A reader received this from Newt Gingrich’s group “American Solutions for Winning The Future” this morning. This is the refined version of his earlier “plan” to bail out the economy. (Click on the image to enlarge.)
I particularly like the amazing chutzpah of suggesting that repealing mark to market and Sarbanes-Oxley will solve the problem. See, what caused the financial crisis was too much regulation which made the companies less accountable than they were before. You just have to love the stubbornness with which these guys cling to their delusions even in the face of stone cold reality.
The “make America more like Singapore and Ireland” are unusual for the exceptionalist crowd, but maybe this is a sort of progress… The rest is a hodgepodge of wingnut wet dreams and traditional pitchfork populist war cries.
Don’t underestimate the political power of foolishness like this, however. It’s all got a certain intuitive logic even if it is completely incoherent. Complicated problems are often subject to this kind of manipulation and Newtie is very good at finding that particular sweet spot of illogic that will appeal to average Americans who have absorbed just enough conservative propaganda to feel that what he says just “makes sense.”
Somebody needs to tell the twits at CNN about this. They’ve been flogging this ACORN story as if it features fellatio or something. It’s been totally wild and irresponsible. And, naturally, they’ve missed the real story.
A former top Department of Justice voting rights official — who once worked with John McCain in defense of the senator’s campaign-finance reform bill — has added his name to the growing chorus that is denouncing the department’s investigation of ACORN as a shameful and inappropriate politicization of Justice along the lines of the US attorney firings. Speaking to TPMmuckraker, Gerry Hebert described the investigation, word of which was leaked off the record to the Associated Press less than three weeks before the election, as “a continuation of injecting DOJ into what has clearly become a political issue.” He continued: “That’s really not the proper role for the DOJ, and why their policies counsel otherwise.” To demonstrate that point, Hebert provided TPMmuckraker with a copy of the department’s Manual on Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses. Under a section headlined “Investigative Considerations in Election Fraud Cases”, the manual reads:
When investigating election fraud, three considerations that are absent from most criminal investigations must be kept in mind: (1) respect for the primary role of the states in administering the voting process, (2) an awareness of the role of the election in the governmental process, and (3) sensitivity to the exercise of First Amendment rights in the election context. As a result there are limitations on various investigative steps in an election fraud case. In most cases, election-related documents should not be taken from the custody of local election administrators until the election to which they pertain has been certified, and the time for contesting the election results has expired. This avoids interfering with the governmental processes affected by the election Another limitation affects voter interviews. Election fraud cases often depend on the testimony of individual voters whose votes were co-opted in one way or another. But in most cases voters should not be interviewed, or other voter-related investigation done, until after the election is over. Such overt investigative steps may chill legitimate voting activities. They are also likely to be perceived by voters and candidates as an intrusion into the election. Indeed, the fact of a federal criminal investigation may itself become an issue in the election.
I’m sure CNN could call this fellow and get him on the air. And there are others:
… House Judiciary chair John Conyers, and, in an interview with TPMmuckraker, former US attorney David Iglesias, have … also connected the FBI’s ACORN investigation to the kind of politicization exposed in the firings saga.
And finally, (thank you!) the Obama campaign has engaged on this:
“With this voter fraud [investigation], we’re seeing an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics,” Bob Bauer, an elections lawyer with the Obama camp, said on a conference call with reporters just now. Bauer compared the decision to launch the investigation with the US attorneys scandal, in which several US attorneys were fired for their unwillingess to pursue politically charged cases, including voter fraud, with sufficient aggression to satisfy the Bush administration. Bauer released a letter sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling on him to have the issue taken on by Nora Dannehy, the prosecutor he appointed to investigate the US attorney firings.
Maybe now the media will take a closer look at what’s going on here. They have been actively helping the Republicans breathlessly frame this election as illegitimate based on nothing more than right wing propaganda. Events are driving the election to a possible big win in a couple of weeks, but this is the sort of thing that could deny Obama a much needed mandate to do what needs to be done. That’s part of the plan.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told a fundraiser in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Thursday night:
“We believe that the best of America is in the small towns that we get to visit, and in the wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation,” she said.
Now, Democrats aren’t taking it anymore:
At a rally in Mesilla, New Mexico, on Friday, Biden responded to those comments in a vociferous tone.
“I hope it was just a slip on her part and she doesn’t really mean it. But she said, it was reported she said, that she likes to visit, ‘pro-American’ parts of the country,” he said to loud boos.
“It doesn’t matter where you live, we all love this country, and I hope it gets through. We all love this country,” he said. “We are one nation, under God, indivisible. We are all patriotic. We all love our country in every part of this nation! And I’m tired. I am tired, tired, tired, tired of the implications about patriotism.”
Note to conservatives: Indeed, Palin later clarified those remarks. She had to, but only because Democrats, liberals, and others strongly objected. However, the past eight years were filled with Republicans impugning the patriotism of Democrats and liberals. Here, for example, is Steve Dunleavy, only weeks after the 9/11 attacks:
It is amazing how liberals, whom I regard as traitors in this time of crisis…
I have no illusions that Republicans will stop questioning the patriotism of Democrats and liberals any time soon. It will start to happen only when a nationally respected Dem goes on the offense, and says publicly, for example, that the scoundrels who outed Valerie Plame actually were traitors who deliberately, with malice aforethought, imperiled the safety of their country.
UPDATE: Listen to this asshole. This has to stop. Some people think Chris Matthews tore her apart. Not true. He was far too polite. He didn’t challenge her: he just asked a few pointed questions and let her rant and rant and rant.
One hopes that her Democratic colleagues in the House would call her on this bullshit. Fat chance.
UPDATE: If you’d like to help get rid Bachmann, perhaps you might consider a donation to her opponent. If you don’t want to donate directly to Democrats – highly suggested, as it increases liberal influence if we can package donations – I’ll try to locate a liberal group to fund a donation through and post it as another update.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to an ActBlue site that supports Tinklenberg
This was inevitable. After all, McCain himself accused them of destroying the fabric of democracy on national television:
An ACORN community organizer received a death threat and the liberal activist group’s Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized Thursday, reflecting mounting tensions over its role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote next month. Attorneys for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now were notifying the FBI and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division of the incidents, said Brian Kettenring, a Florida-based spokesman for the group. Republicans, including presidential candidate John McCain, have verbally attacked the group repeatedly in recent days, alleging a widespread vote-fraud scheme, although they’ve provided little proof. It was disclosed Thursday that the FBI is examining whether thousands of fraudulent voter-registration applications submitted by some ACORN workers were part of a systematic effort or isolated incidents. Kettenring said that a senior ACORN staffer in Cleveland, after appearing on television this week, got an e-mail that said she “is going to have her life ended.” A female staffer in Providence, R.I., got a threatening call from someone who said words to the effect of “We know you get off work at 9,” then uttered racial epithets, he said.
Meanwhile, Congresswoman Michelle Bachman appeared on Hardball today and pretty much openly called for new McCarthy hearings to root out “unamerican” liberals in the government.
Many of us have been girding ourselves for the inevitable emergence of the fiscal responsibility scolds, who pop up like stinkweed whenever Democrats take office. It was clear they were preparing a full frontal attack on government spending, but after the events of the last month I would have thought they’d stick their heads back down and wait for a little bit to see if their case would now endanger the entire economy.
No such luck. They are still flogging their obsession with entitlement spending uber alles. But some economists aren’t taking this lying down. Here’s James Galbraith:
Excuse me for asking an impolite question. But did David Walker, Eugene Steuerle — or Peter G. Peterson himself — devote even five percent of the vast resources that they have lavished in recent years on the supposed “entitlement crisis” to warning about the impending mess on Wall Street? Did they write anything about it? Did they speak out against the Bush administration’s abandonment of supervisory responsibility in the financial system? Did they protest the massive abuse of unsophisticated home buyers by the loan originators in the subprime sector? Did they comment on “liars’ loans,” “neutron loans” and “toxic waste”? Were they heard about the risks involved in securitizing subprime loans? Did they foresee that credit default swaps could collapse like a house of cards? Did they caution that the stock market might crash, ruining the private retirements of millions of Americans? If they did, I must have missed it. Peter G. Peterson is one of the leading figures on Wall Street. Isn’t it reasonable to ask, that if he and his team wish to be taken seriously on matters of public finance, that they should have shown some leadership, some wisdom, some insight and some foresight on the disaster brewing in their own backyard? As the disaster on Wall Street developed, George Soros was heard from. Warren Buffett was heard from. Was Peter G. Peterson heard from? Was David Walker heard from? Was Eugene Steuerle heard from? I think they were not. What is Mr. Walker’s approach to subprime crisis today? His comment above makes his approach clear. It is to use the crisis as a rhetorical springboard, in order to divert the conversation back to what he calls the “super sub-prime crisis associated with the federal government’s deteriorating finances…” But the fact is, the subprime crisis is real. The collapse of interbank lending is real. The collapsing stock market is real. The disintegration of the financial system is real. The collapse of the housing sector is real. The credit crunch and the recession are real. You can see this in the interest rate spreads and in the credit that is unavailable at any price. Mr. Walker’s “super subprime crisis” of the federal government is not real. It is a pure figment of the imagination. It is something Mr. Walker sees in his mind’s eye. He sees it in his budget projections. He sees it in his balance sheets, which are the oddest balance sheets I’ve ever seen, because they have all liabilities and no assets. But the financial markets do not see it. How can we tell? Because those markets are willing, today, to lend unlimited sums to the Federal Government on supremely favorable terms. What is the 20 year Treasury bond rate? Last month, it was 4.32 percent. That is almost exactly what it was in December 1959, in the last month of the Eisnehower administration. The United States Government wasn’t going bankrupt then and it isn’t going bankrupt now. The point is directly relevant to the question posed by National Journal: “is there room for fiscal stimulus?” Of course there is. Not only that, sustained fiscal expansion (I dislike the term “stimulus” because I do not think that a short-term policy will work) will be essential in the next administration if the financial rescue just undertaken is to succeed. It will be necessary to stabilize the housing sector. It will be necessary to stabilize state and local government spending, undercut by falling property tax revenues. It will be necessary to stabilize the incomes and expenditures, in the aggregate, of the elderly. It will be necessary to finance new capital spending at the federal, state and local levels. Failure to do this will cause the housing crisis to get worse. And that will cause the losses in the financial sector to multiply, overwhelming all efforts to stabilize finance. I was at the Peterson Institute the other day. There I heard a very good panel discussion of the financial crisis, featuring Fred Bergsten, Adam Posen, Morris Goldstein and others. All agreed that the deficit would exceed one trillion dollars next year. All agreed on the need for the expansionary and stabilizing steps outlined above. Nobody was defending, in any serious way, the Walker-Steuerle line. I found this greatly encouraging.
I would find it encouraging too if the Village CW wasn’t gelling around the idea that the government is going to have to “tighten its belt” at a time when it most needs to take the belt all the way off. It’s almost as if they are those little birds on cuckoo clocks popping out every hour on the hour during a Democratic presidency, squawking about deficit reduction and entitlements. Even in the middle of an economic crisis they maintain that the government is going to have to tackle the deficit right this minute despite the fact that it is, as Galbraith points out above, a disastrous policy.
I don’t know how much pressure these people can bring to bear on an Obama administration, but so far, he hasn’t taken this on directly. I’m inclined to cut him some slack in these last few weeks simply because it’s too difficult to reeducate the American public in such a short time. But he’s going to have to start doing it at some point or risk the success of his administration for outmoded Republican cant.
Among the images that greeted visitors to the John McCain campaign office in Pompano Beach this week was a sign headlined “Barrack Hussein Obama” that compared the Democratic presidential candidate to Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro.
Shown a picture of the sign Thursday night, Broward Republican Chairman Chip LaMarca said he was “disgusted” by it and would immediately go to the office and remove it.
“I’m speechless at the ignorance,” LaMarca said. “It’s not something we can condone.
Tom Delay is on a book tour…The book, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” has generated a bunch of press, but it’s clear that Jewish Democratic activists haven’t read it. Or else they would have jumped all over this graff…
“I believe it was Adolf Hitler who first acknowledged that the big lie is more effective than the little lie, because the big lie is so audacious, such an astonishing immorality, that people have a hard time believing anyone would say it if it wasn’t true. You know, the big lie — like the Holocaust never happened or dark-skinned people are less intelligent than light-skinned people. Well, by charging this big lie” — that DeLay violated campaign-finance laws in Texas — “liberals have finally joined the ranks of scoundrels like Hitler.”
He’s funny …
Or this, from wingnut welfare queen, Brent Bozell:
Obama’s communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.
AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a “Global Poverty Act” designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.
But the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous. Decades ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them covert agents who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret subsidies from the old Soviet Union.
This stuff is nothing unusual among the right. All Democrats are considered communists of some sort among these folks. (Bill Clinton traveled to Russia as a college student — OMG!) But there is something deliciously frightening in their minds about a black communist. They may not even know who Paul Robeson was, but they’ve absorbed the message into their tiny lizard brains.
Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)
I don’t know how Barak Obama’s parents met. But the Kincaid article referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama’s family, later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black Communist intellectual. And, according to what Obama wrote in his first autobiography, the man in question — Frank Marshall Davis — appears to have been Barack’s own mentor, and even a father figure. Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it’s an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer.
Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama’s mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let’s recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm’s distance.
It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn’t buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.
Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family’s background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.
Why blame some obscure Republican citizen for putting up a sign comparing Obama with famous communists and Hitler down in Florida? This stuff is coming from well known movement conservatives and featured in their respected publications and websites. Of course people are picking it up around the country. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.
Is there any value in an endorsement that comes in the last two weeks of a campaign where the endorsee is substantially ahead? It wouldn’t hurt to have General Luke Warmwater come out for Obama, but I don’t see why anyone but the Villagers will give a damn.
The Supremes wisely (and unanimously) refused to get burned by Republican election fraud shennanigans before the election. (No guarantees about after…)
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in favor of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, overturning a lower-court order that she provide to county elections boards by today details of discrepancies discovered with new voter registrations. The court ruled 9-0 that the Ohio Republican Party, which sued Brunner for the information, was unlikely to succeed in its arguments that Brunner legally could be sued on this issue and that the courts had the authority to issue the order. But the court expressed no opinion about whether federal law was being followed properly. At issue is what should be done when personal information from newly registered voters doesn’t match state motor vehicle and federal Social Security records after an automatic computer check is done. The ruling settles for now a dispute that had worked its way through the lower federal courts in recent days, with district and appellate judges taking different sides on the issue.
I love the theory of this conspiracy. People are registering voters with names, addresses, ages, drivers’ license numbers or last four digits of their Social Security numbers, which are very close to real voter’s information. (So close they appear to be data entry typos.) And then these 200,000 fraudulent voters, all of whom are in on the secret plan, vote under their own names and later come back and vote again under the closely matched phony information. (Either that or they all have an elaborate second identity which includes phony ID and social security numbers.)
If the Democrats can pull this off, I think it’s clear they should win the election just for their supernatural ability to get hundreds of thousands of people to keep such a secret.
As this NY Times guide makes clear, there are points of agreement between Obama and McCain when it comes to the government’s role in science and innovation issues. But the differences are stark and for anyone who cares about America’s role in advancing science and technology, the choice is a no brainer. Let me not keep you in suspense. Obama’s positions are far superior to his opponent’s.
In the area of “research spending” for example, McCain is full of stunts. One of them is just plain stupid political nonsense: McCain would “freeze research spending for at least a year.” Now, this “idea” is not something reasonable people discuss. No. Reasonable people laugh uproariously and change the subject. Why? Because if you discuss this crackpot notion and earnestly try to debunk it, you fall into the exact same trap that was set by the proposal to invade Iraq. You elevate its status and make it appear plausible when it is simply as batshit crazy as proposing a space mission to rendezvous with the alien spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
Slightly less screwy is McCain’s proposal for a $300 million prize for battery technology innovation. Sure, why not? I suppose it can’t hurt and the publicity stunt will focus the public’s attention on an important issue in the development of the electric car and other new gadgets. But that is essentially all it is: A publicity stunt.
Finally, McCain resorts to those cure-all tonics Republicans swear by: tax cuts and deregulation. That’s not a program that engages the US government in serious research. That’s a program that elevates neglect, corruption, and mismanagement to official government policy. With an attitude like that, McCain will create precisely the kind of government he and his party claim to despise.
Obama on the other hand will “double spending on basic research over 10 years.” Since there is no hoo-hah from Obama on deregulation, we can assume that he expects to provide appropriate oversight. (Needless to say, those who are close to the specific issues will need to make sure this actually happens.) That is smart. In numerous sciences, from computing to physics to biology, technological advances are proceeding at an accelerated pace. By doubling the money available (and naturally, spending it wisely), Obama will help prevent a brain drain to other countries. This does have the potential to significantly advance America’s lead in innovative science and technology.
Obama would go further, creating ” a public-private network of business incubators and establish a fund to advance manufacturing technology.” These are specific policy proposals, not publicity stunts. Sure, a fund to “advance manufacturing technology” could create a prize for battery innovation, but Obama, quite rightly, doesn’t insist upon a mere publicity stunt. Rather he insists upon finding, and funding, programs that have a chance to work.
With Obama, you find a seriousness of purpose in erecting a framework to spend government money responsibly. With McCain, you find gimmicks and total nonsense. If you go through the guide, this pattern repeats itself. Both candidates address stem cell research. Obama, relying upon the authority of the scientists who actually work with stem cells, simply supports “federal financing for research on human embryonic stem cells.” This is a support based not on ideology, but knowledge gleaned from experts. McCain, the guide notes, “has supported federal financing for embryonic stem cell research; lately has suggested that other kinds of stem cells may make the use of embryonic cells unncessary.” In other words, under pressure from the lunatic right, which puts ideology above competence, McCain is prepared to waste money pursuing esoterica if his rightwing backers think it is politically correct to do so. This is kind of like funding abstinence-only education. Yes, I’m aware that potential alternatives to embryonic stem cells have been developed. But, from what I can tell, they all have problems that embryonic stem cells don’t. McCain, in the interest of ideological purity, is prepared, apparently, to bet taxpayer’s money merely on the hope that these alternatives may work out rather than follow the advice of experts.
And finally, we get to space exploration. Obama’s approach is a conservative response to the conventional wisdom of experts in the field. But note the nod towards a utilitarian purpose for exploring space: it could actually yield some important insights into “addressing global challenges like climate change.” McCain wants more star wars coupled with wildly expensive and dangerous flyboy-style publicity stunts that reflect “national power and pride.” As for economic development, he is surely joking.
In short, one candidate – Obama – has put forth a proposal for a sensible role for the US government to play in 21st Century scientific innovation. The other – McCain – has proposed, with very few differences, a continuation of George W. Bush’s ignorant, ideologically stained strategy. Obama has been serious, McCain frivolous.
While I am no scientist, simply an outside observer with an intense interest in it, I suspect that no rational scientist can, in all seriousness, support McCain’s proposals for government’s role in science over Obama’s.
If you have the slightest interest in American history, then this is incredibly cool. A CD company, Archeophone Records has released Debate ’08. That’s 1908, dear friends, the master debaters being Williams Jennings Bryan, Democrat, and William Howard Taft, Republican.
But this actually isn’t a debate in any sense of the word. Essentially, both guys made 2 minute long records that were sold for the whopping price of $ .35 (about eight bucks today). Bryan made ten recordings, Taft twelve. Taft won, duh. Whether these recordings had anything to do with that win is…debatable.
These are fascinating documents. William Jennings Bryan, of course, was an early bete noire for anyone who cares about science. He was the celebrity lawyer for the prosecution in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, the most iconic trial regarding the teaching of evolution.* (I would argue, however, that the Dover Panda Trial was far more decisive and just as enjoyable a story.)
What is less well known – and hard to square with modern intellectual/political alliances – is that Bryan also had a reputation as a populist and liberal. The recordings available at the first link bear that out. Bryan makes the case against imperialism and for guaranties of bank deposits. Taft, on the other hand, favors keeping troops in the Philippines and believes that “enforced insurance of bank deposits” will crash the American economic system and is deeply unfair. To bankers, of course. Even then, people, even then.
Also extremely interesting are the voices of the two men. They are speaking in a modified version of what must have been their crowd voices, a strident tone necessary so that they could be heard using no, or extremely primitive, amplification. This sound, combined with the monotonic inflection with which both men read their texts, is rarely heard today. But it provides some insight into how early orators sounded in the pre-phonograph era (oh, what I would give to hear Lincoln read the Second Inaugural!).
Even more interesting to my ear are the accents, which are different from any modern American one I know. I detected a very unusual “o” sound and a subtly different inflection of the “r” from contemporary speech, for example. Your mileage may vary, but I don’t think these accents exist anymore. Even my father, born 1909 and about to celebrate his centennial, sounds quite different.
Great stuff. I ordered my copy, and some early women blues. Take a listen and you may, too.
*Despite the fact that parts of it were broadcast quite widely (perhaps nationwide), I don’t believe recordings of the Scopes Monkey Trial exist. If that is not the case, PLEASE let me know immediately!
UPDATE: Voices of the presidents going back to Harrison can be heard here. Thanks to Michael in comments.
