Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Rebels With A Cause

by digby

Do you know these two women? You should. They are two pro-choice women challenging Bart Stupak and Joe Pitts, of the notorious Stupak-Pitts Amendment– Connie Saltonstall and Lois Herr.

You can contribute to Saltonstall and Herr online. Somebody needed to stand up and they did. If you’ve got a couple of bucks to spare, I’m sure they would be grateful. I’m certainly grateful to them for doing it.

Update: I think one of the problems with Stupak may just be that he’s an utter moron on top of being a liar. Not a good combination.

Update II: Here’s more idiocy:

Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance,” he says. “Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered.” The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, “are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party.”

What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”

This is bullshit we’re talking about.

The sad commentary is that this person is either too stupid to understand the two amendment or is just blatantly lying in everyone’s faces.

The good news is that he acknowledges that the rest of his phony pro-life gang is wavering and may vote for the bill which doesn’t guarantee anything but it’s at least a little hopeful.

He’s also worried about the future of pro-life Democrats. I would be too if I were him. If they are actually so confused that they think a bill which restricts access to abortions for 15 million or so women adds up to more abortions then they have much bigger problems. Cognitive problems.

On the other hand, if they plan to dishonestly and opportunistically leverage their little gang to further restrict a woman’s right to choose, they may not find themselves quite as successful as they have been in the past. This gambit on Stupak and Nelson revealed them to be anything but principled players acting out of religions conviction.

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Failing From the Top Down

by digby

I will delve into this more over the week-end, but on the face of it, this looks like a bombshell that will hopefully change the slow motion train wreck that is Financial system reform:

The bankruptcy examiner’s report filed by Anton R. Valukas on the 2008 demise of Lehman Brothers discusses some accounting gimmicks that are eerily reminiscent of how Enron tried to prop up its balance sheet back in 2001 before it collapsed. Both companies appear to have played right along the edge of properly accounting for transactions designed to make them appear much stronger than they turned out to be, becoming steadily more aggressive as they teetered on the brink of ruin.

The examiner’s report discusses potential claims that the bankruptcy trustee can bring against Lehman’s former officers and outside advisers and does not mention potential government law enforcement action. Reading his report, however, gives strong indications that at a minimum the Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to pursue civil charges for securities fraud, and that criminal charges are certainly possible against Lehman’s former top executives.

Wow.

It’s felicitous that Chris Hayes wrote this insightful essay just as this news came out:

In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment…

For more than 35 years, Gallup has polled Americans about levels of trust in their institutions — Congress, banks, Big Business, public schools, etc. In 2008 nearly every single institution was at an all-time low. Banks were trusted by just 32% of the populace, down from more than 50% in 2004. Newspapers were down to 24%, from slightly below 40% at the start of the decade. And Congress was the least trusted institution of all, with only 12% of Americans expressing confidence in it. The mistrust of élites extends to élites themselves. Every year, public-relations guru Richard Edelman conducts a “trust barometer” across 22 countries, in which he surveys only highly educated, high-earning, media-attentive people. In the U.S., these people show extremely low levels of trust in government and business alike. Particularly distrusted are the superman CEOs of yore. “Chief-executive trust has just been mired in the mid- to low 20s,” says Edelman. “It started off with Enron and culminates in Citi.”

Now Lehman. The failure of elites continues apace.

Read the whole thing, it’s actually got a hopeful ending.

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No Convenient Season

by digby

As I contemplate the various conversations I’ve been having with people of good will on the subject of “absolutism” and “litmus tests” especially as it pertains to the ongoing unanswered assaults a woman’s right to choose, I keep thinking about Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, particularly this passage:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

This issue is a matter of fundamental human rights. To see it used as a bargaining chip, something to be tossed into the pile along with earmarks and kickbacks is very disheartening. And yet pro-choice advocates grit their teeth and behave as good soldiers, this time allowing access to their constitutional right to abortion to be restricted yet again so that health care reform could succeed. And the goalposts have moved once more.

And once again we are told that it is a bad idea to be “too strident” and that we need to have a “big tent” and seek “common ground,” advice which has resulted over the course of 30 years in one party becoming totally anti-choice and another that is creeping ever more boldly toward accommodation to the same people. We are always told that we need to “wait for a more convenient season” to fight for our rights.

I understood what Dr King was saying when I first read that amazing document. I hoped everyone did. But when it comes to civil rights I have learned that every battle begins anew and each new generation must learn for themselves that no one should ever tell someone else that they must wait for their freedom — or force them to relinquish it by the death of a thousand cuts, each time for what is called a greater good. And if we complain we are patronizingly lectured in the ways of the world and patted on the head for being Big Girls and putting others before our petty concerns. This phenomenon has led me to King’s great insight: shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Human rights are not “issues” to be finessed in order to procure votes. They are principles which form the very basis of our values and worldview and they must be defended. Yet Americans have sold out their most cherished ideals of equality and liberty throughout its history. And it’s always, always been shameful, every single time.

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Triumph Of The Conservative Will

by tristero

The intent is two-fold:

1. To render a public school education all but worthless by teaching blatant lies and distortions, thereby advancing the long-desired rightwing meme is, in fact, worthless and should be eliminated.

2. As long as there must be a public education system, indoctrinate children to in the lie that rightwing/christianist authoritorianism is a core American value and not, in fact, the very antithesis of the Americanism the Founders intended.

Textbook procurement protocols must be changed to eliminate the influence of these ignorant, malicious lunatics from the national discourse. Otherwise, we deserve everything that’s coming to us.

It Matters

by digby

Eric Alterman and Danny Goldberg have news for you:

Did you know that when the White House and members of the media mention “code words like ‘diversity’ and ‘equality'” what they are really proposing is “communist revolution?” Did you know that Osama bin Laden’s remarks about global warming are almost identical to “those of the average, run-of-the-mill leftist, like Obama or Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or the entire Democrat Party?” Or that the “global warming scam” is “an effort by the left to destroy capitalist economies?” Here’s one I’ll bet you didn’t know: President Barack Obama was “advised by [the] Ft. Hood Shooter.” If you didn’t know the “facts” above, it means you probably haven’t been spending your time listening to talk radio hosts such as Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz, and G. Gordon Liddy. It’s hard work listening to these shows, but progressives should be paying attention to the impact they’re having: 48 million people get their news from these guys, according to the Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism, and the numbers of radio stations that carry at least some talk shows grew to 2,056 from 1,370 the year before, according to Inside Radio magazine. That’s more than twice the collective audience for the three TV network evening news shows combined, more than five times the audience of the three network Sunday news shows, nearly seven times the combined audience for cable news shows, nearly 10 times the audience for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” and 16 times the audience for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Read on …

I was at an event last night with veteran broadcaster Joan Hamburg and she talked about this as well. Some of her stories were enough to chill your blood.

There is a huge audience for this crap and they are engaged, active and freaked out. And their toxic ideas seep out even beyond their numbers in large and small ways, infecting the entire body politic.

I recently watched Hotel Rwanda again. And I got the uneasiest feeling.

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Radical Freak

by digby

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Ramming And Scoring

by digby

Walter Shapiro at Politics Daily makes an interesting observation about Obama and Bush and it pertains to something that’s driving me nuts in the current health care debate: this sanctimonious lecturing by Republicans about how the Democrats are illegitimately “ramming health care reform down the people’s throats.” Like Shapiro, whenever I hear the Republicans lugubriously wax on about the president and the Democrats acting against the will of the people, I can’t help but think back to the early days of the Bush administration when the man who had been installed by a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court was rolling over the 50-50 Senate as if he’d won a landside.

Shapiro writes:

In short, Republicans like Graham are insisting that the majority-elected Obama must temper his ambitions because of fluctuating and ambiguous polls about health care. So what if Obama’s approval rating has never fallen below 47 percent in the daily Gallup tracking polls. Contrast this with Bush in 2001, who took office with only 51 percent of the American people in a CBS poll believing that he was elected legitimately. But because Bush was (wait for it) a “conviction politician,” he was entitled to pursue his expansive and expensive (in budget terms) agenda starting with massive tax cuts. As Rove writes with almost an audible sneer in his words that the Democrats “were surprised that he didn’t come to them on bended knee.”

He makes the case that if such a thing exists, Obama is a “conviction politician” as well for pursuing HCR, although I’m not sure that phrase accurately applies to either of these politicians. I don’t know exactly what makes either one tick, but convictions don’t jump to mind as the likeliest motivations.

But the contrast between how the Repubicans portrayed their right — no, duty — to enact Bush’s agenda regardless of a mandate or public opinion and their endless allusions to a weeping America forced to submit to a tyrannical Democratic majority (intent upon giving them access to health insurance) is stark. And it’s the kind of hypocrisy that’s making the country stupid.

…South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham begged the Democrats, “Please don’t do this…I’ll work with you to find a smaller bill that the American people feel more comfortable about. Let’s do a field goal on health care. Let’s [don’t] score a touchdown by ramming it down somebody’s throat.”

Keep in mind that this is not only someone who fully supported President Bush after a dubious election result all the way to the point where he was 28% in the polls, but he was also one of the House managers who impeached a popular president in 1998 despite the fact that the country had just repudiated their jihad at the polls. What can you say to this level of intellectual dishonesty?

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QOTD

by digby

I’m intrigued by Glenn Beck’s new book, “Protocols of the Elders of Progressivism”
Jonathan Schwartz, tinyrevolution

By Any Other Name

by digby

Do you know who the enemy is?

Wake up, America, there’s a new, dangerous threat on the horizon: progressives. You may have heard about them if you’ve been paying attention to the right sources. They come from the 1920s, they’re basically socialists — or maybe fascists — and they’re here to steal your country.

A generation after Ronald Reagan and his allies turned “liberal” into an epithet, conservatives are going after the term many Democrats adopted in its place. Glenn Beck and his paranoid Fox News Channel ranting is just at the forefront of what appears to be a movement to demonize the word “progressive,” in hopes of scaring voters away from the left. “Progressivism is the cancer in America, and it is eating our Constitution,” Beck told thousands of adoring fans at the conservative CPAC conference last month. “And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To ‘progress’ past the Constitution.” The National Review ran a whole special issue on progressives in December; staff writer Jonah Goldberg even published a book on the subject, “Liberal Fascism,” two years ago. The latest ad for Liz Cheney’s new group, Keep America Safe, prominently features Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that progressives are about to run the nation — before seguing, sharply, into asking whether Holder’s pals share the values of al-Qaida.

Of course, “progressive” also happens to be the way nearly every Democratic lawmaker, activist and politician describes him- or herself these days

This is why I never stopped calling myself a liberal. There’s just no use in running away from labels because the right has demonized them. It’s not about the label, it’s about you. And you can’t run away from yourself.

I think it’s probably a good idea if people just stop looking at the solution to conservative attacks as a “branding” problem.

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“That’s Life. It’ll Stop Bleeding”

by digby

Allison Kilkenny has written an interesting piece on “Normalizing the police state” in which she notes something that I hadn’t put together before: the treatment of children as suspects:

The officers are accused of detaining, searching, handcuffing, and arresting students for silly things like drawing on desks, or handling — not using, but handling — cell phones in school.

In one case, a safety officer kicked in the door of a stall in the boys’ bathroom, wounding a student’s head. The officer’s response to questioning about the matter was: “That’s life. It will stop bleeding.”

Another student, this time a 5-year-old, was shipped off to a hospital psychiatric ward for throwing a tantrum.

These absurd reactions to normal childhood behavior is all part of “Zero Tolerance.” Six-year-old Zachary Christie faced disciplinary action after bringing a Cub Scout utensil that can serve as a knife, fork, and spoon to school. Apparently, the state of Delaware is terrified of children shanking each other, and after all, it’s the era of Zero Tolerance.

Treating children as suspects is the new normal in American culture. There is something innately wrong with children. If they’re too chatty, they need to be medicated. If they’re too angry, they need to be suppressed by a “peace officer.” They are not to be trusted, and must be monitored at all times.

A school in Pennsylvania is accused of covertly activating webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students. The accusations have generated a lot of outrage, but this is the logical conclusion of the country’s general movement toward a police state. If the NSA can wiretap citizens’ phones, the FBI can infiltrate protest groups, and the police can generally dominate and suppress any kind of protest, why shouldn’t schools be able to monitor student activity?

She goes on to note at some length the acceptance of tasering and the other forms of control technology as due punishment for exercising ones first amendment rights and writes:

Here we have the completion of the perfect police state. Citizens are monitored from cradle to grave. Any signs of anger or rebellion are swiftly squelched with medication or “peace officers.” The schools step in when the state cannot act to monitor and regulate every movement of students’ lives under the banner of “Zero Tolerance.”

When the medicated and monitored children grow into dysfunctional adults, some of who eventually realize their shitty circumstances (complete with shitty healthcare, outsourced jobs, limited resources, poisoned environment, enormous wealth disparity, etc.) and they think about rebelling, they are immediately lassoed with an anchor of bureaucracy. Should you want to protest, please fill out form AYT0754 five months prior to said protest, and pay this fee, and remain in this pen, and please don’t make too much noise…

This sort of thing doesn’t have to happen overnight with a burning of the Reichstag. I think it’s just as likely to happen so slowly that over time it just seems …. normal.

The whole article is worth reading.

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