Do You Think Picking The Lesser Of Two Evils In November Is How We Should Chose A President?

Maybe Hillary assumed no one would notice the kinds of hauls she was taking in from the Financial Sector for her presidential run. After all, the titans of Wall Street had largely underwritten her political career from the get go-- to the tune of $36,846,987. The only Members of Congress to whom they were more generous were McCain ($38,054,987) and, as she pointed out at the Sunday debate in South Carolina, Obama ($68,186,749). She will soon surpass McCain though probably not Obama. But it should have been clear to her campaign that someone-- surely one of the shady Rove SuperPACs if not a primary opponent-- would bring up that her presidential campaign was scooping up money from these unsavory industries:

• Securities & Investment- $5,591,095
• Real Estate- $2,179,194
• Misc Finance- $927,225
• Lobbyists- $600,270

These numbers are through October 16... and the campaign giving season is just moving into high gear now. Hillary still hasn't figured out how to talk to Democratic audiences about Wall Street's affinity for her. When she played the 911 thing card, it was one of her campaign's worst p.r. catastrophes. How many people recalled this bit of political cynicism from Family Guy that night?



This time her excuse was just that Obama and Barney Frank took massive amounts of money from Wall Street and were still crusaders for reform. Barney, who was chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, accepted $4,451,123 from the Finance Sector. In his last election (2010), at the height of his House Financial Services power, Barney's 3 biggest sources of funds by industry were:

• Securities & Investment- $383,816
• Insurance- $277,949
• Real Estate- $267,500

Other top sources were Misc Finance ($141,999), lobbyists ($105,673) and Commercial Banks ($90,200). Today, he's aggressively backing Wall Street's pick for president and doing what he can to undermine the reform candidate. I once asked him about the money gushing into his campaign from Wall Street and mentioned how bad it looked for the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee to be taking this kind of money. He dismissed my concerns and claimed-- like every politician has always done-- that he hasn't been influenced by the cash. That wasn't a credible answer and I was disappointed seeing someone I once liked and respected subtly tilt towards Wall Street forces he railed against in front of progressive audiences. I have no doubt Dodd-Frank and other legislation coming out of his committee would have been much stronger and more effective if Barney Frank-- not to mention the other committee members-- were not taking millions of dollars in legalized bribes from Wall Street.

To appeal to the [Wall Street-dominated Bush] White House, he has made numerous revisions, including dropping a plan to have the government serve as a clearinghouse for auctioning bundles of refinanced mortgages.

Yeah, and we know what that led to. Today, Barney Frank is speaking out for Hillary and for for Wall Street's number one pick for the U.S. Senate, reactionary New Dem and Schumercrat Patrick Murphy from Florida. This cycle, Wall Street has given more money to Murphy than to any non-incumbent running for the Senate ($787,750), and also more than to Republicans like Speaker Paul Ryan, House Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling, and embattled GOP Senate incumbents Ron Johnson (WI), John McCain (AZ), Mark Kirk (IL) and Richard Burr (NC). The revoltingly corrupt Patrick Murphy is Wall Street's #1 electoral priority for 2016. Last summer Barney was appointed to the board of directors of a New York bank. Although the Board chairman, Scott Shay, primarily gives to Republicans, he also contributed to a small handful of Wall Street-friendly Democrats like Chuck Schumer and... Barney Frank ($2,400 on May 11, 2010). Barney Frank is very smart and very witty and a very credible and erudite spokesperson on LGBT equality. He's taken far too much money from Wall Street to listen to anything he says on subjects pertaining to it.

Time Magazine online polling-- although they meant Sunday, not Thursday

Sunday night's debate appears to have been won by Bernie. The online polls, like the one above from Time, say so, as do the Google analytics stats, which showed, for example that "Bernie Sanders" was the search term most used in all 50 states. All 50... every single one. Exactly what Clinton and the wretched Wasserman Schultz were trying to prevent by hiding the debates away on weekends in the middle of NFL playoffs. It must have been painful for him but even villager Chris Cillizza declared Bernie the winner. "[T]hroughout the debate's first hour-- the hour when most people, especially on the East Coast and in the Midwest, were watching-- he was the prime mover in virtually every discussion from Wall Street reform to health care to climate change. He was on offense, accusing rival Hillary Clinton of half-measures and political caution at a moment when boldness is required... More than anything he said, though, it was the passion and disruption that Sanders oozed from every pore over the two hours that should push Democrats on the fence about the race into his camp. Sanders effectively positioned himself as the anti-status-quo candidate, a very good position to have in this electoral environment."

Cillizza also noted that Hillary was the loser. "[S]he did nothing in the debate to slow the momentum that Sanders is building in Iowa and New Hampshire. Aside from guns, where Clinton scored a clean win against Sanders, she was unable to effectively cast him as a pie-in-the-sky idealist and herself as the only person who could truly fight for-- and win on-- Democratic priorities. Time and again, she was boxed into defending a status quo that the American public-- Democrats and Republicans alike-- is dissatisfied with... The Clinton-as-cautious-pragmatist vs. Sanders-as-idealist-fighter is not a good dynamic for the former secretary of state."

Democratic Party insiders-- the Establishment (AKA- Hillary's crowd)-- thought Bernie failed to make any headway in the debate. I guess we'll find out in 2 weeks. But writing for the Post, James Hohmann surveyed the pundits and social media and came to the same conclusion Cillizza did: Bernie won the debate. The debate, after all, was all about him and "the overnight verdict from most in the pundit class is that Sanders prevailed, even if narrowly."

Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis tweeted that 27 of 30 undecided voters in a South Carolina focus group he convened picked Sanders as the winner.

Republican focus group maestro Frank Luntz: “Bernie needed an overwhelming victory in tonight’s #DemDebate. At best, he got a narrow one. That won’t be enough to win the Dem nomination.”

Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin gave Sanders a B+, Clinton a B and Martin O’Malley a C+: “Sanders’ improvement manifested itself all night, winning him more good moments overall than both Clinton and O’Malley.”

NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald: “Sanders shined …. at times overpowering Clinton in a format she typically controls.”

CNN senior producer Teddy Davis: “Sanders notched debate win. 1) Blurring distinction on guns. 2) Putting out a health plan. 3) Being high minded on Bill Clinton.”

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf: “I’m going to call tonight’s debate a win for Sanders. I thought he bested Clinton. … But even if they performed equally well, he stands to benefit, as the candidate who still has less name recognition, from squaring off in front of folks who’ve never seen him before and equaling his opponent.”

The Atlantic’s Molly Ball: “It wasn’t great for Hillary, but I didn’t hear any major gaffes, and Sanders didn’t expand his appeal beyond the base that is already responding to his angry fulminating.”

The Nation, which endorsed Sanders last week, says “Sanders Set the Tone”: “Clinton remains a formidable candidate, but at times it was possible to forget she was even on stage.”

Vox’s Dylan Matthews thinks Clinton’s attacks on Sanders “as insufficiently pro-Obama … generally didn’t sound that persuasive.”

NBC’s Chuck Todd: “Who’s the frontrunner? If you only watched the debate and didn’t read polls, you might assume Sanders.”

Hillary's dishonest attacks against Bernie as a gun-lover-- mindless Hillarybots online have been instructed to refer to him as "NRABernie"-- are easily countered when her own opportunistic flip-flops on gun issues come to the fore. As PolitiFact pointed out recently, "Clinton continued to push for more gun control while serving as the senator from New York, but in her 2008 presidential run, she seemed to back off a bit."

Positioning herself to the right of then-Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton spoke throughout the campaign about the importance of guns to American culture while still defending Bill Clinton’s record on gun control.

"You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl," she said at a town hall in 2008.

At a 2008 Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Clinton gave an affirmative "yes" that she was backing off her 2000 call for a national licensing and registration plan because it would "preempt" cities and states’ initiatives. But she also called for reinstating the assault weapons ban and better background checks for potential gun purchasers.

Clinton responded to another question about her position on a gun registry at a debate in Philadelphia.

"What might work in New York City is certainly not going to work in Montana," she said, explaining her reason to abandon the proposal. "So, for the federal government to be having any kind of, you know, blanket rules that they're going to try to impose, I think doesn't make sense."

"I respect the Second Amendment. I respect the rights of lawful gun owners to own guns, to use their guns," she went on to say later in the debate. "But I also believe that most lawful gun owners whom I have spoken with for many years across our country also want to be sure that we keep those guns out of the wrong hands."

She demagogued against Obama on guns when she ran against him in 2008, although that time she was saying Obama was too anti-gun and she sent out the mailer just above to Democratic voters to try to drive home the point. She's always been a politician who will say whatever it takes to whomever is listening to her, to score a point. It's why she is so distrusted and why so many people have such an intense visceral dislike for her. If she becomes president, it will only be because she is judged the lesser of two evils.

Barney Frank Drops A Financial Crisis Bombshell; The Press Responds With Silence

by Gaius Publius

I can't take credit for this, though I wish I could. David Dayen, who writes at Salon, has been reading Barney Frank's new book Frank and also its reviews. Dayen is one of the most knowledgeable writers on the mortgage and financial crises — both. (Note to readers: It's not a financial crisis if there's no mortgage crisis. It's the inability to pay mortgage debt that started the avalanche of derivative-caused banking losses.)

Dayen noticed that in his book Frank makes a startling revelation, but since it involves (a) mortgage borrowers, not bankers, and (b) the current Democratic president, it has gotten zero coverage. What's the revelation? Barack Obama could have singlehandedly made sure TARP money, as mandated by Congress, was made available for mortgage relief, and chose not to.

For doomed mortgage-holders, as opposed to protected and bailed-out bankers, that makes Obama the perp. How do we know? Barney Frank said so in print. Here's Dayen's catch (my emphasis):

Barney Frank drops a bombshell: How a shocking anecdote explains the financial crisis

Barney Frank has a new autobiography out. He’s long been one of the nation’s most quotable politicians. And Washington lives in perpetual longing for intra-party conflict.

So why has a critical revelation from Frank’s book, one that implicates the most powerful Democrat in the nation, been entirely expunged from the record? The media has thus far focused on Frank’s wrestling with being a closeted gay congressman, or his comment that Joe Biden “can’t keep his mouth shut or his hands to himself.” But nobody has focused on Frank’s allegation that Barack Obama refused to extract foreclosure relief from the nation’s largest banks, as a condition for their receipt of hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money.

The anecdote comes on page 295 of “Frank,” a title that the former chair of the House Financial Services Committee holds true to throughout the book. The TARP legislation included specific instructions to use a section of the funds to prevent foreclosures. Without that language, TARP would not have passed; Democratic lawmakers who helped defeat TARP on its first vote cited the foreclosure mitigation piece as key to their eventual reconsideration.

TARP was doled out in two tranches [slices; bundles] of $350 billion each. The Bush administration, still in charge during TARP’s passage in October 2008, used none of the first tranche on mortgage relief, nor did Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson use any leverage over firms receiving the money to persuade them to lower mortgage balances and prevent foreclosures. Frank made his anger clear over this ignoring of Congress’ intentions at a hearing with Paulson that November. Paulson argued in his defense, “the imminent threat of financial collapse required him to focus single-mindedly on the immediate survival of financial institutions, no matter how worthy other goals were.”

But Frank kept pushing: 

With the first tranche of TARP funds running out by the end of the year, Frank writes, “Paulson agreed to include homeowner relief in his upcoming request for a second tranche of TARP funding. But there was one condition: He would only do it if the President-elect asked him to.”

The "President-elect" was Barack Obama, and he said no, we're just going to bail out the banks, which is told by Frank via this classic Frank-ism:

Frank goes on to explain that Obama rejected the request, saying “we have only one president at a time.” Frank writes, “my frustrated response was that he had overstated the number of presidents currently on duty,” which equally angered both the outgoing and incoming officeholders.

Dayen goes on to document just how often the President-elect violated that "one president at a time" principle before taking office. He also notes that there was a second round of negotiation with Congress about releasing the second tranche, in which promises were made by the President-elect and broken. Seems the man was determined not to bail out the "wrong people" — an opinion widely held among elite opinion makers and leaders.

Remember, this is Barack Obama vintage 2008. Certainly post-campaign — he'd already won — but pre–taking office, with all the rolling betrayals that entailed. Only those watching his FISA vote, perhaps, knew what was coming.

Dayen couches this unfortunate event in humanitarian concerns, as he should, but also in economic terms. By not bailing out the nation's purchasers, the public, Obama extended the crisis:

That’s the main reason why the significance of Obama’s decision cannot be overstated. The fact that we waited six years to get some semblance of a decent economic recovery traces back directly to the failure to alleviate the foreclosure crisis. Here was a moment, right near the beginning, when both public money and leverage could have been employed to stop foreclosures. Instead of demanding homeowner help when financial institutions relied on massive government support, the Administration passed, instead prioritizing nursing banks back to health and then asking them to give homeowners a break, which the banks predictably declined.

But again, we're back to elite opinion, which holds that even though the way out of a crisis like this is to stimulate buying and demand, that option is off the table. Because, whether people will say it or not, in our post-Reagan job-creator world, only the wealthy deserve to be made whole by the government. That's not snark; it's one of the guiding principles of our government.

Dayen makes a great catch, and his Salon piece is a very good read, including his baseball-metaphor conclusion. My point is a little different than his, however. Our need to service the "free" market  wealthy, obvious in this anecdote, will kill us, literally. But that's a climate story for another day.

He drank the milkshake of the mortgaged.
Did Obama hold the straw?

Do stay tuned though; the "free" market wealthy are draining most of California's water, drinking that milkshake as well, and there's a war brewing. More on that shortly.

GP

Why Does The Media Think Aaron Schock's Duplicitous Life In The Closet Is Unmentionable?

Is there still anything to say about Aaron Schock on blogs like DWT which have been talking about his corruption for years and years? Now that TV news has been all over the Aaron Schock scandal, we might as well just walk away and leave it to them, right? Not so fast. Rachel Maddow's report Tuesday night on MSNBC (above) was, as one would expect, better than most of the mainstream media coverage. But like all of her journalistic colleagues, she seems to have left out a pretty key component-- the role of Aaron Schock's life in the closet and how that impacted what turned into a life of duplicity. Are we still too immature to eventually about the subject?

Hunter Walker, writing for Business Insider, asked Barney Frank about "the rumors" that Schock was gay. Schock's gay lifestyle is beyond rumor in DC-- something "everyone" in DC knows about, even if the folks back in Peoria don't. He's not deeply closeted the way Members who actually marry beards are-- like Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Tom Cotton (R-AR). Years ago, when Schock was asked by a TV reporter why such a handsome catch like himself was still single, he smiled and said he just hadn't found the right gal yet. Apparently the gay bars he was hanging out at were the wrong places to be looking.

When former Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank first learned that Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Illinois) was resigning, he assumed it was related to longstanding rumors about Schock's sexuality.

"He was outed or what?" Frank said when Business Insider asked for his thoughts on Tuesday afternoon shortly after news of Schock's resignation broke.

...When Frank was told Schock's resignation stemmed from questions over his use of campaign and taxpayer funds, he noted that the congressman was reported to have improperly accepted money to take a male companion on one of his foreign trips.

"Wasn't it [that] he took somebody with him?" Frank asked. "I thought he also traveled with one particular staffer."

Indeed, Schock's travel with a man (who was actually a non-staffer) was one of the things that fueled rumors about his sexuality. The various stories led the gay magazine "Out" to say in a story on Schock's resignation that he was "believed to be working in a glass closet on Capitol Hill."

Frank noted "there's been the rumor" about Schock.

"I don't know if it's true," Frank added.

Frank went on, however, to explain that Schock had no "right to privacy" because of his record on gay issues. Schock has what The Huffington Post has described as a "virulently anti-gay voting history," including votes against hate-crime legislation and the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

"I will say this, I don't know if he's gay or not," Frank said. "But if he is, he's forfeited any right to privacy because he votes anti-gay. My view is that people who are gay who vote to support the right of other people to do it have a right to privacy, but the right to privacy does not include hypocrisy."

Schock's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Frank's remarks.

...Frank also suggested that, if the rumors were true, Schock should definitely come out now that he is leaving Congress.

"Of course he should," said Frank, who concluded with a reference to Schock's muscular physique that is often displayed in shirtless photos on Schock's Instagram:

"Yeah, if they're true, and I don't know that they are. I have to say, if they're not true, he spent entirely too much time in the gym for a straight man."

This morning the Washington Post's Terrence McCoy skirted the subject a bit. "Schock’s choice of that vibrant color underscored his lifelong determination to go big and brash. According to a review of newspaper clippings going back to when he was a teenager in Peoria, Ill., Schock always pushed for more, more, more-- and to be the youngest to ever have it... He’s bold, like his bright-red office." But neither McCoy nor anyone else talks about how living a life of duplicity-- a life as a closet case-- was key to Schock's emergence as a skilled and practiced liar. He and other journalists-- all of whom are aware of the "rumors"-- chalk it up to an over-abundance of ambition and drive. But no one even mentions the lavender belt and tight white pants.



Michelangelo Signorile, of course, doesn't beat around the bush but is HuffPo Gay Voices really a mainstream outlet that will get the story out to voters in the heartland?

That claim by Itay Hod [that a journalist caught Schock showering with his gay male roommate] and the media attention it spurred was little over a year ago. It's odd that it's missing now in virtually all the current coverage, because it's a part of Schock's media history that also points to deception. More interesting is how the media runs from this story, refusing to investigate it while looking into all other aspects of Schock's political life-- yet the possibility that he is gay is part of his political life. Just as he's denied wrongdoing with regard to who paid for his office makeover or his trips, Schock denied being gay when I asked him in 2012 in the context of his anti-gay votes. He did not do this by saying, "I'm not gay," but by saying the question was "ridiculous" and pointing to a denial from years past, saying, "I've said that before, and I don't think it's worthy of further response. I think you can look it up." The question is relevant because if Schock is gay, then he is a hypocrite, since he voted against the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" and has said he was against gay marriage and for a federal marriage amendment. There are few more stellar examples of past possible deceptions that relate to the current stories about Schock.

That doesn't mean Schock's possibly being gay hasn't been alluded to in the current coverage, however, through code words that show how backward we often still are as a society on homosexuality, as if we've not moved past the 1950s. Both Roll Call and the New York Times, for example, have called Schock "flamboyant," and The Guardian, in an article about the allegedly Downton-inspired office, noted that the decor was "dangerously flamboyant," after first mentioning the White House picnic outfit.

Come on, folks. "Flamboyant" is a word that was most used to describe Liberace but is hardly used to describe any straight male in the public eye. In fact, the Times headlined its obituary of the then-closeted Liberace like this: "Liberace, Flamboyant Pianist, Dead." And in the Times last September, in a review of Behind the Candelabra, the Liberace biopic, reviewer Mike Hale describe Liberace as "a famously flamboyant, closeted-in-plain-sight gay entertainer."

In the recent piece about Schock's current troubles, the Times not only describes the congressman as "flamboyant" but discusses his "ripped ab muscles," his "racy" Instagram account and his "lifestyle"-- a word that is often used pejoratively to discuss gays, as in the "gay lifestyle." In fact, the word "lifestyle" has come up quite a bit in much of the coverage.

It's hard to believe that reporters in D.C. and beyond didn't follow the past discussion of Schock's sexual orientation. Still, I'm not saying all or even most of the code words being used in these articles now are intentional. A lot of it may be unconscious. And Schock is, after all, leading quite a flamboyant lifestyle, painting his office red, posing on the cover of magazines shirtless and jetting around the world and showing it all off.

But whether it's intentional, unconscious, or coincidental, the lack of any overt discussion (or investigation) of Schock's sexual orientation, while wink-wink words keep popping up, betrays a lot. As I discuss at length in my next book, the media and many LGBT activists themselves often breathlessly talk about polls that point to increased acceptance of homosexuality and LGBT rights, as if we've nearly won the war. But when the media still views the possibility that someone is gay as, at best, something that would be too damagingly invasive to report on or, at worst, a dirty little secret-- even when it's relevant or interesting to report on-- then we have surely got a long way to go.

And in Out Magazine Jerry Portwood wrote about "all the talk about the cute, blond-highlighted personal photographer, Jonathon Link, who he employs and even gave a raise to while others in his office had their salaries cut." Even Aaron's father seems to be trying to convince himself his son isn't gay. "He wears stylish clothing, and yet he’s not gay … and he’s not married... and he’s not running around with women," he said. "Everybody’s throwing up their arms. They can’t figure out Aaron. So he must be crooked. So attack him. Bring him down, because he doesn’t fit into our picture."

Wall Street Strikes Again-- Against America

By this morning, progressives started signaling that they're not getting on board with the two corrupt Beltway party establishments' intention of using the last minute/must pass omnibus appropriations bill-- to keep the government open-- as an excuse for some especially ugly legislation they could otherwise not pass. Jim McDermott (D-WA) was as clear as a bell: "Republicans in Congress got burned for shutting the government down last year. They are clearly not going to let that happen again. However, their price for keeping the government running is a 2015 Omnibus Bill that contains a pair of unacceptable provisions. The first is a legislative rider, bought and paid for by bank lobbyists, that loosens regulation on risky derivatives trading. It is inconceivable that Congress would cut crucial regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act, when risky derivatives trading was at the center of the 2008 financial crisis. Why is Congress giving Wall Street a massive Christmas present, when so many hardworking Americans are struggling to make ends meet? Secondly, I have grave reservations about the billions of dollars appropriated to the Pentagon to combat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Exactly what this money will be spent on has not been openly and thoroughly debated on the House Floor. Congress essentially has no idea how these expenditures fit into a comprehensive strategy in Iraq, or how much more money might be needed to combat ISIS in the coming months or years. I will be voting NO on this bill. Sadly, the 2015 Omnibus Bill shows that Congress has not learned crucial lessons when it comes to calamitous derivatives trading or costly proxy wars in the Middle East."

Let's stick to this big smooch Congress is giving Wall Street. Barney Frank-- the Frank in Dodd-Frank-- issued a statement to his former colleagues urging them to reject it outright:

"The provision inserted into the Appropriations bill is a substantive mistake, a terrible violation of the procedure that should be followed on this complex and important subject, and a frightening precedent that provides a road map for further attacks on our protection against financial instability. Ironically it was a similar unrelated rider put without debate into a larger bill that played a major role in allowing irresponsible, unregulated derivative transactions to contribute to the crisis. How to regulate derivatives is a question about which responsible people can differ, and the subject of what insured banks should be doing in this area is a legitimate subject for debate-- but not for a non-germane amendment inserted with no hearings, no chance for further modification, and no chance for debate into a mammoth bill in the last days of a lame-duck Congress. Those who have consistently opposed any significant financial regulation should be willing to put forward their proposals to cut back on the rules we adopted in response to the crisis in a manner that allows full, open discussion, and members supporting this retreat should be required to do so by their votes without the cover of an Omnibus Appropriation, not subject to amendment."

Pelosi has actually been trying to rally all the House Dems to vote no: "Once more, Republicans are working to stack the deck for the special interests against everyone else. Buried in the more than 1,600 pages of the omnibus package Republicans posted in the dead of night are provisions to put hard-working taxpayers back on the hook for Wall Street’s riskiest behavior. This provision, allowing big banks to gamble with money insured by the FDIC, opens the door to another taxpayer-funded bailout of big banks-- forcing middle class families to bear the burden of Wall Street’s mistakes. To make matters worse, the package includes a provision that would work to drown out the voices of the American people and massively expand the role of big money in our elections. With this provision, Republicans would multiply ten times the amount of money wealthy individuals can give to a political party. These provisions are destructive to middle class families and to the practice of our democracy. We must get them out of the omnibus package."

And Pelosi is more than relevant in this debate. Boehner does not have 218 votes for any spending bill that doesn't back forced deportation of Hispanic and Asian immigrants-- and that kind of nonsense isn't going to get more than than half a dozen Blue Dogs in the House and will fail in Senate. Obama wouldn't even have the opportunity to veto it. At least 50-60 radical right Republicans-- which the Beltway media idiots inappropriately refer to as "conservatives"-- will vote against any funding bill without deportation. That means the only way a bill passes is with significant Democratic support. But there are some Wall Street Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the New Dems and Blue Dogs and other regular suspects-- pushing strongly in the other direction, especially Wall Street allies like Jim Himes, the Connecticut New Dem Vice Chair who has already taken $4,512,177 in legalistic bribes from the finance sector since first being elected in 2008. Democrats are already trying to blame this travesty on Republicans-- who do deserve the bulk of the blame-- but the Republicans couldn't do it without Wall Street whores like Himes in the House and Schumer in the Senate.

In the Senate you have Elizabeth Warren leading the charge against the Wall Street provisions with strong backing from progressives like Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley. Her floor speech this morning was a barn-burner. "Who does Congress work for?," she began. "Does it work for the millionaires, the billionaires, the giant companies with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers? Or does it work for all of us?"

[T]he House of Representatives is about to show us the worst of government for the rich and powerful. The House is about to vote on a budget deal-- a deal negotiated behind closed doors that slips in a provision that would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.

These are the same banks that nearly broke this economy in 2008 and destroyed millions of jobs. The same banks that got bailed out by taxpayers and are now raking in record profits. The same banks that are spending a whole lot of time and money trying to influence Congress to bend the rules in their favor.

You will hear a lot of folks say that the rule that will be repealed in the Omnibus is technical and complicated, and that you shouldn't worry about it because smart people who know more than you about financial issues say that it's no big deal. Don't believe them. Actually, the rule is pretty simple. Here's what it's called-- the rule that the House is about to repeal-- and I'm quoting from the text of Dodd-Frank-- "PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS OF SWAPS ENTITIES." What does it do?  The provision that's about to be repealed requires banks to keep separate a key part of their risky Wall Street speculation so that there's no government insurance for that part of their business. As the New York Times has explained, "the goal was to isolate risky trading and to prevent government bailouts"-- because these sorts of risky trades-- called ‘derivatives' trades-- were "a main culprit in the 2008 financial crisis."

We put this rule in place after the collapse of the financial system because we wanted to reduce the risk that reckless gambling on Wall Street could ever again threaten jobs and livelihoods on Main Street. We put this rule in place because people of all political persuasions were disgusted at the prospects of future bailouts. And now, no debate, no discussion, Republicans in the House of Representatives are threatening to shut down the government if they don't get a chance to repeal it.

That raises a simple question-- why? If this rule brings more stability to our financial system, if this rule prevents future government bailouts, why in the world would anyone want to repeal it, let alone hold the entire government hostage in order to ram through the repeal?

The reason, unfortunately, is simple. It's about money, and it's about power. Because while this legal change could pose serious risks to our entire economy, it'll also make a lot of money for Wall Street banks. According to Americans for Financial Reform, this change will be a huge boon to just a handful of our biggest banks - Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Bank of America.

...[T]his provision goes too far. Citigroup is large, and it is powerful. But it is a single, private company. It shouldn't get to hold the entire government hostage-- to threaten a government shutdown-- in order to roll back important protections that keep our economy safe. This is a democracy, and the American people didn't elect us to stand up for Citigroup. They elected us to stand up for all of the people.

I urge my colleagues in the House-- particularly my Democratic colleagues, whose votes are essential to moving this package forward-- to withhold support from it until this risky giveaway is removed from the legislation. We all need to stand and fight this giveaway to the most powerful banks in the country.

Yesterday Sherrod Brown (D-OH) was clear where he stands on this as well: "This giveaway to Wall Street would open the door to future bailouts funded by American taxpayers. It’s been just six years since risky financial practices put our economy on the brink of collapse and cost millions of Americans lost jobs, homes, and retirement savings. This provision, originally written by lobbyists, has no place in a must-pass spending bill."

The White House says Obama opposes the rider but, predictably, that they aren’t inclined to pick a fight, blow up the whole bill, and risk a government shutdown over it. They should. Credit default swaps were the biggest factor in blowing up the economy in 2008. The Wall Street criminal class of predators love being able to use the swaps to dramatically raise the stakes on their speculative bets. If we lose this fight, it makes it 10 times more likely we will get another financial crisis sometime in the next few years. No one is trusting Schumer's bullshit blandishments that in exchange for going along with the Republicans and their Wall Street donors, Democrats have secured more money for the enforcement budgets at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Wall Street Dems-- Rising Or Falling?

Barney Frank is no longer a Member of Congress and his influence on the House Democrats' fiscal agenda has been largely supplanted by that of former Wall Street executive Jim Himes (New Dem-CT). As we saw last week, the New Dems have been boasting that a quarter of all House Democrats are now Members of their caucus. 53 Democrats, including DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have joined the New Dems, a caucus dedicated to-- above anything else-- sucking legalistic bribes from Wall Street and corporate America by backing their toxic economic agenda. And, unlike the Blue Dog Caucus which is nearly extinct, the New Dems have grown, thanks largely to the recruitment policies of Steve Israel and the DCCC, and includes 20 freshmen. (In contrast, the Progressive Caucus only includes 11 freshmen. In fact, the newest recruit into the bowels of the New Dem Coalition was Anne Kuster who quit the Progressives to move over to the Dark Side.)

This year the New Dems have teamed up with the Republicans-- they are, after all, the "Republican wing of the Democratic Party" or, as many joke, "your father's Republican Party"-- to dismantle Barney Frank's efforts to curb Wall Street's predatory excesses. New Dems on the Agriculture Committee-- Kuster, Pete Gallego (TX), Sean Patrick Maloney (NY), Mike McIntyre (NC), David Scott (GA) and Juan Vargas (CA)-- and on the Financial Services Committee, have made common cause with the GOP to undermine regulations--to the point of deregulation-- on derivatives. Support for the scheme to reduce Social Security via a Chained CPI came from just two places: the GOP and the New Dems. The Chained CPI scheme is a Wall Street priority.

Yesterday, conservative Democratic operative Peter Beinert tried making the case at the Daily Beast that the Democratic Party has turned against Wall Street. He's incorrect. His initial assertion that the forced withdrawal of Larry Summers for the Fed Chair proves the congressional Dems hate Wall Street, assumes, incorrectly, that Wall Street was unified in its desire to see Summers get the job. Not only did the Dow spike up yesterday when the news of Summers' withdrawal hot the floor, but Forbes also begs to differ: The Best News for the U.S. Economy This Year: Larry Summers Drops Out of Fed Chairman Race. "As Mark Leibovich has pointed out in This Town, a hilarious new book on the Washington eco-system of show-boating, self-aggrandizement, and financial conflicts, the nation’s capital is noted for a tendency for people to 'fail upward': those who fail in one job suddenly re-appear-- often within months-- in bigger jobs where they are unleashed to do even more damage. Even by Washington standards, however, the idea that Summers had any claim on the job of Fed chairman was straight out of Through the Looking Glass. Certainly had he got the job, it would have been the ultimate proof of John Maynard Keynes’s cynical maxim that 'worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.' Thus it is heartening that Summers has just announced he is withdrawing  from the contest (albeit it took three Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee-- Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, and Jeff Merkley-- to stare him down)." Fingleton, a former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, goes on to cite Joe Stiglitz's NY Times column proving Summers' unsuitability and then explains that Summers' connection to Wall Street is to its "seamier side... Summers’s net worth as of 2009," he points out, "was at least $17 million, more than 40 times the figure he reported in 1999. What made the difference was  Wall Street’s unerring generosity towards those public intellectuals whose ideas sell the American public interest down the river."

Am I being too harsh? Not at all. Those of us who criticize Summers’s record aren’t all merely wise after the fact.  A lot of people over the years have insisted on comprehensive financial regulation, not least the architects of the late 1930s Glass-Steagall system, which kept the U.S. banks out of trouble for more than four decades-- the best four decades in  American economic history. If you want to find contemporary policymakers who have understood all along the case for financial regulation, you need go no further than Canada, which did not follow the United States down the road to deregulation. In contrast with the repeated crises which have rocked U.S. finance for more than three decades, the Canadians have been rewarded with a consistently efficient, crisis-free financial system.  It is a similar story in much of central and northern Europe, where for the most part financial regulators have maintained a firm grip in the face of constant exhortations from the United States and the United Kingdom to deregulate.

Or maybe Beinert meant that the Dems are just moving away from that "seamier side of Wall Street," although the gusher of legalistic bribes to the New Dems wouldn't indicate as much. It was after all, that "seamier side of Wall Street" that got former New Dem Chair Joe Crowley, one of the three most corrupt Democrats in the House, put into the caucus leadership this year. And it is seamy Wall Street cash that has fueled the upward career of a second of the 3 most corrupt House Democrats, DCCC Chair Steve Israel, who has relentlessly recruited Wall Street-friendly New Dems to run for House seats.

Beinert's main premise is that the main reason Summers "dropped out is that he became identified with deregulatory policies that were far more tolerated inside the Democratic Party in 1999-- or even 2009-- than they are today. Four of the twelve Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, and 19 Democrats (plus one independent) of the 54 in the full Senate, had already expressed their public opposition meaning that Obama would have had to rely for Summers’ confirmation on Republican votes. The AFL-CIO had come out against Summers. So had MoveOn, Daily Kos, Chris Hayes, Paul Krugman and the editorial page of The New York Times. By contrast, Summers had barely any high-profile defenders outside the administration. When people did speak up in his defense, it was often on background." You'd think Beinert had never heard of the New Dems, even though he's straight from that DLC wing of the part they crawled out from.

What the Summers’ fight shows is how dramatically the financial crisis has reshaped the economic debate inside the Democratic Party. In 2008, Summers’ patron and ally, Robert Rubin, was rumored as a potential Obama running mate. Today, Rubin has largely disappeared from public view and given his role in the deregulatory policies of the 1990s, any defense he offered of Summers would have hurt his cause. In 2006, an ambitious Democratic policy wonk like Gene Sperling could write a book that criticized liberals for being insufficiently pro-business without worrying that it would hurt his chances of getting a top government job. No one would do that today.

It’s not that Wall Street no longer wields influence among Democrats. The party still relies on the financial services industry to help fund its campaigns and its lobbyists can still shape legislation. But the danger of being too publicly associated with Wall Street has increased. Democrats who want to pass their time between government gigs and earning millions at an investment bank now have to think harder about the political risk. And regulators who coddle Wall Street have to worry more about becoming props in an Elizabeth Warren YouTube video gone viral.

Ironically, Warren may be the political loser in Summers’ decision to drop out. Had he come before her banking committee, their duel would have dominated cable news. And he would have served as the perfect foil for her populist challenge to the Wall Street branch of her party. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, would have had to explain on the stump whether she supported confirming as Fed Chairman the man her husband had picked to run the Treasury Department.

The Democratic rebellion against Summers, like the Democratic rebellion against military action in Syria, bespeaks a deep frustration that party elites still share the economic and foreign policy assumptions that helped cause the disasters of the last decade. The next battle may the Obama administration’s desire for “fast track” authority to help push through giant new trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific free trade deals. If I were Hillary Clinton, I’d come out against it now.

I'm glad Beinert feels Elizabeth Warren speaks for the Democratic Party and represents its future-- and I wish it were true. As for Hillary coming out against the toxic trade agenda promulgated by the Bushs, her husband and Obama... well good idea, unless it's just a political calculation and not a real break with... Wall Street.

Right To Vote/Right To Marry: The Red States

Barney Frank retired from Congress last year. Obama picked a series of crooked Wall Street operators for positions he should have tried filling with brilliant and proven tribunes of the public like Barney and Brad Miller (D-NC), who also resigned last year. I'm not certain what Brad is up to now but Barney has certainly not faded away. Having been for so many years the most noteworthy openly gay Member of Congress, media turned to him in droves for comments about the grudging and narrow Supreme Court ruling that struck down DOMA and kind of struck down California's hateful Prop 8. And Barney, who recently married his partner, was as gleeful as all members of the LGBT community. Like me... well, probably more than me. I'm less an assimilationist and, although I'm happy for the folks who wanted and needed this, I fear it is another deadly blow against what helped make the gay community unique and nonconformist.

But, like Barney, I'm not exactly singing the praises of the Supreme Court. The 5 conservative bastards did something far more destructive the day before by striking down the Voting Rights Act. It's a much bigger deal than letting gays marry-- because it will inevitably lead to a far more conservative and intolerant government, one that could do a great deal of harm to, among others, the LGBT community. Thursday Barney was on MSNBC's Morning Joe and he said that if he had been empowered to decide one Supreme Court decision this week, he would have taken up the case on the 1965 Voting Rights Act and not the Prop 8 marriage ban that is no longer supported by California voters anyway. He explained that the "terrible decision killing the Voting Rights Act" is far more harmful to the country than the marriage equality case. "Racial discrimination," he asserted, correctly, "has been much worse [than discrimination against the LGBT community] in this country and if I could have frankly picked one decision this week,  I'll be honest, it wouldn't have been the gay marriage one. I wish I could have reversed that terrible decision killing the Voting Rights Act because I think there are still serious issues there in democracy." It would be amazing if Scalia, who's 77, wakes up in hell tomorrow and Obama nominates Frank to replace him. And if we all get unicorns for our birthdays.

This wasn't lost on Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN). They got it just right when they commented on the Supreme Court rulings this week in a joint statement:

“We celebrate today’s decision by the Supreme Court to respect the right of all Americans to marry who they love. The road to today’s victories started 44 years ago at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, where the gay community made a public stand against institutional discrimination. Since that day, LGBT Americans have worked tirelessly for equal rights under the law. The decisions made by the Supreme Court today reaffirm those rights and move our country closer to fulfilling the promise in our Constitution of equal rights for all.

“While today’s rulings were a positive step forward, yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act endangers voting rights and is a troubling step backward. We should celebrate the victory for marriage equality by working together to defend the voices of millions of Americans who may face increased discrimination at the polls after yesterday’s decision. Senator Harry Reid has already vowed that the Senate will act quickly to fix the problems created by yesterday’s ruling. The House should follow his lead as soon as possible.”

So what can, realistically, be done to fix the problem before the Republican just start barring minorities from voting across the Old Confederacy and in states they control like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Indiana? The Senate is where it will start, of course. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Judiciary Committee: "I intend to take immediate action to ensure that we will have a strong and reconstituted Voting Rights Act that protects against racial discrimination in voting." He says he plans to start right after the 4th of July break. Unfortunately, Leahy's counterpart in the House is an old line unreconstructed Confederate and racist pig, Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and he's not likely to allow any kind of protections for minorities to get through his committee, which is stuffed full of teabaggers and bigots and boasts some of the most contemptible partisan extremists in Congress, like Steve King (R-IA), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Spencer Bachus (R-AL), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Randy Forbes (R-VA), Trey Gowdy (R-SC), Ted Poe (R-TX), George Holding (R-NC), Doug Collins (R-GA), Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Jason Smith (R-MO).

Pelosi was whistling in the wind when she said "I would like to see something called... the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would address the concerns that the Court put in its decision about Section 4. It’s really a step backward and it’s not a reflection of what is happening in our country in some of these places. And when we put that bill together, when it was passed last time, it passed overwhelming, overwhelming 98 to nothing in the Senate and 390-something to almost nothing in the House. And it was bipartisan and we came to terms on it, in a way that we were all jubilant about the passage of it, Democrats and Republicans alike.”

Barney Frank is as quotable as a private citizen as he was as a congressman

I think [the Republicans] have a real crisis. If they do not break the grip of the tea party they will be very much a minority party. In the short term, they have a real problem because breaking that is going to be messy.

I was talking to a Republican senator the other night at the airport when I was waiting for Jim, my husband. I mentioned to him that the House Republicans were now thinking about changing the [fiscal cliff] deal, and he said, ''Boy, I went over a couple weeks ago to talk to the Republicans from my state to try to get them to be more reasonable. They're fucking nuts. We get the shit pounded out of us for being too much for the rich and they don't understand that.''

-- former Congressman Barney Frank, in
an interview with Metro Weekly's Justin Snow

by Ken

When Barney Frank, newly retired from the House of Representatives after 32 years of service, announced in a TV interview that he had changed his previously announced position and would indeed like the interim appointment to replace Sen. John Kerry after he's confirmed as secretary of state until a special election is held, a lot of us on the Left reacted immediately and energetically. This can't have made life easy for the man who'll make the decision, Gov. Deval Patrick, who has made clear that he won't have anything to say about the appointment until Senator Kerry is confirmed and Massachusetts has an actual Senate vacancy.

When the governor was asked if he would have preferred that Barney not go public on the matter, he said, "Does it matter in the case of Congressman Frank what I would have preferred?" He was smiling. The governor knows him some Barney Frank.

I admit it, I love Barney. I love him because he's a passionate liberal whose liberal passions remained operative at a higher level of government power than anyone I can think of in modern times.

I love him because he made the decision to do the long, grinding-hard work to achieve real inside power as either chairman or ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee.

I love him because he's incredibly smart and knows how to channel that smartness directly into the related but distinctly different businesses of politics and government.

I love him because he has little hesitation in standing up to, and standing down, the opposition, and because he's incredibly funny, partly because he's so damned smart, but also in good part because, as I've noted here before, he actually listens to people, something that isn't exactly common among DC pols.

This particularly drives his opponents all kinds of nuts, because in their view it just isn't fair, Barney's habit of tying them in knots over stuff they've said. As we know, if there's anything right-wingers hate (and believe me, there is; these are people who often live for and on hate), it's being called to account for stuff they've said and done. After all, it's just stuff they said.

And I see I haven't even mentioned about Barney being gay. Of course I love him for that too, for the way, in the glare of the public eye, he found his courage to be public who he is. This is incredibly important for people who are gay and for people who aren't.

All of that said, was I sorry when Barney announced that his 16th term in the House would be his last? Well, of course. Is there any time when Congress could afford to lose a Barney Frank? Of course not. But especially at a time when Congress is in the state it's in, with the House in particular having been taken hostage by people who are by and large so dim and/or so crazed that they may not even realize they've created the country's first terrorist caucus.

And that said, could I blame Barney for packing it in? Again, of course not. It can't have been a decision taken lightly. After 32 years, he can't reasonably be asked to give more. He has a husband now, and has certainly earned the right to live a more normal sort of life.

In fact, as Barney explains in a nice interview with Metro Weekly's Justin Snow, he seriously intended to pack it in sooner.

In 2010, I thought I wouldn't run again. I thought I'd have one more term. I was too tired and doing full-time politics either for myself or for other political people since October of 1967. And I'm married and look forward to time with Jim.

But the Republicans retook the House, and --

I said, ''Well, if I leave now it'll look like I'm being a sorehead that I wouldn't stay as financial chairman.'' And so I was going to do only one more term.

The issue was finally decided for him when --

they changed the congressional districts . . . so drastically that I would've been going 325,000 new people to ask them to vote for me as their member of Congress for one term. And I couldn't do that. I think party responsibility is to work on people's problems and issues," and you can't ask for their vote knowing that "if a problem arises 18 months from now I won't be able to do much about it because I'll be gone six months after that.

All of which is perfectly logical and perfectly understandable. What I didn't expect to be let in on was this fairly stark personal revelation. Here's Justin:

Although he says he'll miss the drafting of legislation and passing of laws, Frank is looking forward to his own form of retirement, which, he says, will include public speaking and a couple books.

"I'm looking forward to working less hard and being under less pressure and having less tension," Frank says. "I'm just tired and my energy is gone," he adds, attributing the four years of the financial crisis that he witnessed from his post on the House Financial Services Committee as contributing to his exhaustion.

The other thing I most enjoyed learning from this interview is that Barney already has some quite concrete plans.

I want to write. I have a great respect for the written word. Some people can write while they're doing other things. Former Sen. [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan could do that — a great senator and great author. I can't do that. So I now will have a major opportunity to write a couple of books. I'm looking forward to that.

The first book, he says,

is about what liberalism should be. Basically, I believe we should acknowledge that of the two parties we are the ones that understand the positive role that government can play in our lives. And we need to figure out how to get people to understand that better.

After that comes "a history of the political activity around here. "

Accidentally, my political career and the gay-rights movement are exactly the same age. I got elected to the state Legislature in 1972 -- three years after Stonewall. I rode in, as a candidate, the second gay-pride parade in Boston history in 1972. I filed the first gay-rights legislation in Massachusetts in 1972 and Massachusetts was probably the fourth or fifth state to do that. And I got here in 1981 and I have been on the floor as a member of the House for every debate and vote on LGBT rights ever, so I want to write about that.

Barney has a lot to say in the interview about that chunk of history, and his optimism in the face of the mounting tensions between "this right-wing group [that] took over the Republican Party" and the kind of Republican with whom he was once able to do some of the nation's business.

Actually, he has a lot to say about quite a lot of things, like this, about his very public marriage:

I did make a point of being married while I was still [in Congress] because I wanted these people to, you know, I'm very pleased to run into some conservative Republicans and introduce them to my husband. And Jim is a very popular guy with the other spouses and we're the only same-sex couple other members of Congress really know. I think that's very important.

To make it kind of a teaching moment, one Republican member of Congress, a more moderate conservative, sent us a wedding present and then voted to reaffirm the Defense of Marriage Act. So I brought the present back and the response was, "Well, why?" And I said, "Are you kidding?"

"Are you kidding?" Is that pure Barney or what?

I'm still hoping Barney has that stint as interim U.S. senator ahead of him, but "private citizen" Barney should be a welcome guest too. And I look forward to putting those books he's writing on my reading list.

#

SENATOR Barney Frank?

"Coach, put me in!": "I'm not going to be coy, it's not anything I've ever been good at. I've told the governor that I would now like, frankly, to be a part of that." (I couldn't get the clip to embed, but you can view it here.)

by Ken

I saw some online link that referred to this as a "comeback" for Barney, which seems pretty silly, since he doesn't have anything to come back from. He wasn't pushed out of public office; he leapt. And while it's just a caretaker role, until Massachusetts can organize a special election to replace State-bound Sen. John Kerry, the idea of Barney back in the mix is pretty invigorating.

Barney Frank: I Want The Massachusetts Senate Appointment

The Huffington Post  |  By Luke Johnson
Posted: 01/04/2013 8:29 am EST  |  Updated: 01/04/2013 10:34 am EST

Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who just left the House of Representatives Thursday after 32 years, said Friday that he has told Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) that he would like an interim appointment to fill the Senate seat that would open if Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is confirmed as secretary of state.

"A few weeks ago, I said I wasn't interested. It was kind of like, you're about to graduate and they said, you've got to go to summer school. But that [fiscal cliff] deal now means that February, March, and April are going to be among the most important months in American financial history," he said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

"Yes, in fact, I'm not going to be coy, it's not anything I've ever been good at. I've told the governor that I would now like, frankly, to be a part of that. It's only a three-month period, I wouldn't want to do anything more, but to be honest, it's a little arrogant."

Said Frank, "Coach, put me in."

The placeholder seat would open in the Senate between Kerry's exit and a special election for the remainder of his term, expected in early summer. Patrick has said that he is strongly leaning toward appointing a caretaker for the Senate seat, as happened after the death of former Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)

Frank, 72, has said that he has no interest in running for the Senate seat in a special election, but that he wouldn't refuse an appointment.

Frank, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, played a pivotal role in both the negotiations over the Troubled Asset Relief Program and financial reform, where he passed legislation known as Dodd-Frank.

Other names mentioned for the interim appointment have included Kennedy's widow, Victoria Kennedy, and former Gov. Michael Dukakis (D), who said he wasn't interested.

Nobody seems to know how Gov. Deval Patrick might feel about the idea of appointing Barney to that interim Senate spot, but it sounds like a swell idea to me.

(By the way, in terms of the "caretaker" nature of this appointment, reflecting Massachusetts's need to maintain full Senate representation before the new elected interim senator takes up his/her post, it may not be well known but Barney has a record in the House of truly outstanding constituent service. It's something that has always been of prime importance to him.)

#

Israel Is Right To Distrust Chuck Hagel-- But For Entirely Different Reasons

Unless AIPAC can force Obama to change his mind-- or talk enough of the senators they control into defeating the nomination-- it looks like Chuck Hagel will be the next Secretary of Defense. Let's leave his long record of ugly homophobia out of the discussion for now, although "he consistently voted against legislation that would have expanded hate-crime protections to LGBT Americans [and], according to the Human Rights Campaign Congressional Scorecard, he earned a 0 percent for the 107th, 108th and 109th sessions of Congress."

Many Democrats like him because he was the first Republican to oppose John Bolton’s nomination to be Bush's UN ambassador, because he voted with the Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to begin an investigation into the pre-Iraq war intelligence and because he came out against Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq when few other Republicans dared. In 2008, he opposed his old colleague, John McCain and endorsed Obama for president. Fine, fine... but there's something else to consider that has long been swept under the rug, especially Inside the Beltway-- how Hagel's electronic theft of his Senate election set the stage for Bush stealing the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Early in 2003, Thom Hartmann helped expose how Hagel cheated to win his reelection 2 months earlier.

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government-- answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders-- would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."

What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka. "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?

..."The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. "To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."

That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our doorstep.

"They can take over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."

Taking over our election systems? Is that really possible in the USA?

Bev Harris of www.talion.com and www.blackboxvoting.org has looked into the situation in depth and thinks Matulka may be on to something. The company tied to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when she went public about his company having built the machines that counted his landslide votes. (Her response was to put the law firm's threat letter on her website and send a press release to 4000 editors, inviting them to check it out.

"I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states," Matulka said in a January 30, 2003 interview. "God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country," he added, "because they leave no paper trail. These corporations are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting machines."

...Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance of voting over to private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their owners, officers, and stockholders, puts democracy itself at peril.

And, argues Charlie Matulka, for a former officer of one of those corporations to then place himself into an election without disclosing such an apparent conflict of interest is to create a parody of democracy.

Perhaps Matulka's been reading too many conspiracy theory tracts. Or maybe he's on to something. We won't know until a truly independent government agency looks into the matter.

When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete, asking him why he'd not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.

Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, Charlie Matulka had requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel. He just learned his request was denied because, he said, Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.

Matulka shared his news with me, then sighed loud and long on the phone, as if he were watching his children's future evaporate.

"If you want to win the election," he finally said, "just control the machines."

Well, at least he didn't piss off the yentas on the ridiculous Sunday morning TV gab-fests. This is as good a time as any to bring up Barney Frank's new thought piece on the new mandate for the Defense Department, in which he points out that progressives need to stay strong on cutting back on military spending. Remember, Barney was one of the 22 in the group of bipartisan congressmembers who signed a letter this week demanding the military budget be "on the table" in the Grand Bargain deficit reduction negotiations.

There were so many encouraging signs for liberals in the election results this year that one of the most significant has been overlooked. For the first time in my memory, a Democratic candidate for President argued for less military spending against a Republican candidate who called for great increases-- and the Democrat won. George McGovern was the last Democratic candidate to talk about spending less on the military. Subsequently, every Democratic presidential candidate was told that he had better look sufficiently tough on national security because a perception that Democrats were too weak vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was a major point of vulnerability. That is why Michael Dukakis, a public official with an extremely distinguished record, and a man of great dignity and integrity, staged an ill-conceived photo-op of himself wearing a helmet and riding in a tank, which became a negative factor in his campaign.

...In the past few years, with President Obama having completed the withdrawal from Iraq, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and with the announcement of a plan to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014 (too late, but an improvement over the open-ended commitment Obama inherited), it has become possible to get some political traction for our efforts to cut military spending. Because so much of that spending stems from overreach advocated by those who believe that America should be the enforcer of order everywhere in the world-- and because we subsidize our wealthy European and Asian allies by providing a defense for them so they need not spend much on their own-- there has been increasing conservative support for reining in the military budget. Ron Paul, who goes far beyond most liberals in his eagerness to impose severe military cuts, was a popular figure with a significant base of GOP support not despite taking this position but in part because of it.

Earlier this year, for the first time that I can recall, a majority of the House of Representatives voted to reduce the military appropriation recommended by the House Appropriations Committee. The cut was only $1.1 billion-- less than it should have been-- but it was a decision that froze spending at the previous year’s level, and it passed by a vote of 247-167, with the support of both an overwhelming majority of Democrats (158-21) and a significant minority of Republicans (89-146).

Deficit reduction over the long term must include significant reductions in military spending along with tax increases on the very wealthy if we are to avoid devastating virtually everything we do to promote the quality of life at home. A realistic reassessment of our true national security needs would mean a military budget significantly lower not only than the one President Obama inherited, but that which he now proposes. That is, by next year, we no longer should be forced to spend additional funds-- close to $200 billion a year at their peak-- in Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, we can reduce the base budget by approximately $1 trillion over a ten-year period (this includes the $487 billion reduction that President Obama proposed in early 2012) while maintaining more than enough military strength to fully protect our security and those of our allies that genuinely need help because they are too poor and weak in the face of powerful enemies. (Should the nation decide in a democratic way to go to war again, that would require an increase in the military budget, and I would hope, in taxation to pay for it.)

Getting the military budget down to that level-- which would mean a reduction of about $250 billion from what it was in the first year of the Obama Administration-- faced two obstacles at the beginning of this past year. First was the traditional political concern that the Republican presidential candidate would have an advantage over the Democrat on the question of who can better protect our national security. Fortunately, Obama understood that things have changed, and that the American people are ready for a reduction in military spending. Governor Romney, operating in the traditional conservative mode, missed it. One of the most important signs that the public was ready to support a rational-- i.e., significantly reduced-- military budget came during Clint Eastwood’s ramble at the Republican National Convention. One of the few coherent things he said in that memorable debate that he lost to a chair was that the President should have announced his willingness to pull out of Afghanistan altogether. This criticism of the President from an antiwar position elicited cheers from the Republican delegates.

...Given the numbers involved, the major trade-off in putting together a total deficit reduction package is between the military and health care, by far the biggest nondefense spending item in our budget. Reductions in Medicare, Medicaid, grants from the National Institutes of Health, aid to hospitals, etc., clearly will have far worse social consequences than equivalent cuts in the military and, I believe, more damaging economic effects, because there is more of an economic multiplier from the health expenditures than from military spending.

...[B]eing the strongest nation in the world can be achieved much less expensively than at current levels. Obama deserves a great deal of credit for ending the war in Iraq, for committing to ending the war in Afghanistan, and for successfully withstanding Republican pressure to spend more on the military. But I believe he underestimates the extent to which the public is willing to support even further reductions, and I believe that he may appear to be overly influenced by being told that as President, he has the duty to continue to lead the indispensable nation.

The United States was indispensable in 1945 and for many years thereafter, given the weakness of other nations, including our closest allies, and the strength of the Soviet Union. But things have changed. We can no longer afford to be the indispensable nation extending a military umbrella over many allies on whom it is not raining-- and who can well afford their own protective gear if it does. Fortunately, there is no longer any need for us to play that role, and that in turn is fortunate because, for a number of reasons, we cannot succeed at the job when we try.

This all means that a major political task going forward for liberals is pushing for further reductions in military spending, an objective that we now know is not only socially and economically necessary but also politically achievable.