Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Can It Be?

by digby

If the Dems are paying attention surely they realize now that Financial Reform is a political winner and that they should beat the Republicans about the head and shoulders with their votes against it. (Uhm, yeah.)

Huge pieces of this package are passing with bipartisan support, including the Durbin interchange fees amendment this afternoon. Of course, the biggie — the Consumer Financial Protection Agency — remains along with the Lincoln derivatives amendment (subject to primary outcome apparently) and Merkley-Levin. So it’s not over yet. Still, the Senate voted down John Thune’s amendment to sunset the CFPA (perhaps because it was completely idiotic — but that’s never stopped them before.)

This is really excellent news for the ability of a tiny bit of reason to find its way into politics in the middle of a systemic meltdown. It’s not really all that much, but it’s something — and it’s obviously politically potent enough that they were able to break the Republican obstructionist strategy for the first time. It’s true that except for the Audit the Fed vote which passed unanimously, only a handful have voted with the Dems, but it’s enough to make it more than a Maine token vote. And that makes it a perfect tool to hammer the Republicans who voted against it in the fall campaign. Well played, Democrats (and for once I’m not being facetious.)

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Virtually Speaking

by digby

Virtually speaking is hosting a fun “cage match” tonight between Republican Jon Henke and Democrat Cliff Schecter at 6PDT and 9EDT.

Give it a listen:

Listen to Virtually Speaking on Blog Talk Radio

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Wheel Barrow Out

by digby

Following up on my earlier post, I see that Howie has laid out some more evidence that this volatile political season can’t be defined by tea baggers and anti-liberal backlash. Here’s another example of where things may go awry for the usual suspects:

This morning Greg Sargent at the Washington Post at least came close, closer than anyone else in the DC press corps, to getting the narrative right about the anti-incumbent— rather than an anti-progressive– mood. And yesterday’s Macon Telegraph was clearly sensing what barnacles like David Broder and Charlie Cook will try to explain in retrospect. Furthering what Sargent alluded to, there is room in the anti-incumbent fervor for insurgent progressives to oust reactionaries like John Barrow.

Rep. John Barrow’s vote against health care in Congress has cost the Georgia Democrat key support within his own party, from officials quietly withholding endorsements to one party leader calling for his defeat.

While other Democrats up for re-election are being targeted by Republicans for passing President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul in March, Barrow faces backlash for his “no” vote from fellow Democrats in southern Georgia… Democrats fuming over the three-term congressman’s vote will have a chance to vent their anger in the July 20 primary, when Barrow faces a rematch with Democratic challenger Regina Thomas, a former state senator.

“We are very angry about the way John Barrow has sold us down the river,” said John Brewer, Democratic Party chairman for rural Montgomery County. “I will go to the polls on primary day and I will vote, but it won’t be for John Barrow.”

…[S]ome Democrats say Barrow went too far in alienating his own party and Obama on health care, particularly for many black leaders to justify supporting him. Black voters make up 41 percent of Barrow’s constituents, and account for a solid majority in Democratic primary races. It’s unknown whether Obama will weigh in with an endorsement.

State Rep. Mickey Stephens, a black Democrat from Savannah, made the rounds of local churches stumping for Barrow in past campaigns. However, Stephens refrained from taking sides in Barrow’s 2008 primary race with Thomas.

This year, Stephens is openly supporting Thomas in the Democratic primary. Barrow’s health vote, he says, wasn’t just the last straw – it “was a piece of timber.”

“Most African-Americans are under-insured or don’t have insurance at all. They need it the most,” Stephens said. “John didn’t just turn his back. He turned his back and ducked on this vote.”

Two other black lawmakers who endorsed Barrow in the 2008 primary have backed off this year. State Rep. Bob Bryant of Garden City says he’s now supporting Thomas. State Rep. Quincy Murphy of Augusta said, while he’s unhappy with Barrow’s health vote, he hasn’t decided whether to endorse either candidate.

Blue America has backed challenger Regina Thomas’s campaign to send the Democrats a message from the beginning. We didn’t know if she had a chance, but we did know that John Barrow is one of those Blue Dogs who everyone vouches for as being a “good guy” underneath it all but because he has statewide ambitions he just “has to” repeatedly sell out his constituents. We think that’s wrong. And it’s possible that for a variety of reasons, this is going to be the year Blue Dogs like Barrow get a big surprise and find out that pandering too far to the crazy right has a price for Democrats.

It’s not like we’re trying to replace mainstream liberals with extremists as the tea partiers are doing on their side. We’d like to see the party move left, for sure, but this is first a move to stop this headlong rush to the right. As the career of Justice Stevens so perfectly illustrates, liberals didn’t leave the center, the center left us.

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Feature, Not Bug

by digby

Liberals are chumps:

Scott Lemieux elaborates here:

There’s an observable asymmetry on the Court, which contains four of the most consistently reactionary justices since World War II and has no liberal comparable to Willam Brennan or Thurgood Marshall. And while on the current Court it makes very little difference whether you have a Marshall clone or another Stephen Breyer, as the configuration of the Court changes, it may matter a great deal. Imagine if Robert Bork had been confirmed by the Senate: Antonin Scalia, rather than Anthony Kennedy, would be the median vote on the Court. The biggest reason to be concerned about Elena Kagan’s nomination is that she seems unlikely to reverse this trend.

There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, not the least of which is the capture of the Village by the conservative movement. But in the end what it really signifies is that the aristocracy (the moneyed elite) reasserted itself after the depression and made sure that the court protected their privilege. Both parties obviously helped, although the motivation is probably some mixture of fear, laziness, myopia and complicity. The result is the same: an ever more conservative judiciary which ensures that the elected riff-raff can pander to the rubes without any negative consequences accruing to the owners of America.

It doesn’t have to be like this, of course. But it’s inevitable when liberals are chumps.

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Saving Mary From Herself

by digby

Very nice of Alaska Senator Lisa “Apple Of Her Daddy’s Eye” Murkowski to take the heat on this (tweeted by Senator Bill Nelson.)

Senator from Alaska just sandbagged my bill to hold BP accountable for up to $10 billion for the oil spill.

I’m sure she had to fight off Landrieu who was dying to get on the floor and defend the oil companies again, but I’m guessing that even BP is beginning to see that her Mother-Lion-defending-her-oil-covered-BP-cub routine is a little bit unseemly at this point so they called in the understudy.

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Sure Honey, I Promise I’ll Pull Out

by digby

Last night, President Obama sent notice to congress that he is going to delay the Iraq withdrawal. Here’s why:

General Ray Odierno, the US commander, had been due to give the order within 60 days of the general election held in Iraq on 7 March, when the cross-sectarian candidate Ayad Allawi edged out the incumbent leader, Nouri al-Maliki.

American officials had been prepared for delays in negotiations to form a government, but now appear to have balked after Maliki’s coalition aligned itself with the theocratic Shia bloc to the exclusion of Allawi, who attracted the bulk of the minority Sunni vote. There is also concern over interference from Iraq’s neighbours, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Late tonight seven people were killed and 22 wounded when a car bomb planted outside a cafe exploded in Baghdad’s Sadr City, a Shia area, police and a source at the Iraqi interior ministry said.

The latest bomb highlights how sectarian tensions are rising, as al-Qaida fighters in Iraq and affiliated Sunni extremists have mounted bombing campaigns and assassinations around the country.

The violence is seen as an attempt to intimidate all sides of the political spectrum and press home the message to the departing US forces that militancy remains a formidable foe.

Odierno has kept a low profile since announcing the deaths of al-Qaida’s two leaders in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri, who were killed in a combined Iraqi-US raid on 18 April. The operation was hailed then as a near fatal blow against al-Qaida, but violence has intensified ever since.

Who could have seen that coming?

Meanwhile:

Afghan, Iraq Wars Cost Over $1 Trillion, Growing

Shhhhh. Don’t tell anyone. If the people get load of this they might not agree to spending their golden years selling pencils for catfood.

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Feel The Rumble?

by digby

Greg Sargent points out that the mainstream media is potentially missing a very important story. If Bill Halter and Joe Sestak win next week, it’s a sign that it isn’t just the tea partiers who are forming an insurgency against the Republican establishment — the progressive movement is making a move as well.In fact, there are a whole bunch of contests that may surprise people in the next couple of months. The ta partiers have all the good costumes and are willing to make public asses of themselves, so they get all the press. But the fact is that the left has been quietly going about its business during this period to unseat Blue Dogs and pull the Democratic party away from its center of gravity in the lap of corporations and right wing ideology. Just because the Village media reflexively interprets anger at Washington as anger at liberal policies, it doesn’t make it so.

Nobody knows what will happen, but the fact is that this is not a right wing backlash, it’s an anti-incumbent backlash.

And some of us saw this coming:

On Sending Messages

by digby

If my comment section, email and other blogs are to be believed, there is a lot of netroots angst about the Democratic party these days. It’s certainly understandable. With the free floating anxiety that’s pervasive out in the country as a whole, the horrific spectacle of health care reform sausage making and the toppling of President Obama from his heavenly pedestal, we have the making of a full blown insurrection on our hands. The question is what to do about it.

Many people believe that the only thing Democrats understand is pain and so the thing that will change this dynamic will be to deliver them a loss of their majority and perhaps the presidency to show the consequences of failure to fulfill the progressive agenda. That certainly sounds right, except you can’t ever know exactly what lesson will be taken from this sort of pain and if history is any guide, the likeliest one is the simplest and most obvious: they lost because people preferred what the other side had to offer. Obviously, that’s not necessarily the case, but it isn’t illogical for them to believe that. And the exit polls or whatever other data may be available rarely clearly show that it was base demobilization that caused a turnover. Often people don’t even know why they failed to vote and you can’t exit poll those who didn’t bother.

More importantly, you have the ongoing, pernicious problem of the conservative Democrats who will always pimp the anti-liberal line and their friends in the media who pull the old “this is a conservative country” narrative off the shelf by reflex. Indeed, we can see it in its full glory already manifesting itself with this classic Adam Nagourney piece in today’s NY Times:

As Mr. Obama prepares to come here on Sunday to campaign for the party’s beleaguered Senate candidate, Martha Coakley, Democrats across the country are starting to wonder aloud if they misjudged the electorate over the last year, with profound ramifications for the midterm elections this year and, potentially, for Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Win or lose in Massachusetts, that a contest between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat could appear so close is evidence of what even Democrats say is animosity directed at the administration and Congress. It has been fanned by Republicans who have portrayed Democrats as overreaching and out of touch with ordinary Americans.

“It comes from the fact that Obama as president has had to deal with all these major crises he inherited: the banks, fiscal stimulus,” said Senator Paul G. Kirk Jr., the Democrat who holds the Massachusetts seat on an interim basis pending the special election. “But for many people it was like, ‘Jeez, how much government are we getting here?’ That might have given them pause.”

Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said the atmosphere was a serious threat to Democrats. “I do think there’s a chance that Congressional elites mistook their mandate,” Mr. Bayh said. “I don’t think the American people last year voted for higher taxes, higher deficits and a more intrusive government. But there’s a perception that that is what they are getting.”

[…]

The Massachusetts campaign has neatly encapsulated the major themes that have come to deplete Mr. Obama’s popularity, themes that have fueled the rise of the Tea Party movement on the right and created an atmosphere where growing numbers of Democrats in conservative-leaning districts and states have decided not to run again.

[…]

Mr. Brown has portrayed Ms. Coakley as an advocate of big government, big spending and big deficits; Obama advisers and other Democrats have worried that the expanding deficit, now at a level not seen since World War II, was hurting Mr. Obama with independents who lifted him to victory in 2008. Polls suggest that those voters have flocked to Mr. Brown, as they did to Republican candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey last year.

I don’t think you have to be a political scientist or a psychic to see where that little narrative is heading. You have to get all the way to the fourth paragraph from the end to see even a hint of the dynamic as we liberals see it:

But most ominously for Democrats contemplating the midterm elections, the battle here suggests an emerging dangerous dynamic: that Mr. Obama has energized Republican activists who think he has overstepped with health care and the economic stimulus, while demoralizing Democrats who think he has not lived up to his promise.

Three paragraphs later it concludes with this:

Still, some Democrats are wondering if Mr. Obama would be in a better position now if he had embraced a less ambitious health care proposal, as some aides urged, permitting him to pivot more quickly on the economy. Depending on what happens Tuesday, that is a debate that might be reverberating in the White House for a long time to come.

“Some” Democrats wonder if he should have been less ambitious with health care and even Obama advisors are terribly, terribly worried about deficits. The idea that they haven’t been liberal enough doesn’t seem to be resonating does it? And I have very serious doubts that it will resonate if the party of Teabaggers starts winning.

So, how do liberals exert what power they have and have the results be interpreted the way we want it to be? The first would be through protest votes for a third party that resulted in Republican victory. (There is virtually no chance that any third party will ever gain real power short of a fundamental change in the way we elect our representatives, so protest is all it will be.) It’s been done before. And if you can live with the idea of voting in a Republican party in the thrall of extremists that make Bush and Cheney look like Rockefeller Republicans, I suppose that might be the way to go. I won’t judge you, but I am personally unwilling to put the world through any more of this failed right wing experiment at the moment.

There is a fairly compelling theory in political science that says that after political parties come into power, fulfill some pieces of their agenda, get fat and bloated and are finally removed from office, they then tend to deny the reality of their loss and blame it on everything but themselves until they lose enough elections that they finally realize that their ideology has failed. The current GOP is not there yet by a long shot. They are still in the process of doubling down on their radical agenda at a time when the economy is still in ruins, the effects of globalization are being fully felt, the planet is in peril and about to reach a tipping point, and a radical fundamentalist movement is trying to blow people up. I don’t think the world can take any more of the right’s prescriptions for these problems right now: Lindsay Graham is considered too liberal and neo-Hooverism is their economic program. Yes, the Democrats are corrupt and inept. But the other side is batshit insane.

However, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do but wring our hands about how the system is broken and fret ourselves into intertia. The other way to send messages to the Democratic party is through the unsatisfying and often thankless process of primary challenges. Nobody can have any problem understanding that message, not even Adam Nagourney.

It’s hard to find challengers and it’s no wonder. It’s expensive, time consuming and after all your hard work you will probably lose. It takes real commitment and a desire to not only win a seat in congress but do it by way of unseating an incumbent of your own party with whom you disagree, an act which is guaranted to make you an odd man out among the party hierarchy. But if you win, it can send shockwaves through the system.

And guess what? We are in the most favorable year for primary challenges in recent memory. The insane teabaggers aren’t going to allow any rational Republicans to run and the anti-uncumbent fever is going to be as high as it’s been since 1994. The Democratic base has an energetic activist faction, the netroots can raise money and there is a burning desire to show the party establishment that they cannot take liberals for granted. It’s a perfect environment for successful primary challenges.

And lucky for us, there are some brave progressives already out there taking on incumbents and there very well may be more. This time a few of them may win, and believe me if that happens, the Democratic party will not be able to spin those victories as being a sign that the party needs to move to the right.

Blue America has helpfully set up an Act Blue page with all the progressive challengers who have announced and we’ll add to it as more come forward. We’re calling it “Send The Democrats A Message They Can Understand.”

If you want a Democratic scalp, these candidates are out there offering to do the work to get it done. And you won’t be giving Adam Nagourney or Cokie Roberts or Glenn Beck what they want in the process. It’s a win that even the villagers and the party establishment can’t spin as good news for Republicans.

It could happen …

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Contests!

by digby

And I’m not talking about election contests.

If you are a music fan, you should be making regular forays over to Down With Tyranny because ex-music mogul Howie is running regular contests to give away some very valuable collectible memorabilia to people who donate to Blue America candidates.

Today, for instance, you can play for a book about Tupac Shakur written and signed by Dr Fred Johnson, candidate from Michigan and at 2pm he’ll be auctioning off a special k.d. lang item in honor of Claudia Wright, lefty insurgent who’s forces Utah’s lone Democratic congressman Jim Matheson into a runoff. He runs them all the time, so check back frequently to see if he’s offering up your favorite artist.

Never say politics is a one way street again! .

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Another Country

by digby

When asked her opinion of the LA boycott of Arizona on Ed Shultz’s show today, Karen Hanratty thinks LA is a foreign country.

(Big eye roll)I think the Los Angeles City Council is the last governmental body I would ever take advice from. (Ed laughs uproariously.) By the way, go to any hospital in los Angeles and see what their emergency room looks like, how many illegal immigrants are in those waiting rooms. Something needs to be done in this country and Los Angeles is probably not the best indication of how we should fix our budget, manage our local municipalities. You know LA is a land unto itself.

And she wonders why Los Angelenos feel solidarity with their Latino brothers and sisters in Arizona? We’re not real Americans either, are we?

Therefore, I propose that our country pass a law that allows us to deport Karen Hanratty if she tries to work here. I’m sure a lot of attractive blond women will be stopped and harassed, but that’s just the way it goes. After a little training the police will be able to tell her by which season of Jimmy Choo’s she’s wearing.

It also occurs to me that she may have inadvertantly given us some good advice. Considering the budget woes we suffer here in the “land” called Los Angeles, perhaps we should cease all the “foreign aid” we throw at all those red states.

The truth is that I don’t really care if fatuous gasbags insult LA. It’s a huge metropolitan mess and nobody should feel that their locale is above criticism or cheap laughs. But I do object to the double standard that allows these gasbags to go on TV and talk about LA like it’s dysfunctional, foreign dogshit while insisting that Real Americans are not to be criticized. The sad truth is that at the moment this whole country is a big mess.

Arizona unfortunately has elected some leadership that is allowing right wing nativist demagoguery to get the better of them. It’s going to hurt their economy because a lot of people around the country don’t want to lend support to a place that discriminates and racially profiles. Just as it’s Hanratty’s right to disparage LA, Los Angelenos have a right to take a stand on what we believe to be an unfair law.

As Laura Flanders said in that Ed Show segment:

It’s a great American tradition: an injury to one is an injury to all.

That’s rather old fashioned, I know, but just as we feel solidarity with the West Virginia coal miners and the Louisiana fishermen and the Tennessee flood victims and any other group of fellow Americans who are getting a raw deal from the powerful or are in Mother Nature’s angry path, we feel solidarity with Latinos in Arizona who are being treated inhumanely. It’s a worldview and it applies to people everywhere. And contrary to current opinion, that’s as American as it gets.

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Elite Malpractice

by digby

From the gulf, never before seen footage of the oil gushing into the water:

Here’s an overview from a couple of days ago, with amazing narration:

And what does Mary Landrieu have to say about all this? Check it out at about 3:20:

Every single time she goes on TV she makes it very clear that her main concern is the oil industry. Even if she’s their full-time employee, she could ask to be let off the leash to do a little less public cheerleading in the middle of this crisis. It’s dissonant and weird at this point.(I have no doubt she knows how her employers want her to vote on the issue.)

This is a fundamental problem with our current crop of elites. Even when it makes good business or political sense they simply cannot stop shilling. It’s obscene. Just as the arrogant Masters of the Universe refused to lay low, even though it was the smart move, you see the oil companies and their lackeys out there spinning like tops and losing all credibility in the process.

This is very stupid politics, stupid business and stupid damage control. Even whatever respect I might have reluctantly held for these sharks’ self-preservation is gone. Our elites are just plain bad at their jobs and they remain powerful and wealthy by dint of their positions not their ability.

In other words, they are a bloated, decadent aristocracy. And we know what tends to happen to them.

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