Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Obama’s Inauguration Music: The Truth

by tristero

Now we know:

h/t, the great Alex Ross.

Getting It Backwards

by tristero

The NYT headline reads “Budget Choices Test Obama’s Political Skills”. Oh, really?

They still don’t get who, and what, they’re dealing with. Obama’s “political skills” passed whatever tests they needed to pass well over a year ago. Today, he is wildly popular while his opponents are reduced to bleating that they want him to fail. Oh, and don’t forget all the money “wasted” on frivolities like monitoring volcanoes that threaten the lives of thousands of Americans.

Like Obama or hate him, the political skills being tested are not his but those in Congress, especially Republicans’.

Discuss.

Two Whole Days

by digby

…before the got around to trashing Ty’Sheoma Bethea. From Joan Walsh:

I thought it would come from Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbaugh, but Malkin is too busy planning her anti-tax tea parties while Rush gets ready for his close-up at the Conservative Political Action Committee this weekend (which is a collection of nuts so nutty even Sarah Palin stayed away).

No, it was the conservative Washington Times that cast the first stone at Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the Dillon, S.C., teenager who wrote to Congress seeking stimulus funds for her shamefully dilapidated school. Obama used her statement, “We are not quitters,” as the coda of his speech Tuesday night, but now the Moon-owned paper tells us what’s wrong with Bethea, in an editorial with the condescending headline, ‘Yes, Ty’Sheoma, there is a Santa Claus.”

Of course, they are full of crap as usual, but it doesn’t stop them from just making things up.

They really seem to take special joy in going after kids that speak out on public issues. See, they think it’s wrong when politicians use them for political purposes and they have no choice but to expose this exploitation.

Well, not always. This was just fine:

LYNN FAULKNER: My wife, Wendy, was murdered by terrorists on September 11th.

ANNOUNCER: The Faulkners’ daughter Ashley closed up emotionally but when President George W. Bush came to Lebanon, Ohio, she went to see him as she had with her mother four years before.

LINDA PRINCE (neighbor): He walked toward me and I said Mr. President this young lady lost her mother in the World Trade Center.

ASHLEY FAULKNER: And he turned around and he came back and he said I know that’s hard, are you all right?

LINDA: Our president took Ashley in his arms and just embraced her. And it was at that moment that we saw Ashley’s eyes fill up with tears.

ASHLEY: He’s the most powerful man in the world and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe, that I’m OK.

LYNN: What I saw was what I want to see in the heart and in the soul of the man who sits in the highest elected office in our country.

Just let your mind wander a bit and imagine what the wingnuts would say if that ad had featured Ty’Sheoma and Obama. Honestly, I shudder to think.

.

Perle Talks

by tristero

As you may recall I turned down an invitation to hear Richard Perle speak. Dana Milbank, however, did go. His headline summed up what happened: Prince of Darkness Denies Own Existence.

While normally, I am a big fan of ridiculing extremists like, say, Ayman al Zawahiri or Richard Perle, I was, for some reason, dissatisfied with the article. Perhaps the cause of my unease can be traced to Milbank’s punchline:

“I don’t know that I persuaded anyone,” Perle speculated when the session ended.

No worries, said the moderator. “You certainly kept us all entertained.”

Ah, hahahahahahahaha! Oh, those ever so clever villagers and their witty repartee. You would never know – as the laughter rose into the ceiling at the I-kid-you-not Nixon Center and comity was restored amongst the well-connected crowd – that Perle was directly responsible for thousands upon thousands of Iraqi deaths, not to mention more American deaths than occurred on 911. He’s entertaining.

These people make me sick. All of them. The only audience Perle deserves is the judge at a trial for his war crimes. And I’m absolutely positive, as the evidence accumulates of Perle’s critically influential role in the moral cesspool that was, and remains, the Bush/Iraq war, no one will find him entertaining in the slightest.

Don’t Trash The Reset Button

by dday

Today the Justice Department announced that Ali al-Marri, the last enemy combatant held inside the United States, would be charged and tried in a federal court in Illinois. This is a major victory for the rule of law. Instead of being held indefinitely without due process or habeas corpus, al-Marri will be given charges and prosecuted in an American courtroom, not a military commission. All Guantanamo prisoners deserve the same courtesy – either be tried, or released. In addition, we will probably get a ruling on al-Marri’s detention anyway, which would be positive to set the precedent:

The Supreme Court already agreed to consider a challenge to the constitutionality of al-Marri’s detention, and the ACLU is asking the Court still to consider that case. According to Al-Marri’s attorney, the ACLU’s Jonathan Hafetz, “it is vital that the Supreme Court case go forward because it must be made clear once and for all that indefinite military detention of persons arrested in the U.S. is illegal and that this will never happen again.”

There is another group of detainees that should be extended the rights of being tried or released – those at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan who were transferred there from around the world. The expansion of Bagram has raised fears that Obama may use it the way George Bush used Guantanamo.

Now, human rights groups say they are becoming increasingly concerned that the use of extra-judicial methods in Afghanistan could be extended rather than curtailed under the new U.S. administration. The air base is about to undergo a $60 million expansion that will double its size, meaning it can house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo.

Apart from staff at the International Red Cross, human rights groups and journalists have been barred from Bagram, where former prisoners say they were tortured by being shackled to the ceiling of isolation cells and deprived of sleep.

The base became notorious when two Afghan inmates died after the use of such techniques in 2002, and although treatment and conditions have been improved since then, the Red Cross issued a formal complaint to the U.S. government in 2007 about harsh treatment of some prisoners held in isolation for months.

While the majority of the estimated 600 prisoners are believed to be Afghan, an unknown number — perhaps several dozen — have been picked up from other countries.

Hilzoy had a great piece about this, showing the genuinely conflicting issues at play here. But one thing seems fairly obvious – if we are going to restore our moral authority around the world, we need to have the same standard for those detainees at Bagram not detained in the course of military conflict as we ought to have for those at Guantanamo. That’s not just true of the Muslim world, where support for Al Qaeda itself is mixed, but strongly in favor of their efforts to drive the United States off their land, through force if necessary. It’s also true of our allies in Europe, who will not work with us on key issues if we just rebuild Guantanamo at Bagram.

In one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama ordered the closure within one year of Guantanamo Bay, where about 245 people are still detained and which has been widely viewed as a stain on the U.S. human rights record.

But Obama has yet to decide what to do about the jail at Bagram, where more than 600 prisoners are held, or whether to continue work on a $60 million prison complex there.

Washington wants the EU to help it close Guantanamo by agreeing to accept discharged prisoners who cannot be returned to their own countries for fear of torture.

But a confidential EU policy paper, obtained by Reuters, said such help would depend on Washington’s overall anti-terrorism policies, including assurances that Bagram or other camps would not become new Guantanamos.

“I would find it very surprising, if the (U.S.) policy remained the same while Guantanamo was closed, to see the EU mobilize itself,” EU anti-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told Reuters.

The EU policy paper said: “It would not be in conformity with EU fundamental rights policies to simply transfer Guantanamo elsewhere (i.e. in Bagram) without solving the underlying question of the detention of terror suspects for indefinite time and without trial.”

This is going to undermine our efforts at global cooperation if it is allowed to fester. Obama’s honeymoon around the world will quickly come to an end. We will have lost a great opportunity to push the reset button.

.

FYI

by digby

In case you were wondering, here’s the Peterson Foundation’s quick response to President Obama’s budget:

President Obama’s first budget contains many encouraging signs, along with some items of concern. He is to be commended for providing a 10-year budget projection and a specific deficit-reduction goal; for including a number of items in the baseline budget that previously were not included (e.g., war costs, AMT fix); and for supporting a PAYGO concept in connection with mandatory spending increases and tax cuts.

At the same time, the President is not proposing to adopt discretionary spending caps or automatic reconsideration triggers for mandatory spending items and tax preferences. In addition, he is proposing to move some items from the discretionary to the mandatory spending category. He is also advocating expanding health care coverage before we have demonstrated our ability to control health care costs, and before we make a significant down-payment on the federal government’s tens of trillions of dollars in current unfunded health care promises.

The President’s budget results in total debt-to-GDP of 96 percent and rising by 2010. This serves to demonstrate the need for the creation of a Fiscal Future Commission to help us get our federal finances in order before we lose the confidence of our foreign lenders.

— David M. Walker, President & CEO, PGPF
February 26, 2009

Clearly, they are not happy at all with the idea of health care reform which is no surprise. “Entitlements” are the enemy after all.

They are going to keep pressing for a commission, which is not supportable. The Republicans clearly want this as well, and it’s possible the administration will mistakenly let them have it as a delaying action. But they should resist. These things lead to nothing good and often create some very serious mischief. Just say no.

Update: Thanks to Greg Anrig for correcting Mark Ambinder on this hysterical nonsense about social security and the new budget. But I won’t be surprised to see Ambinder’s take turn up in other places.

.

Gratitude

by digby

CPAC dispatch:

[John] Bolton’s speech was rather heavy on partisan politics. He asked a packed room to work to elect Republicans in special elections and 2010, something possible because “this is still a center-right country” and “the Democrats misinterpreted the vote that they got.”

And Bolton was overjoyed to be untethered from the Bush administration. Conservatives were stronger now, he said, because they didn’t have to defend George W. Bush. “Too many people identified the Bush administration with conservatism,” said Bolton. “I think that’s far from being accurate.”

Uhm:

During the George W. Bush administration, Bolton has been the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (2001-2005) and U.S. Ambassador to the UN (2005)

And considering what he oversaw during his tenure, one can only assume that he’s disappointed that he didn’t get to start a nuclear war. That’s pretty much all that’s left on the conservative hawk wish list. But the man still has dreams, apparently.

Update: County Fair is collecting video highlights of the conference. Much hilarity all around. Jamison Foser writes that our old friend David Bossie introduced Newtie, and give a neat primer on Bossie’s history.

I don’t think Bossie gets the credit from conservatives he deserves. He was a huge part of their success in the 1990s. ( And the press should give him a bit wet kiss as well, as I wrote back in 2004:)

The press ate up Bossie’s lies over and over again until there was no conclusion one could reach except that they just didn’t care about the truth. The Whitewater psuedo-scandal and the seventy million wasted taxpayer dollars that flowed from it was driven by Bossie’s operation and he remained a player in the Scaife funded character assassination plot for the entire Clinton administration. It’s not as if the press didn’t know from the very beginning with whom they were dealing because they were called to task for their stenographic use of Citizens United “press packages” all the way back in June of 1994 by Trudy Lieberman in the Columbia Journalism Review:

Bossie, the twenty-eight-year-old political director for Citizens United, a conservative Republican operation, runs an information factory whose Whitewater production lines turn out a steady stream of tips, tidbits, documents, factoids, suspicions, and story ideas for the nation’s press and for Republicans on Capitol Hill. Journalists and Hill Republicans have recycled much of the information provided by Citizens United into stories that have cast a shadow on the Clinton presidency. […] …Citizens United has collected thousands of facts and documents on Whitewater and packaged it all to catch the attention of the press and to restoke the story whenever it threatened to die down. Bossie and Brown have been briefing people since October — “the top fifty major publications, networks, and editorial boards,” Bossie says. “We’ve provided the same material on the Hill both on the House and Senate side.” An equal opportunity source, Bossie says he would gladly provide documents to Democrats, but they haven’t asked. Francis Shane, publisher of Citizens United’s newsletter, ClintonWatch, hesitates to say exactly whom they’ve worked with — “We don’t particularly like to pinpoint people” — but he does say, “We have worked closer with The New York Times than The Washington Times.” Jeff Gerth, The New York Times’s chief reporter on Whitewater, hesitated to talk on the record. He did say, “If Citizens United has some document that’s relevant, I take it. I check it out like anything else […] The March 1994 issue of ClintonWatch characterized the organization’s impact on Whitewater press coverage this way: “We here at ClintonWatch have been working day and night with the major news media to help them get the word out about the Clintons and their questionable dealings in Whitewater and Madison Guaranty.” Of course, Citizens United is not the only source of information on Whitewater. And reputable reporters do their own digging and doublechecking. Still, an examination of some 200 news stories from the major news outlets aired or published since November shows an eerie similarity between the Citizens United agenda and what has been appearing in the press, not only in terms of specific details but in terms of omissions, spin, and implication. […]
Whitewater is about character, publisher Fran Shane tells me. “The American people have elected a president with 43 percent of the vote. He is a man of no character. He may have to tell the people he didn’t come clean. We’re saying Bill Clinton may not be worth saving.” Many news organizations explain the importance of Whitewater in similar terms. Take Time, for instance. In a January 24 story laced with references to documents that also appear in Bossie’s Whitewater collection, the magazine pronounced that “the investigation concerns the much larger issue of whether a President and First Lady can be trusted to obey the law and tell the truth.” The character issue can be turned on the press, which has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization, with revenues of more than $ 2 million a year, without identifying the group as the source of some of their information.

Redux

by digby

Many people ascribe the success of the 1994 Republican Revolution to Newt Gingrich. And he was the public face and driving force behind it, no doubt about it. But it was really William Kristol who made it possible with his famous memo about obstructing health care reform:

[P]assage of the Clinton health care plan in any form would be disastrous. It would guarantee an unprecedented federal intrusion into the American economy. Its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas. And, not least, it would destroy the present breadth and quality of the American health care system, the world’s finest.

He’s making the same arguments today:

Obama intends to use his big three issues — energy, health care and education — to transform the role of the federal government as fundamentally as did the New Deal and the Great Society.

Conservatives and Republicans will disapprove of this effort. They will oppose it. Can they do so effectively?

Perhaps — if they can find reasons to obstruct and delay. They should do their best not to permit Obama to rush his agenda through this year. They can’t allow Obama to make of 2009 what Franklin Roosevelt made of 1933 or Johnson of 1965. Slow down the policy train. Insist on a real and lengthy debate. Conservatives can’t win politically right now. But they can raise doubts, they can point out other issues that we can’t ignore (especially in national security and foreign policy), they can pick other fights — and they can try in any way possible to break Obama’s momentum. Only if this happens will conservatives be able to get a hearing for their (compelling, in my view) arguments against big-government, liberal-nanny-state social engineering — and for their preferred alternatives.

It worked the first time. But Clinton had won with a plurality in an election where the deficit was fetishized as the greatest threat to economic prosperity. The economy turned around quickly from the recession of 91-92 and the tech bubble took off shortly thereafter. Health insurance was still affordable. The Republicans were ascendant, the culture war was in full effect, the decades-long electoral realignment was coming to completion with the old conservative Democratic Lions finally retiring. The cold war was over and nothing had yet emerged to take its place to keep the Military Industrial Complex humming. It was a different world.

Today, nearly all of that is completely irrelevant and we are possibly in the midst of a once in a century economic meltdown and an unprecedented climate crisis. Oh, and there are a bunch of religious fanatics blowing stuff up around the world. We just came off of eight years of Republican governance — and 28 years of conservative dominance — that either created or exacerbated all those problems. Indeed, it’s the reason the Republicans were routed in the election.

But then none of that would be persuasive to Kristol, would it? The man is arguing that Roosevelt should have been obstructed in 1933, so the scope of the crisis doesn’t affect his view and the size of the mandate is obviously irrelevant. He simply seeks to find a way to keep the Democrats from achieving anything that the people might see as a positive in their lives. Like Rush Limbaugh, he is openly advocating failure.

Think about what Limbaugh said:

If I wanted Obama to succeed, I’d be happy the Republicans have laid down. And I would be encouraging Republicans to lay down and support him. Look, what he’s talking about is the absorption of as much of the private sector by the US government as possible, from the banking business, to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work. So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.” (interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here’s the point. Everybody thinks it’s outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, “Oh, you can’t do that.” Why not? Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don’t care what the Drive-By story is. I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.” Somebody’s gotta say it.

He is not saying that he doesn’t think liberalism can succeed. He’s worried that it will. So is Kristol when he writes that Obama can’t be allowed to succeed the way Roosevelt and Johnson did. After all, Roosevelt succeeded in leading the country though two of the worst events of the 20th century. Johnson finally ended American apartheid. These are the successes that Obama must not be allowed to emulate.

It’s primarily politics, of course. Both Limbaugh and Kristol are afraid that Obama’s success would mean decades in the wilderness for Republicans. But by looking for failure of Obama’s policy initiatives they are also showing a tremendous insecurity about their own philosophy.

All day I see Republicans on television, filled with sanctimony and phony concern, keening about the deficit and reckless spending and fiscal responsibility. Today, they’ve even resurrected the “tax and spend” trope. These are the same Republicans who gave away the budget surplus to to their wealthy friends and who then went on to destroy the financial system. The same people who spent an estimated three trillion dollars on a war based on lies that didn’t need to be fought. Now they are shamelessly publicly lecturing the new president on “responsibility” and obstructing everything they know is necessary for a recovery, but it sounds hollow and strange in current circumstances.(See: Jindal, Bobby)

They will not change. They will wait it out, hoping for failure, trying to figure out some new “branding” and marketing” for their stale, aristocratic philosophy. They will try to keep the Democrats from enacting the kind of programs that will permanently undermine wealthy interests while trying to resurrect their own ideology so that it’s ready for them to ride it to victory once the liberals have cleaned up the mess. It’s a tightrope, but they’ve walked it before, and been successful.

In fact, it’s the way the pendulum swings. And that’s why it’s important that liberals protect the safety net programs and initiate those that are overdue at times like this. They need them to be there in the future when the aristocrats get greedy and screw things up for everyone as they always do. Roosevelt enacted unemployment insurance, welfare for women with children and social security during the depression. Johnson enacted poverty programs like Head Start that are still feeding little poor kids today during this economic crisis. Without all those things, this country would be in much worse shape today after the greedheads drove us off a cliff. Again. One of the functions of the safety net is to give our society a cushion for the times when wealthy criminals use their outsized power and influence to loot the treasury and cause a cascading effect of misery to come down on average peoples’ heads.

It would be pretty to think they will never do it again. But they will. And if they truly believe their own cant about self-interest, they should be hoping that the Democrats pass health care (which is a good for business as it is for individuals), tackle global warming and do all these things that Meteor Blades recommends. Conservatism is a luxury that can only be afforded by a thriving country. It needs a healthy organism to feed on. And they almost killed it this time.

They need to let the country recover and recuperate but they can’t admit that, make amends or pay the price for their perfidy. They are Randian bullshit addicts and they haven’t hit bottom yet.

Update: And by the way, if Kristol and Limbaugh need some further education on whyfFree market Hooverism is so dangerous, this is it. Maybe all the neocons think Roosevelt should have just let the economy correct itself, but human beings are creatures with free will and tend to react when the “correction” destroys their lives and their futures. Bad things were happening in 1933. Bad things can happen again. These are not things to trifle with.

Update II: Limbaugh today:

LIMBAUGH: I am told South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford called me an idiot, not by name. But he said, “Anyone who wants Obama to fail is an idiot.” I don’t anybody else who said it. So, I guess he’s talking about– … Politicians have different audiences than I do and they’ve got to say things in different ways. So, after he said, “Anyone who wants Obama to fail is an idiot,” then went on in his own way to say, “Gosh, I hope this doesn’t work.” … He just had to say, “We don’t want the president to fail.”

Hell we don’t! We want something to blow up here politically. We want something to not go right. … We’re talking about freedom that is under assault!

He just keeps digging.

.

Breaking The Conservative Working Majority

by dday

The proposed cram-down provisions that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify terms of primary residences, the way they can on secondary residences and yachts and all kinds of other assets, are a perfectly sensible way to give homeowners who might otherwise be out of the street after foreclosure a modicum of leverage in the process, freeing up lenders to perform loan modifications on their properties. In the end, nobody is served by millions more homes on the market and millions more homeless. But the banksters don’t want to do it. They have spent millions lobbying against it because they would rather pretend that they have larger assets than they do. Perversely, a loan that will go unpaid means more to them than a modified loan that would get paid. So they are desperately trying to add loopholes and conditions and restrictions.

And because we have this group of “New Democrats” who basically parrot whatever corporate lobbyists tell them, it is a successful gambit.

House Democratic leaders have abruptly canceled votes on legislation to let bankruptcy judges reduce the principal and interest rate on mortgages for debt-strapped homeowners.

The measure, backed by President Barack Obama, is the most controversial part of a broader housing package that was expected to pass on Thursday.

It hit a snag after a group of moderates expressed concerns in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats about how the bill would affect homeowners who are still struggling to make their mortgage payments.

The banking industry has lobbied hard against the measure, mounting a successful multimillion-dollar effort last year to kill it. The House is debating the measure and leaders hope to reschedule votes for next week.

It’s just revolting. The concern of “moderates” is simply a lie. Homeowners who are struggling to make payments would benefit from having their lender be more inclined to give them a lower payment. After all, we practically own the banks at this point. The least they could do is act in the interest of the majority of Americans. It’s not like they’ll be hurting for cash, given what is coming out about the Geithner plans for essentially unlimited refills.

This is a structural problem, where incumbents well-heeled with campaign cash have more to fear from industry and multinationals than their own constituents. A new progressive group called Accountability Now is seeking to change that dynamic.

Some of the most prominent names in progressive politics launched a major new organization on Thursday dedicated to pinpointing and aiding primary challenges against incumbent Democrats who are viewed as acting against their constituents’ interests.

Accountability Now PAC will officially be based in Washington D.C., though its influence is designed to be felt in congressional districts across the country. The group will adopt an aggressive approach to pushing the Democratic Party in a progressive direction; it will actively target, raise funds, poll and campaign for primary challengers to members who are either ethically or politically out-of-touch with their voters. The goal, officials with the organization say, is to start with 25 potential races and dwindle it down to eight or 10; ultimately spending hundreds of thousands on elections that usually wouldn’t be touched.

This will be looked at with an eye toward district realities. There are too many members of Congress representing deep-blue districts who equivocate to powerful special interests. There needs to be a countervailing force, and Accountability Now can become that.

The New York Times has more, although they kind of botch the story. This is a good development for the progressive movement.

.

One Week To Go For Tom Geoghegan

by dday

Next Tuesday voters in Illinois will vote to fill the vacant seat of Rahm Emanuel in a special election, with 23 candidates on the ballot. With the, er, spotlight on Illinois politics recently, and the fact that this is Rod Blagojevich’s old seat, the Democratic establishment and Chicago political leaders have largely stayed out of the race. With no front-runner, there is a real opportunity for progressive leader Tom Geoghegan to win. Harold Meyerson writes a great profile:

Little about Tom Geoghegan resembles Ronald Reagan, but his hard-to-decipher last name rhymes with the former president’s. A wry, heterodox liberal intellectual with a lifelong passion for American workers, Geoghegan first burst on to the literary and political scene with a great, slightly crazed ode to Chicago — in the best tradition of Hecht, Algren and Bellow — that ran in the New Republic in the 1980s and then with his 1991 book “Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back,” which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has since written four other books, some on the shambles that is the American legal system. He’s became the go-to lawyer for Chicagoans who’ve lost their jobs through discrimination or who’ve been denied the pay they’ve earned. And now, he’s the congressional candidate who supports single-payer health care, expanding Social Security to compensate for the decimation of private pensions, and government investment to rebuild our offshored manufacturing sector.

I confess that I’m both a friend of Tom’s and a Geogheganologist — a distinction I attained when, for a year, I edited the back-page columns he was then writing for the American Prospect. A typical Geoghegan column combined the sense of outrage that all columnists need with broad historical knowledge and a particularly Chicagoan feel for life as it is actually, grubbily, lived. One column on mass transit cut from scenes of Geoghegan stuck in traffic on the way to O’Hare to Henry Clay’s case for internal improvements (roads and canals) to a discussion of how much easier it is to get from Dublin to Madrid than it is to get from Chicago to Detroit. In another column he wrote before Wall Street’s collapse, Geoghegan lamented the high percentage of elite college graduates who funneled themselves into finance, and he characterized the bank bailout policy of the Bush administration as “the new social contract: In Tribeca, at least, no kid will ever lose his (or her) first (or second) condo.” Another time, he wondered “why, in the party of William Jennings Bryan, is there no one demanding an interest cap on our Visa cards and our MasterCards,” also noting that in Chicago, “payday lenders charge more than the Mob wants for juice loans.” In the collected works of Tom Geoghegan, the value of social and economic ideas and practices is set by the way they play out on the streets […] while the nation is going through its first real systemic economic crisis since the Depression, a guy who can knowledgeably compare public works programs clear back to the Jefferson administration and who can sniff out a bankers’ relief program a mile away seems to me exactly what Congress needs.

Howie Klein gives us the state of the race:

Meyerson follows endorsements in the last couple of days by three of Chicago’s legendary progressive reformer elders, Abner Mikva, Dr. Quentin Young, and Leon Despres, and from one of Tom’s former opponents, Marty Oberman. Many in the Inside the Beltway Establishment have other favorite candidates. Predictably Emily’s List endorsed a woman, basically their only criteria for endorsement these days. And some of the labor unions we’ve grown to trust came out for those who have scratched their backs in the grubby world of backroom politics. DFA, The Nation, Progressive Democrats of America, the American Nurses Association, the Greater Chicago Caucus, the Teamsters and Steelworkers unions and a long list of progressive writers from Katha Pollitt and David Sirota to Thomas Frank. Garry Wills, Don Rose and James Fallows have come out for Tom.

Geoghegan is the real deal and he can win. You can help.

Donate
Volunteer locally
Make calls from home

.