It's Harder For Some Republicans To Hop On The Hillary Bandwagon Than It Is For Others

Trump's most recent mail-order bride, the one he thinks would make a perfect First Lady, posing with a gun and a thong... nice boots. Not joining #GOPWomenWithHer

Writing for the NY Times this morning, Patrick Healy makes the point that "Should she win the presidency, Hillary Clinton would quickly try to find common ground with Republicans on an immigration overhaul and infrastructure spending, risking the wrath of liberals who would like nothing more than to twist the knife in a wounded opposition party... Deeply confident that she would perform better as the president than as a political candidate, Mrs. Clinton wants to pursue a whole new approach at the White House to try to break through years of partisan gridlock, according to a dozen campaign advisers and allies who described her goals and outlook. From policy goals and personnel to her instinct for patiently cultivating the enemy, Mrs. Clinton thinks she would be a better dealmaker than President Obama if she finds willing partners on the other side."

Marty Torrey, the head of Republicans for Hillary, wrote on the group's website that "The carnival atmosphere, media coverage, Twitter-based, and cash-crazy nature of this year’s election has thus far managed to avoid addressing what criteria matter most in the selection of our next President: experience, seriousness, intelligence, bipartisanship, global awareness. Yes party loyalty matters, but at this point in what will one day become our history, loyalty to country matters more."

The Republican Party establishment has spent so many years-- decades-- demonizing the Clintons that as much as it's partially inoculated her from even legitimate charges about her corruption and malfeasance in the eyes of normal people, it's made it intensely difficult for Republicans fleeing from the horrors of Trumpism to embrace her candidacy. That said, Ben Howe, a contributing editor of Red State said aloud what many Republicans are thinking: "I am a fiscal conservative and I am a social conservative. That will not change. But I will not vote for an egomaniacal authoritarian. Nope. #ImWithHer." Larry Pressler, a former Republican senator from South Dakota is thinking along the same lines: "I can’t believe I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, but I am…this morning, I woke up and told my wife, ‘Did I really do that?’ But I did…this election is starting to sound like the German elections in the late 1920s, this is a very dangerous national conversation we’re slipping into." Richard Armitage, George W. Bush's Deputy Secretary of State seems to understand that Hillary is more of a mainstream Republican than Trump is. "He doesn’t appear to be to be a Republican, he doesn’t appear to want to learn about issues. So I’m going to vote for Mrs. Clinton." One of the anchors of the Republican foreign policy establishment, Brent Scowcroft, who served as National Security Adviser to both Ford and Bush, is taking the extra step away from Trumpism as well: "The presidency requires the judgment and the knowledge to make tough calls under pressure. I believe Hillary Clinton has the wisdom and experience to lead our country at this critical time."

A few weeks ago Torrey, a retired US Navy Commander, sent out a Country Before Party letter to likely Republicans horrified by Trump and Trumpism, launching the website. "A campaign to pick a President shouldn’t be a made-for-TV brawl," he wrote. "Rather, selection should be about capabilities and experience." In a clear departure from one of Trumpism founding tenets, he declared that "Nobody makes money off www.gop4hrc.com. So if someone is looking to donate, or looking to advertise or make a buck, they should look elsewhere."

Torrey, who had been Chief of Staff for New York Republican Congressman John Sweeney, wrote that "My experience with then Senator Clinton and her staff was very positive and bipartisan. All interaction was straightforward and about getting things done for the people of New York and the country. A lot of the negatives I read and hear about Hillary Clinton during this campaign simply do not match up with my own experiences and interaction with her and those around her for over 15 years."

And that same attitude is inherent in the Clinton endorsement from Hank Paulson, George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary, the TARP guy, who had previously been Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs: "When it comes to the presidency, I will not vote for Donald Trump…I will not cast a write-in vote. I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and our place in the world."

Yesterday, CNN reported on another group of Republicans backing Clinton, Republican Women for Hillary. Chris Moody wrote about a steering committee meeting over glasses of wine and champagne at the swanky St. Regis Hotel in DC. "Five young Republicans busily brainstormed how they could help Hillary Clinton become the next president of the United States. The group included an unlikely gang of pro-Clinton foot soldiers, including a Mississippi-born Southern Baptist who got her start in GOP politics as an intern in the second Bush White House, a conservative health care policy analyst who has volunteered for anti-abortion causes and a former president of the Cornell University College Republicans." That shouldn't sound like too much of a push. After all, Hillary herself was a GOP activist into her twenties and was the president of the Wellesley College Young Republicans in her formative years. They share a lot of core conservative values with her but their motivation for jumping the partisan fence was to stop Trump.

"It's really important that Republican leaders, especially Republican women leaders, stand up right now and say we're not OK with Trump representing our party," said Jennifer Lim, a group founder who works at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and has spent much of her life volunteering for Republican causes and campaigns. "This is not a position I ever wanted to find myself in. But it's important that when things like this happen that people speak up."

Lim's role as a leader within the new group is independent of her day job. But earlier this week, the Chamber clashed with Trump over his embrace of protectionist trade policies, which the business group opposes.

Over the next several months, members of Republican Women for Hillary plan to provide cover for Republicans looking to speak out against Trump, whose surprising rise has torn the party apart.

Faced with a choice between Clinton and Trump, some Republicans have begrudgingly agreed to support him while others are simply opting out of the election. But for these women who founded the group, (and one man who has joined in solidarity), Trump's bombastic style, offensive rhetoric toward women and minorities, slapdash policy "suggestions" risk destroying the party.

This is the post-primary Never Trump movement in action. Their new organization, which is not affiliated with the Clinton campaign, is part support group and part activist hub: They intend to host off-the-record social events for like-minded conservatives and sponsor get-out-the-vote efforts for Clinton. They started in May by launching accounts on Facebook and Twitter and are planning to make an appearance at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia next month.

Making the switch to openly support a Clinton for president wasn't a decision they came to lightly, the group's members said.

"It has been tough for me to come to this point where I can vote for a candidate who has been very against what I've been working for for most of my professional career," said Meghan Milloy, who works for the conservative American Action Forum think tank and has formerly campaigned for Republicans like Trent Lott, Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour. "That being said, I can't vote for someone like Donald Trump because he's overtly racist and misogynist."

Lim said she intends to knock on doors, make phone calls for Clinton and will donate to the Democratic campaign, a step she has never taken in her life.

Which candidate is the bigger liar? It's not even close

Her temporary transition to Democratic volunteer might seem all too convenient at first: She was recently married to Tim Lim, the founder of a media buying firm called Precision that has a contract with the Clinton campaign. But, she said, her reasons for supporting Clinton are genuine and purely strategic. Her current activism is about stopping Trump from winning the general election, preserving the the Republican Party and the conservative values it promotes, she said.

"Our group isn't about selling Clinton. It's about using your vote to keep Trump out of office," Lim said. "We're not going to be in the business of convincing people that Hillary Clinton will be the savior of all of our policy issues. We're trying to convince people that your vote has a political and moral purpose, and it's important to use that."

"This was a long road for me to get here," she added.

It is Republican women like these that Clinton has made a concerted effort to reach during as part of her campaign.

Recent data suggest that it's working. National opinion polls show Clinton leading Trump among several demographic groups, notably women voters. Meanwhile, an ABC News/Washington Post survey conducted in June found that 77 percent of women have an unfavorable view of Trump.

As for policy, there are only a few areas where the group's leaders said they could agree with Clinton, which mostly involves foreign policy and trade. More importantly, however, they see her as a reasonable person-- especially compared with the unpredictable Trump-- and someone Republicans could possibly work with.

"We can put our differences aside to have a safer option that's better for the country as a whole," Milloy said. "The fear of Donald Trump is, to me, more than the fear of Hillary raising capital standards on banks."

These are not people likely to suddenly embrace progressive values and principles or back Democratic candidates beyond Hillary. And if someof them stick to the Democratic Party, they are likely to pull it towards the right the way party switchers like Patrick Murphy, Charlie Crist and... Hillary Clinton have.

The Failure Of Marco Rubio's Neocon Foreign Policy Agenda

Marco Rubio appears young. And he should; he was born in 1971. Donald Trump, the oldest Republican in the race, unless you count 70-year-old George Pataki, had already graduated from Wharton, joined his father's real estate company and was getting into serious trouble with the Justice Department for violating the Fair Housing Act. By covering up his bald spot with a weave a couple of months ago, Rubio appears even younger and more boyish. But his political agenda is not just reactionary but also so decrepit and backward that one would expect it to be espoused by someone stuck in the 1950s.

In foreign policy-- an area he claims, for no apparent reason, some kind of expertise in-- Rubio proudly wears the tattered mantle of spectacularly failed neoconservatism. Yesterday Daniel Larison reminded readers of The American Conservative reminded that Rubio's ideas are bankrupt. Although the now disgraced and reviled Project for a New American Century has changed its name to the Foreign Policy Initiative, its goals haven't changed at all. Friday they sponsored Rubio's simple-minded foreign policy speech, which was, Larison wrote:

focused entirely on attacking engagement with Iran and Cuba, and as such it is a useful window into how he thinks U.S. diplomacy should work. In short, he doesn’t think the U.S. should seek to engage hostile and pariah regimes except through coercive measures, threats, and intimidation in the mistaken belief that these convey 'strength' and produce better outcomes for the U.S. If an agreement is mutually beneficial to both the U.S. and the other country, he will misrepresent it as a giveaway to the other regime, and unless the other regime yields to U.S. preferences on every issue he will refuse to accept progress on any of them. His proposed Iran policy illustrates this very well. He offers Iran no incentives for cooperation, but expects to be able to compel Iran to give way on every front. This not only grossly overestimates the ability of the U.S. to dictate terms to Iran, but it deliberately ignores the reality that almost all other countries in the world don’t share this uncompromising, hard-line agenda and won’t support the U.S. in what Rubio wants to do. Rubio’s desire to link nuclear talks to all these other issues guarantees that the talks will go nowhere, which is presumably the point of tying them together.

Here's what Rubio told the gathered neocons about Iran on Friday:

First, I will quickly reimpose sanctions on Iran. I will give the mullahs a choice: either you have an economy or you have a nuclear program, but you cannot have both. I will also ask Congress to pass crushing new measures that target human rights abusers and Iran’s leaders involved in financing and overseeing Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism.

Second, I will ensure our forces in the Middle East are positioned to signal readiness and restore a credible military option. This will be bolstered by my administration’s efforts to rebuild our military by ending defense sequestration once and for all.

Third, after imposing crippling sanctions on Iran, I will link any talks to Iran’s broader conduct, from human rights abuses to support for terrorism and threats against Israel.

Rubio is living in a childish Republican that doesn't intersect with reality. In that way the youngest and the most elderly of the Republican candidates have something in common. Back to The American Conservative:

Rubio fails to understand the limits of applying pressure to another state. Not only does the U.S. lack the ability to force Iran into the capitulation he desires, but in the attempt Rubio would guarantee even greater intransigence from Iran. Iran isn’t North Korea, but the experience with North Korea is nonetheless instructive. When the U.S. tried to pressure North Korea in much the same way that Rubio has in mind for Iran, it led to North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT and its first nuclear weapons test. Confrontational policies may appeal to certain ideologues, but they frequently produce some of the worst outcomes. Then again, hard-liners don’t think they can or should be judged by the outcomes of the polices they promote. In general, they aren’t actually interested in resolving disputes, but hope to exploit them. The goal of Rubio’s Iran policy is not to limit Iran’s nuclear program or to bring about any discernible improvement in the Iranian government’s external or internal behavior, but it is rather simply to reinforce the mutual distrust and hostility between the U.S. and Iran for the sake of justifying more aggressive U.S. policies in the region.

The audience Rubio was addressing are sure to love what they heard, since FPI is simply the old neoconservative PNAC with a new name. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear, but there is also every reason to assume that Rubio is deeply committed to the same reckless foreign policy views that this group promotes. Rubio boasts about wanting to usher in a “new American century,” and these are the bankrupt, discredited policies he wants to use create it.

Even former George W. Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson recognizes Rubio's prescriptions for what they are: unrealistic and doomed to failure. Paulson was in charge of setting up Bush's Iranian sanctions in the first place. Unlike Rubio he thinks the nuclear deal that's come out of those sanctions should be approved.

"It’s somewhere in between naive and unrealistic to assume that after we’ve, the United States of America, has negotiated something like this with the five other, you know, parties and with the whole world community watching, that we could back away from that-- and that the others would go with us, or even that our allies would go with us," Paulson said during a forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute on Thursday night to discuss his new book on China.

"And unilateral sanctions don’t work, okay?" Paulson continued. "They really have to be multilateral."

..."I think it’s totally unrealistic to believe that if we backed out of this deal that the multilateral sanctions would stay in place," Paulson said. "I’m just trying to envision us sanctioning European banks or enforcing them, or Japanese banks, or big Chinese banks."

..."I had a seat in Washington when we dealt with a big, intractable, messy problem, where there weren’t any neat, beautiful, elegant solutions," Paulson said. "You were deciding between doing something that was objectionable or doing nothing at all, which could even be more objectionable.

"So I don’t particularly like it when people criticize something that’s big and important that’s been done if they don’t have a better idea," Paulson said.

And one thing is clear about Rubio: He has no better ideas-- not on Iran, not on Cuba, not on immigration reform... not on anything.

Republican voters sense there's something wrong with Rubio. The brain-dead Beltway media may be thrilled by his youngish looks, and Sheldon Adelson may have struck a deal with the Koch brothers to make him Scott Walker's running mate, but GOP voters have relegated him to second-tier status despite all the hype. The new Fox News poll shows a steady decline from last spring, when 13% were buying the Rubio hype. His monthly trajectory among Republican voters has been steadily sinking and is now at 4%, a point above Rand Paul and Chris Christie, each of whom is being talked about as probable dropouts. There are 7 Republicans, according to the Fox poll, more likely to win the nomination than Rubio-- and even if his real goal is to be Scott Walker's running mate... well, Walker isn't faring much better with likely Republican primary voters. He's tied with Mike Huckabee at 6%, behind Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Jeb!

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

Since 1990 Oil Companies Have Paid Republicans $163,773,719 To Not Believe In Climate Change

My grandfather was a Socialist who was proud to have voted for FDR in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944. A couple of decades after his last vote for Roosevelt, I had come on the scene and he told me too never trust the Democrats. No, he hadn't turned Republican, of course, he just saw how the corporate warmongers and Southern racists were able to extort effective control over the party on crucial issues. I've usually taken his advice to heart. And even though there were relatively plausible Republicans in office and in contention back then-- Jacob Javits (R-NY), Mark Hatfield (R-OR), Chuck Percy (R-IL), Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY), Charles Mathias (R-MD), Edward Brooke (R-MA), Kenneth Keating (R-NY), Clifford Case (R-NJ), John Lindsay (NY), Ray Shafer (R-PA), even President Eisenhower were actual GOP moderates-- I never voted for any of them.

More recently there have been a few moderates, although they have been more aberrations than part of a realistic movement: Connie Morella (R-MD), Jim Jeffords (R-VT), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Lincoln Chafee (R-RI).. This year, the only House Republicans with more "progressive" voting records than right-wing Blue Dog Democrats are libertarians like Walter Jones (R-NC), Justin Amash (R-MI), Tom Massie (R-KY), Jimmy Duncan (R-TN)-- all very conservative Republicans on most matters-- plus a single actual moderate, Chris Gibson (R-NY), who has a more progressive voting record than 9 of the worst conservative Democrats-- from bad to worse, Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY), Bill Owens (New Dem-NY), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ), Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX), Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC), Ron Barber (Blue Dog-AZ), John Barrow (Blue Dog (GA) and Jim Mathson (Blue Dog-UT). Gibson is really the only Republican in the House who earned the sobriquet "RINO." And not one has in the Senate, where the most right-wing Democrat, Joe Manchin, has a crucial vote score (61.84) that is massively more progressive than the 3 Republicans from blue states with the least right-wing scores-- Susan Collins (27.91), Dean Heller (21.71) and Mark Kirk (13.77).

In the NY Times this morning, Paul Krugman spoke of The Loneliness of the Non-Crazy Republican. Hank Paulson??? OK, he is correct (a lonely, non-crazy Republican) on climate change: "A tax on carbon emissions will unleash a wave of innovation to develop technologies, lower the costs of clean energy and create jobs as we and other nations develop new energy products and infrastructure. This would strengthen national security by reducing the world’s dependence on governments like Russia and Iran. Climate change is the challenge of our time. Each of us must recognize that the risks are personal. We’ve seen and felt the costs of underestimating the financial bubble. Let’s not ignore the climate bubble." But Paulson's premise, that we act to solve the climate change crisis "in the same way we acted to contain the financial crisis," removes him from the Krugman construct of "non-crazy Republican." And Krugman says as much himself:

It’s a dubious analogy: the 2008 crisis was fast-moving, and people like Paulson could credibly warn that unless we acted the whole world economy would fall apart in a matter of days. Meanwhile, climate change is slow but inexorable, with enormous momentum; by the time it becomes undeniable that there’s a crisis, it will be too late to avoid catastrophe.

But that’s not the sad part about Paulson’s piece; no, what’s sad is that he imagines that anyone in the party he still claims as his own is listening. Earth to Paulson: the GOP you imagine, which respects science and is willing to consider even market-friendly government interventions like carbon taxes, no longer exists. The reins of power now rest firmly, irreversibly, in the hands of men who believe that climate change is a hoax concocted by liberal scientists to justify Big Government, who refuse to acknowledge that government intervention to correct market failures can ever be justified.

Given the state of U.S. politics today, climate action is entirely dependent on Democrats, With a Democrat in the White House, we got some movement through executive action; if Democrats eventually regain the House, there could be more. If Paulson believes that he can support Republicans while still pushing for climate action, he’s just delusional.

So how is delusional the same as non-crazy? As individual politicians, Republicans still deny either climate change itself or-- I guess this is the "moderate" position-- that man has played any role in it and therefore can't play any role in ameliorating it. As a party dependent on the Koch brothers and the oil industry in general-- the industry has spent $163,773,719 on GOP congressional candidates since 1990 (and another $48,981,024 on corrupt conservative Democrats willing to vote with the Republicans, like Mary Landrieu and Jim Matheson)-- part of Republican Party canon is to utterly and aggressively deny climate change. And, as wikipedia points out, "manufactured uncertainty over climate change, the fundamental strategy of the "denial machine," has been very effective, particularly in the U.S. It has contributed to low levels of public concern and to government inaction.

And keep in mind, that when the House voted on the American Clean Energy and Security Act exactly 5 years ago this week, only 8 Republicans voted for it, while an astounding 44 Democrats crossed the aisle in the other direction to let their voters know they are also climate change deniers. The bill passed 219-212 and of the 44 Dem-deniers, almost all were subsequently kicked out of office, Democratic bass voters refusing to cast ballots for them. Only 10 remain in Congress and 2 are retiring rather than face sure defeat in November, while 3 more are likely to lose their seats because of Democratic disappointment with their conservatism):

• John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Pete DeFazio (OR)
• Senator Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN)
• Bill Foster (New Dem-IL)
• Ann Kirkpatrick (New Dem-AZ)
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)
• Nick Rahall (Blue Dog-WV)
• Pete Visclosky (IN)

All of the Blue America candidates believe in an activist approach to climate change based on solid science. Take Michigan's Paul Clements for example. Paul is running against the #1 climate change denier in Congress, corporate whore Fred Upton, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Paul:

Climate change is the greatest threat to Michigan and to the world in the 21st century. We need to keep global warming under two degrees Celsius, but this takes a strong international agreement limiting greenhouse gas emissions in each country. Such an agreement can only be reached with American leadership.

Recently Michigan has seen failures of apple and cherry crops, Lake Michigan at historic lows, some of the hottest and driest summers in our history, and increased flooding from stronger storms and heavier rainfall. These and other influences from climate change are likely to get worse. With runaway climate change we could lose half our species of plants, trees, animals and birds. West Michigan could have a climate similar to West Texas by the end of the century, with summers seven degrees Fahrenheit hotter than today. But around the world it would be even more disastrous. Runaway climate change is likely to cause droughts and floods that drive millions from their homes, collapsing governments, and wars over water and other resources.

The technology exists to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius. Southwest Michigan must lead in manufacturing based on this technology. America must take the lead to negotiate an international agreement, address the harms from climate change, and develop the technologies for a clean energy future.

How About Real Change And Hope In Obama's Second Term-- Like Bob Reich For Treasury Secretary?

I was just watching President Obama speaking at UNLV. I'm not exactly an alumnus but I did take courses there-- and write for the student newspaper-- when my van broke down in Vegas and I couldn't afford to repair it and leave town. That was a lot of years ago. Today the President was saying so many of the right things-- things Romney will never say-- like "no one who fights for this country should ever have to fight for a job when they come home." I heard that while I was putting on my socks upstairs.

And earlier this week, on Air Force One, when a reporter pressed Jay Carney, the Press Secretary on whether Obama would support a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, Carney said: "He will not. Could I be more clear?"

But the problem is that while he talks like a real Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Democrat, he hasn't governed like one. Remember he once said he's a Blue Dog Democrat? That's what he governed as-- starting with his first absolutely horrendous appointments-- like Wall Street operatives Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, Larry Summers as Director of the National Economic Council and Tiny Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. A high school teacher of mine once told the class that no matter who the president is, Wall Street always gets one of their own as Treasury Secretary. That started with Alexander Hamilton.

FDR's first Treasury Secretary was William Woodlin, a Republican hereditary industrialist who had served on the Fed starting in 1927. Henry Morgenthau, Jr. took over in 1933 when Woodlin resigned due to an illness than killed him within months-- and he served the whole time Roosevelt was president. He was born into wealth; his dad was a NY real estate mogul. Although conservatives were enraged that Roosevelt appointed him, Morgenthau was a vocal anti-Keynesian and was known for utterances like "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. [...] After eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started [...] and an enormous debt to boot!" He worked hard to persuade FDR to give up on deficit spending, although in 1937 he finally got Roosevelt to focus on balancing the budget through major spending cuts and tax increases... and brought on the 1937 Recession.

After Morgenthau, Truman appointed one of his closest friends, Fred Vinson-- who had served as head of the inflation-fighting Office of Economic Stabilization. He wasn't really a Wall Street person but he was soon kicked upstairs to serve as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and was followed by John Wesley Snyder, an Arkansas banker. He was the last Secretary of the Treasury that wasn't an actual Wall Street person.

Eisenhower's first Treasury Secretary, George Humphrey was a conservative steel industry tycoon was against aid to the poor and fought for a balanced budget, tight money, tax cuts to the rich that would "trickle down" and drastically curbing federal spending. Next came Robert Anderson, a Texas investment banker and alcoholic who was trial and convicted of tax evasion and of laundering huge sums of money for drug dealers in a typical Ayn Rand-like offshore banking scam that Republicans admire so much. He was disbarred and sentenced to prison.

The next president was JFK but he wasn't going up against Wall Street either-- quite the opposite. His Secretary of the Treasury was C. Douglas Dillon, another hereditary one-percenter and notorious Wall Street investment baker (Dillon, Read & Co.)... with pretensions towards Scottish nobility. He was close personal friends with every high end financial predator in New York. LBJ's first Treasury Secretary was Henry Fowler, a conservative who's primary interest was an immense tax cut, primarily for the rich. Upon leaving the cabinet he was rewarded with a partnership in Goldman Sachs. He was followed by Joseph Barr, who was serving as the Chairman of the FDIC and the Undersecretary of the Treasury before LBJ appointed him Treasury Secretary for the last month of his presidency. He went on to head the American Security and Trust Company and then the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta.

After Barr, they could have just moved the Treasury Department to Wall Street itself. Nixon appointed Mormon bankster David Kennedy, followed by Texas con-man John Connally-- a paid shill for right-wing Texas oil tycoons Sid Richardson and Perry Bass-- and Bechtel CEO George Shultz, whose policies brought on one of the worst inflation spirals in contemporary American history. He was followed by William Simon (who Ford held onto once Nixon resigned in disgrace). Simon, a venture capital predator and Wall Street bankster with a series of shady companies, was an Ayn Rand fanatic, "free market" extremist and was responsible for the revitalization of the term "czar" in American politics (having been Nixon's "energy czar"). Carter had two Treasury secretaries, Michael Blumenthal, a NYC corporate guy, and William Miller, a former Textron CEO and Federal Reserve Chair.

The came the veritable bankster boardroom brought to you by the most Wall Street-centric series of presidents since the Roaring '20s: Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama. Reagan gave us Merrill Lynch chairman and CEO Donald Regan, the Carlyle Group's (and bin-Ladens') James Baker, and, briefly Peter McPherson, later Chairman of Dow Jones (and the man who made sure Rupert Murdoch could buy the Wall Street Journal). George H.W. Bush, from a Wall Street bankster clan himself, named Nicholas Brady (former Chairman of the Board of Dillon Read & Co.). Clinton found one of the most conservative Democratic taxcut fanatics around, ex-bankster, Senate Finance Committee Chair & all around Wall Street patsy Lloyd Bentsen. When Bentsen resigned, Clinton appointed an outrageous bankster, Frank Newman who had worked for (and still served) Citicorp, Wells Fargo, and BankAmerica. (After his turn at Treasury-- 4 weeks-- he went to work first for Bankers Trust and then as CEO of Shenzhen Development Bank.) Then can the really bad guys, Wall Street's dream boys, Robert Rubin (Chairman of Goldman Sachs before Treasury, Chairman of Citigroup after Treasury) and Lawrence Summers, an academic who has always groveled in the face of a few bucks held under his nose. His purely Wall Street-oriented deregulation policies were as key to the current worldwide economic meltdown as were Phil Gramm's.

Bush II gave us Alcoa Chairman Paul O'Neill, CSX Transportation's CEO and Chairman of the Business Roundtable John Snow, who later went on to head Cerberus Capital Management, and finally-- and worst of all-- notorious bankster Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Obama couldn't have done worse than Paulson-- but Geithner, former President of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, isn't much better.

If the mistakes Obama made in his first term don't saddle us with Mitt Romney-- in other words, if Obama gets a second term-- he can do something really historic and become a real agent for Change (and Hope). That would be appointing former Labor Secretary Robert Reich Treasury Secretary. Wall Street might grumble a little commit mass suicide, but Reich, as you can see in the video above, would use the office in a way it has never been used before-- for the good of ordinary working American families. I bet the 18 Members of Congress who proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.50 to $10/hour this week would support the nomination!

In introducing a key chapter, "Tax Cuts Aren't A Solution To Every Problem" in his book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, Joshua Holland quotes Mitt Romney explaining a Republican alternative to stimulating the economy. Rather than the government spending money on public works and rather than putting money in consumers' pockets by increasing the minimum wage, the GOP wants to give more tax cuts to the wealthy. "There are two ways," says Willard, "you can put money into the economy, by spending more or by spending less. But if it's a stimulus you want, taxing less works best. That's why permanent tax cuts should be the centerpiece of the economic stimulus." As Holland points out, he's wrong, gigantically wrong. In fact, he writes, "it's difficult to know where to start deconstructing conservative rhetoric on taxing and spending. This is such a central part of their worldview, and it’s informed by a whole slew of falsehoods. In order to make sense of it all, it’s necessary to understand four key concepts behind the Right’s rhetoric." Here are Holland's 4 key concepts that unwind the basis of the Republican Party ideology of selfishness and greed:

1. Shrink the Government and Drown It in a Bathtub

Conservatives believe in small government as an ideological end unto itself. They believed Reagan when he said, “Government is the problem,” and they think that shrinking that problem down so that it becomes small enough, in the words of antitax activist Grover Norquist, to “drown in a bathtub,” is a virtue.

They naturally tend to assume that their political opponents must take the opposite view: that liberals want to expand government and raise taxes because they prefer bigger government and higher taxes. That’s a serious distortion; progressives see policy goals and aren’t afraid of pursuing solutions to problems through government, the private sector, or a combination of the two. When a real problem can’t be addressed by the private sector-- poor kids lacking health insurance is a perfect example-- then we look to the public sector for the answer.

And then we pay for it, rejecting the reckless “borrow-and-spend” approach that George W. Bush used to turn a tidy budget surplus left by Bill Clinton into a deep sea of red ink. The bottom line is that progressives and liberals couldn’t care less about how big or small the government may
be in the abstract, only whether it functions well and solves the problems we ask it to address.

2. Conservative Programs Don’t Count as Wasteful Spending

Despite conservatives’ ideological devotion to limited government, make no mistake that when they say “government,” they are talking about limiting corporate regulation and reducing the amount of money spent on the relatively meager social safety net that takes the hard edges off America’s brand of unbridled “turbo-capitalism.” In practice, almost everybody, from across the political spectrum, is happy to spend money and expand government in pursuit of his or her own objectives. Spending projects are wasteful “pork” only when they’re in another lawmaker’s district. Republicans rarely object to spending tax dollars on the military, our intelligence agencies, law enforcement, or border security, to name a few. To state the obvious: these things cost money, too-- a lot of it.

3. The Poor Don’t Pay Taxes

Contrary to the right-wing narrative, everyone pays taxes. Conservatives insist that the tax system is highly progressive and that anyone who suggests otherwise is just whining. Rush Limbaugh put it this way: “The bottom 50 percent is paying a tiny bit of the taxes, so you can’t give them much of a tax cut by definition. Yet these are the people to whom the Democrats claim to want to give tax cuts. Remember this the next time you hear the ‘tax cuts for the rich’ business. Understand that the so-called rich are about the only ones paying taxes anymore.”

That’s true, however, only when you do a little sleight of hand. You have to look at the federal income tax in isolation and then pretend that it represents the government’s entire take. It’s true that the bottom 40 percent of U.S. households don’t pay much in federal income taxes. And, according to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, the wealthiest 1 percent do pay more in federal income taxes than the bottom 90 percent combined.

Yet that’s a far cry from the claim that the “poor don’t pay taxes.” Rushbo won’t tell you, but the CBO also said that if you look at state and local taxes, the top 1 percent of Americans paid 5 percent of their incomes, while the bottom 50 percent (many of them among those who paid no federal income taxes) shelled out 10 percent, twice as much proportionately. In addition, the CBO found that the bottom 80 percent of the pile paid around 9 percent of their incomes in Social Security taxes, while the top 1 percent paid only 1.6 percent of theirs. After the income tax, Social Security taxes represent the largest share of the federal take.

A 2009 study by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy looked at state taxes (including sales taxes) and concluded, “Nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the wealthy. That is, when all state and local income, sales, excise and property taxes are added up, most state tax systems are regressive [emphasis theirs].” The top 1 percent of earners paid around 5 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, while the poorest fifth of the population paid almost 11 percent of theirs.

When the institute looked at excise taxes-- on gas, cigarettes, alcohol, and other goodies-- they found that the “average state’s consumption tax structure is equivalent to an income tax with a 7.1 percent rate for the poor, a 4.7 percent rate for the middle class, and a 0.9 percent rate for the wealthiest taxpayers.

When you add it all up-- state and local taxes, federal taxes, and excise fees-- it turns out that the rich, the poor, and those in between all end up with about the same tax rate. That’s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson. They summarized, “The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.”

That brings us to an important point: It wasn’t always that way. According to a 2010 study by Wealth for the Common Good, an organization of deep-pocketed progressives, “Over the last half-century, America’s wealthiest taxpayers have seen their tax outlays, as a share of income, drop by as much as two-thirds. During the same period, the tax outlay for middle-class Americans has not decreased.” The study found that the nation’s “highest earners-- the top 400-- have seen the share of their income paid in federal income tax plummet from 51.2 percent in 1955 to 16.6 percent in 2007, the most recent year with top 400 statistics available.” Between 2001 and 2008 alone, tax cuts for the wealthy cost the U.S. Treasury $700 billion.

4. Tax Cuts for the Rich Will Also Help the Rest of Us

Republicans use the lie that the poor don’t pay taxes to justify big cuts for the wealthy. The bad news is that those cuts raise taxes for everyone else. You won’t read that in the legislation, but it’s the real-world result of cutting taxes without taking on the politically unpopular task of identifying services to be cut.

Even when revenues drop, people expect the cops to come when called and the streetlights to burn. Budgets become stretched, and communities tighten their belts-- perhaps laying off some workers. But then-- and this is key-- state and local governments also make up much of the shortfall with higher fees for various services, higher tuition at public colleges, and increases in sales, excise, and property taxes, all of which fall disproportionately on the poor and the middle class.

Most government spending is locked in-- for Social Security and Medicare, the defense budget, and a host of other programs that would be politically unpopular to cut. The Right has done an excellent job of pushing the notion that they’re for tax cuts, but remember that they are talking about corporate taxes, capital gains taxes on investments, and taxes for the top earners. When those revenues dry up, the rest of us have to pick up the tab.

So keep in mind that the Right actually loves to raise taxes, just as long as they’re hiked on the backs of ordinary working people. Barack Obama’s first budget made the Bush tax cuts permanent for every couple making less than $250,000 and every individual taking in less than $200,000, while allowing those cuts targeted at the richest Americans to expire. This effectively cut the tax bills of about 98 percent of the population. The response from House Minority Leader John Boehner, a long-time advocate of tax cuts? “The era of big government is back, and Democrats are asking you to pay for it,” he told the Washington Post.

The Real Doom-and-Gloomers

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss": British philosopher Pete Townshend sings "Won't Get Fooled Again" (playing acoustic guitar, and accompanied by classical guitarist John Williams) at the 1979 Amnesty International benefit show, The Secret Policeman's Ball.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We know now that it is bad economics."

-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, accepting the Democratic
nomination for a second term as president in 1936

by Noah

I. MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

Where I live, in New York City, it usually seems that there are more banks on the corners than there are mailboxes. They seem to come and go in the middle of the night, as if they were mobile homes just temporarily parked on the property, until they are replaced by another bank. There's always a bank there, it's just the names and the decorating that change. They seem to change names so fast that they don't even penetrate the public consciousness.

My own bank has changed names only four times in the last 12 years. In the banking business, they call that stability. Kinda reminds me of some sort of corporate musical chairs game, or maybe it's a shell game. "Step right up. See if you can find your money!" Well, the money has always been there, even if the carpeting and the sign on the door have changed, and even if there are fewer and fewer employees each time, and my wife and I have to get all new checks. How long my money will be there is now a mater of conjecture in this day and age. One thing's for sure, if I was a decorator, all I would have to do is sign up a couple of the bigger banks as clients and I'd be set for life. It must all be very confusing to bank robbers (the ones outside the bank, not the ones inside).

All of this got my mind spinning a few days ago when I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about Secretary of the Treasury Tim "Mr. Inside" Geithner, entitled "Geithner at the Improv." It was about his (as the WSJ calls it) "opening act," aka his first press conference. They seemed to find him lacking, but for different reasons than many of us. They found him lacking for three basic reasons:

(1) He spoke, and the market went down.

Well, the same thing happened every time Bush or his guy "Hank the Grifter" Paulson spoke. It didn't seem to bother the WSJ so much back then. Hmmm. I wonder why.

(2) He didn't focus on just the banks, instead offering, as they say, "something for everyone."

I don't think you or I are included in that "everyone," but some people weren't taught about sharing. They do say that, like Paulson, Geithner "will be making it up as he goes along," and to the WSJ it's worth pointing out that that is bad. I agree, but what if they had chosen the word flexible? That would have a more positive, confidence-building connotation, wouldn't it?

The WSJ looks at "making it up" as something that delivered something other than confidence and rising stocks. OK, I get that, but I also get that maybe rising stocks should not be the number one priority right this moment. Maybe solvency and true stability should come first? And again, why wasn't Hank the Grifter critiqued the same way?

(3) They take both Geithner and his boss, President Obama (hopefully he really is Geithner's boss), to task for pronouncing some "doom and gloom."

Excuse me, piggies, but those of us who do not drive penis-extension Porsches home to Short Hills, NJ, or Greenwich, CT, every night might have very good reasons for a little, as you deride it, "doom and gloom." You and your cronies may not be suffering as you stuff your pockets with taxpayer cash, but a lot of people feel a darkness coming over the land.

There are people trying to tell us that Geithner is the "new" boss at our Treasury, but if there was ever a "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" kind of guy, Timmy G. seems to be exactly what Pete Townshend was writing about almost 40 years ago. Hank the Grifter, meet Timmy G. Oh, that's right, you guys already know each other. You came from the same robot factory to take over our money. I never did learn how to take a sheet of paper and cut it into a string of identical little bears or something, but somebody did, and we don't seem to be missing a beat in the alleged transition between the old Treasury Department and the new one. So, we have two guys, Timmy and Hank, who don't make us warm and fuzzy, but two different treatments. Why, Mr. Murdoch, why?

Rather than focusing on banks alone or proposing a single bailout architecture, Mr. Geithner offered something for everyone with a financial problem [well, not you or I], albeit with most of the details left to be filled in later. Investors naturally took this to mean that, much like former Secretary Hank Paulson, Mr. Geithner will be making things up as he goes along. If the goal was to reduce uncertainty, it didn't work. (By the way, the Senate also passed the "stimulus" yesterday. Stocks fell nearly 5%.)

That said, Mr. Geithner's proposal is correct in its tacit acknowledgment that there is no grand miracle cure. The problem of the capital hole in the financial system is too big to fill in any single way, or with public or private capital alone. The bad assets need to be worked off one by one, institution by institution, until balance sheets are cleaned up and normal lending can start again. It's three yards and a cloud of toxic securities.

I buy the bit about there being no one miracle cure. But we need a Rommel, and we get another Klink. Hank the Grifter seemed pretty disorganized -- unless, that is, his dispensing of $350 billion to his old buddies on Wall Street without any strings attached whatsoever was the plan all along. What? Me? Cynical? So let's just say that when people say Geithner is like Paulson, I'm not brimming with optimism about this guy either. However, you can bet that the WSJ liked Paulson's no-strings-attached approach and has worries about all of this talk about strings this time around. Could that be the difference?

Mr. Geithner said the feds will subject all major U.S. banks to what he called a "stress test" to assess their financial health. We had thought this is what the FDIC, the Federal Reserve and other regulators were supposed to be doing all along, but that's last year's failure. A fresh and thorough scrubdown should be useful in forcing banks to be realistic about their businesses, especially the value of their bad assets.

Regulators? The WSJ complains that regulators weren't doing their job? After they've spent decades bitching and moaning about those pesky regulations being bad for business and not allowing corporations to run even more amok? After they've spent decades campaigning and editorializing for deregulation to the point where the word "regulation" should be removed from their dictionary? If the situation weren't so dire, this would be hysterical!

Then, as you can see, they go on about scrubbing bad assets and "forcing banks to be realistic about their businesses." Realistic? Wow! The WSJ and Wall Street have just learned a brand-new word. Today's word is "realistic." "Look, Mom, the word 'realistic' comes almost right before 'regulate' in the dictionary. Isn't that swell?"

The feds can then sort the banks that have enough capital and are worth saving from those that are insolvent but don't want to admit it. The latter can be liquidated, their depositors protected by the FDIC and their assets sold immediately to a healthier institution or worked off and sold over time. In Mr. Geithner's calculation, the banks that survive will emerge with a clean bill of health that will make them eligible for more public capital, which in turn will help the banks attract more private capital as well.

The editorial drones on about Timmy's vague plans for ridding banks of toxic assets, including those wonderful bad mortgage assets you might have heard something about, and leveraging private capital to buy the toxic assets. I have an only partially facetious question: If assets are toxic, how are they assets? The problem, as even the WSJ all too briefly implies, is, how do you fairly value such assets -- er, junk -- er, wreckage -- er, scrap?

Not many people seem to be mentioning one very important thing in all of this. It's not just assets that will be "cleaned up" -- gobbled up, or dumped on the scrap pile. This is going to have the end result of some banks, as the WSJ briefly mentions, not surviving as well. What's left of those banks will be incorporated into bigger banks. Deregulation has already enabled the frenzy of bank mergers that have caused things like my bank changing its name every three years, apparently just to provide a bigger ATM machine that takes a better picture of me but now fails to provide a receipt half of the time. Maybe next time, they'll have an even bigger ATM that not only doesn't give you a receipt but also laughs at you in 5.1 surround sound!

These mergers are sometimes euphemistically referred to as "consolidations." Corporate buzzwords like "synergistic" also get thrown around a lot. Does increasing the unemployment rolls or slashing of worker-bee benefits get mentioned? No, not so much. Bailout money will be used to buy up banks. Your money -- but don't you go counting on having an ownership interest. The thing that isn't being spoken of is that soon there will just be a couple of megabanks that own all the banks in your town. The name-changing will stop, and some decorators who put all their eggs in one wrong basket will go out of business. These banks will be so big that if one of them fails, we will all be out of business in so many ways. It looks like the WSJ and the whole financial world, Geithner included, thinks such a scenario is healthy and desirable. Yet there is no mention of the Megabank Monopoly scenario and what a tremendous downside it has.

The editorial ends by saying that the WSJ is put off by President Obama's and Secretary Geithner's aforementioned "doom and gloom" rhetoric, that kind of talk doesn't "help public confidence." Yeah, like we're all as stupid as you want us to be. No one mentions that I will soon be able to walk down Second Avenue for 10 blocks and count eight banks owned by just two megabanks. If one fails, then all the retail locations between those banks, along with the jobs, on Second Avenue will start closing up real fast. The financial world still hasn't learned its lessons about unchecked deregulation and avarice. It's still "bigger is better." It's still about uncontrolled greed, with the only meaning of "control" being a couple of banks having it all. When the next downturn comes . . .

So, let me get this straight. The WSJ thinks Geithner is much like Paulson, who they were all gung-ho about back in the fall, but they don't like his doom and gloom. What's the difference? That one was Bush's guy, the other is Obama's guy? One guy talks (and probably only talks) about "stress tests," and the old guy did not? Is it just that the current mumblings about conditions strike a sour note with the "just give us the peons' [i.e., our] money" crowd?

The answer is probably all of the above, with one addition. The WSJ types and their Wall Street and bankster masters just want your tax dollars and they want them now -- no "doom and gloom," no strings attached, big fish gobble up little fish, and absolutely no change in the status quo, right down to still giving out bonuses that are now being rebranded as "retention awards" to get around a possibly deliberate loophole, and using your money to keep them in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed: Super Bowl tix, McMansions, penis-extension Porsches, vials of coke, free-flowing Dom and all. What recession? What depression? Not here!

Did I mention loophole? Yes, I did. Think about this one. Congress agrees to send these assclowns our taxpayer money. Our money flows out. Am I being cynical by bringing up the possibility that a significant amount of that money, our money, might flow back to the same politicians as "campaign contributions" at some future date? Is this how they now define "public campaign financing" in Washington?


II. THE OTHER SHOE DROPS ON THE PARTY OF NO


In this Friday Countdown segment, Keith O's subject was the "Grand Opposition Party," with help from The Nation's Chris Hayes.

In Saturday's WSJ, another piece of the puzzle appeared, this one written by Bradley R. Schiller ("an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno"). He continues the Repug "doom and gloom" talking point. It's more "let's trash Obama" talk. Now I'm glad that Obama, of the two main guys running, won, but that doesn't mean I'm a raving fan. I want him to succeed in saving us from what Bush has wrought, and, in fact, what the failed right-wing economic policies that started with Reagan have wrought. The Rush Limbaughs of the world, if they were patriotic, should want any president to succeed, regardless of where they might stand on the political spectrum. If any president doesn't succeed, we are all screwed.

If we keep the status quo, we will be more than screwed the next time, if there is a next time. Not regulating the size of banks, in effect letting a few megabanks become monopolies, can't be a good idea. Again, what happens if one fails? It's too much of that "too many eggs in one basket" thing. So here's the WSJ again, trumpeting the latest Repug talking point about "doom and gloom," only this time it's about the Obama stimulus plan. These lowlifes are trying to take down Obama any way they can, and if the financial health of those who don't own financial institutions is hurt, what the hell do they care? It's that old uncontrolled greed again that got us in this situation in the first place.

Professor Schiller writes:

President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today's economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

This fearmongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics. It is bad history because our current economic woes don't come close to those of the 1930s. At worst, a comparison to the 1981-82 recession might be appropriate.

First of all, who the hell are these Repugs to talk about fear-mongering? This fear-mongering thing has been their talking point for over a week. Schiller goes on to express worry that "fearmongering can trigger a political stampede to embrace a 'recovery' package." Where was this guy when Bush and Rice were going around yelling, "Mushroom cloud! Mushroom cloud!"? Or when Cheney was saying that if you vote for Kerry, you will die?

Schiller's piece is entitled "Obama's Rhetoric Is the Real 'Catastrophe.'" Really? I would have placed Obama's rhetoric way down on the list of what the real catastrophe is. To me, although not to these WSJ wackadoodles, hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs and their health care last week, along with any hope of sending their kids to college, maybe losing their homes, etc., is the catastrophe. Those things are higher on my list, but then, maybe Schiller is just all bent out of shape because we now have a president that can address a crowd or a roomful of reporters without us cringing in embarrassment. Not only that, but I feel reasonably certain that the new president can spell "rhetoric' and "catastrophe" and use them in a coherent sentence. Screw this bozo!

Back in 1971, David Crosby of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released an album with a song called "What Are Their Names?" It's about wanting to know the names of the men who really run this country, and where they live. The rest is left to the imagination of the would-be torch-and-sharpened-pitchfork-carrying citizen activist. How long before people grab bats and go play club-a-seal on Wall Street?

Did you notice that when these bankster swine showed up for their mild tongue-lashings before some grandstanding politicians in Congress in that meaningless dog-and-pony show last week, full face shots were barely shown? Are they worried about being easily recognized? Is someone at the networks worried about vigilante wanted posters? That whole Congressional farce was proof positive that our legal system has failed us every bit as much as our financial system.

People were angry back in 1971, they were angry 40 years before that, and they are damn angry now. Just how high will the anger meter go? How many more months will be like January, when almost 600,000 lost their jobs and men like those that write for the WSJ and their masters in the financial world either don't notice or don't give a rat's ass about anything other than themselves? These are the Marie "Let Them Eat Cake" Antoinettes of our time.

These Wall Street terrorists have destroyed many, many, many more lives that Osama bin Looney himself. Rupert Murdoch, with his Wall Street Journal and his FOX News and countless other media outlets, gives them a voice. These are the real doom-and-gloomers.

#

2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS, Part 2

December 2006: Time's (in)famous "You" Person of

the Year cover. What a difference two years makes!

Random observations, thoughts, and rants on 2008,
Part 2 (of 3)


by Noah


1. PARDONS, PARDONS, WHO'S GETTING PARDONS?

There has been justifiable concern about who so-called President Bush might pardon before he says "My work is done here" and smirks, slithers, and slinks off into the rest of his life of failure. There's even speculation as to whether he might try to pardon himself along with the rest of the sleazoids in his administration. Not much talk about it at all in the MSM, though, and even less talk about the pardons Bush issued for Thanksgiving.

That's right. Although Dubya has been stingier with pardons than any president in memory, he quietly issued several you may not have heard about, among them five issued to people convicted of crimes related to the mid-1980s S&L scandal, including John Smith (if that's his real name), a former Dallas banker; David McCall Jr. from Plano, Texas; Mark Hale of Henderson, Texas, who went for the gold to the tune of $5 million; and one William Hoyle McCright Jr. of Midland, Texas. The last one there just happened to be a McCain donor. Gee, look at all these guys from Texas. What a coincidence!

Of course, the MSM's blanket of secrecy continues to protect the Bush Crime Family. It's like the S&L crimes never happened. No mention of Neil Bush's role, and still no mention of Jeb Bush's default on a $4.5 million "loan" from Broward Federal Savings. Some guys took a fall. Smaller fish, perhaps. Now they get pardons for keeping silent, I suppose. That's the way it works. The Bush Crime Family sure knows how to get its hands on money, especially our money. Still lots of mention about Clinton's seedy pardon of Marc Rich, but these? Not so much.


2. SPEAKING OF MOVING MONEY AROUND: HANK THE GRIFTER

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is pulling off what those bankers who plotted to overthrow FDR back in the '30s wanted to do. Everyone wants a crack at Bernie Madoff for making $50 billion disappear. Why not Hank the Grifter for making who-knows-how-many-times that disappear? (And I mean that as a question. Does anyone have any idea how many billions have vanished down the Grifter's rathole?) He is turning over a major percentage of our GDP to a few cigar-chomping, meth-snorting fat cats. He is the master enabler. It's thievery that any two-bit Middle Eastern or Latin American dictator can only dream about, all being done before our eyes while politicians and media whores call it something else.

I remember when Saddam Hussein was being shocked and awed, he took a couple of trailer trucks to the bank and loaded up the cash and gold. What's the difference? Where'd the "bailout" money go? It was sold to us as money that would go to people looking for loans to purchase homes and cars. In reality, it went to buy up smaller banks, pay bonuses for bankers (over $1.6 billion to date), and pay stockholder dividends. Understand this: They took our tax dollars and redistributed them -- to themselves. Car and home loans? Nope. The new bank mantra is "Just Say NO."

With the S&L scandal, the participants in the scam took out loans from banks which they had no intention of repaying. Investors and depositors be damned. This time they take it from the U.S. Treasury and hand it over to their slimy buddies. Poppy Bush once described the goal as to get more money into the hands of fewer people. Saddam was known to give the contents of his country's treasury and foreign aid to himself, his family, and a small circle of friends. He created a class of the superwealthy. The Bush Crime Family has aimed at the same goal for decades, across generations. Strip away all the "he tried to kill my daddy nonsense," and you're left with this: Saddam was merely a very nasty rival -- they didn't hate Saddam, they envied him. He wasn't an enemy, he was a role model.


3. BUSH'S EXIT INTERVIEWS

When asked what he would miss most about not being (playing) president, El Heinisio replied wistfully that he would most miss riding on Air Force One and having the White House chef at his call. Oh well, maybe missing the opportunity to make the country and the world a better place finishes a close third. With most people on the way out, we'd say, "Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split ya," but in this case it might be nice if the door had some extra snap in its springs. He used to talk about catapulting the propaganda. Maybe there's an idea here.


4. TIME MAGAZINE'S PERSON OF THE YEAR

A few weeks ago, Time's Mark Halperin spoke out from his cuckoo-clock rest home about how some perceived "extreme pro-Obama bias" on the part of the mainstream media had -- shock, horror -- fooled the public into electing Senator "That One." That Halperin witnessed this imaginary bias may, in fact, be the long-sought proof of parallel universes and previously unknown dimensions that top physicists have theorized. However, on this planet, in this dimension, the 2008 election may just be the watershed moment where the public took a lead from the classic '70s movie Network and started to really scream, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," back at the MSM talking heads, jive-ass spinmeisters, and assorted foaming-at-the-mouth, rotating-head right-wing sideshow attractions.

Halperin must be totally beside himself with sputtering rage and frustration at the naming of President-elect Obama as Person of the Year by his obviously biased employer. His own employer! What a betrayal! Hopefully, someone at Time will film Halperin's near convulsions and upload it to YouTube asap.

Note to Mark Halperin: The tide may be moving the other way. You are obsolete, a caricature of the past. The MSM has always spewed little but the propaganda of the neocon artists, memos from the desk of Karl Rove, and the semicoherent mumblings of religious goons like Pat Robertson, who has become a multigazillionaire off of his "nonprofit" organization. Even when the MSM has a dreaded liberal on one of its political chat shows, they make sure to "balance" the token liberal with two to four screaming ditzbrains who start yelling every time the alleged liberal-commie-terrorist sympathizer tries to get a word in edgewise.

It's time to just turn these loons off. Hell, in my parallel universes I'd make them walk the plank off the lip of an active volcano. Now, that would be a reality show! Kudos to Ed Schultz for actually just getting up and walking off in the middle of one show (the execrable Fox and Friends) this year, leaving the shrieking, hooting, jumping-up-and-down, armpit-scratching righty monkeys to throw their monkey poop at each other in their mass confusion. It was a beautiful thing to behold.


5. GOP ELECTION-STEALING: A TICKING TIME BOMB

In all of the discussion of Barack Obama's victory, something has been ignored. It's a time bomb waiting to blow up in our faces on some future Election Day. It's a voting-machine time bomb. Diebold, a company so heinous, it had to change the name of its voting-machine division to Premier, is still in control of a huge percentage of our election tabulating. Diebold whistle-blower Christopher Hood has provided information as to how the Georgia 2002 Senate election was rigged in favor of Saxby Chambliss; more specifically, how he was ordered by Bob Urosevich, the president of Diebold, to secretly install software "patches" in clear violation of state law on voting machines in Democratic-leaning counties.

Stephen Spoonamore, a talented cyber expert who has done much work for our government (and who is a lifelong Republican) has stated publicly that he believes the 2002 Georgia election was rigged. "If you look at the case of Saxby Chmablis, that's ridiculous. The man was not elected. He lost that election by five points. Max Cleland won. They flipped the votes, clear as day." You can watch him say it on YouTube if you like.

Funny how YouTube provides us with more real information now than the so-called news networks. Was Georgia 2002 just a test for Ohio 2004? You decide. A RICO case is in motion in Ohio. Depositions have been taken, and the Georgia secretary of state was told to save everything -- every hard drive, every memory card, every document relating to Georgia's more recent runoff election. Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the case, has said, "Karl Rove has made a career out of rigging elections. Electronic voting machines like those being used in Georgia are his favorite tool."

Now, just last week, the key Rove IT guy, Mike Connell, who began testifying seven weeks ago in an Ohio vote-tampering case, died in a plane crash on a clear, good-weather night. Spoonamore called him "vital to uncovering the truth" about missing White House e-mails and related things, including the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys who held legal principle above Rovian politics. According to Spoonamore, Connell had asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Connell also did IT work for the infamous Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, designing a program for him that enabled him to see the 2004 election results in real time, as they were counted.

Connell's other dubious accomplishments include being computer guy for the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, RNC.org and numerous House committees and building and managing congressional servers and George W. Bush's election websites and communication networks. This includes the nongovernment e-mail systems that Rove used for virtually all his important e-mail communication, much of which is now -- surprise, surprise! -- mysteriously missing. Connell was an extreme Bush loyalist and also a Christian extremist, an anti-choice zealot who, along with his wife, spoke of electing Bush as a mission from God which no law of man should get in the way of. He was doing God's work, after all!

This guy was the man who knew too much. Talk about knowing where the bodies were buried! But since he was forced to testify, he and his wife have been receiving threats, and now he has gone to his great reward, although it's probably not the one he was expecting. His death is a very convenient one, to say the least.

Remember how confident Rove was going into Election Day 2006? Then remember how completely shocked the White House was by the massive Democratic turnout? Even then, there were dozens of suspicious results, the most famous of which was in Katherine Harris's old congressional district in Florida. I guess the Repugs thought they had it all set up. Things would look close again, but they would prevail again and keep their majorities.

Sigh! There's only so much tampering you can do. Just like in November, the only way to beat machine tampering is with massive turnout. One wonders what the election results would be with no tampering! How one-sided could the Obama and congressional victories have been? There were reports of vote-flipping this time in West Virginia and upstate New York, to name two. What happens the next time there is a tight election, an election where vote-flipping in just one state can change who gets in the White House or who gets to be your Senator?

It's a time bomb, and it needs to be addressed and disarmed, now. It threatens democracy itself. The excuse often given for not acting on this matter runs something like this: "Well, the people might lose faith in their electoral system." Either Washington is the last to know, yet again, or they like things just fine the way they are.


6. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

Bush's final looting of the treasury, the Halliburton no-bid deals, the tax cuts for the wealthy, and bailouts to nowhere are all about starving the government while stealing as much as they can. The easiest way to starve out funds for things like education, health care, infrastructure, enforcement of environmental laws, etc. is to just take the money, all under the guise of fiscal conservatism. This is what "conservatism" is about now -- conserving your money for the few at the top, while we buy into media myths like "trickle-down economics."

Your 401(k)? As if an evil worm like Bush even cares. Ten to one he had to ask what a 401(k) was when it came up in September during the market crash. Bush leaves office snickering and smirking, muttering "Let them eat rum cake" under his reeking-of-alcohol breath. The crashing economy is the end result of 30 years of deregulation, destruction of a balanced tax code, and destruction of a balanced tariff mechanism, which built the middle class and led to a prosperity that deprived the upper class of their favorite weapon against the rest of us, fear. To them, prosperity had to go. It was an anathema that stood in the way of greed. Too much was never enough. The needs of the greedy outweighed the needs of the needy.

Dems like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin shouldn't get off the hook either. He says he didn't know it was coming. He didn't see it. "I saw nothing. I see nothing." Drop the Sergeant Schultz act, bozo.


7. FINALLY, AN OPEN LETTER TO ALAN COLMES

Dear Alan,

I hate to think that you actually enjoyed your last job. The money must have been really good, but you were just a sideshow geek to the rest of the people (and I use the word "people" loosely) on the show. You were, at best, a professional patsy, a punching bag for total jerks. Maybe you could go on Dirty Jobs. I used to hope that just once you would go postal on-air, but you always disappointed me.

Then again, conspiracy buffs might notice the timing of the announcement of your leaving, matching up with word that Ann Coultergeist has a broken jaw. If that's what happened, you have redeemed yourself and taken The Man's money at the same time. Not bad!

Yours,
Noah


YESTERDAY IN PART 1: Sarah P and Joe the P, Gov. Spritzer, Keith and Rachel, the Repugs stuck in mid-20th century, and more

TOMORROW IN PART 3: CNN and the illusion of news, piggies everywhere, the Supremes who gave us Pres. Dubya, and more

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