Sunday Classics preview: Given the resources at his disposal, Vivaldi's musical storms may be the most remarkable of all

This may not be quite the winter storm Vivaldi imagined, but we'll be hearing it in more traditional form in a moment.

by Ken

We began our exploration of storms imagined in music with the orchestral prototype, the thunderstorm embedded in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and the storm of all operatic storms, the opening of Verdi's Otello -- with the "Royal Hunt and Storm" from Berlioz's epic opera The Trojans thrown in. We have a gaggle of musical storms on tap for Sunday's post, but tonight I thought we'd backtrack and rehear some music we've actually heard before: the storm movements from three of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

(We heard them in one of my favorite Sunday Classics posts, November 2010's "I wonder whether Vivaldi would be surprised by the still-growing irresistibility of his Four Seasons," in which we managed to encompass the entire piece -- all four concertos, all 12 movements. By the way, I've just upgraded that post, which included "what may be the only Four Seasons you'll ever need," to Internet Archive's new format for music files, even though it meant replacing the code for 50 music files.)

We'll talk more Sunday about the idea of capturing storms in music, but for now let's just note that Vivaldi was doing it without many of the orchestral resources that later composers -- even Beethoven -- would rely on for their storm depictions. All he had at his disposal was the modest baroque orchestra.


TO HEAR THE THREE FOUR SEASONS
STORM MOVEMENTS, CLICK HERE

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Chris Christie's ignorance about the civil-rights struggle may not doom his political future, but his out-of-control mouth sure may

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King are among those at the head of the marchers crossing the Alabama River on Mar. 21, 1965, early in the five-day march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of equal voting rights.

“The fact of the matter is, I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South."

-- NJ Gov. Chris Christie, on Tuesday

by Ken

Most of us, I think, are accustomed to deriding political consultants and handlers who make a federal case of keeping their candidates ruthlessly "on messsage." The sad reality, though, is that the practical wisdom of this philosophy keeps being reproved.

And I think it's not so much because of the vote-gathering potency of said "message," although naturally those consultants and handlers do whatever they can to press buttons that have been shown to curry favor. No, I think the crucial component to keeping your guy/gal "on message" is minimizing the epic dangers if/when he/she goes off-message. Sure, you or I might think that that's when we find out what they really think, and might possibly get a glimmer of how they might behave if elected. In which case you and I aren't what the political-handling class has in its crosshairs.

Staying on message is no universal guarantee, because there are no guarantees in electoral politics. But there are strong tendencies and odds-tippers. And so while the zealous efforts of the elite corps of Willard Inc. handlers to keep their boy on message, or rather on messages as they try to find some that don't make him sound even more clownish, may not have kept him safe, think how bad things would be for him if he actually said what's on his mind. And in part his message problem stems from too much history of saying stuff -- much of which may actually have been "on messsage" in its time and place but sure isn't in this time, the year 2012, or place, the GOP presidential nominating carnival.

If you want the seeming exception to the rule of message fidelity which may prove the rule, consider Naught Gingrich, who on all evidence is pretty much self-managed and -messaged. It appears to be serving him well at the moment, but that's only because he's competing in such an isolated population segment and against a raft of such hopeless-nothing candidates. But Naught's history of self-destruction has a lot to do with his minimally managed mouth. As bad as the American system of passing on and receiving information is, in a case as crackpotted as Naught's, people do tend eventually to sort of get the idea.)

EVEN THAT BIGGEST OF BLOWHARDS RALPH KRAMDEN
AT TIMES ACKNOWLEDGED, "I'VE GOT A BI-I-I-IG MOUTH"

But Ralph never did anything about that big mouth either.

All of which is a rambling preamble to saying that suddenly I'm less worred about the prospect of a bright political future for one of my less favorite Republicans, "Hefty Chris" Christie, the take-no-prisoners first-term Republican governor of New Jersey. My sense is that the appeal for his own constituents is already starting to wear thin, as they start to measure his immoderate mouth against their inescapable daily reality. But I worried that he might be dangerous precisely for his potential appeal to prospective voters who don't have to experience his actual governance. And while I'm personally appalled beyond measure by this self-revelation of a depth of ignorance so extreme that it should disqualify him from participation in any form in government at any level, it has also given me a good measure of hope that his unmanaged or perhaps unmanageable mouth is likely to disqualify him from any larger electoral prospects.

As so often happens, it's what pols reveal about themselves when they're not speaking directly to the subject at hand that tells us most about what they know, what they believe, and how they think. Which I think is what happened to the Heftyman when he tried to remain true to the bigoted, hate-inspired values he does seem to share with his right-wing base, and thought he had found a slick, seemingly democracy-inspired stratagem to sneak through a bit of a public-relations obstacle course.

The obstacle course materialized when the truly tireless efforts of a lot of highly motivated, highly persuasive activists brought around enough hearts and minds in the state legislature to create the growing possibility that the governor is going to have a bill legalizing same-sex marriage land on his desk. He has already said unequivocally that he will veto any such bill, but he must be realizing that such a position is threatening to become more of a political liability than a vote-getter. Or to put it another way: Any votes that there are to be gotten with a line-in-the-sand position against equal treatment of all citizens are votes that are already in the bag for a right-wing candidate, but among the rest of the electorate it's increasingly becoming a losing proposition.

What to do, what to do? Especially with growing indications that the pro-equality forces have turned around not just a number of the Democrats whose recalcitrance led to the fiasco of the effort to pass a marriage-equality bill in the dying days of the Corzine administration, but if anything more importantly have helped a number of Republican legislators see the light. And what he came up with was what he described as "an alternate move" for marriage-equality proponents: the democratic-sounding proposal to put same-sex marriage rights to a vote. Let's let the people of the state of New Jersey (rather than, say, their elected representatives) decide! What could be fairer or more democratic?

DID NJ'S HEFTYMAN HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT

HE WAS REALLY TELLING US ABOUT HIMSELF?

Now, there are perfectly good reasons why this is not a good idea, having to do generally with the inadvisability of putting people's rights up for a vote. This is unfortunately very hard to explain beyond the concept that Thomas Jeffrerson enunciated so elegantly in the Declaration of "certain unalienable rights." Fortunately, though, thanks to the way Big Chris's big mouth framed the issue, he disproved his own point -- and, I'm suggesting, told us way more about his mind than he meant to, or than I would have imagined.

What he did, as suggested in the quote I've put at the top of this post, was to propose an analogy with the great civil-rights struggle of the '50s and '60s. As it happens, there is a body of quite specific history about this very idea of putting civil rights to a vote back then, when die-hard racists tried to make desegregation go away by means of just such a strategy. It was roundly rejected, as Duncan Osborne sets out in a terrific piece for Gay City News called "Christie Doesn't Like Ike."

But I think what Governor Christie revealed about himself goes way beyond ignorance of this particular. He told the world that he not only knows nothing about the civil-rights struggle -- i.e., what was at stake, who was on which side, and how that struggle played out -- but carries in his head a pack of delusions and lies about one of the most fundamental realities of American history and one of the most turbulent upheavals of the second half of the 20th century. He has announced to the world that he has no compunctions about grounding the way he sees the world in ideologically calculated lies.

Unless the man was just kidding, he actually believes that U.S. voters in the 1950s and '60s would have voted in favor of legal enactment and enforcement of full civil rights for Americans of all races. Which means that, unless he's lying (and I really don't think he is), his brain is totally ignorant of absolutely every single aspect of this crucial development in American history, and of the not-so-distant past, which is crucial to any understanding of the problems of the present. He either doesn't know or doesn't care that everything he thinks on this subject (at the very least) is 100 percent fiction-based.

Which isn't entirely surprising to me. What's surprising is that he was so politically maladroit as to make such a bald, incontrovertible announcement that he's, well, full of doody. Again, his hard-core right-wing home-state constituents and potential out-of-state ones won't care. After all, what's more central to all right-wing beliefs today than the worship of ignorance, hate, and delusion. Add economic predation and you've got the Core Right-Wing Agenda. But when the rest of the electorate is brought into the equation, I think you being to understand that people who believe what the governor has shown himself to believe normally speak, when they're speaking outside their hard-core "faithful," only in code.

Which brings me back to that mouth. I don't kid myself that gross ignorance of and insensitivity to the civil-rights struggle is going to incur any significant political price for the Heftyman. After all, the American body politic has worked hard to develop a convenient case of amnesia on the subject. But a mouth that's capable of dropping a bombshell like this one, even if this particular bomb doesn't do much damage, is almost certainly too uncontrolled to hold up to the rigors of the American media circus.

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Chuck Grassley: Broadband Killer And Corrupt Hack

Last year here at DWT we asked "Is Chuck Grassley Still Capable Of Working For The Good Of The Citizens Of Iowa?" You probably knew the answer to this question then, but if not, you will by the end of this post.

In that piece I looked at Grassley's Gingrinchian use of racial code words, such as his attack on and opposition to Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court justice, because she clerked for and was mentored by the civil-rights pioneer and first African-American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall.

Shameful, but not surprising. And his behavior since... has not changed. Grassley viciously attacked Office of Legal Counsel chief Virginia Seitz because he doesn't like an opinion of hers-- something even a former Bush appointee to this position, Jack Goldsmith, referred to as "name callling" and "misplaced."

He was so rude to the victims of the massacre in Tuscon a year ago that they sent him a letter demanding an apology. And recently the hacker group Anonymous saw him as such a corporate shill for SOPA and PIPA that out of all the corporate whores whose Twitter accounts they could have hacked they thought Grassley's made the most sense.

Perhaps one of the few true things to come out of John McCain's mouth over the past few decades was when he was heatedly discussing the Vietnam MIA issue with Grassley and Grassley asked him, "Are you calling me stupid," and he replied, "No, I'm calling you a fucking jerk!"

So this is who Chuck Grasssley is. But in his battle to smear a small telecommunications company approved by both the Bush and Obama administrations to provide more spectrum, more telecom competition and potentially create thousands of jobs, he's been acting crazy, even for him. I wonder why that is.

Without getting too much into the technical aspects of this fight, a small company, Lightsquared, wants to provide Americans with more options in their telecom choices. But major GPS players claim that their signal is being distorted by the Lightsquared signal, so they used the post-9/11 fear tactics we've gotten to know so well, warning Americans about "planes falling out of the sky" so they wouldn't have to participate in fixing this problem--and could make Lightsquared go away. Here is Harold Feld of Public Knowledge, a well-respected authority on spectrum challenges, on this problem:



So big GPS players such as Trimble and John Deere and their friends in the monopolized telecom business, who give generously to Grassley, have decided to just make this go away, even though, "the interference is a result of GPS devices receiving signals from outside of their designated frequencies."

So, once again it is GPS' fault, but they don't want to deal with it. So they have themselves their very own shill in Chuck Grassley, who has gone around telling lie after lie after lie about the project, to protect his bribers (more on that at the bottom) in the GPS and telco industries. He has even threatened the FCC's ability to function over this. Which I guess is nothing new from the obstructionist, deranged old crank.

You won't see Grassley asking why the tests on this GPS signal distortion-- which again is their fault-- were rigged against Lightsquared:

Exasperated by a government process that has left them scrambling to avoid bankruptcy, LightSquared filed a complaint with NASA’s inspector general’s office Thursday alleging that a key member of a panel that advises the government on GPS violated ethics laws.

Bradford Parkinson, second in command of a federal advisory board that has played an integral role informing the government’s views of the LightSquared-GPS controversy, “appears to have violated a federal conflict of interest statute” as a special government employee, the filing states.

Parkinson serves as vice chairman of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board, which advises the Defense Department, the Transportation Department and a host of other federal agencies on GPS policy. Parkinson has a multimillion dollar stake in Trimble, a GPS manufacturing company at the heart of a campaign to derail the broadband company from entering the market.

You also won't see Grassley the gainsayer questioning the well-planned PR smear campaign that has tried to turn Lightsquared into an example of Democratic "crony capitalism," in the words of walking embolism Michele Bachmann.

And you won't see him wondering why Deere & Co. seem to be bribing countries abroad, violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (perhaps it hits a bit too close to home for Grassley?). while Trimble partnered with a company that lobbied the U.S. Government to do business with Libya. But they're concerned about "planes falling out of the sky," right? What patriots!

Maybe this is the answer to the question (don't miss donors 4, 5, and 12):

Is Romney Cheating The American People On His Taxes?

I hope you're not too bored with hearing about Romney's tax manipulations and offshore tax-dodging accounts to read a perspective from our favorite investigative journalist, Russ Baker. He makes the point that there are still a lot of questions that haven't been answered-- and a lot that haven't even been asked.

Can we expect to find anything crooked in Romney’s filings?

You kidding? Smart rich people hire smart accountants to keep them out of trouble. It’s not the illegal things they do, it’s how they manage to rig things so that they get away, metaphorically, with murder.

Should Romney’s tax returns be the way to judge him?

To be sure, they do reveal how capital gains tax rates are highly advantageous to the rich and penalize those who work for their living. And that’s an important point. But what we should be interested in with regard to Romney in particular is his values, as shown by the strategies and tactics of his companies.

Are Romney’s recent tax filings the most important ones?

Because Romney left Bain Capital way back in 1999 to embark on a political career, it is the earlier tax filings that would likely reveal the most.

His seasoned political advisers would have been all over him to exhibit exemplary behavior-- since ’99, and probably even earlier, when he may already have been considering politics. Also, as he was not actually working at Bain but just receiving passive income from it in recent years, we shouldn’t expect to see much that is worth assessing.

Thus, his 2010-11 release is definitely not very forthcoming.

Was Romney’s delay tactic part of a “limited hangout”?

One of the oldest tricks in the book is to resist disclosure, let anticipation build a bit, then release something that appears to answer questions, while not revealing anything very interesting. This pretty much ends debate.

Consider how long George W. Bush took to release National Guard service records, and how long Barack Obama took to release his birth records. In the end, these controversies fizzled, and people moved on.

Should Romney’s income from Bain even be treated as a capital gain?

No. He actually worked for that money, as a fund manager, plenty of hours every week. Thus, it should be taxed as normal earned income. But because of a loophole in the law (what a surprise!) engineered by the faithful lawyers, accountants and lobbyists of the one percent, it gets treated as capital gains, and therefore the lowest tax rate applies.

What’s with Romney’s having had money in the Swiss Bank UBS?

This looks pretty bad. (For more on UBS, its pernicious activities and how it gets its claws into politicians of both parties, see this, this and this.) There are very few legitimate, or public-spirited business reasons for having a Swiss bank account.

So why did Romney have that account? Someone should ask him. His trustee said he closed it in early 2010. That’s just a short time after UBS was forced to pay huge fines to the US government to settle a criminal investigation that established the bank had encouraged wealthy Americans to illegally hide their income abroad.

Could Romney have been one of those Americans? Possible, but doubtful, mostly because it would have been really dumb. Most of those caught doing that were largely in the “rich but dumb” category.

Could any of the tax shelter stuff turn out to be odious even if not illegal?

Sure, but you probably wouldn’t know unless you looked at, and compared, a whole bunch of different years’ tax filings. And so far, Romney has not agreed to provide that.

Can we trust Fred Goldberg’s clean bill of health?

When Romney released his tax filings, they came with a letter from former IRS commissioner Fred Goldberg saying he’d checked them out, and they looked…supah!

But who is Fred Goldberg? The same guy who, following an unscheduled visit from Scientology’s top leader, abruptly reversed policy to grant tax exempt status to the hyper-controversial, pyramid-style, service-selling enterprise. Worth taking a second look at this guy and why and how he is helping Mitt out.

Does the way Mitt released his taxes demonstrate good faith?

Definitely not. Though this was by far the biggest news out of his campaign on Tuesday, it was released the same day as the State of the Union address, guaranteeing that it would get second billing. Also, the campaign managed to bury it on their website, so much so that after a few minutes, I had still not found it there, and had to rely on the website of the Washington Post.

What about those domestic workers Mrs. Romney paid?

The filing, by Mrs. Romney (not Mr.), show that she paid around $20,000 in total during 2010 to four domestic workers. Sure would like to know more about that-- and what it tells us about the rich vs. poor. The Romneys have at least three houses, some pretty substantial places. Assuming they only employ regular help at their main Massachusetts house, $20k is still a paltry total. That’s an average of $5,000 a year to four people. Wonder how much work they did. After all, Mrs. Romney is known to struggle with MS, and it’s doubtful Mitt does much sweeping, dusting, cooking, etc.

The Romneys should be queried about why Mrs. Romney takes legal responsibility for reporting payments to the help (beyond unfortunate stereotypes about stay-at-home wives), and why no payments show up for 2011.

In any case, it’s not a very good ratio of income to job creation, for a guy who talks about creating jobs: the year the Romneys paid their staff $20,000, they earned $27 million.

The worst thing of all is that, depending on their total income, those domestic workers may have paid a much higher tax rate for their hard physical labor at Romney’s house than Romney did on the millions in investment income that piled in while he pursued his political dream.

And that just seems really wrong.

Romney's growing reputation as a shady businessman and con artist wasn't helped yesterday when the L.A. Times revealed his long overdue tax release attempts to cover up some of his monkey business with overseas tax shelters. Confronted with the evidence, Romney at first claimed it was a "trivial" discrepancy and "inconsequential." Trivial? Inconsequential? It's almost half a million dollars, and no matter how rich you are, that is neither "trivial" nor "inconsequential."

A review by the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau found that at least 23 funds and partnerships listed in the couple’s 2010 tax returns did not show up or were not listed in the same fashion on Romney’s most recent financial disclosure, including 11 based in low-tax foreign countries such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.

...Many of the funds are affiliated with Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm Romney ran for 15 years. Several others are apparently unrelated offshore entities with mysterious names such as Babson 2006-1, which is based in the Cayman Islands, and Barracuda Investments, which has an address in Dublin, Ireland, but appears to be solely owned by Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm based in San Francisco.

Among the assets omitted is a Swiss bank account in Ann Romney's blind trust that campaign officials said held $3 million of the couple's money until it was closed in 2010. The account was listed on a financial disclosure Romney filed in 2007, but it was mistakenly named as an asset held by the couple, not as part of Ann Romney's trust. The campaign said it is filing an amendment to the most recent report to reflect $1,700 worth of interest earned in the Swiss bank account in 2010, as well as another amendment to move the account to the appropriate category in the 2007 report... [T]he discrepancies between Romney’s tax returns and his personal financial statement speak to a broader challenge facing the longtime private equity chieftain: convincing voters that he can relate to their economic distress despite the incredibly complex architecture of his immense fortune.

It looks like President Obama was talking to Mittens in Las Vegas yesterday, don't you think? He even used the "Bill Gates does not envy the rich" line that just eviscerates Romney.

Centrist Looooooooozers

Progressive winners

Suppose there’s a swing district you-- "you" being a Democratic Party committee or strategist or booster-- want to win, and you have your choice of two comparably strong candidates: one who is a "centrist," a polite way of saying a "conservative," and one who is a progressive. Which candidate do you run if you want to maximize your odds of winning?

If you want to win, you’re usually better off running the progressive.

The conventional wisdom in the Democratic Party is that if you want to win an election in a swing district, you should run a so-called centrist. The now-defunct DLC was founded on this idea, the DCCC reinforces it regularly, and political consultants all over the country repeat it as gospel. The problem is that the evidence shows they’re wrong.

In tough years in swing districts, candidates who appeal to their party’s base do better than so-called “centrists” or “moderates.”

In 2010, in swing districts all over the country Republicans ran Tea Party candidates who appealed to their base against “centrist” Blue Dog and New Democratic incumbents. The centrists lost because Democratic voters weren’t excited about them and didn’t show up; the Tea Party candidates won because Republican voters were motivated to show up and vote for them. The Blue Dogs lost roughly 60% of their races in 2010. By contrast, the Congressional Progressive Caucus held 79 of their 82 seats-- even in swing districts like Peter DeFazio’s in Oregon. Who shows up to vote matters, and voters from both parties are more likely to show up and vote for people who they believe will fight for their values.

Republicans, realizing that it’s a lot harder to elect "moderates," have essentially stopped doing so.

On our side, however, we seem to just keep throwing money at trying to elect them. Is that because leaders like Steve Israel, head of the DCCC, are themselves conservatives? Or because they're idiots? I'm still trying to figure that out. The answer is probably "both."

And speaking of money: It costs a lot more money to elect a “centrist” than a progressive. In August, the DLC’s think tank PPI published a study showing that it costs about twice as much to elect centrists than progressives.

It’s harder to elect centrists than progressives. They’re more likely to lose, and they’re more expensive to elect. So in what way, exactly, are they theoretically more electable?

If you want to win, support the progressive. How do you know who the progressive candidates are? Blue America doesn't endorse generic Democrats, let alone conservatives or Blue Dogs. We endorse progressives like Norman Solomon, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Alan Grayson, Darcy Burner, Franke Wilmer, Bernie Sanders and Ilya Sheyman. You can find our list of House candidates here and our Senate candidates here. Tomorrow Blue America will be hosting a discussion with Darcy Burner (D-WA) about how to fix Congress over at Crooks and Liars at 11am (PT). Please join us.

A Mittens Morality Play

The first time I read David Korten's most recent book, Agenda For A New Economy, it was for his economic insights. I reread it for more of that-- plus moral instruction. Like this:

We humans are living out an epic morality play of five thousand years' duration, that pits good, that which serves life, against evil, that which destroys life. Good is represented by the forces of mutual caring, cooperation and responsibility in the service of life. Evil is represented by the forces of domination, unbridled competition, and individual greed in the service of money.


Individual greed surely will be with us so long as there are humans, but if we are to survive and prosper, we must recognize that greed is a sin, not a virtue-- a form of addiction and a sign of psychological dysfunction. Any public subsidy of persons so encumbered should be limited to payment for rehabilitation services as part of a national health care program.

Romneycare, of course, comes to mind. I think most people saw Mitt Romney as a rather mild-mannered, relatively inoffensive middle-of-the-road politician with an outsize hankering to become president. Then came his lashing out against the American people claiming that everyone is envious of him. Really? Envious? He dropped 20 points in the polls after he made that remark. Let him shove his Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Islands and Luxembourg tax havens up his ass. If the Mormons are ever going to fulfill their dream of seizing the White House, it's not going to be by spending all their money on Mitt Romney. They ought to get him some of those rehabilitation services. Korten sounds like he could well have been describing Willard "Mitt" Romney to a t when he wrote these words:

The "genius" for financial innovation and risk management that Wall Street regularly touts as its gift to the world consists mainly of finding new ways for an unethical trader to capture the profits from questionable financial transactions and shift the risk to others. The consequences for society are a revealing lesson in the importance of positive moral practice.

Willard Inc. got paid HOW much to do WHAT?

No, that $374,327 isn't in Monopoly money.

"Now is not this ridiculous, and is not this preposterous?
A thorough-paced absurdity -- explain it if you can."

-- the Dragoons, in Act I of G&S's Patience

by Ken

I think most of the numbers in the following paragraph have been pretty well circulated and digested, at least among people who are actually listening.

On Tuesday, Romney finally lifted a corner of the previously tightly sealed file containing his tax returns. The partial disclosure won't help him. He said his effective tax rate was "probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything." That 15 percent is on investment income -- a huge perk for the very rich -- as opposed to the higher rates on wages and salaries -- up to 35 percent -- paid by most Americans. He also deprecated his speaking fees last year of $374,327 as "not very much."

-- Alexander Cockburn, in "Mitt Romney's Gingrich Nightmare"

And I don't mean to suggest that the numbers that have gotten the most attention aren't in fact the most important ones. But I look at this and you know what pops out?

"his speaking fees last year of $374,327"

Say what? $374,327? In speaking fees?

In the course of a single year, some collection of somebodies paid that man almost $375K to, you know, speak? Okay, I realize it probably wasn't in, like, $375 increments. But still.

It's possible to disagree about the quality of Willard Inc.'s, er, intellect. Noah and I, for example, have gone a round on this. His position (articulated in the "Stupid' is what the Republican voter craves (and Mittens could be that man!)" installment of "Selections from THE NOAH DIARIES 2011") is that the guy is a no-account dunce. Whereas I'm not at all sure of this. I'm quite prepared to believe that this is just another case of a person whose intelligence, such as it is, has been so devilishly misdeveloped that it's useful for certain functions, like economic predation (aka plundering and ravishing the masses of humans), and singularly unuseful for others, like understanding and communicating with people, especially people who are unlike himself.

Either way, however, I find it hard to imagine anyone who would advance the proposition that Willard Inc.'s useful skills include, you know, speaking.

In the rollingstone.com column from which I've been quoting endlessly, "What Mitt Romney Learned From His Dad," Rick Perlstein recalls: "I wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed four years ago, just before Romney dropped out of the 2008 race, arguing that he would 'go down as the most robotic big-ticket presidential candidate in history.' "

When you try to listen to the man speak, between the doltishness of what he's saying and more particularly the hopeless bumblitude of the way he says it, you're likely to think, "Why, that man could never be elected to anything!" And yet he did actually get elected to one term as governor of Massachusetts. Yeah, I suppose the beefcake photos serve to, um, "humanize" him a tad, simply for the way in which so many of us tend to attach nonexistent pretty qualities to people who are pretty enough, but still . . . .

And yet, there the number stands. The Incorporated Willard may consider the that $374,327 worth of speaking fees "not much," but perhaps that's only because his frame of reference for what's "much" in income terms is the going rate for extracting billions of dollars from the economy for the private edification of the extractors. By any other standard, this is "ridiculous" and "preposterous" and "a thorough-paced absurdity." "Explain it if you can," indeed.

Unless, of course, the people who forked over that $374,327 weren't doing it in exchange for pearls of wisdom they expected to receive in return, but for favor they hoped to curry with an individual who already wielded a hefty amount of clout in financial circles and might one day soon wield even more clout on an even larger platform, and therefore stood to be in a position to generously return the favor. This would be utterly consistent with the precepts of market capitalism, wouldn't it? At least as it's practiced in 21st-century America, where the role of government is taken to be to further stack the deck in favor of the economic elites. Or, to borrow the motto of the Roberts Court, "Money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around."

I find that kind of depressing, though, and might prefer to go back to the "ridiculous," "preposterous," and "absurd" position, and leave it to somebody else to explain.

That's three hundred seventy-four thousand three hundred twenty-seven dollars. Presumably not in Monopoly money.


ONE LAST QUESTION ABOUT THE $374,327

Do we know if any of the suckers lucky speech-buyers subsequently asked for their money back? Just wondering.

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Newt Can't Win Over Republicans Outside The Racist South, Right? Wrong

I forget which MSNBC wag said it the other day, but someone did mention that Gingrich hasn't been using dog whistles in up-country South Carolina and the Florida Panhandle, he's using a fog whistle. And Republicans are hearing it all over the country. By and large... they love it.

I guess it's a tribute to Mitt Romney's typically savvy acquisition of Tim Pawlenty but Minnesota is going for Newt. Or, at least, not going for Romney. According to the latest PPP release, "Gingrich has a large lead in Minnesota... for the moment. Our weekend polling there found him with 36% to 18% for Mitt Romney, 17% for Rick Santorum, and 13% for Ron Paul... very good for Gingrich and very bad for Romney. Gingrich's favorability is a +34 spread (59/25) while Romney's is just +14 (50/36). Since PPP last polled the state in May Gingrich's favorability with GOP voters has increased by 40 points from its previous -6 (35/41) standing."

Gingrich's supporters are also more committed with 39% saying they'll definitely vote for him compared to only 27% who say the same for Romney. Among voters whose minds are totally made up Romney actually drops all the way down to 4th place at 15%, behind Gingrich's 44%, Santorum's 25%, and Paul's 16%.

If Santorum's out of the race by the time Minnesota's vote comes around it could work to Gingrich's further advantage. Santorum voters prefer Gingrich to Romney 44-20 if they had to pick between the two and overall Minnesota Republicans pick Gingrich 50-29 in a head to head with Romney.

Newt's winning with pretty much every key group in Minnesota. He's up 44-12 on Romney with Tea Partiers (Paul's at 18% and Santorum's at 14%) but he's up 33-22 with non-Tea Partiers as well. He's up 44-18 with men, but he's also up 28-19 with women. He leads Romney with Republicans (40-20) but he's also up with independents (26-15) who are likely to be a similar share of the electorate to what they were in Iowa. And Gingrich is winning every age group, although he's tied with Paul among young voters.

And the GOP Establishment is throwing everything they've got against him. Yesterday Establishment hack and notorious war criminal Elliott Abrams took to the pages of National Review to expose Gingrich some more, this time about his lies for having been best buds with Ronald Reagan, who in reality he barely knew. That hasn't stopped him, as Abrams points out, from dropping phrases like, “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress.” Abrams is blunt: "The claims are misleading at best."

As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years-- and I was an assistant secretary of state-- Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.

...[Gingrich] voted with the caucus, but his words should be remembered, for at the height of the bitter struggle with the Democratic leadership Gingrich chose to attack [Reagan].

The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail... President Reagan is clearly failing.” Why? This was due partly to “his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail”; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which “have no strategies to defeat the empire.” But of course “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.” Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were “pathetically incompetent,” so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan “contra” rebels “are fundamentally right.” Such was Gingrich’s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

Gingrich scorned Reagan’s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because “the president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.” In Afghanistan, Reagan’s policy was marked by “impotence [and] incompetence.” Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that “we have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.” Reagan did not know what he was doing, and “it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.”

There are two things to be said about these remarks. The first is that as a visionary, Gingrich does not have a very impressive record. The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, just as Reagan had believed it must. The expansion of its empire had been thwarted. The policies Gingrich thought so weak and indeed “pathetic” worked, and Ronald Reagan turned out to be a far better student of history and politics than Gingrich.

The second point to make is that Gingrich made these assaults on the Reagan administration just as Democratic attacks were heating up unmercifully. Far from becoming a reliable voice for Reagan policy and the struggle against the Soviets, Gingrich took on Reagan and his administration. It appears to be a habit: He did the same to George W. Bush when Bush was making the toughest and most controversial decision of his presidency-- the surge in Iraq. Bush was opposed by many of the top generals, by some Republican leaders who feared the surge would hurt in the 2008 elections, and of course by a slew of Democrats and media commentators. Here again Gingrich provided no support for his party’s embattled president, testifying as a private citizen in 2007 that the strategy was “inadequate,” contained “breathtaking” gaps, lacked “synergism” (whatever that means), and was “very disappointing.” What did Gingrich propose? Among other things, a 50 percent increase in the budget of the State Department.

Presidents should not get automatic support, not even from members of their own party, but they have a right to that support when they are under a vicious partisan assault. Today it is fair to look back and ask who had it right: Gingrich, who backed away from and criticized Republican presidents, or those chief executives, who were making difficult and consequential decisions on national security. Bush on the surge and Reagan on the Soviet empire were tough, courageous-- and right. Newt Gingrich in retrospect seems less the visionary than the politician who refused the party’s leader loyal support on grounds that history has proved were simply wrong.

Now it will be the job of Fox and hate-talk radio to get the message out to the morons and zombies who vote in Republican primaries. I doubt they'll want to do anything with this MoveOn video:

Thanks To The Insane Citizens United Ruling, Sheldon Adelson Can Try To Buy The Presidency. We Need To Know More About Him

The Adelsons: bad news for America

What everyone already knows is that Sheldon Adelson and his wife are financing Newt Gingrich's bid for the White House and that he's an aggressively anti-Palestinian Zionist zealot and a cutthroat gambling-casino magnate with a lot of money. Fewer people know that he's the eighth richest man in America and the 16th richest worldwide. His current net worth is estimated at $21.5 billion. (By way of comparison... see that ".5" on the end of his net worth? Romney only has one half of that.) The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Adelson was a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman and a failed stockbroker.

He went to CCNY, a hotbed of socialism and progressive politics for first-generation Jewish Americans. When you think of CCNY you think of graduates like Nobel laureates Robert Hofstadter and Robert Hauptman, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, financiers Henry Morgenthau Sr. and Bernard Baruch, authors Sidney Hook, Paul Goodman, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Ira Gershwin, Paddy Chayefsky. Bill Graham, Edward G. Robinson, Daniel Schorr and Stanley Kubrick were alums-- as was Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground. Sheldon Adelson? He dropped out early-- to chase money. In the film Wall Street, though, Gordon Gekko was a CCNY grad.


Once Adelson got involved in casinos, he turned virulently anti-union and fanatically Republican. He didn't want to pay taxes and he didn't want to pay a fair wage to workers. Those are still motivating factors in his life-- and help explain, along with the Israel thing-- why he backs Gingrich, even more strongly than he once backed Tom DeLay and George Bush. He owns Israel Hayom, the biggest newspaper in Israel, which he gives away free in order to push out a virulently right-wing anti-peace agenda. Adelson is notorious for taking vengeance against anyone who challenges him. He successfully sued the Daily Mail in London for pointing out his "despicable business practices" and having "habitually and corruptly bought political favour." There are no publications in the U.S. willing to write about his extensive collaboration with organized crime. Yesterday Robert Reich tepidly asked his readers to take a look at who Sheldon Adelson is and what Gingrich promised him. Not very hard-hitting when looking into someone who has already contributed $11 million towards Gingrich's campaign.

The Adelsons are billionaires. They might decide to put in another $5 million or perhaps $20 million into Gingrich’s Super Pac. The point is, there’s no limit.

Do you know who Sheldon and Marian Adelson are? Do you know what Gingrich has promised them, or what they think they’ll get out of a Gingrich presidency? I don’t. But if Newt becomes President of the United States, they’ll be singularly responsible. And we better find out, because Newt will owe them big time.

Forget the Lincoln Bedroom. The Adelsons and their kids will have the run of the White House, including the Oval Office. Hey, they’ll take over the Old Executive Building next door and turn it into a casino.

Never before in the history of American politics has a single couple given more money to a single candidate and had a bigger impact-- all courtesy of the Supreme Court and its grotesque decisions that speech is money and corporations are people under the First Amendment.

Good points, but Adelson doesn't care about visiting the White House or turning the Old Executive Building into a casino. As a friend of mine who is connected to the Mossad told me last night, "Adelson wants to turn Iran into a glass ashtray. That's the reason he'll pour whatever he has to into Gingrich." Justin Elliott at Salon came a little closer than Reich did. "The Adelsons," he writes. "once pulled their money out of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) because of that group’s putative softness on the concept of a peace deal with Palestinians." He quotes the infamous and exhaustive 2008 New Yorker exposé on Adelson extensively. Like here:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was organizing a major conference in the United States, in an effort to re-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and her initiative had provoked consternation among many rightward-leaning American Jews and their Christian evangelical allies. … A short, rotund man, with sparse reddish hair and a pale countenance that colors when he is angered, Adelson protested to Bush that Rice was thinking of her legacy, not the President’s, and that she would ruin him if she continued to pursue this disastrous course. Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, “You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what’s right for your people—because at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s. But I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope.”

And he points out Gingrich's transformation on the subject of Israel. "Gingrich was as recently as 2005 praising the Palestinians, referring to 'their ancestral lands' in historic Palestine, and, amazingly, inveighing against 'the desire of some Israelis to use security as an excuse to grab more Palestinian land.' ... Gingrich even used the phrase Israeli 'land grab' in that 2005 essay... Fast forward to the current election cycle, of course, and Gingrich has veered way to the right, famously questioning the very peoplehood of the Palestinians and blasting calls to end Jewish settlements as a 'suicidal step' for Israel. (Adelson, by the way, personally praised Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an 'invented people.')"

Hard to imagine that hard-core Southern racists and teabaggers who are flocking to Gingrich's banner could take a close look at what Adelson is and not recoil in horror. For that matter, what real American wouldn't?

Pennsylvania Has A Candidate From The Democratic Wing Of The Democratic Party-- Meet Matt Cartwright

In the 2010 cycle Blue America backed Sheila Dow-Ford against reactionary Pennsylvania Blue Dog Tim Holden. 2010 was a conservative year and Holden won. Since then, he has voted (on crucial roll calls) with the Democrats 31.96% of the time. That's right-- Holden has backed the right-wing agenda espoused by Cantor and Boehner 68% of the time. But something else has happened since 2010-- PA-17 was redrawn and is now a solidly blue district, with voters who back the kinds of progressive solutions to the problems conservatives like Holden have created in this country.

Holden was happy to get a bluer district, but the result, predictably, is a primary challenge from a real Democrat who stands for progressive values and principles. This year that candidate is Matt Cartwright, and Tuesday he announced his candidacy. Yesterday I spoke with Sheila-- who went to the University of Pennsylvania Law School with Matt-- and she is enthusiastic to see someone of his caliber challenge Holden... and on exactly the same issues she went to bat for two years ago. Tuesday, Matt's son Jack, a college freshman, made the case for his dad here at DWT. I had already spoken with Matt a few weeks earlier because of his opposition to SOPA. Holden was one of the more corrupt of the right-wing Blue Dogs who co-sponsored the Internet-stifling legislation. At the time Matt took off from his single-minded campaign theme of "jobs, jobs, jobs," to talk to me about SOPA:

In my opinion, SOPA is a bill so riddled with unconstitutional infringements on free speech and unconstitutionally vague criminalization of conduct that it is hard to believe its authors ever even read the one document that they swore to protect and defend.

That probably is a giveaway that Matt is an attorney, an attorney who takes the law very seriously. In fact, when I asked him what originally inspired him to run, he mentioned Glenn Greenwald's new book on civil liberties, With Liberty And Justice For Some.

If I still lived in Stroudsburg, I would be able to vote for Matt against Holden. Instead, I was happy to add Matt to the Blue America page dedicated to replacing right-wing Blue Dogs with progressives. (Please hit that link and consider helping Matt with a contribution. The primary is in April, and he needs all the help he can get-- and fast.)

The new district has moved north and east and now includes all of Schuylkill County and parts of Carbon, Luzerne, Lackawanna, Monroe and Northampton Counties, including the solidly Democratic areas of Lackawana and Luzerne. There are about 89,000 likely voters, people who come out for primaries whether there is a marquee fight or not. Of these, about 33,000 come from Lackawanna (Matt's home county), 17,000 from Luzerne (where Matt is very well known for his work as a public service lawyer on TV), 12,000 from Schuylkill (Holden's home county), and the remaining 26,000 are split among Monroe, Northampton and Carbon. It's important to remember that the only part of the new district that was in Holden’s old district is his home county, Schuylkill, so that means he's an actual incumbent in only 14% of the district-- and 86% of the district is new to him. And the new district is 56% registered Dems and 33% registered Republicans.

In his announcement speech Tuesday, this is what Matt had to say about the newly created district:

These are places where the people believe in the same values that I’ve lived by my entire life. These are the boroughs, townships, and cities where people live who I have represented and who I have fought for. These are the places that have made me who I am today; this is a new beginning, a new chance to be represented in Congress by someone who is going to go to Washington with just one plan, one priority, and one promise. To fight for the middle class.

Let's pick up from there and listen to how Matt introduced himself to the people he hopes will chose him over a career politician who almost always sides with corporate interests against workers, consumers and ordinary Pennsylvania families:

My name is Matt Cartwright and I am running to be the Democratic nominee for Congress. I am running to represent the middle class that is the heart and soul of the new Pennsylvania 17th Congressional District.

This is a new beginning, a new chance for the working families of this district to elect someone who truly represents them and their interests… not the interests of the banking industry, the credit card companies, the insurance industry, the oil and gas industry, or Wall Street investment firms.

This is a new beginning, a new chance for working families to have a representative in Washington who will vote to put the economic well-being of the middle class first. This is your chance to elect a representative who will vote for legislation that benefits the middle class… and not the corporate special interests that fund his congressional campaign.

Working families throughout the new 17th Congressional District, like working families all across the country, are hurting. For those that aren’t struggling with unemployment or underemployment, their incomes have been stagnant. Even as we struggle to emerge from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, large corporate profits continue to go up, while middle class incomes go nowhere.

Why? Because incumbent congressmen continue to support policies and cast votes that put corporate profits over people. For too long, their priority has just been to get reelected, to protect their own jobs, so they wind up representing the deep pockets of the special interests instead of the people. It is wrong and it has to stop.

Working families in the new 17th Congressional District do not need a representative who votes against legislation making Wall Street and the big banks accountable for how they spend taxpayer money meant to prevent the collapse of our economy.

Working families in the new 17th Congressional District do not need a representative who, while the economy is still struggling, votes against legislation that helps distressed families keep their homes.

Working families in the new 17th Congressional District do not need a representative who votes for legislation that makes it harder for struggling families to get out from under crushing credit card debt.

Working families in the new 17th Congressional District do not need a representative who votes against legislation that makes medicine and health care more accessible to seniors and young adults, that allows coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and that also includes coverage for women’s preventative health care services.

To vote against legislation ensuring that taxpayer money in the TARP funds is used to benefit the economy and the middle class instead of stuffing the pockets of Wall Street executives-- that doesn’t represent middle class values or interests of working families.

To vote for legislation that makes it harder for folks to get a second chance in life… just so the credit card companies can squeeze their last nickel from them doesn’t represent the values of the middle class or interests of working families.

To side with the big banks… who helped create the economic crisis to begin with… and vote against legislation that helps avoid more home foreclosures doesn’t represent middle class values or interests of our working families.

To vote with big health care insurance companies and HMOs, doesn’t the interest of our seniors, young adults, people with pre-existing conditions and women.

I will stand up and fight for the middle class values and the interests of our working families.

There is an overwhelming feeling here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, that Congress is broken. When you look at the constant dysfunction, bickering and failure to act in Congress, it’s hard not to agree with that. But when a handful of representatives from the Democratic Party turn their backs on the middle class, and start voting like Wall Street Republicans, something is really wrong. Something even more fundamental is broken.

What’s broken is their promise to protect the middle class instead of the profits of big banks…or the oil & gas companies… or Wall Street. What’s broken is their promise to vote for bills that benefit the middle class and not loopholes that benefit special interests. What’s broken is their pledge to make decisions based on what’s best for the average family and not what’s best for the lobbyists contributing to their campaign funds. The pact of faith between our incumbent representatives and the people they represent is what is broken.

But I say to you, we can fix what’s broken. We don’t have to keep electing the same representatives whose voting records go against the values and interests of the middle class.

I’ve spent the last 24 years fighting for average people against huge corporations and insurance companies… fighting for middle class people against corporate greed… fighting for the most vulnerable people in our society against uncaring insurance companies… fighting for small business people victimized by predatory banks, and big business bullies.

And I’ve done this fighting right here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. This is all I do… all I’ve ever done. Fighting for what’s right. Fighting for the average person against those who are bigger and more powerful.

Now, this is my first run for public office. I may never have run in an election before, but I have won in the courtroom for families and small businesses I’ve represented over the years.

And I’m here to tell you-- I will bring that same fight to Congress on behalf of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s middle class.

We may start out as the underdog, I understand that the Republican majority in Harrisburg has already assigned us a Congressman, and they’re calling him the incumbent. It’s no easy task to defeat an incumbent. But I will say to you now: Our fight may start out as David vs. Goliath, but I will never give up and I will never sell out. I will work tirelessly to make sure that this district understands that, and on April 24th, we’re going to take the Democratic nomination. In November, we’re going to take this Congressional seat.

As a Congressman I won’t need campaign donations from special interest groups to know what the right thing to do is. I will already know what the right thing to do is.

As a Congressman I will not apologize for being a Democrat. As a Congressman I will not forget that the Democratic Party is the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR considered his solemn duty to the economic royalist on behalf of the everyday citizens of this country.

I will fight to ensure that when taxpayer dollars are spent, they are spent to help working families first. I will fight to help working families keep their homes from foreclosure. I will fight to protect the environment. I will fight to help working families get a fair deal from banks and credit card companies. I will fight for economic policies that increase the incomes of working families first.

I will not break the pact of faith between representatives and the people they represent.

And so together, let’s seize this new beginning, this new chance for working families. Let’s seize this moment to begin changing the balance of power in Congress. Let’s elect a Democratic representative who will vote the voice of the people who live in his district… and not the voice of lobbyists speaking for HMOs, big banks, big business and Wall Street.

Let’s elect a Democratic congressman who votes like a Democrat. Let’s elect a Democratic Congressman from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

I’m Matt Cartwright and I will be the new Democratic champion of the middle class in Congress.

You can't possibly have read that and not understood why Blue America is so enthusiastic about helping elect Matt Cartwright. Again, if you can, please consider contributing to his campaign.

Re-industrialization of the United States?

Like any American who refused to ever buy into the shortsighted bipartisan corporatist de-industrialization of America by clueless, pie-in-the-sky Wall Street elites making their way blithely between banks and cabinet rooms, I was happy to hear President Obama at least acknowledge that these policies have to be turned back. You missed it? It was part of his State of the Union address last night, that little talk he gave that made Republicans so grumpy but that swing voters loved.

Scott Paul, the executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing sure picked right up on it. The President had barely finished speaking before his office blasted out his support. "Strengthening American manufacturing and growing manufacturing jobs will lay a solid foundation for a new middle class and economic security for the next generation. We commend President Obama for focusing on manufacturing in a way no president has for 25 years or more." Amen to that! These are some of the lines in the President's speech he was responding to:

Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs... Tonight, I’m announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade practices in countries like China.

We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it. So let’s change it. First, if you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it. That money should be used to cover moving expenses for companies like Master Lock that decide to bring jobs home. Second, no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here.

When President Obama talked about building an economy built to last, it could be interpreted as a direct swipe at Mitt Romney, whose vulture capital experience is the exact opposite: short-term financial manipulation for quick profits creating nothing at all. That's the record as a "businessman" Romney seeks to run on. After the speech the White released a document called Blueprint For An America Built To Last. Let me quote a section, the heart of it in my opinion, titled "A Blueprint To Create New Jobs Here In America, Discourage Outsourcing, And Encourage Insourcing." It's pretty specific, although some of those specifics-- particularly the bullshit about "free" trade-- are more the cause of the problem than the solution.

Take away the deduction for outsourcing, make companies pay a minimum tax for profits and jobs overseas, and reward companies for bringing jobs back to America: The President believes that we need comprehensive corporate tax reform that will close loopholes, lower rates, and eliminate incentives that make it more attractive to ship jobs overseas-- corporate tax reform that will:

• Remove tax incentives to locate overseas through an international minimum tax: The President is proposing to eliminate tax incentives to ship jobs offshore by ensuring that all American companies pay a minimum tax on their overseas profits, preventing other countries from attracting American business through unusually low tax rates.

• Stop letting companies take a tax deduction for moving overseas and instead provide a credit for moving jobs back home: The President wants to eliminate the tax deduction companies receive for the cost of shutting down factories and moving production overseas, and create a new tax credit to cover moving expenses for companies that close production overseas and bring jobs back to the United States.

Lower tax rates for companies that manufacture and create jobs in the United States:

• Create new incentives to increase manufacturing in the United States: At the same time he proposes to close special-interest loopholes, the President is proposing to ensure the next generation of manufacturing jobs is created here in America by reducing tax rates for manufacturers and doubling the tax deduction for high-tech manufacturers.

• Support companies that make new investments in the communities hardest hit by major job losses: The President is proposing a new tax credit that provides support for companies seeking to finance new factories, equipment, or production in communities that have been hardest hit by a company choosing to relocate or a military base shutting down.

Get tough on trade enforcement: The President has worked to ensure Americans can sell their products all over the world, and last year he signed into law new trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea, helping to put the United States on track to reach the goal of doubling exports by the end of 2014. But the President refuses to stand by when our international competitors don’t play by the rules. To level the playing field by improving trade enforcement, the President is announcing:

• A new trade enforcement unit: The President announced the creation of a new trade enforcement unit that will bring together resources and investigators from across the Federal Government to go after unfair trade practices in countries around the world, including China.

• Enhancing trade inspections: The President called for enhancing trade inspections to stop counterfeit, pirated, or unsafe goods before they enter the United States.

• Putting American companies on an even footing: When competitors like China offer unfair export financing to help their companies win business overseas, the United States will provide financing to put our companies on an even footing.

Create jobs by using half of the savings from ending foreign wars to rebuild America: To help ensure we have the infrastructure so that companies can ship their goods more efficiently throughout the country and the world, the President is calling for new efforts to revitalize American infrastructure. The President’s plan will protect taxpayer dollars by fixing existing roads and by directing funding to the best projects instead of earmarks, and will continue investments in high-speed rail. To pay for these investments, the President is proposing to use approximately half of the savings that we will achieve from winding down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the 6 year period of the infrastructure plan with the other half going towards paying down the debt. The President also announced that within the coming weeks, he will sign an Executive Order clearing the red tape that can slow down new infrastructure projects, accelerating those projects that have already been funded.

Unserious right-wing obstructionists like the two up top and the cardboard cutout they had give the GOP rebuttal (right) may not have understood-- or cared to try to understand-- what the President is attempting to do to get the country back on the right track. But thoughtful members of Congress sure did-- all dozen of them. Brad Miller (D-NC), who won't be running for reelection in November (yes, you just read something no one else knows), was one of the first out of the box who did grasp what Obama was talking about. "I strongly support his commitment to bring back American manufacturing," he wrote.

For generations, factory jobs meant a spot in the middle class; jobs in the service economy or in retail often do not. Reforming the tax laws to reward companies for creating American manufacturing is an important step. Cracking down on unfair trade practices by China and others will level the playing field for American manufacturers. And extending the payroll tax cut will put money in the pockets of working and middle-class families so they can buy American manufactured goods.

"By axing parks, politicos are stealing the people's property" (Jim Hightower)

Well, you say that I'm an outlaw,
You say that I'm a thief.
Here's a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief.

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

-- from Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd" (as
published, not word for word what Woody sings here)

"A state sales tax on sporting goods, dedicated by law to help finance the people's parks will generate about $236 million this year and next. But the governor and his legislative henchmen raided this pile of revenue, filching two-thirds of it for the state's general fund so they could claim that they 'balanced our budget (without) raising taxes.' "

-- Jim Hightower, in his syndicated column, "By Axing
Parks, Politicos Are Stealing the People's Property"

by Ken

Here's how Jim Hightower begins this column, happily passed along by the invaluable Nation of Change:

"Sorry, we're closed." In one of the saddest signs of the times, this message is popping up all across the country, as governors and legislators are cutting off funds (and shutting off access) to one of the finest, most popular assets owned by the people of our country: state parks.

The logic is familiar by now: If God had meant for us to have amenities like parks, if he felt we deserved amenities like parks, he would have made us rich enough to afford amenities like parks -- and He would probably have probably come up with one of His famously mysterious ways to scam it so that somebody else paid for them. (Rich people just love it when they can get somebody else to pay for their stuff. And I'm sure they can direct us to any number of bought-and-paid-for clergyfolk who''ll explain that this too is part of God's mysterious plan.)

Jim takes a rather different view, as you might expect from one of those goddamn liberal class warriors. "Parks," he writes, "are a tangible expression of America's democratic ideals,"

literally a common ground for every man, woman and child to enjoy, learn, absorb . . . or just be. Especially for the middle class and the poor -- the great majority of our people who can't jet off to luxury resorts for a getaway for vacation -- these spaces offer a form of real wealth, something of great value that each of us literally "owns," knitting us together as a community and nation.

In the wonderful world of Austerity, however, it's a perfect time to hack away at this blatant waste of what should properly be Rich People's Money, the way most all money should be Rich People's Money, at least in the minds of Rich People, and goodness knows they've gone a long way toward making it so.

"Spiritually shriveled, small-minded and short-sighted" he calls the state officials who "are snuffing out this invaluable, uniting social force." (Come on, Jim, isn't any "uniting social force" by definition class warfare?)

The majority of states have been closing many of their parks, slashing hours and services at others or simply handing the public's asset to profiteering corporations. Idaho's governor has proposed eliminating the entire parks department; California shut the gates of a fourth of the state's parks last year; officials in Arizona and Florida intend to privatize their parks; Washington state has cut off most of its park funding; and Ohio has okayed oil drilling in its parks to replace state financing.

As Woody Guthrie said of outlaws, "Some'll rob you with a six gun/Some with a fountain pen." This is theft by the in-laws, the political insiders who're stealing The People's property -- stealing from America itself.

At least in the case of his home state, Texas, Jim isn't being poetic or metaphorical when he talks about those "spiritually shriveled, small-minded and short-sighted state officials" stealing The People's property." He's here to tell us a tale.

Things tend to be bigger here -- bigger hair and hats, for example, bigger money and egos . . . and bigger thievery by political con men.

Last year, the gang of GOP hucksters who control our state government pulled off a huge heist, covering it up with an equally huge boast: "We balanced our budget. Not by raising taxes but by setting priorities and cutting government spending," bragged the gang leader, Gov. Rick "Oops" Perry. How'd they fill the $27 billion shortfall that they themselves had created by their previous budgetary mismanagement? By stealing money from already poorly funded programs -- from education to parks -- that ordinary Texans count on.

People here are justly proud of their 94 parks, but many of these treasures are now understaffed, open fewer hours and in disrepair because the system's budget was whacked by 21.5 percent in order to spare the wealthiest families and corporations in this enormously rich state from paying a teensy bit more in taxes.

But that was only part of the robbery. A state sales tax on sporting goods, dedicated by law to help finance the people's parks will generate about $236 million this year and next. But the governor and his legislative henchmen raided this pile of revenue, filching two-thirds of it for the state's general fund so they could claim that they "balanced our budget (without) raising taxes."

To replenish some of the tax money taken by The Perry Gang, the head of parks for the Great State of Texas is now engaged in a shocking spectacle: public begging. In a video played at 11 December press conferences in state parks across Texas, the chief of a major state agency is reduced to shaking a tin cup, pleading for $4.6 million in donations. "Please act now to help keep our state parks open for all Texans to enjoy," he beseeches.

These right-wing politicians howl that they want to shrink government -- but they are the shrunken ones, and the narrowness of their vision is diminishing what it means to be American.

I want to quote again -- possibly not for the last time! -- a paragraph I cited the other day from Rick Perlstein's new rollingstone.com column, "What Mitt Romney Learned From His Dad," and indeed today go a bit further than I did before.

[George Romney's] vision of how capitalism should work was in every particular the exact opposite of the one pushed by the vulture capitalist he sired. (If George Romney's AMC was around now, Mitt Romney's Bain Capital would probably be busy turning it into a carcass.) A critic once said he was "so dedicated to good works his entrance into politics is like sending a Salvation Army lass into the chorus at a burlesque house." As a CEO he would give back part of his salary and bonus to the company when he thought they were too high. He offered a pioneering profit-sharing plan to his employees. Most strikingly, asked about the idea that "rugged individualism" was the key to America's success, he snapped back, "It's nothing but a political banner to cover up greed." He was the poster child for the antiquated notion that corporations have multiple stakeholders: the workers that breathe them life, the communities in which they are situated, and the nation to whom they owe a patriotic obligation – most definitely and emphatically not just stockholders, as Mitt and his defenders say.

In the video above [you can see it onsite if you really want to -- Ed.], today's Romney insists there is no reason to question the distribution of wealth in America except for envy of the rich -- did his rich dad question the distribution of wealth in America out of envy for the rich? -- and that it was a subject only appropriate for discussion in "quiet rooms." (His dad didn't talk about it in quiet rooms; he talked about it at a Sunday worship service at the 1972 Republican convention, praying, "Help us to help those who need help.")

By the year 2012, the erstwhile party of Governor Romney -- Gov. George Romney, that is -- had successfully redefined "those who need help" to mean America's Greediest, the deserving rich.

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Our Family Values President

by Noah

Running for President on laundered taxpayer money from Fannie & Freddie to the tune $1.6 million...

Running for President while being paid to spew your brand of irrational hate and delusional fantasies on a TV network owned by foreigners...

Drumming up racial hate by implying that it's African-Americans who use the biggest percentage of food stamps when, in fact, it is rural whites who had their livelihoods destroyed by Big Arigi-business...

Running for President on $11 million (so far) of gambling czar and personal patron Sheldon Adelson's money...

Sanctimoniously leading the impeachment of a President for doing the same thing he was doing.

Being ousted from your job as Speaker Of The House on ethics charges, by your own party!

Taking off the charts offense at questions about his character... priceless.

And-- while we're not taking sides in this pig-fest-- we did let Mitt chime in as well... Yes, Mitt, not one of his SuperPACs where he can claim some kind of faux-deniability:

With Democrats Like Artur Davis, Who Needs Republicans?

Before he was thoroughly rejected by Democrats in the Alabama gubernatorial primary in 2010, Rep. Artur Davis, a conservative corporate shill representing one of the safest Democratic seats in the country, was being pushed by the Beltway Democratic Establishment as a future leader. In his last year in Congress he voted far more often with the GOP than with his own party. There are quite a few "Democrats" like that, and when you contribute to the DCCC that's exactly where your money goes. As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, Davis is getting ready to officially become a black Republican. Yesterday he was paying his dues by shilling for the Bush family in the National Review. He's giving his right-wing pals some friendly advice to help them defeat President Obama. When will he get his own show on Fox? He's fretting that "an Obama landslide would devastate conservatism enough that it might be irreparable for a generation" and making the case-- several cases-- for a Jeb Bush run.

One doesn’t have to subscribe to Gingrich’s Manichean rhetoric to concede that an Obama sweep would, for the first time in 76 years, institute government-centered, redistributionist economics as the country’s central governing philosophy. It would be, after all, the agenda that Obama and congressional Democrats had campaigned on, in contrast to the deliberately muted, ideologically vague platforms that elected Carter, Clinton, and Obama in 2008; or the growth-oriented, business friendly liberalism that JFK and LBJ embodied.

Second, Bush would have a pathway to victory in November. His brand of reform-oriented conservatism might actually be his party’s only pathway: Unlike Romney, whose leadership of Massachusetts produced one signature achievement-- a hodgepodge of a health-care law that he likely wishes he could take back-- Bush’s legacy is an issue that Republicans ought to own but are ignoring, education reform. He also turned Florida into a national laboratory for controlling health-care costs and reining in medical tort liability, both soft spots in Obama’s record.

At the same time, Bush has revealed a capacity for coalition-building that has eluded Gingrich. He is a hero of the conservative base who has had remarkable electoral appeal to Jewish and Hispanic voters. He combines support for a modified version of the DREAM Act with backing stronger border security-- a middle ground that is both tough-minded and assimilationist-- and happens to be entering his fourth decade of marriage to a Hispanic woman. It goes without saying that Bush gives Republicans the best shot of removing Florida from the Democratic column, and winning states with a strong Latino presence such as Arizona and Colorado.

The fact is that Jeb Bush bent Florida, a famously interest-group-ridden state, in a rightward direction; that’s an accomplishment Romney can’t begin to claim vis-à-vis Massachusetts. Bush is not just an authentic movement conservative, but a groundbreaker on an array of issues that drive votes, such as accountability for teachers and reining in the costs of private health insurance. While his record has blemishes that Democrats would exploit, from his stint in the Eighties lobbying for southern-Florida business interests to his ill-timed tenure at Lehman Brothers in 2007, this Bush is an adept, articulate campaigner who is unlikely to be tied in knots defending his history. Also, the statute of limitations seems to have expired on the ugliest sentiments around the last Bush presidency.

Jeb Bush should measure his reluctance against the risks looming for his party and, potentially, his country. The fact is that his party could be staring at an unavoidable disaster unless, in the interests of saving it, its best candidate comes out of retirement.

Last week the DCCC unveiled its "Red to Blue" list, the candidates whose elections they're prioritizing. In many cases, they picked staunch conservatives who are in primary battles against progressives. How many on it were just like Artur Davis politically? Far too many. In district after district, "ex"-Blue Dog Steve Israel forced the DCCC to back future Artur Davises who had already been endorsed by the reactionary, anti-Choice, anti-gay, anti-working-family Blue Dog caucus. The Blue Dogs have recruited right-wing candidates Rob Wallace (OK), Leonard Bembry (FL), Brendan Mullen (IN) and Clark Hall (AR), and they were immediately embraced by the DCCC, which is also backing defeated Blue Dogs Nick Lampson (TX) and Charlie Wilson (OH). Meanwhile Israel hops around the country whispering to Democratic donors to not help fund progressives like Darcy Burner so that he can slip more-conservative and easier-to-control candidates into nominations.

How to avoid future Artur Davises? Refuse to give any contributions to the DCCC until the Democratic Party reforms it and stops appointing degenerate corporate shills like Rahm Emanuel and Steve Israel. Instead, contribute directly to progressive candidates. Here's the best batch of them we could find, dedicated New Deal Democrats like Norman Solomon (D-CA), John Waltz (D-MI), Ilya Sheyman (D-IL), Eric Griego (D-NM), Nick Ruiz (D-FL) and Franke Wilmer (D-MT). Hit the link to view the whole list. Almost all of them have been studiously ignored by the DCCC.