DownWithTyranny!

How Sensible Regulations Can Stop The One Percent... From Poisoning Every Person In Berkeley

2012-02-02T21:00:00.000-08:00

Is there a government regulation that prevents a congressman from paying for his wife's plastic surgery out of his campaign funds?

Patricia McKeon, a 70 year old strict Mormon grandma and wife of House Armed Services Committee chairman, Buck McKeon, is running for the California Assembly because, she told a local newspaper, the "government was too intrusive in people’s lives." That's a very common theme among right-wing politicians, and would-be politicians, coast to coast, almost all of whom insist that the government vigorously interfere with, among other things, women's choice, LGBT equality, and marijuana use. At least conservatives no longer demand the government return runaway slaves to their rightful owners. Conservative Republicans, like the McKeons, favor every kind of authoritarian intrusion into people's lives but oppose any and all regulation that protects the environment, consumers or workers. They speak, like all Republicans, for the one percent and for corporate America.

I've been reading Cheri Seymour's frightening book, The Last Circle and I came across a page that I thought could stand alone and out of the book's context to help understand the danger of Republican Party anti-regulatory mania. One bit of context. The biotech company, BioRad Laboratories, Inc. and its subsidiaries, under discussion here, was owned by a pack of right-wing GOP operatives including Edwin Meese. Seymour starts the discussion by referring to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on May 31, 1991, entitled, "S.F. Firm Faces Toxics Charges."

A criminal complaint had been filed against a law firm, an investment banking house and several lawyers and financiers involved with InFerGene Company for abandoning its toxic wastes after filing for bankruptcy.

According to an affidavit filed by the Solano County District Attorney's office at the Fairfield Municipal Court, after InFerGene was evicted from the premises, a county inspector found several hundred containers including petri dishes and vials marked "chlamydia, herpes, and HSV2." Many others contained "bacteria of unknown etiology."

A Vacaville newspaper reported that on December 7, an environmental health inspector found 36 55-gallon drums of radioactive Butanol containing "beef mucosa." They were improperly stored and lacked labels showing content, hazard warning or the owner's business address. A follow-up report made by the environmental health office noted that a Halloween 1990 investigation into a smell was traced to a door with a radiation warning on it. The department had recommended that the lab doors be sealed and the pipe opening sealed.

In all, the county Environmental Health Department had responded four times to complaints about smells from the InFerGene labs in the Benicia Industrial Park well before it shut down in February. One complaint listed persistent smells causing nausea, a problem also cited by others still working in the area.

...In June, 1991, the San Francisco Examiner published a story entitled, "Germ War Lab Alarms Berkeley" which noted the community of West Berkeley "was home to the Defense Department's one and only supplier of anti-plague vaccine." On December 28, 1990, four maintenance men made an unauthorized entrance into a room at Cutter Biological which housed Yersinia pestis, commonly known as "The Black Plague," which once killed a quarter of the population of Europe 650 years ago.

There was no harm to the workers and no release of the live bacteria, but if an accident had occurred, all of Berkeley would have been wiped out.

She goes on to discuss highly toxic experimental "vaccines" being developed by Wackenhut on Indian reservations-- where there are no pesky federal regulatory impediments-- that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Native Americans. And the talks about similar experiments on Iraqi battlefields that resulted in thousands of illnesses among unsuspecting-- and unprotected (by regulations or anything else) American soldiers.

Welcome to Republican-world. It's ugly and brutish. But don't worry; life spans will be mercifully short... at least for the 99%. So why is the above related to this information I'm about to convey? Easy to put 2 + 2 together and get a look at a bleak future.

President Barack Obama has raised more money for his re-election bid from small-dollar donors than Republican Mitt Romney has collected from all his contributors, according to a new Center for Responsive Politics analysis.

Obama brought in approximately $58.5 million last year from individuals who donated $200 or less, successfully rallying a massive base of online donors through frequent email pitches and solicitations to purchase merchandise that ranges from t-shirts to coffee mugs bearing Obama's birth certificate to the "Fired Up, Ready to Grill" apron.

Overall, since he launched his re-election campaign in April, Obama has raised about $125 million. Thus, about 47 percent of his total receipts-- nearly $1 out of every $2 raised-- has come from a donor of $200 or less, the threshold for itemized reporting with the Federal Election Commission.

Meanwhile, Romney, who has raised about $56.5 million for his presidential campaign, saw only about 9 percent of that-- or $5.2 million-- coming from small-dollar donors, according to the Center's research.

Big donors, people who give thousands or even millions, expect something in return, something worth that kind of "investment." Small donors, on the other hand, contribute because they believe in principles and values and a better future.

caption contest

There's something explosive about the combination of truth + funny -- the latest from Andy Borowitz and Lee Camp

2012-02-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

The latest "Moment of Clarity" from the great Lee Camp. For news of a special show Lee's doing in NYC on February 18, scroll down.

by Ken

Thinking back, I'm not sure I can overstate the importance of the emergence of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show during the darkest depths of the Chimp-the-Prez Bush regime. It seemed as if it mattered mostly because it was one of the few mainstreamish national outlets where, despite the guise of a fake-news show, viewers were exposed to so much of the actual news. But somewhere in there you have to factor in the fact that Jon and company made it all so funny.

I don't have any scientific formula for how this marriage of truth and funny works. It's patently obvious that truth isn't inherently funny, and deserves to be heard and spread without having to be, and it's just as obvious that you can be funny without being aspiring to the condition of truthfulness. (Daily Show alum Stephen Colbert introduced us to the crucial concept of truthiness, which essentially aspired to the condition of un-truthfulness, offering instead the appearance of truth.)

But still, there's something special about that combination of truth and funny. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that while there are lots of other reasons why Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have carved out such important places in the truth-telling game, it's probably no coincidence that they both have sensational senses of humor, and understand how to incorporate the funny without in any way diminishing their seriousness.

It's just a matter of personal time management that I've drastically cut back my political-TV-watching time. In part it's been made possible by the emergence of brilliant online funny-truth-tellers like Andy Borowitz and Lee Camp. How terrific is it to encounter stuff like this on a regular basis in my e-mail?

LA JOLLA, CA (The Borowitz Report) –- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney today released the following letter to the American people:

Dear American People:

Yesterday, comments I made about poor people made me look terrible. This always seems to happen when I say what I really believe.

The fact is, I do care about poor people. That’s because I’m poor myself, when you compare me to Mark Zuckerberg.

According to most projections, Facebook’s IPO should net Mr. Zuckerberg a personal fortune of $28 billion. I couldn’t make a pile of dough-re-mi like that even if I fired people twenty-four hours a day.

Now, let’s take a look at Mitt Romney’s net worth: a measly $200 million. Now do you see why I consider myself poor? Compared to Mark Zuckerberg, Mitt Romney is practically a crack whore.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and envy a rich person like Mark Zuckerberg. That’s exactly what President Obama wants poor people like me to do. Mark Zuckerberg made his money fair and square, by creating useful products like imaginary sheep and angry birds. Say what you will about Facebook, it has totally revolutionized the way we waste our lives.

The fact is, if you’re poor in America, you should do what Mark Zuckerberg did: create a social network. I’ve just started my own, called TwoFaceBook. With TwoFaceBook, your profile doesn’t stay the same for more than two seconds.

In closing, there’s one more reason I don’t worry about poor people. They have Groupons.

Vote for me,

Mitt Romney

LOS ANGELES-AREA FOLKS: ANDY B IS COMING TO YOU!

On February 28, Writers Bloc will present Andy in conversation with another seriously funny guy, Patton Oswalt (left), at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, in what Andy describes on his website as his "only scheduled show on the West Coast this year." (I guess that "only scheduled show" weaseltry protects him from lawsuits by disgruntled literal-minded fans in the event that he should wind up doing another show on the West Coast between now and December 31.)

For more information and online ticket-buying, go here.

AND IN NEW YORK, LEE CAMP IS TAPING AN ALBUM

On January 20 Lee reported:

I will be taping my second comedy album at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC on Saturday, Feb 18th at 10pm AND I WANT YOU TO BE THERE. It’s only $8 to get in and there is no drink minimum. Special Guest: Ted Alexandro! Plus, there will be free brownies. …Not kidding. My last comedy album was listed as one of the top 5 of 2011 in Dusted Magazine, so why would you miss this one LIVE? Tickets are available online here: www.bit.ly/LeeCampTix

At that price I could afford to snap up a ticket as soon as I saw the announcement. Though space is limited, I believe there are still tickets available. If you've seen any of Lee's videos you should know what to expect, but I can vouch for the fact that seeing him do it in person -- and doing a whole show -- is amazing. (If you can't make it, you can get more information about Lee's first album here, including a link to free samples on iTunes, where you can also download it.)

Republican Party Class War Against The Middle Class And Campaign Finance Reform

2012-02-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

Earlier this morning we talked about Romney's revealing "slip of the tongue" in terms of not caring for poor people. (A tangent: people should never confuse the Christian Jesus, the one who talked a lot about caring for poor people, with the Mormon Jesus, who they claim was resurrected as the Aztec and Mayan feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl and who, like Romney, didn't concern himself with the poor. Tangent over.) The video above has nothing to do with Quetzalcoatl or the Mormons; it's about American democracy itself. It shows Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), standing on the Senate floor, introducing an amendment to overturn Citizens United, which was, in effect, the culmination of the efforts of the wealthy to overturn both the meaning of the American and the French Revolutions. Citizens United was the bloodless coup d'etat by the wealthy to take over America and relegate democracy itself to the scrap heap of history. Bernie's amendment makes it clear that:

• Corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people.

• Corporations are subject to regulation by the people.

• Corporations may not make campaign contributions or any election expenditures.

• Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign finances.

There's a reason why American corporations, despite the lies propagated by the GOP and their media outlets, are the most undertaxed corporations in the industrialized world. And that reason is the very nature of the political elites in this country-- the wealthy... and not just Willard M. Romney.

Some members of Congress are threatening to allow the U.S. to default on its debt obligations-- and send financial markets into a tailspin-- unless the President agrees to large, sudden cuts in the budget deficit without any increase in tax revenue. But the most recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD),theOffice of Management and Budget and the Census Bureau reveal that the U.S. is already one of the least taxed countries in the developed world. Only two OECD countries have lower taxes as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) than the United States.

Overall, U.S. Taxes Are Third-Lowest Among OECD Nations

* In 2009, total federal, state and local taxes in the United States were 22.6 percent of our gross domestic product, ranking 26th among the 28 OECD countries for which data are available. Only Chile (18.2 percent) and Mexico (17.5 percent) had lower taxes.

* In 2009, total taxes in the 25 OECD nations with higher taxes than ours ranged from 24.6 percent of GDP in Turkey to 48.2 percent in Denmark.

* In most cases, the difference in tax levels between the U.S. and OECD countries is not even close. Of the 25 OECD nations with taxes higher than ours, 22 of them have taxes that are at least 25 percent higher, and 15 have taxes at least 50 percent higher.

Corporate Income Taxes

Many corporate leaders have noted that other OECD countries have lowered their corporate tax rates in recent years, but fail to mention that these countries have also closed corporate tax loopholes while the U.S. has expanded them. As a result, the U.S. collects less corporate taxes as a share of GDP than all but one of
the 26 OECD countries for which data are available.

* In 1965, U.S. corporate income taxes were 4.0 percent of our GDP, compared to 2.3 percent of GDP in other OECD countries.

* But by 2009, U.S. corporate taxes had fallen to only 1.3 percent of our GDP, while corporate income taxes of the other OECD nations collectively stood at 2.4 percent.

* Many countries experienced unusually low corporate tax receipts in the last couple years due to the recession. But even when U.S. corporate taxes recently peaked in 2007 at 3.2 percent of GDP, the average for the other OECD nations was well ahead, at 3.8 percent of GDP.

* In 2009, only Iceland had lower corporate taxes as a share of GDP than the U.S.

Personal Income Taxes

* In 2000, the year before President George W. Bush took office, personal income taxes were 12.3 percent of our GDP.

*Since the Bush tax cuts were enacted, personal income taxes have plummeted. Even with the brief economic bubble that caused income tax receipts to rise in 2007, personal income taxes were consistently well below their 2000 level as a share of GDP ever since the Bush tax cuts were enacted.

* In 2009, U.S. personal income taxes were just 7.7 percent of GDP.

Social Insurance Taxes

* Social insurance taxes and other wage taxes have risen rapidly worldwide.

* Since 1965, social insurance taxes in the U.S. have risen from 3.2 percent of GDP to 6.2 percent of GDP in 2009.

* In other OECD countries, social insurance and other wage taxes rose from 6.1 percent of GDP to 10.8 percent over the same period.

Sales, Excise and Other Consumption Taxes

* In 1965, total federal, state and local consumption taxes in the U.S. were 5.5 percent of GDP. By 2009 they were 4.1 percent.

* In other OECD countries, consumption taxes were 9.6 percent of GDP in 1965, and 9.1 percent in 2009.

Property & Wealth Taxes

* Property and wealth taxes in the U.S. (about 90 percent of which are state and local real estate taxes) fell from 3.9 percent of GDP in 1965 to 2.9 percent in 1980, and have held stable thereafter. They were 3.2 percent of GDP in 2009.

Dr. Steve Porter, Pennsylvania's Independent Candidate For Congress

2012-02-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

Dr. Steve Porter has been a good friend of Blue America's since we got started in 2005. At that time he ran for Congress in northwestern Pennsylvania as a Democrat. I was somewhat naïve back then and couldn't understand why the DCCC wouldn't help such an independent-minded stalwart progressive. Now I understand that the DCCC isn't looking for stalwart progressives and absolutely hates independent-minded thinkers. Steve ran again-- but as an independent. I've invited him to join me on a panel at Netroots Nation in June to help people understand how antithetical to the progressive movement an organization like the DCCC, built as part of a vast incumbent protection racket and imbued with values that extol corruption. truly is. Should be fun. I've asked the Netroots Nation folks to invite Chairman Israel as well. Meanwhile, Steve is, once again-- and as an independent, running for the Erie-based House seat in Pennsylvania. I asked him to give us an idea of what it's all about.

Why I Am Running For Congress As An Independent

-by Steven Porter, Ph.D.

For most of my 68 years, I, like millions of my fellow citizens, have fallen prey to the myth that our two-party system would further the American democracy.

But I was wrong. I didn't heed the warnings of our first President, George Washington, who begged us in his farewell address of 1796 to avoid turning the reins of government over to political parties.

Listen, dear God, listen to his words.

"I have already intimated to you the danger of parties to the state," he said. "The alternate domination of one faction over another... serves to distract the public...enfeeble the administration... agitate with jealousies, kindle animosity, and foment riot."

And as our seats of government were turned over in every state legislature and almost every court to our two-party duopoly, the tenets of our Constitution and sources of our very freedom were prostituted by greed and the desire for power to the point where service to the people has now become a governmental impossibility.

In 1976 with the Buckley vs. Valeo ruling which equated money with free speech and in 2010 when the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court made political contributions virtually unlimited and virtually anonymous, we allowed the nails of our democratic coffin to be driven tight.

In the last twenty years, the wealthy who lust for profits and control have spent an incredible $25 trillion to put into Congress their own lapdogs. People thus owned-- no matter how they once might have wished to serve the nation-- now serve their financial masters. So our legislators squabble over party power and fail term after term to deal with the crises which face us.

If you go to www.opensecrets.org, you will find the statistics of the Center for Responsive Politics. Don't believe me. See the flow of money for yourselves. Look, for example, at the $5 trillion used by the financial industry to buy Congress since 1990. Then ask yourselves how our representatives can serve those of us who have lost our homes and our jobs when their first order of business is to bail out the banks which put them in office.

Well, they can't. Nor can they provide affordable health care before profits to the insurance carriers, nor clean air before oil leases, nor peace before feeding the industries of war.

Confused and misled by corporatized news and under-educated by a continually failed school system, our public has been paralyzed by ignorance and distracted by a media whose profits rely on prurience rather than meaningful information.

Consider this: 37% of American voters are registered independents, yet only 2 of the 535 members of Congress are independents. That is because state-by-state, in ways often patently unconstitutional, everyone but a Republican or a Democrat is denied equal access to the ballot [see Grand Illusion by lawyer Theresa Amato]. For example, here, now, in the state of Pennsylvania, while a Republican or Democrat needs only 1,000 signatures to get on the ballot, I-- an unaffiliated independent-- must get 2% of the total of the winning congressional candidate's vote in the 2010 election. That is far more than 1,000 signatures. And that in spite of Pennsylvania's own constitution which says that elections shall be "free and equal." It also violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which states that all Americans shall have the equal protection of the laws of the land.

I wish I could put all of my research into this one post. I can't. But it is there for you to see in my books. I beg you to read Preserving America and check the references for yourselves. I urge you to listen to my internet broadcasts on http://webtalkradio.net/shows/preserving-america/. I ask you to visit my campaign website, www.porter4congress.com. You will find the truth there, waiting for you to verify, waiting for our nation to hear.

I run with an easily understood platform which-- as I look to our future-- I do not see changing.

1. Leave Afghanistan now.

2. Remove the Social Security earnings cap.

3. Replace Obamacare with HR 676, the Physicians National Health Program.

4. Restore the tax rates on corporations and the wealthiest 1% of Americans so that they generate one-half of what they did in 1960 when corporations accounted for 25% of federal revenues rather than the 9% they yield today, and when the wealthiest 1% were taxed on rates close to 80% instead of the approximately 30% rate of today.

5. With the monies derived from these steps, institute public works projects in solar power generation, wind power generation, and building a national watershed program.

6. Fund all elections with taxes already paid and equally distributed to candidates who are allowed to gain ballot access by laws applied equally to all.

This simple six-item platform will pay off our debts, make us energy independent, put millions to work now and into the future, and end the bribery of our government.

For years we have been brainwashed by the major parties and a press designed to control us instead of inform us. We have been brainwashed to think that if we do not vote either for a Republican or a Democrat, we throw our votes away. And so we leap from the frying pan of the Republicans to the fire of the Democrats and throw our democracy away.

I beg you to support my campaign. Get me elected and see what an honest, un-owned voice in Congress will do. Give me the chance to speak for us. I will not fail you, and-- if I do--cut me loose. You lose very little if you respond to me in mass. Maybe $100. Maybe 2 years. You might, however, gain back the promise of your nation.

OK, So Romney Isn't Concerned About The Very Poor-- Is That A Surprise To Someone?

2012-02-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney is the candidate of, by and for the rich. That simple. His statement yesterday that he's not really concerned about the very poor shouldn't come as a surprise, except in terms of how inept he is as a politician. Even a clod like Bush didn't blunder into saying stuff that dumb. And who are "the very poor" in Willard's mind? People who make less than $100,000 a year? Who knows... remember, this freak referred to the $360,000 he took in from speaking engagements in the same way normal people think about the money they find behind their sofa cushions. And look at who's funding his campaign-- aside from the Mormons who want to fulfilled Joseph Smith's dream of capturing the White House, greedy millionaires and billionaires who think now, thanks to the worst Supreme Court in American history, is the time for their big move to take over the country entirely.

A quarter of the money amassed by Romney’s campaign and an allied super PAC has come from just 41 people, each of whom has given more than $100,000, according to a Washington Post analysis of disclosure data. Nearly a dozen of the donors have contributed $1 million or more.

Four of the $1 million donors are hedge fund managers, and Dems will surely point to this as evidence that the very rich are fueling Romney’s campaign because his tax policies protect their financial interests. The loophole that Obama’s Buffett Rule would close keeps their tax rates lower than those paid by many middle class taxpayers.

Exacerbating this picture, of course, is the fact that Romney himself is a member of this class that benefits so handsomely from the unfairness of this tax structure. The Dem strategy is to paint Romney as the walking embodiment of everything that’s unfair about our economy and tax system, and all the ways it’s rigged for the wealthy and against the middle class. The fact that a tiny handful of extremely wealthy individuals who are reaping so much from the current structure-- as is Romney himself-- are investing so heavily in his candidacy will only strengthen the case.

Even a Romney-supporting creep like Jonah Goldberg sensed something was wrong. "The problem, for others at least, is that because he isn’t a natural politician he breaks the language where it needs to bend. He uses language-- 'I like to fire people!' 'It’s nothing to get angry about' etc-- that doesn’t make him seem like an unconventional politician. Rather his language makes him seem like a caricature of a conventionally stiff country club Republican... A case in point, here he is this morning talking about how he’s 'not very concerned about the very poor'. I get the point he’s making. It’s a point that Bill Clinton won the presidency with-- but with language that attracted voters. Romney’s language won’t do anything of the sort. And the concern is, after nearly a decade of running for president, if he can’t get this stuff down now he never will."

Tuesday night, of course, his best precincts in Florida, were precincts with lots of rich people and he did worst, even among Republicans, where ordinary families are struggling to make ends meet. These are the folks Mitt Romney doesn't care about:

• In 2010, more than 4 million more women than men lived in poverty.

• Families headed by a single adult are more likely to be headed by women, and these female-headed families are at greater risk of poverty and deep poverty. 34.2% of families with a female householder where no husband is present were poor and 17% were living in deep poverty. 17.3% of families with a male householder where no wife was present were poor and 7.9% were living in deep poverty. 7.6% of married couple families with children were living in poverty and 2.4% were in deep poverty.

• Children living in single female-headed families were more than four times as likely to be living in poverty, and seven times as likely to be living in deep poverty, than children living in married couple families

Romney's class has gotten away without paying their fair share for far too long. They should be taxed the way they were taxed when Eisenhower was president and the country's economic growth was explosive and all boats were being lifted and the country was growing by leaps and bounds. Obama's middle-course, of 30% isn't even halfway there.

And here's Lawrence O'Donnell from last night discussing Romney's bungled win in Florida. I'm including it here because of the Rush Limbaugh comments at the 3 minute mark. He's worried about Romney coming across as "the prototypical rich Republican." You think?

A Vote For Romney Is A Vote For Austerity-- In Other Words, Depression

2012-02-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

Krugman gave a talk in Paris today and yesterday he posted the slides he's using as visual aids on his blog, like the one above. He also did a provocative NY Times column about the austerity debacle. It's not good news for the societies being dragged into a worldwide austerity regime by the selfish, greed-obsessed economic and political elites.

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure-- changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began-- Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s-- and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

...Britain, in particular, was supposed to be a showcase for “expansionary austerity,” the notion that instead of increasing government spending to fight recessions, you should slash spending instead-- and that this would lead to faster economic growth. “Those who argue that dealing with our deficit and promoting growth are somehow alternatives are wrong,” declared David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister. “You cannot put off the first in order to promote the second.”

How could the economy thrive when unemployment was already high, and government policies were directly reducing employment even further? Confidence! “I firmly believe,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet-- at the time the president of the European Central Bank, and a strong advocate of the doctrine of expansionary austerity-- “that in the current circumstances confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery, because confidence is the key factor today.”

Such invocations of the confidence fairy were never plausible; researchers at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere quickly debunked the supposed evidence that spending cuts create jobs. Yet influential people on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on the prophets of austerity, Mr. Cameron in particular, because the doctrine of expansionary austerity dovetailed with their ideological agendas.

Thus in October 2010 David Broder, who virtually embodied conventional wisdom, praised Mr. Cameron for his boldness, and in particular for “brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain’s economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession.” He then called on President Obama to “do a Cameron” and pursue “a radical rollback of the welfare state now.”

Strange to say, however, those warnings from economists proved all too accurate. And we’re quite fortunate that Mr. Obama did not, in fact, do a Cameron.

Which is not to say that all is well with U.S. policy. True, the federal government has avoided all-out austerity. But state and local governments, which must run more or less balanced budgets, have slashed spending and employment as federal aid runs out-- and this has been a major drag on the overall economy. Without those spending cuts, we might already have been on the road to self-sustaining growth; as it is, recovery still hangs in the balance.

And we may get tipped in the wrong direction by Continental Europe, where austerity policies are having the same effect as in Britain, with many signs pointing to recession this year.

The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist--- or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook Economics-- could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea. But policy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know. And millions of workers are paying the price for their willful amnesia.

The Financial Times pointed out that the Eurozone jobless rate is at euro-era high. The number of jobless in the 17 countries of the single currency bloc rose in December for an eighth consecutive month to 16.5 million-- 10.4%.

Critics of EU efforts argue that Brussels has focused on fiscal austerity at the expense of growth. Some also belittled the new initiative signed on Monday as little more than warmed up commitments to policies that have been promised or proposed before.

“The council’s [representing national governments] presentation of a strategy for growth is a strategy in name only being far too narrow in scope, too vague in commitments and too small in ambitions to have much impact,” said Sony Kapoor, head of the economic consultancy Re-Define.

“While it is important the council is at least talking about growth and the need to generate employment, they have precious little of substance to say at this point.”

José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, on Tuesday presented EU leaders with a dire report on employment across the region, particularly among the young, where countries such as Spain and Greece are posting youth unemployment rates of close to 50 per cent. “We cannot accept that almost a quarter of Europe’s young people are unemployed,” Mr Barroso said.

...[U]nemployment in the debt-laden periphery has reached severe proportions. Portugal’s jobless rate rose the fastest out of the entire bloc, up 0.4 per cent to 13.6 per cent. Spain was steady at 22.9 per cent, the highest in the EU.

EU leaders pledged to accelerate the spending of European development funds to help alleviate unemployment. But the money they have in mind, from the regional and social affairs budget, has already long been earmarked for boosting jobs and growth, and none of the countries will receive new resources.

National governments will have to submit plans to boost job creation, outlining new measures to cut claimants. Teams of EU officials will assist those countries with the highest jobless rates, a process which started on Tuesday with preliminary contacts with the national capitals. But under tough new fiscal rules, no high-debt governments will be able to stray from the austerity measures.

“We cannot resort to fiscal stimulus to boost growth at the present time,” Mr Barroso said.

For people who like to pretend they're "pro-life," it's amazing how much death they manage to spread

2012-02-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

The mission of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure took an unexpected twist with the hiring of an anti-choice zealot as its policy VP. Now, in furtherance of that demented creature's agenda, the foundation has gone into the business of spreading breast cancer.

“Susan Komen would not give in to bullies or to fear. Too bad the foundation bearing her name did.”

-- a tweet by author Judy Blume

by Ken

On one count you have to hand it to the authoritarian sociopoaths who packaged their opposition to abortion, which is at least a defensible position, into a crusade of oppression packaged under the lying claim of being "pro-life." You have to hand it to them because they were in the vanguard of the New Ultra Right which takes it as a requirement not merely an option that every word out of their mouths be a lie.

Of course they're not "pro-life." How could they be when they believe life is such a toxic, hateful, pestilential biological state? No, what they love is being the judges who determine who else should die. Most of the pro-deathers can never have enough death via executions, wars, poverty, and disease. Even when it comes to banning abortion, apparently the thought of all those women dying in back-room and back-alley procedures is probably better for them than sex. Oh wait, everything is better than sex for them, unless it's for procreation. (Just the people who should be encouraged to procreate.)

As we've noted frequently, the giddy-with-power Ultra Right is now engaging in an all-out war on women, and as we've also noted, with the anti-abortion jihad awaiting only the final death blow from their sociopathic-deviant majority on the Supreme Court, they've already moved to their next target: contraception. Since they are totally devoid of any decency or morality, naturally they feel empowered to destroy those who stand in their way. Planned Parenthood has already been targeted for an ACORN-style death for the sin of not advocating any of its cardinal virtues: ignorance, hatred, and economic imperialism. (I guess it's only natural for sociopaths incapable of decency or humanity to burn with hatred for anyone who embraces those qualities.)

As you've probably heard, the death-worshipping sociopaths have now scored a signal triumph, thanks to a bestial hate-mongering creature named Karen Handel, having wormed herself into position as senior vice president of public policy at the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a foundation dedicated to breast-cancer awareness, which has been contributing substantial sums to Planned Parenthood to enable large numbers of women to avail themselves of cancer screening exams, she has now engineered a cutoff of that funding.

What she's saying, of course, is that she wishes to allot cancer suffering and death on women who wish to avail themselves of contraception., in defiance of her authoritarian psychopathology. And so, in the service of her loathsome dementia, she has singlehandedly transformed the Komen foundation's mission from fighting cancer to spreading it. (As usual with these demons, the Handel creature shows no evidence of having the slightest interest in the well-being of any actually born human being.) This is what happens when you consort with demons.

As the folks in the ThinkProgress War Room noted in a great post this evening, "New Attacks in the Right-Wing War on Women: Right-Wing Bullies Attack Access to Basic Women's Health Care" (with lots of links onsite):

The good news is that people across the country rose up to defend Planned Parenthood against this kind of right-wing bullying. One foundation made an emergency $250,000 donation to cover breast cancer screenings and then another 6,000 donors stepped up in the last 24 hours with an additional $150,000. Richards emailed supporters today to thank them and say the group would fight on:
It doesn’t matter what the anti-choice, anti-women’s health forces out there do. As parents, we tell our kids not to give in to bullies — and we shouldn’t, either. I promise you that we won’t, no matter what.

Progressive groups, including MoveOn, UltraViolet, CredoAction, and the campaigning arm of Daily Kos blasted their supporters to ask them to stand up and fight back against the attacks. Members of Congress, including Reps. Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Mike Honda (D-CA) and Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Patty Murray (D-WA), and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) also expressed their anger and dismay at Komen’s decision. Noted author Judy Blume took to Twitter, commenting: “Susan Komen would not give in to bullies or to fear. Too bad the foundation bearing her name did.”

Meanwhile, according to one analysis of social media reaction, just 27 percent said Komen’s decision was right, while 30 percent said it was wrong and an additional 23 percent said they’d stop donating to Komen as a result. Another 11 percent said it would hurt low-income women.

For its part, after receiving thousands of negative comments on Facebook, Komen issued a non-apology today that seemed to attack Planned Parenthood:
Making this issue political or leveraging it for fundraising purposes would be a disservice to women.

This afternoon, two local Susan G. Komen affiliates announced their opposition to the parent group’s decision.

Is that supposed to be a joke, accusing those who have risen in shock and outrage -- at this shocking and outrageous decision -- of "making this issue political"? The foundation made a calculated decision to do just that when it made the Handel creature its policy czar. As Lori at Feministing noted, Handel "is a staunch anti-choicer, who went so far as to pledge to defund PP’s services when she was running for Governor [of Georgia]."

The Komen foundation made the choice to immerse their organziation in ultra-right-wing zealotry, so I don't know why they're so touchy now that they're proceeding with the agenda. You'd think they would be beaming as they tell all those women whose cancer-screening services they're defunding: "F--k you, bitches! Let the dying proceed!"

What Does Buck McKeon Fear?

2012-02-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

I hope you're following the Buck McKeon saga. The ending will be explosive. Monday's episode will catch you up and put what we're going to look at today in perspective.

So what does ole Buck fear? His life is one big tangle of fears, but today he has three big ones, two from federal prosecutors and one from voters in CA-25 (Simi Valley, Santa Clarita, Antelope Valley). He's scared witless that voters in his district will figure out that his vote in favor of the TARP bankster bailout was connected to his huge Countrywide bribe. And of course it was. That leads to what scares him about the feds. Sooner or later someone is going to ask how it's possible that the house he bought at 25305 Joyce Place in Stevenson Ranch cost him $261,000 on August 15, 1997, but one year later his pal Angelo Mozilo let him refi it, under extraordinary terms, for an additional $315,000. What was the quid pro quo?

His other fear is that one of the shady donors-- a defense contractor who funneled money into his wife's campaign at his request-- will, under pressure, turn state's evidence and put him behind bars. One has to wonder if he will figure out that following Elton Gallegly into retirement is his only way to extricate himself from this mess.

When the Countrywide scandal started to break, McKeon's emergency damage-control team sent him a memo advising him to keep away from local reporters and to set up a meeting with the newspaper's editors instead. They suggested a practice session so he could go over possible tough questions and get his story "straight." They outlined 11 tough questions he'd have to prepare for:

1. How could you not know?
2. Did you not review your own loan documents?
3. You may not have known when you applied for the mortgage, but didn't you notice a difference in the rates when you signed fr the mortgage?
4. Why did you go to Countrywide to obtain a mortgage?
5. How were you given an FOA [Friend of Angelo] designation?
6. Did you ever meet Angelo?
7. What is your relationship with Countrywide? Lobbyist?
8. How much money have you been given by Countrywide? Was Countrywide part of teh bailout?
9. You voted for TARP; was it because of special interest money/treatment you received by big banks?
10. Are there any other instances where you were given special tratment because of your position?
11. If you don't remember receiving this special treatment, how can you be so sure that you haven't received special treatment in other instances?

If the House Ethics Committee wasn't part of DC's incumbent-protection racket, McKeon would already have been asked to resign from Congress by his pal Boehner. Inside the Beltway media is starting to notice you're running a House of Crooks, Mr. Speaker, just like Tom DeLay was.

An increasing number of House Republicans are getting wrapped up in allegations of ethics violations ahead of the November elections, handing Democrats easy campaign fodder and putting the GOP in an unexpected bind.

Republican leaders in the lower chamber pledged to run an ethically sound ship when they took control last year. But as the second session gets under way, nearly a dozen GOP lawmakers are being questions on a wide array of their financial dealings, and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has not publicly admonished them.

...By next Monday the House Ethics Committee is slated to decide whether to formally investigate Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.). Moreover, allegations arose over this past weekend that Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) might have accepted illegal campaign donations, according to The New York Times.

Additionally, there are the three Republicans-- Reps. Pete Sessions (Texas), Buck McKeon (Calif.) and Elton Gallegly (Calif.)-- who earlier this month were referred to the House Ethics Committee for taking part in Countrywide’s VIP mortgage program, aimed at gaining special favor from lawmakers.

Sessions serves as the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), while Buchanan serves as the GOP reelection arm’s finance chairman. Grimm is one of the NRCC’s regional chairs.

...“House Republicans are standing idly by while federal investigations and scandals mount against leading members of their own caucus,” said Jesse Ferguson, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“Republicans pledged a ‘zero tolerance’ policy on ethics but after all these scandals, voters are going to send a forceful and unmistakable message: they have zero tolerance for scandal-plagued House Republicans,” Ferguson said.

So the damage control memo-- which also suggests dragging another FOA, neighboring Elton Gallegly, into the mess-- was dated January 6, 2012. Ole Elton suddenly announced he was retiring January 7, 2012. Also that memo on the 6th discusses how McKeon should respond-- as in mislead-- the press about the Countrywide revelations. On the 13th he announced he was shocked to hear them, a blatant borne out by the memo. His opponent, Lee Rogers, has a post up on his campaign blog that points out McKeons denials raise more questions than they answer.

“On Friday, Representative McKeon met with The Signal and the Antelope Valley Press to review the documents related to his controversial Countrywide VIP loan. I’m glad Mr. McKeon listened to me and many of his constituents, who called for him to be more transparent on the issue and release his loan documents. In his interview, he defended himself by stating that his loan interest rate was near the prevailing rate in October of 1998, which constituted evidence that he didn’t receive favored treatment.

“However, this doesn’t exclude favoritism because he may not have qualified for the prevailing rate. His business was failing and went bankrupt shortly after that time. Howard and Phil’s Western Wear was millions of dollars in corporate debt, including $400,000 in unpaid state sales taxes.

“The House Oversight Committee uncovered evidence that Rep. McKeon was referred to the Countrywide VIP program by a lobbyist from the Mortgage Bankers Association of America. They also reported that CEO Anthony Mozilo intervened in McKeon’s mortgage and personally approved his loan without any documentation of assets, liabilities, or income.

“Mozilo instructed the loan officer to cut the interest rate by 1 percent, which equates to $68,000 in savings for McKeon over 30 years. This would be a mortgage not available to other borrowers. Those are the facts. Additionally, this also raises a question about how McKeon was able to refinance a home he purchased one year earlier for an additional $315,000.

“The House Oversight Committee reviewed the same documents and found enough evidence to refer this matter to the House Ethics Committee for an investigation.

“Because of the atrocious acts of Countrywide Financial Corp., we must hold accountable those who instigated the housing crisis. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has previously stated that the Countrywide VIP program was nothing less than a bribe to those who were in positions of power. We await the results of the House Ethics Committee’s investigation.”

Other Things Buck McKeon Fears

Interviews like the one investigative journalist Lee Fang did with KHTS, which expose his corruption to a wider audience of voters.

KHTS: I’m reading the article and I’m saying to myself is there anything illegal or just inappropriate?

LF: I talked to some McCain-Feingold experts, that’s the campaign finance law on the books, and they said in this case there’s no evidence of illegal conduct. That being said, it’s clear that this lobbyist Mark Valente, this defense contract lobbyist, is trying to get around the Federal limit. The law that limits the amount he can give to a member. He’s basically circumventing the Federal law and giving to McKeon’s wife who is running for the State Assembly. This is legal, but it raises serious ethical concerns, because California has different rules and by giving to Patrician McKeon, or coordinating funds to her, he can basically give her unlimited amounts.

KHTS: He might say just because you give to my wife that’s not any influence on me.
LF: Sure, and that’s completely fair but there’s an interesting kind of pattern here. Buck McKeon has been very unusual for a member of Congress. He’s put his wife on his Congressional campaign staff for the last 10 years. A few members of Congress have done this but in various small kind of ways. I know there’s a Congressman in Maryland who puts his aunt as bookkeeper and pays her about $10,000 a year. But for Buck McKeon he’s put Patricia on his payroll and paid her over half a million dollars over the last 10 years and I believe he’s also paid other family members for Web development, for maintaining his campaign website. Large payments as much as $1,000 a month. So, there’s a strange pattern here where it at least gives the appearance that McKeon is open to the idea of his campaign contributors funneling money to his family.

KHTS: Other than this instance with Patricia, is there another instance that you’re seeing?

LF: I’ve seen reports that David Logan, who is the husband of McKeon’s daughter Tricia, has been paid by the McKeon campaign. And more than that, the Wall Street Journal had a big story, I believe two or three weeks ago, showing that Countrywide, which was caught giving bribes to several Democratic senators several years ago also gave a preferential mortgage to Buck McKeon in the late '90s, so this is a serious ethical cloud and the payments to Patricia McKeon add to that pattern.

(Editor’s note: McKeon officials have rebuffed requests from KHTS to provide copies of the Countrywide loan documents.)

And there's the local newspapers. Who reads them? Just the local voters. Most people in CA-25 don't read the Ventura Star, except the folks in Simi Valley, a new part of the district that's never been represented by McKeon, but have just met him in this feature story:

As a general rule, major defense contractors don't get involved in campaigns for state political offices. There's no Pentagon in Sacramento, and the governor doesn't have an army.

That is changing this year in the race for the new 38th Assembly District, campaign finance reports filed Tuesday revealed.

Republican candidate Patricia McKeon, wife of Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, reported $19,200 in contributions from seven defense contractors or their representatives, including four of the top five recipients of U.S. military contracts. That amount represents more than one-fifth of the money she raised last year, other than a personal loan she made to her campaign.

The contributions, said a spokesman for Common Cause of California, are a clear sign that military contractors are seeking to gain favor with the Republican congressman whose committee oversees U.S. military operations.

"We believe this is a way for these companies to influence Congressman McKeon," said Phillip Ung. "The success of her candidacy absolutely affects him. It affects their family's income and the family's political future."

Hi, Simi Valley, meet your new (corrupt, scumbag) congressman, old Buck McKeon! And of course, Buck is very fearful that Boehner will ask him to step down as chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Why would Boehner do that? Buck sure seems to be taking an inordinate amount of bribes from defense contractors and laundering them through his wife's campaign. Could get embarrassing for the GOP as the election ramps up.

Disclosures posted last evening at the California Secretary of State’s Web site confirm that a flood of military contractor money has flowed to Patricia McKeon, who is running for an open Assembly seat in a district that overlaps that of her husband Republican Congressman Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

...In her first few months of fundraising, Patricia McKeon collected at least $19,200 from defense contractors or their registered lobbyists. Her husband of 49 years is already the top recipient of military industry cash in Congress, so some of the contributions to his wife appear to be an attempt to get around federal campaign contribution limits.

Lockheed Martin, a company locked in a pitched battle to stave off cuts to the lucrative F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet, cut Patricia McKeon’s campaign a $3,000 check.

Congressman Buck McKeon has rigorously defended the jets, despite growing concerns that the planes will run almost $90 million over budget each.

The lobbying firm Beau Butler LLC gave Patricia McKeon as well. Beau Butler lobbies for Proxy Aviations, a drone company. Although its not clear why a drone maker would rally to Patricia McKeon’s call to end plastic bag taxes, the industry is an important cause for Buck McKeon. He’s co-chair of a caucus dedicated to promoting drones for both military and civillian purposes.

Please Help Blue America Replace Blue Dog Tim Holden With Matt Cartwright, A Proven Advocate For Working Families

2012-02-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

Even before I got to know Matt Cartwright I heard rumblings of dirty tricks coming out of sleazy defeated Blue Dog Chris Carney, who has been working to help his fellow reactionary Democrat Tim Holden hold onto a seat he has little to do with. Holden is listed as "an incumbent," but the majority of the people-- and the vast majority of the Democrats-- in the new 17th CD were never represented by him and have little in common with his conservative politics.

Tim Holden backed the Democrats 31.96% of the time on crucial roll calls in 2011. There were Republicans who voted less frequently with Boehner and Cantor than Holden! He's adamantly anti-populist when it comes to economic issues, and he's a virulent homophobe, and not a single Republican is worse than him on issues involving freedom of speech and the press. As for women's health, he wasn't just a voter for Bart Stupak's devastating anti-Choice bill; he was the senior co-sponsor on the Democratic side. His voting record on women's choice is abysmal, worse than over 20 Republicans'. He's completely the wrong congressman for a blue district like the new 17th.

So who's this guy Matt Cartwright who's running against him? I wrote a bit about him last week; let me get into the weeds today. Matt told me he's running for Congress because he believes that "the government needs to work for the middle class, not just the most powerful." For the past 24 years, as an attorney with Munley, Munley & Cartwright, Matt spent his time fighting for the middle class and for working families against major corporations, insurance
companies, big banks and corporate greed.

He's a member of the board of governors of the American Association for Justice, and in addition to his experience as an attorney, Matt's a member of the “Brain Trust” for The Small Business Advocate for nearly a decade. In that role, he's worked to protect middle class interests and working families by addressing issues such as: unfair provisions in business contracts, predatory lending practices and auditing malpractice. He understands how corporate America has taken advantage of our working families and the middle class-- the other side of the inauthentic Mitt Romney "private business" story.

While Matt has served the community outside of government, he’s no stranger to the political process. In 1992, he was an elected delegate for candidate Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention, representing Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, where I used to live.

Earlier, he graduated magna cum laude from Hamilton College, where he earned a B.A. in history (1983) and he's a Law Review graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School, where he earned a J.D. in 1986.

A family man with a wife and two sons, Matt isn't a career politician and is very much aware of how out of touch government has become from the lives of working families and the American middle class. In Congress, he's determined to continue his work protecting the country’s most vulnerable citizens and making government work for his Pennsylvania neighbors.

Meanwhile, redistricting has totally changed the 17th District, which now includes parts of Carbon, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe and Northampton Counties and all of Schuylkill County. About 86% of likely Democratic voters have never been represented by Holden. In addition, almost 60% of the voting population resides in the Luzerne-Lackawanna area, where Cartwright has lived and worked for 24 years. For the last seven years he has appeared five nights a week on the early evening news on WBRE-TV and WYOU-TV, answering viewers’ legal questions. He is widely known in the Luzerne-Lackawanna area.

You may recall that Holden was challenged in the 2010 primary in the “old” 17th CD by Sheila Dow-Ford, who Blue America endorsed. Her biggest problem was that the corporate-friendly Blue Dog outraised her by a staggering 15-to-1 margin. Still, working with a few scattered radio ads as her only medium, she was able to capture 34.7% of the primary vote. Democrats had already been souring on Holden and his reactionary politics.

The new 17th District is a much more Democratic seat, with a D+4 PVI. In fact, in 2008, in the voting districts that make up the new district, President Obama defeated John McCain 65% to 35%. Whoever wins this primary-- the right-wing Blue Dog corporatist or the progressive champion-- will be in Congress in 2013.

Matt Cartwright’s positions on important current issues are a much better match for the new 17th than Tim Holden’s.

* On health care, Cartwright would have supported President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, and in fact was dissatisfied that it did not go far enough to expand health care coverage for more Americans. Holden stated that the bill went too far, and he actually voted against it.

* On the economy, Matt believes that the government has a vital role to play in helping to smooth out the rough edges of the free-market economy. For example, he believes it is essential that the federal government retain the flexibility to be able to stimulate the economy in times of recession, and that measures like a balanced-budget amendment would hamstring such efforts and hurt those who suffer most in downturns. In November 2011, Tim Holden joined just 24 other Democrats to vote for a balanced-budget amendment.

* Matt believes the way to keep the national debt in check is to enact responsible revenue legislation. He would vote to repeal the Bush tax breaks and to return to the tax rates of the Clinton administration. He believes that confidence that the federal government is behaving responsibly breeds economic activity, and that the responsible tax policies of the 1990s were in large part responsible for the economic confidence and prosperity that prevailed at that time.

* Matt believes that the federal government needs to invest in American infrastructure and needs to do so in a way that takes the long view and the global view. He believes that investing in one-off earmarked pork projects is the wrong approach. Instead, his view is that this country needs to make a comprehensive, cohesive plan for improving and upgrading our infrastructure in a way that will enable our businesses to compete with global competitors and will stop the flow of American jobs overseas. That means not only investing in repairing existing roads and bridges, but also examining ideas for more highway capacity in congested areas. It means not only repairing existing rail infrastructure but also investing in high-speed rail systems

* It also means not only investing in education but also exploring ways to enable teachers to help our students compete on the world job market. Matt believes we cannot be penny-wise and pound-foolish. He believes that if we do not shore up our nation’s economic and education infrastructure, we will lose more and more jobs to international competition.

* On the environment, Matt believes it is a mistake to think that a strong economy and a protected environment are mutually exclusive.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the famous environmentalist, has made the point that there is an inadequacy in the way harm to the environment is accounted for. If there is damage done to the environment in the production of a product, unless the environmental cost is included in the income statement, we have not made an accurate accounting of what that product cost to make. Those who complain that environmental regulations are overburdening their enterprises are simply expressing their dissatisfaction that they are not being allowed to engage in inaccurate environmental accounting.

The problem is that other countries are lax in their adoption and enforcement of environmental standards. If it costs an American manufacturer 5% more to produce a product because of U.S. EPA requirements, the answer to that problem is not for America to abandon its environmental protection standards. The answer lies in addressing the issue with our trade partners. Matt Cartwright believes that where a foreign manufacturer produces a product for 5% less money than an American manufacturer, and the reason is the lack of environmental safeguards at the foreign plant, that is no different from foreign manufacturers illegally “dumping” cheap goods in this country. An effective trade policy-- fair trade, not free trade-– is the answer to the problem.

Matt Cartwright believes that global warming is a serious threat to the well-being and national security of the United States. In 2007, in a case called Massachusetts v. EPA, the United States Supreme Court decided that the Clean Air Act applies to greenhouse gases. Since then, a number of Republican Representatives in Congress-– and Blue Dogs like Tim Holden-– have been trying to pass legislation delaying and frustrating the application of the Clean Air Act mandates to greenhouse gas emissions. Principal among the beneficiaries of these attempts is the coal-fired electricity generation business, as well as the coal mine operators that supply them. Matt Cartwright believes this industry should comply with the Clean Air Act. He also believes that cap and trade is a proven, effective tool for helping American industry comply with U.S. environmental laws.

He believes that the Halliburton Loophole-– which Holden voted for-– should be repealed.

* Matt believes strongly in protecting the civil rights of American citizens, including their right to privacy, their right to engage in collective bargaining, their right to vote in elections without new and burdensome requirements, and their right to be free of hate crimes.

Tim Holden, as I mentioned, has voted against the Democrats and the president as a default position. Some examples:

* As the economy continued to struggle, Holden was one of only 24 Democrats who voted against the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, legislation that helps distressed families keep their homes.

* Holden voted against the Health Care Reconciliation Act, claiming that the bill "went too far," making him one of the 32 Democrats who voted against affordable health care and medicine to seniors, young adults, those with pre-existing conditions and women seeking preventive healthcare services.

* Holden voted against the TARP Reform and Accountability Act, which would have made sure that TARP funds were used to benefit the economy and the middle class instead of bonuses for Wall Street executives. Only 9 other Democrats joined the GOP on that one (while 18 Republicans crossed in the other direction).

Blue America has added Matt Cartwright to our page dedicated to replacing Blue Dogs. In 2010 we helped rid the Congress of Bobby Bright. This year we'd like to help get rid of Tim Holden and Heath Shuler and replace them with dedicated progressives. Please give us a hand if you can.

Le Choix

2012-02-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

Conservatives have been constantly, and successfully, chipping away at women's right to choose at every opportunity. They haven't been able to overturn Roe v Wade yet, but they make it more difficult for women to manage their own reproductive health on a regular basis. Obviously, the GOP is mostly to blame, but conservative Democrats, and spineless ones, often acquiesce. This week started with a powerful post from Nita Chaudhary and Shaunna Thomas explaining why birth control matters for more than half the population of this country (and to men who support women).

Birth control matters to women. This is not an opinion. It is a fact. But you wouldn't know it reading political coverage of the administration's decision to do the right thing and approve the rule mandating coverage of it.

...Between 2000 and 2008, 36 MILLION women were sexually active, of child bearing age, and did not wish to become pregnant. 17.4 million of them have incomes below 250% of the federal poverty line or are under the age of 20.

What does this mean? Let's break it down another way. Technically, the poverty line in the US for a four person family is $22,350. That's $1,862.50/month. Nearly half of the women previously mentioned in the "sexually active, but not interested in having children" bucket fall below that poverty line. Having an infrastructure that forces a woman to pay up to $50/month for contraception in that budget is a huge burden on families.

What about religious women? Well, 69% of women of all religious denominations who don't want to get pregnant use birth control, including 68% of Catholic women, 73% of mainline Protestants, and 74% of Evangelicals. And birth control is a lot more than contraception for women-- 58% of us use it to manage other medical issues like endometriosis or menstrual disorders.

Today, 1 in 3 women has trouble affording birth control. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies in the industrialized world, and studies show that women who plan their pregnancies are likely to be healthier, seek prenatal care, and have healthier children.

Given all of this, shouldn't the question be why a group of mostly men-- bishops or otherwise-- need an extra-extra special exemption from prioritizing the health of women? Sadly, this is no freak occurrence. When the Obama administration made the misguided decision not to allow Plan B to be sold over the counter, the debate focused exclusively on the way he-- "as a father"-- viewed the idea of 11-year-old girls getting Plan B with their pack of gum. The overwhelming majority of young women who were simply trying to avoid pregnancy or abortion, both far more risky than Plan B, were ignored. And when a collection of almost all men pushed the "Bart Stupak amendment," holding health reform they supposedly supported hostage for the sake of inroads on their anti-choice agenda, the actual impact their amendment would have on women was virtually absent as news coverage lionized these men's dedication to their consciences.

Shouldn't we ask why women's health, our ability to control our lives and bodies and careers, is such a popular political football? Is it because the women who actually are affected have no voice in our political system?

We need to start asking women what they think about birth control getting covered by their insurance.

That makes Virginia state Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) even more of a hero today. BlueVirginia.com calls out a big hooray for gender equity that I want to send too.

As the Virginia State Senate was ready to pass a bill requiring women who seek an abortion to undergo an ultrasound and then be asked whether they wished to view the results and hear the fetal heartbeat, Howell decided the time had come for a bit of gender equity in the General Assembly. So, she proposed an amendment to SB484, which was introduced by Jill Holtzman Vogel (R-Winchester). Howell's amendment would have required that men who wished a prescription for the "magic" little blue pill for erectile dysfunction to submit to a digital rectal exam and cardiac stress test to prove they were fit for action.

Only one conservative Democrat, shithead Chuck Colgan of Prince William County, voted with the Republicans, all of whom, of course, voted against Howell's amendment.

Were You Looking For Florida GOP Primary Results?

2012-01-31T21:00:00.000-08:00

Before the final votes were counted tonight, Santorum was already running (at least online) a new ad for Nevada (above). Yep, here we go again.

You know, I ran across this cool interactive-ish graphic and I couldn't resist running it instead of a full-blown post on the Florida election returns. I hope no one minds. I do want to sum that Florida thing up with something that came out in one of the exit polls, though: 57% of Republican primary voters want someone else to jump into the race-- and a plurality of them are Romney voters. And don't listen to the conventional wisdom that all the Santorum voters would vote for Newt if only. Exit polls showed that 63% of Santorum voters today feel favorable toward Romney, and only 49% feel favorable toward the Newtster. In the end Willard took Florida with 46.4%-- so less than the combined strength of the odd collection of the 3 conservatives-- and Newt came in with 31.9%, Santorum with 13.4% and Ron Paul with 7%.

Newt swept the whole panhandle, except for Leon, Okaloosa and Bay counties. Generally speaking, Newt took all the really backward places up near the Georgia and Alabama borders and a few teabagger redoubts in south central Florida like Hardee and DeSoto counties. But the counties where people read and write and still have their front teeth when they turn 21... Romney won them all. Newt's biggest wins were in the aptly named Dixie County (54.9%- 26.6%) and Hamilton (practically part of Georgia-- 56.4%- 21.5%). Romney's support from Cuban right-wingers won him a 60.9% share of Miami-Dade and that made him, basically, unbeatable.

Created by Educational Leadership

But I do have some Florida stats for you. 92% of the Republican primary ads were negative. This morning, the radio trade site, Radio-Info.com asked the question, Which candidates were spending money in Florida? And they answered it as well:

Mitt Romney (a lot), New Gingrich (about one-quarter as much as Romney) and Rich Santorum and Ron Paul-– not at all. Media Monitors tracked the multiple media markets of the Sunshine State for the month of January, and found this-– 2,196 campaign-run spots for Mitt Romney. 492 for Newt Gingrich. None for the rest of the field. Those were spots run and “authorized by” the candidate himself. How about the Super PACS? Many fewer spots. The pro-Romney “Restore Our Future” bought 234 radio ads that “attempted to denigrate New Gingrich”, says Media Monitors. The Gingrich-leaning “Winning Our Future” was on the air, bigtime-– 1,537 pro-Newt ads and 1,796 negative ads about Romney. The Service Employees International Union bought 247 anti-Romney ads. The American Family Association was on Newt’s side, with 438 ads. Ron Paul basically skipped Florida and Rick Santorum didn't have the warchest of Romney and Gingrich. One thing's for sure-- the ads are welcome at most radio stations, and the longer the GOP nominating process stretches out, the more money will be spent on media.

As for the TV ads, 68% were anti-Gingrich, 23% anti-Romney, 9% pro-Gingrich, and just 0.1% pro-Romney. I mean, let's face it, even his own SuperPAC can't come up with anything to say positive about him that won't make people switch the channel in disgust. While President Obama is on the same page with the radio industry on that one, I'm not sure how El Presidente feels about his old kissin' cousin, Charlie Crist, once the Republican governor of the Sunshine State laying the groundwork for the big party switch. After a couple weeks of seeing all the GOP right-wing madness playing out in his state, he told Chuck Todd he's considering voting for President Obama in November.

“Consider? Sure, I would consider that,” said Crist. “I really think he’s sincere and genuine. I think we have a lot time, a lot of issues to talk about, but I think, in his heart, he’s trying to do what’s right for the country overall.”

Now a registered independent, Crist said he also wouldn't rule out running for office as a Democrat himself in the future.

“I wouldn’t definitively rule out anything,” the former governor said.

Primary-night special: Ex-"Gentleman from Maryland" (now Floridian) Bob Bauman reveals that he voted for Ron Paul

2012-01-31T18:00:00.000-08:00

Here's our Bob with, uh, some other guy, back in the day.

“I think both parties are miserable. I don’t know what they stand for anymore.”

-- former MD Rep. Bob Bauman, in an interview
with the Washington Blade's Lou Chibarro Jr.

by Ken

Howie has written a number of times, most prominently in an August 2007 post titled "Larry Craig And Other Republican Closet Cases Should Learn a Lesson From Former GOP Congressman Bob Bauman," about the case of the arch-conservative Maryland congressman who saw his political career go up in smoke in 1980 when, in the midst of his reelection campaign, he was unceremoniously outed following his arrest and negotiated "no contest" misdemeanor plea for soliciting a teenage male prostitute. (He notes in the Washington Blade interview with Lou Chibarro Jr. that he was represented in court by Tom O'Malley, the father of current Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley.)

It was a swift and sudden end to a career that until then had seemed headed meteorically upward. Bauman had parlayed an attack-dog political style and especially a hard-won mastery of legislative procedure, with which he succeeded in driving the Democratic leadership batty, into a position of prominence in a mere three and a half terms in the House. What makes his case of such enduring interest is that after slinking out of office in 1981, and then being humiliated when he tried to slide back in the following year, in 1986 he published his fascinating book The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative.

Bauman, now living in the gay-friendly little city of Wilton Manors, near Fort Lauderdale, accepted an offer from Lou Chibarro Jr. of the Washington Blade to share some of his current political thoughts.

In an interview with the Washington Blade on the eve of Florida’s Republican presidential primary, Bauman said he remains committed to conservative and libertarian principles but has shunned politics since 1982.

“I think both parties are miserable,” he said. “I don’t know what they stand for anymore.”

Bauman added, “I think they mirror each other. I think they are both completely enthralled to Wall Street and the banks. I think they are controlled by the people that contribute money to them. And that goes for Obama and it goes for Gingrich.”

“The only thing you can say for Romney is that he’s rich enough that maybe he won’t be influenced by that,” said Bauman. “I hate to say it, but I think he’s probably the least influenced by them because of his religion.”

Bauman said he considers Rick Santorum "no better or worse" than Romney or Gingrich, and he didn't vote for any of the three.

[He] said he voted earlier this month for GOP presidential contender Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas, as a “protest vote.” He said Paul’s outspoken call for reforming the nation’s politics and economic policies represents a refreshing alternative to the other candidates, even though Bauman acknowledges some of Paul’s proposals are unrealistic.

Bob apparently understands why so many Americans are turned off by present-day politics, but refuses to surrender to despair.

Bauman noted that some people he knows who share his disappointment over the current state of U.S. politics no longer vote because they believe it “lends credence” to a lousy system.

“I don’t feel that way. I’ll keep fighting until I go,” he said.

In case you were wondering what our Bob has been doing since his forced withdrawal from public life, after some bouncing around, he hooked up with "a libertarian-oriented publishing company called Agora Publications," and in 1998 --

helped to found a subsidiary to the company called the Sovereign Society, which publishes email newsletters and books specializing in legal tax avoidance through the use of offshore investing.

“I write for them on a regular basis for their daily e-newsletter that goes out to more than 335,000 people,” he said. “And I write books. I’ve written five or six or more books on offshore financing and on places to invest off shore -- asset protect -- all of the things that Newt Gingrich has been railing against for the last few days,” he said.

Apparently his heroic work in spreading the gospel of tax avoidance is what Bob has in mind by "fighting until I go." It's inspiring to know that he hasn't let our lousy political system take all the fight out of him.

Two Sheldons-- A Good One And A Really, Really Bad One

2012-01-31T14:00:00.000-08:00

Bad Sheldon's on the right.

There couldn't be an uglier face for Big Money taking over our country and destroying our democracy than organized-crime gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson. We've been following the Adelson story at DWT for years, and his blatant move to acquire the White House is finally getting out to the public a little. Rachel Maddow has done yeoman's work on the subject, but it's become so blatant that even the mainstream media is starting to take note. Last week Mike McIntyre and Michael Luo introduced the problem to NY Times readers, although to them, of course, it was all about Newt Gingrich's campaign rather than about a fundamental undermining of democracy itself. Rich people buying elections is more important than Sheldon Adelson giving a candidate $11 million for a couple of primaries (and $17 million over all).

The question of what motivates Mr. Adelson’s singular generosity toward the former House speaker has emerged front and center in the campaign. People who know him say his affinity for Mr. Gingrich stems from a devotion to Israel as well as loyalty to a friend. A fervent Zionist who opposes any territorial compromise to make way for a Palestinian state, Mr. Adelson has long been enamored of Mr. Gingrich’s full-throated defense of Israel.

...Through interviews and a review of Mr. Adelson’s testimony in legal disputes with former associates, a portrait emerges of a formidable and determined striver who lifted himself out of childhood penury in working-class Boston. He has a sentimental streak-- on one of his first trips to Israel, he wore the shoes of his late father, a cabdriver from Lithuania who was never able to visit there-- and he has given hundreds of millions of dollars to Jewish causes, medical research and injured veterans.

But his rise has not been without controversy. The Justice Department is investigating accusations by a former casino executive that Mr. Adelson’s operations in Macao may have violated federal laws banning corrupt payments to foreign officials. Also, a Chinese businessman accused Mr. Adelson of reneging on an agreement to share profits from the Macao project.

Mr. Adelson also has a reputation for irascibility and has left a trail of angry former business associates. Even his two sons sued him at one point, accusing him of cheating them, though they lost. He filed a libel suit against a Las Vegas newspaper columnist, John L. Smith, who eventually had to declare bankruptcy, and he waged a bitter court battle with a former employee whom he accused of spreading lies about him.

...Beyond Israel, the [Adelson and Gingrich] shared a conservative philosophy on matters important to Mr. Adelson’s businesses, including limiting the ability of labor unions to deduct money from members’ paychecks for political activities.

Mr. Gingrich also backed legislation sought by casino owners in 1998 to preserve tax deductions beneficial to the industry. That same year, Mr. Adelson hosted a Republican fund-raiser at one of his Las Vegas venues, headlined by Mr. Gingrich, and donated $300,000 to the party for the midterm elections.

In 2006, when Mr. Gingrich began laying the groundwork for a possible run for the presidency, Mr. Adelson provided $1 million in seed money for his political committee, American Solutions for Winning the Future. Mr. Adelson donated an additional $2 million the next year; his contributions to the group have totaled more than $7 million.

During the 2008 election cycle, Mr. Adelson became recognized as a top-tier donor to the right and a moneyed villain to the left. He was the primary financier of a conservative nonprofit group, Freedom’s Watch, which trumpeted plans to spend as much as $200 million on the presidential election. Those plans, however, fizzled as internal problems paralyzed the organization, with Mr. Adelson micromanaging the group’s efforts, Republican operatives familiar with the organization said at the time. The group still spent about $30 million through early 2008, almost all of which came from Mr. Adelson, according to the operatives.

Today, the Venetian and the adjoining Sands Convention Center have become default destinations for Republican events in Las Vegas.

“I call it the Republican headquarters on the Strip,” said Jon Ralston, the political columnist for the Las Vegas Sun.

The other Sheldon, the good one, is Sheldon Whitehouse, the former attorney general of Rhode Island who was elected to the Senate five years ago, and is not a favorite of plutocrats and oligarchs like Adelson-- not at all. He thinks all Americans, even billionaires like Adelson, should pay their fair share, and this week he's introducing legislation to make that a reality: the Pay a Fair Share Act. He thinks the wealthy should be paying at least a 30% tax rate, just like normal people. (I think that's still way too low... laughably low, but it's a start.) In fact, as Greg Sargent pointed out in the Washington Post yesterday,

The proposal will not tamper with existing tax rates. Instead, under the proposal, those making more than $1 million a year would be required to calculate their overall tax rate, taking into account all their income and the full sum of what they pay in taxes. If that amount adds up to less than 30 percent, they would be required to make up the difference.

Whitehouse boiled down the proposal into one line: “If your income is over 1 million, multiply it by 0.3, and if that number is bigger than you’d otherwise be paying, pay that.”

Interestingly, Whitehouse confirmed that the White House had been notified about what he’s up to, which suggests Obama advisers are happy to see this proposal proceeding, at a minimum for the purposes of discussion.

“We’ve reached out to the White House to let them know that we’re doing this,” Whitehouse said.

In his state of the union speech, Obama called for millionaires to be required to pay a tax rate of 30 percent, without offering specifics. Whitehouse’s proposal offers a specific way to make this happen, so it’ll be very interesting to see how it’s received by Obama, the Dem leadership in the Senate, and of course, Congressional Republicans.

Whitehouse said he’d already attracted two cosponsors for the bill and that more would be rolled out in coming days, so keep an eye on what kind of momentum builds behind it and what Senate Dem leaders say about it.

“People believe that the American tax system is not fair, and that the more lobbyists and the more wealth you have, the more goodies you get out of the tax system,” Whitehouse said. “This is a welcome proposal and I hope this will be supported across the board.”

Of course, it won’t be supported across the board; Senate Republicans are all but certain to oppose it. If Dems play their political cards right, they could force a high-profile vote on this proposal-- one that Republicans will vote down en masse-- even as the GOP appears set to pick a nominee who is worth $250 million and is personally benefitting to an enormous degree from the loophoples the proposal is designed to fix, on behalf of the middle class.

And Senate Republicans will have lots of help-- from billionaires like Sheldon Adelson.

Republicans For Illegal Immigrants

2012-01-31T10:00:00.000-08:00

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach & Agriculture Secretary Dale Rodman

When Roland first fell off the turnip truck that brought him from Maine to Los Angeles, we used to argue a lot about "illegal" immigrants. He had never been exposed to reality, and his view, like so many Americans', was that the Democrats want illegal immigrants while the Republicans want to protect America from them. He understands much better now how the corporatists behind the GOP establishment want cheap labor and-- slavery per se being now outlawed-- they thrive on foreign low-wage workers with no rights and no legal recourse.

Last week the Topeka Capital-Journal, hardly a bastion of left-wing propaganda, delved into the strangeness that is American immigration policy as it relates specifically to cheap manual labor. Kansas needs farmhands who will work hard for far less than the cost of living. Although the Republican "solution" is to create two societies, a high standard of living one for the one percent and a brutish low standard of living one for the 99%, it's taking too long, even for fanatic right-wing extremists and racists in Kansas, who after all have a harvest to get in now.

Kansas Agriculture Secretary Dale Rodman gets an earful from farmers and ranchers struggling to fill job vacancies.

It is an economic calling, he said, worthy of thinking outside of the box. The cry of desperation from large dairies and feedlots is that loud.

"You've got to listen to your customers," said Rodman, a veteran corporate agriculture executive comfortable wearing a cowboy hat in the Statehouse.

He has traveled as secretary to the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico in an attempt to recruit people interested in agriculture careers in Kansas. That shows promise, but the payoff would be slow.

He also has looked to Washington, D.C. There is little optimism Congress will sort out the politics of immigration anytime soon, but Rodman met several times with officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about launching a pilot program in Kansas. The idea is to place employers and undocumented immigrants in a special network organized by the state. It would give rise to a legal, straightforward manner of organizing existing immigrant labor.

It won't happen, of course, without a nod from the federal government.

"I need a waiver," Rodman said. "It would be good for Kansas agriculture."

So far, Homeland Security hasn't signaled approval. Those officials haven't closed the door either.

As it turns out, Rodman isn't working solo on this front. A powerful coalition of business interests is preparing to tackle the issue in Topeka.

Details are expected to emerge this week about a bill establishing the outline of a state-managed worker program, in cooperation with the federal government, linking sponsor companies with illegal immigrants who have been in Kansas a minimum of five years.

Fees would be paid by these employees, as well as the employers, to make certain the state incurred no oversight cost. The plan is to reach out to experienced, committed workers with no criminal background. A likely candidate would be a person who entered Kansas on a visa that expired years ago.

Mike Beam, senior vice president of the Kansas Livestock Association, said the objective was to secure a reliable, regulated labor pool to the state's businesses. Despite the recession, there are counties in rural Kansas with unemployment rates half the state average.

"This will be very limited," Beam said. "It would be an agreement between the state of Kansas and Homeland Security."

Without a doubt, raising a certification program will trigger a boisterous debate on immigration policy. This topic is frequently driven by lawmakers intent on running illegal immigrants out of Kansas.

Working to sell lawmakers on reform bills in the House and Senate will be the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and local chamber affiliates, the Kansas Farm Bureau, building industry organizations, KLA and others.

This is the same coalition that contributed in the 2011 session to blocking a version of the controversial Arizona immigration measure compelling police officers to detain individuals they think might be undocumented. The coalition hopes to avoid the experience of Arizona and Alabama-- states that suffered economically following passage of tough laws targeting undocumented workers. Both states' laws invited litigation challenging the statutes.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach helped craft the immigration laws in both states. He has vowed to work in the 2012 session to obtain passage of a Kansas law requiring employers to deploy the federal E-Verify system to establish the credentials of new hires.

"If there were fewer jobs illegal aliens could obtain unlawfully and get away with it, fewer illegal aliens would come to Kansas," he said.

The outcome of the coalition's bill formalizing business relationships with illegal immigrants in Kansas is difficult to predict in an election year.

Chairmen of the House and Senate agriculture committees say they understand the economics of immigrant labor in rural Kansas.

Mud-covered boots of many workers in agriculture are worn by undocumented workers, said Rep. Larry Powell, a Garden City Republican and chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

He said blanket removal of illegal immigrants from Kansas would undercut the state. That isn’t a secret to anyone keeping a finger on the state's economic pulse, he said. The cadre of workers is mostly Hispanic, but it includes a surprising number of German heritage.

"Most have been there more than 10 years,” Powell said. “It would be devastating to the Kansas economy to send them all home."

Sen. Mark Taddiken, a Clifton Republican and chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said the state's labor force needed to be solid to allow agriculture production to expand.

"They're having trouble finding people," Taddiken said. "The agricultural sector is looking for reliability."

Rodman is the appointee of spectacularly unpopular right-wing Gov. Sam Brownback.

Do You Sometimes Feel That Democrats Are No Better Than Republicans? Meet David Gill (D-IL)

2012-01-31T06:00:00.000-08:00

Although the DCCC either tries to sabotage them or ignores them, there are progressive candidates, sometimes a very different thing from "Democratic Party candidates," running for Congress across the country. The DCCC/DC Establishment routinely recruits corrupt conservatives-- mirrors of themselves-- to run against progressives in primaries. This cycle the DCCC has done this in trying to stop Darcy Burner (WA), Ilya Sheyman (IL), Franke Wilmer (MT), Eric Griego (NM) and dozens of others. The above video, an interview with Dr. David Gill, encapsulates the problem directly and comprehensively.

We've discussed Dr. Gill in the past. He's a candidate in central Illinois almost too good to be true. So very different from the hacks, zombies, careerists and charlatans Steve Israel is trying to populate the Democratic congressional caucus with. In 2009 I asked Dr. Gill to give me his perspective on Obama's State of the Union speech the night before-- the SOTU where South Carolina fascist Joe Wilson started screaming.

As a practicing physician for the past 21 years, I’m well aware of the problems with the financing and delivery of American health care. As a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, I look forward to working to provide solutions to these problems.

The health care issue, which has been the subject of so much discussion and heated debate over the last several weeks, has been at the forefront of each of my three Congressional campaigns. I bear witness on a daily basis to the multiple problems inherent in our current system; these problems impact all Americans, regardless of race, age or income level. Virtually every American would be far better served with a reformed system.

As a full-time Emergency Room doctor, my work brings me into contact with far too many stories which demonstrate the failure of our current “system.” Not long ago, I watched a 39-year old man die of a heart attack, leaving behind a wife and two young children. He worked as a full-time house-husband and father, while his wife worked full-time outside their household. He had experienced mild, intermittent chest pain for one week, but because he was unable to afford health insurance he ignored his wife’s pleas to have his chest pain evaluated. And as so often happens over and over again, he arrived at my Emergency Department too late. His children will now grow up without their father, leaving them with broken hearts and putting them at increased risk for a host of negative social consequences.

Many view the health care issue as a matter of great moral importance. However, the reforming of our health care system is far more than just a moral issue-- it bears tremendous importance with regards to our economic well-being as a nation. The time is long past due for us to stop permitting large insurance and pharmaceutical companies to run roughshod over all other American businesses and citizens. When we finally put in place a program which extends Medicare services to all American citizens, regardless of age, the boon to our economy will be like none ever seen before. For far too long, we have permitted 25 to 30 cents of each of our hard-earned health care dollars to be wasted on items which have nothing to do with heath care. When we enact “Medicare for All” legislation, 25 to 30 percent of our health care budget will be put back into the pocketbooks of American businesses and taxpaying citizens; in addition to providing this broad economic stimulus, the health care of American citizens will be vastly better served under such a system. No longer will the well-being of American citizens be sacrificed to maximize the outrageous profits of a small number of large corporations. No longer will young adults suffering with a week’s worth of chest pain be forced to ignore their symptoms, while CEOs such as William McGuire of United Healthcare receive retirement packages of 1,600,000,000 dollars.

I’ve known President Obama for many years, and I know that he fully understands the need to extend Medicare to all American citizens. I have little doubt that he wishes to see this type of boost to the American economy, along with the dramatic improvement in the health care of all Americans that such a change would bring. But President Obama needs more strong leaders in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate; many of the lawyers and CEO’s in Congress do not truly understand health care. As an Emergency Room physician who has long served as the last line of defense for patients jeopardized by our failed system, I am well-prepared to serve as a strong leader in the House. All Americans will benefit from having a physician who deals with the healthcare crisis on a daily basis as an active member of Congress.

Matt Goetten is basically just a rubber-stamp Democrat, with nothing much to say about anything. He'd like a new job in DC, and Steve Israel would like to help him get one. David Gill is a very different kind of candidate. I hope you've watched the video. And I hope you'll contribute to Dr. Gill's campaign here on our ActBlue page.

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.