If We're LUCKY, Trump's Economy Will End In Recession, Not Something Worse

Former California Congressman David Dreier (R) could've been a contender. Except for the homophobia. Closet case Denny Hastert, then GOP speaker, named him Majority Leader for half an hour, but when the House Republican leaders started melting down over the "gay thing," Hastert relented and gave it to a perpetually tanned alcoholic instead. Poor Dreier; he worked so hard before bumping into a glass ceiling he never imagined would end his career. He retired soon after and moved to a couple of fancy digs in Malibu and Beverly Hills, a million light years away from his old district. I think he's like a lobbyist for China or Chinese interests or something like that. He was on the local NBC-TV affiliate here in L.A. hawking his new documentary about China when he happened to mention that his former colleagues in the House were punished by voters for enabling Trump. "Oversight, which is a Constitutionally directed responsibility, is so critically important," he said, "and my Republican colleagues did not, I believe, do an adequate enough job... When President Bush was president and I was chairing the Rules Committee, we insisted on oversight among our committee chairmen and we did a lot of it. Ours is a nation of institutions. We need to remember that, and Congress needs to exercise that [oversight] authority."

I'm sure you've noticed that it's always the retired of retiring Republicans who want to hold Trump accountable, right? Yesterday, in her first public appearance since losing to Blue Dog Ben McAdams, Rep. Mia Love (R-UT) struck back at Trump, who mocked her after the election blaming her defeat on her decision to keep him at arm’s length in the election. Notably, she didn't speak up while the counting was still going on and while it looked like she could win. "This gave me a clear vision of [Trump's] world as it is. No real relationships, just convenient transactions. It is an insufficient way to implement sincere service and policy."

She vowed to continue to deliver such biting attacks now that her defeat means she is “unleashed, untethered and I am unshackled and I can say exactly what is on my mind.”

Love, the first and only black Republican woman elected to the House, took bipartisan shots on Monday-- saying Democratic policies hurt blacks, that Republicans fail to embrace minorities-- as shown by some actions by Trump.

She said she was surprised that while votes were still being counted, Trump took his jab at her.

“The president’s behavior toward me made me wonder: what did he have to gain by saying such a thing about a fellow Republican?” she said. “It was not really about asking him to do more was it? Or was it something else?”

Just when Love was speaking Monday morning in Salt Lake City, New York Magazine was publishing a column by Jonathan Chait, The Deficit Grew Because Trump’s a Republican, Not Because He’s an Idiot". Absolutely! And that's why Trump voters in the Midwest are seeing their jobs disappear. He's just hot air, transactional to his core and never held accountable for any of his bad behavior. Chait explained to his readers that the increasingly out-of-control low IQ ape in the Oval Office "has been demanding that his aides draft a plan to reduce the swelling budget deficit while simultaneously ruling out virtually all categories of possible deficit reduction and demanding new deficit-increasing measures of his own. The Washington Post has plenty of hilarious details from the administration’s internal fiscal deliberations, such as they are. Trump comes across as possessing every bit as much fiscal acumen as you would expect from a man who managed to bankrupt a casino, required hundreds of millions of dollars in secret cash infusions from his father to stay afloat, and can barely absorb written material of even the shortest length."

The Post's account draws heavily from the perspective of Trump’s current and former advisers, who treat his buffoonery as the central cause of the administration’s fiscal straits. But the reality is that Trump is simply expressing a more ignorant version of standard-issue Republican budgeting.

The deficit is the gap between revenue and outlays, and Trump opposes any increase in revenue under any circumstances whatsoever. The story notes that Trump “has said no changes can be made to Medicare and Social Security,” and has boasted about his increase in spending on defense. Those categories, plus interest on the debt, account for 80 percent of federal spending, and the remaining 20 percent has been targeted by desperate budget-cutters for the better part of three decades. When you refuse to increase the revenue side of the equation (and, indeed, make it worse through tax-cutting), and rule out four-fifths of the spending side of the equation, you’ve ruled out any reduction to the deficit.

Trump’s advisers frame this as a story about Trump’s ignorance thwarting their efforts to impose sane and good Republican budget policy. Former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn is portrayed as telling his staff not to bother briefing Trump about the deficit because he doesn’t care. Current chief of staff John Kelly quizzes Trump about the salary of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the president guesses $5 million. (Actual answer: under $200,000.)

It is fair to say that no other Republican president would be quite this ignorant. But in other ways, Trump is indistinguishable from the policies any Republican advocates.

Trump’s refusal to consider higher taxes is a point of uniform party dogma. In 2012, when the Republican presidential candidates were asked if they might support a budget deal with ten dollars of spending cuts for every dollar of higher taxes, every single one said no. If Trump came out for a tax increase he might literally be impeached and removed from office.

The story notes that Trump “has said no changes can be made to Medicare and Social Security.” But every Republican likewise supports maintaining retirement benefits for workers at or near retirement (meaning age 55 or above). By definition this would rule out even the first penny of budget savings within ten years. And only a handful of Republicans support any cuts to the defense budget.

Trump learned most of what he knows about politics by binge-watching Fox News, which has in some ways given him a keener sense of the desires of the party rank and file. Take this anecdote about Trump’s hesitation to frontally attack Medicare for All during the campaign:

When staffers sought to include an attack on Democrats’ Medicare-for-all proposals in Trump’s campaign speeches this fall, he initially blanched, two administration aides said. Medicare is popular, he said, and voters want it. Eventually, he agreed to the attack if he could say Democrats were going to take the entitlement away.

Snickering administration advisers probably see this episode as evidence of either Trump’s buffoonery or his harboring of secret big-government instincts. In reality, Republicans understand full well that Medicare and Social Security command deep support even among their own voters. Trump’s conclusion that the only safe ground to attack an expansion of the safety net is from the left, as a defense of existing benefits, is the exact same strategy Republicans used against Obamacare. The signature national ad that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran in 2012 stated:

“You paid in to Medicare for years. Every paycheck. Now when you need it, Obama has cut $716 billion from Medicare. Why? To pay for Obamacare. So now the money you paid for your guaranteed healthcare is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”

Trump’s inherent Trumpiness is not the reason the deficit has increased. The iconic Republican Ronald Reagan cut taxes, jacked up defense spending, and massively increased the deficit, and his presidency is worshipped as a model all subsequent Republicans must follow. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, did break from his party in order to reduce the deficit, and conservatives loathed him for it and use his apostasy as a cautionary tale to this day. The next Republican president, George W. Bush, promised to follow Reagan’s example rather than his father’s, and he delivered, jacking up defense spending and cutting taxes and causing the deficit to spike.

Trump has signed onto legislation designed by Republicans in Congress that increased defense spending and cut taxes. The deficit has risen as a result. That’s what Republicans do.

The other part of Republican policy is formally denouncing deficits and insisting that the deficit increases their party systematically engineers are not their fault. Trump’s comical ignorance of budget policy makes him a useful scapegoat for this purpose. But the reality is that fiscal policy is one area where the president’s complete ignorance is irrelevant to the outcome.

Yeah, ha, ha, ha. Real comical-- especially for the Trumbull County, Ohio, factory workers who flipped from blue to voting overwhelming for Trump because they loved the populist economic message he stole from Bernie but who just found out the county car factory is closing down. I wonder how many of them recall Trump's Youngstown speech last year where he boasted that the Ohio jobs are "all coming back. They’re all coming back. Don’t move, don’t sell your house. We’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build new ones."

Twitter's War Against The Bots?

About 5 years ago a closeted Republican retired from Congress-- not a case like Mark Foley who was really forced out because he was found to be molesting underage pages-- but just a garden variety gay guy who, though notorious inside the Beltway, was relatively unknown for his homosexuality in his own district. I used to write about him being gay whenever he voted against the LGBTQ community, which was not all the time but was still fairly frequently. After he retired, he became friends with a close friend of mine and I came to know that he had hired an (expensive) firm to bury all the posts I had written about him. I hadn't known that could be done... but it can and often is. There was a time when you could type "David Dreier, gay" into google and tons of DWT would pop right up. Now the first DWT post about him doesn't come up until the 4th search page. Bitch! (Here: take that!)

In 2016 I noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to find topical video clips that were favorable to Hillary and negative about Señor Trumpanzee. After a while I figured out what was happening. "Someone" was running a campaign to banish those clips off the front YouTube search pages with absurd videos that came up by using the search terms someone would use to find the clips for Hillary and against Trump. It went on for month after month after month before-- and after-- the stories about Russian interference-- and collusion-- in the U.S. election.

I hope Facebook is taking action to protect itself from a repitition. Twitter is. They're clearing out the bots-- 70 million fake accounts in May and June alone! That's a million fake accounts a day! The Washington Post reported that that's more than double the rate the social media platform was suspending back in October.

Twitter's increasingly aggressive purges were already alarming some users; In February, the platform assured that it was wiping out bots, not silencing conservatives. But the company has also taken the opportunity to liquidate retweet-spamming accounts in order to promote more genuine interaction. While today's revelations are more about controlling misinformation, the heavier-handed platform policing is a definite policy shift for a company that has avoided banning users for behavior or abuse.

Suspending 70 million users still sounds like a blow to a company that's struggled to increase its userbase, but these cullings have not had "a ton of impact" on the amount of active users, Twitter's VP of Trust and Safety told the Washington Post. According to him, those accounts weren't tweeting regularly.

Sources told the Post that there was widespread internal debate over the decision to target fake accounts on Twitter. Reportedly, it was the political pressure after Congress grilled the company on the litany of Russian-controlled fake accounts that pushed Twitter to pursue more aggressive action to curtail bots on its platform. The company started looking at account behavior to identify them, determining that things like tweeting at a large number of unfamiliar accounts and how often they were blocked were red flags. Twitter's punitive measures have also evolved beyond suspensions: For example, they can now curtail the impact and reach of a user's tweets by burying them deep in the message stream.

Is 70 million a lot. It really is, since Twitter only has 337.06 million accounts, although some experts are claiming that most of the 70 million were just dormant accounts, not Russian saboteurs. Still, as Trump ramps up his war against the mainstream media, it's going to be important tp watch what social media companies are doing here? Are they silencing legitimate voices of dissent or blocking actual spammers and bots?

The Crucifixion by Nancy Ohanian

In case you didn't read Maureen Dowd's For Whom The Trump Trolls this weekend, here you go." More Twitter stuff, this time about, among other things, how dangerous Trump's addiction is to the country.

Donald Trump was profoundly affected by watching his older brother, Freddy, die from alcoholism at 43.

He proselytized against drinking and smoking, warning his kids away from those vices. Even with his casinos, Trump wasn’t a gambler, either, saying he’d rather own slot machines than play them.

And yet, in a strange twist, Trump has ended up an addict.

One of the more chilling things I’ve heard recently came from Jaron Lanier, the Silicon Valley founding father whose new book is Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Lanier, who met Trump a couple of times back in the real estate developer’s New York heyday, thinks the president’s addiction to tweeting is rewiring his brain in a negative way. As Trump picks up speed on Twitter, the Oval Office is becoming a Skinner box. Like other “behavior modification empires,” as Lanier calls social media sites, Twitter offers positive reinforcement for negativity.

“Twitter addicts take on this kind of nervous, paranoid, cranky quality, sort of itching for a fight,” Lanier said in an interview. “Trump used to be in on his own joke, and he no longer is. He’s just striking out every morning, fishing for somebody to harass or seeing who’s harassing him.

“I do think it creates a terrifying situation because somebody who is addicted is easy to manipulate. It’s easier for the North Koreans to lie to him than if he wasn’t an addict.”

And the hostility and insensitivity that so easily flow from his fingers now define his immigration policy.

I saw a report on PBS about a mother on the border who was reunited with her 14-month-old child after 85 days. “The child continued to cry when we got home and would hold on to my leg and would not let me go,” the mother wrote. “When I took off his clothes, he was full of dirt and lice. It seemed like they had not bathed him the 85 days he was away from us.”

On the occasion of America’s 242nd birthday, we must ask who we are, if we can see accounts of infants snatched from their parents and returned covered in lice, and not worry about our country’s soul.

Trump has certainly made political discourse more crude and belligerent. But is he making the whole country meaner, coarser and less empathetic? Or was the pump primed for a political figure like him because the internet had already made America meaner, coarser and less empathetic? Did they happen simultaneously?

Launching a comeback, Twitter recast itself in a harsher light. The company, The Times’s Farhad Manjoo wrote, “tweaked its central feed to highlight virality, turning Twitter into a bruising barroom brawl featuring the most contentious political and cultural fights of the day.”

Manjoo told me: “Now when you log in, they show you the most interesting tweets you missed while you were away. They highlight the tweets of people arguing, the big news brawls of the day, as a way to engage the rest of the audience. That makes it a meaner place.”

This, even as Twitter-- under pressure like the rest of Silicon Valley for letting the monsters get out of control-- is developing “health metrics” to promote civility and communicate “more holistically.”

On its company blog, Twitter said it was inspired by Cortico, a nonprofit research organization that is trying to measure “conversational health” with four indicators: shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion and receptivity. Not exactly the attributes we see in Trump.

It will be hard for Twitter to become more civil and holistic given that in January it instituted a world leaders policy exempting a certain head of state from any tempering efforts. “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” the company said.

That leaves Trump free to grab his phone at all hours to shove and to smear and to spew falsehoods. As Michiko Kakutani writes in her new book, “The Death of Truth”: “Trump, of course, is a troll-- both by temperament and by habit. His tweets and offhand taunts are the very essence of trolling-- the lies, the scorn, the invective, the trash talk, and the rabid non sequiturs of an angry, aggrieved, isolated, and deeply self-absorbed adolescent who lives in a self-constructed bubble and gets the attention he craves from bashing his enemies and trailing clouds of outrage and dismay in his path.”

Be best!

We have a president who is an addict running a country overflowing with opioid and social media addicts. (In an interview with The Times a few days ago, our tech reporter Nellie Bowles said she dealt with her smartphone addiction by graying out her screen, noting, “These phones are designed to look and work like slot machines-- hit us with bright colors and little pings to activate and please,” and “we all have to figure out little hooks to pull back into the physical world.”)

Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has lamented the extraordinarily aggressive online comments at media outlets, hopes people will resume a sense of decorum when they realize “there’s very little long-term profit from a viral tweet.”

“We don’t have to cater to those meanspirited instincts,” he said. “We can be better than that.”

But I don’t think Trump can. He figured out how to dominate Twitter, not with the cool-kid arch style of making fun of someone, but by being school-yard-bully mean.

His tweets propel the story on cable news and shape the narrative for reporters-- who are addicted to the First Addict.

For Trump, who is also an attention addict, that is about as holistic as it’s going to get.

Big Anti-TPP Protest At Obama Fundraiser Today

A few weeks ago a friend invited me to a formal dinner at which former L.A. area congressman David Dreier, a mainstream conservative, would be delivering a keynote address. I had nothing better to do-- and it was at Culina, a restaurant with a good reputation I'd been meaning to try-- so I went. The restaurant was OK, but nothing I would go try again. Dreier was even worse. You may have missed it, but John Kerry asked him to represent the U.S. at the Bali Democracy Forum, a key meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders. Dreier, whose congressional career was ruined when a revolt among homophobic bigots in the GOP House caucus forced then-Speaker Denny Hastert to withdraw Dreier's appointment to replace Tom DeLay as GOP Leader, retired from Congress and is now chairman of the Annenberg-Dreier Commission, which is supposed to work to foster international cooperation between Asia-Pacific nations. It's another "free trade" operation and includes a gaggle of untrustworthy Wall Street shills, from war criminal Henry Kissinger to former China Ambassador Jon Huntsman and "Mack" McLarty, ex-Chief of Staff for Free Trade evangelist Bill Clinton.

Maybe it was the wrong crowd for Dreier to exert any energy for but he was a basically a hackneyed dud who slept-walked through a droll speech about nothing in particular. Dreier was the founder of the Congressional Trade Working Group and in 2009 he made a "free" trade speech on the House floor that must have pleased the campaign donors who financed his long DC career. "It goes back to my education in college; and that is, the notion of the United States of America playing a leading role in global economic growth so that we can increase the number of good American jobs. That means good jobs right here in the United States of America. I believe that trade is key to that. Trade, global trade, is going to play a big role in creating jobs, jobs, jobs." Really? Joshua Holland, cut Dreier's corporate cheerleading to ribbons in his book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy.

Dreier gave that speech during the most severe unemployment crisis the United States had faced since the 1930s. It’s a stunningly counterintuitive assertion, because trade agreements facilitate the offshoring of jobs to countries with lower labor costs, which in turn beefs up companies’ profits. That dynamic is evident in executive pay—a 2004 study by the Institute for Policy Studies found that “CEOs at companies that outsource the most U.S. jobs are rewarded with bigger paychecks.” The authors found that “Average CEO compensation at the 50 firms outsourcing the most service jobs increased by 46 percent in 2003, compared to a 9 percent average increase for all CEOs at the 365 large companies surveyed by BusinessWeek.”

As Dean Baker put it, “The truth is, we carefully structured these trade agreements-- we put great effort into it-- to put our manufacturing workers into competition with manufacturing workers in developing nations.

"That meant going to these places and asking: What kind of problems does General Motors face if they want to set up a manufacturing plant in Mexico or Malaysia or China? What can we do to make it as easy as possible? That means that they know they can set up their factory and not have it nationalized, not have restrictions on repatriating profits, etc. Then they need to be able to import the goods back into the United States, and that means not only making sure there are no tariffs or quotas, but also that there’s no safety or environmental restrictions that might keep the goods out."

The offshoring trend can only get worse as long as we stay the present course on trade. Alan Blinder, a conservative economist at Princeton University, estimated that as many as 29 percent of U.S. jobs are offshorable.

And it’s not simply a matter of jobs sent overseas. In a 2007 study analyzing fifty years of research, economist Josh Bivens argued that the current (and largely bipartisan) trade regime adds some bucks to the paychecks of America’s highest earners but keeps wages down for 70 percent of the U.S. workforce, even adjusting for the greater purchasing power they might enjoy because of cheap imports flooding the shelves of Wal-Mart. He found that corporate-driven “free-trade” agreements not only increase the gap between richer and poorer countries, but also add to inequality among citizens of wealthy states such as the United States. Bivens estimated the direct cost of “free trade” deals to families in the middle of the economic pile to be $2,135 per year. That’s about 50 percent more than the same family pays in federal income taxes annually ($1,495).

It’s tempting to focus only on the economic impacts of trade deals such as NAFTA, but it’s just as important to dig deeper into the antidemocratic nature of the “free trade” orthodoxy pushed by Big Business. All too often, progressives tie themselves up in knots discussing trade because they argue the issue on corporate America’s terms, instead of going to the root of the matter: “free trade” isn’t free, and it often has nothing to do with what most people would consider “trade.”

If the central question we’re asking is “Free trade or protectionism?” the debate is already lost. That’s how the corporate globalizers have presented it and that’s how the media-- which clearly have a horse in the race-- report it. And that’s why the so-called free traders have been able to keep the upper hand.

Here’s the truth about “free trade” agreements. When you talk about trade policy, you’re really talking about the enormous influence of corporate power over democratic governance. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the gutsy leader of the fair-trade caucus, explained the close connection during the lead-up to the vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005. “Our political system is now up for the highest bidder,” Brown told me at the time. “Energy bills are written by oil companies and environmental bills are written by the chemical companies.

"Similarly, this trade agreement-- CAFTA-- but other trade agreements, too, have been written by a select few for a select few-- and that select few is typically the drug industry, the insurance and financial institutions, and the energy companies, and the largest multinational corporations. It’s the same old song, whether it’s international or it’s domestic.

In his book The Myths of Free Trade, Brown described thousands of corporate jets stacked up over D.C. as the vote neared, carrying industry execs eager to descend on the city to lobby for the agreement. Trade policy is clearly an insider’s game.

In their book Whose Trade Organization, Lori Wallach and Patrick Woodall found that among the hundreds of “experts” who sat on the advisory boards that hammered out the thousands of pages of WTO and NAFTA rules, there were only a handful of representatives of labor. The rest were multinational execs and various lawyers, lobbyists, and sundry industry experts. There was almost zero input from human rights groups, environmentalists, or the rest of society. It’s not only that the treaties we’ve signed are flawed, but the process by which they’re created makes it all but impossible that they would benefit working people or protect our commons. These are simply not corporate America’s priorities (nor those of its counterparts in Japan or the EU).

Watch for Kerry to appoint Dreier to something nice and plum soon. This afternoon, starting at 3pm there will be a big protest across from an Obama fundraiser at the Beverly Hills Hotel against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. It'll be at the Will Rogers Memorial Park at 9650 Sunset Blvd in Beverly Hills. Flush the TPP reminds us that what we're talking about is a secret trade agreement being negotiated behind the backs of Congress and the American people, which threatens to undermine not just the economic well-being of millions of families but also democracy itself. "Srom food safety and the environment, to worker rights and access to healthcare, the TPP is about much more than trade. It his a global corporate coup." If you're in L.A. today… it goes from 3pm to 6pm.

TPPtoolkit_Nov2012

David Dreier's Constituent Service-- A Horrifying Report From A Parent Of Two Kidnapped Children

The other day I had a call from an old friend, Russ Warner, who I know as a family man and as a father as well as the progressive Democrat running for the seat in a neighboring district currently held by David Dreier, aggressively not a family man. Russ introduced me to Andrew Ko, a neighbor and distraught father whose two 10-year old twin sons, Christopher and William, were abducted to Singapore by his ex-wife. Once his sons were spirited out of the country Andrew went to David Dreier, his congressman. Dreier was unhelpful... even insulting, sending him a letter address to Dear "Mr. Yo" and telling him to "have a nice day." Andrew wound up taking out an ad (left) in the L.A. Times. He also talked with Russ who personally delivered his paperwork to Senator Boxer, who is now working on the case. I asked Andrew to write a guest post to explain what he's been through. I mean, he's actually a Republican and that ad must have cost him a few thousand dollars.

My ex-wife, Yuxin Mei Wang, is a Singaporean. She violated the July 2008 Custody Order and disappeared with the boys on August 31, 2009.  A “Find and Retrieve Order” was issued by the Los Angeles County Superior Court on September 4, 2009, just over a year ago. 
 
Yuxin Mei Wang was able to obtain new Singapore passports for the children from the Singapore Consulate in San Francisco without my authorization or knowledge.  When the children first disappeared, I contacted the Singapore Consulate.  A consular officer, Lea Chan, told me in no uncertain terms that they DID NOT issue passports for the children. She will have to check with the authorities in Singapore to see if the passports were issued from Singapore. 5 days later, she called and said San Francisco actually issued the passports. So much for record keeping.
 
There is a 4-count felony arrest warrant from the State of California and an FBI warrant. An Interpol Red Notice was diffused on November 25, 2009 and Singapore is a member of Interpol. A former Singapore Police Commissioner, Khoo Boon Hwee, is current president of Interpol. Repeated inquiries by the Los Angeles County District Attorney on the status of the Red Notice for arrest of the abducting parent continues to go unanswered.
 
I bring you back to the case of American teenager Michael Fay who was sentenced to 5 strokes of the cane in Singapore back in 1994 for vandalism. 24 US Senators and President Clinton appealed to the Singapore Government to spare Fay, claiming the punishment does not fit the crime.  Here is a link to a few Singapore newspaper articles about this case. The response is that the U.S. does not have to agree with Singapore laws, the U.S. only has to respect them.

The Interpol Red Notice was issued because the abducting parent broke U.S. laws.  No one is saying she broke Singapore laws. Singapore does not have to agree with U.S. laws, Singapore only has to respect them.
 
In April of this year, the Singapore Foreign Ministry released this statement regarding a Romanian diplomat involved in a car accident. Singapore requested Interpol to issue a Red Notice for the arrest of the Romanian diplomat. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, George Yeo, said Romania has a "clear moral obligation" to persuade the diplomat to return to Singapore to stand trial.  Why is it when Singapore wants to arrest someone, the country providing safe haven has a "clear moral obligation" to return the fugitive; but when the U.S. wants to arrest a Singaporean wanted for crimes in the U.S. Singaproe tells the U.S. to go "pound salt."
 
At the 78th General Assembly of Interpol held in Singapore in October 2009, Singapore Minister of Law Mr. K. Shanmugam gave a speech commending the progress made by member countries of Interpol. He highlighted the apprehension of Singaporean fugitive lawyer Tan Cheng Yew by the German authorities after Singapore Police issued an Interpol Red Notice.
 
When the U.S. issues an Interpol Red Notice, Singapore ignores it completely and offers safe-haven to a wanted fugitive.
 
The U.S. trains the Singapore Air Force at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and Mountain High Air Force Base in Idaho. The Luke AFB training costs $325 million dollars and... who pays for this??

Congressman Chris Smith (NJ-4) has a bill in Congress HR 3240 that will put pressure on countries to prevent child abduction and facilitate the children's return.  Let's amend this bill to say that countries like Singapore, Japan, and Philippines who knowingly ignore valid US requests to return the children will have military and economic assistance suspended until the children are returned. If you want to benefit from the relationship with the U.S., you have to respect our laws whether you agree with them or not.
 
Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont has written to the Singapore Ambassador but the response was not encouraging. Sen. Leahy then wrote to Secretary of State Clinton. My Congressman, David Dreier, has not done much except to forward my letters to a few parties. Singapore's response is that they did not know. They did not know because they did not check and ask some basic questions when a single parent is applying for passports for minor children.
 
The Department of Justice refuses to issue a formal extradition request to  Singapore citing different "interpretation" of the extradition by Singapore. Treaties are not subject to re-interpretation after they are signed according to the Vienna Convention.
 
Another interesting response is from the Singapore Ministry of Education.  They refuse to provide me information regarding the children.  The latest letter asks for a court order. My name is on the birth certificate and the Ministry of Education accepted this as an enrollment document but refuses to provide me information on my children. My lawyer in Singapore has now gone back to the Education Ministry to ask what aspect of law are they basing the requirement that a parent needs a court order before obtaining information on their children. Is this a requirement for all parents or just the left behind parent when their children have been abducted to Singapore? 
 
None of the elected officials I contacted called me regarding my case. I ran the ad above on the 1 year anniversary of the abduction on August 31, 2010 in the L.A. Times.  I even wrote the People's Republic of China Ambassador in Washington DC and their Consulate in Los Angeles asking if they might be able to help as they have a good relationship with Singapore. Guess what? I received a call from a consular officer, Mr. Yang from Los Angeles, within 10 days of my letters. He listened and offered some advice. But at least someone from the Chinese Consulate called; unlike my own elected officials.

Another compelling reason to Dump David Dreier, whose too busy working for Special Interests and galavanting around the globe with his lover/chief of staff to give proper assistance to an American citizen/constituent. Interpol Red Notice:

Made In America Act Passes With Huge Bipartisan Majority... But Not With David Dreier's Vote

The House has been back in session for a couple days now, voting  on things like the Rhett Schiller Post Office in Waterford, Wisconsin (411-0) and agreeing to honor members of the Army National Guard and Air National Guard of the State of Oklahoma for their service and sacrifice on behalf of the United States since September 11, 2001 (378-0). But there was one vote yesterday that flushed out the most extremist of the kooks and nutjobs on the far edges of the right. (I bet Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Ron Johnson, Pat Toomey and Joe Miller are regretting they'll missing out on this kind of stuff while dodging the press and avoiding debates back home.)

Speaker Pelosi brought up Marcy Kaptur's Congressional Made in America Promise Act (H.R. 2039). Basically it amends the Buy American Act to apply Buy American requirements to articles, materials, and supplies acquired for the use of any legislative branch office, including the House of Representatives and the Senate. Sounds like a no brainer-- sort of like agreeing to a post office name, right? Well, for most Members of Congress that's exactly what it was. Blue Dog Leonard Boswell put it like this:

I am proud to support this legislation which will require two major government bodies to lead by example and buy American. It is ridiculous that a visitor to the Capitol Gift Shop could be purchasing an umbrella or mug made in China instead of a souvenir made right here in the U.S. by American workers. These bills will leverage the purchasing power of the federal government to invest in American companies that produce American-made goods, hire American workers, and in turn fill and create American jobs... We must not reward corporations that outsource American jobs for cheaper labor abroad. I will continue to fight for legislation that reinvests and rebuilds America’s manufacturing industry to create jobs and a strong foundation for our nation’s economy.”

And the bill passed, of course. 371 Members voted for it but 35 right-wing ideologues from the bowels of the GOP decided the bill violated the spirit of their version of free enterprise and cast NO votes, kooks and clowns like Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ron Paul (R-TX), Steve King (R-IA), Mike Pence (R-IN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), Steve Kingston (R-GA), closet queen Trent Franks (R-AZ), and, obviously, Paul Broun (R-GA). But also among the cadre of dangerous anti-American extremists and fanatics were two southern California congressmen who go to some lengths to try to pass themselves off as vaguely mainstream, John Campbell and David Dreier. I reached the progressive Democratic small business owner running against Dreier, Russ Warner, and asked him why Dreier had thrown his lot in with the crackpots and fringe elements on this kind of a bread and butter bill that even his own ultraconservative party leaders voted for.

"His vote yesterday against the Buy American Act didn't surprise me. David Dreier is a hypocrite who says one thing and votes the totally opposite. He pretends to support the middle class, but all he cares about are the corporations and wealthy CEOs who have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign over the years and have helped make him the 20th richest member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He doesn't care about small businesses, the people of his district or the image of America. All he cares about is himself and the wealthy corporations that have kept him in power for nearly 30 years. I say-- enough!

"It's just another example showing that David Dreier supports free trade at any cost, even though it has meant the loss of tens of thousands of good-paying jobs for Americans and a growing trade deficit. As of late, Dreier has been pushing for "fast track" approval of a free trade agreement with South Korea, even though Seoul's strict vehicle standards would inhibit U.S. Imports and jeopardize U.S. jobs by eliminating import duties on Korean pick up trucks. South Korea imposes a partial ban on imports of U.S. Beef, which should be pulled back before we make any trade concessions of any kind.

"David Dreier has been pushing his free trade agenda for the nearly 30 years he's been in office. Look where it's gotten us. He doesn't care at all about the American worker. He's just interested in advancing the interests of the transnational corporations who count on him and his vote."

It's time to revitalize DumpDavidDreier.com!

Who You Gonna Call... David Dreier Or Ezra Klein?

When Tom DeLay was forced to resign from the House after being indicted for "ethical improprieties," Denny Hastert decided to appoint fellow closet case David Dreier as Republican Majority Leader. The howls of rage from Capitol Hill were so loud that George Bush was woken from his late afternoon nap. Roy Blunt, a particularly nasty homophobe, had some choice words about poor Dreier's well-known sexual proclivities and about his barely concealed life in the closet, to the effect that he had no intention of working under such a person.

Today Dreier is a figure of derision and pity. He's fairly senior in the Republican hierarchy, but he has no juice whatsoever. He toes the right-wing line religiously-- even voting against the bipartisan bill to control Red Tide, something ultra-popular in his environmentally sensitive district. Other House Republicans, attuned to their districts, bucked the GOP extremist leadership to vote "aye." Liberals? Yeah, right... like Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Brian Bilbray (R-CA), Mary Fallin (R-OK), Adam Putnam (R-FL), Tom Cole (R-OK), Paul Ryan (R-WI), John Boozman (R-AR), John Kline (R-MN), Anders Crenshaw (R-FL), Rob Wittman (R-VA), Adrian Smith (R-NE). Dreier's in a netherworld of his own, a victim of his own horrid choices-- neither fish nor foul-- or a little bit of both.

So when he went running to the media yesterday screaming that the Democrats' healthcare reform bill was dead, most everyone to the left of Michelle Malkin yawned. No one tells David Dreier anything-- except where the newest humpy tea room is. A far more reliable, reality-based source of what's going on is the Post's resident politics-of-healthcare expert Ezra Klein, who has made an effort to remove the hyperbole and give as clear an explanation as possible of what Pelosi is trying to accomplish with her "deem and pass" strategy.

Rather than passing the Senate bill and then passing the fixes, the House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House "deems" the Senate bill passed after the House passes the fixes.

The virtue of this, for Pelosi's members, is that they don't actually vote on the Senate bill. They only vote on the reconciliation package. But their vote on the reconciliation package functions as a vote on the Senate bill. The difference is semantic, but the bottom line is this: When the House votes on the reconciliation fixes, the Senate bill is passed, even if the Senate hasn't voted on the reconciliation fixes, and even though the House never specifically voted on the Senate bill.

It's a circuitous strategy born of necessity. Pelosi doesn't have votes for the Senate bill without the reconciliation package. But the Senate parliamentarian said that the Senate bill must be signed into law before the reconciliation package can be signed into law. That removed Pelosi's favored option of passing the reconciliation fixes before passing the Senate bill. So now the House will vote on reconciliation explicitly and the Senate bill implicitly, which is politically easier, even though the effect is not any different than if Congress were to pass the Senate bill first and pass the reconciliation fixes after. This is all about plausible deniability for House members who don't want to vote for the Senate bill, although I doubt many voters will find the denials plausible.

Pelosi relishes a great, long-term debate with the GOP on the merits of government protecting society from the ravages of the selfish and greedy. It's a damn shame that the Democratic Party-- herding cats-- is so politically clueless as to actually seek members who are sure to oppose the party's own grand ambitions for the American people. Right now the DCCC is pushing Lori Edwards, a reactionary Blue Dog who will always be one press conference away from switching parties à la Parker Griffith, instead of getting behind a true blue grassroots Democrat, Doug Tudor in FL-12. Similarly, we hear Pelosi has put an awkward thumb on the table in favor of one of this year's worst Democratic candidates, former Joe Lieberman for President campaign chair Katrina Swett, who is trying to steal a New Hampshire congressional nomination away from progressive activist Ann McLane Kuster.

Pelosi, more than anyone, knows the depths of Jane Harman's perfidy and has certainly been more than aware of the damage Bart Stupak has done to the cause of healthcare reform, to women's rights, to the Democratic Party and, most importantly, to the United States of America. She has seen Georgia Blue Dog John Barrow, a cowardly cur if there ever was one, crossing the aisle to vote with the GOP in committee and on the floor over and over and over. But she is far from countenancing primary challenges against any of them, even though each has an outstanding progressive challenger eager to vote for the ideals of the party of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

And, as Digby mentioned at her blog yesterday, that is exactly why MoveOn is raising a war chest to deploy against faithless Democrats and why Blue America started the Sending Democrats A Message page. We'll do what weak and compromised leaders won't and/or can't do. When I ran into Rahm Emanuel in a DC bar shortly after Donna Edwards beat insider Al Wynn in the Democratic primary, I wasn't sure, after I had introduced myself, if he was going to keel over from a heart attack or lunge at me. And I was just congratulating him on having traded in a loyal and principled Democrat for an aisle-crossing corrupt one.

Meanwhile, back in Dreier territory... he eventually went on to admit that the Republicans can't stop the procedure that Ezra described (above). “There is nothing that can prevent it,” said Dreier, the ranking member of the Rules Committee. “It’s something they can clearly do if they have the votes.” Happy days are here again? We'll see.

David Dreier (R-CA) Caught Up In Ethics Scandal

The ranking member of the Rules Committee shouldn't be systematically bending the rules for his personal gain

Last night The Hill broke the news that San Gabriel Valley Congressman David Dreier seems to have been breaking the law in the use of campaign contributions for personal expenses, something observers have long suspected. It appears that he's stolen as much as $200,000 from the legalized bribes paid to him by his big corporate donors. That's not just unethical; it's illegal. Dreier claims he uses a personal credit card "for campaign purchases in order "to keep things simple and avoid fraud when it comes to meals at restaurants or catering charges and that each credit card statement is reviewed by four people to ensure proper charges." Dreier's frequent dining companion and traveling companion is his highly paid chief of staff and long-time lover, Brad W. Smith.

According to a review of Dreier’s FEC reports since 2000, his campaign has listed a total of about $200,000 worth of expenditures for the purpose of “candidate reimbursement.” But the forms don’t say, as the FEC appears to instruct, what Dreier had to reimburse himself for.

According to the FEC’s candidate guide, candidates must “report the reimbursement as an operating expenditure” and itemize any expenditure over $200.

...According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he reimbursed himself nearly $63,000 during the 2008 election cycle and more than $78,000 during the 2006 cycle. The numbers were smaller in the cycles prior and included $34,000 in the 2004 cycle and $23,000 in the 2002 cycle.

All but two expenditures from the committee to Dreier are listed as “candidate reimbursement.” One expenditure, from 2006, is listed under “seminar reimbursement,” while another, from 2002, is listed as “luncheons, dinners, etc.”

Beyond those reimbursements, though, it’s not clear what Dreier was reimbursing himself for.

Dreier has spent more than $7 million from his campaign account on his last four reelection races, but he did not face serious opponents in any of them. The incumbent, who has served in his Southern California district since 1980, has rarely faced a tough reelection throughout his tenure.

When I went to work at Warner Brothers, a senior manager tried to show me how to use my credit card to steal from the company. I was appalled. He laughed and said "everyone" does it. I pointed out that claiming handmade Italian suit was an allowable dinner for clients in a high-end restaurant was nothing short of stealing. I watched many executives pull off similar penny-ante shenanigans over the years and I always knew that people with this kind of low moral standing would never be trustworthy. When I became president of my division I was careful to make sure that executives who stole from the shareholders (owners) in this way weren't placed in temptation's way. An inherently dishonest man like Dreier, who has been in office virtually his entire adult life, comes to feel "entitled" to live beyond his means. And it spills over into his job performance.

Dreier has been a relentless and dogged fighter against health care reform-- far out of proportion to the moderate nature of his suburban L.A. congressional district, the 26th. The district has been trending blue and McCain took a mere 47% of the vote, down from 55% for Bush in 2004. The 26th has also been one of the hardest hit districts in the country in terms of the mortgage crisis-- 13,487 foreclosures, and 44,903 projected foreclosures over the next 4 years. But again, Dreier has been in the forefront of stubborn Republican opposition, the kind of stone-cold opposition one might expect from a backward district in rural Georgia or suburban Dallas but not from a Representative whose mainstream constituents live in places like Claremont, Glendora, San Dimas, Monrovia, Arcadia, San Marino, La Canada-Flintridge... It makes no sense-- at least not until you look at the sources of campaign contributions that have bought David Dreier his lucrative political career.

Dreier has been a favorite of the FIRE Sector (Finance/Insurance/Real Estate) and a favorite of the Medical-Industrial Complex. The two sectors and their lobbyists have pumped immense sums into Dreier's career and Dreier has never hesitated to vote for their interested-- even when those private interests are in direct opposition to the interests if his own constituents, like in the foreclosure and banking crisis. The banksters and Big Insurance CEOs have lavished $2,124,338 on Dreier, far more than your average congressman. In fact the only California congressman to have profited as handsomely as Dreier from his pro-bankster voting record is notorious Big Business shill Ed Royce ($2,597,049).

And Dreier is in the top ranks of recipients of legalized bribes from the Medical-Industrial Complex as well-- $597,439, the only California Republican taking in more being ex-lobbyist Brian Bilbray ($720,086). When the Energy and Commerce Committee looked at the benefits the Affordable Health Choices Act would bring to Dreier's district, his opposition seems downright insane.

America’s Affordable Health Choices Act would provide significant benefits in the 26th Congressional District of California: up to 13,200 small businesses could receive tax credits to provide coverage to their employees; 11,200 seniors would avoid the donut hole in Medicare Part D; 1,300 families could escape bankruptcy each year due to unaffordable health care costs; health care providers would receive payment for $35 million in uncompensated care each year; and 71,000 uninsured individuals would gain access to high-quality, affordable health insurance. Congressman David Dreier represents the district.

• Help for small businesses. Under the legislation, small businesses with 25 employees or less and average wages of less than $40,000 qualify for tax credits of up to 50% of the costs of providing health insurance. There are up to 13,200 small businesses in the district that could qualify for these credits.

• Help for seniors with drug costs in the Part D donut hole. Each year, 11,200 seniors in the district hit the donut hole and are forced to pay their full drug costs, despite having Part D drug coverage. The legislation would provide them with immediate relief, cutting brand name drug costs in the donut hole by 50%, and ultimately eliminate the donut hole.

• Health care and financial security. There were 1,300 health care-related bankruptcies in the district in 2008, caused primarily by the health care costs not covered by insurance. The bill provides health insurance for almost every American and caps annual out-of-pocket costs at $10,000 per year, ensuring that no citizen will have to face financial ruin because of high health care costs.

• Relieving the burden of uncompensated care for hospitals and health care providers. In 2008, health care providers in the district provided $35 million worth of uncompensated care, care that was provided to individuals who lacked insurance coverage and were unable to pay their bills. Under the legislation, these costs of uncompensated care would be virtually eliminated.

• Coverage of the uninsured. There are 92,000 uninsured individuals in the district, 13% of the district. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that nationwide, 97% of all Americans will have insurance coverage when the bill takes effect. If this benchmark is reached in the district, 71,000 people who currently do not have health insurance will receive coverage.

• No deficit spending. The cost of health care reform under the legislation is fully paid for: half through making the Medicare and Medicaid program more efficient and half through a surtax on the income of the wealthiest individuals. This surtax would affect only 6,750 households in the district. The surtax would not affect 97.8% of taxpayers in the district.

Do you detect a pattern? Dreier is notoriously dishonest in his personal life-- a lifelong homosexual living in the closet, hypocritically refusing to acknowledge his sexuality while voting against equality for ordinary gay families who don't have the protections afforded the high and mighty-- in the same way he enjoys tax-payer funded health insurance, though he's a multimillionaire, while he is absolutely hysterical about denying even a modicum if that kind of health insurance to his own constituents.

This year Russ Warner, a progressive independent businessman with very different ethics and very different solutions-- real ones-- to the problems people in CA-26 are facing, is running for Dreier's congressional seat again. If you'd like to see someone who wants to rein in the banksters and Insurance CEOs and the HMOs, in office-- instead of seeing someone who sups at their table and does their bidding-- please consider making a donation to Warner's campaign. Russ issued a statement calling on Dreier to explain.

“I've always told my boys, ‘if you haven't done anything wrong, then you having nothing to hide.’ I think that's why these reimbursements are such a cause for concern for myself and so many others,” Warner said. “Maybe it is just a matter of Congressman Dreier cutting corners again, but given his long track record of putting his own interests ahead of those of his constituents, one can't help but think the worst.”

House Establishes A New Pecora Commission/Senate Passes A Very Weak Foreclosure Bill

Clown (R-OH) weeps for millions of evictions his policies caused

This afternoon, the Senate passed, 91-5, S. 896, Chris Dodd's tragically watered-down bill to prevent mortgage foreclosures. The only obstructionist assholes to vote against this inoffensive bill were Judd Gregg (R-NH) and 4 Calhounists, Jim Bunning (R-KY), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Jim Inhofe (R-OK). It was co-sponsored by Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer but once the banksters stepped in, cracked the whip and defeated Durbin's amendment to put some teeth in the bill-- by giving bankruptcy a tiny bit of power over the mortgage holders-- the bill lost most people's attention. Almost a quarter of U.S. homeowners are underwater but the senators are still voting for the banksters who finance their careers. Anyone who votes for any senator-- regardless of party-- who voted against Durbin's amendment is either very rich and selfish or really teh stoopid. (Better yet, take a look at Mike Lux's 6 steps to dis-empowering Wall Street.) But even after voting down Durbin's attempt to do something real for American working families, the Republicans (and their Bayh Bloc allies) weren't finished trying to sabotage whatever was left of the bill. Since April 30th the Senate has worked on little else besides going through countless right-wing amendments meant to obstruct aiding economically hard-pressed families.

David Diapers Vitter (R-LA) kicked off the circus with a pair of amendments meant to screw over the taxpayers in regard to TARP-- half a dozen from Bayh's anti-Obama bloc, Bayh, Dorgan, Kohl, Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Webb, crossing the aisle-- and some snark about the Federal Housing Administration that only got 36 votes, none from Democrats, not even Ben Nelson. What followed were a slew of rejected obstructionist amendments by Corker, Thune, DeMint, and Coburn, all meant to hamper Obama from carrying out his attempt to dig out from the mess caused by these very same Republican rubber stamps of Bush and Big Business.

The amendment by John Kerry meant to help renters who live in homes that go into foreclosure by allowing tenants to remain in their homes for the duration of their leases passed 57-39, all Democrats voted yes, along with just one Republican, Olympia Snowe.

Meanwhile on the other side of Congress, the House overwhelmingly passed (367-59a call for a new Pecora Commission, the Fraud Enforcement Recovery Act. 117 Republicans abandoned their hopelessly obstructionist leadership and joined all 250 Democrats (including even the most vile and contemptibly corrupt Blue Dogs) in voting to protect taxpayers from unfettered bankster avarice by giving the Justice Department more tools to fight fraud in the use of TARP and recovery funds, and increasing accountability for corporate and mortgage frauds, causes of the current economic collapse. Who would vote against this? Only the most ideologically-minded far right maniacs like Michele Bachmann (R-MN), John Kline (R-MN), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Steve King (R-IA), Paul Broun (R-GA), Mike Pence (R-IN), Adrian Smith (R-NE), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Tom Price (R-GA)-- plus the worst of the House's bribed shills of the banksters:

John Boehner (R-OH- $3,045,809)
Pete Sessions (R-TX- $2,730,126)
David Dreier (R-CA- $2,118,538)
Jeb Hensarling (R-TX- $2,111,371)
Ron Paul (R-TX- $1,686,375)-- I know, I know-- the truth hurts
Geoff Davis (R-KY- $1,612,969)
Sam Johnson (R-TX- $1,565,755)
Don Manzullo (R-IL- $1,388,429)
John Linder (R-GA- $1,337,577)
Dave Camp (R-MI- $1,332,147)
Randy Neugebauer (R-TX- $1,253,775)
John Shadegg (R-AZ- $1,191,961)
Sue Myrick (R-NC- $1,140,388)
Scott Garrett (R-NJ- $1,156,599)
Dan Burton (R-IN- $965,288)
Kay Granger (R-TX- $953,275)
Patrick McHenry (R-NC- $876,350)
John Campbell (R-CA- $832,785)
John Culberson (R-TX- $808,155)
Gresham Barrett (R-SC- $786,873)
Charles Boustany (R-LA- $744,062)

Even normally dependable in-the-pocket votes for all special interests, like Eric Cantor, Thaddeus McCotter, Ken Calvert, Dan Lungren, Paul Ryan and Mean Jean Schmidt, slinked across the aisle and voted for Nancy Pelosi's bill. We reached Russ Warner, who is currently spending his time talking with residents of in a district stretching from La Canada-Flintridge to Rancho Cucamonga, and asked him if he had an idea why David Dreier would be one of the only members of Congress to vote so blatantly in favor of this kind of financially debilitating corruption. Russ was very straight-forward: "I may be a bit biased, but I can't think of a bigger hypocrite in Washington, D.C. than David Dreier. Just the other day, he was joining the chorus of legislators calling for more federal oversight in the financial sector; today, he votes against the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (FERA), legislation designed to prevent the sort of criminal conduct that damages our economy and harms hard working Americans. He may talk a good game, but it seems pretty clear where David Dreier's priorities lie."

Today Barney Frank (D-MA) spoke on the floor of the House about the predatory lending bill, and about how the Republicans continue to do everything in their thankfully decreasing power to block desperately needed regulation of the financial services industry.

Which California Congressmen Are Owned By The Special Interests?

Dreier supports property rights-- for banksters & predatory lenders, but not for ordinary California families

Yesterday we looked at the dynamic between congressmen who have taken large quasi-legal bribes from the banking sector and their willingness to always support the banksters' special interests regardless of how gravely it impacts their own constituents. Yesterday's occasion was the overwhelming passage, by the House of the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2009 which  seeks to protect consumers from predatory and unscrupulous banksters and credit card lenders by:

·    Ending unfair, arbitrary interest rate increases;
·    Letting customers set hard credit limits, stops excessive "over the limit" fees;
·    Ending unfair penalties for cardholders who pay on time;
·    Requiring fair allocation of consumer payments;
·    Protecting cardholders from due date gimmicks;
·    Preventing companies from using misleading terms and damaging consumers' credit ratings;
·    Protecting vulnerable consumers from high-fee subprime credit cards;
·    Baring Issuing Credit Cards to Vulnerable Minors;
·    Requiring Better Data Collection from Credit Card Industry;
·    Swiftly Implementing the 45-Day Notice Requirement

Every Democrat but one mangy Blue Dog in bed with the credit card industry voted yes-- and so did 105 Republicans! There were only 69 Republicans voting no, a combination of the well-bribed and the sociopath extremists. Here in California, 6 members-- who always oppose regulations for their campaign donors-- voted no:

Ed Royce (CA-40- $2,506,414)
David Dreier (CA-26- $2,118,538)
Gary Miller (CA-42- $765,988)
Devin Nunes (CA-21- $499,235)
Kevin McCarthy (CA-22- $461,138)
Tom McClintock (CA-04- $353,294)

Yesterday David Dayen did an excellent preview of how the 2010 congressional cycle is shaping up in California. He points out that two on this list of sell-outs, Tom McClintock, who has emerged as the most extreme right member of the California delegation, and Dreier, who only wound up with 53% of the vote and whose district went for Obama in November.

Dreier will once again be forced to face a top rate challenge in 2010, Russ Warner, who has every intention of making sure voters from Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, and Claremont to San Dimas, Monrovia, Sierra Madre, San Marino and La Crescenta know that Dreier is strictly a representative of the special interests that have done such grievous damage to the state's economy and to the financial well-being to his own constituents. “Time and time again," Russ told us this morning after going over the vote yesterday, "David Dreier proves the interests of his corporate donors take precedent over the people he was elected to serve. Dreier’s never felt the pressure of supporting a family and has lived off the taxpayer dime for nearly three decades, so its not surprising he has no idea how harmful these predatory credit card companies are."

I'd like to hear that kind of talk from every candidate making a serious attempt to help us get rid of these congressional parasites. And each one of them should run an ad like this on cable TV:

California Democrat Russ Warner Announces Another Bid For Congress

With everyone preoccupied with Arlen Specter's label switch, I imagined that the only big news out of California today would be the appropriately stiff sentence for former Republican Party crown prince, "America's Sheriff," Mike Carona. One of the most overtly crooked politicians in California history got a stern lecture, a $125,000 fine and five and a half years in prison, of which he'll have to serve a minimum of 4 years and seven months. But an announcement of far greater significance for California progressives just came down the transom.

One of Blue America's hardest working candidates from last year, Russ Warner, just announced what grassroots and progressive Democrats were hoping against hope he would do: Russ has decided to finish the job he started and he'll be running against David Dreier again. First a little background. Obama won the suburban L.A. area district 51-47%. Ironically, Russ-- while bringing Dreier's 2006 winning number (57%) down to the incumbent danger zone (53%)-- didn't win largely because of a massive Mormon turn out for the bigoted Prop 8 their church was pushing. I say "ironic," because few of those anti-gay Mormon voters understood that by pulling the lever for Dreier, they were voting for one of Washington's most notorious and hypocritical closet queens.

At the California Democratic Party Convention Saturday, Howard Dean presented Russ with the Ron Platt Courage Award on behalf of the Red to Blue Coalition and Russ told the participants he would run again next year. It's official now! And Russ is already out there swinging. "Don't be fooled," says Russ Warner. In announcing he would take on Dreier, who spent $2,919,351 last year told hold onto his seat (Russ spent $1,261,171), Russ reminded Democratic activists that "This is the same David Dreier who voted against the best interests of this district and stuck with House Republicans in an effort to block President Barack Obama's $787 billion economy recovery package in February. It's high time Dreier stop playing party politics and start looking out for the needs of the people he was
elected to represent."

The former chair of the House Rules Committee, and now ranking member, Dreier has routinely voted for every single special interest bill the banksters and crooked realtors have asked for. He's been a fanatic deregulation extremist. And, what a coincidence, he's taken $367,750 from the finance/insurance/real estate sector in "donations," far more than the average corrupt member of Congress. The banksters are delighted that they always get what they pay for from Dreier, who even voted against allowing bankruptcy judges to re-adjust mortgages on families being threatened with foreclosure, despite the fact that CA-26 is one of the three-dozen hardest hit districts in the country by the foreclosure blight. (It is estimated that 13,487 families have been kicked out of their houses in the district, something that has had a devastating impact on property values.) Dreier, who lives in DC and Kansas City doesn't have much contact with the district and knows nothing at all about the strains on area homeowners.

Anyway, please help me welcome Russ back into electoral politics with a donation to his campaign. He's going to need all the help he can get if he's going to finally retire Dreier. Volunteers are welcome and can sign up at his website.

The Daily Blue America Report-- #3

California-04- In a rational world it would not be especially remarkable that the Sacramento Bee endorsed Charlie Brown over Tom McClintock today. Of course in a rational world, we would never have accepted George Bush as president and elected a Congress dedicated to the impoverishment of working families on behalf of special interests. The editors of the very Republican Bee say it was a "clear choice" and urges their readers to "opt for pragmatism, not rigid ideology." Bingo! Charlie is a moderate and pragmatic well-respected, admired member of the community. McClintock is some kind of a far right extremist from hundreds of miles away looking-- as he always is-- for a plush job.

Democratic candidate Charlie Brown is a career U.S. Air Force officer, now retired. During the Vietnam War, he flew helicopter missions in southeast Asia. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his helicopter rescue in the Mayaguez incident of May 1975 and coordinated Air Force surveillance flights over Iraq in the 1990s.

Brown, a 17-year resident of Roseville who ran against Doolittle in 2006, has worked hard the last three years to build a relationship with voters in the district. In the end, he would be the more effective voice on issues that matter to the district and the region.

... McClintock has an "old economy" vision for the district, relying on increased timber production (which would require gutting environmental laws and hard-won compromises) and water. He sees an Auburn Dam as the "single most important project for the region."

Brown has met with wind and solar business owners and favors alternative energy tax credits and high-speed Internet access. He would fight for expansion of Interstate 80 and Highway 50, stream-bed restoration in Sierra Meadows, improvements to existing dams and Lake Tahoe restoration. He supports forest thinning to decrease fire hazards.

The most recent polling shows Charlie ahead 48-42 and with $2 million in air time reserved by the DCCC. The Republican Party has given up on McClintock as hopeless and too extreme. He's out of money. His is the race most observers see as the surest Democratic victory in California. The infamous NRCC "death list" from last week writes off CA-04 and is pessimistic about Brian Bilbray's chances for re-election. But several other California incumbents are in jeopardy: Dana Rohrabacher (CA-46), Mary Bono Mack (CA-45), Dan Lungren (CA-03) and David Dreier (CA-26).


California-26- Blue America just launched a special fundraising page with one object: defeating David Dreier, one of the last of the ultra reactionary extremists left in the Los Angeles congressional delegation (along with Dana Rohrabacher).

Dreier has certainly been a dependable Bush rubber stamp across the entire panoply of issues that have made Bush’s presidency the worst in modern American history. But it isn't even just his blind support for Bush that has made Dreier so odious. In these troubled economic times Dreier has been a shameless handmaiden for Big Business and special corporate interests over and above the interests of his own constituents. His record on health care is the worst of any California congressman and his record on veterans is just as disgraceful. Fortunately, there is a way to battle a deceitful and corrupt hack like Dreier on the issues—and that is what the Democrats are doing. We applaud them. But there’s is more to Dreier than just reactionary politics.

Dreier is a closeted gay man and a frightened hypocrite who votes against equality for gay families while prancing around the world to every gay hotspot there is-- at taxpayer expense-- with his overpaid lover. It’s time for him to shuffle back to Kansas City, where he still lives when he’s not in Washington, so CA-26 can have some real representation that makes sense for southern California.

Please help Blue America mail this information piece about Congressman Dreier out to some of the residents of the district, like himself, who are in favor of the homophobic Proposition 8. If they plan to vote against equality for gay people, maybe they need to find out about their own representative's extracurricular activities. You can donate here.



Virginia-10- Clear across the country in Northern Virginia-- the part Republicans claim isn't "real" Virginia-- a Democratic video tracker was politely asking Congressman Frank Wolf a question-- which Wolf rudely ignored-- when he was assaulted by Republican staffers and beaten with a cane. (Hey, Sarah-- is that what you meant by "Real Virginia?") Although Wolf did nothing to stop the attack, at least he didn't personally join in. RaisingKaine has the video and the whole sordid story.

Normally we reserve this space for Blue America candidates-- and let me remind you that you can contribute to Charlie Brown, Russ Warner and Judy Feder right here-- a Sam Bennett supporter in Montgomery County, PA sent DWT a beautiful and inspiring Obama video we want to share with you as we go into the most important week of the campaign: