made me yearn for a cigarette and I haven’t smoked in many years now. I don’t wish to see history whitewashed, but I do know that there is a powerful psychological effect to seeing people smoke. It’s worth at least acknowledging that it might have an effect on kids, who should not be cavalierly sacrificed on the alter of a libertarian choice that kills you.

That being said, it seems to me that what Praeger really takes pleasure in is destruction and cruelty to others and he resents having those pleasures proscribed. And when he’s just destroying himself, I agree with him. He should be perfectly free to enjoy killing himself with tobacco when he’s by himself or other smokers — or enjoy watching cruel video games, for instance. And he can, as far as I know, still use incandescent light bulbs, drive gas guzzlers and air-condition his house, although he may have to suffer the disapprobation of people who think he’s being a selfish pig (or pay a premium to buy these things.)

That’s life. There’s no right to social acceptance for being a jerk and the market will always make the selfish jerk pay more for things that are scarce or only he wants. And people have always had the right to ask that society be just a little bit less sensitive to those who take pleasure in humiliating others rather than telling the humiliated that they need to “toughen up” and learn to take it (even if they haven’t always used it.)

Thankfully we have, as a society, drawn the line at forcing people to endure harassment by predators in the workplace or making people breathe noxious fumes just because Dennis Praeger takes pleasure in these things. And we try to protect kids from all kinds of things because they didn’t ask to be born of the pricks who spawned them. They deserve a little extra help since they can’t do it for themselves.

You see, “the Left” isn’t trying to take away “the Right’s” sadistic and selfish pleasure because they resent them having any enjoyment in life. There’s no moral case involved except to the extent it harms children, who don’t have agency. And we secularists (religious believers and non-believers alike) are known for our indifference to social dictates designed to help anyone get to heaven. The fact is that nobody cares what these people do to themselves. “The Left” is trying to change society’s acceptance of Praeger’s “pleasures” that hurt other people or the planet we are all forced to share. It’s an act of self-defense.

h/t to bb

Virtual Summit

by digby

Campaign For America’s Future is holding a Vitual Summit to try to beat back the self-serving propaganda of the Peterson Scold Summit that’s coming up. Here’s the notice:

If any of you come across a relevant post or article that you think could contribute to this subject please pass it along to me at digby at writeme dot com and I’ll either write about it or send it along to someone who might be able to use it.

It’s important that we not let up on this. The deficit is going to be the shadow issue of the election and the president’s deficit commission will submit its first report shortly after the votes are in. The commission is stacked with “entitlement” cutters, (only a few of them tax raisers well).

It’s entirely possible that Obama is planning to go into 2012 with a “Barack Goes To China” campaign to cut the safety net and prove once and for all that Democrats are “responsible” with the taxpayers money. You’ll recall that when Clinton did exactly that in order to change the way people think of the Democratic party, the Republicans impeached him, stole the election and then immediately gave the surplus to their rich friends. It didn’t change a thing — the teabaggers are screeching like harpies about socialism and communism as if that never happened. (Fool me twice …)

It’s important that the base makes it known in no uncertain terms that they will not be railroaded on this so that the Democrats can turn themselves into the party of Susan Collins and lose elections anyway. There’s a fight that needs to be had, head on, over what kind of government we want. It’s long past time the Democrats engaged it head on.

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