#ChickenTrump And The California Smelt

#ChickenTrump backed out of his debate with Bernie because he's unfamiliar with-- and basically, uninterested in-- policy. His idea of a debate is name calling or arguing with an intellectual weakling like Marco Rubio over which one of them has a smaller penis. I wonder when he'll start worming out of general election debates. He knew he couldn't stand up to Ted Cruz-- and never debated him-- and he knows he can't standup to Bernie, which is my he chickened out of that one after agreeing to it; but I bet he won't even be able to get on a stage and debate with Hillary. And if he does get forced into doing one debate, it will rapidly degenerate into his calling her names and reciting National Enquirer stories about her adopting an alien child from another galaxy and murdering Vince Foster and rolling him up in a rug.

Friday he told Californians that there's no drought, just a government plot to sacrifice them on the alter of Sacramento Delta smelt. The sad thing is that there are people Republicans who hang on his every absurd word and swallow his fact-free bullshit. 2015 was one of the driest year's ever measured in California. It didn't rain; it didn't snow. Californians know it, even if Trump denies it to make a point about a fish as small as Rubio claims Trump's dick is. Stephen Solis, writing for USA Today, seemed shocked that Trump told a crowd in Fresno that there was no dry spell.

Trump said state officials were simply denying water to Central Valley farmers to prioritize the Delta smelt, a native California fish nearing extinction-- or as Trump called it, "a certain kind of three-inch fish.”

“We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” Trump told thousands of supporters at the campaign event... At least we know where Trump stands on the issue: “If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive."

Yesterday,author Joe Conason, explained the absurdity of a fact-free Trump to New York Daily News readers. "Whenever Donald Trump lies," he wrote, "which he does almost every day, the American media listen. Sometimes journalists debunk the Republican presidential nominee-to-be, and sometimes they fail to do so... The urge to smear is apparently irresistible to Trump, as he proved repeatedly during the primaries with his nasty assaults on the family of Ted Cruz. But if he still insists on going there, then news outlets must hold him accountable for all his slurs and slanders." It's not even June yet and sole because of Trump, his approach and his fan base among's life's losers, it's already getting nearly impossible to write about the presidential campaign without using the word "sewer."

Help flush Trump and Trumpist congressional candidates down into the sewer of his own making by clicking on the ActBlue thermometer below:

Ready To Eat? Mark Takano Has Some Useful Suggestions For Thanksgiving

With Trumpf giving a certain air of acceptance to blatant lying this season, California Congressman Mark Takano has put together some useful suggestions about stuffing the predictable arguments with the Limbaugh-lovin' brother-in-law with actual facts. I know, I know... they don't care about facts but what's the alternative? Make them all watch the John Kasich ad about Trumpf/Hitler?

Eat hearty! I think everyone at the dinner I'm going to tonight is either a Democrat or an Independent. Although I guess I can imagine a fight breaking out between Hillary and Bernie supporters. Gee, I hope not. How do you argue with someone unpatriotic/uncaring/uneducated... enough to back Hillary? Sorry for that. I was joking. Bernie admirers will just ignore the Hillary louts. Meanwhile though, Joe Conason offered a worthy Thanksgiving meditation I thought was worth quoting from.

At this moment, millions of immigrant families confront fear and insecurity, as political demagogues vilify and threaten them. Muslim Americans face intimidation from those same opportunistic bigots. Black Americans suffer resurgent racist assaults, especially when speaking out in their own defense. And on the other side of the world, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees seeking only to save themselves and their children from murder and enslavement know that much of the supposedly civilized world, including many political leaders in this country, is coldly turning them away.

That is why I want to express thanks that Barack Obama is president of the United States.

Last year on this day I noted, while acknowledging his flaws and errors, “how much worse our situation might be” had Obama’s opponents been in control from January 2009 to the present instead of him. To me, “the undeniable truth is that Obama righted the nation in a moment of deep crisis and set us on a navigable course toward the future, despite bitter, extreme, and partisan opposition that was eager to sink us rather than see him succeed.” None of that has changed, of course-- and in the current atmosphere of bigotry, recrimination, and psychopathic rhetoric, the president’s calm, rational, decent voice is more vital than ever.

The presidential nominating process of one of our two major political parties is elevating an ambitious television personality whose campaign is based on sinister appeals to xenophobia, suspicion, and anger. Like a Queens-born version of Mussolini, Donald Trump tells big lies about Mexicans and Muslims, encourages violence among his fanatical followers, and issues hollow, bombastic rants about “making America great again.” Most of Trump’s Republican rivals seem envious of him, when they should be disgusted by his plans to “register” Muslims or his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants; their objections to his outrages have largely been equivocal, indirect, feeble, halting. In his wake, they have been all too eager to denigrate the innocent refugees as potential “terrorists”-- and to dispose of cherished American values without a backward glance.

Trump promises to make Americans proud of our country again, but the spectacle of furious thousands cheering him at a rally evokes revulsion and shame.

So when President Obama speaks out to defend immigrants and refugees from the scurrilous abuse of Trump and the Republicans, I feel a deep sense of gratitude-- just as I do when he chooses diplomacy over war, as he did in the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and science over propaganda, as he continues to do in his diplomatic and domestic efforts to address climate change.

With his own admirably cool style, shaking off the vicious attacks of his adversaries every day, the president upholds our venerable ideal of malice toward none and charity for all. In different ways that ideal was embodied in his predecessors, the presidents who originated and revived this most generous of national holidays-- George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt-- and its endurance is reason to be thankful indeed.

Don't let a fascist buffoon spoil your Thanksgiving.

Is There Even ONE Democratic Senator With The Guts And Wisdom To Ask That The Decision To Make Schumer-As-Leader Be Revisited?

Pro-war fanatics Schumer and Cruz

After joining forces with the extreme right to derail the Iran nuclear deal, Chuck Schumer has been widely criticized by progressive groups-- but heartily congratulated by the likes of Tailgunner Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush. Jeb and Cruz love reminding people they're not scientists, although they're loath to admit they will oppose fact-based reality whenever it's in conflict with the GOP's narrow partisan agenda. I doubt whether either of them, or their new ally Schumer, cares that 29 of the nation’s top scientists-- including Nobel laureates, veteran makers of nuclear arms and former White House science advisers, some of the world’s most knowledgeable experts in the fields of nuclear weapons and arms control-- wrote to President Obama on Saturday to praise the Iran deal, calling it innovative and stringent. 

Their expertise doesn't fit in with the Schumer-Cruz jihad against peace. The deal, they wrote, "will advance the cause of peace and security in the Middle East and can serve as a guidepost for future nonproliferation agreements."

The body of the letter praises the technical features of the Iran accord and offers tacit rebuttals to recent criticisms on such issues as verification and provisions for investigating what specialists see as evidence of Iran’s past research on nuclear arms.

It also focuses on whether Iran could use the accord as diplomatic cover to pursue nuclear weapons in secret.

The deal’s plan for resolving disputes, the letter says, greatly mitigates “concerns about clandestine activities.” It hails the 24-day cap on Iranian delays to site investigations as “unprecedented,” adding that the agreement “will allow effective challenge inspection for the suspected activities of greatest concern.”

It also welcomes as without precedent the deal’s explicit banning of research on nuclear weapons “rather than only their manufacture,” as established in the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, the top arms-control agreement of the nuclear age.

But Schumer and his GOP allies aren't the only ones trying to ramp up another war in the Middle East. Yesterday on CNN, President Obama pointed out:

Inside of Iran, the people most opposed to the deal are the Revolutionary Guard, the Quds Force, hardliners who are implacably opposed to any cooperation with the international community... The reason that Mitch McConnell and the rest of the folks in his caucus who oppose this jumped out and opposed it before they even read it, before it was even posted, is reflective of a ideological commitment not to get a deal done... Nobody has presented a plausible alternative, other than military strikes, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Our old friend journalist Reese Erlich, recently back from another trip to Iran, stirred up some controversy by reporting in USA Today that Iran's Jewish community backs the nuclear deal. "Most Iranian Jews strongly disagree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's denunciations of the accord... They broadly support the accord in hopes that the U.S. will lift economic sanctions and the economy will improve." The right-wing Breitbart website disputes Erlich's reporting based on... GOP ideology. 

Joe Conason, writing for the National Memo last week, made the point that it's not just anti-Obama fanatics inside the U.S.-- GOP candidates, Fox and Schumer-- who oppose peace with Iran.

[W]hile vast throngs of Iranians greeted their government’s negotiators in a joyous welcome, the fanatical reactionaries in the Revolutionary Guard and the paramilitary Basij movement-- which have violently repressed democratic currents in Iran-- could barely control their outrage. Upon reading the terms, a Basij spokesman said last month, “We quickly realized that what we feared…had become a reality. If Iran agrees with this, our nuclear industry will be handcuffed for many years to come.”

Hoping and perhaps praying for a veto by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, their Supreme Leader, the Basijis, the right-wing media in Teheran, and their regime sponsors pointed to “red lines” that the agreement allegedly crossed. “We will never accept it,” said Mohammed Ali Jafari, a high-ranking Revolutionary Guard commander.

Such shrill expressions of frustration should encourage everyone who understands the agreement’s real value. Iran’s “Death to America, Death to Israel” cohort hates this deal-- not only because of its highly restrictive provisions, but because over the long term, it strengthens their democratic opponents and threatens their corrupt control of Iranian society.

In Israel, meanwhile, the alarmist criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu-- a sage whose confident predictions about Iran, Iraq, and almost everything else are reliably, totally wrong-- has obscured support from actual military and intelligence leaders. Like experts in this country and around the world, the best-informed Israelis understand the deal’s imperfections very well-- and support it nevertheless.

“There are no ideal agreements,” declared Ami Ayalon, a military veteran who headed the Israeli Navy and later oversaw the Jewish state’s security service, the Shin Bet. But as Ayalon explained to J.J. Goldberg of the Forward, this agreement is “the best possible alternative from Israel’s point of view, given the other available alternatives”-- including the most likely alternative which is, as Obama explained, another extremely dangerous Mideast war.

Efraim Halevy, who formerly ran the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, and later headed its National Security Council, concurs with Ayalon (and Obama). Writing in Yedioth Aharonoth, the national daily published in Tel Aviv, Halevy points out a profound contradiction in Netanyahu’s blustering complaints. Having warned that an Iranian nuclear weapon would pose a unique existential threat to Israel, how can Bibi logically reject the agreement that forestalls any bomb development for at least 15 years and increases the “breakout time” from one month to a year-- even if Iran ultimately violates its commitments?

Such a deal is far preferable to no deal, the ex-Mossad chief insists, although it won’t necessarily dissuade Tehran from making trouble elsewhere. Halevy also emphasizes that no mythical “better” deal would ever win support from Russia and China, Iran’s main weapons suppliers, whose leaders have endorsed this agreement.

In short, both of these top former officials believe the agreement with Iran will enhance their nation’s security-- and contrary to what Fox News Channel’s sages might claim, they represent mainstream opinion in Israel’s military and intelligence circles.

So perhaps we can safely discount the partisan demagogues and feckless opportunists who claim to be protecting the Jewish state from Barack Obama. And when someone like Mike Huckabee-- who memorably escaped military service because of his “flat feet”-- denounces the president for “marching Israelis to the oven door,” let’s remember the sane and serious response of Israel’s most experienced defenders.

Since the day Schumer blustered his way into forcing craven Senate Democrats into recognizing him as Harry Reid's heir as Senate Democratic leader, we have been warning that having Wall Street's worst and most avaricious shill in Congress in that position will be catastrophic for the party and the country. This latest odious escapade is not the reason why Democrats should revisit that decision; it's just another in a long series of actions why that decision should never have been made in the first place. I'd like to see some leadership on this by progressive champions like Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders, Brian Schatz, Jeff Merkley... But so far I  hear crickets.

The Clintons certainly aren't above criticism, but aren't they entitled to fair treatment?

Joe Conason says that the NYT's reporters "dished out unflattering, largely irrelevant anecdotes about Band and Ira Magaziner [above], whose work at the Clinton Health Access Initiative has provided vital drugs, tests and medical services to millions of patients across Africa and around the world."

"if Dowd and her Times colleagues were honestly interested in what the Clinton Foundation does with its funds, including the millions raised annually by President Clinton himself, all they would have to do is get off their asses and go look at its projects, which can be found all over the world."

-- Joe Conason, in the column "Conflicts? Deficits? Why
Reporters Ignore the Real Story of the Clinton Foundation"

by Ken

I don't know enough about either the Clinton Foundation or the Clinton Global Initiative to be able to referee the case that columnist Joe Conason makes in the column we're about to read, but at the very least Joe has raised a bunch of question that need answers.

Joe seems to think that the New York Times writers who made it their mission to jump ugly on the Clinton enterprises don't know much more about their subject than I do -- either the actual work that those enterprises do, which doesn't seem to have interested them at all, and for which Joe professes considerable admiration, or the foundation's internal workings and financial situation, where Joe makes an awfully persuasive case that the NYT hit team did a transparently shoddy job of research and reporting.

Then there's Maureen Dowd, piping up with what Joe describes as "a rather deranged column." It's been years since I bothered reading her, but one thing I learned in years of Mo-watching is that as a columnist she's next to useless, the only exceptions being when she's doing one of her frequent "pile-on" jobs and happens to latch onto an appropriate (usually obvious) subject, which is to say at times when her voice adds nothing but a tiny screech to the general hubbub.

What's more, Joe evokes the ghost of Whitewater, when the NYT -- apparently in one of its periodic sieges of "see how balanced we are?" braggadocio -- went fishing around Arkansas and managed to inflate not much into an ongoing national "scandal" that did tremendous harm to people who had done nothing to earn it.

Conflicts? Deficits? Why Reporters Ignore the Real Story of the Clinton Foundation

JOE CONASON | Nation of Change Op-Ed
Published: Friday 23 August 2013

The mere prospect of Hillary Rodham Clinton running for president again is evidently provoking outrage among old adversaries -- from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to Maureen Dowd -- whose appetite for bogus "Clinton scandals" will never be sated. With the fizzling of Benghazi after an official State Department probe found no wrong doing by the former Secretary of State, her critics have moved on, casting a gimlet eye on the charitable foundation built by her husband, the former president, over the past decade. Although Hillary has mostly been very busy elsewhere, the foundation provides an ample target for speculation and spite -- so long as critics ignore what it actually does for people around the world.

When The New York Times assigned two reporters to examine the finances and administration of the Clinton Foundation, which recently added the names of Hillary and daughter Chelsea to its official title, the results were all too predictable: a front-page article ominous in tone, rife with insinuations and gossip and distorted by major errors. Such is the habit of the newspaper of record, where the phony Whitewater "scandal" originated in a similarly flawed story more than two decades ago. That journalistic disgrace, spurred forward by dozens of Times editorials and op-ed columns, distracted the nation for years, harmed many innocent people besides the Clintons and cost the Treasury more than $50 million -- a troubling episode for a great newspaper.

Now the Times is suggesting that the Clinton Foundation, a charitable organization responsible for saving and improving millions of lives every year, has been financially mismanaged and misused for personal enrichment, among other problems. And those accusations have been amplified not only by the Clintons' traditional enemies on the Republican right, who mortally fear a Hillary 2016 electoral juggernaut, but in a rather deranged column by Dowd, as well.

The article that the Times published on Aug. 13 jumbled together a string of alleged concerns and anonymous accusations, largely lacking in substance. The story indicated, for example, that Douglas J. Band, former counselor to President Clinton who has since left the foundation to build a consulting firm, is guilty of serious conflicts of interest -- without specifying a single actual conflict.

A number of companies impressed by Band's creation and management of the Clinton Global Initiative -- one of the premier venues for corporate social responsibility on the planet today -- have hired his firm to advise them. He has also apparently persuaded companies to support CGI with money and other commitments. Exactly how did such activities compromise CGI or the Clinton Foundation, or harm anyone at all? Readers would find no clear answer in the Times. Instead, its reporters dished out unflattering, largely irrelevant anecdotes about Band and Ira Magaziner, whose work at the Clinton Health Access Initiative has provided vital drugs, tests and medical services to millions of patients across Africa and around the world.

Furthermore, someone told the Times reporters that Band and Magaziner had quarreled about various issues.

Plainly, the notion that personal or professional conflict might occur in a worldwide organization with thousands of employees shocked the Times. (But when similarly nasty and pointless newsroom gossip about Jill Abramson erupted in Politico, the top Times editor and her friends felt deeply offended.)

Worse than the reliance on backstairs gossip, however, were the factual errors featured in the Times story, particularly concerning the Clinton Foundation's finances. As President Clinton himself noted in an open letter posted on the foundation website, the article incorrectly described the foundation's financial condition and history -- because the reporters didn't understand how nonprofits are required to report their cash flows on IRS document. In his letter, which will interest anyone who wants to understand what he has been doing for the past decade, the former president explained: When someone makes a multi-year commitment to the Foundation, we have to report it all in the year it was made. In 2005 and 2006 as a result of multi-year commitments, the Foundation reported a surplus of $102,800,000 though we collected nowhere near that. In later years, as the money came in to cover our budgets, we were required to report the spending but not the cash inflow. Also, if someone makes a commitment that he or she later has to withdraw we are required to report that as a loss, though we never had the money in the first place and didn't need it to meet our budget.

So the foundation budget deficits reported by the Times in 2007 and 2008 were at least partially offset by earlier commitments. Moreover, as President Clinton also notes, he had set aside substantial cash reserves which hedged against the financial crash and recession -- leaving him able to maintain the foundation's service to HIV/AIDS patients, mothers and children and other vulnerable groups despite an economic slowdown that proved devastating to many charities and businesses.

Such facts scarcely concern Dowd, whose habitual tic is to exaggerate any canard against the Clintons. Inspired by the Times probe, her latest column spilled forth one bizarre assertion after another. "If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons," she wrote, as if entirely ignorant of the Koch brothers, the Karl Rove dark-money machine and Sheldon Adelson's outpourings of casino cash. Band's firm is "an egregious nest of conflicts," she exclaimed excitedly, without naming any actual conflict. "We are supposed to believe that every dollar given to a Clinton is a dollar that improves the world," she sneered.

Perhaps not every dollar: Some of the money earned by the Clintons has paid their personal expenses, some has paid off millions of dollars in old legal debts incurred during those earlier fake scandals and some has gone toward political campaigns, including Hillary's presidential race. But if Dowd and her Times colleagues were honestly interested in what the Clinton Foundation does with its funds, including the millions raised annually by President Clinton himself, all they would have to do is get off their asses and go look at its projects, which can be found all over the world. (Disclosure: This topic interests me so much that I recently visited Clinton Foundation projects in Africa with the former president and his daughter Chelsea.)

That they never bother to do so, because reporting those stories would ruin their preferred narrative, tells but everything we need to know -- not about the Clintons, of course, but about themselves.

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Issa Issa, Baby

We've been trying to make the case-- so far without any success-- that the DCCC make an effort, even if it's one that takes more than one cycle, to defeat Darrell Issa in a purple district Obama won in 2008. Last cycle Issa beat grassroots candidate Jerry Tetalman 59-41-- primarily because of Issa's huge margin in the smaller part of the district, the Orange County part. The biggest part of the district, San Diego County, saw a closer result, Issa 56% and Tetalman 44%. Issa, who always acts in the interests of corporate behemoths raised $2,478,710 last cycle. Jerry Tetalman raised $131,168. Did the DCCC come in and even the playing field a bit? No, Steve Israel has put Darrell Issa off the table and not one cent was spent-- even though Obama had won the district 4 years previous!

We'll figure out which side Steve Israel is really playing for in another post on another day. This one is about Issa-- or at least about Joe Conason's awesome idea about investigating Issa himself-- and applying his own dubious methods and standards to the effort. He starts with the premise that Congress is held in such historically low esteem by Americans because of misconduct by Republicans, especially committee chairs and no one more than Issa, chairman of the committee charged with investigations. "Without any evident embarrassment," he asserts, "these mighty politicians deny science, defy mathematics, and dismiss every fact that contradicts their prejudices. But bad as these chairs tend to be, none is quite as flamboyantly awful as Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, a special investigative panel whose latest effort to conjure scandal from nothingness at the Internal Revenue Service would provoke his removal by a responsible leadership." John Boehner and Eric Cantor are not exactly "responsible leadership."

[T]here was no political motive in the agency’s treatment of the Tea Party and associated groups seeking tax exemption (in many cases illegitimately).

It is now equally obvious that the behavior of Issa himself, with his attempts to skew his committee’s investigation and conceal testimony that exonerated the agency, represents the most serious wrongdoing in the supposed “IRS scandal.” But this isn’t the first time that the California Republican, who happens to be the wealthiest man in Congress, has misused the broad powers of his chairmanship. Actually, that is all he does-- as he demonstrated in equally opportunistic and amateurish examinations of both the Benghazi tragedy and the “Fast and Furious” affair.

Issa’s stewardship of the House Government Reform Committee has failed even by the standards of the Republican congressional leadership, which must have hoped that he would have collected some Obama administration scalps by now. He delayed the Fast and Furious probe solely to extend it into the election year, blustered against Attorney General Eric Holder, and accomplished… nothing.

There is little hope that Speaker John Boehner, who has enough problems maintaining a semblance of authority and dignity, will question Issa’s fitness to chair this important committee. But still we are left wondering: What would become of Issa if he were subjected to the Republican style of investigation? What if the presumption of guilt, the preference for insinuation over evidence, the omission of exculpatory facts, and the promulgation of conspiratorial speculations that feature in all of Issa’s theatrical probes were applied to him?

As the richest member of Congress, Issa seems to enjoy the same veneer of respectability that great wealth has provided to many dubious figures. But his past includes several troubling encounters with law enforcement, from alleged car thefts to weapons offenses. So what would the public learn from an Issa-style investigation of Darrell Issa?

First, the committee chair would reveal the troubling findings about Issa, namely that he was arrested not once but twice for illegal weapons offenses. Worse yet, he would explain, Issa had been convicted the second time. Then he would release slightly redacted copies of court records on file in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where Issa grew up, showing an arrest, charges of auto theft and carrying a concealed weapon only one month after his discharge from the Army in the winter of 1972. Those same records would also reveal that Issa and an older brother were both suspects in the theft of a “new red Maserati sports car” from an auto dealership, and that Issa was eventually indicted for larceny.

And then the committee might leak a second, even more damaging set of records showing that Issa had been picked up several months later on another weapons charge in Michigan, where he attended college. Police arrested him for possession of an unregistered handgun, leading ultimately to his conviction.

What we might not learn-- at least not until the facts were excavated by less partisan probers-- is that Issa was only 19 years old at the time; that the first set of charges in Ohio was eventually dropped by prosecutors; and that the Michigan charge was a misdemeanor, punishable by a $100 fine. Which young Issa paid.

Yet whatever Issa did as a foolish kid could be made to look quite sinister by a congressional committee chair like him, dedicated to trumping up minor irritations into major scandals. How fortunate he is that nobody in authority has ever misused the investigative power to smear him-- and that those currently in authority over him have no appetite for reining in his abuses of that power.

Why is Conason covering up the fact that Issa became rich as an arsonist and that he's a terrorist sympathizer? The investigation needs to be thorough. And why is Steve Israel protecting him?

What To Do About A GOP That Has Devolved Into Intransigent Extremism?

Joe Conason takes on the moronic Beltway adage that "everyone is equally at fault" for the nation's problems by pointing out that the most salient fact in American political life is (and for some time has been) the intransigent extremism of the Republican Party.

Whatever the punditocracy may imagine, there is no way for Obama to force his agenda on the Republicans in the House and the Senate, who range from scheming partisans like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor to Tea Party zealots like Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann. Unlike Abraham Lincoln or Lyndon Johnson, the two brilliant manipulators with whom he is sometimes compared and found wanting, the president is not equipped to bribe, blackmail, or herd in the style of those Machiavellian chief executives. If he were so equipped-- and indeed used his power as ruthlessly as Lincoln or Johnson-- the same pundits who now complain that he isn’t controlling the agenda would shriek about his misuse of power.

...What Obama evidently doesn’t understand, despite years of bitter experience, is the significance of that right-wing extremism for someone like him, whose nature is to accept differences and seek compromise. Unable to negotiate with a reasonable counterpart on either side of the Hill, he too frequently negotiates with himself-- whether over Obamacare, the debt ceiling, the budget, deficit reduction, taxes, or “reforming” Social Security.

Yet whenever he discards a progressive position, such as the public option in health care, or adopts a conservative position, such as reducing Social Security cost-of-living increases, he only succeeds in demoralizing his base. Meanwhile, rejection by the Republicans is preordained.

So what is left for President Obama to do if he wishes to see any of his second-term agenda enacted? By now he ought to have noticed that when he speaks out firmly on behalf of progressive principles, in support of working families, his polling numbers improve and his power increases. (And whenever he vacillates, his numbers diminish and his authority weakens.)

Yesterday we saw a resurgent fascist party in England, UKIP, make huge headway against the political Establishment, primarily by capitalizing on crude nationalism and rabid anti-immigrant sentiment. When David Cameron, whose Conservative Party lost big, was asked by a journalist if he regrets referring to the fruitcakes and clowns who ran on the UKIP ticket as fruitcakes and clowns, he responded, “It’s no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for. Of course they should be subject, and they will be subject, to proper scrutiny of their policies and their plans. But we need to show respect for people who've taken the choice to support this party. And we're going to work really hard to win them back." Cameron finds himself in a situation not unlike the hapless John Boehner. When you start feeding the beast of hatred and bigotry some red meat, the beast is never satiated. The beast will inevitably eat you as well. And that brings us to Timothy Eagan's OpEd in yesterday's NY Times, about how the crazies-- the U.S. version of the UKIP-- have taken over the House of Representatives. Appropriately enough, he starts with Gohmert, certainly one of the craziest of the lot, right up there with Broun, King, Bachmann and Stockman.

Not long ago, the congressman from northeast Texas, Louie Gohmert, was talking about how the trans-Alaska oil pipeline improved the sex lives of certain wild animals-- in his mind, the big tube was an industrial-strength aphrodisiac. “When the caribou want to go on a date,” he told a House hearing, “they invite each other to head over to the pipeline.”

Gohmert, consistently on the short list for the most off-plumb member of Congress, has said so many crazy things that this assertion passed with little comment. Last year, he blamed a breakdown of Judeo-Christian values for the gun slaughter at a cinema in Colorado. Last week, he claimed the Muslim Brotherhood had deep influence in the Obama administration, and that the attorney general-- the nation’s highest law enforcer-- sympathized with terrorists.

You may wonder how he gets away with this. You may also wonder how Gohmert can run virtually unopposed in recent elections. The answer explains why we have an insular, aggressively ignorant House of Representatives that is not at all representative of the public will, let alone the makeup of the country.

Much has been said about how the great gerrymander of the people’s House-- part of a brilliant, $30 million Republican action plan at the state level-- has now produced a clot of retrograde politicians who are comically out of step with a majority of Americans. It’s not just that they oppose things like immigration reform and simple gun background checks for violent felons, while huge majorities support them.

Or that, in the aggregate, Democrats got 1.4 million more votes for all House positions in 2012 but Republicans still won control with a cushion of 33 seats.

Or that they won despite having the lowest approval rating in modern polling, around 10 percent in some surveys. Richard Nixon during Watergate and B.P.’s initial handling of a catastrophic oil spill had higher approval ratings.

But just look at how different this Republican House is from the country they are supposed to represent. It’s almost like a parallel government, sitting in for some fantasy nation created in talk-radio land.

As a whole, Congress has never been more diverse, except the House majority. There are 41 black members of the House, but all of them are Democrats. There are 10 Asian-Americans, but all of them are Democrats. There are 34 Latinos, a record-- and all but 7 are Democrats. There are 7 openly gay or lesbian members, all of them Democrats.

Only 63 percent of the United States population is white. But in the House Republican majority, it’s 96 percent white. Women are 51 percent of the nation, but among the ruling members of the House, they make up just 8 percent. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side.)

It’s a stretch, by any means, to call the current House an example of representative democracy. Now let’s look at how the members govern:

To date, seven bills have been enacted. Let’s see, there was the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship act-- “ensuring the stability of the helium market.” The Violence Against Women Act was renewed, but only after a majority of Republicans voted against it, a rare instance of letting the full House decide on something that the public favors. Just recently, they rushed through a change to help frequent air travelers-- i.e., themselves-- by fixing a small part of the blunt budget cuts that are the result of their inability to compromise. Meal assistance to the elderly, Head Start for kids and other programs will continue to fall under the knife of sequestration.

On the economy, the Republican majority has been consciously trying to derail a fragile recovery. Their first big salvo was the debt ceiling debacle, which resulted in the lowering of the credit rating for the United States. With sequestration-- which President Obama foolishly agreed to, thinking Congress would never go this far-- the government has put a wheel-lock on a car that keeps trying to get some traction.

Meanwhile, not a day passes without some member of this ruling majority saying something outrageous. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, for example, has endorsed the far-side-of-the-moon conspiracy theory that the government is buying up all the bullets to keep gun owners from stocking their home arms depots. As for Gohmert, earlier this year he nominated Allen West, a man who isn’t even a member of Congress (he lost in November) to be Speaker of the House. Harvey, the invisible rabbit, was not available.

Gohmert, like others in the House crazy caucus, has benefited from a gerrymandered district. He can do anything short of denouncing Jesus and get re-elected.

The Beltway chorus of the moment blames President Obama for his inability to move his proposals through a dunderheaded Congress. They wonder how Republicans would be treating a silken-tongued charmer like Bill Clinton if he were still in the White House. We already know: not a single Republican voted for Clinton’s tax-raising budget, the one that led to our last federal surplus. Plus, they impeached him; his presidency was saved only in the Senate.

Listen to how conservative Republican Senator Pat Toomey explained it:

Bye-bye, Willard! Don't let the door slam behind you!

I grabbed this snippet off of washingtonpost.com's afternoon update yesterday. It's one of those cases where I didn't feel any great need to read the actual story but surely did enjoy the image conjured -- of Republicans of all stripes waving into the distance and wishing their decommissioned standard-bearer a heartfelt "good riddance" as he fades off toward the horizon borne by the Five Mini-Willards, all of them intoning the famous Romney Savage War-Wimp Chant, "Heck, no, we won't go!" -- to war, that is. -- Ken

"Romney seems to think that newsletters and meetings and money can solve the Republican Party's problems, that it can win the White House when it doesn’t have to run against a President who's bribing voters. He doesn't see that he's the problem: what he believes, what he says. . . .

"[P]art of his problem throughout this campaign, and the one before it, is that he's never been good at disguising his lack of respect for the American electorate. His changing positions, his evasions about them, his misrepresentations -- they all, ultimately, came off as a challenge: I think you're too stupid not to fall for this. And there are very few people who appreciate being told they're dumb, or the person who said it."

-- Alex Koppelman, in a newyorker.com News Desk
post yesterday, "Romney Gets the Last Gaffe"

by Ken

On the whole I'm inclined to let the R's do their own recriminating amongst themselves, secure in the knowledge that they will analyze the 2012 elections to death and come up with almost exclusively the wrong lessons. This isn't to single out R's or movement conservatives; it's the way all movement pols "analyze" elections. If the election had gone the other way, at this very moment we would have the whole of Dem officialdom tearing its hair out (such hair as is there, anyway) and recriminating and finger-pointing and drawing exactly the wrong lessons from the morass -- just as they're now drawing many of the wrong lessons from the victories.

Still, there's something special to the departure from public life of Willard Inc. (At least I hope it's his departure from public life.) Just this afternoon the Washington Post's pretty good political reporter Dan Eggen posted a piece that was headlined "Romney sinks quickly in Republicans' esteem."

The former Massachusetts governor -- who attracted $1 billion in funding and 59 million votes in his bid to unseat President Obama -- has rapidly become persona non grata to a shellshocked Republican Party, which appears eager to map out its future without its 2012 nominee.

Romney was by all accounts stunned at the scale of his Nov. 6 loss, dropping quickly from public view after delivering a short concession speech to a half-empty Boston arena. Then came a series of tin-eared remarks this week blaming his loss on Obama's "gifts" to African Americans and Hispanics -- putting him squarely at odds with party leaders struggling to build bridges with minorities . . .

The messy aftermath of his failure suggests that Romney, a political amalgam with no natural constituency beyond the business community, is unlikely to play a significant role in rebuilding is party, many Republicans said this week.

I'm really not eager to flog a dead horse -- or whatever species of carcass that is. I really didn't expect to add significantly to the lovely NYRB blogpost of Garry Wills's I quoted from on Wednesday, "Garry Wills on Willard: 'What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?'" But son of a gun if the son of a gun didn't that very day go and make it necessary to reopen the dumping operation.

GOING OUT ON A NOTE OF GRACE? NOT WILLARD'S WAY

I confess that I was surprised on Election Night by the reasonableness, even graciousness, of Willard's concession speech -- when he finally gave it, having apparently given up on the hope that Karl Rove wasn't blowing it out his butt in insisting that the networks were calling everything prematurely. I had no way of knowing how sincere or insincere he was. We'll come back to the problem of fact-checking his "sincerity." For now, let me just say that I have no way of knowing. Still, if the goofball had left it at that, he could have gone out on a note of relative grace.

That, however, isn't Willard's Way. I'm sure by now everyone has heard about the stunning performance the buttwipe gave on the post-mortem conference call with fat-cat donors on Wednesday in which he explained away his defeat (never mind that in electoral-college terms it wasn't a defeat, it was a rout) as the product of the president's "gifts" to pampered demographic groups, "especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and young people."

The New Yorker's Alex Koppelman, in the News Desk post from which I've already quoted up top, makes a necessary point: "There are, as there were after the release of the 'forty-seven per cent' video, some people asking whether this is really what Romney believes, or whether he thinks it's what his audience wants to hear."

And I have to say, when it comes to "authenticating" Willard, I really have no tools. It never sounds to me like he believes anything he says -- or at least that he believes any regurgitation of nonsense any more or less than any other regurgitation of nonsense. The only thing that can be said for sure is that when he regurgitates in direct contradiction of his other regurgitations, I take it as a given that he can't possibly believe both. My hunch always is that he doesn't believe either, but I have no way of knowing. I just dismiss most of what he says, as I've written here numerous times, as "stuff he says." The famous "47 percent" campaign pander certainly had a certain ring of belief, but again, I don't know. How could I?

But Alex Koppelman offers what he believes is some evidence on behalf of Willard's belief in what he mouthed off about the "gifts."

[W]e have prior evidence that this is in fact what Romney thinks -- indeed, that it is the explanation that his campaign as a whole has settled on. At the end of last week, in an article about the reasons why the Republican nominee's team simply hadn't expected to lose ["Why Romney Never Saw It Coming"], Slate's John Dickerson reported:

Romney advisers . . . envy [Obama's] ability to leverage the presidency for his campaign. Young voters were told about new provisions for student loans and Obama's support for same-sex marriage, an issue that appeals to young voters. Hispanic voters were wooed by the president's plan to waive the deportation of children of illegal immigrants. One Romney aide also included the much-debated changes to welfare requirements as a policy aimed to win over African-American voters. "It was like they had a calendar," said one Romney aide. With each month, the Obama administration rolled out a new policy for a different segment of their coalition they hoped to attract.

But jeez Louise, is there any incumbent officeholder who wouldn't attempt to do exactly the same thing? Here's Alex's comment:

The Romney people weren't entirely wrong to think this way -- not exactly. The Presidency is a powerful tool, and any incumbent who didn't use that tool to at least some extent would be foolish. And there were clearly times when Obama used policy announcements to great political effect. To reduce the whole election -- not to mention a significant part of the Administration's policies -- to such things, though? That's just absurd. At the very least, the man responsible for the health-care reform plan on which Obama's is based should know better.

"HE STILL CAN'T SEE IT," SAYS ALEX K

But there's another element of delusion on the part of Willard and his campaign which Alex finds more important.

In the same conference call, Romney talked about plans for the future. He wanted to keep his donors together somehow, he said -- "to meet perhaps annually, and to keep in touch with a monthly newsletter or something of that nature" -- so that they could help steer the G.O.P. and, presumably, the country. Which just makes the whole thing sadder: he still can't see it.

What is it he still can't see? This brings us to the chunk I quoted up top, which I'm going to repeat here, now in context.

Romney seems to think that newsletters and meetings and money can solve the Republican Party's problems, that it can win the White House when it doesn't have to run against a President who's bribing voters. He doesn't see that he's the problem: what he believes, what he says. Conservatives have constructed a myth that says certain groups -- blacks, Hispanics, women, young people -- vote Democratic because they're stupid, because they're lazy, and because they can be purchased with trinkets and baubles. It'd be one thing if they kept that myth a secret, but instead they shout it from the rooftops. Then, when it's over, they wonder why those people voted Democratic again.

Romney was never the worst offender on this score; he never delighted in it, as people like Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh do. But he certainly participated. Indeed, part of his problem throughout this campaign, and the one before it, is that he's never been good at disguising his lack of respect for the American electorate. His changing positions, his evasions about them, his misrepresentations -- they all, ultimately, came off as a challenge: I think you're too stupid not to fall for this. And there are very few people who appreciate being told they're dumb, or the person who said it.

There are, of course, other, larger problems for the Republican Party to grapple with over the next few years. But they'll have trouble solving many of them if they can't get past this and realize that Democrats don't have to bribe voters -- not when their opponents are so interested in insulting them.

AS JOE CONASON POINTS OUT, NOBODY GETS
MORE GENEROUS "GIFTS" THAN WILLARD'S PEOPLE

Joe has written a fine column, which I read via Nation of Change: "Mitt Romney's Sneering Farewell to the '47 Percent.'" He devotes much attention to the nonfactuality of nearly all the drivel in both the "47 percent" mouthing off ("Recall how he disowned the '47 percent' remarks when he realized how damaging they were to his chances for victory, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News that what he had been caught saying at a $50,000-a-plate Boca Raton fundraising event was 'just completely wrong'") and the new nonsense. He's especially charmed by the irony of the Willard camp, after making "Obamacare" the centerpiece of their denunciation of the Obama administration, blaming its popularity for their electoral booboo.

"But," Joe writes, "as a matter of feelings rather than facts, Romney evidently cannot stop himself from sneering at society's struggling people and the politicians who seek to improve their lives."

It is not as if the donors he was addressing don't want "gifts" from government — such as the big new tax breaks that Romney had promised them, the huge increases in defense spending that would swell their profits, or the various individual corporate favors that they regard as their very own "entitlements." Just don't expect that kind of honest introspection from Romney or his crowd.

*

Bernie Sanders, Jon Stewart Dissect Squirming Little Insect On The TV

What was the real meaning of Romney's declaration of class war against 47% of Americans at the $50,000/plat dinner at Mark Leder's mansion? This isn't about a "gotcha moment" or an embarrassing "inelegant" misstatement. This was the real Mitt Romney taking to American elites like himself... the vicious predators and self-entitled social parasites who are determined to suck Americans dry. As John Stewart reminded his audience Tuesday, it turns out, nearly two-thirds of Romney's "moochers," pay payroll tax and these freeloaders are actually comprised of those making less than $20,000 a year-- including the elderly (i.e., "the Greatest Generation" and “Nana”), who worked all their lives and are entitled to food and shelter and medical care that Romney and the billionaires would begrudge them.

In his post yesterday for the Daily Beast former Bush aide Mark McKinnon seems surprised that Romney is a cynical man. I guess he never looked into elite Mormonism. "Mitt Romney," he wrote, "is running out of time, and voters like me are running out of patience."

[T]he release of the Romney tape was a moment that certainly revealed something about him. But not what I was hoping for. Just the opposite. It reveals a deeply cynical man, who sees the country as completely divided, as two completely different sets of people, and who would likely govern in a way that would only further divide us. ...This is a deeply cynical view of America. Not to mention wrong. And it’s a long way from the compassionate conservatism that welcomed more Americans into the Republican Party under President George W. Bush.

What about seniors on limited incomes who do not pay taxes? What about veterans? What about even middle-income families with young children and the deductions that go with them? They are not victims, although they might now view themselves that way under a Romney administration. 

How can anyone support a candidate with this kind of a vision of the country? Isn’t a divided America under Obama what folks on the right rail against?

New polls that were released yesterday showed Obama opening a nice lead over Romney-Ryan... in Wisconsin. (Is it any wonder Ryan just dumped $2,000,000 into TV ads to save his House seat?) And on the same day, polls show Obama ahead in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Virginia. So where is And even small business owners, the engine of growth the GOP is always making believe it worships, back Obama over Romney by a wide margin. Romney winning? Well among millionaires, of course-- especially the millionaires and billionaires like himself who don't pay any taxes or cheat and don't pay their fair share of taxes. And here are the real freeloaders-- corporations that paid ZERO income tax: Boeing, Wells Fargo, Verizon, Pepco, Bank of America. But what about geographically? What states are the Romney states? Let's take a look at what he might call, "the moocher states." Joe Conason broke it down. But take a look at this map of the states with the largest percentage of non-tax payers first; notice they're all shaded red-- Romney's base, almost the only states solidly behind him!

The Republican-leaning moochers, as defined by Romney, can easily be found in the red states, which contribute far less in federal taxes than they receive in per capita benefits. Alabama, for instance, receives almost $4000 per capita in federal spending on retirement and disability, while contributing just over $1000 per capita in federal income taxes. Kentucky receives upwards of $7000 per capita in direct benefits, including retirement, disability, student assistance, and unemployment, but contributes slightly less per capita than Alabama in federal income taxes.

Roughly the same dispensation exists across much of the old Confederacy, where white voters in lower income brackets  will faithfully vote for Romney despite his sneers at them. Across the red states generally-- from Mississipppi, Arkansas, and South Carolina to Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas and Alaska-- there is a clear pattern. More money flows in from Washington via government spending than goes out to Washington via federal taxes, which belies the incessant whining of their “conservative” elected officials. (The difference is made up in revenues from the blue states-- New York, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, among others-- that receive less from Washington than they pay.)

...Summing up his erroneous assessments, Romney said “my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Perhaps that cold remark falls within the category of opinion rather than fact. But does Romney truly believe that a lifelong worker, an impoverished veteran, a struggling student, an elderly widow, or any of the millions of Americans in similar straits don’t merit the concern of the president of the United States?

That ugly sentiment, an insult to every citizen of this country, would be hard to express more “elegantly” without the use of a four-letter word.

And the ad, one I only wish would be played in states like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Idaho and South Carolina as well as the usual swing states:

Joe Conason suggests right-wingers are mad at the president for beating them at their chest-thumping game

"This is one of the reasons President Obama has become one of the most divisive presidents in American history."

-- GOP doodyhead Ed Gillespie

by Ken

I know the country has decided that it's A-OK that every word out of the mouth of every right-winger is frothy, thuggish lie. By that standard, of course, the Right-eous rage prompted by the Obama campaign's suggestion that Willard Inc. wouldn't have taken out Osama bin-Laden, is perfectly justified. Who's better equipped to manage the triple feat of lying about what the president and the would-be president, and the former president said about Osama bin-Laden? Not to mention erasing their heroes' unbroken history of screaming jingoism -- most notably in the record of America's forgotten-but-not-gone ex-hero, Chimpy the Accomplished-Mission.

I like Joe Conason's take in his syndicated column "Why Obama's bin Laden Ad Drives Republicans Crazy":

Nothing aggravates Republicans like seeing nasty, effective tactics upon which they have so long relied being turned against one of their candidates. So when Barack Obama's re-election campaign aired an ad celebrating the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death -- and suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn't have achieved that objective -- the right exploded with outraged protests.

Evidently, the feelings of longtime hatchet men like Bush-era party chair Ed Gillespie, ex-Bush flack Ari Fleischer and the editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal, to name a few, were really, really hurt — because the Obama campaign exploited a moment of national unity for partisan advantage.

Then Joe uncorks the Ed Gillespie corker I've put at the top of this post. Yup, it's Barack the Kenyan Milquetoast Moderate who's caused all that divisiveness, not thug-brained right-wingers.

During the Bush presidency," Joe recalls, "Republicans used precisely the same approach and worse, over and over, without fretting whether their words and ads were 'divisive.' "

It began weeks after the 9/11 attacks, amid sincere pledges of patriotic cooperation from congressional Democrats, when Karl Rove told the Republican National Committee that their party would "go to the country on this issue" to win the midterm elections in 2002. They won a historic victory by sliming wounded Vietnam hero Max Cleland and former Air Force intelligence officer Tom Daschle as stooges of al-Qaida.

Bush's 2004 re-election campaign amplified the same themes, with advertising and pageantry at the Republican convention in New York City grossly exploiting 9/11, a series of conveniently timed terror "alerts" leading up to Election Day and repeated warnings by Vice President Dick Cheney that a Democratic victory would signal weakness to America's enemies.

And it persisted into the 2006 midterm, with Rove falsely portraying Democrats as limp-wristed "liberals" trying to "understand" Osama bin Laden.

Until that election, the rough Rovian style succeeded brilliantly -- despite the fact that Bush and Cheney had actually allowed bin Laden and Mullah Omar to escape at Tora Bora.

"By contrast," Joe says, "the Obama ad's brief rebuke of Romney is at least factual and accurate."

Not only did he say what the ad quotes, but he also said that he wouldn't go into Pakistan to get bin Laden, which is what the mission required. Had the president followed Romney's policy recommendation, bin Laden would almost certainly still be at large.

Joe gets off a parting shot at Willard the Gutless War Wimp:

"Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order," scoffed Romney in response. But he shouldn't be so quick to denigrate the former Democratic president, who entered the Navy during World War II and then served as a submarine officer until his honorable discharge in 1953. Somebody may compare Carter's service with Romney's own military record, which doesn't exist -- and remind voters that he avoided the Vietnam draft with a pampered stint as a Mormon missionary, in France.

Not to mention Willard's hulking brood of Junior War Wimps.

#

Odd That The DCCC is Picking On Poor Paul Ryan Again

Paul Ryan, the most corrupt politician in the history of Wisconsin

You know, Blue America didn't open a special page dedicated to attacking any individual conservative slimebag but one: Paul Ryan. Not one for Michele Bachmann, Jim DeMint, Patrick McHenry, Mean Jean Schmidt, Dan Boren, Virginia Foxx... none of the arch rogues and crooks masquerading as servants of the people. Ryan is more dangerous than any of them, because, unlike them, he has a patina of respectability. It's undeserved, and in American politics all you need is a patina. Just look at how well Obama has done.

Anyway, yesterday's full frontal against Ryan by the DCCC-- which, ironically, still refuses to give the time of day to his opponent, progressive activist Paulette Garin-- asks the straightforward question, "As insurance premiums skyrocket, will Representative Paul Ryan continue protecting insurance company profits?"

It's an easy question to answer, and the best place to start looking for clues is at OpenSecrets.org. The Insurance Industry was the sixth biggest briber of politicians in the 2010 electoral cycle ($10,570,732 so far), just between real estate crooks and lobbyists. This year Ryan was the seventh biggest GOP recipient of Insurance Industry favor, odd for so junior a member. He's gotten $75,200 so far, considerably more than over 400 other House members, and certainly more than anyone else from Wisconsin. The top GOP bribees were caucus leaders Eric Cantor ($130,750) and John Boehner ($98,390).

Since 1990 the Insurance CEOs and their lobbyists have also done very well by Ryan-- $534,071, more than almost anyone else in Congress as junior as he is and far more than anyone else from Wisconsin, including members who were already serving when Ryan wasn't old enough to wear long pants, like Jim Sensenbrenner (R- $254,898), Appropriations Committee Chair Dave Obey (D- $122,056) and Tom Petri (R- $114,720).

It's easy to see that the Insurance Giants are banking on Ryan. The DCCC has noted Ryan's immense haul as well, but they're shy-- for obvious reasons-- about calling it bribe money, even if it obviously is.

As the House prepares to vote on health insurance reform, Representative Paul Ryan must decide whether to continue siding with the big insurance companies who have given him $534,071 in campaign contributions or with the people in Wisconsin who have seen their health insurance premiums rise by 108 percent.

“Considering that Representative Paul Ryan has taken $534,071 in contributions from insurance companies, Ryan’s vote on health insurance reform will show whether he cares more about protecting the profits of his big insurance company contributors or about helping the folks back home being hit by premiums they can no longer afford,” said Ryan Rudominer, the National Press Secretary of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Families and small businesses in Wisconsin can’t afford another vote by Representative Ryan to put big health insurance companies first.”

Now, anyone who knows Paul Ryan knows he's one of the most disgraceful whores in the Congress, 100% owned, lock, stock and barrel, by special interests. Ryan was the GOP point person to turn out the Republican votes for the big Wall Street bankster bailout (TARP)-- and the banks love him even more than the Insurance Giants do! But, what's odd about the DCCC going down this road is that of the 39 Democrats who voted against healthcare reform last November, more than a few, though not quite in Ryan's league, are widely known Inside the Beltway as whores for sale to the highest bidder. Some of the worst are (with their own Insurance Biz takes in brackets):

John Adler (NJ- $105,667)
John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA- $80,250)
Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK- $135,985)
Allen Boyd (Blue Dog-FL- $274,881)
Artur Davis (AL- $236,649)
Lincoln Davis (Blue Dog-TN- $81,886)
Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (Blue Dog-SD- $126,196)
Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA- $190,729)
Suzanne Kosmas (FL- $123,116)
Jim Marshall (Blue Dog-GA- $99,300)
Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT- $243,844)
Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC- $98,270)
Charlie Melancon (Blue Dog-LA- $189,335)
Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR- $185,312)
John Tanner (Blue Dog- TN- $595,709)

So is that D-trip hypocrisy? I mean, sure, Ryan is a disgrace to America. But what's Suzanne Kosmas, who they are pointlessly pouring resources into protecting? And John Barrow has a thoroughly progressive and incorruptible former state senator, Regina Thomas, running against him in the primary. If the DCCC can denounce Ryan, they can denounce Barrow for the exact same crime. Of course, like I said, they're not supporting the progressive running against him either!

Meanwhile Joe Conason had a far better take on Ryan Monday over at Salon, the gist of which is that his cynical "roadmap" is to further debilitate and diminish the middle class in favor of his corporate paymasters.

In the mainstream media, the Wisconsin Republican is often presented as a straight-shooting prophet whose prescriptions for privatizing Social Security and eviscerating Medicare can only be ignored if we want to jeopardize America's future, and so on.

Fortunately, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has studied Ryan's proposals with its usual perspicacity and issued a clear warning that his road map would only lead us-- after a series of hard-right turns-- to the same old plutocratic dead end. Like so many Republican speeches about fiscal responsibility, the Ryan promise to balance the budget is a scam whose real purpose has more to do with redistributing taxes downward and wealth upward-- that is, more of the same.

...[As a result of Ryan's proposals which cater entirely to the Wall Street bankers who have him parked for a long and powerful career] middle-class taxpayers would end up paying a larger percentage of their annual income to the government than now, while the wealthiest taxpayers would pay a smaller percentage. According to the CBPP-- which many conservatives acknowledge for its tradition of honesty and accuracy-- Ryan's plan would damage health coverage for most Americans and endanger if not destroy the safety net for the elderly, whose rise from mass poverty began with Social Security and Medicare.

He's as bad as... Rahm Emanuel, Mark Kirk, Roy Blunt, Mike Castle or Harold Ford, several other of the politicians who have been singled out by the Masters of the Universe for higher office where they can do them the most good, and us the most damage. What the DCCC didn't mention was how harmful to the residents of southeast Wisconsin it will be if Ryan's bought-and-paid-for point of view prevails in the healthcare battle coming to a head this week. The Commerce and Energy Commttee has come out with a review of the impact of the bill on Ryan's constituents. Highlights of what the bill will achieve there:

* Improve coverage for 506,000 residents with health insurance.

* Give tax credits and other assistance to up to 153,000 families and 14,000 small businesses to help them afford coverage.

* Improve Medicare for 112,000 beneficiaries, including closing the donut hole.

* Extend coverage to 19,500 uninsured residents.

* Guarantee that 8,000 residents with pre-existing conditions can obtain coverage.

* Protect 1,600 families from bankruptcy due to unaffordable health care costs.

* Allow 51,000 young adults to obtain coverage on their parents’ insurance plans.

* Provide millions of dollars in new funding for 4 community health centers.

* Reduce the cost of uncompensated care for hospitals and other health care providers by $23 million annually.