DownWithTyranny!

Who Are The New Dems?

2012-01-30T21:00:00.000-08:00

Suppose you're basically pretty conservative, especially on economic and fiscal matters, but early in life picked the blue team instead of the red team. And you're looking for a career in politics. What to do? Well you could switch parties and become a Republican, but as Parker Griffith (D>R-AL) discovered, that sometimes works out badly; he lost the GOP primary in 2010 and will lose it again in 2012. The next best thing is to become a Blue Dog. They're pretty much Republicans with blue T-shirts. Problem there, of course, is all the anti-Choice, anti-gay and... well, the Blue Dog caucus is really extreme and barely even part of the Democratic Party at all. That leaves... a group that's kind of like the Blue Dogs but without the white sheets and hoods: the New Democratic Coalition.

The New Dems was founded in 1997 as the House affiliate of the corporatist shills at Joe Lieberman's DLC. It is financed by Big Business and corrupt K Street lobbyists with an anti-worker/anti-consumer agenda. It specializes in "free trade" policies. Most of the leadership has been made up of conservative Democrats with a nose for big money, like Rahm Emanuel, Chamber of Commerce ex-Rep. Melissa Bean, and corporatists Joe Crowley, Ron Kind, Ellen Tauscher, Harold Ford and Allyson Schwartz.

Some conservative Democrats, like Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, seeking to hide their true colors have officially dropped out of the New Dem Coalition in the hope of winning wider leadership positions in the whole party. A number of Blue Dogs-- Adam Schiff (CA), Loretta Sanchez (CA), John Barrow (GA), David Scott (GA), Mike McIntyre (NC), Kurt Schrader (OR) and Jason Altmire (PA)-- are members of both right-wing groups.

Joe Crowley, the slimy boss of the Queens Democratic Party machine, and widely considered one of the most corrupt Members of Congress (an Ethics Committee investigation is still pending which should, but won't, lead to his expulsion), is the current head of the New Dems. His website includes the whole list of current New Dem members.

Watch Ron Kind, Wisconsin corporate whore, lie about the murderous Colombian anti-labor regime:

We can't expect our mighty military machine to keep track every last couple of billion dollars, can we?

2012-01-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

Probably there isn't even any missing money, just missing records. "The audit says it believes records management is to blame, and 'has been an ongoing problem for DoD in Iraq. By all accounts, DoD established good internal processes and controls to account for and report on' the funds it was given after the Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved."

by Ken

You know what's so great about war? Well, sure, it's great for hornswoggling large numbers of people indoctrinated with phony-baloney mock-patriotism to be led around by their thumbs and let you introduce every revolutionary fascist innovation you want. But that's not what I was thinking of. You say that on the principle of "military Keynsian" economics it pumps gazilions of dollars into the economy, without much risk of any of that spending producing any other socially useful benefit -- and at the mere cost of a massive run-up of public debt, which is actually a good thing, because it provides a great excuse for eliminating as much other spending as possible which might produce some socially useful benefit.

Yes, that's closer to what I had in mind. I'm thinking of all those kajillions of dollars floating around available for snatching by the biggest and stickiest hands. And the cool thing is that a lot of that much of that money can, in the grand old tradition of patriotic war profiteering, be glommed legally, as long as you manage to supply products or services that are genuinely called for, more or less, by the war effort. You know, like the way the armor-makers stepped up to the plate to protect our fighting men and women in Iraq. Oh wait, bad example.

Okay, I'm dancing around a little, postponing the moment when I have to own up that I'm making all this to-do over yet another story about unaccounted-for billions from the wars cooked up by those splendid war criminals in the Bush regime. As soon as you hear it's just another unaccounted-for-military-billions story, you'll suddenly remember you have to finish alphabetizing your breakfast-cereal coupons.

I can't even tell you with any assurance that billions of dollars were stolen, because all we know for sure is that the latest batch of unaccounted-for billions is, you know, unaccounted for, and some inspector general somewhere is whining about it. (Don't get me started on those IGs! Most of them know their place, which is to sign off on the forms on the appropriate line. But some of them insist on making a federal case out of every last unaccounted for billion dollars or two.)

The people who are closest to the money, or where the money used to be, or was last heard from, seem to think, or want us to think, that it's just a minor missing-paperwork snafu. It could be like when you finally get ready to do your taxes and can't find the damned shoebox you stuffed your receipts and stuff in all year. For all we know, the missing paperwork could turn up any moment in a shoebox found on the top shelf of some Baghdadi closet.

Anyway, here's Josh Levs's CNN report. You know, if you look at it the right way, it's almost kind of funny.

U.S. Defense Department can't account for billions for Iraq, audit finds

By Josh Levs, CNN
updated 10:14 AM EST, Mon January 30, 2012

(CNN) -- The U.S. Defense Department cannot account for about $2 billion it was given to cover Iraq-related expenses and is not providing Iraq with a complete list of U.S.-funded reconstruction projects, according to two new government audits.

The reports come from the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

The Iraqi government in 2004 gave the Department of Defense access to about $3 billion to pay bills for certain contracts, and the department can only show what happened to about a third of that, the inspector general says in an audit published Friday.

Although the Department of Defense (DoD) had "internal processes and controls" to track payments, the "bulk of the records are missing," the report says, adding that the department is searching for them.

Other documents are missing as well, including monthly reports documenting expenses, the audit says.

"From July 2004 through December 2007, DoD should have provided 42 monthly reports. However, it can locate only the first four reports."

A letter accompanying the report is signed by Stuart Bowen, the inspector general. The audit was overseen by Glenn Furbish, assistant inspector general for audits.

In a response letter also contained in the report, Defense Under Secretary Mark Easton acknowledges "a records management issue."

The audit says it believes records management is to blame, and "has been an ongoing problem for DoD in Iraq. By all accounts, DoD established good internal processes and controls to account for and report on" the funds it was given after the Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved.

Where the records did exist, they matched other records and contained "good financial documentation supporting individual payments." Also, there is "sufficient evidence" that required monthly reports were sent to the government of Iraq, even though they can't be found, the audit said.

The audit deals with a time when Iraq's government was undergoing a transition. The Coalition Provisional Authority ran the country for 14 months from 2003 to 2004. During that time, the authority awarded numerous contracts. When it dissolved in 2004, the Iraqi government gave the U.S. Defense Department access to the $3 billion to pay bills for contracts the provisional authority had awarded.

The Defense Department letter from Easton -- the department's deputy chief financial officer -- thanks the inspector general's office for "the collaborative effort and professional courtesy" in a series of audits.

Separately, the inspector general's office sent a letter Sunday to the U.S. ambassador to Iraq complaining that the U.S. government is not providing Iraq with a complete list of reconstruction projects.

The U.S. criteria for selecting which projects to report to Iraq -- which include only those valued at $250,000 or more -- is a central part of the problem, the letter says.

The U.S. Embassy says the system is designed to help Iraq "focus its limited resources on sustainment of infrastructure and other large capital projects done through U.S. reconstruction efforts," the report notes.

The inspector general's office argues that the limited list -- which is also "hampered by unreliable data and other data entry problems" -- does not allow Iraq to decide where to focus its resources, and notes that the country might consider some smaller projects more important than those that are reported.

"Without more comprehensive knowledge about reconstruction projects the (Iraqi government) will not be in a position to maximize the use of its resources," the report says.

Billions of dollars in spending are not reported to Iraq under the current system, the report says.

In a response letter, Peter Bodde, assistant chief of mission for the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, says that while the current system is incomplete, "it does capture the vast majority of reconstruction projects and there is no other alternative that captures more."

He also notes that the Iraq reconstruction effort "is now in its very last stages, and all remaining capital projects will be reported through the asset transfer process."

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction was created in 2004 to continue oversight of Iraq reconstruction programs.

Blind Trust

2012-01-30T14:00:00.000-08:00

So much disunity and fractiousness inside the GOP these days! I think people are turned off by it. But in an interview with the National Journal, anti-tax/anti-government fanatic-- and self-loathing, demented closet queen-- Grover Norquist had just the thing to unite all factions of the Republican Party: impeaching President Obama if he doesn't extend the Bush tax cuts for millionaires, something polls consistently show the public opposes by wide margins. But the hell with the public, Norquist thinks he can force delusional Republicans in Congress to get back into the impeachment thing that went over so well last time they tried it.

Norquist has long held a tight grip on the marionette strings of the GOP. Wielding undue influence as the head of the Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist ensures that Republican lawmakers sign his anti-tax pledge and threatens them with electoral defeat should they even think of deviating from it. Norquist has marked a successful few years, killing the deficit super committee agreement, batting down a tax increase on millionaires, and, of course, ensuring the extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Pleased with his headway, Norquist is now mapping out how he can ensure further anti-tax victories by securing Republican majorities. In an interview with the National Journal, he mused that a GOP mandate would obviously enact an extension of the Bush tax cuts, work to maintain a repatriation holiday for corporate profits, and even pass House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan that jeopardizes Medicare. But when asked what Republicans should do if faced with a Democratic majority that won’t keep the tax cuts, Norquist had a simple answer: “impeach” Obama.
NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?
NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

[Confidential to Grover N: The Senate doesn't impeach; the House impeaches. If it does, an impeachment trial is then held in the Senate. Sometimes it's handy to know these things. -- Ed.]

Wow! It's like the whole GOP has become unhinged and disconnected from the real world Americans are facing every day. Yesterday you may have missed the Newtster chitchatting on ABC with Jake Tapper, who was sitting in for George Stephanopoulos on This Week. Here's Gingrich's best shot at Republican unity, the kind of unity it will take for these kooks to impeach President Obama.

I think clearly the conservatives and the grassroots are increasingly angry about the way in which the Washington establishment has rallied in many ways with complete dishonesty, as Rush Limbaugh pointed out the other day. Some of the articles, some of the attacks on me have been breathtakingly dishonest. And I think as that deepens, the conservatives are going to come together and decide they do not want a Massachusetts liberal to be the Republican nominee.

...I'm standing next to a guy who is the most blatantly dishonest answers I can remember in any presidential race in-- in my lifetime. And I've seen, I think, every presidential debate-- presidential campaign debate or virtually every one. And, you know, he would say things that were just plain not true.

Look, it's a little bit like yesterday's L.A. Times report. I mean, now it found 23 foreign accounts he never reported until he released his taxes. He would say-- he would say thing after thing after thing that just plain wasn't true.

And I had-- I don't know how you debate a person with civility if they're prepared to say things that are just plain factually false. And that's going to become a key part of this. I think the Republican establishment believes it's OK to say and do virtually anything to stop a genuine insurgency from winning because they are very afraid of losing control of the old order.

We tried a moderate in 1996 for president. He lost. We tried a moderate in 2008 for president. He lost. It's very hard to take Romneycare and Obamacare and have a debate and have the Republican win that debate... [Romney's] supposedly a great manager, yet he can't explain 23 different foreign accounts that weren't reported. He's a great manager. He can't explain being on the board of directors of the company which got the largest Medicare fine in history for fraud?

...[W]hen you get outside the zone where Romney carpet-bombs with Wall Street money, and you look at what's happening in the rest of the country, I'm ahead in all three national polls that were released this week. I'm ahead by a big margin, because when you come to positive ideas, I represent real change in Washington, I represent unleashing the spirit of the American people to get us back as a country, rebuilding the country we love. And when we get to a positive idea campaign, I consistently win.

It's only when he can mass money to focus on carpet-bombing with negative ads that he gains any traction at all. ...He is a manager who will manage the decay. I am a leader who has a vision of a bold, exciting American future where we change Washington decisively. And there's a good reason the Washington establishment is afraid of me. I will, in fact, lead the American people to change Washington. Romney will, in fact, hang out with his establishment friends, managing the decay, and explaining to the rest of us why that's the best hope we have.

God must love Barack Obama.

Buck McKeon Scandal About To Blow Sky High?

2012-01-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

Boehner consorting with the McKeon criminals

Even a casual reader of DWT is aware that California Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon (R) has been writing himself a record of corruption noteworthy even by Inside the Beltway standards. A Mormon, McKeon doesn't drink alcohol or even coffee... he takes bribes. "Oh but everyone in Washington takes bribes," you might say, shrugging it off. And you'd be half right. Lots of-- most of?-- our political elite is involved in a system that encourages bribery. But there are rules that aren't supposed to be broken, and that's when they call it bribery. McKeon has crossed the boundary.

Local newspapers in his Southern California district have gone beyond hinting that a bigger story is about to break, and break nationally. And this isn't just the still unwinding Countrywide scandal, which saw him taking massive bribes from Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo to stave off personal bankruptcy. No, no, there's a lot more to the breakdown of Buck McKeon's personal ethics than just a bribe here or there from a financial fat cat.

Why are venerable media outlets like the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico apparently looking into the campaign finances of 38th Assembly District candidate Patricia McKeon? Well, it’s certainly not to do a fluff piece on the State Assembly candidate and wife of Congressman Buck McKeon!

Our sources are chattering about the fund raising activities of Mrs. McKeon going back to a Capitol Hill fund raiser held last October in Washington D.C. Wait, raising money for a California Assembly seat race in D.C.? Yep, allegedly there was some political arm-twisting going on in October to raise money for Patricia’s run for California State Assembly.

Hmmm, I wonder if that had anything to do with her husband being Chairman of the Armed Services Committee!? Of course it did and that may be the smoking gun for a whole lot of issues.

The National Journal also smells a rat in the dispute between the McKeons and his ex-top staffer Scott Wilk, currently being challenged in his Assembly run by Patricia McKeon, who's been using all of Buck's connections-- some blatantly illegally-- to advance her campaign. Until now Patricia McKeon has been used basically a bagman for Buck's operation, much the same way John Doolittle used to use his wife (another money-mad Mormon couple, by the way). When Wilk heard that his former boss was running his wife for the open Assembly seat, he says, “I started laughing, because honestly that’s a scenario that never crossed my mind. Her political acumen stops at seating charts.”

Wilk, 52, is a longtime political staffer who serves on his local community college board, has been chief of staff to two state legislators, and made an aborted run for the Assembly in the mid-1990s. Patricia McKeon, 69, has been a “full-time mother” (of six), president of a local PTA, and a community volunteer, according to a letter she sent to supporters. She’s been married to Buck McKeon for 49 years.

Rep. McKeon has already thrown his considerable weight behind his wife’s run. He hosted a fundraiser for her last fall in Washington, blocks from the Capitol.

“His main role has been that of a supportive husband,” said Alissa McCurley, the congressman’s spokeswoman. Patricia McKeon and her campaign declined to comment for this story. Wilk said they are running a purposefully stealthy campaign.

“The congressman has told people in the district that he plans to lock her in the room, raise all of her money, and win it on her name ID,” Wilk said.

Neither Wilk nor McKeon has filed a fundraising report yet, though McKeon has seeded her campaign with $40,000 of her own money, state records show.

The stature of McKeon’s husband is already a factor in the race. One of Wilk’s early backers reneged out of fear of offending the congressman. State Sen. Tony Strickland said he withdrew his endorsement after launching his own bid for Congress to replace retiring Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif.

“A lot of folks in the delegation feel uncomfortable going all-out to help me when I’m going against Buck’s wife,” Strickland said.

“You take your wife’s races a little more personal than even your own,” added Strickland, speaking from experience as his wife followed him into the state Legislature. Strickland said Wilk, whom he described as an “old friend,” was “very understanding.”

Wilk still has backing from Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., a former boss who is something of a kingmaker in California’s conservative circles. “He impresses the hell out of me and that was one of the easiest endorsements I’ve made in my whole career,” McClintock said of his former chief of staff. McClintock said he hasn’t spoken about the primary with McKeon.

The race marks Patricia McKeon’s first bid for office. In the letter to supporters, she said her decision to run for state office came when she was forced to pay 10 cents for a paper grocery bag. “I reached my tipping point,” she wrote. (The bag fee was a local levy, however, not the result of a state law.)

McKeon wrote that she overcame any “sensitivities to voters seeing two McKeons on the ballot” by realizing “we are two separate people-- with different perspectives and strengths.”

McKeon has spent a decade serving as her husband’s campaign treasurer. She was paid nearly $47,000 in the first nine months of 2011. From 2001 to 2006, she received more money from her husband’s treasury-- a total of $263,168-- than any other congressional relative, according to a 2007 study by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“It’s not illegal, but it’s certainly unethical,” Wilk opined.

McCurley, the congressman’s spokeswoman, said he has “taken great comfort in that he never has to worry about the money” with his wife controlling the account. “He was able to completely trust her,” she said.

Buck McKeon has a different ethical issue brewing. It recently became public that he allegedly received a discounted mortgage from the former Countrywide Financial. The congressman “appears to have obtained a significant discount on his VIP loan as a direct result of personal intervention by [then-] Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., ranking member of the House oversight panel, wrote in a letter released this month. The case was referred to the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether the loan amounted to an improper gift.

The new Buck McKeon district (25th CD) is a classic swing district. Within the new lines, Obama beat McCain in 2008, but Meg Whitman bested Jerry Brown for governor two years later. Clueless DC pundits rate it as "safely Republican," but of course they're wrong. Even before McKeon's reputation began crumbling, this more and more Hispanic district was becoming ripe for the taking. The DCCC, however, is ignoring it completely-- even with McKeon's obvious problems.

Fortunately, the California Democratic Party is ignoring the DCCC and coalescing strongly behind the progressive doctor, Lee Rogers, who's giving McKeon a run for his money. As we mentioned when first introducing Dr. Rogers, McKeon has been the most vocal and persistent defenders of aggressive war and aggressive policies towards funding war of any Member of Congress. His newly drawn district isn't necessarily one that will support that attitude, especially not with a well-financed opponent, Dr. Lee Rogers, eager to talk about McKeon's slavish acquiescence to the military-industrial complex front and center for the campaign. If you'd like to help replace McKeon with Lee Rogers, we just added him to our ActBlue page.

This Santa Clara Valley Signal poll (click to enlarge) seems to have been too embarrassing for the cause of Buck McKeon's reelection-- it was "disappeared." See the postscript below (with a screen shot of the final version of the poll).

POSTSCRIPT: With Friends Like These...

The Santa Clarita Valley Signal has taken down the above poll, which was showing that most voters in CA-25 think it's time for McKeon to go. In addition, yesterday the paper published an op-ed extolling, or meaning to extol, the crooked congressman's virtues. Tim Myers identified himself as a longtime McKeon supporter who plans to vote for him in November (assuming McKeon doesn't retire under pressure before then). However, to a normal person it reads like a chilling indictment of McKeon, which would make the person search out an alternative-- any alternative.

Say what you will concerning McKeon, and many, now mostly Republicans, do-- unlike Romney, his personal experience most closely mirrors the experience of his constituency.

First of all, he made his living (like many in the SCV) from a family business that eventually collapsed when it could no longer support the hoped-for lifestyles of the extensive clan. Like many, particularly recently, McKeon personally guaranteed certain debts of the family business while it swirled under; debts that he honorably repaid and did not discharge through a personal bankruptcy.

Second, in 1998, after the failure of the business and the necessity and expense of maintaining two residences in the D.C. area and Santa Clarita, McKeon did what any normal SCV resident would do to enhance cash flow. He got a good deal on a mortgage, and put his wife, Patricia, on his campaign’s payroll to channel some of that money from campaign to personal funds.

With respect to his supposedly discounted Countrywide mortgage deal reported recently: Any critic who states that the congressman “should have known” he got a sweet deal must admit that if they do not themselves work in the finance industry or in a financial position, they vet the loan solely by determining the affordability of the monthly payment.

Third, like any in the SCV, my Nebraska bride and myself included, he needed to help his children with their emerging adulthood with additional cash from time to time, hiring them to perform services for the campaign, once again channeling money to personal use and instilling the Republican value of hard, though nepotistic, work.

Fourth, he bought a residence near the peak of the market in Westridge, which probably now stands completely underwater with the mortgage well exceeding the value like 70 to 90 percent of his neighbors.

Fifth, also like many SCV residents, he will utilize personal connections and heft to get another job for a spouse or child, this time plumping for his Patricia McKeon to take the California Assembly seat vacated by Cameron Smyth.

And while many Republicans rail against these actions, I strongly believe that they would avail themselves of these perks personally if they only could.

But, seriously, I have and always will vote for McKeon for nothing else other than his courage in voting for the TARP bill in September 2008, when the global banking system spun toward default and the country (and world) needed fast action to keep the globe from slipping back into a barter economy and travelling back in time to Europe in the Middle Ages.

McKeon did this despite the fact that it went against every bone in his body, but he still cast that necessary vote, even though some fellow Republicans and populist Democrats rolled the dice with their no votes and put the world economy on edge. McKeon did not, and thus he earned my vote forever, and ever and ever.

Finally, here is that screen shot of the final version of the Signal poll before the paper made it disappear without a trace:

UPDATE: Neither McKeon Has Been Arrested Yet

Just moments ago California's top investigative journalist, Lee Fang, published the results of his own on-going investigation into the McKeon's disregard for campaign finance regulations and probable criminal activities.

Recent disclosures reveal that a federal lobbyist with ties to Congressman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), the senior member of the committee overseeing the Pentagon, provided financial support to McKeon’s wife, who is seeking a seat in the California State Assembly this year. As defense industry lobbyists scramble to head off looming cuts in the Pentagon budget, they are looking for new ways to ingratiate themselves themselves with McKeon.

...Patricia McKeon, Buck’s wife, surprised many when she announced her intention last September to run for an open seat that largely overlaps her husband’s district. One of the first reported contributions to her campaign came a political committee called the Fund for American Opportunity, registered to a Post Office box in Washington DC, donated $1,000. The Fund, which is financed by a number of corporations including the drug industry trade association PhRMA, is owned and operated by Mark Valente, a Beltway lobbyist.

The contribution, reported here for the first time, appears to be an effort to circumvent federal campaign limits. Federal campaign disclosures show that Valente has already maxed out in donations to Congressman McKeon this cycle giving $2,5000 to his campaign for Congress. And the contribution came within a day of Valante’s donation to Patricia’s campaign for the California Assembly.

Byron Dorgan On The Beltway Establishment: "A Bunch Of Hogs At A Slop Pail"

2012-01-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

God is great! Bill Moyers is back on PBS. The above clip features an interview with Byron Dorgan, the North Dakota populist who warned most strenuously about the sleazy corporatists-- of both parties-- repealing Glass-Steagall. That repeal is, undoubtedly, the most corrupt moment in American public life... at least since the 1920s. This was the one percent's bloodless coup against America. On May 6, 1999, every single Republican in the Senate (plus one conservative Democrat, Ernest Hollings) voted to give the country away to their corporate masters. It was signed by one of the worst corporatists American voters were ever bamboozled into elevating to the White House, multimillionaire-to-be Bill Clinton. It had passed the House July 1, 343-86, opposed by a tiny handful of nervous Republicans, like Ron Paul and Ray LaHood, plus 70 Democrats, mostly progressives like Tammy Baldwin (WI), Sherrod Brown (OH), Mike Capuano (MA), John Conyers (MI), Barney Frank (MA), Jesse Jackson, Jr (IL), Marcy Kaptur (OH), Dennis Kucinich (OH), Barbara Lee (CA), Jerry Nadler (NY), Bernie Sanders (VT), Maxine Waters (CA), Henry Waxman (CA)...

Among those voting for it were many of today's worst corporate whores, from Jim DeMint (R-SC), Harold Ford (D-TN), Spencer Bachus (R-AL), Joe Crowley (D-NY), Charlie Bass (R-NH), Tim Holden (D-PA), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Richard Burr (R-NC), Ron Kind (D-WI) and Buck McKeon (R-CA) to the leaders of the current GOP Inc., John Boehner (R-OH), Paul Ryan (R-WI), John Kasich (R-OH), David Vitter (R-LA) and Fred Upton (R-MI). It was the worst moment in contemporary American history-- far more deadly to the nation than 9-11-- and all of these people profited enormously from their vote.

The other night I had dinner with the chief of staff of one of the most powerful members of Congress. This staffer has been working in DC for almost two decades and was absolutely positive that things are unredeemably corrupt now, worse than it's ever been, and that the Democrats are not one iota better than the Republicans when it comes to corruption. That's how filthy Washington is now. And getting worse by the hour. Listen to Dorgan's answers to Moyers' questions carefully. I listened twice, and it was more horrific the second time. It brought to mind a paragraph from David Korten's book Agenda For A New Economy:

Capitalism is the institutional embodiment of greed, and Wall Street is its contemporary institutional manifestation. It operates by the moral code of an organized crime syndicate and subverts the values and institutions of both markets and democracy. Far from being ashamed of its ways, it champions them as virtues. What Wall Street considers virtues are actually the seven deadly sins identified by Christian tradition

It gets worse. The other day I tried introducing you to Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire low-life gangster currently brazenly trying to buy the presidency for a notorious Washington whore. Friday, Brian Ross revealed even more about Adelson than I had been able to dig up. He'll probably be killed, or at minimum sued.

The casino company run by the principal financial backer of Newt Gingrich's presidential bid, Sheldon Adelson, has been under criminal investigation for the last year by the Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission for alleged bribery of foreign officials, according to corporate documents.

In a separate civil lawsuit, a former executive of the company has alleged that Adelson ordered him to keep quiet about sensitive issues at the Sands casinos on the Chinese island of Macau, including the casinos' alleged "involvement with Chinese organized crime groups, known as Triads, connected to the junket business." The triads-- Chinese organized crime syndicates-- are allegedly involved in organizing high stakes gambling junkets for wealthy Chinese travelers.

In its filings with the SEC, Adelson's company says it became aware of the investigation in February 2011 when it received a subpoena from the SEC requesting "documents relating to its compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act." The company said it "intends to cooperate with the investigation," which it said may have been triggered by the allegations in the lawsuit by Steven C. Jacobs, a former Sands executive who says he helped run the Macau operation. The federal investigation was first reported last year by Las Vegas newspapers and the financial press.

...Adelson has become a symbol of the new, no-holds-barred environment for campaign money, with recent Supreme Court rulings opening the door for one wealthy individual to single-handedly bankroll one of the costliest aspects of a political campaign: television advertising. Adelson, who is one of America's richest people, has the means to do so. The billionaire owns 49 percent of the Sands casino company and as chairman, is directly involved in its operations. Its operations in Macau have made the Sands the world's leading gambling operation.

But the company operates where corruption is described as "a major and growing problem," according to a 2011 report from the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

"The growth of gambling in Macau, fueled by money from mainland Chinese gamblers and the growth of U.S.-owned casinos, has been accompanied by widespread corruption, organized crime and money laundering," the commission found.

The Venetian-Macao, a casino owned by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, was also the subject of a reported "sex-trade crackdown" that occurred in 2010 on the same day Adelson arrived on the island for meetings with government leaders in Macau, according to published accounts in 2010. Chinese press reported that authorities found more than 100 prostitutes inside the casino.

Jacobs alleges in his lawsuit that Adelson demanded that Jacobs refrain from telling the corporate board of Sands China about issues including "junkets and triads." He also alleges that Adelson wanted to investigate high-ranking Macau officials to provide him "leverage" to thwart any initiatives that would hurt the company.

"The triads are making a ton of money off the gambling industry," said Ko-lin Chin, a Rutgers University criminal justice professor who is one of the leading experts on Chinese organized crime. "They are still there, they are still very active."

Sands corporate spokesman Ron Reese told ABC News he did not wish to comment, instead pointing to earlier statements that Adelson has made about the case.

Adelson said at the gaming forum last year the lawsuit "is pure threatening, blackmailing and extortion" and said the case created a "foundation of lies" upon which the subsequent investigations have been based. He told the Wall Street Journal in October "we have a substantial list of reasons why Steve Jacobs was fired for cause and interestingly he has not refuted a single one of them. Instead, he has attempted to explain his termination by using outright lies and fabrications which seem to have their origins in delusion."

Last year, a judge rejected a motion by Las Vegas Sands to dismiss the case.

What's happened to our country?

A Grimm Tale Of Selling Out Our Country... To Foreign Interests Or Crooked Interests?

2012-01-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

Now, what could these two pious baloneys
have in common, other than corruption?

This weekend shady Staten Island Republican Michael Grimm was in Florida shilling for Mitt Romney's rough-and-tumble campaign against Newt Gingrich. Back home in New York, his claustrophobic little world was collapsing under the weight of revelations, long suspected, that he has been involved with illegal fundraising-- and for high stakes.

Israelis eager to gain more control over the U.S. government haven't only been financing Newt Gingrich. Turns out Grimm is another one, although as much as his half million or so dollars was illegally obtained from a "mystic" rabbi/real-estate swindler and his followers. Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto has been close with Anthony Weiner and Eric Cantor but was apparently looking for another congressman he could control. Grimm, of course, is denying any and all wrongdoing. But so did Al Capone.

Mr. Grimm, a former agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a Roman Catholic who regularly attends Sunday Mass, traveled around the New York region with one of the rabbi’s top aides, Ofer Biton, to raise campaign money from the rabbi’s followers. In all, the Grimm campaign collected more than $500,000 from the followers, according to numerous interviews and an analysis of Mr. Grimm’s campaign records.

That money-- more than half of the total that Mr. Grimm raised from individuals-- proved instrumental in his upset of the Democratic incumbent in November 2010. Since then, Mr. Grimm has established a profile as a rising Republican star.

But now, Mr. Biton, an Israeli citizen, is being investigated by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn over accusations that he embezzled millions of dollars from the rabbi’s congregation. And an examination by the New York Times has highlighted Mr. Biton’s unusual role in the Grimm campaign-- as well as questionable donations that the rabbi’s followers said Mr. Grimm had accepted.

The examination of Mr. Grimm’s fund-raising was based on more than 15 interviews with followers and associates of the rabbi, Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, who divides his time between Israel and Manhattan, where he has a large congregation.

...Three of the rabbi’s followers said in separate interviews that Mr. Grimm or Mr. Biton told them that the campaign would find a way to accept donations that were over the legal limit, were given in cash or were given by foreigners without green cards.

Congressional campaigns are not allowed to accept cash donations of more than $100. Foreigners without green cards are barred by law from giving to political campaigns. They are also not allowed to solicit contributions for campaigns.

One follower of the rabbi said in an interview that Mr. Grimm pressed him for $20,000. The follower said Mr. Grimm instructed him to meet him “near the F.B.I. building,” in Lower Manhattan, in summer 2010 to give the money. The follower said he handed over $5,000 in cash in an envelope to Mr. Grimm in Mr. Grimm’s car.

Within a week, the follower said, he gave Mr. Grimm a $5,000 check from a friend. Mr. Grimm then repeatedly called the follower and demanded another $10,000, the follower said.

“Every day, he used to call me, over and over,” the follower said.

The follower said he ignored the calls and did not give again.

A second follower recalled that Mr. Grimm came to his office in Manhattan to solicit a legal contribution. As he was handing over the check, the second follower said, Mr. Grimm confided in him that there were ways of working around the campaign rules.

“Grimm wanted you to supply the money, and if someone wants to give and cannot give, you have to find a friend to give it through,” the second follower recalled. “Let’s say someone is not legal to give because he’s not American. Grimm wants this guy, Joe A, to give the money to Joe B so Joe B can make the contribution to the campaign.”

A third follower said he picked up, at Mr. Biton’s behest, $25,000 for Mr. Grimm’s campaign from a single Israeli.

“I give the checks to Ofer, and he gives them to Michael,” the third follower said.

The third follower said the money donated by the Israeli was falsely listed in Mr. Grimm’s campaign disclosure records as having been given by at least five other people. The practice referred to-- creating so-called straw donors-- is illegal.

...The donors interviewed by the Times said they gave money to the Grimm campaign because Mr. Biton told them that Rabbi Pinto wanted people in his congregation to do so.

The rabbi’s followers said Mr. Biton rounded up campaign money for Mr. Grimm in hopes that if Mr. Grimm won, he would help Mr. Biton obtain a green card.

It's unclear at this point if Grimm helped Biton get the green card or how much of a kickback Grimm gave Biton, an embezzler, for his help in raising the illegal contributions from the rabbi's flock. But reports of envelopes filled with cash were all over New York this weekend. There had been a minor tiff over this in 2010 when Rep. Mike McMahon first got wind of the fact that Grimm was getting large amounts of weird money from people who had never donated to a political campaign before. His campaign never fully threaded the needle, and the story went nowhere-- until this week.

Congresscrooks this blatant about their plundering are a disgrace even to THEIR profession (which is saying a lot)

2012-01-29T18:00:00.000-08:00

Then-Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA) in 2009, doing the people's business -- and, apparently, a certain amount of "sideline" business of his own

"Experts on Congressional earmarks said they could think of no previous case in which a former congressman stood to profit so directly from money that he personally allocated while in Congress."

-- from "Ex-Congressman Retreats on Energy
Project" by the NYT's Eric Lichtblau

by Ken

The words that pop out for me here are "stood to profit so directly." Puts me in mind of former CA Congressfelon Duke Cunningham, who was so brazen about his congressional influence peddling that he actually had a printed rate card for his "services." C'mon, guys, can't we at least expect a reasonable amount of discretion from our civic plunderers?

WASHINGTON -- A former congressman who became a lobbyist has abandoned his plans to collect $90,000 from working on an energy project that he helped finance through Congress.

The former congressman, Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts, told officials in Hull, Mass., this week that he would do the consulting work at no charge rather than collect $15,000 a month as planned. The decision was first reported in The Boston Globe.

An apologetic Mr. Delahunt told town officials he wanted to eliminate the “black mark” created by questions of a possible financial conflict, Patrick Cannon, chairman of the Hull Light Board, said on Saturday.

“This was a great decision for the town, because it saves us a lot of money,” Mr. Cannon said.

Mr. Delahunt, a Democrat who retired from Congress last year, had faced criticism for the last week from legal and ethics specialists over the unusual lobbying arrangement he had struck with the town, which is seeking federal help to build an offshore wind energy plant at a cost of more than $60 million.

While in Congress, Mr. Delahunt earmarked $1.7 million for the same project, and he was to be paid 80 percent of his monthly consulting fees out of that same pot of money.

Experts on Congressional earmarks said they could think of no previous case in which a former congressman stood to profit so directly from money that he personally allocated while in Congress.

Both Mr. Delahunt’s lobbying organization, the Delahunt Group, and the Town of Hull had defended the planned contract, saying that Mr. Delahunt brought an expertise and familiarity with the wind energy project that could help move it along.

Mr. Delahunt and executives at his firm did not respond to e-mails Saturday seeking further comment on the decision.

The Energy Department, which provided the original $1.7 million in seed money through Mr. Delahunt’s earmarks, said this week that its contracting officials were reviewing his role in the wind project.

The general counsel’s office, which normally reviews ethical and legal questions in contracting work, is not involved in that review, said Bill Gibbons, an Energy Department spokesman.

It is not clear how Mr. Delahunt’s decision to provide his consulting services on a pro bono basis will affect the Energy Department’s review. A department spokesman had no immediate comment on the decision.

In Duke Cunningham's case, apart from the guy just not being terribly bright, it appeared that the Culture of Corruption in the Republican-controlled Congress had grown so pervasive that its most mindlessly greedy practitioners didn't even stop to think that they could get caught. In this schlepp Delahunt's case, I get the feeling that he was a low-enough-level bribe extractor that he just thought it was business-as-usual to engineer his own little pension-bonus ~~scheme~~ scam.

Note that in the earlier report to which Eric Lichtblau links in the above piece, "Lobbyist Helps a Project He Financed in Congress," he had written that Delahunt "retired last year as one of the leading liberals in Congress." Maybe he thought this particular, er, arrangement was OK(-ish) because his cut wasn't carved out of federal funds but out of the hide of the folks back home. Or possibly he actually thought he'd earned his cut (as I suppose he had), and no harm, no foul. Maybe especially compared with the shakedowns many of his colleagues were running.

Now, does anyone really believe that clamping down on earmarks has stopped this sort of thing from going on? If our boys and girls in Congress can't figure out other ways to lay their mitts on public moneys, they're a disgrace to their profession. Which is saying a lot.

Note that nobody seems to be talking about the former congressman paying any price for this episode except the abandonment of his "consulting" plunder.

Super PAC Alert-- A Guest Post By Carol Shea-Porter

2012-01-29T14:00:00.000-08:00

If you live in America, you cannot escape the result of the Supreme Court decision in 2010 that changed political campaigns. Known as Citizens United, this decision allowed those with big checkbooks to contribute unlimited amounts of money for a politician, as long as they do not give directly to the politician’s campaign.

That is why we now have Super PACs-- they are used as the vehicle to transfer money. If an individual wants to give directly to a campaign, he or she can only give $2,500 per election, and a political action committee can only give $5,000, but if you are really rich or you are a corporation, and you want really heavy influence, you can now just give to the Super PAC who backs your candidate, and then sit back and enjoy the air war on TV that you paid for. And as a bonus, voters in each state won’t even know you and your partners were the ones who brought ugly ads to them until after they have voted, so they won’t know that you had a particular agenda.

For example, Mitt Romney’s group, “Restore Our Future” (never mind that you cannot restore something that has not existed yet), will not file until January 31st, well after New Hampshire and South Carolina, and on the day Florida goes to vote after seeing thousands of ads attacking other Republicans from Romney’s people. Governor Romney said he cannot talk to “Restore Our Future,” but that Super PAC is full of his former top campaign aides who know Romney intimately, so it is a pretty thin wall.

We could still win our future though, if Newt Gingrich has anything to do with it. The Super PAC that supports him, “Winning our Future,” is running ads about Governor Romney’s business dealings, thanks to one donor who gave ~~a check for $5 million dollars~~ three checks for $11 million dollars [so far] to the PAC to pay for those attacks. If he had given directly to the campaign, he could only have given $2,500 for the primary, but now, the Supreme Court has allowed him to give unlimited money to take Governor Romney down.

Pity the poor voter in South Carolina right now. According to McClatchy newspapers, New Hampshire voters saw 2,800 ads. By the second week in January, the South Carolina voters had seen nearly twice that many, and Super PACs were responsible for 69% of the spending on TV ads.

Does this matter? Does it influence voters? They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work. Senator John McCain told CNN, “Now it’s the system under which we operate, which leads to this kind of campaigning and will lead to corruption and scandals. I guarantee it.” CNN reported that McCain said the Supreme Court, “basically unleashed-- without transparency-- and without accountability-- huge amounts of money from those so-called ‘independent campaigns’.”

Right now, the Republicans are shooting at each other, but the general election is right around the corner, and Democrats have now answered with some Super PACs of their own. What we saw in 2010 was just a teaser to what we will endure this year. Super PACs and their very wealthy donors are drowning out the voices of the small-dollar donors. David Woodward, a professor of political science at Clemson University, said in the Kansas City Star, “it goes back to politics before we had campaign finance reform and Watergate. It’s just a complete reversal that has brought us full circle to where it’s rich guys playing politics.” Or, I might add, playing for friendly policies and legislation.

These Super PACs will once again be active in congressional races and Senate races, but in a bigger way than in 2010. Jeff Roe, a Kansas City, Missouri based Republican strategist said, “It will have huge impact.” We all remember the deceptions, the distortions, and the trickery from 2010 and from the 2012 Presidential primary. Is there anything we can do to stop it in the general election this year?

Yes, there is. Educate yourself. We all have a civic responsibility to pay attention and learn. There are so many places to check facts now, like FactCheck.org. Listen to the candidate debates, and watch C-Span programs. Look up voting records. Watch several major news shows. Visit websites like The Sunlight Foundation, and see information on Super PACs. Ask candidates if they will support legislation to take this kind of money out of politics. We are citizens, not merely spectators, and we still have the power to be heard. Speak up!

---------------

You can support Carol Shea-Porter's campaign here at our ActBlue page.

Sunday Classics: With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (aka: Musical storms, part 2)

2012-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

There are funny storms too! Alexander Prior conducts the deliciously raging thunderstorm in Act II of Rossini's Barber of Seville at the Chuvash National Opera in the Volga River port of Cheboksary, capital of Russia's Chuvash Republic, November 2009. We've got some better performances coming up in the click-through.

As music lovers know, the hint of a distant storm from a few timpani rolls can be as evocative as the crepuscular waves portrayed by Constable. The ability of music both directly to mimic the sounds of the weather and indirectly to imply its subtler moods perhaps gives this medium more scope for dramatic expression than the visual arts and literature, which unavoidably are limited to more literal interpretations.
-- Karen L. Aplin and Paul D. Williams,
in "Meteorological phenomena in Western classical
orchestral music," in the November issue of Weather

by Ken

Just for the record, the authors of the above-cited monograph hail from the Dept. of Physics, University of Oxford (Aplin), and the Dept. of Meteorology, University of Reading (Williams). If that gives you a gnawing bad feeling, trust it. When I discovered the piece, I thought at first it was a happy coincidence that such a piece had been published just as I was setting out to write about musical storms. Then I started reading the piece. And I was reminded why I rigorously avoided taking any academic classes that impinged on my love of music. If you were thinking there was bound to be some fun in such a piece, so was I. We were all wrong.

Anyway, we began listening to our storms imagined in music a couple of weeks ago, leading off with probably the most celebrated from the concert repertory, the sequence from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony that includes his famous thunderstorm, and surely the most spectacular storm in the operatic repertory, the cataclysm that opens Verdi's Otello -- and nearly rings down the curtain on the opera when Otello's ship is nearly dragged under as it approaches the Cypriot shore. For good measure we threw in a less threatening operatic storm, the beautiful "Royal Hunt and Storm" sequence from Berlioz's epic opera The Trojans.

In Friday's preview we took a step back in time to hear what Vivaldi could do stormwise with just the modest baroque orchestras -- incorporating storm movements in three of the Four Seasons. Today we track what some composers have done with the increasingly resource-rich resources of the modern symphony orchestra.

One perhaps obvious observation is still worth observing: that there's not much point in doing a musical storm if you don't also provide a sort of musical "baseline" -- life as it was being carried on before the storm and as it continues afterward. Beethoven, for example, gave us his countryside peasants dancing merrily before the interruption of the weather event, and then the the merry-making that follows it. The storm itself is brief, but illustrates thrillingly the cleansing, purifying, and exhilarating effect a storm can have. Just to refresh our memory, why don't we listen again to the Klemperer recording with the slow "Peasants' Dance" that producer Walter Legge very likely never did get used to.

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 (Pastoral):
iii. Merry gathering of the peasants: Allegro
iv. Thunderstorm: Allegro
v. Shepherd's song; Happy and grateful feelings after the storm: Allegretto

Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded October 1957

I thought of including the "Scene in the fields" from Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, which we listened to in June 2010), itself a clear hommage to Beethoven's thunderstorm. But the distant thunder near the end seems kind of incidental for our purposes. In that 2010 post you can hear a quite lovely performance of the movement by Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony.

Okay, you talked me into it; here's the Paray "Scene in the fields" again. Just as a reminder: The composer's program for the movement concludes: "The sun retires . . . distant noise of thunder . . . solitude . . . silence . . ."

BERLIOZ: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14:
iii. Scène aux champs (Scene in the fields)

Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paul Paray, cond. Mercury, recorded Nov. 28, 1959

LET'S MOVE ON TO A REAL STORM, THE CLIMAX
OF FERDE GROFÉ'S GRAND CANYON SUITE

Again, we've heard the Grand Canyon Suite in its entirely, in a July 2010 Fourth of July post. At this point in the piece we've witnessed an awesome musical "Sunrise" and the spooky "Painted Desert," ridden our burros "On the Trail," and watched the "Sunset." You never know when you may be caught in a cloudburst.

GROFÉ: Grand Canyon Suite:
v. Cloudburst

Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Howard Hanson, cond. Mercury, recorded May 1958

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded Sept. 30, 1991

RECORDING NOTE: I know there's a resistance among many modern listeners to "old" recordings like these. It still seems to me that the recording art has gone mostly backward, not forward, since, say, the late '60s. If anyone has heard an orchestral recording made in the last 20 years remotely comparable in sonic beauty or believability to the 1958 and 1959 Mercury recordings we've just heard, I'd sure like to know what it is.

COMING UP: STORMS BY RICHARD STRAUSS,
GRIEG, BRITTEN, AND ROSSINI -- CLICK HERE

(And, oh yes, we've also got a storm-pretender from the Waltz King, Johann Strauss II.)

The Florida Primary Campaign: A Tale Of Two Freaks

2012-01-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

by Noah

It’s hard for any total freakazoids to stand out in Florida. The competition is fierce. But two big-name freaks have certainly been trying to stand out this week.

In the “It Doesn’t Get Any More Tone Deaf Than This" category, Mitt Romney stood out in front of a foreclosed house, saying that banks aren’t bad people. Well, first of all, there he goes again. Mitt, banks aren’t people. They may be infested with bad people, but they are not people. They are just evil entities, and evil entities that count you as a friend who will always be in their dark web and slime-filled corner. There was even a big "foreclosed" sign on the property. Keep in mind that Florida has one of the very highest foreclosure rates in the country. Ill feeling towards banks is justifiably running very high in Florida these days. Mitt had already said

“Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”

The whole Romney-standing-in-front-of-the house incident reminded me of Sonny Bush standing on that aircraft carrier in front of his “Mission Accomplished” banner.

You really have to wonder if Romney ever had a childhood or went to school. Remember when Bill O’Liely said Obama was not a traditional guy? Well, Romney is not a traditional guy for real! Maybe Romney really was, until recently, a mannequin, and just hasn’t learned the ways of civilized society. Maybe he is the ultimate manufactured candidate, straight from the Bain-owned factory-- in China, no doubt.

This man or alien man has a special talent for saying the exact wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is the master of the trifecta of cringe-inducing awkwardness. He can’t even look people in the eye when he spins his lies. As he said what he said below, he turned his face away from the folks he was talking to when he got to the second sentence, and ended up looking down at the table or floor. It’s an indication of so many things, including contempt for his audience and lack of experience in talking to people or honest human interaction. It’s alien to him. He’s been a bubble boy all his life. Most important of all, Mitt Romney is devoid of any semblance of empathy.

“The banks are scared to death of course. They’re feeling the same thing that, that you’re feeling.”

Sure they are! Nice try with that “empathy thing”! You have to wonder just who lets this guy out in public. I can’t wait till he gets the nomination and names Snidely Whiplash as his running mate. He’ll go before the cameras and tell anyone who’s still watching that Snidely has been his idol since he was a teenager. Someone will whisper in his ear that Snidely Whiplash is just a cartoon figure and Mittens won’t understand.

Are Romney’s handlers secretly working for President Obama? Oris he some kind of escaped-from-a-lab android robot with a few crossed wires or some defective chips? One thing’s for sure: Mittens is building up quite a catalog of strange utterances. From “Corporations are people, my friend” to “I like firing people” to “I am also unemployed” to $300,000 not being a lot of money to saying he’s for the middle class when he doesn’t even know what the middle class is, he seems to be trying to top Yogi Berra’s saying “It gets late early here” or “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

he difference is, though, that Yogi has a sense of humor, and a trace of logic once you add in the context. Not so with Romney. His whole being seems to exist out of any known context in the universe; at least the universe that most of us spend our lives in. We are all the result of our experiences, the situations we have been in, the people we have met, our parents, those we have loved, the town we grew up in… With Romney, there doesn’t seem to be any context, and that can only be because he has never lived outside of his display case, out in the real world. He has never really walked down the street, even though he told a Florida debate audience that we need someone “who’s lived in the real streets of America.”

Well, that counts you out Mittens, but come to think of it, maybe we need someone who has experience on the streets as a community organizer, eh? Or maybe we need an Occupy participant! Romney has always gone straight from mansion to limo to boardroom and back. There is no evidence of previous human interaction. God, his poor wife!

Then there’s the Great White Pander Bear Category. That’s right. I’m talking about the king of pandering, Newt Gingrich. Pandering to the locals and calling himself a visionary, during a campaign stop in Cape Canaveral. Florida, he promised that in his second term we would be building a permanent base on the moon.

Never mind spending our money on things like the crumbling infrastructure and hunger here on earth in America. Listening to Newt, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that he himself hails from the moon, or maybe that the moon really is made of green cheese, that it has psycho-active properties, and that Newtie ate way too much of it.

Then again, maybe Newt wants a moon base because it would make for a fine out-of-the-way love nest for one of his poor, misguided flab- and Tiffany-addicted mistresses. As for keeping the moon base clean, he could fly some inner-city youngsters to the moon for janitorial services. He’d also have them sing “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine” while they buff up his shoes on a 19th-century shoeshine stand. I bet Newt’s moon-base house would look very much like an antebellum plantation mansion. He’d probably even have a greenhouse in the back 40 to grow some cotton. Failing that, he’ll just stay on earth and call for flying all minorities to the moon, calling it one of his bold new solutions!

Saturday Night Conspiracy Theory: Assassination

2012-01-28T21:00:00.000-08:00

Potential hit man?

The Republican Party sure has changed. The GOP was once as anti-Semitic as it's now anti-Hispanic and anti-African American. And it was certainly the anti-Zionist party. Now, of course, fealty to Israel means more in GOP politics than fealty to America. When Dick Durbin (D-IL), today one of Israel's staunchest friends in the U.S. Senate, ran for Congress in southern Illinois in 1982 and beat longtime Republican incumbent Paul Findley, there was an awful lot of Israel-friendly money sloshing around in the campaign, all of it going towards defeating the virulently anti-Israeli Republican, Findley.

Today Findlay is 91, living quietly-- and sometimes not so quietly-- in Jacksonville, Illinois. I'm guessing he's rooting for Ron Paul and is horrified at the prospect of a Sheldon Adelson-Gingrich presidency. Last night when I was driving home, I heard Mike Malloy reading a blogpost by Alison Weir from Rock The Truth about an alleged Mossad assassination plot against George H.W. Bush. There was a dual goal: getting rid of the hated Bush, who was pressuring Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, and the installation of a new-breed Republican-- a nitwit apocalyptic Likud shill-- as president of the United States, namely Dan Quayle. That website is, to put it mildly, consumed with conspiracy theories, so I got home and looked around to see if I could find any legitimate confirmation of the plot.

"Legitimate" comes down to the degree of legitimacy you would confer on former Republican congressmen Findley and Pete McCloskey. Here's a report Findley wrote in 1992 about the plot, which appears to be the basis of the Weir claims that so animated Mike Malloy.

In Washington, [Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir] fumed against Bush's selection of the time and place for the next round of Arab-Israeli meetings and tried to reschedule them to his own convenience. He declared that his government will not be pushed around by any other nation, even its chief benefactor, the United States.

These aggravations to a president's good nature, serious as they are, cannot be the only problems weighing heavily on Bush's mind. No American president, and especially George Bush, can wisely put out of mind a far more serious threat to his presidency, the question of personal survival.

As long as he remains president, George Bush will be the center of controversy and, therefore, personally at risk. Despite the endeavors of the Secret Service, the agency whose primary purpose is to protect the president of the United States from harm, no occupant of the office can be effectively shielded from danger.

The Secret Service has special reason for concern at this point in George Bush's career. Before Bush headed for the opening day of the peace conference in Madrid, the Secret Service received a warning that elements of Israel's spy operation-- the Mossad-- might put Bush's life in danger.

The danger was first expressed by Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent, to a group of Canadian parliamentarians. After four years' service, Ostrovsky had left the Mossad in protest against its methods and had written the book By Way of Deception, exposing Israel's spy operations in intimate detail.

Ostrovsky told the Canadians that the Mossad, not the elected political establishment, is the real engine of policy in Israel. He added ominously that secret intelligence he had been receiving suggested strongly that Mossad's hatred of Bush-- and support for Vice President Dan Quayle-- may lead to an attempt on the president's life. Quayle, always popular with Jewish groups, is regarded by Israel as much more sympathetic to its problems than Bush.

Ostrovsky told the group that he feared for his own safety and was under Mossad surveillance.

This astounding information was relayed by one of those attending the Canadian meeting to Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey, my former colleague in Congress. McCloskey, an attorney, is my associate on the board of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based organization that focuses on Middle East policy. He was recently named by Bush to the National and Community Service Commission.

Alarmed for the safety of his longtime friend, George Bush, McCloskey flew to Ottawa for a face-to-face interview with the former Mossad agent.

Ostrovsky impressed McCloskey as a patriotic Zionist who believes the Mossad is out of control. Ostrovsky told him the present leadership of the Mossad wants "to do everything possible to preserve a state of war between Israel and its neighbors, assassinating President Bush, if necessary." He said a public relations campaign is already underway in both Israel and the United States to "prepare public acceptance of Dan Quayle as president."

After lengthy discussion during which he became convinced that Ostrovsky was "real" and telling the truth, McCloskey took the next flight to Washington. There he relayed the information to the Secret Service and State Department, receiving mixed reactions to Ostrovsky's reliability. An officer of the Navy Department dismissed him simply as a "traitor to Israel."

Presumably, Malloy (and Weir) decided to bring this up because of the recent column by Andrew Adler, publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, suggesting that Israel might "have to" assassinate President Obama. Apparently extreme right-wing forces in Israel like Biden almost as much as they once liked Quayle. I'd keep deranged (and violent) Florida Representative Allen West away from the President... just in case.

So maybe Eric Schneiderman hasn't sold out after all to a cabal of the banksters and the Obama administration

2012-01-28T18:00:00.000-08:00

BILL PRESS: Is President Obama really a populist, or does he just play one on television?
MATT TAIBBI: When it comes to the Wall Street stuff that I cover, there's a lot of enthusiasm. Even in the last ten minutes actually before the show happened, there's news coming out about this long-anticipated foreclosure settlement, that it looks like it's a much, much better deal than anybody ever anticipated . . .
BILL: For consumers? Or banks?
MATT: For people, and not for banks. The expectation from people like me . . .
BILL: Right.
MATT: . . . for a long time was that this would actually be the equivalent of a giant TARP-size bailout -- in other words, that they were going to allow these banks to escape perhaps a trillion dollars in liabilities. But they've narrowed the focus of this deal so that it really only covers a small amount of liability, and it still leaves these banks incredibly exposed to all kinds of criminal investigations. That's an enormous victory if that ends up being true.

by Ken

Let me stipulate at the outset that I have never been personally closer to NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman than walking past his old district office, when he was a New York State senator, every time I took the A train rather than the no. 1 up- or downtown to or from my way-northern Manhattan domicile. But as I say, he was my senator for a bunch of years, despite the best efforts of a lot of people -- and I don't necessarily mean people of the rival party, of which there's not much evidence up our way -- to get his troublesome butt the heck out.

It was hard not to develop large reserves of admiration and respect for Schneiderman's smarts (very considerable) and for his tenacity and integrity (ditto). And I know enough people with access to NYS's political netherworld to confirm that what we saw from the outside was what inside pols were having to deal with. The politically savvy NYers I know were uniformly jubilant -- and these are people not much given to political jubilation -- when he managed to edge out a crowded field in the Democratic primary to succeed Eliot Spitzer as state attorney general, and then when he stoutly held off what was feared to be an ugly and well-financed challenge in the general election.

So I didn't know what to make of it when people on the progressive side of the political spectrum, people who claim access to all manner of inside knowledge, in recent days were writing Schneiderman off as a sellout, witting or otherwise, when he signed on to co-chair the Obama administration's newly created interagency Financial Fraud Task Force (here, for example, and here, for another). He was only to be "co-chair," they stressed, with the hardly inspiring U.S. Assistant AG Lanny Breuer the other co-chair.

In the most charitable interpretation, they were saying, the poor schlub had been coopted, greasing the way for acceptance of a settlement by the state attorneys general with the mortgage banksters whose dubious mortgage practices did so much to make the economy go whoosh. Now, so the drumbeat from this segement of the Left insisted, not only was the way clear for the state AGs to ram through a settlement (which had been most tellingly resisted by a small group of AGs including Schneiderman and California's Kamala Harris) that was sure to be a financial reprieve if not actually a bailout for the banksters, but the paper-tiger federal task force would protect them from any further serious poking around by state or federal prosecutors.

Then a funny thing happened -- sufficient to make Matt Taibbi, no less, declare himself "almost optimistic." My goodness, Matt T almost optimistic? Here's his rollingstone.com blogpost today.

A Victory for the Public on Foreclosures?

POSTED: January 28, 12:07 PM ET

So there was big news yesterday on the foreclosure settlement front. We still have to wait and see what the final deal looks like, but there are reports out that the long-awaited settlement is a far, far better deal for the public than expected. If these reports are true, it looks like New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and California AG Kamala Harris have scored an enormous victory in narrowing the scope of the settlement to the point where it really only covers robosigning abuses.

According to reports (like this one in the Huffington Post ["Obama Administration And Banks Near Deal On Mortgage Fraud Legal Liability" by Sam Stein and Zach Carter]), the deal will not include:

1. Criminal liability.
2. Tax liability
3. Fair lending, fair housing, or any other civil rights claim.
4. Federal Housing Finance Agency or the GSEs [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac]
5. CFPB claims for the period after they came into existence in July 2011
6. SEC claims
7. National Credit Union Association Claims
8. FDIC claims
9. Federal Reserve Board claims
10. MERS claims

If that is true, and all of those things are out of the deal, and the banks are still exposed to liability not only for all of those things, but also for the broad range of offenses related to securitization, then $25 billion, dare I say it, might not even be a completely sucky number. It's far less than the real liability, but it's a much bigger sum than I ever thought would be negotiated just for robosigning.

I'm interested to see what the market reaction will be if this deal goes through. On the one hand the banks will all obtain some certainly and relief from robosigning claims. But on the other hand, all the banks are still on the hook in other areas, nost notably putbacks of bad loans.

Score one for Schneiderman/Harris. Coupled with the news that the subpoenas have already started dropping ["New Fraud Investigation Group Issues Subpoenas to Financial Companies" by Edward Wyatt on HuffPost] on the securitization front, I'm almost optimistic.

Then Matt notes that he "talked more on this with the excellent Bill Press on Countdown last night," and offers the clip I've put at the top of this post.

It's enough . . . well, enough to make Matt Taibbi almost optimistic!

POSTSCRIPT: ONE OTHER THING I SHOULD
HAVE SAID ABOUT ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN

One point that's always made by the people who have followed his career most closely is that he has a history of getting things done. And not the way the Obama crowd usually manages it, or claims to: by watering down any principles they might have to the point where the "accomplishments" depend on an exceedingly liberal interpretation of "something" and "done." Schneiderman apparently has a way of "bringing people around" and forging coalitions. What he's not much known for is compromising his principles.

Is The Deranged GOP Primary Making Romney Unelectable?

2012-01-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

The theory was that a feisty Republican primary would introduce Mitt Romney, long ordained as the ultimate selection of the Republican Party Establishment, to the public through a series of exciting, nicely staged debates. And sure enough, the debates were as popular as a TV reality show, with TV viewers identifying with the contestants in emotional and visceral ways. Unfortunately for Romney, the series seems to have done him more harm than good.

In episode after episode he's come off as essentially dishonest and dissembling. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent highlighted the dilemma he's facing after Thursday night's debate in Jacksonville.

How do you explain Mitt Romney’s penchant for casually uttering statements that can be completely debunked as quickly as he makes them?

By all accounts, Romney won last night’s debate, and his grip on the nomination appears to be tightening. The question is at what cost to his credibility. At last night’s debate, for instance, Romney claimed that Obama “went before the United Nations” and “said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip.”

This is flat out false. Obama talked about the rockets hitting Israel in two speeches before the U.N.: One in 2009, and the other in 2011.

All you have to do is click on the links, and search for the word “rocket.”

Oh wait, I get it now. Romney claimed Obama said nothing about the “thousands” of rockets being rained on Israel. And it’s true: Obama didn’t use the word “thousands.” My bad!

The Boston Globe has been watching Romney for a long, long time and they're more expert in watching him bob and weave his way through the avalanche of lies and distortions his campaigns always are. Friday they pointed out why the latest debate strains his credibility even more.

Mitt Romney last night attacked Newt Gingrich’s record and credibility for the second consecutive debate, aiming to win the Florida primary and the Republican presidential nomination.

But in the process, he fudged elements of his own record that undercut his own credibility and fueled the type of criticism that may cost him the general election if not the nomination.

It was crystallized in one early moment, when moderator Wolf Blitzer noted the coarseness of the television ad wars in Florida and asked Romney what he meant in one radio ad that accused Gingrich of saying, “Spanish is the language of the ghetto.”

Romney, perhaps thinking of his own TV ads, replied: “I haven’t seen the ad, so I’m sorry. I don’t get to see all the TV ads. Did he say that?”

...Romney retorted: “I doubt that’s my ad, but we’ll take a look and find out.”

Blitzer, the CNN anchor, returned to the subject moments later and reported that Romney’s ad had, in fact, accused Gingrich of saying, “Spanish is the language of the ghetto.”

Blitzer also noted that Romney ended the ad with a standard disclaimer, “I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message.”

As the crowd booed, Romney turned from any potential criticism of his credibility to an attack on Gingrich’s record.

...In isolation, Romney’s obliviousness to an ad he personally approved is understandable, given the pressures of a presidential campaign and the multi-pronged ad wars being waged by him and third-party groups working on his behalf.

But his disavowal of a line of attack prominent in his Florida campaign suggested a disingenuousness that was buttressed by other comments during the debate.

To me it sounded like a distracted, irresponsible and incompetent CEO who needs to be fired. But the broader picture is far worse for the Republican Party. The viciousness of the long drawn-out primary-- and, thanks to Citizens United, there's plenty more to go-- is destroying the electability of any Republican participating. They're making a play for the right-wing extremists and know-nothings who make up the GOP base, especially in backward places like up-country South Carolina and the Florida Panhandle, but they're doing it in front of normal American voters who are appalled at what they're hearing. Even the Republican Establishment is noticing and realizing what a huge mistake this whole process has become. Eric Boehlert reports at MediaMatters:

More and more despondent conservatives are expressing alarm over the unfolding Republican primary season and what they see as the party's dwindling chances of defeating President Obama in November. Spooked at the general elections prospects facing frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich (especially Gingrich), members of the so-called Republican Establishment seem to want to reboot the election season and try their nominating luck again.

Sorry, it's too late.

If the current state of concern transforms into a larger, enveloping blame game, Fox News chairman Ailes ought be a looming target. True, conservatives in recent years have shown virtually no interest in critiquing, let alone trying to reign in, Ailes' empire. Still, it's becoming increasingly clear that Fox's programming and the radical, fear-based agenda it's setting for Republicans is now doing lasting damage to the Grand Old Party.

That's because Fox News isn't simply offering a rightward take on the day's events, or innocently providing Republican-friendly commentary, of course. It's leading an exhausting, day-in, day-out attack campaign against Obama, Democrats and all their liberal allies. (Real or imagined.) Its relentless, paranoid crusade falls well outside the mainstream of American politics, which is why the Republican primary season, so proudly sponsored by Fox News, is shaping up to be such an embarrassment.

Make no mistake, kingmaker Ailes has made sure his channel's profoundly un-serious stamp permeates this year's GOP contest. For more and more spooked Republicans though, it's a stamp of failure and looming defeat.

For Ailes and company, that slash-and-burn formula works wonders in terms of super-serving its hardcore, hard-right audience of three million viewers. But in terms of supporting a serious, national campaign and a serious, national conversation? It's not working. At all.

As Fox News has moved in and essentially replaced the RNC as the driving electoral force in Republican politics today, and with Ailes ensconced in his kingmaker role, candidates have had to bow down to Fox in search of votes and the channel's coveted free airtime. That means campaigns have been forced to become part of the channel's culture of personal destruction, as well as its signature self-pity.

The truth is, the Republican Establishment all but ceded control of the party, or at least the public face of the party, to Fox News (and Rush Limbaugh) in January, 2009. Party leaders, demoralized by John McCain's electoral landslide defeat, faded into the background and obediently followed Fox News' often-hysterical lead as Rupert Murdoch's cable channel unveiled an unprecedented effort to demonize and delegitimize the newly elected president. (In the Fox-led world, it's conventional wisdom that Obama's a foreign, race-baiting Marxist who undermines Israel and is determined to destroy the American way of life.)

Conclusion: Fox is destroying the GOP. A New NBC/Wall Street Journal poll rubs it in, showing the implausible, despised Gingrich actually leading the party's eventual nominee. As they point out, Gingrich not only can't beat Obama, he would probably cause the Republicans to lose Congress and even state legislatures. He's leading Romney 37- 28% nationally among registered Republicans likely to vote in the primaries. That's because Gingrich appeals to neo-Confederates and teabaggers and Romney doesn't.

"Gingrich is Goldwater," said Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "In the general election, Gingrich not only takes down his ship, he takes down the whole flotilla."

...Romney’s strength as a candidate is thought to be his business experience, as it relates to the economy. But GOP primary voters call it a “draw” between Gingrich and Romney when it comes to economic expertise, Hart said.

...There’s also evidence in the poll of a Republican brand problem.

All of the GOP candidates are a net-negative in favorability ratings, with Santorum getting the best marks-- 26 percent positive, 27 percent negative.

Gingrich gets the worst-- 26-32.

Romney scores 31-36, and it’s worth noting that Bob Dole, John McCain, and George W. Bush were all net-positives at the same time in their fights for the nomination. The exception of a recent major party nominee being a net-negative at this point-- John Kerry, who was 22-26 in January 2004.

“Romney’s numbers are net-negative, which is unusual,” McInturff said.

Hart added, “It’s hard to make the case that anything but injury has come off the Republican brand off Congress and electorate.”

The congressional approval rating is near record lows of 13 percent, and more people say the GOP has brought the wrong kind of change (31 percent) in Congress than the right kind (12 percent). That represents a drop for the Republicans from a year ago, right after they took control of the House as a result of the sweeping 2010 elections. In January 2011, 25 percent thought Republicans would bring the right kind of change versus 20 percent who thought they would bring the wrong kind.

Those attitudes are also far worse than right after Democrats took control of the House in 2006 (42-15 percent) and Republicans regained a majority in 1994 (37-11 percent).

Additionally, Democrats lead in who people prefer to control Congress, the so-called congressional ballot, 47-41 percent. It’s the fourth consecutive month Democrats have led on the question and it has expanded from their two-point lead a month ago.

This reinforces the need to work hard to elect progressives to Congress. Not corrupt DCCC hacks, but real progressives with real New Deal values, men and women like Darcy Burner (D-WA), Alan Grayson (D-FL), Norman Solomon (D-CA), Ilya Sheyman (D-IL), Franke Wilmer (D-MT), Nick Ruiz (D-FL), Eric Griego (D-NM) and John Waltz (D-MI). If you want to help, you can do it at this link. It's not enough to defeat Romney and the Republicans. The DCCC and the Establishment Democrats are, in effect, as bad for America. Unless we replace corrupt corporate conservatives of both parties with progressives, we'll just keep swinging wildly from crappy party to crappy party as voters get angrier and angrier.

Blue America Welcomes Back An Old Friend: Darcy Burner

2012-01-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

NEVER GIVE UP!

At 11am PT today, Darcy will be over at Digby's Hullabaloo to talk with Digby about fixing Congress and answer questions from readers about her run for Congress. Back in 2006, when Blue America was just a young PAC, she, along with Donna Edwards and Sherrod Brown, seemed like our best hopes for progressive congressional candidates emerging from out of our own ranks, conversant with the way the new technology had merged with progressive politics. Many, in fact, saw Darcy as the first Netroots candidate. She was the brilliant former Microsoft executive who famously declared that she knew she had to step into the arena when she realized that she needed to leave a better world for her young son, Henry.

We endorsed her enthusiastically in both of her heartbreakingly close losses, in 2006 and 2008, and followed with interest her subsequent work in Washington, DC, with the Progressive Caucus Foundation. While there, she worked closely with Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison and learned the inside workings of Congress, built relationships and alliances with other progressives, and deepened her policy knowledge to truly impressive heights. Yet throughout it all, Darcy has closely maintained her connections to the Netroots and her commitment to the progressive movement we've been trying to build from the beginning. She was one of those rare people with the integrity and backbone to be in Washington without being of Washington.

Still, we couldn't be more thrilled that she is back home in the Pacific Northwest and ready to give it another go. We are proud to endorse her for the congressional seat in the new WA-01 district. We need people like Darcy in Congress more than ever, because, as she says:

We can’t fix what’s broken with our country if we don’t fix Congress. Our Congress is full of crooks who trade on insider knowledge, of people who have sold their souls to the very people who have broken our country. Even the good ones, the members who want the right things, too often give up too easily on important fights, or can’t figure out how to fix the deep structural problems that undermine us.

We need people there who are tenacious and who won’t give up when things get hard.

Indeed we do. And Darcy is nothing if not tenacious.

It's not going to be a cakewalk. She will be facing a primary from a self-funding caricature of the one percent who was lured into the race by consultants who have been ripping her off and by DCCC czar Steve Israel, who wants middle-of-the-road order-takers who won't give him a hard time and who have lots of their own cash. And the probable GOP opponent will be very well financed. (Aren't they all?) She's going to need our help. And here's the place to give her some.

Don't forget to surf over to Digby's Hullabaloo at 11 to meet her in person. We need people like Darcy to remind DC insiders-- of both parties-- about stuff like this, stuff they don't want to be reminded about:

It's Kind Of Courageous Of The Republican Candidates To Associate Themselves With Marco Rubio

2012-01-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

I doubt that even Rick Santorum, struggling to stay remotely relevant in Florida, would want an endorsement from spectacularly unpopular, even despised Gov. Rick Scott. No one else does. Teabagger junior Sen. Marco Rubio, on the other hand... they're all panting to get even a wink or a nod from him. But that's because the full Rubio story, the story of a degenerate party boy who thrived on corruption in Tallahassee, has yet to come out publicly. This week, though, Reuters did start the unraveling a tiny bit by explaining why Rubio will never be anyone's running mate, regardless of Gingrich's latest VP bullshit.

Rubio may not be as coveted as Gingrich or Romney would have it appear as they press for votes in Florida, where more than 450,000 Hispanics identify themselves as Republicans.

Despite his reputation as a watchdog over federal spending, Rubio, 40, has had significant financial problems that could keep him from passing any vetting process as a potential vice presidential choice, Republican and Democratic strategists say.

In some ways, the story of Rubio's finances is similar to those of hundreds of thousands of his constituents in a state where more than 40 percent of homeowners are "underwater," owing more on their homes than the homes are worth.

It is a crisis driven by falling property values and ill-advised home equity loans that drove up homeowners' debts.

Rubio owes far more on his $384,000 Miami home than it is worth. He bought the home in 2005 for $550,000 with a $495,000 mortgage. He soon had it appraised for $735,000 and took out a home equity line of credit for $135,000.

In 2008, despite earning a declared $400,000-- including his $300,000 salary from the Miami law firm Broad and Cassel-- Rubio failed to pay down the principal on his home for several months, according to Florida campaign finance disclosures.

During the same period he did not pay down the balance of a $100,000-plus student loan from his days at the University of Miami, the disclosures said.

Rubio's spending habits also have gotten attention in Florida.

Before joining the Senate last year, his name surfaced in an Internal Revenue Service investigation of the Florida Republican Party's use of party-issued credit cards. He frequently had used his party credit card for personal use, and later reimbursed the card company for about $16,000.

Rubio's handling of his personal finances contrasts sharply with the image of him on his Senate website, which highlights Rubio's efforts to prevent Washington from "piling up debt."

"We need a government that stops spending more money than it takes in," the website says.

Rubio's financial issues have led Florida Democrats to cast him as a hypocrite.

"Rubio campaigned on reining in government spending, but his own personal spending is out control," said Brannon Jordan of the Florida Democratic Party. "He says one thing but is doing another."

...Many Republicans believe the bilingual Rubio could help the party carry Florida in the presidential election by attracting support from Hispanics, who tend to vote Democratic.

Analysts say the party has good reason to be worried about its image in heavily Hispanic states such as Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, where Latinos now make up more than 30 percent of the population.

In a Latino Decisions tracking poll last year, 72 percent of Hispanic voters said Republicans either "didn't care" or were "hostile" to their community.

It is unclear whether Rubio is the right choice to fix the party's image. He has not endeared himself to Hispanic voters on several fronts, analysts say.

He opposed the so-called DREAM Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants, and he expressed support for a harsh immigration law in Arizona.

Rubio opposed President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who is of Puerto Rican descent, and more recently blocked the confirmation of another Puerto Rican, Marie Carmen Aponte, as ambassador to El Salvador.

He also opposed Obama's healthcare overhaul, which is popular among many low-income Hispanics.

"He's on the wrong side on every issue that matters to Hispanics," said Fernand Amandi with Bendixen & Amandi, a political consulting firm in Miami that has been retained by the Obama campaign. "He's going to have to answer to those positions."

Despite holding moderate views on immigration as a state legislator early in his career, Rubio's position toughened as he gained national attention.

For example, in 2003 he co-sponsored legislation to allow the foreign-born children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state college tuition fees.

Recently, however, he said, "If you're here in violation of the laws, you shouldn't benefit from these programs."

He says he would support such assistance for "a limited number" of undocumented students who had "exhibited good moral character."

Rubio also has urged the party to tone down its harsh rhetoric on illegal immigration.

"The Republican Party should not be labeled as the anti-illegal immigration party. Republicans need to be the pro-legal immigration party," he said.

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

2012-01-27T21:00:00.000-08:00

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

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

2012-01-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Chuck Grassley: Broadband Killer And Corrupt Hack

2012-01-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-01-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-26T21:00:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-01-26T18:00:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2012-01-26T14:00:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-01-25T21:00:00.000-08:00

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)

2012-01-25T18:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Our Family Values President

2012-01-25T14:00:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-01-25T10:00:00.000-08:00

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.

All That Obstructionism And Negativity... Coming Home To Roost?

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I read that the bottom has been falling out of Mitt Romney's popularity among white males-- his main audience. I think some see him as a wimp who can't stand up to Gingrich, while others see him as some kind of an alien being with lots of ill-gotten money he has stashed away in tax havens and Swiss bank accounts. Either way, he's looking very toasty and there are probably a lot of frantic calls to various big-name corporate shills-- from Jeb Bush and Paul Ryan to Mitch Daniels and even Bobby Jindal-- from the likes of Karl Rove, kind of the Republican version of the Elder of Zion.

Even more delectable, at least for me, with my obsessive interest in Congress, is the newest generic House poll showing Democrats up over the GOP by a startling 11 points. It shouldn't be startling for anyone who has paid close attention to the antics of characters like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Fred Upton over the past two years. This is huge! When asked if they would "rather see the Republicans keep control" of the House or see "the Democrats win enough seats to take over control of the House," 48 percent of registered voters chose the Democrats, and 37 percent chose the GOP.

Obama also has an eight-point generic ballot lead in the poll, but House Democrats stretched that advantage by playing close to equal or even ahead of House Republicans among some key groups that are cool to the president. Where Obama loses whites to a generic GOP presidential candidate 49-38, the GOP advantage among whites shrinks to just two points, 43-41, in the House generic ballot.

In particular, House Democrats managed to beat the GOP among white men. Obama loses white, college-educated men by 16 points and white non-college men by 11. House Democrats run even with House Republicans among college-educated white men, 45-45, and actually beat the GOP 44-41 among non-college white men. That couldn't be more different than 2010, when House Republicans won 62 percent of the white male vote, according to exit polls.

That improvement explains why the poll shows Democrats even pressing an advantage in the South, 47 percent to 38 percent. By contrast, Obama loses to a generic Republican by five points, 46 percent to 41 percent, in the South.

Last night President Obama's State of the Union address, sandwiched between a spate of raucous, hateful Republican debates that saw Romney and Gingrich desperately tear each other apart, spoke to the better nature and most optimistic nature of Americans already sick of right-wing fractiousness and knee-jerk negativity.

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. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded... The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.

...As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place. No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last-– an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values... Let’s never forget: Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a government and a financial system that does the same. It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.

I wonder if Romney took it personally. His Richie Rich persona exposed and bleeding all over the national consciousness, he's watching his last glimmer of hope to capture the White House for the Mormons fade away... rapidly. As Steve Benen reminded everyone after going through Romney's tax returns, there were good reasons for him to keep them away from the public-- even if he's too weak to even defend himself with any passion or vigor.

By any fair estimate, over $42 million in income over two years isn’t bad for a guy who jokes about being “unemployed.” Indeed, Romney would be in the top 1% based solely on the income he makes in one week.

Romney said last week that his rate was “closer to 15%,” but as it turns out, despite his vast wealth, he actually only paid a 13.9% rate last year-- lower than his political rivals who aren’t nearly as wealthy, and lower than most middle-class American workers.

And what about those overseas investments?
His 2010 return also showed that he had a financial account in Switzerland that was closed in 2010 and that he generated income from overseas investments. He also reported financial accounts in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

...Why did Romney set up $100 million trust funds for his sons without paying any gift taxes? Were his accounts in the Caymans and in Switzerland created to avoid paying taxes? Was the closing of the Swiss account related to this IRS investigation? And given all of the questions surrounding Romney’s Bain-era work, why does the Republican candidate continue to insist he won’t disclose returns from previous years?

What’s more, following up on a point from last week, even if Romney argues that he’s simply playing by the rules-- taking advantage of existing tax loopholes to pay lower rates than much of the middle class-- this doesn’t explain why Romney is eager to exacerbate issues on tax fairness with his tax plan that makes the problem worse.

In a debate over tax fairness and income inequality, Romney is practically a case study for What’s Gone Wrong, but he can at least plausibly argue that this is a mess he benefits from, but didn’t create. Romney, however, prefers to believe the problem doesn’t exist.

Greg Sargent did a nice job capturing the larger political context:
I’m not sure the Obama campaign could have scripted this more perfectly. In a remarkable bit of good timing, President Obama is set to deliver a State of the Union speech focused on income inequality and tax unfairness on exactly the same day that Mitt Romney will reveal that he made over $40 million in the last two years — all of it taxed at a lower rate than that paid by middle class taxpayers. […]

Romney doesn’t just disagree with Obama on these fundamental issues; he personally symbolizes virtually the entire 2012 Democratic message. He is the walking embodiment of everything Dems allege is wrong with our system and the ways it’s rigged in favor of the wealthy and against the middle class. Yet this is the standard bearer the GOP seems set to pick.

I've been glum about the chances of the Democrats to hold the Senate. It;s going to be a stretch, but it's at least possible. As for the House... if only Steve Israel wasn't such a corporate shill and a conservative bonehead, it would be a complete lock. And the Democrats might pull it off despite him; the grassroots is aroused, and the zeitgeist, thankfully, never heard of Steve Israel.

Inequity On The March-- Bad For Your Health

2012-01-24T21:00:00.000-08:00

I was having a talk with Ken the other day about how so many businesses in his uptown Manhattan neighborhood had closed down and so many others are barely holding on. Here in L.A. discounters and low-profit margin stores are doing fine, as are stores that cater to the wealthy, but in the middle... not so good.

I came across a worrisome story in the Guardian yesterday about how struggling working-class families are eating less fruits and vegetables because of the economic downturn. That doesn't matter to an operation like Bain, focused on the quarter and no further, but for anyone worried about the long-term, this is very, very bad news for the health of the nation, whether it's the U.K. or the U.S. The one percent can eat all the fancy organic fruits and vegetables they want while working-class families are forced to consume the kinds of calories without nutrition that Big Agribusiness corporations thrive on.

Inner cities across America are devoid of grocery stores with fresh fruits and vegetables-- which has been correlated to a steep rise in obesity, cancer and diabetes, especially in children. According to The Urban Grocery Store Gap by Bruce Ferguson and Barbara Abell, the poorest neighborhoods typically have about 55% of the grocery square footage of the best-off neighborhoods. You know what a food desert is, right? "Food deserts are large geographic areas where mainstream grocery stores are scarce or missing. They are found predominantly in low-income areas, although not everyone living in a food desert is poor." To return to the Guardian report:

Lower income families in the UK have cut their consumption of fruit and vegetables by nearly a third in the wake of the recession and rising food prices, to just over half of the five-a-day portions that the government recommends for a healthy diet.

Households in the lowest tenth of incomes were buying only 2.7 portions of fruit and vegetables a day at the end of 2010, the latest year for which figures are available, while the average household continued to buy about four portions per person, according to statistics from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). For lower income households, that represents a 30% decline in purchases of fresh fruit and vegetables since 2006.

These rates are likely to have declined yet further in the past year, as inflation has continued upwards and households across the board have seen real incomes shrink. Women are likely to be the worst hit by the fall, as research shows mothers tend to deny themselves meals to give more to their children.

"It's very bad news that people on lower incomes are now even less likely to get their five a day. We urgently need to look at this-- food and nutrition are at the centre of our national life," said Mary Creagh, Labour's shadow environment secretary.

The deterioration in the diets of those worst affected by the recession will be highlighted on Monday in a parliamentary debate on food, called by Labour. Opposition MPs want faster progress on the proposed grocery code adjudicator, which they said would help ensure fairness among supermarkets, suppliers and consumers, and ways to put a brake on food price inflation.

...Creagh said a debate on food was urgently needed, as rising food prices and poorer nutrition for those in lower income households were problems the coalition government had ignored.

She said: "It's an utter disgrace that we are the seventh richest country in the world, and yet we are seeing hundreds of thousands of people going hungry."

...Purchases of fresh fruit and vegetables declined most between 2007 and 2010, according to the Defra figures, which were published shortly before Christmas. The report also found people were buying less beef, lamb and fish, but increasing their purchases of cheaper meat such as bacon.

The day before, the Guardian did a general story on how the middle class is being squeezed, a situation very much like what we're experiencing here in the U.S. Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been raging about increasing income inequality for a long time and has been warning the country that democracy itself is being threatened as the rich get ever richer, the poor get drastically poorer, and the middle classes move down the economic ladder. And in the U.K., the Guardian article warns, "Millions of people on low-to-middle incomes face years of declining living standards and are seeing their hopes of home ownership disappear, a major report will conclude this week."

The study by the independent thinktank the Resolution Foundation questions whether the new phenomenon of falling living standards and lower aspirations will be reversed, even when the UK economy returns to robust health.

The report, entitled Growth Without Gain?, will suggest that those in the "squeezed middle" are losing out in the post-boom era, as the highest earners take more and more from the proceeds of limited growth and so-called "middle-skilled" jobs are replaced by advancing technology.

As a result, the current generation of hard-working individuals is being left dependent on lower-paid jobs in retail, hospitality and care and can no longer expect, as their parents did, to see their living standards rise as output expands.

Sound familiar? It should. And until American voters start replacing millionaires-- and servants of millionaires-- in Congress with proud working-class men and women, we're going to continue to be screwed. Who do you think is going to serve your interests better, hereditary multimillionaire Fred Upton (of the job-outsourcing Whirlpool fortune) or ordinary working-class Kalamazoo blue-collar military vet John Waltz? You want a better America for your children and grandchildren? Help replace Fred Upton and others like him with John Waltz and others like him-- here.

One more thing. Did you know garlic is the #1 most effective cancer-fighting vegetable?

No, I'm not watching the SOTU -- I've been trying to get through Ryan Lizza's supposedly revelatory article about the Obama presidency

2012-01-24T18:00:00.000-08:00

How is it that all these new "revelations"
add up to what we already knew?

by Ken

There's been a fair amount of talk about Ryan Lizza's piece in the January 30 New Yorker, "The Obama Memos," which seems to think it's a behind-the-scenes look at the Obama administration which will explain all and make us see things anew, and as I started reading, I was hopeful. But after plowing through the thing cursorily, it all seems to come back to the things we already knew:

* Obama really seems to believe in his "postpartisan" nonsense, and was convinced there was a vast heaving 'middle" in the country waiting to be liberated from the polarized "extremes."

* Although Lizza doesn't seem to get it, what he documents over and over is how unreformist this self-styled reformer really is. Even as he's being shocked to discover how little power the president actually has, and is frustrated at not being able to pursue his "agenda," it becomes foggier and foggier what that agenda might be, except for not hurting the feelings, let alone the financial interests, of American big business -- like the insurance companies, for example, when it came to health care "reform." (So what kind of reform did he think he could do?)

The "new" perspectives that Lizza brings to his survey of the Obama presidency seems to me primarily: (a) an obsession with quantifying our era's polarization, which I suppose has some value, at least as long as it doesn't slip into the illusion that polarization is some kind of natural phenomenon that exists outside human agency, and (b) that Washington tends to pull all presidents in certain directions -- again true, but what excuse is there for being surprised?

In the end, Lizza acknowledges:

Obama made important mistakes in the first half of his term. He underestimated the severity of the recession and therefore the scale of the response it required, and he clung too long to his vision of post-partisanship, even in the face of a radicalized opposition whose stated goal was his defeat.

But when you're wrong about those things, what is there left to be right about? The people who assisted him in making those errors continue to be quoted as if they were sages.

But then Lizza can write with a straight face:

Obama didn’t remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street.

I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one, Ryan.

I hope to give the piece more concentrated effort, but stuff like this suggests it won't be easy or bear much fruit.

FIXED 18-YEAR TERMS FOR SUPREME COURT JUSTICES?
HEY, AT LEAST IT'S AN IDEA, OF SORTS

Meanwhile, in the same isssue, The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg bids an only slightly unfond farewell to the candidacy of Rick Perry, noting that "It’s not as much fun without him."

At Rancho Perry, every day was Oopsday. Along the trail, he forgot how many Justices the Supreme Court has (eight is not enough); forgot the name of one of them (Sonia Sotomayor); placed the American Revolution in the sixteenth century; identified the voting age (fixed at eighteen four decades ago by constitutional amendment) as twenty-one; and suggested that the chairman of the Federal Reserve is a traitor, that Turkey (a NATO ally of sixty years’ standing) is governed by Islamic terrorists, and that Social Security is not only a Ponzi scheme but also a criminal enterprise, a monstrous lie, and unconstitutional.

But buried in the muck of the Perry campaign, probably not meant sincerely but nevertheless to be found among the candidates official positions, was what Hertzberg calls "Perry's Good Idea."

[T]here was more to Perry’s campaign than blunders. It was also a campaign of “ideas.” Few of them were good, alas. For example, reducing the salaries of members of Congress by half, to eighty-seven thousand dollars a year, is not a good idea. Neither is a tax cut that would net the richest one per cent more than five thousand dollars a week and the unrichest twenty per cent less than two dollars and fifty cents. Nor is there much to be said for reinvading Iraq, reinstituting torture, or unconditionally supporting new and bigger Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Yet at least one idea Perry embraced was, and is, very good indeed. It involves the Supreme Court. The Governor may be a little shaky about the Court’s names and numbers, but he knows what to do about it. Here’s the proposal, straight from his now moribund campaign Web site:
A Constitutional Amendment creating 18-year terms staggered every 2 years, so that each of the nine Justices would be replaced in order of seniority every other year. This would be a prospective proposal, and would be applied to future judges only. Doing this would move the court closer to the people by ensuring that every President would have the opportunity to replace two Justices per term, and that no court could stretch its ideology over multiple generations. Further, this reform would maintain judicial independence, but instill regularity to the nominations process, discourage Justices from choosing a retirement date based on politics, and will stop the ever-increasing tenure of Justices.

This ingenious idea has been kicking around in legal circles for decades. It tiptoed into wider view in 2002, via a Washington Post op-ed piece by two prominent law professors of opposite ideological and political leanings: Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar, a Democrat, a former clerk for Stephen Breyer, and a stalwart of the liberal American Constitution Society; and Northwestern’s Steven G. Calabresi, a Republican, a former clerk for Antonin Scalia, and a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society. In 2006, Calabresi and his colleague James Lindgren fleshed the idea out in a long article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Justices would still get lifetime appointments. After their eighteen years with the Supremes, they could choose to serve on other federal courts, bringing their experience and, in some cases, their wisdom to the appellate bench. Even if they didn’t exercise that option, though, their salaries would continue for life. If a Justice died or retired before his or her eighteen years were up, a substitute would be appointed via the usual process—Presidential nomination, Senate confirmation—to serve out the remainder. The interim Justice would not be eligible for reappointment to the Supreme Court, but he or she would have the same sweet post-Court deal. And what lawyer wouldn’t jump at the chance to be a Justice of the highest of high courts, if only for a year?

The Amendment—call it the Perry Plan—would solve any number of problems. From 1789 through 1970, the average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice was about fifteen years. For Justices who have retired or died since then, the average tenure has been twenty-six years. This isn’t just an artifact of longer life spans. As the Court’s importance has grown—Marbury v. Madison made it the only one of the three federal command posts that is functionally sovereign, and the polarized gridlock of the elected branches has only made it more powerful—and as it has become more “political,” aging Justices have tended to hang on well into senescence, especially when the sitting President is of a different ideological persuasion. Presidents, for their part, seek to extend their influence into the far-distant future, by finding the youngest nominee they can get away with. (Another incentive: while younger is not always wiser, it does make for a shorter paper trail.) The prospect that a Justice will be handing down decisions for close to half a century turns confirmation fights into political Armageddons. The randomness of openings abets the now-or-never mentality. Richard Nixon named four Justices during his five years in the White House; Jimmy Carter, during his four years, named zero. The Perry Plan would change all that. Voters would know that every President, every two years, would get to nominate someone for the Court.

It’s possible that Perry saw his endorsement of the Perry Plan as nothing more than a handy horsewhip for conservative Court-lashing. To him, the Supremes are a bunch of “Grand Ayatollahs” who have “wrested away from the people the power to decide what is right and what is wrong and, at the most fundamental level, how we should lead our lives.” He’s referring, no doubt, to rulings like Engel v. Vitale (school prayer), Roe v. Wade (abortion), and, of course, Lawrence v. Texas (homosexual “sodomy”). But liberals have their own complaints, among which Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. F.E.C. are prominent. As the Court’s power has waxed, its reputation has waned. It could use a therapeutic dose of democratic legitimacy. The Perry Plan would give it one, without, as Perry’s Web site notes, endangering its judicial independence. The Governor isn’t big on earnest, high-minded good-government concerns. He’s no goo-goo. But, whatever his motives, by trying to move an admirable reform from the law library to the electoral arena he has taken a small step toward showing that he’s not just an oops-oops, either.

It's easy to dismiss the idea on the ground that it's politically impossible, even with some support on both the left and the right. Can we fathom what it would take to enact a constitutional amendment at this point in our history? Any constitutional amendment. Still, it's not all that "out there" an idea. It's something to think about, at a time when there seems hardly anything anymore to think about, except escape.

Ryan And Boehner Want A Second Shot At Destroying Medicare And Medicaid

2012-01-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

Not a day goes by on Twitter when the GOP noise machine doesn't puke out something like this (these are all from yesterday morning):

The biggest problem with passing the budget, of course, is that the GOP is using it to push forward their dangerous and radical right-wing social agenda (as even Newt Gingrich readily admitted, calling Ryan's budget "right-wing social engineering"; see video above). The Republicans seem convinced this is a winning issue for them-- ending Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, Boehner and Ryan are threatening to insert it into this year's budget again. Boehner was on Fox News Sunday citing how Ryan and Democrat Ron Wyden have a "bipartisan" idea of how to push forward the Republican Party's dangerous right-wing social agenda.

At a GOP strategy session on Friday, Ryan told the Republican House Members, many of whom are scared to death that trying to destroy Medicare may not prove to be a good idea in an election year, “We’re not backing off on the kinds of reforms that we’ve advocated, but we have to write it... We’ve done more to normalize the idea of premium support than anything at all. We’re confident that these are the right policies. There’s an emerging bipartisan consensus that’s occurring on doing premium support reform to Medicare is the best way to save Medicare." By bipartisan he means Wyden and a motley crew of reactionary and despised Blue Dogs.

Rob Zerban, Ryan's Democratic opponent, is far more in touch with what the American people are looking for than Ron Wyden and the mangy Blue Dogs. "Paul Ryan just announced he is taking a second swing at Medicare," writes Zerban. "His 'new' plan is devastating to Medicare as we know it, but the big difference is that he found one Democrat to help him!"

Here is what has been happening-- Paul Ryan has introduced a new plan to start the privatization of Medicare. He convinced a "Democrat," Ron Wyden, to join in this effort. Ron Wyden, like Paul Ryan, has raked in an alarming amount of lobbyist money from the health insurance industry.

Make no mistake-- this is no bipartisan effort! Almost all Democrats, including President Obama, are strongly opposed to this plan.

Here is what the White House Communications Director had to say: [this scheme could] "cause the traditional Medicare program to "wither on the vine" because it would raise premiums, forcing many seniors to leave traditional Medicare and join private plans. It would shift costs from the government to seniors. At the end of the day, this plan would end Medicare as we know if for millions of seniors."

It is clear what this plan is designed to do. Both Paul Ryan and Wyden admit that it will likely not save anyone any money! The only upside is a big giveaway to private insurance companies at the expense of our seniors. This is sham bipartisanship and the voters of Wisconsin are not fooled!

Ryan has to be stopped. Wall Street has every intention of making him president someday. The DCCC has studiously ignored him-- if not protected him-- for a decade. Rob Zerban is taking him on with zero help from "ex"-Blue Dog Steve Israel, the chair of the DCCC. Zerban just forced Ryan to switch his position and back away from supporting SOPA. He deserves our help, and you can give him some right here at the ActBlue Stop Paul Ryan page. (I should add that Ryan has probably taken more sleazy, corporate cash than any other Member of the House and currently has $4.6 million sitting in his campaign warchest, virtually all of it from corporate special interests.)

Matt Cartwright For Congress-- A Guest Post By Jack Cartwright

2012-01-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Today my father, Matt Cartwright, announced his candidacy to represent Pennsylvania’s 17th Congressional District in the House of Representatives.

In a way, I can’t believe I’m saying that. Having been interested in politics and public policy for as long as I can remember, I thought I was as far away as I could get from the decision makers in Washington. Over the years I watched electoral and policy debates with my family, and year after year we continued to see a gap between what politicians said at home and what they did in Washington. I would talk to family, neighbors and friends about these debates and all I could sense was a growing cynicism about Washington politicians and their ways. I could tell that these people who were so close to me had lost faith in our system because of this political credibility gap.

This past year the Occupy Wall Street movement highlighted another kind of divide. Tax policies crafted in Washington designed to help the special interests and the super rich over the working class people have split us into two categories: the 99% and the 1%. Time after time, the special interests have triumphed over people. After the Citizens United decision, big corporations now have undue influence over our electoral system. The average C.E.O. makes 350 times the amount of the average worker, average hourly earnings haven't increased in 50 years, and the 1% owns 42% of the wealth in the United States. Their control extends to all areas of legislative business, including health care, economic policy, trade policy, environmental protection, etc.

For over 25 years my dad has stood up to the special interests in the courtroom. He has held corporations responsible for their offenses against the middle class people of Pennsylvania. He has sued polluters. He has won cases for unfair bank practices, and auditing malpractice. For several years he gave up his time giving nightly free legal advice to viewers on a local news station. He regularly volunteers at a free legal clinic in a local church. My father comes home every night, and I can tell how much he genuinely cares about the people he fights for every day. When I was a little boy I asked my dad, “Why are you a lawyer?” and he told me, “Because I want to help people.”

Helping people is what he does. After 9/11 he got his firm to take 7 cases representing the family members of victims for free in front of the Victims’ Compensation Fund in New York City to achieve just compensation for their losses. When two local judges got involved in a notorious local scheme to imprison “kids for cash,” he set up a Juvenile Defense Pro Bono Lawyer Project and was honored by the local bar association for it. Outside of the courtroom he has been a leader in our community. He was a District Governor of Rotary International and for many years organized a “Rotary Run Against Drugs.” He has served as a member of the executive council of the local Council of the Boy Scouts of America. As a member he has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local Scouting programs, and he was also a leader in my own Boy Scout Troop. He was on the board of directors of a local hospital. If you attend Divine Mercy Parish at the Church of Saint Joseph in Scranton, you might even
catch him doing a reading.

My father is a person who has been blessed with great success in his career as an attorney, but he always gives back to his community. Now he has an opportunity to help his community in an even greater capacity: by representing it in Congress.

He will have a tough race. It will require a lot of money, and grassroots organizing to be successful. The special interests will be against him, and he will need the help of every person who wants to see positive, progressive change in this country. It will be a battle of ideologies. My father’s ideology being that we need a government that looks forward, maintains a healthy economy, and protects the consumer from the deceptive practices of corporate America. His opponent’s ideology is of a limited government that is reactionary, one that makes deep cuts in spending, protects industries like the credit card companies and the big banks, polluters, and health care insurance companies.

This will be a primary fought on issues. My father believes that everyone in this country is entitled to health care while his Blue Dog opponent does not. My father believes that the government should protect the environment while his opponent votes with the Republicans to frustrate environmental protections. My father believes that we shouldn’t be making it harder for middle class folks to declare bankruptcy against credit card debt, while his opponent voted for that. My father believes that we need energy independence in this country without giving tax breaks to huge oil companies, while his opponent voted for the Bush-Cheney energy policy of 2005. His vote has had devastating consequences on the environment in Northeastern Pennsylvania. In the Bush-Cheney energy bill, the Halliburton Loophole allows fracking companies to dump chemicals into public water sources without the responsibility to inform residents of what is in their water. My father likes to say that he comes from the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party,” while his opponent votes with the Republican Party over 50% of the time. [According to ProgressivePunch, Tim Holden voted with the GOP against the Democratic position on crucial rollcall votes just over 68% of the time last year.]

This primary election takes place on April 24, 2012. It’s going to be a difficult fight, but what it comes down to is what my dad has been doing his whole life: helping people. For the future of this country, my father needs your help.

Here is a recent family photo. Let to right: My dad, my brother Matt, my mom Marion Munley Cartwright and me

--------

You can contribute to Matt's campaign at the Blue America BadDogs page.

Newt And GOP Establishment Panic

2012-01-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

Last night's GOP debate in Tampa may have been entertaining or even, for some, cathartic, but these theatrics hardly matter... and for normal people it was just a boring episode in a reality show that is starting to wear a little thin. The Republican Establishment long ago decided it was Romney's turn, and they don't care how much foot-stomping and breath-holding there is among the Republican base, it's all fixed anyway. The GOP is the Big Money party, and Big Money says "Mitt," so Mitt it will be-- or, if Newt succeeds in making him seem just too implausible, another cut-out hack just like him, a Mitch Daniels or something manufactured like that. But Newt? That's not going to happen.

They don't like him. They don't trust him. They know he would not just lose to Obama but would dash any hopes they have for taking the Senate or even holding the House. Newt Gingrich is toxic. Yesterday, before the debate, Michael Crowley at Time tried explaining Republican Newtophobia:

“The Establishment is right to be worried about a Gingrich nomination,” the winner of the South Carolina Republican primary declared Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Because a Gingrich nomination means that we’re going to change things, we’re going to make the Establishment very uncomfortable.”

The Republican Establishment, such as it can be defined, is uncomfortable, alright. It is likely to re-mobilize, as it did in Iowa last month, to deflate his candidacy before Florida’s Jan. 31 primary, in which a victory could turn Newt from an upstart into the likely nominee. Establishment money will flow to pro-Romney SuperPACs. Establishment pundits and politicos will enumerate (again) Gingrich’s flaws and foibles.

But the Establishment isn’t striking back for the reasons Newt claims. In reality, Gingrich’s platform does almost nothing to threaten the Establishment’s core interests. It’s his candidacy that has the GOP powers that be gnashing their teeth. But as he tries to keep Mitt Romney from mounting a comeback after his South Carolina humiliation, Gingrich’s anti-Establishment pose might be the best thing going for him.

Before going any farther, it’s worth asking who this ‘Establishment’ really is. That’s tricky, but let’s stipulate that it roughly consists of a couple of hundred Republicans. They include the party’s most powerful (and wealthy) Washington lobbyists; its senior members of Congress; marquee television and newspaper pundits; and a gaggle of elected officials, financiers and all-purpose operators around the nation. More specifically, Newt’s key Establishment adversaries include the lobbyists Wayne Berman and Ron Kaufman, columnists George Will and Charles Krauthammer, elected GOP big shots like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley, and party elder statesmen like former President George H.W. Bush.

No one on that list is particularly threatened by a Gingrich presidency, at least not beyond the usual cost of backing the wrong candidate. Certainly not much in Newt’s past record suggests as much. Yes, as a Congressional back-bencher in Congress in the 1980s, Newt was impatient with his party’s more moderate, deal-making leaders (notably including Bush). His 1994 Contract With America did call for Congressional term limits, an idea despised by Washington lifers of both parties.

But since then, Newt has inarguably lived the good life of an Establishment man. As House Speaker he made no serious effort to take on the culture of Washington. Instead, he oversaw an expanded alliance between K Street lobbyists and congressional Republicans. And after he left Congress–purged by his colleagues, not for threatening their interests but for botching the politics of Bill Clinton’s impeachment–he settled comfortably into a life of lucrative speaking and influence-peddling.

What about his current platform? On Meet the Press, Gingrich detailed the case this way: “We’re going to demand real change in Washington, real audit of the Federal Reserve, real knowledge about where hundreds of billions of dollars have gone. And I think if you look at a lot of these guys, they have really good reason to worry about an honest, open candidate who has no commitment to them, who has no investment in them. And I think they should be worried because we intend to change the Establishment, not get along with it.”

Given that scores of Washington Republicans are already on record as supporting a Fed audit, Newt’s one specific argument above isn’t very persuasive. So what about the rest of his platform? Well, he favors huge tax cuts-- probably the Establishment’s top priority. He wants to cut regulations, slash entitlements, and kill off ObamaCare-- all sure fire applause lines at the American Enterprise Institute. True, his radical plan to rein in “activist judges” has drawn withering reviews from some certifiable Establishment men. But that’s not enough to explain the strong opposition to him in the sitting rooms of McLean, Virginia, which has become to the Republican Establishment what Georgetown once was to the Democratic elite (and where, incidentally, Newt himself lives). The bottom line is that Gingrich has more in common with Ross Douthat than with Ross Perot.

To the extent Newt threatens the Establishment, it’s because of his electability-- or lack thereof. The GOP’s mandarins see Gingrich’s nomination as a sure way to blow their chance of deposing Barack Obama. They see Gingrich as the political equivalent of a Fukushima nuclear plant worker, with polls showing him to be lethally irradiated by his negative approval ratings. Whereas Mitt Romney is running about even with Barack Obama in head-to-head polling, Newt loses by double-digit margins. Sure, those numbers could change if Gingrich beats Romney and wins the nomination, with all the accolades it entails. On the other hand, his grandiosity syndrome may kick in, as it has before, and render him a laughing stock. Hence the many Establishment Republicans now saying things like, “Newt means losing 45 states.”

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, the unsigned lead Review & Outlook piece about the Republican Establishment's panic attack bitched that Republican nominees since Reagan have been "tongue-tied or timid" and that at least Newt knows how to put on a good show. Romney, they wail, is too cautious and "befuddled."

As for the GOP establishment, such as it still is, Mr. Gingrich's re-emergence is likely to cause a panic attack. They don't believe he is electable. Our advice would be to relax and let the voters decide. If Mr. Romney can't marshal the wit and nerve to defeat the speaker, then he isn't likely to defeat Mr. Obama.

If GOP office-holders had a better candidate, they should have rallied behind one to get into the race, and they still could if the primary contest drags on without a clear winner. In any case the record of elected GOP politicians in picking nominees is hardly inspiring.

Well... there's always this if they don't want Newt:

How Low Will A Deranged Republican Sink? How About Slaughtering A Pet Cat For "Politics"?

2012-01-23T21:00:00.001-08:00

The picture below is gruesome. Please do NOT scroll down if an explicit photo of a tortured, brutalized cat is going to upset you

I've always been more of a dog lover than a cat lover. I go for a walk every day and bring dried duck breast to feed Gabby, Murphy, Licorice and Louie, the neighborhood dogs. I always bring a couple of extra pieces in case I run into any other dogs. And I'm allergic to cats. But I was horrified yesterday at a note I got from Blue America-backed Arkansas Democrat Ken Aden about the ritual slaughter of his campaign manager's family cat. It made me sick. And it was a lot worse than Romney strapping Seamus to the roof of his car.

Aden has been making a great deal of headway against GOP plutocrat Steve Womack in Arkansas's most Republican district. So much so that Womack is starting to get worried. The press has been covering Aden's race, something that is pretty new for a Democratic challenger. So this weekend, when his campaign manager, Jacob Burris, got home from a long day on the trail, he found something pretty horrible: The family cat had been slaughtered, with the word "liberal" painted on the pet's corpse.

The Russellville Police Department is investigating, and a report will be made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Monday morning.

Jacob Burris, who has served as Aden's campaign manager since late October, arrived home with his family Sunday evening, and his four children discovered the gruesome scene as they exited the family vehicle to enter their home.

The family pet, an adult, mixed-breed Siamese cat, had one side of its head bashed in to the point the cat's eyeball was barely hanging from its socket. The perpetrators scrawled "liberal" across the cat's body and left it on the doorstep of Burris' house.

"To kill a child's pet is just unconscionable," Aden said Monday morning. "As a former combat soldier, I've seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. Whoever did this is definitely part of the worst of humanity," he said.

"It is one thing to engage in civil political discourse, and for Republicans and Democrats to disagree with each other, which is an expected part of the political process. Taking it to this level is beyond unacceptable," Aden said.

While the campaign between Aden and incumbent Congressman Steve Womack has heated up in recent months, Aden said they did not believe the Womack campaign to be responsible. "Although we have certainly disagreed and engaged in a great deal of civil discourse, I do not believe in any way that Congressman Womack or his campaign had anything to do with this incident," Aden said. He noted that, before Christmas, KRUM Radio, a station owned by Womack's father, actually promoted a toy drive held by Aden's campaign for children in the Third District. "We suspect this is the action of a rogue individual or group of individuals who are the type of folks that stoop to the lowest common denominator instead of engaging in civil political discourse," Aden said. "It is unfortunate this has occurred, and we will await the results of the police and federal investigations," Aden said.

Was it politically motivated: I got this heartbreaking photo from Blue Arkansas:

There’s no doubting this was political. There’s no doubting it’s another hideous example of right wing terrorism. Personally I would hope that leaders on the right-- Steve Womack, the Arkansas Republican Party, etc.-- would step up and condemn this as strongly as possible. I would also hope that Steve Womack’s father, owner of a local radio station, would stop giving out the names, phone numbers, and addresses of members of the Aden team or anyone else for that matter on his radio program when ranting about Aden. The elder Womack has done that several times and Aden’s former press secretary got a death threat in the mail soon after her name was mentioned on the program. Clearly there is someone out there that doesn’t need anymore of that kind of information, much less inspiration to act on their hatred. I also hope that the Aden campaign will do whatever they can to up the security at some of their events, for the time being at least. Aden has said he’s going to put out a press release on the matter soon, and we’ll be following this and any developments related to it closely.

At least they didn't shoot a person again. If you'd like to, you can contribute to Ken Aden's campaign here.