According to this report, Sarah and Todd are splittsville, which isn’t exactly surprising. It often happens when an otherwise pretty average family (if being a governor is average) gets thrust into the national spotlight. Look at that “Jon and Kate Plus Eight Is Enough To Make Your Eyes Glaze Over” show.
But if it’s true (and who the hell knows if it is) it will be yet another test of conservative Christian family values, which would surely say that Sarah and Todd should stay together no matter how miserable they are.
On the other hand, from a commercial standpoint, Sarah Palin being a single mom would be a goldmine, so there is an upside. Her “everywoman” persona would be complete and I think that’s probably far more compelling — and marketable — than anything else about her.
Even Christian conservatives are gay or have affairs or get divorced and are single parents. In fact, they are exactly like all the liberal elites who are destroying the fabric of society. They just live in a hypocritical, patriarchal universe that is run by the credo “do as I say not as I do.” It works out well for them. But the rest of us really don’t have to listen.
And hey, more power to Sarah and Todd if they can’t work it out and decide to move on. It’s not the end of the world. There are Christian conservative hypocrites doing the same thing every day all over America.
Just days after officially stepping down as governor of Alaska, former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is dropping out of an advertised speaking engagement in Simi Valley …. It was on Thursday that Palin’s spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton made public the news of the decision not to attend the event via Palin’s Facebook page. Up to 900 people were expected to attend the event at $100 a ticket for members and $150 for non-members, but media had been barred from the occasion.
It’s worth noting, from time to time, the practical and ideological problems with this approach to problem solving. The parties disagree — as they should; it’s why they exist — and are more polarized now than at any point in modern political history. Ezra has posted this chart from Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal before, but I’m glad he ran it again yesterday. It shows current political polarization is at its highest point since the 19th century:
This political environment obviously makes compromises and “bipartisan” solutions very difficult, since the parties, more so than at any recent point, simply see matters of state in fundamentally different ways. But the polarization among lawmakers in both chambers also, as Ezra noted yesterday, “makes it virtually impossible to govern in a system that is designed to foil majorities and require a constant three-fifths consensus. It’s not good if the country is virtually impossible to govern. Problems don’t stop mounting while we try and figure things out.” There’s been some talk lately about the effort to convince at least some Republicans to support health care reform, the way plenty of Republicans support Social Security and Medicare in previous generations. In those eras, the parties were closer together, and there were center-left GOP lawmakers from across the country who were amenable to outreach.
The thing is that we’ve always been polarized in various ways, just not politically — city/country, north/south, rich/poor, native born/immigrant, white/black. It’s just that there are times when our two party system doesn’t break down along those neat lines and basically represents two big tents comprising bits of each side of each divide. Indeed, we have that right now on some very important issues such as the high finance and national security. So the polarization is not really complete even in polarized times like these.
But we are polarized politically on much of our domestic policy, even as much as industry spends to buy off members of both parties. This is where the ideological/culture wars are played out in this country, even to the extent that we had a real live civil war over the most thorny polarizing issue in American history. I think we actually have two different countries in many ways and when it breaks neatly into the two parties, as it would naturally tend to do at times, it creates gridlock if politicians fail to recognize the state of play and use it to their advantage instead of clinging to outmoded coalitions that no longer reflect anything meaningful.
The Republicans actually did that during the Bush years and had they not fallen prey to hubris and gross mismanagement, they could have lasted a bit longer. (Maybe that’s inevitable with a party that is based upon the idea that government is just another profit center, I don’t know.) But they did master the institutions and ran them in a partisan fashion and I’m not convinced that if they had had a president who had a genuine mandate (as opposed to a very dubious ascension to the office) and an administration that was not obsessed with fighting old wars and avenging old slights, they could have had a much more successful run. They understood power in ways that the Democrats don’t.
FDR did(and he sometimes overreached too, as we well know) but he did use the power of his mandate and his institutions completely and thoroughly and didn’t follow some irrelevant social models of propriety over effective governance. And the interesting thing about that graph is that during the depression, there was much less polarization.
Even more interesting is that this is the kind of thing the president was saying to the American people at the time:
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me‹and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.
You can’t help but wonder if people today heard a little more of that and little less bipartisan kumbaaya over high taxes for rich people and industry being “too big to fail,” if the polarization might just drop a bit. In fact, when you read that, you have to wonder the problem isn’t polarization at all, but whether the country just isn’t polarized in the right way.
Ceci Connolly, well-known around these parts, has a “teach the controversy” article out today about the utter B.S. flung about on talk radio and promoted by serial liar Betsy McCaughey that the Democratic health care plan surreptitiously seeks to send roving verbal hit squads out to the sticks to talk the elderly into suicide. Connolly, in her role as a stenographer, dutifully transcribes the claims from all sides of the “debate”. In the second paragraph she gets close to actually explaining the language in the bill:
The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.
That’s not even totally correct, I wouldn’t call Medicare covering end of life counseling a proposal to “pay physicians.” Unless you want to call Medicare covering hip surgery as a proposal to pay physicians to take out people’s hips.
You can read the provision right here. And the story could have ended there. But Connolly and her editors find it more exciting to give lots of space to those distorting the bill, without really coming down on one side or the other. The heading over Connolly’s articles on this subject say “Tracking the Health Care Debate.” I guess it’s someone else’s job to track the truth.
You know what would have been an interesting wrinkle in the article? Besides actually saying who’s right and who’s wrong, I mean. The tidbit that Sen. Susan Collins actually introduced this language back in the spring.
On May 22nd, Senators Collins and Jay Rockefeller introduced the “Advance Planning and Compassionate Care Act,” according to a press release sent over by a source. The measure provides Medicare funding “for advance care planning so that patients can routinely talk to their physicians about their wishes for end-of-life care,” the release says.
Collins praised the measure, which may be included in the Senate health care bill, in the release. “Our legislation will improve the way our health care system care for patients at the end of their lives,” she said, “and it will also facilitate appropriate discussions and individual autonomy in making decisions about end-of-life care.”
Maybe someone should ask Senator Collins whether she’s concerned that Federal funding for end of life consultations could result in “government-encouraged euthanasia,” as we keep hearing. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll ask her.
What a reporter like this would say is that they have a fact-check department, and they write articles about their fact-checking, and the point of this article is to highlight the “debate”. I don’t really understand how that illuminates much of anything. An article with the opening line “A campaign on late-night radio promoting theories that the Earth is flat and sailors fall off the side of the world just past the horizon have sparked fear among seafaring families” wouldn’t be particularly helpful to anyone. I do think Democrats have shown a basic unwillingness to decide whether to ignore B.S. like this and let it fester or attack it and give it more attention, but a journalist writing about it should probably make pretty clear that only one side is telling the truth. There is actually no convention of balance in journalism, that’s a recently invented altar upon which the modern press corps bends and prays.
Movement conservatives’ public support for torture has contradicted even their own cherished mythology. The only constant has been their unyielding conviction in their own righteousness. Consider – they love to invoke WWII, if simplistically and inaccurately, yelling that every new threat is a new Hitler and anything less than belligerence is “appeasement.” Yet they ignore that during WWII, we prosecuted the same torture and abuses they’ve defended under Bush. The Cult of Saint Ronnie still worships the poor policy and cartoonish morality of Reagan denouncing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” (In his recent Reagan book, Will Bunch relates that Reagan himself regretted using the phrase, and later the far right accused Reagan of being Chamberlain for dealing with the Soviets.) Yet the torture program instituted under Bush borrowed directly from the hated Soviets. The key reason given for invading Iraq was that it had WMD and was an imminent threat, but Saddam Hussein was also depicted (fantastically) as the next Hitler and (accurately) as a dictator and torturer. The Hussein regime’s victims were invoked more often after the invasion as a way to browbeat Iraq critics. So how is it that what made Hussein evil became good when done by the United States? When Iraqi Muntadar al-Zaidi threw a show at Bush, several far-right conservatives approved of the broken hand and ribs he received in prison. As Roy Edroso quipped, “I always suspected that when they were denouncing Saddam’s torture chambers, they were just angry that they didn’t get to say who got tortured.”
I think that’s right. But I have to say that it’s purported Christians for whom I’ve lost the most respect in all this:
The disconnect from professed Christians on the torture “debate” is particularly astounding. Given how central the crucifixion story is to Christianity, and that it depicts Jesus tortured and then executed in one of the most cruel methods ever devised, it’s mind-boggling to see anyone claim that supporting torture and Christianity are compatible – or that Jesus would support waterboarding. According to Christian doctrine, Jesus’ suffering redeemed him and the world – but it’s not the Romans who Christians are supposed to emulate in the story! “Turn the other cheek,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “As you have done to the least of my brethren, so have you done unto me” are hardly pro-torture slogans. But in the hearts and minds of movement conservatives, not even Churchill, Saint Ronnie or Jesus himself can compete with the comforting violence of Jack Bauer.
Do you know who pays for the racist campaign against Obama? GEICO, NutriSystems, Proctor & Gamble, and… United Postal Service. Yep, those are the advertisers who pay for the TV time so that deranged sociopath Glenn Beck can get up and spout his divisive hatred and racism. And today the top online civil rights group Color of Change urged its 600,000-plus members to petition companies who advertise on Glenn Beck’s radio and television shows to urge them to cut off their advertising on Beck’s programs. The mobilization comes after Beck called President Obama a “racist” who “has a deep-seated hatred for white people” during an appearance Tuesday on Fox and Friends.
Color of Change has also been urging CNN to fire their own racist shill, Lou Dobbs for his gratuitous birther campaign, which CNN irresponsibly uses to pump up lagging viewership.
“What Beck is doing is race-baiting at its worst, it’s dangerous and it’s hard to imagine any company wanting their brand associated with it,” said James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org. “Beck has now shown that his extreme views are more appropriate for a street corner than a major media program. He no longer deserves the backing of mainstream advertisers.”
I don’t even think they are appropriate for a street corner, but he does have a right to spout them. And likewise, people have a right to withhold their money from those who profit from such views.
Klein and Ailes needs to rein in these asses before they kill the golden gooses. Advertisers do have limits.
Creating fake grassroots organizations to show presumed local support for typically corporate initiatives is known as astroturfing. Corporate lobbies forging letters from local groups to show that same fake support should be called… I don’t know, astroforging?
As U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello was considering how to vote on an important piece of climate change legislation in June, the freshman congressman’s office received at least six letters from two Charlottesville-based minority organizations voicing opposition to the measure.
The letters, as it turns out, were forgeries.
“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization,” said Tim Freilich, who sits on the executive committee of Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”
The faked letter from Creciendo Juntos was signed by “Marisse K. Acevado, Asst Member Coordinator,” an identity and position at Creciendo Juntos that do not exist.
The person who sent the letter has not been identified, but he or she was employed by a Washington lobbying firm called Bonner & Associates.
Staffers found five forged letters of this type, including one from the local chapter of the NAACP, just in Perriello’s correspondence. So you know there are lots more. This seems like the uncovering of a scam that’s been going on for years. In fact, this company, Bonner & Associates, has been at this for decades. Ed Markey wants an investigation from his perch in the Global Warming subcommittee.
Obviously the power of lobbyists has grown so much to become completely divorced from the Constitutional dictate of petitioning government for redress of grievances. In addition to writing legislation, owning political campaigns and having politicians jump in and out of their companies, lobby shops more recently have taken to these deceptive techniques of aping grassroots activity. They have funded and supported the teabaggers, and they’re now offering training sessions on how to approach Congressional town hall meetings during the August recess.
• Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”
• Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”
• Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”
They are busing people around the country to different town halls. Sound like the Brooks Brothers riots to you? Members of Congress somehow still think these meetings reflect the considered opinions of constituents. They should look at Tom Perriello’s mail.
“Ménage à Stella Artois” manages to be both glibly insulting and extraordinarily un-funny. Which is, in itself, fairly insulting. Milbank and Cillizza, through a series of (bad) puns that use the colorful names of microbrewed beers to poke fun at people in the news (swine flu victims should drink…Isolation Ale! Ha!), suggest, among many other things, that “the entire Republican Congressional leadership team” should drink Satan Red/Devil’s Brew/Fallen Angel/Evil Eye/Hell Bier (get it? because they’re demonic, I guess?). Oh, and that the Secretary of State should drink … Mad Bitch.
I’ll bet Jon Stewart is kicking himself for letting The Washington Post get that one before he got the chance.
Has there ever been a slimier, more unctuous piece of work than Mike Pence, a man whose brow is permanently furrowed in an insincere expression of deep regret that he’s forced to convey such terrible news about the Democrats’ raping of the American body politic? It makes your skin crawl.
WATSON: I’m very clear that we are not talking about anywhere close to a trillion or $800 billion in new taxes…so if you’ve got data from the CBO that suggests that some of the proposals on the table…represent that much in new taxes then that’s significant new information. Where are you getting that?
PENCE: Well I don’t think that’s significant new information I think the estimates we’ve all been working with from the CBO are in the — I’m trying to remember — it’s about the $800 billion range in the estimated cost of new taxes. … That’s really all out there Carlos.
He’s just lying. But he does it well. But then his former career prepared him well for it. He was a wingnut radio gasbag.
Americans have been conditioned by wingnut rhetoric into believing that government cannot possibly work well. I think that ought to be contradicted by the success of the Cash For Clunkers program, which leveraged $4-5 billion into the economy in seven days, got consumers spending again on big-ticket items, and improved fuel efficiency on 250,000 cars well above expectations (preliminary Congressional reports show a 69% increase in fuel efficiency – most people are trading in SUVs with 100,000 miles or more on them for solid passenger cars). The program is working so well that Congress wants to continue it.
Congress is moving quickly to save the depleted cash-for-clunkers program, as the House passed a $2 billion spending measure Friday afternoon that would keep alive a program that has encouraged American car owners to trade in their old gas guzzlers for more fuel efficient vehicles.
Despite some criticism from Republicans who called the legislation another bailout for another industry, the bill easily passed on a 316-109 bipartisan vote.
Under the fast-track bill, Democratic leaders will use funds from a renewable energy loan guarantee included in the stimulus. The bill would extend the program through Sept. 30, 2010. Democrats have portrayed the run on cash for clunkers cash as a great success for the $1 billion program, which allows car owners to turn in older, less fuel efficient cars for a $4,500 rebate to purchase higher gas mileage vehicles.
These are the same Republican stooges who complained that GM and Chrysler were shutting down too many auto dealers (remember how Obama was marking dealers for closure based on campaign contributions?). Now the government designs a program that massively helps dealers, advances fuel efficiency and through investment gets a lot of economic activity going, and they scream “bailout.” But if these were tax credits for rich people, they’d be sound measures to induce economic growth. There’s also the fact that this is not even new money, but money already in the stimulus package. They’re also whining that the dealers haven’t been paid yet, even though the program kicked off a WEEK ago. Apparently they all receive their paychecks instantly for all work they perform.
Sadly, too many people see a government program run out of money and think it failed. No, that means demand was so high that it fulfilled its initial purpose in a matter of days. And I see Claire McCaskill rejecting the idea of “subsidizing auto purchases forever.” Apparently “forever”=anything more than one week (UPDATED: she’s backtracked from that initial rejection now).
We still have a tough economy, mangled by failed conservative policies. The recession has leveled off into something approaching stagnation. And there is compelling evidence that the stimulus package is responsible for even getting us back to the stagnation point (it could have done more if it were the proper size). But by and large, consumers still aren’t spending and a lot of people still have no job. Until businesses start hiring again government needs to drive economic activity, which is why you’re seeing second stimulus packages proposed in the form of extending measures from the initial stimulus.
Except lots of those extensions revolve around corporate tax breaks and not things that put money into the economy. Things like Cash for Clunkers. And Democrats ought to tell the story that this successful government program, going deliberately and directly to Main Street, represents our best hope for eventual economic recovery.
John Amato caught Jay Rockefeller taking an unusual upright position:
Jay is a supporter of the public option and was pissed that the co-op proposal was inserted in the Baucus bill since it was never even talked about during the general election. Isn’t it nice that Baucus has killed the public option just to work with Republicans? Conservatives don’t even have to win elections to get what they want. That’s some deal they have.
Ed: It’s not going to work. There’s really no successful model out there to support the basis of signing on to a co-op. Would you sign on to a co-op or is that unacceptable?
Rockefeller: That’s unacceptable and I can almost prove it. We’ve been in touch with all the folks that oversee, represent all the co-ops in the country on all subjects and they point out that there are probably less than twenty health co-ops in the country. There are only two that really work that well. One in Puget Sound, one in Minnesota, except for those two, they are all unlicensed. All present health co-ops are all unlicensed, they’re unregulated. Nobody knows anything about them, nobody has any control over them and nobody has ever said, which is stunning to me, no government organization or private organization has ever done a study to what effect they might have in terms of bringing down the insurance prices.
They are untested, they are unlicensed, they are unregulated, they are unstudied. Why would we even think about putting them in as a control on this massive insurance industry instead of the public option?
Rockefeller, who has been shut out of the negotiations, is actually a health care wonk who has been working on these issues for years. Conrad, on the other hand, came up with this co-op thing all by himself in a late night bull session with some interns and the janitor apparently. That anyone is taking it seriously as a substitute for the public plan is ludicrous. I would imagine that’s why it even has Jay Rockefeller’s head exploding.
Now, much of this stuff is kabuki. Who knows what Jay’s really trying to accomplish here? But whatever it is, I’m grateful that he’s finally stepping into the breach and saying the truth about this half baked co-op concept, even if it’s just out of personal pique at not being included in the negotiations. Hey, we take what we can get.
